Enjoy this fireside chat with Brennan Dunn, where we talk email marketing, selling with integrity, and the beauty of design.

Link to Brennan’s newsletter and products

https://christiancreative.academy/go/brennan-dunn

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00:00:00.910]
Today I’m speaking with Brennan Dunn, who is someone that I’ve been following and learning from over a number of months now. He is an expert email marketer, but at the same time, a very ethical and integrity swamp, which has really kind of turned me on to what he is bringing to the marketplace. As we know, Internet marketing can be somewhat of a swamp and with all sorts of different ways that people express themselves. And I just found Brandon to be very genuine in his desire to help and to equip people to really leverage email marketing in ways that we can walk away from feeling proud of ourselves, not kind of scratching our heads and thinking.

00:00:52.240]
All right. Should I really have done that? He described himself as a recovering agency owner, probably in the same way as I would describe myself as a recovering pastor. He’s the founder of Your Freelancing, a community of 50,000 plus freelancers. That is an incredible stat there, Brennan. That’s a lot of people that you’re helping cofounder of right message, which helps creators build their lists faster and learn more about their subscribers. And the founder of Create and Sell, a community of creators who sell with email. And it’s really through the create and sell side of things.

00:01:33.380]
Brennan, that I think I came into your world because I use some of the tools that you’ve been producing and putting out market, and it’s absolutely transformed, certainly the way my emails look. But also in that I know that we kind of spoke briefly beforehand. Design and content tend to work in tandem with one another. And when we find beautiful design, I think we discover new ways to better communicate what we want to say. Brennan, it’s great to have you with us. Thank you so much for the time that you’re taking, and I just bring value to our community here.

00:02:27.110]
Tell us a little bit about yourself. I know that you’ve moved to the UK, an honorary Brit here. Even drinks tea in the morning. He’s the real deal.

00:02:40.530]
It’s out for milk when we can’t make tea, I’ve acclimated.

00:02:46.320]
Well, yeah, I think definitely. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Brendan. What is it that really kind of lights your fire.

00:02:56.020]
Well, thanks again for having me, David. I really appreciate the invite. And yeah, thank you for. I know you didn’t personally accept me to the country, but thank you for the warm hospitality that your country may have given me. Yeah. Okay. So who am I professionally? Let’s put it that way. I used to be a software developer. I still kind of do like the Temple Pack, for instance, that you were referencing is software, but I primarily identify as a business owner who happens to have had to learn how to do marketing.

00:03:36.290]
So that said business could actually stay afloat and pay me money and keep the lights on. So yeah, for the last 1213 years or so, I’ve been working for myself originally as an agency owner. So I started out as a freelancer and got too many clients. So I hired people and friends who had an agency, and I eventually got kind of a bit worn out by building things for other people instead of building my own things. And I had friends who ran software companies and they didn’t seem to have the constraints or the issues that I did having a few clients, they had many customers who couldn’t.

00:04:20.720]
None of them could have too much control or power. And I envied that. So I ended up actually starting a software company that was called Planscope. That was a project management tool, which most agencies end up starting something like that. So I did that. And I officially exited the agency to focus on that. And a big part of planscope was I had to find out how to get people to find the product and buy it. So that was kind of my crash course on marketing online because with the agency stuff, it was all local.

00:04:56.570]
And I started writing. I created material on Freelancing, which the hope was people would find it and then read it and buy the software. Well, that didn’t pan out like I wanted it to. A lot of people read it, wanted more information and didn’t really care with the software. So I ended up actually selling the software side of things and turning the blog for planscope into what’s now Double Your Freelancing, which has had conferences that I’ve run, used to have a podcast and quite a number of courses.

00:05:28.450]
And that’s what I’ve been doing really professionally for the last few years. And then when doing that, I kind of got deep into email marketing and email personalization. And that’s what led me then to start Right message because frankly, I kind of missed having a software company. And I partnered up with a friend of mine who’s also from the UK to start that. And over the last February, I’ve been working on this new venture called Crete and Sell, which is really my outlet. That’s outside of right message.

