The Startup Ideas Podcast - How to Turn a Podcast into an Empire

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Today Greg is joined by Chris Hutchins, the host of All the Hacks, a podcast to upgrade your life, money, and travel. In this episode, Greg and Chris talk about the best reason to start a podcast and how to grow it way beyond sponsorship revenue. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergaLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comChris Hutchinshttps://www.allthehacks.com/SHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro4:15 - How to launch a successful podcast14:00 - How to think about listener data21:03 - How to "hack" a profitable media company37:19 - Social strategies for podcasters

Dude, you're a pro now. What defines pro? You're a podcaster for, podcaster creator for a living, right? Yes. My wife quit her job and she is now joining the company. So it is now both of us are doing this full time, which is bananas. It's really bananas because you probably don't remember the first time we met, but I do. If I had to guess

Yeah, guess I'm envisioning a room Maybe it's just the Canada thing With Aaron Burry in the room I mean, that's possible I know Aaron Burry Like many, many moons ago And I'm like, was that room in Ireland

Or was it at South By Or was it just in San Francisco? You're not wrong Okay It was in Europe It was in 2011 Le Webb, Paris. Ah, okay.

I actually don't have a good memory, but when a photo comes up, I always zap back into that reality. And I remember being in a warehouse party with you, me, you, Chris Barrett, if you know who that is. He's a PR guy. Okay. And you were talking, I think you might have recently sold your company to Google. Is that possible? Was that around then? I think maybe we hadn't started, but we knew it was happening.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, I'm this like, you know, in my head, at least I'm like country Canadian. And I meet this like, you know, fast moving Silicon Valley guy who knows everyone and who's building all this stuff and who's just, you know, really charming and no, it just like knows, you know, knows where everything is going. and I was like, I need to be in San Francisco. What am I doing? In my mind, now, fast forward to 2023, you've abandoned, like, you were at the pinnacle of Silicon Valley, building startups, raising venture, and now you're doing creation stuff. How does it feel? I was at a conference yesterday in San Francisco, and it was like a VC tech startup conference.

And I was like, do I even belong here anymore? Like, I know everyone here, yet it feels like. It's a whole different world now. I'm like, yeah. So it feels kind of fun to be at the, I mean, I'm not at the ground floor of creator world, right? Like people, it seems like millions of creators have done this before. But for me, it feels as exciting and new as it did back in, I don't know, 2008, when I first learned that people build tech companies for a living. And I was like, I need to go do that.

I find that most people don't treat the creator world like a business. So I meet all these podcasters that are like, oh, gross. Like I never really thought about it. Like monetization. Like I just thought you just, you know, go to a network and they put ads in. I didn't know there was a better, more optimal way. And so applying the principles of like high scale venture startup to a new business that hasn't really taken that is fun.

That I love. Yeah. I think there's a lot of creators who look at it just like, from an art perspective. I'm passionate about this particular thing. I'm going to create videos about it or a podcast. And then there's like this new wave of creators like yourself who know a little bit of the art but also the science.

And you're kind of putting it together and making money and also kind of do into art. Yeah. I meet a lot of creators who are much younger. They're like, you know, 24 and they're, grinding and they tell me oh god we what's a new tactic for tic-tok and i was like do you like making tic-tok videos and they're like no but like i feel like there's such an opportunity and i'm like yeah i'm not i'm not doing any i'm not doing a thing just because like it makes a lot of money i have to

want to do it so it's been what couple years since you started this journey two years in may so a couple months passed but yeah two years and could you share a little bit about like the all the hacks, empire. Like, how's it going? Yeah. So I just knew that I love going really deep on all the things. It's like, if someone asked a question, like, what's the best way to get auto insurance? I'm like, I either know the answer because I've already done it or I'm like, I need to know the answer. And I'll go spend 50 hours the next week going to learn everything you can possibly learn about auto insurance. I'll call 10 brokers. I'll get a quote from every company. I'll read the policy terms. That's just like my personality. During the pandemic, I didn't get to share any of that

with anyone. Yet I also had more time than ever to do that kind of research. And so I just felt like I needed an outlet. And so I was like, maybe I was tried a podcast. I'd started writing blog posts. And I think I wrote two. And then I stopped. And then, you know, I've been on Twitter since I got excited about tech in 2007, but I just never became like the social media person. But when I was running a startup, I went on a bunch of podcasts as a guest to talk about financial planning. And I was like, it just felt like the most natural medium for me. So started as a podcast.

