Focused - 182: Building Focused Flywheels, with Nathan Barry

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

ConvertKit CEO Nathan Barry joins us to talk about the power of focus and how it helped save his company.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? Doing great. And I'm very excited to talk to our guest today. Welcome to the Focus podcast, Nathan Berry. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So Nathan is the CEO of ConvertKit,

and I just came back from the Craft and Commerce Conference, which was amazing. Talked about it a lot, even on the show. So if you're listening to this, you should definitely go check it out. But Nathan, you weren't always the CEO of ConvertKit. In fact, your website still says you're a creator, author, speaker, designer, and the founder of ConvertKit. And anything else you want to add to that tagline? I was just going to say the bio fits ConvertKit last. I might need to switch the order on that based on time spent now. But yeah, there's lots of things I do outside of ConvertKit and the creative world. Yes, but the reason I reached out to you and really wanted to have you on the show

is that at the conference, there was a documentary that was shared, which is kind of your story, ConvertKit's story, essentially. But there was a very powerful moment in that documentary where you kind of came to a tipping point on whether you were going to focus on ConvertKit or not. you were going to focus on ConvertKit or not. And I really wanted to have you on to kind of talk about your journey and kind of the result of that forced focus as you have focused on ConvertKit as your main thing. Sounds good. Let's do it. All right. So I guess let's just start at the beginning.

You know, how did you get into this creator world and where did the idea for ConvertKit even come from? Yeah. So creator world. I grew up in a family where we always made stuff. I think after this call, we're going to nerd out some about woodworking. I did lots of woodworking from an early age. My dad built the house that we grew up in. lots of woodworking from an early age. My dad built the house that, uh, we grew up in. Uh, I, like my first little business was selling wood, uh, products, you know, uh, plaques and decor and stuff like that, that I made selling it door to door or craft fairs. Um, so I, I was always into making stuff. Uh, I got into web design, uh, early on in high school, got clients doing web, early on in high school, got clients doing web and logo design early on, and then got into software design on from there. Actually, a fun little Apple world overlap.

In 2010, the company I was working for, we designed an app for the iPad and got to work on that before the iPad was released. And that was a fun challenge of like, you know, not having the device and being like, well, hold on, what are the dimensions of it? You know? And watching the, the keynote, you know, 25 times, try to understand what else we should do with the device.

I had some friends at the same time, cause I've been in the Apple community for a long time. I had some friends at the Omni group stand out to me in particular where they got measurements of the iPad and they had little three-dimensional printouts of plastic iPads. And they would draw their icons and stuff with paper and move them around just to kind of get a feel for, is this too big or too small? That's a real challenge when you don't have the hardware and you're trying to make software for it yes so it was it was a super fun time uh boise where i lived then and still live now didn't have an apple store so i remember on the day of the release we flew to portland and like there were all these people waiting in line for you know ipads and all of that but we

had made a business appointment and so they're just just like, Oh, are you from this? Yeah, come on in. And I was like, Oh, does everyone know about this hack? Apparently that you could just make a business appointment and bypass like a 500 person line. And, you know, we bought a bunch of iPads, loaded our software, um, tested it, shipped a bug fix and went home. Um, but that was a pretty fun experience for me. And that really got me into the world of iOS design, which got me into the content creation world. Um,

so to close the gap from there to ConvertKit, uh, in 2012, let's see. So 2010, 2011, I started making my own apps on the side, just learning to code and Objective-C and selling them on the app store. And then in 2012, I decided to leave my job and do freelance app design for people. And that went well. And then I thought, you know what? I should write a book about how to design iPhone apps, because who would you want to hire to design your app but the guy who wrote the book on it. That's where I first discovered you was the app design handbook. Yeah. Yeah. 2012. So my goal for that book was to make $10,000 in sales over the lifetime of the book and to get a bunch of clients, you know, and that's how I was going to kind of drive it. I made $12,000 in sales on the first day

to an email list of 800 people on MailChimp. And I ended up never taking on another design client because I thought like, this is way better selling digital products and all of that. So it was like $19,000 by the end of the first week. And it just took off from there. I ended up writing another book and I did a bunch of stuff, but in that process, I found that email was driving more sales than every social channel combined. And so I got pretty obsessed with

optimizing MailChimp. And then, uh, in early 2013, I decided I was going to build a better MailChimp, um, for content creators like me. So that was 10 years ago, 10 and a half years ago now. And the business has grown substantially from them. But it all came from the world of Apple and trying to get more design clients. I do like, though, that you very early were kind of lasering in on, I don't want to just make a newsletter. I want to make a newsletter for people who are creators,

you know, you know, people that want to, you know, there's a specialized set of needs for those people that probably wasn't being served up until then. Well, I think there's something in that, like a lot of people who build an audience or sell a product of any kind and

struggle to get traction. Often they like hey i'm gonna make something for designers and it's like there's a lot of stuff out there for designers yeah how do you how do you get specific and so i said this is for designing ios applications right and so we've taken all of design from graphic design to web to interface to mobile, everything, and said, nope, only iOS apps. At a time when that was relatively small, because you could only, you know, apps for the iPhone had only come out a year and a half earlier, or I guess three years earlier.

But, you know, it hadn't been around for that long. So I think that focus on a specific niche or a specific audience is absolutely key. Like another book that I remember seeing it a lot of early traction was this book called mastering modern, uh, mastering modern payments. And it was not a book, uh, about like how to be a better programmer or how to do whatever in development. Even narrowed down, like Ruby on Rails or something. This book was entirely about

how to do payment processing in Ruby on Rails with Stripe. This is very, very targeted. But the book did phenomenally well. It sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth over the years and resulted in a lot of consulting gigs for Pete Keene, the guy who wrote it. Based on the fact that it was such a targeted, focused thing. And so if you're like, oh, I'm trying to integrate my Rails app with Stripe, yeah, I can read the documentation.

But why don't I spend $50 and get this extra resource and save me dozens of hours? So that extreme focus on a niche I've seen pay off over and over again. Yeah, it's funny because that is so common in the world today. I feel like it's not just independent creators. It's even people who have big fancy jobs. My former life, I was a business lawyer. And the people who focus on a very niche area of law usually do a lot

better than the generalists. And so you've got this emerging kind of philosophy of be your weird self or some variation of that. But I think in a lot of ways, practically what that's saying is find the thing that blows your hair back and become really great at it. And then people will find you and i think that's kind of what you were doing with convert kit yeah for sure i mean it it took a long time

to get traction and we can get into that but uh wait a second you mean it wasn't an immediate success and you didn't buy your island in the caymans and just right off in the sunset. Yeah. Is that not normal? I don't know what I expected, but I did expect it to work faster than it did. You know, when I started in 2013. I think I want that on my gravestone, honestly.

