Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Nathan Barry - Founder and CEO at ConvertKit | The Secret To Becoming A Billion-Dollar Creator

Transcript

Nathan Barry - Founder and CEO at ConvertKit | The Secret To Becoming A Billion-Dollar Creator · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  When we think of a lot of businesses, it's like, I started it, then I just worked consistently on it and then it got better and better and here we are today and it's magic.
• 0:06
  And Converkit did not start that way.
• 0:09
  Nathan Barry.
• 0:10
  Nathan Barry.
• 0:11
  Nathan Barry.
• 0:12
  The mastermind behind ConvertKit with a passion for building audiences and companies.
• 0:16
  Nathan is all about helping creators like Tim Ferris, Rechen Ruben, and thousands more earn a living.
• 0:21
  How do you become a billion dollar creator?
• 0:24
  The idea behind a billion dollar creator is taking something that is so, so valuable, which is attention.
• 0:30
  Attention is one of the biggest currencies that we have out there.
• 0:33
  And as creators, we have attention and space.
• 0:35
  Growing up with financial struggles, Nathan set out on a journey that took him from freelance web design to launching ConvertKit, which now supports over 20,000 creators.
• 0:44
  Let's dive in.
• 0:45
  When people sell content online, this question that comes up a lot of, what should I sell and what should I give away?
• 0:52
  Give away just about everything.
• 0:54
  Just hold back a little bit.
• 0:56
  Charge a fair price for that.
• 1:00
  Welcome to Success Story.
• 1:02
  I'm your host, Scott Clary.
• 1:04
  The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network.
• 1:08
  I am a huge fan of HubSpot because they support entrepreneurs.
• 1:11
  A lot of entrepreneurs, founders, executives, listen to this show.
• 1:15
  And for entrepreneurs that are trying to build, I have a question for you.
• 1:20
  Does it feel like your teams are getting pulled in a million different directions?
• 1:24
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• 1:33
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• 1:35
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• 1:41
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• 1:44
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• 1:50
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• 1:54
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• 2:01
  And everyone can deliver killer results and grow revenue faster than ever before.
• 2:07
  Because when your teams work better, your business grows faster.
• 2:11
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• 2:24
  Alright Nathan, I'm super excited to have you on. This is going to be a lot of fun.
• 2:28
  I want to start this off just at a very high level, very open-ended question.
• 2:33
  How do you become a billion-dollar creator?
• 2:37
  Oh, yeah, it's a high level, but kind of a challenging question at the same time.
• 2:43
  The idea behind a billion-dollar creator is taking something that is so, so valuable, which is attention.
• 2:50
  This idea, you know, attention is one of the biggest currencies that we have out there.
• 2:55
  Companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to buy attention through ads.
• 3:00
  And as creators, we have attention in space. That's what we're the best at.
• 3:04
  And it's creating and capturing attention.
• 3:07
  So it's taking that attention and then pointing it at something where you have real equity value.
• 3:14
  There are just through all to be earning a full-time living, paying their mortgage, that sort of thing.
• 3:19
  And they kind of scale up in there and say, okay, what if instead of making money off of affiliate products or some ad revenue,
• 3:27
  what if I was making it off of my own products?
• 3:30
  I'm selling courses, training, all that sort of thing.
• 3:34
  But really the ones that become billion-dollar creators are the ones who build and use their audience and attention
• 3:42
  to build a brand with lasting equity value.
• 3:45
  So one of my favorite examples is Mark Sisson, who had a blog called Mark's Daily Apple.
• 3:51
  He was one of the first paleo diet, paleo lifestyle blogs.
• 3:55
  He guided that to the point where he was earning millions of dollars a year, which is fantastic.
• 4:00
  This is probably 2013 and 2015, around the time.
• 4:04
  And then what he did is he used that platform to launch a brand called Primal Kitchen, which was all around making a paleo-friendly mayonnaise.
• 4:18
  And then got in solid dressing and other sauces from there.
• 4:21
  And he was able to use that audience to launch, you know, so it was really hard to consumer package goods and scale it up.
• 4:29
  Within a few years, I think three or four years, he sold the craft foods for $200 million.
• 4:35
  And so, you know, he took what was a good business and then, you know, instead of selling, you know, attention, he sold products.
• 4:43
  And he scaled that up to, you know, a massive exit.
• 4:46
  Not officially a billion dollars, but you get the concept.
• 4:49
  Listen, that's a good amount of money for most creators.
• 4:53
  I think that the hard part for creators, and I thought about this a lot.
• 4:58
  And what Mark did is actually very interesting.
• 5:01
  And I find this slightly novel because a lot of creators are creatives first and then their business people second.
• 5:08
  And I actually think we're, both of us were actually the opposite because I come from background and SaaS also as do you.
• 5:16
  So you are business person operator, build a business, understand it, understand a scale growth, all of that.
• 5:22
  And then you're also a creator at the same time.
• 5:24
  But I think a lot of creators struggle with figuring out how to create enterprise value or to create something that they own because a lot of creators outside of, we're not talking like the Logan Paul's or the Mr. Beast.
• 5:36
  They just have such massive reach that, yeah, they sneeze out of product.
• 5:41
  People are going to know about it.
• 5:43
  But people that don't have reach like that and they want to start a product and they don't know how to build a business per se.
• 5:49
  So how come Mark was successful with how many creators launch merch lines or pick a product and it just seems to fizzle out and it just seems to be tired and then they kill it.
• 6:02
  Oh, who's that makeup artist?
• 6:04
  I'm going to blank on her name right now.
• 6:06
  Oh, my girlfriend's going to kill me.
• 6:08
  Anyways, there's a large makeup artist that just basically dropped her whole makeup line.
• 6:13
  But the point is the creators struggle building businesses.
• 6:17
  So how do they do that effectively or is it smarter for a creator to take equity in a company that has an operator that can actually an entrepreneur that can actually build something out for them?
• 6:28
  Yeah, there's a few things in that.
• 6:30
  First, I think you have to know what your strengths are.
• 6:32
  Like you're saying, hey, I am the creative through and through.
• 6:36
  That is what I'm best at.
• 6:37
  I can get attention.
• 6:39
  But I don't want to get involved in software development, supply chain operations, finance, any of that.
• 6:45
  Then you should probably not get into those things just to chase money.
• 6:51
  So finding the operator is going to be really, really important.
• 6:55
  In EOS, which is the entrepreneur's operating system, which is a popular framework that a lot of founders use.
• 7:02
  They have this idea of the integrator, right?
• 7:04
  Someone who takes your ideas as the visionary, the spokesperson, all of that.
• 7:09
  And they're responsible for running the day-to-day operations.
• 7:12
  So I think at a minimum, creators are going to need a really great integrator, a COO, something like that.
• 7:20
  I think the creators should not shy away from those things.
• 7:23
  Like in the same way that you learned how to edit videos for YouTube,
• 7:26
  you can learn how to read a P&L and any of those other things.
• 7:30
  It's not just because there's some fancy certification that someone can get.
• 7:33
  It doesn't mean it's actually that hard.
• 7:35
  So I would encourage everyone to dive in on those topics.
• 7:39
  They'll make you much better at running a creator business.
• 7:43
  But I think, go ahead if you want to jump in.
• 7:46
  No, no, no, no, I'd go ahead.
• 7:48
  I had another follow-up and finish your thought.
• 7:50
  Yeah.
• 7:51
  In this business realm, I think that you should only pursue products on this level and scale
• 8:00
  if that's something that you're really, really interested in.
• 8:03
  I have seen this where people take an audience and say, hey, what should I shoehorn into this?
• 8:08
  And it's just not a good fit.
• 8:12
  Whereas you see the other angle of people testing things with their audience.
• 8:17
  So we mentioned a private kitchen, right?
• 8:20
  The thing they had a recipe for avocado oil mayonnaise, right?
• 8:24
  They had salad dressing recipes. They were very popular.
• 8:27
  There's another CPG company called Wellness that they had this.
• 8:34
  It was spun off in a blog called Wellness Mama.
• 8:36
  That was very, very popular.
• 8:38
  And they had this homemade natural products toothpaste recipe.
• 8:44
  That was very popular.
• 8:46
  And so then they basically started saying, oh, let's take this thing.
• 8:49
  That's already popular and put it out there.
• 8:51
  A third would be, what is it?
• 8:56
  A kettle and fire.
• 8:57
  They make a bone broth broth.
• 8:59
  That was often a very popular bone broth recipe.
• 9:02
  And they build the massive business off of it.
• 9:04
  So you're following this trend that there's already interested excitement.
• 9:10
  And there's an example that I really like is Mark Rober,
• 9:13
  where with his YouTube channel, he has 40 million subscribers or something crazy like that.
• 9:19
  He didn't start out saying, hey, I'm going to make a subscription science box.
• 9:24
  He started out being sponsored by a monthly subscription box.
• 9:29
  And he's looking at how well does that work in my audience.
• 9:32
  You know, he formed a good partnership with them.
• 9:34
  And at some point, he's looking going, wait, I can make something significantly better than this.
• 9:39
  And I don't know the details, but they probably had decent terms for him.
• 9:43
  But he's like, wait, I can not only make a better business,
• 9:46
  but I can integrate it better with the videos.
• 9:48
  I can tell it better.
• 9:49
  And then, you know, he's ended up making crutch laps, which I don't remember the numbers.
• 9:54
  But I want to say it's pushing 100 million a year in revenue or something like that.
• 9:59
  Like the subscription numbers are absolutely wild.
• 10:01
  But it's because he's really looking for the early signs of product market fit.
• 10:05
  Instead of going out and saying, I have an audience, let's just emerge at it.
• 10:09
  Let's, you know, just trying to fill in some of these things.
• 10:11
  And they aren't really a sustainable business.
• 10:14
  I'm wondering if you've thought through this because I'm sure I'm sure you have.
• 10:18
  Like with ConvertKit, I know you're rebranding it as Kit now,
• 10:21
  but a lot of the audience knows it as ConvertKit.
• 10:24
  Did you have a strategy for preemptively finding product market fit
• 10:31
  or reverse engineering a product for an audience that you knew was going to be a hit?
• 10:35
  Or whether multiple iterations and failures and stresses,
• 10:38
  and I'm sure there were a lot of stresses along the way.
• 10:41
  But how seamless was that product when you chose to launch Kit from the ground up?
• 10:47
  And how did, like, talk me through your specific example of what you just suggested creators do?
• 10:53
  Because at the end of the day, what you just recommend to creators do is just a smart entrepreneur idea.
• 10:59
  So my background is in software design.
• 11:02
  I've built a lot of iPhone apps, I've written books on iPhone, Web App Dell,
• 11:06
  and that got me into the creator world.
• 11:09
  And so I didn't, you'll have an established audience and think,
• 11:14
  okay, what's this interesting?
• 11:16
  Let me do software and figure that out.
• 11:19
  Because that's a whole challenging thing,
• 11:22
  as you know, from a lot of times spent in the software world.
• 11:25
  And so, like, I was really a student of that in that business and that industry.
• 11:32
  So what I set out to do is really, as I came into the creator industry,
• 11:37
  is I wanted to build a better email tool.
• 11:40
  I was using, at the time, you know, this is 20...
• 11:45
  Well, I guess. Yeah.
• 11:47
  So, 12 years ago, I'm looking at the email tools.
• 11:51
  The main ones out there were Aweber MailChimp and ImpusionSoft.
• 11:55
  And basically, if you were a direct response marketer, you used Aweber.
• 11:59
  If you had just gotten lumped into this industry, you just started.
• 12:03
  It was probably MailChimp.
• 12:04
  And if you were like sophisticated, you used ImpusionSoft.
• 12:09
  And so I was using MailChimp.
• 12:11
  And I remember thinking, like, this is not made for people like me.
• 12:15
  Like, I learned all these best practices and then you had to hack it in.
• 12:17
  And I was running custom code and I was doing all this stuff.
