Sahil Bloom – Using Flywheels to Build Longevity in the Creator Economy

if I'm spending five grand a month on video editing services that are going to chop up videos and Eclipse I should actually own a video editing business so when I'm posting a video I can say hey I'm using this video editing service send a bunch of other people to this service that I own that is charging five grand a month for these services and now I just turned something that I was just spending cash on every single month into something that is making now it's a seven figure run rate business that's making a bunch of cash and I own a big chunk of it by virtue of the fact that I can drive leads to it [Music] so I want to dive in you have a really interesting background too life is a Creator in that you came from private Equity anyone else have a private Equity to Creator no I didn't think so oh yeah we got one and so I'm curious what was that Journey as you started to see the Creator World from being inside the private Equity world yeah well first off let me just say thanks to everyone for for coming to this it's fun to see a bunch of familiar faces I feel like I've interacted with on Twitter sphere or online over the last few years so welcome everyone and thank you my journey was not engineered there was no strategy behind becoming a Creator I hadn't ever intended I honestly I didn't know I'm curious whether other people felt this way but I didn't know that the Creator economy was really a thing covet happened and I was stuck at home and I was working a job that I was rather miserable in but hadn't really thought about it I was working a lot I was making money and I basically thought that that was what a successful life looked like that I would just continue to show up day in day out and it didn't matter that I didn't enjoy it and I didn't know that there was really another path my view of what it meant to be successful was basically you either work in banking or consulting or Finance or my Indian mother would say you become a doctor is the real that you're supposed to take and so for me it was just all of a sudden I had time on my hands and I was stuck at home I wasn't traveling the three days a week that I had been doing before and writing had always been something that I really felt a passion around since I was a little kid my mom used to write a lot so I would kind of be alongside for her storytelling it was something I knew I enjoyed and that was just something that I was filling time with I was like oh I can kind of pick up a new hobby or interest because I'm stuck at home and I didn't have a social life because I couldn't see friends because we were all locked down I was in the Bay Area at the time and so I started writing and it was on Twitter originally because I just had a Twitter from back in my baseball days before that and it started to kind of become something people were sharing things I was doing it was clear that there was some sort of value that I was creating for others to where they were sharing it and they were gifting me with their attention that was the value I was kind of receiving in return for the value I was hopefully creating and then maybe six months of doing that I started to think about whether there might actually be a business model that was kind of built around it because again I hadn't come from a background of Entrepreneurship neither one of my parents are really entrepreneurs I always just thought that W-2 income was what you did and you needed the stable safe path and so I never there was never a point in that first year where I thought about oh I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to go all in on this this is the thing this is the strategy here's how I'm pursuing it so it's actually funny to me today when I see people break down my strategy and talk about the ways that I pursued different things from the early days and sometimes I often think that we apply strategy X post as a narrative to something that worked right it worked for me I did something some way but I didn't in the moment think oh here's exactly how I'm going to do it and here's how I'm going to pursue it I was just trying things and following something I was enjoying along the way and then it became something and now I can say hey here's how I did it and here's what works and all this and that when the reality is you're kind of just in the trenches and hopefully pursuing something that you find energy around and that creates energy for you and then in another world it becomes something yeah they're in that you you focus on Twitter first yeah I want to dive into some much more advanced things but just to set the stage what have you found this really worked for growing on Twitter that's been the Catalyst for everything else yeah you guys all know this but in at any point in time on any platform there's always something that's the Arbitrage of something that people haven't quite done enough of yet it's not saturated and you can really stand out by doing it and doing it well in the early days when I was writing on Twitter threads didn't exist the first things I was writing on Twitter I just happened to write in this thread format because I was trying to explain something that took longer than 140 characters at the time they hadn't even expanded it and that meant that I had to comment under individual tweets there wasn't even the functionality there and that format started getting promoted it became you know a really good growth hack or a clear Arbitrage on the platform like anything else and like in any Market it gets squeezed out by a lot of people coming into it and the thing that was Arbitrage a few months later is all of a sudden rated and a lot of people are doing it so in the early days just writing in long form on Twitter was a great way to grow today I think that's a lot different there's a lot of people that are writing in long form and I think the growth Arbitrage on Twitter is not anywhere near what it was before it used to be that you could just write a bunch of threads and you could grow to 100 000 Plus on Twitter just by doing it enough over six months I don't think you can actually do that anymore and I think the the Arbitrage on Twitter today is a quality Arbitrage where you can write things that are really within your Niche that are really high value and you might not grow to a hundred thousand people but you're going to attract the 10 000 people that deeply deeply resonate and care about the things you're talking about and so I think anyone that's pursuing it now and pursuing the vanity metrics of just trying to grow to scale is going to be disappointed the people that are IC that are crushing it are the people that are really focusing on delivering value to the people they care about and focusing much more on the quality of the people that are being attracted to the things they're putting out versus just worrying about oh did this get a million views or did it get 500 000 views or whatever the number is I think along those lines since we met and I watched what you did on Twitter I was like that sounds fun I'll do that too and so we would talk and brainstorm ideas yeah last year of growing I don't know what it was from 25 to 30 000 followers to a hundred thousand over the course of the year and I was probably late to the thread wave or some of those new growth tactics that worked but what I found was that if I wrote things that only I could write then that would resonate with the right kind of people and so I'd write how we build company culture at convertkit you can't read Wikipedia and write that thread you know I write about another one that did really well is