The Personal Finance Podcast - The Ladders of Wealth Creation: A Step-By-Step Roadmap to Building Wealth With Nathan Barry

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

In this episode of The Personal Finance Podcast, we’re gonna talk to Nathan Barry about The Ladders of Wealth Creation: A Step-By-Step Roadmap to Building Wealth. Connect with Nathan: Nathan's Blog Nathan's Twitter The Blog Post we are discussing Convertkit - Where I host my email newsletter. Join Our Newsletter here! Checklist of relevant episodes:  The Great Wealth Transfer Has STARTED (Here is How to Take Advantage of It) 5 Things You Need to Invest In to Build Wealth (That Aren't Stocks) with Jeff Rose How to Protect Your Wealth and Assets With a Will How to Create a Bulletproof Wealth Protection Plan How to Build Wealth With Airbnb Short Term Rentals with Lauren Keen Aumond   FREE GUIDES: ============== -Check out the free guide on where to put your money in what order!  https://www.mastermoney.co/stairway-to-wealth   -Here is the free How to Ask for A Raise ebook! https://www.mastermoney.co/get-a-raise-ebook   -Get Access to the 75-Day Challenge: https://www.mastermoney.co/75daychallenge    =============   We have a YOUTUBE channel! Check it out here!    Our Latest Videos:  How To Grow A Podcast Organically What Would Happen If You Maxed Out Your Roth IRA By Age?! (These Results Will Amaze You!) How to Become a Millionaire With a Small Amount of Money (Is it Really This Easy!?) Pre-tax moves for high earners   Got questions? Ask me on Instagram Here. @mastermoneyco This is the fastest way to get in touch with me.    ============ Sponsors:     Thanks to Ka’Chava For Sponsoring the show! Go to kachava.com/pfp and get 10% off on your first order.  Thanks to Shopify for Sponsoring the show! Go to shopify.com/pfp and start selling online today. Thanks to Mint Mobile for supporting the show! Cut your phone bill to $15 a month by going to https://mintmobile.com/pfp Thanks to Fundrise for Sponsoring the show! Invest in real estate for as little as $10 by going to fundrise.com/personalfinance   ============   Want to Support the Show? Follow on Spotify or Follow and Leave a 5-Star Review on Apple Podcasts!   ============   Check out all the Stuff I Recommend!  Check out all my favorite Credit Cards https://milevalue.com/top-offers-mastermoney/   USEFUL RESOURCES: Best Place to Open a Roth IRA: https://m1finance.8bxp97.net/5vzD1 My Favorite Free Net Worth and Budget Tool: https://fxo.co/905L Best High Yield Savings Account: https://bit.ly/3HpPjAr  Get a $10 Free Bonus with Acorns: https://bit.ly/3lV0LLE Best Bank and Debit Card for Kids: https://bit.ly/3pJeI09  Get $5 Free Bitcoin at Coinbase: https://bit.ly/3oIQOml Best Credit Building Tool: https://bit.ly/3rmBuwZ  Best Personal Finance Books: https://kit.co/MasterMoney/best-personal-finance-books    ============     DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial adviser. This Podcast is for educational purposes only. Investing of any kind involves risk. While it is possible to minimize risk, your investments are solely your responsibility. It is imperative that you conduct your own research. I am sharing my opinion.    AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: Some of the links on this channel are affiliate links, meaning, at NO additional cost to you, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase and/or subscribe. However, this does not impact my opinion.   ============     Check us out on social fam!    Twitter   Tiktok   www.thepersonalfinancepodcast.com   www.mastermoney.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're going to talk to Nathan Barry about the ladders of wealth creation, which is a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of mastermoney.com.

And today on the Personal Finance podcast, we have Nathan Barry on the show to talk about the ladders of wealth creation. If you have any questions, hit me up on Instagram or TikTok at MasterMoney Co. and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast player, you love listening to this podcast to, and if you want to hop out the show,

leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. So today, we are talking to Nathan Berry, who is the founder and creator and CEO of ConvertKit. And Nathan wrote this blog post called The Ladders of Wealth Creation, and he wrote this a couple years ago, and it's a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth, and there's one of my favorite blog posts for most people. If you want to create wealth or you want to learn how wealth works, how to get to the next level in your wealth building journey, this is an amazing blog post to start reading.

And Nathan and I go through a bunch of things here, including what are the four ladders of wealth creation. But in addition, we talk through how to stop trading time from money, how to scale up your business in the right way step by step, how building wealth is actually a skill and making money is actually a skill. In addition, we go through a bunch of other deeper dives as well and how extra time and money need to be reinvested. how you can apply your skills to build more wealth. And obviously, we ask him my favorite question, what does wealth mean to you? And Nathan has one of the best answers to that question that we've had thus far.

So I'm so incredibly excited to share this episode with you. And without further ado, let's welcome Nathan to the Personal Finance Podcast. So Nathan, welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. Thanks for having me on. So we are so excited to have you here because you wrote this blog post called the ladders of wealth creation that is something that I read years ago, and it absolutely

was a lightball moment for me, especially for people who truly want to build wealth through businesses, or maybe they even just want to start a side hustle. I think this is such a cool way and such a great framework to actually think through this process. So it is a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth, and it is one of the coolest things that I have read in a while. So there are four ladders of wealth creation that you describe in the post. Can you kind of explain these four ladders and what they are. Yeah. So I was looking for a way to, I guess, break down all these patterns I was seeing in the world. And there are things that I knew to be true. And I wanted a way to represent it systematically. And so I wrote it down in four ladders. Basically,

as you move through in your entrepreneurial journey. The first one is time for money. Second is your own service business. Third is productized services. And fourth is selling products. But the biggest idea behind it is that making money is a skill, which is something that I first heard from Jason Freed maybe back in like 2009. I don't know, a long time ago. And he's like, look, making money is a skill like playing the drums or something else. You wouldn't expect to like sit down on a piano and be able to play this amazing like piano solo without like deliberate practice of building up these like thousand little skills. So I was thinking about that and it's basically like making money is the same thing where it's a combination of a thousand

and little skills. And so this is trying to map it out of how you, do you best develop those skills over time? And then how do you introduce leverage, right? Leverage is this thing that is both wonderful and horrible, you know, or I guess it's self-neutral and just magnifies things in other ways. And it can be incredible for building wealth.

