S2 Ep4: How I turned $1000 into $320 MILLION | Nathan Barry

People say that money doesn't buy happiness, but I can tell you firsthand that a lack of money causes a lot of stress because I grew up in a family where money was very scarce. A little bit later in life, I learned that making money is a skill that you can deliberately hone and practice, and I just thought, I'm going to figure out how to get really good at making money. Nathan Barry is a content creator, author, and the founder of an email marketing platform, Kit, and his story helps people understand that pushing through hard times leads to real success. I got paid $300 to make a website, and that was the start of my freelance design career. I wanted to doing this whole content creation, selling products thing as well. But I had this bad habit of starting things and not finishing them. And I built an iPhone app to help me track a habit of writing 1,000 words a day. And it would build this streak where I wrote every day for 600 days in a row. And so in this 2-year period, I went from making $60,000 a year to making $250,000 a year with 3 self-published books. And the interesting thing about it is email drove more sales than every other platform combined. And that kicked off the entire journey of building Kit.

Can you give us some context as to where the business is today?

Yeah, so we're $45 million a year in subscription revenue, but the growth curve was basically nothing for 2 years. I had a significant drop in income. Like, I burned through a substantial amount of my savings.

For 2 years? I mean, a lot of people would've just given up.

Yeah, I almost did. I got to a point where I was just really depressed, struggling to do pretty much anything.

Do you remember what it was that turned the company?

It is not a sexy thing, but it's something that I think always works, and that is—

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Thanks for having me on.

Thank you so much for coming on. It's awesome for me in that I have used your product, well, long before I knew you. I've used your product and think it is the backbone of my business. Like, I love it. I'm, you know, I'm not a I'm not a sponsor, we don't work together, and yet it's like the one product I'm always talking about. And so when I saw your story in that it's bootstrapped company that you've built over like a decade, like you've built it with your hands and it hasn't been easy and there's been no VC, I was like, that is like a story I genuinely want to cover.

Yeah, well, thanks for being a part of the story. Uh, the, the promotion that you did for Kit last night at the event that we had was, was fantastic. And the thing that I always set out to do was to build a product all around helping creators earn a living. Early on when we were doing this, it was not something that was common at all. Someone would say like, oh, what are you doing? It's like, oh, I'm a blogger, or, oh, I make content on social media. And people would want to say like, oh, okay. Um, and then you work at Starbucks?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, would you like my coffee order? You know, what is that? And so early on it was just like, even how you legitimize this whole industry, and it's obviously changed so much. And so to now have a platform that powers like your story of millions of dollars in sales and all of that, uh, it's pretty special for me. So I'm excited.

I always think of it now like the infrastructure and the sort of the piping behind the business. Like, it's not the thing that you're like, oh, it's the sexiest thing in the world. Yeah, but it's like the reason that everything works. And I think that to have built that when you did, because I've only started— I've only made content for 2 and a half years. And so you were pushing this, what, 10 years ago? You were saying, I think that individuals can become brands. I think individuals can, you know, build mini companies. 10, 12 years ago?

Yeah. So I started the company in 2013, and so that was 12 years ago.

That's the same year I started my agency.

Okay.

Yeah, that is a while ago.

Uh, and then in 2015 is when things really started to take off. So it took 2 years to get to $2,000 in monthly revenue, which is not the growth curve that you want. That's actually not a curve at all. And then in year 3, uh, it really took off. We went from $2,000 a month revenue to $100,000 a month.

Wow. Can you give us some context as to where the business is today?

Yeah, so we're $45 million a year in subscription revenue. We've got 62,000 paying customers, about 600,000 active free users. And then we power the biggest newsletters on the planet. So not just yours, but also James Clear, Andrew Huberman. Uh, and then we've had this ridiculous run of celebrities who say, hey, I want to be a creator like all these. And so we've done Matthew McConaughey, Dua Lipa, Ellen.

Oh wow.

Uh, Hasan Minhaj, Morgan Freeman, like the list just goes on and on.

Tom Brady.

Tom Brady. Yeah.

I saw that and I was like, that's cool.

You know what's fun? Um, I was in Miami a couple weeks ago and I spent time with Tom's manager Ben, and he was talking about how Tom is obsessed with his newsletter, right? Like they're doing all of these things, they've got YouTube going on, they're doing collaborations with like Dude Perfect and Chef Nick and all these other people. Ben was like, no, the thing that Tom obsesses over is his newsletter and like what's going into this week, what photos he's putting in, you know, what stories he's telling. And it's just fun to see it's not like Kit is going after and chasing celebrities. It's that the celebrities are saying, I, you know, they're looking to people like Mark Manson and James Clear and you and I honestly, and saying like, that sounds amazing to have a direct line to my audience, my fans. I want that. And so they're coming in and adopting the exact same playbook.

The challenge with social media is that you can build a huge audience. And so, you know, in 2 years I built a million followers on LinkedIn. And that's amazing. But the problem is, no matter how great the content is, even if you make the best content in the world, the platform will never serve it to your audience. And so you're, you're algorithmically restricted on your own audience, let alone everyone else. And so if you want to build a really high-quality audience that you can talk to when you want, there's no other option.

Yeah. And the interesting thing about it is people tend to fault the platforms or the algorithms for that, of like, how unfair is it that I put out a post and it's only seen by, you know, 10 to say 25% of my audience, but it's actually the double-edged sword, right? The thing that enables your growth on social is this algorithm that if you put out a great post that gets attention, it spreads beyond your audience. But this is— that attention is a fixed pie. And so for your great post to spread beyond your audience and get this additional reach, that means that your bad post has to be like, has to not reach your entire audience because someone else's great post is getting that reach. And so it's easy to blame the platforms or whatever else, but really it's like this, you know, kind of beautiful, complex world that we live in where it's like, well, it's a, it's quite the meritocracy. It comes down to how good are you at providing value and hooking attention and retaining it. Yeah. And You know, you've done a very good job of understanding that game and playing it to its fullest.

I teach a lot of very successful entrepreneurs how to build personal brand. And because entrepreneurs are like relentless, hardworking, you know, they would just bulldoze anything. They get so annoyed with the algorithm. And I'm like, it's not like a thing. Like, we, you know, like if you make amazing content that helps people, the system will just push it out further, right? It's like you're not talking to an algorithm, you're talking to people. But just understand that, like, if you help people, then it will, you know, push it out further and further and further. I just love the frustration people have.

Um, but you're absolutely right that you want to have the, the social growth and the, the, uh, the algorithm and the distribution that can come from that. And then you want to bring them back as well into your newsletter, your email list. Where you have the ability separate from that to push out content. And so you get social for distribution and you get email for connection and retention.

We've got a context now of, of the business today. I'd like to go back to pre the business. I'm fascinated in you. I saw that like you come from incredibly humble beginnings.

Yeah.

And I think your first job was Wendy's.

Yes. 15 years old.

Yeah. So give us a bit of context as to you then. Like, were you natural-born entrepreneur?

I grew up in a family where money was very scarce, and my family was also very scrappy. Like, my dad built the house that I grew up in. Uh, I actually own that house today.

Oh, amazing.

Uh, it's up in the mountains outside of Boise where I live. You know, my mom homeschooled all of us kids. I have 5 siblings, and I'm, uh, I'm 4th of 6. And so a couple— I watched a couple things happen. One, my parents overcome pretty much any obstacle that came their way. Always learning things like they're very avid readers. My mom was, uh, she's very into fitness. Like, uh, she's currently in Australia for an Ironman competition. She's 65 years old and like, oh wow, plans her year around, you know, Ironman 70.3 and all that. She's like, okay, if I get this time here that I can go compete in the world champion, you know, like all of this. So she was always learning like, okay, I'm gonna get this next personal training certificate or all these other things. And at the same time, I watched money be really, really scarce and just the amount of stress that that causes. Mm-hmm. People say that money doesn't buy happiness, which I think is nonsense, but I can tell you firsthand that like a lack of money causes a lot of, of stress. And so I watched that and I just thought, okay, that's not going to be me. I don't know how any of this works, but I'm going to figure out how to get really good at making money. And so when I learned a little bit later in life that making money is a skill that you can deliberately hone and practice, you know, like playing a musical instrument, uh, you wouldn't expect to sit down at the piano and, you know, just be— play this amazing concerto, you know. You know that like it's this— it's music theory, it's timing, it's fingering, it's all of these things. Making money is the same way. And so, you know, you say, okay, I'm going to get really, really good at this. And my journey took me all the way through, yeah, working at Wendy's. We had a, like a wood shop at our house and so I would build woodworking projects and like sell them door-to-door at craft fairs. And that's the first way that I made money. And it just went all the way up to probably when I was 18, uh, but started to get my first web design clients as I got into that world. Mm-hmm. And then ended up getting jobs in that space. And, and so I've always had this back and forth between like a job or an entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, it's just always been around how do I get good at making money.

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Yeah, so it took me a while to get to the point where that I was building an audience or, or like selling products, uh, or that sort of thing, but I was doing client services So I dated a girl in high school who, uh, nothing came of the relationship, but she introduced me to web design. Like, I was like, what are you doing with this?

She's like, danke.

Yeah, 100%. Um, you know, she's like writing something in Notepad and saving it as a.html file and it like changes the background color over here. I'm like, what is this? And so I, you know, got all these books in the library on HTML and, uh, in 2004 and, uh, you know, started to learn it and, and, and all that. So I got paid $300 to make a website for the Idaho Chess Association. And, uh, then I got paid $75 to design a logo for them.

Very nice.

And that was the start of my, um, freelance design career. And then it went into, you know, more established websites and, you know, like local businesses and all that. And then software design and and then the, you know, designing for the iPhone and iPad and on from there.