00:06:03.720]
That’s outside of Double your Freelancing. That has nothing to do with Freelancing, where I can just talk about interesting things about using email to build an audience and offer interesting things to that audience.

00:06:18.830]
Yeah. Tell me, Brandon, the email marketing because I know that with the rise of social media, a lot of emphasis and a lot of the kind of fanfare nowadays is around building social media followings. You’ve got to be on clubhouse, you’ve got to do your TikToks, you’ve got to kind of tweet here. And I know Twitter is a platform that you kind of leverage a more Facebook based. I feel like an old guy because Facebook, my kids tell me Facebook’s role people. And so a lot of people I think are under the illusion that email marketing is maybe dead is too strong.

00:07:06.780]
A word, but a kind of dying beast. And that social media is where you’re going to find traction. Why email?

00:07:15.930]
So first off, I think we’ve seen first hand what happens when I don’t know if you remember. But few years back, there was this big issue online where people who had Facebook pages with a lot of likes and followers started noticed that their reach was getting was diminishing. And Facebook because they own the platform, ended up making it. So they became more of a bit of a play and pay model or pay to play model where you had to promote posts and boost posts or whatever they called it.

00:07:52.960]
And really, ever since then, I’ve been a bit sceptical of the fact that with social media, you ultimately don’t own your audience. You can’t export a list of all the contacts you have and get all their information in any meaningful way and bring it over to Safe from Facebook to Twitter or whatever else. With email, you ultimately own the email list. I can go from Convergence today and I can switch it to another email provider tomorrow, and it’s completely portable. It is effectively mine. So that’s one thing, which is the control thing, which worried me.

00:08:28.310]
But practically speaking, I don’t want to say any. I never want to be too absolute. But when you look at most people who have done proper tests between, say launching a product on social media versus launching a product over email, usually email has the highest ROI compared to social. And I’ve seen that firsthand, and I think the difference is with the email. So for instance, when we’re talking now, any tweets that are happening at the moment, I’m probably not going to see but any emails I’m getting at the moment, I need to deal with it in some way.

00:09:07.370]
I can either ignore them or I need to archive them or read them or something like that. So email is a bit more task list oriented where you get an email from me and you need to do something with it, whereas Twitter, Facebook, or whatever else. They’re all a bit like a firehose where they’re kind of ephemeral. If you don’t see the things going on, if you go on a holiday for a week, you’re not going to come back and see that launch that happened on social media.

00:09:34.390]
So I’m very GungHo on email. I’ve seen first hand how it’s helped my business, and granted, I serve professionals. I’m selling really to other business owners, and the inbox is where work happens for most of us. So I think if I was selling a jewellery to 14 year olds, I probably wouldn’t use or put too much focus on email marketing.

00:09:59.590]
Yeah, a lot of my audience. Brennan, I work largely with Christian Creatives. I’ve run a number of different businesses, nothing quite so deep in the geek trenches as you, Brandon, you’re a master of things way beyond my pay grade. But my focus nowadays is I run something called the Christian Creative Academy. Believers feel they’ve got a real message or an idea that they want to crystallise and put out to the marketplace in a way that others can consume. And with email, there’s a lot of very spammy tactics that tend to take place.

00:10:54.830]
Email spam is like epidemic levels. It’s very difficult to keep. One of the things is very much there was a couple of things, actually, Brennan, that have really stood out for me in your communications. And this is largely the reason we’re having this conversation now is number one, you come across very personal, and I know that you’ve even built software and a business around making email less generic and much more kind of connecting with the people who are actually reading the things that you’re sending out.

