My First Million - How To Get Started With Building An Audience in 2022

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Episode 373: In this special episode of MFM, Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) joined the Demand Curve Growth Summit with Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) of Breaking Points, to discuss how to build a loyal audience and turn them into customers, reactions to tweets, and more. ----- Links: * Demand Curve * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (01:15) - How do you think about building an audience (09:00) - Company brand building vs. personal brand building (14:50) - Reax to tweets (42:30) - Tactics to building the first 100K on Twitter ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Well, let's go ahead and kick things off. How do you think about audience building? And what does your audience mean to you, Sean? Oh, wow, emotional question. How do I think about it? I think about it like, I don't really think about it. It's the byproduct of what I do. So the way I approached it was after I sold my company, I said, all right, I can do whatever I want now.

So like, hey, time to face the tough question. What do I actually want to do? What do I actually care about in my life? And those were big questions that kind of scared me. So then I trimmed it down. I said, all right, well, how do I just want to spend my days? What would be a normal? What would be a great day that I could do every day?

And the thing that came to me was like the thing I enjoy doing the most is just getting curious. I'm generally very curious about things. And if I have to like go do work and then put those on the side and hopefully get to them when I get to them, that seemed like that was not great. But if I could just make my work that I could just be curious about it. these things, whether it's crypto or it's audience building or some new science tech thing, or it's, you know, where the hell, you know, do peanuts grow on trees or from the ground?

I don't know. Let me go find out, right? Like, whatever it is, I was like, I want to be professionally curious. All right, well, that's cool. The curious part's easy. How do you be professionally curious? Well, one way was let me turn that curiosity into content. So I'll take these questions that I want to, you know, go look into.

And then I just got to package up my learnings at the end and share them with others. all right, cool, that'll make it more fun for me. And it'll turn into something that actually generates a bunch of income, which will let me just do this all the time. That was my thought process. So audience building and content was just a kind of a necessary means to an end or a byproduct of the main thing I wanted to do, which was just be professionally curious, be able to wake up and just dive into the thing that's most on my mind that day and have no other

restrictions beyond that. About that. Let's talk about you. Yeah. I mean, I think that building an audience. is a lot like making money, especially in the year 2020, which is that you have to provide something that doesn't exist, and then people will commoditize it with their attention. Or, you know, if you're a business and you're building, you're trying to get revenue. So with a way that I

built my show and the way that I consistently think about building and getting more audience, it's just to continue to fill niches. You started out filling one particular niche, built niches and niches and niches, put an underlying philosophy that girds that and then continue to try and build more on top of that, which just results in overall top line figure that continues to go up. I actually don't think it's really that complicated as a concept. It's just incredibly complicated to execute,

which is why not a lot of people do it. And there's really not that many people at the very, very, very top of the game and why, you know, in the whole influencer market, all returns are exponential. Both, you know, the top 0.01% of podcasts get just so many more downloads than even the top 1% of podcasts.

Like what I figured, When I found out what was even in the top 1%, I was like, wait, like 20,000 pounds. I mean, how can you? I was like, I don't even know how you make a living for something like that. And then, you know, you compare that to what the top 10 are. So I think that execution is harder than anything else in this game, probably exactly the same as business. I mean, it sounds easy to fill a niche. But actually doing that, doing a consistent basis over years and years through changing conditions, you know, changing market conditions for business, changing information environment for somebody who's in the content game.

that's where the skill all comes into play. Like simple, simple, not easy, right? It could be simple, what the answer is, but not necessarily easy.

Like, we did this, like getaway, like this getaway where we went and play basketball with a bunch of interesting people. And one of the people that came was Mr. Beast,

the number one YouTuber in the world. So he, you know, he knows a thing or two about audience building. And it's like, if you talk to him, you're like, hey,

you know, awesome. What's the, what's the secret? What's the trick for getting huge on YouTube? And he's like, he's like, I just want to make,

the best YouTube video is possible. Make great videos. And we're like, okay, yeah, but like, yeah, how'd you do it? How'd you become number one? He's like, I just try to make great videos. Every day I just wake up and I'm like, all right, what's a great video? How do I make that? And it's like simple, not easy in the sense that like he didn't overcomplicate.

Okay, well, what makes a great video? Something that gets your attention, something that holds your attention, something that, you know, makes you feel something at the end, you know, laughter or feel good moment or outrage, whatever it is. You could choose. And you could break it down from there. add a little more detail, but fundamentally, you're not going to get some answer that's like, damn, I never thought of that.

Wow, they had this insight that's just not, it wasn't available to me. And now that I have this insight, now I too can go succeed. It's like the best, the people who are the best do the simple thing, just better than everybody else. Totally agree. Is make great content? Is that really kind of the bottom line here, if you were to say, like, what separates that top 1% that saga was mentioning from.

the other 99%? Is it as simple as just make great content? Yes. Okay. Well, you went through YC, right? You guys, were you in YC? We did, yes. Yeah, what's the YC motto? Why C, the greatest startup accelerator in the world, Barden on as the greatest track record created almost half a trillion dollars of value of the companies that went through it. What's the secret? Make something people want, is their motto. Just try to pay startup. Don't get distracted by fundraising and press. and all these other things that you could try to growth hacks. Are you making something people want? Of course.