I absolutely love that. So $375.

Yes, exactly.

I, I could, I could tell you my first web design project was, I think, I don't want to rub it in, but I think $450. And I was so stoked with it. I was like, I was so happy that someone had literally given me money for my time.

When this is the thing that you're like, I'm gonna spend all my time doing this.

Yeah, I'm gonna do this thing all the time.

When I remember wanting to keep learning, but not having projects to do it on. And like doing these made up projects. I'm like, I'm gonna build a website for this company that's never going to see it. Or, and honestly, it's going to be garbage compared to what they would want. But when I was like, wait, you have an actual project? And so I can learn and do things on that and you're going to pay me money? Like, this is fantastic.

Yeah. And so you started like writing books quite early, and so I wanna talk about that, but also where did that come from? Like where did the idea of like, I'm gonna write books so young come from?

Yeah. So in 2010, I was working for a startup that I joined as like employee 14 and they scaled up to 90, yeah, about 90 people or so. And I was working on, on design for them. So I joined in 2009 and then, uh, left like end of 2011. And in 2010, when the iPad came out, they said, we wanna have an app in the App Store the day the iPad is released. Mm-hmm. And I didn't know anything about designing iOS apps. And so, cause everything was just so new. And so we sat down to design iPhone app based on, you know, all we had access to was the simulator. Like there's no device that you could buy cause it hasn't been released yet. So you're looking through every detail of the Apple keynotes trying to figure out like, okay, how are you supposed to design this? And it was a really fun experience. Actually Boise, where I live, didn't have an Apple Store at the time. And so at like 5 in the morning, we got on a flight to Portland, Oregon, and then there was this, you know, it's the release day of the iPad, this huge event. We, we go there and there's hundreds and hundreds of people in line. And, uh, it turns out all you have to do is make an appointment with the Apple business team.

Yeah.

So we like walk up to the Apple store, hundreds of people in line, and they're like, oh, are you with the Unity team? Like, oh yeah, come, come on in. And we bought 10 iPads. Went back to another company's office, loaded our software on there, tested it, like shipped some bug fixes, and then, you know, we were good to go. But I, being able to be really early in the iPad ecosystem was really fun. And so I was doing that, and then at the same time I was following content creators like Tim Ferriss and especially Chris Guillebeau. Mm-hmm. And so Chris has been doing this for a very long time, and he was one of the first people that I knew. Earning a full-time living as content creator. He wrote—

year is this?

Uh, he started doing it probably in 2009, uh, and so I probably started following him in 2010, 2011. Yeah, somewhere in there, probably late 2011. And he wrote this amazing little book called 279 Days to Overnight Success. and it was about his journey of earning a full-time living, travel blogging and all that. And a full-time living was $60,000 a year.

Wow.

You know, and, but like, that was, that was wild at the time.

Yeah.

And so he did a lot of it through making, you know, basically releasing these books or courses and it's like teaching a concept. And I was like, wait, you can do this? Mm-hmm. And so I just started to see more of these examples and then I started like, okay, I want to build an audience. And I want to teach something that I'm good at. And so I ended up writing a book called The App Design Handbook, and that launched in September 2012 to an email list of 798 people on Mailchimp. And my goal for this book was that I wanted to put it out there so that people would hire me to design their iPhone apps. Yeah, right. Do you want to hire any random freelancer? Do you want to hire the guy who wrote the book? On designing iPhone apps. I'm like, wait, of course the second one. Now I wanted to learn this whole content creation, uh, selling products thing as well. And so I thought, all right, you know, we're definitely selling the book, we're not giving it away for free, but like the goal is getting clients. And I thought if I can make $10,000 over this book, over the lifetime of it, that would be great. That'd be totally worth it, and I'll get clients from it. I ended up doing that launch in September and I made $12,000 in the first 24 hours, $20,000 in the first week, and I never took on another design client. And I was just off to the races on this. I was like, this is way better.

And that is effectively just like how to do this new thing.

Mhm. Yeah. And it, it just, it absolutely took off. And two things completely shocked me about it. First was you could make really a lot of money selling products directly to an audience. And, and a small audience.

Yeah. I mean, 780 people in the US.

And but then the other thing, you know, I had— I promoted on social media, I did all these other things as well. But what the other thing that surprised me is that email drove more sales than every other platform combined. And this is at a time when Instagram is starting to become really popular. You know, Facebook was the biggest channel at the time, and I just thought that's where the growth is going to come from. Social media is the future. And then email was what drove everything. And Boise, where I live, has this interesting culture of like online entrepreneurship. And you get these people who have been in online marketing for a very long time because Bodybuilding.com is based in Boise.

Okay.

ClickBank is based in Boise. Like a bunch of these, like early, um, online marketing companies. So you get a lot of people who founded those companies, worked there, that sort of thing. So I was talking to my friend Ron, who has been in this space for a long, long time, and I was like, Ron, email, email's driving everything. Like, it's the other— it's not even— there's no comparison.

This is like 2012.

In 2012. And he looked at me and goes, yeah. We've all known that since 2005. Like, do you want— what do you want, like a gold star? Like, he's just like, I'm telling him the most obvious things. Yeah, but to me, I was obsessed with it, you know? He's like, obviously, you know, like, welcome to the club. And so then I just became obsessed with, okay, what is every tip and best practice that you can implement in email? And I, you know, I took my web design background and I was like, all right, let's figure out everything. How do you do welcome sequences and lead magnets and, yeah, and how do you segment your audience? And, you know, of what converts better, like beautifully visually designed emails or plain text, and the whole back and forth. And that kicked off the rest of this journey.

It's so funny, even now I would say like the people are still sleeping on it so much. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Like after I spoke last night at your— at the event, I spoke quite a lot about email, even though people would, would normally associate me more with like the public social platforms. But people are like, oh, I didn't realize that the sales happen on the email. And it's like, well, it's like high 80% of all sales and all webinar attendance and anything happens on the email, right? And so like the social is amazing, like you say, because you get like play the game and you get to build a massive audience if you give value, right?

The distribution is—

the distribution is crazy. And like you just have to be smart to understand where the platforms are going and so forth. But the whole business happens on the email. And I didn't have a newsletter until a year and a half ago. And I was thinking to myself, like, how crazy, how quick you can build these things nowadays. But it's also like, to a point about the analogy of the sort of musician, you said to that person, I think email's the thing, and they were like, yeah, duh. And it's like, I swear my whole life, even at the point where I've run 4 companies, I still have moments where I'm like, oh my God, and someone goes, yeah, duh. And it's just like a skill that you learn.

Yeah.

And you have to be ready to learn the thing.

But that's the fun thing about this game that we play, right? Like, I don't play video games, I play business, and it's way more fun. Yeah, right. Because there's just always new skills to unlock, new levels, new challenges, all of that. And then the fun thing is the character is you, right? And so you're like, oh man, my, my little character avatar has to level up in these ways and get these new skills and equipment. And you're like, oh, that's me. And one of the, one of my favorite things to do is to look back on like whether going through my journal or, uh, you know, posts that I've put out to our company or things like that and look at the hardest problems that I faced in a given year. So, you know, think about 2020, the pandemic, you know, all the social unrest, everything that was happening then, you know, or going back even years before that. And you remember how stressful that was and how hard. And you're just like, oh man, this, this pushed me as a leader, as a founder in every way to the limit. And I got through it and all that. And I look back at those, I'm like, oh, 2025, Nathan, could handle those, no problem.

It's amazing, isn't it?

And so then the reminder, you know, I'm like, okay, well, what is 2025 Nathan super stressed about?

Yeah.

And so realizing that, okay, 2027 Nathan is going to be like, oh, that—

don't worry about it.

This 2025 problems were easy. Yeah. The 2027 problems are so much harder. And so just realizing that like, oh, you're on this, this journey, this game of, of constant, you know, like personal and professional development and realize like, okay, I'm continually leveling up and just having that like zoomed out mindset of like, okay, these challenges I'm encountering are building skills and resilience and, and all of that that are going to help me tackle so much harder things. So it's a really fun game to play.

So before we go on to the, the growth, I read that you were writing 1,000 words a day for 600 days.

Yes.

And I was thinking, where does that fit in your story? Is that as part of releasing the book?

Yeah, I had this bad habit of Starting things and not finishing them.

Okay.

And I would run these projects based on excitement and momentum, which are two of the worst things to fuel any entrepreneurial journey because they fizzle out very quickly. They're good for somewhere between 3 days and 3 months of fuel. And so I would do that. I'm like, oh, I'm going to start this project. I'm going to— this is the— The Actor's Handbook was the third book that I tried to write. And I would like sit down and work on it for a weekend or, you know, another project, like 2 or 3 weeks. And I'm like, ah, actually this is a bad idea. And I'd move on. And so when I was like, okay, I wanna write this book, I'm going to figure out how to create the systems to do it. And Chris Guillebeau, who I mentioned earlier, he had this blog post where he said, uh, it's really easy. To write 100 blog posts a year, a traditionally published book, one, maybe two self-published books, and then you gotta grow your audience. And so let's say 50 guest posts. It's really easy to do that in a year. And I'm like, no, what part of that is easy? Like, that sounds insane. That's, it's a huge prolific amount. He said, if you write 1,000 words per day, 2 pages, 2 and a half pages maybe. And that's not a lot. We're talking a time commitment of between 45 and 90 minutes to get that done. But if you add it up, that's 365,000 words. Like, that's a lot of content. And you add— and you're like, oh, that is everything that he listed off.

Yeah.

