The Startup Ideas Podcast - Do This to Be Interesting Online

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Greg interviews Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit, which makes email, automation, and monetization tools for creators.  They talk about how to be interesting online, and different ways to monetize online content.  ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,  creators and commerce. You'll also find out when new and exclusive  episodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.    https://latecheckoutstudio.ck.page/  FIND ME ON SOCIAL:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg  Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/  TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenberga    LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:  Production Team:  https://PodFlow.comNathan Baryhttps://twitter.com/nathanbarryhttps://ConvertKit.comhttp://nathanbarry.com  SHOW NOTES:  00:45 How to be interesting online02:30 Combining education and entertainment04:00 Storytelling for mundane stories06:00 Improving comedy/storytelling skills15:00 Video content spreads well17:15 Studying comedy19:30 Blending journeys and storytelling21:45 Hiring out comedians24:15 Learning monetization skills27:00 Considering scalable business models29:15 Running companies long-term31:15 Building "skyscraper" products34:00 Blending agencies and software

Nathan Berry, the creator. Thanks for having me on. I was talking to a group of authors and book publishers and book industry insiders the other day. They were talking about how I have access to more creators in the book space, maybe than anyone else. I think that's true, just from who uses convert it. Well, that's why I invited you. I figured the person who is the center node to all these creators must have a lot of insight as to what's working for building. audiences and what's working for monetizing those audiences, i.e. building creative-led

businesses. Are you there? Let's do it. Across the entire creator economy, let's distill it down to what is actually working. For a lot of things, it's very overwhelming to go out there and create content and put yourself out there, either for yourself or as a brand. And then there's a hundred ways to monetize. Do I build courses? Do I build coaching? Do I build SaaS product? Do I build an agency? Let's start off by who comes top of mind in terms of audience building. He's done a really good job. Non-obvious. Non-obvious.

Oh, man. The hard thing is if you do audience building really well, you become obvious, right? By definition, people that you've had on before, like Nick Huber and others, have done audience building really well. Someone who I think is really interesting right now is Siava Kaczynski, who runs Enduring Ventures. There's this creator capitalist model that you see happen with people who are building funds and buying companies and all of that. And Siava has this fund where they raised a good amount of capital and bought good cash flowing businesses. He has learned that if he has an audience,

he gets access to a whole lot of deal flow, both for businesses to buy and also more fundraising, more capital to use to buy more businesses. I don't know how much he's talked about publicly, but from him and I talking, he's built a pretty massive newsletter on one scale. He's not the next James Clear, but I think he's up over 30,000 subscribers. from turning around a newsletter pretty quickly on a niche topic. I think what he's done is really interesting. The other thing is that audience is very, very high value. You see people building a smaller newsletter in a specific niche.

It can be really high value. I'd much rather take 30,000 people interested in investing and buying businesses who are a higher net worth on that one side compared to 300,000 who are reading a food blog. And nothing against food blogs. It's just the amount of money expected to transact there is about the different. Siava's really interesting because Siva, 12, 18 months ago basically had no audience.

I've watched him. He must have over 100,000 followers now. And what I take away from his rise to fame, so to speak, is he shares stories. He goes through life and he writes down the stories that he sees. He's buying businesses and he'll be like, I bought these businesses. And here's what I learned. And what I'm seeing right now in terms of audience building is there's a lot of folks who are basically copying other people's content on X. And sometimes that works. But my thesis is that's going to be less and less of a thing over time as AI helps automate a lot of that. So the people that are going to win are going to be sharing unique perspectives and stories. Thoughts on that.

There was a time on X that you could just copy and paste anything from Wikipedia. Yeah. And that would get traction so long if you drop some images and had a decent hook. Especially with writing being done by AI right now, a filter that I like to use is, if I'm writing something, could I have written this? If yes, it's probably not worth me publishing. If no, all right, what do I have here? There's this guy years ago, his name is Callus Tein, and he founded a company called Invato, and they built marketplaces, basically a big tech company out of Australia.