Really? You know, tell me, how do you know? What gives you that feeling? And then they sort of like, I don't know, I just sort of assumed I was. It sounds so simple that I just sort of assumed I was already doing that. Same thing with content or audience building. Are you making content that people want? Right?

That's the thing. It's not just make great content. It's make content that people want. That's what great content is. When he talked about picking niches and then figuring out how to serve that niche, that's what he's doing. making content that people want in that category and then doing it better than others and doing it consistently so they build a habit, et cetera, et cetera.

I completely agree. Yeah, I mean, I get approached for a lot of people. Hey, will this light do it for me? Will this camera? I'm like, camera's not your problem, bro. I'm like, your content's a problem. I'm like, make content good. Everything falls up in that.

You know, I recently spent $60,000 on cameras. And that's after three years of doing this. But needing 4K cameras was an added benefit for my existing audience, not what I needed for a requisite to start. Like, sure, there's the baseline level of production, I think a pop filter, like a Yeti USB mic and a basic webcam. That is not a high startup cost. And everybody's like, what about my thumbnails? What about my, listen, thumbnails matter, headlines matter, all that other stuff matters, et cetera. But what Sean is talking about, which is that all Mr. Beast does is he knows exactly how to rank of retention, thumbnail, all of that,

stack it all on top of each other, iterate it a million times, and then come up with the quote unquote secret sauce. He has the exact same YouTube dashboard that I have, that all of us have that you have access to. He just figured out how to read it better than anybody else. So I always say, is the content good? That's my number one concern. Is it good? Is it compelling? And that, as he said, it's simple. It's not easy. It's a certain point. It is strange. It is really one of those. It's like, you know it when you see it. I can listen to something and be like, that's compelling. And I can listen to something and just like, I don't know what it is, man,

but this needs work. And it's tough to exactly explain what that is. Yeah, we listened to a session on product-led growth yesterday, and it was almost like everybody was kind of like, well, what's the hack? What's the tactic? What's the secret? And our speakers were very simply like, well, you need an A-plus product in order to have any sort of product-led growth.

And I feel like the principle stands true for any form. of audience growth as well. Now, both of you have pretty distinct personal brands as well as like a business brand that you're both independently growing, either on accident or on purpose. How do you think about the brand building as a company, as an entity, versus personal brand building?

Do you have any heuristics or ways of thinking about it, Sager? The way that you kind of use your own Twitter versus, like, right, breaking points? Yeah, that's interesting. So from a business, obviously it has to be whenever, and Sean, you too, you're like, you're in a partnership, right? So this is inherently not something that you have total and 100% freedom on. So whenever I'm doing something under the BP umbrella or, you know, business or hiring,

it's not necessarily just a reflection of me. It's a reflection of the ethos and the principles that we decided that we were going to grow on, mutually agree on together. You know, within that framework, everything is being branded, is being used. that's a reflection of us, of our philosophy, et cetera. On my personal brand, to be honest, I just have a lot less capacity for caring. Like, if I'm interested in it, I'm just going to explore it.

I frankly, I'm at a level where I can do that if I want to. And if people are on me, I'm just like, I literally don't care. You know, either Instagram. You know how hard it was a song to find, find tweets that I'm able to show? Yeah, I was like, I was a little scared whenever you were like, I was like, oh, man, I was like, we're going to piss off half the audience. But I mean, that's fine. You know, I'm used to it in this line of work.

And that's kind of what I'm getting at, which is that the business has an orientation, which is A, make money, B, perpetuate itself. For me, personally, I mean, obviously my personal brand, I probably thought about this very, very differently whenever I was younger and I was like on the up and up. But at this level, I actually just do whatever I want to do. And so that is the only dichotomy between the two. How do you think about it, Sean? So what kind of answer would be interesting to you here?

What's like the like because I try to figure out what's the question behind the question. So so the question, the surface question is like what's the difference between your your pod brand and your personal brand? But what is the question behind that? The question behind that. Let me start with the problem. So the problem is that audience building as a brand is hard. It's hard to create affinity when it's it's not coming from a human face. And people often find at least in.

the folks that I've, I've chatted with. Even personally, honestly, demand curves, Twitter has been difficult to grow versus like, you know, personal, like individuals as like Julian, for example, has a much easier time with his growth than we do as a company account. So, yeah, the question behind the question, that's a great question, Sean, is, you know, how ought to, like, how should startups and companies be thinking about audience, audience building when they have, yeah, but they have got like the personal brand in there.

Now I understand. Now I understand. Yeah. The question really is like, what am I doing wrong here with demand curve? Yeah, but more generally speaking, like, I don't know the, it's, I haven't cracked this nut.

What's the difference? I've noticed personal brands are easier to grow, but I also do, I want my company thing to grow, blah, blah, blah. I think that here's my like very simple slash controversial take on this, which is I think if you're a company,

you should be using individual faces. to grow, you'll grow faster that way. If you're an individual trying to grow like a media property, you should put it under a brand umbrella, mostly because you can't ever sell you. So like if you wanted this to be an asset and not a job, you need it to grow its own brand. Like you need breaking points or like in our case.