And you're right, that, that fits in there quite well. And so I did what any good app designer would do. And I built an iPhone app to help me track a habit of writing 1,000 words a day. And so I made this app called Commit, and it would build this streak. And I'd get to, uh, you know, 5 days in a row, and then I'd be about to miss a day, and the app would pop up and say like, hey, you're gonna write 1,000 words today. And like, all right, you know, get that done and check it off. And I broke the streak a few times, but by the time I published the book, I had a streak of about 80 days in a row. Of writing 1,000 words a day.

Oh, yo.

And I cheated with it a little bit because early on writing was the most important thing. Really later editing and reducing and refining and rewriting was more important. So like as I was getting close to releasing the book, you know, I'd check off my, I wrote 1,000 words today when really I spent an hour, you know, trimming the book down or that kind of thing. But after I published the book and I launched it, it blew me away in sales. and this little iPhone app popped up and said, are you gonna write 1,000 words today? And I was like, no, I did it. Like, done. I'm thrilled. I've achieved all of my wildest dreams for, you know, I've made more than $10,000. Uh, the book is finished. And then what happened is I was looking at this streak of 80 days in a row. I was like, well, I don't wanna break that streak. Okay, let me write a blog post about how the launch went and lessons that I learned. And so I wrote that and published it. And then this really weird thing happened where the iPhone app popped up the next day and said, are you gonna write 1,000 words today? And I was like, what am I gonna write about? Mm. You know, but I didn't wanna break an 81-day streak. And so then I said, you know what, why don't I write another book? And so I immediately started writing, um, a book on designing web applications. So taking similar concepts from the iPhone, but bringing it to designing these great you know, web and SaaS, uh, applications. And turns out if you write 1,000 words a day, it's actually pretty quick to write a book. And so about 80 days later, I published a book called Designing Web Applications.

A paid-for book?

Yeah, a paid-for book. That book launched to a bigger audience of about 3,500 people as this had grown. Uh, and I blogged about my journey and lessons learned. And so I had this great mix of people who followed me both for learning software design, but also like what's the self-publishing thing that he's doing and, and all of that. That book made $26,000 in the first day and $50,000 in the first month. Oof. And I was completely off to the races. And then what happened is shockingly this iPhone app kept popping up every single day and saying, are you gonna write 1,000 words? And I just kept that habit going. I started Kit in the beginning of 2013. So in a 90-day period, I launched two books and started Kit, and then I just kept writing. And so I live blogged the entire journey of building Kit with a post every single week. I wrote another book called Authority, which was all about how do you build expertise, how do you, how do you teach and become perceived as an expert, and then how do you self-publish that and earn a living? Um, and that book sold very, very well. And so in this 2-year period where I wrote every day for 600 days in a row, I transformed my entire life. Yeah. Where I went from making $60,000 a year as a software designer to making $250,000 a year with my own audience, with 3 self-published books, and then, you know, uh, SaaS company. I mean, it was absolutely transformational. And the thing beyond that is I made so many friends, because now I would go to conferences and events, and instead of being the shy kid in the corner who wouldn't talk to anyone, people would be coming up to me and be like, oh, I love the breakdown that you did after you launched that book. I learned so much from that. I actually launched my own thing based on that, and I made $10,000 from it. You know, all of these things. And so that one habit changed everything for me. That is a crazy story.

It's funny to think as well, like, at at its basis, like, you were effectively just creating a PDF and uploading it to a— to the internet, to the internet, and people were buying it. And that's still what people are doing now. You were just doing it 12 years early, 13 years. I think it's mad. And I think that the interesting thing I find about your story is that clearly you worked out quite early on how to make decent to amazing money yourself. And then you launched a SaaS product that while the idea was amazing, it was what sounds like it was agony to actually grow it to begin with. Like, you know, you didn't make real money for a good few years. Yeah.

So I have this, probably the most popular essay I've ever written. It's called The Ladders of Wealth Creation, and it breaks down how you go about building wealth and how you move between these four ladders of time for money, And then, uh, you know, owning your own business and then productizing the services in that business and then ultimately building products. And as you work your way up and, and it explains a lot of why some of these problems that people try to solve, you know, end up failing as they know the skills from ladder 1 and they're trying to tackle the hardest problem on ladder 4. But one of the principles in the post is that as you jump ladders, your income will often substantially decrease. Mm. And so I made $250,000 a year in 2013, 2014, even into 2015.

And how old are you then?

Uh, I was born in 1990, so 23, 24, 25.

I was born in 1990. How funny.

June 29th, I think.

So you're incredibly young, you're making $250 grand a year, presumably the vast majority of that is profit.

Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

And so, but what happened is that in 2015 I made this decision to go all in on building Kit, which at the time was making not even $2,000 a month in revenue. And, and I decided that I couldn't do— I couldn't run my content creator business and go on as being a SaaS founder simultaneously. And so I decided to shut down. Like, really, my idea was the content creation business would like taper off, uh, and that didn't— it like dropped significantly when I stopped working on it. And I went all in on, on, on building Kit. And I thought that, you know, I'd earn money from one while building the other, but my income did not reach $250,000 a year again for 5 years, maybe 6 years, something like that. And like, so that, that lesson of if you switch ladders, like, you might have a drop in income. I had a significant drop in income. Like, I burned through a substantial amount of my savings, uh, and all of that. And then, you know, within a few years I was paying myself a salary from Kit. And then, you know, I gradually ratcheted that up from, uh, $60,000 or $70,000 a year salary up to, you know, a much more substantial salary now. And I ended up, you know, making this insane net worth jump, but it was not linear. Like it took the significant dip before it grew again.

So do you remember revenue year 1, year 2, year 3?

I remember it as like monthly recurring revenue numbers. Yeah. So 6 months in, we got to $2,000 a month in revenue. And then we stayed there for the, until 2 years in as it like dipped and grew and all that.

And that was like people churning off, people coming on.

Oh yeah. Everyone talks about the, like recurring revenue is amazing. You should always pursue that. No one ever talks about churn. Yeah. And churn is brutal. Yeah. Like, yeah, that actually really, really hurts. And, and it just takes so long to build a product that has enough features to drive retention and, and all of that. Really the start of year 3, so in, uh, 2015, I decided to go all in on building Kit. I focused really heavily on direct sales, and instead of growing through content, the thing that I was known for, I said, you know what, I'm going to do one-to-one sales to get as many people on this platform as I can. I'm going to do these migrations to bring them over by hand, like just brute force this problem. And we started the year at $2,000 a month in revenue, at the midpoint of the year, we were at $15,000 a month in revenue and we ended the year at $98,800 in monthly recurring revenue. And then that next year it just took off even from there. So we had basically 50x growth in 2015 and then we 5x that in 2016 to go. So we ended 2016, uh, at $500,000 a month in revenue, which is wild if you think about it because This growth curve was 2 years of basically nothing, and then $100,000 a month the next year, and then $500,000 a month the year after that. And so it just completely took off.

How were you in the, the period where it wasn't taking? Just because I feel like sometimes it's a bit like your ladder analogy. When people look at you, they go, oh, I mean, he's built Kit and it's done this, you know, and he hasn't had funding and all the rest of it. So they compare themselves to your version of yourself now. Yeah, but for 2 years, I mean, a lot of people would just give it up.

Yeah, uh, I almost did. And there's a state actually in between, like, shutting down and doubling down, that's actually worse. And that's just like, it kind of works, I don't know what to do with it. And so many people get stuck there. Like, if your company fails and it fails clearly, like, that's a gift. And if your company succeeds, and it clearly succeeds, also a gift. But the, you know, the purgatory is in the middle where you're like, ah, should I shut this down or not? So I had a bunch of things going on there. First, I had this writing habit of 600 days in a row, and the business was killing it. I, the first 3 months, this would have been of 2014, I did $50,000 a month. And so, you know, I'm like, wait, I am on track this year for way more than the $250,000 a year that I did the previous year. The writing habit was going strong, all of that. We had, uh, my wife and I had one son. Our, our next son was about to be born, uh, in just a little bit. So I said, okay, when he's born, I'm going to take some time off of work and I'm going to— we bought this house, we're going to remodel it. I'm going to be the general contractor on this remodel. And, you know, I'll keep doing the content creation thing, but I'm gonna like back off to 10 or 20 hours a week. But I'll, I'll, I'll keep the, the writing habit going cuz that's the most important thing. And what ended up happening is after August, our second son was born, he slept really well at first. And then like both, like on week 2 or 3, uh, I don't wanna alarm you since you're about to have a kid, but it may have changed my life. Um, Somewhere in there, both kids thought— stopped sleeping. So you had a, a 2-year-old and a 2-week-old who were like, they're both, you know, got sick and they're not sleeping and all this. I'm like trying to be, trying to just take on everything. And, you know, I have a very high capacity for, uh, you know, hard work and lack of sleep and all of that. So I'm like, I'm just gonna take on everything. And it worked really well, uh, for about another 2 weeks. And then one day I noticed this rash on my leg. I was like, well, that's weird. Did we change laundry detergent? Did we like— what, you know, I'm having allergic reaction to something. And like, gets worse, and it's like up my side too. And I text my brother, who, um, he was a combat medic in the Army and now he's a physician's assistant and all that. I was like, hey, what could this rash be? And he's like, well, does it follow a dermatological distribution? And I'm like, the hell does that mean? He's just like, Google it. And it means to follow the pattern of your nerves in the body. And, uh, so I Google that and the pattern, and I'm like, oh yeah, it does. He's like, yeah, you have shingles, go to the doctor. Yeah. And I'm like, I, I'm 24. Like, shingles is something you get when you're like 74, you know? And so I go and, and they're like, well, is there anything in your life that's caused excessive stress lately? I'm like, well, I'm, I'm running my business, I'm the general contractor remodeling a house, and then I have, uh, you know, a newborn and another kid. Who are both sick and no one's sleeping. They're like, yeah, that would do it. And so I remember this moment of them saying, all right, well, here's the antivirals that'll take care of the shingles, and then here's the painkillers. And, you know, they prescribed like some pretty serious painkillers. And I was thinking like, I don't want— I don't want to take that. Like, it doesn't hurt that much right now. I'll take some ibuprofen or whatever. But like, when I was a kid, I'd broke my leg, and so I'd spent a lot of time on like serious painkillers, and I just— I hate the way that that makes you feel. And so I was like, I'll take the antivirals, you keep the painkillers, see you later. Turns out they had taken bets on how long it would be until I called back asking for the painkillers. Uh, it was about 4 hours.

