Building Out a Robust Platform for Your Online Courses with Entrepreneur Kevin Ruess

September 13, 2021
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In today’s episode, we have Kevin Ruess and he is going to talk about why you should consider building out your own platform for your online course business.

You will also get to hear his strategy for providing online courses on dentistry, his recommendation for which platform to use for your own courses, and the easiest software to get your online course up and running in no time.

Website: owwlish.com
YouTube: Owwlish
Facebook: Owwlish
Twitter: kevinruess
Instagram: Owwlishapp
Pinterest: Kevin Ruess

Notes

In this episode, you will hear...

… Kevin’s life before joining the online business world and the early days of his course creation experience.

… how Kevin and his partner launched a successful online course business in a specific niche.

… why you should consider building out your own platform for your online course business.

… Kevin’s strategy for providing online courses on dentistry.

… the easiest software to get your online course up and running in no time. 

… Kevin’s recommendation for which platform to use for your own courses.

… the best way to create and begin a successful product, course, or program.

… the benefits of having a blog for your online course, and how blogging helped Kevin’s business thrive. 

… how Kevin gauged the success of his online business early on.

… Kevin’s number one piece of advice to anyone beginning their online course journey.

Resources

Transcript

Jeremy Deighan
Hey, everyone. Thanks for checking out the show today. We have Kevin Ruess with us from Owwlish, who has a great story that we're going to hear about how he got into online courses through the dentistry world and then began to find a great way to put up information and courses on a platform that he's been working on.

And I'm excited to have you on the show today. How are you doing, Kevin?

Kevin Ruess
Doing well. Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, it's great. I'm glad that we've been connecting and talking through messenger, and good to have you on the show today.

And I always like to start just at the beginning just to hear where people come from and their backgrounds. Because sometimes people have been doing their thing, you know, their whole lives, and then others get through this world in a different way.

And so if you could just take a moment to kind of describe to us what you were doing before you really got into online business online courses? And then how did you get into this world?

Kevin Ruess
Sure, yeah. When I looked up your website a little while back, when I first got to know you, I noticed a line that you had on there that said, "I help people stuck in the 9-5 gain access" or "gain financial and personal freedom with professional online courses."

So that's cool because that's sort of my story and my partner's story. Actually, my partner is both my wife and my business partner. So our story is intertwined a bit. She's actually a dentist by trade. And I met her about 10 years ago, or so now.

I was working in information technology. I had a nine-to-five job. I started off working for the Boeing Company, which most of your listeners probably know or have flown on the airplane. So it was a big multinational corporation, top 100 at the time, and it was a place where you could really feel stuck.

I felt very stuck there. I felt like I was just a number. This was my first job out of my master's program. And I just, I was longing for something more, to be quite honest. I actually switched careers at a certain point and moved into educational information systems and technology. And that was a little more rewarding. But there was still that nine to five element of it.

The entire time, I always wanted, what I really wanted was a bit of financial freedom, just to be able to decide what my day looked like. That was really important to me. And I just wanted, I just had this vision in my mind, like, I just want to get out in the middle of the day on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, at one o'clock and drive to a coffee shop or walk to a coffee shop, and stay there as long as I want.

Just have a nice time, you know, think about how how the Italians live or something. That's what I wanted. And that's all I cared about. If I could just get that, I'd be happy. And that was not part of my reality. It was like clocking in, clocking out, and it just was something that I was frustrated by.

So when I met my partner a few years later, I was getting into a book called The 4-Hour Workweek, again, so your listeners might know that or may not. And if you haven't, check it out. But that was a kind of a revolutionary, but for me, my friend told me about it.

And I remember reading it one day and telling my new girlfriend, who became my partner, "Hey, you gotta check this book out." And she was finishing her last year of dental school at UCLA. And I remember she came home in the evening and said, "Oh, my lord, this book is, this is incredible. This is what we need to do."

And she decided within about two weeks from that conversation that, you know what she didn't actually want to practice the dentistry. She had been actually in dental school at this point, almost 10 years because she'd already been educated in South Korea, in dentistry, and then came here and did it all over again.

