My guest today is Caleb Kingston who is the founder and instructor at App Design Tips. In this episode, we discuss how Caleb created the biggest design meetup in Salt Lake City, getting his first client from the meetup group, making his course stand out on Udemy, how to select which tools to make courses on, joining Adobe XDI, being patient to play the long game and why not to fear copycats. For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show Level Up Your Design Career (Free Email Course): https://levelup.designmba.show/
Caleb Kingston is a serial entrepreneur and award winning designer. He runs his own agency, Brainspin where he’s spent the last decade designing cutting edge solutions for the healthcare industry and many startups. He’s also a YouTube star and online teacher at App Design Tips.
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Jayneil Dalal: Today's amazing guest is Caleb Kingston who's a serial entrepreneur and an award-winning designer. He runs his own agency Brainspin where he's spent the last decade designing cutting-edge solutions for the healthcare industry and many startups. He's also a YouTube star and an online teacher at App Design Tips. You can check out his online courses and YouTube videos at AppDesignTips.com.
Caleb, thank you so much, my friend, for coming on this show. Super excited to be talking with you, my friend.
Caleb Kingston: Thanks for having me. This is really exciting.
Jayneil: You're one of the few people that when I chat with you, it's just such an open mindset and you're just full of energy. I remember the first time chatting with you, I’m like “Oh my God, I got to get this guy on the show.”
Caleb: Yeah, we're living in an exciting time and I think there's a lot of opportunities for us and I really love sharing the success stories that I have to help drive and motivate more people to learn that there are those opportunities out there and there's ways they can take advantage of these opportunities and kind of enhance their lifestyle. So, really excited to share.
Awesome. You are a serial entrepreneur. You've started multiple different businesses, one was even involving Airbnb, the Smart Stay Booking and Brainspin. Can you walk me through some of these origin stories, how you got started with this kind of entrepreneurial mindset?
Caleb: Yeah. So, actually, when I was a bit younger in my teenage years, my father had a friend who was an architect and he kind of got me a gig starting to do drafting with him. And so, it was at a time I didn't know anything about drafting. And so, basically what I did is I came into the office and he had a computer sitting there and he asked me to just learn some drafting software. So, I just kind of took some online courses and learned that my own way. And through that, I started learning graphic design and some different things and I always wanted to kind of further my education on those things and I always had different opportunities to design business cards for people or logos and I really liked taking advantage of those things. And so, that kind of helped get me some of the skill sets that I had but I also just had a drive to learn and it was the self-drive just for these online courses. And so, the thing that started Brainspin actually was that I was doing some of these design projects for a medical student who had some partnerships with some other companies and he told me that there was an opportunity for me to create some software or design some software for a publishing company. And so, he says “Hey, if you quit your job, we can come up with a business or a company together and take advantage of this opportunity.” So, that was something that was kind of a risk to take because it was something brand new for me. I’d never designed a full-fledged piece of software before but it was really exciting for me. So, I kind of took on that opportunity and that's really what started Brainspin.
Jayneil: And Brainspin is your consulting arm, the consulting agency that you run right now?
Caleb: Yeah, software design and development. So, I have a few developers working with me and I’m the designer. So, yeah, we do a lot of software, especially surrounding the medical field. So, that's kind of how it started. It's been a fun ride and that's kind of what launched. As far as UX design, I didn't go to traditional school for UX design. It was kind of like just take it one project at a time and kind of learn these skills. So, that's kind of been my background. It's been fun.
Jayneil: And when you quit your full-time job to start this idea of Brainspin, did you have a backup plan or savings or a runway?
Caleb: I didn't have much of a savings actually. We kind of had this one project secured and it felt really exciting. I didn't really have a backup plan. And so, really, when we finished this project, it was kind of like “Now, what do we do?” And I had to start thinking about how to drum up more business and try to get things working. So, it was a nice starter project and it really helped that transition go smoothly but I did have to think about now “How do I help run a company, how do I bring in the work, and how do I keep this thing growing?” So, it was just a great real-world experience to really get in there and figure out how to make it a success.
Jayneil: How did you land your first client for Brainspin?
