[00:00:00] Nathan: Today I have two legends of the publishing industry. We’ve got James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, which is the best-selling book of the last decade. It sold 30 million copies.

[00:00:08] James: There are four things that you want as an author. You want to have the best earnings possible, you want to have the widest distribution possible, you wanna have creative control, and then you wanna

[00:00:19] Nathan: have- And Madeline Mackintosh, who is the CEO of Penguin Random House US, where she’s published over 1,000 books.

[00:00:25] Madeline: The author and the publisher’s job is to sell the first copy, then the book has to start selling itself.

[00:00:30] Nathan: What are some of the things that make the biggest difference for authors for these books to keep selling?

[00:00:34] Madeline: One of the answers is the probably most frustrating one, which is that- That’s

[00:00:39] James: amazing.

[00:00:40] Nathan: Now, James and Madeline have co-founded Authors Equity.

[00:00:43] James: ACX and Audible kind of screw self-published authors, and so we can improve your royalty there. On the print side, it’s basically the same. The

[00:00:50] Nathan: traditional model gives authors between 15 and 20% of what their book earns. Authors Equity inverts that. James and Madeline walk through exactly who this model is right for, how they select books, and what the publishing industry has refused to fix for 30 years.

[00:01:03] Madeline: With all of the choices that are out there, how do you break through with this book to find your set of readers? You don’t

[00:01:10] James: wanna, like, bury the best stuff. You want them to read the first 5,000 words and be like, “Damn, this is so good, I have to tell somebody about it.” And the thing that has surprised me the most is-

[00:01:24] Nathan: I am so excited for this conversation, ’cause I’ve got two legends in the publishing space. So Madeline, you’ve been in publishing for three decades, seen so many major transformations, been the CEO of Penguin Random House US. You’ve, uh, on the board of another major publisher. You’ve done so much, now founded a, a publishing company.

[00:01:43] James, we’re just now celebrating 30 million copies of Atomic Habits, which is pretty legendary. Come a long ways since, uh, you know, we were planning out the book in, uh, like a cabin in McCall, Idaho. Yeah. Yeah, you

[00:01:57] James: were there at the beginning.

[00:01:58] Nathan: It’s been, been a lot of fun, but I wanna dive in. Madeline, for you, what are some of the biggest inflection points that you’ve seen in publishing- Yeah

[00:02:05] over the last few decades?

[00:02:07] Madeline: So, uh, th- just to, to give a sense of when I started in publishing, it was 1992. There was no… R- really, there wasn’t internet, there wasn’t email, um, and the, um, and mainly the, the two formats that you talked about a lot were hardcover and paperback, and mass market paperback was the, was the biggest deal.

[00:02:30] Um, obviously, that’s not the world that we live in now. Um, in about the mid-’90s I was still an editorial assistant, but I got curious about what was happening with technology, ended up moving to, um, a company then called Banham Double Day Dell, which is now part of what is the very much larger Penguin Random House, and I worked in quote unquote new media.

[00:02:52] So that was initially figuring out, um, what’s a website and how could a publisher show up on the web? Then soon enough, I got to move to the sales department because retailers were starting to also think about- Mm-hmm … the web. So that meant sitting in a, in a conference room with, um, with Jeff Bezos and his first eight employees, uh, figuring out exactly what kind of a, a beast were they, and how to set them up so that we could sell books to them.

[00:03:22] From there, I so kind of rode that e-commerce wave, then, um, then at a certain point, I moved in to be the audio publisher.

[00:03:31] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:03:31] Madeline: Um, and that was really before the big audio boom, so people thought I was kind of nuts to do that. And then, um, I really made the nuts move ’cause I moved my family, um, my husband who’s a novelist, and our two young children, we moved to Luxembourg so that I could work for Amazon on taking the Kindle international.

[00:03:53] Did that for a couple of years before then moving back to Random House, and that was before we then, um, merged with Penguin and became Penguin Random House. So that was a, that was a, a large, um, a, a very broad span of time, but also j- just, uh, very significant transformations where there were these points where people were really panicking- Mm-hmm

[00:04:15] about what, you know, what will e-books mean to, to publishing? What will audio mean to publishing? Um, at a certain point, p- I think this is before my time, but I think people panicked about mass market paperbacks too. Right. It turns out that, um, that format changes don’t really matter that much, um, that you can take the book and make it, um, put it out in any different kind of format that the consumer wants, and actually that’s not that, that big a deal.

[00:04:46] Um, that has generally been, um, been additive to, to the business. What is a much bigger deal is the transformation of sales channels, and so really the advent of the internet, um, and then obviously, um, social media and the complete atomization of attention span, those are much bigger challenges, and those are really the ones that, um, the publishers and authors have to think about today.

[00:05:12] Nathan: Yeah, so you’ve seen all of these transformations throughout the industry, and everyone thinking you’re crazy as you’re jumping on the very beginning of each one of those, right? Going to audiobooks when everyone’s like, “I, I don’t know what this is. It probably won’t turn into anything.” Now for many authors it’s 50% of their sales or more.

[00:05:28] Um- Now, or at least a couple years ago, people thought you were crazy again as you left Yes … you know, one of the largest publishing companies- Yeah … in the world. And you’re like, “I’m gonna go start my own.” Yeah.

[00:05:39] Madeline: They really thought I… I th- I thought my, my family thought I was a little crazy too. Yeah.

[00:05:42] Everybody thought I was crazy. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:44] Nathan: Uh, what was the thing that prompted that? Like, what made you say- I, I- … “I’m gonna go do this”? Yeah,

[00:05:47] Madeline: I mean, really in a, in one way it was an accumulation of insights over time where, um, particularly for one of, one of our co-founders is Nina Von Mulka, and the two of us were often the people who were faced with…

[00:06:02] She was also at Penguin Random House, and we were often the ones sort of faced with trying to figure out, okay, as each of these major transformations is happening, what does that mean for the contract between publisher and author? What does it mean in terms of, um, some of these, what are the strategic implo- implications for how publishers and authors work together?

[00:06:23] So, um, so we had shared many of those insights over time and, um, and finally I just got to the point where I said, “I no longer really believe in what I’m selling- Mm … to authors and to agents. I feel that I’m really more sharing their perspective in this negotiation than I am theoretically what mine is.”

[00:06:43] And so I, I sat in a coffee shop one, um, one particular morning, I remember, and sort of sketched out what, what a different model would look like. And luckily between Nina and Don Weisberg, who was a longtime mentor in the industry, um, he also was leaving his job at Macmillan, and the three of us said, “Let’s, let’s do this.

[00:07:07] We don’t really know how to do this, but let’s figure out how you start a company and how, how that would, um, would work.” And then, um, at a certain point after that, we got to present that idea to James.

[00:07:22] Nathan: Yeah. So James, I wanna hear how you came into this, this picture. And you, ’cause you started in a small role and then said, “Let’s- Yeah What’s going on?

[00:07:28] I, you know, I

[00:07:29] James: was one of the early meetings that, uh, Madeleine and Don Nina had, and, um, I, I think I came across, you know, your radar because I was asking for a lot of the things that you were trying to solve for. You know, like, I was one of those authors who wanted this. And I … You know, traditional publishing, um, it’s a setup that I think worked well for a long time, uh, but that was, like, pre-internet, and we’re very obviously post-internet now.

[00:07:52] And the enormous shift that everyone has seen and felt for the last 10 or 15 years is that the author owns the audience now. They, they have a direct connection with them, and the author’s power has grown basically every year, uh, since then. And if you talk to people who are in, have been in publishing for a long time, they’ll kind of lament the fact that in the ’80s or the ’90s, we could sort of make a book a bestseller.

[00:08:14] We could influence which books, you know, were gonna be hitting the list and doing really well because we had this, such strong relationships with where the audience was, which at that time was through all the retailers. Um, and then they’ll say, “You know, we can’t really make books a hit now like we could before.”

[00:08:29] And I always push back and say, “Well, it’s not totally true. You can make a b- a book a hit. It’s just the author that does it now.” You know? It, it’s having a million followers on social media. It’s having a big email newsletter. It’s … You know, it’s the people that have the platforms are now the ones that drive the sales.

[00:08:44] And, um, everyone has known this to be true, but the industry has kind of resisted it, right? Like, all the incentives, if you’re the publisher and you’re keeping most of the money, you’re not just gonna overnight be like, “Well, you know what? You’re right. Why don’t you go ahead and keep most of the money now?”

[00:08:57] Um, and so it took, it took a startup to come in and, and change things. And I kind of debated how … I mean, you know, you have, you and I have, like, these similar entrepreneurial brains, right? You start to see a problem and feel it, and then you’re like, “All right. How can I fix this?” Um, and so I debated, should I just launch an imprint or spin out some kind of partnership or whatever?

[00:09:17] And then once I met with Madeleine, um, it was, it was very obvious, oh, this is a much better version of what I have in my head. Um, and it just kind of became this fortuitous circumstance where I hope that in 30 years I’ll look back and just think, “Man, I was so lucky to just be The Hot Book at this time,” um, and it was just this kind of perfect confluence of, of things coming together.

[00:09:38] Nathan: Yeah, so let’s dive into the model because it’s fundamentally different. Yeah. Uh, you know, everyone says, “Do you want to traditionally publish, or do you wanna self-publish?” And I’ve, I’ve self-published three books. I have not yet traditionally published a book. And so I … You know, I was thinking, “Okay, the next one that I do, I want the reach,” you know?

[00:09:55] And I d- I’m okay giving up some of the earnings. And then in talking to James, y- you know, he’s like, “You know, you don’t- Like that’s a fal- false di- di- dichotomy. Well, that

[00:10:03] James: is … What you just described is the tension that authors have felt for the last- Yeah … decade, which is, okay, do I wanna keep most of the money and I self-publish, but then I give up the distribution?

[00:10:12] Um, or do I want to go traditional and I get my book to be everywhere, but, uh, they are gonna make most of the money? And, um, finally, for the first time ever, I think, now that authors equity exists, authors no longer have to choose. Mm-hmm. Um, and, you know, Madeleine can speak to that more, and probably unpack the traditional model too a little bit.

[00:10:31] Madeline: The thing to understand about how the traditional, um, just business model works, is that there are a series of, um, really pretty low royalty rates. Um, those royalty rates depend on was this book sold, in which format it was sold in, which channel, which country. It’s very, it’s very convoluted, and it’s- It can even

[00:10:51] James: depend on the price, right?

[00:10:52] If the book is discounted- Yes … significantly- Absolutely … the royalty rate changes. It’s … Yeah. Absolutely. It’s a lot of complication. And it’s

[00:10:57] Madeline: so complicated that really … that this is why I’ve realized a lot of people in the industry, um, are just not that, uh, that good at understanding really the math of it all.

[00:11:11] Um, and the w- the very, um, rational response that agents and authors who have leverage in a negotiation, their, their response to the fact that the royalty rates are too low is that they push for as high a guarantee as possible so that those unit royalty rates essentially- Don’t matter … d- don’t matter.

[00:11:33] The problem with that is then, you know, say you theoretically win the jackpot, a publisher agrees to, to spend an extraordinarily high advance on you, obviously in many ways your interests are aligned. There … You have somebody who’s clearly excited enough about the book that they’re willing to invest that much.

[00:11:51] Um, they, they want the book to sell a lot of copies. Um, but then when it actually comes to the process of making decisions on the, the march towards the market and moving forward, for example, figuring out how, how to spend marketing money, anything that involves spending money, that is just coming completely out of the publisher’s pocket.

[00:12:14] And since they’ve already now spent a lot of money on the advance, your, the author and the publisher’s interests are not necessarily going to be that well-aligned.

[00:12:24] James: Like, if they’ve already spent a million dollars on the advance, and then you’re like, “Hey, we wanna do a $400,000 marketing campaign,” that’s

[00:12:30] On the one hand, they want their investment to pay off, but on the other hand, they’re kinda like, “We’ve already put a lot of money into this book.” Exactly. There’s the tension of- Exactly … do we wanna do that?

[00:12:37] Madeline: Exactly. Yeah. And the, um … And, you know, it can come down to what paper we use, what, you know, uh, any, any of the many decisions that are involved.

[00:12:47] You end up with authors and publishers who are not really aligned financially, and also not really aligned in terms of transparency. Um, when it comes to making decisions. So the contrast with that is that what, um, what we do is we, in one way approach it very traditionally. We assume this book, this author should absolutely have a fantastic editor, they absolutely should have a fantastic designer, absolutely the, the physical specs of this book should be, um, should be attractive enough to be able to grab attention when it’s on the, the bookstore table.

[00:13:26] Um, but w- so we believe in those very theoretically traditional levers, um, but w- and we do the funding of it. So the difference is that I will consult with you as the author, Nathan, and say, “Okay, um, uh, here is a candidate for your, for your editor. Here’s a candidate for your designer. Here’s what it’s going to cost us to hire these people.

[00:13:50] Um, let’s now talk about do we wanna hire a publicist or not?” And- Right … you, you can share what that conversation was like.

[00:13:58] Nathan: Yeah. So I wanna dive into the publicist thing in a second, but, um, the key thing is that the royalties are just inverted.

[00:14:05] Madeline: Yes. Sorry. And so- Very, very important detail …

[00:14:07] Nathan: so in this case, instead of making maybe 30% as the author and the publisher’s making 70%, it’s flipped.

[00:14:15] And so then I’m not having to, not having to choose. And then the other key thing, and so I’m saying this as, as an author, you know, going through the author’s equity process and publishing with you all right now, is exactly as you said, we’re totally aligned. So the, the expenses come out at the top- Right

[00:14:30] and we split that, right? That’s before anybody gets paid. Yeah. And so the dis- the discussion that we had two weeks ago was, okay, do we spend $40,000 on a publicist to try to get press and more reach for this book, with the goal of selling some number of copies? We don’t know. We’ve gotta abstract a few times to be like, “Okay, what press can we get?

[00:14:49] How will that reach? How will that convert?” We don’t know. Or do we wanna spend it directly on advertising? And I have never heard of an author make paid advertising direct to a book successful until talking to you all. Yeah. And the problem is because it’s always done by the author with their 30%.

[00:15:10] James: Yeah, if you pay it out of your share, you don’t have enough money to make- It doesn’t-

[00:15:13] it profitable to-

[00:15:14] Nathan: You, you have … They, these authors end up doing this whole funnel on the back end where they’re selling some other product and it’s about everything but the book.

[00:15:21] James: I think what you’re really getting at is you’re, we’re trying to create a model where everything is aligned. Yeah. Right? And I think just a couple comments on that.

[00:15:27] So first, under the traditional advance model, it, it’s totally backwards. Like, you … The way to make the most possible money under a traditional deal is you get a huge advance, they pay you a million dollars, and then you sell one book And that, that’s how you maximize your earnings. Um- Earnings per copy

[00:15:41] earnings per copy. Yeah. Uh, the better you do, the more books you sell, the more your earnings per copy go down. So you’re actually, uh … The more … I think the way you’ve put it before is, the better the book does, the more the, um, publisher is rewarded, and that’s disincentivizing to the author. Right. Right?

[00:15:58] Like, in most industries, the higher your performance gets, the more your rewards increase, right? If you, if you win the Super Bowl, you get a bonus. If you g- get voted to the All-Star team, you get a bonus. And so, like, we should be incentivizing high performance, not, um, you know, discouraging it. So I think that’s, that’s the first inversion of the model.

[00:16:17] And then the second thing is, if you’re gonna go with a, an advance model, then you’re kind of incentivized to place a lot of bets. Uh, you know, people sometimes equate it to a venture capital portfolio or something like that, and that is, that is the game that publishers are often playing. Um, but if you place lots of bets, then that means you’re playing a game of scale, and it’s just hard a lot of the time for scale and quality to go hand-in-hand.

[00:16:41] And when you’re publishing 500 books or 1,000 books a year, it’s just gonna be parts of it that feel like manufacturing, you know? And a lot of authors say that. I, I feel like I was kind of, you know, put through the processor or, um, you know, like, I got attention for my launch, and then they moved on to the next thing.

[00:16:58] Um, and that, that’s a very common refrain, and it’s just … I’m not, I’m not saying there’s, like, bad people in publishing or anything, but it’s just kind of the reality of we’re making a lot of books, and we gotta move on to the next one. And so you want this model … As an author, you want a model where everything is aligned, the incentives are aligned, everybody wants to win together, and we can all grow the pie together, and you get this, the best possible process for making the best possible book.

[00:17:24] There is, there is nothing in publishing that will beat making a better book. That is, that is the single highest thing that delivers the most value to everybody involved, including the reader, by the way- … which should be the person who’s getting the most value, um, is how can … what can we do to make the best possible book?

[00:17:40] And if you’re not gonna try to make the best book in your industry or your category, I … in my view, it’s not worth it. Right. It’s not worth the time. It takes two, three, four years to make a book. Um, you should only do it if you have the best possible standard. And so the author’s equity model is to try to align all of those stars.

[00:17:58] Yeah. You know, to say, “Okay, let’s reward people based on the value they’re providing.” If the author is genuinely the one providing the majority of the value now, which I would argue they are, they should get the majority of the profit. Um, and let’s also find a way for all of us to win together. And at the root of it, let’s try to design something where it’s the best possible process for making the best possible book, because that’s what’s gonna serve people and help people the most.

[00:18:22] Madeline: Yeah.

[00:18:22] Nathan: I love that. So there’s some very specific additional pain points that you’ve encountered in publishing that you wanted solved, and thankfully Author’s Equity is like, “Yeah, we can solve many of those.” What, what are a few of those?

[00:18:33] James: Yeah, I… We’re t- we’re trying to… I basically look at, you know, I’m no different than a lot of other authors, right?

[00:18:38] You look around and you’re like, “This kinda feels a little bit broken,” and I think we’re looking at all the things that feel a little bit broken and just try to check off each one of those. Mm-hmm. You know, like in traditional publishing, you get paid, you get your royalties every six months, and that’s paid on a three-month delay usually, so you get paid very late, uh, for the sales that you make, and Author’s Equity pays every 30 days.

[00:18:57] Um, or in our businesses, a lot of the decisions that we make are around social media campaigns or, “I’m gonna mention the book in my newsletter this week.” Like, you want… You’re used to posting on social media and getting feedback instantly. How many likes did it get? How many impressions did it get? Um, but- I’m willing to

[00:19:13] Nathan: wait one hour for the data.

[00:19:14] Right, right. Yeah. I

[00:19:15] James: wanna, I wanna see live updates. Yeah. Um, but in publishing, they’re like, “You’ll see numbers in six months with your royalty statement.” And you’re like, “I can’t, I can’t make bus- business decisions like that.” So, you know, we can get you numbers much faster, so that, you know, that’s another big win.

[00:19:28] So there are just all these little things about publishing. International royalties is another interesting one. You know, like I… My audience is worldwide. I write in English, and I have people read my newsletters and my books in English all around the world. So why is my English book going through another English-speaking publisher in the UK or Australia or some of these other territories, who then is taking their cut, and then it goes through the US publisher, and then I get my cut after that?

[00:19:57] It gets watered down. And so Author’s Equity has said, “Yeah, that… We’re not gonna do it that way. We’re gonna distribute directly in those territories,” and the resulting earnings for our authors internationally are significant improvement over what you would normally see.

[00:20:10] Madeline: And I w- I would just add a slight nuance to that, which is that, um, in some cases, we will talk to, uh, if we have world rights, we’ll talk to a publisher in the UK or, um, or in another country, and they’re, they’re so aligned with us and so excited and so passionate about really hustling at a local level that it does make sense to- Right

[00:20:35] license the rights to them. But in many other cases, it just makes sense for us to sell directly to retailers in, uh, on a worldwide basis.

[00:20:45] James: And there are a number of things like that. You know, that’s… I just named two or three, but there’s, there are lots of little pain points like that that could be better, and then there also, of course, are the really big pain points, like who is keeping the majority of the profit, and is the team aligned- Right

[00:20:56] and how do you get the best editor? That, that’s… Okay, so this is another pain point. Now you have me going. Sorry. So I’m, now I’m on a roll. Um, uh- Usually what happens is you have a book idea, and you come up with a p- proposal, and then you and your agent shop it around, and you get offers from seven or 10 different publishers or whatever.

[00:21:14] And then you look at those offers and you say, “Okay, who offered the most money?” And then you convince yourself, “Well, that’s the team I really wanted to work with all along.” Um, and you get whoever the editor is at that imprint. Um, and that’s fine. There are lots of good editors out there, and it can work out well.

[00:21:28] It worked out well for Atomic Habits. Um, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that this person specializes in that kind of book, or is the right person for that type of book, or for you, you know? Like, you wanna … Your editor is an important relationship. Like, you wanna feel connected to them. Um, and so Author’s Equity has kind of flipped that model and said, “We’re gonna select, hand select custom teams for each book.”

[00:21:50] So based on the topic and the author that comes to us, we will hand select an editor for you, a cover designer, a publicist if you want that. Um, and it’s a collaborative process, right? Like, the author is … It’s an author-centric and author-driven business. And so, you know, if you have something you’re looking for in an editor, we can help you find that.

[00:22:09] If you have a particular design that you want on the cover … We even have authors who they have their own design teams, and they want to design their own cover. Like, that, that’s fine. Um, so I think the, kind of at the root of it is we really want to trust the authors, and we have opinions, right? Like, we have our, our expertise and our best practices on ways that we think you can sell the most copies possible.

[00:22:32] Um, but at the end of the day, it’s the author’s choice, and I think many authors have really appreciated having that level of control. I thought that I was gonna be pitching most authors on, “Hey, come with us. You’ll make twice the money.” Uh, but really what a lot of people like is the fact that they can drive the process.

[00:22:50] Madeline: It’s also … I … What I’m picking up on also is that when you think about pain points in the, in the industry- Mm-hmm … so pain points for any author, any publisher, um, and for any retailer frankly, it’s how with all of the, the choices that are out there, how do you break through with this book to find your set of readers- Mm-hmm

[00:23:11] and get them to go into the bookstore and buy this book given all the choices they have? And we are very clear we don’t have the, the answers to this. We, we would love it if all of our authors had the answers to that. They don’t necessarily. But what our approach to the partnership means is that we really are both coming together and putting all of our ideas on the table, hashing them out, trying to think about, is there a different way we could try to do this?

[00:23:39] How … You know, have, have you tried this? Have you tried this? And, um- Uh, the, what gets us really excited sometimes in a conversation with a prospective author is realizing, wow, there’s stuff we can learn from them. Yes, we can share all of our expertise based on decades of being in this bus- business, but, um, but there’s something, you know

[00:24:02] Th- this one really understands TikTok. Mm-hmm. This one really understands newsletters. This one really has a really interesting thing that they’re doing at a local level in real life. Um, that’s a kind of electricity that usually doesn’t get to happen because, as James said, if you’re, if you’re at a big place, even if you have a team that is completely populated by geniuses, um, they’ve got a lot of books they’ve got to churn through.

[00:24:31] Right. And so there’s … I, I feel very strongly that in, in a market that is all about scale, that focus and, and boutique can really be extraordinarily powerful.

[00:24:45] James: Uh, just something to add to that. I, um, I think that our willingness, our, the Author’s Equity team’s willingness to learn from authors- Mm-hmm … and, and our desire to create situations where there can be knowledge transfer, you know, we, we host dinners for authors, we host retreats for authors, and there’s lots of sharing around the table of what’s going well for your book launch, or how did you write your title, or things like that, I think that’s a testament to the team and the type of people that we have.

[00:25:09] You know, we just have people who are very … They’re excited, they wanna learn, and, um, you know, they’re very competent. They’re really good at what they do, and you put that mix together and it leads to really good things. I get … This is how I’ve been describing it to authors. You can tell me if you like this or not, but I, what I’ve been saying is, you know, Madeleine was in a very unique position as CEO of the largest publisher, and publishing often gets critiqued as, like, a business that’s run by English majors or, you know, whatever.

[00:25:35] Um, and that’s fine, like the stereotypes exist for a reason, but the truth is, in any large organization where there are thousands of employees, like, there are some all-stars in there. And sometimes you just kinda feel like you’re stuck like a cog in the machine, you know, or you’re, you’re … You have a lot of energy, you’re really creative, but then the ideas get squashed down by a committee, or it just kinda gets voted out in some portion of the process.

[00:25:57] And there are really talented people in publishing who just haven’t been able to realize their full potential yet, and, um, by virtue of your career and your position, you kinda know who, who they were. So I d- I just tell the authors, like, “Madeleine knew who all the straight killers were, and then she just went up to them and, like, tapped them on the shoulder like, ‘Hey, do you wanna stop dealing with this- Exactly

[00:26:14] and just come over to us, um, and we can, like, let you run?'” You know? And, like, I, I just say, like, “Unleash the all-stars.” Yeah. You know? Like, that’s … It’s true for authors. You know, you get these authors that are like a force of nature, and great, like, let’s let them run and do their thing. But it’s also true on the publishing side.

[00:26:29] Like, we have some really talented people on the team, and now they can, you know, be fully unleashed.

[00:26:35] Nathan: Yeah, and that’s been the experience as an author. We … You know, we’re … It’s- Having the acquiring editor be different from the person doing the co-… Like, you can put the best people on it- Yeah … and, uh, then if s- one role isn’t working out, we can say, “Hey, let’s actually get someone else in for this next stage of the book,” or whatever it is, right?

[00:26:53] We used a different editor for the very first development draft of the book, got to a, a stage that we were like, “Okay, this is pretty good, but I think it needs something else,” and then brought in a different editor to say, “Okay, let’s actually rework it from there.” And I loved having that flexibility to find the

[00:27:08] Madeline: exact right person to work with.

[00:27:10] Yeah. The, the role of the in-house editor in corporate publishing is really tough because they, you know, um, the … Really what they are expected to do is both be s- a star at acquiring books, a star at, at, uh, managing their relationships with agents, a star at being an in-house cheerleader and a project manager.

[00:27:34] And if you do all of those things, you probably don’t have much time left to actually work with the author on the page. Yeah. It’s really, like,

[00:27:40] James: three different jobs. At, at least. There’s just …

[00:27:42] Madeline: Yeah. Yeah. Um, and so that’s where, um, part of what I could see is that a lot of the people who were most skilled at working with authors on the page were the ones who are no longer actually operating inside, um, inside houses- Yeah

[00:27:56] and so they’re available to work on a contract basis. I wanna

[00:27:58] James: make just one more point. We’ve, uh, we’ve talked a lot about, um, the traditional model, how Author’s Equity inverts that, you know. So the summary is traditional model you get the advance, but they keep, publisher keeps most of the money. Author’s Equity, no advance, but you’re gonna keep most of the upside.

[00:28:11] Um, and the issues with scale and alignment and, you know, the author being in more control of the process, I think those are all very strong reasons for why a top author in particular would choose Author’s Equity over a traditional deal. But I also wanna make a comment about self-published authors. Yeah.

[00:28:29] Because, you know, a lot of our friends are entrepreneurs and self-published authors, and so I, I thought about self-publishing Atomic Habits for, like, a year. Um, I debated whether to do it or not, and, um, the story in my head was, “Well, I’ll only be on Amazon and Audible, but how much am I giving up really?”

[00:28:45] You know? Like, isn’t that 90% of the sales? Like, what… And now actually we’ve had some very interesting transitions of books that were self-published and were successful on their own, and then have since moved to Author’s Equity, and now we have real data for what you’re giving up and what the difference can be.

[00:29:00] So, like- Books like Don’t Believe Everything You Think, uh, The Simple Path to Wealth, uh, The Almanac, Naval Ravikant, all three of those books already had sold hundreds of thousands of copies on their own- Right … and then chose to come to Author’s Equity. I always feel like that’s a very interesting signal because none of those guys, Eric, Joseph, JL, they, they didn’t need us.

[00:29:20] They were already doing fine. But, um, what you’re able to see, like if you take The Simple Path to Wealth, for example, we’ve essentially doubled his weekly sales. Um, and it’s because it is now in retail outlets. You know, he’s selling in Barnes & Noble, he’s selling in retail outlets throughout the country.

[00:29:36] Um, and as a book goes omni-channel and it’s available everywhere, it’s kinda like each little book is a billboard. Yeah. And the online sales have also lifted. So the Amazon and Audible sales also went up after it was available elsewhere. Um, yeah, there’s, there are lots of things about that, and I, you know, some of these self-published to, um, Author’s Equity published transitions, there’s, you know, I won’t get into the weeds too much, but there’s, there’s a lot to cover there.

[00:30:02] But we have seen a lot of success with that, and the thing that has surprised me the most is that most of these authors are basically making the same per copy as they were before, uh, on their own. Maybe it’s a little bit less, but it’s … They’re coming out way ahead with the increase in volume, and, um, I did not think that was possible.

[00:30:22] Um, I thought that surely they would have to at least give up earnings, but in fact, uh, in audio, you’ll definitely make more with us than you do- Yeah, your audio deal is, is- It’s notably better. You … ACX and Audible kind of screw self-published authors, and so, you know, we can improve your royalty there. On the print side, it’s basically the same.

[00:30:42] Um, you know, most self-published books are making 5 to 5.50, uh, on the, the print side from Amazon. That’s what they’re taking home per copy. Depends on factors like pricing and all that, but that’s a good estimate, and, like, we’re right there. Um, and so, uh, if you blend the average take-home, uh, a lot of the self-published authors are basically making the same, and they just get this extra volume with us.

[00:31:04] So that’s been, that’s been interesting to see, too. Um, I think … I’m, I’m obviously very excited about the model, right? I think there’s good reasons for self-published authors to move over. I think there’s good reasons for traditional published authors to move over. I have learned that people make this decision for many different reasons, and, you know, it’s not gonna be a perfect fit for everybody, and it is a highly selective model, too.

[00:31:24] We can’t, you know, we’re not gonna be publishing hundreds of books every year. There’s limits to slots. Yeah, how many books are you publishing

[00:31:28] Nathan: in 2026?

[00:31:29] Madeline: But- Um, about 20 under the Author’s Equity imprint- Yeah … and then we have two, two different, um, uh, romance programs, one called 831 Stories, the other called Luxe, and those are, um, are both run in a slightly different way.

[00:31:44] But the Author’s Equity titles are about 20 a year. I,

[00:31:47] James: I think the … My feeling is there’s, you know, there’s good reasons for traditional, uh- There’s … I’m very excited about it. There’s good reasons for, you know, self-published authors to move over. There’s good reasons for traditional published authors to move over.

[00:31:58] But it’s also a very personal decision. You know, it’s not gonna be … Different people prioritize different things. Um, but there are, there are a lot of exciting things about the process, and I think I, I kinda summarize it as, like, there are four things that you really want as an author, and I think Author’s Equity is the first time that you can simultaneously get all four in one place.

[00:32:18] Um, you know, you wanna have the best earnings possible. Um, you want to have the widest distribution possible, so usually you have to give up the earnings on the traditional side. You have to give up the distribution on the self-publish side. Uh, you wanna have creative control, um, so th- whether that’s better rights or just, you know, the ability to control your work and how it’s, how it’s made.

[00:32:36] And then you wanna have the best possible process for creating an amazing book. Um, and I think this is, this is the fir- I’m so excited about the model because I think it’s the first time you get all four in the same place.

[00:32:47] Nathan: So we were talking about this at the mastermind that we’re hosting, right? This is why we’re, we’re all hanging out in Franklin, Tennessee, and there’s a, a category of author that should not publish with Author’s Equity because you are giving up the advance.

[00:33:02] Madeline: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:02] Nathan: And so as I understand it, it’s the person who doesn’t know how well this idea will sell.

[00:33:08] Madeline: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:08] Nathan: So can you talk about that of, of the person who either, you know, could really use the advance so they can then go spend two years writing the book, or they’re working on something that’s maybe a cultural moment in time or whatever else where you’re like, “Who knows if this is going to be a hit and take off or-” Yeah

[00:33:24] uh, you know, sell a few thousand copies and that’s it.

[00:33:27] Madeline: Well, uh, and speaking first in terms of from our perspective of what are we, what are we considering in making our own decisions about whether to offer, um, a- offer a deal to an author, uh, one of our key questions is, is this a book that we believe it’s at least possible that we could sell more copies in year two than in year one?

[00:33:48] Right. So as a, as a small company, as a startup, we do have to think about, um, avoiding cases where it’s just like, wow, it’s a two-week opportunity. We’re gonna- this author’s gonna be on all the morning shows. They’re- … you know, it’s gonna be like, uh, um, a, a rocket ship for a couple of weeks, and then it’s gonna come back down to Earth and nobody’s gonna care.

[00:34:10] That’s a really terrible, um, scenario for us as a company. Um, we also have to think about is this an author who’s going to be a good partner to us? So we’re really, we’re not providing … We’re not a service provider. We’re really business partners together. And so is this somebody who we’re leaning in because not only are we excited about the book that they’re going to do, and not only do we think there’s a market opportunity for that book, but also we really feel like this is somebody we wanna work with.

[00:34:42] This is somebody who knows something about the market out there that we feel like we can learn from. We’re going to enjoy teaching them what we know, and that together we’re going to be able to make good, rational decisions related to any- you know, how, how the, the money’s spent, where we invest, et cetera.

[00:35:01] James: We only win if they win, right? Right, exactly. We win together. And it’s, um … That’s been one of the most fun parts is we have a lot of really great authors, and, um, it’s amazing to learn from them, but it’s also just fun to be a team together. And everybody needs to, everybody needs to be excited about coming together- Yeah

[00:35:17] uh, to make it happen. I mean, if the, if you got friction and the personalities are abrasive or whatever, like it’s not … That, that’s not fun for anybody. No. You know who… I had someone tell me once that there are four types of relationships in life. There’s win-lose, lose-win, lose-lose, and win-win. Mm-hmm.

[00:35:32] And the only one of those four that is sustainable is win-win. Um, and this is why I look at, you know, traditional publishing deals and things like that, and it, it kind of feels like you’re almost- Right … the publisher’s trying to get as much of the pie as they can, and then you figure it out after. You’re a first-time author, and you’re just happy to get a deal, and then you’re like, “But this doesn’t feel like a win anymore.”

[00:35:51] And so of course the relationship doesn’t persist. And I, I’m kind of at the point in my career where I’m like, “Why would we wanna do anything but create relationships that are win-win?” You know, like, let, let’s all come together and, and rise together, and I think this model does that really well.

[00:36:05] Nathan: I think that’s, that’s a good point to jump into the books themselves, right?

[00:36:09] We’re h- we have a lot of authors listening who are like, “Okay, how do I make a great book that’s going to sell more in year two than year one?” And so you have this position from, you know, watching thousands of books, from coaching, you know, all of your author friends, everybody who comes to you with questions and, and all of this.

[00:36:25] And so what are those things that you’re most looking for that are the signs that say- Okay. Yes. This book has a good shot of accelerating over time

[00:36:33] Madeline: I mean, it’s, it’s the, the, um, easy to say, but hard to achieve- Mm-hmm … stuff. But it’s, and this in my mind ap- uh, applies whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, is this a, is there a unique problem that exists in the world that this book is extremely good at solving?

[00:36:53] So the reason that can apply to fiction is I’m bored, or I need inspiration, or I need to be entertained. Um, does this novel do a really, really good job of doing that better than the other options that this consumer might have, either from other novels or watching Netflix? Mm-hmm. Um, so the… You can look at a l- in the nonfiction space, you can look at a lot of different categories that, um, yes, maybe there’s a, a universal need, like a lot of people have, have, uh…

[00:37:28] are interested in making more money, or being healthier, or managing their relationships better. But, um, there also are a lot of books in those categories and a lot of words spilled. And so we’re looking, really taking the perspective of the reader when we’re, when we’re looking at a book to, do I perk up?

[00:37:50] Mm-hmm. Does, like, does this get my heart racing, or am I kinda already bored and, and not, you know, and ready to move on, and this is just a proposal? So it’s, um, a lot of that, the, the answer I’ve just given you, it’s the same kind of answers that, uh, that any, um, any traditional book publisher is also going to say.

[00:38:10] We’re all looking for the same kind of books- Yeah … that are going to, that we believe are going to be able to stand out in a crowded marketplace. What’s different for us is then the idea of, okay, do I also want to grab ahold of this author, and together we figure out how to then bring it to life.

[00:38:29] James: I have a couple things I would add.

[00:38:30] I feel like, um, first I, I, this is focused mostly on nonfiction authors, right? Like, I, I don’t know anything about writing romance or novels or whatever. But, um- As a nonfiction author, I think you really want to be building an audience of some sort, and that is for two primary reasons. The first is, yeah, of course, it makes you more attractive to the publisher and it makes the launch much easier if you can email 100,000 people or a million people.

[00:38:55] Like, yeah, obvious, that’s obvious to everybody. But, um, the real reason that I think it matters is because you force yourself to run your content through a filter. By, by growing the audience, whether that’s making a podcast each week or posting on social media or putting out a newsletter or writing articles, whatever it is, you’re, you’re forcing yourself to put a certain number of reps in.

[00:39:16] And, you know, like in my case, I wrote 120, 150 articles about habits on my blog for three years before I got a book deal. Um, and, you know, it turns out not many people write 100 articles about habits, and you’ll learn a lot along the way. And if you try your best 100 times, well, you’re going to… Not every time you’re going to hit the mark, but you’re going to have 10 or 15 pieces of content where you say, “This is my best stuff.

[00:39:39] Like, this is what really resonates.” And I was able to take those 10 or 15 or 20 things and help make them the backbone of the book. At the time, I thought I had written about half the book. It turns out I had only written about 10%, and a lot of it needed to be reworked and massaged and extended and holes needed to be filled in.

[00:39:54] But it was a very strong starting point because I knew what ideas resonated. So I think building an audience, the primary reason is not just because of the numbers and the reach. The primary reason is because it forces you to make your ideas better. Mm-hmm. Um, and so I really like it when content has been run through a filter first, and you can trust what your best ideas are.

[00:40:14] So I think that’s step one. Um, then after you know the topic that you’re going to write about, maybe you have a blog about finance or, you know, money. Maybe you have, you know, a blog about habits like me or a podcast on, you know, self-help or whatever it is, whatever the topic is for you. You have some category that you’re pretty sure, okay, this is what the book is going to be about.

[00:40:33] You know, this is, this is my thing. Like, I always knew that it was going to be a habits book. I didn’t know what the title was or what shape it was going to take, but I knew that was my, my content. I think the biggest piece that the hardest thing to find, um, is if you’ve been making content for a long time, you probably have lots of ideas, and that means you can fill out the chapters.

[00:40:52] But do you have the vessel that is gonna carry the book? Do you have the, the, what we often call the packaging or the what do you see on the cover, the title, the subtitle, et cetera? You can take lots of examples. So like, um, take Mel Robbins’ book, Let Them Theory, is super hot right now, right? So let’s use that as an example.

[00:41:09] Really, a lot of the core principles of Let Them are things that or the Stoics wrote about. They’ve been around for 1,000 years. You know, don’t focus on what other people are doing, focus on yourself, focus on what you can control. Like, you know, if somebody misunderstands you, let them, and so on. But the unique vessel that carries the book is this concept of, you know, if somebody misunderstands you, let them.

[00:41:28] And then also, rather than focusing on what they’re doing, let me do something else. And that is a very compelling little memeable package- Mm-hmm … uh, for this timeless idea that’s been around for a long time. Um, and so I would say that what you really want is a universal problem that you have a unique angle on.

[00:41:47] Um, you know, I, I feel like there’s a chapter in Atomic Habits where I talk about deliberate practice. It could have been a book about deliberate practice where I mention habits, but instead, it’s a book about habits where I mention deliberate practice, and I think the difference in how those two books would sell is, like, enormous.

[00:42:07] Because if you don’t know what deliberate practice is, I gotta take 30 seconds and unpack it for you and explain it. Mm. But just by virtue of growing up in society, uh, you know that having good habits is favorable and having bad habits is unfavorable. Like, I don’t need to explain any of that. All I need to convince you of is, hey, if you’re only gonna read one book about habits, Atomic Habits is the one to read, and that is a totally different sell.

[00:42:30] And so I think I would– could boil that down by just saying you want to find what is the timeless desire that is always gonna be there that you’re tapping into, but you need a new, unique vessel for delivering the information around that timeless desire.

[00:42:46] Nathan: So taking this and making it very practical- Mm-hmm

[00:42:48] ’cause I’ve had this conversation with you about my own book- Yeah … where, what? A year, a year, year and a half ago, I, uh, brought you a book called The Audience Shortcut, and it was all about how to achieve what you want in life through having the right people paying attention. Had worked on the packaging of it, you know, all of this stuff, had maybe written half or a third of it.

[00:43:08] And we sat down, uh, in Las Vegas, of all places, and um, and I was like, “Here you go. What do you think?” You ran through it, and then you came back. Like, we talked through it a bunch, how to improve it, and we were making all of the tweaks and, and making it better. And then you came back uh, the next day or a couple days later with a 20-minute Loom video and said, “Don’t write th- that book.

[00:43:29] Write this book instead.” Mm-hmm. Talk about what went into that, and you can be as specific as you want or- Yeah … or as high level.

[00:43:35] James: I, well, this other book, the book that you’re working on now- The Ladders of Wealth … The Ladders of Wealth, is a timeless topic. You know, people, I mean, w- I feel like one good filter that people can use for their books when, uh, they’re working on something is can you find three to five books that have already sold over a million copies that are adjacent to what you wanna do?

[00:43:54] Like, you know, in my case, I would’ve said Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The Power of Habit, you know, books like this that you look at and you’re like, “Okay, they’re already a success.” I got my own version that I’m putting out. I’m, you know, doing it my own way, but it’s nice to have a couple examples of that where you can say, yeah, people really want to hear about this topic, and now you’re gonna add your unique lens or your unique angle to it.

[00:44:16] Um, I can’t really name any books about audience- Right … that have sold a million copies. I, I don’t… Maybe we can try to come up with some, some version of it, but I, I can’t really name any. I can name a lot of books about wealth that have sold a million copies. Yeah. And so, uh, you know, Psychology of Money, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Total Money Makeover.

[00:44:32] Like, you just go through the list and you’re like, “Okay, this is a category- … people really care about.” People buy this. Yeah. Um, and you had something unique, which is the ladders of wealth concept. Also, isn’t that one of your most popular articles? It’s my most popular article. It was the most popular article.

[00:44:45] The most

[00:44:45] Nathan: thing, popular thing I’ve ever written. Like, this is- And you had this moment where you’re like, “What are you doing?” Well, Mark,

[00:44:49] James: Mark Manson had the same thing happen when he worked on Subtle Art. Uh, he was like kind of struggling with the title, and then he told his agent like, “This is the most popular article on my website,” and she was like, “What are you doing?”

[00:44:58] Like, “Make this the title.” You know? Like, this is… Don’t, don’t overthink it too much. Like, this is what people wanna hear from you on. So usually the big categories are pretty obvious, habits, money, you know, whatever, things like that. But, um, the hard part is not identifying the category or the desire. The hard part is coming up with a nice unique angle that makes sense, um, for addressing that category.

[00:45:20] And I really liked the ladders of wealth concept, and I felt like, all right, timeless category, bunch of examples of books that have sold millions of copies. I really like the concept. And you had a lot to say about it. Also, a lot of what you say about the audience book can feed directly- Yeah … into this.

[00:45:35] Like, it fits fine in this chapter. It, it- Right … just let it live there. Um, and so that’s kind of one of the secrets of, of writing these books is you, you can sort of say whatever you want on the inside. Um, you can find ways to like work your best material in, and that was, that was a big portion of the process for me with Atomic Habits.

[00:45:56] I… The first year of working on the book was just me figuring out, how do I get my best ideas stacked up front- Right … in the book? Um, you know, how do I get 1% better every day? You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, and every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

[00:46:13] I knew those are three of my most popular articles of all time, and I had all three of those ideas in the first like 26 pages. Um, and the idea is- It takes so many hurdles for somebody to buy a book. It’s so hard to sell one book. Like, you, you gotta be on a podcast, and they see you there, and they see you in the bookstore, and they see you at the airport, and then they’re reminded of it on Facebook, and then they click, and they finally buy.

[00:46:35] And it comes to their house, and it sits on their desk for six months, and then they crack it open, and they read, you know, 14 pages, and then their kid’s crying, and they gotta put it down. And you don’t wanna, like, bury the best stuff, you know? Like, you want them to read the first 5,000 words and be like, “Damn, this is so good.

[00:46:51] I have to tell somebody about it.” Um, and so I was trying to figure out how do you, you know, how do you do that? So anyway, a lot of, a lot of ideas there, but I think those are some of the things to consider if you’re trying to frame your book up in a way to make it successful.

[00:47:03] Madeline: And one thing I would say also that is different about what I think of as good publishing versus a sort of more of a, a service model or of what an author is going to get if they’re going on their own, is you want there to be a push and pull of ideas.

[00:47:20] And, um, no matter how brilliant the author is, no matter how perfect they are on the page, um, there is value in just chewing through it together to really hash out. Like, is… Who do you think the readers are for this book? Here’s… I, I just read this manuscript, and here’s who I think, I think it is. Do you agree with me?

[00:47:43] Don’t you agree with me? Okay, if, if we, if there’s a gap there, then what do we need to address better, either in terms of the content or the positioning or the title or the subtitle or whatever it is? And know that that’s where there is real value in having, um, a team of people who are coming together to work on a book as opposed to just kinda going your own, um, online or going to, into a system where you’re not gonna really get that much feedback because people don’t have time for you.

[00:48:15] Nathan: Yeah, I think that’s so good. And James, something that you had said to me was in, in your, like, “Here’s why you should write about this,” um, ’cause I had everything tied to audience related to Kit and things that I’m known for. Um, but you did a… You went on X on my account and searched minimum favorites- Mm-hmm

[00:48:32] from, from my username, you know, to find, okay, what are the- What were your most popular

[00:48:37] James: tweets?

[00:48:38] Nathan: Yeah, and they were… Your, your point was that they were all about money. Yeah. Or, like, nine out of 10, you know, basically- Mm-hmm … were all about money. And so seeing what resonates. Something that I’ve seen you do, um, Sahil has done really well, is take these ideas that you know resonate and you know are going to go viral, maybe, like in Sahil’s case, uh, the graph of time that you are gonna spend with your kids- Yeah

[00:48:58] by age, right? You know that’s gonna resonate. He’s- He had already

[00:49:01] James: posted on social media five times, and it went viral every time. Right. Um, and so yeah, like I… In my opinion, that graph is probably too late in his book. Mm. It should be, uh, it should be earlier. Um, you know, like, uh, you take your m- list of most popular tweets, um- That would, let’s say that eight of the top 10 are about money Right

[00:49:19] you know those lines resonate. Now, I’m not saying you gotta fit all eight into the first 15 pages, but some of those sound bites should be early.

[00:49:25] Madeline: Right.

[00:49:25] James: Um, that also is really good content for when you do interviews. Like, I… The first time that I was on CBS This Morning, I’m prepping for this morning show, and I’m, like, kind of nervous, and the way that I decided to script it out or try to figure out what am I gonna say in this short four-minute interview was I took my top tweets, and I started dropping them into the questions and thinking about, “All right, if I don’t say anything else, let me try to get this sound bite in.”

[00:49:46] Right. And I, I think I had, like, three things that I really wanted to make sure I said on air, um, and I got those in, and it ended up being a really good segment. And, you know, if you can… This is the point I was making earlier about it’s a great reason to build an audience, is you force yourself to run the content through a filter.

[00:50:02] You can trust that stuff. You know? You, you, you know that, okay, this clicks with people, so let’s lead with some of the best stuff.

[00:50:07] Madeline: Yeah.

[00:50:08] Nathan: That makes sense. What are some of the things that make the biggest difference for authors in year two and beyond for these books to keep selling?

[00:50:15] Madeline: One of the answers is the probably most frustrating one, which is that the book has to be good.

[00:50:21] James: Yep.

[00:50:21] Madeline: Um- That’s the, that is the answer … that, that’s the answer. Um- There

[00:50:25] James: are strategic things you can do, which we’ll talk about- Yeah … but that is the- Um- And, and as

[00:50:28] Nathan: we’ve been working on The Letters of Wealth, that’s the thing that both of you have said, is like, “Here’s the date. Here’s what we’re working towards, and what matters most, this date doesn’t matter at all.”

[00:50:37] Yeah. “What matters is the book being great.” Tim

[00:50:38] James: Urban, Tim Urban told me one time, um, that online, the difference between A-plus work and A-minus work is, like, enormous. It’s not like, you know, an A-plus is, like, a 99 out of 100, and an A-minus is, like, a 93. That’s not how it works online. An A-plus is, like, a 9,000, and an A-minus is, like, a 93.

[00:50:55] And so taking the time to really get it right, to truly… You’re only gonna write the book once. Make it the best it can possibly be. Now, you know, of course, that’s tricky. Like, you don’t want to use it as a crutch to just endlessly edit and kind of over-knead dough and work it too hard and all of that.

[00:51:09] But, um, my little rule is, as long as I’m working, as long as I’m working on it, I should be patient. If I’m not working on it, then I’m just waiting. Right? Now, now you’re just, like, you’re just researching and spinning your wheels and whatever. But as long as it’s moving forward, let’s stick with it until we hit the highest standard we can.

[00:51:25] Madeline: Yeah. There’s a, um… Seth Godin puts it, same idea, but he says the author and the publisher’s job is to sell the first copy. Th- then the book has to start selling itself. Mm. And, um, and so that plays out in lots of different ways. Part of it is that, um, you really, you want booksellers to want to keep that book- on tables- Right

[00:51:51] over the long term. And, um, booksellers don’t operate nonprofits. Those bookstores- … um, whatever their size is, they… inventory costs them money. They are going to, um, to buy the books that they believe they can continue to sell. And so, um, that matters obviously in terms of when you’re selling the book in at the time of publication.

[00:52:14] But the real win is if you have these thousands of different booksellers around the country, whether that’s an independent or a Target or a Barnes & Noble or whoever, that they are continuing to give you visibility that, that goes on. Um, the… another way to think about it is, and it’s particularly helpful doing this with the nonfiction, it’s over the course of the year, there are different retail promotional opportunities.

[00:52:44] They’re, they’re all pretty obvious, but there’s, there are the, um, there’s Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, there’s summer reading, there’s, um, there’s graduation, there’s holiday giving at the end of the year, and then there’s New Year, new you. And so you can think about those as different pulse points that will…

[00:53:01] little, little ways that you can keep, um, creating or reboosting momentum for the book. Um, James, you’ve done this really well for years and years and years. So do you wanna talk a little bit about how you’ve approached this- Yeah … for Atomic Habits?

[00:53:14] James: I, I think it’s tapping into that. The… I, I would say the two things are pretty related, but, uh, tapping into that seasonal buying energy when, you know, in late November, early December, people are buying gifts anyway.

[00:53:26] So the conversation changes from, uh, “Hey, buy this book,” to, “I need to buy something. What should I get them? Oh, I’ll get this book for them.” Um, and that’s, you know, such a different, um, psychology in the, the buyer’s mind. Um, and also these giftable holidays that you mentioned. So I think if you can combine those two things, you can start to stack your, uh, promotional efforts to coincide with, like, these tail win- these natural tailwinds that you get.

[00:53:51] So, like, I really, I only do… I, for a long time, for the first couple years after Atomic Habits came out, I would do, uh, two interview blocks a year. I would do interviews in early April, and then those would all come out, like, April, May, right around graduation season, and so that would give Atomic Habits a lift as a graduation gift.

[00:54:08] At the same time, I would mention it, you know, at the top of my newsletter, “Hey, if you’re looking for a gift for a graduate in your life, you know, here, Atomic Habits is on sale here.” Um, and you start to stack these things together. You could do a little social push. All the energy’s kind of happening in this concentrated window.

[00:54:21] Right. And then I would do a second, um, interview block at, like, the end of November, early December, and obviously January is a very big time for habits, and so all those interviews come out right around the new year. You get this natural spike, and you kind of add to that. So it’s sort of like when is the rhythm of this book gonna rise anyway, and can you just add fuel- add fuel to the fire.

[00:54:41] And, um, you know, I think this is something you do for Ladders of Wealth. We look at that and you’re like, “Okay, you know, it’s often kinda hard to choose what do you buy for your dad or something.” And great, all right, Father’s Day is coming up, and you could mention in your newsletter or on social media that week, “Here are three testimonials from dads who really love this book.”

[00:54:57] Right. You know? Like, you can specifically pull those people from your audience or put one person in there and, you know, it… You start to shape the way that people think about your book, and if you do that for a couple years over and over again, then people are like, “Oh yeah, this is a good Father’s Day gift,” you know?

[00:55:13] And then you can start pinging the gift guide people on Substack or the, you know- Yeah … whoever’s putting together that, and you’re like, “Hey, this is, uh, you know, can you include it there?” Or whatever.

[00:55:21] Nathan: Yeah. I love that. Okay, the topic that I wanna wrap up on is a, a hot topic for a lot of authors, and that is the New York Times list.

[00:55:28] Madeline: Mm. So as you’re

[00:55:29] Nathan: planning a launch, I feel like our, our friends writing books are in two camps. One where they’re like, “Uh, this is my identity for you know, I have to hit the list, otherwise I’m going to have a meltdown.” Uh- “I’ve failed.” “I’ve failed.” Yeah. “Uh, this will change my speaking career, you know, I’m charging x amount now.

[00:55:49] If I have this, these words after my name or in my bio, I can charge, you know, two or… X or, or more.”

[00:55:55] James: And I think even if most people know that that’s maybe not true in the extreme sense, if you don’t hit the list, there’s a feeling of disappointment.

[00:56:01] Nathan: For

[00:56:01] James: sure.

[00:56:01] Nathan: And then there’s the other side where people say, like, “I can’t control it.

[00:56:04] I’m only gonna focus on what I can control.” Uh, and you end up with very different behaviors- Which also sounds

[00:56:08] James: good and is more rational, but if those people hit the list they’re gonna tell everybody they know

[00:56:12] Nathan: about it. 100%. So there’s, you know. So, like, w- what’s the advice that you give? And I mean, you get to see all these books.

[00:56:18] You two are thrilled when the books that you publish- Yeah … hit the list. Sure. And so it obviously matters. But how, how would you advise authors to- The question

[00:56:25] Madeline: is if it do- it, does it really matter commercially or does it just matter psychologically? Mm. And I think absolutely psychologically. There’s…

[00:56:33] Just because there are not that many different, um, Boy Scout badges you can- Right … you can get, and this is, like, the ultimate cool Boy Scout badge. Um, but just for, for anybody in the audience who’s not that clear on how the best-seller list works, how… And we’re talking about the best-seller list because it’s the New York Times list, and that is essentially the, the main one that exists in the market now.

[00:56:58] Um, it is, um, it is very quirky. It is not- Scientific. It is, there is an industry weekly report of, um, how many units sold. Um, those are reported by all retailers to an organization that creates a report called BookScan. That’s scientific. That says you sold 10,000 copies or you sold two copies, and there’s no guesswork, there’s no algorithm, it’s just a tabulation.

[00:57:28] That is not what The New York Times list is. The New York Times has a, a self-selected, sort of like the formula for Coke. It’s a, it’s a mystery. They have, uh, a subset of retailers across the country that report the sales into them. Um, they are… They give different weight to the channels of sales. So if a book does really well in the independents, that’s going to be weighted differently than the number that comes in from Amazon.

[00:57:58] Um, they are trying to, um, to avoid any chance that somebody’s trying to game the list by buying a bunch of copies themselves, so they’re looking for, um, for anything that might look like a bulk sale. Um, sometimes that means that they misinterpret things that are genuinely organic demand. Um, the most, um, perhaps absurd and frustrating experience that I had with this was We publish a fabulous book, um, in partnership with The New York Times.

[00:58:32] It’s with New York Times Games called Puzzle Mania. It’s a beautiful four-color, hardcover, very giftable book. And, um, the … We have a weekly meeting with the, the creative team at The Times that we’ve worked with on these books, and it happened to be that the weekly meeting that we had with them was when the, the list got reported.

[00:58:55] And they … Definitely, like, we knew based on the numbers, like, there were n- there was no ga- there were no games going on- Right … and we were not trying to game the system. It’s just that the organic demand for this book for its first week and week after week after week was just crazy good. So really by all rights, it should’ve been number one or number two on the, the advice how-to list, um, on The New York Times last, that week.

[00:59:21] We’re on a Zoom call with The New York Times when Craig, my colleague, who’s the first one who gets the list, I see it in his face. He, he gets the, the email, and he’s just like, “Sorry, I have to interrupt and say we didn’t make the list.” And the expletives that came out out of our creative partners at The Times, who were very frustrated that this book was not on the list, and if you look, um, which we all then did, at a, the fine print, um, in the bestseller section, it says that all books that are games or puzzles, um, do not get to count towards the list.

[00:59:56] So it’s just … I mean, that’s, that’s silly, and it’s a little bit like the royalty rates. These are things that, that are rules that get built up over time, and it’s great if you hit The New York Times list. It’s, like, a wonderful thing that then you can say forever, but it is really not something you can control.

[01:00:16] And so putting all of your, your hopes and dreams on something that can’t be controlled, um, is a little silly, and it also can, uh, can sort of take your eye off the ball of what is really the most important thing, which is just how do we reach the greatest number of readers, full stop.

[01:00:35] James: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think what I would add to that is you kind of

[01:00:38] I think about it as you sell enough copies to be in the conversation. You know? If you sell, you sell 10 or 15,000 copies- Yeah, you can control … then it’s like, okay, great, you’re in the mix. Maybe you’re gonna be on the list, maybe not. It’s their decision on, you know, where they put you and whether that you make it, but you’re just trying to give yourself the opportunity to, to make it.

[01:00:53] Um, and it’s frustrating if they don’t pick you, but that’s, you know, that’s kinda how it goes. Um, I think the most accurate list in the industry is the Amazon Most Sold chart. Uh, because all of these lists, the, The New York Times list or whatever, it’s, it BookScan, they’re usually divided out by format, so they’re only looking at, like, hardcover sales, or they’re only looking at e-book sales or audio sales.

[01:01:15] Well, I, I, I’m selling in all three formats. Like, I wanna know who’s selling the most units overall. And, um- The Amazon most sold chart is the most accurate representation of that because it’s all print sales, all Kindle sales, and all Audible sales bundled into one number, and then just whoever sold the most units over the last week, that’s where your ranking is on the, um, on the chart.

[01:01:39] Now, not all audiobooks are sold on Audible, not all e-books are sold on Kindle, not all hardcovers are sold on Amazon, but it’s a big enough aggregated number that I think it’s the most accurate representation. There’s no other single source that is combining all those into one number. Uh, and so if we actually want to see who’s selling the most books, I think look at the Amazon most sold chart.

[01:01:58] If you want the highest status marker and to be able to brag about it, then it’s like, who’s number one on The New York Times?

[01:02:04] Nathan: Yeah, that makes sense. There is, uh, so much more that we could dive into, uh, but this has been a fa- a fantastic conversation, and I just wanna say for anyone considering publishing with Author’s Equity, you have a very limited number of books that you can take on.

[01:02:17] It has to be ones that you really, really believe in. Yeah. But you want authors who wanna bet on themselves and who have these books and content to invest in it long term, that you want them to reach out to you. Where, where would you like them to, to reach

[01:02:30] Madeline: out? Um, they … The easiest thing is info@authorsequity.com.

[01:02:34] Perfect.

[01:02:35] James: We do actually read the emails.

[01:02:36] Madeline: We do read the emails. I, I-

[01:02:37] James: I was saying we should put a counter on the website at the beginning of each year and be like, “We have 25 slots le- left,” and then- … each time we sign an author, it’s like, “24, 23, 22.” But, um- I, I … Yeah,

[01:02:47] Madeline: exactly.

[01:02:48] James: It’s, uh … People publish books for many different reasons, and different things make sense for different people, but I think if you are a top author and you have a large audience, and you can look at the numbers and say, “You know, I’m pretty confident, like, I’m gonna be selling tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies,” and especially if it’s a book that has a long lifespan.

[01:03:08] Mm-hmm. You know? It … Once you start to stretch, if you only look at things with, like, a three-year lens, then you’re like, “Okay, maybe the advance is better. Maybe I’m gonna sell more copies. I don’t know.” But if you have a book that you think, “This is a pretty timeless topic, and, like, people are probably gonna be interested in this in 10 years or 15 years,” if you stretch it out 20, 30

[01:03:26] I mean, it just … The numbers become … You end up giving up an insane amount- Yeah … um, under a traditional structure. And, you know, like I said, people make the choice for different reasons. It’s not a, a great fit for everybody, and I don’t want anyone to feel pressure about it, but, um, I’m really excited about the model because I think it’s

[01:03:42] Right now, I think it’s a one of one- Yeah … option. Um, hopefully we’ll put enough pressure on other publishers that there will be more like us, but, um, it’s a unique opportunity right now, and I think it’s, I think it’s a good thing for the industry.

[01:03:54] Nathan: That’s amazing. Thank you both so much for coming on.

[01:03:56] Thanks for having us. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show, then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I’d love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show.

[01:04:11] Thank you much for listening.

[00:00:00] Bryan: Track the outcome and make decisions somewhat focused on that, and you would be in the top .01% of your market.

[00:00:06] Nathan: If you’re struggling to break through the $1 million ceiling in your business, this episode is for you. Because today I’ve got two million-dollar founders joining me on the podcast. Grant Baldwin built the Speaker Lab into a multi-million dollar coaching business.

[00:00:17] Nathan: Brian Harris has scaled Growth Tools past $2 million helping coaches grow their businesses.

[00:00:22] Bryan: We just focus on, first, make offer great and have a high-ticket offer. Like, start by needing the fewest clients possible, ’cause that eliminates most sales and marketing problem. And the second one is-

[00:00:31] Nathan: In this episode, Grant and Brian get into what actually unlocks that first million in a creator business.

[00:00:37] Grant: AI’s creating a new season, and whether that’s positive or negative is kind of ultimately up to you and, like, what you decide to do with it.

[00:00:43] Nathan: Relationships will matter more than ever. Data will matter more than ever. We cover how to position an offer so the right people find you, why tracking customer outcomes beats any sales or marketing tactic, and what Grant saw when he asked himself whether he still wanted to run the company he built.

[00:00:56] Nathan: First, the focus and elimination is key to breaking through a million. Second is obsessing over the outcomes. Like, actually track the outcomes. And then the third is…

[00:01:09] Nathan: Guys, welcome back to the show. It’s… We have had w- a rare episode with multiple guests. Mm-hmm. And now you guys are the repeat guests.

[00:01:17] Grant: Have you ever had… You’ve had repeat guests, but have you ever had- Yeah … the same duo back? Ooh.

[00:01:22] Nathan: It’s the first time.

[00:01:23] Bryan: Wow. Okay. We’re the first repeat duo.

[00:01:25] Grant: This is how Yeah.

[00:01:26] Bryan: This feels like when you- Maybe … when people brag about their book- We were trying to get that this time … on Amazon, where they’re the number one in, like, the 17th category. The, the

[00:01:33] Nathan: the most obscure category.

[00:01:34] Bryan: Best

[00:01:34] Nathan: seller.

[00:01:35] Bryan: We’re the best seller.

[00:01:36] Nathan: But I think people loved your episode because you were talking behind the scenes about scaling creator businesses to a level that most people haven’t seen.

[00:01:45] Nathan: Or if they’ve seen it, they’ve only seen it from someone that’s, like, a household name in the creator space, where, you know, an Ali Abdaal or Alex Hormozi, who’s very loud and out there and saying, like, “I’m very successful. You should, you know, copy this format.” And I feel like you guys took the… have taken the leverage that a, an online business, a creator-type business gives you, and then built just a fundamentally great business behind it, rather than the typical, um, I don’t know, very loud and in your face style.

[00:02:17] Grant: Yeah.

[00:02:17] Nathan: Was that intentional to build a… I guess, to me, it seemed much more traditional style of businesses with this leverage, or is it just… Yeah, how did that come about?

[00:02:27] Grant: I think some of it is, um, like a preference. Mm-hmm. Like, I think, uh, I heard one time someone say they would rather be the owner in the box that nobody knows than be the star player on the field that everybody wants to be around.

[00:02:37] Grant: Mm-hmm. And I think, um, I think for me personally, like, uh, probably similar to all of us, I think we’ve all spent enough time together over the past decade or so of we all like, we like being around people, but we’re also not trying to be the star of the show. Yeah. And so there are certain businesses or models that, that it almost necessitates that or requires you to be out front and to- Mm-hmm

[00:02:56] Grant: you know, beat your chest or, or beat the drum or whatever that may be. And so I think, um, I know for me, like as, as we’ve grown the business, is going, um, how do we build the business in a way that doesn’t require that? Okay. I don’t wanna be the dancing monkey. I don’t wanna feel like I’m on the treadmill.

[00:03:10] Grant: And I think part of the fun of entrepreneurship is everyone gets to build the business in a way that makes sense to them. Mm-hmm. Like, it, there’s not a right or wrong way to do it. Like, everyone gets to design the game and the rules in a way that, that suits them. So from the beginning, I was really intentional.

[00:03:24] Grant: I, I would tell our team regularly, like, “This is not the Grant show.” Mm-hmm. “This is not the Grant show,” meaning, like, if it requires Grant to do it, I’m not interested. Um, from like a, you know, star of the show, face of the whole thing, ’cause it also just makes everything we do less valuable ’cause I’m the, the, the bottleneck to the whole thing.

[00:03:42] Grant: Mm-hmm. So yeah, some of it was, like, a, a preference standpoint, and some of it, uh, is I think it’s a, some- a business that’s not solely dependent on one person is largely a healthier business, I would argue too. Yeah.

[00:03:53] Nathan: Yeah, that makes sense. Brian, what about you?

[00:03:55] Bryan: I’m just an introvert. So

[00:03:57] Grant: I don’t

[00:03:59] Bryan: really wanna be the loud guy out front.

[00:04:00] Bryan: Yeah. But these businesses, these content-driven businesses, I mean, they kinda are that. These teaching-based businesses, there is a face. Mm-hmm. Um, but from day one, probably via something you wrote very early on, the idea of putting my name as the title of the business was not interesting.

[00:04:16] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:16] Bryan: Um, so that alone is, like, a interesting little mechanical decision that can keep you away from being the person out front.

[00:04:24] Bryan: ‘Cause Alex and Ali and all these people, even James, uh, you know, having the name of the business be your, yourself, um, sets it up to be a particular thing. Not that you can’t work around that, but-

[00:04:33] Nathan: Right …

[00:04:33] Bryan: that’s never been all that appealing.

[00:04:35] Nathan: There are some of those structural decisions- Mm-hmm … that, that make a big impact, and I think people don’t spend enough time thinking about the roles.

[00:04:42] Nathan: And so you assume, okay, I wanna run a content business. I, I’ve learned the, the magic of an audience and the leverage that comes with that, and like, wait, we can sell digital products or coaching or any of these things and have incredible gross margin. We were just talking about, you know, the guests we recorded just before this is, uh, Will Guidara and Bryan Canlis, who are, like, legends in the restaurant space, you know?

[00:05:04] Nathan: And we live at opposite ends of the- Yeah … business difficulty, gross margin you know, like- They’re

[00:05:10] Bryan: real business owners.

[00:05:10] Nathan: They … Everything has to go very, very well for their tight margins and, you know, we have a lot of, of leeway in selling digital products. Um, but in this- There’s just, there’s so many different styles of business that you can operate, and we don’t spend enough time thinking about, “Oh, do I wanna be the owner in the box?

[00:05:31] Nathan: Do I wanna be the, the coach who’s responsible for the, you know, success of the season, or do I wanna be the player who has to carry the game?”

[00:05:40] Grant: But especially in the beginning of, of any business, I think m- the reality is, is even if we go back a decade for any of the three of us, like you’re not thinking that far ahead.

[00:05:48] Grant: No. You’re just going, “How do I get to next week? How do I keep playing the game?” You know? Right. And then I think it’s, it’s possible that you just get so far in, and especially if you are largely a personal brand, it’s hard to unwind that. Mm-hmm. It’s hard to transition that to be something different. Um, but a lot of it’s that, you know, that Stephen Covey line of beginning with the end in mind of, of what’s…

[00:06:10] Grant: If I stay on this path, what’s that, what’s the outcome of this, and what kind of business is this gonna be in three to five to seven years if I keep doing, you know, this same thing? And is that something that like, oh, yeah, if this is the path I’m on and it leads to that destination- Mm-hmm … cool, let’s keep going there.

[00:06:25] Grant: But if you look at that and you fast-forward to someone who is several steps ahead of you and is doing that, and you’re like, “I don’t know that I would want their life,” then, like you gotta start to change course sooner rather than later.

[00:06:36] Bryan: Well, and I think all this assumes you know what you want, and I feel like it’s going to…

[00:06:40] Bryan: Like going to college, it’s like, “I think I might wanna be a doctor.” Yeah. Then if seven years in you realize like, “Actually, I hate this”- Right … it’s really hard to change. So for me, it took a lot of experimentation, and I even figure out, e- even feel like in the last year or two I’ve started to, to learn not what I consciously am thinking about a thing, ’cause I can look at different people and, like, like the idea of doing it that particular way, but, like, what actually works with the way I was uniquely wired, and for me, that’s just taken experimentation to figure out what that is.

[00:07:09] Bryan: Um, like the idea… I like the idea of being the owner in the box.

[00:07:13] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:13] Bryan: But turns out I really like being on the front line making things, and, like, if all I did was that, I would quit. So you got Elon, you got Bezos, and you have Richard Branson, and all of them, three of those work fundamentally differently on the day-to-day.

[00:07:27] Bryan: All of it can work, but I don’t know, for me, it’s been 15 years of experimentation of what’s my best way of doing it and what works best with me and is exciting and lights me up. Um, yeah.

[00:07:39] Grant: And even though, like, I think we have a better idea today than we did 10 years ago-

[00:07:43] Bryan: Yeah …

[00:07:43] Grant: it may look vastly different 10 years from now in terms of, like- Mm-hmm

[00:07:46] Grant: what you’re interested in, what your ambition is, what your season of life is. Family, marriage, kids, you know, all of that factors into how hard do I wanna be going, how hard do I wanna be charging, and what do I want this thing to look like? Um, you know, we… E- I, I give him a hard time ’cause he would ask me regularly over the years, like, “What do you want?”

[00:08:04] Grant: I was like- … “I don’t know. Leave me alone.” Stop asking me. You know? What do you want? You know? You don’t know, either? Great, you know? All I know is I want you to stop asking. Leave me alone. Um-

[00:08:13] Bryan: And then one day you came home with a vision statement, and I was-

[00:08:17] Grant: I mean, multiple

[00:08:18] Bryan: times- So

[00:08:18] Grant: funny … I’d float out a vision statement, and he’d be like…

[00:08:21] Grant: I’d be like, “I poured my heart into this.” And he’s like, “Nah, that ain’t it.” You know? I think there’s only one that he’s like, “Okay, that resonates.” You know? You

[00:08:27] Bryan: finally came. Like a year ago, you came in

[00:08:28] Grant: the room-

[00:08:29] Bryan: But like- … like, “That’s the one.”

[00:08:29] Grant: But it’s, it… I think it is. Like, it’s hard to read the label from inside the jar, you know?

[00:08:33] Grant: Yeah. And so sometimes figuring out what you want is- Mm … oftentimes looking at other people who are a few steps ahead and going, “If I continue on this path and it looked like that, would I want that?” A- and sometimes you don’t even know until- Yeah … you’re, you’re in it, you know?

[00:08:48] Nathan: So if we think about the, maybe the avatar that we’re speaking to in this is the, the creator who is somewhere in that maybe 300,000 to 900,000 in revenue.

[00:08:58] Nathan: It’s probably bounced around. W- was blown away when they hit 300,000. Mm-hmm. Like, “Wait, I can do this?” Totally. You know, and the 500,000, “I’m making doctor-level money, and I didn’t spend eight years in, you know, med school.” Like it’s, it’s incredible. And then at some point you realize, “Wait, I feel like I can have a bigger impact.

[00:09:17] Nathan: I feel like I can reach more people, and I… There’s a ceiling somewhere in here, and I can’t break through it.” Mm. What I’m curious for both of you is what it… Well, let’s talk about the, kinda that first year that you each broke through a million in revenue. What, what happened then, and, and what led to it?

[00:09:34] Grant: Um, you know, well, one caveat there I would say is some of this ties into, you know, what do you want. Mm. Um, there’s people who are doing 300, 500, 900 a year, and um, I was talking to someone last week, and they were doing that in a different industry. I said, “You can do that for the rest of your life.” Right.

[00:09:51] Grant: “And there’s nothing wrong with that.” So again, some of this de- determines, like, what, what do you want, you know? But I think, um-

[00:09:57] Nathan: Yeah, to be clear, like you’ve won

[00:09:59] Grant: Yes Yeah If you can set your expectations right there- If you just wanna wash, rinse, repeat that for the next 10, 20, 30 years or whatever, there’s nothing wrong with that If

[00:10:06] Nathan: there’s 100 grand a year going into index funds, like- That’s

[00:10:09] Grant: great

[00:10:09] Nathan: you are, you are set

[00:10:11] Grant: You… Yeah. You’re, you’re winning the game- Mm-hmm … you know, if that’s what you define it as. Um, I think for us, we had, like, one of the things that made a big breakthrough, um, was we had a whole bunch of contractors, a whole bunch of part-time people- Mm-hmm … and, um, we had, like, a part-time marketing guy, and, um, n- we…

[00:10:31] Grant: He, this guy, this part-time marketing guy was getting ready to leave, and we were getting ready to… Needed to hire a full-time marketing guy, and this was gonna be our first true W2, and we were right at about a million dollars or so revenue. And, um, he had referred me to this guy, and so I interviewed a couple different guys, and I was like, “Oh, man, this is the, this is the guy we need.”

[00:10:50] Grant: But it was gonna be a six-figure salary. Mm-hmm. He wanted a big profit share. And it was just like I knew it was worth it, but all… at the same time, you’re like, “Golly, this is, this is a big investment.” Um, but that guy was one of the best hires, you know, we ever made and- Mm-hmm … made such a huge difference in the growth.

[00:11:08] Grant: But I think that was one of the big shifts was people and hiring- Yeah … and just going from a bunch of hodgepodge contractors that were good enough and could get the job done to go, “Okay, let’s hire talented people, high caliber people that can grow and are all in on our thing,” which is just an investment.

[00:11:27] Grant: And so I don’t think, you know, nobody’s gonna hear that and think, “Well, I’ve hired good people. I’ve never heard that before”- Right … you know, but there is, like, there’s so much truth to that adage and how, um, how much of a difference that that can make and at the same time, like, how difficult that is.

[00:11:44] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:11:45] Nathan: Yeah, it’s a big thing of making the step function higher, where- Totally … it’s not, “Here’s the person who I can pay 30 bucks an hour to- Yeah, yeah … you know, 20 hours a week.”

[00:11:54] Grant: Yeah.

[00:11:54] Nathan: It’s like, “Oh, no, I’m actually bringing in a professional who in many areas knows more than I do.”

[00:11:59] Grant: Very much so. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:01] Bryan: For us, it was just simplifying.

[00:12:04] Bryan: So I think at the- Mm … time, the year or two before breaking a million, we had six products.

[00:12:09] Nathan: Okay.

[00:12:09] Bryan: And the year we broke a million, we cut five of those six and focused on one. Um, like, there’s some weird… It seems intuitive that if one product took you to 200,000- Mm-hmm … $300,000 a year, the best way to do it, especially in these audience- Mm

[00:12:23] Bryan: driven businesses, is launch more things to those same people.

[00:12:25] Nathan: Yep.

[00:12:26] Bryan: Um, but man, that’s a trap, um, especially if… Well, multiple the, multiple caveats, but especially if your, if your product is a low-ticket product because the amount of traffic you have to drive from that- Mm-hmm … just goes up exponentially. Uh, but when we just cut the vast majority and focused on the one product that for us was the one that had the highest success rate and cut everything else and focused on one thing and doubled the team down and all the attention down and all marketing down on that one thing, just everything got easier, and the fewer cycles needed to generate a customer- The easier it is to generate customers.

[00:12:59] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:59] Bryan: Um, so for us, that made a huge difference. I think we even wrote multiple blog posts about it back then. Just talking to other people, they got stuck at a similar point, and when they just started eliminating things, eliminating people, in some case, contractors or full-time people that are just dispersed amongst all these different products.

[00:13:15] Bryan: Generating… There’s like a, a trap when you have these audiences, ’cause you think you could sell anything.

[00:13:20] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:21] Bryan: And we drastically underestimate how hard it is to put together a really good offer, position well. And when you have an audience of 5, 10, 15, 20, 100,000 people, you can sell anything to them. Mm.

[00:13:33] Bryan: It doesn’t mean you know how to sell it, though, at all. Uh, and if you go down that road five or 10 years, you exhaust the audience with a whole bunch of these mediocre products, and don’t know how to sell to cold people at all. So for us, like, I mean, I think it wasn’t some gigantically strategic thing other than selling three products hard, selling six products harder.

[00:13:51] Bryan: Let’s just sell one product. Maybe that’ll be easier. But in retrospect, it just simplified the whole business down, and we had probably mostly accidentally found product market fit with that product, and learned how to talk about it- Mm-hmm … in a way that people at the time were very interested in. So just getting rid of all the other ones where we didn’t really know the answer to those questions yet.

[00:14:08] Bryan: People on our list would buy it, but people that didn’t know us would not. Um, just simplified things quite a bit.

[00:14:14] Nathan: That’s something that I see over and over again, to the point that I’ve made illustrations on it of like, build a skyscraper, not a strip mall. Yeah. Because I see creators time and again, exactly, they’ll say, “Okay, I made $400,000 with this product to these 20,000 people.

[00:14:29] Nathan: And so then if I sold this product to the same list, maybe it’s not the flagship, so then I’ll make another 200,000 off of that. And then product three will make another 100 or 200,000. And before we know it, we’ve piecemealed our way to a million dollars and that will work.” And it almost, it almost always works-

[00:14:47] Bryan: Mm

[00:14:49] Nathan: in year one.

[00:14:51] Bryan: For a little bit.

[00:14:51] Nathan: For a little bit of time. It almost never works in year two and beyond.

[00:14:55] Bryan: Yeah.

[00:14:55] Nathan: And y- yeah. I j- I just see it endlessly.

[00:14:59] Bryan: It feels like there’s two big things that seem intuitive, and they’re just wrong, like they rarely work. Mm-hmm. One of them is create more products, and the second one is charge a lower amount of money.

[00:15:10] Bryan: ‘Cause if we lower our price- Mm … it’ll be easier to sell. Never works that way.

[00:15:15] Grant: Yeah.

[00:15:15] Bryan: The second one is if we sell more things, then we’ll value ladder people up, and again- Mm … good luck. Like, if you’re Alex Hormozi or some elite level marketer, go for it, like maybe you can crack it. Yeah. Maybe. But any normal mortal can…

[00:15:28] Bryan: Like, it’s just, it’s so rare- Mm … to stair step somebody from a $10 product to a $500 product to a 10,000. Like it just is extremely difficult to do. And just overwork. Mm. I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes I made, was undervaluing… I think overvaluing sales and marketing skill, and overdeveloping there, and undervaluing how, how much weight having a really good offer carries.

[00:15:53] Nathan: Okay.

[00:15:54] Bryan: Meaning, like, think about it, like, you can cut down a tree with a dull ax. You don’t need a sharp one to do it, you just work harder. And, uh, like, for the first decade, I feel like that’s what I did. Just harder and harder and learn more and try better and more effort. And it works. Like, you can get places, but you’ll be exhausted in the process of it.

[00:16:11] Bryan: And usually your products are crap, too, because you spent all of your effort on the front end and no effort on the back end ’cause you don’t have effort to give there. Um, but you could just take time, slow down, need less, develop an amazing offer. Like, actually have the offer itself solve an acute pain, an acute crisis in your market.

[00:16:30] Bryan: And then your sales and marketing skill can be a lot lower because people actually need the thing and are actively looking for the thing. So I think I’ve… I made both of those mistakes over and over and over and over again, just having too many things and overdeveloping sales and marketing skill and needing too many clients.

[00:16:44] Bryan: Like, if you need 10,000 clients to win or 1,000 clients to win or even 500 customers to win, there’s a whole set of activities you need to do to get that. You need 50,000 people to know you exist, and that’s a lot of humans. But if you need 10 clients to win or 10 customers to win, that’s just not that many folks at all, and your sales and marketing skill can be a lot lower.

[00:17:03] Bryan: So if I were to gonna start over from scratch… In fact, we’ve rewired the business over the past three or four years just to focus on need less people and sell less things, and that lowers the bar. It lowers, like, the amount of humans you have to have in the company that are doing sales and marketing or the amount of your individual time you’re having to spend on sales and marketing, ’cause I, I didn’t get in this to do sales and marketing.

[00:17:23] Bryan: I got in this to, like, actually help people.

[00:17:25] Nathan: Right.

[00:17:25] Bryan: But then almost all of these businesses become… Like, it’s a bummer that creator business has become a euphemism for people that make content. And if content is your product, cool, but if it’s not, you should be a creator who makes products for people. Like, those are the things that actually do things.

[00:17:40] Bryan: Um, and all your content should lean to that if that’s your marketing channel of choice. Um, but it took me… It took a long time to see the… see that and spend way less time in sales and marketing and way more time with humans, actually helping them.

[00:17:54] Nathan: So you talked about simplifying your offer, which is something that’s easy to say.

[00:17:57] Nathan: I wanna know, like, what did the offer-

[00:17:59] Bryan: Mm …

[00:17:59] Nathan: and the messaging behind it look like before and what did it look like afterwards?

[00:18:03] Bryan: So we’ve found our way… Maybe I’ll… I can give you a link and you can put it in show notes or- Yeah … wherever it goes. Um, m- the most simple way we’ve found to do this, we call it the positioning statement, and it’s to treat it…

[00:18:14] Bryan: M- most often, we solve problems we’ve experienced, or you solve a, a, a problem that you’ve helped a lot of other people do. So we have a client named Ernie. He helps grocery store owners increase the profit margins. He’s never owned a grocery store, but he’s helped hundreds of them, so that’s cool. But most of us, 80% or more, are just helping people with things that we used to struggle with, uh, whether you’re in…

[00:18:33] Bryan: had a terrible marriage, now it’s great, do marriage counseling or be a marriage coach or launch a marriage book or whatever. Pick your, pick your topic. Um, so what we’ve done is… W- the exercise we walk people through is helping them catalog for you when was the last time you were in that crisis. So if you, you know, you’re a, a personal finance coach or do something in that market- When was the last time your personal finances were a disaster?

[00:18:55] Bryan: And go back to that moment. Like, literally name the date, the, the date, the month, and year if you can. Go back to that moment, and you have two options when you go to sell the product. You can try to convince people to want what you have- Mm … or you can find the people actively searching for it right now.

[00:19:14] Bryan: So let me give you this example. We were with some clients about a year and a half ago. We had a lady named Kirsten there. We’re all going around sharing, like, “What do you do?” And she said, “Well, I used to describe what I did. My old positioning was I help women who are anxious and overwhelmed not be those things.”

[00:19:29] Bryan: And, like, three other ladies in the room raised their hand and were like, “Oh, I do that, too.” And if you’re wanting to know how to position your offer, and you say what you do, and three other people say, “I do that, too,” it’s not well positioned. Like you’re all at the farmers market with the exact same sign.

[00:19:41] Bryan: Yeah. Nobody knows who to pick from. She said, “But now I tell people…” And this is on her website or in ads or emails or pick your marketing channel. “Now when people ask what I do, I tell them I help women who just found out that their husbands have had a porn addiction their entire marriage recover their marriage.”

[00:19:57] Bryan: Mm. And, like, the room gasped. And you can imagine, like, a woman who’s just had that experience, she’s texting her friends. She’s meeting with people at church. She’s googling trying to find, like, literally what does she do? She’s struggling with shame and doubt and guilt and anger and looking up divorce att- She’s doing all of the things.

[00:20:12] Bryan: So when she encounters Kirsten, Kirsten doesn’t have a sales problem at all. Like, she can just tell that lady, “Hey, I’ve been exactly where you were. I was married for 35 years before I found out. And now, pause. I hear you. I see you. That’s really difficult, and now our marriage is better than ever, and I want you to walk with me as I walk you through what to do with that.”

[00:20:30] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:30] Bryan: So positioning your offer, going back to Kirsten, the exercise she went through, was looking back to, you know, June of tw- 2006 when that happened to her. What pain were you experiencing? What did you want? And generating all of your marketing messaging around that. Not, not looking back now to that point, but when you were in the bottom of the pit, what happened?

[00:20:49] Bryan: What did you want? And what did you do to get there? And using all of your marketing language talking to that person in that spot. Because all Kirsten has to do is find 10 or 15 ladies like that a year, and she’s making multiple six figures. She doesn’t have to have all this crazy stuff, all these bells and whistles.

[00:21:05] Bryan: She just had to find those ladies, and those ladies are looking for her. Like, they’re- Yeah … actively searching. Anybody in crisis, whether your business just got shut down or you went bankrupt or a divorce attorney called or you’re in personal finance crisis. Like, positioning your offer to people that are in crisis looking for help right now just solves most, most of the sales and marketing problems.

[00:21:23] Bryan: Um, and it starts with how you even look at your offer- Mm … and how you look at what you do. So looking at it as an actual… It, it’s morphine to the pain that somebody’s in right this second, um, is the starting point.

[00:21:35] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:21:35] Bryan: Yeah.

[00:21:35] Nathan: I mean, that’s a huge shift. Grant, you’ve sold tens of millions of dollars worth of products at this point and taken a lot of people through the speaking programs.

[00:21:43] Nathan: Did you have similar things as, as you- switched up positioning and, and all that Yeah There’s gonna be a lot of iterations of it over the years.

[00:21:50] Grant: Yeah, I think we, I think one of the things that helped us a lot with growth is we largely only ever offered one program. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so it’s just solving one specific pro- problem for one specific audience, and that was one thing that we would tell speakers, is they’re going, “I could speak about anything and everything, and who do I speak to?

[00:22:04] Grant: I speak to humans. I speak to people.” Yeah. Anyway, yeah. “I speak to everybody.” Mm-hmm. Which is not exclusive to speakers. That’s true for anybody. Yeah. You know, just going, how do I spread the net as far and wide as possible, versus going, no, no, here’s this very, very specific unique crisis you went through, and I’m uniquely equipped to help you solve that problem.

[00:22:18] Grant: Mm-hmm. And so it’s counterintuitive, but the more narrow, the more focused you are, the easier it is to actually find the right type of people. So we, we would always tell speakers, and this is true for just entrepreneurs in general and, and, and, um, uh, content creators, is going, you want to be the steakhouse and not the buffet.

[00:22:35] Grant: The steakhouse, not the buff- buffet. Mm-hmm. Meaning, like, if we’re all looking… You know, we’re going out for lunch, and we’re looking for a good steak. Like, we could go to a steakhouse where it’s like that’s what they do, or we could go to a buffet where steak is one of 100 things that they offer, and they’re all mediocre.

[00:22:47] Grant: Mm-hmm. Um, so being the steakhouse is the thing that, uh, kind of attracts the right type of people, repels the wrong type of people. The tricky part and the irony is that over time, one of the things that we started to struggle with is the business got to a size where that focus and that concentration almost became a liability because we became like this one-legged st- stool, and we solve one problem for one audience.

[00:23:10] Grant: But that’s not everybody. Mm-hmm. And I don’t know that we did a good enough job regularly enough to iterate and pivot and maybe broaden it, not massively- Mm-hmm … but to, uh, a little bit or kind of go to some adjacent categories or, or subjects or topics. And so, um, yeah, that concentration and that, that focus on one end can also become a risk and liability on the, on the other

[00:23:39] Bryan: end.

[00:23:39] Bryan: Mm-hmm. You know who did a great job, or is doing a great job of that is Chandler. I feel like they’ve gone after… I went to his website the other day, and it’s fiction and nonfiction and memoirs, and it’s- Yeah … all books.

[00:23:49] Nathan: Right.

[00:23:49] Bryan: But subverticals within the books. But anybody that’s $7 million needs to ignore all that vertical crap.

[00:23:55] Bryan: Oh. Like, that is all a gigantic distraction.

[00:23:57] Nathan: Right. So you’re talking about Chandler Bolt with- Yeah … selfpublishing.com. Yeah,

[00:24:00] Bryan: yeah. Yeah. They’re doing good. Underneath that umbrella of self-publishing books- Mm-hmm … all the subgenres of books. Each one of those have millions and millions of people who have vastly different things they even want inside of it.

[00:24:11] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:12] Grant: I think, uh, you know, one other part to that is there’s something about just doing the same thing over a really extended period of time. Meaning, like, it, it is far too easy to hop from one shiny thing to the next shiny thing. Mm-hmm. And let’s do, um, you know, crypto, or let’s do AI, or let’s teach this thing.

[00:24:30] Grant: And you see

[00:24:30] Nathan: people who ride that wave, and

[00:24:31] Grant: you’re

[00:24:31] Nathan: like-

[00:24:31] Grant: 100%, yeah … weren’t

[00:24:32] Nathan: you the crypto guy last week? I thought

[00:24:34] Grant: you… Wait a second. Is this the same guy? Okay. Um, but I think there’s something to, you know, what, what’s Nathan up- He’s still doing email, you know. Right. Mm-hmm. What’s Chandler? He’s still doing books, you know?

[00:24:43] Grant: So that longevity of just- Mm … showing up, doing the same thing builds a lot of, you know, track record and, and connection and rapport of people going like, “All right, they’re still teaching the same thing. They probably have an idea of what they’re doing.”

[00:24:55] Bryan: I think that’s y’all, the Speaker Lab’s number one superpower is you’ve done the same thing for 10, 15 years.

[00:25:02] Grant: Yeah.

[00:25:02] Bryan: And it took us a minute to figure out-

[00:25:04] Grant: Mm …

[00:25:05] Bryan: what, what that was. Just had to experiment to find with it. Find it. But four or five years ago, like lock in. I’m like, “All right. We’re just gonna be here for a couple decades.”

[00:25:11] Grant: Yeah.

[00:25:12] Bryan: I mean, go Dave Ramsey. He’s been talking about personal finance- Totally … for 30 years.

[00:25:15] Bryan: He’s answered every question that anybody’s ever thought of on the topic.

[00:25:18] Grant: Yeah.

[00:25:19] Bryan: And he’s absolutely saturated the whole market.

[00:25:21] Grant: But that’s also an example of if he just was doing that-

[00:25:25] Bryan: Mm …

[00:25:25] Grant: they would not be with, at the business that they are today, and so they are in all these other adjacent categories, helping people beyond just personal finance or with other niches or verticals of, of personal finance.

[00:25:36] Bryan: I’d be cur- I, I, I, I doubt that. I think they’ve let… I think they get too shiny object syndrome. But that’s what I’m saying. And they’re doing a bunch of random stuff that make no sense over… And they’ve given up the personal finance space. But that’s what I’m saying. Like other people like Bob and all these people have come in.

[00:25:50] Grant: But, like, that’s where, like, it depends what- Yeah … if they just were doing the personal finance, you know, would they have the level of success that they have today, quote, unquote. But also it kind of depends, like, what does he, what does he want? That’s right. Yeah. You know? Mm-hmm. Um, so which my understanding, I don’t know, I’ve met Dave once.

[00:26:07] Grant: Don’t know him personally, but my understanding is he’s always wanted to be the Dave Ramsey that he’s known as today. Yeah. And there are people in this online space that they want to. So at some point, if you’re just… Y- you take a Gary Vee. What Gary Vee started as is he just talked about wine. Right. This very specific type of beverage, and then that wine led to social media.

[00:26:26] Grant: Now he talks about anything and everything, but it started with wine. Um, and so the same thing as, you know, Amazon. Amazon sells anything and everything they can ship to you, but it started with just books, you know? Right. Nike started with just, you know, a very specific type of running shoe. And so oftentimes it starts very, very narrow, and then it broadens, but any of those…

[00:26:45] Grant: Amazon could have just done books. Nike could have just done specific type of running shoes, and they would’ve been fine. But it kind of comes back to that what do they want, you know? What does Phil Knight- I keep asking you. You won’t tell me. I don’t know. I don’t know. But

[00:26:58] Nathan: if you guys know, if someone could tell me-

[00:27:00] Nathan: that would make things a lot simpler.

[00:27:01] Grant: Yeah.

[00:27:02] Nathan: So- Yeah. I mean, the thing that I notice in both of you is that, like, breaking through a million, the most important thing was a single product and a single offer. In getting to that level of clarity

[00:27:14] Bryan: Yeah. Just absolute focus.

[00:27:16] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:17] Bryan: But not, like, I don’t think an action item from that can be, “Let me go away and decide right now what my thing is.”

[00:27:22] Bryan: Like, maybe you’re somebody who has single-minded focus like Grant from the beginning, or maybe you’re like me and you need to experiment for five to 10 years- Right … to figure out what it is, and I see those people. You know, we got friends who we know well who’ve been around just as long as us, and they’re still experimenting 15 years later, and it’s like, “Great.

[00:27:35] Bryan: Mm. Keep going.” My favorite entrepreneurial question is, what’s a problem so interesting you would gladly bet the next 20 years of your life on solving it?

[00:27:43] Nathan: Mm.

[00:27:44] Bryan: And, like, just take whatever time you need to figure that out. Like, we got friends who, whose kids are graduating college, and I, I’ve, uh, taught our youth or our young adult group at church, like a bunch of 22 to f- 24, uh, 24-year-olds the other day, and I was like, “Guys, I love y’all.

[00:27:58] Bryan: Like, I’m just sick of adults. Like, we got so much baggage and so much stuff going on. Like y’all, like, literally y’all can do anything.” And they’re stressed and worried, and they’re looking- Yeah … at friends who think they know what they’re gonna do, and the friends don’t know what they’re gonna do. It’s like, “Y’all just get to experiment for the next five to 10 years or, or longer.

[00:28:12] Bryan: However long it takes. There’s no… Like, you don’t have to rush into this at all because once you find your thing, you can just ride that for a really long time.” So for me, it took a while to find the thing, and now it’s like, all right, there’s the thing, and I can just let all the creativity, instead of going horizontal with all the new things, just let it go within that thing and come up with all kind of creative ideas with inside of it, um, and solve really cool, new, interesting problems that people haven’t solved before.

[00:28:38] Bryan: Like, that’s wildly fascinating.

[00:28:40] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:41] Bryan: Um, I care more about that than the topic, but if you don’t pick the topic and focus on a thing, then you’re just gonna keep on starting stuff that doesn’t do work. That

[00:28:47] Grant: also kind of raises the question of, like, like a chicken egg thing. Is it, you know, the, the audience or the topic that you’re…

[00:28:53] Grant: That came first or the thing that you’re obsessed with? ‘Cause like you mentioned, it may be I’m, you know, uh, with young adults, have gone, “I’m just obsessed with young adults who are in college who are trying to figure out what they’re doing with their life,” you know? So it’s like, what are the problems that that audience has that I can help solve for them?