He had this line that just stuck with me. They basically said, if you want to be interesting on the internet, first be interesting the internet. That's what is so interesting about Sieva compared to someone who is just copying content or theorizing on stuff. Seava's like, I bought this business. Here's what I learned. Here's where it worked. Here's where I went wrong. Here's my thesis on investing. Follow me as I truly put it into practice. The best content comes from a story only you can tell. The unique point of view you have. Someone else I love to follow is Dan Runcie, who runs a blog called Trappital. He has this inside look into the music business. His newsletter is read by a lot of top music executives. And that's who he's

writing to. He's giving them the inside information. Right. Because the head of A&R at some record label, they still read content online just like the rest of us. Dan is like, hey, I'm going to write just for them and get those people on my list. He has such a unique perspective because of his background in the music industry. He's writing content similar to Siva that I don't think many other people can write. These are behind the scenes conversations. And so if you actually come out and say, here's how the real world works. Here's what I'm learning from it and let people in. On that conversation, I think it's super fun. And you end up with great growth. A lot of people don't double down on content because they say, well, I don't have anything interesting to share. It's interesting because

a lot of those people, when you're like, hey, tell me about what you did today. And it's like, oh, I met this person who's super interesting. Basically, everyone is interesting. If you're on this planet and you're breathing, you're interesting. What do you say to those people who might not be Nick Huber, Sahelblum, Siva, level, who are interesting in the traditional sense. What do you say to the untraditional people? Well, I disagree with your premise that everyone is interesting. I think most people are actually not interesting

because they don't know the fundamentals of a good story. I was talking to the editor at a major publication. We were talking about fiction. You write the entire book and then you shop it. Unless you have a track record, you don't shop the book until it's done. So I was talking to my friend like, wait, so you're just getting entire manuscripts dropped on your desk nonstop. How do you, are you reading all these books to find out if they're worth publishing? He's like, no, you don't have to read the entire book.

I only do two things. I pick up the book and read the beginning, long enough to understand who is the hero of the story, what describes their character. What are they struggling with any of those things? And then I go to the end and I read enough to understand, are they the same person as they were at the beginning. And if they were the same, I just put the book down, like, just toss it. There's no point. I know that the middle, they did not go on a journey that changed them in any way. And so it's not a story worth reading.

But if I can read the end and understand, like, the hero of our story has undergone some fundamental change in who they are, what they're capable of or anything else, then that points to, like, that the middle might be worth reading. And so if you apply that to life in general, I want to know what journey are you on that is going to change you. And I think most people are on the journey of going to work and home again. and I'm happy for you if you're content with that. But that is not an interesting story.

You are the hero of this journey. What is the journey? Who are you going to become on the other side of this? What transformation are you going through? A lot of people are going on these epic quests. See, he was going on this epic quest to build this multi-generational company. He's thinking about business entirely differently. He's constantly having to level himself up.

He's going through his massive transformation. and he's letting us follow, which is amazing. Someone's saying, okay, I want to be interesting on the internet. I want to be followed on the internet. So I have to be interesting. Well, the best way to be interesting on the internet is to be going on a quest that is going to change you and that is worth following. If you look back to the early days of Convercate,

when I started, I've live blogged the entire process of Convercate for the last 10 years. The very first post was me planting a flag. I know what I was doing at the time. But it basically planted a flag and said, this is the journey that I'm going on. I'm going to build a SaaS company to $5,000 a month in recurring route in six months with only $5,000 in my own month. And I called it the web app challenge. That is what ultimately became convert. I didn't hit any of my goals.

Like, it took way longer to take off than expected. But a bunch of people came in who said, this is a journey worth following. And I will give you help and advice along the way because you seem to actually be going somewhere. And so I just encourage more people building an audience, get very, very clear on the journey and then invite people along. My take is there's two types of potential creators. One is just a non-B-to-be creator. You're just a person who has a life. And to me, by being on this planet, you have interesting things happen to you, no matter who you are.