Isn't starting as a podcast like the worst possible idea? Like when people ask me like, oh, hey, like I really want to start a podcast. I'm always like, before you start a podcast, you need distribution. Look, I don't think anyone should start a podcast if you don't enjoy a podcast. because, you know, for the first year, podcast made no money. So, like, yes, I might have had listeners, but, like, it was still a huge amount of work and the return was doing the podcast. So I wouldn't advise anyone to start a podcast as, like, a business opportunity in general, unless you have an audience. So if you don't have an audience, start it because you love it. I think even with a

tiny podcast, I've met a ton of people who've been able to use it as a way to ask for a conversation with someone that otherwise they wouldn't be able to. So if you really are a curious person and like learning from people, use the podcast as a platform to have those conversations, you would be amazed at how many people will say yes. Many of them will also say no. But some of them will say yes and say, yeah, I'd love to come on your podcast.

So I didn't know Morgan Housel is a writer and personal finance world. And before the podcast had launched with no listeners, I shot him a cold email and was like, hey, I got this podcast coming out. It's about life and money and optimization. Will you come on? And he's like, yes. You know, he didn't know that it had anything behind it. I've met plenty of people that have podcasts.

I have so many interesting conversations. I've built an amazing network. I don't care if there's listeners. It doesn't matter to me. So know why you're doing it. So I would say start it not for the reason of a business. But if you do start it, there are some things that I think give you an edge. So one, find a thing that you can be known for and leverage that to go on other podcasts where you're actually an

expert. And don't just send the email that I get 100 of every week that's like, hey, can I be a guest? I did a thing. Be like, hey, I listen to your show. I understand what you're looking for in a guest. And I understand the kinds of topics you talk about. Here are a couple bullet points for what I think we could talk about that would make for a really great conversation. I'm happy to do some more prep work. Whenever I get those emails, I'm like 50% of them convert. Whenever I get the email that's like, I started a business like building lawnmowers. And I'm like, that has nothing. to do with my show. Like, I don't even know why you sent this email. I don't even reply. I just archive it. But when someone says, hey, I've listened to 10 episodes of your show, and I know

that you like talking about optimizing areas of your life, I've actually optimized this one area more than anyone. Here's what I know. Here's some of the takeaways your listeners will get. Those convert really well. Funny enough, I found that the bigger the name of the guest is completely almost inverse proportional to how well my listeners like the episode. So it doesn't I care more about the content than, you know, the name of the person on the show. Really, because that's really counterintuitive. I did an episode with a guy that I couldn't even find a lot of information about, about rental car hacks.

People loved it. And then I did an episode with Tony Hawk. And it was super interesting, but I wouldn't say that episode delivered as many tactics. Tony, I think maybe I could have figured this out in advance, But he's one of those, there are some people, I compare him to Kelly Slater. And it's like, some people are like very good at what they do and they are very intentional about how they do it. And some people are just naturally so good at what they do.

And it's not because they're intentional. They're just, you know, otherworldly. Tony is the latter. It's like, what's your routine? He's like, I skateboard. And like you as Kelly said, what's your routine? He's like, I wake up at this time. I take this supplement.

I do this thing? And I'm like, do you take any supplements, Tony? and he's like, yeah, I got to take like cholesterol meds because like that's what my doctor told. You know, like, totally. But it wasn't the episode where you're like, my life has changed after listening to this and I'm going to do these seven things different. Or I now have, I've gotten emails where it's like, I listed that episode and I made $14,000. That was pretty cool. Or like my marriage is better or my business is stronger.

