Scrapping our goals and getting back into content creation

Quick note: The "peaceful" section of this week's newsletter warranted a bit more space, so you'll notice there are only two sections this week instead of the regular three.

We opted to scrap our yearly goals for Teachery in service of a more "Growing Steady" approach, and we needed a higher word count to take you inside that decision.

We hope you enjoy the transparent look at when and how we shift our goals to stay aligned with the most important guiding principle we have: to ENJOY the journey of building our businesses.

- Jason and Caroline

Peaceful 🧘

We're ditching our monthly customer goals for Teachery. Here's why...

👩🏻‍🦰 👋: I learned something powerful about myself last week, and it led to us scrapping every revenue goal we have for Teachery this year.

But first, let me back up.

At the start of 2024, Jason and I decided to go all in on growing our software business, Teachery. We’ve seen steady growth through word-of-mouth over the last decade, but it felt like we hit a ceiling.

We set out to boost our monthly recurring revenue from $10K to $30K by December of this year, and we set target numbers for new customers each month to get there.

But, as the months ticked by—January, February, March, April—we weren’t just missing those targets, Teachery’s revenue was actually sliding backwards for the first time in ten years. (Not exactly what we were hoping for! 🙈😅)

Here’s what we couldn’t have known when we set those goals in January: there was so much internal groundwork to cover before we could effectively market the business.

Updating the product, fixing our signup process, streamlining our tools—everywhere we looked the foundation needed updates. All these things are crucial for the long-term but don’t exactly pull in new customers right now. So despite all our hard work, the visible results just aren’t yet there. I found myself spending weekends working to get more done in order to catch up to our missed milestones.

And here’s the real complicated part: I've actually loved this period of intense work focus. The challenge of it all has felt so motivating and fun.

(Side tip: In a lot of ways, when you’re enjoying your work, you’re actually much more at risk for burning out because you often won’t realize things are out of balance right away.)

Last week, though, it finally dawned on me. I’m simply sacrificing too much in pursuit of these goals. My time for art, walks outside, local adventures—all of it is being swapped for more work time. That's fine in short sprints and doses, but that’s not what I want for myself for months on end.

So, I asked myself: Why was I pushing so hard?

Turns out, these monthly milestones we set were driving me WAY more than I thought. The pressure to deliver, especially with everyone watching our progress, was fueling this intensity that isn’t healthy long-term.

What I learned about myself: I have a far more goal-oriented brain than I realized, which means I have to be careful just how much I allow ambitious goal-setting to drive my behavior.

It was great at first—feeling that drive. But now? Not so much.

So, we’re shaking things up! One of our operating principles for Teachery is to “keep commitments flexible” and allow ourselves to evolve. So, we’re putting that operating value into practice.

We’re ditching the fixed customer and revenue goals. Instead, we’re going to focus on what we can control, which is the INPUT, not the OUTPUT. We’re recalibrating for a steadier, healthier pace.

We ERASED our revenue goal and instead asked ourselves this question:

“On the final day of 2024, what do we hope we will have poured into the business, regardless of the outcome?”

We made a list of things we want to accomplish, and at the end of the year we’ll see where that gets the business. The most important thing is to take off this arbitrary time pressure away so we can enjoy the ride a bit more.

The lesson I hope you take away from this story:

Goals are powerful, sure. They can kick you into gear and help you make changes when you’re stuck. But they can also cause self-inflicted pressure that spoils the joy of the journey.

We believe business is a tool to support a beautiful life, so when that beautiful life starts to take too much of a backseat, it’s time to reset.

I hope this resonates with some of you. If you too are operating at an intensity that is no longer serving you, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate your goals and take the pressure off.

Cheers to getting back to the STEADY part of Growing Steady!

​- Caroline 👩🏻‍🦰​

Profitable 🤑

Is your content targeting NEW people or only serving your existing audience?

👨🏻‍🦲 👋: As Caroline mentioned, for the first time in its 10-year history, Teachery has seen a decline in revenue (8.9% 📉) over the past four months 👀 <woof!>.

Now, this doesn’t mean our customers don’t love Teachery (thankfully, we hear positive remarks almost daily!) But, it’s clear that the word-of-mouth-only growth strategy for Teachery has maxed out and it’s time for a change.

Just because we're scrapping our lofty revenue goals doesn't mean we're stopping our efforts to grow Teachery! We still want to see this business live up to its potential.

If you listen to our podcast, then you already know what hypothesis we’re going to test to turn our revenue around: Organic content creation. And specifically…

1. Short-form videos on TikTok, IG, and YouTube

2. Long-form SEO-focused articles on our blog

3. Long-form “Watch Us Build” YouTube videos

Believe it or not, Teachery has NEVER had ANY content created for it 😅. But that changed last week! We finally started building out some content to share. We aren’t posting any of it just yet, as we want to get back into the groove and we want to bank a bunch of content so we can start posting consistently in about a month. (Yay for getting back to Growing Steady! 😉)

We’ve been doing a ton of keyword research and competitive analysis. We want to give content creation a solid effort to see if it can grow Teachery’s traffic, new trial signups, and increase paying customers. This experiment won’t have any results for 2-3 months, but again, our input goal is just about wanting to give it a solid try!

For you, the big question we’d ask is: Is the content you’re currently creating for your business only nurturing your existing audience OR is it helping you add new people to your audience?

Or, maybe you’re like us and you’ve been avoiding getting on the short-form video train for your business and it's time to give it a go?

If you want to learn more about how we’re coming up with a content plan and the difference between “Find” content and “Nurture” content, watch this content creation diary YouTube video I recorded this weekend.

Watch the video

If your audience growth has stalled, your website traffic feels stuck, or your sales have been down, creating the RIGHT type of content could be the answer for you (as we believe it is for us). The trick is, you want to be sure you’re creating content people are searching for!

Ps - Since we are going to start posting content soon for Teachery, we’d love for you to help our brand new accounts get a few followers 🙏. Follow us on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

​- Jason 👨🏻‍🦲​