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Hey, it's Friday. Time for a new episode of Weekend Update. This little voice memo series that I started last week, sharing a little bit behind the scenes of what's going on in my brain, in my business. This week was a good week. I feel like I've been in a little bit of a funk the last couple weeks. Maybe that came through in last week's episode, but some big wins this week and some breakthroughs that I'll share with you here. Yesterday, Nathan Barry published a podcast on his feed, the Nathan Barry Show. It's on YouTube and in your podcast player. I'll link to both here in the show notes. But that episode is doing really well for him. He texted me this morning and said this is the best performance of a video they've had so far in the first 24 hours. And looking at his channel, it looks like it's the third most viewed video all time already. Will probably surpass number two today and hopefully the first here before the weekend is over. So I feel really good about that obviously, because for folks who watch that show, I hope find and like my stuff as well. But I also like to show up and over deliver for folks. So I feel like we had a really good conversation. I'm proud of the way we I, I showed up and the conversation we had there. So that is a nice win. Glad that's going well for him. He also showed me his CTR and avd. He's also posted that on Twitter, both very, very high. His CTR was 9.7% for this video in the first 24ish hours, which is crazy high. We've never seen that in a 24 hour period and people are watching on average more than eight minutes. That video. It's 63 minutes long. Just awesome. Glad that is going well. It's good to get a win there. Last week I sent an email to, I guess it was Monday night. I sent an email to my prospective book agent giving her an update on where the book is currently standing, what we're focusing on, because it's been a long time actually since I touched base with her and as I invest more time into this process, I was starting to feel like, man, I wish I had more feedback from her at this point in the process just to see if this is becoming more or less interesting to her as a proxy for the publishing industry. So I shared an update with her and she was very enthusiastic, very encouraging. So I'm feeling good, good about the book and I'm making good progress on writing shitty first drafts of sections that are, that are going to go into chapter one. Chapter one just feels like such a bear of a chapter. And this is just the proposal. Obviously it's going to change in final book form, but chapter one is really where I'm making the core argument and thesis for the book and we're putting a version of that in the proposal. But it's so hard for me to wrap my arms around because I just know it's going to change a bunch of times. And this is arguably the most important chapter in the book. So I've been in my own head, really in my own head trying to be more embodied and get out of my head so that I can more productively get thoughts down on paper. And I feel like I'm making some good progress. Had my call with my editor Julie this morning. We were both high energy and it was very encouraging. So over the next week I hope I will get this chapter done. My hope is to have the proposal finished and approved by my agent at the beginning of September. So we have a few weeks here to get that done in her hands, get feedback, tighten things up. Still a ways to go, but I feel more high conviction than ever that this is a great idea and an important book that can be really successful if I do it as well as I can. It's not going to be easy, but I feel like there is. The challenge is compressing everything I want to say into the book, not justifying what I have to say as book length, if that makes sense. It seems like it's a really big thing that I have to compress. Not that I am expanding a blog post, so that feels good. Good momentum in the lab this week we had a couple new members that I'm really excited about. We had somebody who was a former member rejoin just today and that is a killer, killer sign that you've built something that people remember and value and even when they leave, they want to come back. So that was exciting. We had some members form a LinkedIn mastermind within the community and that was really popular. They're meeting and, and sharing and I have no doubt that's going to be really impactful for everybody involved. A lot of just overall great activity with new experiments shared. I started a post act asking people what they're doing to increase sales right now. So, you know, my North Star for that space is just high quality, high signal knowledge sharing and I have to remind myself that sometimes I can be the catalyst for that. Obviously sharing what I'm doing and what I know. But even Just starting the conversation, asking people to share, okay, what's going on in your business right now in terms of sales? What's working? What are you considering doing? Because even just a kernel of an idea and inspiration can really help other folks in the community who are also thinking about sales right now. So I'm happy about that. But the biggest challenge for memberships, especially peer to peer memberships, because if you have a very outcome, like a specific outcome or transformation oriented membership, then I think it's easier to construct a very long, very clear, linear iterated on customer journey. But when your community is peer to peer, we have goals for the community of we want to experiment and grow together. And yes, that's a little bit soft because honestly, my aspiration for the community is this is the place that professional creators want to be, feel like they have to be. If I'm pursuing being a creator full time, if I'm already doing it full time, this is a place I just need to be. Because the value is so much higher than the cost. But that is the rub. The rub is value extraction is what people are evaluating the quality of a purchase on. For any product, for any product, you are making some promise of value. And if I purchase, it's because I want that and I believe you can deliver it. But at the point of purchase, I have taken all of the risk, all of my money is out. The person selling it has captured the value of that, that transaction. But the value of the transaction for the purchaser still needs to be extracted. And so value extraction, the more you focus on this and solve for it, reduce friction, the more successful you're going to be. Because if you make it easier and easier and easier to extract the value I'm paying for that, I'm more likely to have a great experience, get the outcome that I wanted, tell people about it. And in a peer to peer, connection based, conversation based membership or community, that is more difficult, it's more effortful, it requires a little bit more effort on the part of the member. So what I'm thinking about now, I almost think of it as like midboarding. You have onboarding, offboarding, but then there's this period in the middle of midboarding that I really want to focus on and make better and better and better. Because I know from my data, people coming to the lab have an incredible experience for the first several months. But then whether life happens or they get busy or they feel like I'm taking advantage of this space too much, a lot of people go a little bit more quiet and I want to solve for that part of the journey where you continue to extract value without making a ton of effort. We had a call in the community this week and we were talking about how to make learning experiences, particularly long term learning experiences, better for the student. Like how can we take unreasonable accountability for the success of our students? I'm thinking about almost like a job posting. Could I create a 30, 60, 90 day plan for people joining the membership and how personalized can I make that? At a time with AI where you can train a model on your thinking and a certain set of data that you give it, I'm wondering if I can find a way to build a system that people can generate on the fly new plans for themselves for some period of time based on what they provide and what I've trained that model on. It's going to take a while for me to figure that out. But the key thing that I wanted to share here is if you want more sales, if you want more word of mouth, more referrals, more student success, lower the bar for how they experience value extraction. This is easy and something that's like a template because the template basically gives you value extraction right away when you purchase a SaaS product and you start using the SaaS product value extraction right away. So one, you could look at this and say, I want to do just more high utility plug and play style products where value extraction is obviously easy. But for anything you are selling, how do I lower the bar for value extraction? All right, that's it for today. I need to go upstairs and help Mal get ready for our daughter's birthday party tomorrow, her first birthday party. We're celebrating at the house tomorrow, so we've got to finish decorations and mostly I'm just allowing her the time and space to do the decorating because I am not good at that. But it's important. So here I go. I hope you have a great weekend. I'll talk to you on Tuesday.