That's what I want to deliver. And so that honestly, people are coming to the podcast for me. They're not coming for the guest. So walk me through how this works. So basically you interview someone on the pod, it becomes popular because people are sharing it with a lot of people. Is that what makes a popular episode? A weird thing that I was talking about yesterday was that when you look at someone on social media or on YouTube and you're like, how big is their audience? You're drawn to this number that is usually their number of subscribers, their number of followers, their number of followers.

or something. Podcasters, there's no public number of followers. Okay, so the only number people share, and they don't even share it publicly that often, is how many downloads you get per episode or how many downloads you get a month. That number is completely different from the number of people who listen to the podcast or who subscribe to the podcast. So, you know, the only other metric I have is how many people are still listening at the end of the episode? So how many people did I lose? So if I compare, okay, how many people? How many people? downloaded it is a proxy for like is the topic or the title interesting and how long did they make it in the episode is a proxy for like was it a good episode do you spend a lot of time on titles

probably like 20 minutes I think it's some combo of me my wife my virtual assistant and chat GPT and like between the four of us we're like we're bouncing ideas off and then it's usually my wife and I at 9 p.m. taking all the data from all those sources and then we both are like, that's it. And that's the title. But I don't like A, B, test the title to see which one's going to perform better or I have a data backed opinion on a lot of things because I like using analytics. I don't know what on titles. You look at Tim Ferriss, his titles are like four lines long. And you look at some other shows and the titles are like eight words. And you ask them why. And they're like, yeah, I think it's just so much better.

The SEO of podcasting, like almost nothing is indexed except your show title. So, you know, you could argue that really long titles will help people searching for random things in the app store. So they're not wrong about putting that in there. Spotify will index your summary of your description of the episode, but Apple only indexes the title. Quick interruption from me. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you're getting a little bit. getting any value you need to come to YouTube and subscribe to the Where It Happens podcast YouTube channel.

I promise you the experience is richer, more interesting. So if you're getting any value, just stop what you're doing. Open up the YouTube app. Go to the website and press subscribe at where it happens on YouTube. And if you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed, what are you doing? go press subscribe. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show. So if you want to start a podcast and you want to create a popular podcast, what recommendations do you have for people in terms of things that they can do to increase their probability of

success? Honestly, I think the most important thing is to find some way to determine if you actually have like good content because you could spend all the time in the world growing a podcast, but it's going to be, people aren't going to stick around. It's going to be so much harder. So you need to find if you have a good podcast. So first off, can you actually explain why your podcast is different to other people? Like, try that, you know, try to see if you can convince people about why your podcast is different. Because it's early enough in podcasting that there's room for more podcasts. It's late enough that you can't just, like, be a success because you have one. And very often I meet people and they're like, my podcast is great because I'm going to interview

people and they're going to share all these awesome things. And I'm like, okay, well, there are a lot of podcasts that do that. What's different about your podcast? Like, why is someone going to listen to it? Do you have a different perspective? Like, do you and you have a co-host and you do interviews in a different way? Are you only interviewing a specific person in a niche where there aren't a lot of people doing that content? Like, what is different about it? So you could, but you could have a different podcast and still suck at podcast. So like, you might think I'm crazy, but I don't really look at my metrics for for my podcast. So I look at it every three months and I just look at downloads and which which platforms. Like once every three months, I'm like, okay, am I going in the right

direction? I'll look at it for 10 seconds and then I'll close the tab. I don't think you're crazy. First of all, I think intuitively I could sense if the podcast is doing well because people are like tweeting episodes. I'm getting messages about, hey, I listened to this episode. It was really dope. And I realized when I first started the podcast, I was really, really into the metrics and I was trying to optimize everything. And it was just a lot less fun for me. Now I'm just kind of like, I'm just going to invite interesting people. They don't have to have the biggest audiences in the world. I'm just going to come up with the title that I think speaks to what this thing is. I'm going to post it on Twitter or on email

when I think it makes sense. And like my co-host, I lost like six or eight months ago who has almost, you know, more than a million, one point five million collective followers or maybe even more, two million collective followers. So I saw like a drop in downloads. And I just look every three months and it's just been steadily increasing, you know, and that's all I care about. Like am I missing anything?