Caleb: That was through that partnership. His name is Nephi Walton. He was a medical student that had this relationship with some book publishers. So, that first client was really he had already done some stuff for them in the past. And so, he really helped nail that opportunity down. And so, that was something to where he initially did the first work for that. And for myself, after that, trying to move things forward, it was really like having the confidence knowing that you're able to complete a project and complete the scope. And so, after that, it was really just I have different friends that have different business opportunities and as I was talking to them, I would always ping ideas to them and say like “What if we designed this kind of software that would solve this?” And those kinds of things just really excited them and that's kind of how I built these projects moving forward.
Jayneil: You also started the largest design meetup, if I’m not mistaken, in Salt Lake City. Walk me through the journey and then the reward that came from it.
Caleb: Yeah, for sure. It's not the largest. It's pretty large. There are about two big meetups. So, I have the Salt Lake Designers and there's the Product Hive. And they're both really vital in the community. Actually, I was just thinking one night it would be nice to get together with fellow designers and kind of learn trade secrets. I mean, it was just an idea that just came up because I had this real-world experience but I didn't have the traditional schooling knowledge. And so, I just started looking online trying to find ways that I could connect with other designers. And I found Meetup. What was funny is the first thought wasn't like “I should see what other meetups there are.” My first thought was “I need to create a meetup.” So, it was something that I created and that was when the iPad was coming out with the Apple pencil and I was thinking this would be great for ideation and prototyping and different things on the iPad. And so, when I came up with that, I thought “I’m going to find out what tools that'll help me in my design workflow.” And I thought other fellow designers will really want to have a meetup like this. So, I put up a meetup together and in the meetup title, I just said “Learn the best apps for designing, ideating, and prototyping” or something like that. and I actually had 50 or 60 people sign up for that. So, I was kind of blown away that I just barely started this meetup and I had some people flooding in. And I actually had one person that contacted me and said “Hey, it looks like your meetup is full. I have a flight that's going out around the same time. I wanted to reschedule and try to make your meetup but it says it's full. Is there any chance that I can come to this meetup?” And I told him “Yeah, I think we can make room for you. So, just plan on coming.” He was actually the only one that attended.
Jayneil: Oh my God.
Caleb: It was my very first meetup. I had one person that attended but that was actually the best value for me. We talked for probably two hours. We talked about the iPad but we also talked about opportunities he had, opportunities I had. And towards the end, he says “I think there's some opportunities that we can work together.” So, we kind of communicated with each other later on and further and it ended up that I started doing a lot of work with him and, I think, it's been like three years now and he's still one of my best clients, we work on a lot of things together and it's been just a great partnership. So, if you think about networking and things like this, even the chance of just having that one person attend and the opportunities that arise for the three years later, it's been awesome.
Jayneil: Oh my God. I love that story. And, Caleb, I personally believe that meetups are so underrated because even in my personal journey, my background is electrical engineering, and when I was trying to break into design, I did not have the balls to create another meetup like you did but I joined the one that was really famous, the Dallas UX Group. And my thing was I wanted to provide value. So, I just went there and there was a guy who's now my mentor, uncle Brian that I call him, and I just said “Hey, man, it's my first time. I want to help out” and he's like “Can you shoot video?” And at that time, I just kind of like, you fake it till you make it, I just said yes. Then I went to Best Buy, got the gear, taught myself Final Cut Pro and I started the first YouTube channel for that group to record all these speakers and people that come there. And that is what got me my first gig in design, just networking through that meetup group.
Caleb: That's awesome. Yeah, that's how you do it. I mean, it's just taking those opportunities. You're talking about fake until you make it. I feel like you can't grow, especially as an entrepreneur, if you don't go out of your comfort zone and just try new things and kind of, like I call it, bite off more than you can chew and think about how to take your skills and your opportunities to the next level.
Jayneil: Absolutely. At this point, you got some clients for Brainspin, you're doing that. How did the idea come about that “Hey, I need to create an online course on Adobe products” and what was your first course?
