Sahil Bloom’s #1 Advice to All Content Creators

All right, marketing school listeners, this is a 20 to 30 minute segment of a full interview I've done with an amazing founder, entrepreneur, creative visionary. You're going to get a ton of insights from this, and if you want to listen to the entire thing, go search for Leveling up with Eric Su. That's the entire podcast that you're going to find. So you get 20 to 30 minutes here. And if you want the whole thing, you can just search for Leveling up with Eric Hsu. And without further ado, enjoy the episode. I think you focused on Twitter first, and then you really started to compound. And so I want to dive into how that happened.

Initially, I was working in private equity, so I had no plans. Like, I wasn't. I don't know what. I didn't know what the creator economy was. I didn't know what an influencer was, other than, like, Kim Kardashian or whatever. Covid hit, and I had more time on my hands. I was kind of trying to, like, figure out what to do with my spare time. I was stuck at home. I had no social life, and I'd always loved writing. And what I figured was like, I'll just. This will be, like, an interesting hobby. And so I started doing it on the weekends. I had 500 followers at the time. This is like, May of 2020. And it was very clear to me early on that there was, like, some pull for the stuff I was talking about. Originally it was like, finance explainers. Like, I was kind of explaining finance topics in simple terms. It started, like, taking off a little bit, and the, like, positive reinforcement I was getting encouraged me to do more of it. So on the weekend, I was spending a little more time on it, and it was continuing to go. But I never. There was never like, oh, hey, I'm going to go become an influencer, or, hey, I'm going to go become a creator, and this is going to be a job, right? Like, I was. I had a lucrative job. I was doing well. I was on a good track. I didn't love it, but it was good. And you're getting patted on the back for being successful. For me, at least one of the big takeaways was like, I never set out to become a creator. I was writing about things I knew and things I understood. And then as I expanded it, I was writing about things I was struggling with, like my own life, life experiences, you know, problems I was wrestling with and things like, I was really learning by actually doing them in the real world. So I was never, like, Hey, I read this, you know, in some book and I've never thought about it and let me just like share it with you or like, here are 10 TED talks that'll change your life. Like, my whole thing was always, if a 22 year old kid with no life experience can do this same piece of content, I probably shouldn't share it. It should really be things that like, I am uniquely qualified to share. And that made a big difference. So yeah, I mean, Twitter was the first place I wrote a ton there. My general perspective was like, let me just figure out layers of depth. So if Twitter was like the most surface level, the next layer of depth depth would be newsletter. So I expanded to newsletter, grew that next layer of depth would be book. So I signed the book deal working on that and then expanding mediums and like expanding the surface area. So that's, you know, with all the video stuff I do now and kind of growing from there.

You're spending at least 5,000 hours in the first year on this.

Yeah, it was, I mean, countless, countless hours. Like, this is. No, there was no hack. I mean, people constantly, I constantly get asked like, oh, what was the hack? What was the growth hack? What was the, you know, engagement groups? Like, everyone wants to point to the thing that was like the hack. The hack was that I wrote 300,000 words on Twitter. Like, I literally just wrote an unbelievable amount. And like, some of it worked, some of it was dud, some of it was great. Like some of it was medium. And that was the real thing was like I showed up every single week for long, long period of time. That was it.

You just gotta do the work straight up. Here's the thing, I'll experiment with things. Cause that's kinda my job as a marketer, right? So like on my Twitter, this guy reaches out to me, he's like, hey, we do these threads for people. It's all these other creators and it's like, yes, clearly these are people writing these stories that are super long. And so he does a couple for me and yes, they get 2 million views or whatever. I'm like, great. It totally doesn't sound like me. And like, also, who cares?

Yeah, I think I know this person. So this, if it's the kid that I think I actually like had like a issue with him because he told people he. So I've always, 100% of the time, I've never had a ghostwriter. I write all my own stuff because I love writing. That's my thing. And this kid wrote a message to one of my close friends Sean Puri, saying that he did ghostwriting for me and Sean is one of my close friends. So Sean texted me and was like, hey, does this guy write for you? I'm thinking, you know, I'm like thinking of engaging him on one of my companies or something. And I was like, what? Like, no, absolutely not. And he was like insinuating that he had written for me. And so I reached out to him and I sent him like kind of a joking message and said like, hey, my, my attorneys will be in touch.

