SPI 914: Why Online Business Is So Different Now

SPI 914: Say Goodbye to Passive Income in 2026

Pat Flynn: Everything has changed. Everything has changed. That is my answer to how is the world of online business today versus how it was when you got started. Well, that was 2008 and definitely things have changed. But I could say the same answer, everything has changed, if I were to compare today, 2026, to 2016, 10 years ago.

I could have the same answer for that same question comparing this year to last year. Things are changing very fast. There are concerns and a lot of discussions happening around AI, of course, and where that is headed. And I’m not going to spend a lot of time today talking about that and my thoughts on that.

I have pros and cons and there’s of course pluses and minuses and things to weigh against each other when it comes to AI. I’ve always said that nothing will compete with the human stuff that we need more than ever, which is community, connection, we need relatability, we need proximity. And these are all things that matter when it comes to Not just online business, but just general happiness in life.

I feel like the state of the world is more of a unrest right now, and whether it’s political, whether it’s AI, whether it’s just finances, things are definitely feeling a little uneasy. In and around the world, it seems. In the world, specifically of online business, there have been a lot of things that have been happening, a lot of news and headlines related to people that you and I know.

There’ve been some concerns and things brought up about my good friend and our good friend here on the channel or on the podcast, Amy Porterfield. There has been a little bit of content creator slash entrepreneur drama, which was really interesting. I haven’t seen that in a very long time. That was something that I remember recognizing early on in the entrepreneurial space, there was a lot of finger pointing, there was a lot of drama, and that sort of went away.

Everybody kind of holed up and did their own thing. And more recently, this was especially after the announcement of Amy Porterfield closing down her course to then coach women. There were some people who were not very happy about that, or at least the way she went about doing that. I’m good friends with Amy.

I I haven’t spoken to her since, but she’s an amazing person, and we all make mistakes, I need to dig in a little bit deeper on exactly what’s happening, and I’d love to chat with her as well, but that is just, again, supporting the idea that change is about us, change is happening, and there is some unrest here and there.

And I will eventually speak to what this means for us here at SPI, and me, and some of the things that we’re thinking about to stay ahead of the curve, to better provide value to you, and that word value has changed over time. It used to mean giving you all the information you needed about everything, so that you could have access to whatever you need, and we found that that over time has become now overwhelming.

There is an analysis paralysis because of so much choice out there. So whittling down what is actually necessary has been very, very key to our continued success. We’ve demonstrated this with the podcast and the kinds of content. You’ve heard me tease about what the podcast is going to be like in the near future related to interviewing people about how they’ve grown their followings.

We have always been, I think on the forefront here at SPI about where things are going and we made that transition from just selling online courses and online courses only to then repositioning them and packaging them in a way where people could go through them together through our accelerators and with each other.

In cohort style programs inside of our SPI community. And there’ve been some incredibly loyal people in there who’ve been there ever since we launched that in 2020 and have continued to show up, have continued to take action. And it’s been amazing to see their progress and success and see them grow.

Over time, some of our more recent courses, Short Form Video Formula inside of the community, the YouTube From Scratch course, some reshoots of other courses that were older that we wanted to bring to the new age, like the podcasting course, we thought about these in ways where we’re like, what is the least amount of information we can share within them in order for people to get really incredible results? It’s exactly why the YouTube course, YouTube From Scratch, is recorded and filmed and published the way it is. Short lessons, not too many of them, just a couple hours of stuff for you to go through to get started. YouTube is huge. We could have thrown 30 hours of content in front of you. But what would that have done that would have overwhelmed you? You wouldn’t have gotten results quicker. It would have always felt like you were behind or that there were so much more to consume before you could take action. And as I’ve spoken about in my book, Lean Learning, learning happens and results happen from the actions that you take, not necessarily the preparation.

In fact, the preparation is only good up to a certain point, and then it’s too much. It’s unnecessary. You have to take action. We’re seeing action being taken now in the 30 day short form video challenge, which is amazing. We are seeing a trend, and we wanted to jump on this of helping people through tiny actions and no, it’s not a necessarily a tiny thing to film a video and publish it every single day for 30 days, but it is short form and it is relatively much easier and it’s something that comes with very low risk, and it’s something that can become a habit every day.

And we have seen incredible results. It is continuing to show us that what people need is some sort of container of which to just do certain actions and see certain results and to do it in a way of a 30 day challenge and see thousands of people participate is really inspiring for me, it’s inspiring for us, and we haven’t seen this kind of movement, we haven’t seen this many people partake in something within our brand in a very long time.

