🏄‍♀️ Join Me On The Interweb & Learn Exactly How I Launch a New Offering [BONUS]

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Welcome to Off The Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.

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Hello, hello and welcome or welcome back to Off The Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. I'm Amelia Hruby, I am the founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio, the co-founder of the Lifestyle Business League, and the host of this show, where I like to think of myself as your fellow traveler in this journey of growing successful sustainable businesses with no or minimal social media presence.

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So today's episode is a little different than usual, it's going to be short, it's going to be sweet, it's going to be to the point, it's going to tell you all about a new membership that I'm launching for off the grid listeners, as well as a give you some like real behind the scenes peek into my like a business strategy Galaxy brain. Because I like to think about it. I love to nerd out on strategy to dive deep into offering development, to think so much about how I can connect the content that I create, and the profit that I'm desiring in my business. And in between content and profit. We've got offerings, my friend, and that's what I'm gonna tell you about today. So I'm gonna kick it off by giving you the 411, as they used to say about the interweb, our new membership for off the grid listeners and all sorts of folks who want to build successful sustainable businesses that don't rely on social media. And then from there, I will back us up and tell you a little bit about how this offering was created, why I'm so excited about it, and how it fits into my bigger vision for off the grid. So this episode is going to be great for you. If you're thinking you might want to be an interweb member, and you want to learn a little bit more about it before you join us. And it's going to be great for you if you just want to see how I think about business as a whole and how I go about inventing offerings that both serve the communities and people that I care about, and support my unique talents and limited energy and dreams for my life. So that all said, let's go ahead and dive in my friends. Welcome to the interweb.

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Okay, so let me kick things off by telling you about the interweb. We're going to keep this less than three minutes long. So strap in and get ready to hear all about your new fav marketing membership. So the interweb is an annual membership for creatives, artists, small business owners, freelancers, influencers, entrepreneurs, and creators who want support, sharing their work and making some money off social media. When you join the interweb you get access to on demand courses taught by me and some of my best best friends across the internet, as well as a quarterly live events with me and the interweb community. The courses are designed to teach you foundational business skills and creative marketing practices. So if you've ever listened to an episode of Off The Grid and thought, that's nice, Amelia, I get why I should do this now. But like how do I do it? Like I need you to take me step by step through it. That's the kind of thing you're gonna find in the interweb. So if you loved our episode on podcasting, or our episode on email marketing, or our episode on relationship marketing, and you wanted to go deeper into the how of those things, you're gonna love the interweb it's going to be a place where I'm sharing courses and resources and more materials about how to actually implement these creative marketing practices, as well as how to build some foundational business skills that quite frankly, many of us miss or skip in our online business journey. So that's what the courses are gonna do. And then the quarterly live events are about creating these touchpoints for us to all come together so that you can meet other people who are doing business without relying on social media or who are trying to step away from social media in their business so they can work in more aligned ways. So twice a year, I will be hosting a virtual retreat for the community. And that will be a time for us to come together, map our business ecosystems and have some really heartfelt conversations about

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out the successes and struggles that we're facing in our businesses or creative practices. And then two other times a year, I will join the community for a live q&a event, or a hot seat coaching call, where we'll be able to tap into your questions about the course materials, or the interweb, or other topics that the community will get to vote on and choose the way I think about it. The courses are there for you to skill build, when you might be at a slow moment in your season, or have some extra energy to tend to your business. And then the live events are opportunities to come into community. And to feel that like burst of aliveness and energy that we only get when we're in a group of other people who are totally into the thing we're doing the way that we're doing it. Like that's what I'm creating through the interweb a space where we can all gather with other small business owners, artists, creatives, writers, freelancers, self employed folks, side hustlers, even like all of us can come together and say, We don't want to rely on social media, we want successful businesses, we don't want to burn ourselves out in the process. So how do we get there? And where do we go from here, that's what we're doing in the interweb.

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Okay, that was my three minute 411, all about the interweb. Hopefully, you know a little bit more about the membership, you've got a sense of if it might be right for you. And of course, if you're listening to this, when it comes out, you can join at our founding rate of only $99 a year, which is frankly, a steal. Even if all you do is like open it up and watch one of the on demand courses. And they're like they're all worth $99 Each, let alone you get all of them and all these live opportunities to hang out with me and other community members. So if you're interested Sign up now, while the founding rate is still in effect, our $99 a year rate expires on Friday, October 20, then we'll go up to 119 until Wednesday, November 1, and then we'll settle at our rate of 129 for at least the rest of the year that you're being 4023. If you're listening in from the future, you can head to the link in the show notes and learn what the rate is now. But as you'll hear when I start to dive into the thought behind this offering, I want this to feel like something that you can afford and it's accessible for anywhere you might be in your business, whether you're at the beginning at the end, in an amazingly abundant season or a super scarce one, I want the interweb to be here for you. So join today to get our founding membership rate, or head of the shownotes similar with the rate is now it will go up over time because I'm just going to keep adding resources to the online portal, it's just going to get juicy and better and more full of goodness. But the rate that you lock in now is your rate forever. So you can pay $99 a year for our first year of courses and events. And then five years from now, you'll be paying $99 a year for like dozens of super valuable recordings and other things. So that's the interweb my friends, I hope that you'll join us, I'd love to see you at our first retreat, which will be happening in late January or early February 2024. All the links you need are in the show notes. And for now, I'm gonna take a deep breath, I want to turn off my cell switching mode.

