The Transcript

Why Clarity is Crucial to Becoming a Successful Digital Entrepreneur

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Brian Gardner: Let’s talk about our brocation that s coming up here in December. Me, you, Joshua Becker.

Darrell Vesterfelt: Johnny boy.

Brian Gardner: Yes, Mark Chernoff for sure. Five of us for sure going, and then hopefully a few more.

Darrell Vesterfelt: I’m just going to say it out loud, I want Jeff Goins to come because he keeps talking about how he wants to come, and then he’s still non-committal about it. The gauntlet has been laid, Goins. Come for brocation.

Brian Gardner: Okay. This show is not about that. Maybe we should introduce you.

Welcome to No Sidebar. We’re having a little bit of fun today. I’m here with Allyson Vesterfelt’s husband, also known as Darrell, who really is Darrell Vesterfelt. He does have a name. He’s not just Allison’s husband.

Darrell Vesterfelt: You always do that to me, man.

Brian Gardner: I know. I’ve got to stop. I have a complex that I have to do it that way. You have your own name — it’s household. You’ve got a lot of great things to talk about, to share.

Darrell Vesterfelt: I am my own person, Brian.

Brian Gardner: Apparently, this is now the Darrell Vesterfelt show. How about that?

Anyway, welcome to No Sidebar. Everybody, this is another happy Wednesday as I always introduce the show. We are here to discuss the struggles around being (and becoming) creative entrepreneurs.

Together, we identify what stands in the way of building your business and growing it fruitfully. Today, we’re just having some fun, a little conversation. Darrell, welcome to the show.

Darrell Vesterfelt: Thanks for having me, man.

Brian Gardner: Let’s just start this thing off. I always play off the Allison thing. For those who are devout listeners to the podcast, you know who Allison is. She wrote the book Packing Light, which indirectly helped launch this whole No Sidebar movement. She was on a number of episodes early on in the season and is a very frequent contributor over at NoSidebar.com. I want Darrell to have a chance to talk about who he is, set apart from Allison.

Darrell Vesterfelt: That’s great. That’s my coming out party. I like this.

Brian Gardner: Darrell, welcome to the show. Tell us who you are, where you live, what you do, and a little bit — not too much — of what you do because we’ll get to that later. Give us the 30-second DV story.

Allison, Her and Darrell s Story, and Being Entrepreneurs

Darrell Vesterfelt: We joke about it a lot saying that I’m Allison’s husband, but that’s really where it all started for me and a lot of respects. What I do is based primarily around the work that I did for my wife. When we met, it’s actually a fun story. We actually met on GoinsWriter.com, so we owe our marriage to Jeff Goins. I joke with him about that a lot. She wrote an article four years ago, and I read it. Then eight months later we are married.

That’s probably a story for another day because it feels that it could fill a whole episode. When we met, she was the artistic writer type and I was more of the business producer type, kind of behind the scenes. We do joke about that a lot as I am Allison’s husband, but that’s really where I started learning my job is supporting creative entrepreneurs to become entrepreneurs I guess.

I did it with her, helped her get a book contract, helped her build an online course, helped her grow her following online, and have been the behind-the-scenes guy for her and for other folks as well, which has just been really fun process. Now, I serve as a teammate to creatives and help them in their entrepreneurial endeavors.

Brian Gardner: Your wife was your first client per se. Maybe not even paid in that matter, but she helped you cut your teeth I guess, right?

Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. It’s actually how I tried to get my foot in the door with the conversation with her. I was really attracted to her, and I said something about helping her set up her WordPress site. That was like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been struggling with that so much. I would love your help.” I remember that I was in as far as the relationship goes when she handed me over the password to her site to help her out.

Brian Gardner: Now, that’s extremely geeky come-on sentence type of thing. Instead of “you smell good” or “your eyes are amazing,” you said, “I will help you make money and become something.” She said, instead of something romantic as, “Oh, you had me from hello,” it’s, “Here’s my password.”

Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. I knew that I was in. It was like that if you jump, I jump moment. She throws her password out to this guy that she has never met before, and I receive it as the greatest love gesture in the history of our relationship.

Brian Gardner: It’s a very geeky and now very Titanic.

Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah.

Brian Gardner: All right, so Allison is a creative writer. Up until a few months ago, she was freelancing on her own, which means she worked at home. You were there to support her, and you were trying to identify what you wanted to do on an official level other than just support her. That means that you were also at home.

Now, I can see how creatives and non-creatives in the context of a home and a relationship could possibly be oil and water during work hours. What’s it like to be at home with someone who’s creative when you’re not necessarily wired that way?

Darrell on What It s Like to Work at Home with His Polar Opposite

Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. That’s a really interesting question, Brian. Not only are we creative and ‘non-creative,’ we’re also husband and wife. I remember early on, there were several conversations as we try to figure out the tension between high-level thinker creative and then very practical thinker entrepreneur where I would try to push her in directions, or I’d try to tell her things that she should be doing, or I’d try to reign her in a little bit — which is really hard to do for a creative person. You can really easily stifle someone’s creativity by putting hard lines and hard boundaries and things like that around.

I remember several conversations that we first had where she would stop typing, look over at me, glaring at me out of the corner of her eye, and say, “I am not your intern.” That’s fun. It was an interesting thing, man. I think as a married couple, it adds a level of complexity to it even more because we want to have a romantic and loving relationship.

Then at the same time, we have to have a professional relationship, so there’s lots of dynamics that we’ve had to work through over the years of working from home, working together, being basically on opposite ends of the spectrum as far as practicality and entrepreneurship, strategy, and then artist. Bringing those two things together is a really difficult thing, but also a really powerful thing when you can find a process.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. I painted it a little bit like this is going to be a difficult thing for you guys, but in reality, if you guys have both been wallflowers and no one was there to help ship, you may not have anything online. You know what I mean? There’s that oil and water — probably a bad analogy to be honest, but it’s more of a complementary relationship when you have someone who is and someone who isn’t and they come together. It’s actually, in this case, probably better unequally yoked.

Darrell Vesterfelt: We actually call it the artist and the producer. There are several artists and musicians and people who have amazing talent and amazing craft, but without a producer behind the scenes, their craft does not get seen by people.

Brian Gardner: Is this an opportunity? I’m interrupting you because this is an opportunity for me to drop something about Begin Again with the whole creative artist and producer. That movie is a perfect example of someone who had the talent, didn’t have the discoverability, he came in, he took her, and the rest was history.

Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. I agree completely. That’s a perfect image of what my relationship with Allison has been like and with several other clients has been like — where the ideas are there, the content is there. They could write for days, or they could create content or ideas for days. But it’s a matter of thinking through a strategy to get that to the people who want to hear it, or want to see it, or find it valuable. That artist-producer relationship is one metaphor that we have taken in our relationship and our working relationship together that has helped us to know which role each of us plays.

The longer that we’ve done it, the more that we begin to realize that I can just trust her. She’ll write something, and I don’t have to produce the heck out of it. As our relationship has matured and grown, we understood our roles and the boundaries. The benefit of each other, we can lean on each other in a way that we didn’t before, and I think the end product ends up being better.

Ideas, Ideas, and More Ideas

Brian Gardner: Okay. Let’s not sell you short yet. You mentioned the word ‘ideas.’ Often, we use the word ‘ideas’ and associate that with someone who’s creative, but from a business standpoint you have a ton of ideas. In the back of that, there’s creativity, just more on the entrepreneurial sense. You and I joke a lot about — every other day we’re on Skype pinging each other — “What do you think about this?” Or, “I might go get this domain name, or now I got to go get social media accounts because I’m going to brand something.”

Sometimes I think we enable each other a little bit. You have a lot more leash than I do because I have a job and a partner in a company and all that, so anything I do is just fun and personal. You have a responsibility within your marriage also to bring home some money. Let’s talk about the idea of ideas. We did a show about the whole trying to focus on too many ideas and this and that a few weeks back. But ideas, they’re everywhere. How do you know which ones might have value or potential?

