Nathan Barry
Founder & CEO, Kit. On 3 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthorhostinvestor@nathanbarry ↗LinkedIn ↗nathanbarry.com ↗
Nathan Barry is best known for bootstrapping Kit (formerly ConvertKit), an email marketing platform designed for online creators that grew past $40 million in annual recurring revenue. Before scaling the software company, he authored books including Authority, Designing Web Applications, and The App Design Handbook, and currently hosts The Nathan Barry Show.
3shows
2appearances
24statements
17resolved
12supported
0contradicted
71%fully supported
128said about them ↓ Everything Nathan Barry said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Barry: Moving to your niche's geographic hub significantly accelerates startup success
“So I would definitely recommend right in this world, right? Of someone starting as a creator or building a startup. Absolutely. Go move to wherever the hub of that, of your niche is. It could be for three months or it could be, you know, three or five years an…”
Barry: Most people are uninteresting because they lack storytelling fundamentals
“I think that most people are actually really not interesting at all, because they don't know, like, the fundamentals of a good story.”
Barry: Paid Newsletters Put Growth and Monetization in Direct Conflict
“Turns out I chose a business model that requires my best content to be behind a paywall. And then I need new content, not behind a paywall to get new readers. And like these two sides of my business are directly at odds, you know, growth and monetization are d…”
Barry: Creators Should Build One 'Skyscraper' Business Instead of Strip Malls
“And I think a lot of creators like to build strip malls. Here's what I mean. If you think about the footprint of land, what you can build, right? You're going to a strip mall and you're like, okay, I'm going to build this one little business here. Here's my ra…”
Barry: Tutorials cannot match done-for-you agency onboarding for software
“No amount of like onboarding and help tutorials will ever turn someone into the perfect user. But when you're like, all right, fine, I'll like pay me and I will just set it all up for you. It turns out that works pretty well.”
Barry: ConvertKit generates $40M ARR and sends 2.5B monthly emails
“We have forty million a year in revenue growing pretty fast, about 25, 30% a year. Let's see, 500,000. Free users, 50,000 paying customers. We send two and a half billion emails on behalf of creators every single month. And a team of 80 people spread all aroun…”
Barry: Exposing kids to global wealth disparities teaches genuine gratitude
“It's not that by staying at a Motel Six or, you know, a Holiday Inn versus the Four Seasons, that's what's going to make them grateful for what they have in the world. It's really, like, get out and show them, like, take them to Thailand, take them to, you kno…”
Barry: Execute heads-down so high-value people seek out your meetings instead
“What I love is this idea of like being heads down hermit execute mode and then resurfacing and having a body of work so that people want to connect with me, right? Cause I've built a company to this level. People will want to take my meetings. And then I'm off…”
Barry: Leverage is not inherently good; it neutrally magnifies existing outcomes
“One thing I want to point out is leverage is not good or bad. Everyone talks about it like it's good. It's not. It is a neutral force. It just magnifies whatever else is happening.”
Nathan Barry: The best way to be interesting online is pursuing transformative quests
“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.”
Barry: 30k high-net-worth subscribers beat 300k food blog readers
“Like I'd much rather take 30,000 people interested in investing and buying businesses who are higher net worth people on that one side compared to like 300,000 who are reading a food blog and nothing against food blogs. It's just like the intent or the amount …”
Barry: If AI could have written it, it is not worth publishing
“Especially with writing being done by AI right now, a filter that I like to use is if I'm writing something, could AI have written this? If yes, it's probably not worth me publishing.”
Nathan Barry: Creators only need either a compelling journey or great 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 and be compelling at storytelling. And either one of t…”
Barry: Adding entertainment value expands educational content reach
“Anything you're trying to teach. The more you can add an entertainment value to it, often the more people it's going to reach.”
Barry: Creator status has shifted from high-end gear to accessible tools
“It used to be cool to say like, oh, I had this red camera or whatever the equivalent is. In your industry, right? The absolute best of whatever, and it's polished and perfect. And now it's cool to be like, yep, I didn't do that. I did it this other way. We all…”
Barry: A Growing $10M ARR Software Company Is Worth Over $50M
“A software company doing ten million a year in revenue is worth more than fifty million dollars, right? If it's growing, growing well.”
Barry: Agencies bridge software's short-term cash flow problems
“Software is great at long-term enterprise value and terrible for a short-term cashflow. And so the agency kind of bridges that gap.”
Barry: Mark Sisson built and sold Primal Kitchen for $200M using email
“And so he ends up starting Primal Kitchen. He builds it, uses the email list to kickstart it and launch all of that. And then in two years, he sells it to Kraft Foods for two hundred million dollars”
Barry: ConvertKit began as a challenge whose initial revenue goals failed
“I said, I'm going to build a SaaS company to 5000 dollars a month in recurring revenue in six months with only 5000 dollars of my own money. And I called it the web app challenge. And that is what ultimately became ConvertKit. I didn't hit any of my goals.”
Barry: David Nihill's agency punches up keynotes by measuring laughs per minute
“What he did is he got a bunch of his comedy friends together and said, we were going to make an agency where we will punch up your business talks. You bring a talk that you've already done, and you send it to us, and we will write it no more than five percent,…”
Barry: Creative skills provide massive online leverage by capturing attention
“And it's just because, comedy, writing, teaching, all of these things are so, 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.”