So she spent a lot of time in dentistry and had this as her trajectory. But realize that, you know, she wants to do more than just practice. Now she does still practice. And she has throughout just to keep her skills up to date and stuff. But we've also spent a lot of time in the educational world doing courses, and it's really given us incredible freedom.

And so we basically, to put it in a nutshell, we teach dentists around the world, various aspects of dentistry. Some of it related to passing certain exams, some of it related to techniques, some of it related to interviewing and interview preparation.

So we just have a lot of different courses that we offer. And it's a very kind of niche, online community that we serve. And it's been an incredible and really rewarding experience for us. Because not only have we been able to get some more financial and location independence and time independence, but it's also been to where we are able to help our clients achieve their goals.

And we hear back from so many of them, you know, just wonderful things that, you know, make it worth it. You know, we have a testimonials page that I always kind of look at what when I'm wondering what, you know, "Is this working?" When I go there, I just remind myself of that we have dozens and dozens and dozens of these things. And these words are so sincere.

And so it's been, I think, online courses can be transformative for both the person teaching, but also the people receiving that knowledge.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, definitely. They're amazing and very rewarding. And there's been times where I myself have been down and have gone through and looked at those reviews. And when you see that you're actually changing people's lives, It's motivating to continue forward.

So in the beginning, when you decided, "Okay, I've read this book, it's changed my way of thinking on what my life and my business should be." And then your partner got involved, and you decided, "Okay, let's, let's take this skillset and create courses around it."

What did the early days look like? How did you figure out what you were going to teach? How did you get it recorded? How did you get it up on a platform? What did those early days look like?

Kevin Ruess
Yeah, they were a little rocky at the beginning, I won't lie. The beginning for us was where I think we had the most uncertainty. I remember I started a few different businesses before this, none of them kind of panned out. And so it wasn't even sure that courses were going to be our way.

We knew that there was a need. And Alyssa, my wife, had a few people that we're reaching out to her who were other dentists who, like her, were searching for answers in certain areas. Especially again, she had been trained as a dentist in a different country.

And so other people that had been trained in different countries were reaching out to her and saying, "Hey, how do I pass this exam? Or how do I learn these techniques that I need to know to start a career in the US?"

And she would just give them some free information, free insight, not necessarily for money or anything, just helping people. And notice that they were extraordinarily grateful that they would start to take this information, and she'd maybe coach them over, you know, online.

It began, she was coaching a few people locally to us in Austin, Texas. And they would be so grateful. They'd be like, "You should really help others. I mean, there's a lot of people looking for this kind of information."

So it really wasn't something that we, we didn't think, "Oh, let's start a course. And what should we do our course on?" I know a lot of people kind of approach it that way. Like, "I've heard online courses are great. What should I start my course on?" And they kind of look for a topic.

For us, it was a little different. And I'm not saying there's a right way or wrong way. But for us, it kind of found us. And we actually didn't even think it was possible to teach courses of dentistry through an online platform. We assumed that they would have to have a substantial physical component. And so we began kind of with the physical.

And as time went by, we realized there were just a lot of people around the world that needed our help. And we need to figure out how to make this available remotely. So that's the approach that we'd had. And we began kind of piecing together a course, an online course that could replicate the experience of learning from us in person.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, that's really cool. I like that. Because what you are describing is what I feel like a lot of people should be doing in the beginning. And this is where I kind of went wrong myself, as I did more of what you said.

I went and thought about, you know, "What kind of courses could I create?" And then start, you know, figuring out what was in demand, what kind of skills I had and working backward. And then went and found the audience.

And I found, you know, throughout the years, that that's probably not the best way to do it. Because you're really trying to fulfill your own need, your own desires of getting this information out there instead of what it should be focused on. And that's helping other people.

And so going out, and helping people, coaching people, having conversations and talking to them, I feel is a really important aspect of creating a great program, a great course or even a great product, if you're selling physical products is finding that audience and talking to them. So it sounded like you did that first, which I think was a great step.