And so the whole post is just trying to navigate those concepts. And I love that part about it because it actually brings it down into these simple steps. And what we talk about in this podcast all the time, Nathan, is that it is a skill to build wealth and it is skills that you can acquire. And once you acquire all these skills, put them together, that is where you can really start to accelerate that path. And like you said, once you introduce leverage, then it really gets even faster. So that is one of the coolest things that you're there. So on ladder one, it's some of the basic skills that we have to master is on ladder one. And it's one of the earliest things that most people do. And most people enter ladder one. They don't even know that they're there. So can you walk us through what ladder. one is and some of the basic skills that you have to have when you get on ladder one. Yeah. So ladder one is time for money. And you could think about this in the simplest way of, you know, hey, I will mow your lawn for $20 an hour, you know, or like those first jobs that you might have in high school

or, you know, any hourly job working for a company. And then it could go up, right, a salary job working for a company. My last job before I worked for myself forever, right? It was working as a designer for $63,000 a year at a software company, you know, and that was, like that is trading time for money. Some of the skills that you need early on, right, showing up consistently, being reliable. And then as you move up that ladder, and there's a huge income range in that ladder, right, I could go from $15 an hour to, you know, people have salaried positions that are $500,000 a year,

potentially. You know, it's really growing in your area of work. whether it's as a software designer or a landscape or whatever else. As you acquire more skills, you become more valuable to the company and you tend to get paid more. Or you jump and switch to another company that will pay you more. Exactly. That is the cool thing, too. Like when I worked in the corporate world,

one of the biggest things that I remember doing was I would look for people above me in the corporate world and say, what skills do they have? And then I would go try to acquire all those skills. So you're kind of building up your baseline of skill set when you're doing this. But it could be anything along the lines of even your basic skills. high school job. Like you said, I remember I think I read that yours was Wendy's in that post. Yes. Where you were working at Wendy's very early on and then look where you've come now today,

which is absolutely amazing. So it's one of those things where all of us have those entry-level jobs, but it can be any type of range there, which is, you know, where we all learn, where we all grow some of these basic skills. So now that you've mastered the basic skills of ladder one, then you can jump to ladder two where this is your own service-based business. And I think this is where a lot of people can really start to build out a side hustle, even when they're still on ladder one. They can have this service-based business, and then maybe transition into it full time. So can you walk us through a service-based business

and some examples of this latter as well? Yeah, so that could be as simple, you know, using my own examples. It's like, hey, I'll design this website for you for $50 an hour. You know, like we're just, we're starting out in that. That's pretty basic. It could be instead of working for the lawn mowing company,

I have my own lawn mowing company, anything in there. Now, in this, there's a whole bunch of skills that you have to learn. And if you try to jump into this without mastering some of the skills previously, right, imagine starting your own service-based business, but you're terrible at showing up consistently. You don't have these basic skills. That's why when people who are not reliable are like, oh, I don't like working for someone

else, I'm going to be a freelancer instead. It's like you're going to find that it's even harder without accountability from a job. You know, so that's why it's often best to start with these basic, you know, start on ladder one, learn these skills, move to ladder two of the service business. And you imagine there are some of these things like, you know, how do you find clients? How do you hire employees as you go further on? How do you establish an online presence? I remember when I filed for my first LLC is like, oh, man, how do you even do that?

What? And now, like, someone asked me, like that same question on like a month ago. And I was like, it is the easiest thing. There's a form you fill out on the website. You submit it. You pay your 100 bucks or whatever. But if you've never done that before, it feels like this big obstacle or like getting an EIN. something's like, what even is that?

And you're like, oh, well, you fill out a form with the IRS or you call them and they'll give it to you and whatever. You know, these things that seem hard then become really, really easy. And there's some other really important skills that you have to build, like following up with customers. No one is like inherent with the skill of, oh, if I want something done, I will follow up consistently. It's like, no, you got to learn that. And so you want to learn it when the stakes are low because you're trying to learn these things. as we get into it with products or all of that, then, oh, man, it's going to be rough. And I could not agree more. It's one of those things where it's kind of like developing a muscle,

the same thing with fitness, where it's just something where you do it over and over again. And once you get comfortable with it, then it just becomes very easy. You can even think of it as if you started your first job, you know, when you start that job for the first six months, maybe you're thinking through everything seems a little bit difficult. You're trying to figure out the systems of that company. And then later on, it just becomes easy, it becomes second nature after you've been there for a couple years. Well, these are the same things with some of these skills is that the more that you do them, better you'll get at them. But you need to have these skills, especially as you get deeper into some of these businesses and later on in some of these ladders as well. So the third one is product-sized services.

So this is one that I've seen a number of people skip. So you go into having a service-based business, and a lot of people try to jump to ladder four, which we talked about was selling a product. So this could lead to disappointment in business like you're saying unless you develop some of those skills. So what is, can you explain some examples of ladder three and how people can actually go about doing that. Yeah, so productized services are really where you're trying to bridge this gap between pure services. And it might be selling by the project or something like that. Right. So I've gone from I'll do logo design for you for $100 an hour or two, for $2,500, I will do a brand design package for you. Right. A lot of that happens in the services, like a more sophisticated version of a services business.

That's pretty normal. Productized services is where you're trying to make it so that the sale can happen. without you and as much of the fulfillment can happen in a systematic way. It might still involve you a lot. So a difference would be, so I will edit your vlog. You know, you give me the vlog footage. I will edit it for you for $50 an hour. That's one thing. Another version is you sign up for $1,000 a month.