Yeah.

And he freaked out. And I was joking, but I just wanted to scare him. And he, and like, you know, and then I basically told him like, look, you're a 20 year old kid. This is a learning lesson for you. Never do that. Like, don't use people's names that you actually haven't worked with because the world is so small. I mean, Sean literally like within minutes had texted me and I kn then I was messaging this kid. So you have to be really careful, like if you're trying to build your reputation as a service provider. The other thing is like, you have to ask people before you use their name in any marketing. I mean, this happened with Sean, like with Milk Road. He had that big, you know, like public spat with guy that did his newsletter growth. Because like, you have to be careful about whose name you have to ask. Like if you're an agency operator, you have to ask and get consent from someone that you can use their name in your marketing. And like for any agency operators out there, that's just like, you have to do that full stop. But yeah, I mean, I agree back to your point on the ghost writing. Like it goes to my point of when you're creating a piece of content, if you are someone that is actually doing real things in the real world, you should want any piece of content you put out to be something that only you could write. It shouldn't be something that a 22 year old kid using ChatGPT can write because then like, who cares? Yeah, yeah, could I? I mean I could go around and basically go find interesting things someone else had written that like, oh, they only have a thousand followers, but they wrote something good and I could just repurpose it, write it my own way, and I have a million followers. It'll get a whole lot more views than their version did. But like, if anyone can write, then like, what value is that actually creating for me in the long run? It's just like, it's stupid, right? It's like fairy Dust.

Yep. It's. It's also not authentic either. I mean, with all the AI stuff coming out, it's like, yeah, you have to either have original stories or experiences or you have to have original data.

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of my lamentation with the like, creator world as it stands today. Which like, basically when I was getting started creator or like influence, it wasn't really a thing. It wasn't like a career path. Right. Like, you could go make some money doing it short term, but it wasn't like, oh, mom, I'm going to go become a creator. This is what I'm going to do. And so when I thought about it, it was all about like real experiences and authentic things that you were doing. Like you had to go do things in the real world and then, and then you could talk about them.

Ye.

Now there's like a lot of I haven't done the thing, but I'm gonna write about it. Right? Like a business guru talking about business principles when they live in like a 500 square foot studio and they haven't made any money or had business success is weird. Like, that's weird to me. Right? Because then you're just like what you're writing about like someone else's book basically, if you haven't actually experienced or built the thing. And similarly, like, if you're a fitness influencer and trying to build a fitness creator ecosystem but you're not fit, like, why would I listen to you on that? You know, it's like a running influencer that doesn't have stats to back up the fact that they're a good runner. It's like, it's a weird thing that is, that now exists. And so like, if I give advice to anyone that wants to be a creator, it's like, go do the thing in the real world and talk about it along the way. Like, you can talk about the journey of doing it and the experience and the struggle and the like, successes and the failures. That's interesting content because that's like the path that a lot of people are on. If you're talking about it like you've done it and you haven't done shit that's like, that's just inauthentic, right? It's not real.

Grifter level.

Yeah, it's not real.

Yeah, well, here's the thing too. So it's, it's, it's definitely creating, right? And it's, it's plus being consistent because you, I don't think you've stopped tweeting since 2020. Right.

So, yeah, it's. I mean, consistency is the foundation of everything. And people like, is this a common trope? It's just, it's true, though. Like, you just have to keep showing up and you have to not be so short term that you get discouraged when things don't work because they're going to be just like valleys where for a long period of time and like, I'm not talking like one or two posts, like, you might go three months, where, like, your open rates are really low on a newsletter and you don't know why, or like your engagement's really far down and like, the people that you know aren't going to make it are the people that you then see posting. Like, the algorithms changed and it's so bad and like, they need to change it back. Elon Musk, ruining Twitter and the really great people. Like, I just, I had lunch with Mark Manson. The subtle art of not giving a fuck. Amazing guy. He's been around for 20 years, right? Like, he's writing Facebook blogs back in the day. He's created all these things and his whole thing is like, yeah, the algorithms change. Like, that's part of the game. That's why it's hard to be here for 20 years. You, you just have to figure it out. Like, you're sitting around complaining about it and like, getting down during those valleys versus like, figuring out, okay, what works. Like, how do I operate at the, you know, at the intersection of what I like and what's working in the algorithm today, rather than just sitting around being like, oh, the things change. This is crap. Elon Musk, change it back.