Kevin Ruess
Yeah, that was the essential part for us was really testing this out with people to see if this is what they found valuable, and we kept getting the feedback. I remember there was one particular gentleman that, this is before we were unsure if this would even be a business, could we even make this into our business, and he just kept emailing us and emailing us, "Please help me, please help me."

And we were kind of dismissive at the time, like, "Oh, well, you know, we don't have time for this, we're doing this other potential promising business," which, by the way, never panned out. And I remember I said to Alyssa, "You know, this guy's really pushy. Let's just help him out and see what happens."

And he's the one that actually once we helped him start spreading the word online in different Facebook groups and other types of online sources, like "Hey, go to these guys they'll help you out."

I remember the summer of 2013 is really when this kind of came together. Alyssa and I spent the entire summer in our apartment building out courses. We had multiple cameras going where she would be working on, you know, basically like something called a typodont, which is like a, for lack of a better term, It's like a fake mouth, fake waws, fake teeth.

And it's built for dentists to learn how to do dentistry. And so she was drilling on this thing. Again, fake teeth are in there. She's doing what we call preparations. And we have an air compressor running. And we have multiple cameras. So it was a complete disaster. We're building this course, moment by moment.

I was up every day. We would be from morning till, you know, two or three in the morning. And then it was my job to take that video and start processing and editing and stuff like that. And we put together a few courses at this time. And they turned out to be extremely helpful to people.

And as we were building the course, we had tested this out. And this is something that I think your listeners might find helpful is that we had to actually test it out in terms of marketing by saying to our audience or email list, "Hey, we're thinking of building a course on this topic or that topic. Would this be of interest to you, such that would you help us by sign up right now? Giving us the signup money at a discounted cost," or maybe it was about 60% of the full amount that we were going to charge.

And then "We'll start building it. And you can just join us on this journey. And every week, we'll put out a new module." And that's exactly what we did for the next about, I think about 10 weeks. And so we had this small community that kept growing and growing week by week, and people would tell each other about it and, and then they'd start to join.

And so it was a really, again, organic way of growing loyalty and growing a student base that was really in line and in touch with what they were seeking as learners.

Jeremy Deighan
Nice. I like that. Now, when you were asking people about signing up at a discounted rate before the course has been made, where were you doing that at? Was this like a Facebook group? And how were you presenting that information?

Kevin Ruess
There were a few different places. There were Facebook groups at the time. But this was, again, pretty early on. Facebook groups sort of took their own kind of like, they became much more important and prominent, I'd say in the years after that, as for various communities.

And so there was actually another website that had forums that were related to our topic of dentistry, our area of dentistry. And it's still around today. But it was just kind of a niche website that had a lot of activity.

And so we would just go in there and answer questions and be helpful to people, people would click our profile, we had like a little profile on there with a website link, and they would join our email list. And so that was pretty straightforward. It was nothing too fancy. We weren't doing any ads at the time. That was what seemed to help.

And I would say the other method, which has sort of lost maybe some sexiness over the years, but I think it's still a really powerful method of gaining new learners, is blogging.

Jeremy Deighan
That's great. So it sounds like you were going in forums, and you were, you know, helping out people having conversations, and then those people were coming back and finding you.

And then it seems like you were, you know, putting information on the blog. And that helped out. What was the blogging doing for you?

So for anyone who's listening to this podcast, maybe they are getting into this business. Maybe they haven't done blogging before. What were the benefits of having a blog for your online courses?

Kevin Ruess
I think the blog was a way for us to speak to some of the frequently asked questions that we would hear from our community members. And not only that, but we would kind of work in a bit of a loop where the more useful your articles become, the more questions you start to receive in your contact form on your website.

And we will start to see these patterns and just realizes, "Oh, this is what people want to know about. Let's make an article on this. Let's make an article on that." And, you know, so there are different ways of approaching what to write about and what to speak about.