Like I had a personal newsletter and a personal Twitter that grew really fast. I grew my personal Twitter from like 10 or 20,000 followers to it's at 300,000 in like a year, basically, a year and a half. In a year, we got to 200,000, and then it just trickled up. But, like, great, what am I going to do with that? I don't really want to be some, like, influencer. And great, like, you know, I can't hand this off to anybody.

It's my voice, is my name, it's my face. So it's a job. Now I need to maintain this thing. And it's cool because, like, I just don't get, like, I'm like, I just don't care. So I'll go six weeks without tweeting because I'm not trying to maintain some schedule. It's not a business of mine. But when I call it.

created the Milk Road, it's intentionally not called Sean's Crypto Newsletter, which actually would have been easier at the start to get subscribers for because people already had bought into the Sean franchise. So going for, oh, Sean is going to talk about crypto and do crypto analysis and crypto opinions? Great. I want to know about that. But instead, I called it the Milk Road because I thought, one day, I'd like to not be the guy writing this thing. One day, I'd like to not be the person maybe even owning this thing. I'd like to sell this someday. I want this to be an independent asset. And so for that, again, me as an independent media content creator, I created a brand umbrella for those reasons. But let's say it was my startup. I would be saying, hey, I'm Sean,

the growth guy from Bebo. And I'm going to talk about growth over here, not the Bebo account doing it because it's going to get less play, because people would rather follow people than than companies. And so you got to use, you make that trade off. When you're already a company, then use the fact that people would rather follow people. If you're an individual, you take a little hit by putting it under a brand umbrella, but you get this big benefit of it's not tied to your name and face forever that way. So it's a strategic bet. That's my opinion on this.

Well, it's super helpful. And it kind of points to the problem that we originally had at demand curve where so much of our brand equity was tied up in Julian's brand equity. And so being able to build that up under a new brand, has certainly been something that we've done over the last couple of years. That's super helpful. Okay, we, yeah, let's go ahead and start to repeat that tweet segment here. We're going to experiment with screen sharing for the first time.

Let's see how this goes. And, yeah, both of you all, the idea here is for both of you all to just react to the tweet. What were you thinking when you tweeted it out? Why do you think it took off? Why did it work? And yeah, any other context that you think we would find interesting. I wonder what percentage of these. I'm just going to be like, I have no idea what I was thinking.

I don't believe that. That's stupid. These are bangers only. So hopefully you remember. Sean, you did this hot take about everybody being wrong about the Metaverse. Obviously, it was a very hot topic at the time when you did this. What can you tell us about this? Well, I'll tell you kind of like, okay, I'll tell you my point.

in a second, but like, I guess that's a little less interesting even than just the, uh, what made this work. So this thing reached, I think, uh, I don't know the exact stats. I think it's like sort of like somewhere between 10 and 20 million people in the US, but then it also was, it got shared like crazy on Instagram and it shared in China, like some big Chinese like social media influencers were posting it, I guess. So it got like millions of views there. Logan Paul was talking about it on his podcast.

Mark Zuckerberg referenced this in a Lex Freeman interview. So it like went really far. And I was like, why did this go so far? I think it was because it basically had three things. Number one, it was timely. So this was right when Facebook had rebranded to meta. People were talking with the Metaverse. And I think everybody had this like, six cents and this little sort of like, you know,

sneaking suspicion that everybody's bullshitting about this. But like nobody knew. It was all smart people and big names that were saying how the Metaverse is the future. But nobody was saying what the hell the metaverse is or why it's the future. And so like I think everybody kind of smelled bullshit, but didn't know how to call it. So it was timely. I was calling bullshit, which generally is like something people are going to want to click into and read. And the last thing was, I think I backed it up.

I think I had a good point that could get you to agree with my, my conspiracy theory, so to speak, was not so far-fetched. And basically what all I was saying was like, when people hear the word metaverse, they think about this like virtual reality shit. Like, oh, I'm living in some thing. I'm an avatar now. And I said, actually, I think it's more like this concept called the singularity, which is and artificial intelligence, which is like this moment in time, this tipping point where computers, you know, reaches super intelligence and they're so vastly smarter than humans. And they are so smart, they just program themselves to become, it's like runaway intelligence.

They program themselves to become smarter. And so I thought, oh, the Metaverse is kind of like that. It's basically this tipping point where, well, a lot of my friends are online now. I think I have this experience, many of you guys do. Look at this like experience we're having now. A lot of my work is now digital. My social identity, like my profiles, my followers are all digital. You know, if you buy NFTs, cool, so my art is not digital.

More and more things, more things that are important to you are now like they live on the internet. And so at some point, all of your digital stuff matters to you more and you spend more time and energy and focus there than you do in your physical. That doesn't mean you'll never go eat or walk or exercise or anything like that. That's not what it means. But it just means like sort of there's a tipping point where before rewind, 20 years, it didn't matter. I had a computer room in my house. That was like, there was a computer room and everything else was non-computer.

