Jared Loman:
Hey there, Jared here. Does listening to these shows have you feeling inspired to start your own online business with Kajabi? I want to get you some extra help, simply head on over to kajabi.com/edge or mention the Kajabi Edge podcast in the 'Where did you hear about his field?' when signing up on our homepage. Just for our podcast listeners, we're going to give you two calls with one of our customers success managers, where you'll receive one on one strategic guidance to help launch you on your way to success. So if that's you head on over to get Kajabi.com/Edge, that's Kajabi.com/Edge, and start writing your story.
Hello everybody, and welcome to the Kajabi Edge podcast, where we talk to real entrepreneurs to give you an edge on Kajabi. I'm your host, Jared Loman, Vice President of Customer Experience, and today I am joined by my friend, Renee Yoxon singer, songwriter, and trans voice teacher. How's it going today, Renee?
Renee Yoxon:
It's going great. Thanks so much for having me.
Jared Loman:
Thank you for being here. And I'll have to admit that I was perusing your website just a little bit prior to chatting, so you have four full length albums out, degrees in physics, jazz, and songwriting. What am I doing with my life, Renee? I feel so unaccomplished.
Renee Yoxon:
I'm just a glutton for punishment.
Jared Loman:
Well, tell us all about you. Give us kind of the elevator pitch. What's up with you?
Renee Yoxon:
Yeah, so right now I would say that my business is primarily focused on trans voice lessons, so the third part of my byline, trans voice teacher. Right now I'm creating voice alteration resources for trans and non-binary people seeking to feminize, masculinize, or neutralize their voice.
Jared Loman:
Very cool. I'd love to kind of just kind of dig into where this got started for you. Can you maybe just kind of take us back to the genesis of your journey?
Renee Yoxon:
Yeah, so I mean, of course, like everyone's journeys, there's multiple paths that I took, but I started out primarily as a singing teacher alongside my career as a singer songwriter, but teaching singing was always something I'm extremely passionate about. So I did that for, I guess it's been like 14 years now, at least over a dozen years that I've been teaching singing and voice lessons. And at some point along the line, I realized I wanted to focus on teaching singing to trans people and disabled people because I myself am trans and disabled. And I just wanted to work with people who were like me who needed special attention and care.
And so I created a scholarship program called the Right to Sing Award, so I basically raised some money to give free voice lessons, singing lessons specifically, to trans and disabled people. And because I did that, an organization here in Montreal called Project 10, which is a trans organization for trans youth, they got in touch with me and asked if I could give a workshop on speech voice alteration, which is not something I had ever done before, so that was back in 2018. And ever since then, I've been teaching trans voice workshops. It just turned out to be something that my community really lacked, and then it turned out that it was lacking in many communities, and it's been growing ever since then.
Jared Loman:
Did you anticipate that that would one day be your career?
Renee Yoxon:
No, I never set out to become a trans voice teacher.
Jared Loman:
Yeah.
Renee Yoxon:
But it's something that I love so much. Like you never see more joy on someone's face than when they're able to create a voice that best reflects their gender presentation, so it's an immediately gratifying thing to do.
Jared Loman:
I can imagine so. Sometimes even myself, when I started out doing this podcast, I'm like I do not have a voice for radio. The complexity of that situation is not ... That's just my own insecurities, if you will, playing into it.
Renee Yoxon:
Tell me more about that, Jared. Let's hear about the ...
Jared Loman:
Are we going into a live session now? Yeah, I did not expect to be hosting a podcast. I never thought I had the voice for radio, if you will, but here we are 20 something episodes later. So I guess would like to kind of just get a feel for the sound ... This was something local to your community, you're doing this offline, correct?
Renee Yoxon:
Yeah, we've done live in person workshops with different organizations in and around Montreal.
Jared Loman:
Okay. Okay. And I guess, tell us a little bit more about the online aspect of your business. Were you already teaching music lessons online or where did that start?