Yeah.

And so, uh, and they're like, yeah, we already called in the prescription, like it's waiting for you, just like go, go pick it up. They're like, why bother trying to convince the guy? Like, wait until his body tells him. But what ended up happening is I spent the next 6 months basically losing the ability to work. That 600-day writing streak was gone. Actually, I've never reclaimed that writing streak. I've never been able to rebuild that habit. I've tried many times, and I got to a point where I was just really depressed, struggling to do pretty much anything. And I think what happens is as an entrepreneur, when you derive a lot of your self-worth from what you accomplish, and that is like a virtuous cycle because you're like, look at what I can do. This is awesome. Look at the public validation from it, right? Like the internet is great at public validation for you when you are quote unquote crushing it. Uh, but then if you slip into the other side, there's actually a vicious cycle that comes really quickly. Of like, self-worth comes from what I create, but today I'm struggling to create. And so now it's influencing self-worth. And you know, then I'm like, what the— like, what the hell? I can, I can do this. Why am I struggling so much? Then you get more and more frustrated. I basically recovered from shingles and, uh, didn't do anything else for the first 6 months. And so I always much more publicly tell the story of Oh, I had this, I, you know, I realized I needed to shut down Kit or double down on it. And, um, my wife really supported me in that, but I talked to her about it years later and I was like, hey, when I was saying, should I shut this down or double down on it? What should I do? And she, she was like, oh, you should 100% double down on it. Like, if it doesn't work, we can move in with my parents. You know, all of that. And I was like, no, if it doesn't work, I'll go get a job. You know, like, but the worst case scenario is, is not that bad. But in hindsight, when we talked about it later, she was like, oh, you weren't doing anything. I saw like this little bit of spark in you of like, hey, I could go all in on Kit. And she was like, honestly, if you do anything that like brings you back, and then that's worth it.

So that sounds like depression.

Oh, 100%. Yeah. And so that was the place that I started from, of focusing on Kit and saying like, okay, this is going to be like, I'm rebuilding basically who I am as a person and trying to rebuild all of that identity from how do I feel valuable? How do I, um, provide value to others and, and all of that and rebuild it from an intrinsic place rather than from a Uh, you know, like, what value do I provide for the world?

And how did you do that? Like, how did you come back from that period?

A lot of counseling and going to therapy, a lot of going to founders events. Like, there's an organization called Reboot, um, that's like executive coaching and, and, and all of that with like a very therapy-focused angle to it. And just working through all of those things, like realizing that my drive to make money came from a place of not wanting to be a burden on anyone, right? And if I give you more than I ask from you, I can be dead certain that I'm not a burden on you. And like, seeing— because I saw as a kid all the ways that I was a burden on my parents, and, you know, like, I was so acutely aware of the lack of money and like anything that I would need or ask for. And like, I just— I didn't want any of that. So I'm like, all right, I'm gonna get so good at making money that I never have to ask anyone for anything. It's a very effective, uh, place to create from, and it's a very fragile, uh, place to, to create from. And so yeah, it took a long time to, to rebuild that and realize that, like, I don't know, I have intrinsic value for the world for, like, who I am, not just for what I can do for other people.

I feel like it's something that if, if you're, you're young and you're trying to make money to solve a problem, which a lot of us are when we're growing up, I feel like in many ways you kind of have to go through that cycle a little bit. Yeah. To realize that once you do make money and you have money, in some ways it's not the thing that necessarily makes you happy, and you have to then reevaluate the things that mean the world to you. And like, I would always say that, like, in so many ways COVID saved me because 2011 I started my business. By the time COVID came around, it was like 100 people. A big business bootstrapped, like, had gone through hell to build it, and then it collapsed overnight because it wasn't a SaaS business with retained revenue. Not to say that that was easy at the time, but our clients went from, you know, like, 7, 8, 9 million turnover or something to down to 500,000, right? And so you furlough everyone and all this sort of stuff. And so for me, it was like a handbrake because I was like, okay, you're making loads of money, you've got public validation, but like, what are you you're just a machine. You don't do anything else, you just work. And so COVID was quite a nice pause and break to be like, what is important in my life? And I think that you do have to go through a little bit of that.

Like, something has to provide a reset. Maybe much more emotionally healthy people are like, oh, I'm going to change in this direction, or that sort of thing. Um, for people I think as driven as you and I, it takes something from the outside that like causes that. Full reevaluation.

Yeah. And so you picked yourself back up and at the same time you were building Kit.

Yeah. And, and I, I think that building Kit really, you know, became this thing that I could pour time back into and get stack these little wins and, and build up from there. So yeah, that's the time that I decided, okay, I'm going to go all in on this. Like, this is going to be the focus and the goal and, and I'm going to build momentum. And, uh, the amazing thing is it absolutely worked. Yeah.

Did you put your personal money into the business? As in, you were able to fund the growth from what you had done previously, or did it fund itself?

So the— initially my goal was I wanted to put in $5,000 of my own money and then have everything else be customer funded because I'd seen people dump a lot of money into a venture, not ever really talking to customers, and then finding out like, oh, nobody wants what you're selling.

Yeah.

And so I was like, all right, I have to sell preorders from day one because that's how I'm going to know, does the market actually care? Great idea in theory. I would definitely do that again. It just takes more money to build a SaaS company. And so when I went all in, I took $50,000 from savings and was like, okay, this is what I'm going to use to hire a full-time developer. all of this. And so actually you can look at like our Wealthfront, uh, investment account, you know, and like climbs, drops by $50 grand and then like, you know, very gradually climbs again. But having a full-time team rather than contractors made a huge difference. I have a friend, Danny Inney, who said this line to me around that time and said, you know, if you pay for half of someone's time, you get a quarter of their attention. And I, you know, just when you're building a business just on freelancers, Yeah, that's where you end up, where people aren't thinking all day every day about, okay, how do I make this as impactful as possible? How do I make the product as good as possible? Um, but if you hire great full-time team members who are embedded in your business, they do that.

Yeah, we were talking about this before, weren't we? Like, the— when I was starting this new business, I was like, I probably could go out and like hire some, you know, in equivalence of terminology, a couple of like incredibly trained snipers. Yeah. And they would like come in and edit and film and whatever, and they would be like incredible. But over time, I won't be able to level them up. And to become the best, I feel like you have to build your own engine. Yeah. And so to your point, I think, you know, you can start lower and you can pour time and energy and effort and money into your team, and your team will keep leveling up if they're in-house. But if they're not, you are always suffering the fact that you're just a contract to that person, right?

Yeah. And that person might be highly skilled, but it's still just a contract.

Yeah. So do you remember— and I think this is important for young entrepreneurs now, new entrepreneurs now who are building in AI or tech or digital or whatever— do you remember what it was that, that turned the company from a company doing, you know, $2,000 to starting to scale and then, you know, what it was that, you know, 50x the revenue and then 4x the next year. Like what were the, the, you know, the viral product things like break it down for us.

Yeah, it is not a sexy thing, but it's something that I think always works and that is direct sales. Paul Graham has this line where he says, do things that don't scale.

Yeah.

And he talks about how John and Patrick Collison from Stripe, the early days, they're going through Y Combinator and they're building Stripe and they would watch them. I think Paul would call it like pull a Collison. And what that means is they'd be, you know, John and Patrick, who are like barely 20 years old or 22 years old at this point, would be talking to another founder in Y Combinator and he'd be like, hey, we're building this thing. And they're like, well, have you launched payments yet? Like, no, we need to do that. And we'll make a plan. And instead of like this whole pitch of like, we're Stripe, we help process payments and all that, they're like, why don't we get out our laptops and we'll build payments for you right now? And like on the spot with that founder, you know, 3 laptops are out and they're like going through this whole thing. And then that startup would have Stripe launch processing payments like a few hours later and just this like insanely scrappy thing. And when I internalized that, I was like, okay, I'm selling a product for $50 a month. I, everyone's like unit economic costs and like, you know, all of this stuff, the very fancy things like what'd you acquire the customer for and how is it profitable and all this? 'Cause we're a bootstrap company, right? And that mindset got me absolutely nowhere. And the mindset that worked was do anything you need to in order to land this customer. And so I would spend 10 hours migrating someone from Mailchimp to hit for a $50 a month account. And so the, you know, in month 1, that's where we're at $5 an hour. So we're back to the Wendy's money, you know, you've come so far and yet not that far. And what I found is it just started to compound in these simple ways. The more accounts that I brought on, the easier it got. The migrations got a little bit easier, the sales got a little bit easier, and You know, I'd watch these founders talk about how the biggest thing that grew their business was word of mouth. There was actually this founder who went from, uh, he had this post and this is, um, a company called Customer.io, also in the email space, but they're much more on the like powering email for SaaS tools and that kind of thing. Uh, and now they're wildly successful. He had this post about going from $2,000 in MRR to $50,000 in MRR in 12 months. Mm. And that was super inspiring to me. I was like, if I could do even half of that, that would be amazing. But the thing that threw me off in this post is he talked about the biggest factor was word of mouth. And I remember being so frustrated because like someone telling you that they grew through word of mouth is the most obnoxious thing because you're like, oh, I had all these levers in front of me and I was like pulling this and pulling that. And I just, I forgot to reach for the word of mouth lever and pull that, you know, when in reality you're like, What do you even do?