Should I be? No. I don't even care anymore about downloads for me. The only thing I care about now that this is a business, this is like how. we pay our bills, I'm like, are my sponsors renewing? That's the only metric I care about. And like, if our sponsors are not renewing, that means something's not working. Are we not growing fast enough? Are the reads not good? Like, if you treat it like a business, do I care, like if I had half the downloads, but I just kept all the people that are so excited and are

supporting our sponsors, that's fine. Like, I'm doing the podcast not to be a celebrity, but I like doing it every week. And I like, and it takes time. So I need it to make enough money that I don't need to go get another job because then I couldn't do it every week. So I don't think you're wrong. But I think if someone listening is like, I have a podcast and I want to, you know, try to figure out what topics people like, there are ways that you could look at the analytics to try to figure out which episodes are doing better or which episodes do people listen to longer. I couldn't tell you on my own show, like which episodes people listen to longer because I haven't looked at it because it's not a huge priority for me. The way I decide what I do for episodes is like, what am I interested in? And like,

if I am interested in a new topic now, I'll do an episode on that. But if you're trying to figure out, can I get this to a place that I could quit my job, you probably want to look at those metrics because it's going to be really important. I don't know, man. Like, I hear stories about, like, I hear stories about Joe Rogan. And, like, he spends a lot of time, of course, thinking about the guest and a lot of focus on the guest when he's interviewing the guest. but from what I understand, the guy is not really looking at metrics at all. He's just focusing on who's interesting to interview and then having really interesting conversations.

And I wonder if that's just the best way to do it. Like if the guy who is the most successful podcast of all time is barely looking at metrics. I wouldn't say let the metrics dictate what you do, but let the metrics dictate whether you have a business or you have a passion project. And maybe you want to quit and just go all in and hope that it works. But at some point, you can't go to sponsors to monetize your show unless you have people that are listening to it. So you have to at some point, look. Joe Rogan also has the luxury of having the largest podcast. So like he doesn't care if it goes up or down by 10% because he's probably making, what was his deal?

Like 100 million. It was like, you know, ridiculous amount of money. So yeah, if I was making that much money, I would never even look at it over. Who cares? Like it doesn't matter. How well does Dave Ramsey do? Oh. That is a question I don't know the answer to, but that dude has a lot of money.

Right? Yeah, like a lot. Graham Stephan is a YouTuber that interviewed him, and they went a little deep on his finance. I mean, he has products and courses and books, and his family has their own podcast, and he's built this whole media empire that I don't even think it makes sense to talk about in the same realm. Well, I think it's similar in the sense of Dave Ramsey in the U.S. is one of the leading, if not the leading financial advice guy.

I think his biggest channel is the radio, I think. At least he used to be on the radio a bunch. And I know that he has like an office bill. Yeah, he has a ton of real estate. He bought so much real estate. Like in cash. It's like essentially a skyscraper. It's crazy.

Yeah. I just searched Dave Ramsey or Ramsey Solutions revenue and the numbers are, they range from 20 to 515.6 million. So he's doing a lot. But my point there was just that I don't think it's not the pod. Like if you have a podcast and you don't aspire for it to be more than a podcast, you're not going to be at Dave Ramsey revenue numbers. That ceiling I gave was like the ceiling for people. Like, look at Tim Ferriss, has a podcast, has sponsors, but hasn't tried to turn it into anything else.

Like, it is a podcast. He has a newsletter. He's not trying to make a company. He's not trying have memberships. He's not trying to sell merch. He's not, you know, he's not doing all the other stuff. And I think those kinds of businesses kind of cap out in the podcasting world with a handful of extreme outliers at the like, you know, 10, 15 million range. I got to think that a Tim Ferriss is making seven to 12 million dollars a year on his podcast. Yeah, I think his sponsor page on his website says, here's how much a cost to sponsor the podcast. So you can do the math.

Here's the cost to sponsor. How many sponsors in each episode? How many episodes a year? So I think it's in that range. And I think if I'm him and I'm making, call it $10 million, dollars a year with pretty little costs and he gets to have interesting conversations. He does it his way. You were on the pod and he made you not pee for three hours, you know?

Like to be fair, he gave me the offer, but we were having this crazy, interesting conversation. And then next thing you know, is three hours. And I was like, I have to go to the bathroom. Like, I just can't do it. I just peed myself. You know, I have this great vision because I just love helping people optimize their lives. And there may be a point at, which helping more and more and more people do it is not worth the payoff for me.

But, you know, I spent. I was surprised to hear that, to be honest. Like coming from, you know, you were at wealth front before, pretty big company now. You know, raised hundreds of millions of dollars. You used to work at Google, big company. I wonder if the prompts almost like, how can I have max 10 employees but have revenue per employee be something crazy, $100 million per employee. Yeah, the struggle here is.