Caleb: That's a funny story. Just because most of my schooling, my education, most of those opportunities came through online classes. So, I always had a subscription to Lynda, always learning Photoshop, Illustrator, the different tool sets in there and even how to take pictures, photography, videography. And so, that always appealed to me. And as you think about that, the value that I saw in that, I wanted to contribute and give back. So, I started even with just some YouTube videos and I just started sharing some tips and tricks. And you can see that the production quality on my channel was super low quality because as far as the video and the audio, it was just the webcam but it was just something like “Let's just share some tips out there and hopefully other people will find it handy.” And I started doing that and I started seeing through the comments and different things like the value that I was providing there and I started to think Adobe XD came out, it was something that was really exciting and they had some really exciting things going on. So, I thought I could start an XD course and let's just see where it goes because if you start like a Photoshop or an Illustrator course, it's saturated. There are thousands out there. And XD was still quite new. So, I felt like I could still provide some value. And so, I started hearing some success stories of how other people have made it on Udemy. And so, I just gave it a go and tried it. It took just a couple months for me to put some things together, not having done a course before, but I remember putting that together thinking “Man, I’m going to make it big.” And I did all that work, I put it on Udemy and I sat to watch the money roll in. and I think in my first month I made like a hundred bucks.
Jayneil: Oh my God! You would imagine it would be like thousands of dollars.
Caleb: Yeah. I mean that was the goal. It's like putting all this work and it'll just pay for itself. You just sit back and watch it but sometimes, you run into those major instant big wins but my next thought was “I need to learn how to market on Udemy. How do you get to the top on Udemy and how do you enhance that marketing?” And so, I started looking at the different courses and “Okay, these courses have like at least 30 reviews. They have at least these many students.” And so, I started thinking about different tactics that I could use. One of them that really helped actually was I got on some Facebook groups all these UX Design, Design Facebook groups like I got in about 40 Facebook groups and in each one of those, I just said “Who would like a free Adobe XD course? Just go ahead and comment and I’ll DM you with a link.” And I thought “If I can give this away for free, I can get those students in there, I can get some reviews.” And so, my inbox started becoming like my notifications were flooded and I individually wrote each one of them and just said “Hey, here's the link to the course. if you could please just leave me an honest review in exchange for this course, I’d really appreciate it. It’d help my course get up there to the top.” And so, I said “Honest review.” I didn't want it to be fake, say “Hey, give me a five star” but I wanted to kind of give them that trade value. And I think it's important if I just posted it on Facebook and said “Hey, can you guys check out this free course and give me a review?”, I don't think there would be as much engagement or help at that level but having that personal relationship, that communication and starting that with each one of these people, I think it was great because they said “Sure, I’d be glad to do that.” And then we even further continued the conversation as they were taking this course, “This is great” or “I would like to see this” and it was really great in helping shape the rest of the course but also, it really helped like I think in the first like two days, I got 30 or 40 reviews. I went from like 35th place in Udemy to third place within a couple of days just even with that tactic alone.
Jayneil: Talk about a spectacular rise. Why launch it on Udemy of all places instead of launching it on your own website so you keep all the commissions and you don't have to give anything to Udemy?
Caleb: Well, all the success stories that I’ve heard are kind of surrounded using Udemy. And at that point, I didn't have an audience. So, I created my website. Who's going to notice me? So, that part was a little bit challenging. You have to go through the technical work of creating a website, how to host a course. There's a lot of things involved. And then you go through all that work and you say “Well, now, there's a whole another avenue of getting these students to your courses.” So, for Udemy, the students are there if you create a good course. That was kind of the value proposition for me is “Yeah, they may be taking 50% of the commission. Maybe the price per student, you can only charge so much, but those students are there and they can help bring that market there.” So, for me, I felt like that was a really great opportunity just to not worry about the technical aspects of it. Just record the videos, create the exercise files and place them on a platform that already knows how to market and bring in those students.
Jayneil: I’m not exactly aware about the course fee structure, how much percentage does Udemy keep. So, it seems that if you launch a new course, for every student that pays money, Udemy keeps 50%. Is that correct?
Caleb: Yeah, it's 50% except if I … So, one thing I started doing too on my YouTube channel is I would say like “Hey, here's the top 10 plugins I use in Adobe XD” and in that video, I’d say “Hey, if you like this, go ahead and click on the link in the description below and I’ll give you a steep discount to my course.” So, if I create my own links and people click on those links, I actually get to keep 97% and they take 3%. So, that's really valuable to have there.
Jayneil: And you said there's also a price cap on how much you can charge. Is Udemy putting in this price cap or you're just understanding that you can't charge so much?
