Convertkit Founder Nathan Barry: How Creators Make Millions With Email

My flywheel for Twitter is to go back through 8 years of blog posts and rewrite all of those blog posts as Twitter threads. And then from there, at the end of the Twitter thread, I link to, hey, if you enjoyed this, follow me on Twitter. And two, here's a full article diving into detail on it, which I happened to write 4 years ago, you know, but it doesn't matter. Hey, I'm Nathan and I run ConvertKit, which is a creative marketing platform used by 500,000 creators, everyone ranging from Tim Ferriss, James Clear, and Arnold Schwarzenegger to someone who's just getting started with a newsletter or a podcast or really anything they're growing with.

What's the least amount of email subscribers you've seen someone be able to make $100,000 with?

The people that make the most off of small lists would be service providers and coaches. So I've seen someone, especially if they're doing consulting, you're gonna make, like, sell a $10,000 consulting gig or a $20,000 consulting gig off of a small list because you get the right people on your list. The other thing that makes a big difference is any product that you can charge a lot for. So if you're selling a product for $5 or $10, you need thousands of, tens of thousands of people on your list. But if you're selling a product for $500, let's say a coaching session, or $10,000, like a design engagement, then you don't need that big of a list in order to make a full-time living from it.

Do you think most people undercharge?

Yes, I think most people undercharge, but I'm not in the blatant, like, charge more, always raise your pricing category because there's just so much more to it. There's so many skills that you have to learn in order to demand a price point. And so, like, it doesn't matter if you're learning as you go and you sell something for $50 and it could have been worth $100 or $500. Like, there's always someone else that you can sell to. So learn what you, like, choose a price that people are going to buy at. Don't be the person pricing something at $500 that no one buys and then having to lower from there. I'd much rather start with a price and raise from there as I've demonstrated value and real demand in the market. And honestly, as I've made the product better, 'cause really a lot of things like the first version of the course, the first version of the software product, it's probably not very good. So if you start out charging $50 for it and people are like, wow, This is insane value that I'm getting from this. Then it's like, great, that's way better. You know, for a lot of people to say that, and then you can be like, hey, we're going to raise the price next week to $100. We're going to raise the price next week to $500. Um, starting, you know, low, low but fair and going up from there is much better than starting too high and realizing you have to come back to the market with a lower price later. Uh, one of my favorite examples is just for fun on the side, I made an email course that's for creators who are just, uh, uh, let me think about this. Just for fun on the side, I made an email course that's for creators who have already earned like $100,000, $200,000, uh, as a creator. And I put that, uh, you know, behind a paywall because I only wanted people who were actually really into it to buy it. Um, I didn't want feedback from people who were just like, uh, you know, you're showing off or whatever. And this was, a paid email course that I charged $100 for, and I get these replies and people are like, this is incredible value. Like $100 was totally worth it in the first email. And I want that. You want people to have that experience. And I add to it over time. I raised the price to $150 and that gave me an opportunity to go to my audience and say, hey, if you bought this already, like, that's awesome. If you haven't bought it yet, you know, next week the price is going up to $150 and it gives you this opportunity for scarcity. And then as I make the product more valuable, eventually it'll go to $200 and then it'll go up from there. And at every point I get to do another push for scarcity, right? I get to have another reason for people to buy today instead of someday. And so the product gets more valuable and I get these nice sales bumps. And now that email course, which is just a hobby product that I made, has made, I think, $42,000.

Oh, whoa. That's awesome. Yeah. One thing I have in here, but it was further down, was like, I mean, I've, you, it seems like you sort of reference frameworks a fair amount. Like I was listening to several episodes of your podcast and you were referencing like the flywheel effect and stuff. And like, I would love to sort of hear some thoughts on that. Like what, what is a creator flywheel and why is it effective? Why is it important?