• 12:20
  Preferably basic things.
• 12:21
  And so, I think a lot of businesses are born out of a pain point.
• 12:26
  And that's where ConvertKit was of, okay, this can be done better.
• 12:31
  I can build in the best practices by default for a specific audience.
• 12:35
  And so that was, you know, we started out email marketing for bloggers
• 12:38
  and then expanded into Indie Creators.
• 12:41
  But it was not an overnight success by any means.
• 12:46
  And we can get into that if you'd like.
• 12:48
  Yeah, no, I think that, I mean, those are some of my favorite stories.
• 12:52
  It just shows the whole journey and all the ups and downs.
• 12:56
  And we'll get there.
• 12:57
  I guess let's go back to your childhood because your father owned, I guess, a Christian bookstore.
• 13:06
  Is that correct?
• 13:07
  And that was, he was entrepreneurial.
• 13:10
  And that was sort of your first entrepreneurial bug.
• 13:12
  Walk me through or at least exposure.
• 13:15
  Walk me through some of the really early childhood experiences.
• 13:19
  It could be that.
• 13:20
  It could be other experiences that sort of shaped you into an entrepreneur.
• 13:26
  Yeah, I think there's a couple.
• 13:28
  The first was just being very aware of money or the lack of money.
• 13:33
  You know, my dad running a ministry type business.
• 13:37
  It was supported on donations and all of that.
• 13:40
  And so I was just very aware of the lack of money in my family.
• 13:45
  Like, watch it be a point of stress between my parents.
• 13:49
  They eventually divorced with money being a big, a big factor in that.
• 13:54
  Another one would be, you know, my upbringing.
• 13:59
  I was homeschooled.
• 14:00
  And Derek Sivers talks about this in his book, anything you want.
• 14:05
  He has this experience going to the Brooklyn School of Music, where someone sits and down
• 14:10
  and is basically like, there is no speed limit.
• 14:12
  You can go at your own pace.
• 14:13
  And they teach you a semester's worth of music theory in like a day.
• 14:17
  And they test out the class and moves on.
• 14:20
  And that was my experience as a kid where the first time I remember who's being like 11 or 12.
• 14:26
  And I grew up in the mountains outside of Boise and I remember just like the most amazing snow coming down.
• 14:31
  And thinking like, I have all the school to do and I just want to be outside sledding.
• 14:36
  And my mom said to me, you know, this is a fixed amount of work, not a fixed amount of time.
• 14:43
  Just because school normally takes till two or three p.m. every day doesn't mean it has to go.
• 14:50
  Like, whenever this is done, you can go sledding.
• 14:53
  And you've never seen a more focused 12 year old like in your life.
• 14:58
  You know, I got all my math, literature, everything done.
• 15:01
  Like two hours later, I was out sledding, you know, by an amp probably.
• 15:06
  And that stuck with me in a huge way.
• 15:09
  And that's really how life works.
• 15:11
  And I ended up playing it forward in a much bigger way where I was always trying to keep up with my older siblings.
• 15:20
  And so a lot of my friends were my older siblings friends, so they were, you know, two, three, four years older than me.
• 15:25
  And that didn't seem to matter.
• 15:27
  They were super inclusive.
• 15:28
  They let me tag along to everything until I realized, oh wait, they're all like 16 years old.
• 15:35
  And I am 13.
• 15:38
  They're going to be going up to college really soon.
• 15:40
  And this age gap that didn't feel like a big deal is about to be a giant castle where they'll be gone.
• 15:46
  And it all be here.
• 15:48
  And so I was thinking, yeah, I'm just talking about my mom about it.
• 15:52
  And I asked like, is a high school a set number of years or is it a fixed amount of work?
• 15:59
  And she was like, it's a fixed amount of work.
• 16:02
  You have older siblings.
• 16:03
  The curriculum is already laid out.
• 16:04
  Like you can graduate whenever all of this is done to accept all grade levels.
• 16:09
  And so it was exactly like that sledding example where I remember thinking,
• 16:15
  we would do these drives from Boise to Seattle to this family.
• 16:19
  You know, it's like an eight and a half hour drive.
• 16:21
  And I remember to take care of like, I'm really bored when I'm doing math.
• 16:24
  I'm also really bored when I'm on these drives.
• 16:27
  Like, why not just combine these two?
• 16:30
  I have my older brother sitting next to me who's already done, you know,
• 16:33
  I'll go for a two or whatever.
• 16:35
  And so in that eight hour drive, I would do like a month or more worth of math lessons.
• 16:40
  Just power through 30 or 40 lessons, learn all of that.
• 16:43
  And yeah, you know, get help whatever I needed to.
• 16:49
  And I just had that mindset.
• 16:51
  So I ended up graduating high school when I was 15, going out to college.
• 16:55
  I dropped out of college when I was 17, halfway through a degree to start in bus stop.
• 17:00
  By the way, I'll let you know that when you're trying to research like your pass and your timeline,
• 17:04
  it was very confusing because I saw that you dropped out at 17.
• 17:08
  And I couldn't figure out why like I was using like AI to like do research and stuff like that.
• 17:13
  A prep for the show.
• 17:14
  And I'm like, something's not working, right?
• 17:15
  Like something's totally up.
• 17:16
  No, this is your home school.
• 17:18
  And this is what allowed you to adopt that mindset, which allowed you to apply to get into and then drop out at 17.
• 17:26
  Yeah.
• 17:27
  So it's this idea that, you know, I didn't read this from Derek Sivers.
• 17:31
  Probably until I was, you know, 20 or more.
• 17:35
  I was looking at the book and I think you want to come out.
• 17:38
  But reading that I was like, he is describing my life when he says there is no speed limit.
• 17:43
  And he's just talking about how life is designed to go at the pace of the slowest person.
• 17:49
  Whether it's a 25 person class or, you know, structure and work, projects, all of that.
• 17:57
  You know, you want to make, you want to make people come for roles.
• 18:00
  It should be left behind all all this things happen in groups.
• 18:03
  And he's just like, look, it doesn't have to be that way.
• 18:07
  You can, you can buckle down and focus on it.
• 18:12
  I remember thinking, I did ballroom dance in college.
• 18:17
  And so we're on the, I was on the competitive ballroom dance team for a couple of years and just really enjoyed that.
• 18:25
  And then, but I didn't do it that often.
• 18:27
  And then after college, I didn't do it often.
• 18:29
  But you know, maybe I'd do it once a month or something.
• 18:32
  And I remember talking to someone like, oh, how long you've been doing ballroom dance?
• 18:35
  I was like, oh, six years at this point.
• 18:38
  And then I had this other friend in LA or who had moved to LA and he got really into it.
• 18:43
  And he was doing it like four or five nights a week.
• 18:46
  And I was doing it like one night a month.
• 18:49
  And he, it probably took him six months to get to the point where he was just as good as I was.
• 18:56
  And in seven months, he was probably 50% better than I was.
• 18:59
  And in eight months, he was twice as good.
• 19:01
  And it just really reminded me that like,
• 19:04
  your amount of time and my amount of time are not that so equal.
• 19:07
  We could both have done this.
• 19:08
  I hit have done it for six years, you two or six months and you could be just as good.
• 19:12
  And it's like how focused and deliberate are you with them?
• 19:16
  But that idea of there is no speed limit like you set the pace has probably shaped every aspect of my life.
• 19:22
  I feel I think that's probably one of the smartest ideas I've ever heard on this podcast because I don't think many people,
• 19:28
  I don't think many people have that perception of time.
• 19:31
  I think that I think that well-meaning thought leaders, influencers tell you to balance and to enjoy the journey,
• 19:40
  which is it's important so that you don't give up too soon.
• 19:44
  But you I love that you don't have to be limited just because it took someone else six years to get there.
• 19:51
  You could you could get there in a quarter or an eighth of the time with the right focus and the right mindset and the right application
• 20:01
  and the right allocation of your bandwidth towards this particular thing.
• 20:04
  Very very similar example.
• 20:06
  Oh yeah, a friend of mine, his name is Trent and he spent he has built and sold multiple businesses.
• 20:12
  Nothing like crazy exits, but he's done some good stuff in the e-commerce space and all of that.
• 20:17
  I believe he's he's in his early fifties and he decided last year that he wanted to become an airline pilot.
• 20:27
  Which if you're like 53 years old is the most ridiculous thing because
• 20:34
  first there's a mandatory retirement at age 65.
• 20:38
  So when people say like, oh, you have tons of time to pursue your dreams and all that.
• 20:42
  He's like, okay, I have 12 years that this career is even possible.
• 20:46
  Now he can go fly private charter and other stuff down that, but you know, there's that mandatory retirement.
• 20:52
  The other thing is to even fly, you have to have to fly for an airline.
• 20:58
  You have to have 1,500 hours of flight time, like actually behind the controls of an airplane.
• 21:04
  That is in the air flying.
• 21:06
  And so it takes everyone three to four years to get that, you know, takes them years to get their basic ratings
• 21:14
  and then to become an instructor and to work their way up and all of this.
• 21:17
  And he decided like, I don't have that much time.
• 21:20
  And so he basically set up to see how quickly can I do this.
• 21:25
  And so well, most people get, you know, maybe all of their readings from the first private pilot's license all
• 21:33
  way up to being a flight instructor in a year if they were focused.
• 21:37
  He did it in 90 days because conventional wisdom is you should fly three times a week.
• 21:42
  And he's like, forget that.
• 21:43
  I'm going to fly twice a day, twice a day, six days a week.
• 21:47
  And you know, he's in the simulator training all of a sudden.
• 21:50
  Like he just logged out as much as possible.
• 21:52
  And now he's 18 months into his journey.
• 21:56
  And I think this week he'll hit us 15 hundred hours.
• 21:59
  And so he's done it in less than half the time.
• 22:01
  He has a job offer from Sky West, which is a regional airline.
• 22:05
  And he, of course, he created the YouTube channel about this whole thing which having an audience helped him in every way.
• 22:10
  But I just love these examples of people who say like, the standard pace is for other people.
• 22:16
  Like I'm going to figure out what's up my own pace.
• 22:19
  Hey guys, Scott here.
• 22:20
  I just wanted to take a quick moment to say a heartfelt thanks to every single one of you.
• 22:25
  Six years of this show and it's really all because of you.
• 22:28
  Your listens, your support, your shares, it will keep this thing going.
• 22:32
  When I started, I had no idea how big this would get, how many lives we touch.
• 22:36
  The stories we share, the lessons that we learned together.
• 22:39
  It's truly humbling.
• 22:40
  And I believe that we're building something really special here.
• 22:43
  A community where no one has to reinvent the wheel.
• 22:46
  All in this together, learning and growing.
• 22:49
  And here's my ask.
• 22:50
  If you love this show, it's made a difference for you.
• 22:53
  Please share it with somebody who needs it.
• 22:55
  Hella friend, host on social, whatever works.
• 22:57
  It's the best way to keep this thing going strong.
• 23:00
  Bring on even better guests and share more life changing wisdom.
• 23:04
  And you can find us on all the spots.
• 23:06
  So you can go to successstorypodcast.com if you like listening to podcasts.
• 23:10
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• 23:12
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• 23:19
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• 23:21
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• 23:24
  Let's keep learning.
• 23:25
  Let's keep growing.
• 23:26
  And let's keep making this world a little bit better together.
• 23:30
  All right.
• 23:31
  Let's get back to the show.
• 23:32
  Have you ever noticed, obviously, this is a, this is a sort of a thesis on life that you've adopted.
• 23:38
  And it makes perfect sense.
• 23:39
  Have you ever noticed if somebody is listening to this?
• 23:41
  And they're like, oh, yeah, let's just like, you know, excuse my friends, balls to the wall on whatever it is I'm trying to do.
• 23:48
  You speed run through life, through entrepreneurship, through the precursors that you have to go through to get to the desired end result.
• 23:56
  Are there negatives?
• 23:57
  Are there cautions?
