Summary How Writing Online Will Make You A Millionaire - Nathan Barry (Youtube) www.youtube.com
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Speaker 0 You wrote a 1,000 words a day for 600 days in a row. Yeah. What the fuck?
Speaker 1 I'm never someone that's content to go at the same pace as everyone else. Oh. You set the pace. Right?
Speaker 0 Do you
Speaker 1 want this to take multiple years? Sometimes it should and sometimes it's best for you. Or do you want to get it done very quickly? That's been probably a defining factor
Speaker 0 in my life. That's absolutely insane. This week's episode is with Nathan Barry, who's the founder and CEO of ConvertKit, a software company valued at over $100,000,000 Millionaire Nathan's story is absolutely fantastic. He started off working a normal job, realized he didn't particularly enjoy his normal job, taught himself to do design and code type stuff, and started building apps for the iPhone app store. And then later on, he transitioned away from that to build his software business.
Speaker 1 I had these 3 posters on my wall in, like, my first real home office. And there were the 3 mantras of create every day, teach everything you know, and work in public. And that was, like, my equivalent of of show your work.
Speaker 0 I guess
Speaker 1 the way to put it is it is simple but not easy. Yeah. And so if you get clear with yourself that Online, okay, I am setting out to do something that is in fact very difficult, and I have to design my day around Trading sure that this can happen. This has to become my number 1 priority in my business. Then at that point, you can actually make it happen.
Speaker 0 Oh, by the way, in case you have not yet heard, my book is about to come out. It's called Feel Good How to Do More of What Matters to You and it's a book that I've been working on for the last 3 years. Now it's being published at the end of December 2023, but preorders are actually available. And And I know people don't like preordering the book. But if you do preorder the book and you email me your receipt, you will get completely free access to a live exclusive event that I'm hosting in the 1st weekend of January of 2024.
Speaker 0 And this is a live online workshop all about annual planning, goal setting, and reflection. And so I'm gonna be facilitating a group with hopefully hundreds of people from all around the world. And we're gonna be going through how to figure out what to do with our Online, and how to turn that into goals for the year, and how to build systems, and how be consistent with stuff and how to make sure that we are enjoying the journey along the way. That is purely, exclusively available for people who pre order the book as a thank you for our little community. So if you wanna check it out, you can check out the book.
Speaker 0 You can maybe consider preordering it. The link will be down in the video description. Nathan, welcome to the podcast. Thank
Speaker 1 you for having me.
Speaker 0 So much for coming. This is gonna be so much fun.
Speaker 1 I'm excited.
Speaker 0 So I'd love to start off with your backstory. How did you come to care about making money?
Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay. So I grew up in a family where there wasn't a lot of money. My dad worked in a ministry and, everyone, you know, supported by donations. And so, I actually grew up in a house Online, was born in a house up in the mountains outside of Boise.
Speaker 1 And and, you know, it was like a tiny house before tiny houses were cool. Now I have a tiny house in my office and it's much cooler than the 1 that I grew up in. But, Yeah. So I watched like the struggle of money or the lack of money be like kind of a defining factor of childhood. You know, like there was always enough food, but you’ll know, not much more than that.
Speaker 1 And so growing up, I watched, my parents fight about money. I watched the stress that that caused and then them ultimately divorce. And somewhere along there, I realized like, oh, you can actually make money. I think it was probably, oh, maybe late high school, early college when I first started Trading, like Jason Fried and DHH from Basecamp. And Jason talked about how making money is a skill.
Speaker 1 Mhmm. And you can get better with it better at it over time. And that stood out to me. Because he the point that he was making is you wouldn't expect to sit down at the piano and be able to play, like, some amazing song without practice. And the same way you wouldn't expect or you shouldn't expect to be able to sit down and, you know, start a company in it to do fantastic.
Speaker 1 And so really it's a combination of not 1 skill, but like a 1,000 little skills just in the same way that music is. Right? You you’ll know, there's music theory and timing and everything else. And and business is, you know, confidence in sales and marketing and pricing and, you know, all of the audience building. And so when I understood that, that making money was a skill that you get better at with practice, then I was like, okay.
Speaker 1 I'm going to be, you know, the like, someone else could be the child prodigy in music. Like, that is what I'm going to be absolutely as good as I can at making money.
Speaker 0 And so even hearing you say that that making money is a skill, it's an I I've I noticed myself having a bit of a moment of surprise. I'm like, oh, yeah. I I guess it is. Because I guess it's it's obvious that playing the piano is a skill, but it's not that it's it's weirdly not that obvious that making money is a skill.
Speaker 1 Well, I think you can't see it. Right? I can't sit down. I'm I'm I'm like, Ollie, let me let me just watch you make money. You know, it it's it's very indirect.
Speaker 1 I can watch you play the piano Nathan you yeah. I could watch you, you know, do scales or or build up, you know, these individual things and put it together into a song and and all of that. But, the skills of making money are a little bit more abstract. And we tend to assign them to things like, oh, she's good at sales because she has that natural charisma. Right?
Speaker 1 Or, you know, he's just gifted with being a good copywriter. But these are all skills that are learned. And and sometimes people are better at them than others. Right? If you grew up in a family that music was all around you, then you might, take more naturally or you might have more of a natural ability towards some of those things in the same way that someone might have more of a natural ability, towards sales or marketing or some of these Trading things.
Speaker 1 But all of them have to be learned. Think about the first time you tried to sell something on the Internet. Right? What like, how do you do that? When I tried to do it, you know, I'm like, ClickBank, Ejunkie.
Speaker 1 How do you even get money Online, from a a person to me? And now there's a lot more tools, for it, and it's easier. But it's still something that you have to learn. Right? Creating a landing page for the first time, that is a skill.
Speaker 1 Right? If you look at the first landing pages that a lot of content creators make, they're terrible because they don't understand that the that the headline should capture attention. But once you know that, you never unlearn it. And so now, you know, years later, if you've been doing this, YouTube like, I don't know. I made a landing page in a half hour.
Speaker 1 And of course, it captured attention. Online, of course, it checked all of these boxes in the same way, that, you know, using music as the analogy. Right? Like, you’ll your timing is good because you have learned that. And so I think that's the thing that we miss.
Speaker 1 And and it's hard as a beginner where you're like it just it feels so unknown, and there's so many you’ll, and then someone who's been doing a long time just sits down and it seems so natural because they have rehearsed for, in many cases, a decade or several decades.
Speaker 0 Yeah. That's such a good point. I think so I I made my first landing page when I was, like, 13 years old, advertising my web design services. We'll put it up on screen if we can find if I can find that screenshot because I still have it. It's just so funny.
Speaker 0 It was like, you know, want a website for your business or your life? Call this number. And I put my
Speaker 1 home number on it.
Speaker 0 It was like you’ll made up some names, like UAE Web Solutions, like some shitty agency.
Speaker 1 Yep.
Speaker 0 But then sort of 15 years later, when we made when we're whipping up landing pages for our products that are doing sort of 1,000,000 in revenue, and the team is just Online looking at me being like, woah, how did you just do that? And I'm like, oh, I mean, it's just like, you know, you know, whether it's Webflow or WordPress or Kajal, it's all the same kind of stuff. You just put it together. It's just like, oh, you know, there's obviously the headline and there's, like, this whole thing that goes into it. But seeing it as a skill is, I guess, something I've not really not really considered.
Speaker 1 Yeah. And it it's really, the combination of a lot of different skills. Right? If you learn web design, at some point in there, you probably learned about, user experience and and did some user research. And, you know, you understand, like, the flow of eye tracking and, like, eye movement over a page tends to go in a z format where people, you know, at least in in, English speaking, countries tend to read left to Writing, and then they'll angle down.
Speaker 1 And so if you wanna call the action, you're gonna typically put it like, if I want you to to do something, that's gonna be in the lower right. And, you know, that at 1 point, that was something that I learned and that was probably 15 years ago. And now it's just very intuitive. And so when I come across a page and someone's like, oh, this isn't converting well. It's like, okay.
Speaker 1 Well, let's flip the left and right columns. Let's, you know, let's change this headline. You’ll there's so many design things as well. Design is 1 of these skills that I feel very, like, blessed to have learned early on because it just applies to everything. And someone's like, oh, this page isn't converting.
Speaker 1 I'm like, well, yeah. It's because everything has the same visual weight. Right? Let's make your headline a little bit bigger. That sub headline, let's make it a bit smaller.
Speaker 1 You know, you don't have to use black text for everything. Right? Let's go to Online a 70, 80% gray, you know, and you just add this level of quality and polish to it. That becomes very natural when when you do it, and it spreads out through everything. And I see that so often with content creators where they put out this amazing content, especially written content.
Speaker 1 Right? They say words matter. Words are the most important thing. And they are, but how you package them changes how they're perceived. And that's what's gonna drive if someone actually really engages with it.
Speaker 1 So the number of ebooks that I come across where the content is so good and the actual packaging and and design of it is so bad. And I'm like, you're missing out on probably half of your audience because they're just be like, oh, you know, the packaging isn't very good. And, yes, I am judging a book by its cover or whatever else, and and I'm moving on because if you didn't put that level of care into 1 aspect of it, the content's probably not that great either.
Speaker 0 And and so is, in my team, we we still use your authority ebook that you made, like, 10 years ago as, like, this is what a PDF should look like. Like, we often like package up things as like worksheets and workbooks and stuff for YouTuber Academy and things. I'm just like, sending them authority. Pdf to be Online yeah. This is a good PDF.
Speaker 0 Don't just make it a simple, like, Microsoft, like, Apple page Writing print.
Speaker 1 Yeah. That was actually, Apple used to have a product around making, ebooks, specifically. And I'm trying to remember when it was because that wasn't done in pages or something else. It was done in this other product that they've since discontinued because it was, like, for the whole iBook format and all of that. And I found that that was the best design you’ll.
Speaker 1 That wasn't Online, Adobe InDesign or something, you know, like a full a full thing. But that that's funny that you’ll Yeah. Keep doing that.
Speaker 0 This is good. Okay. So just sticking on this idea of making money as a skill, just for 1 1 moment. A lot of people So it's it's sounds like the like the way the way that we're talking about it. It's right now.
Speaker 0 It's it's almost a given that we're talking about having your own business and learning all the skills to making money within your own business, which I think is also a niche way of thinking about making money because for Online 99.99 percent of the population, making money is the thing that's tied to your job. I wondered, like, what are what are your thoughts on, like, having a job versus having a business? And I guess in your early days, what took you download that the having a business route rather than the getting a job
Speaker 1 route? Well, so if you think about the ability to increase your earnings in a job, you're fairly limited. Right? The default is you're going to get some, cost of living increase. Right?
Speaker 1 3 to 5% a year maybe. Now it won't outpace Nathan, but, you know, or you're going to have to jump roles and level up. Right? And we've seen a lot a lot of people, and I had that in my own career where the first job that I had was making 60,000 a year. And as a designer, the first professional job.
Speaker 1 I worked at Wendy's doing, foodservice, you’ll know, and I did plenty of web design and all that, as well. But in any job, for the most part, your earnings are going to be very closely tied to your time, and you can't really separate those. And so I wanted to get to the point not where I was making 50,000, a 100,000, 200,000 a year. I wanna get to the point where I was making 1,000,000 a year. And there just aren't that many jobs where you're at that level.
Speaker 1 There actually are, but not in the same not in the worlds that I grew up in. Yeah. Right? I didn't grow up in the worlds of, private equity and, you know, I dropped out of out of school. Like, I didn't finish high school.
Speaker 1 You’ll dropped out of college. And, and so I wasn't like, oh, you know, let's go to Stanford and do private equity or or, you know, some financing or or anything like that. And so I was looking for ways that I could earn, you know, far more. And so I think that's where I've taken on the on the earning side is inputs and outputs are completely can be completely disconnected
Speaker 0 when it
Speaker 1 comes to it.
Speaker 0 So why not just think, you know what? I've got a 60 k job as a designer. I'm living in Boise, Idaho, which is fairly low cost of living is my understanding. Yep.
Speaker 1 It used to be.
Speaker 0 It used to be. I can I can live a chill life? I go go to work, do my 9 to 5, come home, I chill. Like, why not be content with that lot in life?
Speaker 1 I mean, that's a good question. I I think I've always been a creator. Like, I've always made things. And so, yeah, I'm I'm constantly learning and constantly Trading, and, I, like, I think I just get really, really bored. And I actually I spent 2 and a half years working as a software designer at the start up.
Speaker 1 And I had done freelance web design for a couple of years, and then in 2000 the beginning of 2009. So at least in the US, the economy was down like crazy, and all my clients, like, stopped hiring except for this 1 company. And they, you know, they're like, hey. We have even more work. Actually, do you wanna just come on full time?
Speaker 1 And so I joined them. We were there for 2 and a half years. And during that time, I watched them raise a ton of venture capital. I think I was employee 15. It maybe peaked at 70 or 80 employees.
Speaker 1 And then they did a few rounds of layoffs, and, you know, I, I eventually left. But that was something I remember going through that process and finding that I was losing a lot of the skills that I valued about myself. Writing. I think it's really interesting if you were to write down, like, what do you value about yourself? And there's probably some things, you know, like, how you are as a friend and other things that are, like, really good.
Speaker 1 But then then there's others that are that you value about yourself that are, maybe a little more dangerous, in the sense that they're they're tied to things that you control us. So 1 thing that I value, about myself and really you’ll a lot then is how productive I was, how fast I was. When I worked food service at Wendy's, it was all about speed. Right? How you maintain this bar of quality and go very, very fast.
Speaker 1 Because when we work the drive through, there's this big timer over the window, and it's basically the amount of time from when a car starts their order to when they're driving away with their food. Right? And we're trying to go we want under 60 seconds.
Speaker 0 Oh, wow.
Speaker 1 And so we would, like, call up at the stores and be like, okay. For the lunch rush, you know, we're gonna get 58 seconds. What are you gonna get now? Okay. We're gonna get, I don't know, 57 you know, you're like trying to compete with them.
Speaker 1 It's just a friendly Trading. But we got very, very fast and efficient. And when I did web design, when I went from working per hour to working per project, then I realized that for the first time, the speed and efficiency benefits me. When you work at Wendy's, it's like, wow, you're so fast. Let's have a raise from $6 an hour to 6.15 an hour.
Speaker 1 And you're like, I think I worked really hard and, you know, that's not benefiting me. And hourly work, you know, maybe as a web designer, it's $50 an hour or something. But when I went to, oh, let me charge $2,000 for a project. Then I was like, wait, the faster I am at this, my hourly rate increases substantially. And so then I was like, okay, how do I template things?
Speaker 1 How do I stay super focused and all of this? And then when I went and joined this company, I realized that I was losing those skills because no 1 else in that environment cared that much about working quickly, especially as the company started to struggle. You know, there was that first round of layoffs. People would spend time, like, standing around the pool table, complaining about how they didn't get paid enough. And I was like, none of us are even working right now.
Speaker 1 You know? And so what I actually did is I realized that I in my design Writing abilities, I realized I had lost the skill of speed. Writing. And I didn't hone and refine it over the previous 2 years. And I had lost that.
Speaker 1 I would sit down to work on a side project, at night and I realized Online I wasn't very good at focus. I couldn't, you know, something that used to take me 2 hours to code out was now taking me 3, 4, 5 hours. And so what I actually decided to do is I wanted to say I was not going to lose that part of my identity. Yeah. Writing.
Speaker 1 Like that would be a valuable skill. I'm like, no, no, I'm not losing Nathan. And so I ended up switching switching my desk, from 1 that was, like, in the middle of a big room. Like, someone else had left, and so there was 1 way off in the corner. And I got that.
Speaker 1 And I decided that I was going to be the best employee on that team, and I was gonna do it in 3 hours a day. And I was gonna spend all the rest of my time, like, learning to design and code iOS apps, you know, other things. Right? And so instead of moving at the slow pace of everyone else and like just turning into someone that I didn't want to be, I was like, Hey guys, I'll need this job, but I'm going to knock out all of my work, make sure, you know, I'm ahead of schedule and everything. And then I'm going to be in a place where you can't see my monitor and I'm gonna be studying how to build iOS apps and I'm gonna be coding on my own side projects.
Speaker 1 And I rebuild that, that speed and that ability to work quickly. And so then 6 3 to 6 months later when I left that company, you know, I had a, a stable of, you know, iOS apps that were making money Nathan I had new skills that I'd built up. But, yeah, that that's the thing of, like, I'm never someone that's content to go at the same pace as everyone else.
Speaker 0 What do you think was it about you that sort of made you different from the other people in your team who were contempt to chill for 8 hours a day and complain about how much they were being paid?
Speaker 1 I just love the juxtaposition between those 2 Trading. I'm like, it'd be 1 thing if we were the absolute best team, but we weren't. I've always wanted to get the most out of my time and and move as quickly as possible. So I was homeschooled, and I grew up with my parents really teaching me that I set the pace. So I remember 2 different things.
Speaker 1 The first is I was probably 11 or 12 years old, and we lived, up in the mountains. And so I remember just the most beautiful snow coming down in the winter, and I loved sledding. And I'm just I I've got, you know, algebra that I'm supposed to work on, and I'm looking outside and it's like, the snow looks so good, and I just can't focus on it. And I think I complained to my mom about her. And and she goes, you know, you just have a set amount of work to get done.
Speaker 1 It doesn't have to take an hour or 5 hours or whatever. Like, you don't have to sit here and do school till 3 PM. You just need to be here and do school until it's done. And, like, that is the most focused 11 year old you've probably ever seen, where I was like, okay. Great.
Speaker 1 Let's get it all done. All of that. You know, my little brothers are not feeling like, no. I don't have time for this. Like, I gotta I gotta get my school done so I can go sledding.
Speaker 1 I think like an hour or 2 later, I was out there sledding because I realized that, like, if you cut out all the complaining when you're Writing math and all that, like, it goes remarkably faster.