[00:29:08] Grant: And a lot of this is, like, speaking to, uh… I know, like, what, what helped start the Speaker Lab was what I wish I had when I got started. Mm. Of going, “Man, I’m looking for… I wanna be a speaker, but nobody’s out here teaching this stuff, and surely there’s other people like me that are in the similar spot,” or creating the email software that- Mm

[00:29:24] Grant: you wish you had when you were getting into the game, you know? So creating the, you know, the solution, whatever that may be, for either the person that you once were or for that, that segment or that audience of, like, I’m obsessed with them. How do I make their life better?

[00:29:38] Bryan: However you get to it, you gotta get to it, ’cause otherwise you do weird stuff.

[00:29:41] Bryan: Like you just-

[00:29:42] Grant: What, what, what examples of weird

[00:29:43] Bryan: stuff? Like, especially, like this… Somewhere between 500,000 and 2.5 million, it just depends on how good you are at marketing, honestly. Mm. You’ll hit it, where you have this, like, bastardized suite of things- Yep … that don’t really coherently make sense together.

[00:29:58] Bryan: Uh, but they’re generating a business at all, and, like, you can’t maintain them all. They’re way too spread out. You don’t even have the skill set to grow them beyond. You really need to pick one and hardcore cut the rest and hardcore optimize on it. Uh, but if you don’t know the problem you uniquely solve, or you could phrase that question different ways, but ultimately, what is the thing you’re trying to accomplish?

[00:30:16] Bryan: Are you… Like, for us, we’re trying to make it nearly impossible to fail for coaches to grow their business. Mm-hmm. But the number one small business problem is growth, like revenue- Yeah … specifically, across all small businesses of every vertical, in-person, uh, digital, online. So like, we wanna solve that for that particular group.

[00:30:31] Bryan: So how do we do that in the simplest way possible for them? And that just answers a lot of questions for us of things we’re not even interested in at all, and takes a bunch of stuff off the, the table. And it… At the end of the day, the thing that wins is the best solution to the problem will win, if it’s substantially better than all the rest, ’cause word of mouth takes over on that.

[00:30:51] Bryan: Mm-hmm. If you’re 5% better, then it’s hard. But if you’re 100% better, 200% better, it… And, and if you go a couple decades in that direction, you just will be- Yeah … because not many people are playing that game at all. Most founders, at least anecdotally, I can’t read the hearts of humans, but the clients I coach, I know really well, and myself and my team, it’s really easy to play the make the business big game.

[00:31:12] Bryan: And that’s just… Like, even if in your own selfish best interest, you’re trying to play the make most money possible game, it’s not the best way to make the most money possible. The best way to make the most money possible is have the best solution to the problem that’s ever been invented.

[00:31:23] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:23] Bryan: And you’ll win the market, and you’ll win the money as a result of that.

[00:31:26] Bryan: But you have to be, like, completely obsessed on what problem are we solving, what’s the next bottleneck, and solve it over and over and over and over and over again. Like, I’m curious about your space right now with, like, Lovable.

[00:31:39] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:39] Bryan: It’s a fundamentally different way for non-tech people to build wildly complex tools.

[00:31:46] Grant: Right.

[00:31:46] Bryan: And the other day I’m using it, and I just speak into existence. It’s like Genesis 1 in the Bible, “Let there be app,” and there’s app. Five minutes later. I mean, I’ve employed… I mean, you’ve employed way more than me, but you know, multiple six-figure engineers.

[00:31:59] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:59] Bryan: This is better and 100 times faster like that.

[00:32:03] Bryan: That changes MarTech and SaaS completely. Even the interface. Yeah. Like, I wish I could say, “Hey, I need a, um, I need a new cart abandonment campaign,” or maybe, “We wanna launch a new product, and, uh, two years ago we sent these emails out.” And Nathan sent that blog post the other day with this kinda launch sequence.

[00:32:20] Bryan: Why don’t you go hunt up the best subject lines we’ve sent over the past five years, pull those out, merge it with those two sequences, and draft it all up and send it to a sub-segment of, like, my most engaged people so I can do the little beta launch, and five minutes later have all that done. Yeah.

[00:32:32] Bryan: ‘Cause that fundamentally changes… Like, as a user, I don’t care what the interface is. Mm-hmm. But that’s way better. Like, I would rather not click and point and do things. I would rather just, like, brainstorm off the top of my head and the thing exist immediately. And that’s a fundamentally… And somebody will do that.

[00:32:47] Nathan: Oh, yeah.

[00:32:47] Bryan: It’s only a matter of time. Somebody will do it, and they’ll win the market. Um, hopefully it’ll be you. Hopefully it’ll be… But, like, that will exist. So obsessing on… Like Oprah, she killed her show at the top of her game. She had the whole… It was like, be like Joe Rogan shutting down his podcast and going to start a pool company.

[00:33:04] Bryan: Or something. It’s like, like what? Like, it’s shocking Right … um, because she thought it was in her best interest of her people to serve them better. So like if we obsess on that, I think it’s Elon’s superpower.

[00:33:15] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:15] Bryan: And a unique way he’s wired of he’s like single-minded focus on best solution. Um, and then be okay at marketing versus amazing at marketing and all your products suck.

[00:33:26] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:26] Bryan: And then you’re just really great at going into business quick. Um, so yeah, I don’t… You just… If you do that, it optimizes all actions that direction.

[00:33:34] Nathan: Okay, so you’re talking about how SaaS has completely changed.

[00:33:38] Bryan: Mm.

[00:33:38] Nathan: And, and I think this is gonna be true and relevant to creators as well, where it’s like, “Congrats, you have your downloadable”- Yeah

[00:33:46] Nathan: “e-book that you’re trading for an email address.” Nobody cares. You know? Like, you have to actually… The, the amount of value you have to provide as the bare minimum now has gone up 10X-

[00:33:56] Bryan: Yeah …

[00:33:56] Nathan: even before you’re charging. So the, the hypothesis that I have for Kit is if all interfaces can be copied, prompted into existence- Yeah

[00:34:07] Nathan: there’s an element of brand trust, and do you ex- Like, is the deliverability there? Is the-

[00:34:13] Bryan: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:13] Nathan: Will th- this company… Like, should I trust them with my business? We were joking before we started to hit record, you know, as both of you have been around Kit since the very early days, when you like sign up and the very, like the absolute basics don’t exist.

[00:34:28] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Like, you, like you couldn’t schedule an email.

[00:34:31] Grant: Nope. Just send now or nothing. Hey, Nathan, is this a feature that’s coming soon or am I just missing this? Nope, we don’t have that. Yeah. Send now.

[00:34:40] Nathan: So like a bunch of our vibe coded stuff that, you know, we all make-

[00:34:43] Grant: Yeah …

[00:34:44] Nathan: is going to be at that basic level.

[00:34:46] Nathan: But it… For now. It’ll get way better. My hypothesis is that the thing that ultimately matters, and you can build a moat around, is the relationship with the subscriber and the data about that subscriber.

[00:34:56] Bryan: Mm.

[00:34:57] Nathan: And so what we’re doing is we’re compiling everything possible that we know, and making it through our app store and all our integrations, so that you have the deepest view of exactly who is in your list, um, in…

[00:35:12] Nathan: that you could ever want. And so what our product does now is it tells you the follower count of everyone on your email list. It tells you their bios, lets you search it with AI, lets the agents go through and say, “Hey, you want… Your ideal customer is this. Well, four of them signed up for your, your newsletter last week.

[00:35:27] Nathan: What would you… Would you like to draft welcome emails? Would you like to get them on a call?” All of those things. ‘Cause our hypothesis is that when we have that centralized data for the creator, that that has a real moat around it. And ultimately, all of our businesses are built around that relationship with the audience.

[00:35:44] Bryan: Mm.

[00:35:44] Nathan: I’m curious what reactions you both have to that.

[00:35:47] Bryan: It’s hard to… Like, I used Lovable at the end of January, and I don’t know if I’ve ever had an experience quite like that. Mm. ‘Cause I tried it a year earlier And it was good, but it would get lost really quickly

[00:35:59] Nathan: And it was basically you could just… You could make a landing page or something at that

[00:36:02] Bryan: level We got, like, fairly advanced dashboarding, but then as you try to add stuff, it just got weird.

[00:36:06] Nathan: Mm-hmm. And

[00:36:06] Bryan: I was like, “All right, this is a pain in the butt.” But then late January, I don’t know, the models updated some… I don’t keep track of that stuff all that much, but-

[00:36:12] Nathan: Yep … and

[00:36:12] Bryan: I was like, “This is a fundamentally different thing now, really.” A- it actually got hard. I’m coming back to relationship. It got hard, and still is.

[00:36:21] Bryan: Like, I don’t… I can’t imagine the future much now. I’m like, I don’t- Right … I… This breaks so many things that I came up with.

[00:36:29] Nathan: Yep.

[00:36:30] Bryan: Like, example, this would be a fun AI thing. Uh, we were doing that. I, I was tr- we were trying to do an integration between Circle and something else on our- Mm-hmm … internals. I forget what the integration was, and I’d been deep in the Lovable rabbit trail.

[00:36:43] Bryan: I was like, “Ah,” usually we go to Zapier, and the marketing team would do it, but I was doing it, so let me just go to Zapier, and they have a co-pilot feature that’s kind of an AI thing that’s okay, but a little janky. But I would just talk to it. It’s so fun just talking to things. So I talked to it, and it starts working.

[00:36:55] Bryan: I was like, “Hmm, let me go to Lovable and see if I can just build the API connection direct while it’s working.” So I opened up another tab and gave it to Lovable. Fifteen minutes later, a direct API connection with a little custom app that Lovable hosts and everything is there. An hour later, Zapier is still working, and th- that has never existed.

[00:37:13] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:37:13] Bryan: Like, that, that is shocking. So I go to Zapier, and their rep had been emailing me ’cause our, our Zapier bill is $800 a month or something. Like, “Hey, there’s different things you can do.” So I went to our usage chart, and there were five Zaps that made up like 95% of that bill. So we just went and, you know, a two-hour afternoon project and made direct API connections between those five apps, and we just don’t need Zapier for those at all anymore.

[00:37:37] Bryan: And it cut our Zapier bill from $800 a month to 50 to $100 a month, and the hosting cost of that stuff is, you know, under $20 a month.

[00:37:44] Nathan: Right.

[00:37:45] Bryan: That’s just shocking. That’s truly shocking stuff, and I’m sure that exists in arbitrage all over the place. So, I mean, that little two or three-day window, I, I was just kind of confused.

[00:37:56] Bryan: Like, I- What is

[00:37:57] Nathan: even the future?

[00:37:57] Bryan: I don’t know what to do. Like- Right … what does this mean for anything? And I, I got to a similar spot as you of if my view of life is even remotely correct, then the one thing that has to, like as AI grows and using it for counseling, using it for all the things, and many of which are really cool, really cool usage I, I love and it’s exciting, the thing that it has to create is more relational need because it’ll force us into more isolation and more…

[00:38:25] Bryan: Like instead of going to a counselor or a, you know, minister at church or whatever you would get help and support from, you’ll go to talk to ChatGPT, and it’ll affirm you with a whole bunch of stuff. Um, so all that to say, I don’t know how you can go wrong by doubling down on relationship more and more and more, like real, genuine human connection in whatever way makes sense for business.

[00:38:44] Bryan: Um, so relationship between you and the client, like I… It can’t replace that ’cause it’s not human.

[00:38:49] Nathan: Yep.

[00:38:50] Bryan: But I, I suspect it can replace literally everything else. Every mechanical function is just a matter of time. Um, so for us, what’s that look… what that’s looked like, and we run a coaching business. We walk beside people for a long time, helping them accomplish, like, very difficult things that tools alone can’t solve.

[00:39:09] Bryan: Tools have to be a part of it, but relational… ‘Cause people’s number one competitor is quitting. Right. Yeah. It’s either quit or not quit. If we can get them not to quit, they will win. Mm-hmm. And ChatGPT, uh, uh, it’s hard to imagine how it’s gonna help them do that in any variations. So we’ve just started adding more and more personal things, like we do…

[00:39:27] Bryan: We cut all of our recorded training, and we do it all live every week. We teach four classes simultaneously every week. We have six live office hours every day. Um, we just started a thing called speed matching, where we mask people to do list swaps, and we do it every day, and there’s 20 to 30 people on, and they’re matching and swapping three to four lists, like, every time.

[00:39:43] Bryan: Mm-hmm. Uh, we do in-person events once a quarter now we just added. Just, like, more and more how can we get humans in a virtual room or real room with each other constantly. So relationship with lists, but, like, how can you take it… Like, how, like, actual human connection. It can’t do that.

[00:40:00] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:00] Bryan: But I, like, even Claude Computer launched four days ago.

[00:40:04] Bryan: As in, nobody’s done that yet. It can just control my computer as me. I had it open up our entire Circle account where we do… It’s where we do all client interaction. It opened up the past 50 client posts that hadn’t been answered by a coach, looked at all the other types that had been answered by a coach, and within 30 minutes it opened up them all in tabs, drafted responses that were nearly perfect.

[00:40:24] Bryan: Like, I, like, I don’t know. That’s a different thing. I don’t know. No APIs, no connections. Right. It just uses my computer to do that. So that, that’s shocking stuff. But optimizing for a relationship has to be… Like, I don’t know how that’s not the overwhelming- Right … thought. And all… Everything else is commodity/free in the not so distant future.

[00:40:43] Bryan: Yeah. Especially in our world, online. Like, I, uh… Yeah. So how can you do that? It can’t do that. Everything else is… Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s disorienting and dizzy the speed it’s moving now. And I feel like just in the last three months it’s sped up drastically.

[00:40:56] Nathan: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Ev- everything changed in December when the latest- Mm.

[00:41:00] Nathan: Like, Opus 4.6, the latest models came out.

[00:41:02] Bryan: Yeah.

[00:41:02] Nathan: It went from being pretty good to absolutely incredible.

[00:41:06] Bryan: Which is exciting, and there’s an arbitrage in this next year or two-

[00:41:09] Nathan: Right …

[00:41:09] Bryan: of doing a… Like, I, I mean, 25-year-olds should be pumped right now. Yeah. I mean, I would be g- I’d be working 80-hour weeks coming up with everything I could possibly…

[00:41:17] Bryan: There’d be a Zapier arbitrage project going in- Mm-hmm … trying to take their business and building direct connections, or there’s a bunch of that kind of stuff that exists- Right … like, right this second. You’re in a uni… It’s like the App Store in 2012- Mm-hmm … when iOS launched. Like, that exists right now in a really, really cool way.

[00:41:30] Bryan: And I think a lot of these SaaS industries and are… Like, a lot of these things will be flipped upside down with interfaces and the barrier to entry so low, and it’s really exciting and disorienting at the same time. But relationship, like, you can’t beat that.

[00:41:43] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:43] Bryan: And that’s the cool thing where we’re at in our age and our experience and other people listening, like, if you get people- Like right now, using these tools to deploy against, like, actual relationship and solving problems, like that’s a unique thing that the 20-year-olds don’t have.

[00:41:58] Bryan: Like, they don’t understand, like, real-life problem solving for the most part. Um, but that’s exciting. How can you do that?

[00:42:03] Nathan: Grant, any thoughts on the future and, you know, whether we should have an

[00:42:06] Grant: existential crisis? Yeah, let me look into the magic crystal ball here. Um- Yeah, I think the, uh… Like, in our group chat, one of the things we talk about is, like, we’re…

[00:42:14] Grant: The three of us are really deep in this. Mm-hmm. And so comparing notes, what are you using? How are you doing it? Here’s this new thing that I did, and here’s this new use case, and here’s what I saw someone on Twitter do. And, um, on one hand, it’s like, yes, it is incredibly exciting. On the other hand, you know, um, are we the 1% of the 1% of the 1%?

[00:42:33] Grant: So, um, you know, if I’m the owner of Kit, am I going, “Holy crap, is this gonna take over my business?” Or are there gonna be enough people that are gonna be like, “Cool, I can whip up my version of Kit in a weekend on Lovable,” you know? But how many people are gonna actually do that, or to what degree, or… I don’t know, it’s just kind of like the, the downscri- downstream consequences of all of this, it’s just hard.

[00:42:57] Grant: Uh, I think- Yeah … that’s part of what you’re saying is, like, it’s hard to know for any of us. Right. You know? Like, we can look at this now at the end of March 2026 and go, “What’s it gonna look like three…” We’re talking about, you know, three months ago when Opus 4.6 came out. Mm. What’s it look like three months from now going forward, or six months or, or nine months?

[00:43:14] Grant: Um, so it’s… Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s slightly ex- it’s exciting and concerning and, you know, all of the above. Um, how are you thinking about it? Like, it, it… In an education training content space, it creates some opportunities. Does it create excite- excitement or anxiety or- Yes … concern for you? All of the above?

[00:43:37] Grant: All of the

[00:43:37] Nathan: above. Well, I, I think about, uh… Like Je- Jeff Bezos talks about focus on what doesn’t change.

[00:43:43] Grant: Yeah, yeah.

[00:43:44] Nathan: And so he… You know, the example on Amazon was people are always gonna want lower prices, faster delivery- Faster shipping, yeah … like all of those things. And so my hypothesis is basically that relationships will matter more than ever, that data will matter more than ever, and that those have to be incredibly accessible.

[00:44:02] Nathan: Um, so I, uh… It’s really exciting, but at the same time, to what you were saying, Brian, I don’t feel like I can predict the future.

[00:44:10] Bryan: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:10] Nathan: You know? And, and we’re so used to seeing solutions that are 10% better than the previous one. Yeah. Or you’re like… Something that we would all rave about would be 30% better.

[00:44:20] Nathan: Yeah. You know, and now we’re seeing things that are genuinely 10X or breaking the paradigm.

[00:44:24] Bryan: Yeah.

[00:44:25] Nathan: Um, like, you know, it, it actually feels like magic.

[00:44:29] Bryan: Hey, what problem do you think Kit solves? How do you think about that? Yeah. What’s the fundamental thing you’re trying to solve?

[00:44:36] Nathan: I mean, f- if you go all the way back, it’s helping people earn a living and build a valuable business.

[00:44:42] Bryan: Yeah.

[00:44:42] Nathan: If you come downstream from that- Mm … it’s like doing it through an audience- You know, of, of people who know you.

[00:44:51] Bryan: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:52] Nathan: And so then you go one step past that, and it’s, we help you reach more people and make money from those people.

[00:44:57] Grant: One thing I think was interesting, um, we do this annual houseboat trip that you’ve ignored us on for many, many years.

[00:45:03] Grant: I noticed that

[00:45:03] Nathan: the invite didn’t come this last year.

[00:45:05] Grant: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been- It’s ’cause I just

[00:45:06] Bryan: gave up. We said just put Nathan on the Do Not Invite list.

[00:45:08] Grant: Yes. We’ll see you, we’ll see you in Montana. Montana’s way closer. It is. It, that, that has worked out. Uh, that’s become a new thing. So, um, uh, but we were, last year or year before, there was a guy that came, and very successful in the online space, and they had built a big business, and then the business had m- major issues and just kind of imploded.

[00:45:28] Grant: Mm-hmm. And, um, one of the things I remember him saying was, “We bought into the myth and the lie that we were just growing year over year over year, and we thought it would always be like this.” Mm-hmm. And very interesting to, like, think about from that perspective of, you know, AI’s a major shift. Mm-hmm.

[00:45:47] Grant: But there’s always gonna be minor shifts happening underneath us, and the importance of evolving and changing. And so even, uh, uh, um, I was thinking about when we were in Montana this past fall. We were on this, this fishing trip, the three of us were on with a group of other guys. And I remember one night, it was you and me and this other guy, uh, having this conversation, and he…

[00:46:04] Grant: You were kind of talking through the lens of, “Hey, Kit’s my life’s work. I wanna be doing this forever.” Yeah. Um, you’re deeply committed and passionate to it. And for him, he was kind of talking about everything is always for sale. Mm-hmm. And everything just has a… But, but he was talking about it through the lens of every business, every industry has a shelf life.

[00:46:19] Grant: Everything has a season. Yeah. And it’s not that one’s better or worse than the other. Again, you kind of decide what makes sense for you. But I thought that was a valid, you know, and interesting point of, from both of these guys of saying, um, just because you’ve had growth doesn’t mean it’s gonna continue to grow.

[00:46:34] Grant: And just because it’s, you know, you’ve had some type of success doesn’t mean it’s always gonna be like that. And so, I mean, this, you know, the idea of seasons can apply to anything- Mm-hmm … of, you know, marriage or relationships or health, and seasons that are strong and seasons that are a mess. Um, and so AI’s creating a new season, and whether that’s positive or a negative is kind of ultimately up to you and, like, what you decide to do with it.

[00:46:56] Nathan: Yeah. Okay, we have some really good threads going. Mm-hmm. We, I wanna come back to seasons, ’cause you’ve changed seasons in your business. Uh, so we’ll put a pin in that and come back to it in a second. I wanna- Do we need to

[00:47:06] Grant: do a part three?

[00:47:07] Nathan: We might need to. Part

[00:47:08] Grant: four?

[00:47:08] Nathan: We’ll see if the view- Can we just co-host

[00:47:10] Grant: with

[00:47:10] Nathan: you from now on?

[00:47:10] Nathan: Yeah, exactly.

[00:47:12] Grant: Is that where we’re headed?

[00:47:12] Nathan: Can we get some new graphics up here to just- That would be- … very grand. Starring- Yeah.

[00:47:18] Grant: Featuring Brian and Gran.

[00:47:20] Nathan: So when we were in Montana, uh, Brian, you were talking about the changes that you made in the business, and the one that stood out to me was talking about the…

[00:47:32] Nathan: First was narrowing in on helping your clients do one thing, which is basically grow. Mm-hmm. Instead of all the things you could help them with. Mm-hmm. And the second one was you’re changing the number of playbooks that you offered. How many playbooks to help clients grow did you have before and then what did you cut down to?

[00:47:49] Bryan: We had way too many. Um, we had around 100-ish.

[00:47:53] Nathan: Yeah, that’s what I remember.

[00:47:53] Bryan: Um, somewhere in the 90s, yeah. Um, because the theory was each person is starting a unique point- Mm-hmm … and let’s just craft a path for each human as they come through. And just, I mean, from early stage, one thing we’ve done, for better or worse, probably been to our own detriment in some ways, is just track success rate, and it’s really hard to do actually.

[00:48:15] Bryan: Mm-hmm. Uh, like it’s actually an interesting problem of its own to solve. Like how do you know if somebody’s being successful, and how do you measure that,

[00:48:19] Nathan: and etc.? And I think probably 95% of businesses don’t track that metric, which is kind of crazy.

[00:48:24] Bryan: You get depressed really quickly. If you think your stuff’s good, go track success.

[00:48:27] Bryan: It’s not, I promise you. It’s not. That’s

[00:48:30] Nathan: true.

[00:48:30] Bryan: Yeah. And y- y- you’ll get disenfranchised with product types. Mm. Like if you think you sell a book to help people, don’t measure success rate. Don’t even measure open rate or finish rate- Right … or any of that stuff because it’s really, really low. Or courses or memberships, like again, you know, .01% of people will find success, but you’re, you’re not…

[00:48:45] Bryan: Almost an immeasurable success rates. Um, so that led us to coaching, and, and then as, uh, as we started like cutting everything else, which took a, a little bit of time to do that reasonably responsibly, we just started focusing on, okay, what are the things that have worked for us? Because we can’t teach a thing we haven’t done.

[00:49:00] Bryan: Um, and let’s codify those. And then as people come in, let’s look at where they’re at, where they wanna go, and look at the components we’ve learned and try to map a unique path for them. And we still do that to some degree, but, uh, I like the Basecamp guys. Like they have- Yeah … I, I don’t know how they described it, or maybe I’m using their words, but they have opinionated design.

[00:49:19] Bryan: This is a way that we do project management, so this is the way you can do project management, or you can hire… You can use another piece of software that allows you to do whatever. But their software is opinionated, and I found that, like when people hire a coach, that’s actually part of what they want anyway.

[00:49:33] Bryan: Mm-hmm. They want their opinion. You were talking about your flight instructor. You’re like, “Just tell me what to do, actually.” Right. Like, I don’t want an opinion. Just yes is the answer. So we kept it way too open because we thought there were so many different paths to get there and, and that’s not untrue.

[00:49:47] Bryan: But as we started cutting those and just focusing on two fundamental playbooks, the success rate went up. Mm-hmm. The ability for us to train coaches and get them up to speed quicker went up. It allowed their coaching to get better and allowed the… Like the clients don’t care. They actually don’t care about much of anything as it relates to sales and marketing content.

[00:50:05] Bryan: No content, have a list, don’t have a list, YouTube, not, ads, social, Instagram, TikTok. They don’t care about any of those things. Like we have specific things we give them, and I tell them on day one, like the win for you is you get clients. The win for me is you tell your friends about us, and everything else is negotiable.

[00:50:22] Bryan: Um, so I don’t care if you learn, I don’t care if you get a dopamine hit, I don’t care if you go six months and you haven’t like got excited about… Like I… Like those things don’t matter. What matters is, fast-forward a year, do you still have a client acquisition problem? Mm-hmm. So that’s been our optimization point.

[00:50:37] Bryan: Fundamental problem, their business grows. What’s the simplest path to get there? So we went from all these, you know, we covered four or five different channels, marketing, you know, ads and content marketing, and some cold outreach type stuff. And now we just focus on first make offer great and have a high-ticket offer.

[00:50:56] Bryan: Like start by needing the fewest clients possible. Mm-hmm. ‘Cause that eliminates most sales and marketing problems. Not all of them, but that lowers the bar drastically. And the second one is borrow other people’s audiences to get exposure versus trying to go buy it or earn it or build it over time.

[00:51:09] Bryan: ‘Cause all those, as the years have gone on, have gotten… all have gotten substantially harder to do. And a great arbitrage right now, for the next long time, is other people that have audiences need content, so just be their content. So we’ve simplified everything down to just those two things. What’s a great high-ticket offer that solves a real crisis that you have experience and, and can help at least one person with?

[00:51:31] Bryan: Need 10 of them a year to have a six-figure business. And then to get in front of those 1,000 or so people you need to find those 10, just borrow the people’s audiences. Give your best stuff away to other people, and that’s worked fantastically well, and gone from 90 plus playbooks to two. So we’ve been able to just get really, really, really good and super nuanced and weeds-y.

[00:51:50] Bryan: Mm-hmm. It isn’t just our experience anymore because if your brain works like mine and thinks like mine, great, that’ll work for you. But if your brain works fundamentally differently and you have other lies and everything you have to overcome, like my stuff won’t work for you. So as we practice that with hundreds and hundreds of people- Mm

[00:52:05] Bryan: we found a lot of the edge cases and nuances and have just like really gotten good at those things. Um, so similar to product, similar to marketing channels. If you have a whole bunch of them, you’re just mediocre at all of them. If you’re trying to teach a wide variety of things, like just really difficult to master and to do really, really well to a high success rate.

[00:52:21] Nathan: So what I’m noticing in that is first we’re talking about niching down in the audience that you choose and then the products that you offer down to a single product, and then what you’re even doing is saying, “Great, now once they’ve purchased, I’m actually just going to niche down from 90 different ways that I can help them achieve their outcome to two.”

[00:52:40] Bryan: Yeah, and think about that competing with AI, ’cause like typing… At least right now with the current models, you type into GPT and it’s like, “Bro, can you talk with fewer sentences?” Like this is just a lot, like a lot. Right. And nobody wants more information, especially now. Now is unique as compared to 15 years ago.

[00:52:54] Bryan: Maybe 15 years ago, we really wanted a bunch of information, but now it’s overly saturated. What we want, and especially the higher ticket you charge, but I think just across the board, give me the simplest path by a trustworthy person to get what I want. Every detail is fairly negotiable. Mm-hmm. ‘Cause as a person in crisis, I don’t even know what I don’t know anyway.

[00:53:11] Bryan: Right. Like, I don’t really have much of an opinion if my marriage sucks. Is it reflective listening or do I need to like… Do I need to go… There’s a million things I could do. I don’t know. If you’re great at that, tell me and I’ll do whatever that is, and I’d rather it be three actions as opposed to 300 actions.

[00:53:25] Bryan: So just like the Bezos things, the, the quickest… Like quicker is better.

[00:53:29] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:30] Bryan: Same thing in training and coaching, like the shorter the path, the better.

[00:53:33] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:33] Bryan: Um, so the more information is not the goal. The goal is a high success rate, and if you optimize for that- I haven’t seen the scenario yet where you get to more modules and more lessons and more things.

[00:53:44] Bryan: Biochemistry. It like always brings it down. But that’s har- that’s… Like, just like doctors have to practice, you have to practice in this stuff. And I think that’s a disadvantage, of course, of membership people, they don’t have the feedback cycles.

[00:53:54] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:54] Bryan: Like, when you coach, man, like you’ll know very quickly when your stuff sucks.

[00:53:58] Grant: Right. ‘

[00:53:59] Bryan: Cause you’ll be staring the human in the face, and they’ll be viscerally mad at you that it didn’t work. And you’ll have to figure something out real time, and you get those visceral feedback cycles to know what to improve on and what to work a different scenario, a different example, or a different template, or a different suggestion for, and you’ll get better way quicker at your thing.

[00:54:13] Bryan: Mm-hmm. So yeah, not more, just simpler path to success- Yeah … for every person that hires you, no matter the format of, of product.

[00:54:22] Nathan: Grant, what you were delivering to, at the Speaker Lab, it… Was that a similar thing of narrowing down? Or w- I’m curious also if you tracked success rate and if that was something that you did in the business.

[00:54:32] Grant: Yeah, we started a couple years ago, and part of the challenge with speaking is, and this is probably true in a lot of different spaces, but it had to be self-reported. Mm-hmm. Right. So we would find sometimes- Yeah … where someone would go out, they would do, um… Like, I remember a couple times I’d, I’d talk to someone or I’d meet someone at an event, and they’re like, “I went through your program a couple years ago.

[00:54:48] Grant: I quit my job. I’m a full-time speaker.” And you’re like- … “Would’ve loved to have known that,” you know? But I, I… Most people aren’t, you know, they don’t think to, “I should go back and tell them,” you know? Right. “And give them a heads-up, ‘Hey, it worked,'” you know? Mm-hmm. So what we found was we were having to go to people proactively and just, “Hey, is it working?

[00:55:04] Grant: Can you tell us?” And so we would track a… We had a form where people would fill out, and it, it created a spreadsheet where we could track how many gigs were people doing, um, uh, how many, how much did they get paid for that? And it was also a fun internal metric that we could celebrate of like, wow, you know, in the past X number of months we’ve had, you know, speakers that we’ve helped have earned over a million dollars from speaking.

[00:55:24] Grant: Right. And it was a… Now, it was, again, self-reported, so it’s probably ideally a fraction of what it actually was, but it’s something. Yeah. You know? And so, yeah, it’s a way to, like, tangibly track that and celebrate it. But to your point, when you track it, you also find that like, oh, it’s way low- Yeah.

[00:55:40] Grant: relative to the number of people, you know? Way low it would be,

[00:55:42] Nathan: yeah.

[00:55:43] Grant: And so, um, which is, you know, you, you try to, like, balance the, all right, part of this is the nature of the beast. This is gonna be the case. And part of it is going, how much of it is the nature of the beast, and how much is ’cause our thing is just not good enough?

[00:55:55] Grant: Um- Yeah … and, like, if it’s really optimized, what would it actually be? What should it be? Um, what’s even realistic? Um, and is it possible to push that? And I know that, like, for you as a… I think you’re more of a product-minded guy, and so you’re going- How do we get 100% success rate, you know? And I think for me, I’d go like, “That sounds like a lot,” you know?

[00:56:16] Grant: But I think for you, like that, that’s what you’re wired to like figure out how do you solve that, you know? Um, and so again, some of this comes back to even the full circle of what do you want, of going, “No, I want to make the best possible product to… that’s going to get 100% success rate. And if that means I need to, you know, tinker with it to the nth degree,” but to get that, that sounds awesome.

[00:56:37] Grant: That sounds like a fun challenge worth solving. Um, and someone else may hear that and be like, “I don’t… You know, that’s… What is the good enough that I can go with,” you know? Um, and again, it’s not that one’s better or worse than the other. It’s just kind of deciding- Yeah … what makes sense for you and what you’re wired for.

[00:56:52] Bryan: There’s a, I’ll totally butcher this, is at the end of Good to Great, maybe in the appendix, it might be the last chapter. It’s gotta be on the last page or two. And, um, Jim is telling the story about his re- I think his re- one of his main research students that helped him produce that book. Again, somebody go read it and fact check it.

[00:57:11] Bryan: But at the end, he said, the guy’s like, “Jim, what if I don’t want a great business? What if I just want a good business?” And Jim was like… A- and this guy had spent hundreds of hours helping produce this study, so this guy knows, he, he’s not an outsider. He’s seen all of the fruit of that and everything. And Jim’s answer was something along the lines of nothing in all of his research has, has shown him that it’s any more work or any more time to build a great company versus a good company.

[00:57:39] Bryan: It’s just different work and different time. And I think that stuck with me of like, “Okay, well, if I could spend the next 40 years of my life working and building things of some nature, if you get to choose same work, same time, um, you have a great thing versus a good thing, I, I think I’d rather pick the great thing.

[00:57:57] Bryan: Let’s do the work needed to do that thing.” So… And there’s something in, I think innate in all of us that when we build something and it’s good and we look at it and we’re like, “That’s really cool.”

[00:58:06] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:06] Bryan: Like you clean out your garage after it’s been a mess- Yeah … and you just open the door like, “Yeah, that’s really good.”

[00:58:10] Bryan: You know, you clean out your car. You gotta go find- Go to a place

[00:58:11] Nathan: that- … find someone and be like, “Hey, the neighbor’s walking by-

[00:58:13] Bryan: Check it out … come look at the

[00:58:14] Nathan: garage.”

[00:58:15] Bryan: Yeah, so it, no matter what, this could be a huge, hugely pivotal company thing, a document you make. Like I made a, I wrote a memo last week to a client that was in the fear loop, like bad, and I hadn’t been able to get him out of it for two years.

[00:58:25] Bryan: I couldn’t figure out what to do to get him out.

[00:58:28] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:28] Bryan: And as I’m writing it, I know, I’m like, “This is like, this is fundamentally exactly… We need to pull it up above the waterline and show it to him.” And at the end of it, I went back and reread it a dozen times ’cause I was just like, “This is really good.”

[00:58:40] Bryan: Like it- Yeah … it’s just proud of making a thing. And it’s not even a public thing anybody will ever see, you know? But there’s something innate in us, at least in me, that I think all of us can feel when we do it. Like when our kid, you know, is on stage and plays the instrument and they’re just really good at or they have the basketball game.

[00:58:54] Bryan: You’re like, you’re proud of your child. Um, so if you could spend your days making great things or spend your days making good things, like let’s do this one, and let’s like call all of us to make better stuff. And my hypothesis is if we do that, we can, like, get way less good at sales and marketing, and not be great marketers, but be great people at making products that help people, because that is an…

[00:59:17] Bryan: Like, there’s so few people. This is surpri- not that there’s nobody, but there’s so few people actually playing that game. Like, that there’s just one Elon who’s ruthlessly optimizing for end result, and has done it for- Right … you know, t- 30 years now. It’s kind of sad that there’s one of them. Not that other people aren’t, but, like, man, like, pure product people who are trying to make great things.

[00:59:40] Bryan: Uh, the, the Basecamp guys, I was listening to Jason Fried interview the other day, and he talked about, um, making the envelope as thin as possible, and he called the business the envelope. He’s like, “I want the envelope basically not to exist.” Mm. Its sole goal is to contain the product, which is the letter inside of it.

[00:59:55] Bryan: And, um, you know, again, different strokes, different ways, all that stuff, but I think for me, a thing as I’ve gone longer and longer is like, man, as little of this business stuff as humanly possible is more as, like, the great thing that actually just helps humans.

[01:00:07] Nathan: All in on product.

[01:00:08] Bryan: Whatever that is. Yeah.

[01:00:09] Bryan: And everything el- And truly, ultimately at the end of the day, like, you could do or have seminars on culture and seminars on all this stuff, or you could just, like, rally a team around making a thing and that generates good culture. Mm. ‘Cause you’re not, like, doing all the trust falls or whatever crap you got going on, which is fine.

[01:00:22] Bryan: Like, do that stuff, but, like, if the thing you’re rallying around… Like, what if that needs to exist ’cause you actually aren’t focused on a problem?

[01:00:29] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:29] Bryan: And their heart is not in it, and they’re in it for the money and the bonus and the comp and all that stuff, and not for actually serving human good in whatever area you’re actually trying to help people in.

[01:00:37] Bryan: Like, what if that generated all the culture?

[01:00:39] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:39] Bryan: Uh, so I’d rather do that, like, just optimize for that thing, than any of this other stuff.

[01:00:44] Grant: Sounds like in Montana this year we’re not doing the trust fall. Yeah. Geez.

[01:00:48] Bryan: Are you

[01:00:48] Grant: gonna have it? Fix that one. The few- Hey, guys, we can’t do it this year. Brian doesn’t like it.

[01:00:52] Grant: Because Brian, he went on

[01:00:52] Nathan: a podcast, he had a rant, and we’re

[01:00:54] Grant: all- Yeah, Brian hates trust falls. Sheesh.

[01:00:58] Nathan: So I, you know, I’m hearing a few things of, like, first the focus on elimination is- Mm … key to breaking through a million. Second is obsessing over the outcomes, like, actually track the outcomes, which almost no one does.

[01:01:09] Nathan: And then the third is really learn to iterate on the product that creates those outcomes.

[01:01:14] Bryan: Yeah, at minimum, track the outcome and make decisions somewhat focused on that. And you would be in the top .01% of your market.

[01:01:22] Nathan: Right.

[01:01:22] Bryan: Like, literally, I’ve, I’ve never been in a single business conversation where really at the end of the day the question was, how do we make the product better so more people will hire us, ever.

[01:01:30] Bryan: Mm. All the questions start with we missed our revenue goal, what are the marketing- How do we do more sales and marketing? … sales things we need to hit the goal? It’s like ra- it’s rare to get

[01:01:38] Nathan: to the product conversation. You know, what’s interesting is I feel like I’ve known you… Oh, how long have we known each other?

[01:01:43] Nathan: Like, 14, 13 years at this point? Yeah. Like, it’s been a long time. Yeah. Um, and I’ve known you primarily or originally as a sales and marketing

[01:01:51] Bryan: person.

[01:01:52] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Right? And so as you’re making this shift here, and I feel like you’re always asking, okay, how do I make- sales and marketing easier and more effective.

[01:01:59] Nathan: You know what to, you know, and then you keep then as you move, move more and more, you’re like, “You know what makes it way more effective is- Just don’t need it … a great product.”

[01:02:07] Bryan: Yeah, really. I mean, it really, that’s- And a,

[01:02:08] Nathan: and a great business model, right?

[01:02:09] Bryan: Totally. Yeah, I mean, that, that is, I’m getting optimized out of sales and marketing.

[01:02:13] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:14] Bryan: Not that that’s not needed, like there’s a pl- you need to know how to take your thing to the market and get humans to know it exists. Right. So there’s a place of it. Turns out, like the amount of effort needed there if you’re just halfway trying over here, over a period of time- Mm … is not that high.

[01:02:27] Nathan: Yeah. I’m curious what mistakes you feel like you both made that, you know, you’d wanna like throw a flag out there and be like, “Hey, if you’re on this journey, maybe you could avoid a few of these- Yeah … in that path to a million or even beyond, right, as you scale to 2 million, 3 million, 5 million a year.”

[01:02:44] Grant: I think one of the challenges is, is thinking longterm- Mm

[01:02:46] Grant: um, and thinking strategically. Like it’s just so easy to what’s the next launch, what’s the next, you know, product thing that we can just spin up just to either make a buck or to- Right … I had two people who asked me, you know, about this feature, so therefore we should spend all this time, you know, creating this thing.

[01:03:01] Grant: Um, and so yeah, really intentionally thinking longterm, um, both from a place of the, of the customer and the, and the product and, and how you’re solving that problem for the, the customer, but also again, what do you want? You know? Like, um, I- What was that question? Hang on. Hang on. We’re coming full circle.

[01:03:19] Grant: All right. There’s a theme here. Gather around boys and girls. But me, like for example, um, uh, you know, we, we’ve kind of touched on this at the beginning. Um, we all like enjoy being around each other. We’re all kind of introverted. Um- Yeah … I think I’m safe to say on both of you. And so for example, um, you know, we’ve had people who’d say, “Oh, as speakers you, you should host some type of mastermind.”

[01:03:39] Grant: And I was like, “Yeah, I just don’t wanna do that.” “I don’t wanna… Are there gonna be people there?” “I’d rather stay home,” you know? Uh, and so again, it’s, it’s not that one’s better or worse than the other, but like when you look at all the different things of courses or coaching or consulting or speaking or books or, you know, any number of the things, it’s going what is a way that makes sense for the customer in terms of what’s the best possible way to solve this problem for them?

[01:04:01] Grant: But then also what do I, what do I actually want to do, you know? I don’t want to host a mastermind, you know? And there are people, uh, someone threw out the idea like, “You should have people like come over to your house.” And I was like, “I don’t want people at my house,” you know? “I don’t want you two at my house,” you know?

[01:04:15] Grant: Is that why I wasn’t invited? A little, a little- I’ve stayed at Brian’s house … that’s why we come to your house. Um, but again, you, again, you get to design it in a way that makes sense for you. So, but that means you just have to think strategically, you know, both in the, uh, not just short term, but in the long term of going is this decision leading to the type of outcome and the type of business model that I wanna have.

[01:04:35] Nathan: Yeah, that makes sense. What was the mistake in there?

[01:04:37] Grant: I think when you’re just trying to do like a, a short-term thing, so like if you’re just- Thinking short term … yeah, just trying to like spin something up and going, so for example, we’ve done, um, uh- There was one, uh, some little offer we did that we’re just like, it was…

[01:04:52] Grant: I mean, it was probably an element of just like a money grab, you know, of just like, “Hey, let’s spin this up and offer this.” And then, you know, a couple months later you’re like, “Well, we did all this work. Now what?” You know? Mm. Now you’re like back to the drawing board. And I don’t wanna be that business that’s just trying to spin up the next thing, you know, every-

[01:05:07] Nathan: Well, what’s interesting is the businesses that we operate function on leverage, like incredible amounts of leverage.

[01:05:14] Nathan: You can have a team that lives anywhere.

[01:05:16] Grant: Mm.

[01:05:16] Nathan: Reach customers that live basically anywhere.

[01:05:19] Grant: Yeah.

[01:05:19] Nathan: You can write one email, and it’s the same amount of effort if it goes to one person or 100,000 people. You c- If you’re doing group coaching- Mm … you know, there’s an element of leverage. Like, in all these things, our product fulfillment, there’s leverage everywhere.

[01:05:31] Bryan: Yeah.

[01:05:32] Nathan: Which means that we can justify certain activities that we wouldn’t normally do. So if you have an audience of 50,000 people, and you’re like, “I’m gonna spin up this product, and I’m gonna do the huge amount of work to make a new product.” But that’s fine, because I’m selling it to all, with, you know, an, a launch sequence to 50,000 people, and so it makes a bunch.

[01:05:52] Nathan: And it, I think it lets us get sloppy.

[01:05:53] Bryan: Yeah.

[01:05:54] Nathan: Where what you actually should have done is take the product that you already had- Yeah … assuming we’re past this learning and experimentation phase, and say, “How do I take the leverage of selling one thing that’s 10% better than it was three months ago, and sell that to the 50,000 people and do a better job of it?

[01:06:12] Nathan: Or how do I get in front of more people?” Yeah. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of business fundamentals that we can get sloppy on, because we’re in such a great space.

[01:06:21] Bryan: For me, there were a handful. One, um, in retrospect… None of these, most of these aren’t obvious. Mm-hmm. Just experimentation. And, and most of these I could make a solidly convincing case that you should do them, and turns out they’re really stupid.

[01:06:35] Bryan: Uh, one is spending more than 20% of my time in marketing and sales, and specifically- Mm … in content production. Um, like, if your s- if your business isn’t ads or direct revenue generated off the content- Mm … and you spend more than 20% of your time in it, like, I would highly question that. Like, are, what’s your business?

[01:06:52] Bryan: You should spend time there. Um, second one is, this one was a near… It’s been the only near death blow in 14 years now of business, and it was offering a refund-based guarantee in a highly relational product. Um, so we did, for two years we did refunds if you didn’t hit a measure of success in a short time period with our coaching- Mm

[01:07:16] Bryan: and that was an extremely bad idea. I could be convinced… I don’t know if I could be convinced now personally, just due to the trauma during that time period. But to do it with, like, less relational products like books and courses and memberships- Mm … and stuff like that, I think there’s prob- Or even in agency land.

[01:07:29] Bryan: I would totally do it in agency land, where you control the variables or the vast majority of them. But in coaching, where it’s literally long obedience in the same direction over 6, 12 plus months to get- Mm … a very hard to achieve result- What you need when somebody’s not winning is to drive them deeper into a relationship, not the exit hatch.

[01:07:46] Nathan: Right.

[01:07:46] Bryan: Um, so that one was tough. The, the third one-

[01:07:49] Nathan: Well, and just to dive in on that for a second. Yeah. It sounds like such a good thing to do. If you believe in your success rate-

[01:07:54] Bryan: Yeah …

[01:07:55] Nathan: and you believe in your product, then, well, of course. Sounds obvious. We believe in it so much that we have a money-back guarantee if we don’t help you achieve- Yeah

[01:08:03] Nathan: this outcome. But what you’re getting at is it actually… W- what I heard in that is it makes the product worse. Because as I go through it, you’re coaching me towards this outcome, I’m… We’re three months in. Well, we’re getting some traction, but it’s really hard. You told me it’d be hard, but it’s, like, really hard.

[01:08:19] Bryan: Yeah.

[01:08:20] Nathan: And then we’re coming up on the, the money-back guarantee.

[01:08:23] Bryan: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:23] Nathan: Do I dive in and, like, do everything it takes to make this successful- Yeah … which you told me I need to do, or do I go, “Oh, let me put in less effort and see. You didn’t do… provide what you needed as a coach, so actually I’ll just take my money back”?

[01:08:36] Nathan: Oh. And we become misaligned.

[01:08:37] Bryan: Oh, it’s total misalignment. Like, or the interest or the op- It’s like gyms. They’re not optimized for you to get fit. Mm. They’re optimized for you not to come. Like, literally, if you came… If every Planet Fitness member came to Planet Fitness is they would shut down- Right … from overwhelm.

[01:08:49] Bryan: Their, their business is for you not to come. They charge you just enough money to get your money and make you not come. ‘Cause if all of you showed up, there would be no m- machines or weights for you to work out on. Yeah, and the refund thing is, phew, boy, it is brutal. It creates horribly framed clients- Mm-hmm

[01:09:04] Bryan: who in, uh, that, who don’t push through the trough or the dip- Yeah … as Seth Godin calls it. Like, when you g- Like, it… You will get to a hard part in any hard to achieve result. What happens when you get there? That’s the entire question.

[01:09:15] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:15] Bryan: Um, and if you frame everything up when you’re fulfilling coaching to tell them about that dip, talk to them about it ahead of time, get them before they get there, get them so much momentum when they get in it, it’s still hard.

[01:09:25] Bryan: They still might quit. But if they have acceleration coming out of it, like, they’ll get through the other side. But boy, if you tell them, “You can have all your money back, and it’s our fault if you hit the dip,” like, they’ll take you up on it and blame you the entire time, no matter what. Right. It’s like…

[01:09:39] Bryan: And that’s br- that is brutally hard. We’d never had a reputation problem ever until those two years. Mm. And then as we exit out of that, no reputation problem again. And that’s our… That’s me, totally. Yeah. Totally my fault. But that would say stay… If you’re in coaching, never ever offer a refund basic- You can do guarantees, actually, but they should push you deeper into a relationship, not further away from relationship.

[01:09:59] Bryan: Um, I could keep going. I got a, I got a blog post I’m working on on top dumb mistakes I’ve ever done. And those are a couple of them.

[01:10:05] Grant: When, when I got started as a speaker, I remember, uh, there’s a mentor of mine who, who said, like, you- as speakers, like, you’re just looking forward to the, the 1% of, like, I stand on stage and I speak and- Right

[01:10:15] Grant: people clap for me, and they laugh at jokes. That’s- That’s awesome … that’s 90% of the

[01:10:17] Nathan: business,

[01:10:17] Grant: right? You know, that’s awesome. And he said, like, the, the reality is, is like, that’s, you know, 5% of the business. Mm-hmm. And you have to… He said you have to fall in love with the process. Mm-hmm. And so the idea of, you know, from like a health or fitness or nutrition space, like, we all wanna, like, stand in front of a mirror and not cry and-

[01:10:32] Grant: feel good about ourselves, but the reality is, like, you have to fall in love with, like, getting up early and lifting heavy things- Yeah … and eating kale and not cookies. And, like, all these things, you’re like, “I want the end result,” but that, what you just described, is not fun. That doesn’t sound good at all, you know?

[01:10:46] Grant: So, um, you can probably tell, we worked out this morning, uh- I can tell. We, you know- Oh, yeah. … it’s pretty obvious. The pump stays for a little while. Um, but it… Where am I going with that? But it’s one of those, like, I mean, even this morning, there’s times where you’re just like, “I don’t wanna get up,” you know, get up at 4:45 to go lift, and you’re lifting things.

[01:11:04] Grant: You’re like, “Are there lighter ones? Where are the pink ones?” “Uh, this, this is heavy. This is hard.” You should’ve found a pink

[01:11:09] Bryan: band this morning.

[01:11:10] Grant: That was, that was cute. This… It was so much simpler. Like, I don’t know why we’re not doing that. Um, but, like, if you want to be in shape and you wanna stay, um, you know, uh, not cry when you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, like, you just have to do the hard thing.

[01:11:21] Grant: And if you are building a speaking business or course business or a coaching business or a, a SAS or whatever it may be, like, there’s just a lot of parts that just suck really, really bad. Mm-hmm. And so you just kinda have to fall in love with the process of going like, “This sucks, and it’s still worth it.”

[01:11:36] Grant: It’s like marriage, you know? Like, we all have really good marriages, but it doesn’t mean marriage is perfect, and so you just have to know going… We attended a wedding a week or two ago, and you’re watching these children get married. And you’re like, “You don’t know what you’re getting into.” Oh, yeah. “Oh, it’s gonna suck,” you know?

[01:11:51] Grant: But, like, you just have to know, like, yeah, but we’re in it. Mm-hmm. And that’s fine. Like, yeah, I’m gonna do whatever it takes. I’m gonna push through the trough. I’m gonna push through the dip. I’m gonna push through the suck ’cause I know it’s worth it to, to stick with it.

[01:12:02] Nathan: Well, and that’s the thing that I’ve really respect about both of you and your businesses is the amount of time that you’ve done it, right?

[01:12:09] Nathan: And so it’s not just how we’ve all built businesses where, uh, it’s more than our personal brand or the style that we’ve done it or the teams we’ve done it with. It’s like, no, we’ve been at this for a very long time. And there’s a lot of different, as you brought up earlier, there’s a lot of different seasons that come-

[01:12:23] Bryan: Mm-hmm

[01:12:23] Nathan: within that. And so we get to be the examples of like, hey, look, there’s staying power- Yeah … in obsessing over these problems and serving these people.

[01:12:30] Bryan: Yeah, the shelf life is just the owner’s in- attention.

[01:12:33] Nathan: Right.

[01:12:33] Bryan: I don’t think there’s shelf life in these fundamental problems. It is like, do you wanna keep doing it?

[01:12:37] Bryan: If so- Mm-hmm … you can. Like, there’s always a way. Uh, but if you get sick of it, that’s okay, too. Right. You can just quit. You can move on. Like, that’s- Mm-hmm … perfectly s- perfectly fine. Let me share one more mistake- Yeah … real quick before we move on. Um, I think I stopped getting my hands dirty way too soon.

[01:12:52] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Okay.

[01:12:52] Bryan: I think I listened to delegation, and I listened to a lot of that, and there’s, there- there’s, there’s some little paradox here of- The number of… Like, we run a coaching company, and if you’re a human at the company and you don’t coach at a coaching company, you’re probably at the wrong business.

[01:13:06] Bryan: Mm. You’re probably in the wrong business. Like, if I’m l- I, I was actually watching this, uh, famous pastor guy about a year ago, and I remember watching him, I was like, “I really like you a lot.” But then I had this thought in my head, very judgy thought, and it was like, but if you aren’t working with married couples when you get down, like, if you don’t have a, a marriage counseling session to go to on Tuesday, I would be really sad.

[01:13:25] Bryan: If you’re really just a great public speaker-

[01:13:27] Grant: Mm …

[01:13:28] Bryan: like, that’d be a bummer, because you’re teaching from theory, not practice. Like, your hands aren’t dirty. And I, I literally, that whole conversation happened in my head and I was like, “Ah, crap.” Like, the percentage of my time spent helping people do the thing- Mm-hmm

[01:13:41] Bryan: really low. So we’ve started changing internally. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re close. Like, 80% of everybody’s time, everybody’s time, should be spent helping people- Mm … or the envelope needs to get thinner. Like, why, why do we need that? Like, can we get rid of that activity? Can AI replace that activity?

[01:13:56] Bryan: Can we just… More time, hands dirty, hands-on. And you can feel it in strategy meetings or planning calls or Zoom calls when, when people are talking about a thing- Mm … they can kind of remember from three years ago. And that’s another… To call back to base camp, they did this a few years back, uh, Jason and the other guy.

[01:14:14] Bryan: Yeah. Said they were gonna stop giving advice on startups ’cause it had been 20, 30 years since they had started the company. They’re like, “We don’t know anymore.”

[01:14:21] Nathan: Mm.

[01:14:22] Bryan: I was like, that- I respect that … major respect to that. Like, yeah. So, like, ke- I would keep my hands way dirtier. Mm-hmm. Like, more, more important than product market fit is product founder fit.

[01:14:33] Bryan: Like, it needs to match you or just keep, keep an experimentation phase as long as it takes to find that thing that you want to be hands-on with. Um, and then stay there and be, be hands-on with that. So I think I backed away way too quick, especially in a coaching company whose job is to actually help people.

[01:14:49] Bryan: Um, so I would change that, if I could go back.

[01:14:51] Nathan: Yeah. I think that’s so important because as you build a team of any kind of scale, which many creators listening to this are, then you’re like, okay, you have to delegate. And we say all this, right? And you, you gotta measure and you gotta move up a level. You have to trust your team and- Yeah

[01:15:05] Nathan: um, which is all 100% true.

[01:15:07] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:08] Nathan: But you can get in a position where you don’t understand the actual experience of the product you sell. You don’t understand your customers. You don’t understand how the market has shifted. And that was… On the flight over here, I was reading Eric Jorgensen’s new book.

[01:15:20] Nathan: Which

[01:15:20] Grant: flight? You have a couple to get here.

[01:15:22] Nathan: On the, uh, on the short- Six connection. On the short- Oh, okay. I’ll just clarify … Atlanta to Nashville flight. Got it. Which I wish there was a direct flight. Uh-huh. Uh, I was reading Eric Jorgensen’s, uh, The Book of Elon. Mm-hmm. Where he’s just got Elon, in his own words, you know, talking through this, and that man is operating at a scale so far beyond what we can even imagine, and is, like, in the details.

[01:15:47] Bryan: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:48] Nathan: And to him, it’s like, it’s a sign of respect to his team, of, like, asking… You know, they’re not like, “Oh, you don’t trust me? You’re second guessing what I’m doing?” He’s like- No, I believe in you so much, I’m fundamentally questioning, like, do you have… You know, is this how the physics work? Is this what, you know…

[01:16:03] Nathan: Can we eliminate more of these parts or any of those things? And I think you have to be in the details, and anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t belong in your company.

[01:16:10] Bryan: And there’s some paradox in that.

[01:16:11] Nathan: Yeah. ‘

[01:16:12] Bryan: Cause nothing wrong with delegation, nothing wrong with having a couple of levels-

[01:16:15] Nathan: It’s necessary

[01:16:15] Bryan: in the business as the business grows. Yet Elon, when there’s a problem, he skips all of that- Mm-hmm … all of that s- infrastructure, and goes to the frontline engineer and stares at the problem with him, and they problem. He doesn’t get a report to the report to the report up to him. Mm-hmm. He just goes to the problem and problem solves it with him, and that…

[01:16:33] Bryan: Like, it isn’t like he goes and, and says like, “Hey, I wanna learn how everything works.” He knows how it works because every day he’s continuing going to the front line. Mm-hmm. So he just by nature knows how it works because he’s helped design it, and is in the act of problem-solving process. His hands are dirty.

[01:16:48] Bryan: Mm-hmm. Sleeps on the shop floor when there’s an existential threat. It’s like that. And if you’re not willing to do that, like, I don’t know. Like, are you in the right business? Mm-hmm. I, I would question, like, if you found product founder fit yet. Yeah. If you just don’t have an inherent drive to do your version of that.

[01:17:02] Bryan: Not exactly that, but… And in these creator businesses in the sub-$1 million range, like, there’s not that many of you anyway. Uh, but optimizing for getting out of helping people or out of whatever the active part of the business is. Like, I love that you do this show ’cause it keeps you in… Like, if you’re not doing email marketing-

[01:17:19] Nathan: Right

[01:17:19] Bryan: and using Kit, your product will be worse.

[01:17:21] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:17:21] Bryan: But if you’re actively using it and finding the dumb stuff, ’cause there’s, there has to be plenty of dumb things. Oh,

[01:17:26] Nathan: yes.

[01:17:27] Bryan: And if you go use A Lovable and you’re like, “This is magical. How in the world?” Like, it took me 27 clicks to send this newsletter.

[01:17:31] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:17:32] Bryan: And I would love if you do all of that. You have no… Like, just go do it all yourself so that you get to see what every creator goes through. And it’s like, if I could eliminate these 27 clicks by just talking to the thing, you’re gonna get that feature launch in three days, and now it’s gonna fundamentally change every client experience that ConvertKit customers have.

[01:17:47] Bryan: Mm-hmm. Like, that feedback loop is, is huge, but you have to fundamentally like email marketing or you won’t do any of that. Right. Yeah. And if you’re optimizing for, like, getting out as quick as possible… Like, we all came up in an executive assistant heyday or virtual assistant heyday-

[01:18:01] Nathan: Yes …

[01:18:01] Bryan: when the goal was delegate every task you possibly can.

[01:18:05] Bryan: But it disconnects you with the real user experience in a way that, like, I, I substantially discounted, and I think it hurt us for a long time.

[01:18:12] Nathan: There are these times where we want to obsessively solve problems or we’re like… Or, or we’ve talked about experimentation as a season, and we’ve talked about this, like, focus to scale.

[01:18:22] Nathan: And then we’ve all been at this game for a long time, and so there’s nothing wrong with those different seasons where you’re like, “Okay, it’s time to, time to do something else,” whether that’s a different business, whether it’s to exit this. Grant, as you’ve looked at the next phase of The Speaker Lab, I’m curious how your thought process was of- Um, like what?

[01:18:40] Nathan: 13 years in to the speaker life?

[01:18:42] Grant: Yeah, 11, 12. Yeah. Something like that.

[01:18:43] Nathan: A long time.

[01:18:44] Grant: Yeah. Yeah, we, um, uh… And I think, you know, several things that you just said there, Brian, that when I got started, um, speaking, I was like, man, I, I had a lot of people starting to ask me, like, “Hey, I wanna be a speaker. How do I do that?”

[01:18:57] Grant: Mm-hmm. And so I was in the weeds speaking, and then also starting to teach people, “Here’s what I’m doing right now. I just did a gig. Let me tell you what, what’s working.” Well, you know, as the business got bigger and bigger, I was doing less speaking. I didn’t wanna be on the road as much. Mm-hmm. And so, I mean, fast-forward to today, and like I haven’t done a keynote in years, you know?

[01:19:15] Grant: And so now we’ve had a, a lot of coaches and people who are like actively speaking, and I’m pointing to them. This kind of goes back to like I don’t want it to be the Grant show. I’m going, “No, no, this is why we have an Eric or Dan or whoever of- Yeah … this is why they are on the front lines teaching the thing.

[01:19:28] Grant: But to your point, like it’s been a minute since I’ve been on a stage. It’s been a minute since I’ve been doing the thing. And so, you know, to, to, you know, your point and your question of, we got to a point where last year we kind of hit a ceiling in growth. And I wouldn’t say I was burned out, but I was just, I was just kind of tired and going like, “I, I’m not as obsessed about this problem as I once was, and I don’t really know what to do or where to go from here.”

[01:19:55] Grant: Mm-hmm. And so, you know, we were kind of thinking through some of the different scenarios and options of like, what do we do? Do we sell this, or do we just crash this into the earth? Or like, you know, what are the, the scenarios or options here? And, uh, we made the decision a couple months ago to actually start to just wind down the business.

[01:20:12] Grant: Mm. And feel like it, it… I was no longer as obsessed with it, with the solving the problem, and going, “I think I personally had done all that I knew to do.” And so we were kind of on that path. We’d since, um, sold the business to a, a couple of employees. But I think it goes to, um, uh, for me and, and figuring out how I’m wired of going like, “What, what, um, what is the thing that I’m passionate about?

[01:20:40] Grant: What is the thing that I wanna be doing? And is this the thing that, um, I’m currently doing? Is there a different way to go about doing it?” And, you know, where do we go from, where do we go from here when you get to a point in your business? And I think we’ve, you know, we’ve all been that, to that point of going, is…

[01:20:55] Grant: Like a, a good reflective question I like to ask is like, is this a season or is this the way it is? And if it’s a season, like, okay, you can ride that out, and you can accommodate that and get through that. But if this is the way it is, then something has to change. Um, and so, uh, yeah, that was definitely like a introspective, um, uh, journey for me of just figuring out, like what- Mm-hmm

[01:21:18] Grant: what do I want? And it’s, uh, as simple of a question as it is, it’s really freaking hard to answer and, and get clarity on.

[01:21:25] Nathan: Yeah. I mean, it’s that, like we’re talking about you have to obsess over the product and the customer and all of this and to get to the next level. And so when you get to the point where you’re like, “Actually, I don’t- Those aren’t the things that I wanna obsess over

[01:21:35] Grant: Yeah.

[01:21:36] Nathan: Brian, I’m curious, as, you know- Mm … uh, you and Grant hang out a lot and all that, and you had to have a front row seat to this transition. Like, what are the things- Yeah … that you noticed that if another founder, another creator is going through that, like, types of questions that you would suggest or what would come up?

[01:21:52] Nathan: Or just anything you noticed in that transition.

[01:21:54] Bryan: In the hard part of last year for him, I asked him at some point, ’cause as the growth was slowing, you know, there’s a whole set of questions you ask there. And, um, they were working through internally, and I asked him at some point, I think this was, like, November, December, I was like, “Hey, this is fixable.”

[01:22:08] Nathan: Mm. ”

[01:22:08] Bryan: Do you wanna fix it? ‘Cause, you know, you for sure can fix it.” Right. “Like, it is a thing you can work through. You can get on the other side, and you can be healthier and better- Mm … and more profitable than ever. But, like, this is what those set of activities are. We’ve run them one time. They’re not super pleasurable

[01:22:24] Bryan: But, like, there’s things you can do. Like, and it totally, totally works. And, uh, like, do you wanna do that?” And he was like, “No.” I was like, “Cool. Great.” Like- It’s

[01:22:32] Nathan: clarity …

[01:22:33] Bryan: go execute. Yeah. And it was like- Yeah … that was re- I think I’ve majorly respected that, and I think a lot of creators need to hear that. Like, if you’re 10, 15, 20 years in, maybe 5 years in-

[01:22:42] Nathan: Mm-hmm

[01:22:43] Bryan: and it’s like you’re not in love with the problem anymore, you’re not in love with the customer anymore, and it’s just really, really hard, you can just shut it down.

[01:22:51] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:22:52] Bryan: You can just say, “Eh, I’m done,” and just shut the thing off. And I think, I don’t know of another example of that. And y’all have sold to employees and all that.

[01:23:01] Bryan: Like, it wound up with a really good ending to it, but, like, I know very few people who have just walked away- Mm-hmm … and said that, and had enough emotion- like, healthy emotional detachment. For me, me and Grant were wrestling with this together over those couple months. I think I have too much identity in my company to just shut it down.

[01:23:22] Bryan: Yeah. And most people I observe and most clients I’ve worked with, there’s way much, part of who they are is that thing.

[01:23:27] Nathan: Right.

[01:23:27] Bryan: And if it were to be gone, it’s, it’s what a lot of people that sell experience actually. They sell the company, and all of a sudden, now what do I do? And there’s a whole- Like a full-on

[01:23:34] Nathan: identity crisis

[01:23:35] Bryan: existential crisis. Yeah. Yeah. Because that was a huge part of them, and I think Grant might be slightly psychotic, because I don’t think he has any of that. Or you’re really good at hiding it, one of the two.

[01:23:45] Nathan: No identity crisis that

[01:23:47] Bryan: came along. It’s like no identity tied into business. I think that’s hard to do, actually, and Grant’s done it really, really well.

[01:23:53] Bryan: So I think there’s just permission to, you can just end it. Mm. Like, that’s okay. Um, and it was liberating to me. Like, I don’t wanna end my thing. Like, I’m, I’m in. But, like, there’s a place in my mind of like, hmm, okay. Well, if there comes a point, there’s at least a data set of one now of somebody that did that in a really healthy way.

[01:24:07] Bryan: Um, didn’t hide it, didn’t not talk about it, but moved on to the next thing. Right. So that’s, that’s really cool.

[01:24:13] Grant: Yeah. I think even when we were in Montana a couple months ago, you know, one of these guys we were talking with, I, uh, was chatting with him a couple months ago. And I was telling him kind of similar of just going like, “I don’t know where to go from here.

[01:24:25] Grant: I’m not really sure, you know, what to do next.” And he was telling me about, I think it was someone, a friend of his in the concrete business, and he said he just got to a point where he just didn’t want to do it anymore and, and he just closed. And I was like, “That’s a thing?” You can do that? You can do that, you know?

[01:24:39] Grant: But by contrast- Yeah … I remember, um, like over the holiday break there’s a, um, I think, like, an email newsletter or something I’m on, and a lady was building, like, a, a big media company or something. And I kind of loosely followed it from afar. Totally different industry or space, but, um, she sent out an email of saying like, “Hey, I just had to file bankruptcy.”

[01:24:58] Grant: Mm. “And, like, none of my employees are getting paid and none of my, um, vendors and partners and customers-” Mm … “Ev- everybody’s screwed in the process,” you know? And I was just like, “Well, we’re nowhere near that, but I don’t want to get to that point.” Right. You know? Like, there’s just far… I think there’s far too many, um, entrepreneurs who think, you know, “I am, I am so chained to…”

[01:25:19] Grant: I heard someone describe it like you, as an entrepreneur, you’re on a road trip with a bunch of people in the car, but you’re the only one that’s handcuffed to the car. Mm. And you’re stuck, you’re trapped, you know? And so- Everybody else,

[01:25:29] Nathan: they’re like, “We don’t actually like where it’s going.” Yeah. “This

[01:25:31] Grant: car

[01:25:31] Nathan: is

[01:25:32] Grant: kind of a piece

[01:25:32] Nathan: of junk.”

[01:25:32] Nathan: And they, like- “Whatever.

[01:25:33] Grant: They can all leave.”

[01:25:34] Nathan: There’s

[01:25:34] Grant: something, there’s something to be said for sure of the people who are like- Yeah … “I’m… You know, I got, I mortgaged my house. I sold out my 401. Uh, I did everything to, like, make this work. I’m all in.” And, like, that’s awesome, and there’s been seasons where I felt like, “Yes, I will do those things if that’s what it takes to make this happen.”

[01:25:50] Grant: And I got to a point where I was like, “I don’t feel that way.” Mm. “And I also don’t want to, um… Like, we’re not gonna file bankruptcy.” Yeah. “And we’re not gonna get anywhere near that, and I’m not gonna jeopardize, you know, the healthy spot that we’re in financially, you know, for our family.” Um, and so what, what are the other outcomes?

[01:26:09] Grant: What are the other options, you know? Versus feeling like you’re just stuck, you’re just trapped. Mm. You know? And I think a lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs feel that way and don’t feel like they have any choice, either from a financials perspective or from an identity perspective. And, like, all those things are, like, real factors, you know, for sure.

[01:26:25] Grant: Mm. And, like, the identity thing of going, “Uh, well, now what? What does that mean?” You know? And, you know, people ask you, “What are, what are you doing now?” And, like, you’ve always had your token answer.

[01:26:35] Bryan: Mm.

[01:26:36] Grant: And so now, you know, what, what does that look like or what does that

[01:26:39] Nathan: mean? Now you’re unemployed and podcasting- I’m unemployed

[01:26:41] Nathan: at 11:00 AM on a Monday. It’s, it’s not

[01:26:43] Grant: too bad actually, you know?

[01:26:44] Bryan: I want to summarize this, because I want to make sure everybody’s tracking with the story. You’ve had a very successful business. You’ve been in the- Mm … Inc. 5000 many years in a row. Very profitable. Big team. Same topic for 10, 15 years. And then you had a hard year in ’25…

[01:27:04] Bryan: or ’24, ’25, in that- Mm … p- period. You’re looking at the problem and you’re like, “Actually, I don’t even want to solve it this time. I’ve solved it in the past, versions of this, but, like, the problem is no longer, for me, like, majorly intrinsically driving. I’m not doing the thing actively myself.” Like, I think I just wanna move on.

[01:27:22] Bryan: So you said, “I think I’m done,” and then a period of time played out, and then you wound up selling the company to employees. Like, that’s really cool.

[01:27:31] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[01:27:31] Bryan: Like, the business never crashed. The thing never fell apart. It’s still profitable, still operational, still helpful.

[01:27:39] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[01:27:39] Bryan: And you were so healthy with your dynamic with the company, you’re able to walk away from it and actually leave it in better hands.

[01:27:47] Bryan: So anybody listening, you can do a version of that.

[01:27:50] Grant: Yeah. And I, I mean, I… Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. Um, and yeah. I mean, we had, like s- um, some hard months, but, like, we… The whole time we were in business, we never lost money on an annual basis. But the, um… I mean, I do remember the conversation at the gym where you’re like, “Do you wanna fix this?”

[01:28:07] Grant: Mm-hmm. And I would totally agree that, like, every problem in business is fixable, you know? Right. And it’s very… I think you, you talked about it from, like, a marriage perspective of going, you know, if you look at your marriage and if you’re in a bad spot, you go, “Do you want to fix this?” Well, if you want to fix this, if mentally, emotionally you’re connected and you’re all in, you’ll figure out a way.

[01:28:25] Grant: But if you’re like, “Eh, I don’t really wanna fix this. I wanna move on,” like, it, it doesn’t matter what the solution is, you’re not gonna do it anyway. Right. You know? And so yeah, I think I was at a point of going like, “No, I think, I think I’m good.” Like, I’ve had a really good run. And so I don’t feel any winding it down.

[01:28:39] Grant: I don’t feel any regret or sadness or second-guessing- Mm-hmm … or woe is me. I feel like, man, we had a really good run. We generated, you know, a lot of revenue, a lot of profit. We helped a ton of people. We made a big difference for our team members and our employees. We did more, you know, in our little business than a lot of businesses do, and I feel enormous gratitude for that, you know?

[01:28:58] Grant: And at the same time recognizing, like, we had a great run. What’s next, you know? Yeah. It’s kind of like, um, you know, uh, Steve Martin going from stand-up comedy to playing the banjo, you know? It’s like, well, those things are different, you know? But he just- Are you gonna

[01:29:12] Bryan: play the banjo?

[01:29:13] Grant: I don’t think so.

[01:29:15] Bryan: Flute? I’m- More of a clarinet guy. Piccol-

[01:29:17] Grant: piccolo. Piccolo? Whatever.

[01:29:19] Nathan: One example of that is, uh, Daniel Radcliffe who played Harry Potter.

[01:29:22] Bryan: Mm.

[01:29:23] Nathan: He is now d- he has this one-man show that he does- In Bro- yeah … to, to a small theater. Mm-hmm. He’s, like, super eng- like, he passes out props to the audience members- Yeah, yeah

[01:29:31] Nathan: to get them to interact and all of that. Yeah.

[01:29:32] Grant: And,

[01:29:33] Nathan: like, you can add up… He’s not making that much money off of it because- Yeah … it’s not that big of a theater. You know, at least compared to movie… But he’s like, “No, I’m done doing that. I… Like, this is what I wanna do right now.”

[01:29:43] Bryan: And he has enough. Like, I, I wonder how much of what we do- Mm

[01:29:48] Bryan: is based on we need more money.

[01:29:51] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:29:51] Bryan: Versus, like, is that what you should be doing?

[01:29:54] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:29:54] Bryan: Like, if you didn’t make money your number one optimization point, and what if you had enough now? Like, what would you do? Not if you had $100 million in the bank, ’cause that’d probably jack us all up even more. But, like, now.

[01:30:06] Bryan: But what if you had right now was enough? Mm. Like, what would you fundamentally do different? And I love, I love that. I love Jewel. She tells a story on Rogan several years ago. She was homeless, sleeping in her car, playing, like, eight hours a day at a coffee shop on La Jolla Beach. And, uh, then she got known.

[01:30:21] Bryan: Like, people started hearing her, and some DJ played her song on the, on the radio. And all of a sudden, like, every day, another record label limousine would pull up trying to give her a deal, and this record label pulled up, gave her a million-dollar deal, and she turned it down as a homeless person sleeping in her car.

[01:30:36] Bryan: And wound up signing a deal a few months later and getting a great gig, because they were gonna own the catalog or however- Yeah … record labels work or whatever. But, um, man, there, there’s a part of that that, like, man, if money isn’t the number one thing-

[01:30:46] Nathan: Mm-hmm …

[01:30:47] Bryan: and helping people is, and producing great stuff is, the money comes.

[01:30:51] Bryan: And I think it comes in way cooler ways. Like Radcliffe doing that is, like, my desi- my esteem of him just goes through the roof.

[01:30:57] Grant: Yeah. What was the quote, you just talked about this on, on the podcast, the comedian who was getting heckled, and he said, “How much money you have? 100 money.”

[01:31:04] Nathan: Oh, yeah.

[01:31:05] Grant: Uh- And, but his answer- It’s Jimmy

[01:31:07] Nathan: Carr

[01:31:07] Grant: yeah, his answer of, “If I had more money, it wouldn’t change what I would… I would still be doing-” Yeah, his definition of rich. You know? Yeah.

[01:31:14] Nathan: Mm.

[01:31:14] Grant: Which is a great answer, you know? Yeah. Of like, “If you, if you could do this thing for free, would you do that?” Um, uh, and, “If you had infinite money, you know, would you keep doing that same thing?”

[01:31:23] Nathan: Yeah, that’s good. This has been super fun to dive into the journey and- Mm … and all of that, and see, like, the full range of it. I appreciate you guys sharing that because I’ve had a front row seat to it- Mm … for both of you. You guys have had a front row seat to, uh, me as I’ve grown up and all of this. One thing that I did ask, uh, you to bring, and I was curious if you have them, is, uh, uh, if there’s any books.

[01:31:40] Nathan: Mm. ‘Cause we have this ability to, like, grab a book and dive into someone’s mind, and we’ve quoted lots of books that have had an impact on us, but any books that come to mind on that journey that have been particularly helpful?

[01:31:51] Grant: I mean, the, the one I, I had in mind was actually one we, we’ve kind of loosely referenced here, but the guys from, um, 37signals basically- Yeah

[01:31:57] Grant: you know. It’s an older book, 15, 20 years old, uh, Rework- Mm … um, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Um, but they just talk about, like, counterintuitive ways to run a business- Yeah … and how to think about entrepreneurship. And, you know, again, it’s 15, 20 years old, but it still, it still holds up. Uh, in terms of just- Do it on your terms

[01:32:15] Grant: yeah, just, uh, and again, goes back to what we talked about at the beginning of, like, you get to design the rules of the game in a way that makes sense for you, you know? Mm-hmm. And so if you wanna build a SAS company, you get to choose. You don’t have to build it like, you know, fill-in-the-blank company did.

[01:32:29] Grant: Um, and so yeah, that’s a, a great one. I love that. Brian, what about you?

[01:32:33] Bryan: Got two. One is Stop Guessing by Nat Green.

[01:32:37] Nathan: I’ve never heard of that one. I like

[01:32:38] Bryan: that. Oh, it’s great. Like, I’ve never… Yeah, I literally one day, I was like, “I gotta teach the team how to problem solve.” So I start trying to like, “All right, how do I problem solve?”

[01:32:47] Bryan: Oh, crap, I don’t know either. I just guess and- Yeah … maybe my rate is 5% higher than the, than the normal person. So I Google problem-solving books, and the first one on the list was this book, Stop Guessing, and it is, it, it is awesome. Um, he tells a story in the very beginning. I’ll try to make it short, but he tells a story of this manufacturing company.

[01:33:06] Bryan: I think they make toilet paper. And the marketing team have developed a new version of double rolls or something, 24 in a pack or something like that for the first time. Uh, and it sells extremely well, but this warehouse can’t keep up with production because the, the machine that wraps the toilet paper, you can’t turn it up past a five out of 10 on the speed knob, or it just, you know, shakes and throws toilet paper off the line.

[01:33:29] Bryan: Literally, they’re having to work triple shifts, and even then can’t keep up, so they’re gonna have to start limiting volume of paper they sell because their machine… And they can’t take the machine out to put a new machine in because they’d have to rip the whole warehouse apart. It’d be a multi-month process, cost $10 million, et cetera.

[01:33:44] Bryan: Uh, so they bring these manufacturers in, and the, the manufacturer of the machine in, and the consultants in, and all this stuff. This is the opening story of the book. You… Like, go read this story ’cause it will… When you talk about simplicity, it has fundamentally, like, rewired my brain, um, in such good ways.

[01:34:00] Bryan: So they bring people in, they’re studying it, they’re giving quotes, and all these different super complex solutions. There’s actually a line now we quote internally and into clients sometimes, and it is, “Refuse complex solutions.”

[01:34:10] Nathan: Mm.

[01:34:11] Bryan: And if you do that long enough, the utterly simple solution always appears.

[01:34:15] Bryan: It’s al- And it’s… It actually takes legit faith because you can’t imagine what a incredibly simple solution would be to these persistent problems, like these complicated and long-standing problems. Uh, but once you see a few cycles of it, you always know it’s there. You just gotta wait and, like, actually make those things go away.

[01:34:32] Bryan: So found out they didn’t buy the $10 million conveyor system. They didn’t shut down the line. They didn’t stop sales and marketing. Um, this consultant comes in, Matt Greer, and the writer of the book. He d- My favorite part is he doesn’t solve the problem either, but he’s talking with the different people, understanding the issues, looking at the machine and all this stuff.

[01:34:46] Bryan: And finally one night, like the overnight mechanic guy is sitting there looking at the machine in the middle of the night, like trying to figure out, “What is the problem with this thing?” So he shuts down the line for a minute, and he gets a ladder, and he climbs up on top and looks down into the machine, which you can’t do when toilet paper’s running through it because you can’t see anything in it.

[01:35:05] Bryan: And he, he’s looking at it, and it’s running fine at, like, a three out of 10 on the speed scale. But as he turns it up to a five and a six, it starts vibrating a little bit. And as he turns it up to an eight, every now and then he could see something kind of like poke out a little bit. He’s like, “What is that?”

[01:35:18] Bryan: So he turns it up to a 10, and by the time he get to a 10, the whole machine’s rattling. Whatever this thing in there is, is like poking in and out and all this. So he shuts the machine off, takes the side panel off, and he kind of gets his hand up in there and, and pulls out this little one-and-a-quarter inch bolt.

[01:35:35] Bryan: And somewhere along the way, this little bolt had fallen off of… Somebody had dropped it in there, whatever. Turns out the only reason they couldn’t keep up with tens of millions of dollars of demand and had to run three shifts and were about to spend $15 million was a 50 cent bolt had fallen off, and whenever the s- at, like, five out of 10, the bolt didn’t stick out.

[01:35:55] Bryan: But at six, seven, eight out of 10 on the speed thing, it would stick out and grab the shrink wrap and throw the whole thing everywhere. Took the bolt out, slapped the side panel on, turned it a 10 out of 10, and the line run, run, run per- r- run perfectly well And the whole book is outlining like, all right, how do you do that?

[01:36:10] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[01:36:11] Bryan: And it gives you a little bit of a framework and process, uh, to do that, to find utterly simple solutions to these highly persistent problems. They give a frame of most of us solution guess, we don’t problem solve. An example he shares is like if a light bulb goes out in your house, what do you do?

[01:36:26] Bryan: You go get another light bulb and put it in. That’s a guess, ’cause you guessed- Yeah … the problem was the light bulb first, which is fine actually. It’s a very reasonable thing to do. But if you do that in business or in other areas of life that have these persistent problems where your solution guessing hasn’t solved it, you need another approach, and the book kind of outlines a really cool way to methodically go through some of these.

[01:36:45] Bryan: And as we’ve done that in business, like it’s been wildly cool- Mm … to find these like incredibly simple, uh, solutions to these complex problems. So anyway, the book kind of goes through that. Stop

[01:36:55] Grant: guessing. Rework is really neat.

[01:36:58] Bryan: Stop Guessing, Not- I like

[01:37:00] Grant: it.

[01:37:00] Bryan: I like it … Great Book.

[01:37:01] Grant: You said you had a second one?

[01:37:02] Bryan: The other book is called Wealth, Riches, and Money by Craig Hill. It’s one of those books if you look at, looks super janky, self-published from the ’80s. Probably is all of those things. Uh, but there’s a coup- two, two things I’ve seen myself and clients I work with, other founders struggle with the most is our view on money, and it comes out in ways that doesn’t look like it’s about money at all.

[01:37:23] Bryan: But, um, but it is great for tearing that down. Like I realized for myself about a year ago, a year and a half ago now, that my nu- I didn’t… This was not intuitive, not conscious, not obvious to me. Maybe everybody else it was, but, but my number one optimization point was money in business and life.

[01:37:41] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[01:37:41] Bryan: If I were to strip and like get to really transparent mode, if I hit revenue goal, everything was great.

[01:37:48] Bryan: If I missed revenue goal, everything wasn’t great. And a lot of little distortions that never made it quite that clear. I would say the right words and probably halfway mean them, but this book made it really evidently clear. Like, yeah, no, money’s your number one idol in life. Like your number one optimization point is that.

[01:38:05] Bryan: Um, and that sent me on a journey over the past year and a half of just trying to tear that down. Like money’s g- money’s fine.

[01:38:10] Nathan: Yep.

[01:38:11] Bryan: You fuel good, but how… Like God’s only gonna give you as much as you can handle without detaching from him, and then it stops. Or the worst thing he could do is keep giving you the thing that’s killing you.

[01:38:24] Bryan: Like th- like fundamentally, those are the two things. So, um, for me that became really evident, and this book helped with that, and kind of gave some alternate ways of thinking about money. One of which maybe to share real quick is not getting… And this maybe goes to Grant’s current transition, is not getting overly married to the channel that the money’s coming from right now, that the s- the daily cash flow is coming from.

[01:38:50] Bryan: Um, I would attribute the source of cash flow as it comes from God. Get married to that, and then if the current cash comes from this business or the current cash comes from this business or this passive income stream, cool. But know- Like, it can change, and that’s okay. Like, the source doesn’t change, but the channel that comes through has changed.

[01:39:06] Bryan: So get married to that, not this. Or you’ll find out really quickly if you have a money idol or if you’ve made money your number one optimization point, ’cause let the channel stop and see what happens. Sell the business for $100 million. Great. See what happens. Have the business shut down ’cause it, you, it, it didn’t sustain.

[01:39:21] Bryan: See what happens. And I, I’ve had versions of all of those personally, and it reveals really quickly where my trust is, and it is in those dollars coming in every week and every month. And if that stops, what do you do? And what does your stress level and your anxiety level go to? Or even if business is going really well, but the bank account balance goes from this many zeros to one less zero.

[01:39:40] Grant: Mm-hmm.

[01:39:41] Bryan: Or even the digit at the front goes from an eight to a four, what happens? And if the anxiety goes up, the stress goes up, the fear goes up, like, it’s a… For me, I’ve noticed, and with clients I’ve noticed, it kicks the fear loop into just high gear. And when fear goes up, like, literally your prefrontal…

[01:40:00] Bryan: your frontal cortex shuts off, your amygdala comes on, and your problem-solving and creativity goes to crap. Um, and it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So that book helped me kind of work through some- Mm-hmm … dynamics of that in a really, really good way. And that’s still a work in progress for me.

[01:40:14] Bryan: I still, f- fear with that is my number one trigger. You wanna get me with going on fear and shutting down and everything, like, get the money, and- Hmm … boy.

[01:40:21] Grant: Yeah.

[01:40:22] Bryan: Those, those buttons are still there. And will probably be like a recovering alcoholic or anybody recovering from any kind of, you know, abuse or whatever, is, like, those are always things to keep on guard for me.

[01:40:30] Bryan: Um, so yeah, that’s another, another book that helped me. We

[01:40:32] Grant: could have a money episode sometime. We’ve had multiple- Yeah.

[01:40:35] Nathan: We- …

[01:40:35] Grant: calls, the three of us-

[01:40:35] Nathan: Yeah …

[01:40:36] Grant: and we’re talking about money.

[01:40:37] Bryan: Mm.

[01:40:37] Nathan: Let’s do it. We’ll do a part three where we dive deep into all of that. So you guys- Yeah … can be the only guests to come back for the third time.

[01:40:43] Nathan: Let’s go.

[01:40:44] Grant: That’ll be good. So we have a

[01:40:44] Bryan: punchline to the book.

[01:40:45] Grant: We just try to… I saw this on a, a total side note. Yeah. Uh, Nate Bargatze, saw him a couple months ago. Yeah. You saw him, right?

[01:40:50] Nathan: Yeah, I saw him as well.

[01:40:51] Grant: Excellent. Um, he had an opener who tells a big story. Mm. Great story, and then he says, “If you wanna hear the ending, I’m gonna be performing at such and such comedy club in a couple weeks.”

[01:41:01] Grant: Ooh. And you’re like, “Oh.” That was good. That was really good. That was good. Yeah. So, yeah, he didn’t finish the story. Oh, that’s

[01:41:07] Nathan: brutal.

[01:41:07] Grant: It was. It

[01:41:08] Nathan: was good. Uh, well, at least we closed all the… most of the loops that we opened, so- Yeah … there you go. Well done. Um, normally I’d ask, like, you know, where should we go to follow what you’re up to?

[01:41:16] Nathan: I actually don’t know the answer for you, Grant. Like- Uh,

[01:41:18] Grant: grant@grantbaldwin.com. Shoot me an email. Yeah.

[01:41:20] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:41:20] Grant: And, um, yeah, happy to answer any questions or- That sounds good … help however I can.

[01:41:25] Nathan: Yeah. Brian, growthtools.com?

[01:41:27] Bryan: growthtools.com/nathan. I’ll put the… We talked about earlier the positioning statement and how to work through that.

[01:41:31] Bryan: Oh, yeah. I’ll put a, a video lesson of me actively teaching that and some templates and examples of that, so anybody that wants to work through, offer, wrestle with that, and really get down to core stuff, I’ll just share some resources so y’all can go do it.

[01:41:41] Nathan: Sounds good. Yeah. growthtools.com/nathan. I have my own personalized URL on your site.

[01:41:45] Grant: Grantbaldwin.com/n- Nathan’s… Ugh. We don’t know where that joke is going. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. You bet, man. Thank you.

[01:41:54] Nathan: If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I’d love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else you think we should have on the show.

[01:42:08] Nathan: Thank you so much

[01:42:08] Nathan: for listening.

[00:00:00] Brian: People think it’s a magic trick. It’s not. It’s a system that we’ve built.

[00:00:03] Will: Too many people think they’re done with something prematurely unless you’ve looked at the same thing over and over and over again and said, can it be better? Can it be more fun? Can it be more awesome? Then eventually you get there.

[00:00:14] Nathan: Will Guera spent over a decade running 11 Madison Park, the restaurant voted number one. In the world, and he just released the field guide on it as well. Joining him on the episode is Brian Canlis, who ran the restaurant Canlis in Seattle for nearly two decades. One of the most respected, fine dining institutions in the country.

[00:00:30] Brian: The message of hospitality, how much it connects to industries all across the board, because essentially it’s about treating humans with creativity and intention.

[00:00:39] Nathan: Two things make this episode really special. First, will and Brian have been friends since college, and you just feel it in the stories they tell and the chemistry they have and everything else.

[00:00:46] Nathan: The second is they’ve actually never done a podcast episode together.

[00:00:50] Will: You will never see a newsletter or a post from us that’s, Hey, there are five seats left at this event, buy now.

[00:00:57] Brian: It’s not always about selling something. It’s not about, Hey, come listen to us. It’s so important to us that it gives more than it takes.

[00:01:07] Nathan: So what I’m curious just to start with is how did you two start working together?

[00:01:11] Brian: We met 28 years ago. During freshman orientation.

[00:01:15] Nathan: Oh wow.

[00:01:16] Brian: Before class, before school even started. Yeah. At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. And we kind of hit it off maybe unevenly.

[00:01:27] Will: You mean that you liked me more than I liked you?

[00:01:29] Brian: No, that I was friends with a girl. That you had a crush on.

[00:01:32] Will: Yes.

[00:01:32] Brian: And therefore you saw me not only as, of course, a physical threat naturally, but an emotional threat as well.

[00:01:39] Nathan: Competition on so many levels

[00:01:40] Brian: and that didn’t last long at all.

[00:01:43] Will: That girl ended up being my girlfriend.

[00:01:45] Brian: Yeah. He

[00:01:47] Will: just, to be super clear

[00:01:48] Brian: and I was actually dating somebody else, so it wasn’t, you just misread the whole thing.

[00:01:53] Brian: We really enjoyed working together all through college. It was funny, we, my social circle was, there was like a Venn diagram between our two circles and they crossed over with just us in it. So all my friends and all my community and all my activities. Was completely separate from Will and vice versa.

[00:02:16] Brian: And yet we, I

[00:02:17] Will: feel like we need to unpack that. Brian was in chess club and was in Razi and uh, Bible study and all of that, and I was in a band and had the party house and, and all of that stuff. And so our friends were, we’re very different friend groups, but we went to Cornell where there’s five colleges and um, we both went to the hotel school.

[00:02:44] Will: We both grew up in restaurant families and we took pretty much every single class together through all of college. And when studying with Brian, it made homework not feel like work like we have always since the day we met, had this ability to enjoy work,

[00:03:07] Brian: to work and have fun at the same time. It’s always been that way and we’ve loved it.

[00:03:12] Brian: Our first big project we did together was we had to open a restaurant together, like a student restaurant for one night.

[00:03:19] Nathan: Okay.

[00:03:19] Brian: Where we’d hire the staff and write the menu and come up with the concept. And it was a home run. It was a, it was a hit. We had so much fun. It was sold out. And I remember looking at him and being like, we, we should do this.

[00:03:31] Brian: Like we, we love working together. But then of course after graduation, I had to, I paid for school with an ROTC scholarship, so I got shipped out to Alaska, to, I was in the Air Force. You went off and started your own career. We lived in opposite sides of the world. I didn’t think we, we would know if it would ever happen, and then a season came in 2014 where I went through a divorce and needed like a break from my own city.

[00:04:00] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Because you were in Seattle?

[00:04:02] Brian: Yeah, I was in Seattle. You were in Manhattan. And I moved to New York City for four or five months. We called it a friend internship, where I wanted to stay professional and stay active, but I just wanted to get outta town and have a break. And I helped you open the Nomad, the Nomad Bar.

[00:04:22] Will: We had a hotel in New York City called The Nomad, and we were expanding it and Brian came onto the team to effectively be one of the top people in expanding it. So he came on for four months, but into a pretty senior role.

[00:04:32] Brian: And it was so fun. And what’s made it even more fun is the artist that he hired to do the Art on the Walls is now my wife of 10 years and the mother of four children.

[00:04:43] Brian: So I met my wife in that process and once again, we fell in love with working and playing together at the same time. Right around that time, the Welcome conference began.

[00:04:55] Will: Wait, hold on. I think it’s important to. Explain what Brian’s career has been.

[00:05:00] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:05:01] Will: And I’m gonna do it on your behalf so I can

[00:05:03] Nathan: inval

[00:05:04] Will: celebrate it however you want accordingly.

[00:05:05] Will: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:05:05] Nathan: I love it.

[00:05:06] Will: So Brian, up until eight months ago, was alongside his brother running the restaurant Canlis in Seattle. They were the third generation owner operators of this restaurant, which is, in my view, and this is not as a friend and partner to him, but

[00:05:25] Nathan: just as an industry expert,

[00:05:26] Will: as an industry, someone who knows a lot about restaurants, um, one of the greatest restaurants on the planet.

[00:05:33] Will: And that was his kind of life, which was in many ways paved out before you and not so much of a choice necessarily, although you made the choice to join it.

[00:05:45] Brian: It, it did surprise me that I did enter the family business. That was not the plan, and that I kind of stumbled into it after the Air Force and then fell in love with it.

[00:05:55] Brian: Hmm.

[00:05:56] Will: And so his break to come work with me in New York was a break from the family business, which anyone who’s ever been in a family business can,

[00:06:05] Nathan: it’s a big deal.

[00:06:05] Will: Can understand that that’s actually a big deal.

[00:06:07] Brian: Yeah. And my brother and partner was completely supportive of it. He was like, yes, just go, I got this.

[00:06:13] Brian: Go pursue that. And goodness, that was a fun summer. You fell in love with We double dated. He was dating Christina while I was dating Mackenzie and the four of us dated all that summer. And it was fun. I mean, he was the, he was the boss, but we were friends. There’s this one night at, at the Nomad where you were having some relational anxiety with your dating relationship with Christine.

[00:06:37] Brian: You can

[00:06:37] Will: tell this story. I’m, I’m, I’m fine with it

[00:06:40] Brian: Will shows up at the bar and I, I’m the only manager that night on duty and it was slammed. I mean, we were slammed the second we opened. It was awesome. And Will shows up and he’s like, we need to go right now. And I was like, what do you. Are you out of your mind?

[00:06:56] Brian: You are like, we need to leave right now. And I was like, I’m the manager. He’s like, I’m the owner and we’re leaving. I was like, all right. He’s like, just 10 minutes. And so we start walking around the block and I was like, dude, what? All right. What’s going on? And he was like, I told Christina I loved her. I was like, dude, that’s, that’s huge.

[00:07:15] Brian: That’s amazing. Like, I love Christine like. And she didn’t say it though. It’s like, what do I do? And you were, you were like on the edge of you were like, maybe do we break up? Is it over? Do I move, you know, to a different state?

[00:07:31] Will: I mean, that’s a hard moment.

[00:07:32] Nathan: Yeah. Oh yeah.

[00:07:33] Will: Anyone who’s ever been in that situation knows that that’s when you need the people that you love and trust.

[00:07:38] Brian: What did she say

[00:07:39] Will: to you next

[00:07:39] Brian: to you? Did Shehan solo you or did she say, I know

[00:07:42] Will: she so, or like, I forget what she said. I, I, it like, thank you was Thank you. It was like, I do know that it was not I love you too. It wasn’t,

[00:07:49] Brian: it wasn’t what you hoped.

