How to Build an Email List with Derek Halpern Who Built a 300K Subscriber List

By the way, I haven't done an interview in 2 years.

Wow.

Maybe a year and a half.

How did I get you?

Well, that's— well, you know, you emailed me 700 times.

Do you want to impact the world and still turn a profit? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to Growth Everywhere. This is the show where you'll find real conversations with real entrepreneurs. They'll share everything from their biggest struggle to the exact strategies they use on a daily basis. So if you're ready for a value-packed interview, listen on. Here's your host, Eric Siu. Eric Siu.

What's the number one problem all businesses face? It's not sales, marketing, or product-market fit. It's hiring. We know just how hard it is, so we've compiled 25 hiring tips from top CEOs that I've interviewed here on Growth Everywhere. And put it into a free resource just for you. Text 25TIPS to 33444 to get the free resource now. Again, it is 25, the number 25, tips, T-I-P-S, to 33444, and you'll get the free resource. Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of Growth Everywhere, where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we have Derek Halpern, who runs the popular online marketing blog, Social Triggers, and also runs ZippyCourses, which is a WordPress plugin for creating awesome online courses. Derek, how are you doing today?

Dude, what's up? Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Yeah, thanks for being here, man. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your background as it leads up to doing Social Triggers and running up to ZippyCourses?

Very interesting story, and I will cut you the details. But I started building websites back when I was in college because I stumbled on this one site by a guy who used to write about the dumb things he did in college and they were really funny. And it was funny because I was in college at the time and I remember accidentally clicking advertise here on his advertising page and I saw he was getting like $500 a week for ads and he had 5 ads. I'm like, wait a second. This guy does dumb things. I do dumb things. I'm going to go start my first website. Well, I started my first website where I talked about some of the dumb things I did in college. One of my first articles was about MySpace angles and how people are very deceptive in their dating pictures. I remember this. What was interesting was my website was horrible. I wasn't funny. I didn't really do that dumb of things, and I had no personality. I went back to the source. I was like, all right, I obviously can't do this. Let me get some more inspiration. I went back to that one site and I saw a celebrity gossip blog. I was like, you know what? I don't do dumb things, but celebrities do dumb things all the time. I then started a celebrity gossip blog and I made fun of celebrities from 2006 through the end of 2007. That site was very successful. It attracted about 40 million visitors over the course of about one full year. That's kind of how I got my start building websites by becoming a gossip columnist for my own blog. Now, I got real depressed running this gossip site because who wants to wake up every day and make fun of other people? It just wasn't good for my headspace. So, I ended up quitting that site at the end of 2007 even though a publicly traded company actually wanted to buy my site out. I still walked away from it because I didn't want to write it anymore. And I went into corporate America and I worked for a financial company for about 2 and a half years. So basically the exact opposite of what I just was doing. Entrepreneurship as an English major, now I'm working for a financial company. And I did that for about 2 and a half years before I realized that that was boring. I quit and then I got into marketing. Now, why did I get into marketing? One of my friends knew about my gossip history. and they had a software company that they were trying to grow. So they heard I was quitting my corporate gig. They hired me as a consultant to help grow their software company, and I did that over the course of 2010, at which point I realized everything I learned about building a gossip site also applies to helping people sell more software and getting more users. And that's when I realized that once my skills as a gossip columnist could apply to other types of traffic, As it was proven with that software company, I decided to start teaching the things that I knew about traffic acquisition and conversions on Social Triggers in March of 2011. That's kind of like the complete genesis of how I went from gossip columnist to working for a Fortune 100 company to being a consultant for a software company to launching Social Triggers in 2011. That's kind of like— I guess that's where I got my skills from.

Got it. Okay. So, tell us about, I mean, the switch from entrepreneurship, I mean, that mindset and switching into corporate America. I mean, kind of what's going on through your head at that point where you're working at that financial company? What got you back into entrepreneurship?