Yeah.

You know, you have to have momentum to build, to get word of mouth.

Yeah.

And the way that you get momentum is cold outbound, direct sales, and then concierge migrations, which is a very fancy way of work for $5 an hour to onboard that customer, you know, pull a call us in and be like, all right, we'll get you switched over right now. And that worked. It got to the point, you know, in January was $2,000 a month. Uh, by June was $10,000 a month. July went from $10,000 to $15,000 a month in, you know, 50% growth in one month. By September it was $25,000. Uh, and then by the end of the year it was just shy of $100,000. And that's when word of mouth was really kicking in. Mm. And so word of mouth is not a thing that you can do. Word of mouth is something that you have to brute force.

Yeah.

And then the next year we started to— we launched an affiliate program. We started to do webinars. It's amazing to me that all of these things that worked in 2015, 2016 still work today. Lead magnets, webinars, all these things. And we started to go out to the creator community and say, hey, will you do a webinar with us? You know, talking about email marketing and list growth and all of that and promoting Kit. And that just— it was direct sales, but now with leverage.

Yeah.

Where I would be doing direct sales to one person to get them on the platform. And then once they're on the platform, I'd go back and be like, hey, now it's, you know, it's direct sales again. Did we do a webinar with us as an affiliate? And then— but now they're, you know, instead of getting one account from it, we're getting hundreds.

Yeah, it is an amazing playbook that can be played out. Like if you I think people will forget that the hard thing about building a great product is that the customer has to love it. Yes. You know, and you have to build it with the customer. And so I can remember in my life, you know, when I was running Lottie with my brother, we had a SaaS tool for care homes. And I mean, it was complicated. The care system is complicated. And so we were like, to the VCs, they were like, yeah, build like the financial, you know, tech behind care homes. And it's like, okay, yeah, I mean, we're gonna have to do it with the care homes. And they were like, scale it super fast though. And it's like, I mean, I'm gonna go into the care homes, I'm gonna work with them on it. And it took probably 6 months of almost no growth.

Yes.

You know, like the customers we were working with barely wanted to use the product, you know. And so eventually you get 4 or 5 using it. And then once you get 4 or 5 using it, you're like, I can see how I can make this better. But you have to do that. But you can still, to a point, like, I, uh, invested in a company called Say What last year, and I am their distribution.

Yes.

You know, and so I invest money, they build a product, it's amazing, and now we cross-promote it. But the founder gets my audience and the cross-promotion of the product. So if you're smart these days, you can build, you know, AI products, you can build tech products, and if you partner with creators, you can get the distribution, which I always think it's something that you guys have done so well because you have so many advocates now in the, in the creative space. Yeah.

And that's the thing. I think for a product you have to select a niche and niche selection really, really matters. And so there's a lot of other businesses that I could have gotten into where if I got a raving customer, they would tell like 2 or 3 of their friends in the Chamber of Commerce, you know, like some local business meetup or that kind of thing. Right. And that's like, the most success you can have. In the creator world, you know, you get a raving customer and they're, they're like, oh yeah, I'm gonna tell 10,000 of my closest friends, you know? And so that helps substantially. And so you do get into these viral loops, right? Where it says powered by Kit, you know, at the bottom of emails or, or that sort of thing. You come out with a free product that expands from there. That has never been as big as even, even still like one-to-one sales and relationship building and being a part of the community.

Even today.

Even today. Yeah. Well, because now we have this product called the Creator Network where creators can recommend and promote each other. So we have, we have network effects in the business where, you know, if someone's signing up for Kit versus one of our competitors, they're looking at, well, who is on Kit? Not just from a reputation perspective of like, oh, if it's good enough for Chris Donnelly, it's good enough for me. But also from a, well, if I ever want to be able to partner with Chris Donnelly, I need to be on Kit, right? If I ever want to partner with Tom Brady or Sahil Bloom or Andrew Huberman, right? Or whoever, I need to be on Kit. And so now every single customer is worth so much more to us because they are that voice, like pulling in that section of the audience. And to your point of the amount of time that all of this takes and, and the products being so bad early on, Um, James Clear is our biggest customer. He's got 3.8 million subscribers on his email list.

Wow.

And he and I have been friends since 2012. So he was the first person that I met at a conference, uh, that I went to in 2012. And we formed a mastermind group. Um, we like built our businesses together. As you were talking on stage last night about, uh, your group of peers where you all built on LinkedIn together, who are all— everyone that you named is super famous. No, but you weren't then. Yeah, it was the same thing for, uh, James and I and others. People were like, oh, well, you know, of course if you partner with James Clear, you're going to be— and like, he's in your mastermind group, you're, you know, you're going to be successful. You're like, no, no, James and I found each other. Yeah, like, he was barely writing on the internet. I was also barely writing on the internet. I mean, that is amazing. In maybe 2015, he, his newsletter was really taking off and I was like, James, you gotta switch. He was on probably AWeber and I was like, James, you gotta switch to, switch to Kit. He was like, all right, let's do it. And so he switches over to Kit, starts to migrate, and he's like, Nathan, this product is terrible. Like it's legitimate.

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The idea of it is great and I can see where you're going, but we didn't even have a page that listed all your subscribers yet.

Right.

And he's like, where is that? I was like, yeah, we still need to build that.

He's like, it's on the roadmap.

That's on the— what you still need to build. And so he's like, I hate to say it, but like, I gotta— I can't use this to grow my business. And so he, he's like, spent 2 weeks on the platform and then migrated to another platform and spent 5 years there, 4 years there. And it was years later when he had hundreds of thousands of subscribers that then we'd built the platform to the level that he came back. And now, you know, because of him and Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss and all these other people on the platform, we've completely dominated the world of authors and thought leaders. And those network effects have done all of it. But it's been like this hand-to-hand combat the whole way. And to your point, like investing in building a great product because no one's going to stick around, no one's going to tell stories of like, I make millions of dollars and 80% of my revenue comes from email, which is powered by Kit. You should use Kit. Kit unless like the product is actually—

oh, the product has to be incredible. Yeah, like that's the thing that people miss, you know, when you get to a certain point in your business and you're, you know, you're running a business at scale, it makes a lot of money. Like, you can smile and be kind and be nice in the world, but like, I take my business so seriously. And so like, the piping for my business is your business, and that's, that's why I rave about it, is because it makes everything so easy. Like, I feel like if I didn't have you guys if we just look at the creator network example, the, the thing I always talk about is, you know, Sahil, Mark Manson, Steve Bartlett, Chris Williamson, and Dan Go are the 5 people I trade my creator network with, which is an amazing group of people.

It's an insane group of people.

Yeah, like it's crazy. And Eric Partaker.

Yeah.

And so all of us have big newsletters, all of us have big growth, but we grow, I don't know, 2x faster.

Yeah.

Because we trade with each other. And so I can't— I don't even know what value I put on the software because it's like inconceivable that my audience, my, my platform that delivers 80% of my revenue grows twice as fast because of the software, right? It's like, what value could you put on that, you know? And so sometimes people say to me, you know, these softwares are expensive at scale. It's like, yes, of course they are, but like, look at the outcome it's providing you, and it's broadly just something that whirs away in the background. Yeah, because you're not actively working on it, I find. So like, when I look at your numbers, for example, you know, 2017 you're doing $500K a month, 2023 $3 million a month.

Yeah, that sounds right.

And it almost feels like as a company you're speeding up in many ways.

It's been pretty consistent from there of adding— basically we add about $5 million of of recurring revenue every year. So our recurring business is at $45 million a year, and then our payment processing and, um, a few other business lines add another $3 or $4 million, uh, to that. And yeah, the, the network effects have really made a huge difference. And that's a, a key thing in products. Like SaaS has always been really siloed. Uh, Shopify was like this, right? Where there's no benefits If I'm on Shopify, I, as a, as a seller, I'm there because it's a great platform and user experience and whatever else, and it powers my business and you're on Shopify, but there's no benefit to me of you being on Shopify. Mm-hmm. And for a long time, Kit was the same way, right? There's no benefit, you know, other than the fact that like I could tell you how I build this auto, like if we're in a mastermind together, I can tell you how I build this automation. You can be like, oh, let me build it the exact same way because you're both on Kit. Or I can actually, I can share it with you and you can import it into your account. But now both Shopify and Kit, there's huge network effects to being on the same platform. Like on Kit, we can cross-recommend each other. You know, we can do all this stuff together in Creator Network. In Shopify, we now all have Shop Pay. Mm-hmm. And so every customer that you get is one more person who can buy stuff from me with a one-click checkout. Mm-hmm. And so you have all of these one-off platforms that were, you know, their own islands now building network effects. Mm-hmm. And that just, it absolutely accelerates the growth and it just makes every customer so much more valuable.

I think for context, so for people listening, you're now running $45 million turnover annual recurring revenue business that you bootstrapped and you're 34.

Yeah.

I mean, you don't hear stories like that very often. And so I suppose when you think about the business now, like where do you think you're going to take it?