Renee Yoxon:
Yeah, for a long time I was only teaching music lessons in person and at some point I realized if I wanted to reach disabled people even in my community, I had to start teaching online. And also for myself, I have chronic pain and it just is a lot easier to manage my energy when everything is parceled out online, instead of having people come into my space all the time. So before the pandemic, I had been doing online learning through Skype, and then once the pandemic happened and everybody became quickly adopting online learning, it became something that it was very normal for people and now my business is a hundred percent online. I only do online workshops and I don't teach privately at this moment because I'm focusing on course creation and social media creation. But even if I was teaching privately, it would still only be online.
Jared Loman:
Okay, very cool. Well, as always, I want to kind of dig in and understand what that journey was like for you. What were the hurdles you had to overcome maybe transitioning from offline to on? How did that go for you?
Renee Yoxon:
Honestly, it was super smooth. I don't know. I remember all of my friends complaining about having to switch to online, people having to learn about the technology and what have you, but I've always been an early adopter and a quick learner. I was live streaming on Periscope back when that was a thing and teaching on Skype before Zoom became popular. Of course, now I teach over Zoom. So it wasn't a challenge at all, it was just something that was exciting to learn and integrate into my business.
I got really into Calendly and booking everybody into my particular schedule. And yeah, I have, I don't know ... Like I said earlier, I have a glutton for punishment, so I really love learning about new things and then integrating them into my life. I think getting the physics degree, like you mentioned at the beginning, makes things easier for me because I really truly believe that there is nothing I can't learn if I apply myself.
Jared Loman:
Seriously. Seriously. Yeah, so I mean maybe just from the perspective of even your audience, was there any struggle for them, maybe those who used to work with you in person, transitioning to a different space?
Renee Yoxon:
Certainly there was a few people who preferred not to continue with me because I went online, but the thing is trans people and disabled people, they're not in a centralized location. I mean, this is true of any specialty group, I could say. Like if you were a fan of canoeing, there are fans of canoeing in your town, but also if you want to join a canoe group, you have to go online where they all exist. So it's very normal for trans and disabled people to congregate online. Most of my friends who are trans and disabled I've met through Twitter or Tumblr or TikTok or any of these online spaces, so it was not unusual for people to start taking lessons from me through Zoom because they were already used to meeting their friends and whoever else in online spaces.
Jared Loman:
It sounds to me like you had a fairly strong audience online that you've built. Maybe you could just kind of dig into that, how did you get started building this audience online?
Renee Yoxon:
Luck had a major component here, so I don't want people to think that there's a magic secret sauce, but I'll tell you the story. So I had been doing my workshops, I started working with a different trans organization in Montreal and I was doing in French and in English, multiple workshops. And then at some point I thought to myself, "Ah, if I want to really make this my business, I need to go where the young people are." Because typically nowadays it's younger trans people who are seeking voice alteration services and certainly, older people as well, because there's no age that's appropriate for transitioning, you can transition at any age, but more and more younger people are deciding to transition, which is fabulous and wonderful. But I realized I wasn't on TikTok. I had been on Instagram for 10 years and Twitter for 10 years, but I had been really resistant to TikTok mostly because I found it incredibly addictive. I don't know if you've been on TikTok.
Jared Loman:
I haven't yet. I'm a little behind the times.
Renee Yoxon:
TikTok is designed to be extremely addictive and for better or for worse. But I decided if I want to expand my client base to young trans people, they are on TikTok, I knew this. So I made my first TikTok, it was about the phenomena I saw as a trans voice teacher, which was I had certain cisgender students. Do you know what that means? Cisgender?
Jared Loman:
I think so. I think that means they are the gender that they were assigned at birth.
Renee Yoxon:
Correct. Exactly. So I had a number of cisgender students who were also reaching out to me for my voice alteration services, like cis men who wanted to sound more masculine.
Jared Loman:
Okay.