Yeah. I expected it to go faster. Wait, does that refer to death or what? No, no, no. Just everything I take on in my life. Yes, exactly. That's like, I'm always overly optimistic of what's possible or what will get done. At the same time, you know, when you see,

isn't the Bill Gates quote? Talks about everyone underestimates or overestimates what they can do in a year and underestimates in a decade or something like that. I don't know who said it, but I've heard it many times. It was probably Einstein or Lincoln at this point.

I think we just, if we don't know, we just attribute it to Gates, Einstein, or Lincoln. Or point. Yeah. I think we just, if we don't know, we just attribute it to Gates, Einstein or Lincoln or Churchill or Churchill. Absolutely. Maybe Roosevelt as well, but you know, we'll get somebody in there anyway. So with ConvertKit,

I've always been this fan of like building in public. Cause I learned, I had no idea like what we all do of making money off of talking on the internet. Like that's wild. If we can just pause for a second, like that's wild. And I had no idea that that was possible. And so one thing for me is that in 2012, I came across these designers, um, who had small audiences and they both launched design e-books on the same day. Their names were Sasha Grief and Jared Dresdale. And purely by chance,

they launched design e-books on the exact same day. And then Jason Cohen, who is the founder of WP Engine, saw that happen and invited them to come on his blog and write guest posts about how, like, they had very different pricing methodologies. And so he was like, write a blog post about why yours is better and this will be interesting. And it was great content.

But one thing that stood out to me in that was seeing these people who had very small audiences, hundreds, maybe a thousand people on an email list, drive considerable sales. I think Slash had made $6,000 in two days and Jared made $8,000 in two days. And so I watched them do that off of a small audience. And I looked at that and said like, oh, that could be me. I'd seen like the Basecamp guys and, and you know, whoever else, maybe a Tim Ferriss or someone else, do these big

self-published launches or some other venture. And it's like, well, of course they can do it. But for me, seeing people like me in my exact niche with my size audience, like that was super inspiring to me. So I always had this idea of like, I'm going to work in public

and kind of pay that forward. And so when I launched ConvertKit, I decided I was going to build the whole thing in public. And so I had what I called the web app challenge, which was to build a software business to $5,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue within six months. And to do it only with $5,000 of my own money

and the rest has to come from customers. Spoiler, I totally failed on that, but it did turn into ConvertKit, which, uh, you know, did pretty well long-term. So slow at first and then, and then, uh, much faster later on. So you, you won in the end, but I did, I did, you know, the, the being absolutely relentless is an underrated skill. Like I think too many people are looking for what's the unique advantage that I have? What's the thing I understand about the market that no one else does or the distribution method or, you know, my unique skill. you know, my unique skill. And it's sort of the one weird trick to make money on the internet. You know, everyone's looking for that. And if I had one,

if my one weird trick to making money on the internet, it's like never give up, like just be completely relentless forever. And maybe that has to end at some point. I'm more than a decade in and it hasn't ended yet, but there's just so many problems that I faced in my early content business with ConvertKit and all of that, where we've stalled out or plateaued or weren't sure how to handle it. And it's just kind of like push through it and figure it out.

I was just telling my kids, you know, the one condition of getting lucky is being in the room. You got to show up, you know? Yeah. And I do think you're right. I think for the kinds of stuff we do, just being smart and having good ideas isn't enough. But again, I mean,

I feel like it's easy for us to drift into creator talk but i know we have listeners who are you know working in an accounting firm or whatever and i think this stuff works that way too i don't think there's any mystery to it yeah i think it's that constant like i add in you know not just being in the room relent showing up, but adding in probably two more things. The first is that continual learning. If you're working in an office job and you can just tell that the person sitting the next office or cubicle over or the next Zoom square over now, I guess how we do it,

they're just taking better notes and they're understanding things better. And you're like, oh, a month ago we had this call and you didn't know what was going on here. And now like you've done all this research where you came back from like that continual learning stands out and it stands out in the creator world and in the corporate world in a huge way. Yeah. And the inverse is true as well. I mean, I worked at a place once and the guy next to me was like a former submarine commander, but he was done. Like he had no interest in anything and it showed in his work. You know, you've got to have that mindset to come up and want to be continually striving.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That's huge. And then I think, so the continual learning is, maybe we have a three-part equation here. Show up relentlessly. All right. Continually learn. And then the last one is, I think, the one that people struggle with the most, because it doesn't get talked about enough.

And that's the teaching. You have to teach and share what you've learned. And it's easy to fall into a trap of like, okay, I'm, you know, the intern at this company and you two are directors, right? What do I possibly have to teach or write down or share. And I think, or if we take a creative version of that, it's, you know, I'm just barely learning web design. Um, you know, I can never, I'm not an expert. I could never start a blog teaching web design or app design or whatever other thing they want to do. But if you can make that shift and say like, Oh, I'm not teaching as an expert. I'm just teaching what I just learned. Cause I have a unique perspective, right? As the intern who just joined the company or as the person who just downloaded Xcode for the first time,

do we still use Xcode? I don't actually know. We do. Okay, cool. Good. Just, just checking. I mean, they, now they have a three-dimensional interface and they use Xcode. So it's all good. have a three-dimensional interface and they use Xcode. So it's all good. That's right. Some things don't actually change. But I think about like, if you were the person taking notes in a meeting and you didn't take mediocre notes, you took really good notes or you get to choose as a person taking notes, you get to choose what to emphasize. I can't speak. It helps to be on a podcast and be able to speak. You get to choose what to emphasize. And in doing that, you get to have a voice. And so I think there's something really interesting, especially as more companies go remote, is that you can just make a plan for something. And you can say, hey, what if we did this and ask questions and put out

that plan? Even if you're working with the accounting company, you'd be like, as you're learning, you're going, Hey, what if we implemented this process and notion for tracking our clients? You know, and here's an idea for it. And you can actually just spend an hour and write it out. And then you will get to the point where partners or someone else is like, I mean, that sounds pretty good. Let's do that. And so in teaching and sharing what you've learned, there's this level of credibility that comes with it that you don't get otherwise. One of my favorite examples is from Marco Polo. And if you think about Marco Polo as an explorer, the first person to discover the Silk Road, you know, all these things that we might have heard about him.