Speaker 0 So that was
Speaker 1 the first thing where realizing like, okay, it it's not a fixed amount of time. And the second thing is Writing up, I spent the most time with my 2 older siblings. And so because I, like, tagged along with them and their friends, all of our friends were older than me. And so that wasn't really a problem through, like, kind of junior high, high school ages. But really once I was just starting high school, they were all thinking about going off to college.
Speaker 1 And that's when I realized Online, oh, this age gap is going to become very noticeable. Because, sure, they're only 2, 3 years older than me, but then, like, I'm going to be finishing out high school and they're gonna be, gonna be gone to college. And so I went back to my mom and I said, you know, is high school a fixed amount of work or a fixed amount of time? And so it's basically the same question that I asked her or that she had brought up about, you know, math homework on a snowy day, but applied to a bigger chunk of time. And, you know, she had homeschooled my older siblings who had already finished high school.
Speaker 1 And and so she said, no. I have I have the exact curriculum, you know, that you're going to go through. You can graduate high school whenever you complete this curriculum. And so I remember thinking that we would do these drives from Boise to Seattle, which is about 8 or 9 hours, to go visit family every summer. And that was before Ipads and, all of that.
Speaker 1 And so I remember thinking Online, I'm really bored on this drive, and I'm really bored when I do math. So why don't I just combine these 2? And I would do them Online a month's worth of math lessons on a drive over to Seattle. And I had it in my older brother sitting next to me and, you know, whenever I got stuck, he could help me and and we go through that. And so, from when I was 13 to when I was 15, I finished all of the, like, high school curriculum, and then, I graduated just a little before turning 16.
Speaker 1 And then I was off going to college and all of that. So really the idea of you set the pace. Derek Sivers talks about this in his book, Anything You Want, how he went through Berkeley School of Music very, very quickly, because of this 1 professor that was Online, let me teach you a semester's worth of music theory in, like, 2 days. Mhmm. And Derek talks about how, like, the class goes at the pace of the slowest student.
Speaker 1 And sometimes that's you and sometimes that's someone else and it changes based on every topic. But, like, average is out, it's going to be quite slow. And so I've just always been obsessed with this idea of you’ll set the pace. Right? Do you want this to take multiple years?
Speaker 1 Sometimes it should and sometimes it's the best for you. Or do you wanna get it done very quickly? And, Yeah. That's that's probably a defining factor in my life.
Speaker 0 That's so good. I was just taking I was I I I feel like I had so many kind of brainwaves as you were say as you as you were saying that. I think this this idea of fixed work versus fixed time
Speaker 1 Mhmm.
Speaker 0 Is really important. Because if you're if you're, for example, working at Wendy's, that's fixed time. Online, you know, the work is always gonna be there. It's not like if you work faster, you can then put your feet up, I suspect. Right.
Speaker 0 But, actually, in most areas, if I think of every job that anyone that I know has or if you're if you're a student in school or university, it feels like fixed time, but it's actually fixed work. Mhmm. Like, when I was working as a doctor, I was you know, it was fixed time. I was there from 8 till 6, but it was actually fixed work. In that, if I could see the patients quickly enough and to get everything done and get them seen, you know, all of that kind
Speaker 1 of stuff. Everything else. All of
Speaker 0 that stuff is done. Now I have some sort of that. I've got I've got some spare time now. And where a lot of my friends in that context were using that spare time or or just sort of going at a leisurely pace because they know they have to be there until 6 PM anyway, because why not? It's a bit more chill.
Speaker 0 In their spare time, they were, like, scrolling TikTok or whatever the thing was. Yep. Whereas in my spare time, I had a side hustle. And so I was like, great. I've got an extra 20 minutes that I can, like, you know, grind and plan out a new YouTube video or something like that.
Speaker 0 Oh, yeah. Similarly, when I was at university, you’ll know, going through medical school, I was like, okay. I need to get this essay done as quickly as possible so that I can tinker away on the business I was building on the side, or I'm designing a landing page or making a site in WordPress or and stuff like that. And it sounds like that was your approach when you had the day job as well. Online, let me get this shit done as quickly as possible so that I can then use the rest of the 5 hours in the day while I'm being paid to be here to actually learn and improve my own skills and build my own stuff on the side.
Speaker 1 Yeah. And I I think that's so important, but most people don't have that side thing. And and many of them are completely content with that. Right? I have a brother who has a great career in finance, super happy with what he's doing and, and all that.
Speaker 1 And and just has you know, I'm over here, like, constantly starting all of these things and all that. He doesn't care about that. I I think we are both equally happy in life, and we just have very different, different approaches. And but it's just it's core to who I am that I'm going to figure out, okay, what can I learn? What can I, implement?
Speaker 1 And I always try to find the overlap. Right? Like, when the iPad came out in 2010 for the starter part I was working for, you know, we were designing iOS apps. And so then instead of, like, doing the minimum to okay. I designed the app.
Speaker 1 At the time we were designing a Photoshop. That was enough. You know, I handed it off. That was all that was expected of me. But then I was saying, hey.
Speaker 1 Why don't I learn how to use interface builder and Xcode to be able to implement the UI? And let me take that further and learn how to program. So it wasn't like I was at my job then doing something a 100% different, on the side. I was saying, okay, how can I do what's expected of me, but take it much further in a way that's going to benefit me long term? Right?
Speaker 1 Like, I learned programming skills there that were related to my job but not required that I went on to use, for years. And I sold, you know, 50,000, $75,000 worth of iOS apps that I, you know, that were an amazing side hustle thanks to the skills that I took further.
Speaker 0 Yeah. I think that's a really good point, Arun. I think, like, if like, I'm I'm always mindful when I wanna do the episodes speak speaking to other entrepreneurs and stuff. It can it can seem as if it's like, oh, starting a business is the only way to be happy.
Speaker 1 But
Speaker 0 it's really not. Online, if someone listening to this or watching this is genuinely happy with their day job, fantastic. You’ll like, the the the goal is happiness, contentment, and meaning. The goal is not have a $100,000,000 business. And if you get happiness, contentment, and meaning from the day job, which you really enjoy, and then you go home and do stuff on the side and, like, have hobbies and have work life Nathan, and that that is absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 0 That is what we're all trying to strive towards in some way or another. But equally, I speak to a lot of my a lot of people I know who have the day job and they're not content. Mhmm. They're like, I'm feeling my skills are being stifled. I'm feeling like I'm losing a bit of myself.
Speaker 0 I used to have all these interests when I was a kid and then they got squashed out of me by the education system, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah.
Speaker 1 I'm capable of more.
Speaker 0 Yeah. And those people feel like, Ugh, you know, if only I could have an extra 3 k, 5 k month of passive income or something like, oh my god, that would that would be so liberating. It would it would buy my freedom. Mhmm. Whereas So some people in my team use it as much as I encourage people to have side hustles.
Speaker 0 You know, Allison, our head of customer success is like, I don't want a side hustle. I just wanna chill. I enjoy my job. I enjoy my team. I, you know, I get home from work, and then I hang out with my friends and I go see musicals in London.
Speaker 0 And I'm like, great. She's like 1 of the happiest people I know. But I think it's that thing around, like, if you are complaining about your situation, then
Speaker 1 Right.
Speaker 0 Starting a business might actually be a reasonable a reasonable option if you do feel like your job is not helping you reach your potential.
Speaker 1 When I think you’ll brought up something of, you’ll know, even the 1,000 to 3000 a month from a side hustle. You're gonna get 2 huge things from that. 1st, all of that money is on top of what you already made. And so you don't have the same level of expenses that that money has to pay. And so it's actually, like, substantially different, you know, as far as the impact that it can make on, you know, your savings or your vacation budget or whatever it is you value.
Speaker 1 And then the other thing is the skills that you learn. Like, in most companies, if if say you're at least 10 to 20 people in the company, and then it's this is especially true as you get into a 500 or a 1000 person company or beyond. Right? There's someone else who knows how to do Writing, Online, tangent a little to your job. And so you're like, I do my thing and, you know, in my in my case.
Speaker 1 Right? I do the design in Photoshop and I can hand it all off. They're talented people who will build a full app from that. And so you just don't have the same level of growth and development because you don't have to. Right?
Speaker 1 Your job is to do your thing in your lane. And the people who say like, no, I want to know more about everything that my work touches and become obsessed with how much can I learn, right? When you realize that your brain is not this, like as new information comes in, something else has to go out, right? You're going to do the digital nomad thing, right? You're going to be like, okay, I have you know, these 2 suitcases or something.
Speaker 1 And someone's going to be like, here's this. And you're like, what am I going to get rid of? You know, to be able to make room for this new thing. That is not how your brain works. You're going to be able to continue to take on new information.
Speaker 1 So, something that I'm I'm, learning how to be a pilot right now. So I'm I'm partway through, flight lessons. And something that, a friend pointed out is, like, once you're a pilot, you're a pilot for life. Like, your license is is is for life. Now you need to, like, stay current and and all of those things and, do flight reviews.
Speaker 1 But I think of it the same way with any of these skills. Like, once you're a designer, you're a designer for life. Once you know, like, the principles of great video and and production and all that, like, you have that for life. And so I'm 33 and I'm thinking about like, okay, what are these new skills that I have forever? And so when someone presents me with the opportunity to learn a new skill, then I'm like, oh, thank you.
Speaker 1 Like like, this is amazing. What a gift. Because I'm gonna have that hopefully for the next 60 years. And, Yeah. I I think it's just a different mindset than a lot of people have where you're just, like, trying to fill the time or finish the day.
Speaker 0 Man, that's so good. Today's episode is very kindly brought to you by Huel. Now I've personally been using Huel regularly since 2017 when I discovered it in my 5th year of medical school. And if you've not heard of Huel, they're a business that creates convenient, affordable meals in a variety of different forms, but all of them are nutritionally complete. So they have the perfect balance of nutrients, carbs, fibers, protein and fat and contain 26 vitamins and minerals.
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Speaker 0 There's Huel ready to drink range, which are pre made shakes in a bottle, which is super handy. And I've actually grabbed a few of these in the airport when I've been between flights while Trading. And finally, you'll also get some of the new You’ll Bars which I'm very excited to try out myself. Plus, if you're a new customer, you get a totally free Heul t shirt and a shaker and pot with your first order. Now I wouldn't recommend having every meal as heal because that would get a bit much, but it's a fantastic supplement to a healthy balanced diet.
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Speaker 0 So if you're interested in potentially getting into investing, what you can do is you can browse the different PIES that different people have created on the platform. So, you might get like a hedge fund trader who's gone onto the platform and has created a pie of investments, having done a bunch of research and stuff. And that pie might be like, I don't know, 20% Apple, 20% Tesla, 10% this, 10% that, but it's generally way more complicated than that. And you can see the performance of that particular pie of stocks and shares and funds. And then if you want to copy that pie into your own account, you can just copy and paste it directly in and then you can invest any amount of money and it will automatically split it according to the allocation in the pie.
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Speaker 0 And if you use that link you will also get a completely free share up to the value of a £100 so it's literally free money so you might as well. So thank you so much Trading 212 for sponsoring this episode. As as much as I'm all about, like, growth and skill development and stuff, I have encountered situations recently where taking an opportunity would have allowed me to build and build new skills. So, for example, 1 thing that we've been toying with the idea for a while and maybe we'll talk about this when we talk about $1,000,000,000 creators is can we build our own productivity app? Right.
Speaker 0 We've got enormous distribution. Even if we have feature parity with with an existing productivity app, we can make our own to do list and drive tons of traffic to and it'll be great and and stuff. But then I'm thinking, oh, but that would require either that would either require me to hire a CTO or to try and learn the skills to become a CTO, and figure out how to hire developers or figure out how to work with an agency, and then our costs go up, etc, etc. And I know I would learn a lot in that process of trying to build a consumer productivity app. And I know it would be pretty hard.
Speaker 0 But there seems to be in my in my mind this trade off of, like, oh, it's it's it's too much effort. Like, it's Mhmm. It it would teach me a lot of new things, but it just feel it feels kinda hard. Like, does that vibe at all?
Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, I think it's the way that I think about setting goals is around what am I going to learn from this goal. Right? So we have a goal at ConvertKit Writing to a 100,000,000 a year in revenue.
Speaker 0 Yeah.
Speaker 1 We sit at 40,000,000 a year right now. And so, you know, in my head, there's Online the little, I don't do they do this in the UK? Like, Trading, things. They'll have, like, a thermometer that they like color it. You know?
Speaker 1 So I'm like, okay. We're 40% to, to goal. And it's not I don't set the goal because I'm gonna hit self actualization when revenue, like, tips over that additional digit. What I think of is what are the skills that I have to learn to build something to that level? And so we could talk about how, you know, 1 of the best paths for you to, build a business worth a $100,000,000 or more is, you know, consumer productivity app.
Speaker 1 And we could set that out, and that's fantastic. But if we break down and go, okay. That's the goal. Who do you have to become in order to achieve that goal? What skills do you have to learn?
Speaker 1 And if we write those out, yeah, and it's things that you talked about. Right? You have to get very good at understanding, user behavior, how to work with developers, how to hire, you’ll to scale a team, like all of these other things. And so you list out all those skills and you're like, yeah, no. Those skills aren't interesting to me.
Speaker 1 That person. Right? If we look at future Online who has to have those skills and be in that. If that life doesn't sound interesting to you, then great. Move on to a different goal.
Speaker 1 I think too often, we either set a goal, without realizing what's going to be required to achieve it, who we have to become to achieve it. Or we go the other way and say, like, oh, this is what I'm trying to do. I want to get better at this 1 skill without a goal in mind. And so I think the overlap of those 2 Trading, clearly understanding what's the goal and why, and then who do I have to become to achieve it, is what results in, you know, something that you're really, really proud of and willing to work on for long enough. Because if you're like, hey.
Speaker 1 I have this idea for an app. I'm gonna throw it together. You know, it should be live in 3 months, and it should have a 100,000 users by the end of the year. And, you know, like, all of this stuff. Guess what?
Speaker 1 It's going to not work out that way. Like, it's going to be 10 times harder than you thought. Take 10 times longer. And if you’ll, we're just looking for like the neat way to use your audience for distribution, then you're going to give up when it gets hard. But if you're like, oh, no.
Speaker 1 This is the goal. This is the mission. And I'm very clear on who I have to become in order to achieve that. Then you'll stick with it when things get really hard.
Speaker 0 There's a journaling prompt I've started using thinking about recently, which is because, you know, people say that 1 1 way to figure out what you want is ask yourself, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? Yep. And I made a list of that and productivity apples on the list. But then I asked myself, what would I do even if I knew that I would fail? Mhmm.
Speaker 0 And productivity app was not on that list. Okay. But there were a couple of other things of, like, even if I knew that this would fail, I would still like to do the thing. Like, I love the idea of building a sort of hour 1 to 2 hour long 1 man stage show, which is like a combination of, like, life advice meets magic, because I'm into magic and shit, like hypnosis Yeah. That kind of stuff.
Speaker 0 That would be you’ll, and it will learn a lot even if it fails. Right. You’ll be very proud
Speaker 1 of that Yeah. End product even if a failure is like like a 100 people came to watch it.
Speaker 0 Exactly. Yeah. And, like, writing a book, it's Online, I even if not many people buy the book, as long as I've written a book I'm proud of, I'll be I'll be happy with that. Whereas for the productivity app, I'm kind of like, I wouldn't do this unless I knew it was gonna be successful. And if I knew and if I knew it wasn't gonna be successful, it doesn't seem fun anymore.
Speaker 1 Yeah. And so in that case, 1 that I love that clarity because it points to what you're gonna take away. Right? Most people are Trading this is worth doing if I achieve the goal or if I achieve 80% of the goal. Yeah.
Speaker 1 And what you're saying is this is worth doing even if I achieve 0% of the goal. And I actually like, the true goal is the experience and what I learned. And I think that's how you can find what's most aligned to what you the the 1 thing I would say is often people don't know I mean, it's it's corny. Right? But you don't know what you don't know.
Speaker 1 And so, like, for me in building the company, I've spent a lot of time getting good at design and code and marketing and all of that. And I'm trying to get good at building teams and setting goals to keep people aligned Nathan right. It's an entirely different skill to run a company at, you know, a 100 people and, you know, whatever, 50, a 100,000,000 revenue and beyond from there, than it is, you know, for me to be selling ebooks like I was before. And so the shift that has been most helpful for for me is to fall in love with the process of building and scaling a company rather than to fall in love with the theoretical destination and whatever that might, whatever that might buy me. And so then when I'm going through something that's really, really hard, then I'm like, oh, no.
Speaker 1 This this the growth from this transition is what I signed up for and what I said that that I want. And so this is the thing that will make the difference. And then the last thing that keeps me from getting too discouraged in that is I like to write out my problems that I've encountered and so just sort of have a Online of them. And then to look and say, how would, like, current me deal with my past problems? Right?
Speaker 1 So for example, the early stages of COVID. Right? In March, 2020, you have no idea what's going on. Teams are worried. We were already a remote team.
Speaker 1 And so we didn't have that, Online, shut down the office, dynamic. But we had both a crazy amount of growth from people being like, I guess I'll start an online business. And also a huge amount of cancellations from people saying like, well, no one's Trading, so let me shut down my travel blog so I'm not paying for all of this. This is a very, very hectic time. And it was, it was really stressful.
Speaker 1 But now that I've been through that and I feel like I'm 3 years more developed as a leader, I'm like, okay. I think I can manage that just fine. Right? And there's plenty of other things that I remember being very, very stressed out about. And now I'm like, oh, that, like, that's almost cute how simple of a problem that was.
Speaker 1 And so that helps me stay grounded when I'm thinking about the things that I'm encountering right now that are so, so stressful. And I'm Online, in 2 years from now, how am I going to look back on this problem? And my goal is that I look back on it and say like, yeah, for, for past me, that was a very challenging problem. But currently it would be like, okay, that makes sense. We're onto like bigger, harder problems that we can handle with the same level of stress.