00:11:36.950]
And number two just very integrates. Could you just talk a little bit about how you approach? Because one of the things I think with email that’s very powerful is it gives opportunity for relationship building that runs far deeper than just someone catching a tweet or happening upon a post that’s going down a scrolling screen somewhere. Could you just speak into that this kind of almost obsessive love of actually making email less generic and much more relationship oriented?

00:12:24.690]
Yeah, that’s a great question way of looking at things. I think that I think many of us miss, especially when we’re trying to make the sale or get that conversion or whatever we’re looking for. I have to say, for me. So I mentioned that I used to run conferences and events, and I always found it so flattering when I remember I was in Stockholm at a conference and that I was running. I was at this resort and it was a freelancing conference that I used to run.

00:13:03.720]
And I just thought it was so interesting when I would meet people there talk to natural human being face to face, and I would find out who they were and the story would never be something like, oh, I heard you on a podcast four years ago, and then I ended up getting your emails and just kind of really enjoyed what you were sending. And I liked that you weren’t kind of aggressively trying to get me to buy anything. And I just really got a lot out of it.

00:13:34.600]
And one email in particular helped me in some transformative way. And then that kind of propelled me to then say, buy one of your courses six months long. And then now, three years later, four years later, here I am now I just paid $1,000 for a ticket, plus all the expenses to get to Sweden. And now I’m standing face to face, hanging out with you and learning from at your event. And I’ve always liked this kind of self selecting way of selling where the idea is, they call it education based marketing, whatever you want to call it is the material.

00:14:11.440]
But at the end of the day, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to show people establish a problem. So here’s something you might not have thought about. Here’s something about the design of emails that is something I find interesting that maybe you’ll find interesting too. And then you basically effectively create a customer in the sense that you show somebody to be specific through the template pack. I talk a lot about email and format and structure and block these things and the digestibility of being able to read an email and why we should be thinking in a certain way about how we structure what we send and what I’m trying to ultimately do is give somebody almost Socratically, but done over email very informally, where it’s very hard to get somebody to change their opinion or change the way they look at the world by telling them that they’re doing it wrong.

00:15:23.470]
Politically, I doubt any whatever side of the coin you’re on. I doubt Facebook posts have ever really, truly converted somebody to think a different way about a political issue. But this comes from my background in the classics. When Socrates would wander around ancient Athens and try to get people to think like he did, he wouldn’t tell them you’re thinking wrong. He would use questions and get people to kind of eventually get to the point where they decide that this is the right way of doing things, and that happened to be what Socrates one of them to think from the get go.

00:16:01.110]
So my thinking is always, well, if I could do that in a way over through the content I send, if I can establish this way of looking at email marketing that I think is a really good way and is better than a lot of the alternatives, especially the CD Internet marketing alternatives. If I can get people over on that side, and then I put in the sweat equity to build products and services that help them implement that worldview, that’s a win win for both of us.

00:16:29.980]
So rather than cornering somebody and saying flashy flashy buy by buy, I’d much rather get people to self decide to buy when they’re ready to buy, if that makes sense.

00:16:42.260]
Yeah. It’s much more of a long play, I think, isn’t it? I would very much look at it as value based marketing that we give first. Really, before we ask for anything to be given back in many respects. And I would totally buy into that, Brennan. And at the same time, I also want to balance that with certainly in Christian circles there’s, like sometimes such an incredible reluctance to actually sell anything ever. Seriously, you got to feed your family. It’s okay if you’re bringing value to the table to place it before people in an integrous way, but ask for that sale.

00:17:28.070]
And so you clearly Brennan got a real passion to help other people as well. Though, because it’s not just that you are kind of seeing these things yourself and building out your business. A lot of the content that you put out there, as you say, is educational. But I think that that flows from a real heart to help other people, doesn’t it? I think a lot of but when people are coming into the Internet, marketing online products, selling courses, even writing books, doing podcasts, et cetera, it can be quite a confusing place to be in.