Yeah. I suspect you're going to agree with me when I say this, but for me, it was all the same thing. I just put myself in a game and I wanted to go win that game. When I was running a company, I was running my own company, that was the game I was trying to win. When I went into corporate America, it was the same thing. It was the same game and I wanted to win it and I just did everything in my power to win it. There was no mindset shift for me. A lot of people think there's a mindset shift between entrepreneurship and working for another company and I don't think that's true. I think you can just go into each scenario with a winning mindset and that's enough for you to succeed. I did well in corporate America. by doing just that. But the reason why I left is because I noticed that when you run your own company, you are 100% in control of your end results.

Hmm.

You're not at the beck and call or approval of anyone else other than your customers, of course. But when I was in corporate America, I was doing really well and bureaucracy started to drive me a little nuts. It wasn't that I wasn't getting promoted. It wasn't that I wasn't getting raises. I was getting all those things. I had a really great career path. Anyone who worked at this company would have been very happy with the progress that I was getting in corporate America, but I just wanted to progress faster. It wasn't possible with all the bureaucratic stuff in place, which is why I ended up quitting.

Got it. Yeah, so I totally agree with you. I mean, it's ultimately at the end of the day, it's the freedom and the sense of control that you get to create your own destiny.

Exactly.

Cool. So let's talk about social triggers for a little bit. I mean, obviously, you know, you've grown that gossip blog. I mean, 40 million is an insane amount of visitors. And, you know, you have a top blog with, you know, at the time when I read it, it said 70,000 subscribers. I suspect you have more now. But the thing is you only post, you know, roughly 3 times a month. So tell us about your secret to, you know, building more traffic.

Yeah. So let me just first, as you know, I've got about 200,000 subscribers now, not 70,000.

Boom.

So there's a lot of people on the mailing list. And I always tell people that there's a lot of people out there that believe they have to keep creating as much content as possible to get traffic to the blog. And you know what? They use people like Huffington Post or the Gawker Media blogs or all these other types of people that update 2, 3, 5, 10, 30, 50, 75 times a day. And those sites do really well by adding that much content to their site. Why? Because their site already has the authority in search engines. So even if they pump out a lot of bad content, search engines will still rank their articles well because the authority of the website, right? But most people are not in a position where they've got 50 million one-way incoming links coming at their website. Most people have a new website with no links, with no traffic, with no audience, with nothing. And if that's the case, that's why I say you need to not create that much content. Instead, you need to create very little content and focus on getting that content into the hands of more people. Now, that means if you write an article about customer acquisition, let's say, and 1,000 people read that article, chances are there's another million people in the world That can read that same article. Now most people when they look at traffic acquisition from a blogging standpoint, they think, well, let me put out as much content as possible and hope something hits, right? But instead I say people should spend most of their time creating the best article on customer acquisition possible, like the number one default resource on customer acquisition, and then focus on getting that one resource into the hands of as many people as possible. So it's not about creating, it's about promoting your content. Now, as this might relate to, like, let's say a software company, people who build software products know they want millions of people to use their software product. I view content in the same vein. I believe content is a product just like software is a product, and I don't believe You should just keep churning out new software products every time you want more users. Instead, you want to make that one software product even better and get more people to use it. So that's kind of how I view organic traffic acquisition.

Got it. Now, so, you know, people talk about promotion all the time and, you know, master promoters, quote unquote, you know, seem to be these elusive unicorns and it's just tough to find some people that are really good at that. I guess my first question before that, before I go into a deeper question is, what should the ratio be between creating a piece of content and promoting it?

Yeah, so I always tell people there's the 80/20 promotion creation rule. This is what I call the 80/20 promotion creation rule anyway, and that I believe that you should spend 20% of your time creating content, 80% of your time promoting that content. That's really one of the best ways to get maximum reach. I mean, it's what I did when I started Social Triggers. It helped me grow from 0 to something like 70,000 subscribers in my first like 16 months or so, all by focusing on creating content and then promoting that content. So 80/20 is the goal. And you think that the best promoters are unicorns, but that's not always the case. I think that we know about the best promoters and they also happen to be unicorns, but there are also plenty of other people who are promoters that are doing really well that we don't necessarily believe are promoters. And think about it from this perspective, anyone who publishes a book usually is a promoter. Why? Because they work on a book for a full year and then they promote that same book for 6 months. Or anyone who does speaking engagements and does the same speaking engagement 5 times. This is common in pretty much the entire speaking industry. People do one keynote and they'll do that same keynote over and over and over again because they're essentially creating one great piece of content, the keynote, and then promoting it every time they give it. So, I think it's a misnomer to believe that only the best promoters are unicorns. I think most of the best people in most industries are good promoters, and even the people who are not the best but people who are second best are also great promoters.