Caleb: You can actually sell your course for 120 bucks or 1000 bucks. The problem is that your course sits next to all these other competing courses. It's kind of like classified ads. If you try to sell something for 1000 dollars and everybody else is selling it for 100 dollars, they're not going to go with yours. And so, there's an option that says you can list it for 120 bucks but let Udemy change the price every so often based off of their sales and their market and different things. It's kind of a numbers game. They have thousands and thousands of students and if you really want to play those numbers, maybe there's times where I get 2 dollars per student or 10 dollars per student, if I’m lucky. I have 26,000 students right now. And so, you multiply those numbers and it gets to be a pretty big number. And so, you kind of want to trust Udemy, if they're getting 50%, they want to take as much as possible and they have something that works for them and their platform. And so, I felt like the best thing I could do is just trust the system they had in place to try to market it. And if I decided “No, I want to keep 120 dollars per student,” I’d probably only have three or four students right now.
Jayneil: So, how much revenue do these courses bring you every month from Udemy?
Caleb: I have the Adobe XD. It started out making 100 dollars a month. Through the later months I started making like 400 or 500. I started getting a little bit excited. Right now, that's probably bringing in more than 2000 a month for the XD course. also, as soon as I was done with the XD course, that's when Figma was also coming out and I was really excited about that Figma course too because that was like brand, brand new and I didn't have any competitors there. So, I thought I could be the first one to market. And around October of 2017, I created the XD1. In December of 2017 or in January of 2018, I did the Figma one. And I launched that one. It still wasn't a hit overnight but over those years, it's been two and a half years or so, with both of them combined, it's about 7000 a month right now.
Jayneil: Holy shit! Talk about the perfect example of passive income. You're sleeping and it's still generating money for you.
Caleb: Yeah, it's been really awesome. I have some smaller courses too like Photoshop for iPad. That came out and I was lucky enough to get the beta access. So, I started even creating that course before it was out and I launched it the day it was out. I feel like that market has to mature for the people using Photoshop on the iPad but that one, it's making about 400 a month right now. It started at about 50 bucks a month but that's the thing with these courses is I don't think it's ever going to be like just a big hit overnight. It's something that if you think about passive income, I’m still trying to find ways to continue the market for these courses. So, I think you still have to invest a lot of time into increasing the value of your market and the courses and different things. I really do believe if I just created these courses and just placed them on Udemy and sat back, I’d probably still be under a thousand a month right now.
Jayneil: One of the most amazing things you've helped me, Caleb, is open my mindset. I remember doing your first chat, you were telling me all these secrets like how you market these courses and what you do and I asked you and I’m going to ask you again aren't you not afraid that people are going to copy your ideas and just steal them and you're going to have more competition?
Caleb: Yeah. So, I actually listen to Gary Vee quite a lot. I don't know if you're familiar with Gary Vee. He's a very aggressive entrepreneur and he's really exciting to watch and kind of learn from but as he talked, he thought “I have all of these ideas and I shout them out from the rooftop and who's there to listen and actually take advantage of these opportunities.” And people ask the same thing “Are you scared that somebody's going to come and take those ideas?” And I think, for the most part, it's helped me tremendously because I talk about opportunities for UX design, I talk about things that XD can do for others. And for the most part, because of that, people see they can help see my value and I’ve been able to get a lot of work and opportunities because of that. If you feel like you have all these talents and these ideas and you don't want to share them, people don't know what value that you have. And I think if you had a thousand people in the room, you might have one that says “I’m going to take that opportunity and I’m going to run with it and take this recipe of success and see what I can make of it.” The other 999, most of them are going to say “I’m going to try to hire that guy to help me with my opportunities” because they don't have that same self-drive. So, I feel that it's something that people are afraid of but because of that, those opportunities don't come. So, just to give you an example too, just because I have this XD course and I have these videos talking about my best practices, that's even the whole idea of how Adobe has reached out to me to become a part of the Adobe XD instructor program. And so, right now, I’m training a lot of enterprise customers, we have training sessions but it was something too where because I shared a lot of these ideas and things that I was doing, I had Damien from Adobe XD, one of the project managers there, he just reached out to me on Twitter and he says “Hey, I really love what you're doing. Can I talk to you about an opportunity?” That's one of the great opportunities that I’ve had but that happens all the time almost daily. I’ve got some of these opportunities that I can take advantage of.
