April Dunford [00:00:00]:
I literally went on vacation to the beach and drew this little three circle thing. I wanna do my best work of my career with good people and get paid fair money, and that's it. There is no back end on this thing. There is no big exit at the end of this thing, and that's fine. Like but I think I would have been so worried about the back end on the thing if I done it when I was 25 or 35 or whatever. I would've messed

Jay Clouse [00:00:27]:
it up. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. I am so excited to share today's episode with you because it has had a big impact on me since we recorded. My guest today is April Dunford. April spent the 1st 25 years of her career as a start up executive running marketing, product, and sales teams. Now the startups that April worked with, they were mostly all acquired for a total of more than $2,000,000,000. And during that journey, April positioned, repositioned, and launched 16 different products.

April Dunford [00:01:12]:
When I started, I didn't wanna run a business. That was never my goal in life was to run a business. My goal was to be the world's greatest vice president of marketing. Like, that's all I wanted to do. I just wanna be really great VP marketing.

Jay Clouse [00:01:25]:
But ironically, today, April is a business owner. She's an independent consultant, and she's worked with more than a 100 early and growth stage startups to help them position their products now if this word positioning is new to you. I don't want you get too hung up on it. It's not super important for this conversation But positioning is basically how you talk about your product and differentiate it from other products in the marketplace so that people see your product as the one they want to buy. April literally wrote the book on product positioning. It's called Obviously Awesome, How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, and Love It. It was published in 2019, and it provides a methodology for positioning that any company can follow. It's become a best seller.

Jay Clouse [00:02:03]:
And among entrepreneurs, product, and marketing folk, April is kind of a product legend.

April Dunford [00:02:08]:
My consulting is my main business. You know, book revenue is just like I don't know. It's like free money. It's I can't believe it shows up every month.

Jay Clouse [00:02:17]:
And while that may be true, April has sold a lot of books.

April Dunford [00:02:22]:
It's a little bit hard to count because I've got all these different channels, and I'm selling some books in bulk. But the 1st book is has sold over 60,000 copies. I could put it closer to 80,000 copies now. But it's a lot like a lot of books.

Jay Clouse [00:02:36]:
And as you'll hear, the success of that book has had a huge impact on April's overall business. And I invited April onto the show because several of my close friends have told me that they love April's business model. She has no employees. She works with a small number of clients per year at high prices, and her clients are glad to pay it because they see an ROI.

April Dunford [00:02:57]:
Getting the book out was absolutely transformational to the business. Like, that's what took me from, this is a good business that pays me more than what my salary was in house, you know, yay me, consultant to holy man. I didn't even think it was possible to make this kind of money and work with this kind of clients and do this amazing stuff. And, yeah, the book was a game changer.

Jay Clouse [00:03:22]:
This conversation is divided into 2 halves. In the first half, you'll hear April and I talk about how she built her consulting business, how she attracts high caliber clients, the process she uses for qualifying them. In the second half of the conversation, we talk a lot about April's experience publishing her 1st book, Obviously Awesome. After exploring traditional publishing, she decided to self publish the book, And she says it's the best decision she's made.

April Dunford [00:03:46]:
I talked to a very famous author, and I basically asked him the question, like, What does your publisher do for you? And he didn't know. Mhmm. He wouldn't admit that, but he didn't know. Mhmm. And I was like, this is kind of a scam.

Jay Clouse [00:04:03]:
I took a lot away from this episode, and I think you will as well. I'd love to hear what you think about this episode. So tag me on Twitter or Instagram at jklaus. If you're listening, let me know. I love seeing it. But now Let's talk with

April Dunford [00:04:19]:
April. For a long time, my goal was be a VP marketing at a Fortune 500 company, and I kinda did that. And then I went back to doing startups because I thought I was better at startup stuff, and so I did that. But, You know, I was VP marketing, I think, 7 times where I ran marketing teams. And after the 7th one, I was like, Really, April? We're gonna keep doing this? Like, are we gonna keep doing this? And I'll tell you, the last one wasn't great. Like, the last one, I was like, well, that kind of sucked. Like, do I really wanna sign up for another one of those? So I did what I think a lot of people do is I just said, well, Maybe I could just do consulting. Like, let's try that out.

April Dunford [00:05:00]:
And I had had some false starts with consulting before where I went and did consulting, and then I fell in love with the company, and then I joined as a full timer. But the last 1, like I said, the last 1 was bad, and I was like, maybe it's time to slam that door and just go do my own thing. And so it took me a couple of years to kind of figure out what that meant. Like, I think at the beginning, I started the way a lot of people do. Like, I'll just do the job I was doing before only fractionally. Nationally. Right? So I'll have multiple clients or I'll work a short period of time and then I'll do that. And that didn't seem like a good model for me for a bunch of reasons.

April Dunford [00:05:36]:
Like, 1, marketing's so broad. There there's so many things you could do. And so you come in and you say, are you a fractional VP marketing? Like, there's a 1,000 things that could mean. The other thing is I felt like the expectations were all out of whack. Like, everybody wanted me to have full time responsibility for part time pay. And I was like, hey, man, this is not I signed up for. Yes.

Jay Clouse [00:05:54]:
So I

April Dunford [00:05:54]:
didn't like that. And so what I wanted to do was have an engagement, like, something where there's a beginning, a middle, an end. Come in, we do a thing together, and then it's clear when we're done. And then I go and then I go to the next one. So I always knew my focus was going to be around positioning. At the end of about 2 years of messing around with a bunch of different models, what I settled on is kind of a workshop model where I'm working with companies on their positioning. I work with a cross functional team at a tech company. I come with a methodology, and I come in more like the facilitator and the teacher, and we're working through a thing together.

April Dunford [00:06:32]:
You know, that sounds very easy and obvious, but it it literally took me 2 years to figure that

Jay Clouse [00:06:38]:
Yeah. Well, what I love from what I'm hearing here is you are so in touch with realizing when something isn't Working the way you want it to and being willing to say, let's pause that then, and let's try something else as opposed to just Doing more and more and more. I find a lot of people, especially in the in the realm of providing client services, they just take on more and more and more, and it gets harder and harder to step away from.

