Darrell Vesterfelt: Finding Success in a Hidden Niche

Tim Stoddart: Hey everyone, welcome to the Coffee Vlogger podcast. My name is Tim Stoddart. Thank you so much for joining me. My guest today is my good friend, Daryl Vesterfelt. Daryl, welcome. Glad you're here. Thanks for having me, man. Of course, I'm going to tee this one up with a quick but funny story. One of the last times I hung out with you when we lived in Nashville, we went to that coffee shop that was near your office. Not the one in East Nashville, the one that was like on the street of, I forget what it was called. I remember sitting down with you and you said, Hey man, I got this idea. I'm going to sell off. some equity and some assets that I owned and I'm going to start a new company about farming and homesteading and canning vegetables. And I remember just being like, well, I didn't see that one coming. Nonetheless, you have I don't want to say found a lane, because it's not like you invented this thing, right? But you definitely saw an opportunity that I don't think a lot of people saw. And since then, you have started SchoolOfTraditionalSkills.com. I think subsequently, you created a magazine, Homestead Living. I think that's the right one. Did I get that right? Okay, cool. I was kind of nervous that I had the wrong website pulled up. And it seems like everything is going well. So please tell me how on earth you came up with this idea and how this came into your life.
Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah, it's kind of wild, man. I'm like the knuckled tattoo guy who drives a nice car and I'm like now doing the homesteading stuff. Um, and it's, it's a story that if you kind of look at it from the outside, looking in doesn't make a lot of sense. But if you zoom out even further, it makes a lot of sense in a couple of ways. First, I grew up in a really, really rural part of Michigan. My grandpa's a farmer. We had gardens and we preserved food and we foraged and hunted growing up So it's a very normal part of my life one that I when I was 18 years old. I was like deuces I'm out of here. Like I don't want to do this anymore. I want to go to the city So it was a part of my life that I kind of had abandoned And I lived in Minneapolis. I lived in Portland, Oregon. I lived in Nashville. I lived in New York City and I really was like like forgetting about a part of my life that many people didn't know because they just knew me in the context of, you know, the guy who worked at ConvertKit, the guy who was an entrepreneur and the guy who was like living in Brooklyn or Nashville or whatever else. And so it was a context that was surprising for people who knew me kind of in a shorter lens. But if you zoom out a little bit more, it made a lot of sense. And then from the business perspective, I have had an agency for many years called Good People Digital. Good People exists to serve creators in the development of e-learning and community, so courses and communities. It's something I've done for a long, long time. I had several clients that were coming to me from the homesteading world because of relationships that I had made in that space, where I saw the market in that space start to grow, especially through COVID. And think about in COVID, everything was shut down. I remember ordering groceries early on and things were running out of the grocery store, things were uncertain. So things like food preservation and gardening really blew up during COVID because there's a lot of uncertainty. So I saw some of my clients, their businesses just explode through COVID. And some of the things that I was seeing, like guys that I played football with in high school were making sourdough bread and like posting pictures of it on social media. And I was like, there's something here, like there's a bigger trend here. And so we kind of watched, I just watched that it was a huge peak. But then when it came back down from that peak, there was like a new floor of what this content was looking like. And I started to see a trend of this market growing. So It was like, hey, this stuff is like kind of calling me back home a little bit to like the life that I had growing up. And at the same time, from a business perspective, I saw an opportunity. And so the marriage of those two things was super awesome, where I could use the 15 years of experience in developing e-learning And websites and growing traffic and marketing and growth with this thing that made sense. Like I know how to garden. I know how to like, uh, like do all the things in the homesteading space. Um, and I just, I'd kind of taken a hiatus from it. So it was really a cool combination between like, calling back to my personal life and also using all the skills in my business. And when I saw the opportunity, one thing that my friend Nathan Berry has said to me several times is like, he's like, you kind of are a strip mall guy. You kind of got like four or five small projects. Like, why don't you build a skyscraper and go all in on something? And so, I really, exactly for that reason, I sold off some assets and some things I was working on to focus so I could try to build something in a vertical that would go up and I could stop being, Nathan, this is for you, I could stop being a strip mall guy and start being a skyscraper guy.