Most of those aren't true. Like, oh, yes, he was an explorer. No, he didn't discover the Silk Road. No, he wasn't the first person. Like, you know, he went along with his uncles who had done this trip before. And he's, you know, as a young man tagging along with them for the first time, it's like, well, hold on. Why do we know his name? And we don't know, I can't tell you his uncle's names, you know, or any of this. I can't tell you the people who went before his uncle and did this trading route. But the reason is that he

wrote about it. Everyone else did this thing and they kept it secret. And they're, you know, they're like, oh, we can't, can't share that. And he just wrote it down. And he's like, here's here, I'm documenting my journey. And so if you get people who have that relentless focus and relentless desire to show up are constantly learning and observing what's going on in the world, and then just writing it down, that's, that's phenomenal. and then just writing it down, that's phenomenal. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

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but use that offer code focus to get yourself that 10% off and to show your support for the show and our thanks to Squarespace for the support of the focus podcast and all of relay FM. to Squarespace for the support of the Focus Podcast and all of RelayFM. So Nathan, one of the things that you talked about at the conference was the creator Flywheel. And I really liked this model. You have some laws for Flywheels, which I feel like are very relevant for anyone listening to this show who wants to gain a little bit of momentum with what they're trying to focus on. You mind walking us through some flywheel basics? Yeah. So first,

I think flywheel might be a term that people say and don't actually understand. Like I put some visuals to it once and someone on my team was like, Oh, I've heard that word like a hundred times and I I didn't actually know what it was. Um, so maybe for a quick intro to flywheels, my first experience with flywheels came in, uh, the country of Lesotho, which is inside of South Africa.

And I was there in 2008 working on a, um, various like humanitarian projects. And we're at this orphanage and we had drilled a well and we were going to put a pump on the well um and electricity was pretty inconsistent at the time and so we didn't want to put in an electric pump where it's like here's water oh but when you don't have electricity you also don't have water oh and it's supposed to provide like, you know, there's 75 kids in this orphanage and that wouldn't work well. So when you think about a hand pump, it'd be like that traditional thing that you would do at a, at a campsite, right? There's a long lever coming out and we're pumping up and down, um, and gain that motion again, works fine

for a weekend up camping. Um, not great when it's your primary source of water, like it's going to be a lot of work. And so I didn't know how we were going to solve this, but, um, when it's engineer on a team who was like, Oh, we're going to put a flywheel in place. I was like, okay, tell me what a flywheel is. So it was this big metal wheel that sits on top of the pump and turns this individual motion of when you push down on the pump handle, you get water into this continuous circular motion. Um, and the way that it worked is it, you know, uses the, the force of, of, of the wheel, um, to build up momentum. So it was really hard to push. Like when we got it started, uh, my friend Luke and I like braced our feet and leaned into it to really

get it turning, but then it got easier and easier as it went. And, uh, so we had to point, you know, it's continually producing water. Um, and then, you know, as, as a city stream, it starts to be disconnected. The point is that the effort and impact become disconnected. And so what that means is that you're able to get to the point, I mean, with this flywheel, where you can stand back and spin it, you know, effectively with one hand and still produce the same amount of water. Now, people might be thinking like, okay, what does this have anything to do with creator businesses or anything else?

But the point is that we're trying to make design systems and design a business that's much less of a hand pump, you know, where there's a direct correlation between how much effort you put in and the results you get. And instead, design a flywheel. So there's sort of these three main laws for a flywheel. So there's sort of these three main laws, um, for a flywheel. And so the first is that activities should flow smoothly from one into the next. So it's not a scattered process where I'm like, what do I want to work on today? Um, how should I jump around? What should I, uh, focus on? Um, or even a linear process where it's like, okay, every time I publish a blog post, I'm going to do A, then B, and then C, right? And I follow that. A flywheel, it actually completes the loop where the very last step flows into the first step, and it's this continual

motion. The second law is that each rotation should be easier than the previous rotation. So it might be really hard and slow to get started. Um, but then it gets easier and easier over time. Um, and that could be, we could dive into the specifics, but that could be, uh, for a bunch of reasons. Like for example, it could be that each time you're onboarding new customers, you're building more of a reputation. Or each time the flywheel goes around, you have more efficiencies that you're able to optimize, and it's improving in that way.

Or it could be that you're able to hire and delegate aspects of the work. But the point is, each rotation, it gets easier. And then the last law is that with each rotation, it produces more than the previous rotation. So an example with this that I'd like to share is there's a creator named Sahil Bloom, who is on a mission to grow his email list to a million subscribers. He has this amazing content that he puts out about living a better life and mental models and habits and all of this. And I love it. I read it every single week. And he's like, okay, I want to get this out to a million subscribers before my book comes out. And so what he did is he designed a flywheel that is entirely made to grow that email list. So basically at a high level, you know,

he has new subscribers coming in from, uh, social like Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, et cetera. And then from there, they're going into ConvertKit's creator network. And that's where he can recommend and partner with other creators, uh, to grow faster. So it's sort of a magnification or multiplication that happens at that stage. Then they're on his newsletter, which goes out every week. He sells sponsorships in that newsletter. So there's a correlation between how many subscribers he has and how much money he makes. And then as you continue around, he takes all the money he makes in sponsorships and reinvests it on paid recommendations to pay other creators to recommend his newsletter. And so what's interesting about this is when the newsletter

is small, let's say he has 10,000 subscribers. I don't know why I just said that's small. If you imagine like a basketball arena full of people, that's probably like 10,000 people. But numbers these days in the creator world are getting ridiculous. For Cy Hill Bloom, that is small.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, 10,000 subscribers, maybe he's able to sell sponsorships for $5,000 a month. Right. And then he's taking that money and reinvesting it. Convert has a product called the partner network where you can, you know, pay for every engaged subscriber that another creator refers to you. And so he's like, Hey, I'll pay $2 per subscriber that's referred to me. He can take that money and say, I'm going to get 2,500 new subscribers a month off of it. And that grows the list faster, which then means the newsletter is bigger, which means he can charge more for advertising, which means he's producing more money that can then go into spending from there. So like an early rotation, that flywheel might produce 2,500 subscribers, maybe 5,000. Now, as that flywheel has gotten bigger and that same cadence, like a monthly turn, it's producing 50,000 subscribers because he's making 30 or $40,000 a month in advertising and reinvesting all of that. So that's kind of the interesting in flywheels that you can design them where both laws two

and three coexist, where law two, it's getting easier with each rotation and law three, it's producing more. And I mean, it sounds like way too good to be true because you're like, wait, I'm putting in less effort and getting more results. No way. And it actually works in physics and it works with flywheels as well it's not linear it's logarithmic yeah but it does require that you have focus on what is the result that you're trying to get like the story you mentioned with sahil bloom you mentioned at the very beginning of it he wants to grow his, reach a million people basically before the book goes out. Right. And newsletter is the way that he's

going to do that. And I kind of get this picture, like we could design this flywheel, right. And it's going to take some effort at the beginning, but then once it gets going, we'll get results from it, but that's going to take some faith that it will actually produce those results. Or we could run from pump to pump a little bit here, a little bit there, try some paid ads, Or we could run from pump to pump a little bit here, a little bit there, try some paid ads, all these other things. And then at the end, decide that none of them worked. And it wasn't worth doing. Yeah, exactly.