• 23:58
  Are there warnings?
• 23:59
  Are there red flags that you, you just note for somebody if you try this?
• 24:03
  Has I ever fought back?
• 24:05
  I think I probably tried to grow up too fast.
• 24:08
  Like, there's probably more fun entertainment that I could have done.
• 24:13
  I don't know.
• 24:14
  I had a good time through high school and college and, and all of that.
• 24:18
  I think I would probably tell myself, you have more time.
• 24:25
  Like, I think that I had probably too much anxiety and urgency through this process.
• 24:31
  So probably try to bring in more of a life as a game type attitude.
• 24:36
  Because I think there's a lot of fun things in that where you're like, all right, let's look at college.
• 24:41
  You know, why don't I just test out of half of these classes?
• 24:44
  Like, go to Barnes & Noble.
• 24:46
  Buy the test guide for US History One.
• 24:50
  I studied a lot of history in high school, you know?
• 24:53
  Like, let me read, study this book, test out of the class.
• 24:56
  That's kind of fun.
• 24:57
  And so do that from a, how do I play and beat the game perspective?
• 25:02
  Rather than from a, it's kind of weird to think back on, you know, at like 17 or 16,
• 25:08
  I was like, I'm running out of time.
• 25:10
  Which I like.
• 25:12
  And so much time.
• 25:14
  So I would just think about your motivations to do it.
• 25:17
  Like, do it in a challenging, fun, playful way, not a stress driven anxiety sort of way.
• 25:24
  Exacting activities, different motivation.
• 25:26
  Very good.
• 25:28
  So obviously you're a content creator yourself.
• 25:31
  Now, I learned that you wrote at one point when you were, I guess, I want to understand if you were getting into blogging and writing,
• 25:38
  you wrote a thousand words a day for 600 days straight, which is absolutely wild.
• 25:43
  And anybody listening to this is like, well, now that they actually know how you look at life, maybe it makes a little bit more sense.
• 25:48
  But for most people, that's like a WTF moment.
• 25:52
  Like, how do you commit to that for so long?
• 25:55
  So when you, when you write a thousand words a day for 600 days, what's the motivation for that?
• 26:04
  What's the reason?
• 26:05
  Like, you're a creator, you're a writer, you're a blogger.
• 26:10
  What was the purpose that that served in your life when you were, when you just started that?
• 26:15
  Yeah.
• 26:16
  So in early 2012, I was working as a freelance software designer.
• 26:22
  I'd made a bunch of iPhone apps both for myself and for clients.
• 26:27
  And I had had a lot of ideas for content that I wanted to create.
• 26:30
  The people that I looked up to and admired were a lot of content creators, both in the web design space, business, software design, and all of that.
• 26:39
  And I thought, okay, I want to write a book.
• 26:42
  I want to be like that.
• 26:43
  I want to, you know, write and either self-ubuse or tuition publish a book.
• 26:47
  And I had this problem where all of my output was tied to my motivation.
• 26:54
  So I would get an idea.
• 26:56
  I would be like, oh, this is going to be great.
• 26:58
  And I'd work like all weekend on it.
• 27:00
  And the next week I'd, you know, work three different days to get time on it.
• 27:04
  And the next week I'd like work on it for three hours.
• 27:07
  And then we get to that and work on it for 30 minutes.
• 27:10
  And I just realized that I had all of these projects that I'd started at different times that had died out.
• 27:18
  And I realized that I was never going to achieve what I wanted to if motivation and output were tied together one to one.
• 27:26
  That was never going to work.
• 27:27
  And so I had to figure out, how do I disconnect these things?
• 27:30
  So that I have productive output regardless of, you know, my current energy and motivation.
• 27:38
  And around that time, I was following Chris Killabo, who is one of these creators that has really inspired me for so many things.
• 27:46
  And he talked about, he had this line where he said, you know, it's really easy to publish a book every year.
• 27:53
  And a self published book.
• 27:55
  Write 100 blog posts, 50 guest posts, you know, maybe some long form magazine pieces.
• 28:02
  It's really easy to do that in a single year.
• 28:04
  And I'm like, I can't even write a blog consistently.
• 28:09
  There's nothing easy about what you're describing.
• 28:11
  But he kept going, he said, if you just write a thousand words a day.
• 28:15
  In a thousand words, I was like, well, that's a lot, you know, four digits of anything feels like a lot.
• 28:22
  But then he kept, he broke it down and he's like, look, that's like two and a half pages of content.
• 28:28
  It's not actually that much.
• 28:30
  If you're on a roll, that's 45 minutes.
• 28:32
  If you're grinding it out, and it's hard, that's two hours.
• 28:36
  Maybe.
• 28:38
  And so I was thinking about this.
• 28:40
  I was like, okay, that's, that's going to be my goal.
• 28:43
  I have to disconnect the output from my current motivation.
• 28:47
  And so I will write a thousand words a day, no matter what.
• 28:50
  That is my primary goal.
• 28:52
  And I really focused on that.
• 28:56
  Actually, the first thing I did since I was a software developer is I went and made an app to track a streak of writing a thousand words a day.
• 29:04
  And then I launched it into actually doing it.
• 29:08
  But I ended up, you know, getting like 10 days in a row and then I broke my streak.
• 29:13
  And then I got five days and broke it.
• 29:16
  And then the third time I was like, all right, I'm going to do this no matter what.
• 29:20
  So I'll accept, you know, schedule the time in on my calendar.
• 29:24
  I set multiple reminders so that it would pop up and be like, hey, did you write a thousand words today?
• 29:30
  And I just, you know, so the groundstone like got that done every single day.
• 29:35
  And there were days I would count editing.
• 29:38
  So I towards the end of this book that is working on.
• 29:41
  And you'd be like, well, I don't actually need to write net new words.
• 29:44
  But I need to edit down and rewrite.
• 29:47
  And so, you know, that would would count towards my thousand words.
• 29:52
  And by the time I published my book, it was called The App to Zen Handbook.
• 29:56
  I published it in September 2012.
• 29:59
  And I was done and I'd gotten to 80 days in a row of writing a thousand words.
• 30:05
  And the next day commit the app that I had made popped up and said, are you going to write a thousand words a day?
• 30:10
  And I was like, no, I did it like check the book in bed of big success beyond my dreams.
• 30:19
  And I thought, I don't want to break that chain.
• 30:22
  And so then I was like, you know, let me write a blog post about how the book launch did and the lessons that I learned.
• 30:28
  Wrote that, published it.
• 30:30
  And then sure enough, the next day, the app popped up and said, are you going to write a thousand words today?
• 30:34
  And I was like, well, no.
• 30:37
  I know what the hell. Let's write another book.
• 30:40
  And so 90 days later, I'd written and published another book on designing web applications.
• 30:46
  And then I just kept that streak going.
• 30:48
  It actually wasn't until, you know, 600 days in that I ended up getting shingles, getting super sick, dealing with a whole bunch of life stuff that I finally broke that streak.
• 30:59
  You know, it seems like this was, there was a very tangible output.
• 31:04
  Obviously the books that you, that you ended up publishing, this is also like a mental training ground and a mental exercise.
• 31:11
  It probably served you super well in, you know, when building, convert kit.
• 31:15
  It reminds me a lot of Seth Godin too.
• 31:17
  I mean, I'm a huge fan of his work.
• 31:19
  And I'm sure obviously if you wrote a thousand words a day for the calendar days, you obviously know that I think he's been writing, not a thousand words.
• 31:25
  But he's been writing every day for, I don't even know how many years.
• 31:28
  Yeah, he published it not every day.
• 31:30
  Yeah, which is super interesting.
• 31:31
  Yeah, I'm a huge fan of Seth.
• 31:32
  We actually had a keynote, our very first conference.
• 31:35
  Yeah, he is.
• 31:36
  Well, I think that was for writers.
• 31:38
  I think look up to him because publishing every day I'm sure, because that's probably, that's not even just writing.
• 31:42
  You have to add it.
• 31:43
  And the thoughts that he puts out everything, every single day are so prolific.
• 31:48
  I actually ended up sitting down with his book agent who had gone to Seth.
• 31:54
  It was either a house or an apartment when he was on tour.
• 31:58
  And the book agent for one of his books, at least, assumed that he'd walk into this apartment.
• 32:04
  It would be like a couple of people like ghost writing for him.
• 32:06
  And it's no, it's just him.
• 32:07
  Like it's just, it's just Seth, just writing.
• 32:10
  And nothing else, no one else, no assistance, no ghost.
• 32:13
  It's just him. He sits down and cranks out an idea per day.
• 32:15
  But anyway, so not about Seth.
• 32:18
  This is about you.
• 32:20
  If you're going to look at some of the, so after you, after you put these published these two books, obviously hundreds of blog posts,
• 32:29
  at what point does the idea of convert kit and now kit come into play?
• 32:35
  Yes, it was actually really soon.
• 32:39
  There's so many things I look back on.
• 32:41
  I'm like amused by my thought process at the time.
• 32:44
  So I had a few things going on.
• 32:47
  And so September 12th, I published my first book to an audience of 800 people on a Mailchimp email list.
• 32:56
  Like December 15th, 2012, I published my second book.
• 33:01
  And that is to a list of more than double the size.
• 33:06
  I should probably three or four thousand people.
• 33:09
  That book goes on to sell $50,000 worth in the first month.
• 33:13
  And then January 1st, I start working on a convert kit.
• 33:18
  So in a 90 day period, I saw most two books and started a software company.
• 33:26
  Just laughing because you never stopped.
• 33:28
  You never stopped.
• 33:29
  Yeah.
• 33:30
  So let's divide itself or we'll be around.
• 33:33
  I don't know.
• 33:35
  But I,
• 33:38
  so at that time,
• 33:42
  I was teaching a lot about software design.
• 33:45
  And I had this idea,
• 33:47
  I could see myself moving fully from being a practitioner into teaching.
• 33:52
  And I had this idea that you know what?
• 33:54
  If I stop designing myself,
• 33:56
  then I'm going to be one of these people who only teaches.
• 33:59
  They lose touch and credibility in the industry.
• 34:02
  And so I should have another project that is software designed so that I can keep learning,
• 34:08
  keep my skills sharp and have more to teach about.
• 34:11
  And so when I started convert it, I did it with something I called the Web App Challenge,
• 34:16
  where I said,
• 34:17
  I'm going to build a software company from zero to $5,000 in a month of your current revenue within six months,
• 34:24
  with only $5,000 of my own money contributed to this.
• 34:27
  Everything else has to be cast or refunded.
• 34:29
  And I'm going to live vlog the entire thing.
• 34:32
  And so that gave me a lot more to write about.
• 34:35
  I actually published another book in the middle of this,
• 34:39
  which is kind of wild.
• 34:41
  But that's the thing.
• 34:42
  When you have this muscle going of like the sheer amount of content,
• 34:45
  I was learning so fast I was just teaching absolutely everything that I knew.
• 34:49
  By the way, just a total is total aside,
• 34:52
  writing that much,
• 34:53
  did it help with your clarity?
• 34:55
  Because I find this helps my clarity of thought when I write in everything that I do,
• 34:58
  and when I don't write, I actually feel like a little bit more sluggish,
• 35:01
  a little bit more foggy.
• 35:02
  I don't know if you felt that too, but I'm curious.
• 35:05
  The first thing that people often bring up,
• 35:09
  people who aren't writers,
• 35:11
  when they talk about the amount that I wrote during that time period,
• 35:15
  they go, don't you run out of things to say?
• 35:18
  And so long as you are consuming content and doing research and all that as well,
• 35:24
  I find that the more that I write,
• 35:26
  the more I learn the more that I have to say.
• 35:30
  And so, yeah, I was just so prolific actively doing things at the time as well.
• 35:36
  That I could just even write about what I was doing.
• 35:39
  You know, and that was the thing with building a software company.
• 35:41
  There was every single week,
• 35:43
  there were things to write about.
