Everything is Teachable Podcast: Teela Cunningham, Every Tuesday

Teela Cunningham is the founder and designer behind Every Tuesday. After her initial success on YouTube, in the spring of 2015, Teela created and published her first online course on Skillshare, and others soon followed. Those first courses enabled both her and her husband to quit their full time jobs and pursue their business full time in the fall of 2015. Now, 4 years and many Tuesdays later, they continue to have a thriving online business built on education within the design and hand lettering community.

Where to find Teela

Every Tuesday: www.every-tuesday.com

Read the full transcript below.

Teela Cunningham: As soon as I started listening specifically to what my audience was requesting, that’s when things started really taking off. It was less about what I wanted to create at the time. It was more about what they were asking me to create that still fit within my aesthetic and my wheelhouse.

Melissa Guller: Teela Cunningham is a graphic designer and hand lettering artist based out of Atlanta, Georgia. She was working in a design studio in 2013 when her coworkers began asking her how she completed certain tasks in the different design programs, and one coworker jokingly suggested she make video tutorials to avoid their repeated requests. And so in January of 2014 that’s exactly what she did and she published her first tutorial on YouTube. The kind responses on YouTube led her to publish more frequently and the business Every Tuesday was born as she released a new design or lettering tutorial every Tuesday, all year long. Today, Teela is here to share how she grew her business from a YouTube channel into skill share courses and eventually into her own online courses with Teachable plus. She’ll share how each platform uniquely supports her business. To this day. Let’s meet her.

Announcer: Welcome to Everything is Teachable, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes to learn how everyday creators have transformed their skills and passions into online courses and businesses. To introduce this week’s episode, here’s your host, Melissa Guller.

Melissa Guller: Hey everyone. I’m Melissa from Team Teachable. And today I’m so excited to introduce Teela Cunningham, the founder and designer behind Every Tuesday after her initial success on YouTube in the spring of 2015, Teela created and published her first online course on Skillshare and others soon followed those first courses enabled both her and her husband to quit their full time jobs and pursue their business full time in the fall of 2015 now four years and many Tuesdays later they continue to have a thriving online business built on education within the design and hand lettering community.

Melissa Guller: Music fades] Teela, I’m so excited to welcome you to the podcast!

Teela Cunningham: Thanks for having me.

Melissa Guller: I can’t wait to share your story with listeners because I think you have such a unique experience where you’ve used a couple of different online course platforms, so you know, let’s go back to the early days. What does your life look like when you were first starting Every Tuesday?

Teela Cunningham: So I was working a nine to five at a design studio in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was pretty miserable. I’m not gonna lie, I drove about an hour to work every day. So there in back stuck in traffic and when I got there I was constantly put on projects that I didn’t feel like fit my style or what I was capable of. I didn’t feel like I was being challenged and I had asked my creative director to put me on some different things so I could prove that I was capable of doing all these different design tasks and he wouldn’t sell my work and I didn’t understand why.

Teela Cunningham: So I was miserable at work as doing really menial tasks like writing brand design standards for logos that I didn’t design and creating presentation slides. So I was pretty unhappy in my nine to five so I was looking for some kind of an outlet. My biggest dream was being self employed and going out on my own obviously. But I wanted to be realistic about just small wins first because I was so unhappy that I wanted to figure out a way where I could still work on work that I really wanted to work on to create the designs that I had in my head, but I wasn’t given the opportunity to to execute it and my day job. So that’s why I just started creating tutorials and sharing what I knew online. My coworkers would always ask me how to do things, so I started making those tutorials and they started taking off.

Teela Cunningham: I was getting really kind of comments, so all of the reasons why I was miserable at my job, we’re the exact opposite. When I got home and I created tutorials and I created blog content, the feedback from the community was just amazing and it was everything for me. It’s what I live for every day, so I was pretty miserable at the time, but that outlet, once I started doing it, I, I just got addicted. I had to keep going. I’m sure that that resonates with a lot of people listening where maybe they don’t love their current work situation or they’re thinking about that word outlet I think is really strong of like what can I do that would allow me to use my skills and the things I’m interested in in some kind of productive way. Totally. What you said too, that it would like take you time to build a business that even though you knew that was what you wanted, it’s not gonna happen overnight.