You bring up an important point because when I talk to people about flywheels, the first thing, the first mistake that I see them make, when they get the difference between hand pumps and flywheels, right? Like, and they're actually focused. And they're like, okay, I'm going to make a flywheel and I'm going to stick with it. And the first mistake they make is they say, okay, this flywheel should get me more subscribers, make me more money. And, you know, and they start listing off all of these things. And I'm like, no, no, no, the flywheel has one job.

You only get to choose one goal for it. It might have other byproducts that come out of it, but like Cy Hill's flywheel works really well because he's like, I don't care about making money from this. The money is entirely a vehicle to get me in front of more people. And so he's just reinvesting all of it. And you could say, Hey, I'm going to reinvest half of it. Right. But in his particular flywheel, it spins faster if you reinvest all of it and so it makes it really really powerful but you make a great point that the first mistake that everyone makes is they try to make a flywheel that like serves three or four goals and uh it doesn't work it can only pump water yeah yeah it has one job. It also kind of, so in the previous segment, you're talking

about the, uh, the person who's at the day job and they're taking the ridiculous notes, right? Because they just want to develop their skills. Right. And so I'm thinking of the flywheel concept for someone in that situation, one of the pieces of advice that I love the most is Jim Rohn, who said, work harder on yourself than you do on your job. Right. And so you're talking about a flywheel having one of the mistakes being trying to get it to do all these different things. If you're in that situation, you could either make everybody at the day job happy. Assume you're the intern who just walked in, that situation, you could either make everybody at the day job happy. Assume that you're the intern who just walked in, you know, you got the job, you're trying to figure out how things are working there. And you could just acquiesce to the norms

of the business, take home the paycheck because it's a steady job. Or you could go into it with that mindset, I'm going to learn and extract as much as I can from this experience. But you really can't do both. Right? You're either going to maximize your ability, and that's going to be the most important thing in that situation in that season of your life. Or it's going to be I'm going to earn the paycheck and pay the bills. But when you try to find the balance, that's where things feel like can get difficult. Yeah. And I mean, it's really just a lesson on split focus, right? Like exactly as you're saying, if you're trying to do all of these different things, you're probably going to do them poorly.

Derek Sivers, I don't know if it's in his book, anything you want, or if he just talks about on his blog, if you haven't read anything you want, you should definitely read it. It's one of my favorite reads. But he talks about this idea of you can do whatever you want in life. He, all the things that you want to learn to do, all the careers you want to have, all of that, you can do all of them, but you need to put them in sequence instead of in parallel. And so he's like, if you want to become a world-class programmer, do that. Go all in for five years, 10 years.

Be great at that. From when you're 20 to when you're 30, or from when you're 40 to when you're 50, whatever it is. Dive all in on that. And then put a pin in that and go do a different career and use those skills. And I feel like that's something that's worked well for me. I still consider myself a designer and I do still design, but I don't make money as a designer.

And I was all in on that world for a long time. And even though now that's not how I spend my time or earn my living. spend my time or earn my living. Um, what I'm able to do is use all of those skills that I learned. You know, I was in Figma earlier today, designing something that just took 10 minutes. Cause I know how to design, even though, you know, and it just brings me joy. But so as you put these things in sequence, instead of in parallel and you do them one after another, they do still build on each other and you get to pursue all these things. So it's true for a fly wheel where it's like, look, we're not trying to, like, Sahil's not trying to make a million dollars a year and build this newsletter to a million subscribers. He's like, look, the goal is a

million subscribers. The money made is a byproduct. And then at some point later, he can say, okay, we've achieved that. The book launch is done. We're on from there. And now I want to optimize for maybe more subscribers or it might be a balance between subscribers and revenue, whatever else. It might be something entirely different. But yeah, focus one thing at a time. The other thing I like about that and implicit in that is that you never lose

anything that by doing it in this way, you carry a skillset that you develop in your twenties into whatever you're doing in your fifties. And suddenly that makes whatever you're doing in your 50s much more informed, better, you know, whatever. Yep. And I think it's really easy in the modern world to like try and write off phases of your life

and things that happened. And you're like, well, you know, that was a big interruption and that got in the way of me doing things. But in hindsight, it's what informs what you're doing now it's nothing is lost you know people talk about like well i waited until this like i personally waited to become a full-time creator till i was in my mid-50s and i don't mind that because i feel like everything i did ahead of that is what made me what I am when I made that decision. And you can't have any regrets.

You just got to like build on it. And I think it's an uplifting message if you think about it that way. Yeah, I think so too. And Pat Flynn had this talk that he gave actually at Craft and Commerce, our event years ago about how there's no, uh, no unique messages, only unique messengers. And it was actually, I love this talk.

Um, it's available on YouTube. And so someone can go look it up, but, uh, he starts off by reading the book, uh, llama,

llama, red pajama, um, the children's book, which I have, I've read to, uh, my kids before.

And he just comes out on stage and he starts reading this book. And everyone's like, what? You know, like they're expecting Pat Flynn, this keynote. And here he is like reading a bedtime story to them at, you know, 11 in the morning at a conference. And then he, so he reads that and everyone's a little confused. And then he plays this clip of Kendrick Lamar wrapping the same book on an LA radio station. And so his point that he's making is like, it's the same message. We delivered the exact same words in entirely different settings and entirely different ways. And so like David, the thing that I love that you were saying is

with entirely different career backgrounds, we might make the same point about focus. We might be trying to convince someone to make the same changes in their life or whatever it is, but we're going to do it in an entirely different way because of our backgrounds, because of our ages, because of our careers and everything else. And we're probably going to end up resonating with slightly different people because of it.

And so like all of that experience that you built up before making the creator shift is what gives you the unique, uh, the unique voice that, you know, thousands and thousands of people specifically listen to this podcast to hear. Yeah. And that's true for all of us. And, you know, if you're beating yourself up about some decision you made, I shouldn't have done that. No, actually, it's good you did it because it made you who you are today. Now, what are you going to do with it? That's the question.