Speaker 1 And so I love using that growth. That's 1 of the things in journaling is just like, what are the hardest problems? And so you'd be like March 2020, you know, how to lead the team and navigate through COVID. Right? June 2020 would be, like, all of the, social justice protests and Black Lives Matter and and what to do through that.
Speaker 1 Right? And you kinda just level up all these things that, that you navigate. Even a simple right? If you have, the you build that that consumer productivity app. K?
Speaker 1 What happens when it gets pulled from the App Store for the first time because of some random thing. Right? You know, I've been download to happen on 4 different apps at different times. Right? And so you're like, oh, this is how you do it.
Speaker 1 This is, you know, how you navigate it. And so but in the moment, that would be the most stressful thing that you've probably ever dealt with. And so I love looking at that growth and seeing the past progress in the same way that if you're going to the gym, you're like, okay. You know, I was doing this, I don't know, deadlift or something, and this was insurmountable. And now, like, that's what you do for a warm up set.
Speaker 0 Yeah.
Speaker 1 So you're you're in the
Speaker 0 day job. You're making your 60 k. You're completing the work in record time, and alongside you’ll learning how to build iOS apps. Mhmm. What happens next in in the journey?
Speaker 1 Yeah. I the first iOS app that I built to sell was, I called it 1 Voice. And, my sister-in-law was working with kids with special needs, like, who had, nonverbal autism. And so they could think through Writing they wanted to say, but really struggled to to verbalize it. And so there's these, devices that were, like, ruggedized touchscreen PCs, that had terrible battery life and cost them a certain amount of money and, and all of that.
Speaker 1 But they've used an app on it that had some sliced speech. So they'd select tiles and then it would, like, build a a sentence Nathan then it would speak for you. And so she was doing that. And when the iPad had come out, Hannah, my sister-in-law was like, this should just be an iPad app. Like but it's such a niche, product, And the money is all made in insurance paying for it.
Speaker 1 And so, like, these were priced at $7,000 because that was exactly what Medicaid in the United States would reimburse for it, you know. And you're like, alright. I understand how this works. And so I ended up making this iPad app that was the same thing. Right?
Speaker 1 And so you bought an iPad for whatever, 7 or $800 and you bought the app and, you know, selling a lot of copies of it. And then, I wanna say the app probably made 40 or $50,000 over, maybe 3 years. And that drove a lot of my side hustle. And then
Speaker 0 And you built that while you were still working
Speaker 1 Yep.
Speaker 0 At the day job. Sick. That's cool.
Speaker 1 Yeah. We actually I went to the job paid for me to go to, like, a developer camp, that was at the PayPal offices in San Jose. Nathan they did, like, a hackathon. And so it was like, oh, you joined team and, you know, people had their different ideas and you joined the team, code with them the whole weekend and meet people and learn a bunch of stuff. And none of the ideas seemed that interesting.
Speaker 1 And I was there with a a developer friend from from work. And, so we, you’ll know, I was like, does anything else I'm interested you’ll to join? He's like, no, not really. And so then I was like, well, I have this idea for an app. Like, let's design, build it, code away on it.
Speaker 1 And so that weekend, he helped me with the initial version, and I learned a lot. And then maybe the next few months, you know, I'd I'd built more. It actually was the way that I learned to code. I always like to make something specific. Like, I'll do the the, you know, 100 level, like, let me just learn the basics.
Speaker 1 And then I'll get to the point where I have something specific that I wanna make. And I I code in every direction until I get totally stuck. And then I would go to a friend. There's a few developer coworkers. And I would like go over to their house on a Saturday morning and be like, okay, I'm now stuck in these 3 categories.
Speaker 1 Like and they'd be like, oh, okay. Here's why. Right? Like, I'm trying to do something. They're like, do you know about different types of numbers?
Speaker 1 I'm like, what? I'm like, okay. We've got floats and integers and, you know, like, there's, like, computer science 101. Mhmm. But it's fun to to get have someone help me get unstuck, And then I'd be off, like, coding more and Googling and Stack Overflow and everything else.
Speaker 1 And, but, yeah, I built that app. I built, 1 that I called commit, which was a habit tracking app. So, like, on along the, like, don't break the chain idea, that ended up being really impactful. I built a flashcards app, that did delayed repetition. And those are the 3 that, like, I actually sold and got got traction with.
Speaker 1 To the point where when I quit my job, to do freelance iOS design, I had I was making about $3,000 a month on the App Store from those 3 apps.
Speaker 0 Wow. How did how did it feel at the time to be just getting 3 k a
Speaker 1 month from, Trading money while you sleep, basically? Yeah. It's absolutely fantastic. And because it was integrated. Right?
Speaker 1 Like, the apps that I built helped me get more like, demonstrate expertise, which helped me get more clients, which helped me, you know, both pay for all my living expenses and learn new things that went into the apps that I built. And so it was this, like, you know, virtuous cycle very early on where I was like, oh, this is all directly related. And I was just doing what I wanted. And that was also the first time that, I was able to, like, travel and not be tied to an office job.
Speaker 0 So that was
Speaker 1 a really good time.
Speaker 0 Nice. When was this?
Speaker 1 2011. 2011. Okay. Cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1 2011 to 2012.
Speaker 0 Nice. Okay. So you had your so you've got the day job. You're learning skills on the side, building these iOS apps as a side hustle. You then quit the day the day job and you become a freelance iOS Designer.
Speaker 0 Designer. Yep. What happened next? When did the ebooks start to enter the the phrase?
Speaker 1 Yeah. So around the time I'd come across a a guy named Chris Guillebeau from reading, I think you’ll written a guest post on Tim Paris's blog. And it's 1 of those things, I I feel like this doesn't quite happen as much anymore. Maybe it still does. Where you come across someone's work and then you just, like,
Speaker 0 binge fall
Speaker 1 off like Yeah. You just just everything. You're like
Speaker 0 and This was me with your podcast and blog. Oh, nice. Yeah. About, like, 5 years ago.
Speaker 1 I love it. Yeah. Where you just uncover everything. And so, I started following everything Chris did, and he had this oh, I remember, like I read everything and it was like, oh, he has a book coming out. Oh, he has a book tour that he's doing for this book.
Speaker 1 This is the book was called The Art of Nonconformity. And then I was like, wait. He has a book tour? Wait. He's gonna be in Boise on Tuesday.
Speaker 1 Like and so then I went to the the event and met him. And, but he talks a lot about building audience Nathan self publishing. He had 2 ebooks that I really liked that were for free. The first 1 was called A Brief Guide to World Domination. Chris was always so good with naming things.
Speaker 1 You know, I just love the juxtaposition. It's sort of like Mark Manson's. Right? The subtle art of not giving a fuck. You know, you're like, Oh, these don't, the juxtaposition within that title works really well.
Speaker 1 And so Chris back in 2011 or something is doing a brief guide to world domination. And that was really fascinating. And then he did another 1 called 279 days to overnight success. That was about his blogging journey. And basically him going from, starting his audience to earning a full time living, which he defined as $60,000 a year.
Speaker 1 I I think in the ebook, he has got like, by the time he publishes it, he's gotten to, like, $65,000 a year. And he put them into, like, these beautifully designed PDFs and distributed them. So a lot of what you're seeing, you know, in authority and and all of that is inspired by things I learned from Chris and watched him model. And so he was following the self publishing path, build an audience, self publish an ebook. And, so then I thought, okay, maybe I could do that.
Speaker 1 But I didn't think I could sell books on that level, And so I thought, what I actually want is more design clients. And so I'm going to write a book and self publish it on designing iOS apps. And then the goal well, I had 2 goals from it. First, get a whole steady string of clients. Right?
Speaker 1 You wanna hire the guy who wrote the book on on design. And then also if I can make $10,000 in revenue over, like, the lifetime of the book, that would be a success. I didn't wanna do, like, the true or the you’ll, like, oh, this, this book is just a business card. It doesn't have to make any money. Like, I think that's a cop out.
Speaker 1 Right? You should try if you you put time into making something, you should try to distribute it to as many people as possible and and, make some real money with it. So I end up, like, building a landing page, writing tutorials, driving traffic from the tutorials to say, like, hey. I'm writing this book. Sign up to get the wait list.
Speaker 1 Built that email list on Mailchimp. On launch day, I had 798 people, on the wait list, And, I ended up selling $12,000 worth of the book in the 1st day. Wow. And so I got hooked on a couple of things. 1, I realized, like, forget freelance design work.
Speaker 1 Like, the goal was to get clients. I never took on another design client after that. Right? I just I was all in on self publishing. And then the second thing is I just I became obsessed with the world of, like, self publishing.
Speaker 1 And Online, okay. What what can I do with this? And what can I do with marketing? And, like, I was okay at marketing. Like, I knew how to make a landing page.
Speaker 1 I knew how to do some of these things, but then I was like, what can I do? And really it was like email marketing. Online, I thought at the time that, you know, Instagram and Twitter and these other Facebook would be driving most of the the traffic, most of the conversions. There's email that drove all of that. And, actually, in Boise where I live, there's, like, this OG Internet marketer crew that's there.
Speaker 1 Because ClickBank and bodybuilding.com and a bunch of these companies were all founded in Boise. And so you get these people who have been around for a long time. So I had 1 friend, Ron, about this, and I was like, email is selling more copies that, like, the than every other channel combined. And he just looks at me. He's like, yeah.
Speaker 1 We've known that since 2003. Like, what do you want? A gold star? Like, I'm, like, discovering this thing that's blowing my mind. And he's just like, everybody knows that.
Speaker 1 I didn't. And so I kinda dove into my love for self publishing and marketing and then particularly email marketing. And then actually this the day after that, I had been using my habits app, Commit, that I'd made to write a 1,000 words a day. And so it popped up and said, like, are you gonna write a 1000 words today? And I was like, no, I finished the book.
Speaker 1 I published it. And I was like, but it had, like, 84 days in a row of a streak. I'm like, okay. I'll write a I'll write a blog post about how the launch went. So I wrote that up, published it.
Speaker 1 That drove some more sales. It got people paying attention from like a, oh, you know, some random designer can make money selling an ebook. Maybe I could too. And then the next day, the app did what it does and it popped up again and said, are you gonna write a 1000 words today? And I was like, well, what I wrote the book.
Speaker 1 I wrote all the launch emails. I wrote a blog post summarizing how the launch went. Like, what else would I write? And then I thought like, I mean, I know web design and specifically web software design really well because that's what I did for years. So, like, okay, let me write a book about that.
Speaker 1 Let me follow a similar habit or similar pattern. And so then I wrote a book, called Designing Web Applications. It didn't take that long to write because I wrote a 1,000 words a day. And so 90 days later, I published it. The email list was up to a couple thousand people at that point.
Speaker 1 And I'm doing $26,000 in sales of that
Speaker 0 book in the 1st
Speaker 1 in the 1st day.
Speaker 0 Nice.
Speaker 1 50,000 in the 1st month. Something that I just realized, some of my husband's years ago and I didn't have an answer for it. But I just made a little connection of why targeted 1 day sales. Because it's like, okay, why does the 1st day of sales matter? Especially because I have this big spike because I would offer like a 20% off discount if you buy the 1st day and then that would go away.
Speaker 1 And then there'd be sales tapering off. Chris Guillebeau in 1 of his articles talked about how he hit a $100,000 in sales in a single day from a course launch. And I think that always stuck with me of, like, the 1 day thing. And I, like, designed my launches around a single day number. Even though I think that probably the optimal launch would be over the course of a week, you know, or but it's interesting.
Speaker 1 These little, like, examples that stick with you. Yeah. So I, yeah, always optimize for, for a single day number. But the point is that I got on this path of writing and launching ebooks and just felt like I had discovered something absolutely incredible.
Speaker 0 A couple of questions Nathan this. So I I I remember now 1 of 1 of the early blog posts I came across that you wrote well, it wasn't early for you. It was early for me discovering your stuff was when you'd written for, like, an absurd number of days in a row. Yeah. Do you remember how many that was?
Speaker 1 The the chain got up to 6, 600 days in a row.
Speaker 0 You wrote a 1000 words a day for 600 days in a row. Yeah. What the fuck?
Speaker 1 Well, first, a 1,000 words is not that much.
Speaker 0 It's yeah. It's not that much, but it it's it it feels like it feels like a lot.
Speaker 1 I mean, they come out it was Online, on 1 hand so a thousand words a day is probably 2 and a half pages. Yeah. Right? And I remember Tim Ferriss talking about this. Chris Guillebeau talked about it.
Speaker 1 Yeah. The way Chris Guillebeau phrased it, he had this, like, it's really easy to what did he say? It's really easy to write a book every year, write 50 blog posts, and another 50 guest posts. What else? Like a couple long form writing projects, maybe some magazine articles.
Speaker 1 He like just lists out all the stuff. It's like, it's really easy to do that in a single year. And I was like, what? It takes years to write a book. It takes years to do all of this.
Speaker 1 It's Online, if you just write a 1,000 words a day. And we talked about, like, habits compounding over time and, you know, these small things adding up. But 600,000 words is an insane amount of content.
Speaker 0 That's absolutely insane.
Speaker 1 And I mean, that that 1 habit built my entire career. Writing. Because that's a whole lot of email newsletters. That's it turned into 3 self published books because later I wrote authority. Actually at this time period from September.
Speaker 1 So September 2012, I published the App Designer Handbook. December 2012, I published Designing Web Applications and then April 2013. So, like, in this, like, 7 month period, I and I published Authority. And so I wrote 3 books in that period of time because I was just churning out content. Mhmm.
Speaker 1 Grew the email list. Right? That 1 habit just was was absolutely insane for me.
Speaker 0 This episode is sponsored by Kajabi, and they've actually got something really valuable for all of our deep dive listeners. Now, if you haven't heard of Kajabi, it's basically a platform that helps creators diversify their revenue with courses and membership sites and communities and podcasts and coaching you’ll. So it's 1 of the best places for creators and entrepreneurs to build a sustainable business. We started using Kajabi earlier this year. And as soon as we started using it, we were like, oh my God, why haven't we been using this product for the last 3 years?
Speaker 0 It's got everything you'd possibly need for running an online course or hosting an online community or building an online coaching business. And it essentially makes it really easy to run your entire online business from payments to marketing tools to analytics. Kajabi has everything that we creators need all in 1 place. And actually, you don't necessarily need a huge audience to generate a sustainable income. A creator on Kajabi can, for example, make $100,000 by converting just 350 customers a year depending on your price points.
Speaker 0 And in fact, there are creators on the platform that are making 1,000,000 of dollars every year with fewer than a 100,000 followers across the social media platforms. We've been using Kajabi to host all of our online courses since the start of 2023 from our $1 part time YouTuber foundations to help people start off on their YouTube journey, all the way up to a $5,000 package for the part time YouTuber accelerator, which gives you access to me and my team. And Kajabi does not take any cut of what you earn. Creators keep and own everything. The way Kajabi makes money is through the monthly subscription fee, and even though we generate like literally 1,000,000 of dollars every year from Kajabi, we're still only paying them a couple of $100 a year.
Speaker 0 And actually in their lifetime, Kajabi have paid out over $6,000,000,000 to creators, that's 1,000,000,000 with a B, and over a 1000 creators have become millionaires through products on the platform. Now, back in May 2023, I did a keynote at a Kajabi in real Online, Kajabi You’ll event in Austin, Texas. And in that keynote, I talked about the exact steps that I you’ll to grow my business from 0 to over 2 and a half $1,000,000 per year from course revenue alone. Now people paid for the pretty expensive tickets to watch this keynote at the Kajabi Hero Online event. But as an exclusive deal for deep dive listeners, Kajabi very kindly offered to provide the recording of that keynote completely for free to anyone who listens to this podcast.
Speaker 0 So if you're interested in getting completely free access to that keynote, just head over to kajabi.comforward/ali, that's kajabi.comforward/ali. And that'll be linked in the show notes in the video description as well. You just enter your email address and then you’ll the recording of that keynote completely for free, whether or not you ever become a Kajabi customer. So thank you so much to Kajabi for sponsoring this episode. What did it look like?
Speaker 0 Like, practically speaking. Okay. So I'll give you some context. Our mutual friend, Sean McCabe
Speaker 1 Mhmm.
Speaker 0 Had a course somewhere about writing in Ulysses. Yeah. The writing app. And I watched that course many years ago, and I was like, I wanna write 1,000 words a day. This was when I discovered your stuff.
Speaker 0 I did it for, like, 3 days and then I I dropped off. And, like, 2 months ago, I rediscovered Ulysses on my iPad. And I set the the target. Like, I I put all of the folders into 1 folder so I could track that folder, and I set a target of a 1000 words a day. And when I do write and I'm typing away, I find myself effortlessly hitting a 1,000 because it's actually not that many words.
Speaker 0 I'm gonna write my newsletter. I'm like, oh, shit. This was 2,000 words. Better cut some of it down. And I'm curious, what did for you, what did this process of a 1000 words a day look like?
Speaker 0 What what app were you using? Where were you writing? How did you figure out what you were gonna write about? Like, where did the inspiration each day come from? How did that work?
Speaker 1 Well, it was weirdly like, the requirement was that it had the app I wrote in had to have really good word tracking because that was the Yep. Your word count. And so I used Scrivener because that was the app at the time that was the best at having, like, individual, pages almost Yeah. But then would be summarized well, like, could be compiled total. And so Scrivener let you set a goal, like, hey.
Speaker 1 I want this book to be 35,000 words. And it would tell you both your daily progress and your total progress against that across all of the, like, pages down download sides. You’ll could organize it and categorize the whole thing. So I wrote in Scrivener. I would if I when I was writing a book, I'd write an outline for it.
