This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Throwback Thursday slash where are they now? Where we take an in-depth look at somebody whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. We've had all kinds of features beginning with a New York City musician with a blog teaching jazz that becomes a multiple six-figure business, an Australian woman who draws houses. Let's see, what else do we have?
Oh yeah, last week was frozen yogurt treats for dogs. That was fun. Well today, I'm really excited for this one. It's hard to top frozen yogurt treats for dogs, but I think we managed to do it because we're gonna hear today from Jessica Brody way back in episode 303. Her story was called "Publish Author Ads Income Source Makes Extra $21,000 for First Year." So that was quite a while ago.
In this update, she has a lot of updates. It was actually a struggle for me to condense them because she gave us so many good things to work with. But suffice it to say that she has massively increased her following and income and influence since that episode. She's doing phenomenally well, and not only that, but she's making some really smart moves to reduce her dependence on the outside platform that she started with. So I thought that was pretty cool as well.
I'll be back at the end to say more about it. There are several lessons to take from this one, especially if you are at all interested in writing or making an online course or anything related to education. So here's Jessica for a bit after this message from our sponsor. [Music]
Hi, I'm Jessica Brody, and I'm a full-time novelist living near Portland, Oregon. I was featured on episode 303 of the podcast.
And as a full-time novelist, my side hustle is a company called Writing Mastery, which is dedicated to teaching other writers how to elevate their writing and their writing careers through online courses, webinars, YouTube videos, and blog posts. I got started because I was doing a lot of speaking engagements. I was hired to speak to writers at writing conferences and different writing events, and I found myself traveling a lot. And so I actually discovered an online learning platform called Udemy, and I decided as a test to transform one of my workshops that I would do live and transform it into an online course, just as a test. And I put it up on Udemy, and it ended up being very successful on Udemy.
I think we made $1,000 in the first day or something. And we were, we, meaning me and my husband, who is my producer for the courses, we were so excited. We were like, "What else can you talk about?" And from there, I started to brainstorm a bunch of different topics of things that I felt like I was good at or that writers often asked me about. So meaning they thought I was good at it. So I came up with a bunch of topics, and I just started to go through them and create courses based on them.
So the second one we launched a few months later, also did really well. That was a course all about productivity hacks for writers. And we've just been producing courses ever since. About a year after I was on the podcast, I released my very first nonfiction book, which is a book all about how to plot a novel and how to write a novel. And it's called "Save the Cat Writes a Novel." And it's based on a very popular screenwriting method called "Save the Cat." And I have adapted it for writing novels.
I looked back and when I was on the podcast before, we had 3,700 students on Udemy. And today we have 30,000 students on Udemy where I first launched my courses. So that's just crazy to me. But then I think the most exciting thing that's happened is was in January, which is my husband and I launched our very first online learning platform that is all ours. And it is called the Writing Mastery Academy.
It is a subscription site where you pay $12 a month and you get access to all of my courses, unlimited access. So you don't have to decide which one you wanna take or what order you can dabble in them. You can take them in any order. Take them as many times as you want. I think when people wanna create online courses, they struggle with either two different kinds of things.
They struggle with either what's called expert syndrome or imposter syndrome. And expert syndrome is when you are so knowledgeable about something that you can't break it down or you can't wrap your head around the fact that other people don't just naturally know how to do this. So you're just so good at it that you don't understand that it actually is a skill that many people don't have or that many people need to learn. And then on the other hand is this imposter syndrome, which is where I think people say, well, I can't create that course because I'm not the best in the field. I'm not the best at whatever I do.
So why would people turn to me to learn that? So they feel sort of like an imposter by making a course and saying, I can teach this. They feel like a little bit of the imposter syndrome. And I think I have some advice on both of those. I think for one, for the imposter syndrome, I think the key thing to note is that you do not have to be the best at something in order to teach it.
You just have to have some sort of skill that other people don't have. And even if that means you're not the best in your field, it means that you have something to offer people who want to learn about that field. In terms of expert syndrome, that one's a little bit harder to overcome, but I think the whole idea behind creating courses is being able to break down skills and knowledge into these bite-size learning nuggets or these bite-size markers on a journey. So I structure all of my courses as here's a pain point that you need to overcome, like conquering writer's block. And then I look at it and how can I break that down into bite-size skills or bite-size steps?
So I think a lot of people, the big mistake they make when they create a new course is they sort of try to tackle it all at once or they sort of tackle a little bit of this skill and then a little bit of this skill and it doesn't really have a clear learning path. So I guess that's my best piece of advice for anyone who's trying to break into the world of online learning. [Music]
Awesome, well, thank you so, so much, Jessica. Some great advice for us, great advice for all of us out there who are interested in doing something like this, the education industry in general. I love that stuff about expert syndrome and imposter syndrome.
So I'm glad she got into that. Now, because she was so helpful, I didn't get a chance to bring you all of her updates about her own stuff. She has actually written six books since we first featured her. So it's been a couple of years, but still six books. And that's in addition to, those are her novels.
That's in addition to many other courses that she has made. And then what you heard about in terms of the Writing Mastery Academy is really, really smart because she's built this platform on Udemy and made hundreds of thousands of dollars there, but recognizes that ultimately that platform has its own rules and she's not really in control of her own destiny there, but in creating her own little Academy, she has total control. So it's a way to continue to reach new people through the platform, through the outside platform Udemy, but then also it's a way of cultivating her own audience, developing community, just being in more control of all those elements and such. So it's just a really smart model overall. And she's thought a lot about how to create lots of little extensions and companion products.
I mean, there's just a whole lot of stuff. So I would encourage you if you're at all interested in writing or in course building, or if you just wanna see like, what is the anatomy of an ecosystem that someone has really built out very well to the point where she's serving lots of different people in different ways. And also critical point here, she's doing what she loves. She's still writing her novels. So she hasn't gotten so distracted with all the core stuff that she has forgotten about, what got her into this in the first place.
So I could probably go on and on myself just because I have so many good things to say about Jessica, but so I will stop now, but check out the Writing Mastery Academy among other things at learn.jessicabrody.com. We will link all that stuff up in the show notes page. So 2020 is our year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, if you perhaps would like to write a dozen books and create a dozen courses and then build your own platform. Well, on that last part, you're gonna need Jessica's help.
So I'm gonna study up to, but for all the other things, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll be featuring them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. Our show notes today are at sidehustleschool.com/1272, episode 1272. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Thank you for tuning in.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from The Onward Project.