Jayneil: I’m going to be paraphrasing you. The first time when I had asked you this question, you said “Jayneil, I’ve given the script how to create a course, how to growth hack a course to more than 60 people for free and not a single person has come back to me saying that “Hey, Caleb, I’m going to take you up on this opportunity.”” And that's when it just shifted my mindset when you said “It's one thing to know the recipe for success. It’s another one to go out in the field and execute that. And most people are not going to execute that.”
Caleb: Yeah, absolutely. And there are some of those people that are saying “Man, I really need this opportunity. I’m really hurting financially” and they're asking me for ideas and you go and try to line them up and they don't even have the excitement for that first step. And so, it's something that I feel like to become successful, it's not rocket science and you don't have to be super smart or have to go to school. It's just that self-drive of like when I started that course, I created it, I didn't see that success and the next thing that you think is “What's next? What can I do next?” And I feel like a lot of people, as they take some of those baby steps, they want to see that massive return, that massive success and they're a little bit more afraid than excited, their fear exceeds their excitement and it kind of stops them from moving forward more aggressively.
Jayneil: So, what shaped your worldview or your inner mindset where you started becoming comfortable with this notion that “If I want to see massive gains, I need to be patient for the long term”? What events led you to think like that?
Caleb: I didn't think that at first actually as far as being patient for the long game. I heard an analogy of a coach who was coaching a running team. And in this story one of the students said “So, what do you have planned for us this year, coach?” and the coach says “If I told you that, you would quit my program.” And he was basically like if they knew how much hard work they had to put into it, they wouldn't have done it. So, they take it a day at a time – “Here's what you're going to do today” and “Here's what you're going to do today.” And I think the same for me. I didn't know how much effort was going to have to go into these courses. And so, for me, it was just “Yeah, I can make a course easy and I can throw it up on Udemy without all these technical hurdles.” And so, that part was easy for me and I did that and I didn't see that and I thought “Well, now, I could just learn how to market it.” And I took that a few days at a time and tried to figure that out. And then, “Now, I’ve got to create my own YouTube free videos that funnels people into these courses.” And so, it was taken in those small chunks at a time. As far as that patience like now, I can see the reward and the effort and that reward excites me better than the fear of the effort. So, I’ve got that real-world experience that'll help drive me but I think for people starting out, as they have these ideas, it's really taking those small chunks at a time and saying “This is just what I need to complete right now” and you kind of learn things later over on and just grow it.
Jayneil: You have released some of your old Adobe XD course that you had on Udemy for free on YouTube. How were you able to pull that off? Does Udemy ping you that “Hey, you can't sell for free what you already have on the platform”?
Caleb: So, Udemy does have something that, I believe, their guidelines or their rules are that you can't host your course in two different places. You have to host it on Udemy but I think they have a program called Udemy for Business and that's where employees or businesses can subscribe to them like a monthly thing. And however minutes are consumed with my course, I get like 25 cents per minute or whatever it is but I think the rules there is if you are eligible for Udemy for Business for your course to be in that program, you can't have it anywhere else. And so, I actually don't have that on YouTube. What I did is I had that old Adobe XD course and after a year or two like that got really outdated because XD just comes up with releases every single month, and so it was really outdated and I had to recreate everything from the ground up. So, I recreated this course completely but then I still had this other course sitting there that had some value. And so, I thought “If I just placed this older course on YouTube for free, people won't complain about how outdated it is. They'll still learn some things through there because it's still XD” but in those videos too I also have a link in the description for those other courses. And it was kind of like a funnel game. So, what I’ve done with those older courses is, I have “If you want to follow along with me, there's a link to the exercise files in the description.” And those exercise files, when they click on that, they actually give me their email address so that I can send them those files but it also allows me to help educate them on some of the future tips that I have and also these newer courses too. So, it kind of helps bring in more of those people on YouTube to become students of mine.
Jayneil: You have a very good point about the fact that content in these courses gets outdated very quickly. So, how does one tackle that problem, meaning you come up with a new course on XD and then they introduce a bunch of new features, how do you mitigate that? Do you talk to the team in advance that “Hey, I’m making a course. I need to know what your product roadmap looks like so my courses get updated”?