Yeah, so the creator flywheel— well, taking a step back, a flywheel is something that you're using to take momentum, use the momentum to make something easier and easier over time. So years ago, I was in Lesotho, which is the little country inside of South Africa, and doing some work at an orphanage. And we actually had the opportunity to drill a well and then put a flywheel on it to pump water out of that well. And I remember our friend Luke and I, like trying to pump, you know, it's this big heavy wheel and we're both on it, like trying to turn it. And the first time it goes around is so hard, right? We worked really hard leaning into it to get that flywheel going. The second rotation was really hard. The third was hard. Fourth was easier. And after a little while, once this thing's going, I can just stand there and just spin that flywheel. One hand, no effort, no help from anyone else. And so the flywheel in business is what's the system, the repeatable thing that you can do over and over again. That gets easier on each repetition. And that is entirely different. It's a different way of thinking about your creative business than to-do lists, or I'm gonna go do this, then I'm gonna go do that, and then I'm gonna go do this other thing. It's saying, let me narrow in on what are the things that continually make me successful and feed one into the other. So showing up consistently, having a place where I own my audience, creating every day, You know, all of these things where I'm like, okay, I'm gonna meet people. What's an example? Let's say that I'm starting a podcast, right? I can have a flywheel around interviewing a guest, then that, let's see, I can have a flywheel around interviewing a guest, producing the podcast, I can look at the best nuggets of that podcast and use it to write an article, blog post, you know, other types of content that's going to go out around that. And then on the next— what's the next part of the flywheel? Would be asking that guest to share the content, right? Hey, you know, here's part of the interview, why don't you share it with your audience? That gets me more followers. And then the final step could be that I'm asking them, who else should I have on my podcast? Who else should I interview? And they're like, oh, you should talk to my friend Brendan.

Right.

And then it goes from there. And now I'm on a podcast talking to my friend Brendan, and then we go around and we're producing this content, which goes live. And then I'm writing essays off of the things I learned from it, turning into the next guest. Right. So here's the flywheel for building an audience. There's a thousand things you could be doing, but you've chosen to narrow in on this flywheel and keep working it. And it gets easier every single time you do it.

I love that. I, and, and, uh, you kind of touched on, I wanted to ask you about this, the, uh, You wrote down, I think you did a blog post about it or tweet thread or maybe both, but actually probably both, 'cause that's probably your flywheel, but Four Laws of Building an Audience.

Well, actually, let me touch on that for a second. My flywheel for Twitter is to go back through 8 years of blog posts and rewrite all of those blog posts as Twitter threads and publish them. And then I ask all of my friends to reply to the tweet, cuz that early engagement of people replying gives it a huge boost. And then from there, at the end of the Twitter thread, I link to, hey, if you enjoyed this, follow me on Twitter. And two, here's a full article diving into detail on it, which I happened to write 4 years ago, you know, but it doesn't matter. Right. And then if you enjoyed that, like subscribe to the newsletter. And then I have this going around and around where I've added 30,000 followers to my Twitter account in the last 4 months from doing exactly this, taking content that I've already written and putting it through my Twitter flywheel. And I'm spending like 2 hours a week on it and I'm wildly more successful than the previous 5 years of posting like to Twitter, like what pithy smart thing can I come up with today? Um, it's just a complete game changer.

I need to do more of that, like, cuz I spend so much time on content creation and not nearly enough time like sort of rehashing the stuff that worked. Like I've started doing that with TikTok now. Like I'll go back and like something that worked or something that I think had potential to work and just like for whatever reason didn't stick, I'll like go back and like do some edits and like it'll do so much better. Like, cuz it's like just that distance provides like so much perspective too.

Right. Yeah. And the hook on the content really matters. So I will have something that I posted and I'm like, oh, that didn't really resonate. And then a friend will be like this, but with a better hook. Like they'll look at the things that didn't work. Cause you know, I try everything in a spreadsheet. So I'll get a call with a friend and we'll talk through it and he'll go, this was actually a good thread, but it got 20 retweets instead of 500. And so let's just post it again with a better hook. And another thing that you'll see with people who are growing really well on Twitter is that they're reposting the same stuff. So if you have a thread that is absolutely killing it, then plan to post that thread every 3 to 6 months, like clockwork. And so then just imagine if you get to the point where you have 12 threads that are fantastic, you actually have like almost infinite content on Twitter because you can post those every other week You know, spaced out and that's like 6 months worth of content.

