Lessons - The Hidden Body Language That Controls Everything | Vanessa Van Edwards - Behavioral Scientist (70M+ Views)

In this lessons episode, explore how unconventional career choices and persistence can transform ideas into thriving businesses, discover how identifying untapped audiences creates rapid growth opportunities, understand why tailoring content to match learner needs builds long-term engagement, and uncover how creative pitching and platform selection open doors to new markets. How did you start science of people? How did you think like this is a viable business idea? How did you commercialize your brand to the point where now you're I guess you're writing books, you have other products I guess would be courses, you have like your whole social going on, you have people's school, so how did that start as like you know entrepreneur and go go. So funny a funny story is that my parents are both lawyers and so when I was in college, my mom I was I think I was home for the summer or home for a break and she said I signed you up for a financial class like great I'm so excited to do that on my break. She said I am a lawyer and I'm paid by my hours and I don't want you to have to do that. I am constantly counting my hours. It was really hard for her as a working mom. I want to show you another way. She said when I was going to college I didn't know of another way. I thought you could be a doctor, a lawyer accountant, everything was hourly and to a certain extent she said there are other ways now. So she dropped me off at the I think it was the LA Convention Center I grew up in Los Angeles and was a millionaire mine seminar by T. Harv Ecker. Have you ever heard of him? Yeah. Yeah. So so in later mine seminar it was like a weekend seminar and this seminar completely blew my mind because he introduced me to the concept of passive income. So at the time I believe I was 18 or 19 so it's very young and he explained that there is other way of earning income that's not just based on your hours that books and products and courses and or very powerful active income which is like speaking or training or teaching. And so from that age I knew that I wanted to create a career with passive income streams. And so in from 2006 to 2011 I was trying all those ways. I hadn't found one that worked. Sorry I was doing a lot of active income youth coaching. I had a youth workbook that I was on which was a passive income stream. I had my first book which was published by Penguin at the time and that's the one that you mentioned do I get my last four after I'm grounded very long title. Don't recommend that by the way the writing books shorter titles are better. And so I had these very small little revenue streams. I could see how it was working. Like they were very slowly paying the bills that still most of my income at that time was coaching and consulting which was very active. Once I figured out you know what there's something broader here more than just the niche of working with youth and parents. I think these frameworks could be used by engineers, companies. I think that C-suite would love these. I think that coders and graphic designers would love to have people skills in their back pocket. And at the time I believe it was 2011-2012 I just started the website. Yudami which was a new online learning platform was just starting it at that time it was all for engineers. It was almost all like technical classes. A couple of the counting things on there and so I thought that's my ideal person right someone who's super engineering minded. And so I said I'm going to upload a body language course to Yudami as a fascinating constraint and just see what happens. So I filmed in my living room. I had no professional lights. I literally had all the lamps in my house. I had a $28 microphone that I had bought from Amazon that I like weave through my shirt and like pinned on my little blouse. And for three hours I just taught the body language frameworks that I had been using and I was like okay my goal was 30 sales. Like if I can get 30 sales it was $49 course. It will just be major gain changeers 30 sales. So I go to sleep and it takes at the time it took about 24 to 40 hours then to approve your course. So I go to sleep I wake up the next morning and my inbox was filled with thousands of sales thousands. The first time you upload to the course? I think now I want to say I'm at like 376,000 students in that course. In my living room it's still the same course. It's in my living room with no lights, with a mic that probably didn't even work. And by the way the entire thing was filled on my phone. The entire course is filled on my phone. That was the first time I went maybe there's something here. And so I'm rethinking what I'm doing for a living now. I'm I know the wheels are turning. I mean yeah it was it was like madness. And so in a while that it was like the Wild West. In six months I completely changed everything that I was doing. I filmed four more courses and this time at every course got a little bit better. By the last course it actually was with a little small crew. And from them I put them on the on the platform they were telling like crazy very quickly request started coming in for me to speak it companies. And the reason why it worked I think is because this was a platform where my people already were. There was already engineers and coders and accountants on their learning online. This was the only soft skills course. There might have been one or two others. And so people were like ah something new. And what I heard with my students kept telling me you're my lunchtime course. They would watch these other very serious courses during the day but I was their break, their lunch, their dinner