For example, you witnessed 9-11 or felt what 9-11 was and you process what that is. The issue is most people are not interesting storytellers, to your point. They don't know how to contextualize these things that happen in life, even if it's as mundane as I'm really into Pokemon cards. They don't know how to put it into a story, which is, let me tell you about the time where I broke a pack of 1999 Pokemon cards and I got a Charzardard. I think everyone should be studying how to be a great storyteller.

Then on the B2B side, because we're talking about Cievas and Nick Cuber's and stuff like that, I think the prompt for people is two things. How do you become interesting, number one, and then how do you become a interesting storyteller, number two? Also realizing your first point, that there's not that big of a difference between the people we perceive as interesting and the ones we perceive is not interesting.

If I'm a designer working at a software startup, I go to work, I come home, I do my thing, that is not really interesting. But if I give a quest in there, trying to level up my skills because I want to be a creative director, now I'm going out and I'm interviewing people and learning when I'm teaching the skills I learned last week.

It's a very small difference between showing up and doing my job and having a clear goal and getting to that point. Or pick a company. Let's say, I want to get a job at Apple. I can go through that in a very boring way, moving through things gradually. Or I can tell a story. I want to work at Apple one day. And here's everything I'm doing.

Here's how I'm learning. The connections I'm building all of that to be someone that Apple would be excited to hire. Who knows if that would actually work out? But I know for a fact, the more you can be clear on a. goal and relentlessly pursue it, the more interesting it is. The other thing I think you can do is focus on being a great storyteller in the mundane. Take those mundane things. And this is something that I don't think that I'm particularly good at. You follow someone's story like some random post on a blog or a newsletter. And you're like, wow, that was really powerful and special.

There's actually not that much to a story, right? It was just someone's interaction at a park that day, but they told it in a certain way. How compelling is the journey that you are going on? And how compelling are you at packaging and storytelling? Someone who is the best at both, they're going to have a much easier time building an audience. But you could be mediocre at storytelling and have a compelling journey, or you could have a mediocre journey to be compelling at storytelling. And either one of those will work as well. What makes a successful story or package?

How do you break that down? Well, at its core, you're trying to educate or entertain. That's all that we're doing as content creators. There's some amount of education, some amount of entertainment. Some things are going to be very heavy on education. Here is exactly how to install Ruby on Rails on your computer. Then other things are pure entertainment comedy. But again, the best are the ones that we've both those through.

Where you're taking comedy, you walk away with a different perspective. You laughed your way to a different perspective. A content creator, Chase Reeves. He did a bunch in the business space. He knows business content really well. Now he has a YouTube channel reviewing bags, backpacks, laptop bags. all of that. He could give you the most boring talk about a bag and that would not do well. But he is so entertaining because of who he is and how he is in the storyteller, his comedic timing and everything else.

I would happily watch that guy tell me about a backpack any day. He's maximized entertainment. If you think of those two things and then what skills you pick up, that's the balance. Anything you're trying to teach, the more you can add entertainment value to it, the more people is going to reach. They call it edututainment. I think the younger you are, the more you want bite-size entertainment. I look at what Ryan Reynolds did with Mitt Mobile, where he has this whole string of commercials that he is starring in. The production quality isn't crazy high. It's often him in front of a green screen.

There's one where they're talking about family plans and he's got his sister-in-law involved. There's some good comedy and all of that. And obviously he's Ryan Reynolds, so partially it's entertaining because of the star value. but I haven't seen many creator businesses try that style commercial. An example, he did the early ads for Square, Adam Lissigore. He did Square and Airbnb, and it turned into this thing where he starred in 80% of the ads. They were good, but they weren't entirely groundbreaking. They didn't have to have a huge budget or this star power.

They were all just good. People watched that. I often wonder if we could do a series of creator style commercials like that. I haven't figured out how it work, but I want to see more brands that have done that because I feel like it's approachable. It's approachable, but also platforms are prioritizing video. So creators,

brands, products are going to want to create more video. And the type of video people want is entertainment plus like shot on an iPhone. Did you see the other day, there was the Apple event. And at the end of the Apple event, which is supposed to be this super high-produced event

that costs millions of dollars to create, it said shot on an iPhone. 15. Yeah, they had the behind the scenes content showing how they actually shot it. And it's fascinating. There's almost a cool factor to be like, I did this with the device that anybody has. It used to be cool to say, oh, I had this red camera or whatever the equivalent is in your industry, the absolute best and it's polished and perfect. Now it's cool to be like, I didn't do that. I did it this other way. We all have access to the same tools and I use them to produce something remarkable. Whereas you're over here complaining about.