00:18:07.950]
But if we boil it right down to its essence, a lot of the driver, certainly I find behind what I do. And I’m sure that you would probably agree really comes from a heart to help other people, sometimes from the pain that we’ve been through. We think, man, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone because entrepreneurialism is not an easy. No, it’s not an easy choice, is it? Just talk about your heart to kind of help and equip other people, and maybe some of the products that you’ve got in the marketplace that can help them do that if they’re looking to build their lists.

00:18:47.790]
Yeah, I know you’re right. Then I do genuinely like helping people because I found that it’s not if I help somebody that doesn’t. I think a lot of people fear. Well, if I give it all away, why would they buy for me? And you see a lot of course, graders who think that. So they kind of do very superficial marketing with the hope of lowering people in. But my thinking has always been, honestly, maybe I could have done better financially if I would have been more like that.

00:19:19.920]
But I think at the end of the day, if I can make it so people feel like when they get an email from me and they read it, they’re better off than they were before they read that email, I’ve succeeded. But obviously, that’s not going to pay the bills. So if I can establish that equation where you give Brennan time and energy and he gives you back something that outweighs the input. Well, if that can be established, then what happens when you give Brennan $100 for a Temple pack?

00:19:54.870]
What output comes from that? And that’s the kind of thing that I want to have established, because I’ve never found that by giving things away or by being having too much good free stuff that that’s ever hurt me. But then again, I might be wrong, because even though I’ve done well for myself, I could have maybe done better for myself quantitatively had I done that. But I find this to be the model that works best for me. It’s something where I can actually sleep well at night, not thinking that I’ve taken advantage of people or anything like that.

00:20:28.040]
And at the end of the day, if I can find ways of putting in focus time, if I can spend a few hundred hours building something like the Temple pack, and then somebody can get it for comparatively cheap compared to the one I put in. But then I can give that to a lot of people or sell to a lot of people. I win day when we all win. And that’s kind of how I look at business. That’s how I’ve always tried to do this. And again, it might be if you’re looking to be the most successful person in the world of this stuff, it might not be the best model, but I find it the model that again works for me.

00:21:07.050]
Yeah, I’m all for kind of living peaceably and peacefully. Life does not just comprise a business alone, but there are some metrics that are often and actually far more important than just our bottom line. It’s like our self worth is not equal to our net worth.

00:21:35.070]
Especially in the internet marketing world. These people who obviously do very, very well for themselves. But you do a Google search of them and you land outside of any of their very carefully curated landing pages and you find scathing reviews about how they’ve been ripped off and this and that. And again, I know they do well, they have say, like a zero tolerance refund policy. They are very ridiculous amount of upsells and this and that and their bank account is probably much nicer than mine. But at the end of the day, I’d much rather have a clean reputation because I’m not using those sort of tactics.

00:22:17.750]
And again, I’m not trying to be an absoluteist ever. I’m not trying to say the way I do it is the only way of doing it. But I’ve found for me and the kind of people I like to be around, namely, the audience that I’ve built and the people who sit around and don’t leave. That’s the way I like doing things. It’s much more comfortable for me. And that’s ultimately what I’m optimising for is I’m optimising for personal comfort and yeah, financial stuff is one component of that.

00:22:44.420]
But also knowing that I ended up having in my mind, done good work is another component.

00:22:51.730]
Yeah. I know that you work oftentimes really work with people who are kind of way into the email marketing game, potentially before they even meet with you. Brennan, I speak to people at all sorts of levels, but many of them would be just coming into the online space, looking to begin to share their message, looking to begin to find out. Okay. How do I actually take what’s on the inside of me and get it out to the world if you can just kind of rewind your own experience right back to those days where you are thinking, man, how do I actually begin to build an email list?

00:23:36.780]
How do I begin to build an audience through email? What kind of advice would you give people who are just coming into this space and looking to begin build to leverage email as a way to add value, build an audience and then potentially kind of lead that audience to kind of consume more of what they offer.