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You can start hiring right now with a $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. This offer is only good for a limited time, so claim your $75 credit now at Indeed.com slash focused. That's I-N-D-E-E-D.com slash focused and show your support for the Focus podcast by saying that you heard about it on this show. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Nathan, there's a video you did. Well, they did about you on YouTube, but it's really, really good.

I want, we're gonna put a link in it. I'd encourage everybody to go watch it. It's such a great journey that you've been on and we've shared some of it already in today's show about, you know, your initial success with the books and leveraging that and the convert kit. But then you had some rough, rough patches there too. Yeah. And you're really

honest about it. And you know, that's something about you that I really appreciate because with your success, it'd be really easy to gloss that over. But I think that was really the point of the videos that no, I had problems, got through them. And, um, I really think that, uh, that, that really resonated with me. And I, so tell so tell me, I guess, first of all, how did you feel about sharing that? And secondly, how did that experience kind of inform who you are now? Yeah, well, one of the early sections of the video,

and this is actually when we sat down to film it, because we do these creative stories about the creators who use ConvertKit. And I really appreciate watching the stories about creators. And so Isa on our team said, hey, we'd love to do one on you. Something we care about a lot at ConvertKit is that ConvertKit is made by creators for creators. A lot of people on our team, you know, have YouTube channels, have newsletters, you know, all of that.

And so that informs the product. And he says, like, hey, we'd love to do your story. And I was like, no, we don't need to do that. And I thought it was funny. She actually started the documentary or the video with this question. I'm just like saying, you know, we asked Nathan if we could tell his story. He said no. And when, when we sat down to record actually in this office that I'm in now, the first question she asked was like, why, like, why did you keep saying no for like, I think she asked me every few months for

two years before I finally said yes and was able to do it or willing to do it. And the first thing I said is like, I don't need to or want to be the center of attention. And I think that clip is in the documentary. But the other thing is like, I mean, the story, like if someone's willing to actually share like what's going on, like it's a deeply personal story. And so a lot of my story that I ended up sharing in the documentary is about like how I grew up in an environment where money was really scarce and like the things

that made me feel like I was a burden on my parents, my family, and all of that. And so I decided, Hey, I'm going to get really good at making money. I'm going to figure this out. decided, hey, I'm going to get really good at making money. I'm going to figure this out. So I'm not a burden on other people. When I heard Jason Freed from Basecamp talk about how making money is a skill, just like playing the drums or another instrument, it's a skill that you can get better with over time. If you like have deliberate practice, then that resonated with me. I was like, oh, I'm going to get really, really good at that. And so it had a couple things for me. One, I studied that for years,

from design to sales to pricing and packaging to how to build an audience, everything from there. Like Jason was 100% right. It's not one skill. It's the collection of a thousand skills in the same way that, you know, playing the piano or something is timing and reading music and music theory and, you know, all of this business and make money is the same thing. So I got really good at that. But something that happened in there is I realized so that so much of my self-worth was tied up in what I created. I'm the guy that wrote a thousand words a day for 600 days in a row.

And that turned into three books and an audience and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and everything else. And I could make sure that I wasn't ever a burden on anyone else. Cause I took care of everybody. Right. And so the kind of how that ended, I talked a lot publicly about like my writing streak. Cause I made an iPhone app to track a streak. And I, you know, had the 600 day writing streak and everyone's like, Oh, what, what made it end? You know, like, why'd you stop? And it's like, well, I ended it end? You know, like, why'd you stop? And it's like, well, I ended up getting really sick and got to the point that I could barely take care of myself, you know, let alone like my young family.

And it ended up sending me into this path of, like, I don't think I realized how dangerous it is to tie your self-worth to what you create. Because it doesn't feel dangerous at all when you have the virtuous cycle side of it. But if you end up on the vicious cycle side of it, then it ends up being a really dangerous thing because the more you struggle to create, the less motivated you are and the less you create. And so the more you struggle to create and on from there.

Yeah, the flywheel can go backwards too, if you're not careful. Yeah, that's a really good point. We talk about, you hear terms like network effects, leverage, flywheels, all of this. And you're like, oh, those are all good things. It's like, no, they're neither good nor bad. They just magnify whatever is already happening. Leverage can be the

thing that allows you to record one podcast episode and have 10,000 people listen to it. It can also be the thing that takes, you know, your real estate empire and causes you to lose all your money, right? Like leverage, it's not good or bad. Um, five wheels are not good or bad. They can, they can go, uh, both uh both ways and so for me like you get into that vicious cycle and i ended up like spending quite a while of really struggling with depression and suicide and and uh working to really like separate that idea of i have this line in the documentary of basically saying, going from I am valuable for what I create,

what I contribute to the world, to just I am valuable. And being able to end, put a period and just end that sentence there. So it's been a long journey, but getting to the point where I'm able to create from a much healthier place. Well, the fact that you share that, I feel is really special. And I think it's something that I really like sharing with our audience because people that listen to the show are interested in things like productivity and staying focused and achieving big things.

But it is a very slippery slope to have those thoughts and then get to the point like, so if I don't do those things, then I'm a defective person. And I hear it from our listeners. Sometimes I get emails from people who are struggling and it's like, no, I, you have to separate them. And, you know, and Nathan experienced that firsthand, but you know, going into this, I think the stuff we talk about is great. And I think it can help you get far.

But it doesn't matter if it doesn't work in terms of who you are. You will always be that special snowflake. And don't forget it. And I know all of us struggle with that. Because if you have big dreams, it's very easy to just make the jump. There's a very thin line between saying, I want to do something great and I need to do something great to be valid. Oh yeah. That's a very good point. But you did, you got through that. And then another thing you

did was somebody tell, tell us about that story where your, your mentor gave you the ultimatum. story where your, your mentor gave you the ultimatum. I love that. Yeah. So this is probably 20, late 2014. Um, so I've been working at ConvertKit for a year and a half. Um, I'd grown it not to the 5,000 a month in recurring revenue that I wanted to, but we got into about 2000 a month and then it was flat. And then it kind of started to decline. Everyone talks about wanting recurring revenue. And that's amazing. But they don't talk about churn like that. Like revenue doesn't recur forever. Like people cancel and you get churn.

