How To Make Money As A Creator | Nathan Barry (ConvertKit)

the best way to be interesting on the Internet is to be going on a quest that is going to change you and that is worth following if you look back to the early days of convertkit when I started it I've live blogged the entire process of conver for the last uh 10 years the very first post was me planting a flag I didn't even know what I was doing at the time but I basically planted a flag and said this is the journey that I'm going on I'm going to build a SAS company to $5,000 a month in recurring R in six months with only $5,000 of my own money and I called it the web app challenge that is what ultimately became kver Nathan Barry the Creator Puppeteer in many ways just running things behind the scenes yeah thanks for having me on I was talking to some like a a group of authors and book publishers and like a bunch of like book industry insiders the other day and they were just talking about how I have probably access to more creators than like in the book space Maybe than anyone else I think that's true just from like who uses can B it well that's why I invited you you know I figured the person who is the center node to all these creators must have a lot of insight as to what's working for building audiences so that's one part of it and then what's working for monetizing those audiences I.E building Creator Le businesses are you down yeah let's do it across the entire Creator economy like let's distill it down to what is actually working for a lot of folks it's very overwhelming to go out there and create content and yeah put yourself out there either for yourself or as a brand and then it's really difficult to know there's a hundred ways to monetize you know do I build courses do I build coaching do I build SAS product do I build an agency let's start off by who comes top of mine in terms of audience building who's done a really good job non obvious non obvious yeah oh man well the hard thing is if you do audience building really well you become obvious right like that is by definition like people that you've had on before Nick Huber and others who have done uh audience building really well someone who I think is really interesting right now is CA kazinski who runs enduring Ventures there's sort of this Creator capitalist model that you see happen with people who are building funds and buying companies and all of that and Seeva has this fund where you know they've raised a good amount of capital and bought good cash flowing businesses and then he really has learned that if he has an audience then he gets access to a whole lot of deal flow um both for businesses to buy and then also more fundraising more Capital to use that to buy more businesses and so I don't know how much he's talked about it publicly but just from him and I talking like he's built a pretty massive newsletter on one scale right he's not the next James clear right but I think he's up over 30,000 subscribers you know from turning around a newsletter pretty quickly on a niche topic and so I I think what he's done is really interesting the other thing with it is that that audience is very very high value right you see people who are building even a smaller newsletter in a specific Niche and it can be really high value like I'd much rather take 30,000 people in interested in investing and buying businesses who are higher net worth people on that one side compared to like 300,000 who are reading a food blog and nothing against food blogs it's just like the intent or the amount of money that is expected to transact there is wildly different CA is really interesting because CA 128 months ago basically had no audience I've watched him grow to he must have over 100,000 followers now what I take away from his uh rise to fame so so to speak is he shares stories he basically goes through life and he writes down the stories that he sees so he's buying businesses and he'll be like I bought these businesses and here's what I learned and what I'm seeing right now in terms of audience building is there's a lot of folks who are basically copying other people's content on X sometimes that works but my thesis is that that's going to be less and less of a thing over time uh as AI helps automate a lot of that so the people that are going to win are going to be sharing unique perspectives and stories what are your thoughts on that there was a time on X that you could just copy and paste anything from Wikipedia and that would get traction so long as you drop some images in a smart way and had a decent hook especially with writing being done by AI right now A filter that I like to use is if I'm writing something could AI have written this if yes it's probably not worth me publishing if no all right what do I have here there's this guy years ago his name is kalis Ted and he founded a company called invado and they built marketplaces basically a big tech company out of Australia and he had this line that he said maybe 2010 that just stuck with me and he basically saidif you want to be interesting on the internet first be interesting off the internet and I think that's what is so interesting about Seeva compared to someone who is just you know copying content or theorizing on stuff C is like I bought this business here's what I learned here's where it worked here's where I went wrong here's my or here's my thesis on investing follow me as I actually put it into practice I think the best content comes from a story that only you can tell it's a unique point of view that you have someone else I love to follow is Dan runy who runs a Blog called trapal and he has this like deep inside look into the music business and so his newsletter is read by a lot of like top music Executives and that's who he's writing to