[00:07:50] Will: Yeah. I’ve gotten that since from her.

[00:07:52] Brian: Ah. But so it was, it was awesome.

[00:07:56] Brian: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:56] Will: Anyway, to fast forward the story. We started the welcome conference. I was running my company, he was running his family restaurant. I sold my company just before COVID. Mm-hmm. Wrote Unreasonable Hospitality. Started to build a business around that. Me and my family decided to move to Nashville. He and his family were really contemplating leaving Seattle, leaving the family business, not to work with me, but just for their family.

[00:08:24] Will: It was feeling like the right stuff. Yeah.

[00:08:26] Brian: It was time. And when I became a restaurateur, I was single in my twenties and the, the T-shirt fit like it looked good in the mirror. 20 years later I had four young kids and I was like, is it’s a

[00:08:37] Nathan: different

[00:08:37] Brian: level. I’ve done this for 20 years. I loved it. I loved my family, I loved the business.

[00:08:41] Brian: I was like, what if the next 20 years looks totally different? Mm-hmm. My wife and I got excited about a new fresh start and we said, let’s hop in the minivan and drive to Nashville.

[00:08:52] Nathan: And so what was the, the vision for the business that you were working on together?

[00:08:56] Will: The agreement was let’s work together for a year.

[00:09:00] Nathan: Okay.

[00:09:00] Will: We are friends first and we wanna make sure that if we work together, it doesn’t compromise the friendship. Mm-hmm. And so we’re coming up at the end of the year, but it was just, Hey, let’s see where we can take this. And we’re coming up on the end of the year, so we’ll, we’ll circle back when we have that meeting.

[00:09:14] Brian: Let’s, let’s date, let’s not get married. Let’s, we’ve both been in significant partnerships. Like, we don’t have to rush into this. Let’s just have fun for a year. What’s it like? You’re growing this brand new company outta this book that I famously told him not to write. Like I was like, the world doesn’t need another book Will like, and he’s like, no, I’m gonna write a book.

[00:09:35] Brian: Then the damn thing sold a million and a half copies. So it was exciting to see what was happening and how the world was connecting with this message of hospitality. And I have hospitality in my blood and bones and love being an evangelist for how. Powerful and meaningful. It is not just in the hospitality industry, but in industries everywhere.

[00:09:56] Brian: And that’s what he was doing. And I thought, I wanna come be a part of that thing. Mm-hmm.

[00:10:02] Will: And so I’ll tell you where the business is now. Okay. What we do and how we decide which things we choose to do as things evolve. And I think it’s important to caveat it like that because for both of us, our careers were very, very linear and required, pretty relentless focus on single goals, right?

[00:10:32] Will: Like when I was growing up, I wanted to get to Cornell, then I wanted my own restaurant, then I wanted four stars for the New York Times. Then I wanted to be number one in the world. And every decision that was made was in pursuit of that singular goal. Now we. Earned the right to not have to be so singularly focused and rather can look at the opportunities in front of us and choose which ones to take.

[00:10:57] Brian: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:58] Will: So what we do now, there’s kind of four buckets. I do a lot of speaking, obviously work on new books. The Field Guide just came out a couple months ago, which is our, our second big book in the series, produce for the Bear, things like that. Then we have our gatherings business where we have the welcome conference, which we’ve been running together for

[00:11:21] Brian: a dozen years.

[00:11:22] Will: Yeah, about 12 years now, which is like our TED style single day conference in New York City at Lincoln Center, which has become the most important conference, I think, in the world around hospitality. It

[00:11:33] Brian: started in a basement in the East Village where we couldn’t give the tickets away.

[00:11:37] Will: Yeah.

[00:11:38] Brian: And now it’s a couple thousand people and it’s just a magical day of people celebrating hospitality, learning, getting inspired.

[00:11:46] Will: The gatherings business grew from welcome. The first year we ever had complaints at Welcome was after like probably the second year after the book came out. ’cause there, I’m the host, it’s not an Unreasonable Hospitality conference. And people came expecting more from me about the book and were upset that it, that I was just introducing other people.

[00:12:09] Will: And so we launched the Unreasonable Hospitality Summit here in Nashville, which is much smaller a couple days. It’s more workshop conference, practical and,

[00:12:19] Brian: well, it’s fun. There’s music. Yeah. And there’s,

[00:12:22] Nathan: yeah.

[00:12:23] Brian: You know, we eat and we celebrate and we have a good time.

[00:12:26] Will: Um, we love the gatherings we host.

[00:12:29] Will: Mm-hmm. And I think it, one of the things we had to decide as we started this business was, I mean, you meet with a lot of content creators, whether it’s authors or whatever. And you’ll get a million different pieces of feedback on the different ways to grow your company online courses, this, that, you know, like YouTube shows, whatever it is, there’s a million different ways to, to grow your business.

[00:12:56] Will: What we recognized early on was we needed to identify what our superpowers were and begin our growth through leaning into those superpowers. And we each come from careers spent hosting other people. And so in person events is really where we kicked things off. Um, and then anyone out there who’s trying to think through how to grow their business, that’s, mm-hmm.

[00:13:24] Will: One of the first things I would advise people to do is, what are your superpowers? Start there. That doesn’t need to be the extent of what you do, but at least start with the things that’s a foundation you’re naturally gifted in, in doing so. Second bucket gatherings. Third bucket are the workshops. So I can go and speak to a company for an hour.

[00:13:45] Will: We have a couple people on our team, extraordinary people who just travel the country doing day long workshops and they will, and they’re leading people through the work, leaning people through, yeah.

[00:13:58] Brian: Kind of putting hands and feet to all of the ideas in our regional hospitality. But how do you put those to action in your company groups of 20 to 120 people

[00:14:07] Will: and there’ll be like minor league baseball or Land Rover or hospital systems and kind of companies across industries.

[00:14:16] Will: Um, and then the final bucket is the creative studio, which we started doing consulting and we found consulting to be quite frustrating actually. Um, we care too much.

[00:14:29] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:14:29] Will: And I, I learned you can’t be a con good consultant unless you

[00:14:34] Brian: don’t

[00:14:34] Will: care. Convince yourself to care less.

[00:14:36] Brian: Yeah. Because you come up with these great ideas and then, and

[00:14:38] Nathan: 10% gets implemented.

[00:14:40] Will: Yeah.

[00:14:40] Brian: Yeah. And then you also can’t control the execution of them. You,

[00:14:44] Will: and then you just become kind of the worst if you care too much. ’cause you get frustrated with the people that are

[00:14:48] Brian: paying

[00:14:49] Will: you, paying you, which is not a good dynamic. So we switched to the creative studio, which is, we, we really go into projects very, very early.

[00:14:59] Will: We only engage with the people at the top of the hierarchy on the other side so that ideas don’t get watered down. And a need for different people to prove their worth in the organization by putting their stamp on something. And, um,

[00:15:14] Brian: and we create,

[00:15:15] Will: and it’s been really fun. So we’re, we’re leading the creative direction for the new A is baseball stadium in Las Vegas.

[00:15:20] Will: Oh wow. Or the Creative studio can do other random things. We did a new approach to playing cards with our friends at Theory 11, um, which, or a blend of playing cards and conversation decks and. Um, we’re probably gonna be leading the design of a new flagship office building for one of the leading financial institutions, just to try to imagine how hospitality can redefine what going to work looks like.

[00:15:47] Will: And

[00:15:48] Nathan: the thing that stands out to me, it reminds me of something I heard Jason free from base camp, say once about like learning to play the drums. And for a long time he was playing the drums. He is holding the drumsticks really tight. And that sounds a lot like, you know, the set path where you’re like, from Cornell to here and you know, his instruction was just like, you gotta loosen up.

[00:16:05] Nathan: Yeah. The magic won’t come until you hold the drumsticks really loosely. And I see you guys like holding them loosely and seeing what comes and you’re like, that does sound fun to go design a new baseball stadium or to a hundred percent. Dive into that and just see where it takes you.

[00:16:18] Brian: Yeah. We’re we’ve been wonderfully surprised at the message of hospitality or even unreasonable hospitality, how much it.

[00:16:28] Brian: Connects to industries all across the board. Right. Because essentially it’s about treating humans differently, right? With with creativity and intention. And every business on earth is dealing with humans. Mm-hmm. Right? It’s not, hospitality doesn’t have to be this word that is stuck in the shoebox of the hospitality industry, but it is all these different organizations and they’re the ones coming to us with these ideas saying we wanna create something totally new a, an experience that’s never been done before, looking through these eyes.

[00:17:01] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:02] Brian: Be it a baseball stadium or a hospital, or a government agency, or a library or, and what a joy that’s been to experience after a career of serving a couple hundred people every night at 5:00 PM to now potentially serving thousands at a time with these ideas.

[00:17:21] Nathan: So from consuming a lot of content, uh, that you all have put together and reading the book and all of that.

[00:17:27] Nathan: Well, I’ve heard a lot of your unreasonable hospitality stories, like if we anchor people in the physical experiences that you all have created, like Brian, I’m curious, one of the unreasonable hospitality stories that you know, or moments that you’ve created that’s like a really special for you in person.

[00:17:42] Nathan: And then later I want to go to how you all do this in the digital side or, um, you know, in the new business,

[00:17:47] Brian: there’s three boys in my family. I’m the youngest, the next brother up was my, is my partner business, was my business partner. The oldest one is the black sheep of the family. He is a Anglican priest.

[00:17:59] Nathan: Okay.

[00:17:59] Brian: And he lived in, he lived in Scotland for a dozen years and we would go visit him all the time and in his parish, uh, part of the job of being a minister for the Church of Scotland is you go and you bless the barrels of whiskey before they get sent out. And he got to know all these distilleries and fell in love with whiskey.

[00:18:18] Brian: And so therefore we fell in love with whiskey and we would travel and drink and it was just the greatest. And at one point we brought home this barrel, which is not an easy thing to do, to bring an entire barrel of scotch home. It was a spring brink, 19-year-old, and it was so special. And we got it through this unconventional means where we actually didn’t have to pay for it.

[00:18:41] Brian: So it was, it had no price, but it was a very valuable barrel, and it was in our basement, and we built this spot in our wine cellar to hold this gorgeous barrel, but we didn’t know what to do with it. And a local billionaire came in, had dinner and said, I want a glass of the greatest whiskey you have in your cellar.

[00:19:02] Brian: And we’re like, well, it has to be that one, because it’s so rare. It’s one of a kind and it’s very valuable. And so we charge them a couple hundred dollars for an ounce, which is about the right price for that. What that is. And we all felt gross and dirty about it because we were selling something that was given to us as a gift.

[00:19:18] Brian: Mm-hmm. So it’s like, what? Wait a minute, how do we, that doesn’t feel right. So that’s the only ounce of that whiskey we’ve ever sold, ever was that single one. And from then on out, we looked at the mission statement of our restaurant, which was to inspire people around hospitality, um, to inspire people that it’s worth putting others first.

[00:19:39] Brian: And we decided we would only give away this incredible scotch for free to anyone who was willing to take the risk to be vulnerable and say out loud how they hope to grow as a human. I know this sounds nuts. Yeah. And so we started this with our staff, where on New Year’s Eve, we’d give everyone together.

[00:20:01] Brian: We’d bring the barrel upstairs, we’d sit in a giant circle, we’d come in a couple hours early, and anyone who was willing to share out loud, Hey, this is how I want to grow as a person. We’d pour them a glass of this great whiskey and everyone would cheers and then we’d all hurrah. We had this saying that we would say, we’d all yell it together out loud and this would go on for a full hour, hour and a half.

[00:20:24] Brian: That story started getting out among our guests and guests started asking, Hey, can we drink from the barrel? Yeah. Or like, yes, it is free and you have to be willing to share out loud how you hope to grow as a human. And so they would, entire tables would then come downstairs into the cellar, gather around the barrel and share out loud.

[00:20:45] Brian: And I had guests in tears. I had people renew their vows. I had, uh, it’s amazing if you put intentionality around vulnerability.

[00:20:56] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:57] Brian: What would happen. And that grew into this gorgeous tradition of guests coming to our restaurant simply to say something out loud. To people they loved, and for that to be witnessed and to toast each other so much so that we went through an entire barrel of whiskey.

[00:21:16] Brian: Now we’re on our second one. Uh, but that’s the kind of moment and even to empower your own service team to say, Hey, you guys are, this is a special moment. You wanna come downstairs and drink one of the greatest scotches in the world.

[00:21:32] Will: The reason I think that’s such a beautiful example is a lot of the stories that get celebrated about unreasonable hospitality, these over the top, very showy things, these gestures, and yet unreasonable hospitality at its core, is about doing something to take an ordinary transaction and turn it into a memorable experience.

[00:21:59] Will: The quote. That I use all the time because I think it’s just the best about hospitality comes from Maya Angelou. People will forget what you say. They will forget what you do. They will never forget how you made them feel. Canlis serves delicious food, and yet I can say with profound confidence that if someone goes to that restaurant and experiences that they may not remember a single thing they ate.

[00:22:23] Will: Mm-hmm. But they’ll never forget the feeling they had sitting around that barrel. One of the beautiful things about hospitality, regardless of what you do for a living, is that you can help people put the world on pause for just long enough to find appreciation in a moment and through what they did, which is equal parts, unbelievably simple and unbelievably complicated.

[00:22:51] Will: They gave that gift to people. Mm-hmm. And I think no matter what you do for a living, yeah. You might not have a wine cellar with. Barrel of whiskey in the basement, but you can look at the product you serve and ask yourself, how do we imbue more meaning into this exchange? That’s why I love that story.

[00:23:09] Brian: What’s really fun is when there was only about an inch or two left in the bottom of the barrel. It’s right when Will won the award for no one restaurant in the world. And we’re like, well, what are we gonna do? There’s as a fun, congratulations. If anyone needs the barrel right now, it’s him and his team to figure out how they’re, what are they gonna do next?

[00:23:29] Brian: How are they gonna grow? They, they just reached the apex. This goal. Yeah. So we threw that barrel in the back of a truck and drove it across America and surprised him. You were genuinely, you actually did not know. I had no idea. Uh, they, they do an annual all team meeting where they close the restaurant and they bring their entire staff together for a day.

[00:23:47] Brian: And we showed up

[00:23:49] Nathan: with the barrel,

[00:23:50] Brian: my brother and I, carrying that barrel through the front door, popped it in the middle of his meeting. And poured for their whole staff and said, now you all need to share out loud what’s next. And it was just beautiful and so fun. And I love that that barrel is still in your heart somewhere.

[00:24:07] Will: Yeah.

[00:24:08] Nathan: That’s incredible. I mean, anytime that you can get people to connect on that level and share something deep and meaningful,

[00:24:13] Brian: it’s always worth it.

[00:24:14] Nathan: Yeah. And I love that you exactly as you said, like systematized it, it turned it into something that people could participate in. ’cause you have these stories where it’s a one-off thing or it’s like, yes, you, you had to be there, but you were able to create it.

[00:24:28] Nathan: You had to be there moment that mm-hmm. People could come to over and over again

[00:24:31] Brian: for years.

[00:24:32] Nathan: Mm-hmm. The, I think the hardest thing for me as I read all of your content and listen to both of you, you know, on podcasts and all of that, is how do you take this and translate it to the digital world, which you’re in the middle of, of doing now, is you build a different style of business.

[00:24:48] Nathan: You know, like as you’re building an email list and you’re going on podcasts and you’re doing all of these things to serve an audience. And so I’m curious, like what comes to mind as you’re thinking about bringing that level of hospitality to this new business

[00:25:01] Brian: in the digital world? I think you always have to give more than you take.

[00:25:05] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:06] Brian: Otherwise, the customer, the guest, the fan, or whoever it is, they sniff out if that ratio is, is reversed.

[00:25:15] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:25:16] Brian: And so when it comes to either Instagram or a post somewhere, or the newsletter or whatever we’re sending out, it’s so important to us that it gives more than it takes. It’s not, we’re not, it’s not always about selling something.

[00:25:30] Brian: It’s not about, Hey, come listen to us. Come like, look at me, look at me, look at me. It’s how can we shine a light on you? Like, how can this benefit or bless or encourage you? And so. Because digital is not face-to-face and you don’t have that ability to create relationship. I think we have to be extra cautious to always make sure whatever, however we interact in the digital world, uh, it is an act of hospitality, is an act of making them feel cared for and seen.

[00:26:07] Brian: Not one that we are selfishly have this secret agenda to get them to click or buy or come or, um, only if that serves them to click and buy. Like, and that’s a filter that we talk about a lot, that we’re not gonna put anything out there in the world unless it’s giving more than it’s taking.

[00:26:26] Will: The way we think about hospitality generally is like one size fits all, one size fits some and one size fits one.

[00:26:33] Will: So what is it about your approach you’re taking to everything you do that isn’t intrinsically hospitable? That’s one size fits all. How can, through simple pattern recognition, you elevate the experience for people that follow certain behaviors. That’s one size fits some, and then one size fits. One is just learning one thing about one individual and doing something really fricking cool for that person.

[00:26:56] Will: Mm-hmm. What Brian’s talking is one size fits all, which I mean, I forget exactly what it was, but I think we sent out 30, 35 newsletters before we ever tried to sell anything or asked for anything, and that was with intention. Even now, you will never see a newsletter from us or a post from us. That’s. Hey, there are five seats left at this event, buy now, or prices go up tomorrow.

[00:27:31] Will: Like we have a really, really low tolerance for anything that feels schlocky or salesy or overly markety. Like if, if we’re trying to sell you something, it will be in a note that tells a story, teaches a lesson, and then at the very end we may very subtly try to push you towards something because otherwise it, it, the exchange is lopsided in our direction and that’s not true to who we want to be or what we think right looks like.

[00:28:03] Will: And so that’s one size fits all hospitality. Um, one size fits some hospitality, and I’ll give you an example from our world and then also from another world. Um, a lot of people reach out through LinkedIn. Um, more people than I could ever respond to. Those are people taking a risk and, and any creator with any reasonable following is, has been on the receiving end of a note that says, I’m not sure this will ever reach you, but

[00:28:36] Nathan: Right.

[00:28:38] Will: Which is such a beautiful sentiment. And, and by the way, the notes that follow after but are filled with vulnerability and sharing and these long notes and people writing these long notes with the knowledge that someone might never even read them. And there’s someone on our team that just responds to every single note because if someone reaches out to you, they deserve a response.

[00:29:03] Will: Um, I think that is an expression of hospitality.

[00:29:07] Nathan: I think two of the most generous, uh, writers and creators that I’ve ever spent time with are, um, Seth Godin and Derek srs, both of whom will respond to pretty much every single email. That they receive. Now, they might not want that shared that they actively do that, and we don’t, we’re not trying to

[00:29:26] Will: generate,

[00:29:27] Nathan: and his

[00:29:27] Brian: email address is.

[00:29:28] Nathan: Yeah. But, but having that approach where they’re just like, look, if someone wants to reach out, it might be a three, a three word response or something like that, or like a, I keep going or, that’s inspiring, you know, whatever it is. But just that, like, that little way of pouring back into anyone who’s willing to reach out, I think is very powerful

[00:29:46] Will: given everything you have going on in your life.

[00:29:48] Will: Mm-hmm. Like where I am individually right now, what Seth is doing, I can’t, I can’t do it myself, but that doesn’t mean

[00:29:54] Nathan: someone,

[00:29:55] Will: it can’t be done.

[00:29:55] Nathan: Right.

[00:29:56] Will: And so like, there is always a yes. Mm-hmm. You just need to be willing to invest the energy, time, creativity, resources to find it. When I talk about one size fits some though, I, and, and by the way, this looks very different pending circumstance, but when this is something we really walk people through in the field guide.

[00:30:17] Will: This idea of pattern recognition of these recurring moments. Um, every single business has these things. Whether you ever meet someone in person, whether you weather, like engage with them as as a human, these things that happen over and over and over again. And if you can identify these patterns, decide in advance how you wanna respond every time one of these things happens and implement a system such that that response is easy to deploy and happens consistently, I think you can create magic for people all the time.

[00:30:53] Will: Um, the best example of this is Chewy

[00:30:58] and

[00:30:59] Will: what they do, and I, we talk about this often because I think it’s so deeply inspiring, but, um, if you have a dog, you go into chewy.com, you set up a subscription dog, food comes to your house the beginning of every month. You never forget to order dog food again.

[00:31:12] Will: Think about dogs they pass before you’re ready for them to pass. When that happens, the first thing you think to do is not to go online and cancel your dog food subscription, which means that a couple weeks later, a new bag of food’s gonna arrive, rip, open the scab all over again. Then you’re gonna reach out to Chewy.

[00:31:29] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:30] Will: To cancel it. This is a recurring moment for them,

[00:31:33] Nathan: right?

[00:31:33] Will: Someone in that organization had the wherewithal to say, this is a moment. How do we respond in a more magical way? And what they do is the same every single time. They obviously cancel the subscription. They can’t take that last bag back for health code reasons, but they credit it to your account.

[00:31:47] Will: They apologize for your loss. And then two days later, at minimum, they do even more than this. But at minimum, a bouquet of flowers arrives at your house saying, we’re so sorry for your loss. They’ve never met you. You never will meet them. The thing about dog people, they’re very likely to get another dog.

[00:32:04] Will: And if you ever buy dog food from anyone else ever again after having received those flowers, you’re a fricking serial killer.

[00:32:13] Nathan: Right.

[00:32:13] Will: Brian used these words before because they are so fundamental to how we think. When you identify opportunities at the intersection of creativity and intention, you can, you can show up for people in remarkable ways all the time.

[00:32:35] Nathan: Well, so with the Chewy example, I’ve actually seen that firsthand because a team member at Kit had that moment happen where their dog passed away. The last thing they think about is, oh, you know what, now I need to go cancel my subscription. And when they wrote in to say, Hey, I need to cancel the subscription.

[00:32:52] Nathan: ’cause the our, our dog passed away, the customer support person at Chewy said, would you mind sending us a photo of your dog?

[00:32:58] Will: And they did the painting.

[00:32:59] Nathan: And they did the painting.

[00:33:00] Will: Yes.

[00:33:01] Nathan: And so then, you know, some number of weeks later, a, a hand painted painting of their dog showed up. And like that’s another level where you’re just like, are you kidding me?

[00:33:11] Will: Well, by the way, that’s also inspiring because I love when someone is already doing something well and then someone in the organization says, how do we make that even better?

[00:33:19] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:33:19] Will: And so they’ve been doing the flower thing for a long time, sometime in the last few years. The painting doesn’t happen always for everyone, but Right.

[00:33:25] Will: It happens sometimes. And

[00:33:27] Brian: well, and you know, whoever that person is at Chewy who gets to do the painting or gets to be the person who makes that moment facilitate

[00:33:35] Nathan: it. Yeah.

[00:33:37] Brian: What a gift that they granted this whole thing is sad. But they’re delivering joy and they’re delivering healing, and they’re delivering redemption.

[00:33:48] Brian: And what’s magical about these moments that you set up when you recognize the pattern and you come up with the system of hospitality is all boats rise with the tide, the mm-hmm. The, the guest or the customer feel so invested in and known and cared for. The employees enjoy it. ’cause now they’re just not awkwardly canceling someone’s description, but now they get to actually do something that brings life back.

[00:34:13] Brian: Um,

[00:34:13] Nathan: well, yeah. Your job is, you’re just like, yeah, I canceled. Yeah. You know, I dealt with more people whose pets died, and you’re just like, wow, I kind of hate my job.

[00:34:20] Will: Yeah.

[00:34:21] Nathan: And then you flip it around and you’re like, I got

[00:34:22] to

[00:34:23] Will: create, create. And I also, and, and you were probably on the receiving end of profound appreciation for the person you sent them to, which always fills your tank

[00:34:29] Brian: and you’re creating guests for life.

[00:34:31] Brian: Mm-hmm. Like, um, it works for profit, it works for culture, it works for retention, it works for customer loyalty. Mm-hmm. And that’s what’s exciting, that we’re starting to discover. Like we in, in the restaurant business, we’ve known this and now all these other industries and we’re learning about it too.

[00:34:48] Brian: We’re not, we didn’t invent this. Uh, but it’s so fun to see everyone else come along and say, Hey, this really works.

[00:34:57] Nathan: Mm-hmm. One of my favorite questions as we launch back in is what would have to be true? And I love that question ’cause it, you know, if you’re talking to a team member about building software or running, you know, can we build this feature, uh, and have it live by, uh, May 1st you’re like, Ooh, I don’t know.

[00:35:16] Nathan: And it gets them into this mindset of, I’m not sure, here’s all the things. And if instead you ask, what would have to be true to have this live, uh, May 1st, or what would have to be true for us to carry the barrel of whiskey into the restaurant and be ready to premiere a film that we finished at, you know.

[00:35:36] Nathan: That was just took place over the last few days. Someone’s like it, it switches entirely into this brainstorming, not, not physically impossible, but

[00:35:44] Will: we, we love working with magicians.

[00:35:46] Nathan: Yes.

[00:35:47] Will: We work with magicians on a lot of what we do and have for years and a long time ago, we did a, a course at 11 Madison.

[00:35:58] Will: That was a magic trick. And working with the magicians to, to create it. They’re like, oh, wait a minute. What if we did this?

[00:36:06] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:07] Will: And I was like, oh my God, that would be amazing. How do we do that? And they’re like, well, I don’t know. But if you like it, then we’re gonna figure it out. One of the things that anyone who’s worked with me for any measure of time has heard me say constantly is don’t ruin a story with the facts.

[00:36:26] Nathan: Okay.

[00:36:28] Will: Which means stop asking how something can be done. Just decide what you want to do. And then once you’ve decided that that’s the thing you wanna do, then just figure it out.

[00:36:39] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:40] Will: Because let’s be honest, my guess is nothing that anyone who is listening to this right now does is actually hard.

[00:36:48] Nathan: Right. We’re not trying to break laws of physics.

[00:36:50] Will: It just requires being willing to try harder.

[00:36:53] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:36:54] Will: And too many people rely too heavily on facts or what has historically been possible in deciding what they want to try to do next.

[00:37:05] Nathan: First, before we go there, when I’ve heard you talk, bring up the ma uh, magicians before working with them, you talked about the coat check experience.

[00:37:13] Will: Yeah.

[00:37:13] Nathan: Can you share that? Because that’s something what stood out to me the most is, uh, seeing all of these points in the journey.

[00:37:21] Will: Yes.

[00:37:21] Nathan: In the customer journey and just saying, how can we make each one magical?

[00:37:24] Will: Well, you know, and I think. Brian at Canlis did something with valet.

[00:37:31] Nathan: Okay.

[00:37:31] Will: Parking.

[00:37:32] Brian: It wasn’t me.

[00:37:33] Will: No.

[00:37:34] Will: Canlis restaurant. Yeah. Did something with valet parking. Tell that story.

[00:37:37] Brian: We don’t give people a valet check number.

[00:37:41] Nathan: Okay.

[00:37:41] Brian: So we just remember your car and it’s a system where when you’re done with dinner and you come to the front door, your car is warm and waiting for you. And people think it’s a magic trick.

[00:37:52] Brian: It’s not. It’s, it’s a system that we’ve built that actually my grandfather built it in the fifties. Uh,

[00:38:01] Nathan: so it’s not even, oh, we use AI to do whatever.

[00:38:03] Brian: No. It’s like, no, it’s just a matter of caring. Mm-hmm. And it’s a matter of being very intentional. And so a dozen year, oh, now, like 15 years ago, we were doing checks for coats.

[00:38:15] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:16] Brian: And it’s like, wait a minute. We can remember a car. We can’t remember a coat. And there’s something called the peak end rule, which is in one of your books. And it’s this idea that one of the most important moments that establishes what a guest remembers for their experience is their very last moment is, is the end.

[00:38:36] Brian: And we have this magical car that shows up and then we started doing coats that we’re always warmed by the fire with no ticket when the guest comes to the front. So not only is their coat waiting for them and it’s warm, then they turn around and their car’s waiting for them. They could have had cold food and mean service and they were like, this was amazing.

[00:38:57] Brian: And it’s funny, we pour thousands of hours into the tiniest details in the food and the service and every little thing you touch, and the number one thing that I hear about our restaurant is the coats and the cars at the end of the night because they can’t believe

[00:39:16] Will: that it is magic. You said it’s not magic, but it is magic.

[00:39:20] Will: And that’s the thing, like mad,

[00:39:23] Brian: that’s how all

[00:39:24] Will: magic is. I, I don’t want to, I I feel bad telling you this on a podcast. Magic is not real. Brian, emotionally processed. This magic is not real. My, but the, my favorite quote, I love magic so much is, is a pen and teller. Mm-hmm. Sometimes magic is just being willing to invest more energy into an idea than anyone else would deem reasonable.

[00:39:49] Will: Mm-hmm. Every magic trick is just someone working really, really hard,

[00:39:52] Brian: really, really hard

[00:39:53] Will: to create a moment of wonder.

[00:39:56] Brian: We, we, we had a large restaurant company call us and say, Hey, could we hire you to consult? We wanna do your valet system and we have a large checkbook and we’re in and let us know. And we said, oh, uh, good news.

[00:40:11] Brian: It’s free. And I’ll tell you in about 30 seconds. And he was like, what do you mean? And I said, well, this is how we do it. And I, and I told him, and it’s, and he’s like, oh, we. We can’t do that. Um, because it’s a matter of training your memory, memory. It’s a matter of caring. It’s a matter of all night long.

[00:40:29] Brian: The valets are obsessed with remembering, and that’s all they do. And they go in and outta the restaurant all night long and they see who’s on check and they have a system of writing down notes and, and he’s like, wait, there it is not a computer program. It’s not a camera system. It’s not a, it’s like, no, it’s just working really hard and training a new valet at Canlis spends about two months just training their memory to get ready for being a valet at Canlis.

[00:40:54] Brian: So where, where?

[00:40:55] Will: And they

[00:40:55] Brian: said, no, we

[00:40:56] Will: can’t do it. Where we did things is like we tried to implement more systems to support this mm-hmm. That didn’t rely on the inherent like skills of an individual, which I, I do believe is where things become institutionalized, right. Is where it’s no longer requiring an individual to be unbelievably passionate where you can actually.

[00:41:15] Will: Compel them to be more passionate through just experiencing the joy of accomplishing something magical. And so the coat check thing in our restaurant, we had a host that would go around the dining room all night updating where people were at in their meal. And that would be reflected on the screen at the front.

[00:41:31] Will: And if it got to green, it meant you were on your check. That meant that your coats would go from a coat room down the hallway to one that was right next to the front door that had space heaters inside. Then they would be more closely looking at that table waiting for them to get up. Thankfully, there was about 40 feet between that table and the, and the front door.

[00:41:52] Will: And they would be there the moment they saw that table get up, they’d go into that smaller coat room, take out the heated coats and just be standing right there. It wasn’t hard anymore. The system just took a little bit more effort to design such that it would be easy to deploy in the moment. And I think anyone can do this.

[00:42:11] Will: Right? Right. Like,

[00:42:12] Brian: and it’s fun. So, and the hosts. Who used to just look at a number and go to a courtroom and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah are doing this transactional moment. Now they get to be magicians, right? And guests get to their eyes, pop open, they’re like, how did you know this is so special? And so the hosts get to, they love it because they get to pull off a magic trick.

[00:42:33] Brian: And so once again, it all boats rise with the tide there. The guests love it. The employees love it. Everyone loves it. And it costs nothing to implement. It just takes creativity and intention.

[00:42:43] Nathan: So what I’m curious about is that mapping process where you map all the points in the customer journey, especially if we take this to, uh, it could be an event, your newsletter, uh, you know, software like Kit, like listening to you all.

[00:42:55] Nathan: I’m like now thinking about all the moments where we’re like, here you go. And we don’t have anything special for our receipts. We don’t have any, you know, all of these, these touch points. And so how do you go about doing that on the digital side and finding these moments or these transformations that.

[00:43:10] Nathan: Any creator or software company could implement

[00:43:13] Will: well, but it’s the exact same. Mm-hmm. I mean, if you actually look through every touch point, every moment of interaction between your, you and the people you serve, whether they’re in front of you or whether you’re engaging with them digitally. Yeah. There are opportunities around every turn to make those moments a little bit more.

[00:43:33] Will: Awesome. I mean, we just, I’ll give you like a really, really small example. Um, when Brian joined the team, we engaged in a pretty comprehensive website. Revamp, not even a revamp. We built a new website.

[00:43:49] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:43:49] Will: Brian did an amazing job building a beautiful website that really outlines our entire ecosystem. And once it was done, then we looked at every little piece of it and said, how do we make it more awesome?

[00:44:01] Will: And so there’s the mo. This is like so small and so silly and really. Irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but it just shows you that raindrops make oceans like enough. Small changes in culmination can be transformative. When you put your email in to sign up for a newsletter, this big confetti thing goes off on the screen, just like a moment of celebration, right?

[00:44:26] Will: Like you can just make things more fun, more playful, more awesome, and too many people think they’re done with something prematurely. Like unless you’ve looked at the same thing over and over and over again and said, can it be better? Can be better? Can it be more fun? Can it be more connective? Can it be more awesome than eventually you get there?

[00:44:48] Nathan: I’m realizing an example of this is there’s a VPN software called Tunnel Bear that I use, you know, when traveling and all that. And so their mascot, as you would expect, is this very cute bear. And when you go to log in it, you click onto the email field using field, and it’s eye, the bear’s eyes look towards the field.

[00:45:07] Nathan: And so you’re like, oh, that was kind of a cute little interaction. Put your email should go to the password and the bear covers its eyes. Yeah. So it’s not looking at your password. That’s fine. That’s And you’re Oh, that’s like, it’s this moment of delight

[00:45:17] Brian: Yeah.

[00:45:17] Nathan: That some engineer designer made once, it probably took them a few hours and now it has brought a little bit of delight Yeah.

[00:45:25] Nathan: To hundreds of thousands of people.

[00:45:27] Will: And does that in singularity impact anything about people’s perception of the business? Maybe, maybe not, but enough little things like that over the course of the entire user experience ultimately, right. Definitively does.

[00:45:40] Brian: But it is essential to map and break down each touch point.

[00:45:45] Brian: And we, we, we do that work with clients. We, we built a tool on our own website that you, it’s free to use where you map every tiny

[00:45:54] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:45:55] Brian: Guest interaction that you have from the second they go online and have their first interaction, whether it’s the website or a phone call or an in person. And then in excruciating detail, what is every single way that that client interacts with your product?

[00:46:12] Brian: Whether it is the touch of the door handle as they pull it open, it’s the feeling of the carpet under their feet, right? It’s what is the hot long does it take to get hot water in the bathroom? If they go to wash their hands, what does the soap smell like? So we will do every tiny, you’re so

[00:46:27] Nathan: many, like I would’ve said, they enter and you’re like, you’re

[00:46:30] Brian: going so much further than that.

[00:46:32] Will: They get outta the car, they walk through the thing. They pull up in the door. They walk through the door, they’re creative. Every

[00:46:36] Brian: single one’s a touch point. And then we would identify which ones are negative, which ones are positive, which ones are kind of neutral. And then go through creative exercises on what does it look like to be creative and intentional to elevate maybe a dozen of these touchpoints this year.

[00:46:54] Brian: I mean, we, at one of our restaurants, our touchpoint map would be in the one fifty, one sixty, a hundred seventy, like a lot of touchpoint. And a goal would be this year we’re gonna elevate five or we’re gonna elevate 10. Mm-hmm. And you empower your people to brainstorm and get excited to collaborate on latching, on to watch, touch a single touch point and what does it look like to elevate it.

[00:47:18] Brian: And when you break it down into these tiny, tiny steps, then suddenly it’s not so overwhelming when you look at the prospect of increasing the, the satisfaction of the client experience.

[00:47:33] Nathan: Right. ‘

[00:47:33] Brian: cause you can just increase one tiny bit at a time.

[00:47:37] Will: Like what happens if you are growing a social media account when you get a new follower?

[00:47:42] Will: If you’re willing to like be relentless and crazy and tracking that sort of thing, you can do something remarkable for that person when they choose to.

[00:47:49] Brian: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:50] Will: Give you a follow. What happens with your newsletter list, and I’m just thinking about this now. We should, we should mess around with this in the next week.

[00:47:58] Will: When someone makes the choice to unsubscribe, what’s that language? What’s the path to subscribing? Like how you say goodbye is just as important as how you say hello. What?

[00:48:07] Brian: We should have a Boys to Men video.

[00:48:09] Will: Yeah.

[00:48:10] Brian: Get sent to them so it’s so hard to say goodbye.

[00:48:14] Will: Yeah. But serious. Like

[00:48:15] Nathan: yeah,

[00:48:16] Will: that kind of creative process is fun,

[00:48:18] Nathan: but I’m thinking through every part of it, right?

[00:48:20] Nathan: Of when someone comes to your website, there’s, maybe there’s a cookie banner they have to accept or dismiss that some lawyer told you you have to do. Yeah.

[00:48:27] Will: Right.

[00:48:27] Nathan: And they put in their email address and then what’s on your thank you page? ’cause that, and you know, it’s usually just check your email to say, yes, you actually wanted this.

[00:48:35] Nathan: What’s in that email? What’s in the fault? Like all of those things.

[00:48:38] Will: Yep. There was a meditation app that I signed up for at some point. And like many of these apps annually, it just resubscribed to you. Right? And then you don’t even realize you’ve been resubscribed until you get that little thing on your phone that says, you’ve just been charged 99 bucks or whatever.

[00:48:57] Will: And I got an email from them a week out saying, Hey, in a week you’re gonna be resubscribed and it’s gonna cost this much. And we just don’t want that to come as a surprise. If you’re going to pay us that money again, we wanna make sure it’s because you chose to, not because you forgot to cancel. And so this is your opportunity to cancel.

[00:49:19] Will: And if you do, thank you so much for your business. Mm-hmm. And if you don’t like, here’s to another amazing year of working together. That is a beautiful example, right. Of unreasonable hospitality in this space. And some might argue that that’s financially reckless. Because more people are gonna cancel than had you duped them into re-upping, right?

[00:49:41] Will: And yet, I think whenever you do what is right for the person on the other side of the table, you are ultimately gonna be more successful in the long term. But that clearly happened because someone in that company said, Hey, how do we wanna be better in this part of the experience?

[00:50:00] Nathan: Let’s tie it into culture.

[00:50:01] Nathan: ’cause all of this comes from, you know, you can sit as a, as a founder, as an executive and brainstorm some ideas. But what you’re talking about in your restaurants and the business you’re building now is how it plays through and it becomes instilled in the culture all the way through. What are the things that make the biggest difference for building a team that thinks in these ways and will spot way more opportunities than you ever could?

[00:50:21] Will: Well, I think you need to empower people to challenge things, to question ideas. You need to create space, like organized time to actually do the work. Um, back in the day, the reservations office in a restaurant is the messiest room in the entire building.

[00:50:44] Nathan: Okay.

[00:50:45] Will: Um, the dining room is obviously beautiful and clean.

[00:50:48] Will: The kitchen normally is beautiful and clean. The reservations office is like the restaurant’s equivalent of a junk drawer because like

[00:50:59] Nathan: That’s so true.

[00:50:59] Will: You know what I mean? Yes. Right before service, if there’s something in the dining room, it needs to go away. Exactly. By five 30, that’s

[00:51:07] Nathan: where it goes.

[00:51:07] Will: It just gets dumped in the reservations office.

[00:51:09] Will: And so it’s like a bunch of people working in this rather confined space. Um, and when a new reservationist joined our team, there’s probably seven to 10 days of training by the end of their training. And they were given, I forget what it was, a hundred dollars, $200 budget. They had to do something to materially improve that space.

[00:51:33] Will: Mm-hmm. And so this is someone who’s had the job for three or four days, right? And they need to figure out something to make that space more organized, nicer to work and whatever. It wasn’t done so that the office would be better. It was done to very clearly at the very beginning of someone’s employment, say Your ideas matter.

[00:51:58] Will: We want you to contribute. You have so many people don’t creatively contribute to something because they don’t feel the confidence or the empowerment to do so,

[00:52:07] Nathan: or their ideas will be welcome or heard.

[00:52:09] Will: Yeah. And so when you force it, you’re telling them your ideas matter so much so in fact that I’m requiring you to give them.

[00:52:17] Will: And then when someone does make the junk drawer less junky, they’re celebrated by their peers for having done so, which then elevates their confidence and ensures they start doing more of that. I think you can systemize collaboration and empowerment and sometimes making something mandatory is a beautiful thing.

[00:52:38] Will: Mandatory it, it almost has like a bad connotation. I think making good things mandatory is a beautiful thing for a culture.

[00:52:46] Nathan: It makes me think of, at Kit, we have a rule that when you join, like you only have fresh eyes once.

[00:52:52] Will: Yeah.

[00:52:52] Nathan: And so in your first 30 days, we want you to go through the entire product outta the customer would, and share your feedback and experience because we have so many touchpoint.

[00:53:00] Nathan: And when I go through the product, you know, there’s lots of things where I’m very, very proud of it. And I just, there’s so many more where I just cringe and I’m like, oh man, we still need to fix that. You know, all of the stuff. And so time and again, you know, as we hire new team members every, you know, every other week or so we get one of these posts of a Google doc or a notion like, here’s my whole experience, here’s what I noticed, here’s what I set out.

[00:53:20] Nathan: And sometimes if they’re an engineer working product. They’re like, and I was able to fix one of these. We really celebrate that.

[00:53:26] Will: Yeah.

[00:53:27] Nathan: But I always make sure, you know, in Slack there’s thousands of messages that go by from a big team, and I always make sure to chime in and reply like individually in the doc and all of that to every one of those first products.

[00:53:40] Nathan: A

[00:53:40] Will: hundred percent.

[00:53:41] Nathan: Because I want to set, like, this is a, I was thinking about what gets status in an organization, like giving feedback. This is how our product could be better, you know, as a new employee or as anyone. Like, that should be a high status thing. That should be a rewarded, celebrated thing. And so, you know, even if it, if all I can do is take 10 minutes to make sure I read it and then leave three or four comments like that reinforces that.

[00:54:04] Will: Well, yeah. If you, if you implement a culture where you’re asking people for their feedback and you’re not there to respond when they give it, you are effectively, like extinguishing, you’re worse off

[00:54:12] Nathan: than if you’ve

[00:54:13] Will: never asked. Well, like they just lit a candle. You’re blowing it out before it could grow into a bonfire.

[00:54:17] I,

[00:54:17] Brian: I don’t know if you remember this when I came to work at the Nomad. So I started like kind of undercover boss ish. I started as a, as at the lowest level as a busboy.

[00:54:26] Will: Okay.

[00:54:27] Brian: And we didn’t really tell people who I was or what I was doing yet because the, what place I was gonna open wasn’t ready yet. And I needed to understand the systems and the culture and Will gave me this little notebook.

[00:54:38] Brian: And he’s like, you’re gonna have, ’cause you’ve run your own restaurant for 15 years, a lot of feedback that you’re going to want that’s gonna drive you nuts or whatever. He goes, I care about everything you’re gonna say, but I want you to just write it on the, on this book for 30 days and don’t speak it to anyone because A, you don’t understand us yet.

[00:55:00] Brian: You understand your place and some of the things that we do that’s different, you might learn why we do it differently. Um, and then you and I are gonna have a drink and we’re gonna sit down and we’re gonna go through your notebook in 30 days. And we did. And it was awesome. And sure enough, a third of the stuff I wrote down, I ended up crossing out because I was wrong.

[00:55:21] Brian: ’cause I, their way is better. And those different, and that’s something that I’ve done now. I dunno if I’ve told you this. Hmm. With every new manager that came to Canlis who came with all this experience, I was like, your fresh eyes are such a gift. Mm-hmm. Here’s your notebook. 30 days, write everything down.

[00:55:38] Brian: Um, and then you’re gonna cross out some of it. ’cause you’re gonna learn that we do it differently for a reason. But some of the stuff, you’re gonna have great idea. And those little notebooks have been,

[00:55:47] Will: I love

[00:55:48] Brian: that. Transformative in, in our restaurant. I

[00:55:50] Nathan: think there’s something giving the physical notebook.

[00:55:52] Nathan: Yeah. It’s not, ’cause what I’m doing is like, you know, put it in a Google Doc or something

[00:55:55] Brian: like that. And you put the date on the calendar. Right. Like, we’re gonna have lunch. Like, you, you, you said it then it’s not this, sometime in the future I’ll care about your feedback. No, no, no. It, it matters and you follow through.

[00:56:06] Will: But I don’t remember that. God, I’m good. No, babe. No, but you know what it is, what’s so beautiful about it is you are right. Fresh eyes is a superpower. Mm-hmm. And by the way, it’s, there’s perishable inventory. You only have it for so long. Once you lose it, you’ll never have it again. And yet the worst thing is someone, especially when they’re coming into some leadership role,

[00:56:33] Nathan: right.

[00:56:35] Will: Talking too much before they’ve actually given themselves the time to absorb the culture. And my last company, we

[00:56:40] Nathan: did this, so let’s implement

[00:56:41] Will: it. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s the worst. They’re, Simon was telling me Simon Sinek, that I think Chanel or Cartier, I can’t remember. But if you join the team there as an an executive, you’re not allowed to talk in a meeting for six months.

[00:56:56] Brian: That’s kind of awesome.

[00:56:58] Will: A little bit for Yeah. And you, and you understand why. Just learn. Just stop. Can you actually learn how we do things? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Before you try to change it. Um, and so the Notebook is a great way of honoring those two opposing ideas and not losing the value of either.

[00:57:12] Nathan: So I wanna go to this idea like building an audience that’s going to be longtime loyal fans, because I, I think we get so caught up in the world of content creation on, just on the numbers, how many Instagram followers do you have?

[00:57:24] Nathan: Oh, 50,000. How many on your newsletter? 37,000. You know, we’re trying to, trying to add a thousand or whatever. Or I’ll hear people say like, I only have 500 people on my newsletter. And I’m like, oh, so does that make you nervous every time you hit send? I’m like, no, it’s 500 people. Well, if it was 500 people in a room, would you be nervous before you got up in front of me?

[00:57:42] Nathan: Like, oh no, that’s actually a lot. But we’re so caught up in just the numbers that we, most, many creators I talk to don’t think about it as the 500 or the 50,000 individuals on the other side of that. And so I’m curious if, as there’s anything that you’ve done as, as you’ve gone into the. You know, the content creation and online audience world to like personalize and humanize that and then think about, okay, these are people we wanna have a relationship with for many, many years.

[00:58:11] Will: I feel like I went through that for a while. Yeah. About a year ago where I wanted more. Mm-hmm. Just bigger numbers because I looked at other people and I was like, well, why do they have more followers than I do? Or why do they have more subscribers?

[00:58:26] Nathan: Brian Holiday has a million subscribers, why don’t I have

[00:58:28] Will: Exactly.

[00:58:29] Will: Seriously. Um, and then I talked to people and there are different advisors who said, Hey, this is how you grow your audience. And, and what I found is most of the things that people were telling me we needed to do to grow our audience were things that felt inauthentic to me.

[00:58:46] Brian: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:47] Will: And I see it all the time where.

[00:58:49] Will: And I, I’m not shaming anyone who does any of these things. Maybe this feels authentic to you and that at the end of the day is the only thing that really matters. But there’s all these little games people play, like they give you three quarters of the story, and if you want to hear more of the story, comment this below and then I’ll send it to you.

[00:59:08] Will: And the more engagement, the dah, dah, dah, that all just feels inauthentic to me. And we will never do anything that feels inauthentic just to get more followers. And I, I think what we found is, in the grand scheme of things, we don’t have like crazy big numbers, but our engagement is extraordinarily high because we’ve kept the promise to people, we will always show up for you in the way that we, that we promise.

[00:59:37] Will: Yeah. We’re gonna engage with you in these formats in the same way that I’d engage with you if you were sitting across the room. Mm-hmm. From me and. Like, I think there’s little ways that you can engage people as individuals, but I think the most important rule is who are you? How would your friends describe you?

[00:59:58] Will: And engage with your audience as that person.

[01:00:01] Brian: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:02] Will: And don’t try to trick people into following you or trick people into engagement, because that might yield short term benefits. But I really do believe in the long term it, it never does.

[01:00:13] Brian: No. An engaged audience always trumps a large audience. Mm-hmm. A friend of mine, his name is Scott Heminger, has a company called Seattle Ultrasonics and he’s basically turned a chef knife or a ultrasonic toothbrush, you know, z that thing into a chef knife.

[01:00:30] Nathan: Okay.

[01:00:31] Brian: And it uses the same technology and you can just cut through anything. It’s terrifying ’cause it does the ultrasonic vibration. Yeah. Anyhow, it’s an amazing product. He was just on a, a YouTube channel show with 16 million views, and he was like, this is the one that’s gonna sell all these products.

[01:00:49] Brian: Mm-hmm. And then he was on one the next day that had like 750 view. And anyway, the 751 moved, four or five x the product because those people are so into, um, they’re so engaged and they’re so, and he was just like, ah, the numbers. Um, it’s, it’s who the people are and why they care about me and why they care about something that is so much more than a giant audience a lot of the time.

[01:01:19] Brian: And so that’s, we’re trying to get the right people mm-hmm. At the right time and to care about them in an authentic way, uh, where they feel cared for more than just numbers.

[01:01:33] Will: And how do you feel about that? I’d love your thoughts.

[01:01:35] Nathan: Well, I think of. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure this out of like the numbers versus the, uh, attention and the intention behind that.

[01:01:44] Nathan: And so I think about an audience versus a crowd. And so like on social media you’ll see, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of followers and not really that connection. ’cause maybe you’re just entertaining them. It’s just a, a moment in time. And you’ll see these small accounts with a thousand or 5,000 followers where people will show up in person, they will take action to do this.

[01:02:07] Nathan: Yes. And so I think a crowd is anyone, it’s just, it’s the numbers. Yeah. And an audience is the right people paying attention. And so I always try to be. Very diligent about that, of like, okay.

[01:02:17] Will: I think community probably comes somewhere. Yeah. Beyond audience.

[01:02:20] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:21] Will: There’s a crowd, there’s an audience. Then you’re actually building a property

[01:02:23] Nathan: community.

[01:02:23] Nathan: The community is where they’re learning from each other.

[01:02:25] Will: Yeah.

[01:02:26] Nathan: And if you were, you know, your role as, as the facilitator and the connector, but if you were to step out, it would continue to,

[01:02:32] Will: but even like, I I, I would even say in a community, they don’t necessarily need to be learning from one another. They just feel in community amongst the others that I, where I belong, like this one person or idea that people are following just gives them a sense of belonging and an identity around that idea.

[01:02:53] Will: They feel a connection to it. Right. We all,

[01:02:56] Nathan: we

[01:02:56] Brian: all wanna belong.

[01:02:58] Nathan: It’s all

[01:02:59] Will: No, but that is true. Everyone wants to feel a genuine sense of belonging to something. Yeah.

[01:03:03] Nathan: And that’s what the, the whiskey barrel, what’s so powerful about that is you create, you systematized a sense of belonging. Mm-hmm. Right?

[01:03:11] Nathan: Where people felt like, oh, I am here with people who. They themselves want to improve. They just witnessed me stating an intention of how, of what I’m going to do. Yes. I now have accountability. You know, I probably didn’t go to a very fancy restaurant with random people I don’t care about. I went with people who yes, really matter to me and they got to witness that intention and we belong together.

[01:03:33] Nathan: And there’s just, I’ve had many moments in my life like that, but never in a way that someone else was able to systematize magic. And I think that’s what’s so, so powerful about it.

[01:03:43] Will: Another way we found to singularly celebrate and connect with people in our audience or community, which is also a system.

[01:03:52] Will: ’cause I really do believe in systems mm-hmm. Is one of the most important parts of our social media strategy is something we called Unreasonable Hospitality out in the world. Um, I think the more stories of unreasonable hospitality you hear, the more inspired you are to create stories of your own. Um, and.

[01:04:14] Will: I think it feels really cool to see a story that you have authored. Shared,

[01:04:23] Nathan: right?

[01:04:24] Will: And so, I don’t know, three years ago I just went on Instagram and I said, Hey, I’m inspired by stories. Every time I hear of one, I want to create more of them myself. Send me your stories and I’m gonna read them here. And it’s one of the temples of my entire social media strategy.

[01:04:41] Will: People send in stories where they have been either on the serving or the receiving end, and I read them, celebrate the person. Mm-hmm. I read their, I literally take out a piece of paper, read it, and then talk about what lesson I learned from it. And

[01:04:55] Brian: well, and now with Kit, with our welcome sequence.

[01:04:58] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:04:58] Brian: We’ve added that in where we say like, Hey, we build this newsletter based on stories that we hear from y’all. Just hit reply to this email and share your stories, which we never did that before. When we welcome people into the community. And the engagement on that. People love it. Like they want their voices heard, like people want to matter and they do.

[01:05:20] Brian: Like, that’s how we get our content.

[01:05:21] Will: Well. And then in the comments it’s like, all right, here we are, another edition of Unreasonable Hospitality out in the world. This one from Nathan Berry, dah, dah, dah, right? And then you have people in the comments being like, go Nathan, or like, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then I’ve literally been traveling and I’ll someone will be like, Hey, you shared a story about my friend.

[01:05:40] Will: And like affirmation, personal celebration is a beautiful thing. And if we can use a platform to celebrate individuals who are doing great things, and when you see this is true in any culture, creating a culture of praise is important. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, to praise someone when they go above and beyond expectations, but because if we all work for a team and you get celebrated for doing something, well now I want to do that thing too because I want to be on the receiving end of that.

[01:06:08] Will: And um, I just think like you can come up with so many little. Weighs in just to celebrate great people. And in doing so, perpetuate the, the very message that you’re out there trying to,

[01:06:23] Nathan: yeah, so I think of everything in terms of flywheels, like how do you have a self-reinforcing loop that feeds on a self, and, and the more that it, it, each loop that it goes through, it gets easier with every, every rotation.

[01:06:35] Nathan: It, uh, produces more results and all of that. And so what you’ve described is, is a flywheel where, you know, you’re starting off by telling your own stories and showcasing, you know, the stories that you’ve come across, and then that’s inspiring people to implement it. And you’re like soliciting like that back, which gives you more content to create and share, which gets in front of more people, which gets more stories sent in.

[01:06:59] Nathan: And, and it also gets more attention to it, right? Because if you highlight, you know, I’m inspired by you, I implement it, and then I send in my story, you highlight. Well, I’m now going to share it to everyone else.

[01:07:12] Will: Yeah.

[01:07:12] Nathan: Because me telling my story of how we applied, this is one thing. You telling my story, I’m like, I’m gonna shout that from the rooftops, you know?

[01:07:21] Nathan: Yes, yes,

[01:07:21] Brian: yes.

[01:07:21] Nathan: And so that gets more people in there. And so I think a lot of people are doing this manual work to try to grow their audience and all these things. And then when you’ve discovered a flywheel like this and you’re like, oh wow, we can do the same thing over and over again of recurring temp pole in your content.

[01:07:36] Nathan: Yes. Like you talked about. And you’re like, it becomes way easier, it reaches more people and it builds meaningful connections.

[01:07:42] Will: But you’re doing it because it’s the right thing Yes. To do.

[01:07:47] Nathan: Yes.

[01:07:47] Will: It like, forget about content. Mm-hmm. And newsletters and social media. Forget about everything. And let’s just go back to like the fundamental message of our work.

[01:07:57] Will: One of the things that we spend the most time talking about is this adage. In the world of economists, which is what gets measured, gets managed.

[01:08:10] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:08:11] Will: That people invest their time into things where they can clearly see an ROI.

[01:08:17] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:17] Will: Like if I do this, it’s going to work and this way, and it’s become this thing and I’m gonna get more followers and this is gonna be the ultimate result and I can measure it for, here’s the thing, with hospitality, it is much harder to measure.

[01:08:29] Will: We made a choice at some point to stop investing in things just because you can measure the impact of that investment, but to invest in things just because they’re the right thing to do. Mm-hmm. Or we believe that if we do that it is authentic to who we are and to the message we’re trying to share. And we think it’s gonna make the world a little bit of a better place.

[01:08:49] Will: I really do believe that, and I’m not telling you not to be strategic, I think being strategic is so unbelievably important, but you can tell the people that are making decisions based on strategy and strategy alone. And those that are blending passion and strategy at the same time. And if you do something because it’s true to who you are and it’s the right thing to do, generally over the long term, the return will be significant.

[01:09:15] Nathan: Hmm. Yeah. And I’ve seen you be very disciplined in so many parts of your business and measure a lot of things so that you can then do these things. Talk about the 95 5 rule.

[01:09:26] Will: Yeah. The 95 5 rule is how we manage all of our resources, money, time, which is manage it like a maniac 95% of the time, such that the other 5% of the time you can spend it foolishly.

[01:09:41] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:42] Will: And what I mean when I say that is, is two things. One, you need to earn the right to spend that last 5% foolishly. If we look at the resource of money, you don’t have money left over to spend foolishly if you’re not disciplined in holding onto as much of it as possible. But I also say earn it because you better earn it.

[01:10:02] Will: Because if you’re not spending that last 5% foolishly, I think you’re being financially reckless. But

[01:10:08] Brian: what do you mean by foolishly?

[01:10:10] Will: Foolishly? I mean, in the

[01:10:12] Brian: thing You don’t mean like going to the casino.

[01:10:14] Will: No.

[01:10:15] Brian: Yeah.

[01:10:16] Will: Oh, I mean, no, no, no. I don’t mean going It’s research. I mean like doing the things that, like if that barrel of whiskey wasn’t free, buying an entire barrel of whiskey and putting it into the basement.

[01:10:28] Brian: Well, no, I mean just to the cost of Yes. Yeah. Or the fact, fact underst there were

[01:10:33] Will: so expenses.

[01:10:33] Brian: Yeah. Or the fact that we have a ski ball machine in our office. Yeah. Uh, and how like joyful and fun that is. Or we’re gonna go and do a special day. Like the, the freedom to bring joy, to treat your own employees with surprises and gifts.

[01:10:50] Brian: The, the freedom to go, go on a trip with your like,

[01:10:53] Will: or at our events, I mean, we dream weave the heck outta people at our events. Because it’s in those investments, the ones where you can’t necessarily measure the return on those investments, that I think the return is the greatest, where you can actually create the kind of memories that will last where you can earn the loyalty that takes a long time to erode.

[01:11:16] Will: Um, but what I was saying before is I don’t, I think it’s financially reckless not to be doing some of that foolish spending because it means that you’re so focused on today dollars that you’re not nearly focused enough on tomorrow dollars.

[01:11:32] Nathan: Yeah. Okay. The last thing that I wanna ask about, and this is kind of a selfish question because it’s about my business, but I think it could be a way that translates to so many people in the audience is as like, Brian, you’ve, you dove in really heavily to set up the newsletter on Kit and we’ve worked super closely.

[01:11:49] Nathan: I wanna know, with your relatively fresh eyes to the platform, what are the things that you’re like, oh, like what are the opportunities that you saw there? Oh, if Kit did this, like these were touch points that either were great, though you don’t need to spend time celebrating us. ’cause we wanna learn. Like what are the things that you’re like, oh, this is an opportunity for magic to be created, or this is a touch point that could really be elevated as we try to make the best platform that we can

[01:12:15] Will: be.

[01:12:16] Will: Like really critical.

[01:12:19] Brian: You know, I, so I’m not a, I mean I’m a restaurant Yeah. Guy by tr I’m not a tech guy. And I feel often, um, like the tool is so powerful. Mm-hmm. Um, it took me a long time to realize like, I’m also a, a creative and I love design. I had no idea how powerful your design tool was until I had to watch several videos and then meet with one of your people and then like, ask chat, GBT.

[01:12:48] Brian: It, it, it was hard to learn how powerful it was coming from a non-tech background. Um,

[01:12:56] Nathan: yeah,

[01:12:57] Brian: so I, I want, I, I, I think the product is so good, but I want it to be more accessible to people who aren’t super smart. Mm-hmm. Like myself, or, um, more intuitive on how to use the design tools or build forms, or actually forms is really, that’s a pretty good tool.

[01:13:20] Brian: Or, um, like sequencing or building automations, or it feels like this, uh, this very complex, very powerful machine, um, that I want like a, a cheat guide u user manual for the non-techie types.

[01:13:39] Nathan: So what it made me think of is. Doing more training is a very natural thing that software companies would do. And they’re like, oh, we need to make the interface better here and we need to do more training there.

[01:13:48] Nathan: But that’s not like an unreasonable hospitality approach. But what we could do is, you signed up, you’re gonna, we could say, oh, you know, you’re a few days in and you don’t have an email template yet. We designed one for you, which would get you, and you’d be like, what?

[01:14:03] Brian: Okay.

[01:14:03] Nathan: And whether you like it or not, or you want tweaks to it, you’d be like, wow, an actual person made that for me.

[01:14:08] Nathan: Like, that’s cool. But then ultimately you want to, you know, learn how to fish yourself. And so we’re like, we designed one for you and here’s a video showing how we made your template.

[01:14:19] Brian: Yeah. That’s what that would do both. Yes. Like, um, what’s that? What are those videos that you send me that are like, personalized to me?

[01:14:27] Brian: That what’s the, what are those things called? It’s like,

[01:14:29] Nathan: oh, like a loom video.

[01:14:30] Brian: Like a Loom,

[01:14:30] Nathan: yeah. Or,

[01:14:31] Brian: yeah. So like the looms have been an amazing service. Mm-hmm. Because this one of your team members saying, here’s exactly what I did and how I did it. Uh, and they’re coaching and teaching me, and that’s mm-hmm.

[01:14:41] Brian: Such a gift.

[01:14:43] Nathan: I’m just thinking about all of these things, like there’s, there’s little bits of polish to add everywhere, but I’m trying to think of what a few of these moments that you could create where someone goes, like, where you’re saying everyone hits this, everybody needs the coat at the end of the night.

[01:14:57] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Everybody needs to build their landing page, but how you turn it from a like, cool, I checked that box into a, something much more remarkable.

[01:15:06] Will: I mean, it, Brian ran this whole process. Mm-hmm. And so I’m, everything I’m about to say is only based on the conversation I just heard.

[01:15:14] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:15:16] Will: This is almost agnostic to Kit, but Kit Falls in the bucket of companies this applies to, which is there’s so many tools out there for people right now where people are overwhelmed.

[01:15:28] Will: Mm-hmm. By the opportunity in those tools. Um, I mean, AI is the biggest thing right now where like people know that you can do so much, and most people, infinite things have no idea where to even start. And I, I think it makes people, this has nothing to do with kid now.

[01:15:45] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:46] Will: It can make people feel dumb when they’re not able to fully realize the power of something that they have purchased.

[01:15:55] Will: And so how do you open up people’s eyes such that they’re using all of the thing

[01:16:04] Brian: Yeah. In a way that isn’t shaming or in a way that is like celebratory of them to, or

[01:16:10] Will: fully consuming either

[01:16:11] Brian: or like taking this risk of Oh my gosh. So you’re trying to build a sequence, like let’s do this. Um, yeah. Like even the video content, I, I think there could be like, there’s so good and there’s so many more that I want that are like coaching and walking me through it.

[01:16:28] Nathan: Yeah. When that’s where you’re getting back to the, the quote that you started with of like, people remember how you made them feel and you might feel, make them feel like they accomplished a task at the end of a hard day. And that’s probably where most people are, but you know, if you made them really feel like, oh, I, I made something that I’m really, really proud of.

[01:16:48] Nathan: Yeah. Or I felt,

[01:16:50] Will: and I had a lot of fun along the way.

[01:16:52] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:16:53] Will: I don’t, I’ve never watched one of these videos.

[01:16:55] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:16:55] Will: So I can’t opine. Are they like the most fun videos ever to watch?

[01:16:59] Nathan: I think they’re the most practical videos.

[01:17:02] Will: So they,

[01:17:03] Nathan: so there’s a big opportunity there.

[01:17:04] Will: And by the way, they should be practical.

[01:17:05] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:17:06] Will: And they should also be really fun,

[01:17:07] Nathan: right?

[01:17:08] Will: Like, I just think like everyone should be investing more time into making work fun.

[01:17:13] Brian: Or like, during the, the very beginning, the, the onboarding or answering all these questions, if there was a random question that said, what’s your favorite candy bar? And it made no sense, and then you went to the next one.

[01:17:23] Brian: But then on like launch day or the day that,

[01:17:26] Nathan: right.

[01:17:26] Brian: I send out. Uh, my very first newsletter, put a packet of Skittles in, in, in the mail and say, Hey, well done the kit team. And it’s a, it cost you a buck, you know, little tiny things that make the person feel celebrated or seen that says, Hey, you did something.

[01:17:45] Brian: Like you built your first newsletter. You sent out your first,

[01:17:48] Will: yeah. What do y’all do when someone hits a hundred thousand subscribers, or,

[01:17:51] Nathan: that’s a big conversation that we’re trying to figure out right now, actually is like, YouTube does a plaque, you know, and so we don’t do anything right now. And, um, we’ve been debating like, do we do a plaque?

[01:18:03] Nathan: Do we do, is it just a

[01:18:05] Will: don’t do a plaque?

[01:18:06] Nathan: Yeah, don’t do a plaque.

[01:18:08] Will: No, but there’s like something, I mean, I, I think by the way, it’s Skittles, like what he just said. I love that idea. That’s a really fun idea. Like, it’s just the little things like,

[01:18:18] Nathan: because it’s personalized. Yes.

[01:18:20] Will: Yeah. And it’s just like, Hey dude, good job.

[01:18:24] Will: Or whatever. If you get a, a significant milestone. You should. The idea of asking one of the coolest things about a magic trick when you go see a magic show is when they do something at the very beginning of the show and you completely forget about that thing. And then it comes back later in the show.

[01:18:40] Will: If you’re asking people questions when they’re being onboarded and they’re so overwhelmed by that process, they completely forget about that stuff, then they might have made

[01:18:49] Nathan: them laugh. Like, why do you wanna,

[01:18:51] Will: okay, whatever. A year and a half later when they hit a big milestone, then you’re using that information.

[01:18:55] Will: That’s when it becomes magical.

[01:18:57] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:18:57] Will: Or um, and by the way, like don’t wait for the crazy big moments to celebrate. Celebrate. ’cause people want to feel like they’re getting somewhere. And even the smallest milestones can be opportunities for celebration.

[01:19:17] Nathan: Yeah, that’s powerful. I love that.

[01:19:18] Will: If we keep on going, we need to start charging you, so let’s stop.

[01:19:23] Nathan: Exactly. Well, this has been a

[01:19:25] Brian: plus five packets of Skittles. Next answer.

[01:19:29] Will: Do you love Skittles?

[01:19:30] Brian: No. Actually, what

[01:19:32] Nathan: is your favorite candy?

[01:19:36] Brian: I think it’s a fifth Avenue.

[01:19:38] Nathan: There you go.

[01:19:38] Brian: It’s nearly perfect. Or a whatchamacallit. Oh yeah,

[01:19:43] Will: yeah.

[01:19:44] Nathan: I can’t, I I,

[01:19:44] Will: I love a Snickers bar and an Hermes wallet

[01:19:50] Brian: delivered in a Ferrari.

[01:19:51] Nathan: Yes, exactly.

[01:19:53] Will: Do they taste better than a stickers bar in the glove compartment of a new Ferrari?

[01:19:58] Nathan: Oh, that sounds good. Guys, this has been so much fun.

[01:20:00] Nathan: First of all, thank you for using the platform and bringing the magic that you all do to the world, and we’re proud to play a, a tiny part in helping you guys do that.

[01:20:08] Will: And so fun to be here, man. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank

[01:20:10] Brian: you.

[01:20:11] Nathan: Um, people want to go sign up to the newsletter, check out everything that you’re doing.

[01:20:15] Nathan: Where should they go?

[01:20:16] Brian: Just go to the website, unreasonable hospitality.com.

[01:20:18] Nathan: Sounds good. And the field guide is out now.

[01:20:20] Will: The field guide is now out available wherever you buy books. And, um, we’re really proud of how that came out. That was, you talk about going through every detail of an idea and figuring out how to make it more awesome.

[01:20:35] Will: We made the process of writing a workbook far more challenging than it needed to be, but we’re pretty proud that we’ve created something that I don’t feel is even, I don’t think, feels even a little bit like work.

[01:20:47] Nathan: Yeah,

[01:20:48] Brian: it’s fun. And there’s a fun Easter egg or two in there.

[01:20:50] Will: Yeah,

[01:20:51] Nathan: I like it. Well, I hope you two create more content together, because you’ve got a pretty magical partnership and it’s fun to share with the world.

[01:20:57] Nathan: So unreasonable hospitality.com. Thanks for coming on the show.

[01:21:00] Will: Thanks Ben.

[01:21:01] Brian: Thanks Nathan.

[01:21:02] Nathan: If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Berry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I’d love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else do you think we should have on the show.

[01:21:16] Nathan: Thank you so much for listening.

[00:00:00] Nathan: All healthy is over a million subscribers. What’s worked the best for driving growth

[00:00:03] Sean: in terms of what’s worked really well for us? I always recommend

[00:00:07] Nathan: Sean Devlin spent years at optimism helping build a portfolio of email first brands to millions of readers before founding his own.

[00:00:15] Sean: A lot of our initial growth came from cross pollination, from other newsletters, and obviously you could do this in swaps with other newsletters too.

[00:00:21] Nathan: He built nice news to over 800,000 subscribers before he was acquired by Encyclopedia Britannica in his latest newsletter. All healthy 1.3 million subscribers. And an incredible 52% open rate.

[00:00:32] Sean: It’s important to determine what it is that your goals are for the newsletter to start, and if we want to group it into three categories, we can group it into engagements, monetization, and retention.

[00:00:43] Nathan: If you have an email list and you want people to actually look forward to opening it, you’re gonna wanna stick around for this one. What works best for monetization?

[00:00:50] Sean: For monetization for us, we’re.

[00:00:56] Nathan: Sean, welcome to the show.

[00:00:57] Sean: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

[00:00:59] Nathan: So I wanna dive right in.

[00:01:01] Sean: All right.

[00:01:01] Nathan: What’s one format change that anybody could make that would make their subscribers more addicted to opening their emails?

[00:01:07] Sean: So I would start with analyzing your existing format for your newsletter. Okay.

[00:01:13] Sean: What does your newsletter look like right now? Why are people engaging with your newsletter? What’s resulting in forming habits in your readers and keeping them coming back, and then building on that. So. For all Healthy. We have a couple sections that are specifically included to form habits in our readers.

[00:01:31] Sean: One of ’em is actually called Healthy Habits. It has Habit in the name, the other one’s called Final Thought, and these are sections that are further down in the newsletter with the goal of getting people to obviously form a habit of actually reading the entire newsletter too. Mm-hmm. But you can include something further up too.

[00:01:45] Sean: Then for Healthy Habit, um, these are two sections that don’t even have CTAs. So the whole goal is basically to get people to build a habit of actually just reading them and getting value outta them. Healthy Habit is just a tangible recommendation of something you can do that day to live a healthier life.

[00:02:00] Sean: Um,

[00:02:01] Nathan: what would an,

[00:02:01] Sean: what

[00:02:01] Nathan: would an example of that be?

[00:02:03] Sean: Yeah, so an example would be, um, like Make Tomorrow Easy. So you’re getting your clothes, your workout clothes, or choosing your outfit in advance or getting your lunch ready beforehand or something like that. And then right after that we have final thought where we have a quote alongside an image.

[00:02:20] Sean: And our goal for that is to kind of choose something that’s relatively unexpected. So we’ll choose something like, um, from a podcast or from a book and really try to provoke thought in our readers. Yeah. And ultimately that section is trying to kind of like evoke some sort of emotion. Maybe it’s like awe or inspiration.

[00:02:37] Sean: Our goal with that is ultimately to kind of get them to feel something. And I like to say that you might not remember everything that you’re reading in a newsletter, but you’re gonna remember how you felt when you read it. And that feeling is what’s gonna result in you coming back the next day, the next week.

[00:02:51] Sean: So that’s kind of what’s resulting in that return behavior. So we really lean into that with those sections. And I mean, for your newsletter it could be something wildly different. You could do a fact or something that happened that day in history and intention and insight or recommendation. I think the goal is for it to feel like it kind of like.

[00:03:09] Sean: Fits with the format of your newsletter and doesn’t feel like a random add-on, and it’s providing value and is integrated in a way that makes sense.

[00:03:17] Nathan: Yeah, I like that. I’m thinking about James Clear’s newsletter. Yeah. Where you know, his 3, 2, 1. He’s ending with that one question for you. Exactly.

[00:03:24] Sean: Yeah.

[00:03:25] Nathan: And so he is probably, I haven’t talked to him about this, but he’s probably wanting someone to walk away with this feeling of like, oh, I’m.

[00:03:31] Nathan: Smarter or more introspective, or it’s something like that.

[00:03:33] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:34] Nathan: You know, uh, like thoughtful.

[00:03:36] Sean: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:03:36] Nathan: The feeling coming out of it. Whereas another example would be Anne Helen Peterson has a section in her newsletter called, it’s just a link that just says, just trust me.

[00:03:45] Sean: Hmm.

[00:03:46] Nathan: And that’s always, you know, something fun or insightful or, or something like that.

[00:03:49] Nathan: Um, where you’re like, oh, just trust me. You don’t even have any context, just click on it.

[00:03:54] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:54] Nathan: And, uh, Marissa Lavell, who runs from Boise, which is a local newsletter that she and I, uh, co-founded, she borrowed that just trust me format and it’s always something funny.

[00:04:05] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:06] Nathan: Or all that. And so going back to a feeling

[00:04:07] Sean: mm-hmm.

[00:04:08] Nathan: Right. You’re going to read from Boise either about the news or history or the events. And the last link is the Just trust me. And it’s the highest click link in every issue. And it delivers. Yeah. Every single, like every single time you’re like, oh, Marissa, I’m glad that I trusted you. Yeah. And you click that link.

[00:04:23] Nathan: ’cause it brought me joy.

[00:04:25] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:25] Nathan: And so then it reinforces this idea that from Boise is about. Joy and happiness and lighthearted. Um, so I love that. Right. You’re, you have a set format that is designed to create a feeling.

[00:04:37] Sean: Exactly. Yeah. No, I love that approach. And we, we’ve tried similar six sections of that where the goal is obviously to get clicks or engagement mm-hmm.

[00:04:43] Sean: But also to provide value in a unique way.

[00:04:46] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:04:46] Sean: Yeah.

[00:04:46] Nathan: What do creators get wrong about email formats?

[00:04:50] Sean: I would say. I, I think personally what I get wrong is I lean into certain metrics, like open rate and click through rate. Okay. And think about it maybe in more of a short term viewpoint. Mm-hmm. So for open rate, that could look like AB testing, five subject lines and one maybe being a little bit more offbeat or mm-hmm.

[00:05:10] Sean: Framing it as a question or incorporating an emoji. And then let’s say that one wins and that’s sent to the entire audience, but it happens consistently over the course of a week or something like that. I mean, it can be a little annoying if your subject lines are framed as a question every single day, right?

[00:05:24] Sean: So I think it’s kind of finding that balance in terms of tone and approach and making sure you’re representing your newsletter the way that you want to, or for click through rate. It could be you include something that maybe. It feels a little bit click Beatty. Mm-hmm. But it ends up in your audience clicking it and like, on a performance basis.

[00:05:42] Sean: I mean, you’re looking at the click that you’re like, oh wow, it performed really well today. Like the, the newsletter performed really well, but did it leave a good taste in your, your subscriber’s mouth? Right. I think it’s important to be thinking about the long-term relationship with your subscriber, not just looking at those metrics more near term.

[00:05:58] Nathan: Yeah. It’s interesting thinking about clickbait. Which we describe as a negative term. Yeah. Right. Of like, oh, you don’t want, that’s a clickbait headline, but it’s only a negative thing if you don’t deliver.

[00:06:07] Sean: Yeah.

[00:06:07] Nathan: Like if you bait me into clicking on something. Exactly. And then it. It pays off. And as a, as a reader, I’m like, oh, had, had you framed that in a boring way or a generic way, I wouldn’t have clicked it, but I’m so glad that I did.

[00:06:21] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:21] Nathan: So thank you for, it’s not like we’re phishing or something and now you’ve got me on the hook. It’s like, no, thank you for, um, getting me to engage with that. Like, my life is better, my insights are better, whatever. Because of that.

[00:06:33] Sean: Yeah.

[00:06:33] Nathan: So were there things that you’ve maybe pushed the envelope on but then made sure that you could follow up?

[00:06:38] Nathan: And actually deliver the value with it,

[00:06:40] Sean: for sure. Yeah. I mean, we’ll lean into that in terms of like phrasing for certain wording where it’s like, mm-hmm this one’s our favorite. Or maybe you missed this. Mm-hmm. To get someone to click. But ultimately, to your point, you need to make sure you’re providing value to them.

[00:06:51] Sean: Right. And they’re happy with where it is that they land and they’re not like, what is this? It’s like sponsor or something like that.

[00:06:57] Nathan: So if I understand it correctly, all healthy is over a million subscribers. Is that right? Yeah.

[00:07:01] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:02] Nathan: And you have pretty crazy open rate numbers. Yeah. Like I always see people grow these big lists, but then the open rate declines.

[00:07:08] Nathan: Mm-hmm. And I’m like. You don’t actually have that much engagement.

[00:07:11] Sean: Yeah.

[00:07:11] Nathan: Talk to me about one, what is the open rate, and then two, how do you, how do you still manage to have that? I have an open rate on that many subscribers.

[00:07:19] Sean: Yeah. So for us, open rate’s really important. Mm-hmm. I mean, our newsletter is a five minute digest our.

[00:07:24] Sean: Core goal is to get people to open and read. Mm-hmm. We’re not focused as much on just getting someone to click, so developing that relationship with them is really important. Our open rate is north of 50%. Yeah. Around hovers, around 52%. And I think we’re able to do that just ultimately by providing value to our readers every day.

[00:07:42] Sean: And they come to expect a specific format with the content that we’re sending. And we still have kind of like some element of surprise sometimes with changing things up in terms of the sections that we include. So it’s this balance of providing value every single day, um, getting trust from our readers.

[00:07:58] Sean: Mm-hmm. And then that results in them coming back.

[00:08:01] Nathan: Yeah. So a daily email, is it five days a week or seven days a week?

[00:08:04] Sean: It’s seven days a week.

[00:08:05] Nathan: Okay. So

[00:08:06] Sean: daily’s like a roundup though.

[00:08:07] Nathan: Okay. So it’s,

[00:08:08] Sean: yeah.

[00:08:09] Nathan: And I think people’s worry is that if I send emails that often

[00:08:13] Sean: mm-hmm.

[00:08:14] Nathan: I’m going to have higher unsubscribes, I’m gonna wear out my readers, I’m, I’m gonna not.

[00:08:20] Nathan: I’m not gonna get high engagement and I’m gonna cap my growth because the unsubscribes will always be a percentage, and the growth is a fixed, fixed number. How do you think about that? Why a daily email

[00:08:30] Sean: for us? Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely something that we’ve considered in terms of the frequency. Mm-hmm.

[00:08:34] Sean: And we, we explicitly call that out in the footer, like, do you want less emails? Click here. So our Sunday email is more of a weekly roundup. Mm-hmm. People could just get it once a week if they wanted to, but. We try to really cast a wide net with the topics that we’re covering with all healthy. So we’ll cover everything from, I mean, nutrition, to fitness, to relationships, to mental health.

[00:08:53] Sean: And because of that, it’s wide ranging and there’s value, and people find the content interesting each day. Mm-hmm. But at the same time, I mean, you don’t have to be opening and reading it every day, and

[00:09:03] Nathan: it’s not like, oh, we,

[00:09:05] Sean: yeah,

[00:09:05] Nathan: we missed episode four of the season and now. Exactly. Yeah. The rest of the season doesn’t make any sense.

[00:09:10] Sean: Exactly. Yeah. So for us, I mean, obviously it’s great to be able to monetize our audience every day too, so there’s value in that. And I think it really depends on the content that you’re sending. If it is relatively niche, it probably doesn’t make sense to be sending it every day. And if you’re looking at your unsubscribe rate and it’s skyrocketing when you send a particular type of email or frequency, right, then maybe reevaluate from there.

[00:09:32] Nathan: You brought up monetization. Mm-hmm. So how does all healthy monetize, and then also, like, there’s other newsletters in, in the network, right? You’ve, you’ve scaled nice news, you’ve scaled a bunch of other, uh, newsletters, like what works best for monetization for this style of newsletter?

[00:09:46] Sean: Yeah, so for monetization for us, we’re in email sponsorships.

[00:09:51] Sean: So in terms of what’s worked really well for us. I always recommend that people think about how your newsletter sponsorships are incorporated in a way that feels seamless and provides value to the reader too. In terms of obviously the sponsors that you’re including, you wanna make sure you’re partnering with brands that are aligned and actually provide value to your readers, but also.

[00:10:11] Sean: Of course you’re like labeling that this is a sponsored section. But sometimes when it stands out so much to the point where it’s just like drastically different in design and it’s something that like feels very like different from the rest of the content that’s included, people can form the habit of just skipping over it.

[00:10:26] Sean: Mm-hmm. So we find a way for it to feel really cohesive and integrated well. And then obviously like there’s value there. What we do in terms of tone of voice is we make sure it’s written by our editorial team in a way that kind of co is cohesive and seamlessly is integrated. And we also try to take an editorial approach with the content.

[00:10:43] Sean: So as an example for a sponsor that we have called Native Path, which is a collagen supplement, we’ll talk about, um, kind of how collagen impacts bone density as an example. Mm-hmm. And then we’ll dig into that a little bit and then link out to learn more. Or a hydrogen water sponsor, we may be talking about.

[00:11:02] Sean: What does the science actually say about hydrogen water? Like, why is everyone talking about this? And then get them to click to learn more. So that approach just feels more, it kind of draws the reader in, gets them interested in the content, and then gets them to click. And we’ve noticed, obviously engagements increase, but also conversions, like total conversions can increase ’cause you’re just getting the audience interested in something and then getting them to engage from there.

[00:11:23] Sean: So that approach has worked really well for us too.

[00:11:25] Nathan: Yeah, I’m thinking about that. Most sponsorships, like let’s say that, uh, we had a, a newsletter about the creator economy or something and Kit was sponsoring.

[00:11:36] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:36] Nathan: Most would come in and be like, sponsored by Kit. Here’s why Kit is so great. Go sign up by, go become a Kit customer.

[00:11:43] Nathan: And what I hear you talking about is, you know, instead it’d be like, why email is important as part of your. Creator tech stack. Mm. And then it’d be thoughts on that, maybe some quotes from, uh, you know, John Isha or someone like someone that’s trusted within that community. And then it’s like, oh, go learn more.

[00:12:03] Nathan: And this is brought to you by Kit.

[00:12:05] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:05] Nathan: Is that right? Of taking this editorial approach instead of the sales approach?

[00:12:08] Sean: Yeah. Like kind of getting that initial interest in the topic. Mm-hmm. And then providing a solution to something. Rather than just like starting with the solution, like, this is why you need this, and you’re like, need what?

[00:12:18] Sean: I didn’t.

[00:12:19] Nathan: I didn’t know that I cared.

[00:12:21] Sean: Yeah.

[00:12:22] Nathan: So it’s, I guess I could see that, that content. Maybe the first thing is sparking curiosity, right? Yeah. Of having the headline of the section or you know, you have to open this loop that then you’re able to start to close and you don’t even have to fully close it.

[00:12:35] Nathan: Like something I’ve seen work well with newsletter sponsorships is when they’re really just trying to get the click through. Then ultimately retarget those people later.

[00:12:44] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:44] Nathan: And so you, you don’t even really care about making the sale on the page that they click to? Yeah. It’s like we, we got people who are now interested in our target market, you know, they’re within our target market, interested in our topic.

[00:12:56] Nathan: And then as a brand we can follow up later with retargeting or with, you know. We’re probably not running one ad in all healthy. Right. We’re running a series over a series of months, and so

[00:13:08] Sean: mm-hmm.

[00:13:08] Nathan: There’s a lot of opportunity to make the sale long term.

[00:13:10] Sean: Exactly, yeah. And that’s our ideal partners. They’re not just looking at that one placement and conversions from that one placement.

[00:13:16] Sean: Obviously they’re analyzing it, but they’re looking kind of more holistically. Yeah. And then in terms of of placements that we have, I always recommend having more than one. Type of sponsorship inclusion. So we have a primary, we have a secondary, obviously more ad inventory equals more dollars, but allows you to charge different price points.

[00:13:33] Sean: Yeah. Maybe test something on more of a performance basis. And we have a section that’s called quick picks two. Okay. Which allows us to, it’s like more short form, we can test a performance sponsor in that section, actually get, uh, kind of a higher volume of engagement too.

[00:13:45] Nathan: So I’ve seen a few people do those where they might say like, here’s my.

[00:13:49] Nathan: Um, five favorite things like the, the, and three of them there. There’s five in a list, but two have an asterisk next to them. Yeah. That ends has a note of like, you know, sponsor partner or something like that. Is that kind of the, the style?

[00:14:02] Sean: Yeah. We just do one that’s sponsored. Mm-hmm. And it’s not every day.

[00:14:05] Sean: So it doesn’t feel too, yeah. Too heavy, but yeah, that’s the approach.

[00:14:09] Nathan: Okay. And then from a monetization perspective, what can you say about what sponsorships in the newsletter cost, how you structure them? Like if someone is saying, Hey, I’ve gotten to. Let’s say 50 to a hundred thousand subscribers in my newsletter, and I wanna start to take on brand deals and mm-hmm.

[00:14:24] Nathan: And, uh, sponsorships. Like what, what advice or direction would you give them? And then we can get into more specifics of. You know, monetization strategies.

[00:14:33] Sean: Yeah. I mean, obviously it’s always great to be able to just have flat rates that you’re charging your sponsors and you can just do it based on A CPM.

[00:14:41] Sean: Ultimately, they’re looking at performance on their end. Right. And I always recommend starting at a more reasonable rate just based on the inventory that you have available and then building up from there. I mean, if you have, if there’s scarcity, you can start charging more and more. And then depending on the partner, it could make sense, even if they’re really kind of opposed to or not interested in something that’s flat rate.

[00:15:01] Sean: You could test how to. Ccpc. Mm-hmm. And certain sponsors click exceptionally well. That example I gave from Native Path, they’re on A CPC. For us, it actually performs better than if we were to do flat rate. So it depends on the approach and the sponsorship you wanna take on. But being flexible early on I think is really important.

[00:15:16] Sean: And then building from there based on the inventory you have.

[00:15:19] Nathan: So a lot of creators might get a couple of brands that come in and say, oh, your audience is the perfect fit for who we’re trying to reach. So we’re we’re willing to pay this high amount, let’s say. I dunno, $2,500 or $5,000 for a flat rate sponsorship.

[00:15:32] Nathan: And I won’t do the math on CCP M, but just assume that’s a good A, a good CPM. And so then the creator gets attached to that number and they’re able to sell two or three more at that, but it’s sporadic.

[00:15:45] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:46] Nathan: Maybe have their own product that they’re promoting in there sometimes. And I think what I hear you saying is it’s best to not be attached to the high price.

[00:15:54] Nathan: Instead, maybe be at a lower price where the brand is saying, wow, we got a crazy return on investment. Can we book out a bunch more? And then you’re getting to where the demand is really, really high. You’ve got four or five sponsors that are all performing really well and their ad teams are like, how can I buy more?

[00:16:13] Nathan: And you’re like, well, we’re actually Q2 is already booked out.

[00:16:15] Sean: Yeah.

[00:16:15] Nathan: Um, than it is to say like, to command the highest price and have these openings where you’re like then starting to have to really. Push to close them, is that right?

[00:16:25] Sean: Exactly. Yeah. ’cause if you have limited inventory, it allows you obviously to increase the rates.

[00:16:29] Sean: And for us, I mean, we’re a daily newsletter, so someone is gonna probably ask, Hey, do you have remnant inventory available? I’m like, sorry, we don’t have any inventory available. Right. We’re booked out a hundred percent. That allows us to charge higher rates. And then also it has to perform well enough for them.

[00:16:44] Sean: For them to, to come back. And you want it to be a recurring relationship?

[00:16:47] Nathan: Well, and that’s the thing that I think creators get wrong, is they, they, most creators that I talk to, they want a CPM. Uh, based relationship. And most brands want some, uh, like paper for pay for performance model.

[00:17:00] Sean: Yeah.

[00:17:00] Nathan: And so they’re naturally at odds with each other.

[00:17:03] Nathan: But what the creator doesn’t realize is that the brand is evaluating it based on performance regardless. And so it’s not that one is better, like, better than the, than the other. Like ultimately they converged to the same thing.

[00:17:14] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:15] Nathan: And it just shows up in how many repeat buys did this brand make? And so the like.

[00:17:23] Nathan: Yeah, I, I guess what I think is creators should be way more open to a cost per lead or a co, uh, cost per click or cost per conversion model, because that ultimately aligns with, with the brand. Um, and just test both.

[00:17:37] Sean: Yeah, I agree. And I think that. I understand the hesitancy in terms of like mm-hmm. A CPA or CPL model.

[00:17:43] Sean: And that’s something we, we try to avoid in particular for brands when we’re uncertain what the performance is gonna be if we haven’t tested something before. But once you have those baselines that you can work off of, then you understand like what makes sense for the brand and what makes sense for you, what the likely engagement’s gonna be, and then you can price it accordingly.

[00:18:01] Nathan: What about getting. Once we have that baseline filled, you know, it’s like, Hey, we’ve got our slots. It might be a blend of a few different deals with a few different advertisers. What’s worked the best for being able to drive up those rates over time?

[00:18:15] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:16] Nathan: Probably ultimately drive up the performance over time for the advertisers.

[00:18:19] Sean: Yeah.

[00:18:19] Nathan: You know, but you know, as a creator, I’m like, look, I’ve got a hundred thousand subscribers. I’m making a good amount. I’m not gonna increase my cents per week. You know, either because I physically can’t ’cause I’m already at seven, or, you know, I’m at my limit as, uh, what I can produce. But I wanna earn more per impression.

[00:18:36] Nathan: What are the things that make the biggest difference?

[00:18:38] Sean: I mean, for us, I mean you mentioned like booking out for the quarter. Mm-hmm. We typically do it. I would love to book out further in advance, like for, for even annually, but it can work well booking out more short term. So like mm-hmm. Our April for instance, is full and now we’re trying to book people out for all of Q2.

[00:18:53] Sean: Yeah. And then it allows us to, to reference kinda the inventory that we have available and then try to kind of fill the slots and make it feel like we don’t have. I mean, hopefully you are in that position where you just don’t have as much inventory, so you’re then filling at a higher rate. I think having like those consistent partners that you’re booking out on a quarterly basis or monthly basis is gonna be where you’re the, allow you to have the most success because you have kind of that consistent, like every other week this brand is performing and we’re

[00:19:19] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:19:19] Sean: Expecting that we’re including them based on our, our rates that we have right now.

[00:19:24] Nathan: Yeah. And so that makes sense to me, but I’m wondering about. What things I could, should do in the newsletter itself or in deeper partnerships with the brand? Like what you know for the like, Hey, we’re at a $20 CPM is what it ultimately.

[00:19:40] Nathan: However, it’s it’s build, it ultimately is equating to this $20 CPM, and I want, I really want it to be a $22 CPM. Got

[00:19:47] Sean: it. Mm-hmm.

[00:19:48] Nathan: Like, what do I, how

[00:19:49] Sean: do you drive that up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, ultimately you have to find ways to increase performance. Mm-hmm. So if you’re bringing in new audience, that can be really beneficial for increasing engagement.

[00:19:58] Sean: Also, testing out different things. I, me, I mentioned taking that editorial approach with the, the copy, maybe leaning into that, trying different approaches for. What it is you’re covering, the angle that you’re taking, the placement type, uh, maybe you throw in something that is shorter form to drive more engagement in addition to the main sponsorship that you have.

[00:20:18] Sean: So testing things out, and ultimately they have to see that performance on their end for them to be willing to pay more.

[00:20:23] Nathan: Right.

[00:20:24] Sean: So hopefully you’re growing your newsletter and that justifies the increase in rates too.

[00:20:28] Nathan: Yeah, I like that. I’ve also seen creators go through and say, Hey, you’re sending these clicks that I’m giving you through to a generic landing page.

[00:20:35] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:35] Nathan: Can I. You know, can we, can you make a custom landing page for me that has a quote from me talking about the product

[00:20:42] Sean: love

[00:20:43] Nathan: that you know, and has some of this handoff?

[00:20:44] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:45] Nathan: And really, I mean, it just comes down to, I guess, probably two things. One is standard conversion rate optimization that would like work whether you’re running meta ads or anything else’s.

[00:20:55] Nathan: Like does your headline match the thing that they clicked on originally? You know, you’re bringing people to through. But then the other thing is taking responsibility for the performance. I think the more the creator says, it’s not just my responsibility to hand over 200 words worth of space, you know, and, and 300 pixels or whatever.

[00:21:16] Nathan: It’s like, no, I’m, I am taking as much responsibility as I can for the sales that are ultimately driven, and then as a result, I want to get paid more for it.

[00:21:26] Sean: Mm-hmm. I think thinking holistically like that is important because it has to be successful for them. And if you’re driving them to a landing page that isn’t converting, then you’re not gonna be able to continue to work with them.

[00:21:37] Sean: So it’s great when you find partners that are open to that feedback and have the flexibility to be able to implement ideas and suggestions that you have.

[00:21:46] Nathan: I like it. Okay, so I wanna go to newsletter design and structure, right? Because. People can get tired of a certain format or, uh, or they can fall in love with a format and keep coming back to it.

[00:21:59] Nathan: But as you’ve worked on different newsletters, I’m curious what’s like, do you have rules of thumb or things you keep coming back to on like how the newsletter is designed and laid out and that sort of thing? Or ones that you see and you’re like, Ooh. You know, gut feeling is like, don’t do that.

[00:22:14] Sean: Yeah. I’ll say it depends on the goal of the newsletter, Uhhuh.

[00:22:18] Sean: Like there are ones that I’ve launched in a previous life that are like, legitimately like just a trivia question. So you’re just trying to drive traffic to web or just like, okay, trying to drive traffic to an article in that place. In, in that, um, case, you want it to be obviously super short form and you don’t want it to be like.

[00:22:33] Sean: You don’t wanna provide all the content, uh, to them in the newsletter. ’cause ultimately then they’re not gonna engage. We take a modular approach with our current template for all healthy and we took a lot of the learnings that we had from Nice News and applied it to all healthy. Mm-hmm. And what’s worked really well for us in terms of like the beginning of the newsletter and when we have intro texts, were establishing that relationship with the reader and then kind of drawing them in further and then having.

[00:22:56] Sean: A few featured stories. Um, and then from there, kind of having some sections that the, like I mentioned, healthy habit and final thought that the reader comes to expect, but also throwing in some new sections here and there, um, which allow us to kind of have this, this balance of predictability and surprise.