Tim Stoddart: That sounds about right. There's a lot of places that we can go here, but one of the reasons why I'm excited to talk to you is because you're much more of an operator kind of guy. You're not out there necessarily promoting yourself 24-7. Not that if you would, I would think that that's bad by any means. It's just not not really your style. At least I don't perceive it to be your style. But with that being said, people that are listening to this for the first time and may not necessarily know some of your past work, I want to give some context, because you mentioned the reason why I'm saying this, because you mentioned that like a lot of things came together all at the same time. And so you had experience in a bunch of different places, which all of a sudden it was like, it met at this perfect intersection. And so I'll start listing some things off, and then please correct me where I might have got this wrong. You've had your agency for a long time. You mentioned Good People Digital. You thrive in the agency space, really, just because I think the logistics and the operations that are there. I believe You had a company called Authority? Authoritative, maybe? And that was almost like a consulting firm to help people create their own courses where you did the production, the editing. I think you even went to people's houses and went to people's offices and sat down with them so that they could record the material. You have a ton of experience selling via webinars with ConvertKit. And then it seemed like you went back to your agency a little harder until all of these lanes intersected, which brings you into this space now. So we don't necessarily need to harp on this. I'm not trying to make it one of those like, well, how did you get your start stories? But I do think it's important for people to know The the different lanes that that you play it in.

Darrell Vesterfelt: So yeah, just give us give us a little background I started blogging in 2004. So it's coming up on like 20 years in this space. Yeah, I started blogging long long long time ago and So the context has switched some And more it's like the nomenclature of it has changed so much like nobody calls ourselves bloggers anymore Um, but early on it was like, I started writing a blog when I was in college and I, I got the idea of how powerful it was that content could be seen all over the world. And for an 18 year old kid sitting in their dorm room, I'm like, dude, somebody is reading this in Romania and South Africa. Like, how is that possible? I became addicted to it right away. So I've been, I've been blogging since 2004, lots of time in the middle there. The biggest challenge in that space was like, how do I make a living doing this? And there was a lot of conversation in the early days of like, can I just get to six figures? Can I like make a business around six figures? So that intersected into the publishing world quite a bit because online courses weren't a thing. until like 2010, like 9, 10, 11 is when that started popping up a little bit with guys like Michael Hyatt and my friend, Jeff Goins, I know started doing it. But online courses, one of the things before that, it was like, can I get a publishing deal? Like, can I, can a publisher pay me for a book contract and then I can make some money on it? Or can I sell some eBooks or can I sell advertising on my blog. It was like, let's scrape together anything we can to make six figures. And I remember one of the books that really like hit me early on was an ebook from Chris Gillible called 279 Days to Overnight Success. And it was like literally like his playbook of how to make six figures from his blog. I was like, that's cool. Like if we can make six figures. And so I've dabbled in the publishing world. I was actually a literary agent for a few of my friends. helping them get book deals because I googled one day how to become a literary agent because I was assuming there had to be like a real estate agent, like a certification or a class I had to take, and there was nothing. So I just started calling myself a literary agent.

Tim Stoddart: It doesn't surprise me at all, by the way, to hear that you were randomly a literary agent for some of your friends.

Darrell Vesterfelt: I still get royalty checks for some of the books. It's kind of crazy. It's not a lot because those books are not selling a lot, but I learned the industry of publishing a little bit, right? So I'm not an expert. I'm not the best literary agent, but I had a little bit of experience there. Like that's a skill that got put on the shelf a bit, a lot in social media. Like how do we get traffic to websites? So I dabbled in SEO. I'm not as good at you, but like I had a little bit, so that's a little skill that I can put on the shelf. Um, I was really good at connecting. So I ran a thing called the bloggers meetup for a lot of years. where we would go to conferences and we'd have 100 or 200 bloggers come together. And so that kind of network is what got the eye of Nathan at ConvertKit. And he's like, hey, come be biz dev director for us because you've got all these connections in the blogging world. Come connect those people to ConvertKit because we have a solution to a problem I know they have. And I was like, great. So I literally took idea of like getting people together at conferences and those relationships that I built into a biz dev director role. And I succeeded there. Cool. I learned a lot about biz dev. Okay. Put that on the shelf as a skill. And then I started like creating these online courses. When I worked at, I worked for a best-selling author and we developed an online course. And that was just a part of my nine to five job where I was making $50,000 a year. We helped develop an online course and it succeeded. And I was like, Oh, that's a skill. Put that on the shelf. And so I started to build like this repertoire of skills that I could take to future projects. So the first step was, hey, I can do this as a service to other people. Right. I've got these skills. I'll do it as a service. We built the agency. The agency is, you know, a couple million dollars a year, a team of 15. It's a great little business, but there's limitations of what's possible at that point. So then how do I build assets beyond just the agency with all these skills? Great. Let's take the like content and blogging skills. Let's take some of the SEO skills. Let's take some of the biz dev skills and marketing strategy skills I had here. Let's take some of the webinar skills, all these skills, like put it together. And that's where School of Traditional Skills has really been an area where I can take a lot of those skills off the shelf that I've developed over 17, 18 years. And now I've got a thing that I can build, like I can build that vertical skyscraper.