Speaker 1 And then I would take the outline and make folders and empty pages for each title within it. And I would put an asterisk at the beginning of the title if I like hadn't written anything meaningful for it. So I would kind of just skip around and be like, oh, click on this. I don't have anything to say about that today. Click on this.
Speaker 1 Oh, here's a few notes that I would add to it. And, like, oh, there was that article. Right? So I'm just kinda compiling things. And then I find 1.
Speaker 1 I was like, oh, I have something to say on this. And I would, like, click in and and write a whole bunch, as much as I could on that 1 topic and then, keep going from there. And so that it was kind of sporadic in that sense. Yeah. But, you know, it eventually built out a full book.
Speaker 1 And then I have another section for my marketing copy. Right? Like another folder at the very end. Because I knew I had to write launch emails and landing pages and all of that. I'm like, that absolutely counts towards my 1,000 words for the day.
Speaker 1 Everything counts. And then even be some days, okay, I don't like editing. Yeah. And so I would count. And I was like, okay, this is an editing hour.
Speaker 1 And that to me was equivalent to a 1000 words, you know? So I'm like, I'm going to force myself to edit and chop down and all of that. And I'm going to get credit for my days worth of writing. The only thing that I would do is try to make it easy just in Apple notes to, like, throw ideas of like, oh, yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1 This is what I should write about later. And it's a classic writing, technique, but to end oh, we've talked about this. Some of those end in those sentence.
Speaker 0 It was some of the famous. Yeah. I've cited them in my but I can't remember who it was. Yeah. It wasn't like Hemingway or something.
Speaker 0 It was like, is he something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 Twain, Hemingway, or
Speaker 0 Yeah.
Speaker 1 Einstein or Lincoln or whoever it was. No. Just kidding.
Speaker 0 Yeah. Gandhi.
Speaker 1 No. And so I would just do all of those, classic things. And you’ll, when I would sit down and have nothing Nathan to write about, like, if you just force yourself to write for, like and you get through that first 10 minutes, then it's totally fine. The other 1 is Seth Godin has a quote where basically about writing you should write like you talk. Yep.
Speaker 1 Because no 1 you know, you don't have talker's block. Right? That you know, if you're just trying to talk to yourself. And so using now transcription stuff is really good. And so, like, just talk on the topic.
Speaker 1 I'll do that when I'm in the car. I'll just start a voice memo and then be like, okay. What do I have to say about audience? But, you know, Online, whatever t-shirt is. And then I'm like, okay.
Speaker 1 And then what about this? And here's the story. And it's all, like, nonsense, but then you transcribe it and you go through it. And you're like, okay. That's a whole thing to write on.
Speaker 1 So is this. And, and then that, you know, you rewrite it and you get the stories and the structure and all of that, but it's it's pretty straightforward. You just have to force yourself to do it. But the the habit compounds in a ridiculous way.
Speaker 0 This is good shit. I'm I'm feeling so inspired right now. Because I I feel like if I if I could I if I actually sat down and wrote a 1,000 words per day, that would be the single thing that would drive me most towards, like, literally every single goal that I'm working on. Right. And even goals that I don't even know I have right now because they're all around sharing my thoughts, content creation, Writing, making videos.
Speaker 0 When getting clear on I'm writing.
Speaker 1 All of these all of these ideas. Yeah. Writing? Something we talked about these flagship essays that I like to work on. I have 3, Loders of Wealth Creation, $1,000,000,000 creator, and then the creator flywheels.
Speaker 1 These are all on things that I generally know to be true or, like, I'm, like, yeah, this is how wealth is built, but I can't quite explain it. And so through writing, I get obsessive about how do you explain this? Why? Why does this work in a certain way? You know?
Speaker 1 And then it turns into this thing to get to where I understand the concepts well enough that I can truly teach it. And that's what I what I love with writing is finding all the things that you intuitively know to be true or observe in the world. And then someone's like, okay. Why is that? And you're like, it it just is.
Speaker 1 You know? And and that really takes you into, like, writing forces you to unpack that. And then 1 of my mantras in life is teach you everything you know because that turns into or we have this idea that only experts can teach. And the the main principle behind my book Authority is that we don't, people don't teach because they're experts. We perceive them as experts because they teach.
Speaker 1 Right? It's chicken and egg and we have it backwards. And so in that, if you step into a world where you're like, okay, I'm just going to teach what I learned today, then you build the habit and you write it download someone's like, okay, I'm, you know, following this web designer who is brand new, but they're on a journey to get a job at, you know, a web design agency. And they're just every day they're sharing and teaching what they learned Nathan they're doing it from a beginner's mindset. And often you’ll learn way more from that person.
Speaker 1 If you're following Online 2 steps behind them, then following the super advanced expert who forgot how, like, who cannot relate in any way to the problems that an absolute beginner is facing. I thought about that when learning when to code in Ruby, which is what ConvertKit is written in. I really struggled to install Ruby, but all the tutorials were like, why would you you know, they all assumed that that was done. Right? Then I came across someone who was a beginner who had said, like, okay.
Speaker 1 I just got this done. Here are the all the roadblocks I thought. Not Online the ideal path, but this is what I actually ran into and how I solved it. And then I was learning from someone who was, like, 2 steps ahead of me. Mhmm.
Speaker 1 And they actually gave me the answers, and I followed them, their content for a long time. So, anyway, writing, teaching, it all comes back to that.
Speaker 0 That's all the same stuff. Yeah. Teach everything you know. The the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon was a big that was the thing that made me start my first blog in, like, 2016. Yeah.
Speaker 0 Because I've been toying with the idea of, like, I really wanna have a personal blog, but I was like, blocked by, oh, I'm I don't know anything. Why would anyone follow me, etcetera, etcetera. Show you’ll work was just like, share what you're working on. Yeah. And at the time, I'd I'd been 4 years into building this medical school admissions company and website design.
Speaker 0 And I was like, I mean, I have learned some stuff along the way about, like, how I started the business and all this stuff. It's like, great. I'm gonna do blog post about Nathan. And that was the precursor to the YouTube channel that happened a year later. So I'm all about teach Writing.
Speaker 0 You know?
Speaker 1 I love it. Yeah. My I used to have 3 mantras on my wall. And by the way, I love looking at your books because you have show your work in in the Austin Kleon section of of your bookshelf. But I I had these 3 posters on my wall in, like, my first real home office.
Speaker 1 And there were the 3 mantras of create every day, teach everything you know, and work in public. And that was, like, my equivalent of of show your work. And then the posters, I should bring them back. It's been years since, I've done it. But up in the like, kinda small up in the corner, they say the secret to growing your audience is to and then the big thing is work in public.
Speaker 1 Create every day. Teach everything you know.
Speaker 0 What do you what do you mean by work in public?
Speaker 1 Well, it's the same idea of of showing your work. Right? Like, what is the thing that you learned today that you could share with other people? Or so many people say like, okay. I I created my I wrote my ebook.
Speaker 1 Right? I published and launched it. And someone's like, oh, sweet. I bought the ebook from you. I bought, I'm learning app design from you’ll.
Speaker 1 All of that. That's super useful. But most people don't take the next step and write the blog post about, like, here's how I did the launch, here's how much money it made, and everything else, which is actually, like, the least difficult part. You know, everything else doing the thing was way harder than explaining how you did the thing and how it went. And so working public in that case was public the blog post I published the day after I wrote the App Store Handbook that said, like, okay.
Speaker 1 I made, you know, 12 grand. Here's the launch sequence. Here's what drove sales. Some of the there was some overlap. Right?
Speaker 1 Some people who I wrote the some people who were designers wanting to learn for the app.
Speaker 0 Mhmm.
Speaker 1 Or some people who wanted to learn app design were the same people who wanted to read, like, about how the launch went. There was definitely overlap. Not, not a 100% overlap, but there's some, but then it brought in other people who wanted to learn about self publishing who were like, oh, this is possible. Oh, and then I know someone who wants App Design. Right?
Speaker 1 And so it was marketing in a sense, even though it wasn't, like, architected from the beginning to be great marketing. But I think that process all the way along of, teach everything, you’ll know, work in public, those are the things that make a big difference. When I started ConvertKit, I really embodied that work in public idea. When I said, hey. I'm gonna build a software company.
Speaker 1 I'm gonna do it, you’ll know, only with $5,000 of my money. It's going to be sold or, like, funded by customers. And my goal is to get to 5,000 a month in recurring revenue within 6 months. And I called that the web app challenge, and I blogged every week about here's how I chose a name. Here's how I hired a developer.
Speaker 1 Here's the problem that I'm facing. Okay. Presales are ready to go. Who wants to buy? You know, like, and I shared all of that.
Speaker 1 And I think it made a huge difference because people were like, oh, here's someone going on a journey that I wanna follow. Writing? Unfolding in real time. So not only do I get more attention, but I also got a lot of very, like, talented experienced founders saying like, hey. If you ever need help with anything, like, give me a call.
Speaker 1 So, Amy Hoye did a deep dive with me on copywriting for the landing page, which I then turned into a blog post. Right? It's like, here's what I wrote. Here's how Amy and I did all. I think I even included the recording of the Skype call, that we had done.
Speaker 1 And, like, here's how we came to the landing page and, like, all these concepts and and everything. And I was just sharing what I learned every week, and sharing that journey. And that has been core to everything in ConvertKit. Like, even today, we have a real time dashboard that shares all the revenue metrics for ConvertKit, that anyone can look at. Right?
Speaker 1 But that's working in public.
Speaker 0 1 thing that I was thinking about as you were saying this. I'm Online, writing is the key. If I could do this 1,000 words a day, that would you know, I'm I'm all about teaching everything I know and creating every day and working public. All that all that stuff is amazing. Fully, fully vibe with that.
Speaker 0 But whenever I sit down to write so so so for example, we did our book launch, and there's a lot that I have in my head that I'd love to share about, Online, how things went and how we're tracking metrics and all those all those kind of stuff. But then I'm thinking, it's it's so niche. It's like I could be making a video called 10 productivity tips instead, which would get Online a zillion more views Nathan Online a blog post that's going deep on this thing that I've learned. But I would love to share, but it's just Online, if I'm gonna spend time on, quote, content creation, I should spend that time on content creation that benefits the YouTube channel, which is massively leveraged Writing here to a blog post. Any any thoughts on this?
Speaker 1 Well, so I've heard Nick Huber talk about the way he thinks about things on Twitter, at different stages of the funnel. Right? So his business is right now has a whole bunch of businesses all around real estate. Yeah. Writing?
Speaker 1 And self storage and all that. But what he was primarily thinking about is there's some tweets that are more general. He takes like a antagonistic approach to it. Right? He's, trying to get some level of outrage or agreement to that sort of thing.
Speaker 1 But so he'll have these top of funnel suites that are about life and work and family and and these other things that will really spread. And then further down, you know, the middle of the funnel, he's thinking about, okay. What can I share about business? You know, lessons learned that are broadly applicable, but it's people who care, from here. And then the bottom of the funnel, he'll share, like, these.
Speaker 1 I I've learned a lot about, like, real estate tax depreciation and all of this stuff from these really in-depth detailed threads that get read by the right people. Right? He's putting out content that I mean, I've been running a business for a decade, and, I didn't know a bunch of these things. And so he's going way down the funnel and writing these very niche things. And he's not worried about that attracting at the top of the funnel.
Speaker 1 And so he's he's going through and saying, you’ll, what do I do at each stage of the funnel? And because the funnel ultimately for him at the time that he was saying this was, like Writing investors, limited partners for his real estate investing fund. Now he has a whole bunch of other businesses as well. But getting people who know that he knows this stuff inside and out, they wanna hire 1 of his companies to help with 1 of these services. Like, that is insanely valuable.
Speaker 1 But it takes these people knowing that he exists, and so that's the approach that he takes. Sponsored things this should get millions of you’ll, this should get tens of thousands of views, And then this niche content, if it gets a 1,000 views from the right people, that's insanely valuable. That's 1 way to think about it. The other way is I gotta write a 1,000 words today. What is interesting to me to write down?
Speaker 1 Like, what would be fun If I'm then weirdly obsessive about, like, a book launch and how it all went, great. Writing about that. We're just trying to check the box that we did the writing. The writing doesn't have to be the highest quality or the most valuable. Because it's also a little bit arrogant to know that you’ll to think that you're going to create what you create today is the best possible content that you could create.
Speaker 1 We're not trying to create the best content. We're just trying to create consistently. And then we'll let, like, the future figure out what is actually worth paying attention to. And especially as things are going to be pieced together from 10 different sources and you never know what your team's going to be like. Oh, this Trading, it's going to be super valuable.
Speaker 1 Or say book number 2 comes out. Alright? And you're like, shoot. What? What does make a good book launch?
Speaker 1 I don't know. I wish I'd written that down when I was right in the middle of it. We run team retreats at ConvertKit, and we've run, oh, 10 of them now, something like that, twice a year, every year. And the thing that drives me crazy is when I make a a small mistake on a team retreat of something that I got right in a previous retreat. It could be a transition, it could be how we set up, like, for an all team meeting, some of those.
Speaker 1 So I have a giant SOP and playbook for what makes a great team retreat. That does 2 things for me. I don't repeat the same mistakes. And then 2, when I bring someone else in and they're like, how do we run team retreats? I'm like, there you go.
Speaker 1 Right? So if you launch or if you write this book launch article, yeah, I'm going to read it and absolutely love it. And there's going to be, you know, business audience nerds on our level who are like, thank you for writing this. I learned so much. I, you know, I'm plucking this other thing.
Speaker 1 And a bunch of people just won't care. But then even think book number 2, team member comes along and you're like, here's how we do book launches. And you're not sitting down and explaining it to them for an hour because you disconnected your knowledge from your time. And so I think it's hugely valuable to write. And, when you write a 1,000 words a day, you're you're producing so much content that great.
Speaker 1 Write the 10 productivity apps, new video script tomorrow.
Speaker 0 That's a great point. I love I love both of those approaches. What is interesting to me about this? I think yeah. 1 thing I've been thinking about a lot is I'm sure you have the problem as well.
Speaker 0 Feeling feeling overscheduled. Like, there's always just random shit in my calendar where I'm Online, the key thing that I actually care about is to be able to learn and synthesize and share Mhmm. And write and make videos because that's, like, my jam. And I'm finding myself doing all this other stuff that does not involve doing those things. And I've realized recently, like, even even just, like, flying somewhere to give a talk is taking time away from like, it's not really the core thing I care about.
Speaker 0 The core thing I I care about is to be able to write stuff and put it put out there on the Internet. And so because my writing time is so squeezed, I'm I'm I'm now thinking ROI for every single thing that I I write. And that takes me into this territory of, like, well, I could write about topics a to zed that I'm interested in. But, actually, instead, I'll write about topic y that I don't really care about, but I know it's gonna get YouTube views because I only have 20 minutes today to do any sort of writing at all. And the views are what drives the business and the business supports the team salary.
Speaker 0 And it just becomes this thing where I've created a prison for myself Right. Through over scheduling in the calendar for shit that I don't actually fundamentally care about That stops me from doing the thing I actually care about, then I would I would love to do. And then the commercial incentives are all, like, fucking all this up as well. Any thoughts? How do I Yeah.
Speaker 0 Yeah. What was
Speaker 1 on my mind as you’ll saying that is some of my favorite things that I've written have been when I don't fully understand it or don't quite know how to articulate it yet. And I've pursued input from other people. Writing? Like the ladders of wealth creation article, has a lot of input from James Clear on it because it was like, here's this thing that I'm trying to articulate. And we were at a friend's, bachelor party for for a weekend.
Speaker 1 You know, there's a whole bunch of business friends. And so we're all like nerding out on the essays that we're writing and that kind of thing. Different vibe than maybe a traditional bachelor party.
Speaker 0 I was gonna say it sounds like a great part of bachelor party.
Speaker 1 Yeah. That that is exactly the kind of bachelor party that I'm into. But we're talking about these things, and he would he's just asking really good questions and filling in examples. And he's like, well, why is that? Why?
Speaker 1 Like, how else how could we visually describe that? And that pursuit of an idea with someone else, I think is really interesting. So as you're telling me like, oh, I'm going off to like deliver this talk and it's not furthering my like writing and, and ideas and learning goals, my first thought is, well, who else is going to be there? Who would you love to not just catch up over coffee, but like say, Hey, here's, you know, I'm nerding out on flywheels for creators. Like you wanna grab coffee and talk about that for an hour.
Speaker 1 Right? Because I'm trying to like, this essay doesn't quite work and that kind of thing is really really interesting. So I would try to combine that. And then I think broadly the point that you're making of, like, what is the ultimate engine that drives your business? And how do you spend your time there?
Speaker 1 And you're saying, like, writing an idea generation is the ultimate thing. Yeah. And so make sure that that is the the core thing on your calendar.
Speaker 0 Yeah.
Speaker 1 Because ultimately, if you stop making YouTube videos, if you stop sharing ideas with your newsletter
Speaker 0 Yeah. The rest of the business stops. Writing else dies. Yeah.
Speaker 1 Yeah. It it to be clear, it has so much momentum that it will
Speaker 0 It'll take a while for it to die, but it'll still die. But it will be. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 We should
Speaker 0 keep paying our ConvertKit monthly. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1 It's a point of like, wait, this is making as much money as it is.
Speaker 0 Every time we look at a software bill, I'm just like, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like, 40% of it is ConvertKit. Online, fair enough.
Speaker 0 We make way more money from ConvertKit than we spend. So it's yep. It's totally fair. Let's go and think about it. It just it just comes down to a 1,000 words a day.
Speaker 0 A 1,000 words a day. A 1,000 words a day would literally change my life.
Speaker 1 Yeah. It's crazy.
Speaker 0 A 1,000 words a day would change the life of anyone listening to this. If they've gone an hour and 18 minutes into this podcast, if you actually listen to this, you actually write a 1000 words per day. It was just damn.
Speaker 1 You know, so even saying that. Right? I did it for 600 days in a row. I actually ended up getting shingles after that. And so that's sometimes people ask, like, well, why aren't you at, like, 1200 days in a row now?