Everyone always asks like, so are you going to exit and all of that? And we had an offer to sell the company in 2021, and that was from Spotify because they were rolling up everything in podcasting. And we had so many of the biggest podcasts on the platform because podcasting and newsletters just go hand in hand. That was something that I had to like really sit down and think about. I decided to, you know, I'm like, nope, I don't want to sell. This is what I want to do. And so now I'm just having the time of my life. Like, the problems are still really hard. Mm-hmm. And they're problems that would probably crush me 2 or 3 years ago. And 2 to 3 years from now, I'll look back on it and be like, oh, please, those are easy. But I'm able to do things at a scale and amount of leverage that I just think is, is so much fun. Both who we're talking with, you know, like there's these moments where I'm like, is this my life? When I'm like on a Zoom call with Matthew McConaughey and I'm like, he's just the same.

Is he the same? Oh, he's 100%. Really? That's amazing.

Or like launching Tom Brady's newsletter or all of these other things who we meet. All of that's fantastic. Hearing the stories, you know, of what people are doing on the platform is amazing. But then also just what we can do with it. Like, you know, as we sat down in the studio, Hailey on my team and I are like looking at the cameras like, oh, you're running Blackmagic, you know, all this stuff because we love building studios. And one of our projects, and this is the benefit of being self-funded instead of VC-backed, is we're like, all right, we have this profit every month. Do we dump it into Meta ads in order to grow faster, or do we do something unique that provides real value to creators? And so like one of our projects right now is Uh, we're building out something called Kit Studios, which is these world-class podcast and YouTube production studios. Uh, we have one in Boise and we have one in Chicago. We're working on New York right now. And so in this space, there's 5 separate studios, each with a different set and style and all of that, that our customers get to use, come in to record their courses and their podcasts and, you know, short-form video and whatever else, totally for free. Because I'm like, I could spend that money on customer acquisition, you know, to buy attention, or I could spend it on a whole bunch of gear, build out these studios and like really enable, uh, not just the top creators today, but really everyone, you know, who's coming up, uh, to have access to all of this. And so that's the kind of thing that I get to do that's just insanely fun.

You're almost like you're just at the starting line of just Oh, another journey. I mean, it's— there's so few people you will meet who, after the years and the grind that you've put in, are where you are and own the business, you know, because obviously now you make profit, you can design your life, you can do what you want. Like, VCs wouldn't like the studio idea. Yeah, you know, they were—

you can justify ROI exactly.

They're like, where's the return? And you'll be like, no, it's about the value in the community and the long-term growth.

And they say, well, where's your model to prove that? And my model is gut feeling.

Yeah. On that. Yeah.

You know, and reactions from people like they come into the studios and they're like, this is insane. What do I have to pay for this? This is like $200 an hour to rent. I'm like, no, no, no. If you're on our platform and— but then I can see how this is a self-reinforcing thing because if you think about the creator network, I need to have the best creators on the platform so that everyone else who's growing is saying, oh, I need to be there. With them. And so how do you get the best creators? Well, first you need to recruit them by having a fantastic product. And that includes the software, includes the value of the studios, the brand, all these things. And then second, you have to grow them. Mm-hmm. You have to bring in the people who might have 1,000 subscribers or 10,000, and they're just getting started. And if we can help them level up their content in a way that helps them get distribution on social, grow their newsletters and all that, then we will have the next James Clears and whoever else. And so like, great, let's take someone who's recording a podcast in their home studio and it's kind of mediocre, but the content is amazing. And let's get them in a world-class studio so that the lighting and, you know, the whole experience matches the quality of the conversation. And then of course they're going to take off, right? Like, let's give them every advantage. And then I'm sure years from now people will be like, oh, how did you get fill in the blank, whoever it is, and we'll be like, oh, they were already amazing. They just helped. They grew here. We didn't, we didn't even recruit them. They're homegrown.

Like me.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's exactly it.

Never had had one email before you guys.

Yeah. There's other people. Jefferson Fisher is someone else. I think he's coming out to London and he's coming on the show. Yeah. Are going to hang out soon. You know, he's also homegrown. Okay. You know, and Yeah, there's so many people like that.

So one of the things I want to talk about— last night at the conference we talked about it— creative flywheels. Yeah, I remember reading something from you in the early days and I was like, what does it mean? Like, how does it work? Can you explain the concept and then explain why it is so powerful to building like a very strong network?

Yeah, flywheels are one of those words that everyone uses in business, like it's a buzzword. I was at a newsletter conference a few months ago and I had the closing keynote and everybody, every presenter before me used the word flywheel at some point, but no one actually explained what it was. And so one of my things is I'm like, I'm gonna actually explain to people what a flywheel is. And I first learned about flywheels in, uh, South Africa in 2008 when we were there building a well at an orphanage. And because electricity was not very consistent there, we knew that we couldn't put an electric pump on this well. It needed to be a hand pump. But like a hand pump, you know, with a long handle and you're doing this manual work to pump it, like that's not a great— you know, 200 kids, their main source of water, like that's a lot of work. Might be fine for camping for a weekend, not great for, uh, you know, a primary water source. And so, you know, you're thinking about in physics, like what tool do we have That would take this hard problem of bringing water from hundreds of feet underground up to the surface without electricity. And the answer is a flywheel. So it's this big, large metal wheel that sits on top of the pump and it, instead of a vertical, like up and down motion, it has this rotational motion that, that creates it. And so it has continuous momentum. Now the momentum has to come from somewhere. And the hard thing about a flywheel is that it's way harder to get it started initially than a hand pump. Mm-hmm. Right. When we got this flywheel going, it took me and my friend Luke, like, leaning into it to really start this cranking. And then we got it and it got easier and easier, but it started really, really difficult. And so I've become obsessed with the idea of flywheels in business. What are the things that you can do, the systems that you can put in place that compound on themselves and build momentum and keep going and going and going? And Everywhere that I look with successful creators, you can retroactively figure out what their flywheel is and, and how they're growing. And so if you contrast this idea of a hand pump versus a flywheel, the hand pump gets instant results but takes continual effort. The effort to impact is always tied 1 to 1, whereas the flywheel, huge effort to get going. you know, decreasing amount of, of, uh, effort as it goes on and increasing amount of impact. So as I've outlined it, there's 3 laws to a flywheel. Uh, law number 1 is flow. So every step in this, you know, in your business or whatever, has to flow smoothly from one into the next. And it's really, really important to reduce as much friction as possible. You know, you imagine that big metal wheel and if it's like sticking in one spot, like that's gonna make everything so much harder. The second one is ease. So every rotation has to get easier. And then the third one is growth. Every rotation has to produce more than the previous rotation. And so if we use an example, uh, if we use Sahil Bloom as an example of this, his newsletter flywheel is all about audience growth. And so if he has, um, when he came over to Kit, he had 100,000 subscribers and the goal was to get to a million by the book launch. Mm. And so we built a flywheel designed just around that. And basically it's get— recruit as many new subscribers from social using lead magnets and all these things that work well. Uh, next is use the creator network to amplify that. You know, every subscriber turns into 1.3 or 1.4 subscribers, and we can do all the math on that. Send a great newsletter twice a week. Mm. Sell ads in that newsletter. Take all of the money, 100% of the money earned from sponsorships and dump that back into advertising, either on Meta or paying other creators through the creator network to, you know, to promote you. And then that grows the audience and around we go. And so it's a seamless— if we think of the 3 laws, it's a seamless process where you can see, okay, here's how every step moves from one to the next. The second law of ease, if we do the same activity over and over and over again, We can optimize every step of it and just smooth that out, reduce friction everywhere. And then the last law is growth, where you think about what happens here is how it compounds. It's like pushing a snowball and rolling it. You know, if we're going to build a snowman or something like that, the first, uh, rotations are very small, but then as it builds up, it's just building so much momentum. And so if you imagine 100,000 subscribers, we can sell sponsorships for maybe a couple thousand dollars per issue, which gives us, you know, maybe $10,000, $20,000 a month to reinvest in ads, which gives us a certain growth rate. Well, later, when you have 500,000 subscribers, you can charge 3 to 5 times as much for sponsorships, which gives you 3 to 5 times as much to invest in advertising, which gives you 3 to 5 times as much growth in that rotation. And so this flywheel in just a couple of years ended up taking his newsletter from 100,000 subscribers to 830,000. And then the book, you know, that he did all of this in order to build the audience to promote the book. And the book debuted at number 2 on the New York Times list. And he would have been number 1 if it wasn't for our friend Mel Robbins.

Like ever.

Yeah. Thanks, Mel.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's just. The thing that the flywheel does is it gives you such a clear thing to focus on, a system to really, really optimize, and then, you know, a plan to stay consistent for a long time. And that's what I see behind the best creators is they, they know how they're supposed to show up every day. They know their channel they're supposed to grow through, and they can just repeat this over and over again.

And so I think in, in the sense of modern creator businesses, like, as you know, with me, like, I train a lot of entrepreneurs to build audience, and I train a lot of creators to build businesses. I feel like some people are amazing at content but fundamentally not amazing at business, and then the entrepreneurs tend to be quite good at business but struggle a bit with the content.

Yes.

I think that modern creators are getting quite good at building low-ticket products, and I feel like there, there is a whole world of high-ticket products that people can't enter into, right? So How does a creator who sells a low-ticket product, which might be an ebook, it might be a product or whatever, how do they move and migrate to selling medium to high-ticket products?