The most optimal way to put money into a retirement account in the U.S. It's like solo 401Ks are amazing. You can control all the features. You can have a thing called the mega backdoor Roth where you can put basically like $60,000 into your retirement accounts with tax benefits. But the rule of a solo 401k is you can have no employees. So in my mind, I'm like, how can I build a massive company with zero W2 employees other than your spouse?

Your spouse can be a W2 employee, but no other, no other employees. So I'm not going to decide the fate of what we're building on the tax advantage of a 401k, but it was a cool exercise in my mind, which is like what you just said, except instead of 10, it's zero. Right. I like how you're like, yeah, I'm not going to decide the fate of my company based on this tax advantage account, but I'm not not. going to do it. Yeah, it's like, I like getting deals. Yeah, it would be on brand.

Yeah. Yeah. Right now we have a bunch of people working on different aspects. I have someone helping with sponsors. I have a virtual assistant. I've got a production crew and they're all 1099. So I think it's possible. What other companies, podcasts, communities do you see and you're like, those guys are doing a cool job. I love what Peter Attia is doing. He is a doctor. And the thing he's doing, which I don't have another business to fund my life enough to do, is he flipped the model on its head. And he says, hey, pay to be a member of our podcast.

And I'm going to go to all these brands. And I'm going to say, hey, I'm not going to charge you for me to promote. You know, normal traditional sponsor deal is, hey, brand, I will talk about you to my audience, and you will pay me a rate of X dollars per thousand people that download. And that rate is somewhere between $20 and $50. So he goes to brands and says, hey, give me an amazing deal. Funnel all the money you would want into the discounts that you're offering my members. So I had a cool episode with David Chang, the chef of a restaurant.

in New York called Momofuku and a bunch of others. And when we got connected, I found out he is, I don't know what the right word is, like a part owner in a company called Any Day, which makes microwave cookware. And during the pandemic, he was like, got obsessed with cooking at home and is kind of more of a home studio cook now and loves cooking a microwave. And with this company, they create a whole line of cookware. And they were like, hey, we want to give a deal to your audience. And they're like, we could do an affiliate deal. And I was like, great, we'll do an affiliate deal for everyone. You get 15% off. But for members, you get 20% off and I don't want the affiliate.

So that's like a slow way to transition into it is like as a member, you get a better deal than everyone else. And there are some people that are like, wait a second, at extra 5% is going to save me to cost the membership. So I'll just join. And hopefully before the year of their membership might expire, we've launched a bunch of other things. And they're like, wow, I keep saving more money.

This is so cool. Yeah, I think what you're touching upon is this shift towards like, member-only community experiences, which I think is where things are going. It's like, how do I drive as much value as possible for this member experience? Just like, benefit, benefit, benefit, benefit, benefit, benefit, benefit, benefit, benefit, benefit, benefit, so that like $10, $20 a month makes it worth it. I saw on Twitter today, Andrew Wilkinson, the founder of Tiny Capital, has like a Twitter subscription and it's like, I don't know, $40 or something, $30 or $40 a month.

And it took a lot of money, I think, for a Twitter subscription, you know, for premium content for a really busy guy who might not, you know, be tweeting in this private only area that much. But then I started reading, you know, he's going to like pick someone random from his audience every month and have a 30 minute conversation and record the audio and post it. And there's like, just like 10 different benefits where once you're reading like benefit seven and eight, you're kind of like, all right, like swipe my credit card. Yeah. And then you're, and when you first said that, I was like, oh, I hate this idea of all this gated content.

But then I realized he's kind of just hacking the platform. He's like, the platform is supposed to be sign up so that people pay for premium content. He's like, sign up. You might, get these audio conversations as premium content, but he's adding more to it. And that's where I think it's interesting. And he's gamifying it too, right? He's saying like there's almost like a slot machine nature to it, which is you could be one of the one in 500 people this month who has that conversation with me on Zoom. And the reality is that's probably 90% of the reason why people are joining, they're playing in the casino of Andrew Wilkinson. So I did this. So I used to work at Wealthfront. And the Wealthfront cash account right now has, I think it's a 4.55% APY in the U.S. But if you refer someone to the cash account, they give you a boost of half a percent up to 5.05%. So I was like, well, I want a boost. So I was like, this is a great product. I believe in it. I put my money in it. So I talked about it. And you can only get four referrals. And each referral I think works for three months.