You have access to this service where you drop into the footage and we'll turn it into four vlogs every month. So one a week, like clockwork. So a couple things in this. it's a recurring purchase. Someone's buying an outcome more than they're hiring an individual. The payments are processed usually not by like sending an invoice and then it getting paid or this back and forth.

It's processed through Stripe or convert it commerce or, you know, an automated tool. It's starting to seem a lot more like a product. And then the other one that's really important is the sale is usually made without a one-to-one touch. If I'm running a web design business and I'm trying to convince you to become a client, we're going to sit down, we're going to talk on Zoom, I'm going to, you know, write a proposal. We're going to talk through this a bunch. It's a high touch sales process. So the product I service, we want to do it where it turns into a low touch sales process. So it might be, hey, I do a lot of consulting on search engine optimization. Well, that's like a bespoke thing.

What does it cost? I don't know. You know, I got to know your project. Instead it could be, I will do for $1,000, I will do an SEO audit for your site. And you're like, oh, sweet, I've been reading your blog. You seem good at this. Buy. And you made a purchase without me having to sell you individually. Because instead I sold you through copywriting, sales page design, which are hard skills, to be clear.

Like, you've got to learn all of those. And so in that, now we're starting to introduce leverage, right? Because time and money, as we're moving these ladders, time and money are starting to drift apart. They're not, like, ladder one. are lockstep together. Ladder two, it can kind of be like, I'm charging for, you know,

maybe first is hourly, but then I might be charging for a project, $10,000 website. And if it takes me forever, I might lose some money or I might like make less. But if I get it done really fast, I might make a crazy hourly rate, like $400 an hour or something. And so really we're just providing optioning for leverage

of things moving apart, both in the sales process and in the fulfillment of the product. And that's what I love about it is once the leverage comes into play and you stop trading that time for money. And once you start doing this, if you've never felt this feeling before anybody listening, it is something where you're like, I cannot believe for so long I was trading time for money because once you start to do this and systematize it all, it is absolutely amazing. So I love that ladder as well. And I think it's one where you really do learn a lot of skills in between there. And when people skip it, they really miss out on some of those skills.

And maybe the fourth ladder becomes much more difficult if they skip that one. Because you have to at least understand those skills before you go to the next one. So the fourth ladder is to sell a product. And this is kind of the level where ConvertKit is now. And it's one where a lot of people want to get to, but they try to accelerate their path there. So this is where it's really possible to scale, obviously, and create some passive income as well. So can you explain this ladder in some products that maybe you'd be able to sell? Yeah.

So this ladder is selling products. So now we have true leverage both in the sale of the product, right? It's purchased without a one-to-one touch. and the delivery. And so now we can have full leverage. ConvertKit works basically the same, whether it has one customer, a thousand customers or 5,000 customers.

Like if you take an e-book, for example, this is a great example. It's a huge amount of work to write an e-book, and let's say I spend six months writing that e-book. That effort is the same. Whether I sell one copy and make $20 or 1,000 copies and make $20,000. and so this is the curse and benefit of leverage, right?

And the reason that I think people jump too soon to selling products is the bar for what you create is much higher, right? We've got to write a full book. Whereas if I did a consulting package on that topic, I can learn how to sell it, how to package it, all of that as a productized service without doing all of this work to, you know, spend 500 hours or whatever writing the book. And so now what we've got is we're avoiding a lot of risk because I think what most people do is they say,

I want to sell a product, and so I need to then first make it. And so you're like, okay, it's a book. I'm going to spend all of this time writing and creating this thing. And then they go to market with it and no one buys it because they don't actually know all of the skills of packaging, positioning, pricing, driving traffic, how and where to sell it and everything else.

So there's tons of things in the product ladder. Like, you know, I have to, digital products as kind of the easiest. And then you can get into like products sold in an existing ecosystem. So this could range from like iOS apps or WordPress plugin to even like, you know, an Airbnb house. You don't have to generate demand for yourself. You're making something.

You're packaging it up and you're putting it inside of an existing ecosystem. So that's a bit easier. I've got physical products. E-commerce is challenging. You can do subscription software, especially if you packaging. with consulting services that can help you get you in the door sooner. And then SaaS is very challenging. I would not start there.

And then ultimately like the top of the ladder where you have both the highest difficulty and the absolute highest wealth creation ability is in things like marketplaces and social networks. So if you look at the companies that have like the highest revenue for employee, Facebook, Amazon, you know, Apple, right, these companies very, very hard to do. And part of what I'm trying to explain in this is why when someone says like, hey, I'm going to make the next Uber for whatever, it's like, just so you know, you have none of the skills necessary. And you're saying, hey, I want to select the very hardest thing and start there. And they're like, oh, but the earning potential of this works is so high.

And it's like, you are absolutely right. If this works, maybe not the Uber for whatever idea, right? But if they're like marketplace idea or a social network, if it takes. takes off. If you build the next TikTok, sure, potentially to build something worth $50 billion, $100 billion or more is incredible. But the likelihood of success, because so many things have to go right and so many skills have to be learned, is very low. Exactly. It's taking this in phases and kind of getting those skills, acquiring those skills, then you can kind of level up into some of these products. Even like you said, just a digital product, which is the basic level on there, if you don't

understand if there's a want or need for this, if you don't understand how to sell it or put it all together or have the skills to market it with something like Convercate or something like that, then you are really going to struggle. And a lot of people I've seen put out courses or they put out ebooks like that, they've spent so much time creating it without kind of figuring out how to actually sell this stuff. And then it absolutely flop. So it's one of those things where just the basic levels, building up those skills is absolutely imperative. I love how you phase these out. I love how you think through this in the framework. So I encourage everybody. We'll link it up down the show notes below so you can check it out. But we want to go to kind of the second level on