Melissa Guller: I like that you took like a little baby step towards something.

Teela Cunningham: For sure. And I wasn’t expecting to make money. It wasn’t part of the plan at first. It was just, I just want to be happy, you know? I just want to create the work that I really want to create and this allowed me to do that every day. I would just go to work and then come home, eat dinner, take the dog for a walk and then sit at the computer until two 3:00 AM until I knew I had to go to sleep so I could function the next day. It was what I looked forward to every single day. And for how long was that kind of your pattern of just putting stuff up on the website, enjoying it, working long hours but not really earning anything. Sure. So I started my YouTube channel in January of 2014 and I didn’t start really making money until, I want to say February or March of 2015 so it was over a year and I was publishing a tutorial every single Tuesday.

Teela Cunningham: So it was over a year of Tuesdays before I started making money off of it. Wow. Which I mean literally that is over 50 videos probably. Well over that and at the time, like how many people would you guess were kind of following along with you? How many views were you getting? When I started my, from the time I started my YouTube channel and January of 2014 to the time that I quit my full time job in the fall of 2015 I had 6,000 around 6,000 subscribers on YouTube and I was getting, I want to say between one and 2000 page views a day on my website. I had just started regularly posting on Instagram at the beginning of 2015 so I’ve probably had like, I don’t know, a couple hundred followers on Instagram at the time. So it was, you know, it wasn’t gigantic. It was decent.

Teela Cunningham: And my email list I want to say was probably 2000 or 3000 people at that time.

Melissa Guller: And how do you think that people were finding you?

Teela Cunningham: So definitely YouTube. I made a point whenever I would create my tutorials, asking them to subscribe, I would use some of the digital products that I would create, like textures and fonts. And I would mention that if they wanted to recreate the design project exactly they could go and pick up the textures or the fonts over on my website. So it was an opportunity to direct people over there. I was also creating a lot of freebies, design freebies, and I would create designs using those freebies. So I would tell everyone, do you want to create this? Exactly. Everything is totally free. Just head over to my website. You can download these design assets and follow along with me through the tutorial.

Melissa Guller: That’s such a smart approach of putting content out somewhere like YouTube where people are searching, and then giving them little reasons to come back to your website.

Teela Cunningham: Yeah, it exposed them to my teaching style and my design aesthetic and if those two matched up for them then it was all about building that relationship and community after that.

Melissa Guller: And what was the moment where you decided I’m going to quit and do this full time?

Teela Cunningham: So I had wanted to quit for a really long time. I think I talked to my husband like everyday for a year about how badly I wanted to go off and how I really believed that I could do it if I just had the chance. So in March of 2015 I published my first online course. Do you want to talk about how I got started with that?

Melissa Guller: Yeah, that’d be great!

Teela Cunningham: Okay. So I was creating all those YouTube tutorials every single week and Skillshare reached out to me around that time and asked if I would create an online course. And I had never created an online course before, so I was a little nervous about it just cause it was unknown territory. But I had built a little bit of confidence speaking behind the computer with all of my tutorials that I thought it might be the next step for me. So I decided to give it a go and I created my first course. And it did relatively well and I started getting paid for that because at the time you were paid per enrollment with Skillshare and then I just started creating more online courses after that with them. I think I did two or three more before I quit in the fall of that same year and they after one after the other, I was building my following on their platform and they’re doing better and better each time. So that increased my income and I looked at what I was bringing in from my teaching online compared to what I was making at my full time job where I was miserable and spending way too much time at every day because of the hour in the car back and forth and then all day there and I was like, you know what, I’m making more teaching than I am at my full time job.

Teela Cunningham: And that’s when I was like, I know that if I quit right now because I have a few courses built up, if I can do this full time, I really believe that I can, I’ll be fine if I do this. And at least like when I quit I still had a reliable income stream. So it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to be able to sleep at night. That was my worst fear is if I quit and you know, it all goes away. But of course that won’t happen because I spent all this time building up a following and reliable great content that people were interested in. So I knew that if I just went full time, I can make it happen. And at the time when I was about to quit, my husband and I really had a long conversation because I had met my husband at the design studio where I worked and we both said, you know what? Let’s both try and quit. Let’s see what happens. So we both quit. We were supposed to get married that year and instead we use our wedding money as our emergency fund. And we just went off and got married by a judge for like a 150 bucks. So we’ve never had a wedding, but instead we had a business. So that was pretty amazing.

