177. A Look Behind Building A 7-Figure Business Through Social Media & A Personal Brand

We've ultimately built a seven figure business. Ten star, thousand members, leading research company in Australia, working with some of the biggest brands in crypto in Australia. All off the back of social media. It's crazy. Each channel is different. What you post on Instagram doesn't work on Twitter, doesn't work on YouTube, doesn't work on podcasts. It all is different. You need to be contextual to each platform. The right language user isn't going on Instagram to want to learn about a really complex layer 2 blockchain like they don't even fly for who's about that?

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me as Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us getting a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia. If you like the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a rating review or share it around with a friend. That's how we grow the podcast and bring it back to you every single week. Completely advertising free, commission free affiliate free to give you the insights you need to take on board to win in crypto and business. And today we're doing a look behind building a seven figure business through social media through our own use case. And I've got the EBITDA hat on today. Bergs earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization.

Hey, got it. Well done.

Now explain what all of those mean. Please don't.

Um, but basically I've been doing this presentation a couple of times recently just with builders and this podcast probably goes out to those listeners in better bergs that are looking to build a personal brand or looking to build a business. Or maybe you're in business and you're trying to grow your social media because ultimately we've been building now Collective Shift for nearly four years. It's our fourth birthday coming up in October which is absolutely crazy and we're having a fourth birthday for those that are interested. It's a bit of an invite only.

Event and you know, we do have a couple of spots for Bennett Berg's listeners. So if you're interested, feel free to DM Bergs or I on on Instagram or, or Twitter and we can see what we can do. But yeah, I've been full on doing content now for what, burks two years, maybe a bit over Two years now, the podcast been going for two years, so it's probably about that. And we've ultimately built now a seven figure business. Ten staff, a thousand members, leading research company in Australia, working with some of the biggest brands in crypto in Australia, all off the back of social media, which is crazy and really at the end of the day, the ultimate goal for us. And when I sat down and started creating content, you know, two years ago, I'd never done it before and I was more of an introvert when I first started and was kind of the only reason I really did social media was because I had to, to get the word out about the business, you know, because we had a great product. But at the end of the day, you can have an amazing product, but if no one knows about it, no one's going to buy it. So you need to, you need to beef up the distribution and awareness. And really the, the real pillar at the basis of everything that we do to grow personal branding, to grow social media, all comes back to one thing. And that one thing is to provide as much value as humanly possible for free and for our paying members. And if we can do that, the ecosystem will grow, the fly will grow, and we can start to distribute word of mouth and ultimately grow the business. And if you do a good job of that, word spread. So that's really been the most important thing and that then builds down to, well, okay, well, what do we talk about? And one of the things I've really learned over the last few years being in business is that you cannot be everything for everyone, because if you are everything for everyone, you are nothing for nobody. You need to dial in, find your niche. Who is your customer, who are you talking to? What is the problem you solve and who is it that you're solving it for? And we've got some really clear target Personas that we talk to because we can't be everything for everyone, but we know who we are for and we do a bloody good job of solving their problems. And ultimately those, those pillars for us is helping people find their crypto positioning in a noisy marketplace, cleaning up your crypto portfolio through frameworks and research, and giving assurity and clarity on market direction at the right time, that at the end of the day, everything we put out comes back to those three pillars.

Exactly. And having a primary customer, like understanding them, knowing them, or even multiple target customers, that helps your business so much. Not just in your brand voice and attracting those people and finding them in the market and cutting through, but also saying no, to people that don't fit in. And you don't get those customers that will, you know, complain, cancel, be really annoying because the product is not for them. You will know. And you say, well, actually, yeah, I don't think this is for you. You'd be better off doing this instead. That's actually saved us a lot of time and money in the business.

Yeah, spot on, Bergs. Spot on. And, you know, I think when I first started out, it took me over a year to get any sort of traction on Instagram. I was putting out reels at nearly every day and just none of them were getting past a thousand views, 2,000 view, 800 views, they just were dead. And it was just consistently posting across platforms for 12 months that I started to get traction. And it was one video that I did about the bitcoin halving event that's now up to 1.3, 1.4 million views on Instagram. And after that moment, everything changed. And that was just down to consistency and perseverance. And I remember sitting down with you bugs going, what the fuck am I doing? Because this is just an absolute bloodbath in terms of trying to, like, get any results. I'm putting hours and hours and hours, like I'd probably spend 15 to 20 hours a week on content. And we were getting absolutely zero results. But after getting that consistency and breaking through, talking to the Persona, delivering value, not being everything for everyone, being consistent, providing value, we started to get results. And that's where we started to double down. We've started to really invest heavily into content. We're now spending somewhere in the range of 50, 60, $70,000 a month, maybe more on content specifically. And it is the backbone of our business, mate.