Yeah, well, first you have to realize that as a creator, you own and are the best at harnessing the most valuable currency on earth, and that's attention. And you have these, you know, many billion-dollar brands that are spending a huge amount of money in advertising and sponsorships and everything else to get attention, which is what creators just get for free. Like that, that is the defining characteristic of a creator is like, yeah, I don't know, I provide value to the world and people pay attention to me for it. And then the thing that creators do is they say, all right, well, since I have this attention, where should I direct it? I can direct it anywhere. I can direct it to a book, to sponsorships, you know, to a business, all of these things. And the question that I always ask is, well, since you can point it anywhere, what's the highest value place you could direct it? And most creators are like, you know what, let's do an ebook. And I'm like, is that the high— like, that is great if we're talking about making money as a skill and we're working our way up through ladders. That is a great place to start, but that is not the maximum value of that attention. And if you look to some of these celebrities, like if you take Ryan Reynolds for example, He's someone who's getting paid millions of dollars for a TV commercial. Someone says, hey, we'll pay you $1 million to represent this product on TV. He's like, all right, sweet. Sounds amazing. Great use of time. But there's probably this moment in the back of his head. He goes, well, hold on. If this one is worth— if it's worth paying me $1 million, this has to create more than $1 million worth of value for you. Is it creating $1.1 million or like $10 million or more? Like, I just want to know what the spread is. I know you're trading a spread here, but what is it? And somewhere here he goes, I think this is more than like a 10% spread. I think it's more like a 10x spread. So if my brand and this commercial and this endorsement is worth so much, why don't I own equity in the thing that I'm promoting? And so you watch him do this playbook over and over again, you know, with Aviation Gin. And, uh, you know, I think the exit on Aviation Gin was like $600 million. And they did it with Mint Mobile. The exit on that was $1.3 billion. Now people are like, well, Ryan, you know, $1.3 billion is great and all, but Ryan only owned 30% of it. And it's like, I think he's doing okay.

I think he's fine.

I think that'll work out.

He lent his audience to the challenge for like $400 or $500 million, which he already had that was already growing and was already compounding.

Yeah. And so you're like, okay, so what are the characteristics of these businesses that, you know, like attention really matters for. And that's something that I'm doing with Kit, right, where I'm building a personal brand and I'm driving all the attention that I get from that not to an ebook like I was doing years ago. I'm directing it to, you know, a recurring revenue software company where every customer, you know, is worth somewhere between thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands of dollars and then compounds from there. So That's the first thing where as a creator you want to think, what is the highest value place that I could direct this attention? And that's like the ultimate thing. That's where, you know, as a creator you can build these businesses that are worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But your question is more maybe at the, the middle part of the journey is of how do you move from selling a $25 product to a $2,500 product? And I think the most important characteristic of that is you have to teach a skill that makes money to people who have money. Mm. And it's pretty easy to miss one part of that.

So easy.

So if we're teaching knitting to 14-year-olds, doesn't make money. They don't have money. That's pretty clear.

It's a niche example.

Yeah. If we're teaching career skills to college students, absolutely a career, a skill that makes money, but they don't have money, right? If we're teaching personal brand creation to founders of $10 million companies and beyond, like a skill that makes insane money to people who understand leverage, you know, very intuitively, and they absolutely have money because they're just making ROI decision and they're saying, oh, $5,000, you know, $10,000. Well, what return is it going to get me? And you're like, well, here's— when people implement the playbook, this is what they get. And they're like, oh, that's a very clear ROI. I'm in. And so that, like, niche selection really, really matters. And so that's where you're going to see you don't need as much leverage to make a lot of money when those two things are true. You can absolutely make a lot of money when you're not teaching skills. You know, if you're teaching relationship advice to, you know, or say parenting to busy parents, something like that. It doesn't make money. The parents probably have money, you know, it depends. I don't know, kids are expensive, right? And so there's these examples that aren't quite as clear. And so it just means you're going to need a much bigger audience and a lot more leverage, and you're not probably going to do it at a $1,000 price point or a $5,000 price point or that sort of thing. But if you want to move into high ticket, which is really where so much of this money is made. And you see people with audiences of, uh, a few thousand people, like, make huge amounts of money. There's a, um, a creator named John Neese, and he teaches coaches how to, like, build sold-out coaching programs. He's been on my podcast. He does not have any social media, and he entirely has his newsletter. His newsletter is basically only grown through word of mouth. He's, like, decided to play the like play this business game on not even hard mode, on expert mode. But because his product is priced at $5,000 and he's got a recurring aspect to it and all of that, he only has to make a handful of sales. You know, he only has to make 5 sales in a given month to make $25,000 to have really a pretty great business in life, you know. And because he's pricing at this at this high level. And it's really about just delivering a huge amount of value to people who have money and can demonstrate a clear ROI on it.

I think that value point is, is quite interesting these days. Like, everyone is quite obsessed with the quick growth and the quick revenue and making digital products and all the rest of it. However, if you think about when you buy a product from a brand, if it's not good value, your value association with the brand plummets immediately, right? You're like, I'm never buying from them again. Maybe I'll try and get a refund. It's the exact same but with a higher bar for digital products. So if you are going to sell a low-value product or a medium-value product or whatever with the hope of selling a high-value product in the future, your value exchange needs to be greater than the price. And so I always try and say to people that the thing that amazing businesses have is their existing customers buy more from them. Like my agency business, you know, it grew because our existing clients grew. You know, it wasn't just because we acquired new clients, it was because our $10 grand a month client went to $100 grand, right? And so, you know, if you think about how my business works, I don't have as many new customers as people assume that I do. You know, like, all the people who do one of my training programs for 3 months with me will probably do the next one with me because they want to learn the next thing. As the second cohort I do, I don't even have to market it. It's just existing customers. But that only comes from them being so wedded to the value exchange of the program.

So I actually thought that you were primarily teaching the same cohort. I didn't realize that you had multiple products. So what, what does that ladder look like?

So I have something called the Creator OS, which is a low value product, which is like $50. So it's like Notion template, 3 introductory videos as to how to build a personal brand. The Notion template is what I use to manage my brand. And that, for— I'll just quickly explain for the audience's sake— that's like to liquidate my ad spend.

Yeah.

So, you know, a proportion of the people that, uh, join my newsletter buy that product, and it makes the whole flywheel of my business.

It makes it so that you can spend as much as I want, as much as you want on it, so long as the customer acquisition cost stays below a certain amount and the conversion rate stays above a certain— like, so long as that math works, you, you can acquire.

It is an equation, and as long as the math works, it works. And you can keep pushing in the top organically or paid. And then I have my sort of signature program, which is the Creator Accelerator, which is £6,500 for 3 months. And we train entrepreneurs, but normally very experienced entrepreneurs, how to build profile. And once they've built profile and audience, they start to see the benefit in their business of doing these things. And then the next one is like how to build a digital business. So it's a lot of the time you're working with founders who have— make millions a year, and they want to build a digital product into what they're doing as part of their flow, or they want to build a, uh, they want to massively improve their lead generation through digital. And so we will work with those people, and that's like $10,000 per person. We will work with those people over 3 months, and they will normally come out of that with a new product within a business, a completely new business, but it's also like similar to your— I can't believe that in your first group was Tim Ferriss. Like, sorry, James Clear.

Yeah.

Was in your first group.

Tim Ferriss actually has been a customer since 2017, I think. So that's crazy.

I've known him for a long time as well, but the group of people you meet in doing something like that, even for me, I'm like, this is crazy. Right, like you get to work with, you know, 50, you know, people who make $5 million to $10 million a year. The conversation is a different conversation, right? And so all of those people almost exclusively come from doing the first program.

Yeah, I love that. A few things I noticed in there is exactly what you're saying of the relationships between the other members is so, so powerful. Because there's a lot of these entrepreneur groups that are, you know, you're paying $10,000 a year or more and the only value is that you get to be in the room with these other people. Right. And so you're saying like, hey, I'm going to give you this outcome. We're going to create this outcome together of a new product, you know, a personal brand, whatever it is. Oh, and the side benefit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is that you get to meet 50 other people who are on the same journey at a very similar level. Who you can form a group with and, you know, make huge gains from there. And so it's like, wait, the side benefit that you don't even teach is the primary value prop is just as good as what, you know, or better than what other people are selling, you know, charging more for.

My favorite thing that's happened recently is the new agency that I've brought on to support my— you'd call it like growth marketing, like landing pages and all that. They are two guys who did my program originally and met on the program. And I'm like, that's amazing. They've built a business from meeting each other on one of my programs, and now they're helping me scale my business. I think what's really interesting about you is, unlike so many other people, you have like, uh, one of the most impressive businesses, like, out and out. I mean, if I was to name like most people I know, I would still always put you at the top because you own it all, it's recurring revenue, and it's unbounded growth as to where it can go, right? You know, and you're now in an age of, of AI, and, and your future is, is so exciting. And yet you personally are super chill, super humble. Like, I never see you like posing next to, you know, private jets and flashy cars. And so what is your life like outside? Like, where are you getting your validation from now? You know, what does life look like outside of work?

Yeah, I mean, I've got 3 young kids and so I spend a lot of time with them. Uh, we have a little farm and a homestead, uh, it's 9 acres, like right in Boise. And so we do a lot of projects there. Uh, I grew up, uh, you know, doing a lot of things with my hands and learning construction and, and all of that. So I'm making sure to do the same thing for my kids. And also there's this idea. I heard this quote from Sean Blanc, who's another great creator, and he said, if you work with your mind, you should rest with your hands. And I think a lot of people say like they have a really stressful day and they're like, you know what, I'm gonna crack a beer and I'm gonna watch a TV show. I'm like, that's one form of rest. My form of rest is like, hey, let's go build a bridge across our creek. Let's go, you know, like let's go do something completely different. Let's get out from behind the computer. Yeah. And let's go make something in the real world. And so doing that, you mentioned planes. Well, I don't have, you know, fancy private jets.

I do have a plane.