Melissa Guller: Wow. So you both quit at the same time?

Teela Cunningham: We quit the exact same day.

Melissa Guller: Talk about a leap of faith.

Teela Cunningham: Oh yeah. But you know, like we had, we had worked so hard leading up to that and my husband is a self-taught developer, so between my skill sets and his skill sets, we felt like we would work really well together as business partners and just pursue this and see how far it would take us. We knew that we can, we can make it, I think three to four months with our savings and what we were bringing in residually.

Teela Cunningham: And then we would have to have a conversation about if he needed to go get a development job or if we could keep going. And you know, the rest is history. We’re able to keep going. And it’s been four years now.

Melissa Guller: Well it sounds like you had not just put a lot of thought into how and when to quit, but also like you said, you had spent really over a year building an audience, testing the waters in a lot of ways already building an online course already earning some small amount of money. And I think that’s so important to point out because there’s this very maybe romanticized vision of storming out of your office, quitting your job, and just starting fresh. But it doesn’t have to be that risky. You can start to do little things online to test out. If you’re interested in blogging, online courses, YouTube videos, whatever it might be. You don’t have to go 1000% full speed ahead right away. You can try it out.

Teela Cunningham: Oh totally. Yep. Yeah, we definitely daydreamed about all those instances of being thing you, let’s throw them out one day, but we left on very good terms. You can always fantasize about that, but I feel like we left in the right way and at the right time. I wish I could, I probably should’ve risked it and went a little sooner, but I’m totally fine with how everything worked out. I’m just so happy that we took that leap of faith and did it that year.

Melissa Guller: And the two of you work together, right? For people who aren’t familiar.

Teela Cunningham: Yes. Yep.

Melissa Guller: So talk to me then about what it was like you guys started working on the business full time and what did those kind of early business days look like?

Teela Cunningham: Yeah, so at the very beginning, Spencer, my husband, our original plan was he was going to make WordPress themes and sell those so he could build up his own passive income stream. And then I was just going to work on courses and digital products. So we did that for probably, I don’t know, eight to 10 months and one day I was just like, I can’t do it by myself anymore. Like I’m too overwhelmed because everything was growing and I wanted to make sure I was giving my audience everything that I could give them. And I knew because he’s got a design background too, I knew that he was capable of helping me on all these things that I knew would really lighten my load. So we had this really long talk and I was like, you know what? Maybe just help with the website for a vet because I need some help there. That way I don’t have to keep fixing it or doing what I need to on it because I was just using a WordPress theme.

Teela Cunningham: So he started working on the website. And that freed me up a lot and he would help me design certain elements on the website. And then slowly we were like, well, why don’t you just redo the whole website? So now he does all the website, he does all of our core sales pages. He helps me whenever we’re launching a new course with graphics, with photography, with recording and editing. So we really are a true partnership now it’s very 50/50 with both of us. He’s more behind the scenes and I create the content and I do the recording and all of the writing and marketing.

Melissa Guller: Well that’s amazing to hear about that partnership. And I have to put in a quick plug that no one asked me to do about your website because Every Tuesday is so beautiful. So I do hope that listeners go check it out. Like it’s colorful and inviting and it just feels like the kind of website that you want to spend a lot of time in and poke around in. So I hope that listeners will check it out.

Melissa Guller: I’m curious, working together also being married, has that been easy? Have there been challenges? What’s that been like?

Teela Cunningham: You know, it’s so funny. I get asked a lot. Do you ever get sick of each other cause you’re around each other all the time and honestly like he is my best friend in the whole world and I love his company. I, there’s no one else I would ever want to be around all day, every day. I don’t know how I got so lucky, but truly like we don’t get sick of each other because we’re so passionate about similar things and creating this business and growing our business together where we have so many similar passions that it’s really easy to get excited constantly about where our business is going, what we want to work on next, what he’s learning with different coding things that I never understand and he researches so he can do all of our photography.