April Dunford [00:07:04]:
Well, the other thing I think people do is they blame it on the client. Right? They'll say, well, that sucked because it was a bad client. And, you know, my whole thing was, how do I make sure I never have a bad client? So maybe it's the engagement changes. Maybe I do a better job of filtering out bad ones at the beginning. Like, you should see how I filter. It's kind of ridiculous. Like, only about 1 in 10 of the companies that reach out to me actually make it through my filter, where I say, yeah, I think this is a good fit.

Jay Clouse [00:07:31]:
Can you tell me about that?

April Dunford [00:07:33]:
Yeah. So at the beginning, I was just kinda taking my victim where I find them, Right? So people knew me as a good vice president of marketing. So what happened is customers would call me and they'd say, hey, come and be our vice president of marketing. And I'd Say, no. I don't do that anymore, man. I'm doing this other thing. And they'd say, yeah. Okay.

April Dunford [00:07:49]:
Let's just sign up for the other thing. And they didn't care what it was. Like, they were just, we We just want you in here, and then you're going to fall in love with us and be our vice president of marketing. So for the 1st year, I did a lot of that, and I should have been saying no to those deals because they didn't want what I was offering, but I was saying yes, because I was like, Hey, I just need to get some work happening here. So then I got more into like, You know, I'm going to qualify you. And so now I have a whole long list of qualification things. So first of all, it became very clear to me, like my background is very B2B. If a company calls me and what they have is a consumer product, that's not really my background.

April Dunford [00:08:26]:
My methodology wasn't built for those kinds of companies. Could we do something together? Yeah, maybe. But would it be amazing? I don't know. I couldn't guarantee that. So I thought, you know what? I'm just going to say no to that business. I'm sorry. So that was the first thing. No consumer stuff, only B2B.

April Dunford [00:08:42]:
Second thing is most of the companies I worked with as VP marketing had a sales team. And there's a lot of things you can do when you have sales team that you can't do if you're selling a completely zero touch sales model. So I stopped working with companies that didn't have a sales team because I was much more valuable to those that did have a sales team. And then if the company was too early stage, we didn't have a lot to grab on to to do positioning work. So I thought, well, you know, if they're too early stage, I should be just telling them no and trying to instead of trying to do something, but we don't really have the right inputs to actually do good stuff. All of this was really important in that what it meant was if somebody makes it through all my checkboxes, They're a tech company, they're B2B. They have a sales team. They've got a product in market with a certain amount of traction.

April Dunford [00:09:29]:
I can feel very confident that we're gonna do some pretty good work together, which gives me the confidence to charge a lot of money for that. Because if we do smash it, That's actually really, really valuable to the company. Before, I think I was scared to charge a lot of money because it was like, well, maybe this is gonna work, maybe not. We'll see how it goes. But now it's like, if you tick all my boxes, we're gonna smash it. Like, it's gonna be awesome when we get to the end of it, and so I have that confidence. People hire me for that confidence. The people hire me because they know their chances of getting a really good result is much higher than if they go to somebody who just minors on this work and doesn't major on it.

April Dunford [00:10:08]:
And so that's allowed me to put the rates up or, you know, work with a higher class of customer, all that stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:10:14]:
How do I interact with this filter? If I'm somewhat interested in working with Are you talking to me and asking me these questions?

April Dunford [00:10:20]:
There's 2 things. So 1, if you go on my website and you go to sign up on my website, there's an FAQ, like, right there on the contact form that basically says, if you're a consumer, don't fill in the form, man, because I don't work. But you're like it's laid out pretty right there on my contact me form. It's like, this is kind of who I work with, and so who's a good fit for me? It looks like this. There's even a mention of pricing on there. I don't like talking about pricing upfront, but I think it's fair to people to let them know, like, what the ballpark is because a lot of smaller companies don't have the budget. And so when I was cheap, I never talked about the pricing up front because I figured once you talk to me, you'd know it was worth some money. Now I put it on the website because I think the smaller companies who don't have the budget, let's not waste each other's time here.

April Dunford [00:11:07]:
If you don't have the budget to do it, then just don't fill out the form. So all that stuff is on the website, and then we'll do a qualifying call. And so there's a handful of things I'm checking for in the qualifying call. Like, Are they really big enough? Do they really have enough traction in the market? Sometimes people call and they say, we made all our money in this market, but we wanna be in this other market. And we haven't sold anything there, but we wanna do the positioning there. And I turned those ones down because I'm like, we don't know how to position it because you haven't sold anything there yet. So you need to go sell some stuff. Me in 6 months.

April Dunford [00:11:39]:
So we're having those conversations. The other thing I'm looking for is sometimes people call me and they think it's a positioning problem, and I don't think it is. So they'll call me and say, you know, once we get a customer in the door, we smash it. Like, we sell everybody. We close everybody. It's amazing. And I'm like, maybe your problem is awareness and lead generation. That that doesn't sound like a positioning problem to me.

April Dunford [00:12:01]:
So I'll disqualify those folks. Because if it ain't broke, we shouldn't be trying to fix it. So we do all that stuff in the qualification call. And then a lot of my clients are looking at me, but they're talking to other people too. And so part of the qualification call is them making sure I sound like I know what I'm doing, and they wanna work with me too. I also have a bit of an asshole filter, frankly, in the qualification call. Like, I don't think I wanna spend the whole week with these people. Like, I've done my time 25 years in start ups.

April Dunford [00:12:29]:
Like, you know, I don't have to spend a week with jerks. So if they're kinda jerky to me, I'm like, oh, jeez. I think I'm all booked up.

Jay Clouse [00:12:37]:
That's a lesson I feel like everybody learns the hard way. Yeah. It's like, oh, I should have I should have a filter for that.

