How it all started

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00:00GM everybody welcome back to the PPC Mastery podcast or actually this is episode one today we're going to be talking about how it all started how it all started with with PPC Mastery with PPC Mastery in this episode we wanted to take you through our journey about how we started out in Google Ads but also how we met and how that eventually led to us starting a business together form of business which we're doing happily now happily married no but yeah I think it would be nice to just kick it off with how we both started in Google Ads because we have really similar backgrounds not only in Google Ads but literally where we grew up I say this sometimes on the streams but not a lot of people know this we grew up like literally 10 15 kilometers from each other and we never met no in in our youth there was just two small cities in between yeah yeah and also we grew up in the eastern part of the Netherlands like the afterhook which is in the middle of nowhere yeah sort of sort of like small villages yeah yeah but you grew up on one part where you go to a school in your city and I grew up in another part where I went to a school in another city yeah so our paths never met I think maybe we might have played each other with football one time you never know yeah it could could be could be yeah I was I was playing soccer at uh and I was keeping in I was a goalkeeper and I was a goalkeeping in the first uh the eye yeah so I guess you you were also playing

01:39soccer in a upper class yeah no I was usually in this in the second teams but yeah anyway long long story short but yeah I know maybe somewhere maybe maybe not but yeah we grew up really close to each other but we never met and then we met online through Linkedin but we'll get to that in a second yeah but maybe you can tell us a little bit about your journey in Google Ads and how did that start and how did that lead you to becoming a freelancer and starting your own business yeah so I'll try to keep it short yeah since I'm curious about your your story as well over here when I started out in the work field online marketing Google Ads didn't really come to my mind in the first place so actually I started out as a call center employee working for one of the bigger banks in the Netherlands I worked for the Rabobank where basically consulted businesses on certain certain insurances about certain bank accounts stuff like that really really simple stuff and I was hired by a company that basically puts employees like me at different Rabobank headquarters across all of the Netherlands and I had to work in the southern part of the Netherlands in a tilbur which is very very far away from Hulu yeah where we grew where we grew up and you are still living I was still living there my girlfriend at the time was still studying in night Maven so naime who was already halfway there but from hunlo to tilburg it was like an hour and almost a two hour drive yeah

03:20and I had to do it every single day so I really liked uh the paycheck in the first couple of months of course but after five months I really I really really started to dislike I got tired about driving driving across so that's when I quit and during that time luckily I had some BNB some b b nights to yeah where I could stay from Monday to Wednesday so I didn't have to drive all of the week and during the evenings I started to to get bored since you're on your own you're not really sure okay I'm in the middle of nowhere yeah I was hiring an Airbnb at a farm so during during the evenings I was easily bored and that's when I started my first web shop in rims in exclusive wheels for cars I'm a car guy and that's what I like I still I still like cars a lot so that's when I started experimenting with a Shopify store actually it was a open card store one of the earliest CMS systems but it worked great so I started experimenting with that and once I got things rolling I had to promote the web shop right so that's when I doubled in Google Ads SEO analytics all of the bars across online marketing so I was building this e-commerce shop for myself during the evenings just to get not bored and I was getting bored and getting tired of my job in my regular job and during a weekend a particular weekend I just had

04:57something like hey I'm just going to stop with the job I'm doing right now were you working full-time yeah yeah full-time I was really sick and tired of it and this only marketing stuff seems to be pretty cool so let's dive into that part and let's continue exploring the only marketing scene so that's why that's when I started to look around in my Regional Center in the eastern part of the Netherlands I started to look for a traineeship opportunity so my plan was to to get a traineeship that space place somewhere and just observe the online marketing services and specialist specialisms as much as possible and that's when I got hired at a local online marketing agency I stayed there for one year and got in touch with Google Ads project management SEO and Google Ads was basically the thing that I liked the most so I'm a second job I started to dive into Google Ads full time that's where I stayed to complete years and after three years or so I felt like I was senior enough to start start a business for myself but that's maybe something that we can dive into together after you have done your introduction yeah yeah but then so then you you worked there for for a few years and then you went freelance right yeah yeah and I I didn't quit immediately yeah I didn't quit my job at the 18 the second agency I worked for straight away and went freelancing