00:24:04.100]
Yeah. So that’s a great question, because I think it’s one of these things I’ve been struggling with myself, both on the I kind of see my job with rate and sell to be very holistic. And part of that is, well, what if you get somebody who’s an absolute beginner who wants to kind of make their Mark? How would I help them do that? And I’ve struggled with that because I struggled to empathise with that, because it’s been years since I’ve been in that situation. And I think one thing that you can do is the people that I think I’ve gotten the most out of and that they’ve been helpful to be have not been the academics have not been the Ivory tower, people who are Masters at something who are so far beyond where I am that they can’t relate case in point.

00:24:55.310]
Right now, I’m getting into woodworking, and there’s people like actually another brick called Paul Sellers, who have been doing this for decades, and he knows what he’s doing. But I’m so intimidated. And so the gap between us is so big that I find myself drawing toward people, say on YouTube, who are just a little ahead of me, very close to me. In a sense, they can help me. I don’t feel intimidated by them and so on and so forth. So I think let’s say that you have a particular angle that you want to share with the world, and you’ve got a way of looking at things you want to share that angle the first thing that I would help that I encourage people to do.

00:25:43.760]
And again, it’s been a while since I’ve been completely from scratch. So take that with that context. But the first thing that I would do is first up, I wouldn’t be put off by the fact that other people are doing kind of what you want to do. I think that there’s a lot of reluctance to be another voice in a crowded room. But I think at the end of the day, expertise is ultimately relative, and authority is also relative, meaning that there are, say, people on my email list who probably potentially think that I am extremely authoritative in all things email, but they’re not actually looking at anyone else who’s talking about maybe they stumbled upon me by chance.

00:26:28.050]
Somebody told them that a friend said, hey, you’re starting with an email, go cheque out, create and sell. They’re there. But they haven’t really branched off. So for them, I’m both the expert and the sole authority. And I think the mistake that I’ve seen people make again and again is thinking that they’re not expert enough or that if they’re not the global authority on a subject that they’re not going to be able to help anyone at the end of the day. I think ultimately you don’t need a large group of people who see you as both an expert and an authority to make an impact.

00:27:04.630]
And I think a lot of people get put off by others are doing what I want to do. Others are a lot better equipped at teaching it than I am, and that kind of stops people from the get go. But I really think that I understand why people think that because there’s always this kind of nagging demons that are trying to tell us like that we’re not good enough or that it’s going to be a waste of time or whatever else. But really, at the end of the day, I would just start putting stuff out there, spending the time to either create or to curate.

00:27:43.670]
So look at what other people are doing and synthesise it down into something that is nice and easy to digest for an audience or come up with your own original content. Start with that. And even if you don’t have a massive list overnight, which you probably won’t just be consistent. When you have a portfolio of content out there, you can start maybe pitching podcast hosts or blog people who accept guest posts and ask them if you can be on their podcast or read a guest post for them, because then what you’re effectively doing is you’re in turn syphoning off part of their audience, hopefully to yours.

00:28:24.760]
And that will just help you boost yours. And then over time before you know it 100 people, then you’ll have 1000 people and so on and so forth. But I think at the end of the day it’s hard because everyone wants that overnight success. We all have been buying Amazon and for wanting things immediately.

00:28:43.630]
I think you got a great point there, Brennan, and as well, a lot of the productizing and commoditization of the way our soul responds to things, tries to lay a lot of those kind of press the button and everything will magically change. Just if you buy this or follow these three easy steps and you fail to realise that the person’s overnight success actually took ten years to get to. There were plenty of kind of days before that overnight and being of a mindset that understands that certainly in the Scriptures, it talks about sewing and reaping, and there’s a rhythm to that that is not kind of press the button.

00:29:45.010]
And two minutes later your meal is going to be on the table. There’s actually a level of cultivating and really tending to, and I think that plays into how we communicate with other people. The kind of products that we create are often we discover how they can best meet the needs of people by actually meeting the people whose needs they meet. And that relationship building that trust building honestly doesn’t happen overnight. And I’ll often tell people that we discover our voice by using it, right? Not waiting like sat under a tree for something to drop up on us.