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And I'm gonna take us into a different type of conversation sharing really openly about how I came up with this offer, which had a little help here all about that. And what I hope it will do for you and your business and for me and my business. And I hope that by pulling back the curtain on all of this, it'll stop feeling like just like a shiny sales page and something you want to buy which of course I want it to be a shiny sales page and something you want to join. But I also want it to feel like something you can create for yourself and like you'll have some insight into how you might go about this process and creating your own interweb esque thing if that's what you desire. So let's take a deep breath

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and dive in to the next part of this episode.

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Okay, so let me take you back to the moment that the interweb was invented. I do not mean the actual internet.

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I'm not having an Al Gore kind of moment here. I'm talking about the moment that my version of the interweb our new membership here at off the grid was invented. So this happened in a car ride on the way from Chicago to Indiana. Last spring I was traveling with my lifestyle business Lee co founder Taylor Elyse Morrison, she has been on the path

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If you've listened to her episode, I know you love her, we were going to this cute little lake house that we had rented to have our first annual lifestyle business league retreat. And as part of that process, we also wanted to offer each other some support on our individual businesses. So Taylor runs a business called inner workout, I obviously run softer sounds. And so we set a spacious retreat schedule, so that we could have time to work on the lifestyle business League, and to do some, like peer coaching, advising on our individual businesses. So we're on this car ride. And I'm telling Taylor about things that I am loving, and you know, maybe like not so loving about off the grid. Because at the end of season one of Off The Grid, I actually went to Taylor and I was like, I just don't think people are really getting it like I don't think they actually care about leaving social media.

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Because frankly, like Season One of off the grid was like semi successful to some extent, I like talked about download numbers and revenue. And an episode earlier this season called something like how I make money from this podcast. But it just wasn't like hitting the sort of like cultural moment that I was trying to be a part of, like, I was like, Maybe this cultural moment is not happening. And I said that to Taylor, at the end of season one, and she was like, You are onto something you absolutely cannot quit this show. People are going to catch up, like you're just ahead of the curve. And I like had a lot of trouble receiving that. But I chose to believe her because I trust her. And then I launched season two, and let me tell you, like, the cultural moment is here. We are tired of social media. If you've been listening since season one, you were on this train earlier with me if you just joined us for season two, I am so glad you're here. Welcome. And I'm just really thrilled to see more and more of us ready to question the role that social media plays in our businesses step back or step away in ways that feel more aligned with our values and like CO create new amazing ways to do business on and offline, that aren't reliant on these major platforms who are, frankly, like always working against us with their algorithms. So Taylor has been an advisor of off the grid for a while now. And she is the reason that season two exists, and I didn't abandon it after season one. Thank you, Taylor. And in this car, on the highway on the way to Indiana, I was coming to her saying, I'm so glad I made season two, it's really starting to grow and reach more people and have the impact I was initially imagining. But I am really struggling to figure out how to make this profitable so I can continue to have the energy to run a weekly podcast that's putting out 20 episodes, the first season 30 episodes this season, we're planning for 40 episodes next year, like how can I keep growing this and have energy for it. And I was sharing with her some of the experiments that I'd done, if you've been listening, you've heard about them, we hosted the refresh in August 2022 and August 2023. And I was like, I love gathering live with people, but I really don't love a launch cycle. And that's not working for me anymore. And then I told her about business success without social media, which was the self guided mini course that I sold. And I was like, this is nice, but I'm finding it hard to sell an evergreen product. And it just feels stale. Like the longer it lives on my site, I just start to feel disconnected from it. And like it's not as valuable or of service as I want to be through the show. So I was kind of bringing these experiments to tailor. And through our conversation, I was realizing that I wanted to just sell one thing throughout the grid all the time, I was like, I don't want to do launches. I don't wanna be changing gears. Like I just want there to be one thing that is for sale, if people want to go deeper into this work. And the other thing I realized is that I wanted there to be a live component like I thrive when I get to see other people's faces on Zoom or in person, and when I get to teach and interact in real time, but I also have limited time and energy. So I'm not trying to fill up my Google Calendar with like dozens of calls a week, like no thank you. So that's the mix that is like the sea that we were swimming in together. I was like sharing all of this. And Taylor was asking amazing questions because she's a fantastic coach. And we were just kind of talking about different ideas. And I think it was Taylor who kind of came up with this idea of what if you had a membership, where you taught people more of the how