06:35full-time I basically built up my freelancing clients and trade it in some some holiday days at the agency site and basically went for a soft shift from a paycheck based job to full-time freelancing how long did it take you then until you went freelance full-time a half a year uh half a year yeah yeah so I started in my in my weekends yeah I started in my evening hours so I worked 40 40 hours a week full time for the agency as a Google ad specialist and once I got my weekends filled to the max I couldn't couldn't take the time to go to the pub anymore with the boys and my evenings were fully time for the girlfriend no more time for the girlfriends and I received complaints yeah that's when I started to to skill down the agency part so I went from five days to four days on a contract basis so instead of working 40 hours I worked 32 hours and from there I started to toss in the the holiday days so instead of going on holiday for two weeks three weeks per year at best they just got one free day every single week so apart yeah if you do that four times a month and then for six months long you basically have 24 Holiday days that you can trade in right so I basically worked three days for the agency and then four days for myself including the weekend and all of the evening hours yeah and once my revenue of the freelance business surpassed the paycheck amount that's when I basically killed the agency

08:12physician and it was about time because I was almost oh I like foreign I think and we'll get to that as well but this this pattern completely repeated itself with PPC with PPC Mastery exactly the same exactly the same yeah yeah we'll get to that in a second but your journey started yeah it's similar when I graduated college in January 2017 I think yeah 16 or 17 17. I went abroad with my girlfriend for four months we traveled around southeast Asia and then I came back and I was still living in holding I was studying there then we came back and I moved to Amsterdam but I had no idea what I wanted to do I studied International Communication so it's quite broad but I I honestly didn't have an idea what if of what I wanted to do and then I was working at the macro for part-time on the on the shelves yeah in the shelves but I was also working in the wine department and I had to give advice for people what kind of I have no knowledge about wine whatsoever so I don't drink alcohol at all no not really back then I I did more than now but now I don't really do it as much anymore but I was working at the wine department part-time just thinking about what I wanted to do and then I wanted to dabble in online marketing as well but didn't know how and then my girlfriend she came across a traineeship at traffic for you in Amsterdam and that's when I applied there and it was supposed to be an

09:51online marketing traineeship where you learn about all the disciplines or online advertising so first you do a bit of PPC or Google Ads then social SEO but they changed it in the last the last moment to only a Google Ads traineeship and I already got the job but then they said yeah it's going to be Google Ads and I was like okay sure whatever it doesn't I don't I don't mind I was actually interested in Social back then but then yeah I did Google Ads and I was completely happy with it I loved it from the first moment uh felt a lot like playing a game really and you really had to use your mind yeah or your Advanced tactic skills back then exactly yeah the skag structure yeah yeah it was a totally different game still a demo was early 2018 yeah it was before smart bidding was it was already there but it wasn't really good yet no but then yeah I did the traineeship for six months and then I stayed there for two more years and then yeah it's similar to what you did you really like Google Ads and you wanted to do more of that I had the same I was working with a lot of small medium and big Ecom client and that's when I learned everything about the whole game of of Google Ads and then in 2020 it was always my goal to start there learn about as much as I can in a short amount of period as possible and then quit and go build something of my own first edition you wanted to start freelancing right before you entered the building no no no at first I actually wanted to build my own Ecom business because I was also experimenting a bit with Shopify Drop Shipping those kinds of things on the side and I thought okay if I work at

11:29an agency I will learn what whatever is needed to build that for myself so that's why I also why I'm also only doing Ecom right now is because first it was my goal to run my own Ecom store yeah and at at the agency where I worked at I pushed them a lot to give me Ecom clients I didn't want to do any Legion nothing no Finance I only wanted to do it no B2B and it took me it took quite some time but in the end yeah I got a really nice econ portfolio awesome but then as time progressed I saw from those econ brands that it's really hard man like running an e-com store it's really difficult and low margins and yeah race to the bottom advert High advertising costs and I have a lot of respect for Ecom store owners because it's not an easy business model with inventory that you need to buy and whatever so then I saw okay I don't want to do that anymore but yeah I did meet some other Freelancers without arms for it and of course I have to shout them out because voucher he was working at one of the clients that I was working for you was the the interim freelancer there so I was chatting to him like hey what are you doing uh sounds interesting and then yeah and he told me yeah he actually told me his hourly rate I was like I was calculating oh okay so that's probably five times as much as I'm making something like that you can drive for nice BMW yeah nice Tesla yeah yeah yeah and they they convinced me to go freelance and and that was right before covet came then covet hit and I and I thought okay now is the time I was working from home so okay maybe now is