Speaker 1 It's like, well, I ended up getting really sick and took me, like, 6 months to recover and all that. But I guess the way to put it is it is simple but not easy. And so, yes, writing a 1000 words a day will absolutely change your Online, and that is a very simple thing. But it is not easy to do. And you have to design your day and your week around that habit.
Speaker 1 And that has to become 1 of the non negotiables. And that's something that honestly I've struggled with, right? As I go back and forth between, you know, building a team and scaling and all of that. I know that all of my goals would be furthered by writing a 1,000 words a day. And I still write fairly sporadically right now.
Speaker 1 Like, I haven't rebuilt that. And I think it's because we say things to ourselves, like, this should be easy. And because we're conflating simple and easy. It is very simple, and it is not at all easy. And so if you get clear with yourself that, like, okay.
Speaker 1 I am setting out to do something that is in fact very difficult, and I have to design my day around and my week around making sure that this can happen, and this has to become my number 1 priority in my business, then at that point, you can actually make it happen. But if you're like, oh, this this will be really easy. I'll just knock it out and then move on. Then you'll get to the point where you can't build up any meaningful streak and you won't get the results from that.
Speaker 0 Any other tips? Any mistakes you made along the 600 day thing that, you know, I I feel like I feel like I wanna commit to that. Okay. I'm I'm I'm I'm going to commit to this.
Speaker 1 Okay.
Speaker 0 I was writing a 1,000 words a day, and I wanna get ahead of any kind of what are some some obstacles I might run into? And also Writing some weekends as well and Yeah.
Speaker 1 I did it 7 days a week. Okay. Right. Like, if it's if it's that important to you. Yeah.
Speaker 1 The ideas flow 7 days a week. Why not?
Speaker 0 Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1 The first thing I would say is when you run out of ideas, a lot of people worry that they're going to run out of ideas. And so they say, like, oh, I might as well not start. Generally, what I find is the more that you write, the more that you have to say. Because you find these threads and you’ll, unravel them. The next thing is if you even with that, if you're still running out of ideas, think about things that think about the content that you're gonna consume that's going to help you’ll, find new ideas.
Speaker 1 So, like, if you get out of your usual podcasts Yep. And start to listen to other things, right, or the business biographies or and you have these prompts. Right? You're like, okay. What would, you know, if you're reading like Johnny Rockefeller's biography, you're like, what would Rockefeller do if he ran ConvertKit?
Speaker 1 You know? And you're like, oh, interesting. Well, he'd probably have all these backdoor deals and he's probably acquiring other companies. You you’ll, like, oh, blah blah. Somehow he creates a monopoly and I I don't know how it works, but, you know, it's a fun exercise.
Speaker 1 As you can have these prompts dive into. But, like, I, listen to Ryan Holiday on Jocko Willink's podcast. I don't normally listen to Jocko's podcast, but I love Ryan's work, and so I was like, great. Listen to this, and it was a really interesting take. But Ryan said this thing about, he was talking about how Tim Ferriss, in the early days of, like, Audible really getting traction, started buying up the the audio rights to a bunch of books.
Speaker 1 Because you had this weird moment in time where Audible was getting traction and publishers did not value audio rights. So Josh Kaufman, who wrote the personal MBA, sold the publishing rights to his book as you normally do. The publisher didn't want the audio rights, so then they sold it to somebody else. And then it kind of bounced around, and then they were going like, he he was like, I don't like this. And so he asked, can I buy them back?
Speaker 1 And so for, like, $10,000 or something, he bought back the audio Writing, the personal MBA, published it himself through Audible. Audible had this crazy distribution thing where, like, the more copies you sold, the higher percentage you got of every copy sold. And it ended up it got to the point that at 1 point, Josh was making, like, 50 to $60,000 a month, off of exclusively the audio version of the personal MBA. Nice. Tim Ferris understood this and started going around buying the audio rights to any book where the audio rights weren't valued.
Speaker 1 So, you have the obstacles away on your shelf. Tim Ferris owns the audio rights Oh,
Speaker 0 does he?
Speaker 1 Oh, I don't know. To the obstacles away. And he did this for a whole bunch of books.
Speaker 0 Yeah. And for, like, the Seneca letters,
Speaker 1 1 of the Stoeck letters. Letter. Yeah. That's
Speaker 0 the 1. Yeah.
Speaker 1 Yeah. So he he's done it for really a lot because there's this moment in time where all your rights were radically undervalued for, what they got. And so it made me think, like, listening to that episode. 1, I had been around, like, I knew Tim and I knew Ryan back then, and so I remember talking to like, I remember hearing that and seeing it all unfold. But what it made me think of is the sprays of Online, who's playing chess when other people are playing checkers.
Speaker 1 And now that's turned into a prompt for me of like, okay, where, where in my business am I playing checkers when I should be playing chess? And then what other like stories can I share on my podcast or, or other things where, someone is operating at that level? And like, I wouldn't like, that is now a a consistent thing in my journal, that phrase. What would it look like to play chess here? You know, who's playing chess?
Speaker 1 None of those are playing checkers. And I only got that because I listen to a podcast outside of my normal, like my normal flow. So when you're running out of ideas, I guess 2 things on that. When you're running out of ideas of what to write about, switch up where you're consuming information. And then the second thing is try to have these consistent prompts that you come back to that lead you to interesting places.
Speaker 1 And so 2 of mine are, what would this person do if, like, tackle this problem? And then another is, you know, what would it look like to put chess rather than checkers? And if you end up with a stable of, like, 15 or 20 of those, then you can go, like, problem or story and then prompt, and that will, result in some interesting thoughts. Some of which hopefully will be worth publishing.
Speaker 0 So you write a 1,000 words a day, but presumably you’ll don't publish a 1,000 words. But then what does the yeah. What does the publishing segment look like?
Speaker 1 I think I mean, it's entirely, up to you. You know, I would just pick something and stick with it. I think publishing a newsletter once a week and then or an essay. Sometimes newsletters are are a little too low quality, and I'd rather people focus on, like, flagship content. I struggle with that back and forth of, like, staying consistent versus being really, really high quality.
Speaker 1 I would just say, pick a frequency and stick with it. And it has to be, you want it to be a point where you're not too frequent so that you can't hit your quality bar. Yeah. Writing? Some people are like, I'm gonna write every single day.
Speaker 1 And then I'm like, well, you're not Seth Godin. You know, you don't have that, like, level of input of ideas and and all that. So I think once a week is a good consistent cadence that forces you to stay on topic and explore. Mhmm. But then you need something that you're really pursuing.
Speaker 1 Right? Like, some thread that you're trying to pull on and unwind or like a book that you're Writing or like a meaningful project. Otherwise, it it it'll fizzle out.
Speaker 0 So I've got about 4 different book ideas that I want to Yeah. Sort of pursue. Me too. And I love the idea of of speaking to Moe Gaudot about this, who wrote You’ll For Happy, and he he has about 6 different book ideas. And he says each day he does 2,000 words a day.
Speaker 0 He said, I just pick whichever 1 takes my fancy, and I just taper away at it. Do you do something similar, or are you Online or would you recommend that, or do you think it's it's helpful to have just 1 thing that you're working towards?
Speaker 1 I think it's no matter what you do, it's important to have a way to capture the ideas Yeah. That are sparked. Because sometimes like, I have 4 different book ideas, I think, And they sort of overlap. Like, is it this book? Is it that book?
Speaker 1 And, you know, what order should they be published in? And so the the biggest thing is get the ideas down on paper. And then, you know, either edit it yourself or hire an editor. Someone else will come along and be like, oh, no. No.
Speaker 1 No. This story is actually the thing that we're going to use here. We're gonna flip the whole thing around. That's in the, like, the order of the Ladder's wealth creation article is very different after James got his hands on it. It was like, no.
Speaker 1 No. No. The, like, read the whole thing, you know, but, like, let's, let's represent it like this. So I would be in the camp of just Writing if that's what works for you’ll. Unless you're so scattered that it's not working for you and then, like, force yourself to to stay consistent.
Speaker 1 But otherwise, like, as you're writing 1 thing, make sure that, like, the documents and the structure for the other thing exists. So you can be like, oh, this does belong over here, and you have a place to put it. And so it's not not lost or wasted.
Speaker 0 Sick. This is so good. Okay. I'm gonna commit to this. Thousand words per day.
Speaker 0 That's that's the thing. That is the 1.
Speaker 1 0, 1 of the you are asking for tips. 1 other thing is there are days that you can't, for whatever reason, or shouldn't write a 1,000 words. Right? Where, you know, it's like, okay, I'm going to go I don't know. Like, with my, partner, I'm off to go do this thing.
Speaker 1 I'm gonna be entirely focused on time with them or whatever. And some people are like, what do you do? It's like, oh, just write more on the bookends. You know, build up and be like, hey, you know, for this holiday weekend, I'm not going to write. And so I guess for the Trading week, I need to write 1500 words a day to get ahead.
Speaker 1 Nice. And and plan ahead like that. And then also look at your calendar and say like, oh, it's going to be really hard to hit, to like to write on these days because of whatever is happening. And so I'm gonna make a plan for it right now. Ultimately, like, you know, I'm gonna get up earlier that day.
Speaker 1 I'm going to, write in advance, you know, any of those things. Yeah. And there were days that I, like, forgot to write. And instead of being like, oh, I broke the chain and all of that and getting upset about it, I would just write double the next day. Yeah.
Speaker 1 So, like, the the goal is 600,000 words in 600 days, not, you know
Speaker 0 Nathan literally a 1000 words a day. Yeah. Okay. That's nice. Yeah.
Speaker 0 Because it gives you the flexibility while also being able to maintain the chain as it were.
Speaker 1 It also helps you think of it like a job, where it's not day by day. It's like the the big picture. You know, if it was like, hey, I have to keep this factory moving all the time, like, with this level of output, you know, but we wanna take this week vacation. No problem. Just increase the output by 50% for the Trading week or 2 weeks.
Speaker 1 Yeah. And you're good to go.
Speaker 0 Easy.
Speaker 1 It's okay. Simple. Not easy.
Speaker 0 Simple. Not easy. Exactly. Yeah. Simple.
Speaker 0 Not easy. What you what are your thoughts on a personal blog broadly? And I asked because so I like your website. I like Nathan. It's it feels personal.
Speaker 0 It's good vibes. I'm unsure what to do with mine. My website, aliefdahl.com. It started off as a bit of a personal blog. It's now morphed into, like, well, this is good lead gen for the business, and so we should get ghostwriters to Writing shit ton of articles about how to grow on YouTube because then that links to YouTube, of course.
Speaker 0 But then it sort of loses the charm of, like, a personal blog, and I like the personal blog from an artistic sense, even though it may not make sense may make less sense from a commercial sense.
Speaker 1 Right. I
Speaker 0 wonder what it yeah. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Speaker 1 I don't have that exact problem because I have ConvertKit and Nathan fairly separate. Yeah. You’ll know, they
Speaker 0 they ConvertKit is more of a publication. Like, you’ll
Speaker 1 And it's approved that other people are writing, you know, the vast majority of that content. Now if you're trying to split it and it's like, okay. You know, 1 1 thing would be like, oh, you’ll spin out another site. It's like, well, but then I'm gonna have to build domain authority for that new site. And you're like, yep.
Speaker 1 Don't do that. From an SEO perspective, I would think of it of it like maybe as these like flagship guides Yeah. That are really going deep on and going to rank very, very well for, you know, how to grow a YouTube channel. These these high intent search terms that are gonna be worth a lot of money to you. Yes.
Speaker 1 Right? This will turn into a $500 course purchase. This will turn into you know, someone's trying to Trading to do that. And I'd build those funnels really carefully. And then, like, I wouldn't do the ghost Writing 1 off random things to rank because I think Google rewards the flagship articles much more.
Speaker 0 Yeah.
Speaker 1 Get tons of ghost Writing help on those. Right? Like, make them amazing. Yeah. It should be the brain dump of your ideas, and then have a great editor, like, really go through it.
Speaker 1 So this is something that you're really, you know, really proud of and can link to and keep updated for years. Yeah. But I would keep the personal stuff going. I I think that's something that's missing from the Internet right now is like the classic, this is what I'm thinking about, and I'm just following that. I wish I did it more.
Speaker 1 I do a decent amount in my newsletter. But, yeah. Like what's something that I'm trying to do is like scale it back. Just just like 1 notch on the level of polish so that not everything has to be a fantastic essay or something else. Online, I want that more raw feeling and less marketed.
Speaker 1 But that's just because that's what I want to exist on on the Internet.
Speaker 0 Yeah. Same. Like, I I really like discovering a personal blog.
Speaker 1 Mhmm.
Speaker 0 And it's so nice. Yeah. 1 thing 1 thing I I Online less about yours is the fact that your podcast blog posts.
Speaker 1 Me too. It drives me crazy. And I'm
Speaker 0 just like, oh, I I just wanna read the Nathan Barry, like, archives. I don't want a 078 interview with Sahil Bloom. It's like Yeah. I would love for that to be separate.
Speaker 1 There's a bunch of those things. Yeah. I'm like,
Speaker 0 And I have the same issue with mine. It's like latest articles. It's like they're all podcast episodes. I'm like, oh, that's it's not it's not the it's not the vibe.
Speaker 1 Yeah. And it it's like what I want, which, of course, I have people on the team so I could I just pay to do actually, it's kind of a weird thing. I have a lot of people on the ConvertKit team, and I don't really have people on the Nathan. On team Nathan. And so you end up with this Online, oh, you know, they may like, it's the WordPress install is in, like, the ConvertKit WP Online server, and so they make sure it's updated and all that.
Speaker 1 But it's like Yep. They have other things. But, yeah, I want the site to, like, be like, these are the flagship essays. These are the recent random musings. You know.
Speaker 1 I want it to be the kind of site that it's easy to get lost in. Mhmm. Of where you're just Online go down the rabbit hole and binge it all. And, but yeah, it's I would definitely what I want more people to write about is what they're most interested in. And then like the behind the scenes, the content, Online I can get the 10 productivity app tips, a handful of different places.
Speaker 1 Yeah. But, like, I wanna read the, like, obsessive book launch things Online, here's how like, I loved, Tiago Forte's content about how he built out his Yeah. Garage studio, you know. And it's not Online, in theory, this is how you should do it. It's like, this is what I actually did.
Speaker 1 And so I just love that. Like the the show you’ll work kind of things. Because I wanna follow I wanna follow the person more than I wanna follow the advice.
Speaker 0 Yeah. Yeah. I think 1 of the 1 of the issues I think I think maybe this sort of the the Nick You’ll funnel that you you mentioned solve this. But 1 of the issues is when and I I guess every media outlet has this issue where it is the the Buzzfeedy 10 productivity apps Yep. Stuff that will get the clicks and get the views from a mainstream audience.
Speaker 0 Mhmm. Even though that's the stuff that's just, like, objectively less interesting. Yeah. And the more interesting stuff, it does not get those views, but maybe and I like I like the way you phrased it, sort of views from, I guess, quote, the right people. Mhmm.
Speaker 0 If you're trying to attract an audience of like, if I want people like you to read my blog, someone like you is not gonna read my article about 10 productivity hacks. It's like, why would you? But if I said, if it was a an in-depth look at how my book launch Nathan, like, the numbers behind it and the screenshots and how we track things and fathom and then the graphs and t-shirt, like, you would read that. And you're the sort of person that I would like to be part of my newsletter. Because, like, do you have Nathan Barry?
Speaker 0 It's like yeah. It's like the the the people who are executing at a high level will read niche stuff, not whereas the there's there's there's just a sort of separation, like, the mainstream world. And it sounds weird to kind of say this because I don't want I don't want people listening to this to think that I'm ungrateful for the audience audience and stuff. But it's just like someone like you or someone like Tim Ferriss would read a very different blog post, right, compared to a random person in the audience who doesn't have
Speaker 1 their own business, for example. When the great thing is that you can segment audiences. And I think that people don't do that enough. Right? I've written a lot about how to earn a full time living as a content creator.
Speaker 1 That's a topic I'm very passionate about. At some point, I feel like I've written enough about that. And there's enough written on the Internet, you’ll know, by the, like, 0 to 6,000 or 0 to a 100,000. The gap that I felt like was there in the market is like, okay, you've done that. You now have, if you understood audience building and leverage and marketing and everything else enough to get to a 100,000 a year in revenue, I bet with the right steps, you get to 500,000 a year.
Speaker 1 And what I wanted to write about is, okay, what happens now? You're not making $500,000 a year, more than you ever thought possible, more than anyone else in your family, more than, you know, all of these things. What do you do? Because there's real problems that come with that. And I wanted to write about that topic, but I knew that's not what you write about to a 50,000 person, 30,000 person email list.
Speaker 1 And so what I did is I said, okay, I'm going to create my own paid newsletter. It's only paid so that there's a little bit of a barrier to get into it. I don't really care about the money from it. But, I called it my secret money newsletter. And I said, it's a $100 1 time to get on the list, Rather than committing to, like, writing every single week, I made an an email course.
Speaker 1 And so I started it when I had, like, 6 emails written out, and you'd get 1 every Friday. Yeah. And then whenever I felt inspired, I'd add another 1. Yeah. It's now 17 emails long, and people just get all the emails and they wait at the end until I add another 1.
Speaker 1 And then it'll be 18 and so so on from there. But it let me write to a different audience without the caveats. Because I just said, like, look. If you're making less than 200,000 a year, this is not for you. If you thought from even a second about is a $100 worth buying this Trading, this is not for you.
Speaker 1 And it's been so much fun because I segmented my audience, and I'm talking about like, okay, what are your favorite things you've ever splurged on? Right? Like, a VIP tour at Disneyland for, like, your family and friends. 1 audience would be Online, that is absurd that you spent $4,000, you know, or whatever. You're spending $500 an hour for someone to help you cut the lines at Disneyland.