So I told everyone, I was like, look, you can get this boost. Here's my referral link. And I got four. And I was like, crap, I don't want anymore. I can't get anymore. Every person that uses my link is going to just be a total. They'll get the half a percent and no benefit to me. So I pinged all of our members and I said, hey, if any member has a wealth front account

and they want to boost, go to this little air table form and put it in. And I still haven't found a site. I can't believe Bitley doesn't do this, but I found this site Nimble Links. If someone knows a better one, let me know. But Nimble Links works for now. And you go in and you type all these. referral codes and it just it you get to choose whether it's random or like equally distributed so I chose the redirect evenly and now anytime someone goes to this URL that I'll even say it here all the hacks

com slash wf cash wealthfront cash WF cash you'll just randomly get a referral link from one of our members and so I've had our members reach out to me and be like I'm now earning 50% more and this is my down payment let's say they're saving you know $200,000 uh for a down payment for a house they're going to earn an extra $1,000 a year. Insane. Like they paid $99 for an annual membership to all the hacks, and they're going to make $1,000 a year from four referrals. And so we're now, now I'm like,

what are all the other brands out there that have interesting referral programs? Credit cards are an interesting one. There are some cards where the referral deal is way better than the deal you get anywhere else. So let's collect all these, there was a window where Amex Platinum had 150,000 point referral deal. So I went to members and I said, send me all your Amex platinum referral links. In the pod, I was like, hey, there's this awesome deal to get 150,000 Amex points with a platinum referral, click this link, and now it's all my members are getting all the bonus points from

these things. So I'm like giving them a distribution channel to earn or get perks or get referral stuff. And they would have no platform to do that. I don't have those referral links. Like when I log into my MX account, my referral for the platinum is like 50,000 points. So nobody wants to use my referral link. And so that's like a cool thing. So I push creators to think of unique ways that are on brand with them to come up with,

you know, products or services or experiences that are really, you know, tied into their stuff that they could offer to people. And I think people are thriving for that. I give one more example. It's great. So I, and this is an example of two things. One, I started my podcast. It was an interview show.

and it was just me interviewing people about areas of their life to optimize. And it was great. I loved it. And then a few things happened. I was like, gosh, sometimes I couldn't find a guest that I thought could match the level of depth I've gone on something. So when we bought a fractional home, we bought like an eighth of a vacation home from a company called Picasso. I was like, I wonder what all of the different ways there are to buy a vacation home. I was like, I wanted to talk to someone whose research time shares, you know, vacation clubs.

the Inspirato Pass, everything. I couldn't find a single person that had done more research than me. And I was like, crap, I can't do this episode. And then I was like, what if I just do the episode? No guest. Because I've already done all the research. So I did that episode, and I was like, I should do this more. Whether you're trying to do it or not, you know, be it the person who's getting

$1,000 a year for doing very little, like they're going to see a new all the hacks episode. and pop up, and they're just going to be like, yeah, of course I'm listening to this. That's my boy, right? Like, it's about reverse engineering. That's my boy or that's my girl, whatever, right? And I think it's really easy to follow other creators and just like kind of copy what they're doing and be like, oh, this person's doing a subscription. I should do a subscription.

This person's doing a paid sub-stack. I should do a paid sub-sac. But it's really hard to be like, how do I just cram as much value as possible to people? and just like follow your curiosity to what you think that they're going to want and just kind of test, get their feedback, iterate. Yeah, get feedback is a big thing. We did a survey and I was like, how do I make sure podcast listeners fill out a survey? Right.

It's very, it's a lot to get a podcast listener to do anything. They're like, maybe they're on a run. So I'm like, I create this URL, all the hacks.com slash survey. And then I said, okay, here's what I'm going to do. My audience loves travel, points, miles. So I was like, I'm going to personally transfer 10,000 capital one points to anyone who takes to someone who takes a survey. And then I also cashed in some points for two United tickets anywhere in North America,