• 35:44
  How do you name the company?
• 35:45
  How do you hire developers?
• 35:47
  How do you write copy for the homepage?
• 35:49
  And that's really where I like,
• 35:51
  cemented these core values,
• 35:54
  or these mantras that I have,
• 35:56
  which are, there's now four of them.
• 35:58
  But the first is teach everything you know.
• 36:00
  Second is create every day.
• 36:02
  Third is work in public.
• 36:04
  And then the fourth is depot, the generosity.
• 36:07
  And like all this is around,
• 36:09
  like constantly creating,
• 36:10
  constantly learning and sharing.
• 36:12
  And if you do those things consistently,
• 36:15
  you cannot lose.
• 36:17
  I don't want to move off of convert just yet,
• 36:21
  but because you brought it up,
• 36:23
  and I was going to bring those,
• 36:24
  I thought there was three things,
• 36:25
  but I didn't realize you added a fourth.
• 36:27
  So those four mantras,
• 36:30
  maybe just two, three sentences on each one
• 36:36
  for a creator that's listening to this,
• 36:38
  or an entrepreneur that wants to be a creator,
• 36:40
  how do they adopt those four mantras
• 36:42
  as they go out and they create content,
• 36:44
  they document their journey, they vlog,
• 36:46
  they meme, they tweet, they write,
• 36:48
  they do whatever.
• 36:50
  Yeah, so the first one of teach everything you know,
• 36:53
  really was a hard earned lesson for me,
• 36:56
  because I got started in web design and all of that.
• 37:01
  And I just didn't understand the difference
• 37:03
  between the expertise that I had
• 37:05
  and the expertise of those who were public
• 37:07
  and out there and famous.
• 37:09
  And it wasn't until I realized that,
• 37:12
  it's not that people teach because they're experts.
• 37:15
  It's actually the inverse.
• 37:17
  We perceive them as experts because they teach.
• 37:20
  And so I was thinking like,
• 37:22
  oh, I can't write blog posts on this.
• 37:24
  I can't, you know,
• 37:27
  but I'm not an expert and so I can't teach any of this.
• 37:31
  But then it was that I realized
• 37:33
  it actually was the first time I was trying to install Ruby
• 37:36
  on Rails on my computer, the programming framework.
• 37:40
  And I read an article written by an expert
• 37:42
  and it didn't make any sense.
• 37:44
  It felt like it made sense to them
• 37:46
  and they'd like skip past some key stuff.
• 37:49
  And then I found an article written by an absolute beater
• 37:53
  who had read the first article,
• 37:56
  suffered through it,
• 37:57
  learned all of the missing points that a beginner,
• 38:00
  you know, actually encountered.
• 38:01
  And they wrote theirs and I was like,
• 38:03
  ah, there's someone who's two steps ahead of me
• 38:06
  and they wrote something that was far more useful to me.
• 38:09
  And so then I always had that mindset of,
• 38:11
  okay, I'm just going to,
• 38:13
  I'm not going to teach from like an ivory tower up the top.
• 38:16
  And like, here's how things work.
• 38:18
  And I say, hey, here's what I just learned.
• 38:20
  It's helpful like as a breadcrumb for you
• 38:23
  as you follow in my footsteps.
• 38:26
  And that changed the game.
• 38:28
  Like that immediately gave me thousands of things
• 38:31
  to write about because it's like, oh, well,
• 38:34
  from the point of a non-expert, I knew a lot.
• 38:38
  The second one of create every day
• 38:41
  really came back to that lesson of writing every day
• 38:43
  and actually finished the book of like,
• 38:47
  you can't have these false starts,
• 38:48
  you can't tie effort to motivation.
• 38:51
  And it's just like, show up.
• 38:53
  I don't know which famous author this is a quote from.
• 38:58
  But it's something like, you know, I'll never write
• 39:00
  when I'm inspired,
• 39:01
  but it can be that I get inspired every morning
• 39:04
  at 9 a.m. sharp.
• 39:05
  And it's just like, I am a professional.
• 39:08
  I do this.
• 39:09
  You mentioned Seth Gordon.
• 39:10
  And he has this essay called,
• 39:12
  a manifesto for small teams doing important work.
• 39:16
  And it's one thing, it's like 100 words long,
• 39:19
  200 words long, it's very short.
• 39:21
  And it's just so good.
• 39:24
  But it's basically like the gist is,
• 39:26
  you are a professional act like it.
• 39:29
  And yeah, that was huge for me.
• 39:33
  The third one of work in public
• 39:35
  is really just separating this idea of,
• 39:39
  you know, what I'm doing and what I'm teaching.
• 39:43
  And just saying like, look,
• 39:45
  I can just talk about what I'm doing.
• 39:47
  I don't even have to be teaching.
• 39:49
  I can just say, here's a problem that I'm running into.
• 39:52
  But I don't have to have the answer,
• 39:54
  where here's a milestone that we hit.
• 39:56
  Here's what we're celebrating.
• 39:57
  Here's what we're challenged with.
• 39:58
  And that in itself is interesting gauging content.
• 40:01
  I remember a time working in Converkit
• 40:04
  where I was struggling with the copy
• 40:07
  for the sales page.
• 40:09
  And I just talked about it in one of my blog posts.
• 40:12
  I was struggling with how to write this.
• 40:14
  And then Amy Hoi, this amazing copywriter
• 40:18
  and business leader in the BitChap software world,
• 40:22
  who I met and we talked.
• 40:24
  I think we'd met once at a conference.
• 40:26
  But she just messaged me and said,
• 40:28
  hey, I'll help you.
• 40:30
  And we got on the Skype call.
• 40:32
  And we rewrote all of the copy.
• 40:34
  And then instead of saying,
• 40:36
  like, here's the final version.
• 40:38
  I did that.
• 40:39
  But then I published a whole blog post
• 40:41
  and everything I learned
• 40:42
  to like the transcripts of some of our conversations.
• 40:44
  And that was one of the most popular things I'd written
• 40:46
  because they wanted to see like how
• 40:48
  a great copywriter works behind the scenes.
• 40:50
  And then so that's working public.
• 40:52
  The final one is default to generosity.
• 40:55
  When people sell content online,
• 40:58
  they have this,
• 41:00
  this question that comes up a lot of,
• 41:03
  what should I sell and what should I give away?
• 41:06
  And a lot of times people say like,
• 41:08
  okay, I'm going to give away 20% for free.
• 41:11
  And I'm going to sell 80% of it, right?
• 41:14
  Because I give away too much that people won't buy
• 41:16
  when I'm selling and all of that.
• 41:19
  The problem when you go that route is that
• 41:22
  you just never provide that much value for free.
• 41:24
  So you never grow that big of an audience.
• 41:26
  So you never end up having that much reach.
• 41:31
  And so there's not much revenue from it.
• 41:34
  And I like to invert it,
• 41:35
  not 80, 20 of giving.
• 41:37
  It started with the 80, 20 of give 80% away for free,
• 41:40
  old 20% back.
• 41:42
  I think now I'm probably more like 95, 5 of defaults generosity,
• 41:47
  give away just about everything.
• 41:50
  And then just hold back a little bit,
• 41:52
  charge a fair price for that,
• 41:54
  and then there's plenty of money to be made in those areas.
• 41:58
  So those are the four mantras
• 42:00
  and they've guided so much that I've done as a creator.
• 42:04
  I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor
• 42:06
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  I just want to take a second
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  to thank the sponsor of today's episode, HubSpot.
• 43:21
  Now, HubSpot has an incredible podcast network.
• 43:24
  Success stories part of it.
• 43:25
  And if you like success story,
• 43:26
  you're going to love other podcasts in their network.
• 43:28
  One of my favorites is iDigress,
• 43:30
  hosted by Troy Sandage,
• 43:31
  which Troy does exceptionally well,
• 43:33
  is in under 30 minutes,
• 43:35
  he helps eliminate complexity,
• 43:37
  complications, confusion in your business.
• 43:39
  He talks about frameworks,
• 43:40
  strategies that really work
• 43:42
  to help you achieve scalable and sustainable success.
• 43:45
  So you need to go listen to iDigress,
• 43:47
  one of the most useful podcasts for entrepreneurs and founders,
• 43:50
  part of the HubSpot podcast network,
• 43:52
  wherever you get your podcasts.
• 43:55
  So when you look at,
• 43:56
  when you look at ConvertKit,
• 43:58
  just walk me through the rationale
• 44:01
  for you even starting that company.
• 44:03
  Like, I'm assuming you were serving yourself,
• 44:06
  that's what you mentioned before,
• 44:08
  which is one of the best ways to build a business.
• 44:11
  You're serving a pain point that, you know,
• 44:13
  you're so in the weeds,
• 44:14
  and you're in this,
• 44:15
  you have all these experiences
• 44:18
  that you're frustrating,
• 44:19
  you go build a product for it.
• 44:21
  So you were serving creators.
• 44:26
  At this point,
• 44:27
  talk to me about the creator economy,
• 44:30
  back then,
• 44:31
  who you were serving,
• 44:33
  some of the problems that creators had,
• 44:35
  when ConvertKit was first created,
• 44:37
  some of the problems that maybe have been fixed,
• 44:39
  or haven't been fixed in the interim.
• 44:41
  I just want to get your sort of,
• 44:43
  your thesis on creator economy,
• 44:46
  more specifically, I guess,
• 44:47
  email marketers, bloggers, writers.
• 44:50
  Yeah, and so,
• 44:52
  the creator economy at the time wasn't called that.
• 44:55
  I think the term was coined,
• 44:57
  maybe considered 2018, 2019.
• 45:02
  It was mostly dominated by authors and bloggers, right?
• 45:06
  And so you had a lot of people publishing,
• 45:09
  you were trying to get people to subscribe to your RSS feed,
• 45:11
  occasionally the RSS feed,
• 45:13
  like the providers like Google Reader,
• 45:15
  which shut down,
• 45:16
  and everyone would be like,
• 45:17
  oh shoot, I just lost access to a big portion of my audience.
• 45:20
  So you had this contingent that really got invested
• 45:24
  in email early on,
• 45:26
  and they did really, really well.
• 45:28
  So those problems that were solving was like,
• 45:31
  how do I give away something for free,
• 45:33
  and trade for you during my email list,
• 45:34
  like a sample chapter of a book,
• 45:36
  or a free PDF?
• 45:38
  And that was hard and painful in these tools.
• 45:41
  And so I just made it so that's a core feature.
• 45:44
  The next thing was,
• 45:46
  a lot of people were just sending,
• 45:48
  you know, broadcast or campaign emails.
• 45:50
  So it goes out the entire list at the same time.
• 45:53
  And I really became fascinated with this idea of email sequences.
• 45:58
  But basically if you join on day one,
• 46:01
  you're going to get emails time to you.
• 46:03
  And if I join 10 days later,
• 46:05
  I'm going to get the same emails,
• 46:06
  but time to exactly meet.
• 46:08
  And this idea that like wait a second,
• 46:09
  I could make this sequence once.
• 46:11
  And it could work perfectly.
• 46:13
  And if someone joins a year from now,
• 46:16
  they're not going to miss out on all the great content that I already shared.
• 46:20
  But there was no interface that made writing these sequences
• 46:24
  like easy and effective.
• 46:26
  And so one of my first innovations was actually just making an interface
• 46:29
  where you had the main email editor,
• 46:32
  and then you had all the other emails down the side.
• 46:34
  So you could tap between them super easily instead of like going all the way in
• 46:37
  and then all the way back out.
• 46:39
  And so actually,
• 46:40
  convergence was launched really on those two,
• 46:43
  those two ideas of making that easy.
• 46:48
  And then as we expanded,
• 46:49
  you know,
• 46:50
  there's a lot into deliverability and tagging and segmentation reporting
• 46:54
  and all those things.
• 46:56
  Basically viewed through the lens of like writers and contact creators.
• 47:01
  Because every other tool was like,
• 47:03
  hey, we're for all of small business, you know.