13:06the time to go freelance so I got my first freelance client on the side that's also another story to tell in a different podcast I think it's quite interesting how I got that but then yeah I was making more with that one client alone than my whole monthly income at the agency so that I thought okay I'm out of here for that client in terms of hours 16 16 per week so less than half a week yeah it's insane right yeah it's crazy it's crazy so then then I thought okay now it's time and then three months later I quit got a few other clients and then yeah built the whole foreign if it was up to me then I would would have probably quit even earlier but my girlfriend she also slowed me down a little bit in that process okay let's take some time build up a little bit of a buffer and then go but then I I got my when I the day that I quit was when I got an offer for a big job at ring at the time an interim interim freelance gig yeah that's that was the proof again for me yeah problem solved it will work out in the end and yeah that's when I built the whole in my whole freelance freelance business and I've been doing that now for three years and around that time we were actually talking to each other because I looked it up in my DMs and I think we connected on LinkedIn for the first time in around early 2020 but it was just like oh you were freelancing I wasn't yet and we were talking about that a little bit exchanging Google Ads tips and and exchanging also freelance tips so our our conversations go back two years or so prior to when we

14:45launched PPC Mastery which is which is yeah it's really cool it was real quiet on LinkedIn back then yeah nobody was sharing anything nobody oh my I'm not nobody almost almost nobody last time I said that that there was nobody sharing anything I got a lot of for it so I will say I won't say nobody and and everybody and always and never there's always nuances that's like in PPC so don't feel offended if I if I say something but no jokes jokes aside it was it was really quiet back then on LinkedIn and I think we were trying to do a little bit with posting and trying to build up some something for ourselves some social exposure some social exposure trying to build a personal brand yeah yeah and you were also already doing doing some like courses and yeah for beginners right yeah I was doing Google Ads beginner courses in Dutch and I started doing physical courses in the middle of the Netherlands in Utrecht because I thought bootraft is quite Central for everyone in the Netherlands if you're from Friesland or the the eastern part artwork yeah people want to drive to Utrecht yeah most of the times so that went really well I was doing a fiscal course every single month for six for six people six persons nice and I was asking 4.95 X v80 so when I was sending out the invoices I was already like oh wait a minute I'm making 3K a day maybe I'm on to something here already since when I was freelancing I was asking an hourly rate in the beginning of 85 Euros

16:24per hour xvt so yeah if you're if you're able to to ramp up the volumes by scaling to a course yeah that was quite interesting yeah so from there I started building my own online base course also teaching the exact same thing but with a little bit more screen sharing going on yeah because of the physical courses are more theoretical you're not able to share as much as you can with the over-the-shoulder videos if you build an online course so the online course was way more extensive I think it was like 22 hours yeah just basic simple stuff and the physical course was eight hours which was too long and too intensive yeah already people today yeah I cannot my brain is smashed potatoes mashed potatoes mashed potatoes but what I found really in really funny was that people see online courses as less valuable as physical courses so I was only able to ask 245 Euros for the online course where I could ask for 95 for the fiscal one and it was three times shorter yeah so it's still or very weird to me but yeah back then it was called PPC Mastery already so we basically used the the I think it's still a great name essentially we can we can use for a lot of things but now we transitioned to obviously we are doing it the both of us and it's in English International yeah International

18:01International Focus instead of just Dutch yeah yeah and then maybe we can we can jump to last year when you reached out to me to see if we can collaborate on something what was going through your mind and why did you reach out to me because that was the July 2022. yeah so I uh you were building a course as well yeah I was mainly focused on search since I am more Legion SAS focused in my day-to-day work of in my day-to-day work back then yeah and you you were fairly fully specialized in e-comm and I saw you were building a shopping course and I thought this could be interesting to team up with and since you were posting very very frequently with really in-depth great posts on LinkedIn already I thought hey maybe we're on to I'm on to something here and maybe it's better to team up or at least try out a certain collaboration since we are after the same thing because I was feeling through my screen that you were trying to make which from your freelancing work to a also a course knowledge sharing focused work week so to say and I was like maybe we can collaborate instead of just seeing each other as a competitor because eventually if we're both focusing on the Dutch Market yeah the Dutch Market becomes way too small really soon yeah so yeah that's when I sent you a message hey Mars maybe maybe we can do something together yeah and I'm not sure in what kind of format but maybe a webinar maybe a free training