Barry: High school teacher makes nearly $1M online teaching other educators
“Like I know a school teacher who makes almost a million dollars a year. Like teaching school teachers how to manage their classroom, how to show up effectively, how to create lesson plans, all of this stuff. And he actually still teaches part time at the high …”
Barry: Nick Huber makes bulk of his revenue from agencies
“He can make plenty of money off of sponsorships and digital product sales and traditional things, but he's actually making them like the bulk of his money off of two agencies with shepherd and his re costs egg.”
The other half of the tape: Nathan Barry's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 116 times in 27 episodes across the shows. 12 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 86Nick Huber 5Brennan Dunn 5Einar Volset 4Kyle Racki 3Ben Arellano 3Adam Robinson 3Codie Sanchez 2
Statements about Nathan Barry, by other people (12)
Gamito: Nathan Barry fired him two weeks before ConvertKit equity vested
“I think my equity was supposed to vest and that director position was supposed to vest the next month, like two weeks after that. So it was a very strategic move on his part.”
Dunn: ConvertKit only worked out once Nathan Barry went all in
“I mean, he was at the same point with ConvertKit where he was splitting his time. And when he went all in on ConvertKit, that's when everything started to work out.”
Barry: ConvertKit does not track CAC closely due to minimal paid acquisition spend
“In the craziness of growth, I haven't nailed it down because we've spent so little on on paid acquisition. It just hasn't been a big channel for us so far that I haven't dialed in those numbers.”
ConvertKit will price solely on subscriber count without feature add-ons
“We're trying to keep the pricing really simple and have it only be on how many subscribers you have, because that, you know, the more successful you are, the more I want to get paid and so I like that really simple pricing. So we're not going to add in, like, …”
ConvertKit does not offer employee equity, granting it only to advisors
“So there are two people that have, or we have two advisors who have shares in the company. So in all across the board, we don't do equity except in these two cases.”
ConvertKit went from 3% to 50% profit margins in five months
“And so we went from having 30,000 in the bank running at like three percent profit margins in February to by July first, we had half a million in the bank and we're operating at a 50% profit margin.”
Sanchez: ConvertKit founder Nathan Barry built multimillion net worth in Iowa
“Nathan Berry, created a company called ConvertKit, never left his hometown in Iowa, never went to school outside of Iowa, built his business in Iowa, is worth millions.”
RightMessage raised $500k from Nathan Barry, Ankur Nagpal, and Paul Singh
“We raised about a half a million from people like Nathan Berry of ConvertKit anchor of Teachable Paul Sing and others just friends of mine, frankly, who wanted to fund us.”
Gamito: Nathan Barry hired him as ConvertKit's first full-time employee
“I was Nathan's first hire at ConvertKit. I was his first full-time hire and he brought me on to do marketing and this new emerging thing, which was needed called customer success.”
Barry: ConvertKit hovered at $1,000 to $2,000 monthly revenue for two years
“So I actually launched it back in 2013. And it was kind of a side project and effort there. And it kind of floundered around for about, you know, a 1002 thousand dollars a month for almost two years.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 109
the Startup Ideas Podcast 5
BigDeal 2
2024 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2023 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2021 39 mentions in 6 episodes 7 per episode
- ConvertKit's Shocking Growth to $25m Revenue, Power of Creator Economy
- ConvertKit Raising at $196m Valuation?
- Proposify Hits $7m Revenue Driving Expansion Into 200 Enterprise Accounts with $10k+ ACV's
- Developer side project gets first 80 customers, $6k in ARR, how'd he do it?
- Tribe Hits $2.4m ARR, 300% Yoy Growth, $42m Valuation Helping Businesses Manage Their Communities
- LennysNewsletter On Building 45k List, 2.5k Slack Group, Monetization Strategies and Substack Future
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 18 mentions in 6 episodes 3 per episode
- Einar Volsett on How TinySeed Works
- RightMessage Hits $360k Revenue, Co-Founders Going All In
- FlyPlugins Hits $500k/yr For Wordpress Addons
- Tyler Tringas: How Earnest Capital Hopes to Re-Invent Startup Investing
- OrderDesk Does $60k Monthly, Profits $10k, Growing Via Shopify App Exchange
- Wingman Hits $6k MRR, 24 Y.O Uses to Track Option Trades
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2018 2 mentions in 1 episode
2017 36 mentions in 5 episodes 7 per episode
- 699: The Fired ConvertKit Co-Founder You've Never Heard Of, Father Made Me Feel "Not Worth Enough"
- EP 528: ConvertKit Hits $480k MRR, Helping 10,000 Professional Bloggers Grow Email Lists with CEO Nathan Barry
- EP 529: $10m Raised, Pre-Revenue, Notion.ai Adds AI to Email Messaging with Co-Founder Guy Suter
- 698: How this Sales Training Tool Went from $600k to $1.2M in Revenue in 1 Year
- EP 527: Proposify Hits 3200 Customers and $150k in MRR with CEO Kyle Racki
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Nathan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Kit | 0 | 0 | 86% 12/14 | full record on Top Founders → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Kit | 1 | 18 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |
| BIGDEALLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Kit | 1 | 6 | 0% 0/2 | full record on BigDeal → |