Got it. And then just to get a little more granular here, the threads. So you're doing three per week initially, you're working a full time job. These have to be taking you a couple hours per thread.

Yeah, early on, I mean, each one was taking me at least four hours because I was doing a lot of research to make sure they were really good. I was like refining them a lot. I hadn't built the muscle yet, so it wasn't easy. It wasn't coming quickly.

And I think you were like, you didn't have any followers. Right. And I think you tweeted something and then I think it was Chamath or something that shared it. Like, so how did the growth look in the first year?

I started at about 500 followers. I posted my first thread. Nothing happened for the first few hours. I commented it underneath something that Chamath posted. And this is before Chamath was like Chamath. He wasn't super famous yet. He had a decent following, but he wasn't enormous. It was before all the spac boom and stuff. I commented it underneath something that was related that he had said. He then shared my thing and said this is good. That sort of spiked me to like 2000 followers maybe. And that was kind of the start. I think by the end, that was May of 2020. By the end of 2020, I was probably at about 70, 75,000 followers on Twitter. That was my only platform though. I didn't have anything else. And then by the time I quit my job, which was May of 2021, I was probably at about 175,000.

What was your initial cadence on Twitter? Because I think my understanding is you are usually writing off the cuff. I think you're like, screw the content calendar.

Yeah, I can't do the content calendar. Yeah, I just, I'm like, I'm terrible at doing things in advance. I just can't do it. Like I won't be able to motivate myself and so, and I have to work from inspiration. It's like something I'm actually excited to write about. So I, you know, originally I was probably writing about like two threads a week and I was working a full time job. So it was sort of like that was all I could do. I don't think I ever really went more than that and I just stuck to it. I think I never missed a week even still like, you know, I launched my newsletter May of 2021. I've sent two newsletters every single week since then. No Christmas off, no, you know, holidays off, no birthday off. Like just have done it the entire way through and it's kind of how I'm wired. Like when I get into something, I'm going to do this for 10 years. Like I'm just gonna do it. And that's the minimum amount of time that I'm committing to doing this. And it's either gonna work after 10 years or it's not. But I'm not doing it for like three months and figure, you know, and then just being like, ah, you know, didn't work. I wanna learn and I wanna get better at it and improve. So taking that long term view was very important to me from the outset.

Got it now in the morning when you're, when you're. Cause again, I don't think you have a content calendar right now. So one, where are you drawing the inspiration from and how. What's like your Content block in the morning, if you even have one.

Yeah. Every morning from 5 to 7:30 is when I create. It's the only time of day that I'm creative. It's before my son and wife wake up, get out of the cold plunge, which I do every morning religiously, when I'm at home at least, and basically go sit down at my desk. And that's when I feel creative and that's when I can create. That's been a lot of book writing, some newsletter writing, and then it's, you know, for the, for the social platforms. What do I draw inspiration from? It's my own life. It's like literally things I'm reading, things I'm, you know, interested in, problems I'm struggling with, questions I'm asking myself, those kind of things. And that makes it authentic for me where I feel like I can do it for a long period of time. And it means that it's unique. Like, it's. It's not. Again, it's like, it's not something that anyone can do because I might read a concept, think it's really interesting, but for me to write about it, then I need to place my own perspective and lens and like, how I wrestled with it personally to. To be able to go share it. And that' the part that, like, you can't replicate because that's me, that's my own unique view on it.

Okay. So I know, like with Alex Hormozi, the way he does it on Twitter, he's really giving advice to his younger self. And I can see how tough he's being on his younger self. Right. For you, is it just like you're drawing from experiences, but there's also like, hey, like, you should do this.