like he's giving them the inside information right because the head of anr at some record label they still read content online just like the rest of us and so Dan is like hey I'm going to write just just for them and get those people on my list he just has such a unique perspective because of his background and everything in the music industry and he's writing content and similar to Sea that I don't think really many other people can write these are behind the scenes conversations and so if you actually come out and say Here's how the real world Works here's what I'm learning from it and let people in on that conversation then I think it's super fun and you end up with great growth a lot of people don't double down on content because they say well I don't have anything interesting to share it's actually inter because a lot of those people when you're like hey like tell me about what you did today and it's like oh I met this person who's like super interesting or uh you know I basically everyone is interesting yeah if you're on this planet and you're breathing you're interesting but what do you say to those people who might not be Nick Huber Sahel Bloom sea level who are very interesting um in the traditional sense what do you what do you say to the untraditional people well I think I'd probably disagree with your premise that everyone is interesting I I think that most people are actually really not interesting at all because they don't know like the fundamentals of a good story I was talking to a uh book publisher this is maybe four or five years ago right so he's an editor at a major publication we're talking about the difference between how fiction books work and non-fiction books so if we're writing a non-fiction book and we want the publisher to buy it I write a proposal table of contents and one chapter and I submit that fiction is a little different where fiction you have to write the entire book and then you shop it unless you have a track record you don't shop the book until it's done so I was talking to my friend of like wait so you're just getting entire manuscripts dropped on your on your desk non-stop like how do you are you reading all these books to find out if they're worth reading and like worth publishing or not and he's like no you don't have to read the entire book to know I only need to do two things I pick up the book and read it at the beginning for long enough to understand who's the hero of the story what describes their character like what are they struggling with any of those things and I go to the end and I read enough to try to understand are they the same person at the end as they were at the beginning and if they were the same I just put the book down like just toss it there's no point I know that the middle they did not go on a journey that changed them in any way and so it's not a story worth reading but if I can read the end and understand like okay this our the hero of our story has undergone some fundamental change you who they are what they're capable of or anything else then that points to like that the middle might be worth reading and so if you apply that to life in general I want to know what Journey are you on that is going to change you and I think most people are on the Journey of going to work and home again I'm happy for you if you're content with that right but like that is not an interesting story you are the hero of this journey what is what is the journey that you're going like who are you going to become on the other side of this what transformation are you going through a lot of people are going on these epic quests sea is going on this Epic Quest to build you know this multigenerational company he's thinking about business entirely differently he's constantly having to level himself up he's going through this massive transformation and he's letting us like follow along which is amazing someone's saying okay I want to be interesting on the internet I want to be followed on the internet so I have to be interesting well the best way to be interesting on the Internet is to be going on a quest that is going to change you and that is worth following if you look back to the early days of conver when I started it the first I've live blogged the entire process of conver for the last uh 10 years the very first post was me planting a flag I didn't even know what I was doing at the time but I basically planted a flag and said this is the journey that I'm going on I said I'm going to build a SAS company to $5,000 a month in recurring Revenue in six months with only $55,000 of my own money and I called the web app Challenge and that is what ultimately became convertkit I didn't hit any of my goals like it took way longer to take off than expected but like a bunch of people came in who said like oh this is a journey worth following and I will give you help and advice along the way because you seem to actually be going somewhere and so I just encourage more people building an audience be get very very clear on the journey you're going on and then just invite people along for that Journey my take is there's two types of potential creators one is just you're a non B2B Creator you're just a person who has a life and to me by being on this planet you have interesting things happen to you no matter who you are for example you know you witnessed 911 or you you felt what 911 was and you process what that is the issue is most people are not interesting storytellers to your point yep they don't know how to actually contextualize these things that happen in life uh even if it's as mundane as I'm really into Pokemon cards and they don't know how to put it into a story which is let me tell you about the time where I broke a pack of 1999 Pokemon cards and I got a Charizard I think