[00:23:12] Nathan: I like that. Are there any newsletters that. You don’t work on that, you follow that, you’re like, Ooh, they, they particularly do things well, or you’re like, all right there, there’s real craft behind it. Or I, I wanna build a newsletter, you know, on that scale or get ideas from

[00:23:26] Sean: Yeah. Um, I mean, in the health and wellness space, I’m like always thinking about that.

[00:23:30] Sean: I love, even if it is just. Primarily text. Mm-hmm. I think finding ways to have the content be seamlessly incorporated, it works really well. So I love like Pump Club and Fit Insider and some of these that are a little bit more kind of industry specific, but. I mean, it really depends on what you’re trying to get your audience to do.

[00:23:48] Sean: So if the format is allowing your reader to stay in the inbox and continue to read, then yeah, something’s working well, if that’s what you’re trying to do. And then if the format is resulting in them clicking to go to web, if that’s what you’re trying to do, then it’s working well. So it, it kind of depends on your, your goals from the beginning too.

[00:24:05] Nathan: Anything that you’ve seen that’s really novel where you’re like, Ooh. I’ve been in the newsletter game for a long time and here’s someone doing something that you’re like, that’s different. It may not be right for my goals, but like that’s an interesting use of, of email.

[00:24:16] Sean: Yeah. I would say in terms of finding that balance between the two, I really love, uh, the Washington Post has a newsletter called like The Seven, and they.

[00:24:25] Sean: Incorporate CTAs in a way where it’s like they’re providing a good amount of content in the inbox still. So it’s kinda like building that habit with their reader. It’s all just about clicks. Exactly. But then they do the CTAs in a way for their featured stories that feels like it’s really compelling, like you want to click to read more.

[00:24:39] Sean: So it’s this balance of like, I’m sure they’re monetizing on web and then we’re up converting people from there. And then also they’re getting people to engage in the inbox. So I think it’s difficult to find that balance between the two. I think they do it really well.

[00:24:51] Nathan: Yeah, I like that. All right, let’s talk growth for a minute.

[00:24:54] Sean: Okay.

[00:24:54] Nathan: Because you, you don’t get to a million plus subscribers without having a few things figured out on growth. Obviously, you’ve gone. Um, broad appeal with your newsletters, which makes it easier to get to tens of people. Right? Like if someone’s building a business newsletter to over a hundred thousand people, that’s very hard to, and that might be equal difficulty to like a food newsletter at two or 300,000.

[00:25:18] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:18] Nathan: Right? Where the broader, the appeal, um, the cheaper you can acquire tra acquire traffic, larger target market and all of that. But what’s worked the best for driving growth? And maybe we could talk at different scales like. Zero to a hundred thousand subscribers and then we could dive into the, you know, a hundred to 500 and then beyond a million.

[00:25:38] Sean: Yeah. So I will say we were in a unique position with all healthy in that. We were a part of a wider optimism portfolio. Our parent company at the time, there were a good number of brands in the portfolio, so a lot of our initial growth came from cross pollination, from other newsletters and tactics. That worked really well for us there.

[00:25:55] Sean: And obviously you could do this in swaps with other newsletters too, but, or paid placements too. Uh, we would incorporate, I mean. Explicit sections to get health and wellness in your inbox and then, um, guide to landing pages to up convert from there. Mm-hmm. But then once we had kind of those core subscribers that were extremely engaged, we then kind of scaled beyond that and then included pieces of content that were our highest engaging pieces of content.

[00:26:17] Sean: And then in order to click to read that piece of content or to get access to that piece of content, kinda like a lead gen flow, you have to input your email to, to get access or from the click initially you’re being subscribed from there. So that allowed us to really scale early on. Um, and the. Now a lot of our tactics are via paid.

[00:26:33] Sean: In particular meta is where we’re really scaling spend and we’re using kind of some of those same flows in terms of lead gen. So we have guides that we’re doing for all healthy around a particular topic, like how to undo sitting all day or how to, um, how to, like things you need to throw away in your kitchen.

[00:26:50] Sean: Like something feels really compelling and aligned with. Like topically what it is that we’re covering anyway. And it

[00:26:55] Nathan: sparks that curiosity where I’m like, well, hold on. What should I throw away?

[00:26:58] Sean: Yeah. You’re like, wait,

[00:27:00] Nathan: now I wanna know where’s the guide.

[00:27:01] Sean: Exactly. Um, so that approach has worked really well for us.

[00:27:05] Sean: Mm-hmm. Because obviously like we get a lower CPA, but also want someone subscribes, they then they have to click in their inbox to be able to access what it is that we’re sending to them. So you get that initial engagement. If someone’s not clicking, we’re filtering them out. So we’re able to still kind of like.

[00:27:20] Sean: Keep on board the people who are actually engaged. So we’ve leaned into that a lot. And then through our sister publication Super Age, we’re doing a good number of quizzes too. Okay. We’ve done a quiz around like how long you’re likely to live, and then we’re asking them a ton of questions. So we’re getting a lot of data points up front.

[00:27:35] Sean: Relatively low CPA and then sending them the results via email. They’re engaged in the inbox immediately. So I think thinking about flows that aren’t just like, sign up for my newsletter, click here. They’re signing up, which can work really well too. Um, it’s allowed us to get a lower CPA and sometimes even higher engagement.

[00:27:53] Nathan: Yeah. Okay. So let’s dive in on meta ads in particular. Like what, what do you think of as for each of your brands? Like a good. CPA that, you know, for acquiring a subscriber, what do, what do you target there and then what are the things that have helped the most to, to drive that down?

[00:28:09] Sean: Yeah. I mean, some of the flows that I mentioned in terms of lead gen have helped us drive that down.

[00:28:13] Sean: Yeah. Like for nice news, we were hovering around like a dollar CPA mm-hmm. For the typical flow, which was like. Driving traffic to a landing page to get good news, and then you’re inputting your email explicitly to get that in your inbox. Currently we’re sitting like less than 50 cents for CPA A. Okay.

[00:28:29] Sean: And sometimes, I mean, depending on the campaign, that can even be like 30, 40 cents. So that’s relatively low. I know people are willing. Yeah, that’s very willing to spend a lot more for subscribers. But I will say that obviously some of those subscribers. Or just trying to get their quiz results or just trying to get this particular guide and then they aren’t as engaged.

[00:28:46] Sean: So you have to filter people out. And it’s worked really well for us also too, because we have the ability to share kind of cross network, so we can even lower that CPA further if we’re sharing it with another newsletter. Um, or having an integration like Spark Loop or partnership with another newsletter can allow you to lower that CPA too.

[00:29:03] Nathan: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I’ve seen people really build those optimized flows where it’s usually exactly, you said a quiz or a lead magnet on the front end. It’s not. The main call to action isn’t get healthy tips seven days a week. It’s like very specific pain point solved. And then, you know, it flows into that.

[00:29:21] Nathan: And then usually the cross promotions, uh, whether it’s through something like Spark Loop or you know, that you manually put together where it’s like, Hey, I’ll cross promote your newsletter. You’re paying me if they end up becoming engaged over here, or the offers portion where. Maybe there’s a brand, like one of your sponsors, you know, whether it’s the water brand or someone else, right?

[00:29:43] Nathan: That’s in that opt-in flow, um, and helping to recoup some of that. And then more in the creator space that you see is a lot of like a direct upsell into a product. Mm. You know, if someone has a 10 to $50 product that is tightly aligned with the lead magnet. You know, I’ve seen like coaches do something where maybe you’re downloading the industry checklist, you know, or the five biggest mistakes made in X industry, and then it’s like, Hey, do you wanna pay for, you know, pay a hundred dollars for an audit Where?

[00:30:17] Nathan: We’ll go and audit, see, like, give you, you know, a half hour coaching call of like, are you making these same mistakes? And um, and I’ve seen that work. Well, especially for, especially for someone who’s doing a low volume of leads, you would never wanna offer that, you know, thousands of leads. Mm-hmm. But if you’re a coach and you, you know, you’re like, look, if I did 10 of these a week, that’d be amazing.

[00:30:37] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:37] Nathan: Then I, some funnel like that can work out. And then you have a, you’re either. To a much lower CPC, ccp CPA or CPL cost per lead because you’re making up that money relatively soon to the funnel.

[00:30:51] Sean: Yeah, exactly. That’s what we’re trying to lean into more now is like lowering that subscriber payback period.

[00:30:56] Sean: ’cause it’s just, I mean, it’s amazing when you can get that that back immediately,

[00:31:00] Nathan: right?

[00:31:01] Sean: Yeah.

[00:31:01] Nathan: Compared to when you’re like, well, let’s see if this person opens. Consistently over, if they’re this likely to open consistently over the next six months. Yeah. Then we’ll make

[00:31:11] Sean: it back, back on and click on a sponsor here.

[00:31:12] Sean: Yeah. Yeah. To get a little bit more granular. Right. In that regard. Yeah, so I think it’s helpful to think about, I mean, depending on what it is that you’re offering, finding something that monetizes that, that individual faster or engages with them. Maybe you have a set onboarding flow, right? That’s like your top engaging content for that individual.

[00:31:29] Sean: They don’t necessarily know that that’s what you’re sending them, but it gets them then to drive to web mm-hmm. Or they see something different than the average subscriber that is gonna result in, um, getting that money back faster.

[00:31:39] Nathan: Yeah. Okay. I’m curious about these. I, I spent a lot of my time in niche newsletters.

[00:31:44] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Right? Where someone might have 10 to a hundred thousand subscribers, but a very high revenue per subscriber because they’re talking about marketing or engineering or some, some like very focused topic. So it’s interesting for me to talk to you where you’re in the broad appeal and you’re like, Hey, how do we, you know, nice news, right?

[00:32:03] Nathan: As a premise. It’s just like,

[00:32:05] Sean: like, could be anyone. Yeah.

[00:32:06] Nathan: Could be anyone. Yeah. Right. Do you like happiness? Would you like to be happier and see the good things in the world? Yeah. Um, I’m curious if there’s anything that you’ve learned from the broad appeal newsletters that you would recommend for the, like narrower niches where you’re like.

[00:32:24] Nathan: They’re not two separate worlds. You should, you should dismiss all of this over here. Here’s how you should mm-hmm. Incorporate it. Mm-hmm.

[00:32:29] Sean: Yeah. That’s a good question. I mean, in terms of user acquisition, I think it’s like much more lenient for us. Mm-hmm. Where we’ve done like joint giveaways with different people and because our content is so general, there’s a high likelihood or high probability that people are gonna be interested in, in living a healthier life or right.

[00:32:47] Sean: Having positive news in their inbox. So that approach can work really well. Um, I think you obviously, like if you are more niche, you just have to look at where your audience is. Mm-hmm. And try to target them outside of just casting a super wide net. Um, yeah, so I don’t know if that’s directly applicable necessarily for, for user acquisition, but I mean.

[00:33:06] Sean: For monetization. I mean, we’re still thinking through the lens of like, we’re trying to provide content that is valuable to our audience. So we’re trying to find partners that our audience is genuinely interested. And I think that translates to, I mean, you need to be partnering with brands that is provi are providing value to whatever it is that you’re, you’re covering and why you’re audience is reading your newsletter each day.

[00:33:25] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And thinking about individual tactics you mentioned. Um, using partnerships a lot to grow the newsletter, which helps, right? That you’re like, oh, well we’re within, within our own company, we have, you know, large newsletters already, we can cross promote. Um, ’cause it’s not really this angle of like, well, if they read one newsletter, they won’t read anymore.

[00:33:45] Nathan: It’s like, no. If they’re, you know, you might have like, someone who reads nice news could happily read all healthy Right. And cover different angles on it. So the cross promotion there makes sense. But something that I’ve seen a lot of creators do. Really effectively is the, the collaborations or the newsletter swaps.

[00:34:02] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:02] Nathan: And those work well within niches because it doesn’t take, if you have 10,000 subscribers and someone else that you’re working with talking to has 15,000 in a related niche, like it doesn’t take that much results for it to be worth it for me to write like a great guest post for them.

[00:34:18] Sean: Yeah.

[00:34:18] Nathan: If I get 200 subscribers, like,

[00:34:21] Sean: okay,

[00:34:22] Nathan: that was, you know, like.

[00:34:25] Nathan: A couple hundred high value subscribers that would’ve cost me, you know, four or $500, a thousand dollars potentially to go acquire in meta depending on, on the niche. Um, and so I see a lot of creators do that. But the thing that I feel like they mess up is they do like. Two, one-off partnerships where they’re like, oh, I did it with this person and that person.

[00:34:46] Nathan: And you’re like, did it work? They’re like, yeah, it worked great. So whatcha gonna do? I don’t know. I think I’m gonna try meta ads. I think I’m gonna go do this. And you’re like, you just described to me something that you, that you could replicate that worked multiple times.

[00:34:56] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:57] Nathan: And so go do it.

[00:34:58] Sean: Find a way to replicate

[00:34:59] Nathan: it.

[00:34:59] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. Go do it 50 times, like mm-hmm. Um, there’s a book I’m reading. I think it’s just called The Book of Elon, uh, by Eric Jorgensen, which is about, it’s just quotes like Elon’s life pH, uh, philosophy and, and all of that, all in his own words. Um, and, uh, one thing that the book talks about is what happens if you scale this up right?

[00:35:22] Nathan: To, to think in first principles or, um, to like pressure test ideas. Like, okay, well if we, if we did two, everyone else is like, oh, we could do 10. Okay, well what would have to be true to do a hundred? You know, and then you’re like, oh, okay. We could reasonably. Is there enough total addressable market to do a hundred partnerships with other newsletters?

[00:35:44] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:44] Nathan: That are interested in our content? Yeah, probably.

[00:35:47] Sean: Yeah. And how do you find that way to scale it? Yeah. Because I think for us, we probably should be leaning into that more in terms of, and you mentioned guest posting. That’s a great way Rather than the typical swap of like, let me include you, your newsletter in this placement.

[00:35:58] Sean: You include me. In this placement, which can obviously work well too, but you can only scale that so much ’cause you’re not including like a hundred newsletters and individual sent. Right. Uh, so yeah, finding ways to, and we’ve done actually something, I mean in this vein where we will have like a spotlight on an individual in our newsletter.

[00:36:14] Sean: Mm-hmm. And I’m sure it’s worked well for you in like the podcast space where it’s like you have a guest arm, they then reference that like. Share with their community that they were on your podcast. Yeah. Similar for that spotlight section for us, we feature them, we request in return, if they’re open to sharing that with their community, like finding ways to kind of scale it in a unique approach in collaborating with different individuals can work well.

[00:36:33] Sean: Mm-hmm. Rather than just kind of the typical swap. And I’ll place you here, you, you place me there.

[00:36:38] Nathan: Right. Yeah. It made me think of what you’re talking about with remnant inventory.

[00:36:42] Sean: Hmm.

[00:36:42] Nathan: As well of like, you could fill all of your ad slots and a third of them are paid. Because you’re able to sell those deals and all the rest are, are those, um, swaps that you’re doing?

[00:36:53] Sean: Yeah.

[00:36:54] Nathan: Because more growth is going to get you, uh, a bigger audience, which is then going to make you, you know, it’s like if fuels the whole flywheel, like if I’m saying, Hey, I have 10,000 subscribers, can we partner? You’re gonna be like, um. I have a million that’s not quite gonna work, you know, so I’m gonna be able to partner with people in the like, call it five to 25,000 subscriber range.

[00:37:15] Nathan: But then as I grow to 25,000 subscribers, I can partner with people in the 15 to 50,000 range and, and up from there. So growth fuels everything. And so, yeah, I think what you’re talking about is not only doing the swaps to fill the remnant inventory, but then also say like, Hey, let’s. Figure out any way that we can make this really valuable.

[00:37:35] Nathan: Might be more that we’re doing on social, or I might be like, what else can I do to help grow your newsletter or help promote your brand as a creator, because that’s gonna make people more eager and excited to partner with you.

[00:37:47] Sean: Yeah, and it could even be centered around just providing value to your point.

[00:37:50] Sean: Mm-hmm. Where it’s like they’re providing content to you that’s really valuable. You’re providing content to them. That’s really valuable. Then, I mean, growth is sort of like icy on the cake,

[00:37:58] Nathan: I think. I guess the, the way I was talking about it more is about the swaps.

[00:38:03] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:04] Nathan: But you could even just say, you know, all these creators, they write a newsletter every Tuesday and they’re like, they might be running out of content, and you’re like, Hey, can I.

[00:38:15] Nathan: Come teach this. I get paid to do this for workshops and for keynotes and all that. Can I just teach my best stuff to your audience for free?

[00:38:22] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:23] Nathan: And a lot of people would be like, yes, please. Yeah. You know, you’re like, well, what value did you deliver to the creator? They don’t have to write that week’s newsletter and it’s gonna be really good.

[00:38:31] Nathan: Yeah. You know?

[00:38:32] Sean: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:38:33] Nathan: And so, especially if you’re friends with people, um, that’s gonna be much more likely to, to work where they’re like a combination of like, yes, you’re taking this work off my plate. Maybe I’m doing you a favor in some way, but like your content is good, so I wanna get in front of my audience.

[00:38:48] Sean: Yeah, I like that.

[00:38:50] Nathan: I’m thinking about flywheels. Um, ’cause what I want people to do is really to, to dive in, like, to pick one growth mechanism. Like if you’re amazing at meta ads, then like do that and obsess over how to get your CPA down and um, you know, bring the, like decrease the cash conversion cycle and, and all of these things.

[00:39:13] Nathan: Or if you’re like, if you’re right at partnerships, then like, do that for a long time. And so I’m curious if there’s other flywheels that you’ve implemented inside of all he or nice news that you’re like, oh, I see. The more we do this, the better results it gets and the um, the easier it becomes.

[00:39:29] Sean: Mm. Yeah. I mean, if we wanna talk about kind of like content creation Yeah.

[00:39:33] Sean: As a flywheel too. I mean, we. In general, I think that talking about like if this is something you’re good at, lean into it. We try to like have that philosophy with our entire team. We’re a really lean team. It’s me and two people on our editorial team. Okay. And we have some freelance writers too. But my goal is to make sure that everyone’s focused on what it is that they do best.

[00:39:53] Sean: And all the content that we’re producing or everything we’re doing is being utilized the best way possible. So we have, um. We use a platform called Feedly as a news aggregator. We’re pulling all the content in based on specific sources and what we want to pull from, and then selecting from there, importing it into Airtable, using Airtable as like a CMS.

[00:40:13] Sean: Also as a, um, like, um, a. Collaboration tool.

[00:40:17] Nathan: Okay.

[00:40:17] Sean: Um, like a project management tool too. Kind of having everything live in there and then from there determining kind of when we’re sending content, um, deciding to send date and working backwards from there and having really kind of set workflows and then also translating that content to different platforms too.

[00:40:33] Sean: So everything’s an Airtable. We can then. Decide if that content’s living on social media. We have this like integration with AI that ranks content in Airtable that could potentially work well on social, which platform it could work on. Translates that content then for that format. And then, uh, from there we have the ability to kind of like edit and, um, populate it on different platforms and then kind of have everything live together there.

[00:40:56] Sean: And then it allows our team to really focus on what they do best in terms of actually writing and producing content.

[00:41:02] Nathan: I mean, I’m just thinking about the volume of content that you have to produce. And so the fact that that’s done three of you and some freelancers.

[00:41:09] Sean: Yeah, and I’m actually not even producing the content I’m doing.

[00:41:12] Sean: I’m doing like sales and partnerships and growth and other things. So yeah, we have, we do have freelance writers too, so that really helps. But it allows, I think, because it’s such like a refined process. Mm-hmm. We, I think it’s important to like. Prioritize and focus your time on what it is that you do best and what you have to be doing versus what someone else could be doing.

[00:41:32] Sean: And it’s obviously easier said than done, but we have, uh, freelancers in the Philippines that help with like certain campaign management tasks they help with. Mm-hmm. Um, customer experience, like replying to emails with different templates that we’re using or flagging certain things if we need to make sure that we see them.

[00:41:46] Sean: They help us with account management for sales and partnerships in terms of like getting assets and approvals Yep. And things like that. So it’s like those are things that like we can create a process around that. It’s not. Something I need to be doing. I think a lot of time can just go, especially as sole, sole individual creators, it’s like you’re jumping from task to task to task, and it’s just not productive.

[00:42:04] Sean: So finding ways to kind of like on a given day, you understand this is, this is what I’m working on. You have the ability to kind of like time block and prioritize your time. And then if there’s something that like you’re currently doing that you can have AI or a virtual assistant do, create a process for that and figure out a way to do it

[00:42:21] Nathan: right.

[00:42:22] Nathan: Yeah, so I’m trying to figure out the, the key leverage points in like the editorial process. Was there something that you implemented where you’re like, okay, this actually on, like, had the, the most leverage or made a big unlock?

[00:42:34] Sean: Mm. I mean, I think using Airtable for everything has been really helpful, where everything’s living in the same place.

[00:42:41] Sean: Um, we actually incorporated with our CMS, the ability for the content to translate from Airtable directly into the template. So that saved a lot of time. Um. Yeah, I think that was, that was a big one for us. And then we have the QA process, obviously in the inbox to make sure everything looks perfect, but we’re not having to kind of manually like copy and paste things.

[00:43:01] Sean: That’s helped.

[00:43:02] Nathan: Okay. And then you mentioned you have AI to help you determine what content was it? What content would do well on social and which platforms?

[00:43:10] Sean: Yeah, so that is more kind of like translating content to different formats, but we actually are training a cloud bot right now that’s gonna do just that, where we are currently meeting as a team to analyze performance for content, whether it’s for sponsors or for other pieces of content that performed well, didn’t perform well every other week.

[00:43:28] Sean: But we’re pulling that kind of like relatively manually and analyzing it and hypothesizing as to why we feel like something worked well or didn’t work well. So leaning into AI to make those kind of, or do analysis for you and make recommendations from there, I think could be really valuable. So that’s something that we’re, we’re gonna try to lean into in terms of content performance or sponsorship performance.

[00:43:48] Sean: So it has more data points and obviously we’re still from there determining what makes more sense, but it’s just a tool that we can use.

[00:43:56] Nathan: Are there other places that you’ve implemented AI in the workflow?

[00:43:59] Sean: Yeah, we use it for, I will say that our editorial team doesn’t use it for all these things, but we’ve explored using it for different things.

[00:44:06] Sean: So like we can use it for top editing if we need to. We use it for like creating outlines, uh, for content. We use it for like ideation for preheader text or subject lines, things like that. Based on what’s worked well, we use Mid Journey for like illustration creation.

[00:44:22] Nathan: Okay.

[00:44:23] Sean: Yeah. Um, I. I’m sure there are other things I’m not thinking of that we use it for on the

[00:44:27] Nathan: illustrations.

[00:44:28] Nathan: Have you been able to get that all in the set style so it like matches your brand guidelines?

[00:44:32] Sean: Yeah, so initially we had designers create the illustrations and then from there it kind of allows us to replicate that style and format without needing to have a, a designer do it every time since we’re such a, a lean team.

[00:44:44] Nathan: I think that was, has always been the challenge historically with image generation, with ai, it’s like it’ll make something great and you’re like, great, now make one like it, but with this instead, and it’ll be like, here’s something completely different. Yeah. No, you know,

[00:44:56] Sean: mid Journey is a lot better than GPT,

[00:44:58] that’s

[00:44:58] Nathan: for sure.

[00:44:59] Nathan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so now I think a lot of people have written off

[00:45:02] Sean: Yeah.

[00:45:02] Nathan: That because they had, you know, maybe a rough experience, uh, originally. Sure. And so I, I’d encourage everyone to go back to Midjourney or these other tools and, and there’s just so much better control now around. Make this, but in exactly the style of the last 10 that you made?

[00:45:20] Sean: Yeah. For illustration creation or, or something else. I think for us, we think of AI as like a tool to enhance what it is that we’re doing. We’re obviously not like replacing content creation in general.

[00:45:30] Nathan: Sean, I’m curious if you have any hot takes on the newsletter industry or newsletters in general since you see so much both in your own business and you know, in everything that all your friends are doing too.

[00:45:39] Sean: Yeah. For me, I would say, I think some people don’t think as much about the design of their newsletter and the importance of the design of their newsletter and how it’s presented. Mm-hmm. But for us in particular, in the health and wellness space, and even in the positive new space in a prior, um, life, I realize the importance of having really quality design, whether it’s like, okay.

[00:45:59] Sean: Logo mark, word mark, the colors that we’re using, how it’s incorporated in the design so it doesn’t feel just like a generic newsletter. And I think it helps build trust, it helps with engagement and, um, returning behavior retention. So I think people. Sleep on the importance of design of their newsletter.

[00:46:17] Sean: And that’s something we’ve really valued like from the beginning with every project that we’ve done.

[00:46:22] Nathan: So in the, the spectrum between plain text emails, like the content is all that matters and let’s heavily design everything. Mm-hmm. What I see you doing is saying like, look. These aren’t two separate ends of the spectrum.

[00:46:35] Nathan: Like we can actually put these, like, this is a multi axis problem. It’s like, let’s have super high quality content.

[00:46:40] Sean: Hmm.

[00:46:40] Nathan: And let’s design it really, really well. And with that we’re gonna stand out. Whereas a lot of people are just like, eh, you know, I threw some AI generated content in a generic template.

[00:46:50] Nathan: And why, why are people unsubscribing? I don’t understand.

[00:46:53] Sean: Yeah. It’s hard to like have trust in, in something that feels like it’s very generic or produced by. Like someone who doesn’t typically produce newsletters. Yeah,

[00:47:03] Nathan: exactly.

[00:47:04] Sean: Yeah.

[00:47:04] Nathan: What’s something that well-designed newsletters do in the first 10 seconds that most newsletters never do?

[00:47:10] Sean: Yeah. I would say for the first 10 seconds, I mean, I think it’s important to establish trust with your readers. Mm-hmm. A connection with them and then draw them in to read further. So for us at all, healthy, we have our intro text is the first thing that someone’s reading that is written by the editor.

[00:47:27] Sean: It’s. Our tone of voice, it’s reminding the reader that there’s a human on the other side of the email. So we’re, it’s an opportunity for us to be like, really voicey reference something timely. Even maybe click out because it can, it’s the first thing someone’s reading or kind of reference something further down in the email to ultimately draw them in.

[00:47:45] Sean: And I also think it’s important to think about the header of your newsletter and how that looks. A lot of people might just like slap a logo on it and call it a day, but it’s kind of setting the emotional tone for your newsletter. So something even as subtle as like color can make a big difference. And for us at all, healthy.

[00:48:04] Sean: I mean, we keep it relatively simple, but another newsletter like Dense Discovery, they have a full fledged. Illustration artwork alongside a quote to

[00:48:12] Nathan: Okay,

[00:48:12] Sean: bring, uh, to open things up that really draws you in and gets you to wanna read more. Or you could do something like a mission statement or a tagline, kind of reinforcing why someone’s opening and ultimately hopefully enticing them to continue to, to read from there.

[00:48:28] Nathan: I could see that quote having like the instant payoff where it’s like, I don’t have time to read the newsletter. Yeah. But I know there’s a good quote there and. I guess I’ll keep reading and go from there, right?

[00:48:37] Sean: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:38] Nathan: Like, you know that there’s going, even if you only have 10 seconds to allocate to this email, you’re at least gonna open it to see if, to see what the payoff is, and then go from there.

[00:48:49] Nathan: Whereas others, you’re like, I. I, there probably will be something good buried within this newsletter that I’m gonna be glad I, but I don’t have time to go find it within that.

[00:48:59] Sean: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think it depends on the format and approach of your newsletter too, but the goal would obviously to not have it be getting someone in the habit of just reading that quote and then leaving.

[00:49:07] Sean: You have to kind of find a way to, to draw them in further if that’s your goal.

[00:49:11] Nathan: Is there anything with newsletter content about open loops where, you know, you see this in TV shows or something where they like. Leave you, you know, they wrap up what they’re doing and you’re like, oh, the episode’s gonna end here.

[00:49:22] Nathan: And no, they actually start a new thing and it, you’re like, right as, and they end it here.

[00:49:26] Sean: Hmm.

[00:49:27] Nathan: Is there anything where, I don’t know, you create open loops early in your newsletter where it’s like they want to keep reading or we’re gonna come back to that. I see speakers on stage this as well, where you, you they conclude one story, but lead a question that then like keeps you engaged because you’re like, oh, they’re gonna.

[00:49:44] Nathan: What happened there, you know, is the payoff going to be there? And so I’m, yeah, I’m wondering if either you’ve seen anyone do it well or you all do that to be like, Hey, there’s something further on that you’re gonna

[00:49:52] Sean: really love. I love that idea. I mean, for us, honestly, we only really use the intro text as a tool to do that Uhhuh.

[00:49:57] Sean: Um, but I think that’s a fun, a fun incorporation where maybe even like in a featured story or hinting at something else that’s further down or depending on the right. Format of your newsletter. Maybe it’s easier to do that and draw them further down or have a cliffhanger at the end for something that’s tease, something that’s coming for the next send too.

[00:50:14] Nathan: I guess the ideal newsletter would have the immediate payoff. That makes me feel really glad that I clicked in. Mm-hmm. Or the feeling of like, I’m, I’m at home. Right? We’re delivering on this promise now that I’m in the newsletter. And then also the thing towards the end that is like, but I gotta make sure to stay for that.

[00:50:34] Nathan: You know, the, just trust me link or the, um, you know, the, the question in 3, 2, 1 Thursday or, or those things. It’s like, I might skip over a few little bit of this if it’s not interesting, but I’m gonna at least make sure I get to this point. It’s hard to like bookend that and make sure you have. You’re delivering especially seven days a week

[00:50:52] Sean: on both

[00:50:52] Nathan: those things.

[00:50:54] Sean: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. We try to do that with the, the sections I mentioned. But yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s tough depending on the frequency and approach for it to feel organic and, and natural.

[00:51:03] Nathan: So we’re in the state of email is doing really well and we’re excited about it and all of that, but people might be listening and be like, I don’t feel like my email is doing super well.

[00:51:11] Nathan: So I’m curious if you have like a top three things that you fix if an email’s underperforming.

[00:51:16] Sean: Yeah, I think it’s important to. Determine what it is that your goals are for the newsletter to start, and then work off of that. It’s like, what does underperforming even mean to you? And if we want to group it into three categories, we can group it into like engagements, monetization, and retention.

[00:51:33] Sean: And if we’re focusing on engagement, like let’s say your goal for your newsletter is to drive traffic to web, then analyze your existing format. If it’s a longer form newsletter, you’re providing all the content to the reader in the newsletter. They’re probably not gonna wanna click out. They don’t need to click out.

[00:51:49] Sean: Right. So incorporating a section like quick picks where it’s like short form, enticing, some sort of like tease to get someone to click could work well. Mm-hmm. Or evaluating even the entire format of your newsletter. Maybe it needs to be shorter form may, maybe you need to reevaluate how you kind of have what the SEC sections and structure are of your newsletter as a whole.

[00:52:08] Sean: And then kind of build from there. If we’re talking about monetization, I mean obviously start with focusing on your, um. Section your sponsorship section mm-hmm. And figure out what’s working well. I talked about some ideas there in terms of like making it seamlessly incorporate, making it in your tone of voice, taking an editorial approach, um, that can work really well.

[00:52:26] Sean: And if we’re talking about retention, so maybe you have like a paid subscription model or maybe you’re just, your goal is obviously to keep people reading every day. The offboarding user flow. Ask them why they’re leaving. Try to understand how you’re not providing enough value to them if they’re willing to provide that feedback to you.

[00:52:43] Sean: And then, let’s say for us, since we’re sending seven days a week, it a lot of times could just be based on the frequency. Like it’s too many emails. Okay. If that’s the issue in our footer, let’s have the option to like explicitly call it out, too many emails, click here, give them the option to just receive the email on Sunday instead, rather than have it every single day.

[00:53:02] Sean: So try to understand kinda what the issue is at hand and then find fixes for it and then evaluate and see if that’s working.

[00:53:08] Nathan: Yeah, I like that. Uh, I like the personalized approach. ’cause the great thing with email is you can automate so much stuff. You can set up these systems or a specific link that does.

[00:53:17] Nathan: You know this, this task, and then you can personalize to each individual subscriber. Is there anything that you do kind of at this scale of personalization? Because you can do it, but you know, then when you have a million plus subscribers like I. Do you personalize based on behavior of what they click or their interests or anything like, anything like that?

[00:53:37] Sean: We’re starting to a little bit more. Mm-hmm. It’s interesting ’cause like on the most recent survey we had for our audience, it was like only, I think it was 6% of people said that they’re like, would like AI recommended curated, um, yeah, like things, which is funny ’cause I feel like AI could curate probably better than our, our

[00:53:53] Nathan: like

[00:53:54] Sean: editorial team to an extent.

[00:53:55] Sean: ’cause it understands what it people,

[00:53:56] Nathan: at least the individual subscriber

[00:53:57] Sean: Exactly. Of

[00:53:58] Nathan: like, oh, I can.

[00:53:58] Sean: Yeah.

[00:53:58] Nathan: For this one person, I can tell you, here’s exactly everything you’ve clicked on. Yeah.

[00:54:01] Sean: Here’s

[00:54:02] Nathan: what you’re likely to click on

[00:54:02] Sean: again. Exactly. So I think we’re finding that balance in terms of like. The reason that people are engaging with the newsletter in the first place is ’cause they are interested in kind of the opinions and the voice of whoever it is that’s producing that newsletter.

[00:54:15] Sean: So leaning into that a little bit more and like sometimes people value the fact that like everyone’s getting the same newsletter that day. Right? But at the same time, there could be a certain section that is more curated to that individual based on their interests. And then ultimately it’s probably gonna end up engaging better too.

[00:54:30] Nathan: Yeah, I’m thinking about like on my newsletter. I followed pretty much the same format pretty consistently, but I haven’t taken this level of analytical approach and like been really thoughtful of like, am I delivering for the reader? And it’s more like, this is what I’m interested in and I hope you are too.

[00:54:48] Nathan: You know? Yeah. But I’m just even thinking about formats where mine probably follows, like I have the intro, which is like a mini essay, and I’m writing a decent amount about that. Like that might be 200 to 500 words. And that is kind of the bulk of the newsletter. And then I have, um, usually a couple of the things I’m linking off to and always the podcast episode.

[00:55:12] Nathan: Um, but I feel like they might be providing, it might be too repetitive. Like as you’re talking, I’m like, okay, from a design perspective, how could I change up the format of the podcast episode since that’s a recurring thing that that comes out. Or maybe look, make the. The individual recommendations I’m making of like, check out this book or this YouTube video, um, or this new kit feature, right?

[00:55:34] Nathan: Making those look differently. Um, and so I’m wondering would you just experiment with that and like try it out week to week? Would you ask for replies? Would you put a poll in there? Like what types of things would you do as you experiment to say like. Hi, dear readers. Do you like this?

[00:55:49] Sean: Yeah. You know, I think it’s, it’s all the above.

[00:55:51] Sean: I think. I mean, first of all, make one change at a time, obviously, so you’re, it’s hard to analyze if you’re making multiple changes. Good point. At the same time, so let’s say you’re not sure about a particular section or you’re like. Evolving that section, changing the format of it, test it out for a certain period of time and see how people are, um, engaging with it.

[00:56:09] Sean: Yeah, do a poll, ask for feedback, talk with, uh, with users, or do a survey too and try to get an understanding of if it is working well or if it’s not. Um, yeah, I mean, we love surveys that all healthy will do them quarterly and ask, and it allows us to get a lot deeper. In particular, if it’s a section that like.

[00:56:26] Sean: Doesn’t require a click. I mean, it’s hard to like ab test it and understand what it is that’s working best.

[00:56:31] Nathan: Yeah. You just don’t have it. There’s no, like on the web you can know, oh, here’s what the cursor did over this. Yeah. Or the, the user lingered here at this. And it’s like, we know open for the most part and we know click.

[00:56:43] Sean: Yeah.

[00:56:44] Nathan: Also for the most part.

[00:56:45] Sean: Exactly. Yeah. And if it is something that you’re truly trying to get someone to click on, then I think it’s a great tool to AB test. And 50%. Of your audience, one version without that section or without that CTA or whatever it may be. And then 50%, the other version, that’s easy.

[00:56:58] Sean: But then if it is something that isn’t more focused on engagement like that than doing surveys or trying to get feedback from them is, uh, works best.

[00:57:06] Nathan: Yeah, I like it. Sean, this has been a ton of fun. You have a unique insight into the creator economy and newsletter space and all of that. So it’s been fun for you to share, like, Hey, here’s behind the scenes at millions of subscribers.

[00:57:18] Nathan: Here’s what works. If people wanna follow you, check out more of what you’re doing, uh, where should they go?

[00:57:23] Sean: Yeah, I mean, follow me on LinkedIn, connect with me on LinkedIn. Send me a message. I’d love to explore what it is that y’all are doing. And yeah, I think that’s probably the best place to connect with me.

[00:57:32] Sean: And then would love to, to chat.

[00:57:34] Nathan: Sounds good. Thanks so much for coming on.

[00:57:35] Sean: Thanks for having me.

[00:57:36] Nathan: If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to

[00:57:43] Nathan: like the video and drop a comment.

[00:57:45] Nathan: I’d love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else do you think we should have on the show.

[00:57:50] Nathan: Thank you so much for listening.

[00:00:00] Nathan: 16 of the smartest authors in one room and learning like what’s working in book marketing and launches and everything else,

[00:00:06] Haley: it, it’s insane.

[00:00:07] Nathan: I co-hosted a private mastermind with James, clear author of Atomic Habits, and we invited some of the top non-fiction authors in the world to Nashville to share what’s actually working when writing books.

[00:00:16] Nathan: We talked about book launch tactics that most creators never try, what they’re testing on Instagram right now, including trial reels and the posting strategies that are actually moving the needle.

[00:00:24] Haley: They were testing content in TikTok and then if it did well on TikTok yes, then they would move it over to Instagram.

[00:00:29] Haley: Mm-hmm. It was like a good testing ground for virality.

[00:00:32] Nathan: So there’s a couple people who have very large Instagram accounts and it was interesting hearing them talk about. How they used on Instagram to reach new audiences. There were so many crazy things, but one thing that really stood out to me was how much prep goes into an appearance on a world class podcast.

[00:00:49] Nathan: I would’ve assumed that someone’s doing like 15 to 20 hours of prep for the most important podcast they’re going on. It’s like, Nope, 80 hours.

[00:00:56] Haley: 80 hours.

[00:01:02] Nathan: So this episode is going to be us sharing our favorite moments, takeaways, all of that from getting 16 of the smartest authors in one room and learning like what’s working in book marketing and launches and everything else.

[00:01:15] Haley: Okay. Before though, before we go into that, be honest, we’re gonna tell, we’re gonna tell everybody who came, right?

[00:01:22] Nathan: Yeah,

[00:01:23] Haley: yeah, yeah. Okay. I mean,

[00:01:23] Nathan: it’s on Instagram.

[00:01:24] Haley: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Be honest. Who did you fan Boy over or in Fan Girl Over? Who is your one person that you Fanboyed fan

[00:01:31] Nathan: over? I would say Will Guera. Unreasonable Hospitality is such a good book and he also, we did an episode on the show. He was fantastic. His business partner Brian, uh, came to, uh, to the podcast as well, and they have great energy and their stories are so good and just the experience they’ve created for so many people running like the best restaurants in the world.

[00:01:52] Nathan: That was pretty great. Mm-hmm. Another fun moment you can talk about this more was the hotel staff like Fanboying over the back. The like number one person in hospitality is staying at their hotel

[00:02:04] Haley: at the concierge. She was like, what do you do? How did you get him to come here? Like, what do you do? Um, but yeah, they really loved the, the, it’s required reading for every single person at this hotel.

[00:02:18] Haley: It was required reading for them to read. Yeah,

[00:02:20] Nathan: that’s really cool. Hospitality. And then,

[00:02:22] Haley: yeah,

[00:02:22] Nathan: just waltzing in one day to stay at the hotel. Yeah.

[00:02:25] Haley: Yeah. She was just like, you must have the coolest job in the world. Um, but yeah, that was funny.

[00:02:31] Nathan: That’s awesome.

[00:02:31] Chelsea: It was fun watching him watch everything too. You know, it’s like he can’t, I don’t think he can’t turn it off, you know?

[00:02:37] Chelsea: I’m

[00:02:37] Haley: sure. Yeah, he was, he was just like a pure, pure joy.

[00:02:40] Chelsea: Yeah,

[00:02:41] Haley: it was great. Okay. Chelsea, I know yours now. I wanna see you in

[00:02:43] Chelsea: the day. You do know mine. Um, mine was James Clear who co-hosted the event with us. Uh, James, it was actually funny, my LinkedIn banner was a quote from James forever and then I changed it this week because I felt like it was a week before

[00:02:58] Nathan: the event.

[00:02:59] Nathan: I was

[00:02:59] Haley: like, oh my gosh. Right

[00:03:00] Nathan: before you met Hung

[00:03:01] Haley: I was like, I don’t wanna be a clear fan

[00:03:03] Chelsea: girl. Wow. Before the event, it was that you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

[00:03:09] Haley: Oh yeah. Okay.

[00:03:09] Chelsea: Which, if you know me, systems,

[00:03:12] Haley: it feels very, feels very much like

[00:03:12] Chelsea: you very on brand for me.

[00:03:13] Chelsea: Accurate. I like

[00:03:14] Haley: it.

[00:03:14] Chelsea: Um, so yeah, James got me back into reading after finishing a couple degrees and I was over books and Atomic Habits came out and kind of reignited that habit for me. So that was exciting.

[00:03:26] Nathan: I like it.

[00:03:27] Chelsea: What about you?

[00:03:28] Haley: I’ve met her before. I had met her before, but I, I’d probably say Jen Hatmaker because I read, I mean, I listened, let’s be honest.

[00:03:37] Haley: But, um, I listened to, um, her book for the Love and she just has a very iconic voice too. Yeah. Um, and then her newest book that, uh, just came out, which is called Awake, was just wonderful and spending more quality time with her was really fun. Um, ’cause I’ve just, I’ve been a consumer of her content, if you will, for a really long time.

[00:03:59] Haley: And, um, so I’d probably say Jen Hatmaker. The other thing is that I love about her in particular is she kept saying, she has, um, words that she says, like, tickled, you know, I’m just tickled about that. Yeah. You know, and like I have found myself, she, another one she said today, I said it on three calls today.

[00:04:16] Haley: I said, yeah, I’ll noodle on that. And that’s because she said that multiple times and I was like, I’m taking that. Yeah, I’m taking that. So. I feel like I’ll just pick up, uh, anything that she says. Um, but probably Jen Hatmaker.

[00:04:29] Nathan: Yeah. There were so many good people.

[00:04:31] Haley: Yeah. There were

[00:04:31] Nathan: One thing that was fun about the format is on, well, we did dinner, a happy hour dinner and all of that the night before.

[00:04:38] Nathan: Basically just let people get to know each other. Ease into the group. ’cause I think a bunch of people said, like, I actually don’t know that many of these people, which is interesting. We knew Mo many of them already. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean we, we and James invited everybody. And so, um, you know, I felt like, okay, I know most all of these people, but a lot of people were like, I’m going in knowing very few people.

[00:04:59] Nathan: Um, so just let everyone get to know each other. All of that is a great group. And then on the morning of the first real day, the thing we kicked off with was everyone sharing one tip or strategy, something that’s been working well for them. And it just immediately got, you know, all these type of people talking about things at a very high level.

[00:05:16] Nathan: And you’re like, okay, wow. The, the brain power in this room and the accomplishments are, are pretty great. Mm-hmm. So I thought we’d kick it off just sharing. A few of the things that stood out to us, uh, that was shared in the group.

[00:05:28] Haley: Are you gonna kick it, kick us off.

[00:05:29] Nathan: You want me to go first?

[00:05:30] Haley: Yeah. Yeah. Kick us off.

[00:05:31] Nathan: All right. Uh, one that stood out. So there’s a couple people who have very large Instagram accounts. Mm-hmm. Like million, uh, many million follower accounts. And it was interesting hearing them talk about how they use trial reels on Instagram to reach new audiences.

[00:05:48] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:49] Nathan: Because it very, you know, for anyone who doesn’t know the trial reel is Instagram taking something and saying, we’re not showing it to any of your existing followers.

[00:05:55] Nathan: We’ll put it out only to, uh, new followers. And I think people, you know, might be like, oh, I’ll do one of those a week or something. But these top accounts were like, look, we’ve kind of saturated our existing followers and we’re actually getting shown to our same followers a lot, so we want to grow more.

[00:06:09] Nathan: We have to go outside that. And so they’re posting really a lot of content to trial reels. And then they were saying they don’t repost it. So if it does really well reaching this new audience. They don’t press the button to convert it to the main feed. They leave it running over there in trial reels and they post a slightly different version, uh, to the main feed.

[00:06:29] Nathan: And that way they get the benefit of those two posts and the audiences will never cross, which I thought was really interesting. Instagram won’t show the same thing. Um, I guess even if it did, you should be like, oh, I’ve seen this video before.

[00:06:41] Haley: What’s interesting though, about this particular one is that I actually feel like we got in the, just for the format, for the sake of the format, one person would say a thing that was working for them, and then if people wanted to jump in, they could be like, oh, I’ve had a similar experience.

[00:06:56] Haley: Or if we wanted to dig into that particular thing and ask questions, people would ask questions. And so for this one, some people did repost it to their feed mm-hmm. After it did really well and some people did not. Mm-hmm. Um, but I thought that, that, that, just for sake of, you know, setting the stage, we did dig into some of these things.

[00:07:15] Haley: Yeah.

[00:07:16] Nathan: Sometimes people would share for a minute or two and be like, oh, that’s interesting. People take notes.

[00:07:19] Haley: Yeah.

[00:07:19] Nathan: And other times it would turn into a 15 minute discussion

[00:07:21] Haley: mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:07:22] Nathan: Of people building on it and say, oh, I love that. Here’s the version that I do.

[00:07:25] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:26] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:07:26] Haley: Yeah.

[00:07:27] Nathan: What about you, Hailey?

[00:07:27] Nathan: What was one of yours?

[00:07:28] Haley: Ooh. Probably, you know, I think this is interesting because obviously we work at Kit or own kit, some

[00:07:37] Chelsea: of us,

[00:07:38] Haley: some of us in the room anyways. Um, we have forever. We have talked about the use of opt-in incentives to grow your list. Mm-hmm. Um, and one of the folks in the room completely kind of threw that to the side and they now do what they call tiny offers.

[00:07:57] Haley: And so rather than giving away free incentives to go their, their, their list, they’re, and I’m not saying that they’re not a hundred percent, like every single one of their opt-in incentives is gone, but they’re doing tiny offers and so it’s like. $59 or $47, um, for a really, really high value op incentive.

[00:08:14] Haley: And then they’re using that to further convert high ticket offers. And so it shows, it’s a, it’s a, a show of extreme high intent if they’re willing to spend $47. Um, and I thought that was really interesting ’cause I hadn’t heard of anyone doing that. Um, I hadn’t heard of anyone doing that quite as prolific as they were doing it.

[00:08:32] Nathan: Yeah. And it kind of split the room because I feel like a bunch of people heard that and were like, oh yeah, of course. And they had their version of it where they were like, charge early. It gets to this smaller but very targeted audience. And then the other half of the room is like, I’m sorry, what lead magnets are out.

[00:08:48] Nathan: And like

[00:08:48] Haley: Yeah.

[00:08:49] Nathan: You know, and obviously it depends on what you’re, um, building towards the person who is sharing it. Originally they’ve moved from like a low

[00:08:57] Haley: mm-hmm.

[00:08:57] Nathan: Like a more of a beginner audience to like serving a much more advanced audience. And so they’ve had to like reallocate. So

[00:09:03] Haley: their lowest ticket item, I think.

[00:09:06] Haley: Is like $6,500.

[00:09:07] Nathan: Mm-hmm. For their main offer.

[00:09:08] Haley: Yeah, for their main offer. And so this is an incentive into that. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:12] Nathan: And then in their ads, they’re able to. Recoup a bunch of their ad spend on this, like 50 or a hundred dollars tiny offer. Um, and I thought that was, that was really interesting.

[00:09:23] Chelsea: Um, well, you have a book coming out.

[00:09:25] Chelsea: That was one of the most exciting things for me being in the room as somebody that is helping with that strategy and everything that we’re gonna do to launch that. Um, I think one of the things that was interesting is being really intentional about how you’re asking people to promote your book. Yep.

[00:09:41] Chelsea: And making it as easy for them as possible. People are busy, you know, you’re not just sending a whole book and say here to whoever you know, will you read my book? It’s, you know, having them opt in. Yes. I want, or, you know, I would like to read your book or sending them specific sections for what makes the most sense for them.

[00:10:00] Chelsea: Um. Yeah, just trying to make sure you curate a team that’s really gonna support you and give you the feedback that you need.

[00:10:06] Haley: The two things that I think were really tactical about this particular one was doing unscalable tactics and then having a really strong street team.

[00:10:17] Chelsea: Yeah.

[00:10:17] Haley: And so the unscalable tactics component of this was, um, writing letters to every single person or like a handful of people.

[00:10:26] Haley: Yep. Um, very wil guera, like, you know Yeah. Like unscalable tactics above. Yeah. It would write, going above and beyond. Um, and then highlighting. Individual chapters or parts in a specific chapter that was specific to the person that you were sending it to. And so I’ll just make up an, an example here, I guess is, um, Sahil Bloom’s book, the Five Types of Wealth.

[00:10:47] Haley: He has, um, a chapter like for parents, you know. And so if that particular person was in that season of life, he might highlight that particular chapter and then put in, you know, like a sticky note or something along those lines. And that was a very unscalable tactic. Um, and so that was one that came from that, I think.

[00:11:04] Haley: And then the other one was, um, a strong street team.

[00:11:10] Chelsea: Yeah.

[00:11:11] Haley: You know, and there were several people, you know, everybody what seemed

[00:11:15] Chelsea: like

[00:11:15] Haley: pretty everybody. There was a New York Times bestseller.

[00:11:18] Nathan: Just about,

[00:11:18] Haley: just about, yeah. Most, most people. Um, and so the street team was a huge, strong component, like mm-hmm.

[00:11:25] Haley: Part of that, um,

[00:11:26] Nathan: and they developed those teams early on. Like that was, you know, we’re taking all these notes from my book launch coming up, and it’s like, okay,

[00:11:32] Haley: yeah.

[00:11:33] Nathan: They had people by city and they, they had all of these different things and then very specific asks of what they wanted their, their street team to do.

[00:11:39] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:40] Nathan: But, um, building on the, the example from, from Sahil, which he’s talked about this publicly, so I feel totally fine, fine sharing it, but he talked about how important it is to have visuals in the book that can be shared easily on Instagram or wherever else. And so he would specifically have somebody he was sending out the book to everyone was saying basically send lots of like, give away lots of copies of your, of your book, but make sure to do it to people who opted in.

[00:12:07] Nathan: So don’t just like. Mass e mass mail to the PR address for our creator. Like it has to be, Hey, would you read this? But then what Sahil would do is he’d find something like in his book, he has this graph of time spent with your children by age and how, like you spend tons of time with your kids when they’re little and then it really drops off.

[00:12:28] Nathan: And so all the parents, you know, that’s what was highlighted. And yeah, the specific ask was like, read this and if you enjoy it, will you share this? And so often it’d be those photos that got shared and a bunch of other, uh, authors, you’d get some version of. Um, I did that as well. Like my book is very visual and that worked super well.

[00:12:46] Nathan: Yeah. And then other authors being like, yep. About six months after publishing, I was like, oh, I should have been made a book that was much easier to share a snippet of or much more visual.

[00:12:56] Haley: Yeah. Um, this is not something that was shared, but I did just think about it and I think it’s a great idea.

[00:13:01] Nathan: Go.

[00:13:01] Haley: I can’t wait.

[00:13:02] Haley: My friend Hannah, who I actually met through the Creator Leaders group Yep. She did all of the, um, drawings for Cody Sanchez’s book, main Street Millionaire.

[00:13:13] Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:13] Haley: And she has a very large audience. And so when you think about your street team, like how easy it would, would it be for you to go out and create those, those drawings or visuals in your book using AI now?

[00:13:24] Haley: Um, but AI doesn’t have an audience. Hannah does have an audience. Mm. And so she actually didn’t have the capacity to do all of the drawings in the short amount of time. I actually loved it. She told this story on LinkedIn recently about how Cody had dmd her in Instagram and was like, I love, I, I love your work and I’d love to include you in my book.

[00:13:41] Haley: And she responded and she was like, there’s no possible way that I could do this in the amount of time. And Cody responded and said some version of. What would have to be true for you to prioritize this project? And so Hannah went out and she found like five different collaborators that did very similar work that she did.

[00:13:57] Haley: And so, but collectively across, you know, set what the five of them, they had an audience of well over a million. And so they were all then sharing Cody’s book, you know, the animations and the drawings in Cody’s book. And so that’s just like who you could consider her part of Cody’s Street team. Yeah. You know, because she was obviously a part of the book, but yeah.

[00:14:16] Nathan: One that stood out to me is how deliberately people think about Instagram stories.

[00:14:21] Haley: Oh yeah, that was an interesting one.

[00:14:22] Nathan: Like I, I just do some things and I post some stories and I’m like, oh, this should probably be on stories. Really? The rest of you harassed me about like, I can’t believe you went to this event and didn’t post anything about it on stories.

[00:14:32] Haley: Yeah.

[00:14:33] Nathan: It’s actually a sarcastic remark, like, oh, you finally posted on stories. Good job.

[00:14:37] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:38] Nathan: Um, just as picture

[00:14:39] Haley: sounds, right?

[00:14:40] Nathan: Yeah. But everyone was saying basically people with these huge accounts, like a million to 5 million followers. They don’t post like, just as things happen.

[00:14:51] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:51] Nathan: They pump, they mostly post sets of three stories and basically their reasoning was if some, if someone, if you’re gonna pop up in someone’s stories list, you want them to interact with each of the stories.

[00:15:04] Nathan: And if you get to, you know, five or 10 or, and I do this too, you see someone who posted 17 stories in a row and you’re like, skip.

[00:15:10] Chelsea: Yeah.

[00:15:11] Nathan: Because you’re there might be good stuff in you. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So they will post three stories. Then nothing for 24 hours and then three stories again.

[00:15:19] Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:19] Nathan: And so it’s like this package thing that’s showing up every 24 to 36 hours rather than a constant drip of

[00:15:27] Chelsea: here’s what’s going on in my life.

[00:15:28] Haley: Sticking on the Instagram theme, one of our guests had a very viral and like public experience on tv. Mm-hmm. And so they had a clip that’s 12 from 12 years ago that still gets millions and millions of views and it’s pinned, uh, to their Instagram like page. And I thought that was really interesting because a lot of people are moving so fast with the time.

[00:15:52] Haley: And so that clip or iterations of that clip still today in 2025. 12, 15 years later still draws um, attention at the same rate that it did when it actually happened. And so don’t be afraid of leveraging old con, we, everybody talks about like leveraging and repurposing content, but like 12 years, that’s a long time.

[00:16:12] Haley: Right. Um, but that is really the first step into like, or first kind of open gate into her content for a lot of people. So yeah. I thought that was really interesting. Are we posting thing? Are we something Chelsea? Can Nathan post anything? I dunno

[00:16:24] Chelsea: if people would recognize. 12 years ago, Nathan,

[00:16:28] Nathan: I was four,

[00:16:31] Haley: a hundred percent.

[00:16:33] Chelsea: But there was a lot of conversations about repurposing content. Yeah. There was, don’t make things harder on yourself than you need to be. Figure out ways to, you know, create that flywheel of using concept platform.

[00:16:43] Nathan: Yeah. That came up a

[00:16:43] Chelsea: lot. Yeah.

[00:16:44] Nathan: And actually looking at the library of all your past talks, um, and saying like, you have a ton of material here, posted a bunch of different ways.

[00:16:52] Nathan: One thing that stood out to me about a few of the TV appearances that people talked about. They would make another video about something else and use a clip as B-roll or a hook or something from the TV appearance. ’cause it gave instant credibility. Oh

[00:17:07] Haley: yeah.

[00:17:07] Nathan: And then they’d go on to make their separate point.

[00:17:09] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:10] Nathan: And so when you see, you know, like, oh, here’s this national TV appearance. And then you can make content about whatever you want.

[00:17:16] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:17] Nathan: Um, and you’re like, oh. I mean, from an Instagram perspective, it’s like, okay, what’s your title hook? What’s your visual hook? And it’s like, well, that is a pretty good visual hook of you.

[00:17:25] Nathan: Right. On national television.

[00:17:26] Chelsea: Yeah.

[00:17:27] Haley: Yeah. Okay. Still sticking to this Instagram theme, because I think this is, is relevant to the conversation. Uh, we talked about trial reels being a good testing ground, but several people, which I thought was really interesting. And this is again, one where the room was totally split, but several people talked about instead of posting or testing content in trial reels, they were testing content in TikTok.

[00:17:49] Haley: And then if it did well on TikTok Yes. Then they would move it over to Instagram so they weren’t even messing around or playing with trial reels. I’m sure following these conversations, they absolutely will. Um, but several of them that were not playing around with TikTok are gonna start testing the ground and sharing that content on TikTok, see how well it does there.

[00:18:04] Haley: Mm-hmm. And then move it over to Instagram, which is where they certainly feel like is a. Um, their deeper audience lives and exists on Instagram, but access to new audiences, obviously. And it’s just, they said, I think they said it was like a good testing ground for virality.

[00:18:20] Nathan: Yeah. And just the quality of the idea and the packaging and the delivery and all of that.

[00:18:24] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:24] Nathan: And I think, ’cause on TikTok what people find is they can just post as much as you want. It feels like much more of a, I was gonna say a slot machine. And it is in that sense of like, put it out there and see what happens. But like a very, uh, like merit based. It’s just like, how good does this stand on its own?

[00:18:42] Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:42] Nathan: Whereas often if you’re posting Instagram or somewhere else, it’s like, how much does my audience already like this and resonate with it.

[00:18:49] Chelsea: I was thinking about the idea of a book launch too, and we’ve been talking about like a podcast tour for you and what it’s gonna look like to do, you know, however many, and someone was talking about their 15 minute podcast

[00:19:02] Haley: Oh.

[00:19:02] Chelsea: Appearance, that this was a very idea, idea. I thought that was really good as well. Mm-hmm. Um. So they were saying basically, instead of doing these hour long whole podcast where you say the same thing over, you tell your whole story over and over. They’re 15 minute appearances. You block ’em in a couple days.

[00:19:19] Chelsea: You tell the people what you’re gonna talk about, what questions to ask me, and then you just have a really snappy 15 minute conversation. Yeah. And you’re able to get through the points that you need to and be on all these appearances without spending 60 hours in.

[00:19:33] Haley: What was interesting about this one was how, how in, um.

[00:19:37] Haley: How the audience took, like essentially the rules, how they followed the rules. Yes. And so the rules were you have 15 minutes, there’s no fluff, there’s no like chit chatter in the beginning, and here’s exactly what you’re talking about. And, uh, they said that, you know, the, the podcaster, whatever, whoever it was.

[00:19:55] Haley: And also what’s important to note on this one is they were micro creators. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. And so they were people that had smaller audiences. So they actually went out to their audience. They said, we are going to be doing this book launch and we’d love to have these small micro appearances on your podcast.

[00:20:12] Haley: And so they were super excited because they normally wouldn’t have had access to someone like this. Right. And so rather than capitalizing on one large audience, they spread their time over several small audiences was like, which I thought was a really smart idea, and really activated the street team.

[00:20:28] Haley: Mm-hmm. Um, it was just like one additional tactic on, on. Leveraging those micro creators because they’re strong in numbers. Yeah.

[00:20:35] Nathan: Well I thought it was so clever, uh, first making the appearance on the podcast an incentive. So that was the street team, and it was like, in most cases it was, Hey, if you sell at least 10 copies of the book or 20, something like that, there’s a criteria.

[00:20:50] Nathan: Then you’re eligible to be selected to have the author appear on your podcast. Doesn’t matter how big your podcast is, it’s like this reach. And so then people would apply, you know, meet the threshold and then apply, and then they get selected. It’s like, oh wow. I, this person that I love their content, I’ve learned so much from them.

[00:21:07] Nathan: Uh, I now get to interview them on my show and there’ll be credibility that I have forever. So that was one thing that was really clever, you know, being able to use that as a reward. The other thing that I thought was clever is the way they packaged it, of like teaching people how to make this a great episode.

[00:21:22] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Because like, if I did it, it’s like, okay, great. There’s now 20, 15 minute in interviews with Nathan, like, okay, why are these little things scattered around? But what they, you know, what the team said is you can add your commentary, the lessons you’ve learned from this author, and you can interweave the actual interview with the author.

[00:21:43] Nathan: Mm-hmm. So you can tee it up, don’t ask background questions or all that. Like, you can say that, and then you put in the, the 15 minutes with the author and then

[00:21:51] Haley: Yeah.

[00:21:51] Nathan: You know, three minutes of takeaway. Now you’ve got a, a full 30 minute episode that’s uniquely yours. And, you know, not the copycat of, we’ve all heard the authors on the podcast where they just hit the exact same talking points over and over again.

[00:22:04] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And this made something unique.

[00:22:06] Haley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let’s take a pause really quick. Okay. And let’s lean into a little bit of a debate. And I would love for you to put in the comments wherever you’re watching Instagram, who knows what this is gonna become, but put in the comments what your vote is.

[00:22:20] Haley: Okay. This is because the next thing we’re gonna talk about is audio book strategy. Right? So here’s the debate. This is an internal debate that we have, uh, and I love to ask people about it, um, because we all have varying different opinions. Mm-hmm. Let’s say that you listen to a book. Do you say that you read the book If, or is that I listened to the book.

[00:22:40] Haley: Mm-hmm. So if you listen to a book on audiobook, audible, does it count as reading Audible? Does it count as reading it? Yeah. So if someone says, have you read? A cord of Thorn and Roses. We’ll stick to fairy smut. Have you read aar? Are you gonna say Actually, we’ll, we’ll stick to one. That’s true for Nathan.

[00:22:57] Haley: Nathan, have you read Fourth Wing?

[00:22:59] Nathan: I have, and I have read it. Not listened to it.

[00:23:02] Haley: Okay. Okay. Um, Chelsea, have you read Fourth Wing?

[00:23:05] Chelsea: I have not.

[00:23:06] Haley: Oh gosh. You know the answer to that. What’s fine with you? I know. Um, okay. So

[00:23:10] Nathan: But as an example Right.

[00:23:12] Haley: But

[00:23:12] Nathan: as an example. Yeah. Um, with. Unreasonable hospitality. Yes. I would say I have read Unreasonable Hospitality.

[00:23:18] Haley: But you haven’t,

[00:23:19] Nathan: but there’s people on the, you’re lying the team who’d be like, Nope. You listen to it. It does not count.

[00:23:23] Haley: Yeah.

[00:23:24] Nathan: I’m like, I consume the information. What more do you want from

[00:23:26] Haley: me? So please vote in the comments.

[00:23:28] Nathan: Does listening count as reading?

[00:23:29] Haley: Does listening count as reading? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[00:23:32] Haley: Moving on to the, the valuable, uh, part of this is one of the participants. I thought this was really interesting because, um, their book Outsells their audio book Outsells the physical book. Yeah. Which is out Becoming

[00:23:45] Nathan: Out Sells Digital Outsells, Kindle Hardcover and paperback.

[00:23:50] Haley: Yes. Combined, which is becoming.

[00:23:51] Haley: Increasingly more common.

[00:23:53] Nathan: Yeah. All these people aren’t actually reading books.

[00:23:55] Haley: Yeah. Well, what, what made,

[00:23:58] Nathan: sorry, did not bias the boat right

[00:23:59] Haley: there. Yeah. But what made this one more interesting is, um, there are guests, well, we’ll say that come in and actually provide, like, like read a section of the book. Um, and so I thought that was really interesting.

[00:24:15] Haley: But, uh, because she’s, they’re looping in more people, uh, into the audio experience.

[00:24:19] Nathan: Well, the example was do doing a, uh, memoir. Yes. And then, you know, you’re telling your stories and all this and you’re reading it, but then having. People, like the actual humans who played a part in that story go and read their section.

[00:24:33] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:33] Nathan: And that making it like this, uh, you know, three dimensional audio experience in that way. They also mentioned that it took a few more takes, you know, for someone who has not done like a hundred podcast episodes are more, and you know, to deliver it well,

[00:24:49] Haley: yeah. But just, but thinking through this, I.

[00:24:52] Haley: Admit that I am a listener of books. Okay. Um, actually that’s not true. I whisper sync, so I go back and forth, but Okay. I’ll say 90. You

[00:25:01] Nathan: only do that,

[00:25:02] Haley: whatever, 90. So you guess I read it exactly. 90% of it I am consuming through my ears, not through my eyes. Um, but I think that’s an interesting component because I think that’s gonna become more and more, uh, more and more common.

[00:25:14] Haley: And, uh, so, you know, everybody there was very interested, uh, in that part for, for that particular guest. Uh, they were all very interested in that because that was a huge component of, uh, their strategy as of what had made their last book so successful.

[00:25:27] Nathan: Yeah. And I think we’re seeing more people make unique audio experiences.

[00:25:32] Haley: Yeah.

[00:25:32] Nathan: Um, this came up at a, at a dinner conversation in a smaller group, but people were talking about how important it is they believe for the author to read the book themselves.

[00:25:40] Chelsea: Yeah.

[00:25:40] Nathan: Like, you’re gonna get. You know, six or eight hours or whatever of mm-hmm. The words come through. It should be in your voice as well.

[00:25:47] Nathan: You want, what if

[00:25:48] Chelsea: they have a really odd voice?

[00:25:50] Nathan: Is this your way of telling me that I shouldn’t read my own audio book?

[00:25:53] Haley: I was trying to find the right segue into this, and here we are. So, okay. Well this is, this is a real thing though, because once upon a time, I did a couple of e episodes of a podcast for a project that I worked on at Kit called Creator Sessions.

[00:26:06] Haley: Right. And so we did a podcast version of this, like YouTube show, and I remember nobody likes to hear their voice. Yeah. It’s kind of gross. Yeah. Nobody likes to hear it. In fact, I, I just heard Dermot Kennedy, who’s my favorite artist, his new album just came out way to the Woods, FYI. But he just. He, I just heard him say that he never, ever, ever listens to his music.

[00:26:25] Haley: He can only listen to him doing a cover. That’s the only thing that he can listen to him doing. But everybody hates the sound of their voice. Mm-hmm. Right. All that to say, I listened to this podcast episode and I was like, oh my gosh, I kind of like the way that I sound. And I was like, I was like, did you guys like doctor this at all?

[00:26:42] Haley: And he’s like, yeah, obviously. And I was like, oh

[00:26:44] shit.

[00:26:47] Chelsea: Yeah. Like, you could’ve just give that to me, just

[00:26:51] Haley: so you know. Yeah. And I was like, for the first time ever in my life, I liked the way I sounded. Yeah. And it’s because it wasn’t how I sounded.

[00:27:00] Nathan: I feel like the only two acceptable ways to answer that question are No, not at all.

[00:27:05] Haley: Yeah.

[00:27:05] Nathan: And yeah, we did a little bit and here’s exactly what you can do in the future to recreate it.

[00:27:10] Haley: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

[00:27:12] Nathan: But, uh, yeah, obviously is

[00:27:14] Haley: Yeah, a little harsh.

[00:27:16] Nathan: Ego shattering.

[00:27:17] Haley: Yeah. Ego shattering. Yeah. Um, so anyways,

[00:27:21] Nathan: uh, let’s go to, we can jump around to tactics and all of that, but, uh, I wanna go to what’s something that you heard someone do of like a, it could be a level of preparation or

[00:27:32] Haley: Ooh,

[00:27:32] Nathan: attention detail, all of that, that you’re like.

[00:27:35] Nathan: Oh wow. The, like there basically, we’ll call this segment. There are levels to this game.

[00:27:41] Haley: Yes, there are levels to this game. Okay. I, I, this was actually probably one of my most, my favorite conversations that we dug into. And the reason why it, I knew it was good and I knew that everybody loved this conversation because this was.

[00:27:54] Haley: Kind of during someone’s hot seat, and then someone made this suggestion and then the entire hot seat go was commandeered like by those parts. And they were like digging in asking a million questions. Now I think like six of the guests, six or seven of the guests had been on a diary of a CEO.

[00:28:10] Nathan: Yeah. Or Mel Robbins, or like

[00:28:12] Haley: Yeah.

[00:28:12] Haley: Make some really big time podcasts. Yeah. And so the particular conversation was centered around the amount of preparation that goes into preparing to be a guest on a podcast, but more importantly, um, the. Difference the amount of, how, how would we say it? The, the, um, variance of things that, the stories that they tell across the different podcasts that they go on.

[00:28:40] Haley: So for example, uh, the, a lot of times, and we know this to be true now, Nathan, not to put you on blast here, but like I’ve heard your same stories. We’ve worked together for a long time, but I’ve heard them a lot.

[00:28:50] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:28:50] Haley: And sometimes you get into the habit, it’s easy to get into the habit of saying the same story on every podcast that you go onto.

[00:28:56] Haley: So this particular guest was saying only 20% of her content is the same.

[00:29:00] Nathan: Right.

[00:29:01] Haley: 20%.

[00:29:02] Nathan: And the other 80% is unique to that show and has

[00:29:04] Haley: been

[00:29:04] Nathan: prepped. Mm-hmm.

[00:29:05] Haley: And they, and prep it Extreme, extreme prep in, in an effort to make it essentially like, is this a viral clip? Mm-hmm. And it’s practiced and it was like, what, 80 hours of preparation is what I think was sharing.

[00:29:17] Haley: Yeah. It was between 60

[00:29:18] Chelsea: and a hundred hours,

[00:29:19] Nathan: depending

[00:29:19] Chelsea: on the show

[00:29:19] Nathan: preparation for a podcast appearance. So that,

[00:29:24] Haley: how many hours did we prep for this one?

[00:29:26] Nathan: For this one, uh, hours. Ultimately six minutes. It’d be in decimals. That’s why we have our laptops with it. Um,

[00:29:36] Haley: yeah.

[00:29:37] Nathan: But it, it was just this moment where it was like, oh, and you could see like half the room was like, there are levels to this.

[00:29:42] Haley: Yeah.

[00:29:43] Nathan: And these are like podcast appearances Yes. That have done millions of views. Mm-hmm.

[00:29:46] Haley: Yes.

[00:29:47] Nathan: And so you’re like, oh, wow. And so then this woman who we won’t name specifically though, I don’t think she would mind, but she was basically saying, yeah. And I know how to tell every one of my stories. With a, a different hook specifically.

[00:30:00] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:01] Nathan: And, you know, and then she just rattled off. She’s like, oh yeah, hooks are easy. She rattles ’em off and everyone’s like, hold on. And they’re like writing down all of her

[00:30:07] Haley: hooks. Yeah. There was one that I loved though, that it took six times. She went on six different podcast episodes. It was never used in a clip and it was always edited out, but she kept trying to make that one a thing.

[00:30:19] Haley: And so finally it was the sixth time and it turned in to be like one of the most viral, uh, clips that, that, uh, has been shared across any of the podcast episodes. And I loved that because it was like, she didn’t, she didn’t get up. She’s like, I know this is gonna hit.

[00:30:32] Nathan: It was like a comedian working their material.

[00:30:34] Nathan: Yeah. At all the little, you know, comedy clubs and then be like, okay, that’s the way that I tell it. That works.

[00:30:38] Haley: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, we can talk about this, but because so many of them had been on Diary of a CEO, many of them talked about that experience. Right. And so those episodes during the recording are, are.

[00:30:50] Haley: Four hours. Yeah. Six hours and a half hours. Hours was, it was three to four hours. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, there’s oftentimes for you to, like, they’re obviously editing it down and they’re trying to, you know, make the most viral and compelling and easy to listen to episode. Uh, and so they had a lot of times to p practice that particular clip, but,

[00:31:06] Nathan: well, that was the thing that I, I assumed that they just sat down, had a long conversation that was really well researched and that got to good stories and that that spread.

[00:31:14] Haley: Yeah.

[00:31:15] Nathan: What we learned is a lot of these top shows are recorded for the clips.

[00:31:19] Haley: Yes.

[00:31:19] Nathan: So they’ve gone through the back catalog of everything you’ve put out on social, what are the most viral things you’ve ever said over the last five years.

[00:31:26] Haley: Yeah.

[00:31:26] Nathan: And then it’s not even, they try to weave the conversation to get to that story.

[00:31:31] Nathan: They just ask you the question.

[00:31:32] Haley: Mm-hmm. They

[00:31:33] Nathan: just

[00:31:33] Haley: tee it up to magic. They have magic editors. Yeah.

[00:31:35] Nathan: They just tee it up so that you deliver your viral clip and they tee it up for another one. And I was like, oh, that’s. Fascinat.

[00:31:42] Haley: I mean, are we surprised by this? Mm-hmm. We like, know Grace. Our, our friend Grace Miller, who Nathan obviously just had his episode come out.

[00:31:47] Haley: She’s the, uh, director of experimentation and failure for Diary of a ceo EO. Yeah. So this doesn’t surprise me in any way, shape, or form, but I think that it’s like a conversation. Uh, I thought that was a really, really interesting, I just, I wouldn’t have guessed.

[00:32:00] Chelsea: Yeah,

[00:32:00] Haley: I wouldn’t have guessed. So it’s

[00:32:01] Chelsea: not just as a guest prepping to be on shows, but as a host Yeah.

[00:32:03] Chelsea: Doing your research know

[00:32:05] Haley: and

[00:32:05] Chelsea: how you’re gonna get,

[00:32:06] Haley: someone said this to me, I actually don’t even know if this was at the event, honestly, but someone was like, if it feels like magic, it’s probably magic. Right? It’s like they’re not sitting down and just having this naturally free flowing conversation.

[00:32:18] Haley: There were so much preparation that went into it, and so it might feel like it was just a viral clip that went because, you know, but it was practiced meticulously. And I thought that was really interesting because that’s just like a level of preparation that’s like Kobe Bryant level preparation. Yeah.

[00:32:30] Haley: And, um, they’re going viral for a reason. Mm-hmm. Because they’re practicing their craft. Well,

[00:32:36] Nathan: and that’s the thing of. Realizing, oh, these people aren’t just naturally good on camera, or like, you’re gifted and charismatic. It’s like, no, you have refined this. Yeah. And you have practiced it over and over again.

[00:32:48] Haley: Yeah.

[00:32:48] Nathan: To a level beyond, probably like five times. I would’ve assumed that someone’s doing like 15 to 20 hours of prep for the most important podcast they’re going on. It’s like, no, 80 hours.

[00:32:58] Haley: Where would you find 80 hours? Chelsea’s like can confirm

[00:33:04] Chelsea: he does not have

[00:33:05] Haley: 80 hours. Absolutely not. He does not have 80 hours.

[00:33:08] Chelsea: Unless this is

[00:33:08] Haley: one. Unless it’s while he’s flying or something, you know, and his like, plane is flying itself, you know, and then he’s

[00:33:13] Nathan: turn on the autopilot and then just rehearse your hooks.

[00:33:15] Haley: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:33:17] Nathan: My favorite thing, when this person was rattling off their hooks, she said one and everyone was, she was like, blah, blah, blah.

[00:33:22] Nathan: Here’s the, you know. And then everyone was like, waiting for the story. Oh. ’cause we’re all, we’re all like, and how

[00:33:28] Haley: we were

[00:33:28] Nathan: hooked. Oh, that was, that was you. She’s like, no, that’s just a framework for a hook that you can use. Yeah. You know, there’s no story to follow. Like, oh,

[00:33:36] Haley: flawless execution there.

[00:33:38] Flawless.

[00:33:38] Nathan: Okay. What other moments or stories when you realize like, oh, people are playing on a different level than what I expected? Mm.

[00:33:45] Haley: This one might be kind of the opposite actually of, of what it is that we’re talking about, which I thought was really interesting. I kind of wanna expose this person. Um, but I feel like it’s a great, um, I think it’s a great comparison.

[00:34:01] Haley: Like, you know, it’s, yeah, it’s soft and dark, whatever. What’s the

[00:34:07] Nathan: soft and dark? Those are not opposites.

[00:34:09] Haley: No, no. Yeah. Oh yeah. That’s hard. So I think a good opposite to that is, and I’m gonna expose who this one came from, is our friend Jefferson Fisher, because Jefferson Fisher’s stuff in a lot of, like, his, his growth on Instagram and social media has been insane.

[00:34:29] Nathan: Yeah. Zero to 5 million?

[00:34:31] Haley: No, he has 6.2.

[00:34:32] Nathan: Well, but zero to 5 million in two years.

[00:34:34] Haley: Okay. Yeah. It, it’s insane. And he’s obviously, come on your podcast and I’ve had the chance to, you know, go, I, I invited myself to dinner with him last time and um, I was very excited about it. But Jefferson is exactly who he is in person as he is online.

[00:34:51] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:34:51] Haley: And I think the thing that makes him so compelling is that he is not putting on. Any show and people can kind of feel that, right? He’s, he, I actually, he said, he said, I’m different from y’all. He said, I talk slow. I think slow. And, and, and he didn’t say that. He said, exactly. And I was like, I was like, that’s great.

[00:35:13] Haley: Oh my gosh. I’m obsessed with you.

[00:35:14] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:35:15] Haley: Um, but all that to say, that was just a vast It was, it was, it was very different. Mm-hmm. From other people’s. And that is what his secret sauce actually is. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s the, it the fact that it’s in his car mm-hmm. It’s under produced. And so sometimes you just find what the magic is.

[00:35:33] Haley: Mm-hmm. For you, for you. And that’s what ends up working for you. And so sometimes people would be digging into this like, deep, deep, deep, you know, like work and Jefferson’s like, I’m just talking in my car. Yeah. You know, I’m just,

[00:35:46] Nathan: you know, and he, he says that, and it’s totally true. But also speaking of levels to this game, right?

[00:35:52] Haley: Yeah.

[00:35:52] Nathan: As a trial attorney. He has done thousands and thousands of hours in very high stakes environments in a courtroom.

[00:35:59] Haley: Yes. Yeah. Yes.

[00:36:00] Nathan: You know, convincing 12 people Yeah. That they need to side with this client or, you know

[00:36:05] Yeah.

[00:36:05] Nathan: Whatever that is. And so you often see people who are very good, who had very important skills in one area, and then translate to the creator world.

[00:36:13] Nathan: Yeah. And, and they, they come in at the top of the game. Um, but it was interesting. There was another creator that I thought was interesting who doesn’t have social on their phone, like at all. And it’s like, wait, but you post all the time. Oh.

[00:36:28] Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:28] Nathan: And they were like, uh, I, yes, I do post all the time, or my account posts all the time, and they record all the videos and they just record a video, send to their team and say like, this is a story.

[00:36:38] Nathan: This, and basically talking about how at that, you know, half a million plus followers. There’s interesting things happening on social all the time. It’s not just even that you’re scrolling other people’s feeds. It’s like the comments and the interactions and the famous people following you on your own feed can draw you back in every like two or three minutes and they’re like, it’s honestly not a great way to live.

[00:36:58] Nathan: Yeah. Mm-hmm. And so I interact with it on like a weekly basis.

[00:37:00] Haley: Yeah. This person was protecting their mental health. Like really? Yeah. They were protecting their, their space, their mindset. And it’s funny because then there were other creators in the room that were like, I’ve posted, I’ve edited. Mm-hmm. I post, yeah, I do absolutely everything.

[00:37:14] Haley: I engage with every, I surprised same.

[00:37:16] Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:17] Haley: Um, and I loved it. Mm-hmm. I love both versions of it, to be honest. The point is, is that they, they all know what works, what works for them.

[00:37:24] Chelsea: Yep.

[00:37:24] Haley: And I could be wrong, but you’ll have to remind me if this is actually true. I feel like we can say this person’s name, but maybe you told me this, James Clear.

[00:37:33] Haley: For a long time had his assistant have his password to social media. Is this right?

[00:37:39] Nathan: Uh, he said this on stage at craft commerce, I believe.

[00:37:41] Haley: Okay. Okay.

[00:37:41] Nathan: Where,

[00:37:42] Haley: so we can’t talk about it. Yep,

[00:37:43] Nathan: yep. Um, where during the work week, his assistant changes his social media passwords and then doesn’t give him his passwords back until he completes his work taking

[00:37:53] Chelsea: notes,

[00:37:55] Haley: change Nathan’s

[00:37:56] Chelsea: passwords.

[00:37:57] Haley: That’s so good. That’s

[00:37:58] Chelsea: so good.

[00:37:59] Haley: Yeah. But

[00:38:00] Chelsea: yeah, I did think it was interesting how many people that have millions of followers or you know, somewhere in there are like, no, I’m the one posting writing and editing. Editing and editing all of it. Yeah. They are doing it. And you’d be amazed at how much that doesn’t happen.

[00:38:14] Chelsea: So that was really cool to hear.

[00:38:16] Haley: Okay. What about the fun AI things that people are doing? That’s like obviously a, everybody’s talking about it, right? Mm-hmm. Ai, we, should we talk about it? I don’t know. I feel like we could, let’s do, yeah. Okay. What about the fun ai things that people are doing?

[00:38:30] Nathan: One that I liked was someone was saying they had an almost like an AI checkpoint.

[00:38:36] Haley: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

[00:38:36] Nathan: Where it was basically like, here’s, here’s how I want to show up in the world. Uh, these are my values, these are, this is my writing style and all of this. And so everything they would post, they would, you know, go and ask Claude in this custom project, like, does this match how I wanna show up in the world?

[00:38:55] Nathan: And be like, yep, totally. Except for these two things. Mm-hmm. You know, you told me you want incorporate those, and it’s like, oh, right, okay, let me go out and do it. And so many people use generative AI to generate things, but I thought it was such an interesting aspect to have, you know, sort of the, the checkpoint and like.

[00:39:11] Nathan: Answer the question, am I showing up authentically in line with how I said I wanna show up?

[00:39:15] Haley: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Because then it would come back and it would say, you say that you wanna show up in this way, and then it would give you actually feedback on how that does not.

[00:39:23] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:24] Haley: How you’re not showing up in the way that you said that you wanted to.

[00:39:26] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:26] Nathan: And I, I do a version of that where, you know, if you, if you ask ai, is this good? It’ll be like, yeah, it’s so good. Great job. You’re the best writer. It’s so complimentary. And you’re like, I am the best writer. Wow.

[00:39:37] Haley: Wow.

[00:39:38] Nathan: But then if you say, Hey, what are the logical fallacies, or like the flaws in my argument, it’ll be like, oh, well actually, you know, and it’ll just then tear apart your writing and you’re just like, oh, I feel terrible now.

[00:39:48] Haley: Yeah.

[00:39:48] Nathan: But it’s so good to get that feedback. Mm-hmm. Because. Then you become a better writer, better communicator. Mm-hmm. It will spread and reach more people. Mm-hmm. And so I love that idea that a checkpoint or using it for very critical feedback,

[00:40:01] Chelsea: and this person does have a team too, or suggested that you could use this for your team too, to make sure that they’re running it too, if they’re writing any copy for you.

[00:40:08] Chelsea: Yep.

[00:40:08] Haley: Something else I thought was really interesting was how many of these authors leverage speaking into their Monet monetization strategy. But specifically what was really interesting about this is the various different rates that people charge for speaking and the psychology that goes into setting your speaking rates.

[00:40:27] Haley: And so, um, and the

[00:40:28] Nathan: range was something like 20,000 to $250,000 per time. Exactly. And so you had the whole range. There were a lot in the. Call it 50 to a hundred thousand. Yeah. That was probably where the, the bell Curve averaged out.

[00:40:40] Haley: Yeah. And so there were several people that were like, oh, I’m worried about going up to that next tier.

[00:40:45] Haley: Right. And so, um, I think we can say who said this one? Yeah. But this one came from James Clear, and you could imagine that he warrants a pretty high speaking fee. And what he said that he did, which I loved this, is that he would do five speaking engagements at a specific rate, and then he would raise it Yeah.

[00:41:02] Haley: And then five engagements at the next rate, and then raise it. And so he just continued to set that bar to see where he basically, how what his ceiling he was he testing?

[00:41:12] Nathan: Mm-hmm. He just

[00:41:12] Haley: like, yeah,

[00:41:13] Nathan: let’s find

[00:41:13] Haley: out. And so he figured out what his ceiling was and he tried to raise it and it, it, it,

[00:41:17] Nathan: he got fewer bookings.

[00:41:19] Nathan: Yeah. And he was like, oh, all right.

[00:41:20] Haley: Yeah.

[00:41:21] Nathan: And it, when that came up, people were like, but if I do that, I won’t get, you know, if I raise my rates, people won’t book me anymore. And this is like a, a key part of my income and how I grew my audience. And he was like, then you just bring your rate back down slightly,

[00:41:34] Haley: Uhhuh, and he, you know, he, but then you also, you figure out where your rate was, should be.

[00:41:38] Haley: Right? Yeah. And I think what’s interesting too is like, let’s, let’s be candid about this, right? There were a couple of people, if we’re, if we’re saying there’s three tiers mm-hmm. There are people in the room that are tier one and we’ll call tier one, you know, 50 to 80,000 or 50 to 50 to a hundred thousand.

[00:41:52] Haley: And then there were people in the room that were like a hundred to 175,000. And then there were people in the room that were 175 and above. Right. And so they were basically saying is you’re trying to go from tier one to tier two to tier three. And so they didn’t wanna move up from tier two to tier three because then they’re competing with the people in tier three.

[00:42:11] Nathan: Right.

[00:42:12] Haley: And so it was a really interesting, like the psychology of it, you know? Mm-hmm. As they’re saying, well, I don’t wanna move into that tier because then I become Mel Robbins tier.

[00:42:20] Nathan: Right.

[00:42:20] Haley: And then I’m competing against and

[00:42:22] Nathan: someone’s trying to decide, well, if I’m gonna pay that much money, then I might as well go book Exactly.

[00:42:26] Nathan: A Mel Robbins or a James Clear or someone like that.

[00:42:28] Haley: Yeah. All that to say it was very interesting because everybody in that room really could probably demand a tier three rate, but the psychology of them thinking mm-hmm. That they couldn’t is what really limited them from getting that, right. Mm-hmm.

[00:42:41] Nathan: And I’ve heard that, you know, if you hear people talk about like, oh, charge more, you’re worth more than that or everything else, it’s like you get into mindset and all of these things.

[00:42:50] Nathan: And James’ solution was so simple. ’cause he is like, give every five talks, raise your, raise your price by five grand.

[00:42:56] Chelsea: Yeah.

[00:42:56] Nathan: You know, or whatever the number is for you. And you’re like, oh

[00:42:59] Chelsea: yeah. And he said that ahead of time. So he wasn’t thinking about it in the moment of questioning about it. And so even

[00:43:04] Nathan: when he was, yeah, in the moment when he is like, oh, maybe I, I don’t know if I’m worth this or will I get more gig?

[00:43:09] Nathan: He’s like, no, I made an agreement with myself that I would raise it. And if I. Don’t get any gigs in the next three months, then I’ll drop it slightly.

[00:43:15] Haley: I mean, we, we’ve talked about this, but like, I just got my first paid speaking gig and I still can’t believe that they paid me.

[00:43:21] Nathan: Can we talk about how much they paid you?

[00:43:22] Nathan: No, because I,

[00:43:23] Haley: okay. We can talk about the fact that I’m officially a higher paid speaker than Nathan.

[00:43:30] Nathan: It’s true.

[00:43:30] Chelsea: Let’s

[00:43:31] Haley: talk about that. Um,

[00:43:32] Nathan: and I was like, that’s, no one’s ever paid me that much to speak.

[00:43:35] Haley: Yeah. But, but it’s in my point is, is that I don’t have a huge social media following and I was not speaking on behalf of Kit.

[00:43:43] Haley: I was speaking on a totally separate topic. Mm-hmm. And so for somebody like me, I have no audience, no meaningful audience. Right, right. Outside of my relationship with kid, I guess. Um, and I was, and no website and I was able to land a pretty decent speaking rate, honestly. Mm-hmm. And so I’m still surprised by that.

[00:44:00] Haley: And so the psychology of that, in my mind, I’m like, if I could get this. You can get 10 times that.

[00:44:06] Nathan: Yeah. I think another angle to talk about is just a few of the people in the room who are really impressive. Um, one person is Madeline Macintosh, who is a CEO and founder of Authors Equity. So she and James, you know, of co-founded Authors Equity Together, which is this new publisher and they really have the perfect blend between self-publishing and traditional publishing and, and all of that.

[00:44:31] Nathan: And I knew she was impressive. Like, uh, I’ve talked to her a good amount because Authors Equity was publishing my book. It was just, you realize there’s levels to it where like, oh, she was the CEO of Penguin Random House us. And so it’s like, wait, you actually got to the top of one of, if not the largest publishers in the, in the United States, and then said, oh, I can’t change it from the inside.

[00:44:53] Nathan: I’m gonna leave and start my own public, you know, and change it from the outside.

[00:44:56] Haley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:44:56] Nathan: And there was this other moment where someone, you know, they’re asking all these questions about like, oh, well you, how do you get distribution? And they’re like, well, it’s through. You know, Simon Schuster provides our distribution into all these physical retailers, and someone’s like, well, what if.

[00:45:08] Nathan: Simon Schuster sells and that deal goes away. And she’s just like, well, I’m on the board of Simon and Schuster. So, you know, you’re like, oh, there’s okay.

[00:45:15] Chelsea: Yeah, I think I actually wanna change my fan girl answer. I didn’t made know going into it that Madeline was gonna be who I was most excited about.

[00:45:22] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:45:22] Chelsea: And she’s incredible. So I think leaving it, I was so impressed by her.

[00:45:27] Haley: Yeah. You wanna talk about my worst nightmare with Madeline? I’ll tell you.

[00:45:31] Nathan: Let’s do it. You brought it up, so,

[00:45:33] Haley: okay. Fair. Um, I’ve never, I would say I don’t make mistakes like this. I haven’t made a big mistake like this in a long time.

[00:45:42] Haley: And, um, we had very limited time. I’m getting nervous just thinking about it. Um, we had very limited time, uh, to record an episode with Nathan and James and Madeline. Yeah. And now I am dangerous with video equipment. We’ll say, you know, I’m da meaning like, I know my way around. I can put something together, but it’s not my full-time job sort of thing.

[00:46:03] Haley: And I don’t do that professionally. Right. I, I’m a little out of practice in that. I ha I’ve done this on the road before. All that to say Nathan, James, and Madeline, they’re 25 minutes into a really great,

[00:46:16] Nathan: the future of publishing, you know,

[00:46:17] Haley: conversation.

[00:46:18] Nathan: So good.

[00:46:19] Haley: Like, I mean, they’re really good. And I look down at the Zoom recorder and I see that there is not a red light blinking.

[00:46:27] Nathan: We’re not recording audio.

[00:46:30] Haley: I. My nervous system has never been so stressed out. And I was like, I’m gonna have to interrupt Nathan.

[00:46:37] Nathan: Well, also, like James has to get to the airport.

[00:46:39] Haley: James has to get run a very tight timeline. Yeah, we’re on a tight timeline. I’m gonna have to interrupt this. And I’m like thinking, I’m like, Hailey, you’re gonna interrupt Madeline James clear and Nathan’s finally recording with them.

[00:46:50] Haley: You’re gonna keep it cool. You’re gonna keep it cool. And I just, I was like, Hey, team. And I’ve never been so mortified in my entire life. Now I knew it wasn’t recording. And both Nathan and Nathan’s like, I’ve got the backup audio on my phone. And I was like, no, no you don’t. No, we’re sorry guys. We’re starting over.

[00:47:05] Haley: And James like, just test the audio. And my brain, I’m like. Okay, I’ll just test it. And I

[00:47:11] Chelsea: knew you were very calm, cooled about it. Like

[00:47:15] Haley: Yeah.

[00:47:15] Chelsea: It, I would not have known that you were dying inside.

[00:47:18] Haley: It was the most mortifying thing that has happened to me in a very, very long time. I don’t, not one that you wanna screw up.

[00:47:28] Nathan: Yeah. That was, uh, that was a rough one. It, you know, we had enough time to record, we were definitely cutting it close and then starting over 20 minutes or 25 minutes in. Yeah, we, we tightened it up a little bit.

[00:47:38] Haley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:39] Nathan: And then I think James was like, don’t worry about it. I like to get out of the car at the airport and just walk straight and not have to pause at all.

[00:47:47] Haley: Yeah.

[00:47:47] Nathan: You know, I don’t wanna have to wait in line and all of that. I don’t want to sit at the gate. So, and he texted it later, you know, he is like, what did he text? It was like three things. He’s like, uh, made it on the plane. There was a fantastic event. Tell Hailey, don’t worry about the issues like that happens.

[00:48:04] Nathan: And it had the perfect moment where. I walked straight through security, I walked straight onto the plane. Like I only had to pause briefly as I want.

[00:48:12] Haley: Yeah, that’s crazy. Um, I, I listened back to the audio today and I, I, I couldn’t even listen to it because it, it gave me hives thinking about it. I was like, I can’t hear myself.

[00:48:23] Haley: I can’t hear myself. The, uh, oh God, it was so bad.

[00:48:25] Nathan: So stressful.

[00:48:26] Haley: Yeah, so stressful.

[00:48:27] Chelsea: On that note, James was, both of were so lovely and passion, they’re like compassionate about it and we’re just like, it’s fine, don’t worry. Uhhuh. And also the entire group was, the entire group

[00:48:38] Haley: was, was, oh, the entire group was the best.

[00:48:38] Chelsea: So nice and just like really wonderful people.

[00:48:42] Nathan: Uh, okay. There was another funny moment.

[00:48:44] Haley: Oh no.

[00:48:44] Nathan: Where?

[00:48:46] Chelsea: Probably with Hailey,

[00:48:47] Haley: IM sure. I was like, was it me? What did I do?

[00:48:49] Nathan: Well, there was the time when you knocked glass. I spilled my wine glass knocked over the wine glass. Yeah, it balls on the, like granite countertop makes so much noise.

[00:48:57] Haley: Yeah.

[00:48:58] Nathan: And somehow it doesn’t break. Mm-hmm.

[00:48:59] Haley: It did not break. The, the funnier part about it though is it was a fresh glass of rose that went a hundred percent down my leg and in my shoe. So my sock, just my left sock

[00:49:10] Nathan: just has a little

[00:49:11] Haley: sopping wet with really nice rose.

[00:49:14] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:49:14] Haley: So, um, that was not ideal. Yeah.

[00:49:18] Haley: You know, it just like poured into

[00:49:19] Nathan: your shoe, you know, it wouldn’t be an event without a ha moment like that. Yeah.

[00:49:24] Haley: Uh, yeah.

[00:49:24] Nathan: Uh, but where I was going is there was an author, you know, I was talking about what were the most impactful things in your book launch and all of this. And there was an author there who had recently hit the New York Times list and they said, um, they, they had a whole thing where they were like, email is still undefeated.

[00:49:42] Haley: Oh,

[00:49:42] Nathan: and then when I talk about email strategies, like you can email way more often than you think. Like the bulk of the sales came from email and that’s a common trait that we had from around the room. But the funny moment is like a little while later, someone was like, oh, well you know, on Creator network you can do this and this and that and you can cross recommend and it works so well.