00:30:40.750]
And suddenly we are thrust into kind of the limelight of influence. But it’s something that we build over time that we recognise that we actually have something valuable to bring to the table. And I think the difficulty, as you touched on, comes because when we first start bringing it to the table, either, the table seems very crowded with other sumptuous looking offerings. And what we bring to the party is like a little bowl of peanuts, you know, and it’s easy in that process to get discouraged.

00:31:23.930]
It’s just so important, and I really want to kind of just jump off the back of what you said. It’s so important for anyone listening who feels that insecurity feels that sense of inadequacy that a part of this process of just putting content out there consistently is as much us finding our voice and finding our confidence and making kind of those incremental steps to where what we share really does begin to land with the people that were called to speak to. And that doesn’t always happen in an instant, because actually we are finding ourselves in the process of trying to find the people that we’re looking to reach.

00:32:19.930]
Absolutely. I think the things you need to kind of extend that. I think when I started creating sell almost the area, I didn’t really know what I should be selling. So I just started with my usual thing of geeky out on things I’m interested in. But I think one thing that’s again, I know one thing that’s helped me tremendously has been incorporating different feedback loops and asking people to actively reply back and share with me things and this. And that because I think if you’re just propelling out content, it can be a bit intimidating in the sense of like if no one’s responding, are you doing something wrong?

00:33:03.090]
Well, no, you’re probably just not doing a good enough job asking people to actually respond. I’d say, and I found that I’m very driven by a bit, like elaborate where if I’m fed, I’m happy. So when I’m fed back when people reply saying, oh, that was really interesting. Or if I put a specific reply and tell me X kind of call to action at the end of an email, I find that that makes me more motivated to do it again and again because I know that there are somebody’s listing.

00:33:35.190]
I’m not just publishing to the void. So that’s one thing I’d say is try to think about how you can create feedback loops. One thing I do, which I think is really helpful for me. When somebody joins my list, I ask them to share with me if I could dedicate next week’s email to you specifically, what would you want me to read or send you? And I found that works well. And another thing that I want to talk about, too, is the issue of originality, and I think this is something I struggle with.

00:34:05.620]
And this is something with I think a lot of creators struggle with is that I’m not original enough or I can’t consistently create original content. And I think that there’s so much that could be done with spending the time doing some research or doing some curation where you’re looking, what other people said on the subject, and just to filling that down for the audience that you have where it doesn’t need to be. David’s brilliant insights he thought of in the shower this morning. It could be a little more systematic in the sense that you’re saving your audience time by making it so they’re not Googling around like you’ve been for the last few days.

00:34:50.830]
You’ve done the Googling. You’ve put it down into a specific, well laid out message, and that’s your contribution. And I look at things now. Like I mentioned the woodworking thing, my new little hobby.

00:35:05.290]
I saw a picture of something that you’d created on last night.

00:35:12.170]
It’s very new to me. But what I’m realising is there’s this concept of a jig, which is just a way of, like a canned way of achieving an output again and again and again. And the email marketer me is thinking that’s constant snippets. And I think that if I ever wanted to have my niche fee, how do I help marketers get in the woodworking, which would be super niche. But I could do that. And I could be thinking, yeah, I’m not going to create original content on how to cut boards or whatever else, but I can think like, oh, how can I take this expertise that I learned from someone else and distil it down into something that my specific audience will understand really well.

00:36:03.730]
And I think there’s just a tonne of room for that. And it doesn’t like you’re the first person ever to think of how to cut a board instead.

00:36:11.060]
You’re just making it relatable based on me. One of the arms of my business is a fiction publishing company, and I can tell you 100% in genre fiction, originality is way overrated. If you write two original people just won’t buy it. It’s like they want what they want.