this because you have eight principles to grow your wealth and income over time. And it kind of tie in hand in hand here on how these go through the process. And the first one is extra time and money need to be reinvested. So what are some of the best ways you have found to reinvest money and time? Yeah, it depends on what you're trying to do. One example, you know, there's some of these skills that we want to learn that require software or tools. You know, if you want to become a video editor and you're using like that Chromebook that you had from high school, like it's not going to cut. it. You know, and so as you're, whatever job you have, as you're making money from it, you better be setting that aside to get like a MacBook Pro or something like that, right? You get that side of

things. Really, anytime you have this money, I think it's one of the later principles, but it can be time consuming or expensive to jump between ladders. And so the more you save and reinvest money, the more cushion and flexibility you give yourself to jump between ladders. What a lot of people do is they jump each, you know, from ladder one to two or two to three, and they do it with no cushion or buffer, and it fails. And so, because they're like, oh, I did this. And so it's going to be easy to get to the next ladder. Or they try to skip multiple ladders at a time, which to be clear, it can be done. It's just really hard and will take a long time. And so if you're in this position of spending everything that you make, it's going to be really, really hard to move up the ladders.

Whereas if you're in a position where you're constantly saving, you're like, hey, I need to take this course to learn this next skill. You know, I'm going to hire this. I'm going to invest in the software, you know, whatever else, or just build up a savings account. When I went from a full-time job to freelancing, from ladder one to ladder two, I had a huge overlap between them. I think that's a later principle too. But not only that I have an overlap that I was doing both at the same time, but I used the capital from my very first products as I was going freelancing and all of that, you know, I had $20,000 saved up. And so I'm like, I've got, I think at the time that was like five months of living expenses for.

me. And so it really de-risk moving between ladders. Exactly. And it's amazing how those principles kind of fall into personal finances. As long as you have something, it's the same thing. Like, if you have an emergency fund or something along those lines, it's having that in place. But the same thing goes for business. And I actually even do this like on our P&Ls and stuff for some of our businesses. I have something called growth where we just actually put cash towards that so that we can move on to the next steps that we need to move towards and have that cash reserves there. So it's really cool to have those buffers because it reduces obviously the stress and anxiety and the pressure. But in addition, it just helps you get to that next level and then reinvesting that

money. I remember even when early on in some of my businesses when I was really frugal, because when I started off, I was extremely frugal and still am. But even early on, when I wouldn't reinvest some of the cash, I noticed some areas would struggle. And then once I started to reinvest some of that money, then you would start to see that growth as well. So it's definitely worth it to be able to start to put some of that cash to work. Now, the second one we already talked about a little bit here, but it's talking about that you can skip ahead, but you still have to learn lessons from each step. So we talk through some of that as well, but how does the journey get more difficult if you skip ahead? And how do a lot of people fail when they skip ahead?

Yeah, you're missing signs of validation. We like to learn. Let's think about different skills, right? There are some skills that give you feedback really early on, right? They're easy. They're fun to learn. I've played pickleball a tiny bit. And I think the reason that it's so wildly popular is it makes you, it's a very approachable game to play, because is the ball is moving slowly. It makes you feel like you're better at it than you are. Versus maybe if you played volleyball for the very first time and you can't even make a basic pass or receive a ball.

It's harder or like tennis is much harder, right? You get these things that are, if you're trying to skip ahead, it's a lot harder and it's going to be frustrating and you're not going to see results. So in the same way, if I'm trying to sell a product and I don't yet know how to make a landing page, I'm trying to cram a bunch of learning into one step

and I'm not getting the validation and feedback that, oh, this is going well. Whereas I could learn how to make a landing page to sell my service business or my product service and someone buys that quickly. And, you know, I didn't have to spend 500 hours making a product to learn that. So just as humans, we want to feel progress and momentum. And so if you're doing this in smaller steps, you're going to feel that as you go. And if you choose to skip steps, which is totally fair, I've skipped plenty of steps. I have examples in the article of people.

who've been very successful skipping steps. If you choose to do that, just know that you're compressing that learning into a single project, and it might make the project take a lot longer until you see success. For sure. And I think that's one of the things early on in business as well, where I was trying to learn how to try to accelerate my path and try to move really fast. And what I realized was, if I just went a little bit slower on some of these steps, then I could actually accelerate my path later on by just going slower learning some of those

skills. And the third one kind of ties into those skills, which because you can apply your existing skills in a new way to build wealth. And I love your example. You have the friend who was in construction and they bought a house with an additional unit as well. And a lot of people who listen to podcast are real estate investors. So they're going to love this. And with that additional unit, you know, they're in construction. So they were able to remodel that unit and be able to rent it out for an additional $1,800 a month or whatever it was of cash flow. And that was just one great example of how you can use your skills to create more cash flow within your life. Are there any other examples that you can think of or anybody that you've seen that has done something like this

where they've used their skills and acquire new ways to build well? Yeah, I mean, I think you see it with a lot of service providers who then move into the course business or like teaching. You know, so I'm a designer. I've learned Figma really well. And then on the side, I start teaching people how to design in Figma, right? Or maybe I'm a video creator and I've got my perfect Zoom set up, right? for my studio and all of that.

People are like, wow, that's really good. How do you do that? It's the same skill to know how to set up a studio, but then you apply it in a new way of like saying, hey, I will do it for you, right? That's one thing. Now we're into a service business. You know, yeah, pay me $100 an hour.

I will set up your studio for you. For $1,000, it could be a productized service and you're just like hit buy and I'm going to, you know, tell you exactly what to do. Or maybe the product version of that, there's two versions. the one product version could be a course, you know, so you're not even getting any of my time.