[00:49:59] Nathan: And I always love it when you know, our customers are doing the selling for us Uhhuh and he, and he goes, yeah, I’m not on Kit. And like the room erupt and they start like mass shaming. So we have like the top authors in the world shaming this other author for not using Kit, and we’re all just sitting back like, no, no, do your thing.

[00:50:19] Chelsea: Yeah, I didn’t say anything. I’ll watch, I’ll watch.

[00:50:22] Nathan: And they’re like, this would be, if you use Kit, you could have done this. And you, in your launch you could have like had, yeah, when you did your newsletter tour, they could have clicked one button and opted in. You’re like, this is great.

[00:50:32] Haley: Yeah, keep going.

[00:50:33] Haley: Same, keep going. It’s all about curating the right room. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I loved that. That was fun. Oh, I, we should, we could. Talk about the venue. Mm-hmm. Because the venue was just give the venue a little bit of a shout out.

[00:50:45] Chelsea: Yeah.

[00:50:45] Haley: We did it at this insane, amazing venue called South Hall Farm and in, in, just outside of, uh, Nashville and Franklin and their team was insane.

[00:50:57] Haley: Amazing. Did a great job. Yeah. So, so wonderful. But it’s like a 500 acre regenerative farm. And so everything was farm to table, so the food was exceptional. Mm-hmm. The service was exceptional. The venue, like it was beautiful. And we also had the most perfect weather.

[00:51:12] Nathan: It was

[00:51:13] Haley: great. Yeah. You had the best weather.

[00:51:14] Chelsea: It was perfect.

[00:51:15] Haley: Yeah. Not a bad, I had the sexiest room.

[00:51:18] Nathan: You had the gr a great room except for those couches. I don’t know what was up with those couches.

[00:51:21] Haley: They should reconsider those couches. They. We’re not the ideal, uh, for the podcast scene. They were not the most ideal.

[00:51:30] Nathan: The dining table setup I thought

[00:51:31] Haley: was great.

[00:51:32] Nathan: Worked great.

[00:51:32] Haley: Okay. Chelsea, one of the ones that you and I talked about afterwards was, um, how creators or authors were leveraging their local bookstore. Mm-hmm. You love that?

[00:51:40] Chelsea: Mm-hmm. Yep. I did. You know, like I said, one of my favorite parts about this was getting to hear everything that we’re gonna use for your tactics, for launching your book.

[00:51:48] Chelsea: Um, and so are we

[00:51:49] Haley: gonna use Hearts on Fire down the street? It’s a romance. It’s a romance bookstore.

[00:51:54] Nathan: Ladders of Wealth.

[00:51:56] Haley: Shout out Hearts on fire. Yep. Um, but seriously, they keep going.

[00:52:00] Chelsea: Um, but on that note, uh, using your local indie bookstores or just indie bookstores across the country, actually, um, to support them and also spread, you know.

[00:52:10] Chelsea: The word about their books through these indie bookstores.

[00:52:13] Haley: This is a good one to, we can totally give credit where credit’s due in this one too. The two people that do this really, really well are Tory Dunlap and James Clear. And both of them have, um, their local bookstore, uh, in their hometown. And what was great is James talked about, um, for his bookstore, and I don’t remember the name of it, but we could probably add it in the comments, but for his bookstore, it works out great for them and it works out great for him because he has all of his books shipped there and then they do all of the distribution.

[00:52:39] Haley: He can go down and he can sign and, you know, sign the books. And then every time if he does, you know, he’ll do author signings in that local bookstore fairly often. And so, I can’t remember the exact number. Do you remember what it was? It was like how many books they have sold?

[00:52:52] Nathan: Oh, it was Acra something Crazy number.

[00:52:54] Nathan: ’cause he, for all his speaking engagements, he’s like, yeah, just buy books for every attendee and do it from this, this bookstore.

[00:53:00] Haley: Yeah.

[00:53:00] Nathan: And then, uh, Tory Dunlap was talking about the same thing of having, I think she picked four or five indie bookstores around the country. That she particularly wanted to partner with, and so she would have them by the books.

[00:53:10] Nathan: Um, and then she would, you know, also, you know, make sure they had signed copies and, and all of that.

[00:53:16] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:17] Nathan: There’s another fun one where, uh, will Guera was talking about, uh, a partnership that they did for Unreasonable Hospitality of getting the book in all of these, um, in all the airport bookstores.

[00:53:30] Haley: Oh, yeah.

[00:53:31] Nathan: Oh, and then he would specifically go around each time he’s in the airport. Right. You’re on book tour. You’re in the airport a lot. Like he would sign the four copies that were there, and then you’d take a photo and be like, all right. You know? Yeah. Whatever the Hudson books or, you know, next to Gate 34 at Nashville.

[00:53:45] Haley: Yep.

[00:53:46] Nathan: And then people, he had examples of people. Realizing they were close, like seeing that Instagram story, realizing they’re close to the airport, buying a refundable plane ticket, going through security, buying the signed copy of the book, taking a photo and sending it to ’em like, you know, 30 minutes later and be like, I got your book.

[00:54:02] Nathan: Also, I’m not traveling anywhere today. Let me refund my ticket and then go back out through security.

[00:54:06] Haley: One of the things that I really loved, and this is just like to kind of summarize some of this is. You know, sometimes you have this perception in your mind that it’s easy for people.

[00:54:18] Mm-hmm.

[00:54:18] Haley: You’re like, you’re Will guera.

[00:54:20] Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:20] Haley: You’re James Clear, you’re Sawhill bloom, right? Yeah. And the thing that I loved is how they’re, they were all grinding.

[00:54:29] Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:30] Haley: Right? Like they were all doing, like, you know, when he talked about Sawhill doing things, unscalable things

[00:54:35] Nathan: like

[00:54:35] Haley: you, you think

[00:54:36] Nathan: individually mailing

[00:54:37] Haley: out Yes. Himself actually.

[00:54:39] Haley: Even better to, to elaborate on the Sawhill story is that his publisher, he wanted to gift a lot of books and he ended up buying those books himself because they wouldn’t essentially allow him to gift that many books. And he knew innately that that was gonna be a huge component to his launch, building out his street team.

[00:54:59] Haley: So he did all he he grinded.

[00:55:02] Yeah.

[00:55:02] Haley: And sometimes you have this perception that, okay, it’s Sawhill Bloom. He has a huge social following. It’s Will Guera. He has a huge social following. The reality is, is that these authors are all doing really hard things mm-hmm. To make their books a success. And not saying that, you know, everybody’s not doing that, but they’re doing it and it’s, yeah.

[00:55:23] Nathan: Well another example of that is, uh, Madeline had a lot of stories since she’s published over a thousand books,

[00:55:29] Haley: Uhhuh,

[00:55:29] Nathan: you know, and, and been in the industry for so long. She was like, look, so many of these authors. Who we read and they’re like so gifted. Like, uh, she brought up Amore Tolls.

[00:55:38] Haley: Oh yeah.

[00:55:38] Nathan: Right. Who wrote a gentleman in Moscow and, and, uh, rules of Civility and others, like these fantastic books that I love.

[00:55:44] Nathan: And she was like, no, he built like bookstore by bookstore. He went into every single indie bookstore, built a relationship with them and ’cause I, I think he was in like finance or he had some corporate career, he was like, I wanna be a writer. And so as part of this transition, as you’ve written in the books, he just, he, he was grinding it out.

[00:56:02] Nathan: And I, I, you know, I read a gentleman, Moscow, I’m like, this is incredible. Like, this is the kind of thing that someone should just, you know, you write that and it just sells on its own. It’s like, no, it really doesn’t. It takes. The hard work over many years to build it up.

[00:56:14] Haley: And I mean, if we talk about James Clear in that light, right?

[00:56:16] Haley: We’ve talked about this a lot of times you’ve taught on it as well. Like you were actually with him and you built this out. But you wonder, you’re like, okay, atomic Habits is a great book, and so you would assume that people are gonna naturally go rate it five stars on Amazon. But did they do that on their own or did they do that with a very slight push that was built right in a strategic flywheel leveraging kit?

[00:56:38] Chelsea: Yep.

[00:56:38] Haley: Um, right. Like we were encouraging people, or the backend systems, that tactics that he had built we’re encouraging people to actually rate the book five stars. Um, and that is a huge component in his strategy. And so it’s not just luck. Luck. That

[00:56:51] Nathan: is a clever one. Yeah. We’ll, we’ll talk about that.

[00:56:53] Nathan: That’s something that, uh, we actually have an automation for this inside of Kit that you can mm-hmm. Can copy in. But inspired by James, um. Where basically what he does is inside of Atomic Habits, there’s various things, additional chapters, um, you know, places to go deep in it, like lead magnet type things where if you put in your, you know, in the book, you put in the RL and then go to that to download the resource.

[00:57:15] Nathan: Mm-hmm. So then what he does is he only links to those from in the book. And so then he tags someone who signs up for that as a reader. So now he doesn’t just have an email subscriber. He, he knows this person has at least read, you know, to to page 74 in the book. Yeah. Where, where that was. And then he waits a little bit, he has a follow-up sequence because you want people not just to buy the book, but you want them to read it and you want them not just read the book, but you want ’em to finish it.

[00:57:39] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:40] Nathan: And so then the follow-up sequence is where he’s reminding them, you know, through other content to come back and, and finish the book. And then after a little bit of time where he’s like, you’ve probably finished it by now, he sends an email and doesn’t say, will you go rate the book? He says, how did you like the.

[00:57:57] Nathan: One to five stars. Each of those being a little image that you can click on and it’s a link. And so depending on what they click, if they click five stars, he says, thanks so much. I’m glad you loved it. Would you post that to Amazon and Good reads? Yep. If they click one to four stars, he says, uh, you know, I’d love to hear more about what you didn’t like or all that.

[00:58:17] Nathan: And that goes to internal feedback.

[00:58:19] Haley: But the better part about that one is, is that he says, what do you, I love this part because he’s like, what don’t you like? Or What feedback do you have? And that’s a whole deliverability hack, right? Because he is getting them to actually respond to the email. And reply and reply, which the reply is a, it’s a great deliverability hack.

[00:58:35] Haley: So all the negative response, he’s getting them to take action, which is further. So, which is

[00:58:39] Nathan: Benefits

[00:58:39] Haley: him. Yeah. Benefits him even more.

[00:58:41] Nathan: And then the positive response, he is like, amazing. I’m glad you loved it. Go tell the world. And so you end up at this flywheel where, you know, the more book sales you have, the more readers.

[00:58:49] Nathan: The more readers, the more five star reviews, the more five star reviews, the more sales. And you know, that’s how he sold well, a, a part of selling 30 million copies of Atomic Habits.

[00:58:59] Haley: I mean 30 million. I loved this though, at the event, um, I had bought a bunch of books. I bought a book of pretty much everyone that was there.

[00:59:08] Haley: So, you know, I don’t know, I just thought it would be cool.

[00:59:10] Nathan: Yeah, it ended up I saw a lot of people taking the social content.

[00:59:14] Haley: Yeah.

[00:59:15] Nathan: Like recording a video of the books all laid out.

[00:59:17] Haley: Yeah.

[00:59:17] Nathan: And it’s interesting from a little like a status thing because it was their book in amongst

[00:59:23] Haley: Yes.

[00:59:24] Nathan: All of these others.

[00:59:25] Nathan: ’cause everyone. I, I’ve talked to probably 10 people who was like, who were like, I cannot believe that you invited me to this.

[00:59:32] Haley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:59:32] Nathan: And we’re like, I can’t believe that you came. You

[00:59:34] Haley: know, that was a very last minute edition. Actually. I had them all sent to our teammate Alyssa, who lives in Franklin. I had them all I sent to Alyssa’s house because I was like, I just feel like we should have all their books.

[00:59:43] Haley: Yeah. Right. So I’m glad I did that very last minute. Um, but, um, the, the thing I loved was that James, he’s like, I haven’t even seen the one that says 30 million copies on it. He’s like, I don’t, I don’t have a copy of my book that says 30 million. Could you fricking imagine Nathan? Well, maybe, maybe, maybe.

[01:00:03] Haley: Ladders of Wealth. Yeah. Crushes it and sells 30 million copies.

[01:00:06] Nathan: Visualize it. We’re we’re manifesting a million. Yeah.

[01:00:08] Haley: That’s the, okay. We’re manifesting a million. Yeah. But, uh, 30 million, like good night.

[01:00:13] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:00:13] Haley: Good night. But all Okay. It wasn’t magic. It, the book is so good.

[01:00:19] Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:19] Haley: But I think like when I, every single person, like talking about people playing a different game.

[01:00:25] Haley: They were playing, they’re, they’re, they’re building the systems that is making them as successful as they are, which was just, it was, like I said, it was kind of, I did not belong in the room. I loved that I got to put the room together, but I promise you, I, I, I did not belong in the room. And there were a couple moments where I was like, wow, I’ve, in the room, same,

[01:00:48] Nathan: very much the same.

[01:00:48] Nathan: But they were all, they were all so grateful. Like they were the number of text, email, they never made us

[01:00:52] Chelsea: feel like that at all. You know, it was just

[01:00:54] Nathan: like, they were all just like, thank you so much for creating this space. Yeah. Uh, some of them were like, I only get invited to like, marketing conferences. I love that.

[01:01:02] Haley: Yeah.

[01:01:02] Nathan: I’m in the room with all of my, my, uh, peers as authors. So I think that also goes to another point, the number of people that reach out to you and I and said when the book comes out

[01:01:13] Haley: Yep.

[01:01:13] Nathan: Here are the five ways I can help. You know, or like, you better tell me, you know?

[01:01:17] Chelsea: Yep.

[01:01:18] Nathan: How I can email or, you know, promote the book launch or any of that.

[01:01:21] Nathan: And it’s just such an important. Thing of this, like invest in the community, give, like we could have, we know all those people well enough that we could have sent an email and been like, Hey, book is launching, you know, in a month, can I come on your podcast? Can you send emails for me? Or all of that? And it’d be like, they’d be like, yeah, sure.

[01:01:38] Nathan: I only get asked that like 10 times a week, but you know, we’ll try to slot you in with everybody else.

[01:01:44] Haley: Yeah.

[01:01:45] Nathan: And. The promotion for the book or, uh, getting them to talk about kit was not the goal of the event.

[01:01:53] Haley: No.

[01:01:53] Nathan: But you realize that like investing in them, their businesses, their relationships mm-hmm. Made them be like, okay, so how can we help you?

[01:02:00] Haley: A hundred percent. Yeah. Okay. I love to talk about failures too. Mm-hmm. And let me tell you, a failure, not a failure, it’s just like a miss. I think. So we had in this room it was. Ex pretty much exclusively nonfiction authors. Yeah. We had a couple of people that fell that were a slightly outside

[01:02:16] Nathan: little memoir.

[01:02:17] Haley: Yeah. And, um, all that to say, we talked a lot about this with Madeline actually, is that there’s the nonfiction world and there’s the fiction world, and both groups do incredibly, they do things really, really well. Right. And so this world, the nonfiction world, they’re typically pretty dang excellent marketers.

[01:02:37] Haley: Mm-hmm. Right? So they’re very good at the growing the thought leader business where then you have the nonfiction world. And the nonfiction world is insane at like book talk and grassroots marketing. This the fiction world, the, sorry, the fiction world Yep. Is insane at that grassroots book talk sort of thing.

[01:02:52] Haley: And the two of them I wish. And for the next one, we’ll, we’ll do something where we actually bring together a few nonfiction and fiction authors, right? Because then you’re learning from someone that’s doing something slightly different. And I love to do this in the creator world as well, where we’re saying, okay, you’re a food content creator and you’re a, you know, a business coach.

[01:03:10] Haley: Like, let’s help you learn from one another. Because there’s often a lot of things that we’re all like in our own lane, doing our own thing. Mm-hmm. And we forget to look, you know. At the strategies tactic. Yeah.

[01:03:21] Nathan: People who said like, ’cause it started like, oh, what could nonfiction learn from fiction or all of that.

[01:03:27] Nathan: And then a few people were like, actually you should really learn from is the romance authors.

[01:03:31] Haley: Ooh. Yeah.

[01:03:31] Nathan: Because the volume is so much higher, like units sold, they’re, they also tend to be very digital first, you know, of. Tons of Kindle sales.

[01:03:41] Haley: You know what was shocking to me is how many people in the room didn’t know what smut was.

[01:03:45] Haley: Tori Dunlap and I are like, let me tell you Nathan also, ’cause as I said, you know, maybe not smut, but fourth wing. There you

[01:03:53] Nathan: go. Yeah,

[01:03:53] Haley: you go. And

[01:03:54] Nathan: I also like, love when Madeline was like, yeah, you all have good book sales numbers, but like romance, you know, are these categories Uhhuh? Like they put sales numbers put all of you.

[01:04:03] Haley: Yeah. Sarah Jane Mass. Like, and you know, like I said, her being on call her daddy like very recently, come on. I mean, I,

[01:04:08] Nathan: we also tried to brainstorm what James clear’s call her daddy would be like, for some reason that didn’t, didn’t take off yet. No,

[01:04:15] Haley: no.

[01:04:15] Nathan: It’ll happen.

[01:04:16] Haley: Um, but so true. Yeah. I was very, I loved my contribution to the, to the group.

[01:04:20] Haley: I was like, well, let me, I got you. I’m gonna bring one value add and it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be smut. It’s gonna be smut. Tori was right there with me. Yeah. She, she led the charge though, so yeah,

[01:04:30] Nathan: she was all about it. Something else that stood out to me was the whole conversation around year two and beyond.

[01:04:36] Nathan: Because a lot of these people have, you know, launched their first or their second book, it’s sold well, maybe had a big spike on the New York Times list and then started to drop off. And they all wanna talk about, okay, where do you go from here? And basically everyone that has had sales that have, you know, endured or stayed consistent.

[01:04:52] Nathan: Never stopped promoting the book.

[01:04:53] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:54] Nathan: And they went to theming it around specific events, like, how can I tie my book to high school graduation? Mm-hmm. How can I tie my book to Mother’s Day, father, you know, whatever to

[01:05:04] Haley: Yeah.

[01:05:04] Nathan: Um, you know, the new New Year, uh, to Christmas. Anything that’s like giftable.

[01:05:10] Nathan: Then they’re just promoting relentlessly. Mm-hmm. And they’re like figuring out a way to put their book into a bunch of different places.

[01:05:16] Haley: I just remembered one that I loved that we forgot to talk about, um, is the experience of reading a book in a specific place. So one of the authors posted, like on social media, it was like every, he kept posting, he wanted people to be reading his book on the beach.

[01:05:32] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:32] Haley: And like he wanted to create that team. That’s the

[01:05:34] Nathan: vibe of the book.

[01:05:35] Haley: Yes.

[01:05:35] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:05:36] Haley: Yeah. It’s the vibe of the book. So the, the social media posts that went out that we’re constantly sharing or like anytime somebody, and it just became the identity of the book is to read it in a place that provides you, brings you extreme amounts of peace.

[01:05:50] Haley: Mm-hmm. And so that is something that lives on in a totally different way. You’re like, oh. I’m like, oh, I saw my friend Chelsea reading this book on the beach. I’m gonna read this book on the beach. Yeah. You know, um, loved, I helped

[01:06:01] Nathan: shape the identity of the book.

[01:06:02] Haley: Yeah.

[01:06:02] Nathan: Which was kind of crazy to think about.

[01:06:04] Nathan: ’cause in that example. It was after the book was released.

[01:06:07] Haley: Yes.

[01:06:08] Nathan: And there’s these broader themes where you’re like, of course they would fit in with that, but it wasn’t a deliberate thing until starting to notice this trend. And then it’s like, okay. Let’s take the spark of something and let’s make it a whole thing.

[01:06:18] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:18] Nathan: And that’s driven a ton of sales and, you know, it shaped this

[01:06:22] Haley: identity. And for many of the authors in the room, their, their books were very evergreen. You know, like Jefferson Fisher’s book, the next conversation is never gonna go out of style. Right. I can promise you this world needs the help of learning how to have hard conversations more easily.

[01:06:38] Haley: Um, but all that to say, that was an interesting part in the conversation because, um, many people were like just riding the wave of that one book. James still hasn’t written a second book. Right. So hasn’t, but he’s built in all of these systems to continue to support the growth of that book. And I think actually it was James that was talking about graduation, you know, you’re going off into the real world, uh, child.

[01:06:58] Haley: Mm-hmm. You should probably build some habits, you know? Um, but yeah, no, that was a, that was an interesting conversation too, thinking about everyone’s different mindset around how they promote and continue to promote these evergreen books. Um, or if their book maybe feels less timeless.

[01:07:13] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:13] Haley: Um. Where they think or how they think about promoting it.

[01:07:17] Nathan: This event was such a hit. Yeah. That we were immediately like, okay, we have to do more masterminds. And we’ve done quite a few and they

[01:07:23] Haley: Yeah.

[01:07:23] Nathan: You know, but we wanted to make a space for it. And so that’s something that we’re doing deliberately in New York where in, you know, Kitsu, Boise and Chicago, you can host things here and, and they’re, but they’re not made for events.

[01:07:35] Nathan: Mm-hmm. And so with New York, you’ve got me to splurge for the, the big, fancy expensive space.

[01:07:41] Haley: And I love spending other people’s money,

[01:07:44] Nathan: particularly mine.

[01:07:45] Haley: Yeah.

[01:07:45] Nathan: Um, and our idea is that we wanna host a lot more of these things. We wanna partner with specific creators where they could bring in an audience, we could bring it as well, we can co-teach, facilitate this

[01:07:57] Chelsea: uhhuh

[01:07:57] Nathan: and just create this community.

[01:07:59] Nathan: ’cause really all we did, I mean, I don’t wanna downplay the amount of work, but we didn’t.

[01:08:04] Chelsea: Yes. Let’s say we, there’s a,

[01:08:08] Nathan: it’s not like we planned a conference worth of programming or all of that.

[01:08:11] Chelsea: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:12] Nathan: We curated a great group of people. Brought them to an excellent venue and then said, Hey, what’s on your mind?

[01:08:18] Nathan: What do you wanna learn? We curated the programming around that and really leaned on the people in the room. Mm-hmm. And so it’s a format that we can do over and over again. Really a format that any creator could do where they could say, look, I have friends who are at my level, uh, or a little bit beyond, um, and I want to, um, you know, I wanna learn from them, so let me book a space.

[01:08:39] Nathan: We all split the cost in some way and let’s make this happen. And that’s something that, you know, James and I did early on with our mastermind and it was fun. Now, I don’t know, seven, 10 years later,

[01:08:50] Haley: I was gonna say was the last time that y’all did a mastermind with you and your group of guys?

[01:08:56] Nathan: 2017, probably nine.

[01:08:59] Nathan: Yeah, probably eight or nine years ago.

[01:09:01] Haley: Yeah.

[01:09:01] Chelsea: Was it that photo on the bridge that James hasn’t aged a single day?

[01:09:05] Nathan: No. That was the first mastermind that we,

[01:09:07] Chelsea: Nathan has aged 10 years.

[01:09:09] Haley: Dramatic. He was a teen and now he’s mad.

[01:09:13] Nathan: Yeah. I did show Chelsea that photo and she’s like, James, looking exactly the same,

[01:09:16] Chelsea: is drinking the

[01:09:17] Nathan: fountain of Youth.

[01:09:19] Haley: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:09:21] Chelsea: That continue.

[01:09:22] Haley: Yes. Sorry.

[01:09:22] Nathan: Yeah. Uh, no, that was, that was the whole thing.

[01:09:26] Haley: As far as New York goes, there’s nothing more. Um, I, when I think about my role, and sometimes it’s, it’s hard to like quantify my role sometimes, but I, there’s nothing better than bringing people together in a room, whether it’s craft and commerce or a small scale event, like a mastermind like this, or it’s at another event, right.

[01:09:45] Haley: You’re just creating a dinner or something like that. Um, the unique thing about this particular event is that it is hard. To get a room full of New York Times bestsellers together. Right, right. Because there are very few people that are at that level. And so I think a really good takeaway is you find someone, to your point, you find a group of people that are all at very, you know, your stage and maybe one or two levels above where you’re at.

[01:10:10] Haley: Um, and you all get to work on this shared goal together. And I mean really that’s how you and James’ relationship was established in the first place. And look where y’all are at now

[01:10:20] Nathan: when I think that’s an important thing to call out. ’cause most people would say like, well of course you can do that because you’re friends with

[01:10:26] Haley: Right

[01:10:26] Nathan: people at this, at this caliber.

[01:10:27] Nathan: And it’s like, that’s not where we started. Right. We had nothing going on. And we just said, Hey. We have similar goals, we’re equally driven. Let’s, let’s make something together and then, you know, like build our businesses together.

[01:10:40] Haley: Yeah. And this is pre Atomic Habits, James. Yeah. You know, and

[01:10:43] Nathan: by like six years.

[01:10:44] Haley: Yeah. By, by a lot. By a lot. So, no. Okay.

[01:10:47] Nathan: This ties into actually my, um, strategy for city league sports.

[01:10:53] Haley: Okay. What,

[01:10:54] Nathan: I’m so excited for you to see what happen. Where are we

[01:10:56] Haley: going with this,

[01:10:57] Nathan: this transition? I am not very gifted when it comes to soccer and volleyball. I did not play either sport in like high school or anything like that.

[01:11:05] Nathan: And I often wanna play on teams that are better than my skill level

[01:11:09] Haley: uhhuh. And

[01:11:09] Nathan: so you’d say like in that, like, oh, you don’t belong here. The way that you belong is you curate the team. If you register the team, do all of the work, recruit everybody and all of that. They’re like, like on my soccer team, they’re like, you’re not good enough to play on this team.

[01:11:25] Nathan: But like, we’re all really grateful. Like none of us would be here. None of us

[01:11:27] Haley: would’ve put this together.

[01:11:28] Nathan: Would’ve put it together. And so they’re, yeah, of course Stanley gets to play, you know, on the volleyball team, you know, I can recruit all of these college athletes to come play with me. Uhhuh teach me how to play the game, and no one is like.

[01:11:39] Nathan: Why are you here? How do we kick you off the team? Mm-hmm. They’re like, I’m so glad you put it together. Now will you please get better?

[01:11:44] Haley: They’re investing, they’re, well, you know, it’s funny because I do talk about this every once in a while because my friends think it’s weird that you like to play volleyball.

[01:11:52] Haley: They think it’s weird that as an adult man, you wanna learn how to play volleyball. And I’m like, I think it’s awesome. But all that to say, um, I am invested in you getting better at this point. I am invested in you transitioning behind the 10 foot line and keeping the ball in front of you on a quick attack.

[01:12:07] Haley: Like that is, I am invested in it. And it sounds silly, but it really is true. It’s like I am, I am several levels above you. Yes.

[01:12:17] Chelsea: Several is generous, I think too.

[01:12:19] Haley: Yeah. Several. But, but no, I’m invested in your growth. Yeah. And

[01:12:22] Nathan: yeah, and, and I think the same thing is true for masterminds or events or something like that.

[01:12:26] Nathan: I’ve seen it over and over again where a creator will, you know, maybe they have 10,000 followers and they’re like, I don’t belong in the room of the people with 50,000 followers or revenue, or whatever the number is that you’re using.

[01:12:37] Haley: Yeah.

[01:12:38] Nathan: But they get in the room and they provide value because they’re the ones who curated it.

[01:12:43] Nathan: Mm-hmm. And so they’re the ones who pulled everybody together. And everyone, basically, two things happen. One people say like, yes, I’d love to come because of the other people in the room. You may not have the name pull yourself, but the people that you brought and you know, do. And then the second thing is, in your journey, you now have all of these other people, like my roster of, uh, you know, D one college athletes, uh, who are then invested in your journey.

[01:13:08] Nathan: And they’re like, oh, we wanna help you with your book launch, with whatever else. And you end up in this. It’s the, the cliche of like, you know, you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with. And so it’s like, okay, be really deliberate with how you curate that and it works. Very.

[01:13:21] Haley: That was my goal.

[01:13:22] Haley: I was just trying to get all the people in the room. I was like, how can I have all these people help me?

[01:13:27] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:13:27] Haley: On Nathan’s dime.

[01:13:30] Nathan: That’s right. All right, Chelsea. What? That

[01:13:31] Chelsea: actually was a really good analogy, so, okay. Thank you. I’m glad we went there. I was just gonna say too, also get on the plane, right?

[01:13:37] Chelsea: Mm-hmm. Like if somebody invites you somewhere. We had somebody fly in from what Belgium just for the day, even though they’re already a three time New York Times bestseller and you know, and then they flew back to Hong Kong or something the next day because they’re on a book tour and just like, get on the plane and go if you’re invited or you know, you just never know what you’re gonna learn.

[01:13:57] Chelsea: And you know, they sent us such a nice message of being like, this was so wonderful. I’m so glad I came and

[01:14:02] Nathan: we’re like, you flew for 24 hours to be here.

[01:14:04] Haley: Yeah, yeah.

[01:14:05] Chelsea: To be here for 48.

[01:14:06] Haley: Would you let Nathan fly 24 hours to go? Are we going

[01:14:09] Chelsea: back to Dubai again? Is this.

[01:14:13] Haley: I am not

[01:14:14] Chelsea: gonna

[01:14:14] Haley: say it. You

[01:14:14] Chelsea: said it.

[01:14:15] Haley: Now that I know

[01:14:16] Nathan: the value of being in the room.

[01:14:17] Nathan: Yes. All right. Chelsea, who’s approved in charge of my schedule Yes. Has just given Hailey permission to

[01:14:24] Haley: push

[01:14:24] Nathan: me all around the

[01:14:24] Haley: world. The entire reason why I hired Chelsea, I hired Chelsea, is to further manipulate Nathan. Let’s be honest. Yeah, exactly. So, um,

[01:14:33] Chelsea: control. Control. Mm-hmm. Control

[01:14:36] Nathan: now that this episode is fully off the rails.

[01:14:38] Haley: Yeah, exactly.

[01:14:39] Nathan: Any closing thoughts?

[01:14:40] Haley: Uh, let’s leave it at what Chelsea said, like get on the plane, be in the room, and if you can’t be in the room, create the room. Mm-hmm.

[01:14:47] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:14:47] Haley: Right. Because you can put in the effort to put together a stacked soccer volleyball team. Um, so if you can’t, if you can’t be in the room, create the room.

[01:14:55] Haley: Mm-hmm. And, um, I mean, that’s my favorite thing is, is creating an experience for other people. So, um. Sometimes you’re just not gonna get invited. And

[01:15:06] Chelsea: yeah,

[01:15:07] Haley: you can make the room,

[01:15:08] Chelsea: make it yourself.

[01:15:08] Nathan: I love that. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment.

[01:15:17] Nathan: I’d love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else do you think we should have on the show? Thank you so much for listening.

[00:00:00] Nathan: You probably know me as the founder of kit, which is an email marketing platform that automates your growth. But there’s actually another business that I started that most people dunno about. It’s a local newsletter called From Boise and I brought on the right person to run it. That person is Marissa LaBelle.

[00:00:13] Marissa: We recently started from Boise Dinner Club. We said, Hey, I’m thinking about this dinner club and if we’re gonna a hundred people, let’s try it. And we had 656 people say yes. And I was like. Oh boy. I guess we’re definitely doing this.

[00:00:25] Nathan: Our readers are some of the most engaged I’ve ever seen. I’d argue she has more influence with her list than most creators have with 10 times that number.

[00:00:32] Nathan: How this thing makes money.

[00:00:34] Marissa: Discount Cards. Dinner Club. I sold merch t-shirts. Stickers. I also had a meetup group called BFFs, and I planned different monthly meetups. Is monetizing it in a way that feels good and makes sense for everybody involved.

[00:00:46] Nathan: I love that. Today, Marissa and I get into how it all happened, the monetization experiments she ran, how she shaped the voice and personality of the emails, and what it took to go from working part-time on the newsletter.

[00:00:56] Nathan: The full-time. You crossed six figures in revenue last year. Mm-hmm. Which is a huge milestone. What were some of the points along the way where you were figuring out,

[00:01:04] Marissa: well, so

[00:01:10] Nathan: we’re gonna have a conversation about Boise, about starting things, uh, running small companies, the future of media and whatever else seems interesting.

[00:01:21] Guest 2: Yeah.

[00:01:21] Nathan: So, we’ll, we’ve got some things that we, we can talk through and then I’ll. We can also take some time and questions and all of that. So if there’s things that you wanna know, uh, but maybe we can kick it off with what made you choose Boise?

[00:01:33] Nathan: How’d you come to Boise?

[00:01:34] Marissa: So, despite the name of my newsletter, I’m actually not from Boise. I am from, um, uh, wheat Farm in eastern Oregon. And I actually came to Boise in 2011 to go to school to go to Boise State. The reason why I chose Boise is not as cool as the reason why I chose to stay in Boise. Um, I chose to come to Boise ’cause nobody else from my high school had come here.

[00:01:56] Marissa: I was kind of trying to get away. Um, but then after I graduated, I. Was just very, very lucky to land a job at Red Sky PR working for the amazing Jess Flynn. Mm-hmm. Who like changed my life and, um, in that job, I, it was where I started writing about Boise and like I just working downtown. I just became immersed in this whole world of Boise that I.

[00:02:20] Marissa: Didn’t know about as a student and um, yeah, I cannot imagine being anywhere else. Mm-hmm. What about you? How’d you, how’d you get to Boise?

[00:02:30] Nathan: Uh, well I was born here, so, uh, I was born if anyone’s run, has anyone run Raced River Creek. Maybe No, Russ has. There we go. Uh, so if you, if you go up toward, if you do the, the course for Race River Creek, uh, I was born in Rocky Canyon.

[00:02:45] Nathan: So you run by the little house. I was born in a tiny house before Tiny houses were cool. Um, I think it was just, ’cause it was just a very small house, um, but grew up in the mountains outside of, uh, outside of Boise, up towards city and um, yeah, went to Boise State. I don’t know. They just stayed here all along.

[00:03:05] Nathan: Everyone always asks like, um, why Boise? And it’s, I find it’s hard to explain, but I love it so much and I’ve traveled so many places. Um, but I’ve actually never been away from Boise for more than six weeks. Like, that is the longest period of time I’ve ever been away. I’ve been there like a couple of times, but everyone’s like, oh, you went somewhere else for college?

[00:03:25] Nathan: Nope, just always back to Boise. I think I’ve been to 38 countries or something. Uh, Boise is home. We’ll always be home. Um, and so, yeah, I guess, uh, by the way of a, a little bit of quick background. I went to Boise State for graphic design and then marketing, and then dropped out after two years, I think. Um, and then started a web design business.

[00:03:47] Nathan: Well, worked for a company called Unity out in Eagle, and just worked for a few Boise companies. And then have been doing my own thing for a long time. So I run a email marketing company called Kit, um, founded here in Boise, but we’re global and we do email marketing for, uh, all kinds of things. Uh, whether it’s big content creators or authors like a James Clear or Andrew Huberman to celebrities like Tom Brady and Dua Lipa and, and, uh.

[00:04:12] Nathan: Then we run some other newsletters that are very special to me. Like from Boise.

[00:04:16] Marissa: Yeah. Okay. So what made you wanna start a local newsletter about your hometown?

[00:04:23] Nathan: Okay, so that’s, everyone probably thinks, uh, that Marissa started from Boise. Actually, I started it. I’m not trying to take credit for her work.

[00:04:32] Nathan: That is just how it actually came to be. But, uh, a friend of mine named Andrew Wilkinson lives in Victoria, uh, British Columbia, which is this beautiful city, and he, he ran this newsletter called, um, capital Daily. And it was all about the news and events, um, in Victoria. And I, I love the format of email newsletters and that, that content, um, and just having such a local feel to it.

[00:04:56] Nathan: And so I saw what he did there and I was like, oh, I love Boise at least as much as you love Victoria. Like, I should do something like that. And actually we were up in McCall over Christmas, um, when would that have been? 2020.

[00:05:09] Guest 3: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:09] Nathan: Um, and just talking with family and I had this idea and, and we started brainstorming it and it was like, okay, we should actually make this happen.

[00:05:18] Nathan: And so I like wrote up and I, uh, format for it, like made, um, a job listing and it then it was actually Jess Flynn. Mm-hmm. Uh, who I’ve known for a long time. And Marissa has as well, who connected the two of us.

[00:05:33] Guest 4: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:33] Nathan: And like, I don’t know, a few dozen people applied for the, for the job, uh, as you know, the editor to take this, this concept and build it into something and.

[00:05:42] Nathan: Marissa was the person who completely stood out and was like, this is a great idea you have, here’s what it should be. And kind of

[00:05:51] Marissa: took charge from that. Like, I’m doing this.

[00:05:54] Nathan: Yeah. What was your experience when, uh, when Jess sent you the, the job listing?

[00:05:59] Marissa: Yeah, so, um, like I said, I, when I was working at Red Sky is like when I started writing about from Boise, which was.

[00:06:06] Marissa: Like 10, 11 years ago now. And actually like how I really started writing about Boise was, um, we had a client at Red Sky called B vep Boise Valley Economic Partnership. And I loved working, I loved having them as a client because I didn’t even know what economic development was when I started working there.

[00:06:23] Marissa: I was like 21. And, um, but I, we started this blog that I was in charge of called Grow Ideas here. Does anybody remember this? Okay, thanks Russ. Russ was every, so no one really read it, but, but it was called your ideas here. And, um, I mean, looking back from where I am now, it’s like an early from Boise, like I would, um, interview companies who were either like relocating or bringing their.

[00:06:47] Marissa: Companies here, um, you know, business owners, and I would like write these profiles. Um, basically what I do now. And so I’ve been doing that and then I started freelancing. And so I was still writing about Boise, but like for, you know, IVR and visit Idaho. And, um, then I had started working on reviving this music site called Go List in Boise.

[00:07:07] Marissa: Does anybody remember Go List in Boise? Yes, of course you do. Chili. Okay. So I was like, um, I was working on reviving that and then Jess sent me. This tweet and she’s like, do you know this guy? And I’m like, no, I don’t. Um, but that is, she was like, you’re made, this is made for you. And, um, and it totally was.

[00:07:29] Marissa: And you know, at the time I was also working at True Fort Music Fest and like freelancing, it was so easy for me to see the path of from Boise, like, you know, more so than anything else I’ve ever done. Um. And yeah, I just kinda hit the ground running. I mean, it was kind of hard for me to figure out what, I think I wrote like four really long stories and then was like, what am I, what is from Boise?

[00:07:50] Marissa: You know? ’cause it didn’t have any sort of, uh, brand And I had been freelance writing for other people and um, so I just wrote it from me and sent it out.

[00:08:00] Nathan: Yeah. And we pretty much had the same format from the beginning. Uhhuh of the long form story on Tuesday and then the, the Thursday of here’s what’s happening, uh, what to plan for the weekend.

[00:08:08] Guest 3: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:09] Nathan: And it was just, we grew it with a combination of social media. Um, we ran some Facebook ads. Mm-hmm. That was actually a funny moment of the Facebook ad that we ran for a while, was me walking through Freak Alley and just saying like, Hey, that’s Nathan. I started a local newsletter and I, I did it in Freak Alley so that people would, would notice the location, be like, oh, this is actually.

[00:08:32] Nathan: A Boise thing.

[00:08:32] Guest 2: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:33] Nathan: And so I’d be playing soccer, like, uh, indoor soccer or volleyball or something. And people that I only knew from that would be like, I saw you on Facebook, you have a newsletter. But it was fun as it grew over time. ’cause there’d be, um, all kinds of things that were just incredible to promote in Boise.

[00:08:50] Nathan: Like another friend started a, um, a coffee truck that was at the, um. All the food truck’s there. And he was like, yeah, we’re just getting going. We don’t quite, like, it’s busy on the weekends, but we don’t have, uh, traffic in weekdays. And I was like, oh, lemme tell you about my side project. I have, at the time it was probably 10,000 people uhhuh on a local newsletter.

[00:09:11] Nathan: And like, we can promote that. Mm-hmm. And so Marissa would be like, oh, this is a great story and we, you know, feature that in. And so it was really fun to have, um, this ability, this platform to be able to bring and, you know, bring visitors and traffic and attention to. All these people are doing great things.

[00:09:25] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:26] Marissa: Yeah. And I think like the time that we started from Boise was interesting. It was 2021, so January of 2021 I think is when. Mm-hmm. And we, I sent the first one on March 30th, 2021. Um, so I’m coming up on five years. Yeah. That’s wild. Yeah. Five years. And you

[00:09:42] Nathan: tell everyone how many subscribers it has now.

[00:09:43] Marissa: It’s pretty, we have, uh, 24,072 when I look today.

[00:09:48] And

[00:09:48] Nathan: she knows every single one of them person I’ll.

[00:09:50] Marissa: Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Um. Something that really drew me to this because, you know, I was kind of working on this music blog, but the newsletter format, like there was not other, other local newsletters at the time.

[00:10:02] Marissa: Mm-hmm. Um, like there is now, you know, there’s a couple other ones in Boise and, and really across the country, like they’re really, it’s gaining a lot of momentum,

[00:10:09] Nathan: but I knew of one local newsletter. I was gonna say nationwide, but it’s actually in Canada.

[00:10:14] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:10:14] Nathan: So like at the time we started, there’s just the one, and now there’s probably hundreds

[00:10:17] Marissa: Oh yeah.

[00:10:18] Nathan: Across the country. But, but it was a very new thing.

[00:10:20] Marissa: Yeah. Yeah. And so that was very exciting to me ’cause I like doing things that mm-hmm. Whether people haven’t done or, you know, just like taking something in, uh, something that’s like new and exciting. Um, but it just immediately clicked for me to like, what a cool format that I can just, I mean, I love writing emails in general and letters, but, um.

[00:10:39] Marissa: Uh, yeah, it was just like such a cool format to just like get to actually talk to, you know, if you get from Boise, it’s like, it’s actually from me. And it just felt like such a natural way to write the newsletter because it is for me and I’m writing to you. Um, so yeah, that was just like I’ve, I still am excited about that.

[00:10:58] Marissa: Like, I still just love that format.

[00:11:00] Nathan: Well, and I think the, the cool thing about newsletters. It’s something that I’ve spent a lot of time in. But is you, you know, you had your blog, but it, it was how do you actually push the content Yeah. Out to people.

[00:11:10] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:11] Nathan: And so with the newsletter, you’re able to say, okay, here it will show up in everyone’s inbox, and, and you don’t have to go pull people into you, you can

[00:11:18] Marissa: mm-hmm.

[00:11:18] Nathan: Um, push out to them. So that was really good. One of my favorite things that you brought to the format though. Is the just trust me.

[00:11:25] Marissa: Oh. Mm-hmm.

[00:11:26] Nathan: And

[00:11:27] Marissa: it’s always the most click thing.

[00:11:29] Nathan: And, and so there’s also like, you brought this style and personality to everything. Like, it feels like, um, you know, the, with love from Boise, right?

[00:11:37] Nathan: Mm-hmm. It’s got this, um, style and so, so many people. You know, love following you. Mm-hmm. You love your voice and it’s been really fun.

[00:11:43] Marissa: Yep. I actually borrow, I borrowed or like stole that from another newsletter. Ann Helen Peterson, she writes about, um, culture. She lives in Montana and I’ve been following her newsletter for, for years.

[00:11:55] Marissa: She was kind of like, she was actually one of the first like journalists who got laid off and started a newsletter. Um, and she has a distrust me that’s. It’s kind of like, it’s a lot of like other essays or something, but mine’s just all over the board. You never know what it is.

[00:12:10] Nathan: What’s one of your favorite things that you’ve put behind the Just trust me link.

[00:12:13] Marissa: Oh my gosh. I mean, there’s so many, but usually in October, I love Halloween, so I try to like make the newsletter spooky. Um, and so I usually try to find some like music videos that are not actual Halloween songs, but like the. Music video checks out and those are always kinda weird ’cause they’re music videos.

[00:12:38] Nathan: I think something that stands out to me about it is the connection with the audience. Mm-hmm. And you know, if we think about total view count or the number of subscribers, like on one hand it’s a lot of people, like there’s 24,000 people. In this city. Actually, one thing that surprised me is how many people don’t live in Boise who read the newsletter on a very regular basis.

[00:13:00] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:00] Nathan: Like what are some of the examples you hear from

[00:13:02] Marissa: that? I mean, I hear it all the time. It’s, it’s, I don’t know exactly what it is now, ’cause it’s been a while since I asked that on a survey. But I mean, for a while it was like 20% and it was either people who were thinking about moving here and were just kind of like researching, which I’ve talked to many people now who.

[00:13:19] Marissa: Um, say, you know, I, like I was thinking about moving here and followed your blog and that’s, or your newsletter and that’s why I moved. Like, you, you are one of the reasons, um, which is awesome. And then it’s people who used to live here and just wanna, you know, keep in touch or it’s people like, you know, my parents who just wanna know like, what’s, what’s going on in Boise and they don’t live here.

[00:13:41] Marissa: Um, but it’s also, I, I do have a lot of parents of college students, so like they’re just wanting to. To know what’s going on in the city that their kid lives in, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, it’s always been really cool. And, and even, I mean, obviously most of the people are in the Treasure Valley, but like McCall, sun Valley, I mean, people who are going to come here on a regular basis, they totally follow it and they save, save things to come and, uh, you know, visit when they, when they come down.

[00:14:08] Nathan: Yeah. That’s really fun. But the idea of the level of connection that you’ve built with all of these different. Um, subscribers, like something that I think about a lot is we, in everything we do online, we hear a lot about view counts, right? There’s a thousand people or 10,000 people or all of that, and it often doesn’t mean that much of a connection.

[00:14:28] Nathan: It’s just passive views. And so something that. I’ve really been impressed with, as I’ve watched from Boise. ’cause I, I have this weird relationship of like, started the thing, helped fund it, got everything going, and then really just left you to do your

[00:14:42] Marissa: own thing. I’m always like, yeah, he started, but he doesn’t do anything.

[00:14:46] Marissa: He like answers my questions every once in a while.

[00:14:49] Nathan: Um, I try to be useful, but I don’t try hard. But is this idea of building an audience versus a crowd. And so I think a lot of times on online we have these people we follow, but you don’t really care about them or someone, you know, a content creator has a ton of people, a ton of views, but there’s not really a relationship there.

[00:15:10] Nathan: And so what stood out to me, like I think of that as a crowd. It’s just a bunch of people. They don’t really, they may be passively interacting, whereas what you have is like a real audience where. People engage, they show up to events, they mm-hmm. Uh, they reply to all of the emails. Mm-hmm. All of this, the stuff.

[00:15:27] Nathan: What have been some of your examples of like, it seemed like an audience and not just a crowd of

[00:15:31] Marissa: people? Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing, and you know, something that I think about is like, what does it mean to have influence and like, what does that look like? And for me, I mean, people. Not only are they going and doing the things, but then they’ll report back about like how it was and, and what, you know, what it was like.

[00:15:48] Marissa: And hey, next time you talk about this, like you should, I mean, a great example of this is over, um, the holidays. I, you know, I talked about a bunch of different holiday markets. It was in the Plan Ahead newsletter and I talked about the Bruno Cowboy Christmas, which is amazing event. I don’t know if anybody’s been there, but it’s so good.

[00:16:04] Marissa: Um, this market takes. Over all of Bruno, which is, you know, south of Boise. And this guy wrote back and he said, um, you know, we went, it was amazing. If anything, I would’ve gotten there earlier. You should tell everyone to get there earlier. Also, just so you know, if you are like me and you’re bringing your family along, they have puppies for sale and it will be very hard to tell your children that they cannot have a puppy from this Christmas market.

[00:16:30] Marissa: I mean, stuff like that, it’s just like. That’s so cool that, you know, and then of course I write back. And so it’s, it’s this conversation. It’s not just like something that somebody saw, you know, and maybe sent to their friend on Instagram. Like, yes, that’s also great, but they went and they did it with their family and he knows that I am a real person and like reported back with real information.

[00:16:51] Marissa: Um, so yeah, I just, you know, I think that’s. I have so many people that I feel, you know, when we meet in person, they’re like, wait, yeah, I feel like I know you. I’m like, me too, because we’ve been emailing. Um, so yeah, I, I I think it’s so cool to have that connection with

[00:17:07] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:17:07] Marissa: With my readers. Like I, it’s really, it’s so special

[00:17:11] Nathan: you hear this term thrown around of influencer and I think a lot of people who are called an influencer don’t actually have influence.

[00:17:19] Nathan: And so what does it mean to have influence? Like if you say, Hey, I would like a hundred people. On a random weeknight to all get dinner together. They go, yeah, okay. They do it.

[00:17:29] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:17:29] Nathan: Right.

[00:17:30] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:17:30] Nathan: It’s like, talk about the, the dinner parties

[00:17:32] Marissa: that you

[00:17:32] Nathan: now throw.

[00:17:32] Marissa: Yeah. Um, yeah, so we recently started from Boise Dinner Club.

[00:17:36] Marissa: We did the first one in January and had so, um. I mean, backing up a little bit is that I, you know, anytime I’m like, I think of everything kind of as an experiment. So like every time I’m gonna try something, I, you know, put it out there and say, Hey, here’s an idea. What do you think about this? And a great feature that Kit has is Pulse.

[00:17:56] Marissa: So it’s really easy for me to say, Hey, here’s my idea. Like, you know, yes or no? Um, what do you think? And, but you can actually put up to five options. That’s really a great feature. Um, but, so anyways, I, um. Said, Hey, I’m thinking about this dinner club. You know, this is how it would be. You fill out a, a questionnaire kind of about, you know, who you’re hoping to meet.

[00:18:18] Marissa: Like, you know, what kind of person are you at dinner? Are you more of an introvert? Are you an extrovert? Um, ’cause you can’t have all the introverts together, you know? Um, that’s

[00:18:27] Guest 4: never gonna work.

[00:18:27] Marissa: Yeah. There’s gonna be awkward. Um, but they, uh, you know, and then you would. You’ll go and get dinner, but it’s at a, you won’t find out the place until the day of, um, you know, would you go?

[00:18:40] Marissa: And I told, uh, Leslie, who, who works with me, um, she’s the only other person up from Boise. Um, uh, I said, if we’re gonna a hundred people, let’s try it. And we had 656 people say yes. And I was like, oh boy, I guess we’re definitely doing this. And then the first one. Had, um, 96 people. The second one had 105 and this one just sold out at 120.

[00:19:06] Marissa: Um, and I think we’re gonna start doing ’em twice a month. And it’s so cool. Like people really, really are making these genuine connections at the, at the February dinner, so our third dinner’s on Friday. Um, but at the February dinner I had a, a group. That reconnected at the after party. They had all met at the first dinner in January and they’re like, yeah, we’ve already been hanging out.

[00:19:27] Marissa: We just had coffee on Tuesday. And then we were all kind of bummed that we like weren’t seated together again. Um, but they knew it was, it’s the point of the event. But yeah.

[00:19:35] Nathan: So just if anyone didn’t follow the format of what it is, is everyone’s like groups of six or eight people.

[00:19:42] Marissa: Yeah. Six. And we are gonna experiment with eight.

[00:19:44] Marissa: But um, yeah, six people to table

[00:19:46] Nathan: and restaurants. All around. Mm-hmm. Did you do 10, 10 to 15? How many different

[00:19:50] Marissa: restaurants? We have, uh, we have 12 different rest. 19 tables at 12 different restaurants for Friday.

[00:19:57] Nathan: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And so you’re just going out with a bunch of strangers. Mm-hmm. The thing that you have in common is that you love voice.

[00:20:04] Nathan: And you love this weird little newsletter about Boise and you’re up for trying something new,

[00:20:10] Marissa: Uhhuh.

[00:20:10] Nathan: And then afterwards there’s an after party where everyone can gather up and

[00:20:14] Marissa: mm-hmm.

[00:20:15] Nathan: Connect and, and all of that.

[00:20:16] Marissa: Yeah. Okay. Another story though about people just having this wild amount of trust in me is, um, there, so in October I wanted to try.

[00:20:27] Marissa: So some feedback that I’ve always gotten is like, Hey, we would love some deals with local businesses, you know, like discounts. And so I, um, decided I was gonna make a Boise discount card and it’s, it’s a punch card with 12 different local businesses on it, and you get 10% off at each local business. And I was, had been thinking about it and I was like, I’m just gonna do it.

[00:20:47] Marissa: And so I put it up for sale and emailed the 12 businesses at the same time. And so I was, I was just said, you know, Hey, here’s this. This is what it is and I’ll let you know what, I’ll let you know who’s involved. And like 36 people bought one without know, like immediately without knowing even where they were gonna get a discount.

[00:21:11] Marissa: And they just, um, yeah. And they were just happy to. To support me and just, I don’t know, I guess it was a surprise whenever they, they did figure out what they bought.

[00:21:23] Nathan: Hey, I hope you’re enjoying this episode and I’m gonna just quickly jump in to tell you about Craft and Commerce. It’s the annual conference that we host at Kit for creators who are serious about building a real business.

[00:21:33] Nathan: We host it every June here in Boise, Idaho. As so much of our work shifts to ai, the thing you can’t replicate is being in the room with other creators. Get what you’re building. We have incredible speakers and workshops, but honestly, the real value is the people you’ll meet and the relationships you’ll build.

[00:21:51] Nathan: We sold out last year, and this year is gonna sell out really soon. So you wanna grab your ticket, go to kit.com/conference. There’s a couple different directions we could go from here. One is around what’s go to monetization for a second.

[00:22:04] Guest 4: Okay. Yeah.

[00:22:04] Nathan: Like how this thing makes money. Mm-hmm. Because you’ve talked about a few of these experiments.

[00:22:10] Nathan: Mm-hmm. And just. Trying things, throwing out there. What are a few of the different things that you’ve thrown out there? There are the discount cards. What else have we tried?

[00:22:18] Marissa: Yeah, discount cards, dinner club. Um, I’ve sold merch t-shirts. If you have a from voice T-shirt, that’s like a limited edition. Um, stickers.

[00:22:27] Marissa: And I also had a meetup group called BFFs, um, that started in 2023 and it was either $9 a month or $99 a year. And I planned different monthly meetups, like we played Boise trivia. One time I wrote all the questions. It’s really fun and um. We like just went, we went to the spirit of Boise Balloon Festival together.

[00:22:48] Marissa: We went to a concert, we went to, um, barbarian and just like got beers and hung out on the patio. It was just this very informal, um, meetup group and it’s, it, it just was hard for me to plan the events. Like it was a, um, it was a hard, at the time I was pretty much doing everything. It was just me. Um, and so it was just, it was just hard for me to spread my time.

[00:23:11] Marissa: Um, but that kind of has become dinner club. And so it’s, it, it was an experiment that then, you know, became, the next iteration is, is dinner club.

[00:23:21] Nathan: Well, and the thing that stood out to me is from, as we would talk about these ideas and you’d run some things by me and, and all of that, and. I would’ve expected that, hey, let’s host an event of trivia and people can be part of this membership and it’d be a bigger group thing that that would work better than go have dinner with five other strangers.

[00:23:41] Nathan: Mm-hmm. But it turns out the first one worked. Mm-hmm. And people loved it, but it ran into some of the issues you talked about. But the dinner club is like far and away the hit. Yeah. Like month after month. Mm-hmm. Selling out and, and so this idea of experimentation, like that’s the thing that we’ve always done, is just like, mm-hmm.

[00:23:58] Nathan: Thankfully a newsletter doesn’t really cost much of anything to start. And, you know, we’re like handing out different things or different ideas, uhhuh from social or any of that to, um, to get people to sign up for it. Mm-hmm. But then like the barrier entry is really low and so we can just experiment with things and try things and

[00:24:15] Marissa: yeah.

[00:24:16] Nathan: See what sticks.

[00:24:17] Marissa: Yeah. There’s this chapter in, uh, the Creative Act by Rick Rubin, where he talks about how all art is a work in progress and regardless of the outcome. You’ll gain valuable information along the way. And so, and I, I think what he says is we’re not, we’re not playing to win. We’re playing to play.

[00:24:35] Marissa: And ultimately playing is fun. And I’ve always, I read that book like very early on in this and um, I really took that to heart. And that’s how I feel about, honestly, all of it. Like even from the get go, it’s just, it’s all an experiment and I really am just playing to play. Yeah. Like it’s. There’s no winning in it, there’s no like, real level of success other than, you know, am I providing real value and doing cool, fun new stuff, and like, am I enjoying my, my day to day doing this?

[00:25:06] Marissa: Mm-hmm. Um,

[00:25:07] Nathan: yeah. It comes through and everything you’re doing right? Mm-hmm. I think if you were, if you had like this tight grip on it and you’re like, oh, it has to be this certain way or it has to work, or

[00:25:15] Marissa: mm-hmm.

[00:25:16] Nathan: All of that, that would come through in the content that would come through in the community.

[00:25:18] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:19] Nathan: And so this. This fun, you know, outpouring of love to the community and the writing and everything else.

[00:25:25] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:26] Nathan: Is why people subscribe to it. And I think something that’s come that we’ve both learned in this journey is this idea of you can just do things right. There’s no. Credibility or you know, no one looked at both of us and was like, well, who are you to, you know, we don’t work for the city.

[00:25:44] Nathan: We don’t, yeah. We just love the city that we live in. Mm-hmm. And wanted to start something. And I think that’s something that, like an ethos that I see all throughout Boise.

[00:25:52] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:53] Nathan: And it’s represented in the businesses that you’re like, Hey, will you be a part of this thing? And they’re like, yeah. Mm-hmm.

[00:25:58] Nathan: Yeah. Absolutely. And everybody just kind of supports that and rolls with it.

[00:26:01] Marissa: Yeah. I feel like that’s, that’s such a huge part of what I. And have noticed about Boise, you know, ever since I really started writing about it, like 10, 11 years ago, it’s like people just have an idea and they’re like, Hey, I’m gonna do this.

[00:26:16] Marissa: And they tell people and they’re like, cool, I’ll support you. And I’ll come, you know, I’ll, I mean, Treeport ISS a great example, like mm-hmm. Eric was just like, Hey, I’m gonna start a music festival. And people were like, okay, how can I help? You know, and like, cool. You can use this parking lot or, you know, um, and look at what it’s grown into.

[00:26:35] Marissa: It’s this like amazing community event. Huge economic driver, like a huge opportunity for artists at all stages in their career. Mm-hmm. I mean, and I’ve seen that so many times in Boise, like it’s. Of course you can just do things anywhere, but there’s something in Boise like this community, and it’s regardless of how long people have lived here in this community, people just rally around like cool new ideas and it’s so special.

[00:27:03] Marissa: And I think it’s, it’s what draws people to Boise. Whether they know that’s what’s happening or not. Like I really do think that that’s a huge part of it. It’s, it’s just like very special.

[00:27:14] Nathan: Yeah. You’ve gotten to profile a lot of businesses. Over the years. That’s something that I always like in the original idea for it, that I wanted to see.

[00:27:22] Nathan: Mm-hmm. A lot of is like, I wanna know the stories behind all of these businesses. Mm-hmm. And so you went and did that, and now I’m like, great. Now I can just on a Tuesday morning, I can just sit and read this.

[00:27:30] Marissa: You’re like, Hey, what, what, what is this? Will you go find out?

[00:27:33] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:27:33] Marissa: Yes. Here is a 2000 word article.

[00:27:36] Nathan: Thank you. Um, but. If you think about that idea of you can just do things. Mm-hmm. Tree fort’s a great example. Who are a few other people or, or businesses or projects in Boise that really embody that.

[00:27:46] Marissa: Yeah. Um, Idaho Film Society is a great one. Um, like you have this old bus station that was a popup tree fort venue, and then Aiden’s like, I’m gonna make this into a really awesome theater and show, you know, these.

[00:28:00] Marissa: Films that maybe, you know, maybe you don’t know, like every night of the week it’s like, so, and be this kind of like incubator for the film industry here. Um, another one is, uh, Shea with Cat’s Eye Creative Reuse, um, on, uh, Broadway. Mm-hmm. And it’s like a, it’s, it’s all, it’s all craft. And art supplies.

[00:28:25] Marissa: That’s like secondhand. It’s like a craft thrift store. It’s awesome. I don’t know if you haven’t been in there. It’s so cool. And, uh, you know, she like hosts these, that’s such a crazy idea. Like, I’m gonna gather a bunch of used craft stuff and it’s this awesome, cool store. Um, oh my gosh, there’s like so many.

[00:28:45] Marissa: Every story I feel like is that it’s, it’s um, catalyst Arts collaborative. That was a recent story is another one. Um. Yeah, I, and like so many of the nonprofits too, that’s just like, you see a need in your community and then you just make the thing to help it. It’s, it’s amazing.

[00:29:03] Nathan: Yeah. I love that. Okay.

[00:29:05] Nathan: Another thing is that people often look at from Boise or a local newsletter and they really latch onto this, the news aspect of newsletter, and so they’re like, oh, so you’re telling us what’s happening, what city Council is doing now? Yeah. What, what’s being built? Or any of those things.

[00:29:21] Marissa: Uh,

[00:29:22] Nathan: and they’re like, oh, you’re the new wave of media.

[00:29:25] Marissa: Mm.

[00:29:25] Nathan: Right. So maybe first let’s talk about the, the news side. Yeah. Because we’re deliberately not doing that.

[00:29:29] Marissa: Yeah. I don’t talk about the news. Um, mostly because everybody else has that covered and it doesn’t really interest me in the way that I want to, like, regurgitate it every week. I, I really saw a need for.

[00:29:42] Marissa: Okay, so also this was in 2021, right? So it was like all bad news the, the year before, before that’s

[00:29:49] Nathan: gonna bring some

[00:29:49] Marissa: joy

[00:29:50] Nathan: to the world. I was, and I’d just be like, yep, things aren’t great.

[00:29:52] Marissa: Exactly. Yes. I was like, people need to know that there is still fun to be had. And um, that was really huge part it. And um, but you know, it’s.

[00:30:03] Marissa: I really do feel like people, other outlets have that covered and I don’t also need to put that out there. Like you can find it. And I really saw a, a need for a really clean live music calendar that has the genres. So you know what you can go find or explore. Um, you know, this, we have more comedy shows it feels like than ever before.

[00:30:28] Marissa: A place to find all of that. And then, you know, where’s like the. The things to do is really what I wanted to, you know, kind of compile and curate every week. Um, so yeah, part of it’s just because, like that’s not what gets me as excited as talking about fun things to do. Um. Yeah. And also I just feel like other people have it covered, and I’m not like a trained journalist, so it scares me a little bit to talk about the real news.

[00:30:55] Nathan: We’ll leave that to Boise Dev Yeah. And all the other great, uh, publications that do that.

[00:31:00] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:31:00] Nathan: What about like the shift happening in media?

[00:31:02] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:02] Nathan: I, I feel like that’s something that people ask you often. Mm-hmm. And you’re like, oh, you’re part of the new wave of media.

[00:31:08] Marissa: It’s kind of funny for me to feel like I’m part of that, but I suppose I am.

[00:31:13] Marissa: Um, and. I mean, I honestly think it’s kind of sad that we don’t like, like I like reading the newspaper. I like having like a physical thing. But I think that now, nowadays, a reason why newsletters are popular is because it is coming from a person. Mm-hmm. Um, and. I don’t even wanna get into like the media distrust.

[00:31:35] Marissa: I think it’s just more of a connection. Like you are, like someone is writing to you. Even with Boise Dov, who does cover the news. Like it comes from one of their journalists who are fabulous, by the way, who’s best, best journalists. Um, and like, you know, if you, if you ask them a question, they’ll answer it in a news story.

[00:31:52] Marissa: Like it’s, it really is coming from a real person who lives here. Um, and. It’s, it’s almost like what columnists were in the newspaper, right? Like you, like I used to have these like columns that I loved reading. Um, and I think that’s why, you know, Substack is, has become like such a place for journalists who leave traditional media to go because we really just want connection with, with humans.

[00:32:18] Marissa: And that, I mean, that’s like never changed, right? I mean, storytelling amongst humans has like always been part of. Who we are and I don’t think that will ever go away. It’s just shifting the delivery format.

[00:32:31] Nathan: Yeah. I think that’s a cool thing of having all these individual writers can now build their own email list.

[00:32:36] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Have their own platform and, you know, have their regular readers on, on a consistent basis. Mm-hmm. And get pretty incredible reach. Yeah. Right. People who have, whether it’s 10,000 or 24,000 subscribers, or in some cases these newsletters are hundreds of thousands or you know, there, there’s newsletters on a kit that are.

[00:32:53] Nathan: You know, a few million subscribers just written by one person who’s like, Hey, here’s what I’m thinking about this week. Mm-hmm. Here’s what I found interesting. And it goes out to millions of people.

[00:33:01] Marissa: Mm-hmm. Yeah. On kit, on Substack too. I mean, there’s some journalists on Substack that are like, they have a huge reach and people pay them.

[00:33:09] Marissa: Mm-hmm. I mean, it’s, it’s really a cool, it’s really a cool shift. Um. I am excited to be part of it even though this, the people we’re talking about are like legit journalists. Um, I’m here to tell you about fun things to do and voice history. Um, but I do think it’s, it’s, it’s an exciting shift to, to watch And, um, there’s some just amazing, amazing writers out there and it’s like, I love reading, I love reading people’s essays and newsletters and um, yeah, it’s a really cool way to consume media.

[00:33:41] Marissa: Like from somebody.

[00:33:43] Nathan: Yep. The point of view is, is good. Something that’s been interesting for me as maybe if we go back to the, like the arc of from Boise, there’s a lot of times where we felt like it was going really well. There are times where I’m like, oh, I’m totally off doing other things. Like, I’m sorry, Marissa, you were a hundred percent on your own

[00:34:01] Guest 6: Uhhuh.

[00:34:01] Nathan: Um, if you need some money to help run some more Facebook ads for growth, like I can help you with that, but I have no time to help.

[00:34:06] Guest 6: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:07] Nathan: Um, but it’s been really cool from my seat to watch you. Like step up and learn this whole creator world. Mm-hmm. And, um, like how to turn a random set of attention from, you know, a thousand or 10,000 people into a full business.

[00:34:24] Guest 4: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:24] Nathan: You crossed six figures in revenue last year. Mm-hmm. Which is a huge milestone. So it turns out you can make a hundred thousand dollars a year more off of, off of a local newsletter.

[00:34:33] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:34] Nathan: Um, but what were some of the, the points along the way where you were figuring out like, oh, this is how. This part of it works.

[00:34:41] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Or a few of the unlocks.

[00:34:42] Marissa: Well, so in 2022, so from 20, all of 2021, basically you were really handling the, the subscriber growth. Mm-hmm. And, um, I was doing, I was mostly just focused on the content. Yeah. Like, I wasn’t even really focusing or even thinking about, um, monetizing it because I had another job.

[00:35:02] Marissa: I worked at Tree Fort and I was just doing fun freelance things when it would pop up. Um, which now I. I think it was kind of like a safety net that held me back from it progressing sooner, um, because it was my part-time job until 2024. So 2025 was the first year I was really all in on it, and it was the first year across six figures.

[00:35:27] Marissa: Mm-hmm. I mean, that really speaks for itself. I also had a new baby, so, um, women are amazing. Um, but, but, um, but really, um. I in 2022 when you, you kind of like handed the keys over, if you will, like, Hey, I’m, you got this now. And I was like, do I, we remember we were sitting on the patio at, uh, wild Root and I was like, I don’t know.

[00:35:51] Marissa: Like, I don’t even know what you’ve been doing. I feel like I’ve just been writing over here. Um, and so yeah, I had to figure out, you know, how do I keep the subscribers growing also, like, how are we monetizing this because I think I do want this to be the only thing I’m doing eventually. Mm-hmm. Um. And it has had a lot of ups and downs.

[00:36:09] Marissa: I mean, just the split of attention for me, I think like I would have all these story ideas and I would, you know, be weeks ahead and then I’m like, oh my gosh, I don’t have any sponsors. Like, we have no money coming in. And then I would get all these sponsors and then I’m like, oh my God, what am I writing about today?

[00:36:25] Marissa: You know? And it was just this, this up and down and, um. And what really changed, changed a lot for me was relying on some freelance writers, which is really fun for me to work with other writers too. Um, I love doing that and so I’m not having to write every single story. Um, outsourcing the sales and the social media.

[00:36:47] Marissa: Mm-hmm. Like just getting some things off my plate so that I can focus on, um. What I want to learn and what I’m best at, and I’m best at writing and I want to learn other pieces of the business. So, um, it’s been really fun to, you know, try to figure out how to make money in a way that is still bringing value to our readers and our community.

[00:37:07] Marissa: Um, ’cause that’s important to me. And, um, just get to work with like, a lot of different businesses and organizations and our partnerships and to figure out ways to reach new people, you know, and, um. It’s kind of fun because I was just recently on a podcast and he asked me, you know, what’s the population?

[00:37:26] Marissa: And so like, what’s the ceiling? And with the fact that people are just, it seems like infinitely interested in Boise, even if they’re not, if they don’t live here and they’re not gonna move here or moving here, um, I don’t feel like I have a ceiling on how many people can potentially read from Boise, which is really cool and kind of scary when you think about talking to that many people.

[00:37:46] Marissa: But, um. Yeah. I mean, figuring out the business, the writing part has always been easy for me. Mm-hmm. The business side has been a big learning curve.

[00:37:56] Nathan: It’s been fun for me to see you go from writer to then learning all these other skills like learning, social learning, uh, you know, selling sponsorships, like how to write, uh, how to grow a newsletter, all of these other things, and then getting team members in place for it.

[00:38:12] Nathan: Mm-hmm. See you now like leading the whole business. Mm-hmm. And building the brand and everything else.

[00:38:18] Marissa: It’s been, mm-hmm.

[00:38:19] Nathan: It’s been a great journey. Yeah.

[00:38:21] Marissa: Um, it, I feel like there was really a turning point in, um, 2023 when I felt like, ’cause the brand that we originally started with is something that you just, like, you made it like very quickly.

[00:38:34] Marissa: It seemed like you just were like, yes, here’s the logo. And that was pretty much all we had.

[00:38:38] Nathan: 20 minutes in Photoshop.

[00:38:39] Marissa: Yeah, exactly. And, um. Up until December of this last year, we only had a landing page. Like I didn’t have a legit website. It was just like a landing page. Here’s just where you can subscribe.

[00:38:51] Marissa: And, um, I decided I like that logo. Just didn’t really feel like true to what I felt like from Boise was and could be. And, um, so went through a, I mean, I, I don’t know if it was a rebrand. I felt like it was the first brand, um, that Isabelle did. And, um. That has just, I felt like it really helped us level up, like it felt so much more official.

[00:39:15] Marissa: Um, and then this, this last year we worked with Ampersand Studios to do a website and I really, it, it was like the next level up, like just seeing that brand come to life and just, you know, um, be across all our things. Like, it’s, it’s been really fun to just, it feels, uh, like it’s growing up.

[00:39:38] Nathan: Yes, it is. Um, well, I want to.

[00:39:40] Nathan: Open it up to questions. Is there anything that you all wanna know about from Boise or the newsletter or building businesses or any of that? Yeah.

[00:39:49] Guest 5: Do you, do people pitch you that they want you to cover them? Or how do you determine what you’re gonna cover?

[00:39:54] Marissa: Um, yeah. It’s a mix of things. Yes. People send me story ideas and I love that.

[00:39:59] Marissa: Um, which is which? It’s really fun to hear from readers. Um, people pitch me stories like they’re from the organization or even just, Hey, did you know about this thing? Um, and I love those. Some of it’s also things that I wanna know more about. Um, and the best ones are where I am biking around or walking around and saying.

[00:40:21] Marissa: Hmm, what’s that? Or for example, there, there’s the red bridge. Um, you know, if you’re coming down off of garden on, on the Greenbelt, there’s a bridge that goes over the river, kinda in between Boise and Garden City. And in 2023, I was writing that and I looked up and it said 1903. And I’m like, wait, what?

[00:40:41] Marissa: This bridge is like what? And um. Yeah. Or it says 1923 ’cause it was a hundred years old. And so yeah, then I started doing this digging and it’s like, the bridge doesn’t even have an official name. It’s a hundred years old. And so, yeah, did a deep dive on that. So part of it’s just like being curious about what’s going on.

[00:41:01] Marissa: Um, some of it’s also things I think people need to know, like, you know, event guides. And then the histories are just kind of fun things that I wonder about.

[00:41:11] Nathan: Some of my favorites are the, uh, or one of my favorites is the history of the Boise Greenbelt. Mm. Like that was one that, you know, you learn so much about it and how it developed over the years and who championed it and made it all come to life.

[00:41:22] Nathan: Mm-hmm. You could see the, the old videos of the helicopter shot of like, okay, this is before the green belt. And, and the, the idea of what it could be.

[00:41:31] Marissa: Mm-hmm. And that one came from a reader actually. Um. Somebody wrote me and said, Hey, we recently moved here, but I would love for you to do a history of the Boise River because, and, and the green belt.

[00:41:42] Marissa: Because when we first moved here, I learned that it used to be, you know, filled with trash. Like it used to be a trash river. And um, and yeah, so that one was really fun. I mean, people just throw things out and I love that. So if you ever have a story idea, let me know. I love that. Yeah,

[00:41:59] Guest 3: so I just want clarity.

[00:42:01] Guest 3: Is the money that you make from ads, is it from sponsorship? How do you actually, what is your money actually made from?

[00:42:07] Marissa: Um, it’s mostly sponsorship, sponsorships, which are ads in the newsletter or sponsored content on social media. That’s where the majority comes from. Um, and then I also make a little bit off of dinner club and BFFs was another example.

[00:42:22] Marissa: And then, you know, some of the products that I’ve sold, like the discount cards in merch. Um, and then also we have readers that donate to us every month, which is really cool. Um, it’s like 300 bucks a month to, in total, um, a handful of subscribers just. Either, we’ll, we’ll give a, um, kind of like a tip or they are donating on a monthly basis, which is like so amazing.

[00:42:46] Guest 8: But you had mentioned how there’s like a lot of newsletters that have come and gone. I’ve lived in Boise for a long time and, and like the event list and what’s going on. So, um, like why do you think yours has so much longevity? Is it the person that, you know, you talked about that feels real and real connected and so it’s, there isn’t that desperation.

[00:43:05] Guest 8: Please sign up for my newsletter. Is that what you think is keeping people hooked or,

[00:43:10] Marissa: it’s a really good question. Part of it’s definitely because I’m very stubborn and I, I love what I’m doing and so I don’t really wanna do anything else, and I’m going to figure out how to make it work no matter what.

[00:43:21] Marissa: Um, and I think the other, the other piece of it is I just don’t. See a cap on the amount of things I have to write about. Like there’s, there’s so many things to write about here, um, and it just is like continuously growing. Um, so yeah, I think it’s, it’s those two things that I am just ever curious about.

[00:43:46] Marissa: Uh, what’s going on here, what has already happened here, and, um, sharing it with people and. I just don’t wanna give up on it ever either. Yeah.

[00:43:56] Nathan: I really appreciate watching the stubbornness that you’ve had. Like there’s, it’s such a, it’s probably the most important entrepreneurial trait. It is just like a refusal to give up

[00:44:05] Guest 6: Uhhuh.

[00:44:05] Nathan: Um, ’cause we had a conversation actually, like, probably because a hundred feet that way on the patio where it was like, Ooh, I don’t know that this is gonna work. Yeah. And like, how to push through that period of time when

[00:44:16] Guest 6: mm-hmm.

[00:44:16] Nathan: Uh, when it was rough. Two things that come to mind for me. One is. I was thinking about how do we get to a certain volume where it has escape velocity?

[00:44:26] Marissa: Mm.

[00:44:27] Nathan: And so that was the first, probably two years, is where I was trying to think, okay, how can we get enough subscribers that you can charge enough for a sponsorship? Mm-hmm. That it makes sense for everybody. Mm-hmm. And so. You know, if you’re going off selling $200 or $500 sponsorships because there’s only 500 or 2000 readers, this newsletter, like it’s never going to get traction.

[00:44:50] Nathan: And so is it investing enough time and effort to where we could get to probably eight to 10,000 subscribers? Was that that point where it was like, okay, there’s at least enough that a sponsorship makes sense. Um, so we did all kinds of things. Mm-hmm. Um, and we talked about that a little, a little bit more.

[00:45:05] Nathan: Um, so the escape velocity matters. And then the other one is, I think of a Seth Godin quote of profit is just permission to do it again tomorrow. And a lot of people, whether they’re running a nonprofit or they’re saying, oh, it’s just a passion project, and so it doesn’t need to make money, and it’s really hard to do things again tomorrow and the next day.

[00:45:26] Nathan: Mm-hmm. If it doesn’t make money and you’re worried about those things. Mm-hmm. And so that’s why. You’ve always had this green of like, okay, but this is still how I make money.

[00:45:33] Guest 4: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:34] Nathan: So we’re gonna make money.

[00:45:35] Guest 4: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:35] Nathan: And so I think of how much you love the project in Boise and all of this. And because you love it though, at least from my perception, because you love it, it’s so important to make money from it.

[00:45:46] Nathan: Mm-hmm. So that you have the permission to do it again. Mm-hmm. And again, um, and that’s how it has staying power. Mm-hmm. And so I think a lot of the projects that have come before this ne either never got escape velocity or never figured out monetization, and then it. Is never gonna, uh, continue.

[00:46:01] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:02] Marissa: And I think when you’re doing something for the sake of creativity, um, which is probably, you know, how a lot of those projects started, it’s really hard to figure out the monetization. Like, you have to wear this business hat that’s like not as creative necessarily. Um, and yeah, it, that has definitely been the, the biggest learning curve for me for sure, is the, is monetizing it in a way that feels, um.

[00:46:29] Marissa: You know, it feels good and makes sense for everybody involved, like you said.

[00:46:33] Nathan: Yep. I like it. All right. Who else has a question? Yeah, Dennis.

[00:46:37] Guest 2: I was just going to say that one of the things that I learned from you, Nathan, is back when you wrote your book Authority and you had about 300 subscribers at that time and how much money you made off of writing your books, that people who are just getting started with writing newsletters don’t realize that you don’t need to have.

[00:46:58] Guest 2: A huge following all the time to make some decent income outta it.

[00:47:02] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:03] Nathan: Yeah. I think that’s something that we’ve figured out, and part of the reason that why we both love newsletters is if you get, you know, a small group of people who really care about this subject, then you know you can make meaningful income.

[00:47:15] Nathan: And it’s not just like, oh, we had to get hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube to be able to pay rent. It’s like, no, you can actually have thousands or tens of thousands of people paying attention and turn it into a full-time living.

[00:47:26] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:27] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:47:28] Guest 6: On Thursday is when you put together all the concerts and mm-hmm.

[00:47:32] Guest 6: Places to do and all those, how do you get all those consistently to, um, yeah. So

[00:47:39] Nathan: the question is about the Thursday email and all of the information. How do you compile that and curate everything? Mm-hmm. And go from there. Mm-hmm.

[00:47:46] Marissa: Well, honestly, for way too long, it just lived in my head and I just. Knew all the places to check, which was not the most efficient way to go about it.

[00:47:56] Marissa: Um, and now I, I have a huge list in, in notion, which is what I use to kind of organize everything. And, um, I go through and, and look at what’s going on and decide, you know, what I wanna include or not. I also still spend quite a bit of time, um, scrolling like Facebook and Eventbrite events because. That’s where like the kind of quirky, weird ones are.

[00:48:19] Marissa: And those are great. So I love those. And I mean, for example, um, a couple weeks ago, one of the most clicked links like ever was an estate sale that I found on Facebook that I was like, that looks amazing. And they’re not releasing the address until Saturday. So like, you have to save this newsletter to click the link to get back to this, to find the address.

[00:48:41] Marissa: And it was like. So many clicks. Um, so, uh, yeah, I, I really just like search around. I, um, you know, spend a little bit of time like kind of scrolling Facebook, um, Instagram and will send myself events that I see that are, that are kind of quirky. Um, but yeah, the music I, I go through and I look at every single, um, venue and see what they’re doing.

[00:49:07] Marissa: Um, yeah.

[00:49:09] Nathan: I think there’s a, a level of curation that can only come from someone who lives in Boise, loves Boise, wants to go to these things. And it’s just so different from, oh, I used AI to scrape.

[00:49:22] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:22] Nathan: You know, all of these different sources. And then I used another AI to curate it down to a list and there you go.

[00:49:27] Nathan: Help you find something in there you like.

[00:49:28] Marissa: Yeah. Yeah. I, I also, um, you know, I find this interesting. I ask myself. Do I wanna go to this? Would my mom wanna go to this? And would my dad wanna go to this? Because they’re diff, they’re divorced, so they like different things. And so, but it really helps me, like my audience is so broad, um, with age groups.

[00:49:49] Marissa: Like it’s truly, I mean, I have a reader with 93 and so, um, and she writes me back all the time and tells me, you know, I will not be attending this event. I’m like, thank you for letting me know. But it really helps me to have these people in my, in my mind, you know, because I’m, I’m curating for a very broad audience.

[00:50:09] Marissa: Um, and I like to have, uh, something for everybody in there. I try to,

[00:50:13] Nathan: I love that. Okay, let’s take one more que I think we have a hand up right here.

[00:50:16] Guest 4: I just have a brass tax question. I’m curious, do you own it now? Is this an LLC? Like what is the business structure behind it now?

[00:50:24] Marissa: Yes, it’s an LLC. It’s very official and, um, yeah, we’re, we’re 50 50 partners in it now.

[00:50:31] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:31] Nathan: Yeah, it’s been a, a fun venture and uh, when I’m not like totally busy running my other company, then I get to come in and help out. Mm-hmm. And otherwise just mostly provide moral support and occasional advice

[00:50:47] Marissa: and the occasional like, Hey, did you know this business just, uh, popped up? And those are always fun too.

[00:50:53] Nathan: Yes, exactly. Well, it’s been fun to have all of you here and. Here’s chat about our little, little project. I appreciate that you love the city as much as we do, and, uh, that you know, Russ, thank you for hosting, hosting this and, uh, listening to us talk about. You know the newsletter, if anyone has not subscribed yet, you should go subscribe from boise.com.

[00:51:14] Nathan: Mm-hmm. There’s no excuses. It’s free and uh, come check out one of the events. Maybe sign up for a dinner club.

[00:51:20] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:51:21] Nathan: Not March ’cause it’s sold out, but mm-hmm.

[00:51:23] Marissa: We might add another one. Come to the April one. Yeah.

[00:51:26] Nathan: Sounds

[00:51:26] Marissa: good.

[00:51:26] Nathan: All right. Thank you everybody. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Berry Show.

[00:51:33] Nathan: Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I’d love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else do you think we should have on the show? Thank you so much for listening.

[00:00:00] Tintin: This is the thing that’s actually gonna get you the outcome that you want if you wanna V, she started to implement a system. The first video that she did has got over 200,000 views overnight.

[00:00:09] Nathan: Tintin Smith is a YouTube strategist and coach who helps educational YouTubers turn their channels into six figure businesses.

[00:00:15] Nathan: What exactly should I be spending my time on?

[00:00:17] Tintin: Obviously, number one is, is filming, positioning and strategy ideation, scripting, and planning. And finally, number five is just

[00:00:25] Nathan: what’s number one on your list of what you should not do?

[00:00:27] Tintin: Number one. Is

[00:00:29] Nathan: he spent two years as Ali Abdaal’s, head of YouTube, running the entire operation.

[00:00:33] Nathan: While the channel grew from three to 6 million subscribers and generated millions of dollars in revenue

[00:00:38] Tintin: whilst I was there, he was typically averages around $5 million in revenue and a few million in profit. The YouTube channel is like the number one traffic source and core driver behind all of that revenue.

[00:00:48] Tintin: If you have a channel and you’re trying to scale it into my serious business, this episode is a masterclass. Now, you don’t get to the good ideas by trying to just focus on a few. You get to the good ideas by coming up with tons, and the way that you actually select the best ones is incredible. I’m hooked.

[00:01:06] Nathan: Welcome to the show.

[00:01:07] Tintin: Thanks, Nathan. Happy to be here.

[00:01:08] Nathan: So I wanna start with a question that I’ve been curious about, which is, how many subscribers do you need to earn a million dollars a year on YouTube?

[00:01:16] Tintin: Uh, a really good question makes a lot of sense. I think it’s probably what a lot of your audience are thinking about.

[00:01:21] Tintin: Uh, the real answer is that there is no specific number and it can be as low. As 500 or a thousand subscribers on your channel, I think because if those 500 or a thousand people are the right people and you have a high ticket business where you have a very expensive product, then you know you only need a thousand of the right people following your channel.

[00:01:42] Tintin: So, yeah, I mean, I’ve seen seven figure channels with, uh, with tens of thousands of subscribers all the way up to obviously millions of subscribers. So there’s no right answer.

[00:01:52] Nathan: Who comes to mind as someone maybe outside of the like business or making money online niche who has a smaller following and then an outsized revenue from from that?

[00:02:03] Tintin: I think the one I know personally the best is a friend of mine called Aman Manza, who actually went through Ali of Dallas kinda YouTube course. And, uh, his channel is all about helping software engineers land mm-hmm. Jobs. So it’s a great niche because obviously software engineers. Typically get paid quite well.

[00:02:21] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:02:21] Tintin: It might

[00:02:21] Nathan: be a hundred thousand, few hundred thousand dollars a

[00:02:23] year.

[00:02:23] Tintin: Exactly.

[00:02:24] Nathan: Yep.

[00:02:24] Tintin: And so they can, he can charge quite a, like a high price for his coaching program where he helps people land those jobs. And he started to hit, uh, seven figures in revenue. Revenue when he was around I think 50, 60,000 subscribers.

[00:02:38] Nathan: Yeah. It’s a lot fewer than I would expect.

[00:02:39] Tintin: Yeah. And so, uh, and he’s as like 24 as well. He’s a very impressive guy. So, um, you know, not necessarily the average example, but uh, it really doesn’t matter. Oh, it matters less how big the audience is. It just matters how intentionally you are creating that audience and the kind of offer that you have on the back of your YouTube channel.

[00:02:58] Tintin: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:58] Nathan: Yeah. Something that I talked about is the difference between an audience and a crowd.

[00:03:02] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:03:02] Nathan: Where an audience is the right people paying attention, and a crowd is just any, any views, anything. And so. If you get the right people and you have the right offer in front of them, you can actually earn quite a bit.

[00:03:13] Tintin: Yeah, absolutely. I think, I mean, that’s what I do is, uh, help YouTubers turn their audiences into businesses. And sometimes that involves like shifting from this mindset of building an audience to, or just building a crowd. Yeah. To intentionally curating your audience to be full of people who actually wanna buy from you.

[00:03:30] Nathan: Yeah. And we’ll get into all of that. Uh, before we do that, you spent a couple of years as the head of YouTube for Ali Abdal.

[00:03:35] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:03:35] Nathan: So Ali is someone who’s built a very, very impressive business. I feel like anyone who is studying YouTube, studying entrepreneurship, like knows him, knows his content and all that, you have like a behind the scenes look.

[00:03:46] Nathan: Yeah. I’m curious are first, are there any numbers that you can share? Uh, Ali’s fairly public with numbers.

[00:03:51] Tintin: Yeah. He’s fairly public. Yeah. I won’t, I won’t claim too much credit behind any of these numbers. You know, Ali’s like a very unique and impressive guy. Mm-hmm. And I obviously loved working for him, but whilst, whilst I was there, he was, and I think still to this day, typically averages around $5 million in revenue a year.

[00:04:05] Tintin: Mm-hmm. And a few million in profit and over 50% of his revenue comes from his own offers and products. So for a long time, the part-time YouTuber Academy and, uh, these days he’s got a new one called the Lifestyle Business Academy, where he helps people kind of build a lifestyle business. And, uh, the YouTube channel is the main traffic source behind the business.

[00:04:25] Tintin: So he’s obviously on Instagram, on LinkedIn, a little bit of paid ads. But, uh, until recently especially, he wasn’t actually running any paid ads. And so the YouTube channel is like the number one traffic source and core driver behind all of that revenue.

[00:04:38] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the, the top of the funnel, the main thing that draw everyone in.

[00:04:42] Nathan: And he’s got all the other aspects to it. I think a lot of people see YouTube and they get excited about it because of the, uh, the ad revenue, right? Mm-hmm. Most platform Instagram, these other platforms, they don’t really pay you money, whereas YouTube will actually pay you on ads. Yeah. And so people have this assumption that if you get really big on YouTube, then you’re gonna be making all your money from ads and going from there.

[00:05:06] Nathan: People make money that way. But the, the channels that you’re talking about, that is not the main way they monetize, right?

[00:05:12] Tintin: Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, typically on YouTube, you can earn an average, let’s say somewhere around $5 for every thousand views that you get, which means that if you get a million views, you might get five, $5,000 from YouTube itself, which is way better than any other platform.

[00:05:28] Tintin: But the trick there is, or the catch is that it’s very hard to get a million views. Mm-hmm. And increasingly so it gets harder and harder. And, uh, the whole game with content creation really, or kind of with just with, with ads and with marketing, is how much money are you getting back for how many eyeballs you got?

[00:05:45] Tintin: Right. And YouTube give you that stat with AdSense, which is RPM revenue per meal. So how many, how much money do you make for every thousand views? And you can increase that with like, you know, a sponsor or brand deal. You might be getting, let’s say $30 for every thousand views that you get. Um, that’s kinda maybe the deal that you set up or maybe that’s roughly how they price your channel is like you get around 20,000 views per video.

[00:06:09] Tintin: So we’re gonna give you this much

[00:06:11] Nathan: right

[00:06:11] Tintin: for a video. But then you can increase that, that return, that RPM even more by selling your own offers and products. And you can start to get into territory where if you get a thousand views, you might get a hundred dollars or $500 or a thousand dollars if you have a really.

[00:06:27] Tintin: Good audience and high quality audience, and also the right offer behind it.

[00:06:31] Nathan: So now what you’re doing, now that you’re out on your own, separate from Ollie and his team mm-hmm. Um, gimme a little breakdown of that. And then if there’s an example of one of your students who has like a really high, you know, revenue per thousand sub, uh, subscribers or, or views based on having a really good offer.

[00:06:48] Tintin: So after leaving Ali’s team, I decided to launch this coaching program accelerator, uh, to help educational YouTubers with audiences, but without massive audiences like Ali Dell turn it into a business. ’cause that’s what Ali did. He kind of, he grew this audience and then he turned it into a business. And, uh, I wanted to help smaller YouTubers without as big a followings do the same and build like six figure businesses rather than trying to, um, you know, build something crazy like seven figures.

[00:07:15] Tintin: Just help people make that initial leap. And, uh, one very interesting channel or client that uh, I work with is called Amy. She has a channel all about. Uh, breaking unhealthy relationship patterns mm-hmm. Through somatic healing as well, like in, in the, uh, dealing with like your body Yep. And the kind of nervous system and things like that.

[00:07:33] Tintin: And she has a high ticket coaching business off the back of her channel where she, uh, helps people kind of overcome those hurdles. And she only has, uh, I think at the time, 45, 50,000 subscribers, and she makes a multiple six figures, which is an amazing return on that channel. And considering she doesn’t work like insane hours, I, she puts a lot of effort in, but it’s not like an overwhelming business.

[00:07:53] Tintin: And so she’s just very intentional about the content that she makes and then the offer that she presents to those people. Another interesting example of someone that I, I work with is this woman called Camille and she helps dementia caregivers. Look after their, uh, loved ones with dementia. Mm-hmm.

[00:08:08] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:08:08] Tintin: And she’s been doing it for 20 years. She’s, you know, qualified in the area. And she came to YouTube recently to start like, well, educating people who are look caregivers, who are looking after their loved ones with dementia on how to do it better and how to avoid arguments and how to make their time, uh, as easy as possible.

[00:08:23] Tintin: And she has a high ticket coaching program already, but she wasn’t making too many sales. But then we started working together and we kinda changed a few things about her channel, uh, especially like her, the idea side of things and the titles and thumbnails, just the packaging, improving that, improving the video quality a little bit.

[00:08:39] Tintin: And then in the last, uh, couple, uh, weeks, she’s actually just like her channel’s gone from about 1000 subscribers to 10,000 subscribers. She’s completely That’s amazing. Completely blown up. Her calendar’s now full of sales calls and she’s making sales and suddenly she’s got a six figure business, literally within like a couple months because she’s just putting the time on her YouTube channel.

[00:08:57] Nathan: And what I love about that is it’s not like she just went viral or something. There’s actually a system behind it.

[00:09:03] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:09:03] Nathan: And then these videos, they go out, they keep working for you.

[00:09:05] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:09:06] Nathan: Right. These videos, they might get a lot of traffic initially and then level off or dip.

[00:09:10] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:09:11] Nathan: But they’re gonna continue to get traffic and views and drive leads and all of this towards the sustainable business for a long time.

[00:09:16] Nathan: So it’s like these little assets or annuities that continue to pay you a little bit.

[00:09:21] Tintin: Yeah, absolutely. Over

[00:09:22] Nathan: time,

[00:09:22] Tintin: I think one of the best ways to think about your channel is. The goal over time is not to go viral every single time. The goal is to make a library of bingeable content around one specific transformation.

[00:09:32] Tintin: So I think most of your audience are probably, uh, gonna have channels where they’re like teaching something or helping people go from A to B in some way, like not entertainment channels, basically. And we wanna make our YouTube channel a bingeable library of content helping people go from A to B and covering all the different things that they might need to know about.

[00:09:50] Nathan: Alright, so you have flown

[00:09:51] Tintin: halfway around the world

[00:09:52] Nathan: to my studio here in Boise, Idaho in order to teach a masterclass on YouTube. Like, what are we gonna cover today?

[00:09:59] Tintin: So we’re gonna cover the ins and the outs of the production systems behind a 1 million YouTube channel from the perspective of the founder or entrepreneur.

[00:10:07] Nathan: I love that. I’m super curious to learn this myself. So let’s jump up to the board and cover it.

[00:10:11] Tintin: Awesome.

[00:10:12] Nathan: All right, so this might be the most pre-prepared board that we’ve had coming into an episode. What do we have going on here?

[00:10:18] Tintin: Yeah. Um, so I mean, I thought I thought of it about it before coming in. So we’ve got, uh, first of all on this side of things, it’s really like essentially the, the inputs from you and your team.

[00:10:27] Tintin: Okay. So what’s the team behind one of these channels? And, uh, like that can be scaled up or down as well, depending on whether you are, um, you wanna go all out, like someone like Dan Martel or Alex Tomoey or Alex Ozzi or whether you just wanna have like one video editor and it’s just you and them. And so we can talk about why you might wanna do different things there.

[00:10:43] Tintin: Sounds good. Then, uh, the schedule. So what does your schedule look like as an entrepreneur trying to build a successful YouTube channel, and how much time is it gonna take you? Then what is the overall production system? So we’ve got seven steps here. The different things that it’s gonna take to actually, uh, build one of these channels and where you’re gonna be involved in it.

[00:11:01] Tintin: And then we’ve just got five things to do and to not do as, uh, as the entrepreneur, just to kind of guide you on where’s gonna be the highest leverage use of your time.