Got it. Now, let's say, for the audience, let's say people are startups. Let's say they're seed round, Series A type of businesses in terms of funding. Now, how would you go about What would your process be if you were like part of a startup and you had to create content and promote it? How would you go about doing it?

Depends on what stage of startup you're in. Do you have a prototype? Do you have users? Are you pre-prototype?

You have users, you have, let's say, $3 or $4 million in funding, and you have a team. Let's say your team's 10 to 15 people.

Okay, so you already have— how many users do you have? Are we talking the first 1,000? Are we talking the first 50,000?

Because this all matters. The first 1,000.

All right, so you have $3 to $4 million in funding. You've got a team of 15 people. You've got a usable product that people like, but you don't have your first 1,000 people.

Correct.

Correct? Perfect. What I would do is— are any of these people on your team writers?

Let's just say one of them are.

Perfect. What I would do is I would definitely launch a blog, 100%. I would launch that blog and I would start committing to one strong article every 10 days. Now you might be wondering what type of article do you want to create? Well, you want to create content that precedes the sale. This is a specific type of content that I call content that precedes the sale, and content that precedes the sale, here's a perfect example. I read this book by Jay Baer called Utility, and they talked about how Columbia, the sportswear company, wanted to get in touch with more people who are interested in purchasing activewear. So they created an app where all the app did was show people how to tie different types of knots, like knots with rope, and they released this app for free, and even though it was an app, it was still really just content in the form of an app, and they released the app for free. Now, what does that have to do with content that precedes the sale? Well, think about this for a second. Who would be interested in learning how to tie 37 different types of knots. People who are probably going out camping or people who are going out into the woods or people who need to know how to tie knots for whatever outer expeditions that they're going on. So if you're creating a piece of content that can help those people that tie their knots, now you're getting their attention. This attention happens to precede the sale of buying activewear. Why? Because if they're interested in going out into the wilderness, chances are they might need to buy some clothes too. Does that make sense?

Makes sense.

Exactly. So you want to put one of your creators on creating this type of content that attracts your exact type of customer. Now, I always tell people that there's 2 types of people you can attract when you write content. You could attract people who want to buy what you sell, or you could attract people who are industry professionals. So as an example, let's say you're a freelance writer and you want more freelance writing clients. You could write a blog post like, hey, 7 ways I— 7 tactics I use to raise my freelance writing prices, right? That's something if you write that, does someone who wants to hire a freelance writer want to read that? No. Another freelance writer wants to read that. So that article would attract freelance writers. Those freelance writers don't want to buy freelance writing services. They want to hire you to learn how to be a better freelance writer. However, if you wrote something like how this one comic store owner started publishing one blog post per week and increased his sales by 75%, now it's like, who wants to read that? Small businesses who want to start creating content, at which point if they need content, they're going to hire you for freelance writing. Do you see how that connection's a little bit disparate?

Yep.

And that's what you want to do. So you want to put one of your team members on creating content that precedes the sale every 10 days. And then once you get great pieces of content like that, you want them to spend the next 9 days. Let's say they take 3 days to write it. You want to spend the next 9 days trying to get that piece of content into your ideal customer's hands.

Got it. So that's the promotion process, right?

Correct.

So how does that look for a startup? Because I see a lot of startups, it seems like they're getting it now. They're getting that content marketing is there. So that's almost table stakes. where they're actually creating some pretty good content out there, but the promotion part, most of them still suck at it. So what would be your process for that? What does that look like?