turning down the acquisition off from Spotify and what we did next and these these compensation structure yeah super interesting yeah a bunch of those things that are from my journey and my story rather than I'm gonna say it again I feel like so many threads are written straight from Wiki yeah and now from chat gp2 right and I think my general perception with content in general is anything that can be done either through Wikipedia originally or now through chatgpt it's barrier to entry goes to zero for creating that type of content so it is going to be mass proliferated and the way to stand out then is to do the n of one stuff like that where you only you can talk about it or to really share who you are in your personality that is unique and as I think about the world of AI as more and more of our lives are consumed by interacting with robots and with technology I personally think the pendulum swings to wanting to have real human connection and to wanting to be able to connect with people like this in real life one on one feel like you know the person that you're actually reading their content and so for me over the last year and a half since really since my son was born which was a life-changing event for me on a personal level I've shared more and more about who I am as a human being and my life and values and things that I care deeply about then I have mental models type stuff on Twitter and maybe that was what people knew me for originally and what they were following me for but over the last year I shared way more stuff about my life than most people do and are there trade-offs to that and your personal life becomes in the public domain certainly but the connection and the community that I think is built around that real human feel is really powerful and so I think the end of one type content where it's only you that knows this type of stuff all of you have something like that some sort of insight you wouldn't be here if you didn't and sharing who you are and what you care about what your core values are I think is another really powerful way in terms of just straight blocking and tackling things that are working still really well on Twitter and on LinkedIn as well visuals are Far and Away outperforming what they used to any images video all of that stuff because Twitter's trying to become more of an ad platform they're prioritizing attention and people looking at things helps with that so I'm sharing tons more in the way of visuals on the platform just because it's clearly performing much better than it used to in the past and similarly on LinkedIn similar General perspective and then the last thing I would say is being very aggressive about repurposing content that you've used in the past is something that everyone should be thinking about there's this tendency to think that you need to come up with some brilliant earth-shattering novel new idea every time you share something and it's putting way too much pressure on yourself I mean the number of times you've shared your compensation thread or your Spotify thread and continued to have it get traction and reach new people and bring in new followers that are really high quality is amazing and you can do it every few months you can be sharing something because it's just reaching new people because of the way the algorithms work so really doing that capitalizing on that figuring out the ideas that resonate for you and then putting them out in different formats across different platforms is something that I've been much more aggressive about and that really helps in terms of broadening the reach of the stuff you're putting out into the world yeah so an example of that is you actually showed me how to do this of creating a spreadsheet of all of the threads and individual tweets that you write that do well and then have a Cadence where you're going to come back and revisit them and I thought I originally thought you should write something and post it once maybe you can rewrite it later and post a different version of it and learning from you into Cuba and others and you can post the exact same thing over again and if it worked the first time it'll probably work the second time and you'll get occasionally people are like have I read this before maybe or I think I've you know you might get one out of 50 replies of someone saying that even less than that to be honest the amount I probably can count on two hands the number of times I've had people respond saying I've read this from you in the last three because it's a stupid comment to come back with so people they might think it but they're not saying it and so you're just you don't get a response from that person that's okay it doesn't matter and if they do frankly it boosts it in the algorithm because there's a comment it goes and reaches more people maybe that's a good thing I mean that's the Nick Huber approach say something that outrages people and that drives it up in the algorithm for them yeah Different Strokes I obviously don't do that but neither of us yeah yeah but yeah yeah and so what you end up with is a Cadence if you're saying hey I'm good with reposting a thread or a series of tweets every four months or every six months let's go with you've been saying three months if that was the Cadence well if you have 12 great threads that you've written that are really Landing well then you could actually write that and then just keep recycling the same content yeah in a three-month kittens I personally like more of a six month Cadence yeah um there's basically you can think of it on a spectrum from inspiration driven creators to kind of tactical operational driven creators and if you think Tim Urban is someone I really admire the white but why writer who really I mean he might publish one blog every several months because everything he does it's deep deep it spends a ton of time thinking it through there's no Cadence how he puts out content it's very inspiration driven the other end of the spectrum is someone like Justin Welsh who has done really really well with he has a system and he's going to write one thing and then he's going to make five tweets out of it and then the five tweets are gonna lead to a newsletter art he really has a regimented system and the ideas are the same ones that he's saying in different ways and he's open about that he talks about how other credit should do that I'm somewhere probably closer to the former end of the spectrum where I've never had the Excel spreadsheet where I look at it I know it helps other people so I've helped other people set it up for me I sort of need to feel anything I post on Twitter I've really written right then I don't have a backlog of content I have no idea what my newsletters are going to be about next week I haven't looked at I write two newsletters a week no clue what's going to be on them and for some people that's really terrifying for me that's the only way I can do it people right like I literally I can't you could not pay me any amount of money to sit down on a Thursday and write my newsletter for the next Friday it's just I can't do it I can't bring myself to do it and I'm really struggling with writing my book for this exact reason oh it's going to be published in January 2025. I'm not going to sit down until like October of 2024 if it's up to me or something like that it's not going to work yeah they don't know that hopefully they're not listening but yeah exactly I'm gonna get in trouble now but I think you need to figure out where you are on the spectrum of those two ends and and figure out what works for you because what works for me or Nathan might not work for you me having an Excel spreadsheet