Renee Yoxon:
And cis women who wanted to sound more feminine. And I just thought how sad that even cis people are feeling the hurt of the gender binary that we're all oppressed by, and I made a little TikTok about that and it went viral. And within one weekend I got 10,000 followers on my TikTok, so all of a sudden I had this huge audience and I think now like six months later, I have about 85,000. Now those numbers might seem very large for TikTok, they're not that large. Like they would be enormous on Instagram say, but on TikTok it's easier to get that because the way TikTok works is that it will show your content to people who are not following you. Like there's an algorithm. People go on their for you page and see videos that the TikTok algorithm has deemed that they might find interesting.
So it's specifically designed to put you in front of the eyeballs of people who are not in your networks, which is what makes it such a powerful tool and why things go so viral so fast, right? So I was really fortunate that I was set up to act when I got the 10,000 person boost, and I immediately just set up a page on my website that was like, "I'm going to make a course." I had no idea what course I was going to make, but I was like, "Okay, I'm going to make a course, give me your email and I'll email you when the course is made."
I tried at beginning to take on all these people who wanted lessons like as private lessons and immediately it was not possible. I realized right away, I was only going to dig myself into a hole that I'd never be able to get out of, so I just made a little website with a little form to capture emails and built up my email list. Now I think I have around 2,000 people on my email list. And yeah, that was just a lucky ... Just a stroke of luck that got me to where I am today.
Jared Loman:
You know, you call it luck, but elements of luck, sure, but certainly some preparation and some quick thinking.
Renee Yoxon:
Yes.
Jared Loman:
That put you in this position. I mean, to have a video go viral on TikTok is one thing, but to take that, and I don't know if it's capitalize on that or to know what to do in that moment. I mean, I think that's huge. I think a lot of people would've looked at this as like, "Okay, well now what?" You put up the webpage, you put up the email sign up, and you said something. A lot of people would probably be afraid to sell something unless they already had it. I myself have been paralyzed about this stuff. Even though I see this every single day, I see thousands upon thousands of people like you doing these things. So luck, that may have been a teeny tiny factor. I think you're overemphasizing on the luck.
Renee Yoxon:
Well, it was a component certainly, and I do know that I was set up to act when the time was right. So I'm very lucky that that happened. I think I'm lucky that I was educated in such a way that I was ready to act, and I'm lucky that I had this viral video. I don't know. I don't like to take on too much credit because I could have been brought up anywhere else or with a different family or having different circumstances. Just the fact that I am who I am is just a product of how I was brought up, so I like to give luck a lot of credit.
Jared Loman:
Well, sure. So I guess kind of moving on, when you put that out there, you put the page, the email sign up page. Did you have the course in mind? Did you try to get people shuffling in to do ... I think you mentioned that you may have already ... You knew you couldn't handle them all one on one.
Renee Yoxon:
Yeah. Okay, so first the video went viral, then I had a little existential crisis for about a weekend and I had been really resistant to making a course. This is what led to the existential crisis. Because my ethos as a private voice teacher was always that every individual student has individual needs, and I thought if I make a course, I'm not going to be able to cater to each student's needs, people are going to be left out. If you create bounds, people have to be on the outside of those bounds. That's just logic.
But then what I realized as soon as I saw my calendar completely book up and I had no more room to take on students was that if I didn't make a course, then I was effectively leaving out a lot more people, right? There was lots of people who wanted this information and if I didn't act and make some kind of online course, then they weren't going to be able to access that at all. And then I would've had a situation where a bunch of trans people were on a wait list for my services. Now you might not be aware of this, but trans people are on wait lists everywhere, and it's a big problem everywhere essentially. If you want to get on hormones in Ireland, you have to wait about four years for the HSE to act.
So it's a big problem, and I didn't want to contribute to that. So I decided to take the workshop that I had already done like 20 or 30 times in French and English and make an eCourse version of it that was more filled out. So the workshop is only two hours but the course is like maybe six or seven hours of information and exercises, and a little more fleshed out version of the workshop essentially.