But I think that was one of the best ways was to take the question that you start to hear from the community and even from your clients themselves, and put them out into the community, and then you start to see this uptick.

Now you know, there are, it's a little more complex than that. I would recommend also doing keyword research. And there are great tools out there, free ones that can help you make sure that what you're assuming is what people want to know. And is actually what people want to know. And so that's part of the art and science of it.

It's not just about looking at Google Keyword Planner, or whatever it's called now and saying, "Okay, well, this article, let's write about this or that," because you might end up with articles that get traffic, but don't convert to sales, because you're not really listening to your customers.

You're just listening to the, you know, the Google gods of the internet telling you what you know what to write about. And that's going to be a less ideal way. So I think because we were willing to actually listen to our customers hear what they were really concerned about.

We were able to match that up with articles that they really, that really resonated with them, even if it wasn't going to be, as you know, maybe it got a 10th of the traffic as what may be a Google suggestion for an article would b

But those articles that maybe got a 10th of the traffic would get 10 times more people signing up for our courses because I really felt we were speaking to their needs. And so it was a very important part of it to me in terms of increasing our audience, but also our reputation.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, nice. And then how were you sending people, say, from the blog articles to your course?

Was it just a direct link to a sales page? Did you have any kind of marketing system, a sales funnel, a lead magnet, or anything like that setup?

Kevin Ruess
We eventually added some of that stuff over the years. But I have to say. It was exactly what you said at the beginning. It was simply we had an information page on some of our courses. We talked all about it and what was in that course, and people would find the blog.

And then we'd have maybe on the sidebar, like "check out our courses." And so it was pretty straightforward. So yeah, we ended up trying and experimenting with different things and different sales funnels.

But again, I think that as people land on your site, if you're an instructor, and they like what they're hearing from you, and they like your pitch, and they like your philosophy, and they like, they get the feeling that you know what you're talking about.

You don't have to trick them into buying stuff. They're just gonna say, "This is what I want to know. I want to know what they know. And I want to work with these people, or I want to work with this person."

So I'd say yeah, you can do a lot of these fancy things. There's a lot of people that will say swear by all this stuff. But the essence has to be there that the sincerity as an instructor has to be there and the willingness to keep on putting out the good stuff, even if you're not sure if it'll ever go anywhere. That's super crucial to me.

Jeremy Deighan
So, you've got this system set up. And I know a question that I get asked often, and people want to know about, you know, someone becoming successful in an industry.

From the moment that y'all decided that you wanted to go down this path, and you started to create these courses, and you started to reach out to these forums and create these blog articles.

What was the timeframe? How long did it take to a point where you felt like, "Okay, this is a legitimate business, this is starting to become successful. And this is a path that we should continue down."

Kevin Ruess
We knew within the first three months that this was going to work. I know that's not always the case. But this was, we benefited in some ways from a bit of luck there that we were kind of entering at the right time in the right place, and there was a lot of good feedback.

So our courses are not cheap. They're substantially they're not like $20 courses. They range anywhere from, you know, $500 to a few grand. And so we knew that this was something that we would probably be able to get to work if we were willing to put in the time and energy.

That said, I've also known many course creators who've had the opposite way where they kept on plugging for a long time and then finally took off. I know a guy who has a course in how to teach a teacher swimming online basically and, and it took him a very long time to kind of ramp things up. But once it did, there was a lot of momentum.

So every you know, obviously everything's different. So I don't want to necessarily say that our path is what everyone will be experiencing for success. But that was our experience. It was pretty early on that we knew.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, definitely. You know, it's good to hear. That's a question I like to ask people and just kind of get an idea. Sometimes, like you said, it could take years. Sometimes things happen a little quicker. But then you know, thank you for providing that.

So, let's talk about platforms. So, when you were creating these courses, and you wanted to start putting your content up onto a platform to host your content and so what were you using in the beginning? And then what have you transitioned to?

Kevin Ruess
Yeah, so we'd start off from the very beginning on WordPress. At the time, there were a few options, very sparse at the time, for course creation. We used what was available some of the technology there. But over time, you know, there were limitations there.