And so we started to decline. I think we were maybe $1,500 a month in revenue. And I was at a conference. And we were walking back from dinner. and I was with my friend Heaton Shaw and Heaton had made a bunch of great companies. Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, a bunch of really well done software companies. We were talking about something, I don't know what, maybe business related, but not on the topic of ConvertKit. And he goes,

you know, you should shut down ConvertKit. I remember being totally shocked because it was as if we'd been talking about like, Oh, how was dinner? You know? And then he was just like, shut down your company, do this other thing. And I had a bunch of thoughts around through my head with like, one, that's not a very nice thing to say two is why and three is like i don't know like who are you to get even decide or give that advice there's like a bunch of things running through my head at the same time and we kind of stopped and i was like what and he was like yeah you're going to be successful at like whatever you do

with you know you've proven that through writing books and self-publishing and design and all that, like even working on ConvertKit for a year and a half now, it's stalled out, like do something else. And then you just started walking again. And I remember staying there, like still just kind of stunned. And then realizing that he was like now 20 steps ahead of me. And so I like kind of caught up to him realizing that he was like now 20 steps ahead of me. And so I like kind of caught up to him and then just watched them for a minute. And he goes, you know, or you could take it seriously. You give it the time, money and attention it deserves and like build it into a

real company. But this thing that you're doing of like writing and selling books and courses and spending your time building ConvertKit and all this other things, it's not working. So either shut ConvertKit down or double down on it. But this middle road approach is not working, so make a change. And I thought about that a lot. And I did what I think everybody does when they hear really good advice, and that's just completely ignore it for like six months.

And we got to the point where revenue declined even further. And we were really at this point where I had to make a decision. Like we were, it was no longer covering its costs. You know, I'm now subsidizing this company. And so I had to decide what to do with it. I talked to my wife about it and she really encouraged me to double down on it. I learned later that it was at a time because of that,

like I was really depressed at the time and she just wanted me to do something. She saw like a little bit of spark related to this company and she was like, you should like do this and see what comes of it um but i ended up making the decision to put like our savings into it uh to stop the you know selling the ebooks and growing the audience and really just go all in on convert it and do direct sales and i did concierge migrations which is a fancy way of saying that i got access to your wordpress site and your mail chip account you know, and I

like copied everything over to ConvertKit and I changed all the forms and all that. And it ended up taking off from there. Like we, it took a while, you know, like the flywheel starting really slow and then building momentum from there. But we ended up, I mean, building an amazing business and I, I credit so much of it to like Heaton giving me very direct advice that I needed to hear in that moment. I had the similar experience. I don't need to tell the story today, but again, I was doing two things and, and people talked to me and it took a while to sink in.

But I think anyone listening that's trying to straddle two things, it is really hard to do that effectively. I mean, there are very few guests that come on our show and say, oh yeah, I'm running two things at the same time and it's all great and nothing is pain, nothing is suffering because of it. But boy, it is hard. If you want to talk about focus, everyone says you should focus.

And that usually means eliminating something. Yeah. Which is not, like focus is such a positive word. Obviously you should focus. Absolutely. And you're like, okay, but that requires a negative thing. You actually have to, like, we need subtraction. We need to say no. We need to eliminate. And you're like, eliminate, that's not a positive word at all. Like, oh, that sounds

violent, you know? And it can be, right? Like these are tough decisions. I ended up making a little framework to help me decide just in two questions. like, should you shut something down or should you double down on it? And the first question is, do you still want this as much today as the day that you started? Or like, we all have things that we were like, I'm going to write that book. I'm going to start this company or, um, learn to play the piano, whatever, whatever it is. And like three months, three years, whatever timeline end, we were like, this isn't going how I wanted. Just ask, like, do you still want this? Is it that you decided a year ago that you wanted this? And so now you're sticking with that decision. Cause that's what we do. And you're like, really, I I've learned things. I don't want to do this anymore. Then just like, shut it down, move on.

So that's the first question. But if you get to the point where you're like, yes, I still want this. And in my case, I said like, yes, I still want to build a software company. I want that challenge. I want the recurring revenue. I want to build it up to scale.

So it's like, okay, great. Go to question number two. And question number two is just, have you given this every possible chance to succeed? Like, is this truly your best effort? Another way to think about it is if you were to look back and say, like, let's say you shut something down and you were to look back, you know, a year later, five years later, and if you were to think, I could have made that work if I had just done X.

Well, that kind of points to that you didn't give it every possible chance to succeed. So I looked at the answer to these two questions. I said I still really, really wanted it, and I had not given every possible chance to succeed. I really wanted this. And I was working on it part-time, split focus between other things. And there was a disconnect in what I said I wanted and what my actions had showed and a level of hypocrisy in that that I wasn't OK with. You're definitely a developer because you built a framework for the decision.

There's a little flowchart. I would add one more. I'd add one more to your framework is, are you, do you want it bad enough that you're willing to disappoint other people? Cause I think so often that's where people get stuck. Cause if you're doing two things and you decide to give up on one in favor of the other, you are going to make other people unhappy. And that, so I think for most people people, is where they get stuck. Yeah. That's really good.

But yeah, where I ended up was just thinking, I'm going to be that guy who five years from now is like, ah, I think if I'd just given a convert kit another shot, I could have made it happen. And I was not willing to have that level of regret. I knew that if I wanted to shut it down, it had to be after I'd given it every possible chance. You know, it's like, look,

if the market doesn't work out or, or something else, we could be by a competitor. Like I can, I can live with that, but just like my own lack of effort being the thing that kills it or stalls out. I couldn't love that. So I decided that at least for the next

I was going to get everything I had for the next six months and see where we got. And we actually got to a pretty good place. That's nice. I call it the no regrets theory of life. You throw so much at it that you will never have regrets if it fails. It's like, hey, I did what I did. I gave it my all. Yep. I love it. And you did it. You did it. all yep i love it and you did it you did it i mean convert kit is is a huge enterprise i'm one of your tiny customers but i love it and and i love the idea of a company that has a focus on people that do what i do because it means that you guys are always innovating in a direction that that favors me And that kind of gets back to the beginning of the show about niches and, you know, finding your space. It's, it's remarkable to me. I'm going to

be a fan boy for a minute is that, you know, your company that makes a electronic newsletter product, right. You know, you're not building houses for people that don't have houses, you know, you're not out, you know, a company that's out curing disease. It's, it's a, it's an email marketing company, but you manage to do it in a way. In fact, email marketing has this stigma attached to it, right? I mean, anything, it's almost like, you know, you're right next to use car salesman to some people, but, but no, you do it in such a mindful way. And the people that are your customers, I guess I'd call it your customers. And also I think the people that are my customers, I think the emails you've created a platform that allows us to do this mindfully and in a way that we don't feel icky. And that is not an easy task.