• 47:05
  And so,
• 47:07
  having that narrow lens allowed us to build something that was really effective
• 47:12
  but didn't, you know,
• 47:14
  have all the clonkiness of trying to serve everyone.
• 47:18
  Now, at 24,
• 47:21
  you had sort of a crossroads for a convert kit,
• 47:23
  and you had to figure out whether or not you wanted to continue
• 47:26
  or you wanted to shelve this.
• 47:28
  So was, was walk me through what happened.
• 47:31
  Maybe this is probably like the one of the more stressful points
• 47:36
  when you were building this out.
• 47:39
  You know, for entrepreneurs listening,
• 47:42
  give some guidance, some wisdom as to sort of
• 47:45
  what sought process or framework you had to go through
• 47:48
  to decide which direction you wanted to go.
• 47:51
  Yeah, so,
• 47:54
  when we think of a lot of businesses,
• 47:56
  it's like, I started it,
• 47:57
  and then I just worked consistently on it,
• 47:59
  and then it got better and better,
• 48:00
  and then it compounded it,
• 48:01
  and then here we are today,
• 48:02
  and it's magic, you know.
• 48:04
  And convert kit did not start that way.
• 48:07
  At the six month mark,
• 48:09
  it wasn't at 5,000 a month for your career revenue.
• 48:12
  I wasn't at 500 a month,
• 48:14
  actually 500 probably would have been better,
• 48:16
  because it would have said like,
• 48:17
  okay, this doesn't work.
• 48:18
  But I spent time in this like painful middle ground
• 48:22
  of almost success.
• 48:25
  And it's just all this ambiguity.
• 48:27
  So we were at 2000 a month in your career revenue.
• 48:32
  And then from there,
• 48:33
  I struggled to get more customers,
• 48:35
  and ended up,
• 48:37
  gradually declining,
• 48:39
  because churn is a painful thing
• 48:41
  instead of saying it's out.
• 48:43
  Everyone talks about the benefits of recovery revenue.
• 48:45
  They don't talk about the pain of churn.
• 48:49
  So that went on for a while.
• 48:51
  And so then about maybe 18 months into the business,
• 48:56
  I had my books and courses that were doing well,
• 49:00
  and I was at a conference,
• 49:01
  and one of the other speakers there,
• 49:05
  Heaton Shaw,
• 49:06
  we were walking back from,
• 49:08
  from dinner,
• 49:10
  and he just said like,
• 49:11
  hey man,
• 49:12
  I think you should shut down in Birkit.
• 49:14
  And I remember thinking like,
• 49:16
  a first just being surprised,
• 49:18
  and then second thinking like,
• 49:20
  that's not a very nice thing to say.
• 49:21
  Like I've spent a year and a half of my life building this thing.
• 49:24
  There are thousands of people following the story
• 49:26
  of me building it.
• 49:28
  Like, what's going on?
• 49:29
  He goes, yeah,
• 49:30
  you've proven that you're going to be successful at,
• 49:34
  you know, any number of ventures,
• 49:36
  you've given Kon Birkit,
• 49:37
  your best effort,
• 49:38
  your 18 months in,
• 49:39
  like,
• 49:40
  it didn't work,
• 49:41
  shut it down,
• 49:42
  it's time to call it.
• 49:44
  And he kind of just let me sit with that for a minute.
• 49:47
  And then as I was processing,
• 49:49
  he's like,
• 49:50
  or,
• 49:52
  you can give it the time,
• 49:54
  money, and attention it deserves,
• 49:55
  and build it into a real business.
• 49:58
  And he'd correctly assessed that I was sitting,
• 50:00
  like half an hour.
• 50:01
  I was spending, you know,
• 50:04
  probably 10 hours a week,
• 50:05
  maybe 20 hours a week,
• 50:06
  building Kon Birkit
• 50:07
  and the rest of the time,
• 50:08
  but he offered into the things
• 50:09
  it was working,
• 50:10
  like building my audience
• 50:11
  and selling digital products.
• 50:14
  And so,
• 50:15
  I like the joke that I did,
• 50:17
  what everyone does when they hear really good advice,
• 50:19
  and that's nothing for like six months.
• 50:22
  So,
• 50:23
  I sat on that,
• 50:24
  and then I revenue kept declining
• 50:26
  and it was probably 1,200 a month.
• 50:29
  And so, it was barely covering like basic server
• 50:32
  and email expenses at this point.
• 50:34
  And even though you were building your brand,
• 50:35
  and everything like that,
• 50:36
  that was not leading customers.
• 50:38
  That was not converting customers.
• 50:41
  At the rate that you were churning,
• 50:43
  excuse me.
• 50:44
  Yeah, it's a big deal.
• 50:46
  So, it's a big deal to move your business to any software.
• 50:49
  And you really don't want to move your business
• 50:51
  to software that is not growing and bribing.
• 50:55
  And, you know,
• 50:56
  and then especially if it's super early on,
• 50:58
  then you're like,
• 50:59
  this doesn't even have half the basic features that I need, right?
• 51:03
  Because you know,
• 51:04
  whatever we complain about a feature
• 51:05
  not being there in software,
• 51:06
  it's like, well,
• 51:07
  someone had to build it at some point.
• 51:08
  And like the competitors
• 51:09
  have a 10-year head start
• 51:11
  of building all of the,
• 51:13
  you know, the commonplace features.
• 51:15
  So, yeah, it was,
• 51:17
  it continued to shrink.
• 51:18
  And I ended up making like a really simple
• 51:21
  two-question framework
• 51:23
  for how you decide
• 51:25
  when to shut something down
• 51:26
  and when to double down.
• 51:28
  Because we all hear these stories of like,
• 51:31
  it was really, really hard
• 51:32
  and then I persevered through it.
• 51:34
  And now, you know,
• 51:36
  Red Bull has gone public
• 51:37
  or you don't know,
• 51:38
  right?
• 51:39
  Red Bull is still privately out.
• 51:40
  But you get the idea.
• 51:41
  Yeah.
• 51:42
  And so, I didn't want to be the person
• 51:44
  who gave up too soon.
• 51:46
  And I also didn't want to be the person
• 51:48
  who wasted years of his life.
• 51:50
  It was something that was never going to work.
• 51:51
  Or at least fighting
• 51:52
  ridiculous headwinds the whole way.
• 51:54
  And just actually,
• 51:55
  that's a really good point
• 51:56
  that you only hear the stories
• 51:57
  that actually worked out.
• 51:59
  So there is, there is a,
• 52:00
  there is a little bit of a bias
• 52:02
  as, yeah, 100%.
• 52:04
  Yeah. And I think it's a really
• 52:05
  tough place to be,
• 52:06
  especially when you don't have clear signal.
• 52:09
  Right?
• 52:10
  If no one buys it,
• 52:11
  then the answer is pretty clear.
• 52:12
  And I just shut it down and move on.
• 52:14
  But if you're like,
• 52:15
  now it's like,
• 52:16
  it could work.
• 52:18
  It's the two questions
• 52:19
  were first,
• 52:20
  do I still want this
• 52:22
  as much today
• 52:23
  as the day that I started?
• 52:25
  Because if not,
• 52:27
  you can move on.
• 52:28
  Maybe it's that thing
• 52:29
  where like,
• 52:30
  oh, I'm going to run a pluck
• 52:31
  and you're so motivated
• 52:32
  and you're excited
• 52:33
  and then like two weeks later,
• 52:34
  you're like,
• 52:35
  I don't really want that anymore.
• 52:37
  And if that's the case,
• 52:39
  like, shut it down,
• 52:40
  move on,
• 52:42
  and do it totally guilt-free.
• 52:44
  You probably learned some great things
• 52:45
  in the process.
• 52:46
  But if you still want it,
• 52:48
  and for me,
• 52:49
  I was like,
• 52:50
  yes, I absolutely want to be the CEO
• 52:51
  of software company.
• 52:52
  I want to build this
• 52:53
  in the next challenge.
• 52:54
  And it's like,
• 52:55
  all right,
• 52:56
  we'll move to question number two.
• 52:57
  And the second question
• 52:59
  is just,
• 53:00
  have you given this
• 53:01
  every possible chance
• 53:02
  to succeed?
• 53:03
  Because if you have,
• 53:05
  if you really really want it
• 53:07
  and you've given it your best effort
• 53:09
  and your years in
• 53:10
  and it's not working,
• 53:12
  there's probably
• 53:13
  some serious headwards.
• 53:14
  You know,
• 53:15
  the idea doesn't work,
• 53:16
  you're too early,
• 53:18
  you're too late,
• 53:19
  you know,
• 53:20
  you're not the right person
• 53:21
  for the solve this problem.
• 53:23
  Any number of things.
• 53:24
  But you can
• 53:25
  shut it down and move on
• 53:26
  knowing that you truly
• 53:27
  gave it your best.
• 53:30
  But for me, the answer is no.
• 53:32
  I felt like I hadn't.
• 53:34
  And that has a tough place to be.
• 53:36
  On one hand,
• 53:37
  where you say,
• 53:38
  I really, really want this.
• 53:39
  And then over here,
• 53:40
  like,
• 53:41
  but I haven't given it my best.
• 53:43
  And I imagine this person,
• 53:46
  like,
• 53:47
  who I would end up as,
• 53:49
  years from them,
• 53:50
  from then,
• 53:51
  at a party,
• 53:52
  being like,
• 53:53
  oh, yeah.
• 53:54
  So it was like,
• 53:55
  hey, what happened to the convertit?
• 53:56
  And like, oh, you know,
• 53:57
  you know,
• 53:58
  if I really focused on that,
• 53:59
  I could have made that thing work.
• 54:01
  Or if I just tried this,
• 54:02
  or I just tried that.
• 54:04
  And I realized
• 54:05
  that that was going to
• 54:06
  lead to regret.
• 54:07
  But basically,
• 54:08
  always wondering,
• 54:09
  could I have pulled that off
• 54:10
  if I had just done these things?
• 54:12
  You know,
• 54:13
  if I'd given it every
• 54:14
  once,
• 54:15
  and I realized that was something
• 54:16
  I was not willing to live with.
• 54:17
  And so that really left me
• 54:19
  in a place of like,
• 54:20
  all right.
• 54:21
  I can only shut this down,
• 54:23
  when I feel like I have
• 54:24
  truly given this my absolute best effort.
• 54:26
  And that made it very clear
• 54:28
  that I had to double down.
• 54:30
  Can I ask,
• 54:31
  why,
• 54:32
  why the difference in mindset
• 54:35
  from somebody who
• 54:37
  wanted to compress time
• 54:39
  as much as possible
• 54:40
  to get to the next stage of life
• 54:43
  and to put their all into school
• 54:46
  and to blog writing
• 54:48
  and to book writing
• 54:49
  and to all these other things,
• 54:51
  it seemed to be these
• 54:53
  adjacent things.
• 54:56
  Why,
• 54:57
  why did you switch your mindset
• 54:59
  and not have that
• 55:01
  enthusiasm into your main thing
• 55:03
  convert kit from day one?
• 55:07
  Yeah, so I think I definitely did
• 55:09
  for the first six months.
• 55:11
  And then it became hard
• 55:13
  to continue to work on it
• 55:14
  as it didn't have traction.
• 55:17
  You know, if I think back
• 55:18
  on all the things that I had,
• 55:21
  they had really positive
• 55:24
  short-term feedback loops,
• 55:26
  where they,
• 55:27
  you know, that's the thing
• 55:28
  about contact creation.
• 55:30
  You can,
• 55:32
  if you're getting traction,
• 55:33
  you get these feedback loops
• 55:34
  of comments and likes
• 55:35
  and engagement on your ideas.
• 55:40
  Now, the hard thing is
• 55:41
  when you're just starting out,
• 55:42
  you don't have that.