00:36:34.540]
And they want her journey.

00:36:36.330]
Yeah, this is it again and again and again with a different name and different clothes, different place, but the same story. And this is it as well. It’s like the idea that we have to be blazingly original or, like, 10,000 miles down the road before we qualify to actually bring something helpful to other people. It’s just such a lie. It’s just not true. I loved what you said earlier is like, sometimes the guy kind of on the mountain top in the distance and you’re still down in the Valley thinking, What’s a spanner or what’s a screwdriver.

00:37:19.910]
It can just be like, I’ll never get there. But someone who’s just a few steps ahead and turns around and puts a hand out and says, hey, let me give you a hand. Let me show you the next step you need to take, not the next 25,000 steps, and we can build. Now you’d mentioned content snippets and things I’m aware of time here, Brennan. One of the ways in which I’m benefiting from what you’re putting out to the world is both yourself and I use ConvertKit for our email marketing presently.

00:38:02.450]
And the email pack that you template pack that you put out has really transformed the way that I am. Certainly the look of my emails. But even the way that I so enjoy how beautiful the emails look that my emails are becoming more like a mini novel because I want to utilise all of these beautiful sections as many times as I can. Brendan, you have courses about kind of leveraging email with ConvertKit. You’ve got the template pack. Feel free, Brennan. You’ve created them. I would love you to sell them right now.

00:38:52.910]
Just tell people a bit about how they can benefit from the content that you’re bringing into the marketplace and the way they can find you. I mean, I’ll put links in the description for the podcast and everything, but yeah, please go ahead.

00:39:07.160]
I’m a horrible marketer. I try to always never be too self promotional on things like this, but since you asked me, too, I will. Yeah. So create and Sell Co is kind of the hub of all things that I’m doing nowadays with content and courses and products on email marketing. So the two things now that I have there, which are going to be greatly expanded in the coming year, are I have my kind of flagship product, which is mastering convergent, and that’s kind of what I’ve had before I had it before great and soul started, and that’s a beast of a product.

00:39:47.950]
It’s 20 plus hours of tutorials on literally all these strategic and technical things you can do with convert it. And that’s what kind of started create and sell, to be honest. But since then, I’ve released the template pack, which originally was just a downloadable thing of here are some templates and not just the structural templates, but also this interesting way that I’ve discovered that you can use content snippets to dynamically change themselves. And again, if you don’t know what that is, basically what I’m getting at is just the ability to have reusable components like a testimonial widget or a referral widget or a call out or something that you can mix into all of your different emails.

00:40:33.890]
So you’ll have if I can just briefly jump in here, that is totally what sold me, because although I was using content snippets in their bare form, there wasn’t that dynamic component. If you had a snippet, it was like set in stone. You dropped the snippet in and it was like, okay, so I was having to kind of really think carefully around. Okay, well, I can create a specific header or a specific kind of layout. But there’s not that dynamic component, but what you’ve created here really has kind of taken snippets from something that was a side dish and made it kind of the main meal in many respects.

00:41:24.850]
I really love it. That’s where, like this kind of I call it geeky, but that’s this incredible way to leverage technology and see what’s possible is just so powerful. And yet I also want to say to people as someone who uses your template pack Brennan, for someone who is very much a front end person. Once you start digging into HTML and Snippets, and I think you talk about liquid code and all sorts of things that I just have no clue about. The beauty of it is someone who with a very limited understanding of those things, can actually utilise what you’ve produced here to get remarkable results without understanding all of the clever things that happening in the background.

00:42:27.290]
Yeah. Well, that’s the thing. I’m sure if you’ve looked at some of the actual code, you’ve copied it from the template pack and you convert, it can be a bit overwhelming, I’m sure. But that’s what I’ve tried to do is I’ve tried to create this abstraction layer because the problem is ConvertKit ticks in a certain way that expects liquid code. If you want to do mathematical operations to say, calculate a progress bar for how many referrals you sent me thing to show a progress bar, and to make it the right width, you need to know how to write liquid code to do some division and this and that so what I’m trying to do with this pack and what I’ve done with it is said right.