of this stuff I'm just not going to look at it I I have team now is fortunate to have them here Blake runs all of kind of operations of my general ecosystem and he's helped me bring some level of kind of rigor to how I think about these things in a plan and an approach but it's had to really mold into how I view the world because otherwise I get overwhelmed really easily and it just kind of makes me lock up I kind of go into Turtle mode and just want to shrink within my show so yeah yeah different methods I'm on the other side where my spreadsheet actually tells me how many months it's been since I last posted it and it's also it's it it has to fit into what you do you have a day job running a big company as a CEO and so you can't spend time every single day writing and so you might need to have that system in place to make sure that you're still able to grow your creator ecosystem and have the Cadence of putting things out for me this is what I do the platform and brand drives everything else within my ecosystem so yeah I need to figure out what works one advantage of building this library of content and whichever structure you take if you go back and look at everything you've written and you have a way of resurfacing that it might be things that you rewrite or whatever else but you'll find that something that you wrote once when it was interesting or inspirational for you might become timely later and so people might have cared a 5 out of 10 about your content and then later when you originally posted it and then if you you share it later they might care a 10 out of 10 because of something else happening in the world so an example I have a thread that I wrote about Ryan Reynolds and why I think he's the greatest marketer of alive today and I think that's the hook on the threat and that did really well got a bunch of attention most importantly it got Ryan Reynolds to follow me on Twitter which is probably my greatest accomplishment of the last year but I think I posted that twice maybe six months apart got a ton of views each time people loved it and then when T-Mobile purchased mint mobile I shared the threat again but changed the hook and talked about T-Mobile just bought mint mobile for whatever that was 1.2 billion by the way someone replied and was like yeah but Ryan only owned 30 yeah yeah loser what a loser yeah yeah poor guy yeah we'll take him a collection afterwards yeah buy another sports team yeah hopefully he'll be all right but it got double the views and Impressions because when I released it timely versus when I released it when it was interesting to me and so the lesson is not write something and sit on it until it's timely it's publish it when you find it interesting and when you want to write it and then if something comes up that's timely then repost it and republish it with a new hook yeah and there's also the broader component of this is being proud to share the things that you've written and created in whatever context I think it's just a shame when amazing content gets shouted into a void and doesn't Reach people and if that happens people have a tendency to say oh it wasn't good but if you're proud of what you created you should be willing to continue to promote it because if you're not willing to then why would anyone else be willing to and if you put out something that doesn't get any traction just by definition that means no one really saw it and so you can go put it out again very shortly if something really just doesn't perform a month later you can be excited to go put it out again and figure out maybe the hook was a little bit off and you need to make it a little more catchy in some way or connect it to a current event in some way but there's plenty of rationale behind just being a little bit more Shameless the the line between Shameless and just pride and the work that you've created is is a thin one you need to kind of dance on that Razor's Edge I like that so as you're producing all this content freakishly close to when you're sending it out to your audience freakishially thanks you're welcome that's scary I don't know why but what are the things you've had to build some some predetermined habits to put out that level of content on that Cadence I'm just thinking about you know your personal life your son's a year old you're super involved with him and or with your family what are the habits and systems that you've put in place to be able to create in that way I think that you need to figure out your own kind of energy Cadence around creating I'll talk about it during my talk this afternoon but one of the things I always think is we all have a very different circadian rhythm and a very different time when our creative energy is flowing and the way that is required for you to create at your highest level I used to think I could write in the evening because that was when it fit into my day and my life and what I realized was I actually was my sharpest most creative version of myself at five in the morning and that's just me being a weird morning person I like waking up early but I was doing a bunch of emailing at five in the morning rather than spending that time on the one creative thing that actually mattered that was really high leverage so figuring out for me when my Creative Energy actually was flowing and then mapping that to when I was actually creating on a daily basis was really really important and that to me is just a matter of mapping out your life of what is the actual real important thing that you're doing on a daily basis from a creative standpoint writing for me is that number one most important thing whether it's my newsletter whether it's my book that I should be working on or writing for Twitter or whatever other platform I need that to be in the morning because that's when I actually have creative energy flowing in the afternoon I'm basically useless after 2 30. I just my energy goes to zero I need six Dunkin Donuts cold Brews in order to do anything and so if I could email or if I have to get on a zoom call in the afternoon that's okay I don't mind going and doing that or you know doing whatever the lower value task is but mapping my energy to what I'm creating has been really really impactful for me yeah like it I've seen it play out just in the volume of content that you create the one thing I would encourage everyone to do is I have this thing I created I called it an energy calendar but basically it's like looking at the activities that are on your calendar during the course of a week that create energy versus drain energy from your life and the way I did it originally was I just at the end of the day I color coded my calendar and I thought about okay that thing that was on my calendar did it create energy for me I marked it green was it neutral I marked it yellow or was it draining energy for me and I marked it red and at the end of a week by doing that every day you get a really good perspective on the type of activities that we're creating a ton of energy for you in your life the type of activities that were draining a ton of energy for you and then the things that were okay and when you establish that kind of awareness of what it is that's hurting versus helping your energy you can then slowly start to reposition your life over the course of a period of time towards more green on your calendar you can't ever hope to eliminate all of the red necessarily because we all have things we have to do probably but you can do things to try to make red look more yellow for me red was Zoom calls and phone calls sitting at my desk but yellow was a walking call if I could walk outside and so I started turning all of