Teela Cunningham: These are all skills that we didn’t have before we went off on our own and now we’re wearing all these hats and we’re able to really have these amazing conversations about all of these new skills that we have and how we can help each other. Help the business grow over time. Yeah, it must be so fun to have somebody who’s in it with you and even if folks don’t have like a romantic partner who would want to go into business with them. Certainly a friend or somebody that you used to work with or somebody in your life who shares maybe similar values but slightly different skills, could be a really nice partner to go in on something like this with because it can feel very lonely and it can be a lot of work to just be totally solo. Absolutely. And it’s, it’s kinda funny how we, we learn how to work together before we ever dated, because we were working at the design studio together.

Teela Cunningham: So we had already had some good practice there and we knew that we jived really well together. So once we started dating, got married, started a business, it was just, it was all so natural for us that transition.

Melissa Guller: Well, it makes sense knowing that you were coworkers first, that you had always kind of had a professional, like a respect and the way that you had worked together versus maybe people who didn’t meet at work and then for the first time had to learn how to work together.

Teela Cunningham: Yeah.

Melissa Guller: Well going back to your business, I know we’ve talked about the fact that you started on Skillshare, which is of course marketplace for people who haven’t heard of that before. Can you share more about how did your online course business evolves? So you started with Skillshare and then where did things go?

Right. So with Skillshare I was creating these smaller courses so they would usually be around an hour or less than they really promoted creating smaller courses. I think of an hour or less as smaller, some people consider that a bit longer, but for me that seemed too short for me. And that was they were really pushing their teachers at the time to create these short bite size courses. And it made sense because the people that were coming to their platform wanting to get some quick tips fast that they could implement. So it made a lot of sense. I totally understand where they’re coming from. But for me, I wanted the opportunity to also allow my students to deep dive into subjects and I knew that I couldn’t do that with just an hour course. So I had talked to them a little bit before. I decided to self host about what we could do to allow me to create these longer courses in it. At the end of the day, it just wasn’t the right fit to have longer courses there.

Teela Cunningham: Now their model is that you get paid per minute watched, which I think is much better than paid per enrollment because with paid per minute watch, it really encourages people to create quality content because the longer students stay in your course, the more you’re going to be get paid for it rather than just creating some clickbait headline just to get enrollments. So I’m glad that they changed that. I still love and respect skill share. It’s just I love Skillshare and Teachable for different reasons. Skillshare is a great place for me to put these smaller courses. Teachable is ideal for me to create these more in depth courses where I can really build relationships with my, with my students to provide them a community to be able to help them one on one to track their progress. It’s just a very different experience compared to what I was used to before.

Teela Cunningham: So now that I’ve self hosted, it also allows me at the same time as Skillshare paying you per minute. They pay the same amount per minute for everybody’s courses so if you have more valuable minutes it doesn’t matter like you’re going to get paid the same per minute as anybody else that has a course with Teachable. I’m able to place my own value on myself and coming from an industry where I was used to someone else always deciding my value. I’m really, really excited that now I can decide my own value and push myself in a much different way than I ever was able to before.

Melissa Guller: hat’s really well said and I think obviously this is a podcast produced by Teachable, but Skillshare is not exactly what we do so we’re really comfortable talking about both and I think it’s really smart how you’ve used both in your business.

Teela Cunningham: I think what skill share can be great for is finding new people because it is a marketplace and people might go there and search for hand lettering and then your face comes up and that they can see a short class by you learn to really enjoy your teaching style and then if you bring them to your own website where behind the scenes Teachable is the platform powering your courses. Now they’re in a world where you’re really interacting with them as your own students versus just Skillshare students. Definitely. Yeah. I realized I was building a following. There’s that quote, don’t build on someone else’s land and I felt like I was really building a great following, but it was on their platform and they had access to all of my followers instead of me building my own email list where I could interact with them directly whenever I wanted in my own way.

Teela Cunningham: So Teachable has really allowed me to build my own audience of students on my own platform. So that’s a great distinction with the students. I don’t think, because I know a lot of people considering online course creation for the first time, a lot of these differences are brand new, so Skillshare. The fact that you cannot email all of your students the way that with Teachable you can. It’s subtle differences and maybe one is right for you. Now maybe one is right for you later. I’m not here to tell you that Teachable is the best, even though we think we’re pretty great, but we acknowledged that they just serve two totally different types of creators depending on what your goal is. For sure. Yeah. I will say as far as an earning and for my business skill shares nights for that, I have a pretty consistent monthly income now from Skillshare for all the courses that I’ve put out.