April Dunford [00:12:42]:
Yeah. You should have a filter for that. This is where I'm at now. Like, if I was just starting out here's the other thing to know about this. Like, I started my own thing. Like, at the end of my career, I've been 25 years as a VP marketing. So it wasn't like I was 25 with debts and broke. It's different when you do it late stage.

April Dunford [00:13:02]:
You can be a little bit more picky, and you can spend 2 years not making too much money trying to figure this stuff out. So I had the privilege of doing that. I couldn't have done this business when I was 30 years old and broke and in debt and whatever. But I had the luxury of being really picky. And so the great thing that happens when you do have the luxury of being really picky, is you tend to smash it. Every time you do pick somebody, it's a really good fit, and then that generates good word-of-mouth. So everybody's like, oh, you know, we did this thing with April. It was really good, and that's all goodness.

Jay Clouse [00:13:40]:
I'm gonna come back to that point you made in a minute about this wouldn't have looked the same had I done it earlier. But you you mentioned this contact page on your website. So I pulled it up here, and I was looking at it. And what I expected to see was A form with a bunch of different fields, a bunch of different checkboxes. Actually, what I see is very simple form with an FAQ below it with a lot of the questions. So it's not saying, Are you this? Are you that? You're saying, I don't work with b to b companies. I work with growth stage in larger organizations. You can expect a minimum investment of $60,000.

Jay Clouse [00:14:10]:
So you're qualifying them and saying, this is just what it is. I fill this out if this is you, but you're not making the form longer, which I see a lot of service providers have a really long intake form, which I think presents new problems.

April Dunford [00:14:25]:
So the person I'm dealing with is generally the CEO of a growth stage business. So they're a startup CEO, companies making 30, 40, 50, 100,000,000 revenue. Like, It's amazing they fill out a form at all. Like, if I put any friction in that?

Jay Clouse [00:14:43]:
Yes.

April Dunford [00:14:45]:
And what they really want to know is, like most of the time, these folks come to me really qualified already. So they've see me on stage somewhere. And then they bought the book and read the book. They might have attempted to do the exercise themself internally because I encourage everybody to try and do it themselves internally. And they've been wrestling with this thing for like 6 months. And so by the time they hit my page, it's like, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

April Dunford [00:15:12]:
I just wanna know, like, how much does it cost? When can we do it?

Jay Clouse [00:15:16]:
After a quick break, April and I talk about the evolution of her business and how her first book came to be. So stick around. We'll be right back. And now, back to my conversation with April Dunford.

April Dunford [00:15:29]:
So I was doing workshops well before the book. The 1st couple years, I didn't know what I was doing. I was taking all kinds of different projects on and things kind of sucked. I was doing some fractional CMO and it was shit. Everything was shit. So I said, well, I actually have to figure this out. And so the first thing I decided was I only want to do work where I'm right in my zone of excellence, which for me is the positioning work. So I want to eliminate all this other work.

April Dunford [00:15:56]:
If it's not positioning work, I'm not going to do it. And then the 2 other factors were, I just wanna work with good people. So I'm I'm gonna hard disqualify anybody that looks like they're problematic to work with. And then the last thing was I needed to figure out a way to make fair money for what I was doing. Like one of the things about being a VP marketing at startups is You generally get paid under market value if you're in earlier stage companies, and there's always this big promise of stock options that never actually works out. And so, even if you get acquired, which is a whole other podcast. But so I thought, you know what? I'm not often getting paid what I'm worth. So at this stage, you know, if we're going to do some stuff together, I got to get paid by no more.

April Dunford [00:16:35]:
So those were the 3 things. One of the things I quickly came to the conclusion on was Anything that appeared like doer work, like I'm gonna do your positioning for

Jay Clouse [00:16:46]:
you. Implementation.

April Dunford [00:16:48]:
That's a problem because I'm always going to get compared with, well, can't we just hire a vice president of marketing to do this? And so they would, you know, take whatever the salary was for VP marketing, split that up and say, well, you're here for 2 months, so we're going to pay the equivalent of 2 months salary of VP marketing. And that's just not I just wanted to get out of that. And so I thought, well, really what my goal here is, is to work with companies on their positioning, but they know more about their product, their market, their situation, all this stuff than I could ever learn. Like, even if I went in and spent 3 months with them and interviewed all their customers and interviewed all the executives, They're still going to know way, way, way more about the situation than me. So a big unlock for me was I started going in and working with companies and basically getting the gang together. Like we'll get the executive team together. And instead of me trying to figure out what the answers were, I would come in with a process to pull the answers out of everybody. Mhmm.

April Dunford [00:17:46]:
Because my thesis was, the answers are there. It's just different parts of the organization don't agree. And so that turned out to be a really big game changer in my work, that instead of me spending months months trying to do all this legwork, I would just bring the right people together in the room and have a process for pulling stuff out of people. So instead of being the person doing the positioning, I'm facilitating and teaching the folks how to do it.

Jay Clouse [00:18:13]:
This makes a lot of sense because as the third party coming in, you are incentivized to do the best work as efficiently as possible. And so you're saying, how can I most efficiently set myself up to do what I need to do? And in figuring out the answer to that question, you developed A really repeatable process and framework.

April Dunford [00:18:37]:
That's exactly it. So after doing that a bunch of times, I thought, okay, I really got this down now. So like, you know, I come in, here's the framework, here's the thing we do. I come in as the facilitator and I'll do it. Then I got this idea. Well, there were 2 things happening in my business. 1 was companies were coming to me And I was trying to explain what we were going to do in this workshop, and it was hard to explain. And people were kind of like, well, can't you just do it for us? And I'm like, No, I can't.

April Dunford [00:19:07]:
And here's why. You know, and then I explain that, and then I explain the process and all this stuff. And sometimes it was hard to do in an hour. Like, we'd need a 2nd call to talk about it. And I thought, well, what I should actually have is a book. Well, at first I thought it was a blog post. I thought what I should have is this big, detailed blog post that says, here's how you do it. And then 2 things would happen.