I could create something great. If only I had access to these other tools or budgets or something else that I'll have. Did you see Sean Puri's application to the All In podcast? I did see it. This is a perfect example. It has well over a million views. He basically shot it himself, edited it on iMovie. It's his job application to work at the All In podcast.

It's basically a two-minute clip. Kind of making fun of Jason Calcanus, Jamah, David Sacks. Friedberg little punches at those people. At the end, he's like, this isn't a real job application. And it says at Sean BP. He just controls the narrative from that. So powerful, probably took him a couple hours. I think we'll see more of that.

What are some brands that in the creator space, either individual creators or companies, that you think would do a good job with this style of content? I actually think that everyone should be creating content like this. If you create content and you want it to spread and build affinity, then video is the best possible way to do it. And I hate saying that because I hate being on video because on video, I'm like, how do I look? Did I say something wrong versus I can just go on Twitter and from the hip just write a one liner press tweet, not think about it. So much easier for me.

I'm just thinking as you're talking about the shoot from the hip type thing, how you would build the habit or a flywheel to produce. content at a consistent basis. Like if you wanted to get good at comedy, I'm trying to think about how you would, because you have to practice. Totally. I guess if you forced yourself every single day, you're like, I'm going to try to write a funny little 30 second vignette about this convert kit feature. It's like any other skill.

If I'm complaining, like, oh, I don't know how to make a convert kit feature release video funny. Well, of course not. You've never done it before. But if you do it every single day for 90 days in a row, I bet some of them would actually be entertaining and you would get better. figuring out what works. People like Sean Porey, he's a student of comedy. Right. The guy loves comedy. I think he might even want to be a comedian when he quote unquote grows up and he's amazing at it.

So for him to go and create that video, for him that was probably shooting from the head. For someone like me or maybe you, that is a bit more of a high barrier. So the question becomes, how do you get normal people like us to the level of Sean? Is there a way to accelerate that learning? This is a little different, but in the realm of public speaking, that's a place that comedy matters a lot. You're finding this balance between education and entertainment. There's a guy named David Nihil. He's his Irish guy, lives in the Bay Area, who hated public speaking, forced himself to get into stand-up comedy in order to overcome his fear of it. And now he's quite a good comedian.

If you look at his videos, he's done really well. But he did something that is a really interesting service. One of his agency that I think is just fascinating. He said, when I sit in an audience and I'm watching like a... conference topic. I hear a story because everyone knows, you give a conference talk, you tell stories, your voice changes when you're telling the story. You'll see the audience start to lean in. They're like, blah, blah, blah, boring thing. Oh, we're selling a story? Then they're leaning in and pay attention. David notices the audience to do that. He's like, as a comedian, I can see where the

joke is going. And the speaker totally fails to land the joke. He was like, there was a great joke there. You could have done this punchline. So what he did is he got a bunch of his comedy friends together and said, we're going to make an agency where we will punch up your business talks. You bring a talk that you've already done, and we will write it no more than 5%. And we will make your talk and we will measure laughs per minute throughout your talk. I'll give you an example. David watched one of my talks and he's like, okay, here's how to make it funny. I was talking about the difference between when you're selling online versus selling in person and how if you sell online, you don't get feedback. But if I'm like, hey, Greg, you buy this thing from me. You have to

respond. You can't just be like, uh, no, thanks. And you can't just leave. Whereas online, you can hit the back button, I never get feedback on why you didn't buy. So the advice David gave me is you have to make that moment really awkward. Play it up. Mime that you're talking to the person in the audience. So, hey, will you buy this thing? Then mime holding the mic and turning away slowly as awkwardly as possible. That counts 10 in your head and walk to the back of the stage.