And now, like, you know, the computer is attached to my body, basically, right? So it's like, you've seen this transition already. It's just going to continue. And so, hey, don't think it's this crazy virtual world. It's just this tipping point where at some point we've been creeping towards it, creeping towards it. At some point, we're just going to value our digital stuff more than we do, our physical, in the sense that we're going to spend more time and energy and effort and money.

on the internet than we do offline. That was the idea. So that's my explain this tweet. Super helpful, man. It was surprising to me during your podcast with Hassan Minaj that he was genuinely triggered by the tweet. It affected him at like an identity level. Yeah, he called me.

He was like, hey, can I call you? I don't know the guy, by the way. I didn't know him before this. He's like, he had followed me from one other tweet that went viral about Clubhouse. And then he called me. And he was like, bro, like, I do stand up comedy and real crowds with real people. That energy. That is my home.

That is my craft. That is my favorite feeling in the world. And like, God, I don't want this like, you know, metaverse bullshit. Like, you know, talk me through it. And I was like, I don't know what to tell you about it. Like, I think it's going in that direction. I don't think, you know, I remember, I remember people being like, I love waking up, getting the newspaper, bringing it in from.

my front lawn and the feel of the newspaper, right? And like, it's true. You probably did like that thing. But guess what you liked more was like instant real-time news, constantly flooding into your brain. Turns out that was more addictive. That, like, you know, being able to get news from all these different sources rather than just your local provider, that turned out to be really important.

Being able to access it on the go on your phone, turned out that wasn't really important. And so, yeah, you like the feel of it, but there's all these other benefits that, like, ended up crushing that. So that was a, that's what happened after this tweet. You contextualized it well. You talked about kind of the benefit of accountability. It's a double edged sword here. We're, you know, the upside and the risk involved in that.

Super interesting. Sager, yes, like I said, challenging to find tweets I can share with everybody here. But I would love to hear. Yeah, actually, I think they're most far. spiral is two days ago. I just saw that. Yeah, very cool. Talk to us about why did this tweet work? What is this speaking to? And like, why do you think this resonated? Yeah, I'm actually, it's interesting. I kind of pivoted to becoming the gas guy politically. This really is really, this is purely a function of what I talked about earlier, which is that I, if you were to ask me why

I think my show is successful, is I think because I cover things in a way that most people feel are not being covered by existing sources of information. That's very basic, like, statement, that's why I think it does well. I've always noticed that coverage of gas is skewed in a particularly partisan way. So one of the things that I like to do is just highlight basic taxualize them. I think that every American has to put into their car on average a couple of times or at the very least, like once a week a couple of times a month. So what did I do there? I said the average American nets X amount of money after taxes at $5 a gallon. That means that they're spending approximately 10% of their take-home pay on gas.

And when you include food and housing, it gives you a picture of how bad things are. That's not a political statement. That's just like a statement about where things are. That got shared, as I was saying, I mean, people screenshot it. It was shared on Instagram both ways. It's like, you know, oil companies need to stop profiteering. Here's why Biden needs to start drilling. I mean, you can put it any particular way you want.

I mean, in general, my most viral content, actually, although just speaks to more putting out, like, facts and then contextualized. them in a way where people feel like they can be used to something that is very meaningful to their life. I'll give you another example. One of my most viral posts recently has been about mortgages. And it really was just a basic take about like, hey, in 2021, you could buy X house, price house for this monthly payment. Mortgage's price has now gone up. So now you get less house. Once again, like, you can read that whichever way you want. Like you can be like, congratulations Jerome Powell. You can say, screw you, Jerome Powell.

You can put it any particular way. So I think to piggyback on what Sean is saying, I think timeliness is everything, everything. So timeliness is, you know, timeliness is number one. It has to be timely. Number two, it has to be, the most viral stuff, I believe, has to be able to resonate with somebody and not tell them how to think,

just give them the ability to then form something. And then three, I think it's also concise, which is why Twitter is very, very helpful. Yeah, that's great, by the way. It's like you handed them like a hammer and you're like, don't beat up whoever you want to beat up with this information. This can be used on anybody. Just use it to serve your agenda, which is like kind of the like,

I don't know, cynical take on content creation, which is like you will blow up faster if you sort of gas up an audience around something that they already have a bias or belief system of and you feed that. This happens, for example, it doesn't even have to. be political. With crypto, this happens all the time, which is like, oh, just be anti the dollar, anti-Fed, anti-Buffet, anti-whoever. And you just keep feeding information that, like, riles up this zealous crowd that already believes. And all they're looking for is like, they're not looking for real information. They're looking for information that just fits their worldview only. And I don't

mean that to pick on them because pretty much everybody does this. And so, you know, everybody's looking for information that feeds their worldview. So one useful way of think about it is, What worldview do I like and respect and maybe share? What worldview do I understand? And then that's the worldview that I can serve by producing good packaged nuggets because I know what will hit with that audience. And then I'm focused on that versus just generically producing content and then not really thinking about the worldview that it's going to go live in.