April Dunford [00:19:29]:
The little guys that were too small to work with me because they you know, they're not even paying themselves, let alone a consultant. They could just read the post and do it themselves, and that would save me having 9,000 coffee meetings with, you know, CEOs of early stage companies, because at that point I was spending a lot of time having coffee meetings with CEOs of early stage companies. And so they could self serve that. And then, you know, in the coffee meeting, we'd have smarter discussions. And then the second thing was that, You know, the CEOs that were in my market space could read this thing. And this is like the description of here's exactly what I do. And so if I go to a conference talk or something and I'd say, Hey, you want more information on how to get this done? Here's the blog post. Go read it.

April Dunford [00:20:10]:
If you're stuck, call me. And so that would maybe save me this 1st call. But then I got right in the blog post and I'm like, oh man, this is more than the blog post.

Jay Clouse [00:20:19]:
Is this too big?

April Dunford [00:20:20]:
This starting to look like a book. So then I went down the whole journey of getting the book out. That took me a long time, like maybe 2 years. But the but getting the book out was absolutely transformational to the business. Like, that's what took me from this is a good business that pays me more than what my salary was in house, you know, yay me, consultant, to Holy man. I didn't even think it was possible to make this kind of money and work with this kind of clients and do this amazing stuff. And, yeah, the book was a game changer for me.

Jay Clouse [00:20:55]:
I'm gonna ask, this is a faux pas on podcasting, but I'm gonna do it anyway. I'm gonna ask you 2 questions at once. The first is, Why did the book take 2 years? You made it sound like it took a long time, longer than you expected. And and, 2, What would you have done differently knowing what you know now to make that path more efficient?

April Dunford [00:21:14]:
Oh, well, let me tell you. I just wrote the new book, and the new book was so much easier than the 1st book because the new one, I know what I'm doing. The first one, I didn't know. So the first one, I got a lot of Really well intentioned, but terrible advice about books. So I thought, well, I'm going to write a book, so I'll go talk to book authors about how they did it. The problem is, is most of the people I talk to, you know, wrote books like 10 years ago. And I think the book business has really, really, really changed. The other thing is that if you wrote a book with a traditional publisher, all you know is that.

April Dunford [00:21:51]:
Like, you don't know what self publishing looks like. So, like, I talked to a very famous author, and I basically asked him the question, like, what does your publisher do for you? And he didn't know. Mhmm. He wouldn't admit that, but he didn't know. Mhmm. And I was like, this is kind of a Scam. And so I spent a year trying to go down traditional publishing route, and that didn't work so good for me. 1, they didn't like the topic.

April Dunford [00:22:18]:
They thought it was stupid. To book publishers were like, well, hasn't a book on positioning already been written? And I'm like, yeah, man, in 1982. But, you know, I think we need a new one every 50 years or something.

Jay Clouse [00:22:34]:
Yeah. Yeah.

April Dunford [00:22:34]:
And they're like, I don't know. I don't know. Sounds risky. And Then they would ask me really, like, these questions that drove me crazy. They'd say, Well, how many newsletter subscribers do you have? How many followers do you have on Twitter? And I was like, well, like a decent amount, frankly. But I mean, I can have as many as you want. Like, I can go buy those. All you care about is the number.

April Dunford [00:22:56]:
Like these these are kind of dumb questions. So I eventually landed at the place where what the book people do is produce the book, but they don't do anything to market the book or promote the book or anything. All they do is produce the book, get you editors and cover art and all that stuff. And even that's terrifying because what they're doing is buying the book, which means technically they own your book now. Like they own your IP, they own all your stuff. For a consultant, I found that of terrifying. Like, if I wanted to use diagrams in a book that they had published, I would have to license them from my publisher.

Jay Clouse [00:23:32]:
Really?

April Dunford [00:23:32]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:23:32]:
That's something I haven't heard people talk about.

April Dunford [00:23:34]:
I was like, that's dumb. Well, that's why most books are so fluffy because you don't wanna put all the good stuff in there. Otherwise, you gotta license from your publisher. This is the other thing I learned is that book publishing is like a hits based business. So what they want is a book It's like chicken soup for the soul. You know, something really fluffy, really broad, applies to everybody. And they're hoping you get a hit. What I wanted to write was something really specific for practitioners that was really narrow.

April Dunford [00:24:03]:
And so that didn't go So great with them. So eventually, I did get a deal with a publisher, but we got into, like, basically a disagreement. They wanted me to write positioning for your life, you know? And I was like, that's not the business I'm running here, people. I work with tech companies. That's it. Like, you know? And so I ended up firing them and going self publishing, which in my opinion, was the best decision I could have made for like a 1000 different reasons. But mainly because I really knew my audience. I knew what they wanted.

April Dunford [00:24:33]:
I knew what I wanted to do with this book, and I needed to have the creative control to build a product that I knew I needed for this business, and I'm super happy that I did that.

Jay Clouse [00:24:42]:
Was it difficult for you to fire the publisher you had an agreement with?

April Dunford [00:24:46]:
I was really lucky. They hadn't paid me my advance yet. And so, if they had paid me my advance, that would have been bad news. But they hadn't paid me the advance yet, So I just said, look, it's not me. It's you. Bye. No. It was bad.

April Dunford [00:25:03]:
And you know what's funny? They came back to me, like, 3 years later and said, wow. Like, looks like you're selling a lot of books, April. We'd like to buy that book off you. And I said, really? Oh, that's cool. How much? You know, and then we went, we got talking about a deal and the deal was Stupid. It was like the dumbest sales pitch I've ever heard in my life, actually. It was like, you give us everything and all your pipeline, everything. We will take all of the royalties, and you will get the privilege of saying that you were published by x, y, z with a little sticker on the back, and I'm like, you're joking.

April Dunford [00:25:38]:
Right?

Jay Clouse [00:25:40]:
Man. Man, oh, man. So here's 1 question I have for you with what, like, a publisher does Potentially. Did you care about bestseller list at all? Because it seems like that carries some cache and might even have some reporting Promise as opposed to self publishing?

