David Siteman Garland on the Infinite Scalability of Online Courses

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Brian Clark: Hey everyone. Welcome to yet another episode of Rainmaker FM. I am Brian Clark, Founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media. And today we have another special guest making my life easy with all of these interesting people that we’ve decided to interview. I think making your life better is the important part.

Today we have David Siteman Garland, a gentleman I have known for several years now and he has been doing some interesting stuff for quite a while. His path is similar to some of the other people that we featured on the show recently. And yet, it deviates in its own special way, which goes to show you there are way more than one path to succeeding online. David Siteman Garland, how are you?

David Siteman Garland: I am wonderful. Brian, not only am I excited to be here, but how about this one? It is the Rainmaker podcast and it is literally raining outside right now. We could not have made this any better.

Brian Clark: I’ve heard it is always raining at your place metaphorically.

David Siteman Garland: There you go, perfect.

Brian Clark: So you are the proprietor of The Rise To The Top, which is at therisetothetop.com. You started out, if I have this correctly, with that site doing a very cool interview podcast format tied with video. Right?

David Siteman Garland: Yep.

Brian Clark: And then you said, “Forget that, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m into online courses now and I’m the guy who can help you create and sell digital products and programs online.” Not both necessarily, but one then the other. I think that is fascinating and we’re going to get into it, but how about you give us the long view? You were born, you did this, that, the other, and you started Rise To The Top.

Who is David Siteman Garland?

David Siteman Garland: That was it. We just summed it up. Here is the Cliff Note version of an odd path. I’m from Saint Louis, Missouri. I didn’t really grow up with that sort of entrepreneurial spirit if you will. I wasn’t one of those people like a Gary Vaynerchuk who had 117 lemonade stands when he was 5.

Brian Clark: Neither was I.

David Siteman Garland: Yeah, it just wasn’t my thing.

Brian Clark: I figured it out when I figured that I was unemployable in that I couldn’t stand having a job.

David Siteman Garland: Totally. I can relate with that because I always worked. I mean I worked things, you know, everything from working in baseball card business to hockey shops to working for a history professor in college. I was always working, but I was really one of those people that was trying to discover for a long time what I was going to do, with really no clue.

I was big into hockey. That’s one of the huge passions of mine in sports and things like that and fitness. I went to Washington University in Saint Louis and majored in Women’s Studies. So how about that one Brian for you there? Women’s Studies.

Brian Clark: That’s excellent.

David Siteman Garland: So I majored in Women’s Studies, and again, I still didn’t have a clue of what I was going to do after college. I really didn’t have the scope. All I knew is that number one, I didn’t think I was all that employable. And number two, I also kind of had this very traditional view of entrepreneurship, which is that the entrepreneur is like the old white dude in the office with like the suit and tie and the cubicle type thing.

I saw that and to me, that’s what I thought it was. So I was thought, “Well that sounds terrible too so what the heck am I going to do?” I didn’t know anything about these sort of creative industries, or these online industries that we’re all in now.

After college I had a very odd path. I actually worked in a pro inline hockey league for two years here is Saint Louis, Missouri. I sort of ran that league. It was a really, really random thing to be doing for a couple years. That’s where I got my business experience, just by trial and error.

How David Siteman Garland “Rose to the Top”

How we got to The Rise To The Top is interesting, and long story short, I ended up with a radio show when I was doing pro inline hockey. What happened was the radio station called me here and they said, “Hey we’ve got some extra airtime and you could purchase this airtime for a very nominal amount. You could create your own show and you could have your own sponsors.”

To me, that was a very exciting idea because I could promote the league. I had no idea what I was doing, Brian, on the radio. I had no clue.

Brian Clark: That’s how you do it.

David Siteman Garland: My first show I remember I was like, “Hello and everyone and welcome to Pro Inline.” You know what I mean?

Brian Clark: Awkward.

David Siteman Garland: I was turning the page. I wrote out every word I was going to say. That’s how scary it was back in the day.

So I did that and what I decided after a couple of years of doing pro inline hockey and doing this radio thing, is that I wanted to create my own business that was my own thing. That’s when I decided to start The Rise To The Top. And what a lot of people don’t know about The Rise To The Top is it actually started as a local television show in Saint Louis Missouri where I’m at.

Brian Clark: Is this like Wayne and Garth on public access?

David Siteman Garland: Exactly, but worse. I had this Justin Bieber haircut and it was brutal. The idea behind it though was that I would interview entrepreneurs in all different types of industries. That was the idea.

I wanted to do an interview show. I wanted a chat show if you will. I was super interested in creative entrepreneurship and I wanted to see what people were doing in building these companies. So I ended up taking a lot of my savings and investing to create sort of this local TV show for a little while. That’s really where I got the start before we brought it online.

I was interviewing people in Saint Louis and then I ran out of interesting people in Saint Louis. So I was traveling around. And this was all stuff that I blew my savings on to be honest with you. It was to get this going.

How a Small Spark Can Become the Beginning of Success

I traveled around and I would interview people, and then the interesting spark came to me. And this was kind of a Captain Obvious thing now, but realize this was way back in internet years about a thousand years ago. This was 2008-2009.

I came up on 2008 and I said, “What if I could interview people through the computer?” I could sit here on my butt in my underwear or whatever and I could interview entrepreneurs via my computer. I know that’s very obvious to do now, but actually if you remember Brian all the way back in the day, it wasn’t so easy back then to figure that out.