Yeah. Well, thank you. I think the creator first focus that we've really built into the company has paid off in a big way. You know, we're joking about tagging woodworking. I made these little plaques that sit, you can see one behind me. Uh, everyone listening can't, but there's one behind me, uh, that has our company mission on it and just says we exist to help creators earn a living. And every team member has one of those plaques sitting on their desk. Uh, it came out of my shop when I went to our last team retreat, I got pulled aside by, uh, customs in Mexico. Uh, cause they were like, what is in this suitcase? You know, they open it up and it's just all, you know, like 50 wooden plaques all lined up. Um, somebody's got to go bail Nathan out. Exactly. Uh, Elizabeth,

someone on my team was going through customs with me and she was like, I really wanted to like, you know, she was just ahead of me and she was like, I really want to take a picture of this, but I also know that cameras aren't allowed right now. And I don't want to get them in more trouble, but I really want the photo of him being interrogated by customs. So, but anyway, that like ethos being so, so instilled in every person on the team.

And that constant reminder, whether it's through the documentaries we do or the stories or any of those things, of like, this is who we're here to serve. This is why we do what we do. And I'm glad that it comes across in the brand. Was there ever a point where you had identified this niche? We're going to do email newsletters for creators,

but you shared that it struggled at the beginning. Was there ever a point where you thought maybe a niche down too far? Maybe creators just don't need a bespoke email tool. Yeah. Well, at first I tried a few different niches. First, we're trying just email marketing in general, you know, email marketing for people that had problems like the problems that I had. Then we went to, I tried to focus on a specific niche. So email

marketing for authors that didn't quite work out because it attracted a lot of beginners. Who's like idea was maybe I'll sell a book on the kindle store for 199 eventually uh so the churn was way too high there what ended up resonating was email marketing for professional bloggers and then eventually we so that was pretty niche and focused and that got us a lot of like the chris guillebeau's world and, um, plenty of other people like that. But I actually went really, really specific because people were like, I talked to investors and they're like professional bloggers. Like you can't build a business off of that. And what I wouldn't tell them was like, I'm actually like my sales lists are like paleo

recipe bloggers who are women. And I would like try to find, you know, cause I'd find one customer that was doing really well with us and then be like, okay, who else on the internet? Can I find this like them? Men's fashion bloggers in New York city. All right, great. Let's go after that. You know? So I would go absurdly specific to the point that I could list every single person doing that. And then I reach out to them. And what it ended up doing is it created this like big fish in a small pond idea. I had this fitness content creator tell me,

I feel like everyone on the entire internet is switching to ConvertKit right now. And I remember thinking, we're not even like $10,000 a month in revenue. There's no way that can empirically be true. But I thankfully didn't say that. I just said, oh, yeah, what makes it seem like that there's no way that can empirically be true but you know i thankfully didn't say that i just said oh uh yeah what what makes it seem like that well everybody in his orbit i mean that's that's how i became a convert customer everybody in my orbit was saying oh because i wasn't happy

with my current vendor and they said yeah i'll make it easy go over there they'll take care of you and so that's why it makes it like everyone on the internet because the people you run with are all doing it yeah it's exactly that someone in their mastermind group had just switched someone else was talking about switching uh someone else had been on convert here for a while and it's like well yeah the one that was on convert here for a while was the customer that was doing well that i was like okay who else is like them and then i ended up making a list of like 20 other people like them. And that ended up being the entire orbit of now this new content creator is talking to. And so you can create this momentum that otherwise just doesn't exist. And now it's fascinating in that someone takes a half step outside of that circle and

they're like, convert it. What is that? I've never heard of it. Is that something for like, I don't know, are we souping up cars? Like what are, what are we converting here? Um, and you know, that's just how that, that focus and niche play goes, but then you can just expand and go to broaden about our circles. So to answer your question, it's not that creators is too small of a niche creators is actually us broadening our niche from being absurdly obscure to now we're going broad to all of Creators, which is still considered very small compared to all of small business. ConvertKit, increase your email sales

or spice up your Dodge Charger. Exactly. So Nathan, the show's called Focused. I always like asking the question, what does focus mean to you? What does focus mean to me? I'm terrible at focus. If you just ask my wife,

I'm trying to do everything. And I love, even going back to the advice from Derek Sivers of put everything in sequence. I definitely want to follow that advice. And in many ways I have, right? Like I'm able to do a lot of things now because I've focused on ConvertKit and that's, that's paid off. But I'm the person right now that's like, Hey, let's do some woodworking on Monday night on Tuesday. You know, I'm, I'm taking flying lessons and I'm studying for my, you know, private pilot's exam.

And, you know, I've got the kids and we've got a farm and all of this stuff. So, yeah, I do all kinds of things. But I try to have some sort of Venn diagram of how they all overlap. Like I have both my personal audience and ConvertKit. And it's not an accident that it's the same people that care about those two things. On my newsletter, I'm talking about marketing and design, building audiences. And guess what? It's a pretty good overlap with ConvertKit.

I think you're being too literal, though, with that idea of one thing at a time. Because you have a family. And you have interests. And I think that all kind of feeds into it. I mean, when you were trying to write books, be a developer, and run Converka at the same time, I think that's where you were having problems. Guess what? Me too. I had the same experience. Yeah. Now, I do have like five draft book ideas that, because of I've had to, to set aside.

But, but I did have that conversation. Like I try to write out what's the goal that I'm most focused on. Right. So in this case, it's growing, convert kit. And then I was thinking about what's the best way to achieve that.

And I, you know, list out a bunch of product ideas or from marketing. What's the best way to do that? Cause sometimes, you know, list out a bunch of product ideas or from marketing. What's the best way to do that? Because sometimes, you know, going all in on marketing ConvertKit directly would be the best way to grow. Other times I might get like by actually publishing one of the book ideas that I have and finishing that, that might become the best vehicle for growing ConvertKit. Because like no one really invites Because no one really invites SaaS founders onto Good Morning America to talk about whatever, right?

But if you were an author, that's a very normal thing to invite a well-known author onto a TV show. And so that writing and publishing the book ends up being a better way to achieve the end goal. So I think about those kinds of things a lot in this moment, I've decided that the books are on hold and some of the other things that are the focus. Now you had said earlier that, you know, early in life,

you for a variety of reasons to have decided to optimize, to get good at making money. Yeah. What are you optimizing for now? Learning and fun. I think those are the two things. I like both. Learning is a very broad thing, but if you take Convergint as a company, it makes $35 million a year in revenue. I live in Boise, Idaho. We have So if you take Convergint as a company, it makes $35 million a year in revenue.

I live in Boise, Idaho. We have plenty of money. There's no need for more money. We're doing lots of big, impactful things. And then I'm over here saying, I want to build the company to $100 million a year in revenue. And I think it'd be pretty fair criticism to be like, why? What's different between 35 and 100 million? Like they're both ridiculous numbers.