April Dunford [00:25:57]:
Yeah. So I decided that didn't matter. So here's the thing. You can self publish and be best seller on Amazon. Anyone could do that. In fact, that's kind of a meaningless thing, like bestseller. Like, if I just make my if anybody makes their book 99¢, they'll be bestseller for a day in some category. So that means nothing.

April Dunford [00:26:15]:
But if you wanted to say you were New York Times bestseller or Wall Street Journal bestseller, you have to be published traditional way because those lists don't count self published books. So they don't count anything that's print on demand. They do everything through this thing called BookScan, which is kind of a thing with the publishers. And so if you self publish a book, you will not ever show up on the bestseller list on any of those bestsellers. And so, you know, I wondered, like, would that do something for me? Like, if I was New York Times bestseller, would that change my life? And so I met a guy, and he essentially bought himself a New York Times bestseller. So what he did was he's a very famous marketer. There is a really, really big email list, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. He got an agent.

April Dunford [00:27:02]:
The agent shopped him around. He got a book deal and he got a Spectacularly huge advance, like $100,000 advance, which, you know, for a new author who isn't like a famous person, That's a big deal. And then he took the entire $100,000 and gave it to a company that goes around and buys books at the specific stores that count for your New York Times bestseller thing and had all those buys happen in 1 week so that he popped up on the list for like 1 week. And that was it. And I could tell you this guy's name. I won't because I don't have permission to talk about him. But you don't know that he's a New York Times bestseller. Like, he didn't get anything that goes with being a New York Times bestseller.

April Dunford [00:27:46]:
And so I just kind of decided, well, who cares? Like, for what I do. Like, if I was a fiction book, like, if I was Harry Potter, That'd be different. But I just wanted to sell a lot of consulting and use this book as a way to make that easier. So I kind of didn't care. Like, I mean, it'd be good for my ego, but I think it's kind of important to separate out your ego on that. And, you know, and I've sold a lot of books, like, really a lot of books, so I feel good about that.

Jay Clouse [00:28:13]:
Yeah. Probably enough probably enough to put you on the list if they were reported in a way.

April Dunford [00:28:17]:
Wall Street Journal bestseller for sure. There's no question in my mind I would have made that one. I don't know if I would have made New York Times bestseller, but who cares? I don't know.

Jay Clouse [00:28:26]:
Yeah. This is the racket that exists within the industry that I wanna point out. I'm using that word very specifically because that word actually has meaning.

April Dunford [00:28:34]:
But can I tell you a little detail here? Please. When I did the math, you know, when I was working with the publisher, they were going to give me a little advance, $10, $20, something like that. And that's an advance on your royalties. And so the royalties, the way they calculate it, Amazon takes 30%. The publisher takes another 50% or something. So you're left with like 10% or something. So like some little slice. So, you know, less than a buck a book or something is usually what happens.

April Dunford [00:29:01]:
And so When I did the math on that, I was like, oh man, I'm not making any money on books. You know, and everyone says that nobody makes any money on books. Yes. Yes. Okay. So then I switched to self publishing. The way self publishing worked was I hired a company and they did everything the publisher would do. So 2 rounds of edits, made my cover look pretty, get everything interior design, get it all set up on all the systems.

April Dunford [00:29:22]:
You can buy it in a bookstore if you want to, all that stuff. And I just paid them up front. So for the 1st book, I paid $20,000 to make that happen. So I did all that and then the book came out. So now the book is selling. I only lose the 30% that Amazon takes. So I'm actually making a few dollars a book, but I'm not looking at it because I'm thinking, well, that's not money. No one makes money on books.

April Dunford [00:29:45]:
So then I got to the end of the year and my accountant said, Hey, April, what's the revenue on this book? We need to figure this out. You know, we got to put this in on your taxes and stuff. And I'm like, Yeah, okay. Let me pull the thing out of Amazon. So I'm selling maybe 95% of my books are on Amazon. So I go on Amazon, I download the report, and I pull this thing to look at how much did I make in royalties for the year. And it wasn't even a full year because the book didn't come until May, and I had made $70,000.

Jay Clouse [00:30:15]:
Wow. Almost that large advance you were just talking about that sometimes.

April Dunford [00:30:19]:
I was like, People, that's not nothing.

Jay Clouse [00:30:23]:
Yeah, totally.

April Dunford [00:30:25]:
So, I was like, oh my god, it's like free money. And then the crazy thing is the book sold more the 2nd year than it did the 1st year. And I'm now on year 3 or something. And my book sales are completely flat. So it's cranking that year after year after year. Now, I would have given that away. All of that. And instead what I paid $20 upfront to do their part, only cost me $20.

April Dunford [00:30:52]:
So if you have faith in your ability to be able to market and sell a book, Why the hell would you give it away to these people that don't do anything for you?

Jay Clouse [00:30:59]:
And I would imagine the book is the best source of lead gen that you have.

April Dunford [00:31:03]:
No, absolutely. So if I, you know, if I counted all that money I made off consulting, like, ridiculous. It's the most high ROI thing I've ever done in my life.

Jay Clouse [00:31:15]:
After one more short break, we talk about April's launch and the promotion strategy for her book. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with April Dunford. On your website, when you look at the book pages, You push people to Amazon. Why not sell directly through your website to people who are looking at the books on your website?

April Dunford [00:31:34]:
Shipping. I just don't wanna deal with shipping. Right? Like, I would have to figure that out. And people are all over the world, and I live in Canada. So, you know, you get all these people in the US, and I got I'd have to deal with shipping. And I'm just like pain in the ass. Don't wanna deal with it.

Jay Clouse [00:31:50]:
Again, another thing that I admire about you and your business model, even things that like, I could do that. Sounds like a pain in the ass. I'm not gonna do that.