those Zoom calls into hey let's actually just do a phone call I'm gonna walk I'll be much more focused on you because when I'm on a zoom call I'm trying to multitask on my computer but if I'm on the phone talking to someone on a walk I'm laser focused on that one thing and so I switched a lot of it and all of a sudden a bunch of red on my calendar became yellow and that helps a lot at the end of the week you actually don't feel completely killed and drained when your calendar was mostly green and yellow so that's another thing that I think I just think people should do it's a very easy activity and it helps a lot nice I use you as a poster boy for flywheels a lot so thanks for being appreciate the example that I can just talk about regularly I'm curious how you think about that flywheel there's obviously the side that I talk about of how it fits into the convergence ecosystem and all that but is the flywheel that runs and drives your newsletter growth something that you consciously think about or what tweaks do we have to did you have to make to get that level of growth that we're talking about yeah I think only recently have I come to understand the way that it all flows yeah honestly again to the point of a lot of these strategies being exposed narratives that something started working and then we say oh yeah that's a flywheel and then we're like okay let's go build one of those I think other people can learn from that but it was only by screwing it up along the way and kind of falling into it that it got figured out it's very recent within the last six months probably and my newsletter at flywheel is really just part of a broader flywheel around my ecosystem that I think about and so I tend to think more on a macro scale it's just the way my mind works you've been helpful in helping me think about what the micro scale flywheel looks like around just the newsletter and how to drive that but it's only recent yes let's go to that macro scale because I think it's a lot of your background coming into this world from private equity and business and all of that gets you thinking on a different level and one thing that I want is so many other creators to think on the level that you do of I guess it's in this billion dollar Creator idea of asking the question if you have an audience that means you have someone's attention and so what is the highest Value Place you can direct that attention and we're all sort of experimenting with this we might not talk about it that way but we're experimenting with that in small ways where we're saying okay is it ads is it an e-book should I sell a course should I whatever else and I'm really curious how you think about that question at the macro level of what's the what's the grand scale of what you're building and how do you think about yeah driving attention yeah I came from a business background so I came from the private Equity world where we were investing in businesses that were I don't know 100 to 300 500 million of Revenue real scale businesses that we're investing in and so coming with that perspective the number one thing that I was most nervous about and wary of as I was starting to build my kind of new ecosystem was the longevity of it and sustainability and realizing that no Creator really creates forever I looked and looked at all the case studies of the different people and there's growth curves to it right people have their period of crazy growth and then they kind of have some the level of stagnation and then some of them have kind of a second growth wave Tim Ferriss kind of had his book wave then it kind of he was quiet and then he had the podcast and he's managed to continue doing it but they're like unicorns right I mean crazy one in a million type thing most creators you have kind of your curve and you need to figure out what's next in a normal career path there's a normal Arc to it you show up every single day as a W-2 employee you get your two percent pay raise every year and you know that if you just keep doing reasonably good work you're gonna have a job for the next 20 30 years that doesn't really exist as a solo printer you have to actually go out and do it and build something that's durable and sustainable so I came in really thinking about that from the get-go of what can I be building that's not necessarily on the surface that people see that is going to outlast me creating if I want to not write for a year or if no one cares what I have to say anymore out of the blue for whatever reason do I actually have something that exists that has value either Equity or real cash that's just coming into me that isn't attached to me just having to create on a daily basis I understand the business models that a lot of creators have built around ads or courses or products all these different things I think they're fantastic but I wanted to have that plus build something that I felt wasn't attached to me being on a treadmill of creating every day and so I came in with that perspective and really was trying to all along the way have those businesses being built in the background alongside things I was doing from a platform and brand perspective and that's really how I pursued it I don't talk about that publicly really at all Nick Huber who you mentioned earlier has been very public about the businesses that he kind of co-owns and that he's driving people to and he talks about how much money he's making on them doing all these things I've never really wanted the attention of like talking about money that I'm making or things that I'm doing or I just don't I personally just don't feel comfortable sharing details financially in the way that other people do and that's prevented me from doing that so it's been more under the surface the vast majority of people have no idea of the business ecosystem that I've kind of created alongside it but I I think there is something interesting there that we can talk about in this room a strategy that I think people can put in place to build something that outlasts them having to create new content on a daily or weekly monthly basis yeah I want to go to that maybe before we do who's the creator that comes to mind could be maybe at our level or someone even much more famous who has this interesting like building substantial equity in something that that either inspires you or you think about oh that is a unique model and it's getting me to think about this differently I think Nick was definitely a version of that for me I disagree with a lot of the things that he says publicly and a lot of the way that he approaches it and the abrasiveness with which he approaches things but there's something under the surface there that's really interesting in the business and and how he's thinking about sort of looking at the value chain of the real estate world that he was operating and creating in and thinking about where in that value chain he could create businesses and partner with people to build businesses and and benefit and profit from that I think there are some investors that have used it really well around building holding companies cable Kaczynski and Xavier helgeson small lure followings than Nick more like 50 to 100 000 followers on Twitter or not big newsletters but they've been really deliberate about how to leverage a high value following for driving deal flow and for being able to create access to the things that they're investing in and they have a holding company that allows them to compound value over a really long period of time and then on the on the big big scale I think what Kim Kardashian is doing with the private Equity Fund is one of the most interesting things it got dunked on a