Caribbean, Hawaii. And I was like, I'm going to pick someone that fills out the survey and they're going to get two free tickets on United. Someone else is going to get some capital one points. I reached out to some sponsors. Vori's like, we're going to give a $100 gift card to someone. Now all of a sudden there's like tangible things you can win for. from taking a short survey. And I didn't ask people, what do you want me to do? I was like,

what are you passionate about? What are you excited about? Like, what do you, you know, questions to try to really get at it, get at it. And that was kind of what inspired some of this. People like, I love traveling. I love unique experiences. And I was like, ooh, people want to travel and get unique experiences. Yeah, I could interview someone and talk about how they set it up. What if we just gave it to them. So I made this crazy spreadsheet where I put like 50 credit cards in, what they earn in all the categories. And I put how much money I spend in every category. And as you checked the credit cards, it would go in and say, which one has the best earning

for each category? How many points will I earn? And it tells you at the end, based on the one to 15 credit cards you picked, how many points per dollar am I earning? So I put online, I created a convert kit, like product page. And I said, pay whatever you want, a dollar. Like any, if any, I spent enough time on this that if you don't think it's worth a dollar, fine.

Like, don't, don't buy it. We have like 100 people buy us, buy like a, a, buy like a, a Google sheet. You know, like, so, and if you remember, I was like, just log in and I put a link right here in the member dashboard. So like, by the way, I love that model, by the way, the pay what you want model. It's the, I call it the, the Radiohead in Rainbows model. It must have been in like 2004, like the peak of pirating music.

Radiohead was like, go to this website, download this album for free, but download it from us. and if you like the album, how about you pay something? And they did an analysis at the end what the average person paid. And the average person paid like $7 or $8. And when you look at that versus what they would have sold the album for, which I think was like $9.99, like they actually made more money because they got more distribution, free distribution. So they were stoked.

The only thing that I think is crazy is that one person I was looking to, through, we had all these sales. The person who paid the most paid $100. But the membership is $99. So I emailed them and I was like, you could have gotten this for free if you became a member. So like, let's just get you in the membership. Yeah, but that's such a smart. It's actually, I don't know who that was, but that's actually such a smart way to get on your

radar. Like if you want to get on some busy person's radar and they have like a pay what you want thing, pay as much as you can. Yeah. I've heard of people that did this for maybe it was Huberman Lab or maybe it was the Founders podcast, but they were like, we have this pro tier where you can pay anything and someone just like, it was like, it's $10 a month or $100 a year and someone just paid $10,000 or so. That's what I wish I can do on Twitter subscriptions.

On Twitter subscriptions, you have to set the amount you want to get paid. Big miss Elon Musk. Yeah. Like big, big miss. Stripe actually has a way to do pay is what you want, but not on a recurring basis. That's right. I mean, Stripe has a way to do it. They just don't have a UI.

They have these cool payment links, but they can't do pay what you want on a recurring basis. I think pay what you want is the new ad to cart in our world and the creator world. Because when you build all this goodwill with communities, you're going to get a bunch of whales, spend a lot of money. The thing that I want to figure out, I don't know. haven't seen anyone. You gave me this example with Radiohead and maybe it'll just work. So maybe I'll test this next. But what I wanted was get it for free and then pay what you want after. Because it's hard when you're giving someone something that they don't know what the experience is like to get them to even know what it would be worth. You know, like, what is this spreadsheet worth to me?

I don't know. So the way I did it was I made a loom video and I walked through it all and I was like, here's exactly how it works. But what I wanted was like, it's almost like a tip at a restaurant. It's like off your card. And like we know you're committed to pay something. And then a day later, we say like, do you want to, you know, what do you want to pay? Or it's like, what do you, you know, from one to five stars, what do you rate this? And like five stars is this amount of money.

Four stars is this amount of money. I like that. I've seen some that say like the average people pay this. this. Like on average, people pay this. Right. But I just think there's not a good, easy way to do the payment after the fact. That's right. It's almost like, pay a dollar, and then I'm going to hit you up and ask you if you want to pay more later. Because I really only want you to pay me whatever you take it's worth. You can't say pay a dollar. It has to be, you have to remove all the friction. And you just have to trust that people.

I'll try it. I got, I got so many different spreadsheets and notion boards. that I've like researched something on. You're sitting on a gold mine, dude. You're literally sitting on a gold mine. Stay tuned for round two of all of these updates. So before we bounce, I ask you a lot of questions. Do you have one question for me? One?