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Oh, that was about Dr. Fauci. We don't have to get into that one. What are we here to do? I mean, I'll go into it. I don't care. Sure. Well, they'll not to derail your, not to derail your tire. For those who are not familiar with something called, all of the lab leak theory. The theory is that coronavirus leaked from a lab. And so the underlying

facts and circumstances around this are pretty interesting. The tweet that I did was, again, you know, actually speaks directly to what we just talked about, Sean, which is that if you're familiar with the characters who are involved, there's one particular guy who served as the cutout, as so-called cutout of funding from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His name was Dr. Peter Dazzack. He's been intimately involved kind of in the cover-up of any facts or evidence around the Lab League theory. This was all old news at this point, basically two years ago that we've known all of this information. Well, you know, Dr. Fauci on his waning days, as the head of NIAID, actually just granted a $600,000 grant to the same individual

for the same type of research, which possibly led to the escape of coronavirus from the Wuhan lab. That was it. There you go. It's right in front of you. If Vouchy is waiting days, as you said, like, here's information. Why do I think it went viral? I mean, that's not difficult because nobody else was reporting it. And millions and millions and millions of people are interested. That's literally just a screenshot from a governed website. By the way, you said something like, you know, I know a lot of people care about,

you said like, I know that the gas issue is something. A lot of people talk about that they don't feel is being adequately covered. How do you know that? You're reading YouTube comments to get this information? you're talking to people, how are you figuring out both what my niche is interested in and then where there's a lack of service on that topic? Is it because you're not seeing it? And so you're like, oh, I am a customer. That's how I know? Or do you have some feedback loop? How do you do it? At this point, it's art and a science. So I have a general intuition of like, hmm, this is not being

covered. Also, the reason why I got into gas was because I could see that my segments on inflation were going astronomically high. Really what it is is I did a model of monthly. Really what it is I did a monologue months and months and months ago. It was very basic. I was like, hey, we are going to have an energy price crisis. This was actually before the entire Russian invasion of Ukraine because we were still having problems in our gas supply. And I was really obsessed, like, why these specific market conditions. And it just went mega viral. And I got all these emails from these people being like, hey, man, like, thank you so much. Like nobody talks about this, like heating oil in Vermont and like what contracts look like for these things. And, you know, for me and my family, I only make $50,000.

thousand dollars a year. So when I have to lock in at X price, like, it really, really hurts. And I was like, hmm, that's interesting. And so then, again, you throw a couple of test segments and you're like, do some segments on it. Each one either consistently performs or does more so than normal. I'm like, okay, well, clearly people care a lot about this. And so what I do then is, like, kind of use my insider ability as a guy who worked in the Washington Press Corps more to like cover it in a professional manner. And I think that was the way that I could discover it. But I also have a general sense of, you know, I work in this media. I work in media.

I live in D.C. I know what the people in power are talking about and obsessed with. And my general orientation has to bet against whatever that is and cover anything else. And in general, that serves me very well. So there you go. That's cool. I like that. One thing that Sagar shared, maybe when we get into more tactics later, he can cover this.

But one of the things that worked for him early on was, I think you would said like, just posting transcripts of like what different people would say. So if Trump would say something, all you would do is just snip the transcript and just sweep that out and let people to have whatever take they wanted on it. Yeah, I mean, I can share that. So my first 50,000 followers, I was really obsessed with Twitter, like obsessed, which is not a good thing, I should say,

when it was younger. And I was like, I want to get more Twitter. I remember my goal, I was like, I want 50,000 followers. I had like 4,000 at the time. I had a job as a White House correspondent. And I'm like, okay, well, how can I take advantage of this? So all I did was I just got really proficient at using live transcription services, which literally watched cable television and then spit out rough transcripts,

copy and pacing it, taking out the caps, editing it for clarity, and just trying to be one of the first people to be like, Trump said X, or the Secretary of State said why. And as you said, Oval, you're just pumping information out into the world. This is why I also, you know, I think I probably have a timely bias, because I work in the news business. Like for us, time limits is everything.

If you're two hours late, like, you might as well be dead. You're a zombie. And so for us, like, microseconds, especially in the,

you know, in the so-called, like, information distribution game, you're competing against the Associated Press against Royors and,

you know, like major multimillion dollar professional organizations. It really just turned out to be getting pretty good at tweeting out transcript. So I think my first 50,000 followers all just came from people

who were following me in order to find out, like what was going on that day in politics. And since that was literally my job, I was both doing my job well and I was building an audience. So it's an easy way. Yeah, there's a lot of ways that people in this audience can apply that. I mean, you're all in your own niche. You all have the influencers and the leaders in those niches going out and doing appearances.

There's ways of adapting this strategy, not just in the news and timeless context, but even in the tech. I have a quick story of timeliness. Oh, yeah, yeah, exemplifies it. So I created, so there was this big news event that happened in crypto where this token called Luna crashed. And it had been one of the high flyers and then it goes to zero kind of like overnight. And I had a position in Luna. So I ended up losing what was like a million dollars in that crash. And I also had kind of like an interesting take because you need to have a take on, you know, everybody knows what happens.

What they want to know is, you know, either why it happened or what it means. And so I had a good take. And I decided, okay, the way I'm going to do the, and two things happened. Hey, I was a little bit busy that week. I was like on vacation and stuff like that. Came back. All right, a couple days go by. And then I was like, okay, what do I do?

Either I'm just going to post this as like, you know, a couple tweets, a thread. Or what if I made like a video on this? And so I go on YouTube, I end up creating this like almost like a like the John Oliver show. last week tonight, I go and I create this like, I'm like, I do this rant. I rant about Luna. I rant about why it got big and then why it crashed, why it got devastated and it had jokes spliced in. I hired this editor.