[00:11:10] Nathan: Incredible. I’m hooked. Where do we go from here?

[00:11:14] Tintin: Okay, so why don’t we just start with the, the YouTube production systems, because that’s gonna give us the overall picture of, uh, what we need to do and what team members we might need to have in place as well.

[00:11:24] Tintin: And you know, there’s that famous James Clear quote, which is like, you don’t rise to the level of your goals. You thought the level of your system. So this is the thing that’s actually gonna get you the outcome that you want. Okay? You don’t just get views or whatever by thinking about getting views. You think you have a, a system in place.

[00:11:37] Tintin: So I think let’s, let’s cover that. Okay?

[00:11:39] Nathan: What’s number one on the systems?

[00:11:41] Tintin: So number one is positioning and strategy.

[00:11:44] Nathan: Okay?

[00:11:45] Tintin: So positioning strategy is a core pillar behind your YouTube channel, obviously is like, what are the kind of videos you’re gonna be making? What is the overall, uh, picture of your channel?

[00:11:53] Tintin: And there are three things that I think make this up that people wanna be thinking about. Okay? Keep it nice and simple. We just have you. Your avatar and your niche. Okay, so those are the three things we can just quickly explore each of those. Keep it nice and simple. This is also something that that really evolves as you make videos.

[00:12:09] Tintin: You don’t wanna like really overthink it to begin with because as you start to make videos, you start to get into the YouTube process. These things will change. But to start with, you wanna have a clear idea of, of you, so your backstory, your credibility. Mm-hmm. And fundamentally answering this question, why should I listen to you?

[00:12:23] Tintin: So your viewers, like, why should they care about what you’ve done?

[00:12:26] Nathan: Yep.

[00:12:26] Tintin: In your case, if you’re starting like a typical talking head channel, like Dam Martel or whatever, Alex Ho Mosey, you’d be saying, I’m the founder of Kit. Yeah. I mean, does this much, you know, in revenue

[00:12:34] Nathan: we built, we have a team of a hundred people.

[00:12:36] Nathan: Yeah. We built it to 50 million a year in revenue. And we serve clients like James Clear, Dan Martel, Matt Guney.

[00:12:43] Tintin: Yeah. Immediately I’m like,

[00:12:44] Nathan: okay,

[00:12:45] Tintin: okay. I’m gonna listen to this guy. That’s incredible. What an amazing kind of story. And so being really clear is just about what is your credibility, what’s your backstory?

[00:12:52] Tintin: But also what are the elements of your personality that you wanna bring into the content? So just like dialing up as much of you as possible. ’cause it’s gonna be a key. You are obviously the differentiator from Daniel Pree, Alex Homo, or any other channel in your niche. I’m using the teach the

[00:13:05] Nathan: same. So I might bring in like, like contrast some things.

[00:13:10] Nathan: I don’t live in a Las Vegas. Yeah. Highrise. I live on a little hobby farm in Boise, Idaho. Yeah. You’re gonna find me woodworking, playing volleyball and

[00:13:21] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:13:22] Nathan: You know, gardening.

[00:13:23] Tintin: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:13:23] Nathan: When I’m not building a software.

[00:13:25] Tintin: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I think that that’s what makes you likable. That’s what makes people relate to you and differentiates you from the other guys in your space.

[00:13:31] Tintin: And obviously we’ve been talking about these guys in the make money niche. All of this stuff applies to any channel, whatever niche you’re in. And so then the next thing is, is avatar. So just being very clear on who it is you are targeting. Now, if you’re an entrepreneur already, you’re gonna be pretty clear on who is your ideal customer, and that’s the same person that you wanna be targeting in your content.

[00:13:48] Tintin: Yep. So hopefully you have a reasonably clear idea of that, but that’s just because. When you’re making your videos, when you’re going through the rest of these steps, you wanna be super clear on who are we actually making videos for? Who do we want to be watching these? And uh, yeah, that can be the same as in your, as in your business.

[00:14:04] Tintin: And then your niche is when you are coming to, uh, building your channel and taking your channel more seriously. You wanna have an understanding what’s going on in your space. So if you’re in the relationship space, the health space, the kind of like software engineering space, you wanna understand who are the other channels.

[00:14:19] Tintin: And the most important thing is to look for patterns in what’s working. So we don’t wanna just copy people, but we wanna understand or get a picture of what’s working, what’s not working, what are people typically looking for, what are they not looking for? And through that research, you are gonna get a clear idea of, okay, where are the gaps?

[00:14:33] Tintin: Where can I come in? Where does my experience and background lend itself to filling the gaps and the opportunities that I’ve see that I see from this research?

[00:14:40] Nathan: Yep. Does

[00:14:41] Tintin: that all make sense?

[00:14:42] Nathan: Yeah, it does.

[00:14:43] Tintin: Cool. Okay, so next thing after positioning a strategy is just gonna be ideation. So generating and then selecting video ideas for your channel.

[00:14:52] Tintin: So yeah, ideation. There are two really simple steps here. It is just generating lots and lots of ideas. You know, you don’t get to the good ideas by, uh, trying to just focus on a few. You get to the good ideas by coming up with tons. Okay. And what are all the different things I might wanna talk about on my channel?

[00:15:06] Tintin: And then the second thing is just selecting the best ones. And the way that you actually select the best ones is through doing a bit of research, what’s working well in your niche, finding those patterns, but also if you’ve got videos on your channel before, what’s worked well before is gonna be important data for selecting the next ones to make.

[00:15:23] Tintin: But those are the two simple steps to, to go through.

[00:15:25] Nathan: That sounds good.

[00:15:26] Tintin: Then the third step here is packaging. Okay, so titles and thumbnails. So titles and thumbnails. In case people don’t know, they’re the first thing that viewers see when they come onto YouTube and they come with the platform. You don’t see videos.

[00:15:38] Tintin: You see the little image, the thumbnail, and the title of the video. And so we wanna be thinking about before we commit to a video, before we actually commit to making anything and putting time into something we wanna have thought about what is the thing that the viewer’s gonna see first? Are they actually gonna be interested in this and click on it?

[00:15:52] Tintin: If they don’t click, they don’t watch. It’s a good thing to just have in your mind. And this is where it can be very helpful to have your first team member, particularly outsourcing your thumbnails. So everyone in your audience, ’cause they’re all entrepreneurs, they should definitely be outsourcing their thumbnails.

[00:16:06] Tintin: You are gonna wanna outsource your thumbnails, which, which we can come over to, to the team here to have a look at. Okay. Um, kind of what the overall team picture might look like, and then come back to the systems. That’s good as well. So at the top, you’ve obviously just got you as the entrepreneur and, uh.

[00:16:21] Tintin: You in a little box like that. Yeah. And we’re gonna assume that to build a $1 million YouTube channel, you don’t need to have this, but you might want to have a YouTube producer. So that is the role that I had with, while I was working with Ali AB Dow. And what I would do is then communicate with Ali, be his mainly his, like really his only source of communication.

[00:16:40] Tintin: Keep it simple for him, and then I’ll communicate with all the other team members involved. Okay. So let’s put YouTube producer below you. So you definitely don’t need this role. Okay. Uh, you like, if you’ve got, you know, free time as an entrepreneur, which like some people can do, like have, you know, less time spent on delivery, depending on the nature of their business, they might just have the time to do the YouTube producer role themselves.

[00:17:01] Tintin: But you’re gonna get a lot of return with someone who’s very good in this role with this. And so the YouTube producer will be coordinating with the, the thumbnail designer.

[00:17:09] Nathan: Okay.

[00:17:10] Tintin: So

[00:17:11] Nathan: where do I put them? Are they thumbnail designer right here?

[00:17:13] Tintin: Uh, let’s put them over to the left. Let’s put them over to the left.

[00:17:15] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:17:15] Nathan: Uh, we’re just gonna say designer.

[00:17:16] Tintin: Just designer. Yeah. Nice. And. Again, you know, there are lots of different variations of what a successful team might look like, but they, the YouTube producer could be doing the thumbnails themselves. I did that rally for a while and then we decided to outsource them because, uh, I’m not a particularly good designer.

[00:17:33] Tintin: Yeah. So, uh, you know, again, you could, if you happen to be like your background is in graphic design, you might be good at designing thumbnails, but it’s just not gonna be a good use. I find

[00:17:41] Nathan: that it’s a different

[00:17:43] Tintin: skill. Yeah.

[00:17:43] Nathan: Yeah. And it’s. Like being immersed in that world, having someone who specializes is a good idea.

[00:17:49] Tintin: It’s a very high return on your time because it can be the difference between a successful channel and successful. How

[00:17:55] Nathan: expensive is this role?

[00:17:56] Tintin: So thumbnail designers, uh, the benchmark really is like typically you’re paying per thumbnail.

[00:18:01] Okay.

[00:18:02] Tintin: And you’ll start to find good ones at like $50 per thumbnail.

[00:18:06] Nathan: Okay.

[00:18:06] Tintin: And that they can be harder to find. Obviously the more you’re willing to pay

[00:18:09] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:18:10] Tintin: Then the easier it is to find someone. Okay. The best ones, they will start to charge up to like a hundred, $200 per thumbnail.

[00:18:17] Nathan: And is that per thumbnail concept they develop or per video that they do a finished thumbnail for?

[00:18:21] Tintin: It’s typically like per finalized thumbnail. Okay. So if you want like multiple concepts, then it might be a little bit more, maybe you get some kind of package deal. Okay. But, um, you know, I work with a designer who I pay $50. Her thumbnail, but they will do a few variations for me like that they changed the text and maybe it’s like a slightly different concept and things like that.

[00:18:42] Tintin: But

[00:18:42] Nathan: let me write that down. And so you’re saying basically,

[00:18:44] Tintin: okay,

[00:18:44] Nathan: 50 to 150.

[00:18:46] Tintin: I think 50 to 200 is like, okay. Uh, just to, to give that range for, for your audience. ’cause there are gonna be some people watching who, who have the budget to spend, uh, on like the top designers. But, uh, again, this can, you can, it’s

[00:19:01] Nathan: not that expensive.

[00:19:03] Nathan: Right. If we’re talking about a video a week, we’re in the 200 to $800 a month. Yeah. Uh, on this cost year.

[00:19:10] Tintin: Yeah, exactly. And, and

[00:19:11] Nathan: you’re saying this is worth it. It’s titles and thumbnails matter.

[00:19:15] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:19:15] Nathan: So getting someone who,

[00:19:16] Tintin: yeah, it can be the difference between a channel that gets a thousand views and 50,000 views of video just because people are clicking on it and people wanna click.

[00:19:24] Tintin: But it is important to say that, uh, with AI getting better and better, there are tools that help you do both titles and thumbnails. Uh, with ai. So something like one of 10, one of ten.com

[00:19:36] Nathan: okay.

[00:19:37] Tintin: Is probably the best one out there at the moment. It doesn’t yet make your finalized thumbnail, but uh, it can give you like great inspiration and great concepts that you can kind of tweak a little bit.

[00:19:46] Tintin: And so the cost is going down. Um, but a good designer is still like worth their weight gold. So definitely something to, to consider, uh, trying to find.

[00:19:55] Nathan: Okay, that sounds good. What’s the next role?

[00:19:57] Tintin: Let’s just go to the, the next step in the systems. ’cause that’s gonna then bring out another role, which is script writing and planning.

[00:20:03] Tintin: So that’s the next thing. Once you’ve, uh, come up with a video idea and a title thumbnail for that video idea, then it kind of goes officially into production. Okay. And that’s where you then wanna start writing and planning the video. And so things, can I stop you

[00:20:18] Nathan: there

[00:20:18] Tintin: because

[00:20:20] Nathan: me not being a YouTube expert

[00:20:22] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:20:22] Nathan: These steps are backwards from what I would do.

[00:20:24] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:20:25] Nathan: I would come up with the, I would write the script. I, I would. I would actually have titles and thumbnails much later in here.

[00:20:30] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:20:30] Nathan: Uh, talk to me about why it’s number three.

[00:20:33] Tintin: So there’s, I guess, the theory here and then also the, the reality and like, what actually happens in your experience as an entrepreneur or just as a YouTuber.

[00:20:42] Tintin: So the theory is that it’s the first thing that the view sees kind of as we, as we discussed. And so we wanna start with something that the wants to click on, right? And then think about the content that comes afterwards, because sometimes, uh, you come up with, uh, well, if you make a video and then think about the Titan thumbnail afterwards, you realize I can’t figure out a way to package this very well, and therefore you’ve made this amazing video and no one’s clicked on it in the first place, right?

[00:21:02] Tintin: And that’s when, uh, you know, you get let down, the performance doesn’t work, or performance doesn’t go very well, and you kind of get a bit despondent. So it makes sense to just start with that. But the reality is that it’s very hard to finalize Titan thumbnails every single time before you commit to writing and planning.

[00:21:16] Tintin: They can be a little bit more like, these aren’t just like a hundred percent completed. One after the other. You sometimes go, like, as you write and plan, you’re like, oh, actually maybe we should tweak this. I can thumb a little bit to this.

[00:21:27] Nathan: So it can be fluid between those.

[00:21:28] Tintin: So it can be a little bit

[00:21:29] Nathan: fluid, but start with, I mean, you said packaging.

[00:21:31] Nathan: I wrote tiles and thumbs. Yeah, that’s fine. But you’re saying start with packaging. Yeah. So you know. Exactly. Yeah.

[00:21:36] Tintin: Like

[00:21:36] Nathan: did I have we come up with a concept that’s gonna get people to click?

[00:21:40] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:21:41] Nathan: Because if not, like let’s not go spend the next 20 hours on the video on.

[00:21:45] Tintin: Exactly. Yeah. And this can really depend on, uh, the channel that you have as well, right?

[00:21:50] Tintin: Like for this podcast, we’re posting this on YouTube. We put a lot of time into, into like, you know, come, I mean coming out here, you organizing it, giving up your time, and we wanted to succeed and work. And so we spoke about like the title a little bit and even the thumbnail beforehand because we wanna know that this is gonna be something that, this conversation’s gonna be something that people are interested in.

[00:22:09] Tintin: And, um, so. You want to have, uh, a as best you can, a finalized title and a finalized thumbnail concept. It doesn’t have to be completely ready.

[00:22:18] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:22:18] Tintin: But it’s just like we kind of know what we’re doing here. We know what the thumbnail text might be and uh, and then we can go into production and the writing and planning.

[00:22:26] Nathan: Okay.

[00:22:26] Tintin: And so once it’s kinda in production, again, you can do this all on your own. You don’t need a team for this. And it’s easy to overcomplicate YouTube. However, if we’re trying to recreate maybe like, you know, uh, a very successful channel, uh, like Ali AB do or something like that, you might have a script writer or someone to help you with research Okay.

[00:22:45] Tintin: And planning as well. So we can add that to the team. So an example we mentioned earlier was, uh, Aman Manza who has a channel about, uh, software engineering, landing software engineering jobs. Now, he, um, kinda wrote and plant all of his content for a while, like, um, a year to two years where he was just kind of sitting down thinking about what are the things that I wanna share in this video?

[00:23:04] Tintin: And obviously this is the, the preparation for the, the video itself. This is really important, like you want to put time into this, but effort into this. However, recently he has hired a script writer and someone he’s trained, uh, through like over several weeks and months. And someone who also had a background in this already to help him systemize that side of things.

[00:23:24] Tintin: Yeah. So what they’ll probably do is they’ll have a meeting where they come up with or they agree on the video that they, I wanna go ahead with, and then I’m on my brain dump some kind of like interesting things to talk about. And then they’ll turn it into a word for word video script.

[00:23:36] Nathan: Right?

[00:23:36] Tintin: But you obviously don’t have to have a word for word script.

[00:23:39] Tintin: Um, like, you know, in your, in your niche, if you were to do your YouTube channel, your competitors like Daniel Priestly Alex, or Moey Dan Martel, they don’t have word for word scripts. They’re kind of just explaining the ideas and concepts that they’ve had in their brain for years.

[00:23:52] Nathan: Okay.

[00:23:53] Tintin: And so.

[00:23:54] Nathan: Or they may have, they’ve, uh, distilled a bunch of things down into a book Yeah.

[00:23:59] Nathan: Or something like that. And then they’re, someone’s going through a, a writer on their team Yeah. Might be going through and saying, Hey,

[00:24:05] Tintin: yeah.

[00:24:05] Nathan: Here’s something you talked about in the book. Like, yeah, I have, we have a video packaged in this way that we want to do.

[00:24:10] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:24:10] Nathan: And you’re like, okay. Say it more like,

[00:24:12] Tintin: yeah.

[00:24:12] Nathan: Like just roll the camera and I’ll give you some good stuff.

[00:24:15] Tintin: Absolutely. Yeah. Exactly. ’cause they’re just so, they’re so fluent with those ideas.

[00:24:19] Nathan: Right.

[00:24:19] Tintin: But the thing that you do wanna do with writing planning is you do wanna script the intro word for word. Okay. Because like, as I’m sure most of your audience know, uh, with content, when people start watching it, like the intro, the first 30 seconds is where you see most drop off.

[00:24:31] Tintin: Right? So

[00:24:32] Nathan: retention matters,

[00:24:33] Tintin: it’s worth scripting the intro word for word and to set up the promise of the video to demonstrate your credibility, to make it sound like you know, something that people actually wanna watch. Right. And importantly, to confirm the expectations set by the title thumbnail as well.

[00:24:46] Nathan: Okay. Why don’t you write intro right here and we’re gonna put a star next to it or something. Okay. Um. That’s something that’s really important.

[00:24:53] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:24:53] Nathan: Yep.

[00:24:54] Tintin: Little star.

[00:24:55] Nathan: I like it.

[00:24:55] Tintin: Uh, so that is worth scripting word for word. There are some people out there who will argue that, you know, your whole video should be word for word scripted.

[00:25:02] Tintin: Mm-hmm. But, uh, it doesn’t often like account for just like enjoyment. It can’t just be really boring to read off a teleprompter.

[00:25:09] Nathan: Right.

[00:25:10] Tintin: Some people are really good at it. I dunno if you’ve seen Ramit S’S channel.

[00:25:12] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:25:13] Tintin: But, um, he’s just like, his video’s scripted word for word, but, and they’re so good. Like I love watching his channel.

[00:25:18] Tintin: I love learning about, uh, like personal finance from him, but it’s all word for word. He’s just so good on camera and he’s so good at like, acting, all that

[00:25:25] Nathan: kind of stuff. He’s done a lot of media training.

[00:25:26] Tintin: He’s done so much. He’s just been doing this stuff for like 15 years now. Yeah. But then, um, if you look at Daniel Priestly, who’s like, who’s building his channel recently, he is not scripting word for word.

[00:25:37] Tintin: He’s kind of drawing stuff and he is kind of being fluid. He’s just, he’s just got like that natural kind of charisma that comes across very well. And so it is really, uh, personal preference, but it’s also gonna be revealed kind of just through time. Of like making videos, what’s gonna work for you, whether you need a writer, whether you need a researcher, someone to help you.

[00:25:55] Nathan: Okay.

[00:25:55] Tintin: Kind of, um, like bringing your ideas to life. It, it is just very helpful to have someone who’s just kind to bounce ideas with, to kind of create mm-hmm. To help you create the content, uh, together. Basically that can be your YouTube producer, so you don’t necessarily need a writer. If you’ve got a competent YouTube producer you can balance ideas with and they can do a kind of, uh, put some content together as well.

[00:26:14] Tintin: So there are two more quick things that we wanna think about in this, in this phase as well before we into filming, which is, uh, calls to actions and lead magnet. So I can just go through both of those. Yeah. Great. So there’s actually gonna be the things that are gonna allow us to take someone from being a viewer who’s found us on YouTube for the first time.

[00:26:29] Tintin: They’ve watched one of our videos, and then we take them from being a viewer to being a potential lead, um, potential customer eventually as well, which is where your amazing software comes in. Yes, kit. So, uh, let’s start with lead magnets. As you are planning your video, you might wanna be thinking about what is the specific.

[00:26:46] Tintin: Resource that I can kind of, uh, bring into the content that my viewers are gonna want and maybe even build the content around that. So it could be some kind of template or checklist or whatever you walk through in the video. And then you can say, if you want this, uh, this resource here, you can get it by, I go into the first link in the description.

[00:27:03] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:04] Tintin: And then viewers have to put in there their email to get it. And then they obviously become a lead. So I’m gonna put down here, um, kind of, I’ll put down LMS for Okay. Um, lead magnets. And then the second part of that process obviously is once you’ve got the lead magnet is planning, when you’re gonna say you call to action, which typically you don’t really wanna be doing it before three minutes into the video because three minutes

[00:27:27] Nathan: we’re just focused on retention.

[00:27:28] Tintin: Your viewers haven’t really earned that. You haven’t earned that trust with them yet. They’re still just like seeing if they wanna watch the video. And so we want to kind of provide enough value before we make that call to action. Okay. If your, if your, uh, the LI Magnet is like so specifically integrated into the content, you might wanna bring it out in the intro and just be like, the thing we’re gonna be talking about in this video is this thing, and you can get it with the first linking description.

[00:27:49] Tintin: That could be like 30 seconds in.

[00:27:50] Nathan: Hey, so I got a comment the other day, which was, what do you actually do? They’d been listening to the show for a while, but enjoying the content about growing a creator business but didn’t understand what I do, and they thought maybe you’re a full-time podcaster. They didn’t realize that this is the side hustle.

[00:28:03] Nathan: My main thing is Building Kit. Kit is an email marketing platform for creators. I think one of the groups that should really pay attention to and start using Kit is anyone who’s grown a lot on social but doesn’t own that audience. Kit is built for the creators who mean business. So those are the people who have gotten a bunch of attention on social and then turned it into a sustainable business with a diversified revenue stream.

[00:28:24] Nathan: Automations a team and more. So if that’s you or you wanna become that type of creator, go check out kit.com and learn what we can do

[00:28:31] Tintin: for you.

[00:28:32] Nathan: Okay. So what you’re saying there is that the lead magnet can’t come in the very beginning, but you don’t wanna wait till the very end, right? You need it partway through the video.

[00:28:39] Nathan: Yeah. What, what does a timeline look like for that?

[00:28:41] Tintin: Let’s draw a little timeline. Okay. But, um, again, there’s obviously nuance and context to this. So let’s just do it down here. Let’s say this is the length of your whole, your whole video.

[00:28:49] Nathan: Okay.

[00:28:50] Tintin: Um, we have the kind of intro here, the first 30 seconds, let’s put, uh, just 30 seconds there.

[00:28:56] Tintin: Typically, you wanna script this word for word, and you just wanna be focusing on confirming the title, thumbnail expectation, setting up your credibility, why they, they should listen to you, and, um, laying out like a plan for the video, what value they’re gonna get. And then in terms of your call to action, again, this, this doesn’t have to be to a lead magnet.

[00:29:12] Tintin: It can be that you go direct to your offer unless you have a coaching business and it’s just book a call down below if you want help doing this thing. Yeah. So. Call to action can be to direct the offer or to the lead magnet, but typically, let’s say, let’s put the three minute mark here. You don’t wanna be doing call to action before that.

[00:29:28] Nathan: Right?

[00:29:29] Tintin: Because

[00:29:29] Nathan: So we’re, we’re pure value in

[00:29:32] Tintin: this

[00:29:32] Nathan: section. Yeah.

[00:29:32] Tintin: We just wanna be winning their attentions and trust. So

[00:29:34] Nathan: it’s hook to there and then value.

[00:29:36] Tintin: Yeah. There we go. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:29:38] Nathan: Okay.

[00:29:38] Tintin: I think that’s a, that’s a, it’s a good way of thinking about it. And then, uh, the reason for that is like, at three minutes, you’ve still got a large percentage of people watching.

[00:29:45] Tintin: Mm-hmm. You know, maybe 50% of people who clicked on it are still watching, and lots of ’em are still gonna see the thing that you are, that you’re talking about. But the later on you do it, the call to action, then the more engaged viewers, uh, are gonna be the ones who are watching. Right? And so you do see some videos where the call to action is like right at the end, you know, it’s like, let’s say 15 minutes in.

[00:30:05] Tintin: And the people who see that are just like the most engaged viewers, right? So there’s no like a hundred percent right or wrong. Can I do both? Absolutely. Yeah. So if you do two call to actions, it typically does increase the, the number of poses you’re

[00:30:15] Nathan: get. So I might do a quick one here at three minutes.

[00:30:17] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:30:17] Nathan: Right. Especially if it’s for a lead magnet that might help someone implement what’s, you know, they’re taking notes and it’s like, actually you don’t need to take notes. You could,

[00:30:23] Tintin: yeah, yeah.

[00:30:24] Nathan: Go to this link and download it right now.

[00:30:26] Tintin: Exactly. Yeah. The one exception though, as as we said, was that if your, the whole video is like around the lead magnet was around the template uhhuh, then you can mention it in this like 32nd mark.

[00:30:36] Tintin: Just say, you know, if you wanna get the template that we’re gonna be using in this video, then it’s the first link in the description. And I do that on some of my videos where I’m talking about like a specific thing.

[00:30:44] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:30:44] Tintin: So, yeah, let’s just put on here. CTAs for call to action. So this is, these are the things you kinda might wanna be thinking about in the, in the writing and planning phase, but, um, we spent a while on this, so let’s go to the ne the next one.

[00:30:55] Tintin: Okay. Which is filming. So, with filming, I think it makes sense to come to the, the schedule down here now. Okay. ’cause this is like obviously a key part of your, your responsibilities as the entrepreneur at the top of your team, no one else can do it for you.

[00:31:07] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:07] Tintin: And, uh, I mean, all of these talking head channels are gonna be, it’s gonna be, you are the one doing it rather than you can’t really outsource it.

[00:31:14] Nathan: Right.

[00:31:14] Tintin: And we don’t want it to be a faceless channel either. So, um, there’s a bunch of different ways of approaching filming, but one good principle to have in mind is batching. So Okay. Trying to batch record, uh, videos. Mm-hmm. So trying to record at least two, uh, in every filming session is like a good way to approach it.

[00:31:31] Tintin: Some people find that hard because they find filming just like such a tiring thing. It’s a, uh, a very helpful principle to bear in mind. And so this is a kind of monthly calendar for you as an entrepreneur. You’re gonna, everyone’s gonna find their own like schedule that works best for them. But, uh, I mean, what I do is I actually record every single Thursday and I, I, okay.

[00:31:51] Tintin: And I try to film, uh, at least one, ideally two. That’s kind of the rule I set for myself. And that’s ’cause I like filming, um, on like a regular basis. I find that if I film once a month, I just like lose kind of touch with the skill, I guess. Okay. And it is a skill, it’s like a really key part of the system is you coming across well on camera, presenting your ideas.

[00:32:09] Tintin: Well, articulating stuff well,

[00:32:11] Nathan: right.

[00:32:11] Tintin: So that’s what I do. But, um, I know some Alex or Moey, for example, he shared that he just does one filming day a month and he just like batch films, uh, 4, 5, 6 videos all in one day. So they do all of this stuff, the preparation in advance, and then just like knock it off in one day.

[00:32:28] Nathan: So he’s gonna take a single day, I don’t know, let’s say it’s this Tuesday or something like

[00:32:32] that.

[00:32:32] Tintin: Once a month. Yeah. Just one full day

[00:32:33] Nathan: and he’s got the entire day.

[00:32:35] Tintin: Yeah. Just to like really get into it. But that again, uh, can be quite a lot. It’s just like quite draining. Filming videos is quite tiring. So, uh,

[00:32:45] Nathan: like one thing that I found is one time trip, we tried to do four podcast episodes in a day.

[00:32:50] Nathan: Yeah. Because we had the studio, we were offsite and all of that. And we actually didn’t end up publishing the, the fourth video because we didn’t, we didn’t quite get the packaging Right. And a few things, but really it was just, I didn’t have the energy

[00:33:01] Tintin: really

[00:33:02] Nathan: to do it any, you know, I was like, I did not produce a good video because it was on hour eight of filming.

[00:33:08] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:33:08] Nathan: And the fire alarm had gone off at 5:00 AM in the hotel that morning. So, you know, there’s some complicated factors, but really like what you’re saying is, or what I heard in that is two different things, one or three things. Uh, first always batch record. Even if it’s means two.

[00:33:24] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:33:24] Nathan: Right. Because then if you miss a week, you end up being sick, whatever.

[00:33:27] Nathan: Right? Yeah, exactly. You’ve got a little buffer. The second thing is to keep it to a system where if you do it often enough, you stay in the rhythm and you’re not, like a month later you’re like, how?

[00:33:36] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:33:36] Nathan: How do I do this? Exactly. Yeah. Especially if you’re not a professional yet. Yeah. Like Alex Ram Moey doing this at such a huge scale, like he’s a machine.

[00:33:43] Nathan: Yeah. But you know, maybe you or I starting in YouTube were like, oh, I need to actually keep this skill fresh.

[00:33:48] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:33:49] Nathan: Um, you and I are both pilots.

[00:33:50] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:33:51] Nathan: Right. If you were to not fly for oh a month, you like that first time you get back in, you’re like, okay, yep. Let me, like the muscle memory has to come back.

[00:33:59] Nathan: So same thing on the YouTube videos.

[00:34:01] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:34:01] Nathan: And the third thing I heard you say is to really align the quantity of recording, uh, with like your own output and energy levels and all of that. Yeah, absolutely. Because the last thing that we want is to record a bunch of videos. Just notice later, you know, in the edit or something else of like, well, I just didn’t have any energy.

[00:34:21] Nathan: Like, those later videos weren’t good. I didn’t do, like, I did a huge disservice to the writing and the thumbnail and planning.

[00:34:27] Tintin: Yeah. All this prep. Yeah. Prep

[00:34:28] Nathan: because I just, I didn’t perform.

[00:34:30] Tintin: Yeah. A hundred. Exactly. A hundred percent. So I think it’s gonna look different for everyone. Mm-hmm. You need to find your kind of rhythm.

[00:34:36] Tintin: And, you know, it’s worth saying here as well, that, uh, like filming is a really core pillar, obviously, in the whole process. Okay. And putting filming dates in the calendar is what forces all of this stuff to actually happen. Okay. Because you’re like, oh my gosh, I’ve got a filming day next Tuesday.

[00:34:50] Nathan: Right.

[00:34:50] Tintin: If I need to get some fricking ideas down, I need to get some titles and thumbnails down.

[00:34:54] Tintin: I need to plan some videos. So it’s like, it’s the thing that when it’s in the calendar, kind of forces everything else into the forcing portion into action, which is really helpful.

[00:35:02] Nathan: Yep.

[00:35:02] Tintin: So you find your, your filming schedule and then you commit to it. That’s what then makes everything else happen. And I also think it’s quickly worth mentioning him at this point.

[00:35:12] Tintin: You might be like, one of your audience might be listening or watching for this and being like, oh my gosh, there’s so many things. This whole team, there’s all these like systems and whatever. Um, but we, we spoke previously about this, uh, channel called, uh, by a guy called UL Wells. And UL’s strategy for all of this stuff was, uh, to just take out video, uh, take out his phone, record a video every single day, about 10 minutes long, and just share his experience working as a financial advisor for 20 years.

[00:35:38] Tintin: And he just didn’t overcomplicate it.

[00:35:40] Nathan: I think he’s been to Craft and Commerce. I think he’s been, studio has

[00:35:43] Tintin: studios. He prob has he he lives in

[00:35:44] Nathan: Salt Lake, right?

[00:35:45] Tintin: Uh, I actually dunno where he lives.

[00:35:46] Nathan: Yeah. I’m pretty sure he’s been, I’ve met him. I think he’s recorded here.

[00:35:50] Tintin: Okay.

[00:35:50] Nathan: Uh,

[00:35:50] Tintin: in

[00:35:51] Nathan: kid studios.

[00:35:51] Tintin: He’s a great like creator and entrepreneur.

[00:35:53] Nathan: Yep.

[00:35:54] Tintin: And that was his strategy. And he went to zero to a hundred thousand subscribers in a year. Mm-hmm. And so, whatever variation of this you end up going for, it’s gonna take a lot of effort, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be feel heavy. It, you have to find your version of it that feels fun.

[00:36:07] Tintin: It feels energizing. ’cause otherwise you’re just not gonna continue with it like Right. So, you know, I think every, we encourage the audience to take everything with like a pinch of salt here. Yeah. To find their rhythm, to find their approach. And this is, this is very much the like. All in kind of strategy, right?

[00:36:21] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:36:21] Tintin: That’s what we want. Um, the dam Martel kind of approach, like maybe you could got a videographer in there or something, but, um, yeah. Okay. I think that’s everything with, with filming, I guess. Anything else you wanted to go through there or,

[00:36:31] Nathan: yeah. Um, that sounds good on filming and then we’ll come back to the schedule as we

[00:36:34] Tintin: Cool.

[00:36:34] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:36:35] Nathan: Fill in more things.

[00:36:35] Tintin: So number six is then editing. Okay. So, uh, definitely not something you should be doing yourself, um, which is like a little teaser for one of the things not to do, but, uh, yeah. Most videos on YouTube need to be edited, so.

[00:36:49] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:36:50] Tintin: I know we just mentioned is all his videos aren’t edited.

[00:36:53] Tintin: Uh, they, they are a bit more now, but, um, you know, most of them are gonna need some kind of editing and it is not a good thing for you to be spending your time.

[00:37:00] Okay.

[00:37:01] Tintin: As an entrepreneur doing that’s another team or learning how to do. So this is another team member, video editor. Cool. So I think it’s worth mentioning at this point that.

[00:37:09] Tintin: It can be that you don’t have a YouTube producer here, it’s just you communicating with the writer, the editor, and the designer.

[00:37:15] Nathan: Right. The trade off that I’m noticing in that there’s always this, this time, money trade off.

[00:37:20] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:37:21] Nathan: And I don’t know how to map it out exactly, but if we, you know, if we have this trade off between time and money, there might be an element of velocity as well.

[00:37:31] Nathan: So of how quickly do I want results?

[00:37:34] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:37:34] Nathan: So if I have far more time than money

[00:37:38] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:37:39] Nathan: Then let’s eliminate this YouTube producer role. Yeah. Right. And I can do more of this myself.

[00:37:43] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:37:43] Nathan: And all of that.

[00:37:44] Tintin: And upskill myself as well.

[00:37:45] Nathan: Yeah, exactly. Which is always a good thing.

[00:37:48] Tintin: Always helpful.

[00:37:48] Nathan: If I have more money than time, if time is the biggest constraint in my life, then absolutely.

[00:37:53] Nathan: Hire this role.

[00:37:54] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:37:55] Nathan: And ’cause the other thing is it like how, how long am I willing to wait for results?

[00:38:00] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:38:00] Nathan: If I need results this year. Like, I’m probably gonna double down on a, on a high quality team. Yeah. Spend more money and do that early.

[00:38:08] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:38:08] Nathan: But if I’m like, look, I’m playing the long game and I’m like, I’m okay with this, this curve looking pretty flat.

[00:38:15] Nathan: Yeah. And then starting to climb and I’m money constrained then. Great.

[00:38:19] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:38:19] Nathan: Go without the producer.

[00:38:20] Tintin: Exactly. Yeah. And learn

[00:38:21] Nathan: more of these yourself.

[00:38:22] Tintin: I mean, and also generally, like long term you’re better off, like knowing more about the process.

[00:38:26] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:38:27] Tintin: Learning the skills anyway. Like setting up the foundations for a good channel.

[00:38:30] Tintin: But yeah, if you want to kind of, um, like I think when, when Dan Martel, I know we’ve mentioned him a few times. Mm-hmm. When he wanted to go all in on YouTube, like two, three years ago, he hired the whole thing

[00:38:38] Nathan: Right.

[00:38:39] Tintin: And was like consultants and everyone and just like all in and then, you know, surprise his channel.

[00:38:43] Tintin: Like really blew off. Right? Blew off. Yeah. His channel blew up. Um, but yeah, video editing. And I, ideal world as well, uh, if you’ve got a YouTube producer, you don’t even review edits. So with, when I was working for Ali, um, it was kind of amazing to, to watch really. He would like film the video and then he would press like the button on the, on the camera to stop recording and that was the end of his process for the whole thing.

[00:39:07] Tintin: Okay. I would then take the SD card out, I would then upload the footage to, to Google Drive.

[00:39:12] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:12] Tintin: And, uh, then the editors would download the footage, uh, kind of automatically ’cause they have access to the folder. Then they would edit it, upload it to a software called frame.io. Mm-hmm. Which is like probably the most popular one for reviewing, uh, reviewing content and then the YouTube producer.

[00:39:28] Tintin: So me in this scenario, I would then review the video, um, because I’d learn the skills, like, and Ali was, trust me, at that point.

[00:39:35] Nathan: Yep.

[00:39:35] Tintin: And then it would be, I, I would, I would do a round of feedback, just share some comments. It’s great if you can get to just one round of feedback that’s like, that’s what I do with my editor now is they send me the thing, I leave a couple comments and then they just upload it straight to YouTube studio so they have access to YouTube studio, they upload it there.

[00:39:53] Tintin: And, uh, yeah, that’s kind of like what it, what it should look like from, uh, from the entrepreneur’s perspective in an ideal world.

[00:40:01] Nathan: Alright, so in a minute we’re gonna get to the five things to do and the five things not to do. But before we do that, what is the last system?

[00:40:07] Tintin: The final part of the system is admin and analytics.

[00:40:11] Tintin: Okay. Just putting ’em in one in one kind of bucket. Admin is just like managing YouTube studios, so actually scheduling the videos, making sure they’ve got the right descriptions and things like that. And then the analytics side of things is reviewing the video performance, uh, not just from a views perspective, but also from how many leads did it generate for your business or potentially just sales directly.

[00:40:31] Tintin: And so that’s kind of just like all the stuff that comes after you’ve, uh, posted the video

[00:40:37] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:40:37] Tintin: As well. So, and

[00:40:39] Nathan: who on the team is doing that?

[00:40:40] Tintin: So yeah, if you’ve got a YouTube producer, it can be them. Um, if it’s, uh. If you don’t have a YouTube producer, it can be you, it can also be the video editor because they’re the one who’s also uploading the video to YouTube.

[00:40:51] Tintin: They’re

[00:40:51] Nathan: already in

[00:40:52] Tintin: there. They’re kind of already in there. They might as well just continue on. It depends on the relationship you have with your editor.

[00:40:56] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:57] Tintin: Um, but we also didn’t mention the, the cost for these guys as well. Oh yeah. So we’ll quickly go through.

[00:41:01] Nathan: Yeah. So what is the, the cost for the, actually lemme take an orange.

[00:41:05] Nathan: Yeah. Sorry, my colors to match. Um, how do you structure payments for a writer and what does that cost?

[00:41:10] Tintin: So writers can, it can be a tricky one. Okay. ’cause they, it’s often like not that good a return for or not necessarily worth it for you as an entrepreneur to pay for what it takes a writer to do. And obviously we haven’t really mentioned AI in that part of the process.

[00:41:24] Tintin: AI can obviously do quite a good job these days with like, uh, scripting something for you if you can train it and give all the context. But a good script writer these days is, uh, it might be some, somewhere between 500 to a thousand dollars per video.

[00:41:37] Nathan: Okay.

[00:41:38] Tintin: So I think per video is typically the best way to think about it.

[00:41:44] Tintin: Uh, you can, some script writers might charge per the hour or something like that. I’m sure there are some script writers out there who are like, either I’m not getting paid that much, or, you know, I’m, I’m charging way more. Way more. Yeah. But like, it’s a, as a general rule, it’s something to go off. Yeah. But it just, ’cause it takes, like, to write a good word for word script.

[00:42:01] Tintin: Mm-hmm. It’s gonna take someone like. You know, maybe a day or two even with AI to like, you know, to kind of really actually get something high quality

[00:42:08] Nathan: and hopefully they’re reading it out loud to themselves. Yeah. And, and they’re thinking like, not just is the written word great, but does it flow? Does it

[00:42:14] Tintin: sound Exactly.

[00:42:15] Tintin: And two good channels to look out there, actually both in the personal finance space are Ramit sat, who we mentioned earlier, very well scripted videos, just like, they’re so good. I watched ’em, I say, wow, this is a work of art. And I’m sure that he pays his script writers somewhere in that range. Mm-hmm. And then, uh, the other one is Damien Talks money.

[00:42:32] Tintin: Okay. A UK personal finance channel. And he, uh, has, has a team, something like this. And he’s, he spends 90% of his time writing ’cause that’s where he thinks like the leverages on his channel. He

[00:42:43] Nathan: personally spends

[00:42:44] Tintin: that, he personally spends that time writing. He doesn’t have a script writer, but his videos are very well produced and made and word forward scripts.

[00:42:51] Tintin: So just a good example channel to look at. Okay. Um, and then should we come to the the video editor? Video editor? Yeah. So this is, uh, again, there’s like nuance and context, but typically $150 per video

[00:43:04] Nathan: Okay.

[00:43:04] Tintin: Is the, the kind of lowest you probably want to be.

[00:43:07] Nathan: Okay.

[00:43:07] Tintin: As an entrepreneur trying to take this seriously.

[00:43:09] Tintin: So above that, you’re gonna start to find editors who have good experience. Mm-hmm. And. Uh, actually know what they’re doing. You can go all the way up to like a thousand dollars per video here. Okay. Now, if you’re getting videos that are edited, something like, you know, Ali Dial’s videos or Daniel Priestley’s videos, which have lots of graphics and kind of animations, it’s gonna be like near a thousand dollars.

[00:43:30] Tintin: But obviously if you’re just getting started, you probably want someone in the like $200 video if someone’s

[00:43:34] Nathan: cutting a talking head video.

[00:43:36] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:43:36] Nathan: And that sort of thing without the animations or the

[00:43:38] cuts.

[00:43:39] Tintin: Yeah, it’s doing the basic stuff. Yeah, maybe like 2, 2, 300 for someone who’s good and um, you know, typically per video you can get people on retainers as well.

[00:43:48] Tintin: You can have different setups there

[00:43:49] Nathan: as you have a predictable schedule.

[00:43:51] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:43:51] Nathan: You’re like, Hey, we might, we could be doing, you get someone really good, you might be like, okay, we’re 4,000 a month for the four videos.

[00:43:56] Tintin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[00:43:57] Nathan: But I may able to lock someone in ’cause I’m making this bigger commitment.

[00:44:00] Tintin: Yeah, exactly. And a good tip actually, just for, for everyone watching is the, the best place to find all of these people typically is in your audience. So,

[00:44:08] Nathan: okay.

[00:44:09] Tintin: Obviously if you don’t have an audience, then you have to go find ’em elsewhere, right? If you do have an audience already. Mm-hmm. The reason that’s so good is because they,

[00:44:14] Nathan: they already love

[00:44:15] Tintin: your material.

[00:44:15] Tintin: They already love your stuff and they already know what, know, kind of what your channel’s about. They just like, they know, they have that intuitive sense of what not to do and what to do. So,

[00:44:22] Nathan: so these are all freelance roles. Do you do the YouTube producer?

[00:44:26] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:44:27] Nathan: Part-time, full-time freelance.

[00:44:29] Tintin: It depends on how seriously you’re taking it.

[00:44:30] Tintin: Okay. I think if you’re going all in, you know, um, you wanna hire someone full-time Yeah. It’s very helpful. They’re just gonna be helping you make the channel better from mm-hmm. From like, well, yeah, from day one, but you can get someone kind of fractional or like part-time to start with. And best way probably is just like a day rate to start with.

[00:44:44] Tintin: Mm-hmm. Like, think about, um, what should that be? Go and, uh,

[00:44:49] Nathan: so from the fractional side, how would you structure that?

[00:44:52] Tintin: Um, so maybe it’s just they’re doing like a certain number of hours or certain of days per week and transparently. I actually have less experience with knowing exactly what the, what someone who’s doing that would charge Uhhuh.

[00:45:02] Tintin: Even though I was doing it myself, I was on a full-time salary from, from the full-time perspective, I can share that, you know, salaries for the YouTube producer role. Someone who’s good mm-hmm. Might range between like, uh, in dollars, $60,000 to like all the way up to like 120,000. If you’ve got some, like a really serious channel and you’ve got like someone who’s got tons of experience in the YouTube space, it might be somewhere in that range.

[00:45:21] Tintin: Like, you know, hormo is probably up of that. The top end Yeah. Kind of thing maybe, but then

[00:45:25] Nathan: higher.

[00:45:25] Tintin: Um, then if you’re just like, uh, yeah. On the lower end of, of that spectrum, it’s probably gonna be somewhere around there, but you want someone who’s got experience doing this stuff.

[00:45:33] Nathan: What if on, on the fractional side, if you’re just like, look, I need someone part-time to do all of this, is that like a monthly retainer?

[00:45:41] Nathan: How

[00:45:41] Tintin: would you Yeah, I think I’d probably structure it with like a monthly retainer. Um, maybe a day rate to start with, and then transition into a monthly retainer as well. And the day rate, like, you know, different people come to you with different, obviously asking for different things, but like you might say it could be somewhere between like two 50 to $500 a day potentially.

[00:45:58] Tintin: Okay. Um, again, take that with a, with a pinch of salt.

[00:46:01] Nathan: You say two 50 plus per

[00:46:03] Tintin: day. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:46:05] Nathan: Okay.

[00:46:06] Tintin: And all of these roles, well, actually, um, not all of these roles, these roles, editor, writer, designer, um, you know, you want someone with experience. Typically you can train people, but, um, you’ll just obviously move faster with someone who’s done it before.

[00:46:18] Tintin: And with YouTube producer, you can, that role is like quite trainable. So you can find someone who just like, loves YouTube mm-hmm. As a good sense of organization, loves your

[00:46:25] Nathan: content,

[00:46:26] Tintin: loves your content. It’s like someone to just help, help you with the channel. And, uh, then they can learn the skills of like ideation, ties, thumbnails, all that kind of stuff.

[00:46:34] Nathan: Okay. And, and because they’re following a system that someone Yeah. Like yourself has put together and said

[00:46:40] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:46:40] Nathan: You know, like, watch this video.

[00:46:42] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:46:43] Nathan: Here’s the role

[00:46:43] Tintin: in theory.

[00:46:44] Nathan: Yeah. As the producer, you’re working on these aspects of

[00:46:46] Tintin: it, these things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That

[00:46:48] Nathan: kind of thing. So the, the things I would look for in that producer and add to this or correct anything, I would look for a love for the niche Yeah.

[00:46:54] Nathan: That you’re in.

[00:46:55] Tintin: Absolutely.

[00:46:55] Nathan: Uh, you know, your content specifically a love for YouTube. Mm-hmm. Where like on their free time

[00:47:01] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:47:01] Nathan: They’re studying all of this stuff. Um, like a high aptitude for learning.

[00:47:06] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:47:06] Nathan: Where they tend to learn something once and it sticks with them or

[00:47:09] Tintin: mm-hmm.

[00:47:10] Nathan: Um, that kind of thing.

[00:47:11] Nathan: You don’t have to tell them like, go learn this. Exactly. Yeah. They’re like, oh yeah, I was already watching videos about time. Yeah, exactly. I’m already learning it. And last thing is someone who’s good at systems and follow up

[00:47:18] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:47:19] Nathan: Of like, is this schedule running on time? Yeah. Can I coordinate between these people?

[00:47:24] Nathan: Did we make sure the editor hit their deadline?

[00:47:26] Tintin: Yeah, exactly. A good YouTube producer is like, is like a manager of a business, like a general manager. They’re like, okay, this is the system that we have. Like, is everything working? What needs improvement? Um, where are we kind of falling short? Like all that kind of stuff.

[00:47:38] Tintin: They, and they’re just taking a ton of stuff off the, off the, the entrepreneur’s plate.

[00:47:42] Nathan: Alright. So this gives a clear view on the team. What I’m most curious about is this list of five things to do and then what not to do because I’m like, okay, I can jump into all of this. Yeah. And like, but what exactly should I be spending my time on?

[00:47:54] Nathan: Versus what things should I not touch at all?

[00:47:56] Tintin: Cool. Yeah, let’s, let’s just go through the first, the five things to do first. Okay. Then we can come to not what not to do. So obviously number one is just, is filming,

[00:48:03] Nathan: right? That requires me as the,

[00:48:05] Tintin: yeah, you can’t, as the talent, you can’t, you can’t really replace it.

[00:48:07] Tintin: And uh, if you don’t like filming, then YouTube’s gonna be, gonna be hard. Pick a different, or just pick something else. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, you’re not gonna be able to remove yourself from that. And so obviously you wanna put that into your calendar. Have those blocks of time, like very much cemented in there.

[00:48:22] Tintin: So then after filming, the next thing is gonna be positioning and strategy. So you want to be involved in that. Obviously you don’t want someone, you making that up for you. And, uh, that’s just like a conversation either with yourself or with your, your YouTube producer where you’re just like, you know, how am I fitting into the space, the space, space?

[00:48:41] Tintin: And, uh, obviously thinking about these things like you, your avatar, your niche, just like, you know, being very clear about those things in your mind when you’re kind of approaching the channel. Then the next thing is ideation. So, uh, I even noticed like before this, um, this, uh, session we’re doing now, you were talking to your kinda Instagram person about, um, you know, different ideas that you have for Instagram reels.

[00:49:00] Tintin: Yep. It’s just very much like a natural thing for the entrepreneur, free flow entrepreneur to be doing free. It’s just like you’re gonna have ideas about the content you wanna make. And so the way that I’d be, would be thinking about this is, um, number one rule is whenever you have an idea for a piece of content, YouTube or anything, just write it down or tell someone about it.

[00:49:16] Tintin: So either tell someone on your team or just write down your phone. It’s gonna come, come to you later. Um, but then, but you don’t wanna be doing the deep research into what’s performing well, trying to un really understand your niche. Trying to like, use tools like one of 10 to try and find video outliers to like, get inspiration of what’s working that you want.

[00:49:34] Tintin: Ideally, you want a YouTube producer to be helping with or potentially, uh, a consultant that can help with that, right? If, obviously, if you’re on your own, you can, you can do it on your, you can do it like by yourself, but with the more complicated team setup, really, you wanna be in like the approvals process here.

[00:49:50] Tintin: So you come up with video ideas, you pass ’em on, and then you have like a dedicated meeting potentially. Once a month or once every two weeks. Yeah.

[00:49:57] Nathan: Where would we fit that in

[00:49:58] Tintin: the

[00:49:58] Nathan: schedule? So

[00:49:59] Tintin: I think you can just put like maybe once every two weeks or, um, something like that. Okay. You have like an intentional ideation meeting?

[00:50:06] Tintin: Um, exactly like that. Yeah. You have an ideation meeting, which is where you just discuss the video ideas that you wanna make on the channel. And it can be half an hour, can be an hour or something like that. And your producer or, uh, you and someone else. You can just go through the list of ideas that you’ve got.

[00:50:23] Tintin: Uh, it might spark some new ones and then you can just like choose the ones that you’re actually gonna commit to production. Mm-hmm. So it’s very helpful to have an ideation meeting. It can be once a month and you just like set the videos, uh, that you’re gonna do for that month. Right. On one day. That’s kind of nice and simple as well.

[00:50:37] Tintin: But uh, yeah, that’s kind of how it would

[00:50:40] Nathan: Okay.

[00:50:40] Tintin: Would, would work from the entrepreneur perspective. And then the fourth one was scripting and planning. So,

[00:50:46] Nathan: okay. You involved in that?

[00:50:48] Tintin: You are involved in it in the sense that, um, obviously you are. Like the source of all the, the knowledge and experience this channel is about you and your

[00:50:58] Nathan: right, your 25 years of personal finance

[00:51:00] Tintin: experience.

[00:51:00] Tintin: Exactly. You can’t just repeat, you can’t just outsource that to a, to a writer Completely.

[00:51:04] Nathan: Much as you might wanna. So I

[00:51:04] Tintin: see

[00:51:05] Nathan: a lot of these creators who are really successful. Like, they come on the scene and they blow up in a big way.

[00:51:08] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:51:09] Nathan: They have expertise already. Yeah. They’re not like trying to learn

[00:51:11] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:51:12] Nathan: Being a creator and

[00:51:13] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:51:14] Nathan: Become a neuroscientist. Yeah, exactly. You know, it’s like Andrew Huberman already had all this credibility and he is like, cool. So this podcast thing, how like

[00:51:22] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:51:23] Nathan: Just talking to the mic and Yeah. You know, like great that

[00:51:25] Tintin: Exactly. Yeah. And he can’t just get someone to like script his content

[00:51:27] Nathan: Right.

[00:51:28] Tintin: For him or plan his content. So, uh, an interesting challenge.

[00:51:31] Nathan: It’s gonna be like seven viral waste to whoever’s like, this has no credit, like

[00:51:35] Tintin: Yeah, exactly. Um, a channel that’s like been blowing up recently. This a guy called Callaway, have you come across him? So he’s got like 300,000 subscribers maybe in the last like, uh, 18 months or something like that.

[00:51:45] Tintin: And, um, his video’s a scripted word for word, but, uh, he’s, his content is about his experience as, uh, in the social media game. So he’s, he helps people kinda blow up on social media and um, uh, so he’s probably working with a script writer, but he’ll be sharing like brain dumping, kind of what he wants to talk about.

[00:52:05] Tintin: Maybe an interesting anecdote, um, that he’s like, well, we should get that into the video. And then someone can take that from him and turn it into a script. If you want to turn it into a word for word script. But then Alex Ozzi is just an example. Your audience know he has unscripted videos. Yeah. But what he’ll probably be doing is having conversations with his team about like, okay, we’re gonna go through these specific points.

[00:52:25] Tintin: These maybe these diagrams I’m gonna draw. And his team like, well, I wouldn’t do that, I would do that.

[00:52:30] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:52:30] Tintin: Um, all that kind of stuff. But you need to be involved in the script and planning process. You don’t want to turn up to a filming day that you’ve got in the calendar and see a script that you’ve not read.

[00:52:38] Nathan: Right.

[00:52:38] Tintin: So that is a mistake that me and Ali made a bunch of times, um, was that. I’d be like, Ali, we’ve got the script and we’re gonna film it today. And then he would read the script and be like, oh, I, I wouldn’t quite say it like that. Or like,

[00:52:49] Nathan: right.

[00:52:50] Tintin: All this kinda stuff. We’d approved the idea, but then the script wasn’t what mm-hmm.

[00:52:53] Tintin: What he was expecting. So, and

[00:52:54] Nathan: so these, these scripting days, like review days are really, really,

[00:52:58] Tintin: yeah. So this is these, we had them in for ideation, but they can be, um, would you

[00:53:02] Nathan: do it together?

[00:53:02] Tintin: Well, actually me, what I did with Ali was we had a separate then like script, uh, review session. Okay. So from Ali’s perspective, all he was doing was the filming day.

[00:53:12] Tintin: Yeah. Which he actually did every week. An ideation session or kind of an approval session, and then a script review. And the reason we kept ’em separate was just. Uh, to kind of have like just distinct

[00:53:23] Nathan: stages. Well, there’s in idea ideation, there’s no bad ideas. Yeah. You’re throwing it out there.

[00:53:27] Tintin: You’re in different

[00:53:27] Nathan: mode in, in scripting and writing and planning.

[00:53:30] Nathan: Yeah. There’s lots of bad ideas. Yeah. You’re like, don’t say that. That’s terrible. Yeah. And so to step into the different

[00:53:34] Tintin: head space. Yeah. So, okay. Um,

[00:53:37] Nathan: so then, what am I doing here? So

[00:53:38] Tintin: we can Orange

[00:53:39] Nathan: again.

[00:53:39] Tintin: Oh yeah.

[00:53:40] Nathan: Maybe,

[00:53:41] Tintin: what am I, uh, I guess putting it, it depends on your filming schedule, but you just wanna make sure that for the filming day that you’ve got in, that you have seen, you know what you’re gonna do.

[00:53:51] Nathan: Would you do it um, on a different, actually I’m gonna say with yellow go a different shape.

[00:53:56] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:53:56] Nathan: Um, would you do it on a, like, let’s see, we’re on scripting. Uh, would you do scripting every week if we’re recording every week? Or would you batch that more and like, we could review and improve? Three to four scripts.

[00:54:10] Tintin: Yeah. I think it, it obviously depends on your team and your setup. Mm-hmm. But I would batch script writing as much as you can.

[00:54:16] Nathan: Okay.

[00:54:16] Tintin: So, um, yeah, why don’t we put in like, uh,

[00:54:20] Nathan: like two for the month.

[00:54:21] Tintin: Two for the month? Okay. Yeah. Something like that.

[00:54:22] Nathan: So I’m,

[00:54:24] Tintin: yeah.

[00:54:24] Nathan: Here’s our, I’m gonna have to draw a key later Exactly.

[00:54:27] Nathan: So people can

[00:54:28] Tintin: Yeah,

[00:54:28] Nathan: I understand this.

[00:54:30] Tintin: So, so every, so essentially what we’ve got going on here is like, potentially the entrepreneur in question. They, every two weeks they are deliberately coming up with some video ideas and connecting to a few. Then they’re scripting and planning their videos. They’re batching it.

[00:54:43] Tintin: Maybe they’re doing that just like a whole morning or a whole day. They’re just like getting all like the, the content down that they wanna talk about, maybe turning it into a word for word script. Mm-hmm. And then they’re filming once a month, twice a month, or four times a month, whatever, um, works for them.

[00:54:58] Nathan: Yep. So if I were to map these out here, and if I just put my legend on here, the film is a check mark or all day filming was, uh.

[00:55:07] Tintin: Yeah,

[00:55:07] Nathan: our grid, that’s our Alex Hermo where it’s like,

[00:55:10] Tintin: yeah, yeah. He’s just going for it.

[00:55:11] Nathan: Do the full batch. Then ideation was our circle. Yeah. And scripting is our X. And so they’re sort of the key frame on watching Exactly.

[00:55:21] Nathan: Of like what those aligned to.

[00:55:23] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:55:23] Nathan: And you could put these on some of these on the same day or some other things, but what we’re getting at is that these are ideation and scripting are two separate things.

[00:55:33] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:55:34] Nathan: Like go get lunch between those two activities. Like go, you know, like

[00:55:37] Tintin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:55:38] Nathan: Get in a different head space.

[00:55:39] Tintin: Different head space. Yeah. And finally, number five is just performance. And so as the entrepreneur, you wanna be reviewing whether all this effort that you’re putting in the team, potentially that you’ve put together is actually generating return, is actually performing for you. And obviously the most important metric behind all of that is sales.

[00:55:57] Tintin: Mm. So we don’t care about, uh, views for view’s sake. It’s nice ’cause it builds our personal brand. More people know about us, right? More views is nice, but ultimately entrepreneurs care about sales. And so is the work that we’re doing driving sales for our business. And so a big part of this, we didn’t actually uh, talk about this too much, uh, up here, but in analytics is, uh, tracking your links.

[00:56:20] Tintin: Mm-hmm. So that was one thing that we actually, we missed. Okay. Was being able to track how many links, uh, how many clicks are your links getting

[00:56:27] Nathan: to a lead magnets

[00:56:28] Tintin: to a lead magnet or to an offer.

[00:56:30] Nathan: Yep.

[00:56:30] Tintin: And potentially how many, uh, sales are those clicks generating as well? ’cause there are tools out there that do that.

[00:56:35] Tintin: So one popular one is psychometrics.

[00:56:37] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:38] Tintin: Uh, which is like a, a very popular software for just tracking. Your marketing costs. So seeing where, where people come from.

[00:56:44] Nathan: Yeah. If you’re on the pro plan for Kit, you get a free license to psychometrics.

[00:56:48] Tintin: Oh,

[00:56:48] Nathan: so

[00:56:48] Tintin: amazing. There. You do. Yeah. So that’s, it’s

[00:56:50] Nathan: a great

[00:56:50] piece

[00:56:50] Tintin: of software.

[00:56:50] Tintin: So that’s probably integrates super nicely with, um, uh, using Kit for your lead magnets and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. There’s one from Ed Lawrence who, uh, has a channel about a lot of this stuff, uh, called Rev Track, uh, which is like, I think a little bit more expensive and a little bit newer, but yeah, ultimately you wanna be like keeping a pulse on like, is this effort worth it?

[00:57:08] Tintin: Are we getting a return? Checking how the videos are performing, not obsessing over YouTube studio and the analytics you get in there ’cause you can waste hours. So

[00:57:14] you’re

[00:57:14] Nathan: saying this is at a higher level.

[00:57:16] Tintin: Is it a higher level? Are we actually generating a return?

[00:57:18] Nathan: Is are, are these thumbnails actually working?

[00:57:21] Nathan: Like look at it a monthly view

[00:57:22] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:57:23] Nathan: Is all

[00:57:24] Tintin: Yeah. And like assessing the like team member’s performance, all this kind of stuff. Mm-hmm. Um, but like ultimately like, yeah. Are we,

[00:57:30] Nathan: would you put this on the schedule as well?

[00:57:33] Tintin: Yes. Actually that’s a very good question. I think, um, I would probably set aside like.

[00:57:39] Tintin: An intentional like hour month or something like that. Okay. To, uh, to look into, um, to look into performance review. I love that. Um, so just thinking about what could be improved, uh, maybe it’s a conversation with your YouTube producer, if you’ve got one. It’s a meeting with them. It’s just like, look back at everything we’re doing.

[00:57:58] Nathan: How is the business performing?

[00:57:59] Tintin: How is the business performing,

[00:58:00] Nathan: basically all this time and money that we’re putting in? Is it paying

[00:58:02] Tintin: off? Yeah. I like that. And Ali would often ask me for like a kind of, um, well, I would do monthly reports actually. Mm-hmm. Is what I would, I would do as YouTube producer. I would kind of, uh, be like, this is how many views we got.

[00:58:12] Tintin: This is how many leads we got. Mm-hmm. This is the best performing videos, the worst performing videos. And this is how many clicks we got to our links. How many, like, all this kind of stuff. Right. And so just like a wrap up of like, you know. Whether is,

[00:58:22] Nathan: is working,

[00:58:23] Tintin: weather’s working,

[00:58:23] Nathan: that also helps. Getting that from your YouTube producer helps you understand how well are they seeing the big picture.

[00:58:29] Tintin: Yeah. And

[00:58:29] Nathan: you’re like, oh, this is great. We’re getting more views. And you’re like, wait, we’re up by a hundred more views than last month.

[00:58:34] Tintin: Like, or we’re getting tons

[00:58:36] Nathan: of

[00:58:36] Tintin: views, but like we’re not gonna get any sales. Like, and so that’s why tracking is like part of the flywheel. May, maybe we can have time for that or not, but like the flywheel of making videos, sending people to your offers early leave magnets, and then kind of making sales and, and stuff like, so it, depending on which videos perform well actually drive sales.

[00:58:54] Tintin: You can obviously wanna make more of those videos and less of the videos that, that don’t drive sales. So that’s a very key piece that actually we should have come to, uh, in, in, in that kind of step seven.

[00:59:04] Nathan: So that, that would be coming back to the admin analytics is tying it back.

[00:59:09] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:59:09] Nathan: Just under underlying analytics here.

[00:59:10] Nathan: ’cause they’re tying it back to the performance.

[00:59:12] Tintin: Yeah.

[00:59:13] Nathan: Not just of that video, but of our broader business

[00:59:16] Tintin: metrics. Yeah, exactly. Understanding which videos. Actually move the business forwards. And which videos are just like getting views, but not

[00:59:22] Nathan: vanity

[00:59:23] Tintin: generating leads or Yeah, exactly. Vanity metrics.

[00:59:25] Nathan: That sounds good.

[00:59:26] Tintin: Um, yeah,

[00:59:26] Nathan: let’s step into what not to do. ’cause I think the tendency for a lot of entrepreneurs, creators, all of that is to be like, I can do it all. I can learn all these skills. Yeah, I can dive right in. What’s number one on your list of what you should not do?

[00:59:37] Tintin: Number one is, uh, for every entrepreneur’s editing.

[00:59:40] Tintin: Okay. You don’t need to be doing the video editing. So it’s a simple one. Like it’s just worth being on the list because lemme

[00:59:45] Nathan: write that down. Oh yeah. In orange of the like, don’t do this.

[00:59:48] Tintin: And just to expand on that slightly, you obviously shouldn’t be reviewing the edits as well. In an ideal world, you can obviously do that if you have the time.

[00:59:56] Tintin: But if you have a YouTube producer, they should be able to do that. If you don’t have a YouTube producer, then obviously it’s gonna be you. But then the next one is, uh, titles and thumbnails.

[01:00:04] Nathan: Okay.

[01:00:04] Tintin: Titles are obviously. A simpler skill and like you can see how good the titles are so you can contribute to them.

[01:00:11] Tintin: But then thumbnails are the big one that you definitely don’t need to be doing, and uh, you don’t really need to have like a skill set in it either. It’s helpful if you understand like, you know, what makes people click. Mm-hmm. But it’s not something you to be worrying about if you’ve got a good thumbnail designer and a good YouTube producer.

[01:00:26] Tintin: If you don’t, you do wanna know if the ortho thumb designer is doing a good job or not. Then the next one on here, number three, is just admin. So kind of uploading files, uh, uploading stuff to YouTube, doing the video descriptions, um, being

[01:00:40] Nathan: in the weeds on YouTube studio

[01:00:41] Tintin: being in the weed. You don’t need to be doing that.

[01:00:43] Tintin: Um, either. It can be your editor, it can be your designer, it can be your YouTube producer. It could even be you have a personal assistant who just helps you with like a bunch of other things and they just do all the

[01:00:51] Nathan: mm-hmm. The

[01:00:51] Tintin: like. Setting up the links you are working with psychometrics, all this like admin based stuff.

[01:00:56] Tintin: You don’t need to be doing it. You definitely should be.

[01:00:58] Nathan: You actively should not be doing

[01:01:00] Tintin: it. Actively should not be doing it because it just takes you out of your sort of, you know, your creative headspace as as an entrepreneur in general. And it’s just like low leverage work. Mm-hmm. So someone in the team can be doing it.

[01:01:11] Tintin: Okay. And then the next one, I know we’ve touched on this already, but it was reviewing edits, so just wanna kinda reiterate that point. It’s not an essential thing for you to be doing. Now obviously your videos are very, very important. This is the whole thing. It’s like. The videos are the actual thing that’s driving the whole system forwards.

[01:01:29] Tintin: Um, but you can watch your videos, right. You know, analyze them and intentionally review them in the performance meeting or whenever it is. But you don’t actually need to be like reviewing the edits at some point if you have a YouTube producer. So in this system, yeah. If you don’t, obviously it makes sense to, you’re trying to get

[01:01:45] Nathan: everyone to operate at a higher level, like stay at this higher altitude, focus on the performance, the, the, the quality of the business, you know, what’s the impact’s having there, the quality of your performance when you’re recording on screen, like what I hear you saying is I would far rather have a content creator or a founder spend the time.

[01:02:05] Nathan: Looking back at like, okay, how can I have a better unscreen presence?

[01:02:09] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:02:10] Nathan: Then well hold on. That exact cut isn’t what I would make Exactly. Why did you exactly run it for three seconds there instead of five, you know?

[01:02:16] Tintin: Yeah. And being like, oh, there’s a spelling error in that text, or like that kind of stuff because that’s, that’s, that’s a

[01:02:20] Nathan: flaw in the system.

[01:02:21] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:02:21] Nathan: Don’t,

[01:02:22] Tintin: yeah.

[01:02:22] Nathan: Don’t try to be a, a cog in the

[01:02:24] Tintin: machine. Yeah. Your and your editor should be good enough that like, there aren’t many mistakes. So you are working to, to that point where you have an editing guideline document where the editor just like, he knows what they’re doing and they know what they’re doing and when, when they send you the video, if you don’t have a YouTube producer and you are reviewing the edit, you’re just like, nice.

[01:02:39] Tintin: Yeah. Looks good. Um, and you know, it’s not taking up a ton of your time, but in general. Yeah, if, if you, you wanna avoid these kind of like lower leverage

[01:02:50] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[01:02:50] Tintin: Tasks. And then the final one here was, uh, expecting results too soon. So it’s obviously less like a weekly task that you’re gonna be having on your schedule.

[01:03:00] Tintin: Yep. Which, just a kind of mindset point. It takes time for YouTube channels to kinda get working and sometimes it doesn’t. You know, there’s, there’s obviously all of this is just like, there’s so much context to apply to your own business and, and channel stuff. Sometimes YouTube channels can take off very quickly.

[01:03:14] Tintin: Uh, if you get the right team behind it, you have the right strategy, all this kind of stuff. But a good mindset to have is like, okay, I’m gonna take YouTube seriously. I’m gonna commit to a filming days and a posting schedule of once a week or, um, or every two weeks. That was actually something we missed was how often should I post?

[01:03:29] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:03:30] Tintin: Um, uh, which is like ultimately once a week is like just the staple.

[01:03:35] Nathan: That’ll work just fine.

[01:03:36] Tintin: Um, I wouldn’t go less than once every two weeks because you’re just not making enough content to, to grow. And if you want to be gold standard or you wanna like push, then twice a week is gonna be, uh, like a reasonable maximum.

[01:03:50] Tintin: Going beyond twice, twice a week is just like the content quality starts to dip. Your audience can’t keep up and it’s just the returns aren’t there. So that’s um, uh,

[01:04:00] Nathan: so we’re talking about expecting quick results. Yes. So what time period am I allowed to take a step back? I implement the system. When can I take a step back and be like, is this working?

[01:04:11] Nathan: Like, and start to see based on results.

[01:04:13] Tintin: Yeah. I think three to six months is like,

[01:04:16] Nathan: okay. The first time they, you were line

[01:04:17] Tintin: is, yeah. I think within three months you are like, we’re just, I’m just trying to make videos and get the system kind of going here, whether it is with the team or without one. Whether it’s just you or you’ve got a little bit of help, you’re just like, I’m just finding my feet.

[01:04:28] Tintin: I’m, I’m taking this seriously. I’ve got my filming days scheduled in. Right. And I’m putting, and all the inputs are in place for at least three months. Yep. Because that’s that saying, you know, results, were a lagging indicator of, of inputs. We wanna, we wanna have the inputs for like, at least three months.

[01:04:43] Nathan: Yep.

[01:04:43] Tintin: Six months would be a better frame.

[01:04:46] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:46] Tintin: Even better than that would be like, I’m doing this for, you know, 2, 3, 4 years

[01:04:50] Nathan: no matter what.

[01:04:50] Tintin: Or just like for the long term, you know,

[01:04:51] Nathan: I’ll, I’ll try to be 1% better

[01:04:53] Tintin: and I’m just gonna keep going. Yeah. So yeah, there is, there is that mindset as well. And um, yeah, it’s very tempting to start YouTube putting lots of effort, realize how draining filming is planning content, like how intense this stuff can be.

[01:05:07] Tintin: And then just be like, I’m not seeing any results after two months and I’m gonna give up because I’m not enjoying it. And obviously that’s a totally fair business decision, but it can take time to

[01:05:16] Nathan: get

[01:05:16] Tintin: results.

[01:05:17] Nathan: So I’ve talked to literally thousands of creators

[01:05:20] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:05:21] Nathan: In my, the last 13 to 15 years that I’ve been in this business.

[01:05:26] Nathan: Yeah. And I have never met a single creator who showed up every single day

[01:05:30] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:05:30] Nathan: For at least 30 minutes or an hour.

[01:05:33] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:05:33] Nathan: Like actively tried to get better.

[01:05:35] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:05:36] Nathan: And did that for multiple years.

[01:05:37] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:05:37] Nathan: And was not like substantially successful. Like six figure to seven figure creators.

[01:05:42] Tintin: Exactly.

[01:05:43] Nathan: I’ve met tons and tons of creators who tried it for two weeks.

[01:05:48] Nathan: Two months, yeah. That sort of thing. And died out and never found success.

[01:05:51] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:05:51] Nathan: But I have never met the person who’s like, I was grinding it out. I did all of the things.

[01:05:56] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:05:57] Nathan: And I learned continually. Yeah. And I didn’t find success. I,

[01:06:00] Tintin: yeah.

[01:06:00] Nathan: I just, I’ve never met that person.

[01:06:02] Tintin: And they, yeah, exactly. So. You can expect results if you put in the, if you put in the work.

[01:06:07] Nathan: Yeah. But set that timeframe around.

[01:06:09] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:06:09] Nathan: Um, in three to six months, I’m looking at how well is my system, my inputs? Am I checking all these boxes? I’ve been doing all that.

[01:06:16] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:06:16] Nathan: And then six plus months is when I’m allowed to start to see, okay, are there results?

[01:06:21] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:06:22] Nathan: Like, are, are we improving in results based on the inputs that we have?

[01:06:25] Tintin: Exactly. Yeah. And we drive actually driving sales to our business, which is what this is all about. We’re getting the return that we, we were hoping for when we started to take this really seriously. And an interesting channel who’s actually gone through a very kind of. Uh, gone through this, this shift, um, very recently there’s a woman called, uh, Joanna V or y I’m, she sure say her name, but she has a channel about copywriting.

[01:06:46] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:06:47] Tintin: Have you, do you know her?

[01:06:47] Nathan: She’s a friend of mine from like 10 years ago.

[01:06:49] Tintin: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. So have you seen her YouTube channel?

[01:06:51] Nathan: I have not. We’ve, we used to speak at the same conferences and all of that, but I, I haven’t seen her like

[01:06:56] Tintin: rising

[01:06:56] Nathan: YouTube.

[01:06:57] Tintin: I don’t really know much about her. I just have, I’ve just, like her, one of her videos popped up on my feed and I was like, looked at her channel.

[01:07:01] Tintin: I was like, whoa, this is super interesting. So she, for a couple years on her channel was just posting like two minute long, three minute long videos, like clips of stuff or just like little talking head bits. The titles were really, uh, just like descriptive and boring.

[01:07:17] Nathan: Yep.

[01:07:17] Tintin: And they just weren’t following like basic title principles.

[01:07:20] Tintin: The thumbnails were like really amateur, but they’d been design in Canva without any kind of thought in them. Not that canva’s actually a bad, uh Right. A bad thumbnail tool. Um, but she was making these like kind of basic mistakes. Then you can see the video where she clearly. Got some help.

[01:07:35] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:36] Tintin: She started to understand the platform.

[01:07:37] Tintin: She started to put in some, like, regular filming sessions. She started to implement this system and uh, the first video that she did, uh, kind of with her like new approach to YouTube has got over 200,000 views overnight. So she implemented the system and it just went, like it, her lead sky skyrocket, skyrocketed, her business skyrocketed, and she has got like a bunch of unqualified leads coming through.

[01:07:58] Tintin: ’cause she was getting so many views, but, uh, her business is also like right. Flourishing as a result. And so she did, like, it doesn’t have to be complicated, you know, it, it can feel super overwhelming, especially looking at this board right now. But, um, you know, ultimately it’s, it doesn’t, it’s the more seriously you take yourself, more effort you put in right.

[01:08:17] Tintin: For the longer timeframe and just 1% improvements. Like, you’re gonna get the results that you’re looking for eventually.

[01:08:23] Nathan: Yep. I love that. Okay. I wanna ask you a couple rapid fire questions and then I wanna recap this thing.

[01:08:28] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:08:28] Nathan: And, uh, let people know where they can find you and all of that.

[01:08:31] Tintin: Oh yeah.

[01:08:31] Nathan: So first rapid fire question.

[01:08:33] Nathan: How much time as the founder, let’s say I hire. Okay. Yeah. Hire this team and all of that.

[01:08:38] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:08:39] Nathan: What is the amount of time I should expect to spend per week to bring this to life?

[01:08:43] Tintin: Cool. Uh, I think per week you should expect like a day. Okay. I think of your, of your working week. Okay. Around that at least is gonna go towards growing the YouTube channel.

[01:08:54] Tintin: You

[01:08:54] Nathan: think eight hours a week I could get this done.

[01:08:57] Tintin: Yeah. Eight hours a week is gonna be, uh, kind of, at least probably what you’re gonna need to, to do to implement this. It might to start with take up like two days a week of your time. You’re getting into three days a week, then you’re probably spending too much time.

[01:09:08] Nathan: Something’s wrong with your system.

[01:09:09] Tintin: Yeah. I mean, maybe it’s to start with you, it is like a bit heavy. Mm-hmm. And it, and, and, uh, hard and you’re trying to figure everything out. But ultimately it doesn’t have to be two full days as well. It can be like mornings or, you know Yeah. Different blocks here and there, like as we’ve got, but um, yeah, one to one to two days.

[01:09:23] Tintin: Uh, when I was working with Ali, he had one filming day per week, and then these two ideation and scripting meetings mm-hmm. Which were like an hour each, let’s say. So it was kind of amounted to like a day and a half.

[01:09:33] Nathan: Okay.

[01:09:34] Tintin: Uh, per week. So,

[01:09:36] Nathan: yeah. But he’s also. At the top of YouTube, you know,

[01:09:40] Tintin: he’s also

[01:09:40] Nathan: someone who’s running a full-time business.

[01:09:42] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:09:43] Nathan: Uh, could be doing it

[01:09:44] Tintin: in,

[01:09:44] Nathan: in less time. Yeah. But it’s important to call out. Like that is a meaningful commitment.

[01:09:47] Tintin: It’s a meaningful commitment as we, but as we discussed before mm-hmm. The episode, you can set the constraint.

[01:09:52] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:53] Tintin: I don’t want this to take more than a morning a week. Right. And that’s an interesting kind of thought experiment.

[01:09:57] Tintin: It’s like, okay, if I had to do YouTube in a really fun, light way that was gonna energize me in a morning a week, or maybe even like two hours a week, what would that look like? You’re gonna go through all these steps kind of regardless ’cause of just how you make a YouTube video. Right. And whether it’s you’re spending five minutes on one of them, you’re gonna be doing them.

[01:10:14] Tintin: Uh, but that’s also an interesting thought experiment. It’s like, okay, I don’t wanna spend eight hours a week, but I’m kind of interested if I spend, you know, two hours a week, what does that look like?

[01:10:21] Nathan: Right.

[01:10:21] Tintin: And uh.

[01:10:23] Nathan: That was gonna be my next question is like, what constraints could you put on it? And one of my favorite questions to ask is what would have to be true?

[01:10:29] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:10:30] Nathan: And so you say like, what would’ve to be true for me to, to hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube from zero

[01:10:35] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:10:35] Nathan: In 12 months.

[01:10:36] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:10:37] Nathan: With only three hours a week at my time. And you could map it out and you’re like, well, I have to, you know, spend more money than time, you know?

[01:10:44] Tintin: Exactly. Just play with the pieces.

[01:10:45] Tintin: Yeah. Because it’s a, it’s a production system. It’s just like, okay, this here, this there. Like just moving it around. I think that’s an awesome question. Yeah. And that is the one that people should be asking is like, what outcome do I want? And what would have to be true to get the outcome?

[01:10:56] Nathan: Hmm. Okay. Final question of everybody that you hire.

[01:11:01] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:11:01] Nathan: What is the like highest leverage role that you bring in?

[01:11:05] Tintin: I think the best way to answer that is to think about, just look at the, the, the production system here. These first four steps

[01:11:12] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[01:11:12] Tintin: Are really where your, your gains are to be had. It’s like the 80 20, this is leverage. Yeah. This is the leverage.

[01:11:17] Tintin: And that’s, that comes before filming. So the 80 20 of YouTube is all in like the preparation. So what videos are we actually choosing to make? What, uh, what titles and thumbnails in are we gonna put on them? And then what is gonna be in the content

[01:11:31] Nathan: right

[01:11:31] Tintin: before you can get to filming. So that’s where the 80 20 is.

[01:11:34] Tintin: And so,

[01:11:34] Nathan: whereas most people do the reverse.

[01:11:36] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:11:37] Nathan: They’re like obsessed. They spend all their time filming and then tons of time editing.

[01:11:41] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:11:41] Nathan: And then they’re like. On the analytics and all of that. Yeah. And you’re like, well, the analytics aren’t good because your ideation, you’re positioning

[01:11:47] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:11:47] Nathan: Your thumbnail.

[01:11:48] Nathan: Those were all not

[01:11:49] Tintin: good. Exactly. There’s, there’s a channel I love by a friend of mine called, uh, Lewis, who has a channel called Mule of Knowledge and 600,000 subscribers or something. He teaches like this on a whiteboard. His videos are like 15, 20 minutes, no editing, no cuts, like, kind of like a Z. But he, uh, spent so much time thinking about like, how do I wanna explain these, these concepts?

[01:12:07] Tintin: He, he’s talking about, um, uh, kind of like, um, psychology mm-hmm. Mindset, being a social person dealing with social anxiety. And he like, uh, it’s all just on a whiteboard, like you’re in a classroom with him. Right. There’s no editing, but his camera presence is just so good that he doesn’t really need it, but all of his returns are in this, in this like writing and planning and ideation phase and not in the, like, in the editing and, and stuff like that.

[01:12:31] Tintin: So

[01:12:31] Nathan: that’s something else that has stood out to me about Dan Martel. Yeah. So he’s been a friend of mine for, I don’t know, 10 plus years now. Yeah. And I once went and spoke at his mastermind. Yeah. For like, um, his SaaS founders group, right? So it’s the top people in his group, maybe 25, 30 people there. And I spoke about a concept and shared it all and he jumps up and he is like, you know what you need?

[01:12:50] Nathan: You need a diagram? Yeah. And he’s like, put it in a triangle. Here’s these. Yeah. And he had that ability, like your friend to say, I. Let me take this complicated idea. Yeah. That, you know, I talked about for like six minutes or so.

[01:13:01] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:13:01] Nathan: And then he like heard that, distilled it down. Yeah. Put it in his di a neat diagram that everyone could walk away with and Dan Martel talking more.

[01:13:08] Nathan: A few of these people who are

[01:13:09] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:13:10] Nathan: Really influential. Yeah. Have gotten very, very good at that.

[01:13:12] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:13:13] Nathan: And like that’s in the 80 20.

[01:13:14] Tintin: Exactly. Yeah. I’ve started to watch Taki Moore’s videos as well. Oh, he’s so good. I don’t quite have the problems that he’s like talking about in terms of like, you know, eight figure entrepreneurs.

[01:13:21] Tintin: But, um, it’s, a lot of it is just in, in these first four steps, isn’t it? Like he’s very good on camera. He’s not really editing the videos, he’s just, you know, so he, he’s definitely thinking about these things even though it looks simple. Yeah. On camera when you’re watching.

[01:13:33] Nathan: I love that. Okay, so we’ve got a bunch of things here.

[01:13:36] Nathan: What I love about this overall is you’ve mapped out the entire system, given people a playbook that they can clone directly into their business and say, okay, if I’m willing to put in this level of commitment, you know, the money that we’ve outlined, like

[01:13:48] Tintin: yeah.

[01:13:48] Nathan: All of the steps are here. Um, I think this is fantastic.

[01:13:52] Nathan: Now people want more help going through this process. Right. And they’re saying, okay, this is good.

[01:13:57] Tintin: Yeah.

[01:13:57] Nathan: You know, an hour and whatever, hour and 15 minutes you gave me the breakdown. Um, but talk for a second about like one where people can find you and your content. Yeah. And then two, the program that you run to help people with this.

[01:14:08] Nathan: Exactly.

[01:14:08] Tintin: Yeah. So what I do is, uh, actually I help people who have built audiences on YouTube already. So YouTubers first and help them build businesses kind of off the back of it. Oh, smart. A bit more of the monetization side. Yep. And that is a program called the hundred K YouTuber. Mm-hmm. Or a hundred thousand dollars YouTuber.

[01:14:23] Tintin: It’s just like a fun name. And, uh, so you can find that at a hundred k yt.com is the, is the URL. Um, but my YouTube channel is Tintin Smith. And then, uh, so yeah, I’m, I can definitely help people kind of, um. Like, I can coach people to, to implement their systems kind of through that program if they’re the right fit.

[01:14:42] Tintin: But if you want this actually like done for you, there are people who do just come along and like, we will take all of this off your hands. Except for like filming and,

[01:14:49] Nathan: yeah.

[01:14:49] Tintin: And, and, and a bit of scripting and stuff like that. A friend of mine staff, uh, I dunno if you’ve come across him, but he, he’s not my business partner.

[01:14:55] Tintin: He’s just like a best mate and I’m gonna give him a plug ’cause he uh, he has a done for you YouTube agency.

[01:15:00] Yeah.

[01:15:01] Tintin: And it’s like one of the best in the space. And uh, you can just go to his LinkedIn, like Safwan Mohammed and book a call there with, with SAF if you want like a done for you version. Yeah.

[01:15:09] Tintin: Which is which I don’t offer. So I think it makes sense to chat. I

[01:15:12] Nathan: love that. Well, everyone should go search on YouTube. Just Tintin Smith.

[01:15:15] Tintin: Tintin Smith. Yeah.

[01:15:15] Nathan: Go find you there. And then for every, anyone who’s watching who is obsessed with YouTube maybe already has an audience Yeah. Is like, well hold on.

[01:15:22] Nathan: You’re talking about numbers that are far beyond. Uh, you know, the revenue per Yeah. Video that I’m getting then that’s where your program comes in. Exactly. You can say, Hey, let me help you build the business.

[01:15:32] Tintin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I have a weekly newsletter, which I send on Kit, obviously as well. Thank very much.

[01:15:37] Tintin: So, uh, we can put that in the, the link in the description or something that as well, in case people want to kind of read my, my weekly updates on, on YouTube and building one of these businesses and stuff like that. Perfect.

[01:15:46] Nathan: Well, thanks so much for coming on.

[01:15:47] Tintin: Thank you very much, Nathan. I really enjoyed it.

[01:15:49] Nathan: If you’re thinking about how to structure the right offer for your YouTube audience, episode 87 with Jay Clouse is the next one to watch. Jay breaks down why courses are losing ground and what high ticket offer structures are actually gonna work long term. Specifically for creators who already have an audience coming in from YouTube, like the video.

[01:16:05] Nathan: If you enjoyed it, hit subscribe on YouTube or wherever you’re listening, and I’ll see you next week.

[00:00:00] Nathan: Were you at WDS in 2012?

[00:00:01] Chase: I never went to A WDS, but I was always doing like the, like the, you were always the tour guide for like the cool kids. I guess. I didn’t know they were the cool kids even. It was just, it’s like

[00:00:11] Nathan: just the people who showed up.

[00:00:12] Chase: I was just, oh, you gotta come to this pizza place with me.

[00:00:14] Nathan: Yeah. You know, because how You were living in Portland then?

[00:00:16] Chase: I was living in Portland.

[00:00:17] Nathan: Okay. I showed up. WDS 2012 knew no one.

[00:00:20] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[00:00:21] Nathan: Actually, the very first event that I went to was the Think Traffic meetup.

[00:00:26] Chase: Okay.

[00:00:27] Nathan: Because the first two people that I met at WDS were James Clear. Mm-hmm. And Caleb Wick.

[00:00:32] Chase: Yeah.

[00:00:33] Nathan: And I registered, went over, like, talked to two tall Baldman and they were like, you seem friendly, I guess. I don’t know. Perfect. And so I met them and was like talking, and then Caleb’s like, well, I’m headed to the think traffic thing. Do you wanna, you wanna come? And I was like, sure.

[00:00:47] Chase: Right

[00:00:47] Nathan: on. And so then I met Corbett and Steve Cam and all these people who

[00:00:50] Chase: Yeah.

[00:00:51] Nathan: Were like characters in that space. But then it was probably the next year that we met. Maybe the next year, I would imagine.

[00:00:57] Chase: Yeah.

[00:00:58] Nathan: I feel like you came onto the scene and were just immediately like connecting with everybody, designing everyone’s websites. Mm. That was the thing. And like as a designer, I was like, who is this guy?

[00:01:09] Nathan: Stuff is really, really good. So I’m gonna start by talking about the kinda the skillset of a designer.

[00:01:15] Chase: Mm.

[00:01:16] Nathan: Because you’re like this creator, every man. Like you just take on all the pro, like all the projects and you do all the things. But I first noticed you for the design element.

[00:01:25] Chase: Yeah.

[00:01:26] Nathan: Like, were you professionally trained as a designer?

[00:01:28] Nathan: Like how did that No,

[00:01:29] Chase: I read a lot of websites, you know, I read a lot of blogs and stuff, but No, uh, but I knew how to use computers. Uhhuh. I knew how to use Photoshop from like a, a pirated version back in college when I needed to make band posters. So I knew how to use the computers and uh, and then I had like a sense of, you know, it’d be cool if it was like this.

[00:01:49] Chase: Then I figured, figured it out from there.

[00:01:51] Nathan: I feel like musicians into content creators is like a underused path.

[00:01:57] Chase: Yeah.

[00:01:58] Nathan: Like what are the skill sets from music that Yeah. You’ve brought in. Because I feel like you, that’s a space where you have to do everything. You have to figure it out. You

[00:02:05] Chase: have to,

[00:02:06] Nathan: yeah.

[00:02:06] Nathan: And you like the hard skills with the, the, uh, you know, mixing and editing. Yeah. Like all this carries over to video. Like what’s the

[00:02:14] direction

[00:02:14] Chase: there? Yeah. So I mean, I’d say the through line is taste point of view. Perspective, like intention.

[00:02:21] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:02:21] Chase: Right. It’s like, oh, this is, you know, as a musician, I never sat down and go like, okay, I want like a, like a four 40 beats per minute love song.

[00:02:29] Chase: Something that has, like, I, a lot of producers now, like if I was professional, I’d probably be thinking like that. Mm-hmm. But I was always like, you know, oh man, I miss, or, or whatever. Like, fuck you do. Like, just like,

[00:02:42] Nathan: like what, what do I feel and how do I

[00:02:44] Chase: express

[00:02:44] Nathan: that feeling? Yes.

[00:02:45] Chase: I was in the hardcore scene in the Bay Area, so there was like, um, and in the, like the evangelical, like the developing evangelical worship scene, there was a premium on like the rawest emotion actually.

[00:02:58] Chase: Okay. Not only that, was that like moving and touching. It just, it felt cool, like it looked cool and I wanted to be like that. Mm-hmm. So there was, um, there was an exploration of feeling on purpose, which requires a. You to get out from like the hair, like a little bit to like actually be seen. Yeah. Right.

[00:03:19] Chase: So it’s this mix of like, look at me. Mm-hmm. I’m gonna do something that’s real at you and what happens. That’s a very tender balance, trying to do that. ’cause what happens is you start doing, you start wanting to do the thing that they wanna see mm-hmm. More than the thing that you want, or you, you believe that they’re not gonna want the thing that you want that, that you’re doing.

[00:03:42] Chase: Mm-hmm. So you get more insular with it. Right. Uh, those are at least two paths that you can take. Right. But to be a creator, you’re like open, openhearted and open. Mm-hmm. Authentic. And like, it’s okay, you can look at me without getting to like, fucking look at me, dude. Yeah. Because you can, you can feel, you can feel it.

[00:04:03] Chase: Almost people, there’s

[00:04:03] Nathan: a line there and once you cross it, someone’s like, oh, you’re just show boating. You’re just yes in it for the attention or whatever else. This is no longer authentic,

[00:04:10] Chase: ironically. Like ironically for me, I was really good at both of those.

[00:04:15] Nathan: Okay.

[00:04:15] Chase: Some people are like, really think I’m a douche bag.

[00:04:20] Chase: Anybody who spends time with me is like, oh my God, he is not a douche bag.

[00:04:23] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:04:23] Chase: You know? Um, and I’m okay with them thinking I’m a douche bag.

[00:04:27] Nathan: My favorite thing is when people talk about. Someone who has like an online persona.

[00:04:32] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:32] Nathan: And then they talk about hanging out with him in person. And they use the word actually.

[00:04:36] Chase: Yeah.

[00:04:37] Nathan: So it’s like, like Nick Huber Uhhuh. Right. Someone’s like, you’re friends with Nick Huber, you know, or something. Or I’ll hear someone say, yeah, I met Nick Huber at a conference and I actually really like him. You are like the word actually know, like, I hung out with chase ribs and I actually really like it.

[00:04:51] Nathan: Totally. You know, I say, but actually it’s like this disconnect between how they come across in person,

[00:04:57] Chase: right? Yeah.

[00:04:57] Nathan: Or like, and or like the, the human to human connection that comes through versus

[00:05:02] Chase: Yeah. Persona. ’cause that’s, it’s an, it’s like, it’s something about our, like, something I believe is like our, you know, the way that the internet work

[00:05:10] mm-hmm.

[00:05:10] Chase: Is work, the way that the internet works is through nervous systems.

[00:05:14] Nathan: Okay.

[00:05:14] Chase: You know, this is what, like, you’re designing a website from your billion year old year old nervous system. To create an experience in someone else’s billion year old nervous system on the other side of a screen. It’s like ba, you’re like, like look on two sides of a window.

[00:05:29] Chase: Mm-hmm. Right. And the reality of the, of, of how this nervous system, in fact, like you walk by someone in the grocery store, this is all online and, and making assumptions and judgements and this, that and the other, just as much as on the internet and just as much as, uh, as in the show and in the game and and mm-hmm.

[00:05:50] Chase: And in the, the market so to speak. You know? So like the nervous system really matters in business stuff is something that has taken me a long time to, to think about. But even from the beginning, that’s why I oriented towards the feeling when I was designing websites. It was like, I just wanted it to feel cool.

[00:06:10] Chase: I just wanted to be fucking interesting. Right. Pardon my friend. I just wanted to be like, just like, hey. Check this out. And, and every time I designed someone’s website, I would do it in Photoshop and I would, and I couldn’t use Laura Ssom. Mm-hmm. I can’t be like, well, is headlights gonna go here? Or blah, blah, you know,

[00:06:25] Nathan: no er text,

[00:06:26] Chase: I would, I would write it like, here’s what, how, here’s what I would do.

[00:06:30] Chase: And every single time they used my copy throughout. Right. So that’s where I started to realize,

[00:06:34] Nathan: yeah. Many of them were writers.

[00:06:35] Chase: Yeah. And

[00:06:36] Nathan: they’re,

[00:06:36] Chase: all of them were writers. Yeah. And that’s where I realized, like, okay, I’ve got some copywriting. Right. And that came from the, like, you know, I was trained as a pastor.

[00:06:44] Chase: I’m like a word, I’m a poet. I’m, I like the words. Mm-hmm. I like the, the depth of things. And that’s like, you know, you’re studying scripture, that’s words. Right. It’s not pictures. You know, it’s, it’s interesting that, like, that ended up pulling through into a, a marketing sort of point of view. Another thing that’s always been challenging for me is like, is we are marketing on the web.

[00:07:06] Chase: Mm-hmm. We’re asking you to pay attention to a thing. And that took a long time. It’s still sort of challenge, like I’m doing a men’s retreat this this weekend and my girlfriend’s like, you need to make a video where you just say, come to my men’s retreat. I’m always like,

[00:07:21] Nathan: like be as direct as

[00:07:22] Chase: possible.

[00:07:22] Chase: Yeah. As direct as PO and I, and it’s still a little bit of a challenge to me, but that’s what we’re doing. We’re honestly, we’re honestly asking for you to pay attention to this thing, but we’re smuggling it, it in. Mm-hmm. Also where it’s like, Hey, have you ever wondered why this, that, and the other is so important?