I try to avoid you should do this type stuff. The main reason. So I do some of that where I feel like it's advice to my younger self. And I explicitly say, like, this is the things I wish I knew when I was 22, you know, that I feel like I've kind of learned at this point in my life about these different areas. Usually I try to avoid it. And the reason is my answers to these questions are going to be different than yours are going to be different than our friends are going to be different than our parents. At any stage of your life, the problems and the questions I'm asking are universal. But the answers are entirely driven by your circumstances, your perspectives, the things you want, like what season of your life you're in. And so my goal with all of it is to help you ask slightly better questions, to help you wrestle with them slightly better, but not to give you the answer to it because I actually don't know the answer for you.

Pre show you mentioned that you're bearish on the creator economy, so let's start there.

I think it's, it's what I said, which is like there's a lot of people that have gotten into this because they think that it's a lucrative career track, but they haven't actually done anything yet in the real world and like creating real experiences and, and that I am really bearish on. I don't think you can do that for a long period of time. I think you can probably do that for a short period of time. You can like hack your way to a decent sized audience. Like if I, if, if I were to start from zero on Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever. And you told me like, hey, you have to make, if it was today, so like October and you told me like, hey, you have to make a million dollars in 2024, so next year. So I have like sort of three months to like build it and then like I have to make a million dollars next year. I think I could probably do that, but then I think it would fall off cliff in 2025. Like I think I could for maybe like maybe a year, two years, three years. Like hack your way where you could like convince people you're legit for a short period of time. Do some like course or something, you know, at brand deals on Instagram, whatever. Like I think I could hack my way to doing that, but that's not a lasting, viable career. Like if you want to have a career doing this, you're talking 30 plus years, right? Like 20, 30, 40 years. There's no precedent for that in the creator economy. The best precedent that exists is people like Tim Ferriss or Mark Manson who have like been doing this for 20 years and that's really freaking hard to do. Like you ask them, they've probably seen so many people come and go during the different phases of their life in these spaces. And so my, my firm perspective is that if you are going to do this, you need to like really approach it differently and there needs to be a longer term view and vision and a lot of that has to be grounded in things you're actually doing or building in the real world. Like the accounts on Twitt that I think are most interesting are the ones that are like in some niche space and then just like talking about it publicly, like car dealership guy is this like, you know, he's a friend of mine in real life, but like he's doing those things in the real world and then he's talking about them. He's built a big audience talking about this like weird niche thing of like auto dealerships and you know, like used car financing and all these things. That is super cool. And he's gonna build an enormous empire around these different things because now he has a huge audience of people interested in car dealerships. Like the potential to launch businesses around that is enormous. And businesses that have real enterprise value, that have durable cash flow streams, totally different from hand to mouth brand deals of so and so is going to pay you five grand to do an Instagram reel. And that's just a very, very different thing.

I keep going back to the Warren Buffett quote here where it's like, if you're not going to hold this stock for 10 years, don't even hold it for 10 seconds. And it applies for everything.

That's a great quote. I've never heard that one actually. That's fantastic.

I'm pretty sure it was him that said it. Yeah, this is. Okay, so this is where it's like you have this creator led agency where you guys will cut up clips. Right. I think it was called Viral Cuts. Correct. I tried it for a little bit. I think my take on this one is I think most of them are gonna go out of business and my.

Reason, I think so too, by the way. Yeah, I just don't think ours is gonna go out of business.

I think. Okay, so for you, for example, like, you know, you've been in pe, like you jumping around like I think there's a good strategic brain and like you don't want to tarnish your name. Right. So I think yours is gonna be fine. Yeah, I think the other ones, because they're going to have like an influx of customers and there's going to be a big operational issue and they can't. The churn is going to go through the roof.

I mean, when you think about so. So what you're referring to is like a broader holding company called assembly partnered with a good friend of mine who's built and sold to eight figure agencies in the past. He's a laser focused operator. Right. I'm not. I have the network and the connections and the partnerships and the strategy. So we have a lot of complementarity in our skill sets, which is great. But the view from us was.

You.