April Dunford [00:31:58]:
Yeah. No. I I mean, if you think about my time, my time's worth a lot of money. And for the number of people that would actually buy it from there, I just kinda looked And it went I don't know. Again, I'm talking about CEO of a company that makes 50,000,000, $60,000,000 revenue. They're just gonna go buy it on Amazon. Yeah. And if you don't love Amazon, you can go to your local bookstore and order it and it'll come in the same as it would if I was a traditional publisher.

April Dunford [00:32:22]:
So you can get it anywhere you get books. So, you know, and again, I'm, I wasn't ever thinking about, oh, I'm trying to optimize for book revenue. But if I was really trying to optimize for book revenue, yeah, I'd probably think about that.

Jay Clouse [00:32:34]:
Are you willing to share the name of the company or how you found the company that helped you do the, like, setup to print this?

April Dunford [00:32:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. They're incredible. So they're called Page 2, all one word, g e t w o. You probably heard them because they anybody who's curious about self publishing is working with them. And, you know, when I worked with them on the 1st book, and I didn't really know what I was doing. And, you know, they were kinda new in business too. And so, you know, we kinda bumbled our way along, I think, on the 1st book.

April Dunford [00:33:03]:
But I went back to them to do the 2nd book, and I gotta say, like, that whole process was perfect. Like, I Couldn't imagine doing a book with anybody else. So they just basically do everything. You pay them upfront. And in my opinion, like, Like, if you look at the people they have working there, they all come from traditional publishing. So you're working with editors and people that also edit books for McGraw Hill or wherever. So it's the same quality. So they have a really great process for doing several rounds of edits to make sure you get a really, really good quality book.

April Dunford [00:33:37]:
They were really good with me. Like, I had a very specific idea of how I wanted the book to look. Like, I did a lot of research with CEOs before I wrote the book. And what I wanted it to be was like an in flight magazine, like lots of white space, easily skimmable, quite short word count wise, but spaced out. And they did an amazing job with that. And then, you know, and then professional looking cover and then all the back end stuff, like get me set up on all the places. And they'll even handle things like bulk book buys if you wanna sell bulk books because you're speaking at a conference or something like that. They do that.

April Dunford [00:34:16]:
Audiobook, everything everything. So super easy. And The the only downside is you gotta cough up the cash up front. You know? And the 2nd book was more expensive than the 1st book because they're they're a better company now. But in my opinion, super worth it.

Jay Clouse [00:34:31]:
I wanna give a shout out to the book, Write Useful Books, which I read that really talked about self publishing. The Image that stands out in my brain from that book that I can't stop thinking about is you said, you know, in a traditional publishing world, everything is optimized for the presale and then The week of publish because most people in traditional publishing are trying to hit that best seller list. And if you look at book sales for most recently published books, You have a spike in sales, and then it's just like a slow decline forever after that. Now what you're describing in the self published world, it's the same methodology in this book, write useful books. You wrote a very specific book for a specific audience that teaches them how to do something, which has generated positive word-of-mouth, and you're actually seeing sustained, sometimes growing sales Year over year. Yeah. Seems like a pretty good alternative.

April Dunford [00:35:19]:
I treated like, I come from tech. Right? It is so like, I'm a ex VP marketing in tech. So I treated the whole thing like a product launch. Like, you wouldn't call that a successful product launch if the product only sold for a week, would you?

Jay Clouse [00:35:33]:
Nope. No. That would be a bummer.

April Dunford [00:35:36]:
So, you know, again, if you take that whole I gotta, you know, ego thing, like, I gotta be New York Times bestseller thing. If you take that out of the equation, then what you really want is a book that generates a lot of word-of-mouth. Because that like, for my audience, that's the only way they hear about books is word-of-mouth. And so, you know, first of all, you gotta write a book that's really good. Like, you gotta write a book that's good and useful and all the rest of it. And then launching it is, you know, it's just like launching a product. There's a bunch of things you do before the launch. There's the launch, but the launch is kind of whatever.

April Dunford [00:36:11]:
Now it's out there. But then what you need is this kind of sustained set of things carrying on. Like, my original launch plan for Obviously Awesome was a year long plan, and it was like prelaunch, launch, postlaunch, momentum launch the same way I would do it for a product. And that worked really good.

Jay Clouse [00:36:30]:
I want to talk about that. Can you talk about that?

April Dunford [00:36:32]:
Sure. So like, I'll give you an example. Like when I was at IBM, if we were launching a product, we would have the pre launch. And the pre launch phase would be like, Oh, boy. This thing is coming. It's gonna be amazing. Right? And so you're teasing you're teasing it with the press, and you're teasing it with your audience, and you're letting everyone know, like, this is the thing coming. And then you might do preorders.

April Dunford [00:36:56]:
And preorders are just a way to get some hype rolling for the thing before it's available. So you're all preorders are available. Woo hoo hoo. You know, get on there and get your preorder, And then the thing is available. And so you've got a week of, you know, really sustained effort. Like at IBM, we would do big press release, a couple of events, bunch of big stuff going on, but then we would have all this stuff planned for afterwards. So usually we would do what we call a success announcement. So 2 months after the thing was announced, we put out a press release and talk about all the cool companies using our stuff and all the stuff happening For a book launch, what I did on the first one was a few months after putting it out, I was like, holy cow.

April Dunford [00:37:35]:
I got a 100 Amazon reviews. Look at what they Hey. This is amazing. I can't believe how many books I'm selling. You haven't got one yet? My god. What's wrong with you? Get out there.

Jay Clouse [00:37:45]:
My man's time.

April Dunford [00:37:46]:
Get that thing. So I did that. And then the audiobook was not available at the same time, so I did that one later. At IBM, we do a point release. So what we do is There'd be a couple of features that people really wanted that weren't available at the time of the general release, and so we'd put that out 3, 4 months later. We'd be like, woo hoo. You know, new news. This is out now, and maybe it didn't buy before because it didn't have this thing.