I've done it once and now, and you know, everyone could take it to get the studio of how to, the course of how to set the perfect studio. Or, you know, it could be something where you click by and like you get a box in the mail with all of the lights, cameras, everything and the course and all of that, right? And so like knowing how to set up a good webcam, Zoom setup, is a skill and then you can apply it in a lot of different ways.

to build wealth. My favorite example is still the, you know, the construction skill, like, reapplied to being something that generates like persistent cash flow. Absolutely. And I think even on that studio example for the Zoom calls, there's one creator I'm thinking of that has like a similar product to that where they do that and they create courses. I think it's called like Dream Studio Tour or something like that. Yeah, I think so. And they create courses on how to do that. It looks really cool. They have like one of the best landing pages I've seen in a long time. And then when they go through that process, process, they can also do something where they offer consulting as well. And he has a team that does

it. So he doesn't even have to do it fully, but he has a team that does that that will look at your Zoom setup for like $3,000 or the course is $500. So there's different levels to it as well, which I absolutely love that. So he's using skills in different ways to create additional income. And real estate is probably the easiest way, like you said, to kind of go through that process and understand that as well. And then number four is a cool one as well because there's a difference between working for a better wage and truly building wealth. So what is the difference between the to you. The difference is what do you end up with? What do you have equity in afterwards? And so the example that I use is, again, my friend Patrick, who is doing construction. He built his studio.

He helped me build the tiny house office that I'm in right now. I'd call him up whenever I get stuck on something. Like, hey, how do you do the roof overhang on this? And he'd like, oh, come over and show you. You know, and so he built another tiny house. And he's like, okay, what if we made a business building tiny houses? And you get that. It's kind of even a productized surface. You could say, like, hey, for 50 grand, here's what you get and all of that. And what was interesting is in that case, what you get at the end is cash. You really just traded time for cash. And so it's like, what do you do with that cash afterwards versus the Airbnb example

that he had before where he has something that he owns, he's building equity in, and it's giving him cash flow ongoing. So if we think of different examples here, if I'm an content creator, I've got my newsletter with 10,000 subscribers on it, all of that. I can be an affiliate for other products. And that's giving me cash flow. That's fantastic. Super low bar to enter.

But I'm not building equity in something else. If we take this to the extreme example and go to Ryan Reynolds, right? Ryan shows of a movie, gets paid great cash to do it. Or better yet, he gets paid to do a commercial. Somebody, and they're like, hey, we'll pay you $2 million. You just got to show up for this one day. film this commercial, and here's your $2 million. Step functioned in wealth,

and he's probably going to invest that in the stock market or whatever else. Right. But then he has this realization where he's like, wait a second, I think I'm providing more value through this ad than the $2 million you're paying me, like more value to the company. And so he goes, what if I own the company? And so then he goes about,

and I have another blog post on this called the billion dollar creator, but he realizes the best way, way to build wealth, not just cash, but wealth, is for him to buy companies. He buys Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile and to be the spokesperson from them. And he's like, okay, same thing. Showing up to shoot a commercial. No one's paying me anything up front because it's my company. But then he's getting this crazy increase in value. I think he sold Aviation Jin for, I don't remember what it was, five or six hundred million or something crazy like that. And I don't think he even sold all of it. I think is still just a portion for it. But the

important thing is that he was making sure that his time, his cash, all of that, went into something that could build long-term wealth rather than just cash. There's something wrong with just cash? So long as you then take it and use it to buy like Shopify stock or S&P 500, you know, like it's got to go into something that has real assets and value. Exactly. That is one of my favorite stories as well in business. And if you look at some of the best athletes, some of the best people who are in that

industry, some of the best people in music, they all want to acquire ownership of some of this stuff. And Mint Mobile is actually one of the sponsors of this podcast as well. So, but that is, look at that segue that we pulled in. Exactly. It's perfect. It's perfect. Drop the ad right now. But that's one of the perfect spots for that too, because I think it's one of those things that, you know, it's one of my favorite things to study is, well, we're actually working on an episode where we're going to go through some of those examples, and that is one of them that's on there. So I think that is one of the coolest examples as well, because he took that equity, how much more net worth he had instead of just taking the cash on that

side. So I think it's really, really cool. One quick thing on that, to my knowledge, there's not a single billionaire in music who became a billionaire through music, but there are a lot of billionaire musicians. I don't know if they're quiet all there, right? But Rihanna, JZ, Dr. Dre, and they all use the attention from their music and a lot of cash, right? The music made cat, like, it takes money to move up these ladders. And then they all did something like launch another product. same way Kylie Jenner, you know, is, I think, one of if not the wealthiest of her siblings and all of that. And it's because she, you know, it's not like, hey, let me make money from my endorsement deals or sponsored Instagram posts or whatever. She's like, no, no, no, I'm going to build a billion dollar cosmetics company and I'll make my money through that.

Exactly. It's incredible. There's even, you know, the athlete examples of like Michael Jordan, for example, he's one of the first ones to actually do that. You can even look at people like LeBron James or Floyd Mayweather. all these guys wanted like ownership pieces. And it's one of the most incredible ways to study these types of people. I think even there's a bunch of examples, but I think there's a select few, even on the athlete's side, I think there's like five or six of them that are billionaires now. And all of them, the reasons why is because they took equity in some of these businesses, which I think is one of the coolest things.

And it's one of my favorite things to watch through as well. So I think you have the perfect example for the next one is using an earlier rung of the latter to fund the next one. So why is it important to do this in order to protect your finances as an entrepreneur? Yeah, you know, jumping between ladders can, we'll combine this one and the next one, because it can often mean, the next one is that maybe between ladders can mean a decrease in income. Like it often means that. Like the number of people that I know who maybe had a job making $100,000 a year in their salary,

and then they're like, hey, I'm going to do this freelancer. I'm going to start an agency. And maybe they get a bunch of contracts, so they're bringing in more revenue, but then they need to hire employees and everything else. So they're actually taking home less. And that's pretty normal. You know, I think about in my own career, going from a salary position to freelancing,

that was probably an even financial move. And then I started selling like built my audience and sold digital products and all of that, kind of up to about $250,000 a year from digital products that I was making. And, you know, which is wildly more than my salary. And then I was like, okay, now I'm going to move. I'm already on the products ladder. but I moved from e-books and digital products up to SaaS,

you know, jumped like five rungs at once or something. And it took me, I think, five years to get back to the same level of income. Of like, now Converick, it was making millions of dollars a year, but my personal take home, I think was five years until it, like, again, exceeded that $250,000 a year. And so this is why, and to be clear, Converka has worked out very well. Like my net worth and all of that has gone way beyond it. but there's this valley that you don't expect.