Tim Stoddart: Hey there, it's Tim. And I need to take a moment to tell you about this show's sponsor. It's a product called Hype Fury. When I was able to speak to Yannick, who is the CMO, one of the founding partners of Hype Fury, and he agreed to sponsor the show, I was so thrilled. And the reason is because I have personally used Hypefury for the last three years and it has allowed me to build my social media following and my personal brand to over 70,000 followers. I could not have done it without Hypefury. And I really, really mean that. I use this product every day and it's added so much to my business and to my life. So Hypefury is a social media scheduling tool. It has three main features that I think separates it from every other tool. One, it, it allows you to quickly create content and schedule them. So it's a very nuanced feature, but it's so helpful. Basically, I sit down at my desk in the morning and I type out my tweet, I type out my LinkedIn post, and then all I do is I hit enter and Hypefury schedules it at the opportune time on Twitter. and on LinkedIn. I don't have to think about it any more than that. All I have to do is sit down and create my tweets, create my posts, hit enter, and Hypefury does all the work for me. Second, Hypefury makes it so that you can easily create threads. And threads have been the biggest value add for me in growing my following. So threads really helped me grow my following on Twitter and those threads format themselves into longer form LinkedIn posts on LinkedIn. It's actually kind of funny. I made a video about this not too long ago about how, yes, like you want to create threads on Twitter. You want to be a thread boy, because I'd say like 80% of my growth on both Twitter and LinkedIn have been from threads and long form posts. And I wouldn't have been able to format any of this. without using Hypefury. And then third, Hypefury is really good for keeping you inspired. So what it does is it, it shows you some of your most popular tweets and your most popular posts. And it basically gives you information. It gives you inspiration as to what your audience is looking for and what they're most actively engaged in. So you're never sitting at the computer thinking, oh man, like, what am I going to say today? What, you know, what kind of content am I going to create today? It's constantly feeding you new ideas, new inspiration, and it allows you to, to quickly create this content so that you can continuously get yourself out there. Continuously build your brand and most importantly, turn that social media following into newsletter subscribers. So through Hypefury, I've been able to grow my personal email list, timstodds.com to over 30,000 followers. That's turned into a business within itself. It's really helped me grow the copy blogger newsletter. We're at 110,000 followers right now. A whole lot of that is also because of Hypefury. So please, this is a product that I use every single day. I personally vouch for it. You can check it out at hypefury.com. H-Y-P-E-F-U-R-Y.com. If you have any problems with it, you can send me a DM on Twitter and I'm sure I can convince you as to why it will add value to your life. So hypefury.com. Thank you so much to Hype Fury for sponsoring the show and let's get back to the episode. Amazing. I love, I love the journey there because I think you and I have always agreed that How do I say this? I don't ever want to say that you don't want to have a plan, because I think having a plan is actually really, really important. But I've never in my life once had a plan ever even come close to working. It was always like, just do the next thing. New opportunities emerge. Next right thing. Next right thing. That's it. Let's see the next right thing. So I love hearing that journey. I think that's a really great nugget to pull from it. But, um, okay, great. So we have some context. We know about your business. Now, please, what the hell is homesteading? And what is homesteading?

Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah, there's a there's a wide range of what this means for a lot of different people. But homesteading really is about building self sufficiency or community sufficiency around your life. So how this manifest is gardening, how this manifest is raising animals, chickens for eggs or chickens for meat or having a milk goat or a milk cow and just building sufficiency outside of the reliance of the system or the man in some ways. And so, for example, I think there's a spectrum of this too. I have friends who I would consider homesteaders who live in a suburban area. Like I had breakfast with a friend today and she lives in a suburban part of Minneapolis. She has chickens. She has a sourdough starter. She has a garden in her backyard and she goes to the farmer's market. And so she's kind of building a sufficiency around the community of the people around her and around her own area, but she's not reliant on like the big systems of everything else. So and then my business partner, Josh, he lives on 40 acres and they grow probably 90 to 95 percent of their food or raise their food on their property. So it goes from like larger kind of like I would consider it close to farm systems all the way down to like, you know, people living in Brooklyn in an apartment who have, you know, small gardens on their their balcony or are connected to a community of other gardeners or farmers markets or things like that. So a wide range of what it means, at least to us or to me, but really it's around self and community sufficiency, specifically around food and kind of having reliance on what you have and where you're at, things like that.