There weren't big platforms to the level that there are now. There were a few. But we really felt that what we were doing was unique. We had a lot of kind of unique needs for our community, that especially in the experiential side of things. We did a lot of kind of one on one work with people.

And so, there were different aspects of WordPress that we were able to take advantage of. It's a very customizable platform. And so we would have, for instance, a feedback system where different parts of our different staff on our team would be able to provide unique feedback to our dentists about how they're progressing.

And so,we had to develop an entire feedback system where people could submit their work and get feedback. And then there was a whole reporting system that came with that, where they'd be able to see how they're doing and progressing and stuff like that.

And so using a platform, like WordPress was really powerful for us because it allowed us to kind of dream big, and whatever we wanted to do it, it could, you know, we could either get an existing tool, like a plugin that did it, or we could custom code it ourselves.

Now, I had a development background that was a coder. And so, between those elements, we were able to put together a pretty robust platform that was extremely customizable. And so this is something that I'm pretty passionate about is.

You know, there's a guy I know who has a course in fly fishing. And he teaches, again, online. He teaches something that's hard to teach online and hard to teach remotely.

But I talked to him about using different platforms, and he's decided to adopt a similar method of something custom coded because of the flexibility of something like WordPress, where he can really create a lot of unique experiences for his students and really be able to give them more personalized attention than maybe something that's just like a big teachable platform or something where it's a little more rigid.

And so even in our community, we have something called BuddyPress, which we've customized and customized, you know, and it looks really good. It operates as a kind of a little mini Facebook. And we have people that are in our community chatting and doing instant chat where they're sending each other messages, posting their updates, posting their problems, posting their questions on our internal forum.

And so we've been able to kind of create a little online kind of social network within our one WordPress site, as well as courses and combine that so that they're getting the full experience. And for me, that's been important.

Because I think at the beginning, we did rely on Facebook groups. And what we started to feel after a while, this is around maybe 2016 ish, is that Facebook started to get a little picky about what it wanted to show from our group to our group members.

So at the beginning, they would just show everything. So every, every post, or every time someone posted in our community, everyone would see that, and it was very active. And then, after a while, we started to say, like, "What, why is the activity of this group's kind of slowing down here?"

This is when the election was going on at the time. There are a lot of things competing for attention. And we began to feel like our groups were getting a little deader, a little more less active. And there was not as much conversion from people in the groups to join our courses.

And we started to realize, and then the people who were in our, who were already students, were starting to drift off. So what we began to realize was could we build our own community? Could we build our own kind of center where people log in, where they get notifications of updates through their email, and they're a lot more engaged than they were on maybe a Facebook.

Where there's not really a huge incentive for Facebook to want to give your particular group a lot of airtime sometimes, because they're just so much, so many other groups that they're part of competing for that attention.

And it turned out to be a really, it was a bet that we made that we were going to kind of rebuild our site in about 2016 with a lot of these new functionalities. And it's a bet that's paid off because we have an active group that is very engaged, very loyal. And a lot of people will actually meet each other there and create new relationships through our online community. And it's been really, really cool to see that.

So we're still on WordPress. Although what we've done is build new tools ourselves and redo a lot of the technology that we started with, we've actually rebuilt ourselves and actually built our own new platform, which you mentioned at the beginning.

It's called Owwlish, and it's actually a new way. Doing courses and built into WordPress to make things easy to make things streamline, and to really work well with other kind of more community-based and other kind of functional plugins that come on the platform. So it's been a long journey, but it's been really rewarding to get there.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I've used WordPress for a long time. And like you said, you have a lot of customization. But if you don't have a developer background, or you don't know someone, or can pay someone, you know, it can be hard to kind of get the things out that you want to.

So it's great that there are people like you out there who are creating these solutions for someone like me, who doesn't want to spend all day coding and trying to figure it out, or, you know, paying multiple 1000s of dollars for a developer to come in.