And you can actually see it in, if I were to show you a graph of my retirement accounts in wealth front, you would see it like climb and then take this steady decline as I like cash out to like fund lifestyle as I didn't, you know, lifestyle makes it sound inflated, fund a basic mortgage and, you know, groceries. And then like it takes off and climbs again as I'm being able to invest a lot. And so really, you know, like I showed an example.

of saving up money. You know, what I did, I tried to overlap two steps when I went to a freelancer. You know, I was taking freelance work on the side and making sure I had this going. My friend Patrick, who I reference, you know, he had to have building materials.

It is not cheap to build out a studio to rent on Airbnb. He did so much himself and he, like, did it very, very cost efficiently. And it was still like $10,000 or $15,000, you know, out of pocket for this little. studio. And so he picked up extra shifts as a bartender and did all of that so that he could get the money to fund, you know, this next run. And so people who are like, oh, I want to move up the ladder,

but I can't afford it, you know, or I can't do that. Or they say something like, oh, it takes money to make money. And you can debate how much that's true or not. But it's like, yeah, that's why you have to live below your means and you have to build up this cushion so that you can move between liners. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck somewhere that you don't want to be and not have the ability to make a jump. Absolutely. And I'm sure during that time frame where you were taking the reduction pay, sometimes it's difficult for people to go through that. And that's where a lot of people for entrepreneurship is kind of surprising when they have to go through that process in terms of taking that reduction pay for those five years, even though Convert Kit was doing

very well. And now ConvertKit is obviously doing amazing. And Nathan's being modest that it's doing well. It's worth hundreds of millions of dollars now. So it's one of those things that's absolutely amazing and it's one of the coolest tools. It's what we use for our email list as well. So I absolutely love it. So lately, I've been noticing how fast things are changing at home. The kids are growing like crazy, clothes don't fit anymore, and routines are changing. And it just hits you. Life is expanding. And when your life grows, your responsibility grows with it. That's something I've been thinking about more this spring, making sure the safety net we have in place actually matches the life that we're building. And that's where PolicyGenius comes in. PolicyGen is. PolicyGen

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What are some of the best ways that people can build an audience right now? Yeah, I think in the most basic sense, you should do interesting things and talk about it. Or maybe phrase differently, you should go on an interesting journey. So if you're saying I am working my salaried position right now and we can make up whatever job it is. And I'm going to get into investing real estate. And my goal is that 10 years from now, I have, I'm just totally making things up, but 10 single family homes that I own and my full-time income is coming from that, right? That's kind of an interesting story. Like how are you going to do that?

And so you clearly articulate your goal, and then you blog about what you're learning along the way. My example of this is when I started to convert it. I said, hey, I'm going to build a SaaS application. I'm going to do it in six months, and I'm going to get to $5,000 a month and monthly refram revenue. Oh, and it's going to be customer funded. And I had live blogged that.

And people were like, I don't know they can do it, but sure, I'll subscribe and see. Or people are like, oh, this is amazing. What are you learning? So I have blog posts about how I hired a developer, how I chose the name, how I, you know, and it's not written. from the place of like, I'm the expert who's done all of this before.

Like, let me tell you, I have come down from my ivory tower and I'm letting you know the best way to do this. Instead, it's like, here's what I did last week. Here's the progress that I made. And people love following a journey. Like when I was learning software development, I'd often read articles written by experts that it just felt like there was something missing. And I realized what it was is it had maybe been five years or more since they'd been a

beginner or 10 years since they've been a beginner like me. And so they're like, oh, just do this. In the same way that, right, if I'm like, start a business, just like, you know, file for an LLC, grab an EIN, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, hold on, I totally stuck on grabbing EIN, you know. But someone who just went through it is going to be like, oh, here is how you do the steps. I just went through this. I got stuck on this part, so you might too. If you have a specific journey, like, you know where you're going, you share that story in a way that lets people follow along and then take that beginner mindset. And then there's two principles that I don't have them.

They used to be in posters on my wall. They're not in this office, but they are teach everything you know. So not like, oh, I'm only going to teach the things that I'm an expert in. But like just teach whatever you learn this week. Teach that and do it from the place of a beginner or intermediate,

whatever your skill set is. And then the other one is work in public. Like don't disappear for months or years and work off on your own. own. Instead, like, hey, I made stuff today. What did I make? Teach it. Share it. You know, put it on the internet. Here's the problem I ran into. It's interesting. We love following people's journeys. And then what happens is you end up with this group of 50 people, 100 people, 10,000 people who are following you. And when you go, like, hey, I'm going to move from writing e-books to

building a SaaS company. People are like, oh, sweet, tell us about that. That sounds interesting. You know, and then you get this like, for whatever you're doing in life, what if you had like 500 people who are in your corner cheering for you and me like, oh man, like, Andrew, I can't wait for that to succeed. Like, whatever you do. And that sounds ridiculous and too good to be true. And that is exactly what it means to like go about business with an audience. And I think it's the biggest cheat code you could ever have. I could not agree more. And I think one of the coolest things about it too is once you start to learn some things and you're starting to build out some of these skills and you start teaching these skills, those skills are going to be so much better because

you're doing it with a teaching mindset. So you're just going to acquire those skills. But when you teach it, it's even easier. I even notice this like, even when I read a book, for example, I read books with the assumption that I'm going to have to teach it at some point. And it's one of those things where I just, I regurgitate that information so much more with that kind of mindset, because you really think deeply about it and think through all the processes. So it's one of the coolest ways to be able to do that as well. It actually helps you with in business and all of your skill sets. So I could not agree more with that one. And it's one of my favorite thing. So now the last one is it takes longer than you think, but the results can be incredible. And

This is absolutely true. And it's probably true within your journey. It took longer than you think to get back to that $250,000 a year even when you went through that process. But how was this true in your own journey when you went throughout this process of getting to ConvertKit and where it is now? Yeah. So I thought when I launched Convercate it, I'd be at, well, I mean, I wrote it in the blog post.