That's a great point. I, I heard you get, you talking about that with the Sahil podcast. Yeah. I thought that was like pretty smart. I'm like, oh yeah, the math, it like works out really, really well. Like that completely makes sense. What are other key habits or systems for successful creators?

The most important habit as a creator is showing up consistently and specifically showing up consistently for a long period of time. So I see all these people and they're like, oh, I have this idea for a blog, or I'm gonna, you know, start a TikTok, I'm gonna do all this. They're like, put a bunch of effort into it over the weekend, and then like on Tuesday they put in a little bit more time, and that's fine, you make a little progress, but then they don't put in any more work for another month or a few weeks, and they have these spurts of energy. And what happens is that that fizzles out and it's gone. And so the creators who you follow who are successful, they're either complete one-hit wonders right, where they— it was a total fluke and they made it, or they showed up consistent like every single day for years. And so I like to say create every day for 2 years. If you do that, you can pretty much guarantee success as a creator. And the people who aren't finding success are the ones who gave up too quickly.

I love that one. I know for me personally, it's like the case. I've been— I think I started posting to LinkedIn like just over just, yeah, just over 2 years ago I started there and then I was like, I got up the nerve to try TikTok and that was sort of where I have built. Now I wanna do Twitter next. I really need to invest in my Twitter.

It's hard to know which platforms to go to because you can get pulled so many different directions, right? Yeah. And so if you're trying to do newsletter and TikTok and oh, and then you have someone on a podcast who's great at YouTube and you're like, I should have a YouTube channel. And you go to every different thing, then you just get pulled further and further away from a flywheel. And so I've had to very deliberately say, I'm doing Twitter right now, and I'm not doing anything else. Actually, the way that I think about it is a hub and spoke model. So, if you think about email, email's amazing for connecting with people, but it's not good for discovery. There's no algorithm an email that says like, oh Brendan, you sent out a great email to your list, let me, you know, like we'll make sure that 100 people see it or 1,000 people, right? In the way that TikTok and YouTube both have these amazing algorithms that creators are using to get discovered. So email is great for connection, not good for discovery. So what you have to do is have— choose one platform for discovery and one platform for connection. And so what I do in that case is I'm using Twitter for discovery and email for connections. And so I'm putting all of my discovery efforts, you know, the bite-sized little things that I'm putting out there on Twitter, and then, you know, I'm trying to funnel everyone into joining my email list and getting my longer-form consistent content and becoming a fan of me, not just the random Twitter thread that I did. And so then I think once you get— so email's the hub, uh, Twitter is a spoke. And I think once you get one spoke working, you're allowed to start like playing with a second spoke. So it's not— or you could experiment. You could, you could see, okay, I'm gonna try TikTok and LinkedIn next, right? And then whichever one gets a little more traction first, I'm gonna pause LinkedIn and I'm going in on TikTok, you know? And then once I build that up to a full, full-fledged spoke in my wheel, then I'm allowed to start the next one rather than dipping your toe into a whole bunch and being like, oh, I've tried. I'm sure you hear this, right? I tried TikTok, I did whatever, didn't work for me. It's like, yeah, well, you were doing 12 other things at the same time. Of course it didn't work. So anyway, hub and spoke model is my, my system.

I love that. And just out of curiosity, why did you pick Twitter?

Yeah, I think it's the most native format to my style of content. Like, I'm more comfortable in written form than I am in video. And then it's also where I'm spending the most time. And I started to understand the algorithm. I think that's the sort of thing that you, you know, people who understand YouTube well, they're like, oh yeah, I can just tell you right away, this is gonna work, that's not gonna work. And I think I spent enough time on Twitter that I'm like, starting to see this is what works. You know, threads work, uh, getting people to reply in the first 10 minutes in particular really works. Like, a reply is almost as good as a retweet. A quote tweet is still the best. Like, that's the biggest endorsement from the algorithm. Or like, you know, if I quote tweet your thing, that's like the highest vote, and then a retweet is quite a bit below that, and then a reply is just slightly below. Every tweet, as best as I can tell. Um, and so it's one of those things where like the flywheel is predictable for me, where I know if I put in this much effort, not every thread's gonna hit. I don't know for sure what's gonna, um, drive the most, but I know I can get consistent results over time. Uh, and I think that's when it's most frustrating as a creator, when you feel like there's no connection between the effort you put in and the results you're getting. But if you knew, for example, for every tweet you're gonna get at least 50 new followers or 100 new followers, or every TikTok post, like it's gonna continually get you at least X number of views or something, then it feeds that, I guess, that feedback loop of wanting to create consistently and being like, okay, I know that I can get to 50,000 followers or something if I just do this enough.