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have how to do the things that you're talking about on the show, and somehow created these like touch points where you could gather with them live, hear about their issues, learn what they need to know and what they're wanting. And then, frankly, like make better content for off the grid as well, because it's informed not just by like, what's happening in my brain, I'm reading on the internet, but also by real life, people who are interweb community members. And as Taylor was like, putting all that together, for me, I was just like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Like, everything was clicking into place. And I was finally seeing the way that I could simplify my marketing and sales, because I was only selling one thing at any given time. And it could be super helpful, because it's full of these workshops and mini courses that I'm teaching, which is definitely one of my special skills. And it can also provide those moments where I get to gather live with people and get that like face to face energy, because nothing fuels me more than being in a group of people who like share similar goals and dreams, and helping all of us figure out how to get where we want to go. So that was the interweb, we didn't come up with the name and that car ride. But over the course of our retreat, we did brainstorm a bunch of names, I think an early favorite was the net. And then we went to the web. And then we landed on the interweb. Because, you know, I love a sort of play on words, hello, off the grid. Here we are.

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But it was just such a conversational journey. And that conversation was informed by these experiments that I had done. And those came out of this mission and vision that I had to talk about my experiences, leaving social media, to share resources for how other folks can do the same, and to have conversations with amazingly brilliant guests who had either done that themselves, or could share marketing practices that help other people do that. So now that you've heard the story, let me do my Amelia thing and reverse engineer it for you as like a five step process real quick. I don't know if it's five steps, we'll see where I land. But all of this starts with me following my gut instinct to leave social media. That's where it all begins. It begins with me being in touch enough with my gut and my intuition and my inner knowing that I could take a step that was off the conventional path. And then from there, it became me responding to all the people who were asking me questions about it. And doing that by launching off the grid podcast. Once I had the platform of Off The Grid podcast, I started experimenting with different things I could sell to this audience because I knew I was serving all of you lovely listeners, so much free information and wisdom. And I wanted to offer paid opportunities to come together around this work, so that I could feel as fueled by it, as I know, listeners often feel fueled by it. And so I started experimenting with different ways of doing things. And honestly, I took a lot of clues from what I saw people doing. I hosted a live workshop series, I sold an evergreen course.

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And for each of those, I did a sort of like post mortem to figure out like, what did I love, and what did I not love about this. And that's where I came to those realizations of, I don't love launching things on a timeline. That's not for me. I love evergreen stuff that feels stale. That's not for me. So I took all of that information and let it fuel what I wanted to create that was equally informed by what I was hearing from off the grid listeners and community members that they wanted and needed. And what they wanted and needed was how to do these things that I talked about on the show, like even more practical steps and advice, as well as opportunities to feel less alone, like we needed to come together. And I decided because of my unique like energetic rhythm and flow that I didn't want to come together in some sort of like online hosted community, I wanted to come together at these specific moments of face to face or face through computer to face real time interaction. And I wanted to teach and the teaching could happen without me having to be live. But the gathering is happening with all of us together in the virtual room. And so like all of those experiments that led me to all those realizations that led me to all that input from other people, that all went into this amazing conversation I had with Taylor and the interweb came out the other end.

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And so I wanted to share with all of you here

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how that worked for me how that worked in the case of the interweb. And again, it's that combination of trusting my inner knowing, taking an unconventional step, sharing the journey down that unconventional path publicly selling different types of things. So I could learn what I like to do and what resonated with my community. And then really listening to myself about what I need to feel energetically and financially supported for an ongoing project. And finding a way for that to take a shape, and a price point that really meets you off the grid listeners and community where you're at, and helps us get where we want to go together. That's the process. That's how the offerings come to life. Then there's a bunch of logistics that quite honestly, I will build courses inside the interweb to tell you how to write a sales page, pick your course platform, set it up all of that, that how to stuff that's what we're gonna do in the on demand courses, part of the interweb. But these bigger conversations about like, how do you channel the vision and bring it to life, that's the stuff that's going to happen in the retreat. That's the stuff we have to do together. I think I do it better when I do it together. So I think that's the episode My friends, I'm gonna land this plane, I'm gonna pull over this car, we're gonna get off that highway to Indiana.

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We get off the highway a long time ago. But you know, sticking with my metaphors here, wrapping up my story. Thank you so much for listening to this. I hope that off the grid podcast is helping you feel more supported in launching, growing and running a sustainable, successful business that does not rely on social media. And I hope that you will join the interweb to help yourself, build the skills and community that you need to keep going. And quite honestly, to help me keep making this show in a way that feels nourishing and support it. We've got two more episodes left in season two of off the grid. I'm going to leave you with some really juicy solo episodes about breathing social media and about getting off the growth escalator of online business. That's going to be a good one. So make sure you're subscribed. Stay tuned, join the interweb and I will see all of you beautiful people off the grid

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Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes and don't forget to grab your free leaving social media toolkit at softer sounds dot studio slash bye IG and this podcast is a softer sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter and our logo is buying N'Atelier a studio. If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help find more about our services at software sounds dot studio. Until next time, we'll see you off the grid