Jared Loman:
Well, I guess I'd love to kind of just hear what happened next in the storyline. So you have all the signups, you built the course. Did you have a traditional launch? How did you actually ... When the rubber meets the road, what happened next?
Renee Yoxon:
Yeah, that's a good question. I remember ... Let me see. I have to go back in my memory and see how this went. I took about three months off from private teaching. I decided if I wanted to make this happen as quickly as possible, I had never made a course, so I didn't know how much time and energy was required to write it and film it and edit it and everything. So I originally had planned to take two months off, so I took the two have to create the course and then I needed a third month just to plan the launch.
Now I had hired a virtual assistant at that time, so a really nice woman named Emily was helping me with the launch, and together we made a launch strategy where we pre-launched the course for a week before the course went live. And in that first week, I think we had like 120 sign ups. I was hoping to get 75. That was like ... If I can get 75, I will have recouped my costs and everything will be great. But 120 people signed up and that's when I realized, "Oh boy, there is a real serious need for this education."
Jared Loman:
Wow, 125 over 75. I can't do math quick enough to ... I should be like, that's such an easy problem.
Renee Yoxon:
It was like 50 extra people. Like we really ... I ended up with enough funds that I didn't have to immediately go back to private teaching. It meant I had some time to relax and think about what is the best way to reach my overarching goals as a business owner. And my overarching goals are to create a world in which affordable, accessible, and non pathologizing voice education resources are wildly available to any trans person. So this is one way that trans people can access these resources, but I want to create more and more ways. So with the time that I had, I was able to think about the next course that I was going to make, which is the one I'm working on right now.
Jared Loman:
Okay, very cool. Any hints, secrets, spoilers you want to drop on that or ...?
Renee Yoxon:
Well, so the course is out, it's a live course, and it's a teacher training course. So I decided to do a five week course where teachers come and meet me for four hours every week, and I teach them how to teach trans voice alteration. So I target it towards singing teachers and other voice professionals, and we have 12 teachers from five countries and it's the best part of my week. They come and they meet me and we just have a wonderful time talking about how to support trans people with their goals, and I want to make a whole giant group of teachers who are just like me, who are kind and patient and trans positive.
Jared Loman:
All right. Well, I'd love to ... One thing I haven't touched on yet is I think our listeners would like to know where did Kajabi come into the picture? I don't think we've gotten there yet. You knew you were going to create a course. Did you already have a Kajabi account? Where did that happen?
Renee Yoxon:
No, I didn't have a Kajabi account when the TikTok went viral. I had my website somewhere else and I had integrated a bunch of things into my website to make it function. And because of the really rapid growth, I was immediately looking for scalability right off the bat. I knew that if I went with some things that integrated into my website, I would have to pay for a bunch of different services. I could already see that if I went with a certain mail server, it was going to be free for a couple of months and then I'd have to pay for this service and that service. And just to make the machine work with the growth I was expecting, I knew that it was going to be a giant pain unless everything was integrated into one.
So Kajabi was really attractive to me because it had everything I wanted under one roof, one price. I was super pleased with that and I found it through Leonie Dawson's course. So Leonie ... I'm sure you're familiar, I don't know, with Leonie Dawson. She is a business woman from Australia and I was a fan of hers before, but I had never bought one of her courses and so I took her Create Your Course in 40 Days course, and it was exactly what I needed. It told me, "Okay, just do X, Y, and Z. Here are your options. Kajabi is great." And so I just took every step right away. I didn't waste any time.
Jared Loman:
I love it. I love it. Just out of curiosity, did you even explore anything else or was it just you already knew what you were doing?
Renee Yoxon:
I didn't explore anything else very seriously. I signed up for other services and looked around, but I could tell that this business was going to do really well really quickly because trans people are famously underserved as a market. So I knew that word of mouth was going to spread quickly and I was going to need something that was going to scale.