The editor is amazing. We're working on this. We're iterating on it. We're making great content. And we put it out. Now, two and a half weeks have gone by as we put it out. You can see this if you go to YouTube, Luna, John or something like that. And the video has like, I don't know, 17,000 views or so.

20,000 views maybe at this point. But it never went viral. And like so I consider that sort of like a flop of a piece of content, especially one that I tried really hard on. And the funny thing is like I kind of knew this that like the smarter thing would have been if I literally had opened up my phone, typed out a thing in the notes app, screenshot it and just posted it immediately when it happened, it would have been less great because it was not the jokes weren't as good.

There was no video production. It was no nothing. But it would have been on time. And on time matters way more than great. And when it comes to this type of reactionary, what does everybody care about right now? Because a lot of time three weeks have gone by, just nobody cared about it anymore. The world had moved on. There was two other crises to worry about.

And so that was an expensive time-wise lesson of how much effort I put into something that did not go viral compared to shit that did go viral because I did it. Good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time. Totally agree. good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time that is the quote and a heck of a some art here that you got going on Sean I love it okay cool let's rapid fire through one more each um let's see so Sean we have your clubhouse one but I feel like it's pretty close to the Metaverse one as to why that work

do you want to talk about this Elon one or do you want to talk about this learning one Yeah, I'll do both real quick. The Elon one is actually like Sager was saying. One of the threads that went viral was no original insight. Elon was on Clubhouse. Elon popped onto Clubhouse when Clubhouse was hot. And just a guest appearance by Elon Musk is not something you get very often. And also Clubhouse was like overloaded.

It was like invite only and it was overloaded. So I just go, for those who are locked out of the Elon thing, here's what he's saying. And I just live typed and transcribed everything interesting he was saying in a thread in real time and I was the only guy doing it. And like, you know, on one hand, I felt a little silly. I was like, oh, man, I've become like a professional note taker on a fucking beta app of Clubhouse. Like, geez, what does my career come to? And then also I was like, oh, wow, this is like 7,000 likes already.

Okay, no matter. Let's shut up. Like, go. And so, you know, I just like just did it. But it was like, it talks about that same thing, which is like some people think they need to have this like really great insight or amazing, you know, perspective or whatever. And sometimes you're just providing a service better than others. You're just clipping good content and you're posting it and you're doing that consistently.

And people will follow you. For that, you can build a huge audience as simply a curator or remixer of content. You don't even need to be an original content creator. I would say in most cases, you do not need to be. So that's kind of what this one was, which was I just pull. This was separately, I just pulled out this great quote by Elon. And this is another one where it fits people's worldview. My audience is mostly entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs,

love to have this chip on the shoulder, this badge of pride about like how hard it is to be an entrepreneur, which I find pretty stupid in general, but I can play to it. And so I played to it here, which is like, Elon was like, you know, if you need words of encouragement for doing a startup, don't do a startup. Oh, yeah, like, you know, that's right. We are the special breed and like, we don't need this, you know, motivational, you know, speeches, whatever. So I knew that this would play. And so, you know, just threw out there and sure enough, it hits. The other one that you shared was, oh yeah, this was meant to trigger people. So everybody thinks that things like education and healthcare are like highly nuanced topics.

And I find also that really funny and stupid. Like I think that nuance is something that smart people love to hide behind because it's so easy to just say, well, you know, it depends. And like, you know, it's not so simple. It's not so easy. It's not so dry. It's not so black and white. It's not so binary.

They love to like do this, this nuance thing. And so I knew I could trigger everybody if I just said, here, I could fix education in like a tweet. And it's like, oh, classic tech bro thinks he could fix education in a stupid tweet. And so, you know, I know how to like, you know, just bait the animals with like, here you go, right? And it's something I do believe, which is that most people, when they want to learn something, they start by trying to learn it.

They go read about it. They watch about it. They go attend seminars and workshops or take courses about it. And they'd be better off just going and trying to do the damn thing. And then when they get stuck, they should go look up how to get unstuck. Like, I do believe that that's true. But if I had just said that, it would have gotten a tenth of the likes. By adding there, I fixed education, I was able to trigger a bunch of people.

And so, you know, that was, you know, these are the Jedi mind tricks of the great kind of creators. I mean, I really hear that you relate to Twitter as a game. Like it's not like a thing where you have to tell like what you believe exactly the way you believe it. You're, there's a bit of a game that you're playing. Is that how you would relate to it? Yeah, don't take it too seriously. Like I don't take anything too seriously, but definitely not going to be Twitter of the things I think too. I barely take parenting and like, you know, things like that seriously.

I try to be playful and silly and lighthearted with those two. So I'm definitely not going to take Twitter too seriously. And the other thing is I'm lucky that Twitter is not where I, like, I'm not, Twitter's not my, my real job, you know, like I've basically been successful outside of content creation. So I had this security that I can just kind of F around with content creation and do what I think is interesting because I'm not doing this in order to become successful. So I don't have to, so I didn't have this mental block of like, I need to play things a

certain way. Saga was talking about this too. Like once you get to a certain size, whether you, you're, You did it outside of content or even through content. You can start playing much looser because at the end of the day, your life store, just do whatever you want to do. Say what you want to say. It's a lot more rewarding and fun and interesting that way.