Just miming this awkward interaction. Sure enough, the more awkward I made that, the longer I played it up, it got a much better laugh. I've given that talk 10 times. It gets a great laugh every single time. It's fascinating how these small tweaks can make a big difference. I think that's true for storytelling and across the board. It should give hope to people because it's teachable. You learned.

You basically had it before and after. One of my favorite followers on X is Nikita Beer. Whenever I see his tweet, I'm always laughing. It's just so good. Three different layers. You read it and you're like, oh, like, that's funny. And then you realize that it's actually a reply as well to the other thing that's happening in the narrative.

And it's making fun of this other group entirely. Then you're just dying. It's cool because you can actually follow his account and be entertained and learn about consumer social apps and consumer behavior. So it's not all jokes and memes, that sort of thing. Both him and Sean Pori are people I look up to in terms of how do you inject comedy into your stories. I think storytelling in terms of Cava style works in terms of building audience. and Nikita style, Sean Forrey, comedy, and punchiness also works. If you can blend the two and then really realize these are all skills that can be learned.

Like we wouldn't expect to sit down at the piano and be able to play something amazing if we've never played piano before. So you're like, oh, I wrote this story and it's terrible. Well, yeah, if you don't know how to write and you haven't studied that, then of course it's going to be bad. Deliberately go and learn those skills. The second thing is you can also hire people. I'm trying to do a talk and I go out and hire a speaking coach, whether it's someone like David Nathill who's focused on comedy or someone else like Mike Pacione who is focused on the overall talk.

He'll give me things. It's not going to be funny in the moment, but I gave a talk at Craft and Commerce, my conference, talking about flywheels. I have these visuals. I'm explaining it and all this. And then transition to the next thing. He's like, that transition is weak. Just play it up and be like, that's what we're.

we call a metaphor, it gave just this little bit and it got a laugh from the audience every time. A professional will come and be like, here's the joke. They'll make those tweaks. And so in any of your content, deliberately learn and then go out and get the outside opinions to punch it up. And it probably costs a lot less than you think because comedians all the time are making millions of dollars a year. I have a few comedian friends. They're some of my smartest friends, smarter than some of my tech friends because they're just so quick, so witty. They have this amazing ability to see the audience and they're able to predict what's going to happen next. As a content creator, that's what we need. We need to be able to craft the messages and content

that is able to anticipate the needs of people, understand where their eyes are going to gloss over and where we need to insert a joke. Sometimes these valuable skills are not well-paid skills. Writing has been a terribly paid skill. If you were to go get an English degree or something at university, they'd be like, cool, I hope you enjoy working at Starbucks, right? That would be the joke and comedy, the same thing. Like, okay, how are you actually going to make money? And now we're finding online, those are insanely valuable skills when applied correctly.

If you came in and told me, hey, I started doing this. And two years later, I'm making a quarter million dollars a year with my audience of 50,000 people that I'd be like, yeah, naturally. Like, that makes sense, you know? But in these other circles, people would be like, wait, what? How are you as a writer making 250,000? $50,000 a year. And it's just because comedy, writing, teaching, all of these things are so valuable at capturing

attention. And then you can drive that attention to whatever you want. And you get leverage in a really interesting way. The writer piece is really interesting. You used to get paid $50,000 to write. And now the greatest writers, the Sahel Blum's, and the Nick Huber's are getting paid $5 million a year to write. Think about it. Like writers, comedians, school teachers.

That is not a well-paid job. You have all of these school teachers who end up leaving and either teaching their field online or providing resources for other school teachers. They bring in the elements of online business and audience. And then turns out that is a wildly profitable job. I know a school teacher who makes almost a million dollars a year teaching school teachers how to manage their classroom, how to show effectively, how to create lesson plans. And he actually still teaches part time at the high school.