• 55:44
  And so, you know,
• 55:45
  you really have to suffer
• 55:46
  through that time period
• 55:48
  of no positive feedback
• 55:50
  because you're writing
• 55:51
  to, you know,
• 55:52
  three friends or family.
• 55:56
  So I think I was split
• 56:00
  basically about six months,
• 56:01
  probably a year
• 56:02
  in to work on convert kit.
• 56:05
  I was doing two things at once.
• 56:07
  One was really working
• 56:08
  and one was really not working.
• 56:10
  And so, the building,
• 56:11
  the audience,
• 56:12
  and selling books and courses
• 56:14
  continued to work well.
• 56:15
  And I got to the point
• 56:16
  I was making $250,000 a year
• 56:18
  on that venture.
• 56:20
  And then, you know,
• 56:22
  over on the software side,
• 56:24
  it was just a grind.
• 56:26
  It wasn't until later on
• 56:27
  that I had watched a conference talk
• 56:30
  for a woman named Gail Goodman.
• 56:33
  She was the CEO of Constant Contact.
• 56:35
  And the talk is called
• 56:36
  the long, slow,
• 56:37
  SaaS ramp of depth.
• 56:40
  And it is about their grind
• 56:42
  building Constant Contact,
• 56:43
  an email company,
• 56:44
  from like 1998, maybe,
• 56:47
  or 2000,
• 56:48
  somewhere right in there,
• 56:49
  like for the next,
• 56:51
  I think she's probably 15 years in,
• 56:53
  at the time,
• 56:54
  that she gives the talk.
• 56:56
  And she basically talks
• 56:57
  about how like,
• 56:58
  it is so slow going.
• 57:00
  And I didn't understand that.
• 57:01
  I didn't understand the compounding
• 57:02
  nature of software.
• 57:03
  And so I was looking,
• 57:05
  you know, my energy followed
• 57:06
  where I was getting the feedback,
• 57:07
  which was in the contact creation.
• 57:10
  So, obviously,
• 57:12
  when you had that conversation
• 57:13
  and you had that thought about,
• 57:14
  should I shut this down?
• 57:15
  You applied that,
• 57:16
  sort of that two-prong test
• 57:18
  to figure out whether or not
• 57:19
  you should or shouldn't.
• 57:21
  Okay, you decide to go back
• 57:22
  into it.
• 57:23
  That's a pivotal moment, obviously.
• 57:26
  What was the strategy,
• 57:29
  the framework,
• 57:30
  the mental model that you had
• 57:32
  to apply so that
• 57:34
  six months later,
• 57:35
  the same thing didn't happen?
• 57:37
  Yeah, so,
• 57:39
  there's a few different things.
• 57:41
  First, I realized
• 57:42
  that my artificial
• 57:44
  constraints were fruitless.
• 57:46
  I was taking something hard
• 57:47
  and making it extra possible.
• 57:49
  You know, and so saying,
• 57:50
  like, okay,
• 57:51
  I have to fund this only
• 57:52
  with customer money.
• 57:55
  So I stopped it.
• 57:57
  I took most of our savings
• 58:00
  and put $50,000
• 58:02
  into the business.
• 58:04
  The second thing I realized
• 58:05
  is I couldn't build this
• 58:06
  with contractors.
• 58:07
  I needed someone on the
• 58:08
  engineering product side
• 58:09
  who was focused on this 100%.
• 58:11
  My friend of mine,
• 58:12
  Danny,
• 58:13
  talks about hiring contractors
• 58:15
  versus full-time team members.
• 58:17
  And he says,
• 58:18
  if you pay for half
• 58:20
  of someone's time,
• 58:21
  you get a quarter of their attention.
• 58:25
  And his point that he's making
• 58:26
  is, if you're dealing
• 58:28
  with a whole bunch of freelancers,
• 58:29
  they're just like,
• 58:30
  yep, let me get that
• 58:31
  hashed on for you.
• 58:32
  Let me take care of that.
• 58:33
  And they're doing good work,
• 58:34
  but they're not thinking
• 58:35
  about it, you know,
• 58:37
  every weekend.
• 58:38
  And so what I ended
• 58:40
  doing is hiring my friend David
• 58:41
  who was a great engineer
• 58:42
  and designer,
• 58:43
  and he went all in,
• 58:45
  and he was like,
• 58:46
  all right,
• 58:47
  this is everything that I'm thinking about.
• 58:48
  There's little things,
• 58:49
  like, I would send him a design,
• 58:51
  and he'd go to implement it,
• 58:52
  and he would,
• 58:53
  like, I thought it was great design.
• 58:55
  His implementation
• 58:56
  was better than my design,
• 58:57
  like,
• 58:58
  the little animations
• 58:59
  that polished the details.
• 59:01
  The rated development
• 59:02
  sped up a lot,
• 59:03
  based on that,
• 59:04
  you know, it was starting to get
• 59:05
  really real momentum.
• 59:07
  The next thing is,
• 59:09
  I focused on a specific niche,
• 59:12
  so before,
• 59:13
  I'd even given this advice
• 59:15
  in contact creation,
• 59:16
  of like, you've got to serve a niche.
• 59:18
  You know, you can't build,
• 59:20
  you can't make a course
• 59:21
  or write a book for everyone,
• 59:22
  you've got to choose
• 59:23
  something really narrow,
• 59:24
  and build it there.
• 59:26
  But then,
• 59:27
  I just think that's the easiest
• 59:28
  advice to give,
• 59:29
  and the hardest advice to take,
• 59:31
  and because I was like,
• 59:32
  well, well, well, well,
• 59:33
  we don't,
• 59:34
  I mean, the software
• 59:35
  could work for everybody,
• 59:36
  so like, it's more,
• 59:37
  you know,
• 59:38
  if you're running a marketing agency,
• 59:39
  versus your blogger,
• 59:40
  all of that,
• 59:41
  you know,
• 59:42
  you have the same needs
• 59:43
  that works for all of them.
• 59:44
  And that can be true,
• 59:45
  but in the messaging,
• 59:46
  you have to narrow it down.
• 59:48
  And so I narrowed it
• 59:49
  to email marketing
• 59:51
  for authors,
• 59:53
  and then I played around
• 59:55
  with the wording,
• 59:56
  and I realized that,
• 59:57
  the people are trying to reach,
• 59:59
  really more identified
• 1:00:00
  as professional bloggers.
• 1:00:01
  And so then,
• 1:00:02
  that's where we ended up.
• 1:00:03
  And then the last thing is,
• 1:00:05
  I focused on direct sales.
• 1:00:07
  I had all of the success,
• 1:00:09
  you know,
• 1:00:10
  selling ebooks and courses,
• 1:00:11
  mass market,
• 1:00:12
  to thousands of people
• 1:00:13
  on an email list.
• 1:00:14
  And so it's like,
• 1:00:15
  I'll sell software the exact same way.
• 1:00:17
  And turns out,
• 1:00:18
  you can tell what,
• 1:00:19
  $40 ebook is an impulse buy,
• 1:00:22
  at a $50 a month software platform
• 1:00:24
  that you have to migrate to,
• 1:00:25
  is not an impulse buy.
• 1:00:27
  And so I had to sell it differently.
• 1:00:30
  And so there's a lot
• 1:00:31
  that we did downstream
• 1:00:32
  from that,
• 1:00:33
  but those are the thinking
• 1:00:34
  that really started
• 1:00:35
  to gain traction in momentum.
• 1:00:37
  I want to,
• 1:00:38
  I wanted to save a couple
• 1:00:39
  of last minutes to talk
• 1:00:40
  about creator economy,
• 1:00:42
  but before I,
• 1:00:43
  so I pulled out a couple different,
• 1:00:46
  I guess, insights, thoughts,
• 1:00:47
  from different people
• 1:00:48
  that comment on the creator economy.
• 1:00:50
  I just want to get your feedback
• 1:00:51
  on them,
• 1:00:52
  because obviously you live it
• 1:00:53
  and you breathe it.
• 1:00:54
  But before that,
• 1:00:55
  I just want to give you sort
• 1:00:56
  of the floor.
• 1:00:57
  So talk to me for people
• 1:00:58
  that are listening who
• 1:00:59
  don't know kit
• 1:01:01
  or know it,
• 1:01:02
  but don't know the direction
• 1:01:03
  that you're going in.
• 1:01:05
  Who are you serving?
• 1:01:07
  What are you building out
• 1:01:08
  for creators?
• 1:01:09
  Like,
• 1:01:10
  give the elevator pitch,
• 1:01:11
  so people can sort of get
• 1:01:13
  to understand how to use kit
• 1:01:15
  for their business,
• 1:01:17
  their brand,
• 1:01:18
  whatever they're trying to build out.
• 1:01:20
  Yeah.
• 1:01:22
  Kit has evolved a lot
• 1:01:23
  over the last 11 years
• 1:01:25
  that I've been building it.
• 1:01:26
  And so really,
• 1:01:27
  what we're building now
• 1:01:28
  is the operating system
• 1:01:29
  for creators
• 1:01:30
  who mean business,
• 1:01:31
  meaning those
• 1:01:32
  who are,
• 1:01:34
  they could be beginners
• 1:01:35
  or they could be the biggest
• 1:01:36
  creators out there,
• 1:01:37
  but they're approaching it
• 1:01:38
  with a level of intention
• 1:01:40
  and business mind
• 1:01:42
  to like, hey,
• 1:01:43
  we're going to build
• 1:01:44
  something really substantial here.
• 1:01:46
  So a couple things
• 1:01:47
  that play into that,
• 1:01:48
  first is
• 1:01:50
  everything is email-focused.
• 1:01:51
  You know,
• 1:01:52
  and so we're bringing a lot
• 1:01:53
  of creators who might have
• 1:01:54
  a big audience on social
• 1:01:55
  on Instagram,
• 1:01:56
  YouTube, et cetera.
• 1:01:57
  But they're using email
• 1:01:59
  as the core
• 1:02:00
  of how they connect
• 1:02:01
  with their audience.
• 1:02:02
  And then,
• 1:02:03
  the next thing is
• 1:02:05
  really playing in
• 1:02:07
  the reporting side of it.
• 1:02:09
  So we pull in data
• 1:02:10
  from every platform
• 1:02:12
  that we can.
• 1:02:13
  So if you were to sell,
• 1:02:14
  you know,
• 1:02:15
  courses on Teachable
• 1:02:16
  or a membership
• 1:02:17
  on my network
• 1:02:18
  or whatever else,
• 1:02:19
  that aggregates into
• 1:02:20
  kits so you can see it
• 1:02:21
  in one place.
• 1:02:22
  So like,
• 1:02:23
  who's buying what
• 1:02:24
  and why?
• 1:02:25
  And then the last thing is,
• 1:02:26
  just as here,
• 1:02:27
  we launched an app store
• 1:02:28
  where now the idea is
• 1:02:30
  that, you know,
• 1:02:32
  any developer can build
• 1:02:33
  on top of kit
• 1:02:34
  and extend it.
• 1:02:35
  And that's still super early.
• 1:02:36
  But, you know,
• 1:02:37
  for people
• 1:02:38
  in the software space, right?
• 1:02:39
  You look to Shopify
• 1:02:40
  and WordPress,
• 1:02:41
  and you can see,
• 1:02:42
  oh, there's a,
• 1:02:43
  there's incredible power
• 1:02:44
  in an app store.
• 1:02:45
  Why is no one
• 1:02:46
  in the creator
• 1:02:47
  of the email space doing this?
• 1:02:48
  And so we have our first
• 1:02:49
  six or seven apps
• 1:02:50
  out now.
• 1:02:51
  And it's just amazing
• 1:02:52
  to see, like,
• 1:02:53
  what developers are adding
• 1:02:54
  onto it.
• 1:02:55
  And I mean,
• 1:02:56
  if you're a creator
• 1:02:57
  listening to this,
• 1:02:58
  I mean, other competitors
• 1:02:59
  have popped up now
• 1:03:00
  and maybe just like,
• 1:03:01
  speak to the,
• 1:03:02
  the similarities
• 1:03:03
  and differences.