We’ve always had action takers, we’ve always had people come into the community, go through the courses. Our accelerators are incredibly, incredibly well attended, and people are very likely to finish them. They’re three times more likely to finish a course when they go through it in our accelerator format, which is amazing.

It’s just, again, a testament to the way this information is presented, the methods by which you share that info, and the pacing of it. That has all been something that has been proven inside of the SPI community. But now with the challenge, it was the 100 Emails Challenge from way back in like 2015 that we did.

This was our public challenge where you could create an email list and get 100 subscribers in just 72 hours. I believe that challenge is still available. It’s more automated now. It’s evergreen. If you go to 100. The number, 100emails.com, you’ll be able to go through that. And that’s completely automated, it’s dripped through email and it continues to serve people.

It never had the same characteristics as when we initially launched it and did so publicly. And this 30 day challenge has been really, really amazing. It also brings to light just how quickly people quit. This is something that is the state of the world today. People are so quick to quit. So quick to quit.

That’s a mouthful, but it’s absolutely true. People expect results right away. They want instant results and feedback, and in the world of business and content creation, there are ways to get that instant feedback. There are methods by which you could find answers sooner than later. But certain things are going to take time, they require consistency, they require repetition for you to understand what is working and what it’s not.

And for other people to understand you. Because, remember, this is a people thing. You are serving an audience and that audience is made up of actual people. And so, connecting with them, DMing them, building relationships. And then serving them from there is always going to be, principally, the number one thing that we should always do.

The technology’s changed, the platform’s changed, but that principle will always remain the same. And that is, work, it takes effort, it requires courage, and that is something that a lot of people just seemingly don’t have today. So, we need to find that courage. Or, if we are a creator and we’re hoping that our audience takes action, we need to find ways to bring courage at our people. And this is why, again, small quick wins are really amazing.

Small quick wins. That’s how you get people to start paying attention and then you can deliver more. That is a la Superfans, which is a great transition into where things are headed in the SPI brand because I remember when superfans came out, it was 2019, right before the pandemic. And I wrote it knowing where things were headed, but I had no idea things were going to get there this quickly.

Where is there? There is community, connection, the idea that a person becoming a customer is not the endgame. In fact, that is the beginning, because if you can build a loyal group of superfans, or as Kevin Kelly, the senior editor of Wired Magazine, who wrote an article called A Thousand True Fans, calls them true fans, you can build true fans and loyalty.

You don’t need very many people to do some incredible things for your brand, for your business, for your life and for their lives too. And this is such a relief when I teach this on stage. And when I have conversations with people, they’re like, I don’t need a million subscribers. I don’t need an email list of a hundred thousand.

I just need a thousand fans. And when you break it down, that’s one fan a day for less than three years. If you imagine, I’m gonna paraphrase a lot of what Kevin Kelly said in his article, 1000 True Fans. And that is, if you have a thousand fans, and they’re each paying you 100 a year, that’s less than 10 a month for your art, for your craft, for your service, for whatever it is that you have to offer.

Maybe they’re just that much of a fan that they want to support you through a Patreon type of model, or a Kickstarter campaign that you do. That’s a six figure business, not including taxes. That is six figures, nonetheless, in revenue. And again, the comfort that I see in real time, the shoulders that come down and the relaxation that happens in real time when I talk to people and say, you just need a thousand true fans.

It’s like, oh, that’s doable. Maybe I’m not too niche, I just need to go out and find my people. I always reference Wojciech who is a Fire Science podcast host. He’s one of our students and there are only like, I don’t know, 1500 fire science people who call themselves that in the world. So immediately. You’d think, well, it would be pointless to start a podcast with just literally a cap of 1,500 people around the world who could potentially ever find you, let alone the percentage of them that will probably discover you and then listen to your show.

Well, if he had that mentality before he started the Fire Science show, he would have never found success. And even though he still has his job, the last time I spoke to him, he’s making more money with sponsorship on his podcast than his day job. He is now. Rightly so, a celebrity in that space, because he’s the one who has stepped up to bring people together and to bring all the names in in that space, people who know each other, and he’s become the celebrity that everybody needs to speak to if they come into that space.

It’s amazing. So  Wojciech, keep it up. I love it. I love to hear that kind of stuff.

With SPI, I do want to address the elephant in the room, and that is the PI part of the program. of SPI, and that is the passive income part of this. As you may have maybe caught on to, over the last number of years, I’d say five to six years, we at SPI have been avoiding the full name of our brand. Even though it’s still SmartPassiveIncome.com, we always say SPI. Our logo says SPI. It’s the SPI community. Pat Flynn, founder of SPI. I don’t say Smart Passive Income anymore. And the reason for that, that change was very intentional. It’s because it became very clear that the passive income part of this, it’s not impossible, but immediately it puts a story in a person’s head that either A, this is just fake, like this is never going to happen.