19:40maybe even a an e-book that we can write right out together and I guess you responded very very enthusiastically about that idea and in that time we had a big big shift from Smart shopping to BMX so it was a great time to to to share all of our knowledge in regards to pmax with the world yeah and that was basically our first webinar we did yeah yeah and I think what I really liked about your message was that you you reached out and you and this is yeah this is why it worked between us is we are we're already chatting it's not out of nothing you said hey let's build a course together or let's build a business together we were already speaking to each other for years online online yeah I never met not even a call last year in Malaga yeah yeah three months after we started the business we were only spoken in DMS but it was only about helping each other and sharing sharing value and and seeing how how are you working with specific clients I remember I was working with ring interim job and there was four days per week so it was like a big big gig and you said no it's much nicer to have a portfolio a portfolio of more clients yeah now that got me thinking as well so 40 clients that's crazy yeah it's insane yeah yeah that's that's how we spoke before before we even did something together and then you reached out you said yeah maybe we can do something together in form of a webinar or a podcast episode or something like that and the reason behind that was also because you had a great following already yeah and I had

21:16also a similar following back then yeah something around like 3 000 followers or so 34 000 each yeah but you had completely different followers than I had so yeah I was like hey there's something for the both of us in here yeah if we team up you're following will meet my following will meet miles yeah and we will do a cross basically a cross following a share out some followers and that's exactly sorry to interrupt that's exactly why the the end that you send was so good because you said in the space of what's in it for me yeah that's the exchange that we can both get value from this instead of you want to extract value from me or I want to extract value from you it's like how can we do something that is mutually beneficial people like yeah okay interesting also also because it was you and I knew who you who you who you were and I knew that you're a trustworthy guy in terms of what you show online of your knowledge about PPC so that was a no-brainer for me to at least get on a get on a call and I remember you were in the camper van back then in France where it was like 40 degrees or so it was crazy hot yeah it is terrible yeah and but we yeah we hit it off I think we we vibed on a personal level as well which was even more important because both of us in our character we will never start a business with someone that we do not dislike or do not Vibe with some people will go into a business with someone because they they think that it will be a good opportunity oh yeah we can we maybe we don't really like each other but we can build a big business but that was never our goal we just want to yeah enjoy life as much as possible yeah on our own terms and we

22:55have the same personal goals exactly exactly yeah and business related goals yeah and that's maybe something that we can talk about in the future episodes yeah and we are really aligned on that idea as well yeah so a lot of things Lifestyles matched yeah yeah a lot of it matched yeah and yeah that's when we that's when we did the first webinar performance Max Mastery webinar and that went really well I think we got 900 plus registrations and 500 people were there live and it was crazy yeah it was also because as you said it was pmax so it was all new people were afraid of losing their jobs yeah yeah 100 100 and it was a big unknown black box and nobody really knew how to yeah how to handle such a thing yeah how to handle such a beast yeah and I thought we had some great some great insights and some great best practices already and people really loved it yeah and I think also people loved it because because we were doing it together people didn't really expect that so some people already knew both of us individually and then they saw oh these guys are doing something together okay let's check it out and as you said some people from my network discovered you and some people from your network discovered me and I think we have Good Chemistry Between Us also when we're doing those webinars it's always a bunch of fun as well we're laughing making jokes and I think people really really enjoyed that and off the back of that webinar we sold our first version of performance Max Mastery which I think we got 10 sales or so at that webinar so we'll be like okay this is that's nice it's quite nice yeah let's let's see what we can do more but we didn't start the business yet and you just mentioned