[00:07:37] Chase: Like, I have Chase, I help creators deal with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s the, and then, you know, you we’re like, we’ve got some nugget. We’re trying to smuggle in. You can’t just like say, here’s the point, right? You have to like juice it up a bit. And then the reason why you want them to pay attention to that actually is so they’ll work with you or buy your product or this, that and the other.

[00:07:57] Chase: It’s another phase of the creators is like, we just want people to pay attention. And then you get some attention and you’re like, oh, wait, I’m broke. Like,

[00:08:05] Nathan: okay, so taste.

[00:08:06] Chase: Yeah.

[00:08:06] Nathan: I feel like there’s so many things that are out, like learnable. If you said, Nathan, I need you to sit down and learn how to build a house, I’d be like, no problem.

[00:08:14] Chase: Yeah,

[00:08:15] Nathan: I can follow, you know, I can, I can do all this. Learn to code.

[00:08:17] Chase: Yeah.

[00:08:18] Nathan: Learn Photoshop, learn all these skill sets. Not a problem. You said, Hey, I need you to learn how to have good taste. Yeah,

[00:08:23] Chase: yeah.

[00:08:23] Nathan: When I’d be like, I don’t have good taste. You know,

[00:08:26] Chase: like I,

[00:08:27] Nathan: I take it personally in some way, but there’s all these creators that we talk to or or, uh, admire their work and they’re like, oh man, they just have taste or musicians, that sort of thing.

[00:08:36] Nathan: How do you go about developing taste?

[00:08:39] Chase: Okay, first answer is that I glass quote. Do you know the one I’m talking about?

[00:08:43] Nathan: Uh, tell me I, if

[00:08:45] Chase: you can. It’s like there’s, there’s, it’s, it’s fascinating to me that there’s still a few things from the early days of the internet mm-hmm. That are just as relevant.

[00:08:53] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:08:54] Chase: You know, like Gary V at Web 2.0 conference or whatever it is. Like, you could, you could watch that today and it was like 15, 20 years ago. It’s just as relevant.

[00:09:03] Nathan: Right.

[00:09:03] Chase: This IRA glass quote of him talking about taste. When you first start making things, it’s disappointing because your taste is higher than your capabilities.

[00:09:11] Chase: Mm-hmm. But as you keep going, your, like, your taste is up here and your capabilities are down here as you make things. Right. This is what my answer is. As you make things,

[00:09:22] Nathan: you build, taste,

[00:09:22] Chase: you as you become the man in the arena.

[00:09:25] Mm-hmm.

[00:09:25] Chase: Right. As you’re actually not like going like, I would do that differently, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:09:29] Chase: As you’re actually making things, that’s how it, that’s how it gets better. Mm-hmm. To make things and put them out. You have to confront a lot of psychological material that, let’s just put it that way. Yeah. You have to confront a lot, namely your fear of rejection. Right. Which is what, like wanted to take me out for forever and then I figured out how to do a personality that was like, I really don’t care.

[00:09:51] Chase: And then it’s like, you know, uh, it catches up with you over time. Yeah. But there is a way where you can honestly open-hearted step into creating and making things. And even though you’re afraid that you’re not gonna get the views, you’re gonna feel the rejection and all this other stuff. Like, that’s why we stay out of the game.

[00:10:09] Chase: Mm-hmm. That’s why we stay out. That’s also why we sabotage ourselves. All of this like tricky psychological material is very much at play in creator business. Right. Even though it sounds like I just make a blog or whatever. It’s like all of this is what I realize now and what I’ve helped some clients with is like, this is, you actually are, you are determined not to be seen.

[00:10:33] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:33] Chase: You like want to prove it to your, to yourself that you don’t want to, that you’re not good enough for it. We gotta work through some of that so that you can step out in ways where you can see the risk that’s take for you.

[00:10:46] Nathan: Right.

[00:10:46] Chase: You know?

[00:10:47] Nathan: Yeah. There, I’m thinking about what you’re saying about taste and the hourglass quote of you basically put in the reps.

[00:10:54] Chase: Yeah.

[00:10:54] Nathan: And you know, you, the frustrating part of creation is the gap between what you think you should be able to create. Yeah. What you want to create, what, what you have the skillset for. Something that helped me a lot is just directly copying other people’s work.

[00:11:05] Chase: Totally.

[00:11:06] Nathan: Like going into, when I was learning Photoshop.

[00:11:09] Nathan: I would pull up a website or a graphic designer or something else and say, I’m going to recreate this pixel. Perfect.

[00:11:15] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:15] Nathan: And to try to understand what are the techniques that you literally

[00:11:18] Chase: did that

[00:11:18] Nathan: Oh yeah.

[00:11:19] Chase: Oh, wow.

[00:11:19] Nathan: Because you would go through and I didn’t know that was a technique.

[00:11:22] Chase: Yeah.

[00:11:22] Nathan: Years later, um, I’ve heard like Sam Parr and other people talk about copy work, where they do that with, um, great writing.

[00:11:29] Chase: Mm.

[00:11:30] Nathan: Where they’ll actually pull up, you know, Ernest Hemingway or whoever they’re trying to and

[00:11:33] Chase: just start typing along

[00:11:34] Nathan: and, and actually hand write it.

[00:11:35] Chase: Yeah. Wow.

[00:11:36] Nathan: To get like the connection to your brain.

[00:11:38] Chase: Yeah.

[00:11:39] Nathan: And so there’s one aspect of that where if you don’t know what to make,

[00:11:42] Chase: yeah.

[00:11:42] Nathan: Go make something that’s an exact copy of someone else’s and, and you’re like, internalize those and build those skills.

[00:11:47] Chase: Lemme pause You there. Can you remember what you’re about to say?

[00:11:50] Nathan: Uhhuh?

[00:11:50] Chase: Because the time to copy something mm-hmm. And do that. Right. That is like sacred. Yeah. In this today’s day and age, the Nathan, the younger Nathan Barry going like, I’m gonna, I’m gonna actually just make this, I’m gonna fuck around with this and make this.

[00:12:09] Chase: That is, that’s the element that like, that’s how you build taste mm-hmm. Is have that time Yeah. Built in to try something. So specifically to copy something, but also just that time alone is like, I’m putting a pin in that for people to like mm-hmm. Double click this idea that you can, you gotta slow down enough

[00:12:25] Nathan: Right.

[00:12:25] Chase: To actually start copying someone. And I’m sitting here and so are you saying like, oh, I’m glad I did that. Like

[00:12:31] Nathan: Right.

[00:12:31] Chase: That’s valuable.

[00:12:32] Nathan: Yeah. You

[00:12:33] Chase: know.

[00:12:33] Nathan: Well, and so basically carving it, like first, the intention of saying, Hey, I want to develop taste.

[00:12:39] Chase: Mm.

[00:12:39] Nathan: And so then I’m going to see, okay, who’s, whose taste do I like?

[00:12:42] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Who am I going? Like, let me curate all of my inspiration sources. Mm-hmm. And it could be across a bunch of things, right. There might be. A YouTuber that you love there, you know, musicians, whoever else, right? Like some of the best storytellers are musicians. And so you pull from all these different sources and then you’re say, okay, now I’m going to, I have the intention.

[00:12:59] Nathan: I have the inspiration. Mm-hmm. And now I’m going to set aside the time Yeah. And protect that and say, okay, for an hour a day, two hours a day, I’m gonna learn this thing.

[00:13:08] Chase: Yeah. Well, I mean, think what’s so sacred about that is your interest is actually a, a an authentic development of your own voice and your own soul.

[00:13:16] Chase: Right. That’s what you’re interested in. Mm-hmm. We wanna be seen, we want, we wanna make the money like doing something that’s authentic to us. That would be killer. Yeah. That was always the dream. Right? I was always gonna have my career come out of who I am. Why? Because I’m just a very bad employee. Like, not good at it.

[00:13:32] Chase: Um, but it’s, it’s honestly a, like a kind of a sacred exploration to be a songwriter, to be a, a writer to be, and I don’t wanna like make it sound too highfalutin or whatever. Mm-hmm. But that. Pathway of scratching your own itch, discovering what’s interesting to you. Figuring out how to pull the thought through to completion, right?

[00:13:54] Chase: In a blog post or an email newsletter or a YouTube video, figuring out how to press record like and, and ramble and just, you know, improvise, which is how I got started. Like I was interested in, in, in some sort of a deeper connection to myself. And I wanted to see if anybody wanted to have that kind of connection with me too.

[00:14:15] Chase: Right. So for me personally, this was very much like a, a soulful exploration beyond just, can I do it? Because that was in there too. Can I make a website like this? Mm-hmm. Could I know how to figure out how to like light and do a camera stuff? Mm-hmm. Could I perform the camera like with nobody else in the studio?

[00:14:32] Chase: Could I make a song? And like, and, and all this goes way, way, way back to like high school where it’s like, yeah, could I record something? Could I write something and record it on my laptop, my gateway, like 6,500 or whatever it was. You know,

[00:14:46] Nathan: something that’s so unique about being a creator is the wide range of skills.

[00:14:50] Nathan: Like, you don’t actually get to specialize. Mm. You have to do all of these different things, especially, you know, you don’t have a team early on. You don’t have any of this. And so it’s something I’ve always admired about you is you’re just like, you’ll dive in, you’ll learn anything. Whether it’s design code on camera work, like.

[00:15:06] Nathan: How do you think about tackling each one of these? Was it deliberate or you just, you have something you wanna make and you’re like, I, I just decided to make it. And the first version was terrible and the second version was a little better.

[00:15:16] Chase: I’m laughing ’cause I’m like, well, first of all, what you really need is a, is a, is a deep sense of insecurity.

[00:15:22] Chase: Step one. Step one is like, be like concerned about if you’re lovable, but that’s like, uh, there was a drive. Mm-hmm. There was just a drive, there was a, a sensitivity and attunement like mm-hmm. I would watch pastors on stage. I would, or watch musicians at shows. I would watch movies like actors in movies or eventually learn to see the director and the filmmaker and the writer in the movie.

[00:15:50] Chase: And, and I would connect to these people as auteurs, as creator, as like a point of view. It’s like still in the age of ai, the moment you get that sniff that it’s like, oh, this feels like it’s fucking generated.

[00:16:03] Nathan: Right.

[00:16:03] Chase: You notice that? Yep. It’s like that uncanny valleying feeling where it’s like,

[00:16:07] Nathan: Ooh, it just asked a this.

[00:16:08] Nathan: This author just asked a rhetorical question and then answered it immediately later, or said, it’s not this. It’s that. Totally. You know when you’re like, Uhhuh.

[00:16:15] Chase: Totally. Even though like Chad’s pretty fucking good at those little like juxtapositions, I’m like, actually that’s brilliant. I should use that.

[00:16:22] Chase: But there’s something about it that just feels unpersonable. Mm-hmm. That feels like it’s not coming from an actual person and a point of view. And I don’t mean there needs to be a human, I just mean I want someone’s perspective, a lived experience. Mm-hmm. And something like that. And. Because I had those sensitivities and was so curious, uh, about those I icon forms of media or creativity, uh, because I connected with the filmmaker in the film and the musician and the song or the songwriter in the song.

[00:16:54] Chase: I just wanted that. Mm-hmm. I wanted to be that. Same thing with like, when I was designing those websites, like I was with Corbet Barr, who we partnered in Fizzle and he did think traffic before that. There was like a personality in the writing. There was a sense of of him in there. And I just wanted to create something where that was like coming through, especially with Pat Flynn when I did his site, there was like this like real California old license plate kind of vibe that we were going for.

[00:17:23] Chase: And Steve Kame, nerd Fitness where it was just like comic books and you know, Lego characters and uh, and stuff like that where it was somehow trying to, trying to take some of these elements. ’cause I had to limit myself creatively, but then to pull that through in a way that wasn’t cheesy. And then, you know, and there was very specifics in the web design, right?

[00:17:47] Chase: Where it’s like, okay, golden ratio on my type. And, uh, so it’s, I’m this wide, then my line, line line height needs to be this. And like, you know, and like learning to hand code websites by like percentages and, and s instead of pixels and stuff so that they’re responsive and all that jazz. All of that. I fell in love.

[00:18:04] Chase: I had one one CEO guy tell me when I was, when I was working for him, I was his marketing department and he was like, Jace, you fall in love with the technology. It makes you both the best and worst sales guy ever. You are never gonna be my solo sales guy, but like, I like you in the room kind of thing. So I fall in love with the technology I fall in love with.

[00:18:24] Chase: Like, I see the beauty in HTML CSS and trying to make it as concise as possible. I, for some reason, I went from being a musician to also, that’s beautiful. Mm-hmm. Right. I had a drive to learn some of this stuff, so like if I’m trying to teach someone how to do that, I’m, do I want to help? I want to explore where their interest is right now.

[00:18:46] Chase: It was just a, it was an interest, it was a need to be seen. It was a need to be a craftsman, and so for some reason that was up for me for some reason. You coding that website or like, you know, Photoshopping, it just like making a pixel perfect. Like why, like Right. How do you explain that? There’s just a, there’s something you wanted to learn how to do, you know?

[00:19:09] Nathan: Yeah. I feel like right now a lot of people are shying away from learning a skillset because they, they’ve had their identity around whatever. Previous job they had before they became a creator or something else, right? Mm-hmm. I, I am a, uh, filmmaker and editor, so I won’t go, I won’t go on camera, right?

[00:19:26] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. I am a behind, behind the screen, behind the lens, uh, type person.

[00:19:30] Chase: Yeah.

[00:19:30] Nathan: Or another angle would be like, oh, I’m a developer. Yeah. And so of course it doesn’t look good.

[00:19:35] Chase: Yeah.

[00:19:35] Nathan: Right. Why would you expect me to make, make it look good? Like, you know, the code behind the scenes is perfect.

[00:19:40] Chase: Yeah.

[00:19:40] Nathan: And what I’m trying to get to with you, that you’re probably the person who, of my friends who embodies this the most is.

[00:19:47] Nathan: The obsession with learning every part of the craft.

[00:19:50] Chase: Mm.

[00:19:50] Nathan: And not even a, you don’t seem scared of it at all. You know, I, I could learn video editing, but mm-hmm. I don’t want to, it’s gonna be hard. Like, there’s so where you just dive in and you just do it. Yeah. Is that like, is that like a multi-week process?

[00:20:03] Nathan: Is that you’re spending months or you, like, what makes you say, Hey, I don’t have that skill, and I’d like to, and so

[00:20:08] Chase: Yeah.

[00:20:08] Nathan: There a month from now, I will,

[00:20:09] Chase: I guess the first thought that comes up is, is there’s plenty of stuff that I don’t decide to learn.

[00:20:14] Nathan: Okay.

[00:20:14] Chase: Not like consciously. I just like, there, there, there’s no interest.

[00:20:17] Chase: There’s no interest. There’s like no light over there.

[00:20:19] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:20:19] Chase: I can’t even see it.

[00:20:20] Nathan: Does anything come to mind that, that you’re like, oh, I, I’ve thought about learning that and I It’s

[00:20:24] Chase: a great question. Yeah. I don’t like, uh, becoming a shaman.

[00:20:29] Nathan: Okay.

[00:20:30] Chase: Yeah. I was like, I was like, maybe I’m gonna become a shaman.

[00:20:33] Chase: Yeah. And then I’m like, I don’t know if I have the ancestors for this. Like, it, it was just like, it that takes me too far away. It just takes me too far away

[00:20:42] Nathan: because they’re an, they’re an endless number of things on this earth to learn.

[00:20:46] Chase: Yes.

[00:20:46] Nathan: And all of that information is at your fingertips now. Yeah. But you know, like maybe 50 years ago mm-hmm.

[00:20:51] Nathan: You’re like, I want to be, and it’s like, okay, you’re gonna have to move countries. You’re going, you know, all of this stuff. And now you’re like, oh, I, yeah. I connect with anyone now

[00:20:58] Chase: you got it right here.

[00:20:58] Nathan: And so you, so being deliberate about here’s what I want to pursue and here’s what I done.

[00:21:03] Chase: Yeah. It’s, it’s really, it’s that Liz Gilbert thing about don’t, don’t follow your passion, follow your curiosity.

[00:21:10] Nathan: Mm.

[00:21:10] Chase: Follow your curiosity.

[00:21:12] Nathan: What’s the difference to you between those two things?

[00:21:14] Chase: Okay. Passion is like a thing I’m supposed to be eventually. I, I like, I’m passionate about this, and it’s like, remember, you are so passionate about gymnastics in high school, right? It’s like, yeah, but curiosity, there’s no pressure on curiosity.

[00:21:29] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:29] Chase: There’s, it, it, it alleviates all, it, it’s a subtle, it might be the same exact thing and all, when’s all said and done, but. For me, like way finding from where I am right now, my passion is like I’m looking backwards to what I’ve been passionate about. Mm-hmm. My curiosity is I’m right here looking at like where, what’s alive right now.

[00:21:49] Chase: So there’s something about personal interest that’s always been important not to say, you know, that person, that interest doesn’t dip.

[00:21:56] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:56] Chase: Right. And sometimes, sometimes I have enough wherewithal that like, this is gonna be important sort of past the dip and you just. You stick with it. Um, there’s something about your curiosity and your personal interest.

[00:22:09] Chase: There’s also something about sensing that there’s greatness out there. Like, uh, if I was stepping into something where I didn’t already, I hadn’t sniffed out some of the greats, like with web design, I kind of, I I saw some greats. Yeah. Like, wow. They were doing something freaking different. Like, oh, there’s artists out here with filmmakers with, you know, YouTubers with fricking obviously musicians and, and shamans and things like this.

[00:22:35] Chase: You can sniff out some of the greats. You have an experience with them and you’re like, oh, there’s something that can be devotional and beautiful about this. ’cause ultimately, I think that’s where I had to get. Is it has to be for me, I, I’m, I’m the one who’s gonna give me the love that I need.

[00:22:51] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:52] Chase: Actually, first and foremost, second of all, like if I’m in, if I can make this a labor of love because I believe it’s important and make my own contribution to the, the field of this thing meaningful as a gift to myself as like already meaningful, then all of the views and all of the comments and all the love and all of this, that and the other is a benefit.

[00:23:16] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:17] Chase: You know, be, but like, burnout is what happens, right. When we need, we’re leaning over our skis, we’re leaning forward, and we need that more. ’cause they’re, they can come, this is a curse is when it comes. ’cause people don’t have any idea of how long this game actually is. Mm-hmm. And how, what it’s like to be a fucking winner.

[00:23:39] Chase: For, for like years even. But to watch year four, like it’s been trickling down for like a year and you just see it on these people’s faces, you know this just like, it’s a real, it’s a, it’s a real, you’re getting que squeezed out ’cause you’re not aligned in some way, or, or you, what got you there won’t get, I got you here, won’t get you there kind of thing.

[00:24:02] Chase: Mm-hmm. Or it’s a longer game to be doing this professionally. So I’m like, I wanna make a clear distinction between doing this professionally. As a living.

[00:24:13] Nathan: Right.

[00:24:13] Chase: And being an honest, like in per honest pursuit of your craft, your, your exploration, your creativity, your artistry, because you don’t need to make any money from any of this stuff, you know?

[00:24:24] Nathan: And it’s a hard thing now because you can make money from anything.

[00:24:27] Chase: Yeah.

[00:24:28] Nathan: Then there’s a temptation of like,

[00:24:30] Chase: yeah,

[00:24:30] Nathan: oh, I like this. I’m getting traction with it. I should make money from it.

[00:24:34] Chase: There’s some old Buddhist precept I have promised to abstain from exploiting my passion. You know, it’s like, okay,

[00:24:43] Nathan: interesting.

[00:24:43] Chase: I promise to abstain. From exploiting my passions. It’s like, ’cause why? Because there’s something beautiful, sacred, holy and true in there. And like a huckster, we can sell ourselves out on the market and end up 10, 15. You don’t know how long life is, you end up 10, 15 years down the road having shucked that like sacred stuff out of you and you’re, and you’re kind of, you’re, you’re kind of a husk.

[00:25:11] Chase: You can build it all back. But, but again, to what got you here won’t get you there sort of thing, it can feel really devastating and to, to be that humbled and to come back to yourself. I’ve seen it happen again and again. I’ve experienced it, but like, so like there’s, there’s a way through it, but like, you know, life, it lives another Liz Gil Gilbert thing.

[00:25:33] Chase: Life is long and Chase is young. There’s plenty of time. I’ll be saying that when I’m 65, 78. Like, it’s this idea that like creative work is a very long term. Mm-hmm. Fricking exploration. And to do it in the marketplace of, you know, social media is bonkers. So I’m just like letting people know, like it’s bonkers.

[00:25:53] Chase: Okay. It takes a lot. It takes a lot. It might take everything, but it’s also beautiful.

[00:25:58] Mm-hmm.

[00:25:58] Chase: It’s also very beautiful and I’m grateful for it and I’m still surviving and I was a precious little snowflake. Let me just tell you. Okay. It is delicate in here, but I’ve learned, I’ve, I’ve learned, and you can too.

[00:26:11] Nathan: I love anytime we get a straight to camera like delivered to watch on YouTube so you can know that that was a speech into your soul

[00:26:19] Chase: as it’s eye contact that really matters. That’s talk about something I learned on YouTube. You can literally look into the camera. Like, I would do this for hours by myself.

[00:26:27] Chase: Everything I’ve done on YouTube is by myself with a freaking camera that I’m pushing record on and setting up all the lights and I would just like feel like there’s a human there.

[00:26:35] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:35] Chase: And I would go from that place I would connect to, to that place. Then different words come. And I find that that is like a really important part of like, when I slow down enough to do that, as I’m doing it now, now I can, now I won’t look away.

[00:26:49] Chase: And some people are like, this is fucking awkward. And I’m just like, no, this is connection. Like, you don’t know, but I know we can do one to many like this. And like, I see you, you’re good. I love you. Everything’s gonna be okay, but it’s gonna take a little work.

[00:27:02] Nathan: Alright. That’s something that I learned from Levi Allen, who’s a great filmmaker.

[00:27:05] Nathan: He’s

[00:27:05] Chase: awesome. Love Levi.

[00:27:07] Nathan: Uh, you know, also a very talented, prolific, like, we’ll learn any skill. He always starts this video with Hey friend.

[00:27:13] Chase: Yeah.

[00:27:14] Nathan: Like, right. Hey friend.

[00:27:15] Chase: Yeah.

[00:27:15] Nathan: You know, right into the camera. It’s not friends. Hey everybody. So excited to you all. Everyone’s together here. You know, it’s just like you and me.

[00:27:23] Nathan: We’re just, we’re just connecting. And it’s that same idea of, you know, right. To one person.

[00:27:27] Chase: Yeah.

[00:27:28] Nathan: And how that, that connection.

[00:27:29] Chase: Yeah.

[00:27:30] Nathan: Something else that I’ve heard you say in the past is that the internet rewards performance, not integration.

[00:27:36] Chase: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:37] Nathan: Tell me about that.

[00:27:37] Chase: Like a bad dad. We got it in like a bad dad.

[00:27:42] Chase: The internet rewards performance.

[00:27:44] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:44] Chase: Okay. So meaning like you’re getting this external validation for a performative. Like, uh, aspect of yourself. And so this is

[00:27:51] Nathan: like me score, you know, as a kid, I score the goal in, in the soccer game. Yeah. And it’s, that was celebrated not the work to,

[00:27:58] Chase: to get that. Yes.

[00:27:58] Chase: And you feel like all, like, there’s more love now. Mm-hmm. It’s not just, and, and you didn’t score the goal the next day. And there’s not that love. It’s conditional. The internet is extremely conditional that way. So

[00:28:10] Nathan: I had this moment, so, um, my 14-year-old son is very into pickleball. Mm. And so

[00:28:14] Chase: good job. I mean, fastest growing sport in America.

[00:28:17] Chase: Yeah. Great

[00:28:18] Nathan: sport. He picked that. Uh, he can now destroy me at it. There’s really, oh, I mean, he’s so good. How

[00:28:23] old’s

[00:28:24] Chase: your oldest?

[00:28:24] Nathan: He’s 14.

[00:28:25] Chase: Okay.

[00:28:25] Nathan: So we, uh, I came home last night from the PPA, so the whatever the professional pickleball, you know, the, their big tournament in Arizona. And so he’s playing in the 16 U Division.

[00:28:37] Chase: Wow.

[00:28:38] Nathan: And the, this team that they’re playing against. So they’re playing, um, playing at doubles game and the. They were winning the game. And I could start to see the kids on the other side like struggle and start to fall apart a little bit. And the kid goes to his dad, like I’m standing near his dad. ’cause it’s just like a small court.

[00:28:57] Nathan: Mm-hmm. It’s it, you know. And so I’m standing maybe 10, 15 feet away from his dad and you could just see the frustration on his dad’s face build. And the kid actually turns to his dad at this moment. I felt so bad. He’s like, Hey, like gimme something. I need this. And his dad was so frustrated.

[00:29:12] Chase: Yeah.

[00:29:12] Nathan: At the like, you could just watch it deflate and like their performance, you know, just continued to degrade.

[00:29:18] Nathan: And it was like he, like a bad dad, like a bad, you saw that show up. There was none of the like, Hey, whatever outcome comes from this, like, I’m here for you. All that. It was pure disappointment. Yeah. At a time when this four 14, 15-year-old, like needed the exact opposite. Which

[00:29:35] Chase: is hard. It’s hard. Like, by the way, I’ve been that dead more eye contact.

[00:29:39] Chase: I’ve been that dead, you know, like, uh. My dad has been that dad at moments. Mm-hmm. You know, not all the time, but some of the time. Like, it, it, we do it, we do it. Mm-hmm. We get excited. We get, we lose the connection. We, we lose track of our purpose. So first of all that second of all, the internet isn’t a human, but it’s made out of humans.

[00:29:57] Chase: Right, right. Back to that nervous system idea and you will get feedback that you are good and wanted and loved and it will nourish, it will like feed that part of you and

[00:30:08] Nathan: you use it to fuel to create the next piece of

[00:30:09] Chase: content or whatever

[00:30:10] Nathan: else. Exactly.

[00:30:12] Chase: There is always, however, a danger in being externally motivated.

[00:30:17] Chase: Mm-hmm. Externally validation, external validation is terrific, but unless you learn how to pull that inside and then start to be internally motivated according to the therapist. Right. That, and according to my experience as a creator. Mm-hmm. Right. That is what we’re looking for. Because otherwise you’re on the cycle of, of boom and bust and boom and bust and boom and bust, which is fine.

[00:30:40] Chase: So it’s one way to like squeeze out the dopamine and serotonin from a nervous system and then you’re gonna get all the cortisol and shit flooding back and

[00:30:46] Nathan: a lot of great artists whose work we. Incredibly admire

[00:30:50] Chase: Yeah.

[00:30:51] Nathan: Have ridden that cycle.

[00:30:52] Chase: Yes.

[00:30:52] Nathan: And you know, it’s a lot of times where you say like, oh, I want the outcome.

[00:30:56] Nathan: Yeah. I, I want the outcomes that they created, but you don’t wanna beat them.

[00:30:59] Chase: Right. Yeah. It’s like that Jeff Goss book. Like, real artists don’t starve

[00:31:02] Nathan: Uhhuh.

[00:31:02] Chase: Right. What if there’s a way to be a real artist mm-hmm. That has the longevity of a kind of like neutral growth of, of a, of equanimity.

[00:31:11] Nathan: Right.

[00:31:11] Chase: Instead of this boom and bust, which I’m a very passionate, romantic person.

[00:31:15] Chase: Like, I still have those booms and busts in, in ways. But like I can tell when I’m on the depressive side, like I can go like, okay, we’re on the depressive side. Mm-hmm. Like, and I can, and I can come at it with less judgment. Mm-hmm. Or no judgment. And when I’m on the fricking manic side, I’m gonna be like, I’m pretty sure we’re a little bit.

[00:31:34] Chase: Higher than we should be. Mm-hmm. Like, I, like I can, like, I’m not used to feeling this good,

[00:31:39] Nathan: do you know what I mean? Like, I don’t trust this.

[00:31:40] Chase: Right. The upper limits click in. Right. But, um, that external validation from the internet is a real thing. Mm-hmm. And it’s possible. And it takes so much work to get there and just get that fucking little hit back that you’ve really done something, you’ve accomplished something.

[00:31:56] Chase: But like, for some reason, I’m thinking about this, I’m just gonna say it ’cause it’s a weird meta metaphor. There’s this thing in meditative and yoga experience called the Kundalini awakening. Just go with it for a second. Kundalini away. Kundalini is strong energy lives at the base of the spine and you wanna wake it up so it comes up.

[00:32:11] Chase: One time I, I had a spontaneous kundalini awakening and I couldn’t, uh, sleep for three weeks. And my one mentor at the time was like, shut it down. Spend time in large bodies of water. Eat red meat, watch daytime television. Do anything that will shut down and bring your energy down because a kundalini meltdown will set you back ears.

[00:32:33] Nathan: Hmm.

[00:32:33] Chase: And uh, it’s like that I couldn’t ground it. I got new access to my, like, internal system, but I couldn’t ground it. I would lie down at sleep and it would be like fireworks in my body and the most pleasurable, like amazing. I felt like I had attained something. So to shut it down felt so sad, but I was getting crazy without sleep.

[00:32:54] Nathan: And you knew that it was going to cra your mentor was basically saying like, yeah, if you don’t regulate, this is somebody, you’re going to crash incredibly hard.

[00:32:59] Chase: So it’s, it, that’s the metaphor that’s coming to mind for like the, the internet. You work so hard to get that pop. It’s like go, something went viral.

[00:33:06] Chase: We’re starting to grow, we’re seeing the results. Mm-hmm. Okay. If you can’t ground it, like literally a tree root, tree roots go down, tree branches going up, reaching for sunlight, reaching down for the water and the soil. Mm-hmm. If you, you need both of these. I just like, this is the tantra of it. You need both of these because then you’re gonna be able to sustain the growth, and that’s what we want.

[00:33:28] Chase: Again, if we’re thinking really long term with this thing, which is, which is what we’re gonna need to do.

[00:33:32] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:33] Chase: I don’t know how many creators are going so big that they’re, that they’re done in a few years and then they can just kind of cash out. Like maybe people who started email marketing companies, but like the rest of us, silly little talkers and YouTubers and people who are, who are basically hobbyists creating something that now we’re professionals in.

[00:33:53] Chase: It’s like, how do we do this over a long period of time? There’s absolutely a way and your audience changes with you over time and like, there’s just, there’s stages to the game. Also congratulations. You got that pop. Like you saw some, you saw some traction. I don’t know if I ever really saw the traction.

[00:34:09] Chase: My whole thing has been like this.

[00:34:11] Nathan: Yep.

[00:34:12] Chase: The entire time we launched Fizzle, it was like to, to the, to the, uh, think traffic audience. Br We were like right there. 2000 members and we just fricking every, we were constantly Right. Podcast 10,000 listeners the whole time. Same there.

[00:34:27] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:34:28] Chase: Little bit of fluctuation.

[00:34:29] Chase: Same with my YouTube channels. Just been like, so I’m kind of, I’m being taught this like long term

[00:34:36] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:34:37] Chase: Thing. And it feels, it, I believe, I believe in it at least now because I’m doing it and I’ve been successfully paying for like my kids my life, like all this stuff for like years now, for over a decade.

[00:34:50] Chase: Mm-hmm. Uh, like 15 years almost. I mean before that with fizzle.

[00:34:55] Nathan: Right.

[00:34:55] Chase: For longer. But like, I’ve been 10 years on my own with just being a fucking YouTuber.

[00:34:59] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:35:00] Chase: You know?

[00:35:01] Nathan: So it, yeah, it’s this long longevity. What, what contributes to being able to have that longevity and to actually, if you were saying.

[00:35:10] Nathan: Okay. I am coaching or mentoring a creator.

[00:35:12] Chase: Yeah.

[00:35:12] Nathan: Who their, their tree as a creator is growing tall.

[00:35:16] Chase: Yeah.

[00:35:16] Nathan: And you’re, you’re starting to worry that maybe their roots aren’t matching it.

[00:35:20] Chase: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:21] Nathan: How would you coach or mentor them on building’s? A good

[00:35:24] Chase: question. Okay. So the roots, if it’s, if I’m really seeing a deficiency in the roots Yeah.

[00:35:28] Chase: Then it’s like, okay, we’re gonna go, we’re gonna do some deeper work. Mm-hmm. We’re gonna do some actual, like, depth work. We’re gonna get into our feelings. We’re gonna do, like, do some, do a men’s weekend if it’s a, if it’s a male or like whatever. Some sort, yeah. If you’re in a relationship, we’re gonna get deeper into relationship stuff.

[00:35:43] Chase: We’re gonna understand how to tell some truth to each other, understand what we’re co-creating in life. Like, there’s, that, that’s the grounding out into our domains of ownership is like where our roots go.

[00:35:55] Nathan: Are there specific questions that. You like or that, you know, you assign someone to journal on

[00:36:00] Chase: the question kind of comes from the person, right.

[00:36:02] Chase: But it, it, it, like, you we’re probably gonna be exploring, you know, stuff around mom and dad.

[00:36:07] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:08] Chase: Right. It’s just like, we’re probably gonna be exploring stuff around where do I feel performative in my life? And just kind of getting a little sense of that. And we’re, we’re gonna be definitely doing like somatic, like just sort of stuff in our body, literally down in our body.

[00:36:21] Chase: Like our back of our back down the, the down the back of our legs to the back of our heels. That’s the thing that opened in me in this coline awakening.

[00:36:29] Nathan: Okay.

[00:36:30] Chase: I never heard, I was like, I wasn’t there, I just didn’t have, we’d be building some internal awareness there. Lower belly, right? The bottom of the heart, the bottom of the brain feeling, the weight of the brain, the head actually resting on the neck.

[00:36:44] Chase: All this grounding sort of stuff.

[00:36:46] Nathan: Okay.

[00:36:46] Chase: Is like, uh, it, it sounds goofy, but it really, it starts to open our field of awareness to like. To what is what is good in this thing without me getting all hyped up? Without getting taken away and losing myself in the dream of the success of it. Because the other, another thing to like how we’re gonna be successful over long term is gonna be partnerships.

[00:37:10] Chase: And partnerships in order for those to succeed, well, you can’t be flaky.

[00:37:14] Nathan: Mm.

[00:37:15] Chase: And you, you, you’re gonna have to like, like the fin on the bottom of the surfboard is what keeps you like going in the same direct. You have, you have to develop that fin. And so when you, when a potential client comes in or an opportunity comes in and you got a little bit of like a, uh, but it’s a good opportunity.

[00:37:31] Chase: Like there’s an extra zero there, right? Where it’s like that, like we wanna slow down and notice that because what it’s gonna feel like there’s momentum and we gotta go with it. Um, knowing that you are a genius, like your nervous system’s literally a genius. And it’s, and like if you step into it, it’s gonna be learning in that, uh, feeling.

[00:37:51] Chase: And doing that consciously, as opposed to just like, uh, but that’s, we gotta do it. This is what we’re about, right? We gotta go all the fucking way. Turn the hat backwards, click, send. Right? And then you’re going, um, great, you’re on the ride. There’s gonna be some learning, you’re gonna get some stuff out of it.

[00:38:07] Chase: But like, long term, what makes these things work is your brand deals, your partnerships on those kinds of sides. They matter a lot. They do. And so not being flaky, but also they can tell, like, like any, like you can tell when someone’s coming at you with an opportunity or energy or you, they’re asking you to do something for them and you’re like, I don’t wanna do that.

[00:38:28] Nathan: Right,

[00:38:29] Chase: right. You’re building an ecosystem of partnership. That’s what’s gonna sustain you over a long period of time.

[00:38:35] Nathan: What I can think of, of actually quite a few people who I really admire. Them as humans. I admire their work, all of that. And if they were to pitch me on doing something together, I’d probably say no, because I feel like they don’t have that fin on their surfboard.

[00:38:49] Chase: Yeah, yeah.

[00:38:50] Nathan: That they’re gonna be onto the next thing, or they don’t have the stability to follow through.

[00:38:54] Chase: Yeah.

[00:38:55] Nathan: Or that sort of thing. And so I, I like that where you’re saying, Hey, how reliable are you? We’re talking about building skills earlier. Mm-hmm. Have you built the skill, the muscle, the discipline?

[00:39:04] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:39:04] Chase: Yeah.

[00:39:04] Nathan: To stay consistent and to follow through.

[00:39:06] Chase: Which part of that is the perspective that we’re gonna be here for a while. And these are the other plants in the environment. Like these thrive, we thrive, the, the, like. There’s an ecosystem,

[00:39:16] Nathan: right?

[00:39:16] Chase: That perspective and that take, that took me a long time to grow that.

[00:39:19] Chase: ’cause it was just like, me, me, me, my, my, my please. And is that the difference

[00:39:22] Nathan: between thinking, you know, three to six months out versus like three to six years? Or that’s the thing where you’re like, look,

[00:39:29] Chase: it’s, it’s one element of it. Mm-hmm. It’s one element of it. Right? There’s other parts of it that are related specifically to you.

[00:39:35] Chase: Like, who am I? You don’t know who you’re gonna be in three years.

[00:39:37] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:38] Chase: You don’t know who you were three, three years ago. You even recognized yourself in some ways that Ira glass quote again. Yeah. About taste. Now your taste is at a different level. Mm-hmm. Um, so it’s mystery. It’s an exploration. That’s why this is soul work.

[00:39:49] Chase: That’s why I like it so much. You know, especially as a creator, right? God’s the creator, right? Like, think about that word, like you’re making some shit. Um, this, this element of who you are gonna be and what your interests are gonna align with. And the fact that that’s. Like we can, we can have some sense of it.

[00:40:10] Chase: And also it’s like as a function of your age, like hormonally, if you’re not, if you’re a man at like 43, like I’m like, I know right where you are, if you’re 35, it’s like, okay, I know. Right? Like, like, and you might not have much of a fin yet. Yeah. You’re kind of squirrely. ’cause that’s what you’re supposed to be learning right now.

[00:40:26] Chase: Mm-hmm. Because pretty soon that fin’s gonna develop and you’re gonna go like, oh fuck yeah, I want to go this way and I want to take. Them with me, and yeah, this is what we’re doing. And then like other people are like, I want in. And you’re like, I don’t know, I haven’t even thought about you. You know, and you’re like, things kind of emerge and develop over time, but developing purpose

[00:40:46] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:40:46] Chase: In someone is, uh, you can’t rush it.

[00:40:49] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:49] Chase: It’s like a function of our hormones as men as we age. Like the estrogen goes up a little bit more. That like makes us a little more care takey, you know? But we also gotta navigate the testosterone, you know, women with perimenopause and all, like, there’s a, there’s like our hormones is one of the things that, that like we can be a little bit intelligent about because Yeah.

[00:41:09] Chase: At 26 young thirties Yeah. Go, go nuts dude. Right. Go crazy. Try stuff out. Mm-hmm. Right. And, and notice when, if you can slow down enough to notice when the hits kind of hurt. Or to like be like, oh, maybe I’m not as invincible as I think I am. There’s that line in that bony ver song at once. I knew I was not magnificent.

[00:41:29] Chase: Right? It’s like, that’s 39. You know? It’s a long game. It’s a long game. I had no idea. Now I’m so glad that what I’ve built is able to, A, be authentic to me. I can roll with it, I can change it, shift it, flow with it. B, I have partnerships in, in these brands and other creators and thi like that feel. Like soulful and good to me, I feel aligned, and c, I can, I don’t know exactly what the future is, but I can feel the direction of it that is holy.

[00:42:05] Chase: That’s great. Most of my life I have been a fucking scared kid trying to get to the next paycheck, right? Just like not feeling like I have done it yet, not feeling I have done it yet, and I still haven’t done it, but I like I’m doing it more, right? Mm-hmm. That is a. Fucking awesome place to be. I’m so glad for it.

[00:42:28] Nathan: Yeah. So something that I’ve watched in your career and, and that I’ve heard you talk about is this idea of becoming known for something on a pretty big scale that’s not your deepest work.

[00:42:37] Chase: Yeah.

[00:42:38] Nathan: Right? Yeah. And you’re talking about the emotional connection to the work.

[00:42:41] Chase: Yeah.

[00:42:41] Nathan: Uh, maybe things that drive depression or like the downs and the cycles.

[00:42:47] Nathan: What did that look like for you in your journey, and then how did you come through it?

[00:42:50] Chase: Yeah. It is a great, it’s like, yeah, it’s, uh, I’ve always had two skis going right. And one of them’s the, like bigger audience

[00:43:00] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:43:01] Chase: Public facing. Uh, figuring out how to make money from that one. Mm-hmm. This is like the thing that they want, you know, you know about iga?

[00:43:10] Chase: Yes. What, what you’re great at, what the world needs and what you can fucking make. I don’t know, t remember what the other one is now, but it’s like, this is what the world needs. Mm-hmm. And what they’re wanting from me. And then there’s the other ski, which, which was something more, it’s like this, I keep using the word soulful.

[00:43:28] Chase: Mm-hmm. But it’s like my authentic flow. It’s, it’s, I was a, I was, I got really into Christianity. My, none of my family was Christians. I just was like interested and curious. I think I just wanted more hugs, you know, or something. And then it ended up becoming like an identity. And I became professional and I became like trained as a pastor, was like a successful worship leader pastor guy for a long time.

[00:43:51] Chase: And then my wife at the time, and I were like, you know, after starting churches, like, I think we’re not gonna do this anymore. She, like, I was literally taking a crap and she leaned in and was like. I don’t think I’m gonna go to do this thing with the God who’s got the whole health thing anymore. And I was like, all right.

[00:44:06] Chase: But my first thought was, all right, father, we’ll see where this goes. My first thought was a prayer, my first, and, and ever since then, it’s still been an authentic exploration of spirituality, the soulful, deeper work, all the things that can’t help but come out from me in here about the longevity, the roots going down, and uh, the sacredness of our nervous systems.

[00:44:27] Chase: And the fact that like the more you’ll get aligned with the fact, with your nervous system, the more of a chance you can put another nervous system into resonance with you. ’cause like we’re so susceptible to this, like this billions of years old, it’s just billions of years old. So that second ski has always been in this like soulful, deeper sort of side of things.

[00:44:48] Chase: Mm-hmm. This curious, honest, like cosmic explorer, curious. Mm-hmm. Like thing. And I had never quite felt like, uh, like ready to start. Just offering that. Mm-hmm. Until recently, I started making more offerings in and hosting these retreats. Right now it’s just men’s work. Mm-hmm. And doing, we’re doing more client work.

[00:45:10] Chase: I’ve been training and coaching for like 15 years. Yeah. Like from seminaries and like Dan, who I was with here yesterday, did his coaching thing and it’s like off starting to make those offers into the thing that I’ve been slow, like learning passionately over a long period of time, starting to put those things out.

[00:45:27] Chase: I’m surprised how much of me it brought back into my work because as a provider and a caretaker. That other ski where the money’s already coming in. Like, that’s where I’m gonna, like, I’m scared. I want to make sure that that’s going. And, and, but as like a soulful guy, I’m like, dude, I’m scared. ’cause I like, I am gonna burn out.

[00:45:51] Chase: I’m like, I’m becoming a husk. I’m mm-hmm. M like,

[00:45:55] Nathan: and is that as you’re like diving in and teaching business content and all these courses and like

[00:45:59] Chase: Yeah.

[00:46:00] Nathan: What was the thing that you were successful at and not

[00:46:04] Chase: resident even then? I was the pastor of that community.

[00:46:06] Nathan: Okay.

[00:46:06] Chase: I was a pastor and I was a motivational speaker.

[00:46:09] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:09] Chase: Right. I would take the, we would develop the content, I would perform it into a, right, into a course. We would lead, do the coaching calls, and it was an energy of like, uh, you know, I live in a van down by the river, like, let’s go, what’s I’m getting You fired up. Right? Yeah. And take like, because when you’re starting something from scratch and you live in fricking Indiana and you don’t have that many close friends, but you like mm-hmm.

[00:46:33] Chase: Started paying attention to some blogs and you took a chance and like, now you’re paying $50 a month to be a part of this community. It’s like, I wanna start a blog on this thing. It’s like, man, just, you need some firepower. You need like, you need help. Like Diana needs a little juice. Right. Diana now has this very successful photography blog, but like, um, that.

[00:46:55] Chase: Motivational speaker plus pastoral element, and then I was just a teacher. I’ve always been a great teacher. I can synthesize information really quick. Mm-hmm. I can, I can put stuff together, I can find what’s interesting. I can also go off on rabbit trails, as you can see, but like the, but the, the like performance of information is, is mm-hmm.

[00:47:15] Chase: Not too challenging for me. Mm-hmm. Also the development of it. Like the first very first course we did at Fizzle was called Defining Your Audience. Mm-hmm. And I was just, me, Corbit was just like, go make it. ’cause I was the web designer who before I would design a website, I would go read every comment on the website.

[00:47:32] Nathan: Right.

[00:47:32] Chase: I would read every single comment did. I’m like, like, who are these people? Well, that’s my version of deep research. ’cause like, I’m just like, who are they? And I would most of the time see a little avatar and like this, the, the gist. I, I didn’t read any of the article. I was just like, what’s this?

[00:47:46] Chase: Where are they coming from? ’cause when people are commenting, they’re like, look at me. Look at me. Like, here’s something I realized that’s good about you. That’s what, that’s about me. Right. Everything’s about them. The articles that we’re writing is about them.

[00:47:57] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:57] Chase: Right. The videos that are made, it’s like part, it’s like it’s about them.

[00:48:00] Chase: Actually. They’re the ones, it’s like back to Donald Miller thing, where it’s like they’re the ones who are the hero.

[00:48:06] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:07] Chase: You’re the Yoda. You’re not the Luke Skywalker. You have to become the Luke Skywalker in your own life to like take a chance and do something, the main character energy. But then when you’re making something, you’re the guide.

[00:48:18] Chase: You’re the guide in the hero’s journey. Right. That was fast. And, and that was like one of the pieces in this defining your audience thing where it’s like an an actual perspective of service. Mm-hmm. To understand who these people are, what they’re struggling with. ’cause nobody on the fricking internet is gonna love you the way that your mom did, or at least we’re supposed to.

[00:48:39] Chase: Okay. Like, they don’t care. You’re still needing that. And that’s wholly and sacred and let’s talk about it, but like. What they’re interested in, if you wanna be a successful creator, is you have to get interested in what they’re interested in. You have to identify or understand what their need and their journey is.

[00:48:56] Chase: And chances are, if you’re building an audience around your persona, it’s the same need that you had.

[00:49:01] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:01] Chase: Right. Where the, the place where you’re the most valuable to someone is right on top of the spot that cost you the most to learn about. Right. I don’t know, does that answer questions?

[00:49:14] Nathan: Yeah. I mean, there’s a quote that came to mind.

[00:49:16] Nathan: Um, I think it’s from Phil McKernan, where he says, your greatest gift is next to your deepest wound.

[00:49:20] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:21] Nathan: And, uh, I always think about that, you know, that’s in like a very soulful, like, do all the work through your pain and trauma. Yeah. And use that to impact the world. But it, you can also apply it in a way, going back to the curiosity of, in a very tactical skill-based way, where you could say, Hey, what’s the thing that I struggled with the most?

[00:49:40] Nathan: Mm-hmm. You know, as I was. Learning these skills or learning business or learning and these other things, and they’ll be like, oh, maybe that’s what I can teach.

[00:49:48] Chase: Yeah.

[00:49:48] Nathan: You know? Yeah. Or they say, if you’re teaching something, like go back to the, the painful time that you learn that lesson.

[00:49:56] Chase: Yeah.

[00:49:56] Nathan: And, and if you share that, people will automatically trust you.

[00:49:58] Nathan: They’re in more,

[00:49:59] Chase: they’re in, they’re in. Yeah.

[00:49:59] Nathan: Because they’re like, oh, that’s what, okay. When, even if it’s a simple thing that ultimately doesn’t matter, like the time that you were learning to write client proposals and you did it wrong and it cost you a $5,000 web design gig. Right.

[00:50:11] Chase: Right.

[00:50:12] Nathan: You know, and so now you learn to do it this way, and now I’m teaching you the same thing.

[00:50:15] Nathan: Right. It’s so I trust you,

[00:50:16] Chase: like authoritative actually. Mm-hmm. I, ironically, again, these are billion year old nervous systems. Right. It’s stuff like that, that makes so much sense on that level.

[00:50:25] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:25] Chase: But might not, might not make sense from the, like the, the things we’ve been trained to try to be, you know, the,

[00:50:30] Nathan: the thing that it makes me think of is you going back to the.

[00:50:34] Nathan: The musician and the songwriter. Mm-hmm. And like then it was like almost what gets status in that world of like, with the authentic connection and saying like, oh, here’s what I’m actually truly feeling.

[00:50:44] Chase: Yeah.

[00:50:45] Nathan: And I think that’s true now in the creator world.

[00:50:47] Chase: Yeah.

[00:50:47] Nathan: Of like, not only do people see, oh, you’re being real and they connect with you, but the, and they’re more likely to know, like, and trust you, but they’ll share ’em more too, where they’re like, oh, this is someone who is sharing from like a, like something that’s deeply personal to them.

[00:51:03] Chase: Yeah. There’s a, there’s a a lot of videos that I’ve done where I just had a little extra energy.

[00:51:08] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:51:09] Chase: And I did these like songs as intros. Some of ’em are incredible. Nathan Barry

[00:51:14] Nathan: imagining you with Extra Energy.

[00:51:16] Chase: Dude. There was some like little vlog I did, uh, for a trip to Bozeman when I was with a, working with a company up there packed.

[00:51:23] Chase: And, uh. I did an intro about Bozeman ’cause I fell in love with Bozeman.

[00:51:28] Nathan: Yeah, yeah.

[00:51:29] Chase: I was just like, oh my God, I love, this is before I saw Yellowstone and all that other stuff. Okay. Now I’m a huge Taylor Sheridan fan. Yep. As you can see from my Western shirt. But like, I’m just trying to get, I’m just trying to get like extra status in some shared and production Land Man season three.

[00:51:44] Chase: But the, the intro that I made for that video. Is so fucking good. I still to this day, have a buddy, Jesse Elder, who introduces me. When he introduces me to somebody. He’s like, here, watch this. And he pulls up that

[00:51:59] Nathan: You’re in person together.

[00:52:00] Chase: We’re in person. This is Chase. I mean,

[00:52:02] Nathan: actually no,

[00:52:03] Chase: it’s so good. A lot of chase

[00:52:04] Nathan: to

[00:52:04] Chase: introduce if anybody knows someone at the, at the Bozeman fricking travel sort of world.

[00:52:09] Chase: Uh, please, we need to, we need to hook that up. The Tourism Bureau, it’s one of those partners. I’m, I’m trying to build one of those for sure, but I’ve built a lot of songs with raps and, uh, lyrics that like, are so much fun. Mm-hmm. It’s so much fun to do, to just like, pull that out and I kind of crush, uh, and then I just drop it and walk away over here to the ski.

[00:52:28] Chase: That’s like, it’s just making, making the money. But I, it’s one of those questions I have at the back of my head. If I could just. Go off and do music thing? Would, would, i, could, I, should I kind of thing, because that’s the most vulnerable place for me to go. And I still, like, I’ll, I play my drum and I play, I, I, you know, pray, I pray with music by myself, and I improvise and I make stuff up.

[00:52:52] Chase: Mm-hmm. And it’s still very much alive, but like, to, to take that and put it, and like, again, the look at me kind of place is something I’ve, I’ve been much slower to do. You know,

[00:53:04] Nathan: I’ve learned so much either directly from you or from watching you, or a friendship over the years. Um, I’ll write off a couple of them and then go to the thing that I’m like that I see you doing that.

[00:53:14] Nathan: I wanna learn from

[00:53:15] Chase: you. Mm.

[00:53:15] Nathan: So first, uh, I still edit the way you taught me, like edit videos, which as a quick aside, that is to hit record on the camera, deliver straight to camera. Every time you make a mistake, just do a clap. And then do the take again and then edit backwards.

[00:53:31] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:32] Nathan: And so you see in your timeline all these spikes, you see this audio spikes of the snap or the clap, whatever.

[00:53:36] Chase: Yeah.

[00:53:37] Nathan: And then you can go through and edit all of that Uhhuh. Um. Before I dive into the other things, any, anything to add? Anything that didn’t get right about the way you added?

[00:53:45] Chase: No, that’s perfect. Yeah. And I, I actually would always go, I would just make those, like three or four of those. So now it’s very, now like I, like my daughter and I, we play like, we just watched all the Jurassic Parks and so we play raptors and I’m like, and she’s like, how do you do it so fast?

[00:54:00] Chase: I’m like, honey, that was 20 years of fucking up on camera. Pardon my French. Right. But yeah, you see the audio waveform? Mm-hmm. And you can just go backwards and it makes it really easy to flow. Uh, once you, once you’ve edited a few times, it helps you to do it. And I’m always encouraging, like we were talking before, uh, to people to edit their own stuff.

[00:54:21] Chase: Right. Because it makes you better on camera. Mm-hmm. And that is. That’s a lifelong skill. Once you get good at that, sort of like being on camera. ’cause you understand what you’re gonna be editing later. I mean, I still edit all my own stuff. I’ve worked with editors in the past and they’ve been helpful.

[00:54:39] Chase: But like I just put a little, I just got a little different, it’s that taste thing right? Where it just comes off a little bit better and you know, I’m whatever, 15 or 20 years into a professional YouTube and video maker career and I’m still editing my own stuff. Mm-hmm. And I still use Final Cut instead of like all the things I should be using, you know?

[00:54:59] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:54:59] Chase: Because it’s just like, I’m so, it’s just so fast. Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, that’s a going backwards because then you might do a take three times and you’re just getting the last one of it. ’cause the

[00:55:12] Nathan: last one was where, when you were in front of the camera it was the take you’re happy with.

[00:55:16] Chase: Yeah.

[00:55:16] Nathan: When you moved on,

[00:55:16] Chase: you moved on from there.

[00:55:17] Chase: ’cause you’re, you’re literally editing in

[00:55:19] Nathan: front of the

[00:55:19] Chase: camera.

[00:55:20] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:55:21] Chase: What else?

[00:55:21] Nathan: So another one is. Unless I hear differently.

[00:55:25] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:26] Nathan: This is a bias towards action. Yeah. So this is something that you put together actually with Chris Johnson?

[00:55:31] Chase: Yeah.

[00:55:31] Nathan: Where, uh, you talked about something you learned from him, what it was

[00:55:36] Chase: in Fizzle.

[00:55:36] Chase: We, we did an interview inside of Fizzle, which was my previous business with Corbet Barr and Caleb Logic. And uh, and we did an interview with, with Chris Johnson, who’s sort of like this, like he’s a little bit like Rainman about businessy type stuff.

[00:55:48] Nathan: Yep.

[00:55:49] Chase: And he is like, another thing that I, that I optimize for with my employees is, uh, is a bias for action.

[00:55:55] Chase: Uh, so I say, if you’re gonna write me an email, what I want you to do is make a decision and say, unless I hear differently, this is what I’m gonna do.

[00:56:02] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:56:03] Chase: Then I’ll tell you if I want you to change it, but if I don’t say anything, you go ahead and do that.

[00:56:06] Nathan: It’s like the train is going by. Yeah. And if I’m like, oh no.

[00:56:09] Nathan: Switch directions, otherwise. I know where you’re going.

[00:56:11] Chase: Totally. That’s what bias for action means. And so I took that, I don’t know, however long ago that was, and I just grabbed a web, A URL unless I hear differently. Dot com and or different Yeah. Should be, unless I hear otherwise. This is, uh, this is internet like history, but, and you know, I just loved making all these little one-off websites.

[00:56:31] Chase: It’s another thing I think, uh, I don’t think it’s still there, but Smuggling Biz was on the inside. Joke from the Fizzle Show for forever ago. Uh, tiny ceramic unicorns.com. Another one. I’ll just make these one page websites, uh, money stress.biz. Uh, just make these little one page websites about one idea.

[00:56:55] Chase: Just one idea. Like the money stress was just like, you’re just scrolling down and there’s all these little bits of text that you like to stop and read and stop read. And then at the end of it’s just this dog gif. Just like, whatcha you so sad about? But unless I hear differently. Dot com, what is it? Is just like some sample emails.

[00:57:14] Chase: Mm-hmm. The video, it’s footage how to it? Yeah. Yeah. Here’s how to do it. It is just like real simple. And that ended up getting on, uh, oh gosh. Who was that guy on the W three? Uh. Some old, the guy who wrote like all these HTML books and stuff. Oh, like Jeffrey

[00:57:27] Nathan: Zelman,

[00:57:28] Chase: Zeldman.

[00:57:28] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:57:29] Chase: Zeldman had a, like that was my, pick

[00:57:30] Nathan: that up

[00:57:31] Chase: little moment.

[00:57:31] Chase: You know?

[00:57:32] Nathan: Yeah. And the version of you who is like coding responsive websites was like, yes, I made it, well,

[00:57:37] Chase: I made it

[00:57:38] Nathan: Zelman

[00:57:38] Chase: The of me in Mexico with my co-founder with a mustache and a pink shirt.

[00:57:42] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:57:42] Chase: On video is a little embarrassing for

[00:57:45] Nathan: sure. Oh man. Yeah, there’s, there’s so many other things there. But one other one is this obsession and learning skills.

[00:57:52] Nathan: Mm-hmm. And just saying like, follow your curiosity and just say, oh, I’ll learn that thing.

[00:57:55] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:56] Nathan: The thing that you do that you’ve always done that I feel like I don’t do that holding things loosely and playing.

[00:58:02] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:02] Nathan: Right? Like, uh, you’ll do this thing where you’re like, should the intro to this vlog about Bozeman be a song?

[00:58:09] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:10] Nathan: Yeah. Absolutely. And like, I think I care way too much what people think Uhhuh. And so the like freeform. All of that. Yeah. Like there’s too much of a editing process from even what’s in my brain. Yeah. To what comes out.

[00:58:24] Chase: There is a deep care, like wanting to be. Seen and connected to as me, but there’s also like a fierce, like, I will fucking leave and go be fine somewhere.

[00:58:33] Chase: You know? Like I will be like, people who need to see this will see this and understand it. Mm-hmm. And it’s not for everybody. I remember hearing, I used to listen religiously to Marin’s, WWTF show.

[00:58:44] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:45] Chase: Um, and he had this, uh, was it Stuart Smith, an English like sort of alt comic guy on there. And he has just brilliant but dry shit.

[00:58:56] Chase: And, and Mark was talking to him about like, what, like what have you learned about doing? He is like, I, there it is not for everybody. I can spot them. Like, I’ll, like, early on I’ll spot the ones that it’s like, and I’ll call them out. I’ll be like, sir, this is not for you. It is just gonna have to hang in for a little bit, you know?

[00:59:11] Chase: And there’s something like in

[00:59:13] Nathan: a comedy

[00:59:13] Chase: show. In a comedy show mm-hmm. He, ’cause ’cause it’s just this guy’s like, what the, he doesn’t get it, but I’m looking at it going like, this is fucking brilliant.

[00:59:22] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:22] Chase: You know, and this guy’s over here just it completely dead to it. Mm-hmm. Like, this is not interesting at all.

[00:59:28] Chase: The reality of something that is actually really well put together, going completely over or under somebody’s radar, first of all, that that’s true and that can happen.

[00:59:39] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:40] Chase: Second of all the thick enough skin to be able to, to take it third of all the open heart enough to keep going. Mm-hmm. And doing it.

[00:59:49] Chase: So it’s, it’s not easy. It’s not easy, but there’s also, like, the first thing I was thinking about when you were like, you know, be more playful. And I’m like, well, listen, Nathan, bear, I’m already covered by the blood of Jesus. Do you know what I mean? Like, we all get in, you know? So, uh, but it’s like, there is a, there’s like a, there’s a, a strong sense of, you know, and Jesus and I sort of have an open relationship, but there’s just a strong sense of, of like, I’m in, I’m in my flow.

[01:00:17] Chase: I’m doing my, I’m doing my direction in life as authentically as I know how to do right now, and I’m sure I’m making mistakes. Mm-hmm. And I, the mistakes used to feel like I would die. Like, I’ve, like, not just, I made, I did something wrong. Like, I’m wrong. Right. I’m bad. Right. Um, and now it’s a little bit more like, you know, we all, we all make mistakes.

[01:00:38] Chase: Ooh. What I learned about mistakes is we get to, mm-hmm. We get to say sorry and we get to try better next time. And I guess I, that wasn’t like a, I, I, for some reason thought like. The true about me is that I’m not good, you know?

[01:00:51] Nathan: Right.

[01:00:51] Chase: But, um, I love hearing that you want more of that playfulness. If I was designing sort of a route for that with you, it would be, I want you to do two things.

[01:01:01] Chase: I want you to take some risks, but I’d want you to enjoy it. Mm-hmm. To notice if you’re enjoy. So it’s not just taking risks, even if you don’t like it. Mm-hmm. It’s taking risk for sure. But to find the thing that you actually enjoy, right? Mm-hmm. Like to, to try to start normalizing that experience in your nervous system.

[01:01:17] Chase: Yeah. Of like, oh, sometimes a little bit of out of control, a little bit of, of unstructured narrative. And I’m kind of enjoying myself and I get to be a little, ’cause I’ve identified with the, I was a, I was a funny guy. I was like, I was gonna use humor to try to get people to, to like me. And I, that eventually became very authentic.

[01:01:40] Chase: I don’t remember being all that young and trying it on, but, um. I, I’m always a little chaotic. I’ve always had a little chaotic, chaotic. And the, uh, the, the interesting thing like is most people don’t think I’m as smart as I am. You know, that might sound like, you know, Mo there’s this line in the Bible that apparently Moses wrote where he is like, Mo Moses was the most humble man on the planet, which is very un humble thing to say Moses.

[01:02:04] Chase: Right? But like, you know, like to say like, I’m very in intelligent. Like my mind will get, get, I un, I tr I believe I’ll get what I need to get when I’m talking about financial investments and this, that and the other. There’s stuff that I’m like, wow, I just don’t get, I just really can’t get it. And I’m okay with that.

[01:02:21] Chase: But other things, like I can sense like, no, no, I know something. Like, you come with me down into the, you, we go down into soul deep sort of places, right? And I’ll be there in a way that surprises you. I’m like, I know that. I know that. And I don’t need you to know that or see that or believe that about me.

[01:02:36] Chase: Like I’ll, like, I know that about, I, I hold myself there. Um. So there’s a confidence, there’s like a, there’s something that’s confident. And the irony is that came from insecurity.

[01:02:47] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:47] Chase: I came from, like, I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel okay, I didn’t feel loved or wanted or connected to. I just felt unsure.

[01:02:55] Chase: I just felt a lot of unsure. And so I would perform and do stuff to get those, you know, external validations and the dopamine. And it was never, it never was satisfying, but I like made a whole personality out of it. And it took years for the hormones to start correcting to the point where it’s like, I’m ready to feel my feelings now.

[01:03:16] Chase: You know? It’s like, oh, there you are, Peter. You know, you’re starting to feel the thing that you wanted all along. It’s just on the, it is just like you had to go through grief and things that I really didn’t wanna feel

[01:03:26] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[01:03:26] Chase: To get there. Um, now how that connects to play if I’m really smart, like, like how am I gonna connect that?

[01:03:34] Chase: But like. Those two things of you taking risks and then you actually like learning, noticing if you like it or not.

[01:03:42] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:43] Chase: To say, to sense how, ’cause chaos is the mother of us all actually, you know, chaos is like, where it comes from. Chaos is we, we prefer order. Especially like you, you prefer order high conscientiousness.

[01:03:58] Chase: Nathan Barry is what I call you to all our friends, right? High conscientiousness, Nathan Barry, control directed, disciplined, going in the same direction for a long period of time. Chaos. Is would be, yeah. Would be a little bit of the antidote to all of that. Mm-hmm. But it’s where that play comes from. It’s where it’s where innovation comes from.

[01:04:18] Chase: And so to, to try to get some of that into your system, the quickest route would be just through taking some risks. Mm-hmm. Right. Taking some, some risks and then slowing down or noticing enough what, what that felt, what that feels like. Yeah. Because when you start to feel safer with a little more risk take and not, like, not like, oh, I don’t, not like you’re, you’re risking your fucking life or something, you know, just like, I’m gonna say this thing.

[01:04:42] Chase: I’m gonna perform this song in karaoke sober, you know, I’m gonna do this, uh, I’m gonna try like karaokes. Great. Actually, that’s what I would do. You know, I was a karaoke whisperer of Portland. I taught many people how to, how to do karaoke and, and I gave many of their golden song. And it is like, it, it’s a, it’s a holy thing, figuring out where your holy song is.

[01:05:02] Chase: ’cause with the karaoke, you want to, you gotta be able to sing it like, ’cause it means something to you.

[01:05:06] Nathan: Right.

[01:05:07] Chase: You gotta be able to, like, you want, people can’t

[01:05:09] Nathan: be souling

[01:05:09] Chase: it, you want people to hear it because they’re having their own moment with it. Mm-hmm. Right. It’s like a good enough song. And it, and it also can’t be something that someone already did.

[01:05:17] Chase: You know, you can’t be fricking don’t stop believing, but it can be faithfully by journey, which is mine. I will fucking, I’ll make the place cry and fall out and everybody’s arm in arm doing the big chorus at the end. Uh, but finding that song for you is one of those like risks that I, I that would explore because then you get to sense through.

[01:05:40] Chase: Ironically through the meaning of this song.

[01:05:42] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:42] Chase: And then the, the potential embarrassment of performing it in a karaoke place where people are drunk anyways. Mm-hmm. Right. It’s like you, it does, none of this matters. None of this matters, but it’s all the ingredients are there. Mm-hmm. To play with that little bit of chaos and how you find yourself in it.

[01:05:59] Chase: And that’s what’s so good about it. And that’s like, that’s what creating on, on in the, in the midst of a public marketplace

[01:06:05] Nathan: Right.

[01:06:06] Chase: Is like, ’cause we really notice when someone’s showing up as themselves. And I think that’s what we’re gonna crave more and more and more over time. It’s what we’ve always craved, but like, even more so in the age of AI

[01:06:17] Nathan: because it’s so different.

[01:06:18] Nathan: Like, one thing that stood out to me was you talking about speaking directly to the person and imagining the person in the other side of the lens. Yeah. Just watching that and like sitting that and forming an emotional connection to not a direct person, but you can, you can imagine, you can create them, you can have that persona there and that being so different from.

[01:06:37] Nathan: Reading from the AI edited generated script off the teleprompter to totally hit that before you go to the next thing.

[01:06:45] Chase: Totally. You know what your, your key phrase in that to me was, here’s what this means to me.

[01:06:49] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:50] Chase: Like, that’s the name of the field notes.

[01:06:52] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:06:53] Chase: Like, right. It’s like, or the segment on the YouTube channel or whatever.

[01:06:56] Chase: Right. Here’s what this means to me. ’cause. What I, what I’m sensing and what you’re saying is like actually, uh, wanting to be seen a little deeper. Mm-hmm. Right? It’s like, like that’s, that’s a little different than play. Right. It’s like wanting to be seen a little deeper and wanting to be a little more, um, a little more show your work.

[01:07:12] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:13] Chase: Right. And that’s awesome. That’s right. I think that, you know, from my perspective and from my experience, that only grows things

[01:07:20] Nathan: right.

[01:07:20] Chase: And it doesn’t grow things with everybody.

[01:07:22] Nathan: Yep.

[01:07:22] Chase: Like it grows things with like

[01:07:25] Nathan: the right people,

[01:07:26] Chase: just a certain, and it’s like, again, that’s Stuart Smith, like this, this isn’t for you, sir.

[01:07:31] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:31] Chase: Right. To put yourself out there in a way, the, the, the, you call it rigid, some would call it control, but maybe a better word is even just structured.

[01:07:41] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:41] Chase: The structured or architecture approach to things makes so much sense, like a developer, like just like putting it out. What I’m hearing is just what I’m feeling from you is more of your heart.

[01:07:52] Chase: In it. Right? And like you have be an amazing big heart. You have a huge heart family man Bill. Like I see you with the employees. I see. It’s like, you know it, you’ve got a lot that’s golden and glowy about you. Mm-hmm. And I would like, I would like to see more of that. I would tune in for that and, you know, being, you know, here’s what this means to me.

[01:08:13] Chase: As a way to connect to a little more of that, and also as a way for you to have something to explore

[01:08:20] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[01:08:21] Chase: In that, ’cause it’s like a thread. Yeah. You start pulling it and it, it’s a little different over time and you’re gonna have a dip with it where it’s like, some are gonna be great and some are like, just, that’s why I do ’em at the end of my videos because

[01:08:34] Nathan: well talk about this idea of bag reviews.

[01:08:37] Nathan: Yeah. Because at first we haven’t even talked about that of like, that you do the bag reviews Yeah. But then the philosophy, right? Yeah. Bringing philosophy into that.

[01:08:43] Chase: Yeah. Well, again, to those two skis

[01:08:45] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[01:08:45] Chase: I’ve got my own personal interest and I, I do geek out about bags where at least I have,

[01:08:50] Nathan: I mean, I have, I, it’s sitting under the desk, but I have a bag right here that you recommended.

[01:08:54] Chase: Troubador Apex, bro.

[01:08:55] Nathan: That’s a great,

[01:08:56] Chase: I know. I

[01:08:56] Nathan: love it.

[01:08:57] Chase: Yeah. Troubadour iss awesome. They’re like, that’s a perfect bag for you. Yeah. It’s a perfect bag for you. So, yeah, I, I, first of all, I find all these soulful brands that are interesting, like Troubadour, who are making elevated. Elevated products. Right? How do you notice that it’s elevated?

[01:09:11] Chase: The shape and the structure and the silhouette of it. The, uh, the, the materials, especially on the inside, especially on that handle. Mm-hmm. And the straps. All these little design elements. And the same thing we were doing with websites, right? Where it’s like, how do we make this a little different? All these physical soft goods designers are doing the same thing.

[01:09:29] Chase: I don’t notice a difference between those two designing on a digital surface versus the, you know, same, it’s the same exact thing. And, um, so first of all, it’s finding all these brands and relating to them and seeing these products and all that came from personal interest and curiosity. All of that came from one mm-hmm.

[01:09:46] Chase: Company that, you know, Corbett knew the guise of Manal, uh, forever ago. Oh yeah. Because they used to come to like bloggy conference, internet things. And I negotiated to get a bag for them from them. And I’ll do a little video and, you know, anyways, the rest is, the rest is history. I still get most of the things in my life for free, including my sauna and coal plunge.

[01:10:07] Chase: Thank you. Redwood Outdoor Sauna. Make the best sauna out there. A little bit thicker thermo wood. Okay. I went for the, I went for the, the more expensive 10,000 unit fucking uh, heater. Also, don’t sleep on the cold plunge.com because they’re actually still making one of the best ones out there. I, I never got paid from those guys, but I did get stuff and I do love, I really love that stuff.

[01:10:28] Chase: But, um. There’s philosophy that I keep dropping mm-hmm. Through talking about a product like that, or the sauna, or the cold plunge, or wandered bags, or peak design or pact. One of my favorites of all time, which is like, in order for me to express why this is just as interesting to me as that, like nomadic, super techie, cool looking one.

[01:10:50] Chase: Mm-hmm. Like to, you know, like, like that one look, you all the techie, the Star Wars dudes are like, yeah, I love that already, just without even talking about it. This one. They’re like, what do you mean? Like, what’s that? I’m like, let me tell you. Right. It opens clam. Shell look at these straps. Here’s this waterproof pocket here.

[01:11:06] Chase: Look at all this stuff that like, there’s a. There’s things that only start to speak to you when you’re on a journey with it. Right? The journey itself is what you have a travel bag for. That’s like, that’s the metaphor when you’re really, when I really started to take off, it was all these, what are called one bag travel backpacks, where you travel without a roller bag.

[01:11:26] Chase: Mm-hmm. Everything’s on your back. It can fit under the seat in front of you. Best case scenario. So you can be the last person on the plane. Um, and you know, you get that international flight and you’re, you wake up in fricking Prague or Denmark or Milano or something and you’re just like, I. I guess I’m, I guess I’m doing this now, like the, the day just begins,

[01:11:49] Nathan: but also I have everything that I need.

[01:11:51] Chase: You have everything that you need. Mm-hmm. You’re walking through cobblestone streets, which is a real bitch with a roller bag. You’re in Barcelona. We’re like, I didn’t know there was a beach here. It’s like, I’m not, I’m not gonna take this roller bag out to the, out to the sand. Right. It was such a different vibe mm-hmm.

[01:12:08] Chase: Of doing things, and I was always a traveler. I met my, my wife who now were separated, but like, uh, on a trip in Europe right after college, you know, a several month trip. And then I got a visa and went and lived out in Dublin and, and did the whole thing. I was always like a, like once, once I started traveling I was like, oh, this is a part of me.

[01:12:26] Chase: Different old places like Europe felt great. The point being I’m dropping philosophy of that second ski in that first it’s a second ski strategy in a first ski context.

[01:12:41] Nathan: Oh, man. But you said something about that that stood out to me when we were talking earlier about the bag. Like it being what you carry with you

[01:12:51] Chase: Yeah.

[01:12:51] Nathan: On the journey.

[01:12:52] Chase: Yeah. My favorite, my favorite thing to review these days is the everyday carryback fact. Mm-hmm. Like that troubadour and because, you know, some of my favorites are the simplest in the world. Mm-hmm. They got like a YKK injection, molded zipper, and it just, and the shape of it just feels so fucking good.

[01:13:07] Chase: And then there’s just a 3D moldy molded pocket, like basic old school jansport school bag. Right. God, I love that. I love that. But it’s a little elevated ’cause I’m talking about like the brown buffalo conceal, right. Or um, or something that like, you know, wandered has a new thing that I haven’t even played with yet, but I got it and I was like, uh, it starts with an NI can’t remember what, what?

[01:13:27] Chase: And it was like. Okay. Wondered. Alright. Because they’ve been making the provoke for like a billion years and it’s amazing back. I know this is a little inside baseball, just go with it because like five dudes are like, yep, yep. That one. Yep. I know, I know, right. You know, but there’s that everyday carry.

[01:13:46] Chase: Mm-hmm. Product is so interesting because as creatives and entrepreneurs, we live out of our bags. We’re going back, we’re like a laptop culture. I really like, I’m always trying to carry as minimal as possible, but there’s some things that I need, like I have these. These focal bey headphones, which are the best, like just spend the extra a hundred dollars and get these.

[01:14:09] Chase: ’cause they’re the best of the best. Okay. They just feel incredible. They sound amazing. The noise canceling is fricking great, but they’re spacey, they’re big, you know, so I gotta, I know I’m carrying those ’cause I’ve already, I’ve already got a relationship with that product. I have a relationship with my brother’s old, uh, battery that has like the USBC and the USB Mini and the Lightning, even though I don’t use, I only use, use USBC.

[01:14:33] Chase: Right. Uh, I have the, it just has a Keep Tahoe blue sticker on. It’s always in my bag. I use my studio, neat book notebook, which is a different form factor and I just, I love it. I can’t get enough of it. Why? What was that?

[01:14:46] Nathan: So the thing that, that stood out to me when you said that of you’re going on a journey and it’s what you carry with you mm-hmm.

[01:14:53] Nathan: That I think shapes the journey. Mm-hmm. And I think about that from a. From an emotional perspective.

[01:14:58] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:59] Nathan: Not about the gear at all.

[01:15:00] Chase: Totally.

[01:15:01] Nathan: But like,

[01:15:01] Chase: yeah.

[01:15:02] Nathan: Uh, you know, say, imagine that Barcelona, there’s opportunity to go, there’s a beach here, all of that, but you’ve got your suitcase with you. Oh, I guess we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna go spend two hours in the beach and join.

[01:15:13] Nathan: It’s

[01:15:13] Chase: like, yeah. Because we’ve got two hours to kill before the train or whatever.

[01:15:16] Nathan: Yeah. You know, everything has to sell. I don’t wanna

[01:15:17] Chase: get sand in my wheels because you don’t.

[01:15:20] Nathan: It would suck. And so what, like the emotional baggage Yeah. That you carry with you on this journey of your life and business and relationships and everything else.

[01:15:29] Nathan: Like if you can. Be thoughtful about each thing. Yeah. Whether it’s like, oh, my, my dad was disappointed in me for this thing, and so now I have to always do it this way. Yeah, yeah. And now I’m gonna carry this with me. And so I can’t go have this experience, I can’t pursue this dream.

[01:15:44] Chase: Right. Or are even like, like, what am I looking for?

[01:15:49] Chase: Mm-hmm. Right? Like, what am I still searching for and seeking? Am I gonna find it in Milan? Am I gonna find it in Prague? Is it, was it her? Is it that meetup? The WordPress fricking meetup at some pub in Berlin? Right. Was it, where am, what am I looking for? Mm-hmm. And travel was so great to be like, oh, there’s this, and oh, there’s that, and oh, there’s this.

[01:16:12] Chase: And now again, 43 hormonally, it’s a little more like, okay, the compass is turning inside and it’s like. And also the, all of the psychotherapy is very clear on this, like mm-hmm. You’re gonna generate your own, meaning you are gonna generate your, they call it reparenting, right? You are going to reparent yourself and give yourself the love that you needed and didn’t get, because that ache is controlling your life.

[01:16:35] Chase: Mm-hmm. And it’s not teaching you how to fulfill it. It’s just getting, it’s like more, maybe this, maybe that, maybe this, maybe that maybe over here. ’cause you don’t actually, that doesn’t, it doesn’t even wanna be fulfilled.

[01:16:44] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:16:45] Chase: It doesn’t know. You don’t know how to get into the. Texture of fulfillment.

[01:16:50] Chase: So baggage. What do we carry with us? I carry that panel book from studio Neat. Because that’s where those kinds of notes go. Where I’m using their mark one pen. ’cause it’s juicy and there’s no fricking label on it or anything. And it’s got an all metal click mechanism. Make them bury. Okay. And their kids are gonna fight over it when you’re dead.

[01:17:08] Chase: And it uses my favorite pen refill and I’m writing in there in this weird shaped paper because it’s slowing me down. Enough to maybe notice that I’m satisfied that like fucking gelato in Italy was absolutely worth the price of admission. Or, um, you know, a fricking cross all at like the wicker chairs at the cafes in Paris and this, and just like the vibe of the city or the, the road trip through the countryside in France.

[01:17:41] Chase: It’s like. Am I satisfied now? Am I satisfied now? What do I need? What in this moment is lacking and slowly over time, like the bag gets lighter.

[01:17:52] Nathan: Yeah. Do

[01:17:52] Chase: you know what I mean? You need less. It’s like, oh, I didn’t have, you know, I didn’t. I forgot my fucking toothpaste. I can’t believe it. Well, good news is there’s a, the equivalent of a CVS everywhere you go everywhere, right?

[01:18:06] Chase: Yeah. That mode of travel starts to be less about what I carry with me and more about how I am in the journey. Right. How’s that for a metaphor?

[01:18:16] Nathan: I like it. I like it.

[01:18:17] Chase: Yeah.

[01:18:17] Nathan: Well, the last thing

[01:18:18] Chase: Yeah,

[01:18:19] Nathan: that I want to touch on is I’ve seen you go from this focus on. Big audiences and reaching lots and lots of people mm-hmm.

[01:18:26] Nathan: To small groups.

[01:18:27] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:28] Nathan: And being in person, being intentional with people. Yeah. And like going so much deeper in relationships.

[01:18:33] Chase: Yeah.

[01:18:33] Nathan: Like tell me about that journey and how are you spending your time Yeah. In these men’s groups.

[01:18:37] Chase: Well, it’s the best dude because we don’t know how to, we don’t know how to one to many, most of us don’t know how to one to many.

[01:18:43] Chase: Every once in a while you meet people who are like professional stage people and they know how to one to many and you’re a little bit like, oh, okay. Like,

[01:18:48] Nathan: you know,

[01:18:49] Chase: you’re, you’re not even you until you’re up there. Got it. Like, right. And you don’t even really have access to them Here. They’re like, no, no, I have a family dude, I don’t need you.

[01:18:55] Chase: You’re like, okay, got it. Do your thing.

[01:18:57] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:18:57] Chase: But most of us. That back to that idea of like, what am I seeking? Mm-hmm. What am I, what is what in this moment is lacking? It is exactly to your point on, you know, what did we, what did we call that key word for you? This is what ma, why this matters to me. What was the field notes called?

[01:19:14] Chase: I can’t remember now.

[01:19:15] Nathan: Oh, I’m not

[01:19:16] Chase: sure. But like, what it’s like what I think of this exactly. To the same point on that, Nathan, where it’s like, I wanna be seen a little bit more.

[01:19:22] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:19:22] Chase: I wanna be witnessed. Here’s one thing I’ve realized in these small groups is healing requires a witness. Mm-hmm. It doesn’t require it necessarily, I mean, might not, but I’ve found that, um, like in men’s groups that I’m hosting, man shows up.

[01:19:36] Chase: We create a space of security, safety. Yeah. And, and v it starts to deepen. Mm-hmm. The space starts to deepen, which happens really naturally. Vulnerability starts to be expressed and just the witnessing, this guy is not my responsibility. He’s not yours either. Mm-hmm. None of us are responsible for his life.

[01:19:53] Chase: It’s his life.

[01:19:54] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:19:54] Chase: Right. He’s not responsible for mine. It’s my life when I’m sharing. It’s like you’re not responsible for my life. It’s, it’s, it’s mine. Witnessing where I’m at was started to become like this like thing where it was actual intimacy, I guess, for lack of a better term. It’s, it’s intimacy.

[01:20:11] Chase: I’m being seen and it’s fine. And it’s not like, oh my God, I love you and you’re the best. Right? And it’s not like, Ugh, what a fucking piece of crap. Right? It’s neutral. That space is more scary. I’m less reactive. I want to find some place to bounce off from what I’m doing, just to the same point of like the being in a little bit more of the chaos and the karaoke and normalizing that in our system, what I’m doing, normalizing reality, that’s what we need.

[01:20:43] Chase: I, from a young age was alone in my room, like creating my own little world. And it was like, interfacing with reality was like dodgy. It was like, it was, I don’t know. It was, it was suspect at best, you know? And I wanna be, in reality, in my relationship with, with my lover, I wanna be, in reality and my relationship with my kids, I wanna be, in reality, my relationship with my customers and clients and, and the internet at large.

[01:21:08] Chase: I wanna be in reality and I wanna help people get into reality. So I find that in smaller groups, and yeah, I do one-on-one work too, but like, the group dynamic itself becomes this like sort of energetic, uh, spaceship that like we can go places with, we can do stuff with. And ultimately, I think of it like a car wash.

[01:21:28] Chase: You come in one end and you go out the other. ’cause what matters is not what, this is what matters is you’re, you’re going back to your wife, your kids, your business, your career, your like, like this. Lemme talk to the men for a second. You know, men have gotten a lot of shit. It’s like a lot of the roles have changed.

[01:21:47] Chase: A lot of the, the experiences and the expectations have shifted. We’re all still trying to figure that out. But we’ll absolutely be holding the world together or a part of holding the world together. And we carry a lot on our backs and we’ve gotta connect with each other in ways where it’s not just sports and booze.

[01:22:02] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:22:03] Chase: Where it’s also like, I see what you’re carrying. Yeah. That’s cool. It was a good job. Like, yeah, I hope you keep going. You know, if you don’t, no worries. Right. And it’s like there’s something that we can do with each other. And so like on Instagram I have this like, trend on stories where it’s just join a men’s group, JAMG.

[01:22:21] Chase: And it’s just these funny videos that I find and it’s just JAMG join a men’s group. And it’s either reasons why you should, or reasons why, why this guy needed it or like whatever. Um, ’cause I just want to normalize the idea that like, guys can get together, uh, in smaller groups, bring a little intention, which is not necessarily comfortable.

[01:22:44] Chase: Mm-hmm. But like, once you get into it, then it starts to get kinda lame when someone’s coming and being a performative little Turkey. Right. You know, you’re just like, all right, settle down. Fucking Charles. You know, I can’t feel your heart at all. Right. And what you’re steering by the way, you know, good performance because, uh, like these guys in my men’s groups.

[01:23:03] Chase: That I’m just a part of. Like they walked me through divorce. Mm-hmm. I walked them through finding the woman that they asked to marry, uh, where our kids have all grown up together. Like, there’s just so much life you end up walking each other through accidentally once every three weeks. Right. But that amortized over three plus years ends up being super valuable.

[01:23:25] Chase: Um, so that’s why I am like, join a men’s group. Mm-hmm. Like join a men’s group and if you don’t have one, like come to one of my retreats. Mm-hmm. I work with a guy named David Sutcliffe right now, who was the best group facilitator I’ve ever seen. He was the, he was the dad on Gilmore Girls, by the way.

[01:23:40] Chase: Okay. He was like an actor in LA for a long time. And just the, one of the best I’ve seen in the, in the room, my buddy Dan Tini, who I was with yesterday, who lives here in Boise, who I was telling you about. Yeah. Does like all this negotiation. Another one of those guys that was just like, the best in the room.

[01:23:55] Chase: So I’m hosting things at my house that are, that are deep.

[01:23:58] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:23:58] Chase: Um, and then I’m also starting to host like kind of a oh 1, 0 1, like I’m men’s activation, where it’s just like, all right, here’s the basics of the nervous system. Mm-hmm. We’re gonna do some sonic cold plunge, we’re gonna talk about our fucking feelings and I’m gonna show you they can be cool.

[01:24:11] Chase: We’re also gonna do these experiences where you’re gonna, you’re gonna see yourself mm-hmm. Reflected back from someone else who doesn’t know you. It’s another thing about this where it’s like, especially when you don’t, you, there’s a like a, a debate. Do I go like with my buddies? Or do I go where I don’t know anybody.

[01:24:27] Nathan: Right.

[01:24:28] Chase: And there’s so much value. I think you were talking about this at the, when you were talking with your coach about the reboot uhhuh thing as well. Maybe in something like it, but just that, like that walk down back

[01:24:38] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:24:38] Chase: You know, with somebody you don’t really know about, like the place in your life that you’re in.

[01:24:43] Chase: Mm-hmm. Right. That can be wildly effective at getting us to come to terms with where we are. ’cause I noticed in myself, I just didn’t wanna see it. It made me feel like a failure. It made me feel like something’s wrong with me. Mm-hmm. And it was being witnessed again and again over time. Like I could still feel the feeling of it, like the scared in me, you know?

[01:25:06] Nathan: Well, you said the word intimacy. Yeah. And uh, someone explained it to me once as into me, you see?

[01:25:13] Chase: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:25:13] Nathan: And I like that. Yeah. Of just like being with people who can see what you’re going through. Who,

[01:25:18] Chase: yeah.

[01:25:19] Nathan: Who can truly. Um, I just bring it to another, like, another layer of depth.

[01:25:25] Chase: Yeah. Terry Reel is this great therapist, uh, guy.

[01:25:28] Chase: Like when, uh, Esther Perel needs relationship coaching Uhhuh, she goes to Terry reel.

[01:25:33] Nathan: Okay.

[01:25:34] Chase: Okay. Um, that’s

[01:25:35] Nathan: a good marketing line.

[01:25:37] Chase: Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of when, like this Dr. Jack Cruz was on Tetragrammaton, which is Rick Rubin’s podcast. Mm-hmm. The only, it’s, it’s Jack Cruz, Andrew Huberman, and Rick Rubin.

[01:25:48] Chase: And the only thing Rick Rubin does to open the conversation is he ask Jack, ask Jack Cruz, how many brain surgeries have you done? And he goes over 10,000 and the conversation off, and Jack Cruz is yelling at Andrew Huberman the entire time and Huberman is like, okay, no, I get it. I can see what you’re saying.

[01:26:04] Chase: There’s fucking bonkers his dickhead jack. Anyways, completely, completely separate, but like, yeah. When Esther Perel needs coaching and relationship becomes to Terry Real, and he says, for those of us who are, have like a addictive tendencies or addicts of some kind, um, the cure to addiction is intimacy and that’s a fascinating idea.

[01:26:25] Chase: Mm-hmm. The cure to the striving and the never enoughness and all of that is intimacy. And I will say from my experience, initial experiences with intimacy were dis was actually the feeling of disappointment. Like Trump Barbae says, uh, enlightenment is the last great disappointment. And I just think that’s a fascinating idea.

[01:26:50] Chase: Right. Sometimes it doesn’t look how we expect it or want it to. We, we hear the word intimacy and we think it looks like melting into. Mm-hmm. But it might have more, actually I’m standing here individuated, but I’m in relationship

[01:27:03] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[01:27:04] Chase: Than we expected. It might be different than we expected. Right. So that’s why over time with a group.

[01:27:13] Chase: That kind of experience can get a little bit more normalized and then you can start to feel that with your partner. ’cause Nathan Barry, back in the napkin math, you wanna change the fucking world. You affect the relationship between a committed monogamous couple of whatever sex and gender that are raising kids.

[01:27:28] Chase: Because what that’s doing is that’s creating an environment that those kids are living in. Mm-hmm. It’s shaping the worldview and the reality for those kids within one gener, within like, you know, 40 years, you’ve changed multiple generations. If you can, you can make aliveness, which comes from being able to tell the truth and it being okay to be me here.

[01:27:45] Chase: Mm-hmm. With you. And it’s okay for you to be you here. ’cause then we can figure this out over time. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk, bro.

[01:27:52] Nathan: I like it. I like it. Uh, maybe a final thing that maybe wrapping all of this together, I’m very curious of what success looks like to you.

[01:28:04] Chase: What I used to imagine for success was just people paying attention to me and liking me and, and fitting.

[01:28:10] Nathan: Yep.

[01:28:11] Chase: Now it’s like me liking me and I, ironically, it’s so classic. Uh, what I needed for that was integrity. I didn’t need to be a better artist. I didn’t need to be more creative or take more risks or whatever. I just needed to know what I was committed to. And, uh, that is like a vibe, integrity’s a fucking vibe.

[01:28:36] Chase: Um, success is like liking me for sure. Um, and, uh, you know, a huge, a huge part of that is, is like, um, touching into and feeling the, the feelings that I didn’t know how to feel. Like I just turned myself off of like, there was a whole, whole parts of my inner experience that I was, even though I was deep meditator, very experienced in lots of modalities, all the psychedelics, all the things like that.

[01:29:05] Chase: It’s like inner child work. Mm-hmm. And touching into. Relating to this 4-year-old, 7-year-old, 11-year-old, 22-year-old, all these different experiences with Kimmy in Austin, Texas at Kuya. Go see Kimmy where something started to happen, where I started to love this young me, I started to love, love this guy.

[01:29:25] Chase: ’cause every time I connected to him and I’d, I’d, I’d sense into like, what is he wanting? He just wanted somebody there to attune to him and just like for him to be okay to sense like he was, he was okay. Um, and I, I’ll be damned if I don’t see that in just about everybody I see out there, you know, ironically the integrity and then the, like, loving into myself, those were available this entire time.

[01:29:50] Chase: Nathan Berry, like those books, I read those books 15, 20 years ago. You know, it didn’t click, it didn’t click. But now there’s such a richness in those, the, the emotional texture of that, that is, oh God, it’s nourishing. Mm-hmm. And it feels great. I’m still scared. I’m scared of. I’m scared of, of going into relationship again and being, being hurt, you know?

[01:30:17] Chase: Um, but I’m like. I’m with that fear of abandonment in a way that I, that I wasn’t before, I would’ve just bounced right off of it and gone done Big performance guy and try to like, get her to like me and still be like, mm-hmm. You know, BA I’m, bam, I’m a bamboozle. You know, it takes about two hours. I don’t know how you’ve been in here to, like, a therapist needs to talk to me for about two hours before I’m like down right in the substrate.

[01:30:40] Chase: Like, okay, we can just fucking hang out from here. So, uh, that’s my definition of success, I think is just liking me. But, and yeah, ’cause for me, liking me, uh, it, because I put myself on a, on a, both, on a pedestal and I beat the shit outta myself. Mm-hmm. Right? Like, I expect the highest

[01:30:57] Nathan: standards.

[01:30:58] Chase: I expect very great things of myself.

[01:31:00] Chase: I, I’ve worked with the, some of the best coaches, mentors and shamans and guides and artists out there I’ve paid attention to and studied like. Like legit studied the best comedians and artists and auteurs and filmmakers and all this stuff. Like in a way where I’m like, no, I see what they’re doing. Like I get it.

[01:31:17] Chase: Like I get it. And um, and so like the expectations are really high for myself in the face of all of that to just go like, oh yeah, but you know, it’s, you know, it’s even better. This is just liking me. It’s a very

[01:31:33] Nathan: simple answer and it’s a like a very deep answer simultaneously.

[01:31:37] Chase: Yeah. It’s so strange how, how that’s exactly the depth I was looking for and I was looking everywhere.

[01:31:43] Nathan: Yeah. Oh man, there’s so many things I’m taking away from this conversation. I’m just thinking about bringing an element of play mm-hmm. In, uh, the karaoke. Mm-hmm. McCury that, that terrifies me a little bit, you know? Yeah. Which points to, for me, like a, an aspect of, um, like wanting to seem put together, not wanting to fail on a public stage.

[01:32:02] Nathan: Yeah. That sort of thing. Yeah. And so everything, which is

[01:32:04] Chase: so relatable, by the way, of course.

[01:32:07] Nathan: And so everything that I put out there goes through an editor in some way. Right? If I’m like, Ooh, that was garbage. You know, clap make, make my vosser after sound. Yeah. You know, whatever, cut it out. Um, and so, you know, you do things in a public stage, um, or like the entertainment side, I’m like, Ooh, that, what if it’s not entertaining?

[01:32:25] Nathan: What if I fail? You know, or that sort of thing. So finding, like chasing my curiosity, finding things that, uh, challenge me. I, I don’t think I’ve sat down to like, learn a new skill in quite a while. And so that was interesting. I’m like, oh, what, what if I were to do that and to document, what

[01:32:38] Chase: would you learn if you were gonna learn something right now?

[01:32:41] Nathan: I’d be singing.

[01:32:43] Chase: That was so quick.

[01:32:44] Nathan: Yeah. So a question that I like is, uh, you know, if you, if you could like, snap your fingers or wave a magic wand and like acquire a new skill, um, that would be something where I think of it fully. I tend to think of, I, I think as humans we, we bucket things in terms of, um, I.

[01:33:01] Nathan: Like what you can only be, you can only be great at, with like natural ability

[01:33:06] Chase: mm-hmm.

[01:33:06] Nathan: Versus what, uh, you could acquire with deliberate practice.

[01:33:09] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[01:33:09] Nathan: So for me, like, um, design, video editing, all this like deliberate practice, like show up, put in the reps, all of that.

[01:33:16] Chase: Yeah.

[01:33:16] Nathan: You get it. Um, now math, any, any of those things fall into that bucket for me?

[01:33:23] Nathan: I think like, uh, playing an instrument. Mm-hmm. Probably in that bucket. Mm-hmm. But like singing and vocals and all of that would be like, oh, you gotta be,

[01:33:30] Chase: yeah.

[01:33:30] Nathan: Has to be an innate talent.

[01:33:31] Chase: Yeah.

[01:33:32] Nathan: My wife is the other, she’s like, whatcha are you talking about? That is absolutely a skill you can learn. You know, like, yeah.