everyone should be studying how to be a great Storyteller I think on the B2B side because we're talking about seas and Nick Hubers and stuff like that I think that you're right in the sense that not everyone who does do things professionally is doing something interesting professionally prompt for people is two things for for B2B it's how do you become interesting number one and then how do you become a interesting Storyteller number two I think also realizing going to your first point that there's not that big of a difference between the people we perceive is interesting and the ones that we perceive is not interesting if I'm a designer working at a software startup I go to work I come home I do my thing and that is not really interesting but if I give a quest in there right I am trying to level up my skills because I want to be a creative director and now I'm going out and I'm interviewing people and I am learning what I can do and I'm teaching the skills that I learned last week like there it's a very small difference between like showing up and doing my job and having a clear goal and getting to that point right let's say I want to get a job at Apple I can go through that in a very boring way moving through things gradually like and someday I'd love to get a job at Apple or I could tell a story of like I want to work at Apple one day and here's everything I'm doing here's how I'm learning like the connections I'm building all of that to be someone that Apple would be excited to hire who knows if that would actually work out but I know for a fact the more you can be clear on a goal and like relentlessly pursue it the more interesting it is or the other thing on the other side I think you could do is really focus on being a great Storyteller in the mundane because if you can take those mundane things and this is something that I don't think that I'm particularly good at at you follow someone's story like some random post on uh a blog or a newsletter or something else and you're like wow that was really powerful and special and like there's actually not that much to a story right it was just someone's interaction at a park that day but they told it in a certain way how compelling is the journey that you go are going on and how compelling are you at packaging and storytelling someone who is the best at both they're going to have a much easier time building an audience but you could be mediocrite storytelling and have a compelling Journey or you could have a mediocre journey be compelling at storytelling and either one of those will work as well what makes a successful story or package like how do you break that down well I think at its core you're trying to educate or entertain right that's all that we're doing as content creators there's some amount of education and some amount of entertainment some things are going to be very heavy on education here is exactly how to install Ruby unveils on your computer and then other things are going to be pure entertainment right comedy but then you again the best are the ones that weave both those through where like if you're taking comedy where you walk away with a different perspective like you laughed your way to a different perspective a content creator named Chase Reeves uh he did a bunch of stuff in the business space he knows business content really really well and now he has a YouTube channel reviewing bags so like backpacks laptop bags all of that like he could give you the mo most boring you know like talk about a bag and that would not do well but he is so entertaining because of who he is and how he is as a Storyteller and his comedic timing and everything else I would happily watch that guy tell me about a backpack any day and so he's like very much maximized entertainment you think of those two things and then what what skills you pick up it's really it's really the balance anything you're TR trying to teach the more you can add an entertainment value to it often the more people is going to reach they call it Ed educ now and I think especially as the younger you are the more you want bite-size entertainment like you want your education to feel like entertainment and you want your entertainment to feel like entertainment like what Ryan Reynolds did with mmobile where he has this whole string of commercials that he's starring in the production quality isn't crazy high you know it's often him in front of a green screen there's one where he they're talking about family plans and he's got uh his sister-in-law involved in the commercial and there's some good comedy in there and all that and obviously he's Ryan Reynolds and so partially it's entertaining because of that you know um the star value but I I haven't seen many Creator businesses try that style of commercial an example he did the early ads for square Adam Adam lore right he did that he did like square and Airbnb and it turned into this thing where he starred and you know 80% of the ads they were good but they weren't like entirely groundbreaking or they didn't have to have a huge budget or this star power but they were all just good and so people watched that and I often wonder if we could do a series of Creator style commercials like that I haven't figured out how it would work but I want to see more brands that have done that because I I feel like it's uh approachable because it's approachable but also because the platforms are prioritizing video creators are going to want to create more video brands are going to want to create more video products are going to want to create more video and the type of video people want is basically entertainment plus like very shot in an iPhone like even did you see uh the other day there was the Apple event and at the end of the Apple event which is like supposed to