Can basically leverage creators as distribution when there is product audience fit. So the best Example you reference viral cuts which is with Cody Sanchez and Sam Parr. They do a lot of clips. You know, Cody in particular has built an enormous audience off of doing clips. What we've learned by the way is like you're actually not a good customer. The best customer is a business that is looking to like do tons of video clips and ads versus creators who tend to be like, just like shorter term customers in general. Because if it's like working or not working and you know the price point not for you because you have businesses, but like the price point is significant. It's 5,000 to $10,000 a month. A business can easily invest that in doing more direct response ads and doing more brand ads and all those things. And so the vast majority of that business, which is now, you know, multi seven figure run rate business is, is going to be B2B. You know, it's real, it's businesses on the other end. The best example of this is like hey friends, Ali Abdaal, our shared friend where Ali had this amazing course, the part time YouTuber Academy that he had built incredible audience around helping YouTubers build their YouTube presence. Well for me I could take that course, but I don't want to go edit YouTube videos. I don't have time for that. I'm not good at that. It's not my skill set. I want someone to just do it for me and I'm happy to pay. And there's tons of people and businesses that are like that where they want the Ali editing quality and style and all of the strategy and thumbnails and all of those things, but they don't want to actually do it. And so for Ali to launch this premium offering that actually does it for you makes a ton of sense and there's a ton of leads to your point. Now the real devil is in the details of how you actually service with quality those leads. That is going to be the thing that makes most of these businesses go belly up. I tweeted this today that services businesses sound great because you make cash from day one. The reality is building like a tiny little services business is quite easy. Like if you have five clients for a YouTube business like that charging 10 grand a month, if it's just you that runs that you're making 50 grand a month, you feel rich. That's a great little business. Taking that business to where it's doing 500k a month is miserable and extraordinarily difficult and requires like a very specific set of skills. I mean now with these video based businesses we have like 100 employees and you're having to manage all of these different editors and you need PMs and you need a GM at different business units. Units that's like all of a sudden you're talking about like you need a culture and you need, you know, HR policies and you need company off sites. Like that's a real business at that point. And so that I, that's why I agree with you that I think most of these like you know, sort of fly by night creator led agencies that are getting started or creator led services businesses that are getting started are going to have a really tough time because they don't have the actual business background or the business partner that is actually going to understand how to like navigate the inevitable enormous challenges that come with these businesses.

Got it. That's a good point. And so I guess the question would be with the, are you the Holdco here? Are you involved with all these agencies?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. So the Holdco basically is like the shared services layer that builds and launches all of these different services businesses. It's not always going to be just services businesses. The idea is like, I think, I mean this is my finance background, but I call it a bond with a call option. So like the services businesses are a cash flowing bond. They are cash flow from day one. You know, they're generating a ton of cash today, like 50% net margins across the whole thing. And you can then take and invest the cash flow from that bond into like call option upside bets. And when I say upside, I mean like real enterprise value because we know this like services businesses don't typically trade at a great premium. Like you can't really, they don't have a ton of enterprise value. They don't trade at a great multiple. But a CPG business or an app business or a software business will trade at a great multiple. And so those are your like call option upside bets that require some upfront investment of capital. And you can do the whole thing in a really nice way if you're like taking the cash flow from the services stuff and funding the bigger upside bets.

I'll give you the flip side. Flip side?

Yeah, please.

So, so my podcast co host Neil, so he bootstrapped the agency to nine figures. It took about four or five years to do it off his, off his audience. And so my mindset was always like same. It's like, you know, there's more scalable, you know, things with higher upside, you know, better multiples and everything. And what I didn't realize until maybe A couple years ago or so was that if the agency has, let's say over 5 million EBITDA, you're getting like this is like pre 2022, but you're getting 15 to 20x multiples. Right. And it's like, it's pretty significant. I just think most people don't know about that. And so I got myself, I got trapped in doing too many different things and now for me I'm just laser focused on.