I do have a plane. You know, it's a little 5-seat. It's a Cirrus for anyone who knows planes. And I have my pilot's license and I love flying. I use it for work, you know, going to cities, you know, within basically the western half of the United States. But that's a really fun thing. And That was a fun challenge to be a beginner again and to dive— like, learning to fly is, you know, you have to sit down and take tests and you have, you know, like all of this stuff and it's really, really quite difficult. Uh, so that, that was a lot of fun. Um, yeah. And then I love sports. Uh, working with your hands is a great way to let your mind wander and explore problems or unpack things that might be bothering you or whatever else. Uh, and playing sports like soccer or volleyball are the ways to get your mind to shut off, right? You can only focus on, you know, getting the block that's right in front of you or something. So I'm terrible at sports, but I love them so much.

I'd say that's pretty much my go-to when I'm not working or with friends is playing sport. Yeah. As if I could play every single day, that would be my preferred, you know, and business sometimes does get in the way because you seasons where growth outstrips whatever you put together. And so you have to kind of say, okay, I'm leaning in for this period. But I would say that for since I exited my last company, I would say that I've played sport maybe 5 days a week.

That's amazing.

Since for at least like an hour or two. And I feel like that's my like my absolute favorite thing to do. And I just get more enjoyment from that than almost anything else.

Yeah, that's great. And, and for me being able to do it with my kids is a lot of fun. So pickleball is wildly popular in the United States and, uh, with weirdly a much older generation and a very young generation. So my 13-year-old is obsessed with pickleball. Like, his idea, he wants to become a professional pickleball player. And so to be able to like ride our bikes over to the park and play pickleball for an hour is, is pretty great.

So I have a couple of, uh, quickfire questions to wrap up. What's the difference between a strip mall and a skyscraper strategy for digital products?

Oh, this is the biggest mistake that I see so many creators make where they say, I'm going to build, you know, I've built this one product and let's say it's making $200,000 a year and that's wildly successful. And so let me launch another product that will make $100,000, sell to an, and you know, a smaller part of my audience. And now we're at $300,000 and now to get to $400,000, we need another product or $500,000 and on from there. And they stack all of these. These products. And so what I think about is, if you use a real estate analogy, that is a strip mall. You're going in, you know, in the suburban sprawl, and it's like we've got a Subway and a Radio Shack and, you know, Wendy's and whatever else, and it's just all spread out, all these little businesses. And I think that works really well to grow a great living as a creator. It is not a great way to build generational wealth, which does not have to be the goal, right? But as a creator, you should know that you have all the ingredients for generational wealth if you want it. And so what I think about instead, the most successful creators are the ones who say, this is the one thing that I'm doing. I'm going to keep building this up as a skyscraper, as tall as possible. And for me, that, that's what I've done with Kit. You know, I, I don't sell books and courses, do these other things. I only do things that push kit, push kit and build this one skyscraper. And I just see these examples over and over again. Um, one would be Mark Sisson who ran this, uh, health and wellness lifestyle blog called Mark's Daily Apple. And he became very well known, uh, in the paleo diet space. And so this is in like maybe 2013, 2015. And this is that time where he's making over $1 million a year off of his blog between digital products, um, affiliate links, partnerships with brands, all of that. And, you know, if you're making— I think, I think it was about $2 million a year, and the taxes on that have to be pretty, you know, like, or like the profit on that's got to be good. You're living a great life.

Yeah.

And especially in 2015. Now I think the, the strip mall version of that is like, okay, what else can we add and what else can we sell to this audience that is going to bring that $2 million to $3 million? Or how do we grow this audience to, to scale it up a little bit? And instead what he did is he said, what is my audience asking for over and over again? And there I have these recipes, you know, for salad dressings and these other things that, that match the paleo diet. And I'm teaching people, here's how to do it. And they're like, Mark, can we just buy it from you? I don't like— this is great. I mixed it up once, but like, I honestly just want to go buy it. And what he did was he ended up creating a paleo-friendly mayonnaise, a salad dressing, all of that. He launched the brand called Primal Kitchen. He had this amazing ability to kickstart it from his own audience, right, to, to promote that. I don't know if this is how it played out, but this is the way that I would do it. You imagine getting distribution in Whole Foods or some of these other big grocery stores, and they're always going to run a test project. They're going to be like, okay, this is interesting. We think our audience will buy it, but we're going to try it out in 3 stores, see how it does. And Mark's, you know, probably like, okay, great. Sounds good. Let's see how it does. Uh, uh, which stores are we testing that out in? And they're like, oh, this one in Austin, this one here and all that. And they're like, okay, cool. Go to the email list, geographically draw a circle around that store. Guess what, guys?

Uh, it's available.

It's available in the store. We do a huge favor. Go buy it. That, you know, the audience shows up, they go buy it in those locations. Uh, you, 'cause you can geo-target and all of that. And the next time you talk to the Whole Foods rep, they're like, you would not believe this. We completely sold out. He's like, it was crazy. We did amazing. People must absolutely love it. And they're like, yeah, we're gonna launch it in You know, like, we're going to bump it up to 20 stores. Amazing. Oh, by the way, which stores are we thinking we're going to do? Yeah, right. And that's the power of an audience. And so in just over 2 years after launch, Mark sold Primal Kitchen to Kraft Foods for $200 million. Wow. That is an example of building a skyscraper instead of a strip mall. Mark could have worked for 100 years. Yeah. Or he could take a skyscraper approach and create the same amount of value in 2 years. There's another— for any business nerds, uh, at least in the United States, I don't know how it works in the UK, but the $2 million a year would be taxed as ordinary income. The $200 million would be taxed as long-term capital gains. And so even the government is like rewarding your skyscraper strategy over the strip mall.

It's the same here.

Yeah. Yeah.

And what is the one, the biggest single skill that a creator can cultivate these days?

Uh, I think it's to show up consistently. If we go back to that 600 days in a row of writing 1,000 words a day, if you pick something that is a moderate amount of effort, it's not Herculean, it's not basic. Mm-hmm. It's a moderate amount of effort and you say, this is what I'm gonna do every single day. And I'm going to do it for a very long time. I'm going to create every day for 2 years. You can absolutely transform your life.

And you've said before, who is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers?

Yeah, I love thinking about that, of just these examples that you see of someone implementing strategies and you're like, oh man, this blows my mind. Yeah, you know, an example of this would be Reese Witherspoon. She has a book club. A lot of celebrities have book clubs. That's a very normal thing. That's how you build a relationship with your audience. We seem relatable. See, you and I, we read the same books. The same. What, what Reese has done, uh, with her book club is that when she would feature a book, she would buy the option to the movie rights for the book. And so you have a book that's fantastic, but you don't know, is this really going to take off? Well, she's able to, at a relatively inexpensive rate, option the movie rights and then promote the book, put it in front of as many people as possible and be like, Does it, does it have a K-factor? Is it spreading, right? Is it, is there a viral aspect to this book? If no, not a big deal. We spent not that much money to option the movie rights. If yes, which we are doing everything we can to make it so that yes is true, then, uh, you know, the book goes super crazy. Everyone's like, oh man, you know, every studio is like, we gotta buy the rights to this book. They're already sold. They're already sold to the person who made the book wildly successful. And so that's just a simple example of playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers. And I just think that creators can do that so much because they have attention. They can be kingmakers and take this thing. The product has to be good, right? If the book sucks, it's not going to spread despite whatever amount of promotion. But you can have— you can create options on that. And so you can do things like, you know, instead of selling an ebook, I'm going to go partner with the founder of a SaaS company, right? Like you're doing and saying, oh, I'm going to build them up. I'm going to partner with someone who's amazing at that. And that's an example of playing chess.

And for creators listening today, how can they spot the kind of underpriced, overvalued opportunities that exist in the market today?

I think it's hard to spot those opportunities because all of them just look like hard work. And that's the thing. In hindsight, they look like this brilliant opportunity. And you know, of Kit, it's like if you carve out this market, you know, email marketing is huge, but if you carve out creators specifically, uh, it will take off in a huge way. You can serve this niche. That is very true and obvious in hindsight. Uh, in the moment it looked like taking the most competitive space in marketing software. Or really maybe even all software, which is email marketing, and say, I'm going to build a business in all of that. So I would say it rarely looks like an underserved market or like nobody's doing this. Usually it looks like a hyper-competitive market where there's a lot of money flowing around already and there's a lot of products and all that, and saying, you know what, for this one group of people, I can do something better. And then you either find out that that one group of people is growing to be super large, like creators, uh, turned out to be. Or you find that from that one group of people, you can move to adjacent markets from there. And so usually when I talk to a founder and they're saying like, I have this brilliant idea, no one's doing it, I'm like, it's probably not a brilliant idea then. Mm-hmm. But if they say there's this hyper-competitive market and I have a different take on it, or I'm gonna do it for this narrow group of people and I'm gonna serve them so much better than anyone else does because I only care about them. Then I'm like, that's probably very worth pursuing.

And so to finish, what do you think is the one thing that people should wake up to today?

I think you should pick the big goal, the thing that you want to work towards, and then just figure out what are the small steps that you could take every single day to work towards that. And as you do it, too many people focus on the destination. I'm going to build this and then I'm going to get it to $1 million and that will mean this thing for me. And I think that what matters is the journey. And it's totally a cliché, but you end up making completely different decisions if you focus and say, hey, the journey is the only thing. The destination only matters so long as it invites an interesting journey, right? You and I are going to go on a hike together. It's not about getting to the top of the mountain, it's about enjoying that process of the hike and the top of the mountain is only because, you know, we've picked a trail that's going to be interesting and all that. If we picked a lame trail, it's going to be a lame hike, right? And so we're going to pick something that's fun and challenging and rewarding, and we're just going to focus on enjoying the journey along the way.

Nathan, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me.