Today we welcome to the BRAND new you show Joseph Nicoletti from LearnScrivenerFast.com.
Joseph is a highly successful entrepreneur who specializes in helping people work more efficiently and create awesome things online.
Joseph knows first hand how to create awesome things online. His course Learn scrivener fast, is an online video based class that teaches writers, authors and those aspiring to be one,
how to overcome the steep learning curve for scrivener so they can finally publish the book they’ve always dreamed about.
While today, Joseph is a successful entrepreneur this wasn’t always the case. In fact, at first, he was very much a normal everyday guy just like us;
But then something happened and Joseph asked himself, “Why not me?”.
Since then Joseph has created a BRAND new version of himself. He has been able to quit his full-time job and has been featured on popular podcasts like Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income, John Lee Dumas’ Entrepreneur on Fire, and Mixergy by Andrew Warner.
Joseph welcome to the show.
Recommended book(s) for the show
Since I believe that reading is a necessary part of becoming a BRAND new you, I ask all of my guests what non-fiction book are you either reading now or just recently finished.
Joseph is currently reading a book written by Ryan Levesque called:
Ask (Affiliate link)
Summary – Ryan Levesque left a lucrative career on Wall Street and later in Shanghai, China to launch a multimillion dollar online publishing business selling information and software using what's now become the “Ask Formula” as taught in this book.
The Ask formula has helped build multi-million dollar businesses in 23 different industries, generating over $100 million dollars in sales in the process.
JOURNEY
Joseph’s online success had humble beginnings. It started with the simple goal of trying to earn an extra $300 a month.
Like most of us, Joseph had a decent job and overall was happy with his job but he was living from paycheck to paycheck.
In an effort to bring in more income Joseph decided to find a side job. He applied for several side jobs including 3 pizza delivery companies. He was rejected by them all.
Like me, Joseph had a very long drive to work at the time. He used this drive to think and take inventory of his skills to determine what he enjoyed doing, which was teaching and creating “things”.
It was this self-assessment combined with the rejected job positions that led Joseph to look online.
OVERCOMING FEAR
Once online Joseph quickly discovered Pat Flynn. Pat was helping and teaching people about internet marketing. This happened to align with Joseph’s skills. So in typical Joseph fashion, he dove in head first.
While he was excited about the opportunities, he was a little more afraid of failing. Like many of us, he asked himself, “What if I fail?”
He decided in order to prevent his friends and family from finding out what we were doing online he would use a pen name, Joseph Michael, which was simply his first and middle name.
The pen name gave him the freedom to pursue the world of internet marketing without worrying about what others might think. This way if he failed it wasn’t “him” who had failed it was this “Joseph Michael” guy and no one would be the wiser.
Even thought he had no website development skills he started a blog from scratch, using WordPress. Which you can do to in less than 5 minutes (VIDEO).
Joseph dug in and learned. Eventually, he decided to create an eBook to sell to readers of his blog. It didn’t sell. At all.
His first year online was frustrating but learned a couple of key points. First, reframe failure into an experiment. Rather than looking at his attempts to make money that didn’t work out purely as a failure, he decided to view each an experiment.
Looking at failure, this way helped temper his expectations and relief the pressure he was putting on himself.
Additionally, he learned to make connections online with others who were struggling through the same experiments.
After trying out multiple experiments, Joseph finally made his first dollar online from a simple AdWords campaign. This completely changed everything for him and would serve as his first lightbulb moment.
WHY NOT ME?
As Joseph was pouring every spare moment he could into learning he started to enroll in online courses. One of them was called the iPhone Video Hero.
Joseph had taken the course for fun but was curious by the overall process. Not the process of how to make better videos with your iPhone but the process of teaching something online via videos.
This curiosity would soon serve him well.
While continuing to work full-time and plugging along with his blog, Joseph forever the efficiency geek, discovered a program called Scrivener. He started using it to write his blog posts.
But the program was cumbersome and had a very steep learning curve. Steep enough that even Joseph abandoned it for a period of time.
Then it happened. One morning he was reading the latest blog post by Michael Hyatt which happened to be about why he switched his writing platform over to Scrivener.
Intrigued, Joseph read the post and all of the comments. It was then that he noticed others were struggling with the same things; steep learning curve, frustration, etc..
Then he read a comment posted by Michael himself in response to another comment, “I would pay for a training course to learn Scrivener faster.”
At that point Joseph started to ask himself “What If I made the course?” and “Why not me”? After thinking about it for a few days he decided to do what many won’t. To help, he turned the “Why not me” question around and instead adopted the mindset of “Why NOT me!” and the idea for the learn Scrivener fast course was born.
LEARN SCRIVENER FAST
Initially, he thought the course would only take a month to complete. It took nearly 10 months. Many times during the journey he faced the typical roller coaster ride of being super excited one day to ready to quit the next.
But he didn’t quit and little by little over time he would finish a module at a time.
While he was building the course Joseph maintained his day job and found the time to build the course in the margins of his life. Squeezing in an hour after his wife went to bed, an hour or two on the weekends, he started to use his lunch time to record videos in his car.
In order to keep himself motivated as well as make sure he could sell the course when finished, Joseph started soliciting feedback from potential buyers. Initially, he gave them the course for free in exchange for feedback and suggestions.
This initial feedback did two things. First and foremost it validated in his mind the necessity of the course. Second, he knew people would pay for it.
Unlike his eBook, Joseph was now building something he knew people would buy. He was solving a major pain point for them. This an another lightbulb moment.
To keep the momentum going Joseph began to leverage his initial connections online to help him market the course. Additionally, he began talking about it on Twitter and with friends.
In early 2014 the course was ready and Joseph held his first webinar promoting his course Learn Scrivener Fast to the world. He eventually partnered with others in the writing space, authors, and bloggers to hold joint webinars. Their audience, his product.
These partnerships proved to be the key to accelerating his success. In his first webinar in early 2014, Joseph earned as much on this one webinar as he had made for the entire year for his day job.
In July of 2014, Joseph quit his day job to pursue his online pursuits full-time.
PRODUCTION CREATION LIVE
Never being one to rest on his laurels, Joseph is hard at work on a new course he is calling Product Creation Live. As he listened to feedback from his learn Scrivener fast customers, the question they continued to ask over and over was, “How did you put this course together?”.
Knowing what his audience wants, Product Creation Live will be a course to teach people how to create amazing things online by turning the curtain back and allowing us to see work that goes on behind the scenes when creating an online course.
He is currently filming and producing the course which will take us through the process of turning a book into a sellable product.
Launching later this year, you can sign up for notifications and updates at ProductCreationLive.com
SUMMARY
Here are the best ways to get in touch with Joseph and to learn about all of the exciting things he is working on:
Twitter: @scrivenercoach
Web: betterblogimages.com
Web: josephmichael.net
Joseph leaves us with these final thoughts:
“Ask yourself, “What if?, what if you could be the one. Remember the time you think it is going to take that you don’t have is gonna pass any way so create a situation a for your self where you say you’re glad you did instead of you wish you would have.”