Tim Stoddart: Self-reliance. Okay, so all of these skills come together. You find an opportunity, or at least you see an emerging opportunity. You are at a place in your life where you're ready to build a skyscraper. So let's talk about how this happens. But when I look at a business model like this, I wouldn't even necessarily know where to start. And it's not that the model itself is unique. It's not un-unique, but you're not breaking down any walls in terms of how you're marketing it. I think what's unique about it is you're, you're tapping into a community that is within itself, self-reliant, just like you said, you know, like they don't need marketers to come in and blow this thing up for them. And so how did you build a community of community members? Like, how did you get the word out there? How did you get people interested in this in the first place? What did that look like?

Darrell Vesterfelt: Let me give a little context. So School of Traditional Skills is a membership, a subscription to a library of courses, very similar to Masterclass. We have 21 classes now. We release a new class about every single month. So the value of the subscription increases every month because we're just releasing new content. So that's a little bit of context on that. And, and what I'll say, Tim is I'm not that smart. So like, I have realized that like, I just want to go see what other people are doing and I want to see if I can do it too. So. I saw masterclass masterclass as a multi-billion dollar valuation. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. It's doing it at a large scale, right? That's a huge company. And I don't think I'm, I'm, I'm just smart enough to know that I probably can't create that. And I don't necessarily want to. But like that model has been proven to work, right? It's working and it's working. So cool. I don't have to pretend like it works because it's already validated. That's working. Somebody else is doing it. Awesome. There's a thing there. And something I learned at ConvertKit when I joined up with Nathan early on. is the idea of carving out your niche and your area. So at the time, MailChimp was the behemoth in the space, right? Yeah. Millions and millions and millions of customers, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, billions in valuation. And then ConvertKit, we are the scrappy young company. And I saw what Nathan's vision was for the company. And we were carving out a small part of that market. Right. We didn't ever like the vision that Nathan was was setting for us was never to create the next MailChimp. That wasn't it. But what we were going to do is we were going to serve a segment of the market better than MailChimp could serve. Right. So we were email marketing for bloggers. And we did automation for bloggers in an easier way to understand than Infusionsoft did. So we're like taking the parts of like serving a very specific niche. Right. And Nathan has obviously built a ton of value in the marketplace and a ton of value for him and his family. I don't remember the exact valuation, but it's in the couple hundred million dollars now with the secondary round that they're raising. So that's awesome. But you know what? That's not MailChimp. What he's doing is serving a specific need for a specific customer, and he's carving out a part of the marketplace that he can do better than anybody else. So great. So my MailChimp is masterclass. I now have a specific segment of the audience or of the market that I know that we can serve better. And I know that we can serve them better because of the partners that I have in the space. They are actually living the lifestyle. They're doing it. They're experts in their field. Um, masterclass has classes on gardening. They have classes on traditional cooking. They have classes on some of this stuff, but the reason that we can do it is that we don't have a class on leadership from Hillary Clinton or on free throws from Steph Curry or like other random stuff. So they're going at a mass market. We're going at a very niche market. And so we're going to serve that niche market better than anybody else possibly can using the same model. So like. They're kind of a competitor, but not really. We're not really a competitor to them because the people who sign up for us would never sign up for them. But we're carving out like a very small part of the pie that like we can do better than anybody else. So I don't think we're ever going to get to billions of dollars of valuation. but I think we can get to hundreds of millions, right? And so it's, it's looking at the bigger thing, seeing who we can serve better and carving out that small part of what we're doing. And so that's what school of traditional skills is, is like, Hey, there's a market here, obviously. And I think we can serve this group of people better than anybody else. And so we're going to do that. And we're going to let no rock be unturned to figure out how we can serve that market again, better than anybody else. Yeah. Oh, they're all over the place. It's really crazy. It is. And that's kind of where I found what I found is, you know, I saw the YouTube subscribers where they were like hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers. I was seeing the email lists that were growing. There just really was kind of like a market for it already. But nobody was doing what we wanted to do specifically. And so we knew I knew that there was like a validation because I would see like, you know, my partners, they had hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube. It's like, oh, that's a lot of attention, you know. I would see the email lists grow or the social platforms grow. And so there was a tension there already. And honestly, you know, I'm not that smart, man. So it was like, hey, here's a good idea. Here's a validated model. And then I see the attention already there. All we got to do is connect the dots together. Right. And that's that's really what we're doing is it's not rocket science, I think. I was with a friend last week and we went to an AI conference and it was like everybody was touting like all these magic pills that are going to save you and grow these crazy businesses because AI is going to be this new. It's like there's no secrets, man. Like it really is like, hey, we saw a market. We saw a model that was validated. We saw attention there. Like just connect the dots. Like it's not there's not a lot of rocket science to it. So. Uh, I know that's a really boring answer, but it's the truth is like, that's what businesses is built on is like solve a problem better than anybody else. Do it in a compelling way and like find attention and that's kind of it. So.