break and they would buy every single course that I put out. And so that's when I realized okay like I can be the the soft skill balance to the hard skills and I can teach soft skills like hard skills and that was in 2011 2000. And I think 2012 was when I finally cracked the Udemy game. Yeah. Very impressive. Congratulations. Seriously that's the incredible success. Like and like you know you got the content timing platform and it just took off. That's really really impressive. I had no idea. Seriously that this was this is how you sort of built your own brand your entire company. The reason I was asking about education was sort of alluding to why I was also so I'm just blown away by the fact that you put this on Udemy and it took off. And my point is or my question is is there anything else like this out there that teaches people for 50 bucks. I'm assuming it's great content because 300,000 plus people have I haven't taken the course that I can go check it after we finish this call. But it's so old. It's so old. If you want to take a course take my newer one. It's so little and so old. But the point is during a thousand people can't be wrong. Let's let's be honest like that's that's some that's some social proof that the course is pretty damn good. So so is no one else teaching this stuff or you know are there just the people that charge the Tony Robbins five thousand dollar for ten thousand dollars at the competition. Right okay so I think it was critical it was definitely good timing right so it was very good timing that this was before the wild west of online courses right like 2012 people were like online what like people kind of knew what it was it was very new and so the timing was really good the other thing was there are a few other at the time there were a few other people teaching soft skills or by language but they were doing it in a very traditional way. It was very traditional so they would be hired by a company they would come and they would do a two-day sales workshop and that was it you couldn't access them otherwise you couldn't even hire them as a coach. Maybe you could hire them as a dating coach but no one had thought and that's I had other people tell me you can't teach body language online you can't you can't teach body language in a video and so that was actually hard it was hard to move the content into video format but I think that being willing to try readers and students were like yes I don't want to attend people also don't want to attend a two-day workshop where they have to role play with their colleagues my person so I think it's also really important to know your person my ideal student is a super high achiever above average intelligence usually very technically minded recovering awkward person they do not want to do a role playing workshop they do not want to have to go to an HR webinar on here's how you smile at someone they want to learn on their own time and so that means this is one of the reasons why I almost exclusively teach on video is if they want to speed me up 2.5 speed because that's how fast they learn cool I'm not offended great do it if they are like no I want to actually pause the video and absorb it we have a lot of our students who say I learn in chunks I have to I can only do 15 20 minutes of time cool you can consume my content however you want and so I think it was also critically important to know that my ideal student didn't like the way that a lot of my competitors were teaching and I want to I want to sort of unpack what you teach a little bit more before before we go into that because there's there's entrepreneurial lessons and then there's very tactical lessons that you teach over that I kind of want to tease out and run through some of those and understand some of those but before I migrate off like your career path was there anything else like notable in your career path that you think would be good to chat about or was this is this kind of the summary of where you've been so yeah I think it was so that was the first part and the second part was I try to go to where my students are so I tried very hard to go to other platforms or other podcasts where my students are so from you to me I went to creative life so my next group that I wanted to meet with a different audience was a highly creative audience artist photographers who are super creative but hate selling so that was my next group so I hit my engineers and my amazing computer geeks in you to me and then I wanted to hit my creative and so creative life was where they were all watching online content and so I cold-pitched creative life I was not invited to speak there I had to bang on their door and I cold-pitched them in the most creative way I could think of I sent them an email to their support inbox that said I want to make you money and then I outlined all the ways that I thought my course could make them money and it got forwarded internally I didn't know this until later got forwarded internally and bounced from department department department until finally at the right content producer who was willing to take a risk on me and they brought me in San Francisco so this was a very different way of selling they bring you into San Francisco you film your course and we took a risk it was we did my first course was a three day course and it was one of their top selling courses across their entire platform and so I've done four more courses for them that is a different audience among you to be audience and so I think that one of the major things that I've tried to do in the last you know 15 years is go to my people know who my people are one who are my people and then try to meet them where they're at thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one