• 1:03:04
  You can name names
• 1:03:05
  of competitors
• 1:03:06
  or not.
• 1:03:07
  I won't do it.
• 1:03:08
  But, there's a lot of people
• 1:03:09
  playing in the,
• 1:03:10
  in the email space
• 1:03:11
  and the newsletter space as well.
• 1:03:12
  So,
• 1:03:13
  how do you stand out?
• 1:03:14
  Who do you serve differently
• 1:03:15
  from someone
• 1:03:16
  if I'm a creator?
• 1:03:17
  I get some other names
• 1:03:18
  that would immediately
• 1:03:19
  pop up.
• 1:03:20
  Yeah, so I think,
• 1:03:21
  you know,
• 1:03:22
  first, the biggest players
• 1:03:23
  in the space are like
• 1:03:24
  the campaign monitors,
• 1:03:25
  active campaign
• 1:03:26
  and MailChimp,
• 1:03:27
  where they still,
• 1:03:28
  you know,
• 1:03:29
  or many,
• 1:03:30
  many multiples
• 1:03:31
  of our size
• 1:03:32
  and revenue.
• 1:03:33
  And so, against those,
• 1:03:34
  it's like,
• 1:03:35
  hey, we're really focused
• 1:03:36
  on creators.
• 1:03:37
  We do all the things
• 1:03:39
  that they do,
• 1:03:40
  but in the best
• 1:03:41
  practice for creators.
• 1:03:42
  Now, on the other side,
• 1:03:43
  there's probably
• 1:03:44
  three main companies
• 1:03:45
  that have spun up
• 1:03:46
  in the last few years
• 1:03:47
  that are focused on creators
• 1:03:49
  specifically,
• 1:03:50
  just like we are.
• 1:03:51
  And those would be
• 1:03:52
  FlowDesk,
• 1:03:53
  BeHive,
• 1:03:54
  and SubStack.
• 1:03:55
  And so, I think,
• 1:03:57
  FlowDesk is one,
• 1:03:58
  I mean,
• 1:03:59
  they bootchapped that company.
• 1:04:00
  So, it's,
• 1:04:01
  it's incredible,
• 1:04:02
  incredible what they've built.
• 1:04:03
  And they really focused on,
• 1:04:05
  like,
• 1:04:06
  beautiful email design.
• 1:04:07
  And so,
• 1:04:08
  that's something
• 1:04:09
  that we actually
• 1:04:10
  probably a little late
• 1:04:11
  of the game
• 1:04:12
  of building it out.
• 1:04:13
  And so, they built
• 1:04:14
  a great business
• 1:04:15
  and, you know,
• 1:04:16
  we saw like,
• 1:04:17
  okay, that is a really
• 1:04:18
  popular thing.
• 1:04:19
  So, like, let's match
• 1:04:20
  their beauty
• 1:04:21
  and email design,
• 1:04:22
  but let's do it in a way
• 1:04:23
  that's accessible,
• 1:04:24
  way easier to use.
• 1:04:26
  Things like,
• 1:04:27
  you have to use their
• 1:04:28
  templates,
• 1:04:29
  but in ours,
• 1:04:30
  there's an open marketplace,
• 1:04:31
  where any wood
• 1:04:32
  designers can make
• 1:04:33
  and sell and share
• 1:04:34
  or give away templates.
• 1:04:35
  So, they have,
• 1:04:36
  I think, dozens of templates,
• 1:04:37
  we have hundreds, you know,
• 1:04:38
  and the design quality
• 1:04:39
  and accessibility is way
• 1:04:40
  better.
• 1:04:41
  And then there's other things,
• 1:04:43
  like,
• 1:04:44
  we just launched
• 1:04:45
  a free plan in front
• 1:04:46
  of 10,000 subscribers.
• 1:04:47
  So, we're like,
• 1:04:48
  here, just use the product
• 1:04:49
  for free, kind of,
• 1:04:50
  kind of bring everyone
• 1:04:51
  in.
• 1:04:52
  And then on the other side,
• 1:04:53
  if you look at, like,
• 1:04:54
  a beehive or a sub-stack,
• 1:04:55
  you know, those
• 1:04:56
  are the venture-backed
• 1:04:57
  companies where you see
• 1:04:58
  Silicon Valley, like,
• 1:05:00
  just pouring in
• 1:05:01
  insane amounts of money
• 1:05:02
  into the creator space.
• 1:05:04
  Because it's like,
• 1:05:05
  congratulations, creators,
• 1:05:06
  like, you're the hot
• 1:05:07
  new thing.
• 1:05:08
  And so, you know,
• 1:05:09
  Andrews and Horowitz are,
• 1:05:11
  Google Ventures
• 1:05:12
  or whoever is, like,
• 1:05:13
  how do we drop $50
• 1:05:14
  million into seeing
• 1:05:15
  if this will work?
• 1:05:16
  And those,
• 1:05:18
  those are email-focused
• 1:05:19
  platforms.
• 1:05:20
  So, they really focus
• 1:05:21
  on monetizing
• 1:05:22
  through paid newsletters.
• 1:05:23
  Which, that's a whole
• 1:05:24
  thing that we can get
• 1:05:25
  into.
• 1:05:26
  I think paid newsletters
• 1:05:27
  are great.
• 1:05:28
  Kit Power is a lot
• 1:05:29
  of them.
• 1:05:30
  But it's not the highest
• 1:05:32
  leverage way to earn a
• 1:05:33
  living as a creator.
• 1:05:34
  You know, we,
• 1:05:35
  we have this data
• 1:05:36
  from running newsletters
• 1:05:37
  for people like,
• 1:05:38
  James Clear,
• 1:05:39
  Andrew Huberman,
• 1:05:40
  Tim McGraw,
• 1:05:41
  I mean,
• 1:05:42
  so many giant creators
• 1:05:44
  that we get to see, like,
• 1:05:46
  here's what actually
• 1:05:47
  works.
• 1:05:48
  And it's really creators
• 1:05:49
  selling their own products
• 1:05:50
  that turns into that
• 1:05:51
  business,
• 1:05:52
  that way you're doing
• 1:05:53
  millions or tens of
• 1:05:54
  millions a year in revenue.
• 1:05:55
  So, yeah,
• 1:05:56
  we're the,
• 1:05:57
  the indie platform
• 1:05:58
  built specifically
• 1:05:59
  for creators.
• 1:06:00
  And I think,
• 1:06:01
  playing on that,
• 1:06:02
  like, it's
• 1:06:03
  extensible when it grows
• 1:06:04
  with you.
• 1:06:05
  It's kind of the main
• 1:06:06
  idea.
• 1:06:07
  I'm curious about,
• 1:06:08
  about some of your thoughts
• 1:06:10
  on the future
• 1:06:11
  of the creator
• 1:06:12
  economy.
• 1:06:13
  So, I was just looking
• 1:06:14
  at some, both,
• 1:06:15
  both some contrarian
• 1:06:16
  opinions,
• 1:06:17
  just some thoughts.
• 1:06:19
  So, one thought,
• 1:06:21
  the guy who put this out
• 1:06:22
  there is Alex Cantrowitz,
• 1:06:24
  he's a journalist,
• 1:06:25
  he has a podcast,
• 1:06:26
  but the point is,
• 1:06:27
  the thought,
• 1:06:28
  and the quote is,
• 1:06:29
  after years of hype,
• 1:06:30
  the creator economy
• 1:06:31
  is slimming into reality
• 1:06:32
  and influencer programs
• 1:06:33
  are shuttering,
• 1:06:34
  investment is drying up,
• 1:06:35
  and worsening
• 1:06:36
  economic conditions
• 1:06:37
  are threatening to
• 1:06:38
  crush creators,
• 1:06:39
  and trying to find
• 1:06:40
  them,
• 1:06:41
  while today's
• 1:06:42
  economic downturn is
• 1:06:43
  causing broad pain,
• 1:06:44
  the creator economy is
• 1:06:45
  suffering in particular
• 1:06:46
  because it's
• 1:06:47
  middle class
• 1:06:48
  hasn't yet emerged.
• 1:06:49
  What do you feel,
• 1:06:50
  what are your thoughts
• 1:06:51
  on this quote?
• 1:06:52
  Yeah, there was
• 1:06:53
  a whole trend,
• 1:06:54
  maybe 2021,
• 1:06:55
  where people were saying,
• 1:06:56
  like,
• 1:06:57
  the creator economy
• 1:06:58
  doesn't have a middle class.
• 1:07:00
  And it was really
• 1:07:01
  interesting.
• 1:07:02
  This came about a
• 1:07:03
  bunch in the news,
• 1:07:04
  and then this is,
• 1:07:05
  you know, a continuation
• 1:07:06
  of that,
• 1:07:07
  like, middle class
• 1:07:08
  watching that,
• 1:07:09
  thinking like,
• 1:07:10
  they could not
• 1:07:11
  be more wrong.
• 1:07:12
  But I understand
• 1:07:13
  where they're coming from,
• 1:07:14
  because basically,
• 1:07:15
  what they were seeing is,
• 1:07:16
  in the influencer space,
• 1:07:17
  all these people
• 1:07:18
  are trying,
• 1:07:19
  not getting traction,
• 1:07:20
  maybe they got a whole bunch
• 1:07:21
  of views on TikTok,
• 1:07:22
  like 100,000 followers
• 1:07:23
  and a bunch of views
• 1:07:24
  on TikTok,
• 1:07:25
  but that never turned
• 1:07:26
  into revenue.
• 1:07:27
  And then you have
• 1:07:28
  the other end of the spectrum,
• 1:07:29
  where you have,
• 1:07:30
  the big name celebrities
• 1:07:31
  or those creators
• 1:07:32
  who then became,
• 1:07:33
  big name celebrities,
• 1:07:34
  who are getting
• 1:07:35
  huge amounts of money,
• 1:07:36
  like,
• 1:07:38
  he was just announced,
• 1:07:39
  yesterday, today,
• 1:07:40
  that,
• 1:07:41
  wondering did a hundred
• 1:07:42
  million dollar deal,
• 1:07:43
  for the Kelsey
• 1:07:44
  Brothers podcast.
• 1:07:45
  You know,
• 1:07:46
  and you're like,
• 1:07:47
  okay, so we have the two
• 1:07:48
  extremes.
• 1:07:49
  We have people making,
• 1:07:50
  insane amounts of money,
• 1:07:51
  where I like,
• 1:07:52
  that's,
• 1:07:53
  that's,
• 1:07:54
  that's,
• 1:07:55
  like, closely
• 1:07:56
  amount of money they made,
• 1:07:57
  as, you know,
• 1:07:58
  NFL,
• 1:07:59
  like, star NFL players,
• 1:08:00
  and they're doing it
• 1:08:01
  for a,
• 1:08:02
  a weekly podcast now,
• 1:08:03
  and then no money at all,
• 1:08:04
  on the other end.
• 1:08:05
  But what we were seeing,
• 1:08:06
  is,
• 1:08:07
  the thriving middle class,
• 1:08:08
  right?
• 1:08:09
  We were seeing,
• 1:08:10
  the creator who,
• 1:08:12
  is teaching something
• 1:08:13
  of value.
• 1:08:14
  They're teaching design.
• 1:08:15
  They're,
• 1:08:16
  they're a teacher in Kansas
• 1:08:17
  who's like,
• 1:08:18
  hey,
• 1:08:19
  this is what it looks like
• 1:08:20
  to run and manage
• 1:08:21
  a good classroom.
• 1:08:22
  Here are my lesson
• 1:08:23
  plans for,
• 1:08:24
  you know,
• 1:08:25
  high school English.
• 1:08:27
  And their customers are
• 1:08:28
  other teachers
• 1:08:29
  who are trying to do their,
• 1:08:30
  their job better.
• 1:08:31
  Right?