Tim Stoddart: I have a similar example where I feel silly sometimes, not on Copyblogger, on my personal blog, because I just like to write. I remember you and I had a conversation once about being a rich dad, poor dad, and the idea of cash flow and using cash flow to buy assets, which generates more cash flow, which generates more assets, you know, and I know this is a little bit off topic, but I've had a, as my blog, like my personal email list has gotten bigger and bigger, I'm getting these kind of esoteric emails sent to me. And it's getting to the point where I'm like, Hey, look, I feel like I'm just saying the same thing over and over again. And basically like, this is how you do it. And no matter which example you come into and like which angle you look at it, this is the thing to do. And I don't have to be smart to do it. I just have to follow a process over and over and over again. And so it sounds like you just found a process that you know that works and whether it's in homesteading, which is good because you're passionate about it, or I don't know, like I know you're passionate about basketball or whatever it is. You're not creating anything new. You're just sticking to a process.

Darrell Vesterfelt: I have a, I have a theory about this, Tim. Um, because I think businesses that don't think through some of these steps, they're lucky and they don't admit that they're lucky. Um, and then businesses that succeed that are strategic are thinking through these things. Um, there's a book that I love called extreme revenue growth and it's really a book about product market fit. It's like, who's your avatar? What problem are you solving for them? How are you doing it differently than others? Are people willing to pay for that solution? It's like the basics. And I'm like, wait, this is a book about revenue growth. And the more and more I think about it, it's like the companies that are growing revenue find product market fit. Sometimes you do that by luck because you're solving a problem that you have. And so you just are doing it intuitively. Sometimes you do it strategically, like I did, where it's like, I see a market. I see a need. I see how we can do it better or different. Great. I kind of hit product market fit. Other people just like, hey, uh, I had this problem. So I created a widget or a service to solve that problem for myself. They were doing the product market fit thing just for themselves. And then they knew that there were other people like them. Right. And so I think like business is not hard. It's really not. And people who are selling you that it's hard are probably selling you something on it. But like the process is really simple. Solve a problem. do it in a more compelling or credible way, figure out how much people are willing to pay for it and then sell it to them. And you just got to do that over and over again. And you just do it better than the people around you. So again, I'm not that smart. I'm like a poor kid from a trailer house. And I like didn't get good grades in school. And if I can figure it out, it's like, it's just the same process over and over again. And again, no matter what market you're in, that's what you got to do. And so Yeah, the people who win are the people who just do it and don't quit and who do it better than the people around them so

Tim Stoddart: Let's talk about the attention that you say that you recognized. I'm really curious right now about where traffic comes from because you're like me in that your business is built around a website and an email list. And I've been hearing that the sky is falling forever about how any social media site or Google or AI or podcast, like it's all going to be traffic that is owned by that property and people aren't going to want to send traffic to websites anymore. And I keep waiting for this thing to happen because all I ever see is my Google numbers keep going up, my YouTube numbers keep going up. And so with that bit of context, I'm really interested right now about, let's call it the state of traffic, right? Out of the attention mechanisms that you say that you recognized in your space in particular, which Which one is providing the most value for you? Is it still old school, long form content? Is it, is it videos? What's working?

Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. Um, so again, when you're early on, you can only do so much. The thing that I'm good at more than anything else is like partnerships. So out of the gate, this is how we launched the company, which I think is a pretty interesting story is we knew that we had friends who had attention, right? Mainly on email lists. We also knew that Facebook advertising was working in our particular niche in ways that it wasn't working in others because there wasn't as much competition. So the thing that we decided to do was a big webinar event, like a summit, an online summit. We call it the Traditional Skills Summit. And we were willing to do it better and to risk more and to make more asks than anybody else. So we had a pretty significant advertising budget because we knew because we had done it before that we could get leads for a specific lead cost there and we were okay with doing that. So we advertised a good chunk there. We also knew that we had lots of friends who would be willing to share for an affiliate commission. And so we had 100,000 people register for our summit right out of the gate. So like immediately we knew we had attention because we could leverage our skill with Facebook advertising. Again, we didn't figure it out on Reddit or Pinterest or YouTube or anywhere else, but we knew that we could do it on Facebook and we knew that we had friends that would also share about it. And so we aligned incentives there too and we were able to do the launch and the launch went Really? Well, we did a five and a half percent conversion rate. So right out of the gate, we had fifty five hundred paying members on our first week. And so it was like gathering that attention in that way. And then we knew we would have the ability to market and remarket to the email list of those who didn't convert. So right out of the gate, we just knew that we had that because we were trying to kind of get to a critical mass as fast as possible from that point. Then we could have the budget to start investing in SEO and long form content and video and other things in the future. And we're just to the point now we're getting to be able to do some of that. But that's kind of like that stuff is some of the long tail stuff that takes months and months and months to see returns on where we wanted to kind of get a return right out of the gate so that we could hire a team and keep momentum moving fast. And so we've done that. We also do those kind of events on a smaller scale every single month where we'll get between 10,000 and 15,000 people to register, which again is infusing a new group of people into our system. We can then do what we know with email marketing on that point. And that gives us time, buys us time to start doing some of the longer tail stuff so we can start layering different marketing approaches. But that's what we've done. Webinars, live events. That's been my background. It's how we grew ConvertKit early on, too, I think I taught 150 webinars in 12 months at ConvertKit. It's just like what I knew to do. And again, I'm not that smart, so I can only do like one or two things at a time. So we just kind of do that until we got a system around and then we start layering other strategies.