And so you could do that. You know, you could buy yourself that right. But most people sort of have this mental block where they're like afraid and they take everything so seriously. And then it becomes an unpleasant experience for them. I think why I think a lot of people don't enjoy social media because they don't treat it like a game. enjoy games. You don't enjoy things that are ultra-serious. And so, you know, I think that's where most people get it wrong. About that, yeah. Having that block of like, oh, I need to get it right, I think, is the kind of the internal conversation that keeps people from even taking that action

in the first place. So let's see, we have this on student debt or this on CNN Plus. Which one would you like to chat about? Oh, I like that one. That's a good one. Narratively, I always enjoy that. So that one was, yeah, so just for those who may not be watching, the failure of CNN Plus and lapsing of Obama's wife Carter Cramp are related. So why is this tweet successful? You take two viral events that are being discussed. You pair them together and then you put a thesis statement on why exactly it supports a broader meta-narragic. Shitty establishment content previously forced by to us in cable monopoly era simply cannot

compete in the free market streaming. The revolution has just begun. So revolution has just begun. Punchy feeds the thesis, you know, most of the people. people who follow me. And in general, anybody below age, like 50 doesn't like cable monopoly and cable news. So obviously a huge market there. You know, biology actually said, Bology Trina Vachman said something to me is always bet on charts. It's just you've got to find the right chart to bet on. And so I always say that the right chart for me is trust in the mainstream media,

which is 13%. That means my market size is 87% of the United States. So I always have even more to grow. And if you include globe on that, it's even better. You're like, man, I feel sorry for CNN serving this niche 13% of the audience. Poor guy. If they need some help, I got you. It's about flipping things on its head. And it's like, no, no, no, no. It's like, you're the one who is only serving the need.

So putting these two things together, the Obama from the Spotify contract, you get CNN, like two legacy, established, political, both brands kind of in their own right. Everybody knows, but yet not a lot of people are consuming. And then putting them together and saying and trying to describe. a market condition that is arising that can tell us about why these two things have failed that goes against the way that people who actually work in professional media explanation are able to tell you. I mean, to date, I have not seen a dispassionate view, maybe out of one or two people. I can count on one hand.

Sarah Fisher over at Axios, I think she's awesome. There's like Dylan Byers over at Puck News. I think he's a straight shooter too. those two are pretty much the only ones I've seen with like an actual rundown of like why these things don't work compared to the amount of money that are being invested in them. The Obama's Spotify contract is the same one. It's like, you know, they paid the former president of the United States millions of dollars and it just didn't do that well when he was paired one of the biggest rocks here is on earth.

That's that's kind of insane. I mean, you have somebody who hundreds of millions of people knew that, no, his name, billions of people probably know his name. you have somebody who received like hundreds of millions of votes collectively over two elections and yet he can't even crack the top 10 on podcasts like how does that how does the former

MMA cage fighter beat this person? Like how is that possible? And so that's a very interesting story. Now nobody wants to tell that story because you know when you're working the quote unquote powers of B you're going to offend the wrong people. And so again, that's just a niche that opens up for me

to come in and to fill that. So I think that's why that it took off. It was, it's not a, not even a difficult one really to explain. Well, no, that's, that's, I like that take two viral events, stitch it together with a thesis statement, uh, and then cater to that, uh, 87% of the audience who doesn't trust in the mainstream media. Very clever. Um, cool. Well, let's go through, uh, some rapid fire questions, tactical questions, uh, and some, uh, questions from the audience, uh,

over the next five to seven minutes, uh, and then we'll call it a day. Um, Sagar, talk to us, you know, you mentioned the, strategy that you did early on, kind of just taking scripts of what other more influential people are saying. Like, what were really the inflection points or tactics that took you from that first zero to 100K, let's say Twitter? Okay, so Twitter is actually not that hard, which is that most of the people follow only a few amount of accounts. So get those few amount of accounts in order to follow you and get them to retweet you. And that's basically the secret to grow. I don't think it's complicated. So what does that mean? It's like, well, find

that niche, the 0.01%, what do they need in their feed that they're not getting? Provide that service. For me, I was the first guy in order to tweet the transcript, which means that they were all following me, which means that they're all retweeting me and exposing me to their millions of followers, which means that some people would then follow me. So for me, it was, I would say around 10K is a big, is a big jump. For some reason, in people's minds, it's like when you cross 10,000, that is a point where you're going to get exponentially more new numbers of followers. What I've discovered across all my platforms, the more followers you have, the easier it is to get followers, which is so frustrating. Whenever you're starting out, you're like, when you're, oh, man, 5,000.