lot people were going crazy over it but I think that's one of the smartest ways that she could possibly make money yeah yeah using that attention yeah to point it to something that a business that you can really grow and have yeah private Equity Funds have been claiming that they create value for the companies that they invest in for the last 30 40 years it's been 99 excuse my language I worked in private Equity the value we created was we would send a bunch of Consultants to go create process and bounce around and say smart things and then not do anything and then we'd pop out and hope that it worked cross your fingers hope you don't run out of cash before you pay off the debt and and if the market was good and the company was good it worked out great you made a lot of money because you levered up a business and if it didn't oh well we did well on the other ones it's fine and with a model what she's put in place with this new fund she can drive seriously changed outcomes for a consumer business assuming it's the type of the right type of business that they go and invest in people will go buy the product that you get excited about I mean they the Kardashians for all their flaws have massive influence in getting people to consume things so if they buy a consumer business the amount of value that she can create for that business overnight it's like messy coming to the Miami MLS team the amount of value that is created in a franchise by one person is enormous and I can't think of a better business model for creating value out of that attention than having a billion dollar private Equity Fund where you can put a bunch of equity to work that isn't yours and you make 25 of The Upside on the profit it's the best business model in the world and you're taking two percent fees on it along the way so being able to do that I will be shocked if more seriously influential celebrities aren't doing that in the in the coming years and for everyone that is the macro macro scale none of us I shouldn't say none of us there's probably a high high likelihood that none of us will ever have the level of attention that a Kardashian has I don't want it I hope none of you guys do it's kind of a weird life to live but that model can be distilled down to a micro level that a lot of people actually can go and execute on it's not inconceivable that anyone in this room could go and raise a couple million dollars to go and acquire a niche business that's within your category of things you're doing and really build a cool compounding vehicle around the space that you're operating in if you're working in the in the cooking space and in high-end chefs restaurants that is a very real model where you could drive a differentiated outcome because of the attention that you have in that space so there's a lot of really interesting things I think that can happen on a micro scale taking that same model and pulling it down yeah I like that it drives towards owning equity in something right and so you brought a messy as an example I think he turned the offer from Saudi Arabia was over a billion dollars yeah right and he turned that down in order to get equity and rev share and the ability to own an MLS team and not have to live in Saudi Arabia that's worth a lot so think about that in your own business when are you trading attention for cash versus when you're trading attention for equity and there's a time and a place for each right it's not you could you could live a really difficult life if you too early on you only pursued Equity because like Equity is not going to buy the groceries at least not now Equity will buy the groceries 10 years from now yeah although equity in a business that cash flows from day one might buy the groceries just more specifically around the ecosystem that I've focused on I have a venture fund that invests in early stage startups small Venture fund those are all 10 plus year bets companies that are money losing today that you're predicting are going to build a huge ecosystem around them amazing Founders building big big Solutions there's no cash in that type of stuff you're hoping for Billion Dollar Plus exits the other end of the spectrum of business types are these cash flow from day one agencies Services these businesses that just create value from day one a lot of the businesses you guys run and have built are in that mold coaching businesses whatever it might be around the agency model you can go build businesses like that that are going to make you cash and real cash flow from day one and so for me I've thought about I have reach of say 2 million people across these different platforms and there are a lot of things that I was doing on a daily basis or monthly basis that I was spending money on video editing Services Design Services newsletter growth Services people building my newsletter on the back end all the Ops around it and I was spending cash on that every single month and I just looked at it from an Amazon model of Amazon turned all of their cost centers into profit centers how can I do that exact same thing well if I'm spending five grand a month on video editing services that are going to chop up videos and Eclipse I should actually own a video editing business so when I'm posting a video I can say hey I'm using this video editing service send a bunch of other people to this service that I own that is charging five grand a month for these services and now I just turned something that I was just spending cash on every single month into something that is making now it's a seven figure run rate business that's making a bunch of cash and I own a big chunk of it by virtue of the fact that I can drive leads to it I don't have to run it you partner with a great operator someone that's actually going to run it that's going to own 50 plus percent really have it be their thing but but I can just drive leads to that business and be along for the ride and that's cash and it's also Equity if you have kind of a more Diversified platform there so that's really how I pursued it was just looking at things that I had really clear sort of product audience fit around I think that's the really important piece is for me to go and promote I don't know a cooking business yeah I don't talk about cooking really I don't have any background in the restaurant industry or anything it would be kind of weird no one would really connect with it but for me to post a post of beautiful visual versions of a thread that I've written and then say hey this is the company that's actually doing all these visuals for me that's a very clear audience product fit and connection there that drives a bunch of new eyeballs to something a business that I own a piece of so that's really how I've pursued that on the back end yeah are you open to running through a couple of those agencies and sure because there's more than I think that implies there's two there's actually probably like 10 or 12 today somewhere in that range yeah yeah yeah what are some of the examples of what those agencies do yeah so the video editing and the design service ones are to new ones that have both had blown up yeah in 45 days since we launched them it's pushing a three million dollar Revenue run right now across those so it's reached real scale and cash 50 margins cash flowing from day one out of them we invested zero dollars to start the businesses scaling capacity so you like have to time the services and how you're actually bringing on capacity to do it and make sure that it's really managed well by a great operator on their back end but there's real money in doing these kind of businesses that you can scale and finding those for your Niche