April Dunford [00:38:08]:
But now it has this thing. Come and get it. So I held the audiobook off a little bit and release that one later, and it gave me a chance to just go out and announce it again. And so people are waiting for the audiobook. We're excited, and, woo, that was generating some stuff online. Yay. The audiobook, blah, blah. You know? And then I had some templates and things that went with the book because it's a very much a how to book.

April Dunford [00:38:31]:
And so then I released a new version of the templates and everybody was excited about that. And so there was, you know, some new supplemental material. And then at the 1 year mark, I put it on sale. So again, a lot of people will put the book on sale on day 1 because they want to hit these bestseller lists, which are stupid and meaningless. And like, I don't know why you would do that because, like, your people that love you the most are buying on day 1. So why? They're happy to pay full price. So at the 1 year mark, like I thought, well, at a year, that's probably as much juice as I can squeeze out of this lemon. At the 1 year mark, anybody who hasn't bought now, you know, needs a sale.

April Dunford [00:39:08]:
So I put a so I was like, ebooks going on sale for 99¢, and I sold 4,000 books. Woah.

Jay Clouse [00:39:19]:
Can you repeat that?

April Dunford [00:39:20]:
At that 1 year mark, I was like, call you Keepies.

Jay Clouse [00:39:25]:
Wow. Are you comfortable sharing how big your email audience was that you sent that to? I'm trying to think of, like, a proportion of that.

April Dunford [00:39:32]:
I I didn't even have an email list. Like, I had a e like, I'm not doing any of that.

Jay Clouse [00:39:38]:
Who'd you sell it to?

April Dunford [00:39:39]:
Well so I did I did a handful of things. So one was that has stinky little email list. Like, we're talking like 5,000 names maybe. And this list isn't even active. Like, I don't newsletter. So, like, I hit the list, but I probably sold 10 books off to hitting the list. I put it all over socials. At the time, I had 50,000 fairly active users on Twitter.

April Dunford [00:40:00]:
And this is back when Twitter was still good. So I put it out on Twitter and that generated a bunch of buzz and LinkedIn and whatever. And then I also ran a promo on this site called BookBub, which if you're having a sale, They have this giant audience of people. And so I did a BookBub promo and set that up for the same time. And so, unfortunately, I can't filter out how many of those books We're BookBub people versus people off my socials and whatever. But it did get a lot of action on social media, I'll tell you that, because The book was just starting to build a bit of buzz. And then I put the 99¢ sale on for 48 hours. And there was a lot of Like it was all over the internet.

April Dunford [00:40:41]:
It was a little hard to miss it, actually. And then I had this bookbub thing going at the same time. So yeah, I sold a ton of books. And then the crazy thing was, is The sale was over, but the stuff was still all out there. So I actually had sustained bump in sales for, like, 2 weeks.

Jay Clouse [00:40:58]:
Well, you have a lot of respect in the space and friends in the space, other people who have platforms. I imagine they're sharing the sale a little bit. How much of that was organic and whatever happens, happens. Thank you, friends. Or did you do anything to reach out to some of your Larger scale friends and say, hey. Can you help get the word out?

April Dunford [00:41:18]:
Yeah. No. So I didn't do any of that. Like, I was kind of a big nobody before that book. Like, I didn't have any friends with big audience.

Jay Clouse [00:41:26]:
Okay. Okay. I misclassified. I misread.

April Dunford [00:41:30]:
I kind of like, I mean, I like, I think of all my friend group, I probably had the most audience of anybody. But even then I wasn't doing email and LinkedIn was not a thing back then like it is now. And so Twitter, again, I didn't have like hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, but I had a very engaged 50,000. And so if I was talking about stuff that usually got a lot of action. And then I had this little email list, but I wasn't doing anything with it. And, you know, I've just I started getting serious about email. I literally just launched a newsletter this week, which is gonna be awesome. But I finally decided the time has come, April, to do the damn newsletter.

Jay Clouse [00:42:16]:
So if I hear your marketing plan correctly, you said there's, like, prelaunch, presale, launch, and then you had a couple of post launch Editions of Yeah. Things to get people excited, and you had the sale at the end. I love that because you're basically creating all of these many marketable events throughout a period of time. Are you saying that you had all or most of that planned out beforehand? Yeah. Okay. That's good. So I

April Dunford [00:42:42]:
had a launch plan. Again, I'm VP marketing. Right? So it's like, we're gonna launch something. We gotta have a little launch plan. So I had a launch plan, and it had Stuff happening every 6 weeks. Every 6 weeks, there was something to talk about. I got to remember all the things. It was something about reviews.

April Dunford [00:43:00]:
It was audiobook. Oh, I did a little thing around the holiday time where I was giving away stupid stickers and bookmarks and Stuff like that. So I had this sticker that said marketing can polish a turd, but positioning can transform your turds into fertilizer. So I put that on a bookmark and stickers, and I gave that out. And so that was kind of meme able, you know, so people were sharing that around because it was stupid, and, so I did that. Oh, the templates was another thing. Trying to think what else I had. Like, literally, I had something every 6 weeks, but it was, like, some things were more effective than others.

April Dunford [00:43:37]:
I I did a big thing when I hit, like, a 1000 reviews on Amazon, which was incredible to me, and I was like, holy crap. I'm at a 1000 reviews, people.

Jay Clouse [00:43:47]:
How big is your team?

April Dunford [00:43:48]:
It's just me, man.

Jay Clouse [00:43:50]:
It's just you.

April Dunford [00:43:50]:
This is the team. Well, I have a gal that part time like, I'm not her only client, but part time helps me with some admin stuff, but that's it.

Jay Clouse [00:43:59]:
Well, how would you describe if I had a pie chart of your time? Because there's so much that falls into your time if it's If it's mostly just you. Yeah. How would you describe, like, the biggest segments of that pie for where you're putting your time right now?

April Dunford [00:44:11]:
Well, I would say so, you know, actual work with clients is about 50% of my time.

Jay Clouse [00:44:18]:
Wow. Okay.