[01:33:35] Nathan: She’s a different life experience. One thing that I believe is a parent, your job is to help your kids give them a taste of as many things as possible. Yeah. So they move it from the bucket of like, oh, I could only do that if I had innate talent.

[01:33:46] Chase: Right.

[01:33:46] Nathan: Right. Into the mental bucket of if I wanted to. I could acquire that skill and I could do it over time.

[01:33:52] Chase: Yeah.

[01:33:53] Nathan: But yeah, like I think, uh, music and singing would be the

[01:33:56] Chase: That was so quick, Nathan. Yeah. You know, you like kind of over owe it to yourself. And also there’s nothing more like connected and holy than the actual experience of, of your own voice.

[01:34:06] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:34:07] Chase: Right.

[01:34:07] Nathan: And for me, it’d be the, like, it’s something that’s so, uh, important to my wife.

[01:34:11] Nathan: Like, she loves music and she loves, you know, she’s in jazz choir. She’s, you know, all that stuff

[01:34:15] too.

[01:34:15] Chase: S singing Harmony is a vibe dude. Yeah. Is a vibe. It’s great. Okay. I’m gonna hold you to that a little bit. Yeah.

[01:34:21] Nathan: There you go. Now I gotta be

[01:34:22] Chase: careful. There’s good, there’s like, there’s great coaches out there.

[01:34:24] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:34:25] Chase: There’s great vocal coaches and they have you do good warmups and exercises and things, just to get you a sense of it. Like, this is a well known thing about how to teach this,

[01:34:34] Nathan: but I think for me, if I think about personal development, right? There’s the skills that are, would be interesting to acquire next of like, maybe it’s like, uh.

[01:34:44] Nathan: You know, you’re like, oh, I’m gonna learn to be great at AI with this thing, and there’s a bunch of skills there. Or for me, another one would be art.

[01:34:51] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[01:34:51] Nathan: Right? Like, I’m at one point was okay at drawing mm-hmm. To be great at that. My friend, um, Kevin Esperino, uh, who runs a, uh, a blog YouTube channel called Epic Gardening.

[01:35:02] Chase: Mm-hmm.

[01:35:02] Nathan: He took the last nine months and he is like, look, I’m just going become good at drawing. And he went from being like, not good to very, very good in nine months way and documented it. And, but like that’s a very achievable thing. Like, I, I have enough of that.

[01:35:15] Chase: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:35:15] Nathan: That I’m like, okay, I know I could do that.

[01:35:17] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:35:17] Chase: Yeah.

[01:35:17] Nathan: If I set aside the time, but something like, uh, I would say like dance or,

[01:35:22] Chase: yeah.

[01:35:22] Nathan: Singing Uhhuh is like, oh, that’s actually a little like the curiosity Yeah. Is here and the fear is here.

[01:35:29] Chase: I’ll guarantee you that you do the, you do, like, you hire a coach trainer on the vo voice thing and do the, like the, uh, notebook sort of some of that notebook content.

[01:35:40] Chase: Yeah. Um, you’re gonna. You’re gonna feel more expressed.

[01:35:44] Nathan: Right?

[01:35:44] Chase: Right. Yeah. You’re gonna feel a lot more expressed, which is mm-hmm. I think it’s just something that we all want, especially like you’re living at the top of, of like, like of, at such a high level. Mm-hmm. Right. And you’re not feeling fully expressed.

[01:35:58] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:35:58] Chase: You’re not feeling fully alive in some ways. Like you can feel the, like the itch or like the interest in that. Like follow, follow some of that. Yeah. And that’s the best thing about, like, you could just hire a coach to

[01:36:09] Nathan: Right.

[01:36:09] Chase: To do that. Right. You could just like tell some of your people, like, this is important to me.

[01:36:14] Chase: I want you to keep me on task with this. So now I have to keep with field notes in my pocket.

[01:36:18] Nathan: Right.

[01:36:18] Chase: You know, although the, although the studio neat ones a little bit better. Or tote book mini.

[01:36:22] Nathan: Okay. We’ll get that in there. Well, there’s been so many good things in here. Thanks for the. I think, yeah, thanks for the most chaotic conversation I’ve ever had on this podcast.

[01:36:33] Chase: My favorite part was it’s a two ski approach and a single ski. It’s a second ski approach and a single ski context.

[01:36:41] Nathan: So if people want this level of chaos from you on a more regular basis, where should they go on the internet to get more Chase Reeves in their

[01:36:47] Chase: life? Um, you know, most of it, it used to be my whole internet presence was very chaotic, and now it’s very cultured and curated.

[01:36:54] Chase: So, but like my YouTube channel and my Instagram, that’s where, that’s, that’s where I live.

[01:36:58] Why

[01:36:58] Nathan: should people search just your name, chase

[01:37:00] Chase: Reeves? Yeah, chase Reeves, Bozeman, chase w Reeves on everything basically.

[01:37:05] Nathan: That sounds good.

[01:37:06] Chase: Yeah.

[01:37:07] Nathan: Thanks so much for coming on.

[01:37:08] Chase: Thanks, Nathan.

[00:00:00] Simon: What is a successful life for you? If you could take away all of these external metrics, when you know what fulfillment looks and feels like for you, that awakens one of the greatest energetic sources within us.

[00:00:10] Nathan: Simon Alexander Ong is the author of Energize a bestselling book on energy and performance.

[00:00:15] Nathan: He works with leaders and creators around the world who want to perform at a high level

[00:00:19] Simon: energy. I see it through four dimensions, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. In many cases, when we think about energy, we only focus on the physical and mental energy is all about your mindset. Emotional energy is all about relationships, and spiritual energy is all about meaning and purpose.

[00:00:33] Nathan: Simon’s work focuses on energy as what’s underneath productivity, creativity, and leadership.

[00:00:38] Simon: Difference between energy management and time management is that time management assumes your energy’s constant fat, entire. Energy management appreciates that. It fluctuates throughout the day.

[00:00:48] Nathan: We also talk about one of my favorite topics, which is showing up consistently and how you can build a way of working that’s sustainable in the long run.

[00:00:56] Nathan: What do you see that stops people from taking action?

[00:00:59] Simon: I think there are three things. First, two, fear and self-doubt. And the third is,

[00:01:04] Nathan: oh, I love that.

[00:01:09] Nathan: Simon. How long have you been a creator?

[00:01:12] Simon: Interesting question because I’ve never really considered myself a creator.

[00:01:15] Nathan: Okay.

[00:01:16] Simon: Uh, people have labeled part of what I do as being a creator because I have a YouTube channel. I post on platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram.

[00:01:23] Nathan: You’ve written a book?

[00:01:24] Simon: I’ve written a book, and I, I think in a way, we’re all creators because you can’t not build a business today without creating some form of content.

[00:01:32] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:33] Simon: And I think creators just today’s buzzword for describing Right. What we all have to do in terms of building and growing a business.

[00:01:40] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So how long have you not been a, no, I’m just kidding. Um, so before you came into this world of, of teaching and sharing these stories and talking about energy and all of that,

[00:01:53] Simon: yeah.

[00:01:53] Nathan: Where were you before in business?

[00:01:55] Simon: So, I grew, I grew up with this mistaken belief that to be successful in life, you had to earn a certain job title.

[00:02:02] Nathan: Okay.

[00:02:02] Simon: So when I was a teenager, I remember speaking to my dad and my dad looks like the Dalai Lama. So I thought this will be quite a wise conversation. I remember sitting down with him at the dinner table and I asked him, so when I finish college.

[00:02:14] Simon: What would be deemed as a successful career? And he said, well, Simon, if you become a banker, a lawyer, a doctor, or an accountant, I think you would’ve earned a reputable career. And so seduced by films like Wall Street and Boiler Room and the like. I decided to pursue a career in finance.

[00:02:31] Nathan: Yeah, you strike me as a finance guy.

[00:02:33] Nathan: Not

[00:02:33] Simon: at all. At the worst possible time. Actually, this was the middle of 2007. Mm-hmm. A year before the global financial crisis swept across the planet. And just to make things a little interesting, the company I started as a graduate with was Lehman Brothers.

[00:02:46] Nathan: Oh yeah.

[00:02:46] Simon: Wow. Which collapsed 14 months after I joined.

[00:02:48] Nathan: Right.

[00:02:49] Simon: Nothing to do with me, by the way.

[00:02:50] Nathan: Correlation, causation, there’s no way to know

[00:02:53] Simon: indeed. But for me, I always say that was, even though it was really difficult and challenging at the time, yeah. It was a blessing in disguise because for me it kickstarted what I believe is the longest journey we as humans make, which are the interests from our heads to our hearts.

[00:03:08] Simon: Never an easy journey, but the most important and fulfilling that we will ever take. About eight years later, I quit the industry and decided I wanted to run my own business. I, I was really into the psychology of personal development, understanding what made people, uh, show up and achieve the success they did.

[00:03:27] Simon: And so that led me to the coaching industry. And one thing just led to another, I started coaching people. Coaching, then led to speaking. Speaking then led to doing a lot of interviews. And then that led to landing a book. There were penguin

[00:03:38] Nathan: right

[00:03:38] Simon: in 2020, just as the world was entering its first lockdown.

[00:03:42] Nathan: You tend to make these big pivots. It seems like right before global, global things happen again, correlation, causation, I’m not, um, so coming from, I think the intersection of, of finance and that background is really interesting is then you get into the world of coaching. ’cause you Yeah. You, you have this analytical side to you.

[00:04:00] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:01] Nathan: But then also everything that I hear you talk about in your content and your book and all of this Right. Is so heart focused.

[00:04:08] Simon: Yeah.

[00:04:09] Nathan: Um, what’s the relationship between those two for you?

[00:04:13] Simon: There’s a, the relationship is that we listen to both our heart and our mind.

[00:04:18] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:19] Simon: The heart knows where you need to be, but often the mind steps in and overwrites it.

[00:04:25] Simon: So let’s say your heart is pulling into a certain direction. The mind then jumps in and analyzes every possible outcome. Is this really what I want to do? Am I gonna succeed in this? And it’s why so often people aren’t where they want to be in life. We talk ourself out of the journey. Before it’s even started thinking about scenarios that may or may not even happen.

[00:04:45] Simon: But what we come to realize, or at least I did as I began in this journey, is that we live in the feeling of our thinking moment to moment to moment. Okay? So your life is essentially what you choose to see. If you choose to see failure, if you choose to see setbacks, if you choose to see why it can’t be done, your mind will go up and find reasons for it.

[00:05:06] Simon: But if you see possibility, if you see potential, if you see that there could be a way forward. Your mind will go out and find it. So you’re just sending instructions to your mind all the time. But it’s the awareness to know that that is what’s causing your reality to be the way it is.

[00:05:22] Nathan: My background is in computer programming.

[00:05:24] Nathan: Mm-hmm. And that sounds like you had having one program running and then choosing to say, you know what? We’re gonna change some code and we’re gonna reprogram this. Is there an example where you were able to reprogram yourself and like choose to see something different and had then have a different life experience because of it?

[00:05:42] Simon: Absolutely. So one of the things we can’t avoid in today’s world is logging onto social media. And looking at what everyone around us is doing. And so the trap that I used to be in is I would look at what everybody else was doing and I kept comparing myself to them.

[00:05:56] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:57] Simon: I was thinking, well, they achieved this amount of success because they had certain resources, they had the right network.

[00:06:03] Simon: And if I continued to choose that line of thought, I would never have started in, in terms of my journey to what I get to do today. But what I learned is a simple reframe that instead of looking at others for comparison, look at others for inspiration.

[00:06:17] Nathan: Mm.

[00:06:17] Simon: So instead of saying, well, why can’t I do, how come they’ve got there?

[00:06:20] Simon: They’re just lucky.

[00:06:21] Nathan: Right.

[00:06:22] Simon: Ask yourself, what can I learn from how they’ve got there? What can I learn from how they’re doing, what they’re doing? And then how can I just start testing? How can I start experimenting and see what works and what doesn’t? So I find my own path forwards. Mm-hmm. And ultimately, the only person we should be comparing ourselves to is who we were yesterday.

[00:06:42] Nathan: Okay.

[00:06:42] Simon: If we are constantly better than who we were yesterday. Eventually we get to reap the rewards.

[00:06:47] Nathan: Mm-hmm. So was there someone specific that you were comparing yourself to that you then shifted?

[00:06:54] Simon: I think just everyone ahead of me.

[00:06:55] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:06:55] Simon: J just a, a, a. As soon as I got into this industry

[00:06:58] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:06:58] Simon: I was just following lots of people doing incredible things and I was just consume, consume, and consume.

[00:07:05] Simon: But then I realized that WW when it comes to social media, especially. You have two choices because social media is just a tool. At the end of the day, you have the choice to just consume or you can use what’s available to create something, to create something of value. And that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to start using it in a healthier way so I could grow not just my brand, but build awareness about what I did.

[00:07:28] Nathan: Mm-hmm. So what did that shift look like as you, you got into, what were the steps that you took to, to step into that creative role?

[00:07:34] Simon: So when I first started, it was just me going to networking events, speaking to people, giving people experience of what coaching was like. And then on social media, what I started doing, which is documenting my speaking, it was showing people behind the scenes was giving people highlights of my speaking and just writing my thoughts onto articles, onto posts, uh, blogging at the time.

[00:07:53] Simon: Yeah, your blogging was the thing, uh, that was doing really well. That’s how people found out about your work. Uh, and then just trying to build a profile on, on these different platforms. And I found that over time, that’s how people came across my work. It wasn’t Google anymore. I mean, some people would still search, uh, looking for your work specifically, but people would go straight onto platforms like Instagram or YouTube or LinkedIn to learn about who you were.

[00:08:17] Simon: And then they would want to have a conversation and see whether they wanted to do business with you.

[00:08:20] Nathan: So something that you’ve talked about really a lot is energy.

[00:08:24] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:25] Nathan: And the reason I ask how long you’ve been a creator is I’m curious about how you are, you sustain that energy over a long period of time.

[00:08:33] Nathan: Because something that I see so many creators do is burnout pretty quickly. And they might get to a tiny fraction of the reach that they hope to

[00:08:42] Simon: mm-hmm.

[00:08:42] Nathan: Because they burn out after six months Yeah. Or two years or that sort of thing. And I’m now at 14 years

[00:08:50] Simon: mm-hmm.

[00:08:50] Nathan: In the creator industry. I think plenty of other people are at, you know, five years before they get traction or all of this.

[00:08:57] Nathan: And so. When it relates to creators and, and burnout and their energy, like what do you see people getting wrong in both how they think about it and then the day-to-day actions that they take.

[00:09:06] Simon: For me, it boils down to consistency versus intensity.

[00:09:11] Nathan: Okay.

[00:09:12] Simon: We go hard.

[00:09:14] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:15] Simon: And when we don’t see results, we burn out.

[00:09:17] Nathan: Yeah. I,

[00:09:17] Simon: I, I mean, classic example is when we start a new year, lots of people have resolutions and they go very intense. So if you’ve never been to a gym that often before and you decide this is a year that health is gonna be my value, and you go three, four times a week. If you go from zero to that without slowly building and focusing on consistency, eventually you find out you can’t keep it up, you burn out and eventually you give up your gym membership.

[00:09:44] Simon: So the key is to focus on consistency over intensity. And so when you first start out, it’s understanding, well, what does that look like for me? So not to follow what other people are doing, but just say maybe once a week. Posting on social media might be my frequency.

[00:09:58] Nathan: Right.

[00:09:58] Simon: And then slowly build from there.

[00:10:00] Simon: Because the key is you wanna thrive, not just survive. And the only way to do that is to find a good rhythm that works for you. And we all come from different setups. You know, some people will have a team, you might be starting out on your own. Other people might be holding a holding down a day job as well.

[00:10:14] Simon: And so you’ve just gotta work out what is my rhythm that I can sustain over, over a long period.

[00:10:19] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:19] Simon: Knowing that something is always better than nothing.

[00:10:23] Nathan: Right. I mean, something that I, this is not a show focus on beginners, but something that I, I recommend for beginners is that they start with journaling Yeah.

[00:10:30] Nathan: Rather than actually posting. Mm-hmm. And so that the consistency that you build up is the consistency of logging your thoughts and ideas. Mm-hmm. And then once that exists, and then let’s get to a consistency of refining them and then maybe posting them. Right. And so you start with this much easier step.

[00:10:47] Simon: Well, I’m curious, what, what’s kept you going? You, you’ve mentioned you’ve been doing this for quite a while.

[00:10:52] Nathan: I mean, I, I truly love it.

[00:10:53] Simon: Mm.

[00:10:53] Nathan: Right. So it’s the people that. Uh, and the relationships that I have. Yeah. Um, I also think that you don’t truly understand an idea until you teach it. And that teaching is the biggest thing there.

[00:11:04] Nathan: There’s so many things, you know, I love money and finance mm-hmm. And, um, like the physics behind building wealth. And so something that I really enjoyed is trying to distill those principles down into something that I can teach. Yeah. Because they’ll be like, oh yeah. This is why it works that way. You know, SaaS companies have higher enterprise value than agencies, right?

[00:11:23] Nathan: Mm-hmm. It’s a, a standard thing, and someone’s like, why? I’m like, they just do. I don’t know. You know? But it’s, it’s not until you can teach it

[00:11:32] Simon: Yeah.

[00:11:32] Nathan: That you realize like, oh, do you really understand the physics behind it?

[00:11:35] Simon: And that’s also the power of teaching because I think when you teach something, you’re forced to really understand it.

[00:11:40] Simon: Mm-hmm. And also simplify it.

[00:11:42] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:11:42] Simon: How can you simplify it into frameworks or ways where people can get it immediately? And when you pass that knowledge on, that’s how we empower other people to also follow on the same journey. Yeah.

[00:11:52] Nathan: And I think for me it’s having a mission and a purpose

[00:11:57] Simon: Mm.

[00:11:57] Nathan: Of why you’re doing it.

[00:11:58] Nathan: So this is something that I keep trying to recenter the team at, at Kit around is our mission as a company is that we exist to help creators earn a living Yeah. And to build valuable businesses. And so I’ll keep going back to BA basically learning that making money is a skill

[00:12:13] Simon: Yeah.

[00:12:13] Nathan: Was a transformational thing for me, where I took something that was, uh, scarcity based and, and I, you know, watched my parents divorce over, like fighting over money and all of that and realizing like, okay, I wanna, I wanna a path to Yeah.

[00:12:27] Nathan: Like taking care of my family in a sustainable way, and then realizing that like, wait, making money is a skill. I can learn this thing. Yeah. And then achieving all of the goals that I had set out. And then basically going around to the world, like, do you understand this?

[00:12:40] Simon: Like,

[00:12:40] Nathan: does everybody know that? You know?

[00:12:42] Nathan: And so I felt like I had discovered like, the cheat code for a video game.

[00:12:46] Simon: Mm.

[00:12:46] Nathan: And I wanted to share that with everyone else.

[00:12:48] Simon: And, and that’s for me, what makes it energizing. You know, you go back earlier about how do we keep it energizing fr mm-hmm. The longevity of surviving as a creator. It’s how do, how do you treat it like a game?

[00:12:58] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:12:58] Simon: Because if you can see the journey as a game, it becomes far more fun and enjoyable. So each challenge you see, you treat it like an obstacle to get to the next level. Right. And when you get there, you energize to try and get to the next level and the next level. And then you’re working out, well, what are the cheat codes that are gonna help me break through to the next level?

[00:13:15] Simon: Uh, and then for me, that’s what, that’s what makes it so much fun. Yeah. Uh, as you go in without knowing what the outcome’s gonna be, but just to experiment and treat the journey like a game.

[00:13:24] Nathan: Something I think a lot about is stress.

[00:13:25] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:26] Nathan: And I have had times, you know, years in the past where I would have like panic attacks really, really struggle with stress.

[00:13:35] Nathan: Yeah. And then other times where I’ve really, really enjoyed the work and had like a, a much more, I guess, fluid easygoing, um, easygoing relationship with it. But is that something, as you work with leaders and, and all that, is that something that you work with them a lot on, is their relationship to their work and, and the stress side of it?

[00:13:55] Simon: Absolutely. So many people are stressed because they tie their emotional wellbeing mm-hmm. To whether something works out or not, or even their achievements. So, I dunno if you know this, but when Michael Phelps retired from being an Olympic swimmer mm-hmm. Within the first year, he talked about how often he had suicidal thoughts.

[00:14:14] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:14:14] Simon: And that was because his identity was so tied to being an Olympic swimmer.

[00:14:19] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:20] Simon: So when you retire from that career, who are you?

[00:14:23] Nathan: Right.

[00:14:23] Simon: How do you describe yourself now? And so it’s, it’s really understanding that you are not your achievements. If you tie yourself to it, your emotional wellbeing’s gonna be like a rollercoaster.

[00:14:34] Simon: When things go well, you’re gonna be having a euphoric hire. When things don’t go well, you wanna shut yourself away from the world.

[00:14:39] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:40] Simon: And so it’s really focusing on the fact that you can choose to be happy and grateful just for the sake of it. It doesn’t have to be tied to an achievement. And in fact, when you operate from a place of gratitude, for me, that’s how you access abundance.

[00:14:53] Simon: It’s again, choosing what you see. If you’re realizing that there is so much to be grateful for in this present moment, suddenly your mind finds even more things to be grateful for, you attract more opportunities into your world.

[00:15:06] Nathan: That seems like something that is really easy to say and really hard to live out.

[00:15:10] Nathan: Like how do you coach people through making that, that transition and saying like, okay, my accomplishments are not my self worth, you know, and, and all of those things.

[00:15:21] Simon: Absolutely. I mean. It’s one of those things that’s hard because it’s something we’re so conditioned to believe. Mm-hmm. So if you look at how society judges success, we judge success on external metrics.

[00:15:31] Simon: So usually when you ask people, who do you consider to be successful, the traits that go into their determination of who’s successful are things like how much money someone is earning their status, their job title, the company they work with. But if you were to take all of that away and really ask someone, well, who are you?

[00:15:48] Simon: Without those things, a lot of people can’t tell you because they don’t know what that is. And so in a way, when we, when we talk about wisdom and when I’m teaching people to become wiser, I always say wisdom begins with knowing yourself.

[00:16:01] Nathan: Okay,

[00:16:02] Simon: who are you? What do you stand for? Ultimately? What is a successful life for you?

[00:16:07] Simon: If you could take away all of these external metrics, you choose what is a successful life for you? What would that look like? And it’s starting from there.

[00:16:15] Nathan: Hmm.

[00:16:16] Simon: It’s having clarity of purpose, because going back to something you said earlier about purpose for me. When you know what your purpose is, when you know what you’re working toward, when you know what fulfillment looks and feels like for you, that awakens one of the greatest energetic sources within us.

[00:16:33] Simon: It’s what wakes us up in the morning. It’s what pulls us forward. It’s what allows us to do more than our basic job description.

[00:16:39] Nathan: Okay. So going to that stress, I wanna give listeners a handful of tools. Mm. For, for dealing with that. ’cause I, I find that most ambitious people that I come across.

[00:16:48] Simon: Yeah.

[00:16:49] Nathan: And if you’re listening to this show, you’re probably an ambitious, very highly driven person.

[00:16:53] Nathan: Are going to encounter a lot of stress at some point. Yeah. It might be self-inflicted, it might be, um, whatever comes up from family, from work, from, you know, anything else. Opportunities you’ve taken, the ones that you’ve missed out on, whatever else. And I wanna give a series of, of tools and I’ll, so I’ll kick off with one and then I’d love for you to share one, one thing that really helps me.

[00:17:13] Nathan: Is thinking about life as a video game. Mm-hmm. Like you’re talking about and there being a series of levels.

[00:17:18] Simon: Yeah.

[00:17:19] Nathan: And so looking back,

[00:17:21] Simon: mm.

[00:17:21] Nathan: So I look at a problem today that feels crushing to me, where I’m like, I don’t know what I’m gonna do about this. This is so stressful. And I will set that aside for a moment.

[00:17:29] Nathan: And I will think back to a time a few years ago that I felt the same way.

[00:17:32] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:33] Nathan: So like an example would be, uh, figuring out how to lead a company through a global pandemic.

[00:17:40] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:40] Nathan: And lock down and everything else. And that felt crushing at the time. Mm-hmm. Now I look at that and I go, oh, that’d actually be pretty easy.

[00:17:48] Nathan: Not, not easy, but I know how I would do that.

[00:17:51] Simon: Mm.

[00:17:52] Nathan: Past me was crushed under the weight of that stress current me. It would be like you. That’s fine.

[00:17:58] Simon: Yeah.

[00:17:58] Nathan: I’ve grown enough. And so that reflection in time realizes, oh, I have leveled up as a leader, as a human, all of that. To the point that what was crushing before is manageable now.

[00:18:12] Nathan: Yeah. And so now I can go forward in time and say, okay, so the thing that feels crushing now Mm. I bet Nathan three years from now will go, okay, I wish my problems were that easy.

[00:18:23] Simon: Yeah.

[00:18:24] Nathan: And so using time in that way and, and personal growth mm-hmm. To put things in

[00:18:27] Simon: perspective.

[00:18:28] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:18:28] Simon: So for me, there’s, there’s three things that come to mind.

[00:18:30] Simon: The very first thing is when you feel stressed, especially if you’re going through a very tough situation right now Yeah. Or a period that’s challenging, the hardest thing is focusing on that challenge now, because it just makes you more stressed when you, the more you think about it. Uh, and so the first thing you wanna do is you wanna distance yourself from it.

[00:18:49] Nathan: Okay.

[00:18:50] Simon: In order to see the solution that we all know, but often gets clouded by judgment. Mm-hmm. So, for example, if somebody’s going through a tough time right now, or perhaps they’re procrastinating on something they know they should be doing, I might distance themself from that situation by asking them a question like, well, if the next year of your life.

[00:19:08] Simon: Was like the next episode on a Netflix show. What would that episode be called? And what would be happening on it that would make it compelling viewing.

[00:19:18] Nathan: Okay. Interesting. That’s not where I thought you were going at all. So,

[00:19:22] Simon: so what happens is it distances themself away from them being in the trenches.

[00:19:27] Simon: Okay. And gets their creativity flowing. And then saying, well, I think in the next episode I would finally break my procrastination and start that project. And they’ll be like, then what would happen next? What would make the viewer wanna continue watching? And they’ll be like, well, the project starts to take off.

[00:19:42] Simon: We start calling some suppliers. And now they’re detailing out a plan forward.

[00:19:47] Nathan: Right?

[00:19:47] Simon: They’re doing it, but they’re doing it from a distance, from them being in it.

[00:19:51] Nathan: When you move from analytical to storytelling.

[00:19:53] Simon: Absolutely. And storytelling has emotion.

[00:19:55] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:56] Simon: And emotion is what activates an energy inside of us to realize we know the way forward.

[00:20:00] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:00] Simon: So that’s an example. Another one could be, a client might say you, you know, it’s really tough. In my company right now, I feel like my manager’s micromanaging me. I can’t get my faults across. Now if I continue just focusing on that situation, it just makes that person more stressed. So I might say, well, let’s, for a moment, imagine your team is in a kitchen and you are all part of a kitchen team to prepare food for a restaurant.

[00:20:27] Nathan: Okay?

[00:20:27] Simon: And your manager is the chef. Tell me about the chef. And so we’re just creating a very extreme storytelling scenario that just takes him away from being in that situation. But we think of it through a different lens, and then it becomes a bit humorous, it becomes a bit funny, and then say, well, you know, the chef’s running about ordering people to do stuff, but he hasn’t really prepared all yet.

[00:20:47] Simon: Um, I’m trying to tell people what to, but no one’s listened because of pots and pans are just going up. Steam is coming up all over the place. And then we might say, well, how are you gonna get the chef’s attention? And so we’re coming up with a solution, but through a different, different path.

[00:21:01] Nathan: So I guess in that case, you’re going from contrasting, let’s say that the a this person actually works in a remote environment.

[00:21:08] Nathan: Mm-hmm. They’re communicating over Slack and email or Jira tickets. I don’t know what it is. Um, and their boss is micromanaging them through these messages or, or that sort of thing, or the things that are unsaid, you know? Mm. Or what comes across as passive aggressive in some way. And what you’re doing is you’re taking it out that real environment.

[00:21:30] Simon: Yeah.

[00:21:30] Nathan: And you’re going into,

[00:21:31] Simon: you, you, you’re, you’re switching up the environment to get them to see their same situation mm-hmm.

[00:21:37] Nathan: Through

[00:21:38] Simon: a different lens. So for example, in that situation, I might say, well, let’s take you out of you and put you in your boss’s shoes.

[00:21:47] Nathan: Okay.

[00:21:47] Simon: How do you think he receives information best?

[00:21:50] Nathan: Hmm.

[00:21:51] Simon: And so we’re just shifting perspective a little bit. It, it’s like, um, I had a recent conversation with a potential client and he was telling me about all the things that were worrying him. All the things he needs help with. And he felt drowning in, in, in all of these challenges. He told me he’s a family man.

[00:22:07] Simon: And so I just said to him, imagine you’ve come back from work and your children come up to you and one of them before leaving, tells you the exact same thing you’ve told me. What would you tell your son or daughter?

[00:22:21] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:21] Simon: If they told you what you just told me. And suddenly he’s formulating answers and he’s formulating advice because deep down, we, we have that knowledge, we have that wisdom, but it’s just having the courage to listen and follow through with it.

[00:22:34] Simon: Mm-hmm. So that would be one. The second is stillness is to slow things down so you can see the path forward. And very often we don’t rest. We see rest as a reward for working hard or hustling without realizing that work and rest are partners of the same team. So how can you slow yourself down? You mentioned journaling earlier and, and just to understand your thoughts at a deeper level.

[00:22:58] Simon: It could be something like just going for a walk in nature and then coming back, writing them, what came up in your mind? It could be meditation, whatever form that might take. How do you begin to find rest within your routine, not as a result of having achieved something.

[00:23:13] Nathan: Hmm.

[00:23:13] Simon: Um, and, and that’s key to me.

[00:23:16] Simon: And the third is connection to your future self. So what I mean by this is a lot of us make present day decisions based on our past self.

[00:23:25] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:25] Simon: And that’s what holds us back. But if we make present day choices and decisions based on our future self, IE what would future me do?

[00:23:33] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:23:34] Simon: Then that changes the game.

[00:23:36] Simon: Even a process of visualizing yourself sitting down on the table and the person opposite is your ideal future self, what would he or she tell you about where you are in the direction you should take?

[00:23:48] Nathan: Is there an example from either your own life or a coaching client where. They were able to have that clarity.

[00:23:55] Nathan: Yeah. When getting advice from their future self.

[00:23:57] Simon: So I can speak from personal experience when I was contemplating quitting my corporate career, it, it was probably at the time, the toughest decision I was about to take. Yeah. Um, you made

[00:24:07] Nathan: it so hard.

[00:24:08] Simon: Nobody in my me family had ever run a business. They’d always worked for someone, and my environment wasn’t full of people that were entrepreneurs.

[00:24:16] Simon: I, I grew up in an environment where everybody worked jobs. They would go to college, follow the blueprint that most of us follow in life. And so what made it hard was, if I quit this job, what would my parents say?

[00:24:27] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:27] Simon: What would my friends say? There was a lot of thoughts running through my head. And so what I started to do was to close my eyes, imagine myself walking to a room where there’s a table in the middle, pulling out the chair, sitting down and seeing my ideal future self in front of me.

[00:24:44] Simon: And just asking him, what would, what would you do? What would you do? What path should I take? And just as a result of doing that, I realized the pull and the excitement came from going into the unknown. It came from just exploring what I hadn’t done before, because I think that when you go into the unknown, the beauty of it is that anything is possible, but you’ve got to put yourself there.

[00:25:09] Simon: And just to change my environment, it taught me that the first step to getting anywhere in life is to design an environment around you that makes it impossible not to succeed. Mm-hmm. So I started changing what I read, what I watched, what I followed, what I listened to, who I spent time around, the events I went to, and that just really helped to change, uh, my vision of what could be possible.

[00:25:28] Nathan: Mm-hmm. That’s so interesting. I’m imagining the, like, the advice that your future self would give in so many different scenarios, but yeah, it, it gives clarity where you’re saying. You know, I, and I’ve done that like coaching other people through something of,

[00:25:43] Simon: yeah.

[00:25:43] Nathan: Just like, okay, that’s interesting. Like trying to set it aside and then create a different scenario.

[00:25:48] Simon: Mm.

[00:25:48] Nathan: Where the, and it’s like, well, what advice would you give this person? And they give the advice and they go, oh, that was me. Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. You know, it’s like, but you, you created that distance. The one that I found is really helpful whenever someone’s stuck, like not taking any action at all, is to have the framing around, like, doing a favor for your future self.

[00:26:09] Simon: Mm.

[00:26:09] Nathan: Like whenever someone, you know, can’t get past the procrastination. Yeah.

[00:26:12] Simon: Or

[00:26:13] Nathan: you know, you’re like, you know, it’s just like, Hey, today all I want you to do is do one favor. Could be tiny, could be medium sized. I don’t care for your future self.

[00:26:23] Simon: Yeah.

[00:26:24] Nathan: And so that, you know, that could be eating right. That could be working out, that could be going to bed at a reasonable time.

[00:26:29] Nathan: That could be making a little bit of progress on the book project you’ve been working on, on any of the things, but it’s just a little bit of a favor to you. Future self.

[00:26:38] Simon: Mm.

[00:26:38] Nathan: And then also to have some gratitude for something that your past self did.

[00:26:43] Simon: Yeah.

[00:26:43] Nathan: And like if you, it is just these tiny little things like what’s one thing I’m grateful for that my past self did?

[00:26:48] Simon: Okay.

[00:26:49] Nathan: Well, you know, I’m grateful that I, I, uh, my past self sat down for 30 minutes and made progress on the book. Yeah. I’m trying to write, and then the favor that I’m gonna do for my future self is, you know, I’m going to, uh. Go to bed at 10 instead of staying up till home midnight watching a Netflix show.

[00:27:05] Nathan: You know, something like that.

[00:27:06] Simon: Yeah. That’s so key. And that’s why for me, uh, beginning with the end of mind is so important. So when we wake up in the morning, it’s asking ourself, how will I know that today will have been a productive day? How will I know that this week will have been a productive week?

[00:27:20] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:27:20] Simon: And then just work backwards. And when we think about the action we take is to focus on the feeling after having taken the action, not the process of taking action.

[00:27:30] Nathan: Right?

[00:27:30] Simon: So for, for example, with the, with the book, rather than focus on what you’ve gotta do to complete the number of words or to get to your goal, focus on the feeling of how it would be like once you’re there.

[00:27:43] Simon: Okay. You’ve written the 500 words. How does it feel? How does it feel? If I’ve written 500 words today and set yourself up, great for a good start tomorrow. Because when you focus on that, that’s an emotion. And emotion is all about energy. And that emotion excites you enough to want to do it. It’s, it’s like.

[00:27:59] Simon: If, if all your friends are watching a TV show that you’ve never heard of, the excitement that they share, the feeling that you see they get from having watched this show almost seduces you to also wanna watch the TV show. Even though you’ve said to everyone, you’ve got no time, you find time to watch it because it’s now an emotional connection to wanting to watch that show.

[00:28:18] Nathan: Right. Okay. I wanna dig in on this, the emotion side. ’cause I spend all of my time, not quite all, so much of my time in the logical analytical side. And you’re talking about just focus on the feelings. Like how, how do you actually make that shift?

[00:28:36] Simon: Well, first of all, I’ll share my, one of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou, which goes, people will forget what you said.

[00:28:41] Simon: People will forget what you did, but they will never forget the way you made them feel. And feeling is simply a transference of energy. And I first learned about this when I, you know, I often share about how I now have short hair, but when I was a teenager growing up in secondary school. You might not believe this.

[00:28:58] Simon: Nathan buy longer hair. I, I used to spend 20 minutes every morning jelling up my hair

[00:29:02] Nathan: okay.

[00:29:02] Simon: Preparing to go to school. And one summer I decided I’m just gonna shave it off. I I was back home in Malaysia and I said, I’m just gonna shave it off. And I come back to school in September. I remember being in the school canteen and a friend of mine comes up to me and he says, Simon, have you, how did the rumor going around about you?

[00:29:18] Simon: I’m like, no. What are they saying? And keep in mind, this was before social media, before the internet. Yeah. So people would often make up rumors about what you did during the summer holidays. And they said, people are saying that you spent the summer in a shower in monastery learning kung fu, and you had to shave your head.

[00:29:32] Simon: And I was thinking to myself, that’s why nobody’s coming up to me or wanting to start a fight with me. And I kept it ever since. And, and so the reason I, I often share that story is because we are telling ourselves stories every single day.

[00:29:46] Nathan: Mm.

[00:29:47] Simon: About our past, about our present, and about our future. And what we cannot, cannot do and stories is what activate.

[00:29:54] Simon: Our ability to get things done. Stories are also how we influence other people. The best communicators in the world are able to tell great stories, and it’s the stories that sell because they activate something inside of us that makes the audience relate to whatever that communicator is saying.

[00:30:10] Nathan: Hey, I hope you’re enjoying the episode.

[00:30:11] Nathan: I wanted to jump in really quick to suggest one thing you should do this year if you wanna grow your creator business, and that is to show up in person at conferences. You can do any of these great creator conferences. But the one that I would specifically recommend, because I organize it, it’s called Craft and Commerce.

[00:30:26] Nathan: So for the last 7, 8, 9 years, I dunno how long it’s been now, we’ve been hosting an in-person event for creators and it’s basically the event that we wish we had early on in our creator careers. We’ve got incredible workshops and speakers and just so many great things happening. But the thing that you’re gonna enjoy the most is the hallway track, the conversations at restaurants over lunch or just around the event with other creators.

[00:30:48] Nathan: My creator career changed drastically when I started showing up in person building relationships and then having those other creators help build my business with me and build me up and provide accountability and masterminds and so much more. So I would say get in person with creators, show up to Craft and Commerce this June, and if you want to grab your ticket, you can do that at kit.com/conference.

[00:31:09] Nathan: Uh, it’s sold out last year. It’s probably gonna sell out really soon again this year. So make sure to do that right away. Okay. Going back to this idea of stress and thinking about, I guess, your relationship to work.

[00:31:20] Simon: Yeah.

[00:31:21] Nathan: I’ll give a, a specific example of something I, I was reflecting on my year. So this was, you know, we’re, we’re recording this in January, um, so maybe mid-December.

[00:31:31] Nathan: Um, and I’m sort of reflecting on the year and realizing. That I, we accomplished so many incredible things this year. Mm-hmm. But the first thought when I was like, well, what was 2025 like? I was like, oh, it’s stressful. Mm. And then I, I went back and I realized we actually took all these amazing trips as a family.

[00:31:46] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Like, I had a really good balance to the year I did so many of things that I wanted to do, but stress is the thing that stood out because of, um, like some tough team transitions at the end of the year.

[00:31:58] Simon: And,

[00:31:58] Nathan: and like, it was more of a recency thing. And I remember thinking to myself, wait a second, this is weird.

[00:32:05] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:05] Nathan: Like, I have accomplished way too many of my goals. Mm-hmm. Like, I went back 10 years and I was like, whatever, Nathan in 2015 hoped and dreamed to accomplish. Mm-hmm. Like, Nathan in 2025 has exceeded those by 10 x or more, like in all of these different categories, like, just to name a few things.

[00:32:26] Nathan: Like the, the company was at over $50 million a year in revenue. The dream list of clients. It’s not even, it’s not just the biggest names in the creator space, it’s the biggest names in the celebrity space, you know, and like, and everything. And so if I were to rewind 10 years, like 2015, Nathan would be shocked.

[00:32:44] Simon: Yeah.

[00:32:45] Nathan: At two things. One, how successful everything was, and two, how 2025 Nathan felt about it. Like, how could you achieve all of this and be that stressed? And so I basically made a decision even just, uh, you know, three or four weeks ago mm-hmm. Of like, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna loosen up. I’m going to deliberately have a different, uh, relationship because, you know, with my own stress and emotions, because otherwise what am I doing?

[00:33:10] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:11] Nathan: Um, and so I’m curious if there’s similar transitions that you’ve helped people work through and, and some of your

[00:33:18] Simon: processes and, and what you shared there is. Not uncommon.

[00:33:22] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:22] Simon: Because what I’m hearing is the reason, or maybe one of the reasons that the stress has manifested mm-hmm. Is because wherever you are in your journey, you are focused so much on how far there is yet to go.

[00:33:35] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:33:35] Simon: And when you’re always focused on how much further you’ve got to go, you’re always gonna be stressed. But when you take a moment to step back and say, well, look at how I’ve come.

[00:33:45] Nathan: Right.

[00:33:46] Simon: Look at the journey I’ve been on, it makes you grateful for the present moment.

[00:33:50] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:50] Simon: And you start to let go a little bit.

[00:33:53] Simon: You are not so tired to the next thing in the next thing, because otherwise you’re gonna be in a constant set of anxiety. You’re not living in the present or the future or the past. And you, you, you fall into this tragic scenario of living as if you are never going to die, and then dying, having never really lived because you’re neither in the present, the past or the future.

[00:34:12] Simon: You’re just. In your thoughts. You’re

[00:34:15] Nathan: right.

[00:34:15] Simon: Constantly thinking about things that may or may not happen. You’re focused on control when in many cases all you can control is your input. And so when you kind of loosen up a little bit, you get to enjoy life more. You get to be open to circumstances beyond your control.

[00:34:30] Simon: And sometimes things work out better than you imagined. But when you start to try and control everything, that’s what creates stress. Because stress happens when an expectation does not meet what you are thinking about. So you might expect something to happen. It doesn’t happen. That creates stress. So loosening your control on the outcome being exactly the way you want, helps to reduce that feeling of stress.

[00:34:54] Nathan: One of my favorite authors and entrepreneurs is Jason Farid, who founded Basecamp. And he, uh, wrote a bunch of books, rework, getting Real, um, all these great books, and he talked about learning to play the drums.

[00:35:07] Simon: Mm.

[00:35:07] Nathan: And you know, as he’s playing the drums and, and all that, his, his teacher is like. You have to loosen up, you have to hold the drumsticks loosely.

[00:35:17] Simon: Mm.

[00:35:18] Nathan: Because you’re not getting the sound and, and all that, you’re, you’re death gripping the drumsticks and it is not working.

[00:35:24] Simon: Mm.

[00:35:25] Nathan: And that stood out to me so much because it was like, wait, that’s what I’m doing. I am, I am controlling, I’m holding tight and I’m trying to shape and create this outcome. And, you know, you could immediately see how, if you’re doing that, like nothing is gonna sound right in drums and it’s not gonna work well in business or life at all.

[00:35:42] Nathan: Yeah. Because I think it’s a really hard shift to make

[00:35:43] Simon: that that picture you’ve created is, is the equivalent of somebody holding so tight on something Yes. Focused on a particular result and trying to force something through when life doesn’t always work that way. Mm-hmm. And it reminds me of Wing Chun.

[00:35:56] Simon: I dunno if you heard of Wing Chun. It’s a form of martial art.

[00:35:58] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:35:58] Simon: Uh, but it was actually invented, uh, by a female. It was invented by a nun. And the reason she invented Wing Chun was because she was challenged, uh, to fight a man. Of course, strength versus strength, she couldn’t win. So the reason she designed Wing Chun was she observed animals in the environment and she wanted to understand how she could beat the other person’s strength, but without having strength herself.

[00:36:23] Simon: And it was simply by loosening up, by loosening her grip.

[00:36:26] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:27] Simon: By going with the flow and using the person’s strength against them. And that’s how Wing Chum was born. Wing Chum was simply, uh, her understanding of how to beat the person in the fight. And she actually won the fight simply by loosening up and using the opponent strength against himself.

[00:36:44] Nathan: So if we. Take that into the practical world. Mm-hmm. What’s an area of your life that you were able to loosen up and not be so attached to the result and,

[00:36:53] Simon: yeah. I think for me it’s certainly been parenting. Yeah. Parenting. It’s, yes.

[00:36:59] Nathan: Control that child and

[00:37:00] Simon: see

[00:37:00] Nathan: how well that works for you.

[00:37:02] Simon: Parenting is tough because, uh, as parents, you naturally have certain expectations that you want your child to meet, and you, you, you hope they do certain things, make certain choices and decisions, but you realize you can’t control them.

[00:37:16] Simon: They’re their own person and every child is different. And, and this is why you might have the first child and it’s like, oh my God, I really enjoy this child. They’re so well behaved. They eat and sleep so well. And then you have a second child that’s completely the opposite. You second children

[00:37:28] Nathan: are never

[00:37:29] Simon: Yeah.

[00:37:29] Simon: What, what went wrong? And, and so I think parenting has taught me so much about loosening up in the sense that you can’t control every aspect of that person. You can only guide them. And that’s why I think there’s a lot of similarities to leadership. You know, you can’t control every single right team member and employee.

[00:37:51] Simon: All you can do in your position is to guide them mm-hmm. Towards a compelling future that you then hope they make the right choices. And so with, with my daughter, it’s giving her the emotional space to share what she’s going through and simply acting as that guide. And one of the things I learned, um, from psychologist, Adam Grant, actually, he, he speaks a lot about this in some of his work, is that children, as they grow up between zero and 10, their default when they experience something for the first time, or they’re nervous about going to school or doing a new activity, it’s, they go straight to mom and dad and say, mom, dad, what do I do?

[00:38:28] Simon: I’m a bit nervous or I don’t know anyone here. What do I do now as parents, we, we jump straight in. We offer advice, we give them help and. This is kind of the same for adults in the sense that when you have a partner who may, has gone through a, a tough day at work and your partner comes back and they share what they’ve gone through automatically, we, as the other person, we feel like we have to jump in and offer advice and guidance.

[00:38:53] Simon: Right now, what he said is that you wanna spin it around to try and get them to coach themselves by you being vulnerable. So vulnerability being a path of connection. So instead of me, uh, just constantly giving advice to my daughter, I might say to my daughter when I’m noticing she’s a little nervous, I might say, you though dad’s feeling a little nervous right now as well.

[00:39:15] Simon: And she, she might go, really? You get nervous as well? I’m like, yeah, I’m s I’m speaking at this event next week. It’s the biggest audience I’ve ever spoken to, and I’m feeling a little nervous because I don’t really know the audience that well. What tips do you have for me?

[00:39:29] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:29] Simon: And suddenly her eyes light up and she goes, well, dad, yeah, you’ve, you’ve always done this and that.

[00:39:35] Simon: And they’ve always enjoyed. And so suddenly they come up with the most purest forms of wisdom and advice. But for them, it’s almost like they’re talking to themself as well. So when they next experience something similar, the child is thinking, actually, I can just do the same thing. So they’re learning to build that resilience and the fact that they can trust their own wisdom.

[00:39:55] Nathan: It’s a very similar thing as, you know, what would your future self do? Or all that. But in this case, it’s just, it’s, it’s a different person. Yeah. And so you’re giving them that distance from the problem and telling those stories is so important as well of,

[00:40:09] Simon: and it’s trust as well. It’s trusting that you’ve done the best you can.

[00:40:13] Simon: And whatever they do, it’s really up to, up to them to take it forward. Uh, in the same way in the business, uh, you know, I’ve spoken to a lot of different companies and I’ve noticed that the teams that feel that they are trusted, supported, and appreciated always perform better.

[00:40:27] Nathan: Right?

[00:40:27] Simon: Because they have been given a freedom to do what they were hired to do and are just guided towards, um.

[00:40:34] Simon: Activating their full potential.

[00:40:36] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. I’m thinking about, you know, this idea of control and trying to control the outcomes.

[00:40:42] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:42] Nathan: Um, I was doing that a lot in parenting.

[00:40:45] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:46] Nathan: I have three boys, uh, they’re 14, 11, and six. And, uh, my 11-year-old really struggles with a lot of things with, um, his school, with just, just really a lot.

[00:40:59] Nathan: And the more I tried to shape and control the outcomes Yeah. The worse it got.

[00:41:03] Simon: Mm.

[00:41:04] Nathan: And the last few months, all I’ve tried to do is spend a lot of time with him.

[00:41:11] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:12] Nathan: And so we’re doing a massive construction project on a fort, uh, that he wants to build in the backyard, and he’s talked about it for a long time.

[00:41:21] Nathan: He wants to build a hobbit hole in the backyard. We have a little farm and, and there’s like a hillside and, and all of that. And first it was a ridiculous project and I don’t know how to do that. And you mm-hmm. You know, all of this. Mm-hmm. I realized that when I didn’t know how to help him, I was trying to control all these things.

[00:41:37] Nathan: And I thought and said like, wow, what if, what if the only thing I tried to control was how much time we spent together.

[00:41:43] Simon: Yeah.

[00:41:44] Nathan: And so I said, okay, you know what? Finally he was like, dad, let’s you know, can we build a hop hole hole? That’s me. Instead of saying like, I, what are we even doing? Like that? That’s,

[00:41:52] Simon: yeah,

[00:41:53] Nathan: that’s, I said, I just finally said, okay.

[00:41:55] Simon: Mm.

[00:41:55] Nathan: Because I knew it was something that was going to give us, you know, a project that was going to take hundreds of hours of us doing things together and just being,

[00:42:05] Simon: and the key is you’re doing it together.

[00:42:06] Nathan: Mm-hmm. So

[00:42:07] Simon: you’re learning together, you’re being challenged together. And even asking him, well, what do you think we should be doing next?

[00:42:14] Simon: And that brings you into the present moment. It, it’s, it’s like over, over the Christmas holidays, my, my family, we love doing jigsaws together.

[00:42:21] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:42:22] Simon: And the reason is because you’re not distracted by any technology. You’re just focused on building this jigsaw and you’re doing it as a team. And that’s quality time.

[00:42:30] Simon: And when we finish. The recent holiday period. I remember asking my daughter, ’cause I’m getting her to do some regular reflection, and I asked my daughter, what was the most memorable thing you did in the past two weeks? And it wasn’t the present, it wasn’t visiting Santa, it wasn’t doing all of these outings.

[00:42:46] Simon: It was simply, I just enjoy spending time with mom and dad. And what we realized is that the greatest gift we can give to someone else is our energy and our presence. Not time, but energy and presence. Mm. And children especially can feel that, you know, they can really notice that. They can notice if you are distracted or your, your mind is elsewhere, or they can tell whether you’re actually present with them, listening to them and connecting with them.

[00:43:10] Nathan: You actually just gave me something. I, I’m gonna change how I interact with August, my son on this project. Mm-hmm. Um, I am, I have a plan, like we drew up, we know what to do, but I have more of it in my head. And so he’s like, dad, what should we do next? Mm-hmm. Like, okay, well. Uh, we need to run electrical before we can put it in insulation.

[00:43:29] Nathan: So why don’t you grab the drill and start drilling these holes and we’ll run electrical wire and all of that. What I should do instead, and what I’m going to try to do when I, uh, come home from Dubai is to ask him, okay, what, you know, let’s go work on the hoba hole. Mm-hmm. What, what, what do you think we should do next?

[00:43:47] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:47] Nathan: And I bet he would get, you know, he’ll we’re far enough into the project. There’s probably four or five things that he’d be like, well, let’s do this part of it. Like, great.

[00:43:55] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:56] Nathan: You know, and let him drive more of that. And, and that’s holding it even more loosely and ’cause even though we’re spending a lot of time together

[00:44:05] Simon: Mm.

[00:44:05] Nathan: It’s still pretty outcome focused. Yeah. Right. We are building this thing. Mm. But if I ask him, Hey, what should we do next?

[00:44:11] Simon: Yeah.

[00:44:11] Nathan: Then it’s so much more presence focused.

[00:44:14] Simon: But, but it also feels like they’re valued.

[00:44:15] Nathan: Yes.

[00:44:16] Simon: That my contribution is valued. Like, one of the things that, uh. I do, and I shared a lot with companies as well, because I think it’s important when they have their team meetings

[00:44:25] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:44:25] Simon: Is often in team meetings. It’s the same people speaking, it’s the same people, uh, contributing to decisions. But if you can find ways to include people, you actually find not only does morale go up, but productivity also mm-hmm. Accelerates as well. And so we have a family committee and it’s a way to kind of get my daughter involved more in what we do.

[00:44:44] Simon: Yeah. And not for her to be just told what to do. So it might be, for example, where we’re going cinema, and last time we went to the cinema, it was dad’s choice of what to watch. And then it’s okay, the next time it’s your choice and the next time it’s mom’s choice. Mm-hmm. And so now they feel like their contribution is valued or we’re doing the chores this weekend.

[00:45:02] Simon: Uh, what cho do you wanna do? We just put all the different choices on the table. Right. She gets to pick, but it’s one that she is naturally drawn to and she wants to do. Mm-hmm. But then we’re gonna do some as well. So then it feels like you’re really operating as a team. Yeah. And she feels like what she shares, what she tells us, it’s also valued, it’s listened to.

[00:45:20] Simon: And I find that really gets her involved and she wants to actually contribute. She actually wants to help us.

[00:45:25] Nathan: Yeah. I love that. Okay. Thinking about this level of intentionality and energy as a leader, how, how do you think of, and how do you coach people to show up at like the energy that they bring to their companies?

[00:45:38] Simon: Absolutely. So energy, I sit through four dimensions and I see it through four dimensions, which are physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

[00:45:46] Nathan: Okay.

[00:45:46] Simon: Now, in many cases, when we think about energy, we only focus on the physical. It’s things like get more sleep, um, have a healthier diet, do more exercise, and those are things we can see as externals the most.

[00:45:57] Simon: But the invisible stuff is mental, emotional, and spiritual. Mental energy is all about your mindset. It’s your creativity and how you respond to things that don’t always happen the way you expect. Emotional energy is all about relationships. Relationships with yourself and the relationships with those around you.

[00:46:13] Simon: And spiritual energy is all about meaning and purpose. And so if we look at the world around us, a lot of people I see are exhausted, not because they are physically doing too much, but because they’re doing too little of things that bring them joy and they’re running someone else’s race. They haven’t figured out for themself.

[00:46:31] Simon: What success means. And the way I explain this to people is I imagine you and I were to go to to a buffet, now we go up to the food stations, we pick up our food, we come back and we sit down. I guarantee you that we would not sit down with the exact same looking plate of food and it wouldn’t be in the same quantity.

[00:46:49] Simon: It’ll be very different looking. It’s the same with success. So we need to look at all of the influences and inputs as just inspiration and what do we take from that to design our own philosophy? To arrive our own definition of success and then work towards that. So that’s all to do with spiritual energy.

[00:47:07] Simon: We talk about it a lot in popular culture. In Star Wars, they call it the force.

[00:47:11] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:47:11] Simon: In uh, Maui culture, they call it manii. My Chinese culture, they call it qi, but we don’t actually think about it when it comes to ourself. And the difference between energy management and time management is that time management assumes your energy’s constant for that entire day, whereas energy management appreciates that it fluctuates throughout the day.

[00:47:31] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:32] Simon: So you could have a whole day free to get work done, but if you’re not energized, you’re gonna waste it.

[00:47:38] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:38] Simon: You’re gonna procrastinate.

[00:47:39] Nathan: I’ve done that once or twice.

[00:47:41] Simon: Whereas if you have a certain level of energy, you’ll get more done in hours than most will get done in days because it’s what you bring into the hours, not how many hours you work.

[00:47:53] Simon: And that’s important to understand. So that for me is how I see energy.

[00:47:57] Nathan: So let’s take that to the example of the creator business.

[00:48:00] Simon: Yeah.

[00:48:01] Nathan: Right. Where uh, maybe we have a massive project like the or, so something that’s really important.

[00:48:06] Simon: Yeah.

[00:48:06] Nathan: Uh, the writing towards the book or maybe even like a, a energy makes a big difference in writing, but it matters even more in say, the YouTube video that we’re producing.

[00:48:16] Simon: Yeah.

[00:48:17] Nathan: Did I show up with reading the script off the teleprompter and no energy? Or was I able to bring in this energy and enthusiasm that’s gonna come through on camera and be this exciting thing?

[00:48:28] Simon: Yeah.

[00:48:29] Nathan: How would you go about structuring your day and thinking about bringing the right energy to the right scenario?

[00:48:36] Simon: Well, first of all, I would say when it comes to communicating something, and this goes to the same, whether it’s a YouTube video recording or a bit of content, you’re recording, it’s the same when you speak to an audience live.

[00:48:44] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:45] Simon: Is whatever you’re speaking about, it has to be about something that you are fascinated by and that you truly enjoy.

[00:48:52] Nathan: Okay.

[00:48:52] Simon: Because if it is, you’re naturally gonna be energized. It’s like if you ask a friend who’s just watched a really good show or really good film, what film or show should I watch next? When they talk about it to you? You don’t have to worry about their energy. They’ve gotta light up and say, oh Nathan, you’ve really gotta check out this TV show.

[00:49:07] Simon: It’s amazing. I’ve really gone through the first season.

[00:49:09] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:49:10] Simon: The energy is flowing and so if it’s a topic that you enjoy and that you really find yourself connected to, the energy will naturally come.

[00:49:18] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:18] Simon: Now, outside of that, it’s how you prepare ahead of recording the content. Are you kind of doing it last minute where you’re rushing to get it recorded?

[00:49:28] Simon: Or are you doing it in a way where you’ve prepared, you set things up and you’re ready in the right state to record and get their energy across? So the preparation is very important. Again, whether you’re speaking in front of an audience, whether you are recording content or sharing anything live, uh, that you’re looking to put out to a bigger audience.

[00:49:46] Simon: So it’s how you prepare and then your connection to that material.

[00:49:50] Nathan: Are there things that you think about, not just energy on a daily basis, but on like across a week or a different period of time?

[00:49:57] Simon: Yeah, I, I see a season, so there’ll be seasons in your year where, you know your energy is gonna be tested more than others.

[00:50:04] Simon: So for example, we, we’ve mentioned book a couple of times, so if you’ve got a book about to launch, you will know that in the four to eight weeks before the launch and the four to eight weeks after.

[00:50:14] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:14] Simon: It’s gonna be pretty intense.

[00:50:15] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:50:16] Simon: So you might be doing a lot of podcast interviews, you might be doing a lot of PR related activities,

[00:50:20] Nathan: traveling,

[00:50:21] Simon: book signing, traveling.

[00:50:22] Simon: Yep. And so if you know ahead of time the impact is gonna have on your energy, you can say no to a lot more things ahead of time. Mm-hmm. You can clear the diary ahead of this season picking up just so you have the energy to deal with whatever’s gonna come into your inbox. So that’s how I see it. I see my year as seasons, so summer and Christmas for example, what I call the quiet seasons.

[00:50:42] Simon: And I use those seasons to reflect, spend time with the family and just disconnect. And then there’ll be particular points in my year where business really picks up, you know, beginning of the year, towards the end of the year where there are big conferences going on where people wanna book me to speak.

[00:50:55] Nathan: Right.

[00:50:55] Simon: Or I’m launching something that I need to just block out a bit more time for, just so I’ve got the energy to deliver whatever it is I’m looking to deliver with the best that I can do.

[00:51:05] Nathan: Are there, you know, what other energy decisions have you made in your life to, to make it so that your energy most matches the, the way you wanna show up or the outcomes that you’re trying to create?

[00:51:14] Simon: I think it’s a mindset as well. Yeah. If I’m going to mental energy, I am, I’m a creative, uh, which sounds weird coming from someone who used to come from finance

[00:51:22] Nathan: Right.

[00:51:22] Simon: But I love thinking differently.

[00:51:24] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:24] Simon: And for me, creativity is one of those skills that is gonna become, if, if it’s not ready, is gonna become so much more important, uh, as AI takes over a lot more of our functional skills.

[00:51:36] Simon: And so creatively, it’s just ability to see things and do things in a different way, often in ways that has never been done before. And that for me, is what really gets me going. It’s really understanding how can I do something in a way that has never been done before. Now in marketing, they call this UTP, which stands for unique talking points.

[00:51:53] Simon: So what happens is when you build unique talking points into your business or what you do, people can’t help but share about it on their social media, on, on their platforms because you in effect, turn your customers and your audience into your marketers. They become your marketers. And I, I remember talking about unique talking points, talking about sort of like finding creative ways to get you energized from a mentor point of view.

[00:52:19] Simon: Mm-hmm. A friend of mine in London, uh, opened a nightclub a number of years ago, and it’s a very competitive space. You know, when you think about what you wanna do in an evening, you, you’re spoke with choices.

[00:52:28] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:52:29] Simon: But he decided to think about what would my unique talking point be? Would get all of the guests telling all of their friends about this club and marketing it, doing the marketing for us.

[00:52:41] Simon: So they ended up getting some train tracks on the ceiling of this nightclub. And if a VIP table were to order some shots from the bar, the bartenders would put the shots into this toy train. They would light the toy train up, so it’ll be on fire. It would go along the train tracks to the table and day of the dead characters, because it was a Mexican themed bar.

[00:53:02] Simon: Day of the dead characters would come out and take their shots and give it to the table. The moment the train is going through that nightclub, everyone’s got their phones out taking photos, videos, selfies, and they’re just marketing it for on, on, on their behalf. And so that’s the power of thinking about unique talking points and really accessing that creativity.

[00:53:19] Simon: And that’s, for me, what gives me that mental energy. It’s really being inspired to see things differently. It’s why I love connecting with people from very diverse backgrounds. Now, if you only look at your competition. You can only be as good as your competition. But when you look beyond your industry, when you look at other people doing well in different sectors, you are able to bring that inspiration into your own industry and stand out.

[00:53:44] Simon: It, it’s how Steve Jobs came up with the MagSafe chords for the MacBook on the trip to Japan. He, he, he noticed the rice cookers there, had this magnetic cord and so curious. He, he wanted to know the reason behind it. And the company told him, well, the reason we have these magnetic cords is that if a child was a trip on the wire

[00:54:04] right,

[00:54:04] Simon: the wire would come off, but the appliance would stay still.

[00:54:08] Simon: And Steve came back to us and he said, we’re gonna bring that into the next MacBook.

[00:54:12] Nathan: Mm.

[00:54:12] Simon: And that was where the MagSafe cord was bought. And when it came out, the editors and the journalists said, what a genius move. This is such an innovative bit of design, but it was inspired by looking beyond his industry.

[00:54:24] Nathan: And then you’re just, it’s not another me too copycat product. It’s pulled from a totally different place. And I’m thinking about the Bryce cooker that, that we have. And it has that,

[00:54:34] Simon: that

[00:54:34] Nathan: magnetic cord, right? ’cause the last thing that you want to do is to drop a Bryce cooker on a small child.

[00:54:39] Simon: Absolutely.

[00:54:39] Simon: And so that’s why, for me, to keep me energized throughout this entrepreneurial journey, I’m always seeking to learn from people with different backgrounds

[00:54:46] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:54:46] Simon: Who are successful in different ways. Uh, so if we look at the content creative space, it’s not just your YouTuber, it’s your TikTok, it’s your Instagram.

[00:54:54] Simon: It’s the person that’s built a, a big newsletter. The person that’s built a, a great audience in a variety of different mediums. What are they doing that I can learn from, especially if they’ve done it in a way that is different to what I’ve seen.

[00:55:04] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:05] Simon: Because as you start to collect all those dots, your ability to then connect them and learn from them allows you to make that progress forward.

[00:55:12] Nathan: There’s so many examples of, um, pulling from different industries. Mm-hmm. Two that worked really well for me.

[00:55:17] Simon: Yeah.

[00:55:18] Nathan: One is when I was in the design space. I would see all of these web designers

[00:55:24] Simon: mm-hmm.

[00:55:24] Nathan: Put their work on, uh, these gallery websites. Yeah. So it was like CSS galleries or that, that sort of thing.

[00:55:30] Nathan: And it was all of the trends in design and people would copy that and everybody sort of made things that look the same. Yeah. And they needed inspiration. Mm-hmm. And so they went to their peers and they got inspiration and sure enough, it all trended towards one area. What I ended up doing that I found was much better

[00:55:46] Simon: mm-hmm.

[00:55:46] Nathan: Is I found that clothing brands in particular would have really great source of design. So I would go to like Banana Republic in the mall and they would have like their, you know, their fall collection would have this interesting blend of colors and textures and typography or you, you look at the, the clothes themselves and the tag on it would have like an interesting texture to it.

[00:56:09] Nathan: And it’s like, oh, well let’s, what if I build a website that’s inspired by this fabric that’s texture and the font that they chose and I was. You know, fairly blatantly copying from something, but it didn’t, it felt totally new in my world because I took, I took it somewhere completely different.

[00:56:26] Simon: Yeah. But, but that’s creativity for you.

[00:56:27] Simon: Creativity isn’t about inventing something that has never been done before. Right. It’s about creating something as a result of your, your influences. You’re drawing from different things to give birth to something new, but it’s influenced by things that have already, already come to pass.

[00:56:42] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:56:42] Simon: And so that’s all creativity is, but in order to activate that, we have to be curious.

[00:56:47] Simon: We have to follow our curiosities.

[00:56:48] Nathan: Right.

[00:56:49] Simon: In the same way that Steve Jobs did, in the same way lots of other people have done the same way that you did. It’s to follow our curiosities again, without being attached to the outcome and seeing where they may lead.

[00:56:58] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:58] Simon: And often they can lead to very interesting insights, opportunities, or introductions.

[00:57:02] Nathan: Yeah. I love that. The other one that, that was important for me is the blend between the startup world mm-hmm. And the direct response marketing world. And so the first book that I published. Um, I had a long form sales page. Mm-hmm. Which in the direct response world was very, very common. Right. Long form sales pages.

[00:57:24] Nathan: Mm-hmm. The copy is very, very important. We’re addressing all of the obstacles, but they would do it in this like poorly designed yellow highlighter. You know, anyone who’s spent time in that space knows that look. But then at the same time, I would go over anyway, I spent all this time in the, in the world of startups.

[00:57:41] Simon: Mm.

[00:57:41] Nathan: Where simplicity, elegant, like great design, really, really mattered. And so I came out with these, this landing page for my book and everyone was like, I have never seen something like this. And it was just the intersection of those two worlds because it was great copywriting, a long form sales page, but it was beautifully designed.

[00:57:59] Nathan: And it’s like, I just took two industries, like very, very common practice in two different industries and merged it together. And everyone’s like, I’ve never seen this before. And you’re like,

[00:58:09] Simon: and, and that’s originality in motion. You just connect in different industries together. I mean, this is how we, uh, how we launched my first book.

[00:58:15] Simon: I mean, we partnered with the Aughts Hotel in London, uh, which at the time was the world’s best bar. And my book is called Energized. And they designed an energized cocktail.

[00:58:23] Nathan: Okay.

[00:58:23] Simon: And so for the first few weeks of launch, if you ordered that cocktail in a bar, it would be mixed in front of you. And then presented on the signed copy of my book, we, we partnered with a celebrity chef.

[00:58:32] Simon: We did a seven course menu. Yeah. Where each course was inspired by a theme for my book.

[00:58:36] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:37] Simon: So communicating personal development and leadership through food. It, it was a unique experience. And then we partnered with an artist,

[00:58:44] Nathan: and it’s noteworthy. It gives you unique talking points.

[00:58:47] Simon: Exactly. Gives you so many unique talking points.

[00:58:49] Simon: Mm-hmm. Uh, that people can’t help but share and talk about it. And then an artist created this beautiful abstract painting based on my work. And again, things that often in many cases have never been done before.

[00:59:00] Nathan: Right.

[00:59:00] Simon: But it’s just, as you say, just now, it’s simply the intersection of two different industries given birth to New Fort.

[00:59:06] Nathan: Let’s dive into this because the book is coming out, right? I it is. If we rewind in time a little bit Yeah. And you’re thinking about, okay, I have a message that I wanna get in front of a lot of people.

[00:59:16] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:18] Nathan: First, are you tied to an outcome on that or

[00:59:20] Simon: no?

[00:59:21] Nathan: How did you distance yourself from, from the outcome?

[00:59:23] Simon: So, so for me it’s, again, it’s letting go of the outcome, being grateful. So for me, if I’m honest, I was already grateful. I, I had a book, they were penguin. Many people would, would love to have a deal with a publisher like Penguin. Uh, and then to get the likes of Simon Sinek, Ali Abdal and the like to, to endorse the book was for me already a huge win.

[00:59:42] Simon: So for me, whatever happened after that was a bonus. But for me, in terms of the marketing, it was like, well, what are some cool experiments I can try? And just treat it like a game. Gamified a process.

[00:59:51] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:52] Simon: And we just had a whiteboard up on our wall and we just all had all of these different channels that we wanted to experiment with.

[00:59:57] Simon: And the way I describe it is a lot of authors who are about to publish, it’s the equivalent of their strategy. It’s equivalent of driving through a narrow country lane in the sense that once you hit traffic, you can’t go anywhere. And so a lot of authors, when they have a new book coming out, they just go into social media, that media, they did the

[01:00:13] Nathan: exact same

[01:00:13] Simon: playbook.

[01:00:14] Simon: Buy the book, buy the book, buy the book. It’s just buy the book. Buy the book.

[01:00:16] Nathan: Right.

[01:00:16] Simon: The message the whole time is just get my book. But that’s not gonna be effective because when you put new content out, each piece of content has to be slightly different. I mean, it can still be about the book, but it has to be something that’s a little indirect

[01:00:29] Nathan: and a unique way to get attention.

[01:00:30] Simon: Yeah. Because it appeals to different segments of your market. Not everyone’s gonna resonate with Just buy my book all the time.

[01:00:35] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:35] Simon: And so when we looked at the different channels, it could be things such as what book clubs could we reach out to? So when they recommend this book in a month, suddenly you have hundreds if not thousands of people buying the book.

[01:00:45] Simon: What podcasts could we get on? Uh, which people could we collaborate with? What sort of stunt marketing could we do? What activations could we do? Who could we collaborate with? What events could we speak and so on. So with all of these different channels, and I liken that to driving on a highway, so unlike the country lane, when you hit traffic, you can’t go anywhere in the highway.

[01:01:04] Simon: If something doesn’t work out, you just keep shifting lanes.

[01:01:06] Nathan: Yeah. Big.

[01:01:06] Simon: You just keep moving lanes big. You, you’re just constantly experimenting. And so that’s how I, at, I detach from the outcome is I just focus on the fun of it.

[01:01:14] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:01:14] Simon: Let’s just treat this journey as a game. I’ve already, I’m already in a very good position.

[01:01:18] Simon: I’m really grateful having got a book deal and having got these incredible names to endorse the book. Let’s just have a bit of fun with marketing.

[01:01:25] Nathan: Mm.

[01:01:25] Simon: And and see where it may go.

[01:01:27] Nathan: Yeah. You’re holding it loosely. You’re optimizing for fun.

[01:01:29] Simon: Yeah.

[01:01:29] Nathan: You’re gratitude all the way through and you’re saying, what can I do that’s unique?

[01:01:32] Nathan: Something else that helps. I mean, it really stands out as I’m starting to, to come down the final stretches of finishing my own book and, and thinking about promotion. Realizing like, oh yeah, by default I’m just gonna run the same playbook that everyone else does. And so two things is, I guess, changing the way that you brainstorm.

[01:01:52] Simon: Mm.

[01:01:53] Nathan: Uh, one is having like a no bad idea is brainstorm.

[01:01:56] Simon: Yeah.

[01:01:57] Nathan: You know, where you’re just at the whiteboard. What are the craziest thing I would never have thought of? Partnering with a hotel and a bar and Yeah. You know, the cocktail on a copy of your book, like even if only five people ever ordered that mm-hmm.

[01:02:09] Nathan: And you, but you got the Instagram reel and it like Exactly. That’s worth it and itself. It’s the

[01:02:13] Simon: novelty.

[01:02:13] Nathan: Yeah. It’s the novelty of, it’s the novelty. Right. So, you know, you can do this like no bad ideas and you’re throwing things out there, writing it down, and no one’s allowed to say like, well, that would never work, because, yeah.

[01:02:25] Nathan: And so that’s one side of it. The other that I find really, really helpful is stepping into the pre-mortem.

[01:02:30] Simon: Mm.

[01:02:31] Nathan: And that’s basically going into this. Instead of no bad ideas, it’s this project has failed.

[01:02:37] Simon: Mm.

[01:02:38] Nathan: I know. We’re, you know, not too tied to the outcome, but let’s say that the outcome is, uh, we, you know, we didn’t sell 50,000 copies.

[01:02:45] Nathan: Mm-hmm. We sold 50

[01:02:46] Simon: mm.

[01:02:47] Nathan: You know, we didn’t reach the people that we wanted to. Yeah. We didn’t achieve this goal. The startup that we’re building shut down. Why? And we just step in into this world. Mm-hmm. So we’re saying, okay, it’s a year in the future. It’s completely failed.

[01:02:57] Simon: Yeah.

[01:02:58] Nathan: What are all the reasons why?

[01:03:00] Nathan: And in en listing all of that out. Mm-hmm. You can identify you. I think you’re doing two things. You’re identifying the, the reasons that it would fail. And it’s very tempting. You go, oh, but we’d fix it with this. No, no. Remember it failed.

[01:03:15] Simon: Yeah.

[01:03:15] Nathan: And you just write down, here’s all the reasons that it, that it failed, uh, or that could possibly have failed.

[01:03:20] Nathan: And then the other thing that you’re doing is you’re getting all those anxieties out of your head.

[01:03:26] Simon: Yeah.

[01:03:27] Nathan: Because then it’s even, that’s like list out and you’re like. Oh, well if it failed because of this, like, we still learned a lot, right? Mm-hmm. You can, you can sit in that world. And so I think the pre-mortem and knowing that you’re gonna do that really allows a team to step into the

[01:03:42] Simon: Yeah.

[01:03:42] Nathan: The brainstorm and the positive thinking where it’s so easy to, like, I throw out an idea.

[01:03:47] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:48] Nathan: Or let’s throw it the other way. You throw out an idea and I go, well, devil’s advocate, like, you know.

[01:03:53] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:53] Nathan: That would never work because of this. And like, now you’re crushed. ’cause you’re like, oh yeah. You know, but we can full, fully stay in the positive side, brainstorming no bad ideas and knowing that in 30 minutes or an hour mm-hmm.

[01:04:06] Nathan: Or another day, we’re then going to set all that aside and switch into the fully the negative side. And instead of balancing both things side by side, we’re gonna separate them, but give each their due.

[01:04:16] Simon: Yeah. And, and also an interesting thought to throw into the mix, instead of just brainstorming. What’s also good is to question storm.

[01:04:24] Nathan: Okay.

[01:04:24] Simon: And question storming is just throwing out questions into the middle of the room and seeing what comes of it. So it could be simply like, well, what’s the craziest marketing strategy you’ve seen in the worlds that you operate in? Because now you’re given permission to doze on the table to share from their personal experience.

[01:04:41] Simon: Someone might be interested in gaming, someone might be interested in racing, someone might be interested in shoes. And you’re just saying, what’s the craziest marketing campaign you’ve seen in the things that you’re interested in? And then they just go, oh, oh, actually I really followed this particular product or this brand.

[01:04:55] Simon: They just did an amazing marketing campaign on this. Great. Tell us about it. And what you’re doing is you’re drawing from people’s backgrounds and experiences and saying, well, that works. What can we learn from that?

[01:05:05] Nathan: Right.

[01:05:06] Simon: And bring into what we do. Because if it’s just purely brainstorming, some people might not feel confident that their ideas are valuable.

[01:05:13] Simon: So that’s why some people just don’t contribute.

[01:05:15] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:15] Simon: But when you throw questions out, that you’re giving permission for people to share their insight and wisdom.

[01:05:20] Nathan: Hmm. What I’m realizing about that is, the question I would draw is more naturally is what’s the craziest book marketing strategy that you’ve seen?

[01:05:30] Nathan: And people are like, well this, this guy I follow in the uk, like partnered with this bar. And you know, you’d have the examples like that. But that’s like the, the web designer.

[01:05:38] Simon: Yeah.

[01:05:39] Nathan: Just copying from the other web designers.

[01:05:42] Simon: Absolutely.

[01:05:42] Nathan: But when you say, what’s the craziest marketing strategy you’ve ever seen?

[01:05:46] Simon: Yeah.

[01:05:46] Nathan: Then we go way beyond books. Mm. Then we’re throwing out all of these things and maybe only like maybe 20% of them would be relevant if we pulled from books and because now we’re pulling from all of marketing only 3% or 5% is relevant. Yeah. But then it would spark something else and, and you’re just go in much more

[01:06:02] Simon: broad and let’s say, come up with these ideas.

[01:06:03] Simon: Like recently, um, I, I got interviewed by a friend who, who is launching a book in the uk and just by diversifying his inputs mm-hmm. He found out one great idea was when he does street interviews. Well, instead of just holding a mic, put the mic on your book.

[01:06:17] Nathan: I saw that. Yeah. I watched that clip. Yeah. And I sent it to my team actually.

[01:06:20] Simon: Just and be, because you’re keeping it visible in the content, the book a whole way. It’s going back and forth, forth, back and forth. And that book is going into your subconscious.

[01:06:27] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:06:28] Simon: And that’s what it’s about. It’s all about subconscious marketing, because even though he’s not explicitly saying, Hey guys, this book’s coming up by the book.

[01:06:34] Simon: It’s just a natural conversation. But the book is in,

[01:06:36] Nathan: was that, so the clip that I saw was with Tim Amu.

[01:06:38] Simon: Yeah. That, that, that’s what I’m referring to. Yeah.

[01:06:40] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:06:40] Simon: And, and so we initially started the conversation without the book.

[01:06:43] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:44] Simon: And then it was actually, let’s experiment with it. ’cause I saw this in another video.

[01:06:47] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:06:47] Simon: And then we tried it, and then we looked at it and we thought, actually that’s, that’s a really good bit of content because the book is visible throughout the entire conversation. Right. And even when you’re speaking, uh, I, I, I, I’ve now shared that with other speakers as well, that if you’ve got a book coming out, walk onto stage.

[01:07:02] Simon: If you’re walking from, uh, left to right, walk on stage with a book in your hand and put it on the lectern and then walk after stage with a book in your other hand. So the, the front cover, the book is always visible to people taking photos and videos of your speaking.

[01:07:14] Nathan: Hmm. I love that. But yeah, like, I mean, even from a content creation perspective.

[01:07:18] Simon: Yeah.

[01:07:19] Nathan: I always think about, I had a guest on the show who told me to really think about the, the visual hook Yeah. For a short form video

[01:07:26] Simon: mm-hmm.

[01:07:27] Nathan: The audio hook and then any title hook mm-hmm. And right. And so for every short form video that he is putting out, he’s like, where’s you, you need to hit all three of these categories.

[01:07:37] Nathan: Yeah. And I was always thinking about just the audio hook. What am I saying? And he’s like, no, you need both. But when I saw that reel on your page

[01:07:44] Simon: Yeah.

[01:07:45] Nathan: The, the book being used as the microphone holder Yeah. Gave, was a visual hook.

[01:07:51] Simon: Yeah.

[01:07:52] Nathan: Even before I got into the audio and the title hook and all

[01:07:56] Simon: that.

[01:07:56] Nathan: And so I was

[01:07:56] Simon: like, and those hooks are so important.

[01:07:57] Simon: I, I, I remember, again, just me looking outside of my own industry, I, I, I, I follow a nutritionist on, on YouTube.

[01:08:03] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:04] Simon: And when she was announcing her book, the title, which created a huge amount of curiosity. Was something as simple as, I’ve been waiting three years, I’m finally able to come out with this.

[01:08:16] Simon: And now you’re like, well, what is it?

[01:08:17] Nathan: What is it?

[01:08:18] Simon: You, you, you’re thinking, what’s you gonna share? Mm-hmm. And so it just hooks you into, wanna watch the video?

[01:08:22] Nathan: Ah, there’s so much good stuff in there. I’m gonna go back to energy. Mm-hmm. And particularly energy with the team.

[01:08:27] Simon: Yeah.

[01:08:27] Nathan: So something that I think about a lot is what energy am I bringing to the situation?

[01:08:31] Nathan: Mm. Because running a, a team of 10, 20, 50, a hundred people, people are always looking to you like, is Nathan happy? Is Nathan upset? Is this a good idea? Is this not? And I naturally give off like fairly negative energy, or at least neutral. Like give me an example. At one of our team retreats, this is maybe two years ago, uh, Scott, one of our product managers mm-hmm.

[01:08:55] Nathan: Who actually lives in London.

[01:08:56] Simon: Okay.

[01:08:57] Nathan: He gave this incredible session about the app store that we were building, and it was super early in this app store project. So he led this whole brainstorm. He facilitated it so well and all of that. And afterwards I came up to him, I was like, Scott, that was so well done.

[01:09:09] Nathan: Mm-hmm. Like, you nailed it with that session. I’m so excited. And he goes really good, because every time I looked over at you, I thought like, wow, he’s so pissed. I’m probably gonna get fired. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I thought that was amazing. How did you think that He’s like, you just, and I, you know, he kind of didn’t finish that sentence and I was like, I have resting bitch face, don’t I?

[01:09:28] Nathan: And he was like, but you said it, not me. You know? But what I realized is that the natural energy I was giving off was just, was just negative and I didn’t mean to,

[01:09:38] Simon: yeah. It, it can be often unintended. Um, but what it tells me is that so much of our communication is nonverbal.

[01:09:45] Nathan: Right?

[01:09:46] Simon: You, you know, there’s only a small percentage that is, that is verbal for what we say, but the rest is the nonverbal stuff.

[01:09:51] Simon: How we look, how we react. Mm-hmm. How we respond. And often when I. I’m trying to help people respond better. Especially if you’re just in the audience and you are, you are in a position of leadership and you wanna support that person’s stage. It’s just, imagine it’s one of your sons on stage.

[01:10:05] Nathan: Mm.

[01:10:06] Simon: And one of your sons is performing in the school play.

[01:10:09] Simon: How would you respond to your son’s performance?

[01:10:11] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:10:12] Simon: Naturally. It’s one of a proud father, right?

[01:10:14] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:10:14] Simon: So it’s just a picture. How would a proud leader or a proud manager respond of their employee on stage?

[01:10:22] Nathan: Oh, that’s such a good framing. I love that. Yeah. And if you bring that energy that’s going to allow someone

[01:10:29] Simon: mm-hmm.

[01:10:29] Nathan: Like going back to our drumsticks analogy.

[01:10:31] Simon: Absolutely

[01:10:31] Nathan: right. They’re, if they’re leading the tighter they grip those drumsticks, the worse it’s gonna go. And then they’re gonna see that it’s going badly and they’re gonna pick up on you noticing that. And it’s, it, you know, it’s this vicious cycle.

[01:10:43] Simon: Yeah. It’s, it’s like why, if you are doing something that’s important to you and you have a mentor, you have a close friend or a partner in the audience, and they’re responding and they’re cheering you on and they’re yelling for you.

[01:10:53] Simon: You find that extra bit of energy to go the distance.

[01:10:56] Nathan: Yeah,

[01:10:56] Simon: and it’s the same way. You know if, if you’re a young child and you’re on stage and your parents are in your audience and something goes wrong, but your parents are like, you got it. You got it. Keep going, you’ll get there. Don’t worry about it. You just suddenly have this belief in yourself.

[01:11:08] Simon: And for a lot of us, we just need someone else to believe in us first. Right. To just give us that energy to perform.

[01:11:14] Nathan: Yeah. So thinking about that, that framework of bringing that proud energy.

[01:11:18] Simon: The proud energy, yeah.

[01:11:19] Nathan: Yeah. Because then that’s going to allow someone to loosen up. I mean, in my talk yesterday here at the conference,

[01:11:25] Simon: yeah,

[01:11:25] Nathan: right.

[01:11:26] Nathan: I was a little thrown off because I maybe about 10 minutes before going on stage, I realized this stage is in the round. Like I’ve never given a talk before where the audience is on all four sides of me, and so I’m like, wait. You know, it’s a short talk. I know it pretty well. I know I can deliver well, but now you’ve thrown in a variable that throws me off and I’m like, how quickly should I turn to each side?

[01:11:52] Nathan: You know, do I like, what do I do here? And there were a few people in the audience, uh, I think of Gabriel who runs the Creative Leaders group in the uk. You know, he was on one of those sides. He was sitting front and center with this great, smiling, encouraging energy. And so anytime I was like, you know, in my head of like, am I doing the right thing?

[01:12:11] Nathan: I’d kind of come around and there’s Gabriel just be like, like thoroughly enjoying the talk and supporting me. And I was like, oh, you know, I was getting that proud energy from him and I was like, what I needed.

[01:12:20] Simon: And just imagine how you felt at that. Right, right. And, and imagine how someone else would feel when they get that same, that same experience.

[01:12:25] Simon: Yeah. And this is where you, you, you know, when, when we go back to gratitude from women, the way I tell people how powerful gratitude is, is imagine if your manager or your boss were to send your voice note or come up to you even and say, Hey. I just wanna say I’m really grateful for the effort you put in yesterday.

[01:12:44] Simon: It really contributed to us winning the pitch. Yeah. How would you feel?

[01:12:47] Nathan: Fantastic.

[01:12:47] Simon: But how often do people do it? Right. And so what I say to people is, as often as you can go up to someone and verbally tell ’em how grateful you offer them focusing on something specific or drop a voice note to someone.

[01:13:00] Simon: Yeah. If they’re not, you know, within your proximity, that’s not just in the professional setting, but it’s also in your personal setting as well. So how can you drop someone a voice note to tell them how grateful you are for them?

[01:13:11] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:13:11] Simon: Because voice carries energy that’s important. If you send ’em a text message it, it just doesn’t land the same.

[01:13:17] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:13:17] Simon: Because you dunno the emotional state they were in when they, when they wrote it, but when you tell someone verbally how grateful you are for them, you are expressing gratitude and it doesn’t just impact the recipient. It impacts yourself as well.

[01:13:31] Nathan: Yeah. Oh, I love that. I mean, that’s a simple action item that you could do.

[01:13:33] Nathan: Mm-hmm. That any leader. Could do coming out of this episode.

[01:13:37] Simon: Yeah.

[01:13:37] Nathan: Is just say, you know what, let me send a voice note to if I have a team of five people,

[01:13:42] Simon: yeah.

[01:13:42] Nathan: Let me go spend five minutes total. Right? Like this is a very simple action to send a 62nd voice note to each person saying, Hey, you know? Right.

[01:13:50] Nathan: We’re at the end of a year. We’re any of this time like, Hey, I really appreciate the work that you did this year is just reflecting on 2025 and you know mm-hmm. It made a huge difference and we could not have gotten here without you. And I just want you to know that I’m. Honored to work with you and, and so proud of the work that you do.

[01:14:04] Simon: Right. And, and, and it’s incredible. ’cause I think once you start expressing gratitude, you access this sort of web of abundance.

[01:14:09] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:09] Simon: So I got invited to speak at a, at an event by Canon. It’s a Canon the camera company. Yeah. In, in the uk. And the person that put me forward as a speaker was someone that was in the queue about five years prior at an event I spoke at.

[01:14:23] Simon: And I stayed right into, the last person had a question they wanted to ask me. Yeah. And we, we briefly met maybe for about three or four minutes, speaking only a couple of minutes. And then she ended up following me on Instagram. And she put me in contact with Canon and she said, I wanna put you forward. I met you a few years back.

[01:14:38] Simon: I didn’t remember her, but she said, I just wanted to express my gratitude because you stayed behind to speak to every single one of us that had a question to ask you. And I’m helping Canon with this new event, and I will be delighted to put you forward as my way of expressing gratitude back. And so you access this web of reciprocity, the more gratitude you put out in the world, the more that comes back.

[01:15:00] Nathan: Ah. So if you just think about. All the relationships, like the creator world is built on relationships. Yeah. And it’s, it’s the little things. If you listen to a podcast episode mm-hmm. And you express the gratitude for the thing in there that you took away, or you follow up for a friend and like, Hey, I was just thinking about you, and really grateful for the time we spent together at that conference.

[01:15:19] Nathan: Right. It gives these little touch points. It’s just such a great place to hang out at

[01:15:22] Simon: it. It’s an appreciation of the fact that you never get to the top alone. Where you are is a result of all the people that have helped you get Right. Your partner, your children, your colleagues, your team. And that’s why, for me, the favorite part of my book is not any single chapter.

[01:15:38] Simon: It’s the acknowledgement section. Because when I wrote that, it just reminded me of how important the people around me have been.

[01:15:45] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:15:45] Simon: And the role they’ve played, uh, to help me get to where I’m today.

[01:15:50] Nathan: Hmm. I love that. Okay. The thing that I wanna end

[01:15:52] Simon: on mm-hmm.

[01:15:53] Nathan: Is what stops people from taking action.

[01:15:57] Simon: Hmm.

[01:15:57] Nathan: There’s so many things we’re like, I want to do this. But I’m not going to, or I can’t make myself. Or like as you’re working with clients or in your own life, what do you see that stops people from taking action?

[01:16:10] Simon: I think there are three things. First, two, fear and self-doubt.

[01:16:15] Nathan: Okay.

[01:16:16] Simon: First, fear of the unknown.

[01:16:17] Simon: Fear of what’s gonna happen. Mm-hmm. That stops a lot of us. Simply put, though, nothing beats fail at practice. You’ve just gotta chunk things down to the smallest possible action and then build from there. Second, self-doubt. Self-doubt stops us because we’re doubting our talent, we’re doubting our potential and our capability to adapt to whatever the world throws our way.

[01:16:39] Simon: And the third is trust. Trust in what you have to offer. And the way I put it is that there are always two sales that happen in business. The second is selling you to others, and the first is selling you to you. And until you can sell you to you well. The second will always remain a challenge. If you don’t see the value that you have to give to the world, how is anybody else gonna see it?

[01:17:03] Simon: But if you see worth in what you have to offer, other people will see it as well. They will feel you and they will wanna work with you in some form.

[01:17:12] Nathan: Yeah. Oh, I love that. How do you think about bringing this idea of energy to decision making? Because often when we’re making decisions, mm. Like the thing preventing us from action is knowing which decision to make.

[01:17:25] Nathan: Yeah. And so, and we’re like, if you told me like, Nathan, you need to make a decision on this. Like, all right, so pros and cons list, like, let’s spend all of our time in the intellectual space. But that’s not where you do it if you’re following energy,

[01:17:39] Simon: truth is deep down, you already know what the right decision is.

[01:17:42] Simon: We all do. It’s the courage to take that action. Mm-hmm. So to give an example, one of my favorite activities that I like doing with coaching clients when they’re in a mood of indecision is I take the two decisions. I’d say, I’m gonna put a coin in one hand. You’ve gotta choose which hand the coin is in.

[01:18:00] Simon: And if you choose the hand that a coin is correctly in, you choose this choice. Mm-hmm. If not, you choose the other. And often when they choose the hand without the coin, and they have to choose the alternative, I can tell from their body language, that wasn’t the result they were hoping for.

[01:18:15] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:16] Simon: They wanted to choose the hand the coin was in.

[01:18:18] Simon: And so that tells me deep down, we already know the path we want to take. It’s just discovering the courage to venture into the unknown.

[01:18:26] Nathan: Yeah. I’ve done this as well with, you know, when you’re trying to make a decision, and it sounds flippant, but you say flip a coin.

[01:18:32] Simon: Yeah.

[01:18:33] Nathan: You know, heads you do it, tails you don’t.

[01:18:35] Simon: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:36] Nathan: And so someone’s like, wait, you’re going to, you’re gonna put this decision down to a coin flip? And you’re like, yeah, of course. When that’s not what you’re doing, what you’re doing is you’re creating a, a moment. Mm-hmm. You’re creating an opportunity that you can react to.

[01:18:48] Simon: It’s a moment of insight.

[01:18:49] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:18:50] Simon: It’s a realization that you know the path you are meant to travel on.

[01:18:54] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:55] Simon: You just have to find the courage to now believe you can make it happen.

[01:18:59] Nathan: Yeah. So if you flip that coin or you choose the hand and it says like, yes, do option A, and you go, oh, I feel relief, I feel, you know, a sense of peace or purpose, then you’re like, okay, that’s what I’m meant to do.

[01:19:13] Nathan: Mm-hmm. And if you feel disappointment

[01:19:15] Simon: Yeah.

[01:19:16] Nathan: Or something like that, then you’re like, oh, well, okay. Mm-hmm. I like, I, I then go with that, you know, you, you not,

[01:19:22] Simon: and then that’s all about energy because if a vision is so compelling and magnetic in nature, it just pulls you forward.

[01:19:28] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:19:29] Simon: You don’t need motivation.

[01:19:30] Simon: It pulls you forward. That’s excitement. So you’re following what your heart is telling you. If your heart is saying, we we’re really excited about this, then you follow that wisdom. If you’re feeling tension inside, then of course that’s another sign. Yeah. It’s saying to you, maybe you’re not meant for this.

[01:19:44] Simon: Right. It’s why people talk about this term Monday Blues, you know, you finish the holiday, you finish the weekend, and you gotta go, you have to go back to the office on Monday, and people talk about the stress or this, uh, depressing feeling they get on a Monday. That is the physical manifestation of something that is draining you.

[01:20:00] Simon: When you do something that is not aligned to who you are or an extension of your skillset, you, you have this physical manifestation of fear, right. Of like, I’m, I’m not living the life I’m meant to live, but when you’re doing something that energizes you, you can’t wait until Monday.

[01:20:14] Nathan: Right.

[01:20:15] Simon: You’re looking forward to the emails coming in.

[01:20:16] Simon: Again, you’re looking forward to an ocean of possibility ahead. It’s a very different feeling.

[01:20:21] Nathan: Yeah. And I’m, what I’m realizing is the reaction that I want to have when I encounter that feeling and notice it. Mm. Curiosity,

[01:20:29] Simon: yeah.

[01:20:29] Nathan: Is then going, okay, why do I feel that way? Because it might be that I’m very frustrated with work overall, or it might be something, or it might be down to there’s one interaction

[01:20:38] Simon: Yeah.

[01:20:39] Nathan: That like subconscious, I go, oh, I’m going to run into this person and I haven’t given them the feedback that I’m supposed. You know, like I might realize, oh, I’m actually just worried about this interaction because I haven’t shown up authentically to who I am, and I’m afraid of that conversation. Mm-hmm.

[01:20:52] Nathan: It’s like, oh, well, that, I just need to seek out that conversation. Yeah. And I can let go of all of it.

[01:20:56] Simon: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s, it’s not to avoid the things mm-hmm. Of discomfort, but to actually find a way to face some head on.

[01:21:03] Nathan: Yeah. I love that. Simon, this has been amazing.

[01:21:05] Simon: Thank you so much.

[01:21:06] Nathan: Thank you so much for coming on.

[01:21:07] Nathan: Where should people go to follow your work and, and see everything that you’re doing?

[01:21:12] Simon: I’m on all the major social media platforms, so you can find me on YouTube just by searching my name, uh, LinkedIn, Instagram. My handle is at Simon Alexander o. Uh, or you can check out my newsletter on my website, simon alexander on.com, which is who said by kid.

[01:21:27] Nathan: Thank you so much for using the platform. Nothing brings you more joy than playing a tiny role in powering the businesses of all these amazing creators.

[01:21:36] Simon: Thank you so much.

[01:21:37] Nathan: Yeah, thanks for coming on. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment.

[01:21:47] Nathan: I’d love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else do you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.