Darrell Vesterfelt: That’s a great question. I don’t think you really do know — which is part of the struggle and part of the allure of ideas. It’s really, really, really fun for you to have a new idea for a few reasons, but mainly because there’s not a lot of resistance at that point. I think I own like 150 domain names, maybe not as many as you. I think that you have quite a few as well.

Brian Gardner: I’ve purged. I own maybe 20 now, if that doesn t convict you.

Darrell Vesterfelt: Oh wow. Maybe I need to No Sidebar my domain list.

Brian Gardner: Exactly.

Darrell Vesterfelt: I think that’s really sexy to have ideas. What I’m starting to learn is ideas are actually, potentially, an obstacle for progress. That having 15 new ideas is going to stop you from finding the one idea that’s going to work. I’ve struggled with this for the last year, and just in the last six months, I started to find some clarity about which ideas to focus on, which ideas to just put into ‘idea folder.’ I actually have a basecamp project that I just call my ‘idea folder,’ and I’ll just drop ideas in there.

If I have an idea, I’ll just drop it in there. That way I don’t lose it. I can go back to it later, but it’s not soon that I have to start executing on right now. I think it’s really tricky. Ideas can be somebody’s greatest strength and their greatest weakness. Somebody who has tons and tons of ideas, it’s either somebody who is executing one or two of those really, really well or somebody who’s trying to execute 50 of them and not doing any of them.

Brian Gardner: Hey, man, you’re talking about me now.

Darrell Vesterfelt: I’m talking about myself, too. You and I both know that.

Brian Gardner: One of those ideas that you had, I was around when it formed, and it’s a brilliant domain name. I love the domain name by the way. This project that you guys have called Author Launch. Let’s talk a little bit about that. This is one of those ideas that came through and was produced and is out there. You’re working with some really great people in this. Just talk a little bit about what is Author Launch, who’s working with you, and where you want to take it.

What Is ‘Author Launch,’ and the Target Audience

Darrell Vesterfelt: Author Launch, I helped my wife get a book contract just about three years ago, and then I’ve helped about 15 other people write and produce and publish their books — either self-publishing or with the relationship of a traditional publisher. We kind of had a context of how this whole process works. We also saw a great need. When we see that, we have a little bit of expertise and then we see this great need.

We read an article in The New York Times that said that 85 percent of Americans that they surveyed said that they wanted to write a book at some point in their life but probably never would because they don’t know how. I was like ding, ding, ding, flashing lights. Ideas start popping up. So we had the idea for Author Launch, which was let’s create a video course that will give somebody a process to write their book. Give them one small step every week for 46 week, which is about 10 1/2 months, which will help them have the idea, write, edit, and publish their book.

Darrell Vesterfelt: We started working on that last fall and launched it this January. Basically, seeing an opportunity, having an expertise to an extent. I don’t think we’re the greatest publishing experts in the world, but we are experts in helping people overcome the obstacles and overcome the excuses that will get in front of them to writing the book that they’ve always dreamed about writing.

Brian Gardner: You mentioned you don’t have the expertise. Obviously, you have some because Allison wrote a book and she published it and all that, but this is a good take home nugget for those who are listening. You don’t have to be the know-all, right? In other words, if you’re going to walk into something with the producer model or mentality, it’s okay that you don’t know everything. It’s really, really smart at that point to bring people in that have maybe more expertise or just a different point of view.

Honestly, that’s what Copyblogger Media is right now just from a company standpoint. Brian had a number of relationships with people who were doing things that he wasn’t, but he had the idea, right? The initial idea, let’s build a whole platform. I need all of these pieces. All of these people are good people and are succeeding in what they’re doing.

For you in Author Launch, you brought in a number of very reputable authors to work with you and help produce some of these training videos. Who were the people that you had with?

Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. Before I say who the people were, Brian Clark and Seth Godin had a podcast about