Brian Clark: No, not at all. I mean it wasn’t even easy to subscribe to a podcast unless you were someone nerdy.

David Siteman Garland: You had to be a tech expert to subscribe to a podcast. Right?

Brian Clark: Right.

David Siteman Garland: So back in the day, we decided to give it a shot. And my business model at the time, which has changed now completely, was we had sponsors that I was able to hustle and get and move that direction early on. I remember the first interview that I did online. We did it via Skype video because I wanted to do video because I had done the TV show. I liked the visual aspect of it. And my first one was with (and Brian I believe you know him) is Peter Shankman.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

David Siteman Garland: Help a Reporter. It was my first online interview. And I remember it like it was yesterday. That’s because I did it and I was like, “That was amazing!” Then we realized that we only recorded his audio and not mine. So we had this full interview of Peter just talking to nobody.

Brian Clark: I’m totally telling you right now I always have this moment. Before we went live I said, “Okay, we’re going to pause. I’m going to hit record, and then we’re going to go.” And yet I always have this flash of anxiety and I check the recording light after you’ve been talking for eight minutes because I always have that fear like, “Dude, we got to start over.”

David Siteman Garland: Right. It’s super funny. It’s just the way it is. Thankfully Peter was super cool about it and we ended up reshooting it and it was great and whatever. But that’s really where The Rise To The Top began. It’s not where it is now, but it’s where it began, which was simply by doing interviews.

I did that for lots of years and over 500 interviews of people across every type of industry and that’s where this story begins is with a podcast and doing interviews.

Brian Clark: One thing that I’ve been dwelling on, which is one thing that works for me day and night, what is it almost nine years of Copyblogger archives now? But when you think about the podcast and that audience and the repository that you have in iTunes and the other audio channels and on your site itself of course, I was just perusing around trying to dig up our old interview together.

David Siteman Garland: Right.

Why David Ended His Podcast and Started an Online Course

Brian Clark: And you’ve got this immense catalog of content that continues to work for you and yet everyone thinks, “Well, if I start a podcast, I’ve got to do that forever.” You’re an example of someone who said, “No, I’ve done that enough and I’m going to let that work for me and I’m going to shift.” Talk a little bit about that.

David Siteman Garland: So this is a great question and that’s really where things get interesting to a certain degree. I published my very last in December 2013. So after five years I decided not to do the podcast. Why? Well a few things. Number one is I became obsessed with online course and creating and selling online courses. Now what I am ultimately known for is helping other people create their online courses. That is through my products and programs.

But how that all got started, and this is the funny sort of ironic story was through the podcast. That’s because, and you know this Brian, half the fun of having a podcast or maybe three-fourths of the fun besides creating content and having a great audience to share that with is you get to learn and hear amazing things from people. Right?

Brian Clark: Right.

David Siteman Garland: I always noticed when I was doing interviews that I was always more personally invested and I did a better interview when it was someone that I was really trying to learn something from maybe for my own life or for my own business.

What I noticed is that I had interviewed a gamut of entrepreneurs. We’re talking everything from Zappos and Tony Hsieh and those types of big people, to authors like the Seth Godin’s of the world and we even got to the Brian Clark’s from Copyblogger and Rainmaker, which are very, very difficult to get to. We got to them though somehow.

Brian Clark: Definitely a high point, I’m sure.

Are You a Mediapreneur?

David Siteman Garland: Exactly. We go to product makers and to all these different types of people. But what became so interesting for me is this subset of people that I’ve not deemed mediapreneurs.

These mediapreneurs were like an underground entrepreneurial society without necessarily even knowing each other. It was the Derek Halpern’s and the Maria Forleo’s and the Amy Porterfield’s. It was people like that and they were creating these online courses and programs. They were making a ton of money, and they had zillions of happy customers that were getting results.

They were living this really cool, I don’t want to say internet lifestyle because I think that has a weird connotation, but just more of a freedom based lifestyle. This was where they weren’t tied to, let’s say clients one-on-one work. They weren’t tied to stressing out at the office for twelve hours a day sitting there.

It was very much a freedom based business where they could work from where they wanted to. They could do what they wanted to do with their life, whether it was spending time with family and friends or traveling or whatever they want to do. They could watch paint dry.

To me that was super exciting and sort of a life changing moment, which was when I discovered these people. I said, “This is what I want.” I don’t want to be tied to doing stuff one-on-one. I don’t want to be tied to doing sponsors. I don’t necessarily want to be tied to the treadmill of a podcast.

Brian Clark: You wanted something that is scalable without you necessarily doing more work, right?

David Siteman Garland: That’s exactly right. It punches dollars for hours in the face. You have infinite scalability. So if you have something to teach someone how can you go about it? You, Brian, are obviously one of the best at this.

Well, we could teach someone one-on-one. Great, you’ve helped one person. Or maybe you could teach a small group and you’ve helped five people. Maybe you can go on stage at a conference and you speak in front of 500 people. That’s awesome, right?

But as you know, digital products and programs and courses have infinite scalability. You can reach as many people as you can possibly get to, with not necessarily requiring your time all the time.

Brian Clark: Do you think you would have been able to make that shift if you hadn’t put in the five years?

David Siteman Garland: That’s a great question and it is hard to say. That’s because I did after five years. You know what I mean?

Brian Clark: Right. In my case, it was no.

David Siteman Garland: Now