Teela Cunningham: But with Teachable, whenever I launch a course, I have a really big month and then I still have, I maintain a consistent amount for the other months where I’m not launching. So I’ve been able to have, I’ve achieved a six figure months with my Teachable courses, the most I’ve ever done as a high four figure months with Skillshare. So the differences are pretty shocking when you think of it that way. There’s definitely still a place in our business for Skillshare, but Teachable has really taken us to that next level.

Melissa Guller: That makes a lot of sense. And then just one more question. At this point, how many courses do you have on each platform?

Teela Cunningham: Oh my gosh, I would have to go and count cause I really don’t know. I want to say that I maybe have, I probably have 10 11 or 12 on Skillshare and on our own site I want to say, gosh, I think five or six maybe.

Melissa Guller: Haha, so just a few…

Teela Cunningham: Yeah, just a few here and there. I might have a serial course creator. It’s my favorite thing to do. I truly love making courses.

Melissa Guller: So I’m curious too, because this is in addition to the YouTube videos, the content that you continue to produce. What’s the difference between creating a YouTube video and then what you might put into an online course?

Teela Cunningham: Sure. So all my online courses are extreme deep dives into a subject. So it’s kind of like with a tutorial, I can give you a base overview, I can give you a quick win. I kind of thought of it as like if I were still creating like a, if I wanted to create a 30 minute Skillshare class, that’s what my tutorials are. Instead of doing a 30 minutes Skillshare class, I’m just doing it for free and putting it on YouTube.

Teela Cunningham: So my YouTube videos are not 30 minutes. They’re usually around 10 to 15 minutes. So there they’re quick wins. It lets you create something really beautiful that you maybe didn’t think you could achieve before. And then if you want to learn more and really dive into the subject, learn a program or an app or software even better, that’s what the course picks up from.

Melissa Guller: hat makes a lot of sense. And knowing that you have so many different courses, so many different videos, how have you as your business has grown, decided what to teach next?

Teela Cunningham: I think about this a lot. I definitely pay attention to trends. I pay attention to what’s popular at the time. I pay a lot of attention to my audience. They’ll email me and make requests. I get a lot of tutorial requests. So I will do that. And then when I put up my tutorials, I see how well it resonates with my YouTube audience. And if people are asking for more tutorials like this, please create more than I know. Okay. This is a topic that people are really interested in about, at least my audience is interested about. And those are the people that I’m serving. Those are the people that I want to pay the most attention to. One early mistake I made was thinking that all right, these are all my interests and I want to create a course for all these different things and then I would create a course just because I wanted to create the course and then it wouldn’t resonate well. As soon as I started listening specifically to what my audience was requesting, that’s when things started really taking off. It was less about what I wanted to create at the time. It was more about what they were asking me to create that still fit within my aesthetic and my way wheelhouse.

Melissa Guller: Hmm. That’s really good advice and I love what you said too about putting out the YouTube videos and seeing how people respond. It’s a much smaller load of work for you to make one video compared to the whole course. So it’s like a mini research project to see which videos people are responding to.

Teela Cunningham: For sure.

Melissa Guller: And I’m sure for people who aren’t doing YouTube, you could do the same thing with blog posts and seeing which get the most reads or podcast episodes or social media posts, whatever your content it is. Yep. So we have mentioned that you’ve been doing this since around 2015 what are some of the things that you’re doing today that maybe you couldn’t have imagined at first? Or how have things surprised you?

Teela Cunningham: I definitely didn’t think that I would have like a home studio and a real recording set up that I would teach myself video editing and fun photography and marketing. I’m like a sponge with all of these topics that I never thought that I would be so interested in before. So now I feel like my time is equally spent on content creation and also just learning and becoming better, a better business owner. So I never thought I would love marketing as much as I do. And I, I just crave it. Like I, I love learning more about marketing and all these business things that I, I never thought would be so fun. So I would say that I’m most surprised that my life now includes this whole other aspect that I have learned on my own outside of just creating content and publishing it and trying to be my following.