24:33that you were already owning the PPC Mastery brand and how did we do that in the first couple of months yeah we had already buy the domain no we were still thinking about what would be the name of a project together and then we had some ideas but nothing was really like good where we thought okay this is something that we can take seriously and then I remember I sent you a message like what what if we just take PPC Mastery as a brand but the.com domain was already taken with someone else and you had the sale it was for sale and you had the dot NL domain so before we did anything with the first few thousand of Revenue that we got we bought the ppcmastery.com domain yeah yeah I think it was like two and a half K or so yeah yeah I think even more maybe even more yeah I think it was four and a half yeah something like that which was crazy exactly but it's it was worth it so it's still still a great name yeah as far as what I'm concerned for sure and we already had The Branding and the logo and everything all the things we we tied together and you back in to make to make the first course work yeah we we got a famous system like Peggy pay or something like oh yeah the accountant we had was basically extremely mad because all of the vhd stuff wasn't wasn't done and there was a one total mess yeah it's true yeah we had so many things where you just you just started you just do it and we'll see we'll figure it out we'll figure it out once we hit the problems we'll create problems first yeah and then we'll solve them yeah which is a good mindset I think in business

26:11and yeah yeah and also I I think we we sold that we sold the PMX course yeah we sold it first before we actually finalized that yeah so there was also yeah takeaway yeah yeah that's something that I believe heavily and is to sell sell before you make to validate the idea because yeah a mistake that I made before when you spoke about the shopping course that I was creating I I built out the whole thing yeah I really like the whole took me weeks and weeks maybe even months to build like of course it's not easy to create and film and edit and everything really time consuming really time consuming and then I was ready to sell it and I was like nobody wanted to buy it did a webinar I got three sales shout out to those guys that bought it and then later on I got maybe like 10 more sales or so nothing nothing major so then I got the idea from someone else about cell before you make to validate the idea and then basically what that helps you to do is okay if you get some sales then you you get the green light because people are actually waiting for this products and then you build it out and you ship it to them on a date that you agree on don't sell something and not give them anything that would be scamming but if they buy if if only two or three people buy then you can just refund them say the project is not going through yeah here's your money back maybe next maybe next time and then you have wasted the time of creating the whole product yeah I I really like that and we sold it's quite quite well yeah in the first couple of weeks and then we had to so then we had to build it and ship it and I can still recall that that was a very very stressful yeah you had to do it on top of all the free network

27:49yeah I was I was fully fully stuffed with freelance clients and I had to do this in my evening hours and in the weekends from a camper fan yep in the evenings if you watch back the version one performance Max Mastery course yeah a lot of a lot of the videos that I recorded are in the dark I didn't I did it from upper lighting going on it was just just a big black silhouette of me trying to teach at least you had the good audio that was good yeah yeah did I did I have to yeah you had it I didn't have it I was only doing it every recording through your headsets yeah not good not good so right now we're creating a version two yep but but the leap in just one year from a very extremely low production value of course to what we have in place right now it's such a leap but what we had going for us was the quality of the court so yeah that's why people content like the content yeah the content was good even if you have a V1 course that is low production value if the audio you need good audio but even if the yeah everything else the decks were definitely not on the level that we have now video but they were okay yeah the content for sure but the way that we structured the the slides some of them were really messy but they were okay for V1 because I think one thing that can stop you from progressing is being too much of a perfectionist especially if you're launching a first version yeah then speed matters yeah exactly yeah and we need it delivered to everybody that pre-ordered

29:27it but then yeah now after year we have you know we're upgrading it and the quality is going to be is going to be much much better uh but that was the the first traction that we got and then we got a message from from our friends over at Lunio if you wanted to do a webinar together with them so that's I think that was the first like thing where people saw us as oh these guys are making moves maybe we can invite them over to to do something together and we were doing everything like a Lunio webinar and then yes we have said it yes everything ProfitMetrics and everybody that sent us a DM or maybe we can collaborate or or have an idea we did everything and it was we were all over the place with with the with everything that we were creating we didn't really have a focus no no Focus no not yet but then it started to become better and we decided to start a real business yeah what do you remember from from that time was it what impact that did that have on your freelance work or yeah on on on on your business apart from PPC Mastery when we started when we started out with PPC Mastery as a formal business on paper that's when we also launched the audit templates for what I can recall yeah and those were doing great as well in terms of sales and revenue so that's when I started to to to to think or see hey we're definitely on to something here and we have to we have to do something with this we cannot just shake each other hands and thanks for the great course and then go freelancing again we saw that something was brewing