Speaker 1 But then some other person is going to be like, this is amazing. Like, how do I, you know, how do I book that? What other tips do you have? And even little things Online there's people in my life who have helped me reframe things around money in a really important way, and I wanna be able to pass that on. Like my friend, Mark, at 1 point was talking about investing.
Speaker 1 Like, I assume that once you get to a certain level, then, like, investing is really complicated. You have to have, like, financial advisors and you have to, you know, you like you have all these new opportunities, and so it means all this stuff. And he's like, look. We're talking about it, and he built up, I think his his Vanguard investing account about $5,000,000 dollars from his creator business just continually, you know, for a decade Writing in 100 and 100 of $1,000 a year just following all his profits in. And I was like, but don't you have to do more complicated things?
Speaker 1 He's like, no. The Vanguard account functions the same at a $100,500,500,500,000. Like, it just works the same. Like, it it doesn't matter. It's like, wasn't that a ton of money to keep in Vanguard?
Speaker 1 He's like, no. Think of the grand scale. Like, they're Online, $5,000,000 doesn't even register for that. You know?
Speaker 0 Yeah. They probably have Like, 1,000,000,000. Yeah.
Speaker 1 1,000,000,000 of dollars in single Vanguard accounts. Yeah. And another moment, when ConvertKit first got a $1,000,000 in our checking account, right, to operate the business and the, you know, all that we'd we'd saved up to that point. And I asked them this software founder Slack group. Like, what do I do?
Speaker 1 What fans like, what do I need to set up? This is all that. And this guy, Ian, who runs a really successful, SaaS company, just said Online, Nathan, a $1,000,000 is a very normal amount of money to have in a checking account for our business. And I was like, what? But don't you and I realized like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 That's just how businesses operate. So there's there's these conversations around money that I wanted to be able to write out, and I wanted to do it in 2 ways. I wanted to do it where I can create something once and it continues to work for me forever. So not on my content treadmill and where people are like, Nathan, where is this week's essay or something like Nathan? And then the second thing is I wanted to do it to a niche enough audience that they would care about and value the same things.
Speaker 1 And I wouldn't have any of the, like, here's Nathan bragging about something related to money. Yeah. Right? And so I think that tool Online an email course or a private section of your blog or something else is really great for that because you can explore what you care about, niche it down to only the people who care about that. And those are also my favorite replies.
Speaker 1 Right? Like, I'll write 1 on, like, if my favorite splurges once you have money. And then I just say like, hey, what are your favorite splurges? And people will reply and say, oh, this 1 time I we took another couple on this, like, what was it? Like a bikes and barges cruise throughout, like a river cruise throughout Europe, where you Online rode your bike all day from 1 city to another, like stopping, and then you like got back on the you’ll cruise boat and stayed there for the evening and it like repeated over and over again.
Speaker 1 They're like, it was an amazing experience. And yeah, it cost, I don't know, $10,000 or some really meaningful amount of money, but they're like, but it was amazing. So I love reading all of those stories and getting the replies. And I feature the replies in future editions, of the the newsletter. So it makes this little community.
Speaker 1 So that's the way that I handle it of, like, being able to write the niche topics that I care about and just segment it to a niche audience.
Speaker 0 That's very good. I'm gonna sign up to the secret money newsletter. Yeah. Because I I I heard some I've heard or read somewhere, maybe 1 of your podcast. Is is this the same newsletter where you where you reveal, like, personal income details and all that kind of stuff?
Speaker 1 Yeah. I have, about once a year, I have, like, an update of this is my net worth and where I invest Writing. Interesting. Yeah. Because I wanna write about this stuff.
Speaker 1 The other thing is I want to read back all my own previous stuff. Right? I write a year in review blog post for the last, I think, 12 I think I'm 12 years in of Writing. You know, you just nathanberry.com/like2012 dash you’ll. 2022 dash review.
Speaker 1 You'll get there. And I'll even pull up stuff. Like, I just want to show someone a photo the other day. And I was like, I know the URL structure of my blog so I can get to that really quickly. But those are written for me because I'm like, oh, what was I struggling with in 2013?
Speaker 1 What what did I value in 2017? Where did I go? Right? I'll go and look through all of that. Oh, there's the kids when they were really little.
Speaker 1 There's, you know, all of these different things. And so, yeah, I'm just creating content for me and trying to have that archive. I just also put it out in the Internet because I guess I'm weird like that.
Speaker 0 That's cool. That's very cool. Yeah. Because I've been doing these videos for the last 5 years or so about how much money I make on YouTube each year, and they're getting more and more upset. And I'm kind of like, I don't know if I wanna continue doing these.
Speaker 0 In a way, it does sort of paint a target on my back to some degree because people might think that business revenue is equivalent to personal money in the bank, which is really not. And and
Speaker 1 It's like you get, like, kidnapped outside your fire.
Speaker 0 Yeah. That's the sort of thing. I don't want that to happen, especially if I get married, have kids and things. But I like I do like the idea of being public and transparent about stuff
Speaker 1 like this. There is a point that it that it becomes entirely unrelatable. And so that like, I I wonder the same thing. Like, for ConvertKit, you know, we're public with our metrics. But our business has gotten a lot more complicated or sophisticated.
Speaker 1 And so now, like, our public dashboard only shows, you know, 1 revenue Online, and we have 3. And, you know? And and then I'm thinking about, like, okay. Is this still serving the same same journey? So the
Speaker 0 Yeah. Sometimes they Yeah.
Speaker 1 It's it's a balance. I I don't know. And especially because you’ll Writing. People don't understand money. They're like, okay.
Speaker 1 Oh, you made $5,000,000 off of this. That's Sponsored, you know. So you probably took home, like, $4,000,000 and you're like, no. No 1 did. No 1 did.
Speaker 0 I wish.
Speaker 1 That is not how it works at all. Yeah. So, yeah, there's definitely a point where you would stop. And 1 thing that I would say, because I've struggled with this just to make clear Yeah. Is you don't owe this to anyone.
Speaker 1 Mhmm. Right? There's a point where if you create content for a long period of time, people will start to treat you like you owe them that you continue to create that content.
Speaker 0 Yeah. True.
Speaker 1 And you don't. Like, do it for as long as it serves you in that Nathan you can change people and be like, oh, Ollie, why are you not releasing that video anymore? Like, you know, and you're just like, look, it wasn't interesting to me. It wasn't serving me or the business. And, you know, if you need that roadmap, look at the last 6 years of this video that I put out.
Speaker 1 I also wonder about, this is kind of an, a struggle for me on, like, how much lifestyle things to share
Speaker 0 of Here's my fancy house. Yeah.
Speaker 1 Here's my fancy house or, if you charter a plane to go somewhere. Right? Or or, you know, who knows? Private tour at Disneyland or like all of this in the a fancy car. It's a weird thing where I like don't on my end, don't feel like sharing any of that stuff.
Speaker 1 But on the other hand, if you do share it, like it drives, like lots of attention. Right? Like, my friend, Dan Martell, just bought his own plane.
Speaker 0 Mhmm.
Speaker 1 Right? And he doesn't live that far from me, like, right at you’ll know, it's like a 10 hour drive.
Speaker 0 Yeah.
Speaker 1 You know? But, like, commercial flights is ridiculous to, to get there where he's up in Canada.
Speaker 0 And like Kelowna. Kelowna. Yeah. I've been trying to plan a trip there, but it's a fucking nightmare to get to.
Speaker 1 It's really, really different. Get on
Speaker 0 the podcast and, like, like, his new vlog and all this stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1 Yeah. It's so much good stuff. And so I imagine I haven't talked to him about this, but I imagine when he bought the plane, you know, there's a whole thing of like, oh, should I share this? You know, like that puts that's a different level of wealth. But then on the other hand, in sharing it, he's getting a whole bunch more attention because there's someone scrolling through Instagram.
Speaker 1 Like, he owns a Online? Who is this guy? Yeah. Right? And they dive in, they find the stuff, and they're end up, like, using his his advice to grow their business and and all that.
Speaker 1 So that's something that I struggle with a bit, is at what level to share that. Because on 1 hand, I, like, live a pretty simple straightforward life on a farm in Boise. Yeah. And then on the other, like, there's things that I spend absurd amounts of money on, and I'm I absolutely love it. And so it's like, oh, you know, like, do I need a marketing photo like that?
Speaker 1 You know? Not that I have a Lamborghini, but if you did that Online a Ferrari or something. Right? You could get a lot of Writing mileage out of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 And I'm like, I don't know. So you gotta figure out what what your brand is and and what you wanna share.
Speaker 0 Yeah. Yeah. At 1 point, I was doing, like and I did a a tour of my apartment in Cambridge, which was cheap. It was, like, £1500 a month rent, or the or the or the rent equivalent. And then I moved to London, and I moved into a fancier 1.
Speaker 0 And I was like, okay. Let's do a clickbait title. And even though it was renting, we we called it, like, my my $2,500,000 apartment tour.
Speaker 1 Yep.
Speaker 0 And there's something about that. I was just like, oh, this be, oh, God. And like, now this place is even more expensive than that, but I've not mentioned it. Well, I haven't really talked about the price unless someone's supposed to see us on the podcast. And I like the idea of being I like the James Clear approach, kind of.
Speaker 0 But the James Clear approach, basically, I wanna be known for my ideas. I don't I don't I don't wanna be known for my face or, like, my lifestyle or anything like that. Yep. Trading fuck tons of money. But at the same time, I do like I do like I vibe with your thing about the whole transparency side and sharing and, you know, the fact that, like, Dan, if, you know, Dan Martell talks about how he how he has a Nathan and be like, I'm way more likely to follow his stuff.
Speaker 0 And I'd be interested because I'm like, oh, shit. I'm not thinking of that as him bragging. I'm thinking of it. That's really cool. That's inspiring.
Speaker 0 But I know that there are lots of people out there. I speak to my grandma. I was chatting to her yesterday, and she was like, oh, Ollie, please talk about stop talking about how much money you make. And I was like, oh, but it's inspiring to people. And I've so many people have said to me that, like, because of that video, they started a YouTube channel.
Speaker 0 And she's like, yeah. But, you know, everyone else out there is just sort of feeling they're not feeling inspired. They're feeling, like, hurt because they haven't achieved that. I'm just like, oh, yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 0 I
Speaker 1 don't know. Yeah. And it's challenging, right, because you don't know and you can't control how someone's gonna react to your content. And whether someone's going to say like, like I feel envious of that or someone who goes, oh, I could do that. Writing?
Speaker 1 So years ago, actually, before I published the App as a handbook, I was wanting to write and I had, like, kinda start and stop and, you know, work on this ebook. And then on same day, these 2 guys, Jared Drysdale and Sasha Grief published ebooks, self published ebooks to small audiences about design. And it was pure chance they launched both of these on, Hacker News on the same day. Sasha had this, like, it was like a design case study where he walked you through how it went, and he sold it for, I think, $6. And then if you wanted to buy, like, the 1 with the Photoshop files with it, it was $12.
Speaker 1 So we had these 22 prices. And Jared sold his book for $39 and it was just that 1 price. And it was fascinating to see both of these happen on the same day. And it was like, you know, you're like looking at them ranked in the Hacker News and you're like, that's, that's interesting. And then Jason Cohen, who's the founder of WP Online, invited both of them to come on his blog and say, like, write a write a guest post about your pricing model, how your launch went, Nathan, like, why your pricing model is better than the other person.
Speaker 1 Right?
Speaker 0 That's fun.
Speaker 1 And so it was great fun. And so I read both of those. You’ll published them like 1 after the other. I read both of them and thought a couple of things. 1, you can make money self publishing.
Speaker 1 2, these guys are just like me. They're designers with small audiences, you know, self publishing a fairly niche product. Compared to like reading about Jason Fried, who's like, Oh, look, we made $500 self publishing. You should too. And so it really resonated with me.
Speaker 1 And I've heard a lot of other stories of people saying Online, okay. Like, I'm Trading into the story. And like, there's a black woman like me who accomplished that. There's this person who lives in my country who accomplished this thing. Writing?
Speaker 1 And seeing that representation. And I think that's just really, really cool because you can see it and go like, that could be me. And so I really like the idea of sharing the stories ultimately and being Online, this is the scale that it could get. Right? Like, you could build a business to $5,000,000 a year, $10,000,000 a year.
Speaker 1 And it's possible because that's the power of audiences. And that that's why I love telling all this because otherwise, people don't realize how far it can go. But then it's a trade off. And, you know, you just don't know how people will respond. I haven't really heard of examples of people having truly negative outcomes, you know, like Yeah.
Speaker 0 The Tim Ferriss blog post is scary, but other than that
Speaker 1 That's true. That's true. And that is right. That is another level.
Speaker 0 That's Online that's a whole 5 levels up from where I am, for example.
Speaker 1 But if you think about I don't know how many copies of his books Tim has sold. But if we go to James Clear, for example, right, he sold 15,000,000 copies of Atomic Habits. He has, I think, the largest single author newsletter on the Internet. Mhmm. And that's that's pretty wild.
Speaker 1 You’ll know? But but he doesn't seem to have like, he seems to stay much more in the background.
Speaker 0 Yeah. But, also, like, most people who have read Atomic Habits probably don't know what he looks like.
Speaker 1 Mhmm.
Speaker 0 So he's he's, like, profit per unit fame is quite strong.
Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, so we host a conference every year called Craft and Commerce. And so we've had a lot of big names, you know, James has spoken at and Seth Godin. Nathan year, we had, Casey Neistat come out to speak. 2018, I think, 2019, somewhere in there.
Speaker 1 So he was, like, pretty close to the peak of his, like, vlog popularity and and all that, putting out a ton of content before he kinda, like, switched up his, his stuff and took a little bit of a break. And so he arrived at the airport in Boise, Idaho. And, like, someone on our team wouldn't pick him up and all that. And even Online, he was starting to get mobbed, like, and then, you know, just like waiting curbside in Boise. Writing?
Speaker 1 People like Casey, Casey, you know, like Trading to get his attention and all of that. And, you know, so watching like that level of recognition and getting recognized very randomly and and, that level of fame was 1 thing. And then, the next year, Mark Manson came out to speak. And this he, the subtle art would had, like, sold an absurd number of copies was, you know, top 5 New York Times list, continually. And Mark attended the entire conference.
Speaker 1 Like, not only was he at the speakers dinner, but he and his wife were like, they went to workshops. They they just like, Mark's a very chill guy. And, they loved it. And then he got up and gave his closing keynote. And I think a bunch of people went, I had lunch with that guy.
Speaker 1 That's Mark Manson. But it's the difference between YouTube where your face is on everything and you have that level of fame and the book where you're like, oh, I could think that's an amazing book and have no idea what Mark looks like. Now what I wonder is over the last year or so, at least as I've noticed it, Mark has a lot of stuff, a lot of content that he's putting out with his face on it. And so I'm always curious. I wonder what thoughts you’ll have on it Online that.
Speaker 1 Is Mark giving up something? Like, he had the level of fame and name recognition that maybe so many people want without the face recognition. But don't know. Maybe he wants to get recognized on the street. Maybe there's another type of content that he wants to truly have his face.
Speaker 1 I do it. What do you
Speaker 0 think? Yeah. Yeah. So I I I had dinner with him in in LA a couple months ago, and he was very kind enough to offer a blurb for my book, which which is very nice. Super chill guy, very friendly.
Speaker 0 Yep. It it was interesting how because because I kinda said to him that, like, he he is where I I aspire to be in terms of, like, the book stuff, and the book still sold stupidly well, etcetera, etcetera. And he seems to be trying to be a YouTuber and Mhmm. Succeeding fairly well at being a YouTuber. And he's and he kinda said that, like, you know, with all the traditional media stuff, the Hollywood film and everything, that it's it it reaches more people, it's more fun, and it makes more money to just make YouTube videos.
Speaker 0 I was like, okay. That's interesting. And he was kind of saying to me that, like, don't peg yourself worth on, like, whether you hit the New York Times bestseller list or not because you'll do it. Right. Maybe maybe not.
Speaker 0 Like, you'll change your Instagram bio and your Twitter bio, and life will move on. And it'll just be a minor blip, and you won't really care, but it's like, the work is the thing. Right. And so I was like, that was it was quite reassuring. Yeah.
Speaker 0 But I don't know how he feels about being recognized in public and stuff.
Speaker 1 Yeah. Do you get recognized in public for a half?
Speaker 0 Yeah. Like, a few times a day if I'm roaming around London. Okay. I quite like it because that feels like a good level. It's educational content.
Speaker 0 So people are like, Online about it. Yeah. And, like, it's only really nerds who follow my stuff. And so, like Yeah. Chances are I I don't wanna talk to them about about something.
Speaker 0 Yeah. But I wouldn't want it to be, like, in an entertainment kind of Right. Genre.
Speaker 1 Where there's, like, a line of a 100 people trying to get to you, and you're, like, trying to be like Yeah.
Speaker 0 I think it's all yeah. Different different genres as well. Like, who's it? MKBHD, Marcus Bradley was was talking about how he would, you know, he was at this YouTuber event with, like, Lele Ponds or something like Nathan. And he sort of she, she walked out the airport, and there was, like, a mob of, like, a 100 people, like, just waiting.
Speaker 0 He walked out of the same airport. No 1 recognized him, And he's got, like, 15,000,000 subscribers. It's Online world's biggest tech YouTuber. Yeah. But also the the sorts of people that walk that watch his channel are not the sort of people that would like to line up outside someone's hotel room to figure out, oh my god, Marquez is is here.
Speaker 0 So I think there's
Speaker 1 What outfit is he wearing today?
Speaker 0 Like, you you’ll? Ladders of wealth. The ladders of wealth creation, a step by step road map to, what's it, to building wealth. Yeah. So I guess the first 1 is yeah.
Speaker 0 I You’ll you know, there's there's these 4 different things. I wonder if we can just sort of talk through these in turn and just love for you to riff on these.