be this like super high produced event that cost millions of dollars to create it said shot on an iPhone 15 yeah and then they had the the behind the scenes content like showing some of how they actually shot it I mean it's fascinating there's almost a cool Factor to be like yep and I did this with the device that anybody has it used to be cool to say like oh I had this red camera or whatever the equivalent is in your industry right the absolute best of whatever and it's polished and perfect and now it's cool to be like yep I didn't do that I did it this other way we all have access to the same tools and I use them to produce something remarkable whereas you're over here complaining about I could create something great if only I had access to these other tools or budgets or something else that I don't have did you see Sean pu's application to the all-in podcast I did see it this is a perfect example it has well over a million views he basically shot it himself edited it on iMovie it's his job application to work at the all-in podcast and it's basically a two-minute clip kind of making fun of Jason Cal kenis jamath David Sachs fredberg little little punches at those people at the end he's like this isn't a a real job application and and it says like at Shan BP and he just controls the narrative from that so powerful probably took him a couple hours to do uh so I think we'll see more of that what are some brands that in the Creator space either individual creators or companies that you think would do a good job with this style of of content I actually think that everyone should be creating content like this if you create content and you want it to spread and you want to build Affinity then video is the best possible way to do it and I hate saying that because I hate being on video because like I'm on video and I'm like how do I look and you know did I say something wrong versus I can just go on Twitter and just like from the hip and just sort of write a oneliner Press tweet not think about it so much easier for me I was just thinking about as you're talking about like the shoot from the hip type thing or how you would build the habit or flywheel to make it that you could produce content at a consistent basis like if you wanted to get good at comedy but I'm trying to think about how you would get good at it right because you have to practice I guess if you forc yourself to do it every single day and you're like all right I'm G to try to write a funny little 30- second vignette about like this convertkit feature and it's like any other skill like if I'm complaining about like oh I don't know how to make a convert kit feature release video funny it's like well of course not you've never done it before but I if you have to do it every single day for 90 days in a row I bet some of them would actually be entertaining and you would get better at figuring out what worked people like Shan pory like he's a student of Comedy the guy is loves comedy I think he might even want to be a comedian when he quote unquote grows up and he's amazing at it so like for him to go and create that video like for him that was probably shooting from the head for someone like me or maybe you that is a bit more of a high barrier and the question becomes how do do you get normal people like us to the level of Shawn is there a way to accelerate that learning this is a little different but in the realm of public speaking that's a place that comedy matters a lot you're finding this balance between education and entertainment uh there's a guy named David Nill who uh he's this Irish guy lives in the Bay Area who hated public speaking forced himself to get into standup comedy in order to overcome his fear of it and now he like he's quite a good comedian if you look up his videos he's done really really well he did something a really interesting service one of these agencies that I think is just fascinating he said when I sit in an audience and I'm watching like a conference talk I hear a story right because everyone knows when you tell a you know give a conference talk you should tell stories your voice changes when you're telling the story you'll see the audience start to lean in they're like blah blah blah boring thing always telling a story then they lean in and pay attention so what David was saying is he notices the audience do that he's like as a comedian I can see where the joke is going and then like the speaker totally fails to land the joke he's like there was a great joke there like you could have done this punchline and so what he did is he got a bunch of his comedy friends together and said we're going to make an agency where we will punch up your business talks you bring a talk that you've already done and you send it to us and we will write it no more than 5% and we will make your talk funny and we will measure laughs per minute throughout your talk I'll give you an example the David and he watched one of my talks and he's like okay here's how to make it fun you for next time I was talking about the difference between when you're selling online versus selling in person and how if you if you sell online you don't get feedback but if I'm like hey Greg you buy this thing from me you have to respond you can't just be like uh no thanks and like you can't just leave whereas online you can hit the back button I never get feedback on why you why you didn't buy so the advice that David gave me is he's like you have to make that moment really awkward like play it up mind that you're talking to the person in the audience hey we you buy this thing and then just like mime you know holding the mic and turning away slowly and like as awkwardly as possible he's like count 10 your head and walk to the back of the stage where it's just like miming