31:04and we just had to to take the dive yeah and we were still freelancing and we were still Freelancers we were still freelancing I have always been this very this very discarded that likes to wait to see risk of the risk of first thank you to see how things develop so I so I'm like hey if we want to go all in the full 100 on this we have to see certain consistent revenues each single month before I feel comfortable saying goodbye to some of my freelance clients yeah yeah and that took way longer way longer than expected yeah and I guess you also hoped for so you were kind of like hey this works yeah and this is exactly what I was looking for the last couple of years that F my freelance clients okay that's okay I'll explain that in a more nuanced way I'm going all in yeah that's the story but yeah I was always looking at something to do on the side of freelancing build something yeah but yeah when I saw that we were getting traction I was saying goodbye to some of the the lower end of my of my freelance class but I was still keeping the bigger the big clients also because they make for good case study materials but your lower end clients were all that already clients that did 5K Plus or in revenue for you every single month together combined yeah yeah yeah and I did I did the same with my lower end clients were like 300 Euros yeah 400 euros yeah facility bigger ones yeah it was like I cannot really let go of this because what what if miles

32:41portrays me yeah and I have to hahaha so I Hold On To those clients for way too long yeah and in the last couple of months PPC Mastery just well took off every single month month after month after month and I was still still stuck on these clients that I didn't want to get rid of until recently yeah yeah and I'm my personality is much more okay I see that it's going well yeah I trust that it's going to continue to go well I'm in it for the long game you're in it for the long game uh then I I have to make free up some time somewhere because I don't I don't want to work on the weekends or late in the evenings to compensate that was I was doing that yeah exactly still you was working you were working five days a week just a regular work week for PPC Mastery yeah including some of the freelance clubs yeah let's say three and a half just updates PPC Master you want to have freelance clients or something and I was doing four or five days a week freelance freelancing and then basically working for PPC Mastery every single evening and every single weekend to make up for the time you'll spend in yeah you had spent already yeah that that really broke up or really got me exhausted at some point yeah so that's when I had to kill certain relationships unfortunately unfortunately I had great clients I still have some that are great but it was really really hard for me to say goodbye yeah yeah it almost feel feel like it feels like a sort of a betrayal yeah since a lot of the clients were with me from day one

34:20yeah when I first started out freelancing and I grew with me yeah and vice versa and then you have to tell them hey I'm sorry man but I have to I have to go now where you have to go left but what changed for you now then because you did that you did this literally two or three weeks ago where you really made up more time you were already doing it freeing up three days in a week for PPC Mastery doing freelance two or three days but now recently you you cut it down even further because then you have more time to build courses and everything in PPC Mastery what was that shift that you had recently then I still had to much going on yeah in my head and in my work week I was still responsible for a hell of a lot marketing Euros every single month so in terms of the amount of clients I went down quite quite a bit I started out at 4015 in the first shifts I got the amount of clients down to I think eight nine and now I have five six uh but I had two very big clients that were that I needed to spend I think two or two and a half maybe three days a week on yeah those were my biggest clients so it was really hard for me to to cut them off and say goodbye to them but yeah I just had to so I came back from from a motor psycho holiday I left my laptop at home in for the first time in seven years in seven years I always carried my laptop with me because of you're responsible for other people's money so I couldn't just leave it at home but now now I was like I have to I have to leave

35:58this at home and during the evenings I also didn't brought my bring my phone with me so I started to to to think I had space to think and previously all the weeks prior to that I just I just had to move every single day and there was no room to to to look back yeah no no room to to think about hey where do we want to go where do I want to go but during the motorcycle holiday it was one of the first times that I could clearly think and I came back and I was like where we have to go for PPC Mastery 100 finally one year later one year later do we have to go for this it'd be 100 what was it like one year later miles have a great idea yeah I think PPC Mastery I think PPC Mastery yeah we're on to something I'm already like 150 percent and I was just holding off the boats yeah but you were also all in but extra hours yeah I was dedicated yeah creating Kick-Ass products yeah for sure but I felt really uncomfortable saying goodbye to my personal clients yeah but yeah we just had to that's when I recently pulled the block yeah yeah and went all in so to say yeah yeah super nice I think for us for PPC Mastery this is a big move because now yeah maybe the time that you spend is the same but you have you're much more relaxed I see it much as well the way that you came back from from that trip I have time to go through the through the fit to do Fitness yeah exactly the gym I haven't been gyming for five years yeah because I just