Speaker 1 Yeah. So in the ladders, well, I break down, like, 4 different ladders that you’ll can climb as high as you want on any ladder, but they are I guess some are some are ultimately taller than others. So run through them quickly. Time for money, your own services business, product and services, and then ultimately selling products. And as as we think about skills, the skills that you have to learn are pretty different on each ladder.
Speaker 1 So time for money, you might think, like, what skills do you have to learn for that? But it it you know, going back to the job at Wendy's, there's a lot of people who did not learn the time for money skills. Those are like being able to follow a process, doing what you’ll told, showing up to work on time, showing up to work sober. You know? I was like, some of these these things that, we might take for granted, but, like, for a lot of people, you have to actually learn that to be reliable and to be consistent.
Speaker 1 And so in that ladder, you're gonna start with, like, an hourly job. You know, it could be landscaping, could be Wendy's, could be something else, and then later move up to a salaried job. And you're gonna have a pretty big range within that. Right? There's plenty of salary jobs that would be on that ladder that could get to 2 $100,000 a year, you know, maybe even as high as $1,000,000 a year that that could be within that.
Speaker 1 The next ladder, I think, is where things start to get more complicated. Right? That's like having your own services business. At the basic level, you're talking about operating as a freelancer. Right?
Speaker 1 And so that's where I'm just, you know, trading time for money. Both these first 2 ladders are time for money. And and there's a a 1 to 1 relationship there. And and so but in the services business, I have to know how to form a company. Right?
Speaker 1 I had to fire the, file the paperwork with the government. I have to know, okay, I gotta work with an accountant. I can't just you’ll, like, TurboTax or some other software. Right? There's some more stuff from that.
Speaker 1 How to how to write contracts? You know, all of those things. So the first rung in that ladder is really like hourly work. Hey, I'll design your website for $50 an hour. I'll show up for this amount of time, you know, or I'll mow your lawn for $25 an hour, anything like that.
Speaker 1 The next ladder the next rung in the ladder is when you start to charge by the project. And this is where things get interesting because now you have this big disconnect or a possible disconnect and a leverage point and you've separated time for money. Instead of I'll You’ll design your site for $50 an hour, so I'll design your site for, $2,000 no matter how many hours it takes. And now we've introduced leverage and you understand, leverage. A lot of people are like, oh, leverage is good.
Speaker 1 And I have to remind them, like, leverage is neither good nor bad. It just is and just amplifies what already is going to happen. Yeah. Right? So if I am investing and I borrow money, that gives me leverage to be able to invest more.
Speaker 1 That means that I'm going you know, if stock goes up, I'm going to make more money than I would have otherwise. And if the stock goes down, I'm going to lose more money than I would have otherwise.
Speaker 0 Sure.
Speaker 1 So in our web design example, maybe it takes me 10 hours, and I end up making an equivalent of $200 an hour. Maybe it takes me 50 hours, and I make far less than I should've you know? So that that's the first thing. Once you disconnect time for money, then you start to get leverage. And the last rung on that ladder on the, services ladder is really like managing a team, and that's a whole new set of skills, and you’ll can get even more leverage.
Speaker 1 So at each of these 2 ladders, you can make a lot of money, and you need to learn 1 set of skills or, I guess, differences of skills, and you can get increasing amounts of leverage. And then really as you move across, to other ladders, then, like, product and services, I think it's really interesting. I guess to to run through them quickly, the productized services are interesting because you're you're trying to take something that was totally flexible, and you're saying, let me standardize it more and more so I can move more people through the process. I can have it's easier for team members to provide this value. Like, Hey Friends, for example, is a good example.
Speaker 1 What did you if you explain really quick?
Speaker 0 How you're doing that. Is an agency that we're building, with with a couple of partners. Basically, it's if if people sign up and they pay large amounts of money, Online, I think starting at $14,000 a month, then, the agency will do all of the work to make them bang on YouTube videos that kind of look like mine, I e, they're talking to a camera, talking head educational videos where all like, for example, Nathan, if you wanna do YouTube through Hey Friends, all you would have to do is show up and talk to a camera for, like, a handful of videos. We would do the titles, the thumbnails, the ideation. We would say, Nathan, we've analyzed all your work.
Speaker 0 We figured out your style. We figured out your goals. These are the videos we want you to film. You would just record to a camera, send us the files, and then our team would do all of the work and turning them into sick videos with great editing and good vibes and deal with all the analytics and everything. And so that is a productized service in that we have basically converted my process for making videos into a standardized playbook Yep.
Speaker 0 That team members can follow. We'll plug in your goals and your brand aesthetic and everything into Nathan, and then we can then sell it out at a discount compared to what it would be to create that completely from scratch.
Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. So it's no longer perfectly bespoke. But in a lot of ways, it benefits from the fact that it's not because you're you're being able to take the wins that you have across clients and and things you learn in the process and and and go from there. So what's interesting about productized services is that you usually go from selling them, 1 to 1.
Speaker 1 Right? Like, I'm not taking you out to coffee and then saying Online, oh, here's all we can do. And, like, that is 1 skill set that you need to learn in a services business. But as you you’ll productize, it's like, oh, now I need to disconnect the sales. I need to be able to sell through a sales page.
Speaker 1 And so for that, I I have to learn copywriting and design and maybe WordPress or ConvertKit landing pages or whatever else to build up to make that sale without my time. And then on the the services aspect of it, we're trying to standardize as much as possible there, so we have as much leverage. So in each case, we're like, it goes from very connected, and then we're just gradually trying to disconnect, okay, how the service is delivered, how it's sold, and we're getting further and further apart. Because in each case, that allows, for more leverage. Yeah.
Speaker 1 And then do you take that further? Right? Hey, friends is a is a recurring offering. Right? And that oh, that's another point of leverage because wait a second.
Speaker 1 I sell this 1 time. And so long as I keep delivering value consistently, then they're going to stay on. I'm not having to make a new sale every single month. And so that's a huge thing. And then then the final ladder is really where you're going to to pure products.
Speaker 1 And so that could be something as simple as an ebook Online we've talked about. It could be like a WordPress plugin. Even it Online a an Airbnb is a is a product that you've made. Right? It's disconnected.
Speaker 1 And so, like, WordPress, Shopify, Airbnb, all of that, are products inserted into an existing marketplace. Right? Like, I own several Airbnbs, and I don't think about how do I market them. I think about how do I make my listing good, and then Airbnb takes care of all that deal flow. So that's an easier product to make than a product where you have to, like, create and package and sell, and then continually market and have your own,
Speaker 0 you know, Online sales to
Speaker 1 to scale that up. So that that, you know, things get harder and harder on the ladder. And then ultimately, I think that, software as a service is 1 of the most difficult things, to do, but also 1 of the highest you’ll. Because when it gets implemented into a company, it sticks around for a very, very long time. And then, you know, you see them get ridiculous multiples and all that.
Speaker 1 And then, ultimately, I think the hardest thing to build in the highest possible leverage is like a marketplace or a social network. Mhmm. Where and what's funny is a bunch of people start there. Right? They're like, I have this idea for, you know, a dog walking service and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1 You know? And you're like that. That's a 2 sided marketplace. And so you have the skills that you should be operating Online on ladder 1, rung 1. And you're saying like, let me dive all the way in and try to tackle the like, the absolute top of the last ladder.
Speaker 1 Nathan and that's why people really struggle because they they try to bite off way too much, and they they try to make a leap that requires learning, you know, 50 skills instead of iterating through 1 skill
Speaker 0 at a time. Yeah. I when I when I first read your read read this essay, I I I thought it mapped quite well onto what I was doing with my life. Mhmm. So, like, I started off trading time for money when I was, like, 12 and doing, like, private tutoring for, like, £4, £5 an hour.
Speaker 0 Yep. Then I moved into selling services, which was, like, web design services, where I was charging by the hour. And then moved into charging by the project and didn't really make very much money from it. Then slowly started dabbling with the product thing. So my first proper business that that was successful was, sort of med school admissions business, where I was doing selling in person courses, teaching people how to get into med school.
Speaker 0 And, initially, I was doing them all myself, but then we sort of turned it into, like, a a a process that, like, I could hire people to follow. And then I built a sort of software medical school question bank because I knew how to code and Online forces with my brother, and then that was a product with some level of recurring revenue. And then the YouTube channel came and the courses on on top of that. And so now it's like almost everything we do, we try and do in the product camp. And I don't like going back into productized service.
Speaker 1 Mhmm.
Speaker 0 It's like, hey, friends was nice because we didn't have to do anything for it. So to us, it was, like, basically a product, but the team is managing managing everything. And we do have a bit of a service based offering for our YouTuber accelerator, which is a little bit service y, but that's more like a product, but just like good customer customer service. And so now I it's just Online having gone through the the 3 different ladders and onto ladder 4, it's like that is where the true gains are to be had.
Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. Depending on the goal. Like, actually, it was fairly against, services as, like, an ideal business. But I think the more that I've gotten into that world and paid attention to it, there's some very, very, like, truly fantastic services businesses, at both crazy scale and, much more.
Speaker 1 Like, I always thought it hit some limit. Yeah. But after seeing, like, behind the scenes of some of these services businesses that are doing, like, 10 to 20,000,000 a year in profit, then you're like, oh, okay. So what's really interesting about that is a lot of products, you end up with a low average revenue per user. So if we take your, like, productivity consumer app.
Speaker 1 Yeah.
Speaker 0 If we will be a low average revenue per user. Yeah.
Speaker 1 So you might be making $100 per year per user. Yeah. Something like that. Right? That's very different than if we're charging $10,000 a month for, an agency service.
Speaker 1 Right? That's a $100,000 per rev average revenue per user. And so it takes really a lot of individual app subscriptions to add up to, you know, even a handful of the agency subscriptions. And so it really depends on your goals. Right?
Speaker 1 If you're trying to maximize enterprise value, basically, the the equity value of what you could sell this for, then you might really focus on the upside. But if you're trying to maximize, you know, cash flow both short and long term, then the agency could be a much better model. And then especially realizing, that they're not mutually exclusive. This is something that Sahil Bloom is very good at. Right?
Speaker 1 Where he's saying, oh, I'm gonna start this and this and this. And he asked the question, like, what would have to be true for me to be able to run multiple agencies without that being a huge drain on my time? Right? Like, for him, protecting his writing time is the most important thing, in his business. And so he's Online, great.
Speaker 1 I just can't run any of the agencies. Right? And he and I have an agency together, called Paperboy, which is a newsletter growth agency. And we collectively like, he and I each spend maybe an hour or 2 a month on it because, you know, we hired a CEO. And so when we mapped it out from the beginning, it was like, okay.
Speaker 1 Well, it has to be true for us to focus on our core thing, have it feed into it, and then still provide this really valuable service. And so it's all just all on how you design it.
Speaker 0 1 thing that you've been, writing and, I guess, thinking about a lot recently is, the $1,000,000,000 creator. And I think that relates to the idea of sort of flywheels when it comes to creator stuff. I wonder what what what is all this stuff?
Speaker 1 Yeah. So the the idea behind the $1,000,000,000 creator, which is another 1 of these essays that I wrote, is if you have attention, which creators are so good at getting attention. Like, you get to point it somewhere. And so what's the highest ROI place you’ll point that attention? A simple example, you know, most creators are saying, okay.
Speaker 1 Let me sell an ebook. Let me sell a course, affiliate products. And we're blown away, right, that you can make a $1,000, 10,000, a 100,000, a $1,000,000 off of an audience. And, like, this is amazing and mind blowing. But as people who are always trying to push the limits and know it's possible, like, what what else could we do?
Speaker 1 And what I wonder is could you build a $100,000,000 business? So an example that I love is this guy, Mark Sisson, who he created a blog, called Mark's Daily Apple, maybe 2009, 2010, time period. And if you think about when the paleo diet started to really become popular, they were focused on, recipes and content in that niche. And he built this blog to the point that I think he was making over $1,000,000 a year, which is just absolutely incredible. And you might think, like, okay.
Speaker 1 That's the pinnacle of what you can do with a blog. And what Mark ended up doing is he said, what else can I offer to this community? And so he thought, like, wouldn't it be really nice if you could have a, like, a mayonnaise or a ketchup or the things that match the paleo diet? And so he started his own company, making that called Primal Kitchen. And, you know, got his recipes, manufactured it, all of Nathan, and used his audience, you know, about couple 100000 people on an email newsletter in this niche to, like, drive his first sales.
Speaker 1 And then as it went from there, he was trying to get distribution in grocery stores. And I don't know the exact details, but I imagine what happened is things like like getting in Whole Foods for the very first time. They're like, sure. We'll see if people buy this. We'll, like, give you 1 bit of placement in this 1 store in Austin.
Speaker 1 Right? Well, what he does is you just go into your email you’ll. So Online, okay. Let's target everyone who lives within 50 miles of that store. And then you're like, why don't you go buy, this, you know, hey.
Speaker 1 Online, great news. Primal Kitchen products are now in this Whole Foods location. Go buy it in person. Writing? And then the week later you’ll talk to your Whole Foods rep and you're like, so, you know, how'd that little test do you put in like a couple of stores?
Speaker 1 How'd that go? They're like, it went incredible. Like, people had sold out instantly. Really? Oh, that's that's fascinating.
Speaker 1 I love that the the product is resonating. You know? And it's like, when they use your audience to kick start that. So they can spread through our they get more distribution and expand from there, using the power of audience. The short version of the story is in 2 years, they sold primal kitchen to Kraft Foods for a $150,000,000.
Speaker 1 My god. And so when you think about okay. If you have all of these people who are, like, close for or big fans of a topic, you can direct that attention to affiliate products, courses, ebooks, that kind of thing. Or in the case of Mark says that he's like, no. I'm going to create a consumer product that a massive scale.
Speaker 1 And it's like, okay. A blog can be worth, you know, 100 of 1,000,000. Emily Weiss created this this blog called Into the Gloss about fashion. Right? And so that was a topic that she cared about.
Speaker 1 And like, okay, a fashion blog, what could that be worth? Probably a decent amount. But it ended up being the thing that kick started her company, Glossier.
Speaker 0 Oh, that's her company. Yeah. No. That's that's her in common garden, I thought, yesterday. Yeah.
Speaker 1 Well Right? Can a blog build into something worth $1,000,000,000? Yes. If you think about things in the right way. And so you have to focus on products that, you know, have built a lot of value are can be sold to many, many people, often purchased in a recurring way.
Speaker 1 Mhmm. If we go to the celebrity world, like, if you think Ryan Reynolds, he's someone who's Online, I'd rather not pay $500 or a $1,000,000 for a TV commercial. I'd rather buy a company Online Mint Mobile or Aviation Gin, and then use my marketing acumen and, you know, face to promote those and have all the equity value. And, you know, he sold Aviation Gin, I think, for 7 or 800,000,000. Mint Mobile, he sold for 1,300,000,000 to T Mobile.
Speaker 1 Right? And so he's not like, he's not doing basically a paid sponsorship to be on a TV commercial. He's like, nope. I'm gonna do it where I get capture the full equity value. And there's example after example.
Speaker 1 And people focus on them in the celebrity world. Yeah. But it's happening nonstop in the creator world in the same way. And that's a topic that I'm absolutely obsessed with. And I guess just to give 1 more example, that's what I'm doing with ConvertKit.
Speaker 1 Right? I can take my podcast, my content, my network, all of that, and I could focus it on books and courses, and that's a great way to make 500,000 or a $1,000,000 a year. Or, ultimately, I can channel all of that into building Convergys as a software company that's now at 40,000,000 a year in revenue and, you know, worth a few 100,000,000. And then, like, my goal that's the the premise behind the $1,000,000,000 creator. My goal is to build that into a company worth a $1,000,000,000.
Speaker 1 And it's the same thing. What's the best ROI place that can direct that attention?
Speaker 0 It's absolutely wild. The interview I did with Dan, Dan Priestley on this podcast came out a couple of days ago, so I was relistening to that. He is sort of a serial entrepreneur here in the UK. He is, and he's also very bullish on the he was Online he was saying to me, Ali, look, you can screw around with courses all you like, but if you if you owned a business that Right. If you owned a business outside of your YouTube channel business and directed traffic to that, or even owned a minority equity stake in a business and directed traffic to Nathan, And that business then exit exits.
Speaker 0 In 1 transaction, you could make the same amount of money as you would make in a lifetime of selling courses. Correct. And I was like, oh, yeah. I know I know that's right. But to me, it that just seems like you know, if I if I look at someone like Sahil, it's he's he's got the background in private equity and, like, investment banking and all that shit.
Speaker 0 And for him, it probably seems easy to be like, oh, I guess I'll just build a business and hire an operator and stuff. To me, that's such a black box
Speaker 1 Right.
Speaker 0 Where I'm like, I don't know anyone who could do that. But I as I'm saying that, I mean, like, it wouldn't be that hard to find out. I could literally spend a day just, like, going through people I know and who follow me on Twitter and be like, hey. Wanna do this thing? Wanna hop in a call?
Speaker 0 Get some advice from the people that I know. Put out a message to my newsletter and be like, hey, who wants to partner up in building 1 of these things?
Speaker 1 Like Right.
Speaker 0 It you’ll be very doable. I don't know why I'm not doing it. It feels feels scary, feels hard, feels like a black box. Don't really know. I'm very comfortable in the courses business.
Speaker 1 Well, there's a timing thing as well. Mhmm. Right? It would be very easy for someone to listen to the what we're doing here, and maybe they have, say, 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, a 100,000. Right?
Speaker 1 Something that that is a very meaningful milestone and a and a huge audience. Like, I always someone's like, oh, a 100,000 isn't big. I'm like, look at, like, the largest football stadium. Like, that's a 100,000 people. You know?
Speaker 1 It'd be easy to look at that and go, okay. Forget courses. Forget all of these other things. I am going to go build the next primal kitchen. I'm gonna go build, the next Mint Mobile or whatever.