this awkward interaction sure enough like the more Awkward I made that and the longer I played it up with the audience it got a much better laugh and I've given that talk 10 times it gets a great laugh every single time I think it's fascinating how these small tweaks can make a big difference I think that's true for storytelling across the board should give to people because it's teachable you learned you basically had a before and after you know one of my favorite followers on on X is is Nikita beer whenever I see his tweet I'm always like we laughing uh it's just so so good there's usually like three different layers like you read it and you're like oh like that's funny and then you like realize that it's actually a reply as well to this other thing that's happening in the narrative and it's making fun of this other group entirely and you're like all right this is then you're just dying loud it's cool because you can actually like follow his account and be entertained and learn about consumer social apps and consumer Behavior so it's not like just all jokes and memes that sort of thing both him and Shan pory are people I look up to in terms of how do you inject comedy and your stories I think like storytelling in terms of sea style works a lot in terms of building audience Nikita style Shan porri uh comedy uh and punchiness also works if you can blend the two and then really realize that these are all skills that can be learned right like we wouldn't expect to sit down at the piano and be able to play something amazing if we've never played piano before you're like oh I'm I wrote this story and it's terrible Well yeah if you don't know how to write and you haven't studied that then of course it's going to be bad so like deliberately go and learn those skills the second thing is you can also hire these people I'm trying to do a talk and I go out and hire a speaking coach someone like David Nill who's f focused on Comedy or someone else like Mike pacon who is focused on the overall talk like he'll give me things it's not going to be funny in the moment but I gave a talk at craft and commerce my my conference talking about uh flywheels I have these visuals I'm explaining it and all of this and then it transitioned to the next thing and he's like I don't know that transition is weak just play it up and be like that's what we call a metaphor it gave just this little bit and it got a laugh from the audience every time a professional will come and be like yeah here's the joke and they'll make those tweaks and so in any of your content like deliberately learn and then go out and get the outside opinion to punch it up it probably cost a lot less than you think because you know comedians a lot of the time aren't you know making millions of dollars a year like I have a few comedian friends like they're some of my smartest friends even smarter than some of my tech friends because they're just so quick so witty they have this amazing ability to see the audience and they're able to just predict what's going to happen next and as a content creator that's what we need we need to be able to craft messages and content that uh is able to anticipate the needs of people and able to understand where their eyes are going to gloss over and where we need to insert a joke sometimes these wildly valuable skills are not actually well paid skills writing has been a terribly paid skill right if you were to go get a you know an English degree or something university' be like cool like I hope you enjoy working at Starbucks right that would be the the joke that people would make and probably comedy the same thing okay great how are you actually going to make money and now what we're finding online is that those are insanely valuable skills when applied correctly and if you came in and told me like hey I started doing this and then two years later I'm making a quarter million dollars a year with my audience of 50,000 people that I built I'd be like yeah naturally like that makes sense you know but other circles people be like wait what how are you as a right writer making $250,000 a year and it's just because comedy writing teaching all of these things are so so valuable at capturing attention and then you can drive that attention to whatever you want and you get leverage in a really interesting way the writer uh piece is really interesting like you used to get paid $50,000 to write and now the greatest writers Sahel blooms and the Nick Hubers are getting paid $5 million a year to to write think about it like this whole you know writers comedians School teachers like that is not a well-paid job and you have all of these School teachers who end up leaving and either teaching their field online or providing resources for other school teachers or whatever else they bring in these these elements of online business and audience and then turns out that is a wildly profitable job like I know a school teacher who makes almost a million dollars a year like teaching school teachers how how to manage their classroom how to show up effectively how to create lesson plans all of this stuff and he actually still teaches part-time at the high school that he originally taught at because he's like look I still want to be boots on the ground I still want to have this regular material and I love what I do I just didn't want to make 60 Grand a year anymore and so now I'm doing the online thing got an audience of 100,000 people uh I've got my email let dialed in and all of that and I can do the thing that I love and get paid absurdly well for it these previous the undervalued skills are now insanely valuable so once you've built up that audience let's let's uh move into the second section of this of this pod around monetization how do you think about coming up