37:34de-prioritized every single every single thing and which is actually more time in France yeah and your health is the most important thing but if you're working your ass off and you're like I don't want to lose I don't want to lose one Euro a revenue at all and I want to see growth every single month that you become like this insanely work workaholic robot that I was yeah things go better that's really good man and I think it also helps with PPC Mastery because now you can just take the time to build Kick-Ass products which is the division that we have this year you're mainly focused on the products yeah product side so creating really good courses really good resources um and the more headspace that you have for that I think the better the quality of the product is going to be definitely so I'm really happy that that you have much more calm and less stress and more Focus yeah me too because it shows in the in the products that we create together that you're mostly responsible for uh yeah I think that's that's really good and but we're still doing some freelance gigs yeah we still have to we still have to put work into place yeah and we still have to work in our accounts ourselves in order to get up to stay up to speed yeah and and build up case studies and then teach that in you know in our products so the clients that we still have are just the the cards carte blanche clients that are okay with every single thing that's that's the way we can experiment test and yeah spend some some relaxed time on yeah but yeah PPC Mastery is the 100 Focus right now

39:12for both of us and what maybe two more things and then we can run this off for the first like how it all started episode I think one cool thing to look at is what have we shipped until now in terms of products and what are our plans for the future for the near future so I think maybe you can kick it off with what have we shipped until now after before you mentioned performance Max Mastery and the audit template what came after that was it Master Class yeah it was a master class that was really nice yeah last winter I he was in the northern part of Spain yeah and that's when my wife she went to Australia for a wedding of her family for I guess six or eight weeks so I hired this beautiful Airbnb next to a beach but the weather was turning shitty already yeah because North Spain is really really beautiful it's one of the most beautiful spaces countries areas in in Europe I think but it has the same weather as the Netherlands yeah so it can be quite shitty yeah so it was raining every single day and that's when I sold a master class to one particular agency a Dutch agency and it was also a cell before we we we we we build anything yeah so I had to build this thing from scratch and it was basically the the beginning of our Master Class program that basically consists of four four days yeah where we touch on all of the latest areas topics within Google Ads that then it was eight days actually we had eight workshops of 60 minutes yeah later we did four workshops of two hours

40:50yeah way better yeah way better yeah to create some chunks yeah but it was in Dutch because the agency was Dutch but they really really loved it yeah so I guess I showed you the product afterwards and we discussed hey we can basically create this in English we can add some additional details to this some additional case studies some additional insights we can create we can create a kick-ass product for for the mask class and just well let's see if we can get any traction on this and we and we had some great traction selling the Google SMS class we have done three three master classes until now I think we're going to do the next master class in q1 of 2024 but that was our yeah it is our biggest product until now next up was the conversion tracking Mastery so there was a big gap between the Google as mask class and the conversion tracking Mastery as a course because we basically did the master class every single quarter that was the gig we were doing it was a cohort based product it's the laser chord based products but yeah we didn't develop anything in between we basically tweaked the master class every single quarter to make it yeah to have it updated and make it as as relevant as possible but yeah recently we we started to create a shift towards a more on-demand products assortments so to say so it all started with the conversion tracking

42:26Mastery which is a five hour course something like that yeah five hour course where we touch on everything that's related to conversion tracking within Google Ads it is a kick-ass course yeah I think personally for sure I get in the market that we that we filled in yeah and from there on we are currently well building creating additional products they're also I think excellent products yeah so we're starting out with the search Mastery course right now which is all about search fundamentals you are re-filming the performance Max Mastery course to to increase the quality and to have all of the latest insights included again and the next couple of months we're basically going to touch on every single topic or campaign type within the Google Ads and I guess we're not done until late 2024. we have so much to build and then it all starts over again because of all the updates and all the changes for sure but we have so much to build and we have so little time yeah and we're doing this with the both of us yeah full time no employees nothing no employees nothing indeed and it's still it's still yeah we're going places but so it's like we're still getting started yeah yeah it feels like we're still getting started yeah we are yeah we've been doing this for one year now and it's going really fast but also yeah in terms of products we're still lagging behind first yeah if we're looking at ourselves yeah and and even though master class is our best product or yeah our most valuable product so far uh doing a cohort is really takes a lot of energy and time it's intensive yeah it is intensive but it is definitely coming