Is there anything actually materially different? And I think about two things in that. One is the journey that I'm going on as a creator, as an individual, like how does that change me? Let me back up for a second. And I have a bunch of friends who work in the world of book publishing and in nonfiction publishing. If you, if you want to get picked up by a publisher, you write a book proposal and a single chapter and you sell that. And that's, um, what it's all based off. You get a book deal, then you write the rest of the book. In the world of fiction, you write the entire manuscript and then you try to sell that. So it works different in those two worlds.

So a friend who's a book editor in fiction, and so they're getting books submitted nonstop. And I remember asking, like, wait, so you're just getting like dozens of books that show up on your desk every single day and you're supposed to decide like, I want to buy this one, but not this one. Like, do you read all of those books? I'm like, of course not. There's no need to read all the books. I'm like, well, how do you know? Are you are you judging a book by its cover? It doesn't even have a cover yet.

You know, it's just a manuscript. And she goes, now, all you do is you open the book at the beginning you read just enough to get an idea for who the main character is and you skip all the way to the end and you read just enough to get to know who the main character is and if it's the same person like and i mean it's the hero should say the right? It's consistent. But if they themselves are the same, then no transformation has occurred. So probably there was not a worthwhile journey. And I don't think the book is worth reading

and I toss it out. But if there's a transformation that has occurred that's interesting and engaging, and you're like, wow, this character is different. They've undergone some meaningful growth because of the journey that they went on. I think I'll read that book and see if it's worth checking out.

And so when I think about my own life, then I go, what has to be true in the middle so that I come out a different person with substantial growth? And I don't optimize for the outcome. It's not actually about building a company to a certain size or a specific number or selling a company for an exit. I really optimize for the journey. I think that's what we have is the time today. And I want to spend time going on a journey that's going to fundamentally change me. Like I have to become so much better of a leader to build a company to a hundred million, um, than to build a company at,

at 20 million. And so I know that like all the areas that I'm bad at of like delegating and leading in front of a team and making these tough decisions and so many other things, um, I have to grow substantially in that to to achieve this journey and so i'm trying to pick a journey that's hard enough that results in that level of change so you're looking at the metric of 100 million not as the desired result but the the outcome of the desired result that you yeah you grow as a manager in such a way that the company grows exactly i like that i like that the company grows. Exactly. I like that. I like that. Yeah, and there's so many things in that.

Because it also points to there are plenty of ways that I can hit that goal. Like we said differently. So I grow as a manager, a leader, a father, a spouse and partner, all of those things that allows me to achieve that goal in line with my values. And so there's a lot of ways that you could achieve the numerical goal and totally fail on the values side of things. And so it gives you good goals and anti-goals

and a clear understanding of it. And so I think a lot of people are really capable good goals and anti-goals and a clear understanding of it. And so I think a lot of people are really capable and they're either headed on the wrong journey or they're just, it's like, look, if you continue on the path that you're on, I think you're going to end up as one of the books where it's like, I flipped to the end. It's like, oh, the character is the same.

This is not a compelling story. And so I think a lot of people need to take on bigger challenges that actually force them to grow. We all need our own hero's journey. Yes. A little Joseph Campbell in there. Always, always. Nathan, you talked a little bit about the values.

That's always been one of the things that fascinates me about ConvertKit is the values that you have and got printed on the t-shirts of people who come to the conferences. And every time I see those, they really resonate with me. I think I bought like three or four of them. Can you talk a little bit about how those values affect the goal? You kind of touched on like you want to grow and you want to become the type of person who can achieve that goal in alignment with the values. But how did you kind of align or arrive at those values and how do they guide you along the way? Yeah, there's actually four values or mantras that I kind of set out. And they are create every day, teach everything you know,

they are create every day, teach everything, you know, a work in public and then default to generosity. And those actually, uh, the very first time they showed up were in posters that actually said the secret to growing your audience is to create every day. The secret to growing your audience is to teach everything, you and on from there and so it's very much they started from a like this is the mindset that you need to have to achieve these results and even like default to generosity people would have this question in their minds of how do i how do i decide what to give away for free versus what to sell to my audience? And it's like, look, default to generosity. If you're, if the stuff that you're giving away is as good or better than what other people are charging for, like,

I guarantee you're going to grow a very successful audience and you'll have plenty of things that you could charge for and you'll earn a great living. And so that really started from the audience growth perspective. And it's ended up carrying through to every other part of the company where, you know, if you take default to generosity, people ask questions. Hey, how, like, a customer's asking for a refund, like they signed up and forgot and blah, blah, blah. Like, what should I do? It's like, well, our mantra's

default is generosity. What do you think we should do? I think I should give them a refund and, you know, and do this for them as well. It's like, great, good chat. You know, like they become ways to, to make decisions, even things like, like work in public, um, and teach everything, you know, you know, quote revenue numbers. We actually have a dashboard that shows our metrics in real time. And that's part of paying this forward. I'm saying, hey, if you want to build a software company,

you can look up exactly what Comirka did and when. If it goes all the way back to, we talked about Jared Drysdale and Sasha Grief, the two designers that I followed. Because they were working in public, I thought, oh, I could do that too. And that became an important thing. And so you'll see us do posts on how we do compensation at Converge, how we run team retreats, you know, all these things. It's just teach everything you know.

And that's become such a mantra throughout the company that I will come across our engineering blog. I'm like, oh, I had no idea we wrote a blog post about the finer points of this complicated engineering thing that dozens of engineers are commenting on and saying like, wow, thank you so much for sharing this. And on one hand, that has almost nothing to do with our core business for creators. And on the other hand, you know what?

Teach everything you know. And then maybe you know, maybe it's not chance that we have a whole bunch of developers who end up as customers. So anyway, those mantras are all through the ethos of the company. And yeah, it's interesting.

I hadn't thought for a long time about where they actually came from. So I'm glad you asked the question. Well, Nathan, thanks again for coming on today. For Deep Focus, we're going to be talking about woodworking. So buckle up, gang.

In the meantime, I want to thank our sponsors, our friends at Squarespace and Indeed. Nathan, where can people go if they want to learn more? Yeah, so all of my content is at NathanBerry.com. I'm just NathanBerry, B-A-R-R-Y, throughout the internet. Twitter is probably where I'm most active. And then you should definitely check out ConvertKit. We power the biggest newsletters on the web, and we'd love more great creators to come on as customers.

Yeah, join me and Mike as customers. I love it. We are The Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm.com. We'll see you next time.