Yeah, that's spot on. I think the next one I personally am trying to focus on is Twitter now, cuz like with the little bit of time I've spent investing in Twitter, like compared to like LinkedIn, like I've had threads like do really, really well for me.

Mm-hmm.

And like for some reason I like, um, yeah, I like, I've like wussed out, like for some reason it's like each, each platform I think sort of has this like psychological hurdle you initially sort of have to get over.

And like, right. Um, one for me was feeling like, uh, people were judging me for putting out threads of like, oh, Nathan's playing the thread game now.

Yeah.

And then I was like, you know what, I don't care. And it took me a while to realize that, that I don't actually care. Like the thing that I want is to use Twitter as a channel to grow my business and meet new people and all of that. And so I was like, oh. In all of that, I'm gonna have people who are like, oh, there's just someone self-promoting again. Or, you know, you're breaking the format of Twitter. And it's like, if people really thought that, then they wouldn't start following you by the thousands when you start posting really valuable threads. The other thing that I realized that was kind of holding me back is some of the people posting threads were just doing the ones that were like, I read a Wikipedia article. And just put some decent copywriting to it. And so I try to not do that. I try to write as many of my threads as possible from my own experience of like, here's what I learned, here's how I run my business, here's how we do compensation at ConvertKit. You know, any of those things where it's like, okay, no one else could have written this exact thread. And I don't always do it, but at least that's a guiding principle. Makes me feel better about my content.

And I've heard you talk a lot about the importance of building in public. Can you talk about the importance of building public?

Yeah. So building public is letting people follow along for the journey. And what that means is a couple of things. When you're selling products, they're going to be interested in like, oh, let me buy that. So you have your first audience. When you need help and have questions, which always happens, right? There's these people that you can ask for help and people would be like, oh, I know how to do that. Or be like, hey, your copywriting is not good on this, like read this book, you know, or I'll get on a call and troubleshoot this for you. And it gets you, it gets people following along for the journey, not just for the thing that you're selling. So when I started ConvertKit, I did what I called the web app challenge. And this was in 2013. And I said, I'm gonna build a SaaS company to $5,000 in recurring revenue in 6 months with no outside money. I'm just gonna put in $5,000 of my own money and that's it, uh, and everything else will be customer funded. Oh, and I'm gonna live blog every week the process. And so there's posts of how I chose the name, how I found the first developers, you know, me pre-selling the product, all of that. Um, one thing that was amazing that happened in the early days is I had these people who were really good at software and copywriting and all of that who were offering to help along the way. And I would write articles about like, oh, there's someone named Amy Hoy who helped me rewrite all the copy for my sales page. And I turned that, not only did I make a better sales page for ConvertKit, but I turned, you know, all of her help into an article about what I was learning in the process. And so I had this software product that Over 1,000 people were following along and watching me build, and some of them bought it as well. Now, I didn't hit the goal. I think at the end of 6 months, we were not quite at $2,000 a month in revenue, but it was still pretty awesome. And then now, what, 9 years later, ConvertKit's doing $30 million in revenue. It's like, it worked out in the end, but we've built in public the whole way, 'cause it, People want to see you succeed. And so they'll follow along for the journey because it's entertaining. They'll follow along because they can learn something from it. And because there's just this human nature to want to root for the underdog who's like actually going out and trying something. And so, uh, a huge fan of building in public because I think that it gives you encouragement along the way, helps you achieve your goals faster, and, uh, gives you this built-in audience that you can promote and sell your product to.