Jared Loman:
Yeah. Well, I'm interested, I guess tell us a little bit more about like, kind of the timeline in which this all transpired, because we've talked about a lot of different things. It sounds like overnight success. I'm sure there's a little bit more of a reality to this. This is probably, I'm assuming several years of hard work. I know you don't get college degrees overnight, or if you do, I need to know your secrets.
Renee Yoxon:
No, no, you definitely don't get college degrees overnight. I mean, the course was kind of an overnight success. You could look at it that way because the TikTok went viral in May of 2021, and now it's November of 2021, or yeah, so it was like six months between that viral TikTok and launching my second course. So really, really, really happened quickly. But I had been creating my ethos as a teacher over my entire life. I went and got a jazz degree from McGill University, and then I got a songwriting degree from the University of Limerick in Ireland, and all of that time was spent sort of crafting the person I wanted to be and the teacher I wanted to become.
So yeah, it definitely took time to learn about trans voice resources. Back in 2018 when I first got asked to teach this, I had no idea. I only knew what I knew about singing, and I kind of had an idea of how to apply what I knew about singing to the trans voice space, but I had to do my own self teaching. And this is why I decided to do the teacher training because I remember as a voice teacher, there is no centralized education for voice teachers out there, for this trans voice alteration thing. I had to look on Reddit and on YouTube and on different forums, the back alleys of the internet, and I have all these books and things. And I really created my own course essentially for training myself in this, and so that's why I wanted to create this teacher training course so that it's much easier for the next generation of trans voice teachers.
Jared Loman:
All right. Just to kind of finish things off, I would love to know, I guess what's changed for you in your life and kind of your business as a result of everything leading up to this?
Renee Yoxon:
I would say I'm finally able to have a life that is accessible to me as a person with chronic pain. I've had some office jobs and I've worked in different places, and my chronic pain has always been a limiting factor, but thanks to the success of my work on Kajabi, I'm able to completely manage my pain and have basically a pain free life, and that's huge for me.
Jared Loman:
That's amazing. Absolutely amazing. Well, I'm going to do something that I haven't done in a long time. I did this with Elissa Weinzimmer. I don't know if you've listened to her podcast. She is a voice teacher. I'm going to put you on the spot.
Renee Yoxon:
Here we go.
Jared Loman:
You were kind of going there earlier too, I think. What's just an exercise that we can think through and if someone is sitting in their car listening, maybe they could do this with us as we do this, but maybe work with me on something that I can do to have more presence or whatever techniques that you maybe start with.
Renee Yoxon:
Well, so the important thing to understand is that I really believe in student led learning, so I'm not the gender police, I'm not going to come out here and say, "Do this to sound like a man and do this to sound like a woman." Because Jared, if you're a man, you have a man's voice. But if your voice doesn't reflect the presentation of your gender that makes you happy, then we can work together to look at what the possibilities are. So you were saying earlier, you didn't think you had a voice for radio.
Jared Loman:
Yeah.
Renee Yoxon:
Can you tell me what your issues were with that? What did you think the issue was?
Jared Loman:
Oh man, I think it's probably just from hearing myself back when I was a kid recording myself on cassette tapes. As soon as you hear yourself, you're like, "Ah." You just sound so much weirder when you hear the recorded version.
Renee Yoxon:
That's true. Everybody sounds weirder to themselves, but could you identify a characteristic of your voice that was giving you stress?
Jared Loman:
I mean, I definitely don't have that deep radio voice.
Renee Yoxon:
Ah, there we go. So deep radio voice is what you were looking for.
Jared Loman:
Yes.
Renee Yoxon:
So in some bodies that have experienced the testosterone in puberty, the pliable cartilage of the larynx will grow and you get more space in the vocal tract giving deeper, darker resonance. So you just might have a smaller vocal tract than some other cis men, whatever. It's a bimodally distributed characteristic. There's no wrong way to be a human being. So if you want to create a little bit deeper, darker resonance, you just need to make a little more space in your vocal track. So what I'm going to have you do is just put your hand just gently on the prominent part of your larynx and just yawn and tell me what you feel.