• 1:08:32
  I see example after example,
• 1:08:33
  of people making,
• 1:08:35
  hundreds of thousands
• 1:08:36
  of dollars a year,
• 1:08:37
  off of,
• 1:08:38
  all kinds of industries,
• 1:08:40
  whether it's cooking
• 1:08:41
  or bird watching
• 1:08:42
  or, you know,
• 1:08:44
  development,
• 1:08:45
  any of these things,
• 1:08:46
  and there's a very
• 1:08:47
  thriving middle class.
• 1:08:49
  But the difference is,
• 1:08:51
  they're not chasing views.
• 1:08:53
  And they're usually not,
• 1:08:56
  driving it based on advertising
• 1:08:57
  or sponsorship revenue.
• 1:08:59
  So what they're doing instead,
• 1:09:01
  is they're teaching something
• 1:09:02
  of a lot of value.
• 1:09:04
  And most often,
• 1:09:05
  they're teaching a skill
• 1:09:06
  that makes money
• 1:09:07
  to people who have money.
• 1:09:08
  And in that,
• 1:09:09
  they're building a deep
• 1:09:10
  relationship with a smaller
• 1:09:11
  audience.
• 1:09:12
  And then they're,
• 1:09:13
  they're selling a product
• 1:09:14
  themselves.
• 1:09:15
  And there's such a clear path
• 1:09:17
  to making tens of thousands
• 1:09:19
  or hundreds of thousands
• 1:09:20
  of dollars off of that.
• 1:09:22
  And so I think,
• 1:09:24
  there's a lot of money
• 1:09:26
  that has come into the
• 1:09:28
  critter economy,
• 1:09:29
  chasing these extremes.
• 1:09:31
  And so far,
• 1:09:32
  that has mostly skipped
• 1:09:33
  over the middle class.
• 1:09:34
  And so it's,
• 1:09:36
  it's sort of the tools
• 1:09:37
  like kit that are just like,
• 1:09:38
  hey, we've always been here.
• 1:09:39
  We have a first-hand seat,
• 1:09:41
  you know,
• 1:09:42
  to what actually works.
• 1:09:43
  And we're at this point.
• 1:09:45
  You're enabling the middle class
• 1:09:46
  with kit, really?
• 1:09:47
  Yeah.
• 1:09:48
  And we're like,
• 1:09:49
  we're watching more
• 1:09:50
  of the billions of transactions,
• 1:09:51
  billions of dollars
• 1:09:52
  of transactions go by
• 1:09:53
  across the platform.
• 1:09:54
  And people earning a huge amount
• 1:09:55
  of money.
• 1:09:56
  And it's,
• 1:09:58
  it's just,
• 1:09:59
  it's not as flashy
• 1:10:00
  or,
• 1:10:01
  basically,
• 1:10:02
  still the press hasn't,
• 1:10:03
  I picked up on it.
• 1:10:04
  And also,
• 1:10:05
  I think it's because,
• 1:10:06
  people kind of want,
• 1:10:08
  they seem like influencers
• 1:10:10
  take off in a way,
• 1:10:12
  and people kind of want
• 1:10:14
  influencers to fail,
• 1:10:15
  because it feels cheesy
• 1:10:17
  and fake.
• 1:10:18
  And so,
• 1:10:19
  that's a headline
• 1:10:20
  that people want to write.
• 1:10:21
  It's a very different headline
• 1:10:23
  to be like,
• 1:10:24
  no, there's people
• 1:10:25
  who are like,
• 1:10:26
  there's creators
• 1:10:27
  who are delivering
• 1:10:28
  some substantial value
• 1:10:29
  in their account.
• 1:10:30
  And,
• 1:10:31
  you know, going from there.
• 1:10:32
  It's not,
• 1:10:33
  it's not as sexy
• 1:10:34
  as headline.
• 1:10:35
  And it also seems like,
• 1:10:36
  it seems like,
• 1:10:37
  there is,
• 1:10:38
  in the same vein
• 1:10:39
  of thought,
• 1:10:41
  people,
• 1:10:42
  people look at traditional
• 1:10:43
  and like,
• 1:10:44
  a scene news organizations.
• 1:10:45
  And they,
• 1:10:46
  like, this is actually,
• 1:10:47
  the second quote
• 1:10:48
  that I was going to bring up
• 1:10:49
  was from,
• 1:10:50
  where was this here?
• 1:10:53
  Oh,
• 1:10:54
  it was about,
• 1:10:55
  it was Jack,
• 1:10:56
  it was from Jack Conti,
• 1:10:57
  the CEO of Patreon,
• 1:10:58
  talking about creators
• 1:10:59
  are about to have
• 1:11:00
  the leverage control
• 1:11:01
  and political
• 1:11:02
  and cultural influence
• 1:11:03
  to a degree that's unprecedented.
• 1:11:05
  But,
• 1:11:06
  there is an insinuation
• 1:11:07
  in that thought
• 1:11:08
  that the goal
• 1:11:09
  of the,
• 1:11:10
  of the creator is to,
• 1:11:11
  is to replace
• 1:11:12
  traditional media
• 1:11:13
  and replace traditional news.
• 1:11:15
  And with that thought comes,
• 1:11:17
  okay,
• 1:11:18
  if I'm going to replace
• 1:11:19
  traditional news,
• 1:11:20
  and how do I structure a business
• 1:11:21
  in the same way
• 1:11:22
  as a news organization
• 1:11:23
  with sponsors
• 1:11:24
  and advertisers.
• 1:11:25
  And I think these are the,
• 1:11:27
  the goals of a creator
• 1:11:29
  that doesn't understand,
• 1:11:30
  for example,
• 1:11:31
  how to sell a product
• 1:11:32
  or how to build a business.
• 1:11:33
  I think you just want to create
• 1:11:34
  the most amount of impressions
• 1:11:35
  or eyeballs.
• 1:11:36
  And then the sponsors
• 1:11:37
  are going to come.
• 1:11:38
  And this is the way media
• 1:11:39
  is always kind of worked.
• 1:11:40
  I mean, news doesn't
• 1:11:41
  traditionally sell
• 1:11:43
  an information product
• 1:11:44
  or a course
• 1:11:45
  or some sort of,
• 1:11:46
  you know,
• 1:11:47
  instruction
• 1:11:48
  to solve a problem.
• 1:11:50
  But,
• 1:11:51
  I think that the way you approach
• 1:11:53
  the creator economy
• 1:11:54
  or the way that you enable
• 1:11:56
  and empower creators
• 1:11:57
  is a much healthier way.
• 1:11:59
  And it's a much quicker path
• 1:12:00
  to revenue.
• 1:12:01
  That's the way that I see it.
• 1:12:02
  Yeah, I think that's right.
• 1:12:04
  And you do have examples
• 1:12:05
  of news organizations
• 1:12:06
  that sell products.
• 1:12:07
  Like Bloomberg News,
• 1:12:08
  for example,
• 1:12:09
  has the Bloomberg Terminal,
• 1:12:10
  which is a very,
• 1:12:11
  you know,
• 1:12:12
  every trader
• 1:12:13
  on Wall Street
• 1:12:14
  uses that product.
• 1:12:16
  And you see a lot of businesses
• 1:12:19
  around it.
• 1:12:20
  And you see, like,
• 1:12:21
  the New York Times,
• 1:12:22
  they've had a lot of success
• 1:12:23
  with their subscription product.
• 1:12:25
  And there's a lot of other publications
• 1:12:26
  that have not had success
• 1:12:27
  with their subscription products.
• 1:12:28
  But,
• 1:12:29
  you see the wide range of it.
• 1:12:31
  But yeah,
• 1:12:32
  I think that,
• 1:12:34
  creators have this opportunity.
• 1:12:35
  Their influence is just going to keep growing.
• 1:12:37
  You think about the content,
• 1:12:38
  the content that you're consuming,
• 1:12:40
  the,
• 1:12:41
  even people
• 1:12:42
  from the creator world
• 1:12:43
  who break out
• 1:12:44
  into the traditional space,
• 1:12:45
  and take like a Matt Rife
• 1:12:46
  in the comedy space,
• 1:12:48
  where he very much grew up
• 1:12:50
  in this digitally native world.
• 1:12:54
  And yes,
• 1:12:55
  he's doing Netflix specials now.
• 1:12:56
  And not like,
• 1:12:57
  he's broken through
• 1:12:58
  into the,
• 1:12:59
  the prime angle.
• 1:13:00
  But,
• 1:13:01
  but he still has this direct connection
• 1:13:02
  with his audience.
• 1:13:03
  If at any point,
• 1:13:04
  he didn't get,
• 1:13:05
  you know,
• 1:13:06
  the third Netflix special
• 1:13:07
  or something,
• 1:13:08
  he'd be like,
• 1:13:09
  cool, no big deal.
• 1:13:10
  Because I have,
• 1:13:11
  you know,
• 1:13:12
  millions of people
• 1:13:13
  on my email list
• 1:13:14
  and on my social volumes
• 1:13:15
  that I can just
• 1:13:16
  pursue in other,
• 1:13:17
  in other ways.
• 1:13:18
  If people want to,
• 1:13:20
  if people want to connect
• 1:13:21
  with you,
• 1:13:22
  where should they go?
• 1:13:23
  Where do you want to send people
• 1:13:24
  who listen to this,
• 1:13:25
  who want to get more involved
• 1:13:26
  in Kit,
• 1:13:27
  or just sort of consume more
• 1:13:28
  of your content?
• 1:13:29
  Yeah, I think the,
• 1:13:30
  the first thing is,
• 1:13:31
  I'm going to podcast,
• 1:13:32
  called the billion-dollar creator.
• 1:13:33
  Very soon,
• 1:13:34
  it'll just be called
• 1:13:35
  the Nathan Berry Show.
• 1:13:36
  We're going to keep things simple.
• 1:13:37
  So just search that on YouTube.
• 1:13:38
  And then,
• 1:13:39
  yeah,
• 1:13:40
  NathanBerry.com to subscribe
• 1:13:41
  to my newsletter.
• 1:13:42
  And then kit.com to see
• 1:13:44
  everything that we're doing
• 1:13:45
  to power the creator economy.
• 1:13:47
  I love it.
• 1:13:48
  All right.
• 1:13:49
  Last,
• 1:13:50
  a bit of wisdom
• 1:13:51
  for entrepreneurs
• 1:13:52
  for people listening
• 1:13:53
  for creators.
• 1:13:54
  I guess entrepreneurs
• 1:13:55
  are one and the same at this point.
• 1:13:56
  But,
• 1:13:57
  if you were going to go back
• 1:13:58
  and tell,
• 1:13:59
  you're young.
• 1:14:00
  So I was going to say
• 1:14:01
  you're 20 year old self.
• 1:14:02
  Maybe tell you're 15 year old self.
• 1:14:03
  One piece of wisdom
• 1:14:05
  or insight or lesson learned.
• 1:14:06
  What would that be?
• 1:14:07
  Oh, man.
• 1:14:08
  I,
• 1:14:09
  there's so many things
• 1:14:10
  that I did
• 1:14:11
  that I would absolutely do again.
• 1:14:13
  I think going back to the idea
• 1:14:14
  of there is no speed limit.
• 1:14:16
  That's the thing
• 1:14:17
  that I would just hammer home
• 1:14:19
  of like,
• 1:14:20
  do that,
• 1:14:21
  keep directing that
• 1:14:22
  in the way that you want.
• 1:14:23
  And I would just add
• 1:14:24
  the caveat of
• 1:14:25
  paying attention
• 1:14:26
  to your motivations
• 1:14:27
  as you do it.
• 1:14:28
  Like,
• 1:14:29
  do it from a place
• 1:14:30
  of abundance
• 1:14:31
  and fun and joy
• 1:14:32
  rather than,
• 1:14:33
  you know,
• 1:14:34
  occasionally straying
• 1:14:35
  into the,
• 1:14:36
  the trap of doing it
• 1:14:37
  from a scarcity of mindset.