Caleb: I’m actually very fortunate to be a part of the beta program on some of these things that I teach. And so, I have the opportunity to have a little bit of a heads-up of what's going on and kind of plan for that but still there's a lot of work that goes into it because if you think about Adobe XD, I’m actually teaching them how to create an app or design an app from start to finish. And so, when one new feature comes out, almost to introduce that feature, I’ve got to recreate that app from start to finish sometimes. And so, it's a lot of work in just kind of how to fit that in there. So, what I do for the most part is I have one of the videos in my course that talks about joining my YouTube channel and staying up to date on some of those things. And so, if there are a number of big releases, I might put out a video of what's new and I’ll introduce “Since this course has launched, there's been a number of new features and here's some things that you can learn.” And that just kind of gives them the opportunity of learning how to use these new features but also on YouTube, I kind of create these other videos that kind of help “Here's what's new with XD this month and here's how you can take advantage of it.” And so, there's a number of ways, not just through that course that these existing students can continue learning that. And so, I feel like if you tried to keep up every single month, I’d have a headache trying to do that. And so, I think once a year is a good plan to really look at this course and say “Okay, how do we redo this entire course and put it together in a way that incorporates these new features?” And so, that's kind of been my strategy.
Jayneil: Going back to the Figma course, you've realized that you had an opportunity to be one of the first ones to launch a course on it. How did that conversation happen? Did you reach out to the Figma team and tell them your intentions?
Caleb: No, I didn't actually. I did ask them if I can have access to their Alpha and they gave that to me. I just told them “I’m really excited about what you're doing. I want to learn it.” And Alpha, that's what the term means, it wasn't really ready for primetime. There's a lot of things that were broken but it really just gave me that peek into what they're doing and it really excited me. When they got into the beta, I started trying to use it for some sample projects. And so, it wasn't necessarily talking to the team and saying “Hey, how can we collaborate or partnership?” or “Are you okay with me doing this?” but they did have those beta programs open, I enrolled in those and I knew, because I’ve been a student all my life in these online courses, I knew how excited somebody would be for a tool like this because I’ve come from Fireworks and using Illustrator Sketch, some of these other tools, I knew the value that some of these tools were bringing. And so, I knew that there was a market there. And, yeah, the biggest thing was that they might not know Figma right now and it might not be the best thing in the world to some people right now but if I am the first in the market when they realize that, I’ll be there.
Jayneil: Essentially you took a big bet.
Caleb: Yeah, for sure. And it was something too where it didn't feel like a big bet to me just because I was my prime target customer. So, I knew there were more people like me out there but, yeah, I thought I was going to be first in the market for Udemy. Actually, I took long enough but I was second. Somebody actually did it before me and I thought “Oh man” like “I lost that chance. I could have been sooner” but within a day or two, I was on top, just asking people for reviews and different things. And you can see now, if you go into Udemy and just type Figma I’m number one on there and number two is just miles beneath me as far as students and reviews and things like that.
Jayneil: And that's because you have an amazing marketing plan in place.
Caleb: I think my course is really good. I’ve tried to structure it the best way possible and my production value I’ve really focused on but more important than that, there's other courses that I have. For XD, for example, there are two courses that are bigger than mine in terms of students and reviews. One of them is really good. It’s from Dan. And there's another one. And they're really good and they started a long time before I did but there's one of them on there that I thought “How are they ahead of me?” or “How is my course behind theirs?” because I feel like my production quality is a lot better but the real answer is it is about that market and that market strategy and also having been there. They were probably there way earlier on than my course was. They generated all those students. And once you get that head-start, it's really hard to trump something like that.
Jayneil: So, you're saying that if somebody's just got an advantage in terms of timing, no matter how many reviews your stuff gets, it's going to be hard to beat that.
Caleb: It's going to be hard but I could sit for a couple of days and I could put a lot more effort for marketing and trying to drum up those reviews. And I think if I did that, I could increase my ranking still. Number one, for example, for XD, they might have 3000 or 4000 reviews where I have 800 reviews right now. And so, if you think about just a few days of work of trying to drum up those reviews and trying to work in these groups, you might get 40 or 50 reviews but it's having to be aggressive every single day.
Jayneil: Maybe they've had from these groups posting every day.
Caleb: Yeah. And then they're going to exhaust them and say “All right, man, enough with these free courses.” It is what it is. First to market is always really important but there are things you can do if you really push to get more of that market share.
Jayneil: How do you tackle people who just can't get enough? And I’m talking about those people that want a five-star experience while paying for a one-star price, meaning customers who just want everything and if they're not satisfied, they'll just leave you one-star reviews. How do you deal with those kinds of people?