Melissa Guller: Yeah. Well I love hearing that because I’ve often kind of joked that all content creators, all course creators are really just marketers. Because after you make your course on hand lettering, drone flying card, magic, whatever it is, once you’ve got that product, everyone’s a marketer and now you have to figure out how to find your people. And marketing looks very different from person to person based on your own style and your audience. And one of the things that I think is most interesting about marketing is that it’s really just asking like what is somebody thinking about? Or what do they need and where are they? So I think marketing can get kind of like an icky or a stressful reputation. But totally today there’s so many ways that you can reach people in a very like real way. And certainly with like YouTube videos, you’re really showing off your personality and people can see you.

Teela Cunningham: Yeah, and for me, I’ve always been a pretty big introvert, so putting myself online was a really scary step. But YouTube allowed me with screen recording was what I was doing, teaching design programs. I was able to stay behind the computer and really not show my face for until I started making online courses. I was terrified of showing my face. But now that’s another thing. I’ve gotten much more comfortable just speaking and delivering my content. I don’t, I don’t even think about nerves when I’m teaching any more because the content is so important to me that that is first and foremost in my mind when I’m creating. So that’s been a really cool kind of side effect of all of this too.

Melissa Guller: Oh yeah, that’s great to hear. I’m sure a lot of listeners right now are introverts or do have a fear of public speaking and maybe they’re thinking to themselves, “Oh this couldn’t be for me because I don’t want to be on camera.” Or “I can’t imagine putting myself out there for friends and family to see all of this.”

Teela Cunningham: Totally. There are ways around it. You can definitely still do it. And your advice too about how you were behind the screenshare, I think that’s a great option for people who don’t want their face to be in the whole video. You can even pop up in, in the beginning just to say hello, but then you know, 95% of it you can just show your screen or just show your hands if you’re doing something physical.

Melissa Guller: Yup. Well, I’m also curious to talk a little bit about your life outside of your business. So since you had, you know, miserable life four, five years ago, uh, how has your life changed outside of work?

Teela Cunningham: It’s been incredible. Um, so my husband and I were able to pay off all of our student loan debt. We paid off our house this year, which was really incredible and very freeing. I gave birth to our daughter in December, so now we are a family of three and a dog and it’s just been incredible figuring out this new balance because it’s such a different life now. It’s such a different day to day routine, figuring out our new normal, but being able to move forward with our lives knowing that we’re going to be okay cause I never would have imagined being able to have a family with the debt that we were facing before and just how miserable I was. He wasn’t super happy at that job either. We’re just so happy and we’re more focused on our future and the goals that we have and goals for the business. There’s so many things to look forward to now that I felt like I just couldn’t dream about before.

Melissa Guller: Wow, congratulations! I mean that’s such a huge accomplishment to pay all of that off and to have your family together. And for people listening, I’m curious, what does… mean average day might be hard to say, but what does an average day look like for you now?

Teela Cunningham: So now our daughter wakes up, gosh around set between seven and eight so get up, feed her, hang out with her, have breakfast together and then I will start working on something or special start working on something we trade off with. Who watches her while she’s awake so one of us can keep working and then she’ll go down for a nap. He and L have lunch together and then we’ll both work for a while until she wakes up and then feed her. We’ll both hang out with her. We’ll take a walk, hang out outside, go shopping and then we’ll come back. She’ll go down for the night and then we just work nonstop from the time she goes to sleep between six 30 and eight we work until at least midnight every night. And it’s every single day that week. Like we weekends don’t even exist. They’re just weekdays to us because we work every single day and then we plan in like when we’re going to go see family and when we’re going to have a vacation. All of that stuff gets kind of planned in the editorial calendar. It’s very planned out now. I was never such a planner, but having a kid makes me like really respect planners because that is our whole life now has to be planned out.

Teela Cunningham: But it makes it a lot easier to operate that way, to schedule launches, to schedule and whatever other things we want to do together.

Melissa Guller: And I ask this because I know how passionate you are about your work. Do you feel like you have the freedom to do everything that you want to do or does it feel like there’s just too much to be done?