I love that. I think I need to do more of that because I feel like the people will find you because of the information you sort of provide, but then they'll stick around because of the community or the personality. What are the benefits of building an email list versus just being on social?

Yeah, so the two biggest benefits are one, you own relationship with the audience. So if you were to build an audience on MySpace, that's not really worth much these days. And actually, I used to always joke about how Facebook is more valuable, but really, Facebook is kind of going. That's not really the audience that you're paying attention to. Email, what you do, it can come with you. You could leave one email provider and go to another, and it's an export and an import. 'cause that's your relationship. The other part of it is that there's not an algorithm deciding whether or not your content gets to those people. So you could have a post to a Facebook page, and you have your 100,000 fans on Facebook, and 5,000 see it, and you're like, "What about the rest?" And Facebook goes, "Yeah, just boost this post, and then the rest will see it." And it's the same thing if you follow people on YouTube. You'll see a YouTube channel with 300,000 followers or subscribers and they'll have 20,000 views, 10,000 views on their latest video. And it's because the algorithm, if your content's not amazing and really resonating, the algorithm isn't showing it. So the biggest things are connection, having that deeper relationship, and then having an algorithm-free environment where you can reach them. I think the last thing that I love about email is that you can build these profiles on people over time. So I can see, oh, you've been following me for this long. You've been subscribed to my list for 4 years, right? You don't know how long someone's been following you on Twitter. Like, that's not a thing. And then you can also say, like, they bought this product, add that in. They are interested in this other thing, add that in. And now I have this robust profile of everything I know about you. And I can segment based on that. So I used to have, uh, in my newsletter, I used to talk about both design and marketing. And I was really worried in the early days about who cares about each. And I just segmented all my opt-ins, all my products, and all of that into, uh, are you interested in design or interested in marketing or both, right? Cause there was a good overlap and I could do that with email where I could say, oh, let me just promote my design products to people who have interacted with my design content. And, and the other thing with marketing, whereas, you know, the other social channels can't let you do that, right? It's just, here's a blast to everyone and there's no nuance or filtering or segmenting. Um, that's why going again back to the email is great for connection and then social is amazing for like distribution and discovery. Yeah.

Why ConvertKit versus MailChimp or one of these other platforms?

Yeah, so I actually started ConvertKit because I was using Mailchimp for this exact thing and I got really frustrated with it because Mailchimp was built for all of small business and I was hacking around it and trying to make it work for a creator business, right? Where it's actually audience-focused. So there's all kinds of things built into ConvertKit, like the opt-in forms that you can put on your site, the way you can embed rich media in your emails, other little things. That are like only creators would care about. Like for example, you can change the link in an email after the email's been sent. If you send out an email and you get a reply back and they're like, oh, your link to your sales page is broken. Instead of having to send an email and be like, I'm so sorry, I made a mistake. You can just go into ConvertKit and edit where that link goes and fix the, you know, the little typo that you had in there afterwards because ConvertKit is built around like a creator's workflow. And so we're just solving all the problems that we had as creators.

That's awesome. Yeah, the, uh, I, I, I love it so far. I need to get back in the routine of actually sending my newsletters. Like I was, that, that's another one I gotta figure out. Um, now, uh, there's like the rise of sort of like these private social platforms, which also sort of, uh, have this promise of like the direct line of communication to your audience. What's the benefits of ConvertKit versus like a Discord?

Yeah, I think that they can go hand in hand really well. 'Cause Discord's gonna provide a lot more real-time communication, fans can talk to each other, whereas email is going to be about pushing things out to everyone at once. Advantage of email in that case is that you can actually build a profile of people, so you know who's opening, who's engaging, you could have push content, and if someone buys, that's tied to your Shopify store, that's tied to your ConvertKit Commerce, and so I can see Who spent the most money with me? And I could filter down to that, whereas in Discord you wouldn't be able to do that. But at the same time, Discord has the advantage of that real-time communication. So my favorite move is to use them both together, and then that gives you the community plus the, you know, the data and the, like, being able to push content out to people in a dynamic way.