And alongside that, a sense of this is just scummy stuff happening over here on this side of the internet, which is sad. And I know that’s not our fault. This is the fault of those who have taken on that term and have, you know, used it and overused it and has associated it with things that are indeed and factually scammy and playing off of people’s dreams and stuff.

The reason why I chose to use the words passive income back in 2008 when I started SmartPassiveIncome.com was because I was seeing it happen in real time with my architecture business and combined with some keyword research, it was a term that was heavily underutilized but had a lot of volume.

Man, it’s even weird to say that out loud. That was very much a strategy back in the day. All the way through 2015, 2016, keyword research. And then choosing a domain name simply based on what are people looking up. I mean, it makes sense, right? What are people looking up? Well, then create a website about that and then connect the two together and boom, Google search engine optimization.

But search engine optimization has changed. Search engines have changed. People are finding answers now by prompting ChatGPT versus looking up a more general word on Google. Google, they’re literally asking a specific question on ChatGPT and even on Google, even if you have the first search result, good luck getting a ton of traffic in many cases because it’s still below the fold.

There’s still already an answer that Google provides before you can provide it. So the idea of starting a website first for a business has changed. The idea that you can generate a ton of traffic automatically by just building a website and using keywords has changed. And we have changed. We do not associate ourselves as much with the passive income part of this. Now, when I’ve spoken about this with people, I say it’s completely real. There’s a lot of people who say it is completely fake. No, it is real. There are not just in my own life, but there are several, I mean, thousands of case studies of students of ours who now have built something that generates revenue for them without having to trade time to generate that revenue.

It’s not a one for one thing like a nine to five job. They have spent a lot of time in the beginning investing that time up front to then reap the benefits later. And the passive income is real. But it’s the last step in the process. So if you lead with passive income but say, Oh, well, okay, by the way, yes, passive income is real, but you’re not going to see that for years.

That doesn’t really help a person go, Oh, I’m comfortable learning from you and your brand because you were promising something, but then you’re not giving it to me, or it’s not possible, or it’s going to be very difficult to go through because I’m busy, I don’t have a lot of time, this is complicated, there’s a lot of options, I’ve tried and it hasn’t worked yet.

All those things get in the way of that promise of passive income. And there are many, many, many more ways to generate revenue that are not passive, that are absolutely fulfilling, that can change a person’s life. Everything from building software, which yes, can be passive, but I mean, let’s just be real.

It takes a lot of effort, not just to get a software up and running, but to manage it, and to upkeep it, and I’ve shared those stories along the way here on this podcast across over a thousand episodes almost, and blog posts about how hard building a software was, and the mistakes that I’ve made, and the fact that, yeah, it’s not as passive as I thought it was going to be.

So that’s the passive income part of this. So we’ve decided to move away from that, just in how we talk about the brand, we kind of turned it into like the IBM, you know, International Business Machine is what it was once known as, but it is now IBM. And it has worked. People are like, hey Pat, from SPI, SPI, SPI, it has a ring to it, we’ve used it, we’ve trained people, it is working.

But then when people ask, what does that stand for? Smart Passive Income. We don’t want to focus on the passive income part of this anymore. I don’t. I don’t even want to focus on the building business part of this to lead with anymore. That is still absolutely the goal is to help you build a business to create revenue, generate revenue from the following that you’re building, from the service that you’re putting out there, from showing up in the content and the way that you are.

That is still absolutely the ultimate goal. But if we lead with that, then it can be very difficult for a person to grasp how to do that or even believe that it’s possible. So, we are going to start talking about, and we’ve already started doing this, talking about the Top of Funnel stuff. Building a following. This is where the 30 Day Short Form Video Challenge has come about.

It is sort of our entryway into taking charge and really planting a flag in the ground saying we can help you build a following. We’ve always been able to do that, but we’ve always mixed it with, well, if you want to build a business, first you need a following. If you want to generate revenue, let’s build your following.

No, no, no. Let’s just focus on building your following and then we could take you from that following that you build into an email list and then serve that audience in the ways that we know how to do that and have courses and communities and we are able to take you after you build your following to do that.

But if you’re just getting started leading with, let us help you build your dream business is not the tagline that’s working anymore. Let us help you double the amount of followers you have on Instagram. It’s, let us finally help you unlock monetization on YouTube and build those subscribers up. It’s, let’s repurpose your videos, since you already have them, on these other platforms and generate more revenue from ad revenues on the platform.