Teela Cunningham: Um, some days I feel really overwhelmed where I just feel like, you know, why did, why did it, am I doing this? Why did I schedule this the way that I scheduled it? And then there are other times where I’m like, man, I’m really glad that I killed myself on this because it’s so amazing now. So I go back and forth. I’m kind of just with my personality, I’m kind of an extremist, so I get really upset at myself when I’m in the thick of it. But at the end of it I’m like, Oh man, that was like such a high and it was so amazing. Like I’m ready to do it again. So it’s, it’s pretty, it’s kinda messed up that I do that to myself. I know that I need to be more balanced and having our daughter definitely forces me to be way more balanced than I was before. Before I spent the night, we were super night owls and I would do all of the recording at night, so I wouldn’t hear landscapers in our subdivision. I wouldn’t hear cars going by. So we would, this sounds terrible. I would wake up at like five or six in the evening and then we would work until like 5:00 AM Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was really messed up. But we got so much done and it was like this ride, this roller coaster that he and I were taking together and it was, it was really cool and we’re always going to remember those times and it really, it made our relationship even deeper going through all of that together.

Teela Cunningham: But yeah, I have to be more balanced now. So I do feel like that we can schedule in time together. I just need to be more responsible to my health and wellbeing when I am scheduling things out. Well, it’s nice to, I noticed that you have obviously the freedom of your schedule to decide, you know, you’re gonna hang out with your daughter during the morning and then kind of intermittent working. But then the bulk of your work happens in the evening, which is so backwards from what most people are doing in a nine to five where the job is dictating one and how you have to work. Yeah, pretty much a different than I think the classic jobs that we were all taught in. You know, what your day should look like. Yeah. It’s kind of awesome. It makes me like love my life that much more just because I like being different and I like knowing that we have the ability to do this now where we couldn’t have even thought to do this before.

Melissa Guller: Kind of on the same note before we start to wrap up, are there any other kind of misconceptions about your business that you think people on the outside maybe don’t realize?

Teela Cunningham: SI think once you have your own business, some people do, and I know that this is maybe true for some of my family members to think that now that you have your own business, you can do whatever you want whenever you want, but we work way more hours than we ever worked working for somebody else. It’s a lot harder, but it’s way better. So I don’t know how to like, I guess that’s the best audio bite I can get for that. It’s, it’s much harder, but it’s much better. I feel challenged constantly. I’m super excited about all the work that I get to do. I get to choose what I want to work on every single day.

Teela Cunningham: So that’s been amazing. But it’s, it truly is a fulltime and then some of the job because you’re working on your own thing. No one’s gonna love it more than you do. So it’s a lot of work and it’s not super easy to just get up and go all the time. If you wanted to schedule your day that way, then you could. I, I just don’t schedule my day that way, especially now with a little one. But yeah, I think that’s the biggest myth. Misconception of all is just that you have unlimited time to do whatever you want, whenever you want. There’s so much, so many hours of work involved in a week.

Melissa Guller: I think that was really well put and I love how you said that it’s harder, but it’s better because I agree with you. I think that there’s this, “Oh, you can earn passive income and you just set it up and then it just runs while you’re at the beach” kind of thing going around. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. But even though you guys are clearly still working quite a bit, there’s like a fulfillment and a joy that you get from running your own business that a lot of us just can’t get elsewhere working for somebody else.

Teela Cunningham: Yep.

Melissa Guller: Well, I am curious, before we go, if you were just getting started today, what would you do first?

Teela Cunningham: I wish, like at the very beginning, I wish I had created more content than I had when I first started because once I started creating, once I started publishing my content and it started doing well, then I felt the pressure of like delivering as often as I could and with a full time job, it was really hard just to move into that mindset right away. So I wish I had built up, I dunno, a few months of content before I officially started my business or started posting things online.

Teela Cunningham: So I would have built up more, more content and then I would probably, because YouTube more competitive now than when I started in 2014 I would have started with two tutorials a week instead of one tutorial a week at least for a little while to build up my following because it is so competitive now. If you want to stand out, you have to put up content consistently and often. Right now I am, I’m still one one a week but my audience is used to that. They know wants Tuesday rolls around, check out what’s on the channel, but back then just starting out, I think I would have released more content at the beginning to try and you know, supercharge my audience to grow it a little a little quicker.

Melissa Guller: Those are two really nice interlocking pieces of advice because to your point, a big part of being an online creator is consistency, and that once you start to publish, people are going to want, whether it’s once week or two things a week…YouTube, podcast, blog, whatever it might be. If you’re not ready with some kind of backlog, like if you’re constantly just trying to keep pace one week at a time, it’s going to feel so stressful.