Tim Stoddart: What you just talked about is one of the reasons why AI doesn't scare me because I almost think this emergence of AI is going to reinforce that person-to-person deal-making. There's an example that I think about all the time. I mean, you met my wife. She's super into fitness. She's like, everybody loves her she's just one of those people you know where like everybody just loves her and um we live in a neighborhood in denver called sloan's lake there's a big giant lake across the street from me and it's it's really beautiful and there's like a big big patch of grass basically a big field and uh she was discovering a community of recent mothers that wanted to exercise but didn't know how. And you go online and everybody just says, go for walks, basically. But, I mean, my wife is a strength trainer, basically. And the analogy that she made was always, How is it that right before women are having babies, they're told to rest and not strengthen their bodies when they're just about to do the most physically demanding thing that is possible for a person to do? And so she put this connection together that there's a lot of women out there that just had babies that think like, yeah, I want to get my my body strong again. And everybody is telling me just to sit in bed and like eat soup all day. Point is, she made a little workout group where every Sunday a couple moms get together at the lake across the field and they do strength training and like specific strength training for for your core and shrinking those muscles back up. Within two and a half months, there were 30 to 40 people come in and she didn't even try. It was basically just putting people together, just bringing people together that all have Maybe communities, yeah, I mean, let's say a community, just a community of new mothers that have this shared experience together.

Darrell Vesterfelt: But it's also like a specific problem for a specific group of people in a specific niche, and that niche is Sloan Lake, right? So it's like, how is AI going to compete against that? Like AI could create 50 hundred articles, 50 million articles about strengthening your core. But like, how is it going to compete against a woman who's given birth twice, who lives in Sloan Lake, who can actually meet with people face to face? It's impossible. AI will never beat that. It will never, ever in a million years beat that. And so like, yeah, AI is a great tool to like, like improve or speed things up or like become more efficient, but it can never replace that. Again, for her, she knew the problem intimately because she went through it. So how is AI going to be able to empathize? You and I have talked about this many, many times. I think empathy is one of the secret weapons for entrepreneurs. How is AI going to ever empathize with her, with like those women in that community, the way that your wife can, because like, she's been there, she's done it. She's gone through it. She's cried the tears. She's like had the moments of insecurity. She's had like all of the emotional responses that she is going to feel in that moment. She's had them. AI can guess at that, but like, there's something different when you look somebody eye to eye and be like, I've been there. I'll help you solve that problem. AI can never fix that.

Tim Stoddart: Totally, and people listening are probably sick of hearing me use this example before, but like, I build online brands about sobriety. You can build online brands about anything as long as you meet those criteria that you just said. You have specific knowledge and it's almost specific experiences I think is a better way to say it because you can't have empathy without a shared experience. And so, yeah, I think that's beautiful.

Darrell Vesterfelt: I think that's really- And that's why you can build communities and sites around sobriety better than I ever could. Because you have a different lived experience than I do in that space, right? So the credibility that you have to solving that problem or speaking that message or copywriting or whatever else is way more credible than me. I could ask AI how to answer a question in that space, and I have some experience in it, but not like you. Right. And so I think that's the case. And same with the homesteading space. Right. Yeah. The reason that I think our company does so well is that my co-founder, one, he's like really, really smart and he's a really good business person. But two, like he grows all of his own food. They have huge gardens. They have cows and they have chickens. And they have goats and sheep and he has been doing this for 30 years. And it's like there's credibility there. I'll say this. There's a site in our space that is owned by a very well-known Internet marketer. Right. It makes money. It for sure makes money every single month. Probably a lot on affiliate deals. The site gets traffic. But everybody in our niche knows that it's not authentic. Everybody and you know what? I know he uses a lot of AI to develop content around it But it's less valuable than what we do because it's authentic. It's like it's made by people who have lived experience It's made by people who are experts in the space so like they can sniff out the BS and like two seconds when they land on the site and it's like That's not right. Like homesteaders don't really talk like that They don't really think like that. They don't really do those things in that order. So there's a level of authenticity where it's like my partner, his name is Josh. He cares so much about the content that goes out because it's like it has to be authentic. It has to be like in our tone and voice. And so it's really, really important. Like AI can kind of mimic authenticity, but it just cannot have it in the same way. And so cool, like that guy gets traffic to his homesteading site, but like ours is real. And it feels and tastes and touches and, and like you can, you can sense it differently. And I think that authenticity, and that empathy, it's just really different. Like, AI will never know what it's like to have a pig escape a pen and spend three hours trying to get it back in, right? It just won't, but Josh does. And so the way that article gets written is different. It's going to be very clinical and dry. Again, amazing tool to help maybe Josh speed up writing that article. But at the end of the day, the human connection and the empathy and the authenticity just cannot be recreated by any program ever.