44:03back but in the meantime we wanted to build some courses that were more like Evergreen that we can offer to people not only like time sensitive but throughout the entire year and also also something that we're building right now is the PPC Hub membership which will launch in September it'll be epic that's going to be really epic like to explain a little bit about that we after the last master class we pitched it to the all the mass class students uh and we got 50 founding members inside the new PPC Hub membership which is a yearly membership in which we give all that we have basically and it has three core pillars if you join then you will get a lot of on-demand training so all of the courses that we have are going to be included included in there some courses are also we're not going to sell everything on the front end a lot of courses are going to be PPC Hub membership only as well then there is live trainings we're doing like Advanced workshops and and stuff like that and then there's also Community aspect and we're doing really cool events now with like round tables getting people to talk about different subjects it's cool and it's still in the alpha or beta phase yeah with 50 founding members yeah we limited it to 50 funding members to keep it small by Design yeah to gather feedback and then in September then we're going to open it up for for everybody and then we have a lot more courses inside a lot of products so that's going to be really epic a lot more members yeah exchanging ideas yeah exactly and we have the the some a players already in there yeah so some

45:41really Kick-Ass Google ad Specialists that know what they're doing already and we want to maintain the same level as in the Google Ads masterclass where it's not designed for beginners there are a lot of beginner Google Ads courses out there but master classes we always say like it's for at least one year experience but maybe even a bit more at least meteors meteors yeah because it goes into depth really fast and it goes really fast and we want to maintain the same level in our PPC Hub membership so yeah that's that's going to be super exciting man a few more like five or six more weeks until we fully launched that so that's what that's going to be the main focus yep I think that will be our hero product yeah for the time yeah absolutely and everything that we were going to build will be built for yeah the PPC Hub yeah but we might we might create separate Standalone products for the things that we create as well yeah and just sell it directly on our website uh but I think the the the deal or the the offer that we have created for the PPC Hub is just too stupid to say no two that's what we were able to design it yeah yeah so yeah really really looking forward to the launch in September yeah yeah yeah I think that's it because now we we spoke about our whole journey leading towards where we are right now we've spoke about what is expected to be expected for the for the near future we have so much more planned like the the PPC Hub is is the first thing that's coming up most likely the new thing but then as you said q1 master class which is going to be free for PPC Hub members a lot of extra products and courses a lot of resources

47:18optimization course optimization checklist free stuff free trainings we want to do we did a summer school training about conversion tracking last week or two weeks ago two weeks ago yeah but that was a lot of fun as well like I felt like a streamer interacting with the chat and we want to do more of those things as well of course like a a part of it is going to be paid because it's paid products we're definitely also looking at how can we do do more stuff for free like this podcast for example which is going to be going to be really cool full of nice insights full of nice insights yeah a lot more to come from from PPC Mastery but I think that concludes our first the first real episode awesome I hope you you enjoyed it I hope you you liked listening to our backstory of of how we started PPC Mastery and maybe in a year or so we can reflect on this and see where we are then and see what we did uh in in the in this year the upcoming video we we will have shipped so much so much in terms of products and resources yeah that's crazy yeah even if we look back at what we did in the last year alone it's insane but we never really stop and reflect because we're just going going going and there's always something else to build yeah but yeah thanks guys for for listening so as always I want to end it with a call to action Please Subscribe subscribe no but if you're listening to this on Apple podcast or Spotify we would appreciate a review likely five stars or I don't think I think that's how that works share it with a friend or colleague that would be appreciated and if you can give us your feedback just

48:55send it on Discord or LinkedIn and in the next episodes we will also tell you how you can submit questions that we can then in some podcasts yeah talk about so we will prioritize some some FAQ podcasts as well where we will touch on the most upvoted questions yeah in the space yeah so we will touch on that in the future yeah in the next episode and we're building a page for that where you can submit questions so we'll we will share how you can do that in next episodes and on LinkedIn and and whatnot so thanks everybody for listening watching viewing if you're on YouTube thanks appreciate it and we'll see you in the next so ciao peace