I mean, there's all different types of promotional processes, right? One of the techniques I teach people is called the drafting technique, and this is a technique that if you just Google the drafting technique, there'll be a free 5-minute video about it. But long story short, you can use the drafting technique to try to get other blogs and press writers and newspapers and news shows to write about your content or to link your content or to link your product. I guess if I were to describe this, it's a little bit easier. Like I said, it's a 5-minute video, but if I were to describe this as fast as possible here, what you want to do is find people that are already writing about the things or have a history of writing about the things that you plan to write about. And try to reach out and become friends with those people. Network with the people who have a history of covering content and products like yours. Over the course of, let's say, the next 3 or 4 months, build that relationship in a positive way. That way, when you do need them to write about you or when you do need them to pitch— when you do need to pitch them, you kind of built the relationship before you needed it.

Got it. Okay, that makes sense. I mean, you know, I think a lot of startups, I mean, they're so busy, quote unquote, that they just don't have the time to put in the promotion. They think, you know, you build it, they will come, and it's just not how it works.

No.

I look at you, I look at, you know, the Neil Patels of the world. It takes, you know, takes months, takes years to get to where you guys are at. And speaking of which, I mean, you know, you have great content out there. Another guy that does it really well, I just mentioned him, Neil. I mean, he's dropping quite a bit of money for a 30,000 to 40,000-word guide and it's well-designed. Would that be an example of content that sticks out or do you have something else in mind?

Yes, absolutely. You want to create the world's best resource on a topic because when you're first getting started and you don't have any credibility, you really need to create this in-depth content that really walks people through one specific topic and gives them a reason to do it. So let me give you an example, right? So I recently published a blog post over on Social Triggers called How to Increase Sales by 300% with a Persuasive Guarantee, plus 39 examples of guarantees. It's 7,804 words, and it goes through 39 different types of guarantees you can offer your customers. This article took 2 weeks to research and then probably another week to write it out. So this was like a 3-week-long piece of content, but now it's literally going to become the default resource for anyone who wants to figure out a guarantee that they can include on their product. And what has happened, it is already— when I first released it, it didn't go super viral, right? It didn't go viral like as in it generated 100,000 people. What it did do though is start gaining consistent traffic every single day and links and shares, and it continues to gain that same type of traction every day. So once you create something great and put it out there, you want to promote it and get it into the hands of more people, of course, but 2, once it kind of gets its own legs, it kind of spreads itself. That makes sense?

Yeah. Totally makes sense. So when you, I mean, in Derek's definition, what a post like that, I guess we'll use that post as an example. What's the length of that post word-wise?

I'd just say, oh, that post was 7,804 words.

I like how you know the exact number.

Yeah, well, I had to look it up. It's like I just remember, I'm not like a freak and I remember how many words everything that I write is.

Cool, man. I want to take this in another direction. I mean, I look at Ryan Deiss, a digital marketer, and he always talks about using paid advertising to drive people to traffic first, and then, you know, pixeling those people, and then driving people that have saw the content or seen the content to a squeeze page to collect emails. I mean, what's your take on that? Do you do anything like that?

There's all different types of channels for traffic acquisition. There's organic traffic acquisition, which is where content and promotion really comes into play. And if you talk to anyone who does organic traffic acquisition, they'll tell you that organic traffic Organic traffic is worth a whole lot more than paid traffic. The problem is there's people out there who believe you can't control organic traffic, but I'm saying you can when you put the right people on promoting it and doing all that stuff, right? Then there's other people like Ryan where— and I'm friends with Ryan, but Ryan will say that he'd rather buy traffic because Buying traffic is something that you can literally control from day 1. And he's right. I also buy traffic and I also buy traffic to long blog posts. And what I like to do is very similar to what Ryan does, is I send people to a long blog post. So that 39 Scripts Guarantee article I told you about, it literally says, the first sentence is an alert saying, this blog post is 7,804 words. If you want all 39 guarantees as a PDF download, Get it right here, it's free. So I have a long blog post there, but then I also have a nicely designed PDF with each guarantee in it where I tell them, hey, instead of bookmarking this blog post, just download this free guide and keep it on your computer, and that converts like gangbusters. Now if people visit this page and they don't download it, I will sometimes retarget them With advertising. Now, I only tend to do that when the content is leading directly into a sales funnel. I'm— you can't really pay to acquire subscribers if you don't have a way to turn those subscribers into money, because as Ryan would say, you can control how much traffic you buy, but if you're not buying that traffic and seeing money come out the other end, you're just going to be wasting a lot of money.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So I do that too though. So I have a different article. It's called like 7 Tips for Creating Online Courses or whatever. And inside that article, I do a very similar strategy where I drive paid traffic to the blog post. I then offer a free opt-in on that blog post. If people don't opt in, I retarget people who visit the blog post and I send them direct to an opt-in page. So I do do that, but that also leads into me selling ZippyCourses. So, it makes sense for me to do that because it leads into a sales funnel.