Tim Stoddart: Yeah, I could spend a couple hours chit-chatting back and forth about this stuff with you. But before we sign off, I need to pivot to the homesteadliving.com. I think I don't know the numbers behind your business. I'm assuming that homesteadliving.com is smaller than School of Traditional Skills. With that being said, I think this is the fucking coolest little business I have seen in such a long time. I love when people do like the what's old is new again type deal. I see it all the time. I'm about to start a bell-bottom company, you know, just because this stuff is so cyclical and it keeps coming around and you're making an actual Magazine, um, is it, is it printing yet? You're printing them out now, right? Okay. Um, people listening, Daryl just, dude, it looks great. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

Darrell Vesterfelt: It looks great. Yeah. It's like something you can touch and hold, which I think is so interesting. Same concept though, man. Again, I'm not that smart. People were just asking for it. So we developed it. And then once we started developing it, we saw that people really, really wanted it because they were voting with their dollars. And so we just started selling thousands and thousands of copy of the print edition. Homestead Living started as a digital subscription, because again, that's the world that I live in. So it solved a problem in a particular way, but it wasn't a very compelling way for our folks. The more compelling way is they wanted to touch it and to hold it and to feel it. So we're like, cool. Like people told us, we went and solved that problem. And it's a, it's a seven figure business. Like it's a substantial business. It's not like a, a cute little business. Like I think that has legs. So once I started going down that route, because people were asking for it, I started learning more. And what I learned is that half of all print publications went out during COVID for several different reasons. Like, Oh, there's an opportunity. Okay. That's kind of cool. Oh, people are actually responding and voting with their dollars saying they want print. And so we just started to double down into it more and more. Again, it's very new for us. We're learning a lot about the print market, but it's a different kind of business serving a similar niche. So I had already validated that this niche wanted content. I had already validated that they wanted to print because they were telling me they did. And so we're just kind of learning more and more as we go. And, you know, it's a it's a really great business that gets to serve in a different way. Right. So it's like same audience, same ideas in a lot of ways, but it's in a different way, a completely different way. So.

Tim Stoddart: I want to hear about these specific lessons. I was a little surprised. I looked at it about two weeks ago and I saw that you redesigned the website because last time you showed it to me, you know, we text back and forth relatively often and the website didn't look like this and it was only a digital subscription. And so that's why I was a little hesitant when I was saying it's a print magazine now, right? Because last time we talked, it was just digital. So this is still pretty new. Like I said, I think it's so cool. What's one of the random lessons? Whenever you start something like this, there's always a thing that you didn't know that you didn't know. Right. Where where you go into it and you say, huh, I got I did not see that coming. I did not realize that that was a part of this this space. What's one of those little idiosyncratic lessons that you've learned about having a print magazine?

Darrell Vesterfelt: Again, I'm going to sound really dumb to everybody who's in e-commerce because this is not a new thing to have learned. But what I have learned is like advertising against a physical product is a completely different beast than advertising for digital products or webinars or things that people can't touch and hold. I had another friend who's in the golf space and it's like he had this business that was all digital for many, many years. All digital, all digital, all digital. It was stuck at a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. And then they developed four products that were all physical. And now the business is like four or five million dollars two years later. And so there's a different way. Again, the margins are completely different. So I have to learn a different like different muscles and managing a business where there's actual like hard cost against the things that we make. And there's shipping prices and there's variable prices, like sometimes printing costs this and shipping costs this and they change from time to time. So it's a different muscle. Again, people who are good at e-commerce are probably laughing at me a little bit because this is like table stakes for running a good business in an e-commerce space. But what I have learned is that people respond to physical products in a way they don't to digital. And I lived in the digital space for 15 plus years, never doing anything physical. And now getting the physical product space, like I like it and I want to do more of it because it's just a whole different beast. And it's a lot of fun. So yeah, we're able to acquire customers at a much lower rate than we do on the digital stuff, which I was not anticipating. So there's a lot to learn in that. I'm kind of like growing up and maturing and kind of my business acumen of, you know, how you run cash flow for a business that there's physical products and then there's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory sitting in a warehouse in Missouri and what it looks like to fund like large print runs and other things like that. It's a whole different game, but it's a lot of fun. But again, like people respond differently to things they can touch and feel and hold. It's a lot of fun. So.