That's interesting. Yeah, I mean that's a, it's a good counterpoint. I think that like, I mean even if it's come down a ton and it's 10x EBITDA or 8x EBITDA, like at 5 million you're talking about like you just created 40 million of enterprise without having to, without having to, you know, invest a whole ton of capital up front. I just, I, I think it's really, really interesting. I think it's an interesting space. But now you see, you know, everyone is like there's been a ton of people that have tried to launch these things but there's no business background to it. Right. So like I really think, I don't have any business background running an agency. My partner does. If I were to just go try to do this on my own, we either would have like died while trying to scale and take on these leads or we would have had to stop at 50k a month. And like as an individual again like if you just want to stop at a 50k month, that's a great business. Like you and I know a ton of like ghostwriters that have a little ghostwriting agency that makes you know, 50 to 75k a month and like, like that's an amazing business. As an individual you bought yourself a job, but it's a high paying job and it's like a high cash flow job and that's a great life. If you're young and you're doing that, you can make good money doing it. It's just like if you want to go build the thing that is then on the accelerator path to being a real big business, 100 million of enterprise value, whatever it is, you have to think differently. There has to be another layer to it.

So is your playbook, I guess on the holdco, are you going to just keep cash flowing or are you looking to sell them? What's the play?

I mean as of now, keep cash flowing and own 100% of it. Right. Like across me and my partner today, there's a handful of video businesses there's a handful of design businesses. You know, I own a newsletter growth business that has scaled a bunch own like a sort of premium content agency business. So there's a bunch under there. They all have like real operators running them. You know, I would guess at this point, like I think most of them will survive and do well. I think a couple of them will just be sort of small and like niche and then a couple will be really successful. And so the question then will be like, what do you do with the ones that are really successful? Do you just keep it as part of the whole and cash flow it and look like if the thing is cash flowing $10 million a year, is there a reason to sell it? Or do you just say like, why would I sell that?

Right.

You know, in our private equity days, my fund owned really large, the largest franchisee of Taco Bells in the world. And it cash flowed 50 plus million dollars a year. And you're sort of just like, why would we ever sell this again? It's like a bond that's just paying you an enormous dividend every single year. And sometimes there's just not a reason unless someone is willing to pay you so much that it takes off so many years of that future dividend that you're going to take. Why? Why sell it?

Makes sense. Do you think? I mean, look, you're getting a lot of leads right now and then you're getting clients through the holding company too. Have you taken any equity in these other businesses or these other creators yet?

Have I. So what do you mean by that? Sorry.

So it's like, you know, let's say I invest in you as a creator, right? Like I invest in Sahil, the brand.

I haven't done that. I get asked about that a lot. I think it's tricky because you sort of like, have you seen the Last Dance? The Michael Jordan? So like Scottie Pippen, he signs that preemptive deal with the Bulls and then he's outperforming it and he's pissed and he's like, I want to renegotiate. I'm pissed. Like it's, it's a, it's like an adverse thing that, that it's like he's now upset because he signed that preemptive deal. I think you'd be opening yourself up to a lot of similar things where like say you invest in a creator, you take 20% of their future earnings, you're going to provide them services. If they like become Mr. Beast and you somehow own 20%, you don't think they're going to be pissed when you're not no longer really providing them value and you're taking 20%. It creates this, like, weird environment where like, the success stories are actually going to be the ones that are really angry about it versus venture, where, like, yeah, if I give you the money up front, you grow. Like, you know, are you annoyed that I might own 20% of your business when I didn't contribute? Maybe. But you can't do anything about it. Like, it's very stock and trade. These income share agreements haven't fully been like, litigated or played out. And they, they are a little like, sketchy sometimes in, in. In how people receive them. It happens a lot in athletics. I think there's an interesting. I was thinking about this at breakfast before coming over, actually. I think there's maybe something interesting to do with like, athletes, given the nil stuff in college. Like, if you could, you know, like, basically sign on athletes and say, like, hey, we're going to help you blow up your brand, which is going to make you way more valuable as an athlete whether or not you have a successful sports career. I'm providing you value via, like, hey, we're going to do all of your clip editing. We're going to launch tons of stuff for you. We can get you, you know, all this stuff that helps expand your brand, which is going to make you more valuable and make you money, and we'll take the cash on the back end and be providing you these services for free. That's kind of an interesting model, potentially. I was literally like on the way over here was thinking about it and I was thinking about texting my business partner, like, I wonder if we should think about helping athletes grow their brands. It's kind of an interesting idea.

I love it.

Yeah.