Teela Cunningham: Yeah, that’s for sure.

Melissa Guller: So you said a couple months worth of content. Can you kind of give a number to that? How many like videos or what does that look like before a launch?

Teela Cunningham: Sure. So for me, I was focused entirely on YouTube videos to start and I think that’s also good advice that I would give is focused on one platform. First. You don’t want to get too overwhelmed by trying to manage multiple platforms because even now, now that I’ve got a following built up on a few different platforms, it still gets really stressful. Delivering content, preparing it for all these platforms and then writing an email blast and publishing a blog posts like it’s a lot to take on, so focused on one platform and I’m really glad I did this without even realizing I was doing it because Instagram wasn’t that big back then. I was just focused entirely on YouTube and that really, really helped me and gave me an advantage by putting all my effort into YouTube and I would just make sure I responded to every single comment. I made sure that I was posting consistently. So for me, because it was videos once a week, that would be for a month, so I would have at least eight to 12 of those videos prepared ahead of time before you publish your first one. But if you plan to do two a week and you want to stay focused on YouTube like I did, then just double that.

Melissa Guller: Great advice. And that comment about focusing I think is so important because it’s easy to assume that you need to go out and create every single social platform and participate in all of them equally. But that’s such a quick route to burnout because maintaining even one channel is quite a bit of work. It’s overwhelming.

Teela Cunningham: Yup.

Melissa Guller: Well Teela, this has been such a pleasure. Before we go, do you have any final words of wisdom or advice for anybody listening today?

Teela Cunningham: I would just say hang in there and once again stay focused. It’s really easy when you start out and you start getting a little bit of popularity and a little bit of a following built up. You start imagining all the other things that you can do. I know that when I was working on Every Tuesday at the very beginning I started having ideas of other types of businesses because you get that high in that rush of getting a following and getting some attention on your work. Finally it’s like, what else can I create and make for them?

Teela Cunningham: So I was having all these other business ideas while I was starting Every Tuesday and thank God my husband was this voice in my head that kept saying, you have to stay focused on this first. Let’s see how this does before you think about changing course at all, and that made a huge difference for me because as tempted as I was to try other things, staying focused on Every Tuesday for as long as I did helped us to build it into what it is today. So just stay super focused on what you’re doing. Stay focused on what platforms you’d like to spend your time on as far as social media goes, don’t let yourself get overwhelmed and please stay consistent with your posting. If you decide to post once a week, make sure you post that day, that time every single week. And that’s what Every Tuesday was for me.

Teela Cunningham: It was my way of holding myself accountable to post consistently every week and not not let it go because I knew if I missed ever missed a Tuesday, I was failing myself and I was failing my audience. So ever since I decided to do Every Tuesday, I haven’t let up since. And that’s what’s led to this beautiful life that I’m able to live now.

Melissa Guller: Well, that’s perfect advice I think to end on. So I hope that listeners enjoyed hearing your story and your advice as much as I did. And Teela, it’s just been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Teela Cunningham: Thanks so much!

Melissa Guller: Thank you so much for joining us this week! You can learn more about Teela, Every Tuesday, and Teachable in the show notes at teachable.com/eit18. One more thing before we go, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all of you listeners out there for helping us become one of Apple’s featured Best New Podcasts in Business in 2019. Without you tuning in and leaving us such kind reviews, we wouldn’t be anywhere. So a huge thank you from our entire team, and if you haven’t left us a rating yet, we hope you have a few seconds to spare to give us a five star rating and even a short review if you’re feeling extra inspired. On behalf of Team Teachable, we hope you enjoyed this episode about design and the gradual but realistic growth of an online business with Teela Cunningham. We’ll see you next time on Everything is Teachable.

Ep. 18: Lettering & graphic design (with Teela Cunningham of Every Tuesday)

Today’s guest: Teela Cunningham, Every Tuesday

“We used our wedding money as our emergency fund. And we just went off and got married by a judge for like $150 bucks. So we’ve never had a wedding, but instead we had a business. So that was pretty amazing.”

Where to find Teela

Read the full transcript below.