Today’s Guest
Jon Nastor is a Canadian entrepreneur, and the co-founder of VelocityPage, a premium WordPress plugin aiming at changing the way normal people and business owners use WordPress.
Nastor has built multiple SaaS businesses (software-as-a-service) that now allow him to maintain the freedom and lifestyle he craved for. But it wasn’t easy — as you’ll find out today as we cover:
Episode Highlights
- How Jon created several successful businesses without reinventing the wheel, and with no knowledge in coding or design.
- Why the internet means that there’s no competition anymore.
- How to use other successful products in the market as your validation.
- Why spending two years in study-mode without taking any action is a bad plan, and how it affected Jon’s journey.
- How Jon got a world-leading developer to write VelocityPage with no money down — and how can you do the same to make your business idea affordable!
- Why the best time to start is NOW.
- How frustration led Jon to create VelocityPage, that is changing the way people use WordPress
Mentioned Resources
- VelocityPage
- Jonny’s blog
- Jon’s Twitter account
- IIP059: How Anyone Can Build An Audience And Make Over $100,000 A Month
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Thanks so much for having me on the show, Meron! It was great to catch-up with you, I had a blast!
I am more than willing to do what I can to help any listeners that are stuck, need advice, have a great idea, or would just like to chat — I’m always available to Inspiring Innovation listeners. 😉
Thank YOU Jonny for coming on the show. Your message is so important and I hope that your enthusiasm will prove contagious for the Inspiring Innovation family – since it’s taking action time!
You should consider a career as a preacher 🙂
As to being stuck… I should schedule some Skype time with you myself!
Jon, I just checked out VelocityPage. I’m super excited and love how the demo page allows a visitor to customize and edit. When I got to check out it asked if I had a discount code…I’m purchasing at the $97 level…sooooo I figured I check in with you for any IIPer discounts before making the final purchase. Like you, when you found the need, I have a conference next weekend, so it would be great to have this landing page up for my new offerings regarding conferences and social media. Again, great episode and product. Looking forward to being a customer! Best, Michelle
Michelle,
Thanks for the kinds words and interest in VelocityPage. Unfortunately, we do not have any discount codes at this point. I can guarantee that you will be able to get your pages up in time for the conference though!
Let me know if I can help at all. Twitter is the easiest place to find me.
Thanks.
Great episode guys! I especially loved the part at the end where Jon talks about why now is the best time to start. Preach it! 🙂
Also, Meron, I would definitely be interested in hearing a quick episode on Sunday’s. Just my two cents.
Thanks Melissa! Aren’t you happy you didn’t over-learn half as badly as Jon? I was 😛 LOL 🙂
Thanks for your support of the Sunday episode concept. Response has been very positive so it will definitely be added soon!
How’s your week going? Any wins?
Haha I was thinking the same thing about over-learning when I listened to the episode! 🙂
Glad to hear that people are interested in a Sunday episode. I’m looking forward to it!
My week’s going pretty good. I was a little under the weather over the weekend so just catching up on getting this week’s blog post ready for tomorrow.
Kudos on maintaining the writing schedule. Well done ! 🙂
I really loved this one, Meron. It made me realise I need to grow a pair of balls and get in touch with people like Mark Jaquith – which I never would have done and that’s sad. I saw Mark talk and the London WordCamp last year btw, he was being really honest about over-stretching in a WordPress update.
But, anyway, I’ve been really inspired by Jon. I love his attitude. Move into the busy areas and create a better product than one that’s already doing really well and make it better … by taking out the stuff that’s unnecessary. I love the way Jon does it by going to the best person in the world to do it! 🙂
I’ve been doing everything myself but now I’m thinking partnerships, partnerships, partnerships …
The mindshift into partnerships and letting go is sooooo hard, isn’t it? It’s truly an art of itself. Yet, every highly successful entrepreneur built a team around him and didn’t go alone. Great lesson to extract! I don’t know how the heck I didn’t emphasize this more in the downloadable PDF! 🙂
I challenge you to ask yourself – “what’s one project I could share with someone else this week?”. You don’t need to say what it is here if you want to maintain the confidentiality – but let me know how it went. What’s the worst thing that could happen? 🙂
Yes, I don’t have trouble letting go of the easy stuff to VAs but I have trouble letting go of the difficult stuff to more highly paid individuals. The stakes are higher and it’s gone badly in the past. Offering equity, as Jonny did, it one great way of making that work.
As we speak, I’m outsourcing lots of stuff to VAs but it’s early days and I haven’t seen any great time or productivity wins yet. But I’ll keep at it.
There were so many important points to this interview. The PDF download is great, by the way. And I love the way you get the email and promote the webinar en route to the PDF – very Clay Collins 🙂
Regarding the lack of productivity gains, I’ve summoned Julie to give some advice, so expect her comment soon 🙂
As to the webinar promotion – the more I use LeadPages (both the opt-in box and the “Thank you, now let’s get you on a webinar” landing page are theirs, and it rocks. Speak about productivity gains – they save me HOURS every single week! 🙂
When are you introducing LeadBoxes to your site? 🙂
I’m such a skinflint, Meron, but I’m going to try to use GravityForms with different Aweber lists in order to do this.
I’m hoping these landing pages and e-mail lists I’m not then take me too long to setup myself. I’m really not being a superhero about this, trust me!
Rob,
you are not alone there! Many entrepreneurs face the exact same situation, though I believe it can be easily fixed with proper training for your VAs.
You mentioned outsourcing “easy stuff” to VAs. Are those things you would have done, unless you had a VA, or are those things you allow to get done because you have a VA?
Often we hire people, evaluate their level of expertise and give them tasks that we believe will leave us in a safe zone; But these people are capable of much more with proper training. By training I don’t mean an online course on Pinterest or social bookmarking, I mean teaching them to do tasks by recording yourself do them. allowing an adjustment period during which they can make mistakes while attempting to replicate your actions and getting daily feedback from you. It takes time, but employees need to be trained and taught to do everything you do, in the way you do it.
Are you training your VAs? If not, perhaps you should stop hiring them and wasting money on them – they will not bring you more time or results unless they do the core things in your business.
As per highly paid individuals – are we talking experts, such as video\audio people or just “smarter” and more qualified VAs?
Sorry for bombarding you with questions, I hope that by having a bit more clarity as per your situation I can be more of help, rather than throwing vague “train them!” in the air:)
Actually, Julie, I listened to the episode of IIP with you and your VA from the Philippines and I hear you about the training.
What I meant to say to Meron was that I am fairly happy with my VAs work. For example, at the moment, they are uploading 150 videos and entering them into a membership site which is a job that I would’ve hated to do myself and I’m very glad to outsource. I did a video for them as well which exists on YouTube (with over 100 views). They started off slowly but they’ve speeded up today so overall, I’m happy.
I also outsource some client work in Illustrator and InDesign as well as video editing. Again, I’m fairly happy with this.
Where I have failed is when I try to get developers to, for example, hack a plug-in to allow a certain type of photo editing on a site. This is a job that I wouldn’t know how to do myself. I couldn’t even begin to do it. I find this really hard to outsource.
Julie, this would make a great post idea for you — how to outsource stuff from your “things I don’t know how to do” list. Right up Mr. Ducker’s alley 😉
Meron, I’m with Melissa. I love the Sunday snippet idea. cheers mate!
Noted! Thanks! 🙂