and finding a great operator is the challenging part right but once you do that there's a really amazing business that you can actually put together and it doesn't have to be enormous I say that I think that's on a big scale you can do something like that and build this multi-million Revenue business quickly but on a niche level if you go get if it's high ticket Services type stuff and you have a few clients at a few thousand dollars a month there's a real business to be made very very quickly that's driving significant cash flow into your ecosystem that you can then reinvest into other things and I I read invest a lot of the cash flow from these businesses into growing my platform because the platform then drives it all in that big macro flywheel that I'm talking about I mean you and I are working on one together now yeah we're doing uh basically we productized the back end of my newsletter growth operation the the team and everything that was doing all of my newsletter growth operations we productized that Playbook and so now it's kind of a done for you model around that Nathan and I had been working on that together for a while we partnered with a great operator who's running that business yeah who's sitting in the room actually and yeah and that business will scale very quickly because there's a model it's very clear that I'm able to talk about it very credibly because I actually use this exact team and the exact Playbook and it has worked there's a case study built into it and there's something really interesting to just be done for all of you and for you to all think about and sort of wrestle with the idea around how can you create something like that within your ecosystem yeah and I think the product audience fit is really really important I'd love to open up to the group and take questions we are going to pass the mic around and just to capture on the video for the podcast who's got a question they want to ask you know we've got there in here you tossing mics are we going I think that we've learned the tossing microphones good good to know I'm impressed that microphone did not break the LED wall what happened what was that in the time the catch box that came apart oh geez yeah and it it was it a little bit of War Zone feel okay yeah so the question is from the other side the non-creator if someone wanted to partner with a Creator what's the approach to if you created your own product or if you want to create a product together what would you recommend for that type of person yeah so for anyone that didn't hear your questions kind of around the other end on the operator side or on the Builder side you've built something you want to figure out kind of distribution around it and the reason this is an interesting model for a builder obviously is when you're just thinking about acquiring customers you you were the person that has built the product and now you have to figure out distribution if you can find someone that actually has that distribution it allows you to hack the entire model sort of you're not having to buy Facebook ads and do all these things when you have someone that owns it I think the biggest thing is to make the list of the people that actually have real product audience fit around the thing that you're putting out into the world I think the worst thing you can do is partner with someone too quickly that actually doesn't have any resonance around the topic area I had someone approach me about doing like an SEO agency business and they had built it and it was doing fifty thousand dollars a month of Revenue and they wanted to give me Equity to help them push it out and I honestly just had to have an honest conversation of like I I don't know what SEO stands for I was like I can talk about this and we might bring in some people just because there are people out there that care about it but I have zero credibility to talk about this and you should find someone that does someone that really really knows it that might have a much smaller audience and reach way fewer people to me but those people are going to care about what they have to say about SEO so I think that that is probably the most important thing is figure out who is talking about those things and in that little ecosystem and they don't have to be enormous creators and open up a dialogue with those people I don't think it's I don't think the information is well distributed enough about the equity side that all creators are going to get it immediately if you go to them and say hey interested in partnering I think most of them will default to thinking of it as like a cash retainer collaboration type deal because that's the default model with these things brands have been paying Instagram influencers to post things on their feeds for forever and so having that conversation of how you want to actually approach it if you do want to give up Equity or if you don't is probably an important one to have up front as well I love it all right who else you're right there my name is Rachel from moneyhackingmama.com I've got to get that in the podcast perfect that's good in this room okay you mentioned that it's hard to find to create these opportunities in these agencies but you've done it so can you tell us more of how are people coming to you are they pitching you or are you coming up with ideas and finding people and then how do you find those operators yeah it's a great question I have been fortunate in that because of my business background I had a lot of people that I was kind of that were in my network that I knew were really high quality operators they weren't building this exact thing but I knew that they were very very capable of building something within the space and when they came up for air and were ready for what their next thing was this most recent the video stuff and the design services that was a guy who I'd been friends with for a while that had built an eight-figure agency and sold it and was taking six months to figure out what was next and I was able to get together with him and Pitch him on hey I think there's this interesting concept or idea is it something that you'd be excited to do and it worked out without that I think the thing is you need to just put yourself out there into the ecosystem of people that might be Builders I think it's frankly being in rooms like this being around other people that are talking about these things interested in these things is the only way to get lucky with connecting with someone that might be the right collaborator and partner on it I don't think there's some perfect method of the approach to do it I do think looking at your value chain and figuring out what you spend money on or what people like you spend money on and how you can actually flip those things into profit centers is a very easy way to think about it that kind of will give you some ideas at least from the get-go because that was how I thought about it was like what am I spending money on and there's a lot of people that are spending money on those things that I am I'm not the only one in the world and everyone wants a high quality version of that and so how can I use that then to to create a value chain I think the Amazon model is really interesting of the exactly what they did with AWS of the cost center to profit Center another thing in that that's really important is as a Creator it will be tempting that oh I'm starting this business and then I'm going to be the CEO of that you're already the CEO of your creator business and I would not recommend pulling an Elon Musk and trying to be the CEO of people thankfully you're not Elon Musk in many ways but you don't very few people can