He originally taught out because he's like, look, I still want to. I have this regular material. And I love what I do. I just didn't want to make 60 grand a year anymore. So now I'm doing the online thing. I've got an audience of 100,000 people. I've got my email list dialed in and all of that. And I can do the thing that I love and get paid absurdly well for it. These previously undervalued skills are now insanely valuable. Once you've built up that audience, let's move into monetization. How do you think about coming up with business model ideas for creators and prioritizing the ones that make the most sense. You can end up in a place where there's so many opportunities

that you could be paralyzed and not choose a good one or not choosing any at all. Probably the first thing is choose something, anything that works, and you'll iterate from there. A lot of people start with ads or a paid newsletter or an e-book. There's a bunch of skills that you have to learn in order to make money on the internet. How to write a headline, how to sell a product,

how to create a landing page, process payments. And someone was like, wait, How do I process payments on the internet? If we were starting from scratch, that's a question you have to figure out and understand. Same, if you were trying to set up an LLC, you'd be like a registered agent. What is that?

That sounds so official. That's just a form of, like, that's actually a really basic thing. I have an essay called The Ladders of Wealth Creation where I talk about the skills that you need to learn to move up and basically gain leverage with each ladder. I think it's important to be deliberate about the skills you're learning and where you're going to go from there.

And then just expose yourself to a lot of different methods of modernization. and look both in your industry and then across industries. When I was doing design full time, instead of going to like the CSS gallery websites, because that would result in me just creating the same stuff that everyone else was creating. I liked to go to other industries entirely and try to borrow from them. One of my favorites was actually fashion and not like high-end fashion. Just looking at Banana Republic as they put out their fall collection. What colors are they using?

What textures on the clothing tags? I'd get great web design inspiration. I would shamelessly copy some of their color palettes or some of the font choices and bring it to an entirely different industry. It felt new and novel. It's the same thing when you're looking at pricing or monetization. Pay attention to how are people doing it in your niche, but then also go to an entirely different niche. Nick Huber can make plenty of money off of sponsorships and digital product sales and traditional things, but he's actually making the bulk of his money off of two agencies with Shepard and his R.E. Costseg, right?

Sahoe Bloom's doing the same thing. he's making the bulk of his money off of agencies, right? And then you get this whole range of people. Ryan Holiday makes an absurd amount of money selling coins that have stoic phrases. I'm involved in this ghost town in California with Ryan Holiday and Brent Underwood and a few other people. That has layers of modernization to it. People visit. There's a YouTube channel.

It makes like 50 grand a month in sponsorship revenue because the YouTube channel is so popular. there's merch. This ghost town has a fantastic revenue line, which all gets spent to run at the ghost town because turns out it's expensive to do. But then if you go from there, there's actually TV and movie commercial or product commercial licensing and location fees here. And they take that brand, you could create Sarah Bordo whiskey or something else. There's often another business model that is much higher ROI that's possible and you just have to branch out to see it. You need to ask yourself, where do I want to start? Once you have an audience, a hundred ways you can skin the CAD in terms of monetizations.

Do you want something that's low ticket or high ticket? You mention ads. You can just plug in ads to get going. Low ticket would be an example of an ebook or a course. High ticket or medium ticket might be a SaaS software subscription. High ticket might be something like a mastermind or high-end agency type thing. Second, what does this look like when it scales? For example, if I were going to start an agency,

doing the logo design for high-end clients like Coca-Cola. What does this look like when it scales? Or if I'm Ryan Holiday, he's got a pretty sweet gig because he creates some coins and then he sells the coin. I think the mistake a lot of creators are making in terms of starting these agencies is scaling. It's very easy to start an agency. It's very hard to scale an agency.

And quality between clients is hard to predict in some service. service offerings. So what you don't want to have is you don't want to be a creator who has 100,000 subscribers, and then you sell 20,000 people on this service, and they get different coins, so to speak. My thesis is you're actually going to see a bunch of creator-led productized agencies die in about 18 to 24 months, whereas the winners are going to create smaller agencies, or they're going to create a build one, sell twice course type thing, or they're going to create an Orion holiday type thing that has quality control. What's your thoughts on that? Everything sounds easier when someone talks about it on a podcast that actually is in real life.