I thought I'd be at $5,000 a month in recurring revenue within six months. Instead, I hit $2,000 a month. And it's like, okay. You thought this trend, you're a little behind pace. Like, sure, we'll catch up. give it time. In reality, what happened is for the 18 months after that, we basically bounced around that number and shrunk. And so at the two-year mark after starting convert it, we were at 2,000 a month. I'm sorry, we're at like 1,500 a month in recurring revenue. Turns out

churn on a recurring revenue business is pretty painful. And so if someone had told me that two years after starting, I'd be at 1,500 a month in revenue, I don't think I would have done it. Now, Around that time, I had a friend named Heaton Shaw who really encouraged me to either shut down, convert it and do something else or like double down on it and really give it everything that I had. And that's what I chose to do. And that was in those two years in, so January 2015. And in that moment, it's like, okay, I'm going to double down on it. And, you know, it took one month to go from 1,500 to 2000.

And then like three months later, four months later, we were at $5,000 a month in revenue. like it started to take off. And then six months after doubling down, we're 10,000 a month in revenue, a year after doubling down, we're 100,000 a month in revenue. Two years after doubling down, we're 500,000 a month in revenue.

You know, and today it's like two and a half million a month in revenue. And so I think it's just this idea. We think that all this is going to happen faster. I think there's a, I don't know who's the quote for, but like everyone overestimates what they can do in a year and underestimates what they can do in five years or a decade or something like that, right?

And it's just so much the case. And one of my favorite stories in this is, I have it in the article, but is my friend in high school, his grandma, or his grandfather passed away when his grandma was about 60. And, you know, so his grandma is like, you know, not sure what to do now with her time. And they had a little bit of money. They had two small houses that were paid off because they lived really conservatively. And she's like, well, I like buying real estate. so let me buy another house and fix it up and rent it out. And so she does that.

And then a couple years later, she buys another one. And then like a year later, she buys, I guess now a fourth maybe, you know? And it keeps going. And she just gets in this habit where like every bit of cash flow, she just keeps rolling it forward. And it gets the point that she's buying like multiple houses a year. And when I met her, she was 80. And so she'd been doing this for 20 years.

And she had well over 25 homes that she had. she had acquired. She has this real estate empire. And this is before, like, you know, it's real estate empire is now worth like, well, when I met her, was worth probably like two and a half, three million dollars, maybe more. And then over the next 10 years that like more than doubled because the Boise area of real estate has just gotten insane. You know, so what was interesting is at no point, is she like, I'm going to acquire this massive real estate portfolio. She's like, I'm going to just keep doing this and keep rolling it forward. I mean, it's like the Idaho grandma version of Warren Buffett's snowball. And it's just like the most amazing thing. I think what she passed on to

her kids and grandkids is worth like $10 million worth of real estate because of the ridiculous appreciation. And even if you ignore the appreciation, it got to the point where the cash flow off of it was ridiculous. That's absolutely amazing. That's a great example too of like it's never too late to start and start to start building wealth along the process. And the Warren Buffett example is one of our favorite ones because I think he built the majority of his wealth after the age of like 57 or 58. It's something like 99% of his wealth, which is really cool. So that's an amazing story as well. And I think going along that journey, you're right. It's the first year you may think you can get there fast, but once you realize it's start to build the skills and say,

oh, these skills may take a little bit longer for us to actually acquire and go through this process. Then you kind of realize, yeah, it's going to take a little longer than I thought. But then once you get to that five-year mark, it starts to accelerate even more, which is some of the coolest part as well. So I want to shift to some of these questions that we ask a lot of our guests, and we get really interesting answers. So I think you're the perfect person for some of these questions as well. So what part of your work or life makes you come alive?

Oh, I like, so today, actually, we hit $10 million that Convercate has paid out through Convercate Commerce to creators. It was a fun milestone. We actually got to look and see, like, who's the creator that had the 10,000? and, you know, not 10 millionth payment, like who processed the 10 millionth dollar. And there's actually this designer out of New Zealand named Holly who sells design coaching services.

Ooh, perfect example. She has gone from time for money of just design stuff to her own service business providing design. And then through Converick Commerce, she's like, hey, I will coach you on leveling up your design career. For $350 you can book a session, which is a product as service. So what makes me come alive is like seeing creators make money.

All of these things are skills and habits that you can learn. And I love teaching it. And then I love providing the software and tech to make it easier. And then I love when like people do that to create like major changes in their life and their family and everything else. So yeah. And I love that. It shows through the work that you guys do. It's like the creator hub basically of all the features,

the tools that you have there is one of the best ways to, If you're a creator, it's one of the best ways to grow your, not only your email, but there's so many other features and things that are there as well. So the second one is what is the best advice about money that you have ever received? Oh, there's so many things. Like money is basically my favorite topic ever. It's pretty, you know, I like it a lot when it beats out like design and audience building of things I want to talk about.

Exactly. I think that, you know, this idea that making money is a skill, it sounds simple on the surface, but it changes your entire mindset. It changes everything. And the reason is, I used to think that who had money, what you earned, what you kept, the wealth that you built, came down to like a few choices, who you knew.