Love it. So, just so people know, you know, and I don't expect people in the audience to spend what you're spending, but when we're talking paid content promotion, how much is Derek Halpern spending per month?

A real lot, man. I'm not even going to mention it. Let's say tens of thousands of dollars.

Tens of thousands. Okay. So, that just shows you, you know, when you're at the 200,000 subscriber mark, that's what you— Perhaps can expect to spend, but what about a startup? I mean, should they even bother with this stuff in the beginning? What do you— what's your take on that?

If you have a good product that you need to get into the hands of more people, yeah, why wouldn't you? If you have $3 million in the bank and 15 employees, you should have organic traffic acquisition, you should have growth hacking, you should have content marketing, you should have social media marketing, and you should also have paid traffic acquisition channels as well. I just launched a software company which starts as a WordPress plugin and we'll be moving it to SaaS, of course, ZippyCourses. And how do we launch it, right? We start with organic traffic. Now we have paid traffic running every single day to promote ZippyCourses. And it's helping us, you know, for every dollar we spend, you have the potential to make another $1.50 or $2 out the other end within 21 days. So if you have the opportunity to double your money that fast, you should absolutely take it. However, when you're working with a software product that's a SaaS product, As you guys know, your lifetime value of a customer is worth a lot of money. And if your lifetime value of a customer is worth a real lot of money, you know what you could spend to acquire a customer. So at that point, it's just about spending less. And if you have $3 million in the bank and you're not using it, I mean, I think you're— I think that's dumb, to be honest with you.

Just to be clear here, we are— so I totally agree. I mean, you know, everybody in the audience is definitely spending on paid advertising for their software as a service product, but if we're talking paid content promotion, not a lot of people are doing that right now. So is this— does this still apply in terms of what you're saying right now?

Of course. I believe that paid content promotion or organic content promotion is the same thing. It's a channel of— it's a source of traffic, right? So you can promote it the way where you have someone reaching out and networking, which people think you can't control. You could also promote it by paying to promote that content like we were just talking about. That's another way you can promote it. Another way you can promote it is by trying to create a piece of content that you believe would go viral, at which point that might be growth hacking content. So that's another channel for content acquisition. You have to decide what channel you want to pursue, and then what I would recommend is don't try to do all of them, just pick one of them and get really good at it. So if you look at Social Triggers, I went the organic traffic route at first, and I grew very fast. But that's all I did for the first year of Social Triggers. I didn't do paid traffic. I didn't even have a Facebook page back in like 2011 when Facebook was really easy to get traffic from Facebook. I just didn't launch my Facebook page for like the first year or something after I had Social Triggers because I was focused on that organic traffic promotion that I was talking about earlier. Then eventually I launched a Facebook page. I did more social media stuff, and then I also went into Paid traffic. I kind of went after each channel as my team and my company was able to support it.

Got it. Yeah, you know, I think it's really interesting. I mean, what you've accomplished, you know, going into a really crowded space in 2011. And I look at Neil, who kind of did the same thing a few years back. And then also a guy that's up and rising right now, Brian Dean, who's an SEO guy. You know, super crowded space, right? But all 3 of you are, you know, pushing past, you know, the 100,000+ visitors a month, massive amount of email subscribers. It just goes to show that this stuff works and it's all about the promotion at the end of the day, just like you're saying. So, I think it's a testament to it.

Yeah, we're actually— last I checked, I think we're about 500,000 people on Social Triggers a month.

Wow.

