The Exchanges, every show

Q an ideas video that did 260,000 views, and so we have, we have a bunch in the six figures, but most of them, you know, they get to five or 10 K, and then they're like, bam, even though we have a 115,000. So, do you, do you agree with that assessment of, like, email and podcasts is more the owned media, or how, how do you think about it?

A I split the, uh, platforms into two buckets. I call them discovery platforms and relationship platforms. Discovery platforms are anything with an algorithm where there's like inherent mechanism for connecting new consumers to content. And in relationship platforms, there is no mechanism. It's decentralized. So on the relationship side, there's only a few, and I agree with you. It's email, podcasting, SMS, and private communities. So to me, the game is Using discovery platforms to reduce your dependency on discovery platforms is basically like, I'm going to go over here. I'm going to perform for the algorithm so that I can get people to my email list or so that I can get people to my podcast or private community. And some people do SMS really successfully, especially in the e-com space. But, um, that is kind of the game today is to say, I don't want to depend on discovery platforms because that can be, it's certainly going to be changed if not completely eliminated from being useful to you. But the longer that you can leverage it to not need it, the stronger your actual leverage becomes.

AI assessment note: “So on the relationship side, there's only a few, and I agree with you.”

Q And with your, with the lab and specifically, what are the price points and how many people are taking it? And how much revenue does that bring in?

A I've taken some interesting design choices with the lab. Uh, we have 200 members because that is the cap that I put on it. When we got to be about 50 members, I said, I'm actually gonna keep this at 200 people. Um, so we, we hit that 200 member cap at, uh, in February of this year. Um, there were two tiers of membership. There was a standard tier, which was community access and access to all the courses. Then there was a VIP tier, which was The standard tier plus a quarterly one-on-one call with me. Uh, the standard tier is priced at 1999 and the VIP tier is priced at 29 99. So that part of the lab.

AI assessment note: “we have 200 members... standard tier is priced at 1999 and the VIP tier”

Q And you were in the startup world for a while. Did you start your own company or did you work in, in the venture backspace?

A There's a founder in, uh, he's based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and he had started a ticketing company, kind of a StubHub competitor. And he's going through an accelerator and he brought me in and calls me a co-founder generously. Uh, and I, I will take that and say, sure, because I was basically there from day two, and we built that. We, we raised some angel funding, both from the accelerator and then some angels afterwards. Uh, we were acquired about two years after that for a non-life-changing sum of money. And it was an awesome experience, uh, for the most part. And it was also intense, and I looked at that and I said, I am not going to do that again unless I really love whatever problem that company is solving. So then I took a product management role at a company that had gone through a series C at that point in the healthcare space. And they raised from this venture firms called drive capital here in Columbus, Ohio. And they were, I guess, technically the second investment out of their first fund. Those guys came from Sequoia and there were unicorn hunting, you know, like they were trying to build unicorns and show that you could do that from the Midwest. So there was so much pressure on the founder of that company. And I was in a leadership position where I was close enough to kind of see what his life was like. And I thought, man, that was even worse than my first experience…

AI assessment note: “he brought me in and calls me a co-founder generously”

Q Yeah, I like that. And that will automatically force you to Do it, and if you do it enough, then you may start to get better at it, right? That's the idea, is repetition.

A Yeah. You know, and we go through phases. Last year was a challenging mental health year for me, and what I realized at the end of December, after like a very intense December, was I haven't done any strength training for like six months, and so I put together a plan with my friend Claude, and, uh, Claude created some workout plans for me, and since then I haven't missed more than one day of working out, and Now, it's just automatic. I, I start to feel itchy if I haven't worked out that day, and like, the pendulum can probably swing too far in that direction as well, but by and large, if I'm trying to make a positive lifestyle or identity change, building a string of successful days doing that thing has always served me.

AI assessment note: “building a string of successful days doing that thing has always served me.”

Q So, can you give me examples of folks in your community of, like, the niches that they're selling to? You know, your audience is creators who want to educate, my audience is B to B SaaS founders, right? Like, what are, what are three or four others that are some off the wall? I mean, I just have to imagine there's, like, awesome little niches.

A Yeah. Uh, I like going to just our members directory and scrolling. So here's a guy who teaches people how to learn the fiddle. Here's a guy who teaches people how to get the most out of every native Apple application on their, their computer. Here's a woman who's a world champion pole dancer who teaches people movement. Here's a photographer from Iceland. We had another woman who, uh, teaches people how to run marathons or like how to train for marathons if they're on plant-based diets. So it's like super specific. We had, we had a guy who taught high school defensive line coaches how to train their players to be more effective. You know, like it can be extremely specific and narrow, but a lot of the times the pathway is these people were known for being good at something. And so they started working with people one on one. And at some point that became unsustainable because there was just more Demand for that time than supply or interest in, in doing one-on-one consultation. So that kind of became the beginning of content creation.

AI assessment note: “Here's a guy who teaches people how to learn the fiddle.”

Q Yeah, I would also, I would also argue that, and I wish Rick would, would have said this in the book, but it's often not about distributing to what people want, but it's distributing what the algorithm wants, right? So you're not just trying to please people, you're trying to please an algorithm.

A Well, and that's, That's if your strategy really weighs on the discovery platform side, right? Um, for a long time, I just didn't do discovery platforms at all. To my detriment. Like it, it took me way too long to realize, ah, I should actually prioritize more time creating on social media instead of just doing email. Because the best way to grow an email list is not by writing great emails, unfortunately. Like it's by getting top of funnel elsewhere, introducing them to the point, to the fact that you have, have email. Um, because if you are really predicated on the discovery platforms, you do have to play towards what's working there. You know, what, how is the game being played? You're just not gonna win on Instagram if you're not doing reels right now, you know.