One. You got one. So I want to get your take on something that I'm dealing with, which is I have this podcast. There's a lot of great content. I've decided that each time I do a podcast on a topic, I'm going to translate that to a newsletter version of it. And I feel like newsletter and podcasts I have down. And I am awful at you, like, creating any value for anyone on, let's call it, just for the scope of this, since I only get one question, you know, social. I feel like you understand that world. Like, what should I be doing?

Should I just ignore it and focus on the platforms that are feel natural? Or am I totally missing out on things? I think my instinct is I hate repurposing. Like I don't think people want to watch a clip of a podcast as much as they want to watch something that's natively made for that platform. But at the same time, that's just like 10x the work. So am I crazy for not clipping my show and putting it on social? Am I more crazy if I pay someone to do that? because I always see these tweets about how profitable all like the same people are like,

hey, use my clipping agency for $5,000 a month. It's amazing. Are the same people that are like, I love running this clipping agency that's a 90% margin business. So on the clipping agency bit, by the way, we looked at buying some of the bigger clip, clip agencies. And what we learned was their turn is so, so high. Okay. And their turn is so high because people don't see results.

Like their sell is, hey, take. this podcast, Chris, you're ready doing a podcast. We'll just clip it up. You'll have to do no work. We're going to put some Alex Hermose style like captions on it. And you're, you know, you'll be at 100,000 YouTube subscribers in six months. You try it and it doesn't work. And I've been guilty of this too. Like, I've tried it and it doesn't work. My take on short clips is specifically with podcasts, but it extends to other areas too is the era of repurposing clips is basically over unless you have a crazy huge guess like a Tim Ferriss. Not worth it. If I were you, like if you, you know, look at me, like I get, I don't know, 10 to 50 million tweet impressions every single month.

And it's not even that that's a lot of impressions. it is, but the important part is I could share links. And like, I haven't checked, but I probably, I probably send 50 to 100,000 visits per month, at least, to different things that I'm trying to promote, be at my podcast, my email newsletter, products that I want to sell. And like, to me, I look at your Twitter and it's like, I can't, I honestly can't believe, given that you're like who you are and what you've done and that you've built social products in the past like that you you you have you have you that it's such a graveyard and you have so much content

that you can all you have to do is figure out how to put it in two lines or one line bangers or long form threads now you probably if I were you what I would do is I would find a writing partner maybe it's your wife, maybe someone else, and just get them to ask you questions and go through a bunch of old newsletters and interviews and just try to, how can I write these ideas in one line and just try to have like a thousand of them

and just have a thousand one liners? And then what I would do is I'd probably take 20% of them or a third of them and create images specifically for those one-line bangers to explain the points better. And also because the Twitter algorithm favors images right now. But like infographic-y kind of images, not like a random stock photo. No. Infographics-y, like images that actually are cool and interesting to look at that also help support and explain the idea that you're trying to get across. And if you did that, like, look at, you know, people, who's done in the past?

like people like Jack Butcher. I don't know if you know who that is. His whole thing is visualized value. He has a community called visualized value. And he would do these black and white images daily on Twitter and Instagram or almost daily. And like during the pandemic went from like zero to 200,000 followers pretty consistently. And it was just because he took complex ideas. He bowled it down to a simple concept and used an image to explain it.

And that's exactly what you can be doing with all the hacks. in your personal brand. I love it. It's funny because I know a guy named Brian Ferraldi who does this in investing, and I love his content. He's great. Yeah, that's what you should be doing.

There's a higher likelihood that that person that's excited to help with a project like this listens to your show than mine. So if that's you, reach out to me. Chris at chushens.com? Chris at all the hacks.com. Nice.

Hit him up. Also, good idea on the, on the podcast survey, if you're listening to this, just DM me on Twitter what you hate about this podcast and what you like about it. And what would be a cool experience to do with you? What am I missing? What if someone's not on Twitter?

You've got to give them more ways to get in front of you. Maybe your audience is all on Twitter. I think my audience is like very much not on Twitter. Or you could comment on the YouTube. On YouTube, I read all the comments. Comment on this video. Where could people find all the half, and your whole empire that you're building.

Go to all the hacks.com. Fortunately, I think the name is a double-edged sword. People love it. It's exciting. And brands are like, I don't know if I want to be around that brand. But for now, that's a brand. It's easy to find.

Love it. Thanks, Chris. All right. Thanks for having me.