You came to me for the strategy and then it was up. Only from there.

I don't know, boys.

And girls gave me a strategy, had to throw it out, started again, mate.

So you did put, I remember, like our first conversation when we're like, okay, you know, the things we're doing aren't working, how do we create a point of difference? How do customers find us? And one of the options was going heavy in social media and building up our brand. And then from making that decision, there was a lot of trying things. A lot of different contractors, marketing agencies. Oh, geez, a lot of wasted time. But I think the key takeaway here is a lot of you never really know what is going to work. You just need to start trying and start improving. And it's more of an emergent kind of strategy, rather than going in with a fixed plan. You should have the loose things of, hey, I'm in crypto. These are the kind of people that I'm targeting and these are the platforms that they're on. So I'm going to do that. But then you start to get feedback and data and you start to modify what you put out there and your process over time. And that is really, really powerful.

That's a really good point. You know, we, we, we spent a lot of time.

Testing and getting data and trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. Because the reality is there's no framework to this sort of stuff. Like people sell your courses, people sell you all the, all the frameworks just like they do crypto. All the, all the experts, they know exactly what to do, you pay them a bunch of money and they deliver absolutely fucking nothing. You know, same with most gurus out there. And we went down that path, did the courses, did the agencies, did, we did it all in Webergs and it was just a huge waste of time. And ultimately what I bring it down to is having spent a lot of time in each individual platform, you need to understand the platform. Each channel is different. What, what you post on Instagram doesn't work on Twitter, doesn't work on YouTube, doesn't work on podcast. It all is different. You need to be contextual to each platform. The right language, you need to know who's consuming. Like you're not going, a user isn't going on an Instagram to want to learn about some like, you know, really complex layer two, you know, blockchain. Like they don't give a flying for Hoosier about that. They might on podcasts and YouTube. What they go on Instagram for is maybe more entertainment. You know, maybe they want some shorter, sharper reels, more like, you know, exciting stuff where they can share it with their friends. TikTok even more so way more entertainment. Right? People are moving and scrolling within the first half a second. YouTube and podcasts on the other hand, long form content, interviews, insights, deeper analysis, you know, email and newsletter different again, like every single channel is completely different. LinkedIn, it's more business related. Like every channel is different and you've got to spend a lot of time figuring out each channel before you can.

Really scale it exactly right. And we kind of, when you're in that iterative process and you're getting feedback, you're getting views, you're getting data. For us, they were vanity metrics because we could have 10 million views, but that's not the outcome we want. The outcome we wanted was to have more customers.

Yeah.

So they're the sanity metrics. So we started heavily interacting with our customers as well and prospects. Where did you hear about us? What was the thing that you liked? What brought you to us? And then iterating on that and seeing a conversion cycle, even, you know, surveys, interviews, all those kind of things to really get a good idea of where we place our effort to actually attract those customers, get them into the business. And we've now found Ben even. And customers come in many different forms. You could even look at staff as your customer. Like new staff and hiring and even them coming in. Like they already. They've heard about us. They've seen, they've listened to this podcast. They've looked at your social media and everything that you say and the content that's provided and the platforms that you're on. And when they actually get on a call with you, whether it's an interview to be an employee or a sales call for a prospect, all of that then lines up like, there's no bullshit in there. There's no disconnect. You're not farmed off to another person. It's through and through our brand and what we say is actually what we do and what we deliver. And that was really important for us.

Yeah, you're spot on, man. The values and. And the pillars, everything comes through. And it's an omnichannel approach. Right. And we'll speak about this other day. It takes over. You know, I think the magic number is seven burgs in marketing. Seven touch points to. To convert a customer. I think it's a lot more in crypto because you don't trust anyone. Right. I think it's probably 20 or 30, you know, to have that omnichannel approach is super important. And. And yeah, consistency has been a big thing, like just continuing to be consistent. And like you said, the, the vanity metrics really don't matter. Like, you can have a hundred thousand followers, but if no one shows up to your event, it's because they probably don't care about you or they don't care about the value you've provided. You got a story burgs on this?

Yeah. Yeah, mate. Remember that photo there was like a TikTok lady. I don't even know what she did. And she had something like, I don't know, 100 million followers or something ridiculous. Right? And then they took a photo where all of these popular people at some event, you know, it's like A signing event, a meet and greet, and there was zero people in her line. And that just really shows you the level of depth and connection and even activation for those people that that person had. Whereas other people where they created a deeper, longer connection. I have to meet them or I have to get their signature or I have to go to their event. That's what we're really focusing on. Like, we don't want 10 million views. We want what, one to 200 people in each state where we're like, hey, we're coming over, let's go to the pub. And they rock up. Like that is way more important than millions of views.