AI assessment note: “That's if your strategy really weighs on the discovery platform side, right?”

Q you and where you help them get to and how they became successful. And the reason I ask is as a creator myself, I'm always trying to figure out how are creators succeeding? You know, what are the tools that they're using? How are they structuring their content? How are they, uh, you know, what are the hacks that they're using? So, um, Anything you can share is, is helpful.

A I think so. Let me, let me lay out some, some frameworks here that I think are helpful, at least in understanding how I view the space. So in the creator economy, quote unquote, I think it's, it's kind of a dichotomy between people on the education side and people on the entertainment side. And of course there's some in between, um, people who are both educational and entertaining. But broadly, I see that as the dichotomy and the creator economy space. I work with a lot more of folks on the education side, people who have some sort of earned insight, some sort of experience, and now they're saying, I want to teach people who need to learn what I know, and I'm trying to build a business on the back of that. Um, ironically, what I still see as the biggest issue for most creators who enter my world, it's not, uh, creating good work and it's often not even just getting attention to their work. A lot of them don't know how to turn that attention into a business. They have like a really, I guess, immature view as in like, it hasn't been fleshed out of what like a revenue model looks like, how they actually turn this into a business. And a lot of times they come in and they think that attention Is sold to advertisers and that's kind of it. So a lot of the folks that have entered my world, I've helped them on the revenue side building out. Okay. What, what levers do I pull so that I am…

AI assessment note: “I've helped them on the revenue side building out. Okay. What, what levers do I pull”

Q Can you talk more about your top of the funnel strategy? So, uh, how are you thinking about, of course you're capped right now, but I imagine you're going to have new products and maybe open up that cap in the future. How do you think about attracting audience and then converting those into, you know, paying customers?

A Yeah, I, I look at it now as, well, I think as a creator, there are two types of platforms you can be creating on. I call them discovery platforms and relationship platforms. Discovery platforms have built in discovery mechanisms to the platform, uh, social media, YouTube search engines. These platforms, these machines are incentivized to introduce New viewers to your content because, because they're ad support and it keeps them on platform relationship platforms. You own that distribution. It's email, it's podcasting, it's SMS and it's private communities. And so my strategy is to top of funnel is the discovery platform, but I very quickly, as quickly as I can want to get them into my relationship platform, my main relationship platform, which is email. And then I actually tried to grow the email to push people towards The podcast. That's like at the bottom of my platform funnel, if you will. So increasingly in the discovery, uh, platform part of my business, I'm actually leaning on YouTube more. I'm finding that YouTube is becoming one of the largest sources of new audience because YouTube has an incredible algorithm. We've started to find like good content market fit with our podcasts, um, on YouTube and they're really high quality, which is awesome. Um, and so YouTube both gets people into email, even though there's not a great pathway for that. And it introduces people to …

AI assessment note: “top of funnel is the discovery platform, but I very quickly... get them into my relationship platform”

Q thing about themselves, like, that's not me, I'm not super creative. So if someone Does think that their product or their space is conducive to founder-led marketing, they kind of have to get over that. So I'm curious, two-part question, like, how did you get past that in yourself, and maybe what would you say to a founder who's convinced they're just not creative, right, or not a marketing person?

A Yeah, I remember this very distinctly. So in January, 2017, I started working with a coach who was here locally, and a bunch of my friends had worked with this person. They're like, Chris really got me unstuck. He helped me get out of my own head and move forward, and I didn't even really know what outcome I was looking for. I just knew, like, I'm not happy in this job, and I feel like I'm probably gonna leave it at some point, but I also feel like I'm stuck, so let's see what this experience is like. In one of the early pieces of homework he gave me, he said, go out for a walk, take a, like a pad and paper with a pen, do not bring your phone, do not bring headphones, you just need to go for a walk, and at some point you will start to hear, like, whatever tape is playing in your head, and I want you to write that down. And that's what I wrote down. I, I realized that I had this narrative that I was not, uh, an artist. I was not a creative person. And I felt like I didn't have much to contribute because of that. And the second half of that homework assignment was, okay, what if we, instead of believing that was true, what would it look like to believe the opposite? Like, how can we make you believe that you are creative and that you do have something to contribute? And The, the answer to that was, well, you need to create some evidence. So I decided I like writing. I know that a…

AI assessment note: “how can we make you believe that you are creative... create some evidence”

Q to do founder-led marketing, and they have five hours a week or something, and they don't like being on camera, how should they think about producing content? Like, what is the minimum viable version of, of building an audience? I brought up video, but I mean, there's written, and there's audio, and there's video. Is, is video where it's at these days? Like, how do you think about all this?

A I think there's probably more consumers of video than there are of text. I think that is probably true. So law of big numbers would be on your side, but it's a very competitive game. And there are like very specific points of leverage within video. You have to be really good at the hook in that video. And there are, I would say technically three different types of hooks. Like there's the visual hook, what I see on screen, there's what you're saying. And then, uh, there's even like text on screen. So it's like what you're reading. So what you're reading, what you're seeing as the backdrop of that and what's being said. So there's just so many points of failure. If you're not like really bought into winning that game, that it's going to be hard. I actually think, especially for folks who are building companies and you have a little bit of a budget, if you have a little bit of a budget, probably the fastest way to get results is to go and hire like one of the best agencies you can find. And I'm not big on hiring agencies most of the time, because I think the incentives of the business model are misaligned longterm. But if you hire like the best and they're going to be expensive, you're basically hiring them to download a lot of knowledge to you and your team very quickly. You don't even have to hire them to do The work itself necessarily. You could say, can I hire you to help trai…

AI assessment note: “I think there's probably more consumers of video than there are of text.”