Jared Loman:
I feel my Adam's apple go up and down.
Renee Yoxon:
Yeah. So I tend to call the Adam's apple the laryngeal prominence because Adam's apple is kind of needlessly gendered, women and men have an Adam's apple. And I don't know, it just gives some people gender dysphoria, so I stay away from that phrase personally.
Jared Loman:
What's it called?
Renee Yoxon:
The laryngeal prominence.
Jared Loman:
Laryngeal prominence.
Renee Yoxon:
The prominent part of the larynx. Yeah.
Jared Loman:
Okay.
Renee Yoxon:
So if you yawn and then just hold that extra space open like that and do a little Darth Vader breathing, like you hear how it sounds. The breathing sounds a little dark and deep.
Jared Loman:
Yes.
Renee Yoxon:
So now what's a phrase that you say every podcast?
Jared Loman:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Kajabi Edge podcast.
Renee Yoxon:
Perfect. So we'll start with that. So what I'm going to have you do is make that yawning shape and then hold it down and say your phrase.
Jared Loman:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Kajabi Edge podcast.
Renee Yoxon:
Ooh. So I notice a little difference. I don't know.
Jared Loman:
I did too.
Renee Yoxon:
Did you? Okay, so that's the kind of work that I do with my students.
Jared Loman:
That's awesome. It's going to be real. I don't know how many people listen to this in their car, but I can just imagine ... For some reason I imagine people listen to their podcasts in their car and they're going to be doing this while driving down the road.
Renee Yoxon:
Of course, if we want to feminize the voice, it's a completely different thing.
Jared Loman:
Okay. Well, I will save that for podcast round two.
Renee Yoxon:
Sounds good.
Jared Loman:
I'm sure there are several listeners that would be interested in doing so though, so I guess tell us for anyone who is interested in you, what's the best way to get ahold of you?
Renee Yoxon:
You can get ahold of me at reneeyoxon.com. So that's R-E-N-E-E-Y-O-X-O-N.com. And @ReneeYoxon, on all this things, on TikTok, on Twitter, on Instagram. Those are my three favorites, I would say.
Jared Loman:
Okay.
Renee Yoxon:
So my website and my social media, if there are people listening, especially trans people who want to take the course, but can't afford the course, I also have a scholarship list that you're welcome to get on and I give away about four or five scholarships. It depends on what are available. And if you're listening to this and you want to buy somebody a scholarship, you're also welcome to go ahead and donate that, so all that information is on my website as well.
Jared Loman:
Amazing. All right. Well, what is next on the horizon for you?
Renee Yoxon:
Oh, I don't know. Okay, I'll tell you. This is a little preview into my big, scary ideas. I would like to create a system in which the teachers that I train can get hooked up with students who don't have the funds for private lessons so that teachers can practice with students who give them feedback. So I want to create this give and take system that benefits everyone. I'm really trying to change the world here.
Jared Loman:
I can tell. I can tell. This is ... Yeah, that's really cool. So it's almost like the next iteration of your scholarship program.
Renee Yoxon:
Exactly.
Jared Loman:
Someone doesn't even need to pay for the scholarship, they can simultaneously help each other.
Renee Yoxon:
Exactly. That's what I want.
Jared Loman:
Amazing stuff. Well, thank you once again for joining us today, Renee. This has been a true pleasure.
Renee Yoxon:
Thank you so much for having me.
Jared Loman:
Really, I think that's all we have for everyone this time, so thank you to all of our listeners who've tuned in once again. Of course, as always, we love it when you share your feedback with us. You can always reach out to us at edgepodcast@kajabi.com. Of course, leave us a review. Leave us a comment in your review. I really love those. I check not every day, but I check a lot. So thanks again for listening and we will see you all next week on the Kajabi Edge podcast.