with business model ideas for creators and prioritizing the ones that make the most sense yeah I think you can end up in a place where there's so many opportunities that you could be paralyzed and not choose a good one or you end up not choosing any at all probably the first thing is choose something anything that works and you'll iterate from there a lot of people start with ads paid newsletter or an ebook there's a bunch of skills that you have to learn in order to make money on the internet right how to write a headline how to sell a product how to create a landing page process payments if someone was like wait how do I process payments on the internet if we were starting from scratch today like that's a question you have to figure out and understand same way that if you were trying to set up an LLC right if you you'd be like a registered agent what is that that sounds so official that's just a form on the you know like that's actually a really basic thing so I have an essay called the ladders of wealth creation where I talk about the skills that you need to learn to move up and basically gain leverage uh with each ladder I think it's important to be deliberate about the skills you're learning and where you're going to go from there and then probably just expose yourself to a lot of different methods of monetization and look both in your industry and then across Industries when I was doing design full-time instead of going to like the CSS G Gallery website cuz that would result in me just creating the same stuff that everyone else was creating I liked to go to other Industries entirely and try to borrow from them so one of my favorites was actually fashion and not like high-end fashion like you know Armani or something like that but even just looking at like Banana Republic as they put out their fall collection what colors are they using you know what textures on the clothing tags you know any of those things and I'd get really great web design inspiration like I would shamelessly copy some of their color palettes or some of you know font choices or that sort of thing and bring it to an entirely different industry belt new and novel it's the same thing when you're looking at pricing or monetization like pay attention to how are people doing it in your Niche but then also go to an entirely different Niche right we've referenced Nick Huber he can make plenty of money off of sponsorships and digital product sales and traditional things but he's actually making the like the bulk of his money off of two agencies with Shepard and his re cost EG Ryan holiday makes an absurd amount of money selling coins that have stoic phrases on them I'm involved in this ghost town in California with Ryan holiday and Brent Underwood and a few other people and that has layers of monetization to it people visit there's some money to be made with tours it has a YouTube channel it makes like 50 Grand a month in sponsorship Revenue because the YouTube channel is so popular there's merch right that's expected so this ghost town has actually like a fantastic Revenue line which all get spent to run the ghost town because turns out it's expensive to do but then if you go from there you're like wait there's actually like TV and movie commercial uh or like product commercial licensing and location fees here and then you could also take that brand and you could turn that into you create sordo whiskey right or something else there's often another business model that is much higher Ry that's possible and you just have to kind of Branch out to see it you need to ask yourself where do I want to start once you have an audience there's like a hundred ways you can skin the cad in terms of monetization so so do you want something that's low ticket or high ticket you mentioned ads you can just plug in ads to get going um low ticket would be an example of an ebook or a course High ticket might be or medium ticket might be something like a SAS software subscription High ticket might be something like a mastermind or high-end agency type thing what does this look like when it scales for example if I were going to start an agency doing a logo design let's say logo design for high-end clients like Coca-Cola what does this look like when it scales or if I'm Ryan holiday he's got a pretty sweet gig because he he creates some coins and then he sells the coins I think the mistake a lot of creators are making in terms of starting these agencies is scaling a it's very easy to start an agency it's very hard to scale an agency and also quality between clients is very hard to predict in some service offerings so what you don't want to have is you don't want to be a Creator Who has 100,000 subscribers and then you sell 20,000 people on the service and they get different coins so to speak so my thesis is that you're actually going to see a bunch of Creator Le producti agencies die in about 18 to 24 months whereas I think the winners um are going to create smaller agencies or um they're going to create a build once sell twice course type thing or they're going to create like a Ryan holiday type thing that has quality control what what's your thoughts on that everything sounds easier when someone talks about on a podcast that it actually is in real life I like that you're bringing up like hey this whole running an agency thing is actually kind of hard or you get into something where it's like it's simple but not easy have good deal flow to get clients provide those clients it's a great experience they'll tell more people book more clients right it's pretty simple model but then you get into it and you find like oh everyone has slightly different goals as much as you try to productize it and then you're having to fire clients who you hoped were a good fit but