I like that you're bringing up, hey, this whole running an agency thing is actually kind of hard. Or you get into something where it's simple but not easy. You have good deal flow to get clients, provide those clients a great experience. They'll tell more people, book more clients, right? Pretty simple model. But then you get into it and you find everyone has slightly different goals. as much as you try to productize it. Then you're having to fire clients who you hope were a good fit but ultimately aren't because they want something

20% different than what you're offering. Or you don't fire them and your agency gets spread so thin trying to do all those custom work for everybody. Or, for example, it's just natural growing pains. Your team is based in North America and you design a logo for someone in Tokyo

and what is amazing in American culture doesn't transatlure. doesn't translate well to Japanese culture. You're going to see a lot of that. You're also going to see a lot of people who don't understand how to run agencies starting them because it's easy to start a business and it's really hard to run a business year three and beyond.

That's when all the compounding starts to kick in. I don't know that it's an agency business model in particular. I think we'll see the same drop off in all forms of monetization. Someone launches a paid newsletter and then they realize, I may be a good writer, but I'm not a prolific writer. And turns out I chose a business model that requires my best content behind a paywall. And then I need new content not behind a paywall to get new readers. And these two sides of my business are directly odd. Growth and monetization are directly in conflict.

Or my favorite writer runs a great paid newsletter. Let me copy their model. Oh, turns out, they've been a professional journalist for the last 20 years. I only have to write one piece today. This is amazing. Whereas I'm over here being like, I can't even get out a single newsletter a week, let alone five days a week. So I think you're going to have the whole range of people finding out this is actually really hard. It's hard to stay consistent. It's hard to work at it long enough for the compounding to kick in. This requires a different set of skills. Sometimes there's a very natural thing to sell to your audience where you're like, oh, this is easy, so I'm going to do it. And it doesn't match your skills or you don't staff the team accordingly. You see this a lot

with celebrity products. Someone sees, hey, George Clooney and the Rock, we're both successful with tequila's. I'm going to start with tequila as well. Why not? I'm as famous as they are. So they think okay, we'll just find something to white label. We'll do some splashy ad campaigns. We'll throw some money at it. And we've already seen a bunch of those fail. You're going to see way more of them fail because people don't understand that the demand and the attention is only one part of it.

It actually takes an insane amount of work to run a successful business, even if you've got the top of the funnel figure. If you're me and you've got an audience of 500,000 followers across platforms, 75,000 newsletter to subscribers. I just moved to ConvertKit last week. I shut out. I monetized via agency businesses. We have an innovation agency that works with Fortune 500s on designing their future.

We've got an SEO agency. We built some proprietary AI software that allows us to get really good search results. We sell that as a service called Boringmarketing.com. We've got a design agency as a service, focus on community-based products, and companies that's called Meetdispatch.com. We've got communities that we run. You probably need a robot.com, for example, which is an AI community. So I'm monetizing via services and internet communities. Internet communities is more like digital assets that we sell. What would you do if you were me? Just to give people to have the examples. Examples. Exactly.

When you have a lot of great ways to monetize right now, there's this idea I've talked about of strip malls versus skyscrapers. I think a lot of creators like to build strip malls. Here's what I mean. Think about the footprint of land, what you can build. You're going to a strip mall and you're like, here's my radio shack. It's going to have a subway right next to it. And we're just expanding horizontally across. And if I get enough revenue from all of that, I've got a great business. I'm well diversified. My philosophy has been the skyscraper approach. I'm going to take all of those same pieces and I'm going to build it into one thing and I'm going to build that as tall and successful as possible. When you're looking across the landscape of businesses that

you have, a bunch of small to medium businesses. I would look, is there one of those that you could build into a skyscraper that you could put a ton of effort into and this could be the next thing? The SEO industry is actually pretty big. Software for SEO is a big market. The multiples on software companies right now are really good as well. They're down from what they were two years ago, but they're still valued recurring revenue is valued highly. What has to be true for that agency that has software in the back end for us to start selling that software. What if the high end is done for you and it's many thousands of dollars a month and then can I get the software company to the point where it's doing 10 million a year in subscription revenue by itself? A software

company doing 10 million a year in revenue is worth more than $50 million if it's growing well. I always look at how can I go from a strip mall to a sky screen? We had an offside recently with boringmarketing.com team, the SEO team and it's going really well. So there's obviously the inclination to be like, oh, we should incubate this or we should buy this company. But the CEO of the business was a skyscraper guy. He was like, guys, SEM Rush is a publicly traded company. You see their numbers. We've got this incredible software.