So let's talk about Owwlish for a minute. So you said that it's a platform that's going to be used inside of WordPress to host your own online courses?

Kevin Ruess
It is, and the reason we're kind of taking this approach, I mean, there's a lot of solutions out there for putting courses into WordPress. We want to take a sort of a fresh approach. And we wanted to say, "What could we do to make getting a course onto WordPress or into WordPress as dead-simple as possible? What could we do to make things just easy?"

And one of the biggest struggles that I dealt with even as a developer when I was trying to do this was just the utter complexity of some of these plugins, and there are a gazillion different settings. And you have to be inserting shortcodes and inserting this and inserting that, creating pages.

It really does take a lot of work to get there. And we just thought to ourselves, "What would be a way that we could go from zero to 60 in seconds versus, you know, this being this week to months-long project for most people?"

"Could we make a product that if you want to host your course on a WordPress because you know how powerful it is, you know how flexible the platform is, you know, there's plugins that you want to take advantage of that are fantastic and will allow you to be extremely entrepreneurial and you're and customize a great experience for your learner's could we do it so that you can install our system in WordPress, and within minutes, you have your course up and running?"

And so that's been our challenge to ourselves. And that's where we're, you know, we're launching soon with this. And we're really excited because I think we're getting there. One of the biggest things that I dealt with, too, was how do you deal with, like, video? And what if you don't want to use YouTube as your video source, or you want to use something a little more protected?

So that people, there's an assuredness that you're not going to have your videos kind of copied and, you know, spread around the internet. So video is a challenge with WordPress because you're always dealing with, you know, trying to hook it up to an Amazon cloud or something like that. There are a lot of moving parts.

And so we've taken care of all that for you in Owwlish. I mean, you just literally create your course, upload your videos to our system and connect it to your WordPress site. And now it's just up and running.

So that's really been the goal for us is to make some of those complex things that made people come wary of doing their courses on WordPress a lot easier so that there's more of, "Oh, I can do this now. I don't need to be an engineer to figure this out."

And I can still take advantage of some of these very unique and popular plugins that WordPress offers that, you know, you might want to build your own mini-app within WordPress that does a lot of functionality and has a lot of automation. That's all possible in the same system that you're using to serve your courses.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome. Yeah, this is great. This is actually something I've been looking into myself because, you know, I get asked a lot about the best platforms to create courses in, and there are different types.

You have your Thinkific's and your Teachable's if you just want your course, but that's hosted outside of WordPress, separated from the login from the sales page. You can do an all-in-one solution like a Kajabi or new Sandler.

But then you have the problem of those usually great for all-in-one solutions, but they're usually not great at any one thing. And so you miss out on a lot of like email automation functionality. Or you might miss out on SEO-optimized content if you did want to have a blog.

And so to me, personally, I like the WordPress approach because I feel like I have a little more control. I can customize it the way I want to. And I can use aspects of WordPress that make it shine, such as, you know, blogging and making sure that it is SEO optimized for Google.

But I've looked at these plugins that you're talking about, like the MemberPress's and the LearnDash's. And you're right. There's a lot of setup. There are a lot of buttons and a lot of tweaking, and if you can provide a solution for people that makes it super simple, I think you'll definitely have a winner there.

Kevin Ruess
Yeah, I appreciate hearing that. And this is what I hear from a lot of course creators that you know, they've tried the all in one solution, but there's just this one thing they wish they could do. Something unique that would served their business really well. Help their learners really, really effectively learn better.

But they've asked, you know, these big all on one platforms to do it. And they're just. It's not of interest. It's not so that everybody needs. And I think that's what's so powerful about building your own platform.

You know, there's this new thing called the "no-code movement," where people are building their own platforms. Not just on WordPress, although WordPress is a fantastic one. But there are other platforms where you can really create your own app with a lot of kind of automation. And when everything kind of ties together.

And it's nice, like you said, to have everything in one place. You have your beautiful branding for the front of your site. And they don't have to jump to a brand new website to just take your course. They can all get it in one.