Speaker 1 And that would be jumping, like, 3 ladders. Attempting to jump 3 ladders simultaneously in, like, a single leap. Yeah. And that is a pretty sure way to to fail. Right?
Speaker 1 And so instead, what you're doing, you're iterating through all of these things. Right? You have learned to build a team. 5 years ago, I don't think you knew how to build and manage a team. Nope.
Speaker 1 Right? And so you got to do it in a little bit lower stakes environment. You didn't take all of your savings from the YouTube channel and say Online, we're gonna pour this into an app. Yep. And we spent $1,000,000 building out this app and it totally flopped because we did I didn't know how to build and manage a team.
Speaker 1 Right? And so a part of the ladder's wealth creation article is to think about the skills that you need in order to do this and and deliberately chunk away at them. Right? And so that's the thing. It'd be I I think it'd be totally fine to say like, oh, I am not ready for this.
Speaker 1 I want to get ready for it. So maybe the like, building Hey Friends as an agency is 1 of the is a key building block for you in those skills. Because you're like, wait. This would be the first time that I have a business that's making substantial cash flow and requires very little time for me. That's something for, with Paperboy, my agency with Sahil and then Shane, our CEO, that was really weird to me.
Speaker 1 So I showed up to a call about, like, the next steps. We'd we'd launched it. We'd done a bunch of things. I showed up to an update call. We talked through it.
Speaker 1 We helped Shane with some key decisions he was trying to make, and then I left. And what was really weird to me is that I did not have a single to do item coming out of that call. Whereas with ConvertKit, I am like deeply embedded in all these things. And I realized like, oh, I've like put myself in this too much and it's holding things back. So a key learning for me is, like, wait.
Speaker 1 I can have a successful business that I don't spend meaningful time on. And I'm still kind of sitting with that because that was just like a a month ago. Yeah. And you're like, wait. So so going to a journaling prompt.
Speaker 1 Right? How could ConvertKit be more successful if I spent less time on it? And you're like, it could Online, my time is wildly valuable. All of us, I have a huge impact everywhere I go, whatever we wanna say about ourselves. But then I think about it, I'm like, okay.
Speaker 1 Well, I could empower my team more. I can make the vision more clear. I could step out of the weeds. You know? Online, there's so many things in that.
Speaker 1 And so I think these are just skills that we build and develop over time. And so I think in your case, it might be totally fine to say like, oh, I am not ready for this level because there's either skills that I want to continue to build or a certain level of comfort. Yeah. And then make a roadmap. What would have to be true for you to feel ready at that point?
Speaker 1 What small steps could you make? Is there a business that you could come in and say Online, hey. I'd love to buy 10% of your business for a 100 grand, and, then I will also actively promote it and get a rev share from it. Right? Like, there might be something that that you could push on that level and you could try it out and then end up with this portfolio business.
Speaker 1 So, like, how could you ease it rather than take a big leap?
Speaker 0 That's a really good point. Yeah. At the moment, I'm think I I think I think I'm thinking of it as all or nothing. Mhmm. But, actually, just as you were saying that I was thinking instead of thinking of, hey, friends, as a, oh, I don't need to do anything, that's a great learning opportunity.
Speaker 0 I could just actually take more of an interest in, like, okay. I wonder how it's actually working. Like, what's going on here? Right. Treat that as a bit of a learning learning thing.
Speaker 1 It's I talk talking to, Hunter, who's the the CEO of, like, that whole company. Like, how does he build teams? Yeah. How would he you know, what what traits are you seeing? Mhmm.
Speaker 1 If you were to look for another operator for an entirely different business, what could you learn from watching him? All of those things are are really, really interesting.
Speaker 0 How do flywheels fit into this whole thing?
Speaker 1 Flywheels are are probably, like, my biggest obsession right now. So do you think your audience knows what a flywheel is? Should we explain it?
Speaker 0 Let's define it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 Let's define it. Yeah. So I first encountered a flywheel in 2008. I was in Lesotho, which is a little country.
Speaker 0 That's where I used to live. Really? Yeah. I lived at 5, 6 years growing up. Okay.
Speaker 0 Where? In Massaro.
Speaker 1 Okay. So I was in Massaro. No way. That is very, very random.
Speaker 0 Yeah.
Speaker 1 Most people were like, the what?
Speaker 0 Where where is that?
Speaker 1 Where is that? And they're like, oh, that's that country inside South Africa. So we have family friends who, lives around, South Africa and Lesotho. And and, so we got to do a trip with them, and go visit. And and did some work at this orphanage, and we put in it's like, had a well drilled and we're installing, you know, we need some kind of pump on top of it.
Speaker 1 At the time in 2008, the, like, electricity wasn't super consistent, And so they didn't wanna put an electric pump in there. They wanted a hand operated pump, which if you think about from a, you know, like at least near where I live, you'd go to a campground. There'd be like this hand pump that, you know, is is a pretty works fine for camping for the weekend. You would not want like a 100 kids be relying on that for for water. So instead we install a flywheel, which is this big metal wheel that sits on top.
Speaker 1 And instead of having this, like, up and down linear action that a pump has, it has a rotating action. And so it it move it turns continuously. Yep. And so once we got it
Speaker 0 all set up,
Speaker 1 like, it was really hard to move at first. Like, my friend Luke and I both, like, were on each side of it on the handles, like, turning it. It's very difficult to get going. And then what we did, like, like, over time, it starts to speed up and gain momentum and it gets easier. And what that allowed us to do is, like, then he steps away, and he's no longer turning it.
Speaker 1 And I can turn it by myself, and then I can turn it with 1 hand. And then, you know, by the end, I keep the momentum going with 1 finger because this continuous thing in the the metal wheel, Online, the inertia of that carries forward. And so when you think about it from a business perspective, most things that we do are the hand pump version. There's a direct correlation to how much effort we put in and how much results that we get out. Right?
Speaker 1 Every pump down, there's a spurt of water. And flywheels are fascinating because they almost sound too good to be true. Like, I've defined it as 3 laws for a flywheel. The first thing is that every action flows smoothly into the next. Right?
Speaker 1 It's this it finishes in a loop. The second is that, it should get easier with every rotation. Right? Every time you turn it, it gets easier. And then the third thing is every time every rotation, it actually produces more.
Speaker 1 And in an abstract business sense, you're like, this is too good to be true. You're saying this gets easier with time and produces more. That's insane. But it actually works in real life physics. Right?
Speaker 1 And I I know firsthand of how hard that was to turn at first and how little water I got. And then by the end, I'm just Trading there spinning it 1 hand. It's so easy. So I'm now absolutely obsessed with, with flywheels of how can I apply this all throughout my business, and how can I help creators apply this? So I wanna go both on a very small scale and then on a very large scale.
Speaker 1 Let's take, for example, writing a newsletter every week. On 1 hand, it's not that hard. On the other hand, you're like, shoot. What do I even write about? And if you're working through a list of ideas or it's scattered, then you're like, you’ll trying to figure, it's Monday night, the newsletter goes out Tuesday morning.
Speaker 1 You're like, what should I even write about? I'm running out of ideas. If you have a flywheel around content ideas, then it can completely change the game. So let's say that if we map out this flywheel, new people are signing up for my newsletter. Yep.
Speaker 1 And I send them a few welcome emails. And, like, in the 3rd or 4th welcome email, I ask them a question. And I say, hey, what is your biggest frustration with learning to scale your YouTube channel? Right? That's what we're teaching on this newsletter.
Speaker 1 Then hit reply and let me know. People hit reply, and they say, oh, I'm really struggling with how to make thumbnails. I'm really struggling with, Online, building out my contact calendar, you know, whatever it is. All of those replies, you put into a label in Gmail or you’ll Zapier to put into something else. And now when you're saying, okay, what should I write about this week?
Speaker 1 You just go into those replies and say, oh, John is struggling with thumbnails. Let me write an answer to his question, and then make it a little more generic so it fits for everybody and not send it out to the newsletter. And so the way this works in a flywheel is people come in. So basically, the more people who come in, the more frustrations I collect, which gives you more ideas for content, which as I publish that content, reaches more subscribers, which gives me more frustrations, which gives me more ideas content on and on. So this is a continuous loop.
Speaker 1 It gets easier with time because we're getting more and more of these questions. And then it also produces more Because then later, each piece of content is gonna reach even more people. So early content might have gotten 5 newsletter subscribers, and down the road, the content might get 500 new newsletter subscribers. So that's an idea of taking something core in your process and Trading into a flywheel that's now just running for you with some really basic automation. If you think about on the other end, we talked about Sahil.
Speaker 1 He is really interested to me because he's grown a newsletter to 500,000 subscribers in 3 years, 2 and a half years, like, very, very quickly. And, actually, I think he's only just over a year from a 100000 to 500000. And it's all because of the spywheel that he's built out. And so the way that this spywheel works is he has new subscribers coming in from social. So, you know, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn primarily.
Speaker 1 As they come in, he is selling sponsorships in his newsletter. So, actually, ConvertKit has a whole advertising division, so we sell the sponsorships in his newsletter. He's got emails, like automated emails, walking people to his newsletter, sharing his work, all of that kind of thing. And then he's taking the money that he makes from a sponsorship and spending it on, paid acquisition through, another company that we bought called SparkLoop, which has his recommendations network. And then that gets his grows his newsletter.
Speaker 1 So in the simplest form, the more subscribers he has, the more money he makes on sponsorships, which means he invests more money in paid growth to make his newsletter bigger, which means he's make more Online Sponsored, which means he has more money to invest
Speaker 0 Yeah.
Speaker 1 And so on. And it's it's pretty basic, but, like, an early rotation of this flywheel would get him, maybe $10,000 in sponsorships for the Nathan. And, you know, he reinvest that 10,000, and that might get him 5,000 new subscribers. But now, he's making 50 to 70,000 a month in sponsorships
Speaker 0 Bloody hell.
Speaker 1 And reinvesting that Yeah. And growing even faster. So you just watch Online the snowball rolling down the hill Writing bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's like, getting easier with time. It's producing more and more results.
Speaker 1 And he's well on track to hit a 1000000 subscribers, you know, in the next 5, 6 months,
Speaker 0 based on that, which is crazy to think.
Speaker 1 It's mental. Yeah. He's now Trading, like, a 100,000 email subscribers a month. Yeah. And it's all because he's got this aspect of his flywheel absolutely dialed in.
Speaker 1 And there's you’ll know, there's things with it of, like, other creators he partners with and more and more that goes into it. But basically Trading to take all these 1 off tasks that you do, and turn them into a process that can either run automatically, or, you know, be operated by your team or something that you can run, in a pretty straightforward way. So I'm obsessed with flywheels. That's the point.
Speaker 0 That's good stuff.
Speaker 1 You’ll like, I I see the diagrams Writing, newsletter. It's all
Speaker 0 Yeah. I'm just thinking Online everything is download fundamentally downstream of writing.
Speaker 1 Mhmm.
Speaker 0 And all commercial activities are fundamentally downstream of the newsletter, I think.
Speaker 1 Yeah. And 1 thing that I've done is I love the design tool Figma, and so it has this infinite canvas. And so I like to map out my flywheels in that. I'm like, okay. What about this?
Speaker 1 And I'll I'll design the same thing in a bunch of different ways. And because I like playing with hypotheticals of, like, figuring out what's the 1 driver of the spy wheel. Yeah. What's the thing that makes the biggest impact? And then what if I had this other thing that was the biggest driver?
Speaker 1 Mhmm. And so you can really just play with, like, sketching this out, Or I I have all these components that I use in Figma to, like, move it around and and, just think about how could I how could I tweak this flywheel. Then it forces you to really simplify things about your business that otherwise you’ll just wouldn't. Online, the sketch that you started to make there, that's exactly the kind of thing that I I'll I'll make, like, dozens and dozens of flywheel sketches.
Speaker 0 No, man. I'm gonna show you my FigJam. I I I do the same thing. Okay. Like, on Nathan, I'll go to a coffee
Speaker 1 shop for 4 hours and just literally draw boxes on FigJam. Yeah. Just be like,
Speaker 0 how do I simplify our business to only 3 metrics? What are the 3 that are really and this is like. Yeah. And then it'll it'll be really simple. It'll be Online, okay.
Speaker 0 Well, views equals newsletter subs equals revenue. I'm like, why was that complicated?
Speaker 1 Yeah. And so then you’ll have to close that loop. Yeah. Right? If you wanna make it a flywheel, is to go how does more revenue drive more views?
Speaker 0 More revenue drive more profit. Profit gets reinvested into the business. Right.
Speaker 1 And then you get specific. Right? Okay. That That profit. How exactly does it get re invested?
Speaker 0 Okay. Yeah. That's what I haven't done yet YouTube I've just been like, oh, generally. But how it would be do is, like, if we can increase our output, that was that's 1 option. But a completely an option I've not even considered is the subtle paid acquisition model Yep.
Speaker 0 Where actually putting money in gets you more more views and stuff. Putting ad Sponsored behind our videos that we know will convert to things Online
Speaker 1 Mhmm. Yeah. Nathan and, like, in a very simple way, if you looked at, like, mister beast spy wheel, he's just like, great. How much money did I make? How much can I pour this into making a ridiculous video that's gonna get more attention?
Speaker 1 Right? And and that that compounded pretty quickly. And so then what I like to do is get to a point in the flywheel where it's obvious. Like, first figure out how to close the loop.
Speaker 0 Mhmm. Because most people get
Speaker 1 to a linear process. Mhmm. Yep. Right? So closing the loop is really, really important.
Speaker 1 And then force yourself to come up with 4 or 5 different ways to close the loop. Right? I had a very brief stint, going to college, and I was in art school. And I didn't have a lot of good takeaways, but 1 thing that they would force you to do is when you're planning out your art in the early stages, do something called thumbnailing. And they just said take a piece of paper, like fold it up a bunch Nathan then unf what?
Speaker 1 Unfold it so you have, like, you know, 12 boxes or something of of a small size. And, like, sketch out a particular, like, composition for your landscape, or I you’ll it a ton in designing apps later on. I'm like, you know, at the small size, what are 10 different ways that I could design this app interface? Yep. And so I'd apply the same concept to fly flywheels where I'd say, okay.
Speaker 1 What if I what if money and reinvesting profits? What if I'm not allowed to use that as the loop closer or the engine of the supply wheel? What else could I use? And that'll get me thinking through, like, okay. Maybe it's relationships.
Speaker 1 Maybe the like, going on podcasts or something else, you know, like partner webinars, maybe that turns into the thing. And so I I like to put in the these things, the classics would be, what if I'm not allowed to reinvest any money in my business? What if I have to reinvest every dollar that I make in my business? What if you’ll play with those constraints and you get to things that, you know, you might get all the way back to the exact same thing that you drove that you drew out in the first place, but you'll be way more confident in it. Or you might get something entirely different.
Speaker 0 Sick. Alright. That's some homework for me. So a, I've been committing officially committing to doing a 1,000 words a day. So I'll message you and let you know how that goes.
Speaker 1 Yeah. Although,
Speaker 0 mate, that'll be so good if you're Online, just thinking a 1,000 words a day. That's email newsletter. It's Online, I never struggle with, like, you know, it's Sunday today, so I need to send my newsletter today, and I don't have anything written.
Speaker 1 Right.
Speaker 0 We need need to write something today, so that'll be a good start. But also things like Instagram captions and stuff. I always feel like I have thoughts, but, like, I can't share those thoughts because they're either in the newsletter or they're compiled into, like, a sort of full on YouTube video production type thing. But, actually, if I just had the stuff written, I just have things that I'd like to share and just chucking them as an Instagram caption or is it Twitter long form post or something. And then alongside also making progress on these, like, 4 different book ideas, and all of it would just happen by default if I actually wrote a 1,000 words a day.
Speaker 0 Mental. Yep.
Speaker 1 Mental. Simple, not easy.
Speaker 0 Simple, not easy. Alright. We got this. Nathan, thank you so much. For anyone who's listened to the last 2 and a half hours of this conversation, who vibe with your way of seeing the world, any final parting words of advice for anyone who's gone this far in the pod?
Speaker 1 Oh, man. I think, create every day is probably the biggest thing. Like, if you embody that and you keep learning continually, like, make something, put it out in the world, and try to learn from how it's, you know, everything that happened there. That's the single biggest thing. And then everything else is is strategy downstream from from those habits.
Speaker 1 So don't over complicate it. Like, we can figure out all of the crazy advanced flywheels on how exactly we're making the highest ROI from a single unit of attention
Speaker 0 Yeah.
Speaker 1 Later on. But you gotta make sure that you have the creation dialed in.
Speaker 0 Brilliant. Where can people learn more about you and your work if they would like to find out more?
Speaker 1 Yeah. Let's see. If you go to nathanberry.com, that's all of my essays and and all of that. I'm starting a new podcast called $1,000,000,000 Creator. So it's a nerd out on all, you know, things like flywheels and equity and everything else.
Speaker 1 And then, anyway, he's not using ConvertKit shit. It's just at convertkit.com. We power all the biggest newsletters on the Internet.
Speaker 0 Yeah. Including us, which is not very big, but well, actually,
Speaker 1 yeah, it's it's
Speaker 0 reasonable. It's reasonable. About 500,000 subs in total.
Speaker 1 That's that is a very large newsletter.
Speaker 0 Nice. I'm glad I'm glad to hear it. And I realized that, like, you're actually most famous for ConvertKit, and we spent basically 0 time talking about ConvertKit. That's totally okay.
Speaker 1 It'd be great
Speaker 0 to do a round 2 at some point Nathan going charting the 10 year history of ConvertKit and the lessons you've learned along the way. That'll be awesome for round 2. But, yeah, thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 1 Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 0 Alright. So that's it for this week's episode of deep dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the Itunes store.
Speaker 0 It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4 ks on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching.
Speaker 0 Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.