00:43:12.870]
Well, here are some components that I’ve created that I think are kind of best practises that do this stuff for you. You can tweak it like you said, the front end stuff where you can change the colours, you can change the font stuff, you can make it fit your brand, but at the moment, you can’t do much beyond that which that is changing, and then you give it those inputs, and then you just click a tab and it gives you the exact thing that you need to just load directly into ConvertKit, and then now convert.

00:43:40.950]
It has fancy progress bars that are using the data of the subscriber getting that email.

00:43:45.670]
Yeah.

00:43:46.120]
And that’s the thing that I think in a perfect world. I hate saying it’s because it kind of ruins that business of mine. But converted should have this stuff built in, but it doesn’t. So this is the next best thing for having that outcome that I think a lot of people want. And funny enough, it’s been a bit of a runaway success for me. I don’t really talk about this much, but I’ve had close to 400 people buy it, and I haven’t done hard selling of it much.

00:44:16.530]
I mean, usually I’ll put in my emails, like in my footer. I say if you like the design of this email, click here and I’ll talk in my email sometimes, but it’s usually casual reference. I don’t really push it that hard as you’ve seen, and it’s largely word of mouth at this point where people are either getting emails that have been sent that you or a friend told them.

00:44:41.030]
Yeah, well, it’s amazing, Brennan, really, as I say, it’s transformed the look and just some of the ways in which I’m actually leveraging kind of what I want to put out to the world has been affected by what I can now do and the ways in which I can actually present those things in a manner that I feel really happy to put out to the world. I wouldn’t be putting out the kind of volume of content I do a weekly email. Now. The template pack actually led me to really reconsider how I am doing my email marketing that.

00:45:35.290]
Happened with this little side project of mine.

00:45:37.660]
Yeah. So people can go to createandsell co.

00:45:41.120]
Yes.

00:45:41.600]
Co they can see the different courses that you’ve got available. They can pick up the template pack. I recommend that they pick it up quickly.

00:45:51.460]
I don’t know when this episode goes live, but basically at the end of the month, the final Monday, the month I’m removing right now it’s effectively a lifetime deal where you buy it now and you get it forever, including all the updates. But I’m turning it into a software product that’s going to be a lot more powerful and it’s going to have a proper monthly billing model. But obviously.

00:46:17.710]
I’ll do my best to edit it. No, totally. I’ll get this out to people because I would love to see people benefit from what you’re putting out and how they can begin to utilise it in what they’re doing. Brandon, thank you so much.

00:46:35.350]
A lot of micro things I’ll be creating on different workshops and hosting might even do a live workshop, probably in the UK at some point, but yeah, but thank you, David.

00:46:47.410]
I might be one of those guys that comes up to you and says like, oh, well, three years ago.

00:46:52.390]
Well, I put a face on the name now. So my wife, I have this weird knack for I’ve seen somebody’s Twitter profile picture, and then I see them in person at a conference and they come up and we start talking, and I immediately know who they are and all this stuff. I’ve seen their thumbnail in Gmail. That’s my one gift, I think, is the ability to once they have a face. I’m good at in person recognising them.

00:47:23.410]
Well, Brandon, thank you so much for your time. Really has been a blessing to just get opportunity to see you face to face, speak with you and just enjoy some of the wisdom that you brought, and hopefully we will continue to connect in other ways. And other places.

00:47:43.530]
Of course.

00:47:44.320]
God bless you, Brandon. Thank you so much.

00:47:46.200]
Thank you, David. Yeah. Thanks.

00:47:49.210]
Well. Thanks for listening. Hopefully, it’s been an encouragement to you today. If you want to connect any further, you can do so through my website at davidleemartin.com.

00:47:58.850]
Have a great day.