Caleb: Yeah, a lot of that happens. And in one of my courses, I actually tried to just say “Hey, does everybody want this course for free?” and I posted a link somewhere, somebody shared that across multiple platforms. It just kind of went out of hand and I got a spike in students but I started getting a lot of negative reviews. And the reason why is, I think, when somebody has that like “Oh yeah, I think I’ll check this out” and they don't invest in that value, they don't see or appreciate that as much. So, when that happened when it was like just a free-for-all, “You guys just grab this link and share it with your friends,” I did have a little bit of a problem with that. And that's why, later I’ve just said “Hey, I have this free course. DM me if you want this” because I felt like if people put in just that little bit of time to engage with me and direct message me and say “I want this course” and I could talk to them, they would value that course a little bit more if there was that personal touch there. And so, I feel like that helped a lot but also, I have things in place like when they very first jump into my course, one of the things that I say is “Okay, the first thing you want to do is follow me on YouTube and Facebook” and I give them those links. Then I say “And once you go through this course, it would help me out a great deal if you can leave me an honest review. It really helps in the discoverability of my courses and to help others see the value of this course.” And so, I kind of have that ask for them for them in the video course and there's an automatic email when they jump in that has some of this information too. And a lot of people just reply and say “Sure, man, I can do that.” So, you have to be a little bit proactive there because you know those negative comments are going to come. You're going to have to combat some of those things but if you just have a course and you don't sit and be proactive and asking for those things, I think, predominantly, the negative comments will always overpower the positive ones unless you take a more active approach in just engaging with the students and say “Hey, is this something that you can do?” And I think that's helped me out a great deal to combat that.
Jayneil: How many people are running this entire operation for you including you? Is it just you that's running this entire online education course business or do you have other people working for you filming? How many people are working for you?
Caleb: So, it has been just me for the past three years on these courses but I actually have an employee now from Brainspin that helps me out. So, how my process works right now, I’m creating a much bigger course, it's taken a lot of my time and I’m trying to balance that with some of the things that I have going on at Brainspin and also teaching as an XDI for Adobe XD. So, I know that I have to be the one to film these courses to create the course outlines, to come up with the exercise file. So, that's something that I can't hand off and delegate to anybody else. And so, I had to kind of create this matrix of what is it that I can do and then what can I pass off and get this help. So, I actually have somebody right now helping me that does all of the editing. So, as soon as I’m done filming a course, I’ll just give that to them. They'll go through the editing and they upload to Dropbox where I can review and comment. So, we have this process that I’m still smoothing out but it's been great getting their help. We're also building our new website App Design Tips. And AppDesignTips.com, we're trying to self-host a lot of these newer courses on there because I do have an audience now and I have a market that I can start to demand a higher price and get people that feel like there's more value in these courses. So, that's our approach. And I have somebody that's hosting those videos and those courses and putting those things together for me so I can just spend my time on what only I can do and try to delegate the rest out.
Jayneil: So, you're planning to launch your full-fledged end-to-end design course. Is that correct?
Caleb: Yeah. So, this is just going to be like “Become a Successful UX Designer”. My goal is to teach them how I learned. And I have gone through 20 years of failures and successes and learning things and it's been a really random path. I run into this pain point and I go and find this course that can teach me how to solve that. And I run into this obstacle and I try to solve that. And so, my goal is to compile all of my experience and everything that I’ve learned to say “Hey, if there's somebody that aspires to be a UX designer and doesn't quite know where to start, I’m just going to start them from that similar path, just kind of condense that path into how I learned and teaching them how usability works and how you can enhance the experience and even test things and then go right into actually designing and prototyping a sample app.” And I even want to talk about how to set up a business, how to get your first client, how to put together a portfolio, things like that because you can slap something on your portfolio that's shiny but if you think about the perspective of a business owner, it's not so much about the looks. It’s where's the ROI on that. And I think, as a junior designer, they don't quite understand that yet. And it's something that you can help teach them. If you are putting something in your portfolio, talk about what the pain point was and what you were trying to solve and what your solution was and if there are any results. Put those in there and that's going to trump any sort of polish that you can put in your designs if you can show them “Hey, if you have the opportunity to work with me, I can see your pain point and offer value for you.” There's a lot of tips and techniques like that that I want to share. And so, it's going to be just a really huge undertaking, I feel like, for me, but once I have that down, it's kind of like an alternative angle of education instead of going the college route or some of these UX boot camps to have a course like this to think “I’ve got this entrepreneurial mindset. I want to start my own agency or freelance business and I just need somebody that tells me from point A to point Z, what do I do?” And that's what I feel like I can provide for them.