April Dunford [00:44:19]:
So, like, to actually on a plane or in a room with clients. About half. Like, I'm actually hoping to dial that down a little bit, but I'm still doing, like, 2 weeks out of 4. Between 30 50% of my time is me with clients doing stuff. And then if I look at the rest of the time, you know, it's bursting. You know, if I think about putting a book out, that's a bit of a big project. And so if you look at the last 4 months, I've spent a lot of time, probably the other 50%, working on book promo stuff and getting the book out the door. And, you know, I launched a podcast partly to promo the book, and then the newsletter is brand new too.

April Dunford [00:45:05]:
So those 2 things are really in service to helping me get the word out about the book. You know, part of this is because I lost my main social media channel, which was Twitter. It just doesn't work anymore. It's just for me, it's just gone. My engagement It's just falling off a cliff. It's there's not even worth posting stuff on there anymore. It's so bad. And so I made the switch to LinkedIn about a year ago.

April Dunford [00:45:28]:
So I'm, like, the last person to get on LinkedIn. So

Jay Clouse [00:45:31]:
Oh, you're still ahead of the curve. LinkedIn is still underrated.

April Dunford [00:45:34]:
Yeah. Yeah. I think it is still underrated. Anyway, so I'm doing them some stuff there. And then I thought, you know, when I got back into a regular groove, like, posting on LinkedIn felt like blogging to me. In a way Twitter didn't. Like, Twitter was always fast and easy for me. And so I thought, this is great.

April Dunford [00:45:50]:
This is like I don't have to have a newsletter. I can just Do this, and this is really easy. I can do it on EdgeTime, and I'm good at it. But when Twitter went away, that got me thinking about, what am I actually doing for content these days? And so I switched to LinkedIn, but LinkedIn felt like blogging. I was like, well, for the amount of time I'm putting into doing a good meaty LinkedIn post, This should be a newsletter. So, you know, then I spent some time thinking about how did I wanna do that. In the end, I settled on Substack. So I I launched that this week or last week with the new and improved templates for both the books as my lead magnet to get people to come and subscribe to the thing, but that's doing okay.

April Dunford [00:46:30]:
And so now I got a little I got a little newsletter going. I think I got 13,000, 14,000 subscribers over there.

Jay Clouse [00:46:37]:
You know, I started this conversation saying that a lot of my friends have spoken about your business model, how much they admire it, and I think a lot of it is because of the leverage that you've created. You know? You have scale with the book. You're doing client work, but it's A higher priced, like, very leveraged in that way as well. Yeah. And it's still just you, and your decision criteria for a lot of things, it seems to be, is do I wanna do this?

April Dunford [00:47:01]:
Like, it's so awesome in a way. Right? Like Yeah. You know, if early career April knew that this is where it all ended up, oh, man. It's pretty good. Like, I take the whole summer off. You know, if somebody's don't wanna do strategy stuff in July August, and everybody's on vacation. It's really hard to get everybody together. So I just don't work in July August.

April Dunford [00:47:23]:
You know, and I I very deliberately didn't wanna have employees. Like, I I managed teams my whole professional career when I was in house, and And I just didn't wanna be responsible for people. Like I didn't wanna, I didn't wanna ever have to say, Oh, gee, you know, I don't like this client, but I gotta take them, otherwise my team doesn't eat. And when it's just me, I could say, you know what? I'm just not going to work with these people because I don't want to work with these And then if I decided to take August off, I'll take August off and no one's gonna cry. And so I wanted the freedom of that you get without having a staff. So The other thing was that I know a lot of people with agencies and I just think it's really hard to build a good, profitable agency. And so I was like, Nope, it's gonna be me. I'm just gonna sell my brain.

April Dunford [00:48:08]:
That's it. And that's worked out way better than I thought it would.

Jay Clouse [00:48:12]:
Well, let's close this conversation then with One, I said I'd return back to what you said about the 35 year old version of yourself. But some of the same friends who have talked about your business model have said that you've told them, I would have screwed this up if I had done it earlier.

April Dunford [00:48:29]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:48:29]:
And I wanna know what you mean by that.

April Dunford [00:48:31]:
Oh, yeah. That yeah. I totally would've blown this if I did it earlier. So the great thing about doing this in my old ladyhood is that, One, there's all this comfortableness that I you know, I've already made my money to a certain extent. You know, I can afford to have a few years that are kinda lean and whatever. The other thing is that if I hada done it when I was 35, I'd be thinking about this, like, how do I make this really big and sell it. Like, how do I I'm going to put all this energy into this thing. I'm going to grow it really big, and then it's going to get acquired, and I'm gonna make my bajillion dollars or whatever.

April Dunford [00:49:09]:
And, again, I've seen that model not work. Like, I think it's quite hard to build a good profitable agency. It's Obviously, not impossible. There's lots of people doing it, but there's a lot of people that try to do it. And when I look at their businesses, they're barely paying themselves. And, you know, there's there's none of the good stuff of of being on your own with that. So I probably woulda went down that path because I woulda been worried about, well, Is this thing just me? And, you know, how do I extricate myself from the business and blah blah blah? And because I'm doing this when I'm old, I was kinda like, I literally went on vacation to the beach and drew this little three circle thing. I wanna do my best work of my career with good people and get paid fair money, and that's it.

April Dunford [00:49:53]:
There is no back end on this thing. There is no big exit at the end of this thing, and that's fine. I'm actually living the dream. But I think I would have been so worried about the back end on the thing if I done it when I was 25 or 35 or whatever, I would've messed it

Jay Clouse [00:50:15]:
up. This conversation had a Huge impacts on the way that I've been thinking about traditional publishing versus self publishing. I hope it impacted you as well. If you wanna learn more about April, you can visit her website april dunford.com. Links to that as well as their social profiles are in the show notes. Thank you to April for being on the show. Thank you to Adam Lockwood for editing this episode, Emily us for our artwork and Brian Steele for our music. If you like this episode, please let me know.

Jay Clouse [00:50:42]:
You can tag me on Twitter or Instagram at Jake Thank you. And if you really wanna say thank you, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next