We need to create, we need to double down. We can unbundle the software and make it a SaaS product, sell that. And the enterprise value will be in the software. We'll just reinvest a lot of the cash flow to the software side of the business. Yes, we can go incubate other things, but why would we do that if we know that this opportunity is so large? I think the blend between agencies and software can be really interesting. A lot of people have failed in that space. What agency has tried to go out and search for a problem to make software around?

Often the hard thing is software is great at long-term enterprise value and terrible for a short-term cash flow. So the agency bridges that gap. The other thing is early software is a pain to use. You can say our agency will use it for you. Brendan Dunn is a creator who's very good at email personalization and segmentation. He has this product called Right Message, which I'm an investor in. He would get customers for the software. They wouldn't be successful and they'd cancel their account, which was not the fault of the software.

It turned out people didn't want to do the work to set it up. He had people saying, we will pay you to do all this for us. He's like, no, we run a software company, not an agency. In the last six months, he switched and said, okay, I started an agency. It's called Slice and Dice. It's all about segmentation, personalization. and we'll do all of it for you. We will use our software to do it

because we have the best software platform for this. Now he's running these launches and building amazing funnels for all of these top creators. He's applying these principles. They're paying a bunch of money up front and then they end up paying $250 to $500 a month for the software.

He's basically ensuring every customer is the perfect user of the software, which no amount of onboarding and help tutorials will ever turn someone in the perfect user. But when you're like, all right, pay me and I will set it all up for you. Turns out that works pretty well. He's getting the cash flow to build out all the features that he wants. He's getting all these flagship customers saying, I'm getting these insane results.

Here's how my funnel was converting before and then Brennan to this team rebuilt it. And now it's getting results. It's a great case study. I think the blend between software and agencies is really, really interesting, if done law. This conversation was everything I dreamed of and more with the creator architect himself, Nathan Barry. I'm looking forward to using Convericket. I'm not being paid to say this. I'm a paying customer of Converickin.

Yeah, you're paying. I watched the episode that you did with Nick Huber where at the end you guys were diving into next Converkin account and you were riffing on messaging and all of that. Another vote for like the power of content. You can throw something out there. Like, I don't know, Convercate should message things like this. And then you can get the Convercate marketing team to be like, interesting. You can intercept ideas into people's minds by putting it out there. The interesting thing about that is I began that conversation in the Beehive camp.

Uh-huh. And I sort of was like, okay, show me where I can. Merkit, did my research, played around with it, liked what I saw and I changed my decision. Converkit made sense for me because I'm looking for segmentation and some landing page stuff. I'm excited to play around with it. If you're listening to this and you haven't subscribed to my new Converkit newsletter, Greg Eisenberg, my name, G-R-E-G-I-S-E-N-B-E-R-G-G-com, sign up and get that weekly dose of inspiration. Nathan, where do you want to send people to learn more about you and Converkit?

just convertit.com to check it out. It's free to use up to a thousand subscribers and then it goes from there. Also check out the creator network, just creator network.com, which is the convertit feature that drives a ton of growth for people. And then my newsletter is just Nathan Barry and Barry's B-A-R-R-Y.com. I write a newsletter every Tuesday about whatever I'm thinking about in the creator economy. As you should. Describe myself as the architect of the creator economy. Is that too pretentious? No, no. I mean, it's, I called you it. You said it first.

If you called yourself that, I think that would be a problem. But I do like that you still write a newsletter. It's like that teacher you're talking about who still teaches. It's still showing up in class. I like that. That's cool. You got to use your own products. Work, it's a big business.

I like that. You could be out of beach somewhere and write in newsletters. I love it. Thanks for having me on. This has been fun. Anytime.