You know, I had an uncle growing up who was a doctor, right? I knew that he made more than our family did, right? And it's like, oh, that's because he chose to be a doctor. Random side note, the wealthiest people I know, highest earning, are content creators. And they make way more than any of the doctors that I've ever met. Someone's like, hey, go to school,

become a doctor, you can make a quarter million dollars a year, maybe specialize, you can make half a million dollars here. We're like, go be a content creator, you can make a million dollars here. It's like, what? Five years ago, that's a ridiculous idea. And now it's like, oh, yeah, now the math checks out.

It's the power of leverage. So I think if you really internalize making money and building wealth or the combination of many thousands of skills, then you start thinking about it, of like, okay, what do I have control over? What do I need to learn? How do I need to apply this?

Rather than this idea of even like wealth is a zero-sum game, you hear a lot of people. I don't think someone listening to this podcast is going to come from this mindset, but if you pay attention to the news at all, people are like really having this idea that, oh, if Warren Buffett makes another billion dollars, that means that someone else doesn't have that billion. He took that from someone else. And you're like, it's not a zero-sum game. That's not at all how it works.

and when you start thinking about things in terms of skills, then it's like, oh, this is within my control. Yes, luck is a factor. Luck is always a factor. Did you, you know, were you born in the United States in the year 2000? Or, you know, were you born in Europe in 1915? Like, you're going to have very different experiences based on that. So luck is always a factor.

I think he's also maybe a Warren Buffett quote where he talks about winning the ovarian lottery of like where you were born. But you just, if you internalize that as a skill, then you're really going to take ownership of the outcomes and decide what skills do you want to learn, how do you want to apply that? And then what can you turn it into? I absolutely love that. And I think it really does go deep. Like you said, there's so many different levels to the skills that you can have to build wealth. And once you start to acquire some of those skills, you're really going to see a major difference

as time goes on. I remember just starting off like my entry level job and thinking the same thing, like I should have went to school via doctor or something along those lines. But then once you start to acquire these skills, it really start to accelerate. And you can really see that happen. The last one is my very favorite one. And it's one that we get a different answer every single time. So it's really interesting to see how people kind of think about this.

But what does wealth mean to you? Okay, so it's a broad term that can go a lot of different directions. Man, the first thing that comes to mind is, like, impact. I want everyone in my family, everyone I know, everyone who reads my work, all of that to like be better off in some way because like we cross paths. And so I think about like how can I do that, whether it's the wealth that we're building and convert it, that, you know, how do I help everyone who works for Convercate?

become financially independent. How do we build something that's wildly valuable? How I spend my time on the things that I want to. I'm not so much of like, oh, wealth is being able to spend my time on anything. And so, you know, I achieved a certain amount of income and now I'm just going to go do woodworking or something, which I love, but, you know, all that. Wealth to me is, it's like a compounding and leverage over time. I think the most ridiculous example to me is last year we did a small secondary sale for ConvertKit to help team members sell shares and equity and all of that. I sold one percent of the company or one and a quarter percent of the company for two and a half million and retired my parents and my wife's parents with that money.

And it was just wild to be able to sell one percent of, like to create something so valuable that one percent of it is like enough to push actually six people because my parents are divorced to be married. So six people into retirement. you know and we talked a lot my wife and I talked a lot about it because they're like oh should we sell some equity we don't need the cash you know it's not going to make a difference for us we don't live an extravagant life I mean I live on a farm in Boise Idaho right like you know my lifestyle expenses are not that high but then what we came to is realize like time is a big difference right an extra two million dollars today isn't really going to make a huge difference for us we don't need that

but for our parents who are, you know, still three, four, five years away from retirement, or it's a bit of an unstable retirement, they're not quite sure. Like that, when they're 62, 64 years old, that money now makes a huge difference for them. And so being able to do that last summer, they all left their jobs. They all, you know, somewhere a year away from retirement, some are five, but they all moved into retirement. And actually, my stepdad passed away five months after we did that. And so he had a whole bunch of health issues.

So it wasn't a huge surprise. You know, we knew, I think we thought he'd lived for another three or four years. But he passed away knowing that his wife, my mom, was 100% financially taken care of. And so, like, wealth to me is being able to do that. Like being able to make sure that everyone's taken care of everybody. it's a positive impact on everyone around you. And, again,

it's wild to me, right, that one percent of something could create such an amazing change. So, yeah, that's well. I think that is one of my favorite answers that we've had because I think it comes down to,

a lot of things we talk about on this podcast is generational wealth as well. But a lot of people just think of generational wealth as handing it down to maybe their kids or their grandkids, that type of thing. But it is all generations within your family. And what you did was create freedom for so many people within your family, which is absolutely amazing. And just that 1% changed so many people's lives.

And that is so cool that it went through that process. So that is absolutely amazing. So Nathan, this was an amazing conversation. I think there's going to be so much value that people can take out of this episode. So where can people learn more about you? Talk about your Twitter, your blog, everything else, convert it, everything you have going on. Yeah, let's see. A couple things.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, just at Nathan Berry. Barry's B-A-R-R-Y and try to drop threads on, you know, life experience, things that learning all of that. The blog's at Nathanberry.com. The biggest thing would we get on the email newsletter. There's a lot of stuff that I send out to the newsletter because I don't polish it up enough for the blog. It's not like an epic essay,

but it's still like my thoughts and musings. There's also, if you subscribe to that for long enough, you'll see a link. I have a private newsletter just about money. That, like, I only share with people who like really follow my stuff quite a bit. But if you follow the newsletter, you'll end up with a link to that. And the last thing, if you're thinking about building an audience, you know, or you know someone who is, go to Convercate.

It's like everything I know, all the best practices that I know and that's like built into a software product. It's my life's work. And it'd mean the world if you checked it out. Absolutely. It ConvertKit's absolutely amazing. It's what I use. And Nathan's blog and Nathan's email list. I read your email every single week when it comes out.

It's like the one I have like always bookmark and stuff. So I think it's one of my favorite newsletters to subscribe to as well. So Nathan, thank you so much. This has been absolutely amazing. We truly appreciate you coming on today. Yeah, thanks for having me.