And it's more fulfilling too, right? Like, we do this because we can actually make a difference in people's lives. That's why we do collective shift, because we genuinely want to help people. Right. So providing value and providing, you know, and creating relationships with you guys, the listeners is something that we, you know, we love to do. So, yeah, Instagram, LinkedIn's been awesome. The podcast, we're over two years now creating the podcast. 30, 40,000 all time downloads on the podcast, plus YouTube, which is just unbelievable. Thank you to everyone that tunes into the podcast for, you know, we love doing it.

Absolutely.

Abs, you know, X as well. Just in terms of the, the reach and engagement there. I think over the last year I've had 3.5 million impressions. Like crazy, crazy number of, you know, visibility.

All of it, all of it interacts and compounds as well. It's completely crazy. And even other things like business opportunities, we get not just customers, but people coming up to us. Have you met this person? I want to recommend you to the customers I have because you're a complimentary product or hey, we need your service. Like we've really made it so that people can't say no because we're in your face all the time. Right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. And then building the team and operations behind it. Like there's so many people behind the scenes to help, you know, myself. We've got, you know, my assistant that coordinates a lot of the content. Podcast editor, thumbnail creator, YouTube head of strategy, YouTube long form editor, short form, real creator, scriptwriter, copywriter, graphic designer, analysts. Like it is a machine behind like what goes on. Like this is not something that you.

Kind of spin up overnight platforms, integrations, distributions, all those crazy, yeah. Those crazy like, yeah. Automations that we have. All the systems we use to actually, because all of these people are all over the world as remote different time zones. The systems we use to Coordinate these people, make sure all the checks are in there, everything goes out correctly. It is an absolute machine that can just pump out content. Now it's a well oiled machine, a hundred percent.

A hundred percent. But it's, it's an area that will continue to build. It's continuous, getting more saturated and harder and harder. There's so many more creators out there, you're competing with so many people. Attention spans are getting shorter, you've really got to break through. But yeah, my, my advice if you want to start out or start doing content is just, you know, learn the platforms but consistency honestly, like the first year you'll get no results, you know, just if and if you do amazing, but have the expectations that you won't and it's really in that sort of 12 to 36 months as you'll start to, you know, get the, get the growth and you know, as long as you're doing a good job, I think you know you're going to see some, some good, good results come out the back of it.

Absolutely. And again you're just documenting proof of work on the Internet and that's going to stay there forever until you take it down. And there's always an opportunity for people to see that and interact with you. And it reminds me of this Jack Butcher diagram where it's just flat, flat, flat and people give up. This is pointless. And it's just before this huge peak and even now like we've got this machine working for US and in two years, five years, 10 years, what is that going to be? It's going to be so much bigger and better. The reach, the amount of people will be able to get in front of it just creates more and more opportunities. But it's every single day doing that content, it takes a lot of time, it's exhausting. You don't want to do it, but no one can do your push ups for you. It's like going to the gym every day. It absolutely sucks. Like it's a joy and a privilege to do it. But when you're on the hook to do this like every single day like you are Ben, it can be very, very difficult. Especially like when you're traveling and you're busy CEO like you are, it's infinite game.

You've got to build in process and automations like you know, I now take a videographer with me most places when I go do events so I can get the content doing reels in, in hotel rooms, doing podcasts when you can, interviews, trying to write, you know, Content like it is. It's an infinite game. It never stops.

I laugh at your hotel videos because when you rock up to a hotel and you take that video. Hey, guys, I'm just here. I'm here.

Look at this amazing view.

And I know all you want to do is just crash in bed because you're exhausted from traveling through the airports and getting your Uber there and everything like that, but you still put that ahead. You do that video, and then you crash out, wake up and have a steak, wake up and remember that I.

Lost my wallet somewhere or don't know where I am or where I'm going or, like, exactly.

It's really, really difficult. But again, with. With a lot of things in life, consistency and just staying in the game is key. And you will outlive and outperform your competitors.

And if you want to BE in the 1%, you know, the 1% of results or 10% of results, you've got to kind of do what the 10% aren't doing or the 90% aren't doing. Sorry, more the point. And that's the way I think about it. Like, if you want to get, you know, if you want to get results that most people don't, you've got to do what most people aren't doing.

Yeah. They're not willing to do. You have to do that.

Yeah.

And then you can do the things that they can't.

Amazing. Love it. Right, guys, thank you so much for listening. Hopefully you found that valuable. If you like this episode, we'd love for you to share with a friend. As I mentioned at the start, we do not do advertising. There's no paid promotion, there's no affiliates, there's no nonsense on this podcast. We just bring this to you completely free and mean the world to us. If you could share it around. That's how we grow the podcast, and we thank you so much for listening in, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks, champions.