Q3 Business Recap: Wins, Losses, and What’s Next in Q4

It’s the beginning of Q4, which means Q3 is officially over. I wanted to take this time to reflect on some of the wins, and losses, of my own Q3. Hopefully you guys can take some inspiration (as well as learn what NOT to do haha).

We had some pretty big new projects that were launched Q3 this year - most notably doing a big push for some of my info products. We built a few new courses and communities centered around helping content creators monetize better, personal branding, and helping businesses do YouTube.

We also launched a full service agency called Done For You YouTube (I talked about this before) where we help strategize, edit, run, film, and manage YouTube channels for people. We have 1 client so far and it’s been going well! Here’s the link: www.dfy.yt if you want to check it out.

In terms of revenue, we’ve held pretty steady at what we are used to, maybe a slight uptick over the last couple months. Nothing too crazy here, but the expenses and payroll are certainly creeping up. A lot of projects and channels we are working on are still losing money, which is still completely fine with me. 

If you had told me a decade ago that I would be spending up to $30k to launch a single YouTube channel (and doing that many times over) with no guarantee of any income, I would’ve called you crazy. But that’s the norm now and it’s the level of risk I am willing to take. I’m very much operating on the belief that 80% of results will come from 20% of what we do. We’re determining what those 20% of things is, and while we have a good idea what they are, we’re trying to find more and more of those “20 percenters”. Finding these winners takes time, money, energy, and resources - and I’m okay with the losses of working on the “losers”.

For our courses and communities, sales are not good. I’ll admit that while I’m proud of the products themselves, having a super successful info product is something we haven’t been able to crack yet. I’ve built many offers, and as of right now the time spent on those has been a super low ROI. Definitely not worth my time. We are definitely too scattered and trying to launch too many at the same time. I’ve seen this bite me in the butt in the past.

But.. and here’s where the mindset comes in - I believe that if we keep cracking at it, we will identify and find one info product that does extremely well. It hasn’t happened yet, but with some grit and consistency, we’ll find it eventually. 

Over at Paired, we’ve been cooking on a lot of interesting stuff. The biggest project of this quarter has been completely revamping our website and branding, as well as hiring a head of growth to help us scale with paid media. These updates have been brewing for months now and we’re going to be ready to launch in the first couple weeks of Q4. I am beyond excited and very optimistic about Q4.

I realized that to scale beyond organic marketing is what takes a company to the next level. To scale Paired beyond what we’re currently doing, we need to spend on ads and we need to have really good ad creatives. This is how you unlock the magical phenomenon of a good ROAS. Then business becomes a math equation where you can scale by putting more money into ads, increase the fulfillment team, and repeat.

Revenue at Paired has held relatively steady and while we didn’t have any record months, it’s been sufficient to keep hiring, building, and investing back into the business. Jeff and I also began taking payroll this quarter! $2,000 per month salary for each of us, which is more of a formality and requirement of having a C Corporation.

In Q3, I trained for and finished a half Ironman race, travelled to Mexico City, and overall had a great time. We also signed the lease on an office in Jakarta, a new office in OC, and a house in LA!

Excited for Q4, and I hope you guys are too. Q4 is usually a pretty exciting time for everyone, and I am looking forward to celebrating the holidays with family and friends.