pull that off and I wouldn't try yeah it's an awareness of what you like doing and what you're actually good at and then what you don't like doing and what you're bad at I know I'm not and this has taken me a long time to realize it and to be self-aware enough to talk about it I'm not great at managing people and for me I have zero desire to say that I'll manage a team of 15 people that I have a lot of Creator friends who I think in the early days of the Creator movement it was sort of a flex to say that you had a big team because it was I left the corporate world now I have this big team look at no I'm credible so you felt proud to say that and now I think the movement is actually being really lean and Nimble and not feeling like you have too many people to manage and a whole big organization is an amazing way to approach it and so for me I know I'm not great at managing people I have zero desire to spend time managing people I really want to spend time on creative things that I enjoy and get a ton of energy out of and so building it the way that you want and that means partnering with people that are going to manage people and that really are great at that that's where they Spike and light up is important finding people who are great at the things that you're terrible at you're great at the things they're terrible at is the the best potential model that you can hope for yep I love it okay hi I'm Logan I work in the dating and relation space I'd love to hear you talk about failure and related to failure how you run your experimentation process so I'm sure you're constantly running experiments how do you know when it just hasn't been long enough and you have to keep going or when hey this one didn't work and I'm going to Pivot and do something else I failed a lot as an athlete enough that I sort of became very comfortable with it I was a baseball player prior to prior to my work and just by nature of the sport you have to get really comfortable with failure and failure on a pretty public stage you have it in your Twitter box I still have that in my Twitter bio say what your Twitter bio said yeah I gave up a grand slam on ESPN in 2012 because my whole family there and all my family and friends and watching at home and stuff and it's it's still one of the low lights of my life now I can laugh about it but it was pretty bad at the moment but failure I mean I think because of that failure is something that I'm not particularly scared of and sort of able to recognize quickly and and move on I would say giving something it's a silly heuristic but six months is generally how I think about timelines of thinking about things I tend to I review my own life on like a quarterly basis where I'm looking at okay what am I spending my time on am I spending time on the right things what really matters in my world right now I do that quarterly but usually if you can't really make a decision about whether something worked or not in that three-month period you kind of need to adjust course at the quarterly Mark and then if that adjustment really didn't fix the thing of what you were trying to fix then after six months you can kind of make a go no-go decision I've jumped into a few things that I think had bad product audience fit and didn't really make a ton of sense like I'm involved with one right now that I would say it's probably a month or two away from me saying okay I'm probably not the right person for this the business doesn't really work the the operator is just thinking on a different plane than how how we're thinking about it and being able to just kind of walk away from things like that is an important I think it's just an important trait and skill set going in with the right communication with the operator and what the goal is what you're actually trying to build is really really important there's that one I think he is really trying to build a lifestyle business that makes X dollars and for me that won't be impactful and so spending any time on it if that's what it's going to be doesn't make sense for me it might make sense for someone else and they should should probably work with that other person then in that case and so just being really eyes wide open with the people about what the goal is and what the anti-goal is what would make this a disaster for both of us and when we were starting our agency together we had a discussion with with our CEO of what are our goals for this and what are our anti-goals what do we want to make sure we avoid along the way here and for both of us we have full-time things that we're working on and building our anti-goal is spending more than x hours a week on this makes it a total total failure and so if we're building a model that requires us to spend that much time on it it's not going to work and we already know that so we can avoid it from the get-go so I think that that helps also at that at the outset is having that discussion I love it let's do a few more from this side of the room who over here has one balance out the sides yeah exactly this is kind of a ridiculous question but 10 years from now what do you think the Creator ecosystem looks like I'm terrible at predicting the future the way I think about it as a company is if I have the the north star of helping creators in a living and I just continue to follow that North Star then the exact way that that plays out I'm not married to one implementation of that or oh this feature or this way we do business it's really just continually checking in what what's working and be relentless on that and I think that allows me to build a business that is long-term sustainable without having to have a a really clear idea of oh I know exactly what 10 years from now this is going to look like I think a lot of Trends are going to continue I think audience sizes are going to continue to grow like crazy I was saying in my talk I just see even global population growth and then the population is coming online that's absolutely huge and we're still in this really small ecosystem compared to even just Current Online populations I like General mental model for this is Commerce follows attention and 50 years ago attention was highly centralized the biggest conglomerates owned all of the airwaves and they had every single ad space they owned it was PNG it was just the handful of big companies owned all of the attention and the airspace so they had all of the Commerce that followed it and increasingly attention is becoming decentralized and it's owned by people like all of us in the room who are building these little micro communities and micro attention centers that are built and spread out all over the world Commerce is now following that I think it's way behind it's lagging actually and so you're on the very early part of an s-curve of Commerce decentralizing to all of these tiny little attention centers that are being created around the world world I think that will continue to happen I don't see a reason why that would stop because I don't see the big attention grabbing conglomerates being able to try to re-centralize all of this maybe they start trying to acquire a bunch of creators to try to bring that back within the fold but the reality is all of these platforms the social platforms all the things that exist exist to allow people to create those tiny little attention centers around themselves and all the software that's being created stands an example this all of the stuff that exists out there is allowing people to create these little attention centers around the world Commerce will then follow that so I think 10 years out I would just continue to see a trend towards that being able to build your