ultimately aren't because they want something that's like 20% different than what you're offering and you know or you don't fire them and you end up then your your agency like gets spread so thin trying to do all this custom work for everybody or for example it's just natural Growing Pains like your team is based in North America and you design a logo for someone in Tokyo and what is amazing in American culture doesn't translate well to Japanese culture for example you're going to see a lot of that I think you're also going to see a lot of people who don't understand how to run agencies who are starting them because it's easy to start a business and it's really hard to run a business in year three and and Beyond um and that's really when all the compounding starts to kick in I don't know it's something with the agency business model in particular I think it's a we we'll see the same drop off in all forms of monetization right someone launches a paid newsletter and then they realize like oh I may be a good writer but I'm not a prolific writer and turns out I chose a business model that requires my best content to be behind a pay wall and then I need new content not behind a pay wall to get new readers and like these two sides of my business are directly odds you know growth and monetization are directly in conflict or like my favorite writer you know runs a great paid newsletter let me copy their model oh turns out they've been a professional journalist for the last 20 years you know they're like wait I only have to write one piece today this is amazing whereas I'm over here being like I can't even get out of a single newsletter a week alone five days a week so I think you're gonna have the whole range of people finding out like this is actually really hard it's hard to stay consistent it's hard to work at it long enough for the compounded to kick in this requires like a different set of skills than what I have sometimes there's a very natural thing to sell to your audience where you're like oh this is easy so I'm going to do it it doesn't actually match your skills or you don't staff the team accordingly you see this a lot with celebrity products someone sees hey George Clooney and The Rock were both wildly successful with Tequilas I'm going to start with tequila as well why not I'm as famous as they are so they think like okay we'll just find something to White Label we'll do some splashy ad campaigns we'll throw some money at it and that should take off and we've already seen a bunch of those fail you're going to see way more of them fail because people don't understand that demand and the attention is only one part of it it actually takes an insane amount of work to run a successful business even if you've got the top of the funnel figured out if you were me and you've got an audience of 500,000 followers across platforms 75,000 newsletter subscribers I I just moved to convert kit last week uh shout out all right I monetized currently via we've got some agency businesses we have an innovation agency that works with sort of Fortune 500s on on designing their new future uh future we've got an SEO agency we've built some propietary AI software that allows us to get really good search results so we sell that as a service called boring marketing.com we've got uh design agency as a service focus on uh communitybased uh products and companies that's called meet dispatch.com um we've got communities that we run you probably need a robot.com for example which is an AI community so I'm monetizing via Services um and internet communities internet communities is more like digital assets that we sell what would you do if you were me to give people to have the examples EXA examples exactly one you have a lot of great ways to monetize right now there's this idea that I've talked about of strip malls versus skyscrapers and I think a lot of creators like to build strip malls here's what I mean if you think about the footprint of land what you can build right you're you're going to a strip mall and you're like okay I'm going to build this one little business here here's my Radio Shack and it's gonna have a Subway right next to it and we're just expanding horizontally across and if I get enough revenue from all of that I've got a great business right I'm well Diversified My Philosophy has much more been the skyscraper approach I'm going to take all of those same pieces and I'm going to build it into one thing and I'm going to build that as tall and successful as possible when you're looking across the landscape of businesses that you have bunch of small to medium businesses I would look is there one of those that you could build into a skyscraper that you could put a ton of effort into and this could be the next thing okay the SEO industry is actually pretty big software for SEO is is a big Market the multiples on software companies comp right now are really really good as well they're down from what they were you know two years ago but they're still valued you know recurring revenue is valued very very highly and so I'm like okay what has to be true for that agency that has software in the back end for us to start selling that software what if the high-end is the done for you and it's like many thousands of dollars a month and then like can I get the software company to the point where it's doing 10 million a year in subscription Revenue by itself a software company doing 10 million a year in revenue is worth more than $50 million right if it's growing growing well so I always look at how can I go from a strip mall to a skyscraper we had an offsite recently in in Charlotte with the boring marketing.com team the SEO team and um it's going really well so there's obviously the inclination to be like oh we should incubate this or