Jayneil: How do I find out more about this course? What's the website I can go to find out more information?
Caleb: So, that's AppDesignTips.com. And, again, we're still working on this right now but AppDesignTips.com is where we're hosting some of our other courses right now that you can find Photoshop for iPad, Adobe XD, Figma and things like that. So, that is going to be where it's hosted. There's a lot of work to drum that up but if you want to learn more, it's AppDesignTips.com.
Jayneil: You've got multiple ventures going on. How do you manage your time across them?
Caleb: It's really difficult. I would say delegation is really important. And sometimes, as you're thinking about all these opportunities you have, it's really hard to let go and say “Man, I need to do this if it's going to be done right or if it's going to be done efficiently.” And sometimes, you have to let go and say “This part doesn't have to be 100% if I can focus more of my time on these things that are important.” So, it is hard. There are things that come up that you have to try to juggle and feel like “Where do I spend my time that's going to be of the most value?” but there's things, I think, today, that I wouldn't have been okay with letting go three years ago but I’m okay with it now because I know I’m not going to be able to do it all, I need this help. And so, at Brainspin, we have four or five people on our team and they're really awesome. We do some digital marketing and software design and things like that. And so, even some of the clients that we work with, some of the partners, we've had other team members be able to come in there and kind of control those relationships and the projects and help me out in a big way to be able to focus on some other things that I have going on.
Jayneil: What is your favorite failure that later set you up for success?
Caleb: My favorite failure. It feels like a failure in a lot of things that you do when you don't see those immediate results. I have a hard time pinpointing a single failure but I would say some people could see even this course that I created the first time and you see that the money didn't come in like you thought it would, that starts to feel like a failure and a lot of people might stop and say “Okay, that's that” but kind of rolling on and taking that and picking that back up, that's what's really exciting for me is putting all this work into something and then not seeing the result that you imagined but still saying “Okay, how do we twist this and turn this and grow it into what I was thinking originally it could be?” I think, in all of our lives, there's things that, in other perspectives, people would see that as a failure but I have a hard time seeing that because I think if you invest in something enough and if you learn from that enough, it's just that first phase and it's going to grow into a success.
Jayneil: What are your final words of wisdom to designers who are looking to start selling their own courses online?
Caleb: My final words of wisdom for designers that are looking to start courses online is really think about what you're really good at because as a designer, there's a lot of facets and skillsets that you have. And so, it's hard to teach something that you don't have that confidence in. And so, what I like to do is maybe outline what it is that you would like to teach. And you outline those things out and maybe come up with four or five topics. And then you have to ask yourself “What am I the strongest in and what am I the most passionate about?” And don't try to create a course that encompasses everything. Try to start simple but you can do that. The other thing that I would say is look and see where that market is at because if somebody says “Yeah, I’m great at HTML and CSS,” that's a very saturated market and you'd have to be really good and really good at marketing too. If you had the best course and you launched it out there, you'd still make pennies. And as far as that goes, you have to think of the marketing angle too. So, if you're thinking about creating a course, I would find out what is it that I’m good at and see if you can find something that you're really good at that there's a position in the marketplace for. And also, let's say you're hosting on Udemy, for example. Search for that and see who your competitors are. And sometimes you look at position one, two or three and you're like “They're first place? I can do better than that.” Some of that is a great analysis to kind of look at that and say “If they're first place and they have this many students and have this many reviews, if I create this course, I can do a little bit of gaming and marketing within Udemy and I can get that position.” And so, that's what I would say. Just make sure that you're passionate about what you're doing because if you're not, you're not going to have the drive to continue it further.
Jayneil: How do people find you and connect with you?
Caleb: I have Twitter @KingstonCaleb. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn, just Caleb Kingston.
Jayneil: Thank you so much, Caleb, for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom.
Caleb: Thank you, Jayneil. This has been really awesome. Thank you for having me and looking forward to working with you in the future.
Jayneil: Absolutely.
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