Tim Stoddart: Before I sold my t-shirt company, the feeling of just boxes and boxes of shit that you have to get rid of. And I also learned from an accounting standpoint, inventory isn't an expense because the way the government sees it is it's still like liquid. So when you're spending money on inventory, that's not a business expense. That is still stuff that you have to sell. Yeah, it's just a different line item on the balance sheet. And there's a rush that comes with selling physical products that I learned a lot about. You know, for instance, I used to, it was a really small t-shirt company, so I'm not trying to blow it up or nothing. I had the time to write handwritten notes on all of the poly bags. And the emotion that I was able to share with the customers through that stuff, like the Instagram pictures that people took and they would send the pictures to me. You know, it was a much more personalized connection. I do miss that. There's a couple of times I've had opportunities to go back into e-com and I was like, no, you know, I'm not there right now. I don't know if I'll ever be there again. I really love what I'm doing. Nonetheless, there is just a different different vibe about it that scratches like a different fun itch. It's really cool.

Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. Yep. I like it. It's fun. It stretches my mind in different ways too, which is really, really great. I love, this is just a total aside to me, business is it's, it's like one of the greatest tools for personal growth and development. So it's like when I like come up against the challenge, I'm like, awesome. I like, this is either going to expose all of my weaknesses or it's going to show me that I have skills that I didn't know either way. Like this is a great tool for growth. And so. I love getting stretched and learned. That's like half the fun of business is the growth that you get to exhibit for yourself and kind of prove to yourself over and over again.

Tim Stoddart: Sure. All right. We have a closing question on this podcast. I like to know what it is that when you think of School of Traditional Skills and you sit alone and you're at your desk or you're just leaning back in your chair, what is the vision that you have for this company in your head that is almost, you're apprehensive to share it with people. When you see where this can go and that vision that comes into your mind, describe that for us.

Darrell Vesterfelt: I want to be the biggest platform in the world that educates people on self-sufficiency and homesteading. And I think I don't feel ashamed of that vision at all. We've been banging the drum on that vision since day one. We actually raised venture capital money. So it was a part of us raising the money of expressing this vision. I think there's 100,000 to 150,000 members. and a space like that. Um, and honestly, this is one thing that I'm really passionate about right now. I think that vision and the size of that vision is why we're able to recruit such great talent into our team. And people are willing to take pay cuts. People are willing to like take what feels like a quote step backwards because I think the vision and the bigger the vision and the more compelling the vision, it's like it gets you excited in ways that it wouldn't otherwise. When things get hard, you can hang your hat on that vision a little bit. And then your team is the same exact way. Our team is awesome. We have a team of 14 people. I'm like in the younger half of that team, meaning that we have a ton of veterans and people who've been doing this for longer or as long as I have on several levels. And people like really believe in the company because that vision is so big. Like we want to actually like make people's lives better. We want to improve the way that they grow or think about their food. We want to help them be more sustainable and have a different and better life. all of that at a large scale. And it's a really, really big vision. So I think like 150,000 people in the next five years. And we want to be the biggest resource in the world teaching people about homesteading and making their life more sufficient.

Tim Stoddart: It's one of the things about you that I've that I've always admired and thought was difficult to come by is that you, I don't know if it's in your genes or if you force yourself to do it, but you do things as big as you possibly can. Like sometimes I'm sure it seems like a gift, sometimes I'm sure it seems like a curse, but Whatever that is about you, man, you definitely got it. So I'm super happy for you. I've watched you see this thing from an idea to what it is now. I check on the website once every couple of months. I've seen all the iterations of the website and all the growth that you guys are having. I mean, congratulations. Thanks. This has been a great project for you. Congratulations.

Darrell Vesterfelt: Thanks, man. Thanks for having me on.

Tim Stoddart: Yeah, my pleasure. OK, so we have. SchoolOfTraditionalSkills.com. We have HomesteadLiving.com. You have a personal site, which I will share on the show notes of this episode. Anybody who is interested to learn more about these websites, about these businesses, to learn more about Daryl, go to CopyBloggerPod.com. All the show notes will be linked in the episode page. I appreciate everybody for listening. Daryl, very much appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on.