Some of the best course experiences I've had, surprisingly, had been built on WordPress. Now I'm sure they spent a lot of money on these things. But they were beautiful experiences from the branding from the front to the course, to the membership area. And everything was streamlined and consistent. And it was a really enjoyable experience as a student more than that I've had in money, many other students other places.

So we're trying to see if we can do that without people having to spend 1000s of dollars to have all this stuff custom coded. And we're really trying to be, you know, that WordPress spirit, something that a more ambitious kind of DIY'er, who's willing to spend a little time willing to put a little more hours into to their own platform.

We can give them the tools to build this themselves, or get help from somebody but not. We're not looking at stuff that should take 10 grand or something to build. We want to help people that are willing to put in the work and burn some midnight oil themselves and still have a beautiful experience for their students.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome. That's terrific. And I think that you will have major success. And I had a chance to hop over and look at some of the stuff that you had on the site. And it's starting to look good already.

And yeah, I just hope that you get this launched out there. And that it really can help a lot of people. Thinking back to the early days of your course creation experience and kind of what you know now, as far as anything.

As far as getting traffic or coming up with your idea, or helping people first or the platforms. And thinking about the person who's listening to this podcast episode, maybe they don't have an online course, or maybe they're early in their journey, and they're looking for some advice, looking for some help.

What would be your piece of advice that you could give to them to help them out along their journey?

Kevin Ruess
Yeah, thank you. There are so many to choose from. But one thing that, I'll just talk a little bit about mindset here because there's a lot of great nuts and bolts tools that people you can find everywhere.

The thing that I would say, if I were starting there again, what I would want to hear is you have to kind of look at your own self-doubt. There will be an immense amount of it at the beginning if you've never done something like this before, especially if you're working in a nine to five.

We have been taught from you know, early childhood, often we go to schools, and they put us through these systems, which are great in themselves, we learn a lot, but one thing schools don't teach you is how to be anything for yourself a little bit.

And also, it doesn't necessarily give you the confidence that you can stray off and do these things yourself and build your own kind of self-sustaining income stream.

And so it's an intimidating aspect. I know a lot of people are scared to kind of launch and failure to launch. And I would just say I didn't. There were years where I wasn't sure I could ever reach any kind of success outside of working for a 9-5.

There was a lot of failures that I hadn't mentioned this podcast before it got there. I'm kind of gave them the more quick, streamlined version of the story. But there was a lot of failure in between. And so what I just say is to focus, you know.

If your first course doesn't work out, try about 10 more, and you'll get there. You might be you might be an overnight success, but it might have taken 10 years in the making sometimes.

But either way, once you get there, it will change your life. It'll change your reality. You'll change your perspective on who you are and what the world is all about. And so I think it's something that I just hope people don't give up too soon. Even if they're getting kind of badgered with their first project because it's not always smooth sailing the first time you put it out there.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, that's some terrific advice, Kevin. It makes me think about what you said earlier, where when I asked you how long did it take you to start knowing that this was going to be a success.

And you said at that time, three months, but earlier in the podcast, you also had mentioned that you had tried many businesses adventures before that. And you know, sometimes we have to go through those processes, and we pick up and learn little things along the way that will help us in the future. And so I love that.

Just keep going at it, and I appreciate you coming on on the podcast today and sharing all of your wealthy knowledge and information. If people want to find out more about you and your business and what you're doing online, where can they go?

Kevin Ruess
Yeah, great. I would say, head over to owwlish.com. And there's a contact page on there. You can just send me a message. I'd love to hear from you directly.

And I really appreciate you doing this for people, Jeremy. This is really just a gift for those who have that entrepreneurial spirit and want to want to take the reins into their own hands.

And I really appreciate you doing this for people, Jeremy, this is really just a gift for those who are have that entrepreneurial spirit and want to want to take the reins into their own hands.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. And I hope you have a great day and just to your success in the future.

Kevin Ruess
Thanks, you too. I appreciate it.

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