At that point, if I had 5,000 followers on Instagram, which, you know, once upon a time was a case. If I got 50, I was like, oh, my God, I lose 50 a day to now. Actually, more. Probably more like 100. And yet I'll net out, you know, at a thousand a week or something like that. And it's simply because of like the churn, the burn, the way that your algorithmic treatment, is offered. So I think 10 is a big inflection point. I think 50 is an even bigger inflection point. That's where things really begin to go vertical. And this is probably the same startups,

which is just getting that first initial customers and then compounding that to a sustainable-ish business is like the really most difficult, requires the most amount of thought. Because at the end of the day, that's where you're filling the niche. That's where you're discovering the niche. That's where you're playing around. That's really the time, too, of the most experimentation. where you have really, really high stakes. So I would say it's there, and then also on the other end where, you know, after I reached 300K, actually, after I reached 200K on Twitter, I was like, I just don't care anymore. I was like, if it goes up, it goes up, I could care less.

You know, my business is almost entirely dependent on YouTube. And frankly, I care more about Instagram than I do about Twitter. I think I have much higher quality engagement just from what I've seen. My ability to sell either my subscription tickets, any of those things are there. So then it just became a complete game after that. I just genuinely did whatever I wanted. So those are kind of interesting inflection points. Cool.

Yeah, I like the idea of finding, look, there's a few accounts that everybody follows. Like, it's almost account-based marketing at that point where it's getting in touch and making an impression with those nodes, those sort of super nodes in your industry. Sean, do you have anything to add? That's smart. I wish I had done that. Didn't have that insight, but I learned something great today. Yeah, mine was sort of like the, actually it was the same, but I did it in a much slower, stupider way, which was the first kind of 25 people mattered a lot.

And so it's not the number. It's who those 25 are. For me, I built those relationships in person. So like, you know, Ryan Hoover had a popular Twitter and I had known Ryan in person, you know, for seven, eight years at that point. And so once I started getting active and started saying it doing things, he was happy to kind of like share. never asked him to. He just, he followed me already. He thought some things I said was interesting, and he would share it with his audience. And, um, and then that happened with like 25 important people in tech that were already well known, but I had built in person relationship with them,

built in person credibility with them. And so it's kind of the same idea, actually, but just a very slow version of what he just talked about. And I didn't think about it like creating content that, that serves them, um, that they would want to share with their audience. I just thought like it just accidentally happened, so, you know, sort of along the way. The main things that I would say is like, you know, figure out your, you know, the domain you're trying to build your authority in. So, you know, get really tight on that. The tighter, the better.

But it's very tempting to be broad. And I've made this mistake many times. It's like, well, it's that. But it's also these other things that I like. And it's also this and it's also that. And actually, you'd be better off just starting off, starting off there. Then there's basically like some tactical things. Like, you know, for example, there's this theory called the red pill theory, I guess.

I think in politics, it has a different definition. But I heard it when I talked to the guy. There's two guys who do wait but why. And so there's like Tim who's like the writer, the famous guy. And then this is his friend Andrew, who childhood friend who helps run his businesses. And Andrew, I talked to Andrew. And Andrew was like, yeah, you need to have your red pill, which is like, you need to have the truth. that you can say that wasn't like,

it's not the thing everybody's saying, but when you hear it, people, like some said to say one of the people will nod their head vigorously, right? So what is the, and so other people call this your spiky point of view. It's like,

you know, what's your thing, right? Like, you know, maybe your thing was like that inflation is a way bigger problem. The government is playing this down.

Boom, that's your red pill. And you can do, you can base your whole brand off that for a period of time. And then you have to eventually swap out and create a second red pill, which is like, you need to be giving people. And by the way, red pill comes from like the matrix,

where it's like, do you want, if you take the blue pill, you go back into the matrix, you just live like a sheep again and you just don't question anything. Or do you want the truth? And that's the thing. You're trying to give people the truth

in a way that they're not, that they haven't been told. And then you can become known for that. And so I think that's important. That's a very useful tool. I think some other tools are speaking from the eye. I found great success in this, which is a lot of people in,

the more successful that they get, they'll just keep saying you, like a fortune cookie, like, oh, you got to do this, you got to do that. You know, when you feel this way, you got to try doing this.

And it's like, it's much more powerful when you're like, you know, I was feeling this way, or I was going through this. I had this experience and it made me think this,

but what I need to do differently is I need to do this. It's a much more, I think in general, it's good for personal accountability to speak from the eye, but secondly, I think it plays really well

to contact because it's different than what everybody else is doing. So same thing, personal stories and speaking from the eye, I think works. But like the high level things is, you know, you could be either a generous expert, sharing your knowledge and expertise, or you could be a curious novice. And a curious novice is somebody who's just going through, like you're saying, you're just typing out the transcripts. You're just finding interesting clips and sharing it.

You're remixing, packaging, curating, and presenting, you know, stuff as a beginner's point of view rather than saying, I know everything. So you've got to know, what areas are you an expert in and what areas are you going be a curious novice and then use both in your content. And the last is just, I don't know, don't quit and go viral. Like that's ultimately, like, if you want to win, don't quit and like find ways to go viral or you won't grow. So if you just, we're only going to remember two things on the strategies, like don't quit and go viral, I would say is the takeaway. I could talk to both y'all for another hour. This is awesome. Yeah, just the, the nuggets at the end

nonstop. I think we're going to create an illustration of this to capture a lot of those things. So stay tuned for that. Yeah, thank you both so much for spending your time with us today. This is a ton of fun.