And then, take those followers and put them into an email list. That is what we are leading with now, and we’re going to continue to do that. In fact, the 30 day challenge has been so successful, I want to do it again, and we’re going to do it again. And we’re going to do other challenges that are relevant and matter for today.

To help you build that following and build that trust. I imagine there might be a, I’ve really wanted to do this, a live stream challenge where you go live every day for seven days or something like that. It wouldn’t be 30 days straight. It might be once a week for a month or whatever it might be. I’m still designing it in my head, but I think a live streaming challenge will be just as valuable, if not more valuable than the 30 day short form video challenge.

It’ll help you learn how to get up there and tell stories, and make mistakes, and be okay with it, to build a loyal following and learn how to engage with people in real time. Something that I do every single week now in front of 8,000 people while I open Pokemon cards on Deep Pocket Monster, and something that I know that I can help people with.

And if I can help you go live and build a following and gain some confidence on camera, then that’s going to help you in many, many ways. Even if you don’t ever do anything with it entrepreneurially. You can take those same skills and apply them in your work. You take those same skills and apply them in whatever movement you want to make, an impact you want to make in the world on social media platforms that all allow Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.

They all offer the ability to go live. So that’s just something that’s in my head, but really the overall overarching theme here is no longer passive income. It is what I said earlier, it’s Superfans. I’ve already written the book. It has well over a thousand reviews on Amazon, without ever having to really ask for them.

It is a book that I continue to get asked about, to then go on stage and speak. I get paid to speak about superfans. And the crazy thing is, I wrote this book in 2019. And then I moved on. And, of course, the pandemic happened, and I never really focused on the book after that. It is coming back. It’s coming back because the principles and the things that I talk about in that book are now more relevant and more important than ever before.

Ever before. The idea of building community. How to not just grab a person’s attention, but hold that attention and bring a person into your ecosystem. How to world build so that there’s a connection between you and your audience, and a connection between your audience with each other. When you build for superfans, you are building for the future of your business.

No matter what happens with tech or AI or platforms. When you build superfans, you have an insurance plan for your work and ultimately your life and your livelihood. So that’s where we’re leaning. There’s gonna be a number of different, I don’t wanna say consequences, that’s a negative term, but there are a number of different avenues that we’re gonna use moving forward that we haven’t used before.

We are going to talk about Superfans more. I do want to write another edition of it, because a lot has happened since 2019, especially in the world of community. We have the SPI community, we have now the Deep Pocket Monster community and the live events and the other things, like literally Deep Pocket Monster and the way that I approached that brand was just following everything that I wrote and talked about, the game plan coming out of Superfans.

I mean, everything, from the language that’s used in the community to the live events and the quote unquote gigs that happen to bring not just me in front of people, but people with each other, there are superfans. The same kind of things that happen with SPI, getting people to do artwork and draw and send letters, is happening here at Deep Pocket Monster too.

And it can happen for your brand as well. I’ve done it now in the entertainment space with Pokemon, previously, and still, I still continue to get letters and thanks and drawings and gifts from teaching entrepreneurship. It doesn’t matter. It’s the connection, it’s psychology, it’s human psychology. And the things that are needed today in the world more than ever, and this is your potential advantage.

So, I want you to put on your seatbelts, hopefully if you are driving, they’re already on, or in a car even. But if you are ready for this, I mean, hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already, because we have a lot of amazing things coming your way, including, like I said earlier, a couple women next week who have built a brand in a surprising way, and it’s going to blow your mind.

So make sure you hit subscribe because I want to share more, not just inspirational stories, you can get motivated. I’m going to ask specifics in terms of strategy, tactics, things that are applicable, because those are the things that I know you are working on right now, too. Superfans, baby. Superfans is where it’s at.

And thank you for being here and listening. If you are indeed a superfan, you’ve listened to several of these episodes. I appreciate you so much. I am feeling so blessed to be now nearly a thousand episodes into this, having done this for nearly two decades now. It’s quite wild how we got here. And if you’re a new fan, I don’t expect you to become a superfan overnight.

In fact, probably one of the most highlighted quotes, because, you know, if you have a book on Kindle, you can, as the author of that book, go in and see what are people highlighting. And that’s such a cool feature. One of the quotes that is most highlighted out of that book is, people don’t become fans the moment they find you. They become a fan from the moments that you create for them over time. So, thank you for your time, and we hope to spend more time with you, and we hope that one day you will become a superfan. I appreciate you. Thank you so much. Here’s to the future, and your future, and your brand. Cheers.