attention center around whatever it is that you want to build it around and then have a Commerce apparatus that's built around that if that's businesses the things we're talking about or if it's products or if it's a newsletter business ads whatever it might be I think that that the capacity to do that will continue to accelerate that's good you had a question and I think we have time for one more after that so think of your question the final one that we're going to hang out here appreciate your time and interesting you asked that question because I was going to ask do we see aggregators coming in and trying to pull back and do that but you kind of already answered that so my second question will be this what's something that a an early stage new Creator business idea needs to concentrate on if they're looking to build I've heard Nathan use this term a lot an Enterprise style business because you have so many things going on right I would imagine when you first left the PE world that you didn't say I want to have these 15 things going right there was a point somewhere where it started to add up I think it has to be credible connected attention and Community First for all of this stuff to work I don't think any of it worked the their growth hacking it we've all seen it right if you are if you are building something for the next 10 15 20 years you've all been frustrated by it too or you see someone growing super fast by doing whatever the chat GPT thread is AI whatever it was web 3 before it was Chrome extensions before that at whatever the thing was that people grew really fast with that has all that will continue to exist but it will be very very difficult to build a credible durable long-term Commerce Center around that because the attention is is fake in a lot of ways it's not a real connection that you have with your audience so I think that the community the real human connection that you build with people has to be at the center of how you think if you're getting started if I mean if I were to start from scratch today that's what I would be focused on it wouldn't be trying to grow to the anywhere near the scale that my stuff has grown to it would be really focusing on how do I create true connection on a scale of a thousand I could think the Kevin Kelly thousand true fans thing holds up entirely today and I think it will continue to over the 10 years ahead because again all of the Baseline stuff will become commoditized and that human connection is going to be what actually stands out yep I agree okay final question Jay all the way in the back making them work for it that's right thank you for sharing so much soil this has been awesome super good to meet you maybe you touched on this I got in a little late so hopefully not but I think for a lot of us it's really impressive the output that we see from you and to hear you talk about things hey there are 10 to 12 businesses that I've helped launch I'd love to hear a rough breakdown of the proportion of time and attention you're putting into different parts of your business yeah so my actual day just tactically I I have a grandpa schedule so I go to bed at 8 30 and I wake up at 4 30. I used to be like asleep when I'm dead hustle culture bro when I was in finance and then I realized I was actually going to die and my health was suffering and it was no longer worth it so fortunately I have a one-year-old who actually sleeps he probably goes to bed at like seven and wakes up at six so it actually kind of works with our life but I go to bed early I wake up super early and for me my Creative Energy I mentioned this earlier flows early in the morning so from 5 to 7 30 I have my deep focus writing period that's either newsletter Mondays I write both of my newsletters and then the rest of the week it should be booked but it tends to be like book or whatever other creative work that I'm really excited about focusing on my whole goal is that if the whole day goes to after that first block because of things with my son or family stuff or whatever it is that's going on that I still feel like the day was a win if I really focused during that period That's why non-negotiable I have to have really sat down and done that I would say like 20 of the time the day does go to there's just stuff that happens and and I still feel okay about that and I kind of got my stuff done but what I try to do is I try to have another block of a few hours in the afternoon basically after lunch when I sit down and have sort of my business focused deep work session which is really focused on anything that's going on with any of the businesses that I need to kind of think about weigh in on Etc or things associated with my fund or other stuff that's kind of going on within my business ecosystem or any miscellaneous content creation it's sort of an open deep work session I don't spend a ton of time emailing anymore I'm very very bad at email I was I probably have PTSD from my email time the amount of time I had to spend on it during my finance days I batched all all of my calls and meetings onto a single day of the week so I don't do calls or meetings other than on Thursdays that has helped a ton and it took a little while to pattern people into that and make sure that I could do it but it has been massively helpful because the random 230 call on an afternoon that ruins your entire day of creative work really was impacting me in a big way and so when I when the book started coming into the fold I knew I needed to focus on that I kind of forced myself to really have it have it be concentrated on Thursdays that's really what my week looks like on the surface when I tell people that they're like wow you don't work very much and I think that's true in a sense but I also I feel drained by the end of a week because of how on I have to be with all of the social facing stuff and the people-facing things that I do and I find that to be probably the biggest struggle in my life is there's constantly people that want something that are responding to things commenting and I really try to engage with people in good faith on all of that stuff but it really drains me because my natural bias is to be more introverted and so for me I feel like I have to be in character a bit and so while I don't like I work a lot in the traditional sense of sitting down and doing emails or doing whatever work looks like I feel like I'm really on almost 24 7 around even on weekends and so finding ways to actually turn off and make sure I'm present with my family is really what I'm currently trying to make sure I do wrestle with and really focus on yeah I love it well there's so much that I've learned from you over the years and I'm excited likewise yeah from you not for myself sorry I've learned from myself a lot as well I first heard that as like what and I was like okay but I'm just excited for I mean you're gonna share at the closing keynote today and uh share a bunch more but yeah thank you for building in public and sharing all this and then giving everyone the room a little peek behind the curtain of the actual the macro fly reel yeah of what's going on yeah I'd love to hear from everyone as well so all my DMs my email address everything's all out and open so if there are any questions or anything definitely reach out I'd love to love to chat more sounds good thank you all right thank you thank you [Music]

Channel: Nathan Barry Show

Views: 3,760

Keywords: email, newsletter, email marketing, convertkit, nathan barry, podcast, interview, email subscribers, email newsletter, email list

Id: n4VtNBFiBgs

Length: 52min 27sec (3147 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2023