we should like buy this company but the CEO of the business was a skyscraper guy and he was just like guys sem Rush is like a publicly traded company you can see their numbers like we've got this incredible software we need to create we need a double down on creating this incredible software we can unbundle the software and make it a SAS product um sell that and like the Enterprise Value will be in the in the software um so we we'll just sort of reinvest a lot of the cash flow to the software side of the business yes we can go incubate other things but why would we do that if we know that this opportunity is so large yeah and I think the blend between agencies and software can be really really interesting like some a lot of people have failed in that space before where an agency has tried to go out and search for a problem to make software around often the hard thing is software is great at long-term Enterprise Value and terrible for a short-term cash flow and so the agency kind of bridges that Gap the other thing is that often early software is just a pain to use so you can say like okay our agency will use it for you uh Brendan dun is a Creator who's very very good at email personalization and segmentation and he has this product called WR message which I'm an investor in he would get customers for the software they wouldn't be successful and they'd cancel their account which was not the fault of the software right it just turns out people didn't want to do the work to set it up and so finally he had people saying like we will pay you to do all this for us he's like no we run a software company not an agency and eventually like in the last six months he switched and said like okay I started an agency it's called slice and dice and it's all about segmentation personalization and we will do all of it for you right and we will use our software to do it because we have the best software platform for this and so now he's running these launches and building amazing funnels for all these top creators he's applying these principles they're paying a bunch of money up front and then they end up paying you know $250 to $500 a month longterm for the software so he's basically ensuring that every customer is like the perfect user of the software which no amount of like onboarding and help tutorials will ever turn someone into perfect user but when you're like all right fine I'll like pay me and I will just set it all up for you uh turns out that works pretty well he's getting the cash flow that he can use to build out all the features that he wants uh and he's getting all these Flagship you know customers that are saying like I'm getting these insane results like I here's how my funnel was converting before and then brenon and his team rebuilt it and now it's getting more results and so it's a great case study and so I think the blend between software and agencies is really really interesting if done well this conversation was everything I dreamed of and more with the with the Creator architect himself Nathan Barry and I will say I'm looking forward to using kkit I'm not being paid to to to to say this I'm a I'm a paying customer of convert kid uh I watched the episode that you did with Nick Huber where at the end you guys were diving into Nick's conver account and you were like riffing on messaging and and all of that yeah another vote for like the power of content right you can throw something out there of like I don't know conver should message things like this and then you can get the conver it marketing toam be like interesting you know like you can just incept ideas into people's minds by putting it out there the interesting thing about that conversation is I began that conversation on in the Beehive camp and I sort of was like okay like I show me where I canver kit did my research played around with it liked what I saw and I changed my decis convert kit made more sense for me because I'm looking for like segmentation yeah um and some landing page stuff um so anyways I'm excited to play around with it um if you're listening to this and you haven't subscribed to my new convert kit my newsletter Greg Eisenberg uh my name g r e g i s n bg.com yeah sign up and get that weekly dose of inspiration Nathan where you want to send people to learn more about you and convertkit convert kit.com to check it out you know it's free to use up to 1 th000 subscribers and then goes from there uh also if you check out the Creator Network just Creator network.com which is a convertkit feature but that drives a ton of growth for people and then my newsletter just Nathan Barry and Barry's b a r y.com and I write a newsletter every Tuesday about whatever I'm thinking about in the Creator economy now I'm going to describe myself as the architect to the Creator economy is that too pretentious no no I mean it's I called you said it first if you called yourself that I think that would be a problem but I do like I do like that you still write a newsletter it's kind of like that teacher you're talking about like still he's still showing up in class yeah I like that that's cool yeah you gota use your own products right work it's a big business and so I like that that you can you know you could be on a beach somewhere but you're wri in newsletters I love it thanks for having me on this has been fun anytime

Channel: Greg Isenberg

Views: 869

Keywords: convertkit, convertkit newsletter, how to make money online, how to make money as a creator, how to monetize as a creator, how to build an audience, nathan barry, email marketing, email monetization, newsletter monetization, monetization secrets, monetization tips, how to build a personal brand

Id: sZGbQvX9AXY

Length: 43min 57sec (2637 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2023