There you go. Cool, man. So, let's talk briefly. I mean, you know, this conversation is centered around lead generation. So, I mean, what's one other unique thing you're doing to acquire more customers today?

Yeah. This is something that I actually first wrote about back, I think, in 2010 on the DIY Themes blog, and it's something that I'm going to be focusing on a lot more this year. So here is— here's a long story of it, is a lot of people, when you're creating content, you'll find that your content has legs after you create it. So you need to go find your content that's like, you know, go look at your analytics and see what your most popular posts are. You'll see that some of the most popular posts are new. Are the new posts, obviously. But then you'll see that there's some other posts that are generating a ton of visitors every single month because it's either linked a lot of places, maybe it gets shared a lot. Whatever the case, go back and update those older articles with a free download associated with that article. So I used to have on Social Triggers just, you know, content, and then I would have a pop-up form and I would have a a subscriber signup form in the sidebar, but the reality of conversions is the more targeted your offer is to the visitor, the higher the conversions will be. So I'll have a video about like, hey, how to write fast, 5 ways to write faster. I'll then put a free ebook download for, hey, here's 5 more ways to write fast, and that will actually help increase the conversion rates of those older pages. And that has been working very well for, I guess, squeezing extra subscribers out of the traffic that I'm already generating.

Love it. You know, what Derek's talking about right here, if you guys want to Google it, Google just content upgrade and you'll find a ton of posts around it and about how he can pretty much skyrocket your conversion rates on these pages. I mean, it's really low-hanging fruit at the end of the day. You just throw together a PDF, use like a lead link or something like that. You don't even have to use a lead link, but add in a box and boom, your conversion rate skyrockets. Is that right?

Exactly.

Cool.

It's a good name too.

Dude, let's talk about your energy. Where does that come from? Because by far you're the most energetic guest that I've ever had.

Well, let me tell you where it doesn't come from. Me being an extrovert, because I'm not. I'm not an extrovert. I'm not even remotely an extrovert. As a matter of fact, my ideal day is me sitting in my apartment By myself with a book. So where does it really come from? It comes from this one interview that I read. Well, not read, I actually saw Chris Rock was being interviewed and they said, the guest interviewer was like, hey, Chris, you're nothing like you are on stage. What gives? And Chris was like, people don't want me on stage. They want me to be 3 times me. And I started to think about that for a second, and I realized that the people who are personalities in the space are very rarely middle of the road. They're either all the way to the right, all the way to the left. I'm not talking politics. I'm talking like they're usually a caricature of their normal selves, and they exaggerate their real qualities about themselves. And make it— it makes it more interesting. And when I read— when I heard— I don't know if I read it or I heard it or whatever, wherever I saw that, when I just read this, I thought to myself, what's interesting about me? Well, I'm kind of a little— I'm kind of insufferable when it comes to certain things. So I magnify that when I'm being interviewed. I magnify that in my videos. I also Know some people, like if you look at like Susan Cain, she is probably the exact opposite of me in public. She's quiet, she's reserved, she's, she's great. But if you look at her, it's almost like she's too quiet. And she probably magnifies her introversion in public. The goal though is when you're trying to be in the public eye, very rarely do you gain any attention or traction by being someone who's a little bit extroverted or a little bit introverted. You gain traction by being really loud and obnoxious, being really soft-spoken, by just basically going to a full 10 in whatever it is you want to do. Does that make sense?

Totally makes sense. And I'll tell you what, I mean, the one word that sticks out to me when I think about Derek moving forward is just memorable, right? You've become memorable.

I have. And that is honestly not even my own doing. Like, this was always me. I'm not pretending to be a character. I will say though, I exaggerate certain parts of my character when I know people latch on to it, if that makes any sense.

Totally makes sense.

So if I sometimes talk about the fact that I read 3 books a week, I don't always talk about that because no one wants to read 3 books a week. You know what I mean? Like, they don't want to hear that I spend 6 hours, 10 hours a week, 12 hours reading books. You know what I mean? That sounds like too much work.

Right.

However, I do dial up the fact that I sometimes boot people off my email list, and I always show people that I do that. Why do I do that? To let them know that, you know, the community that we're building is not an entitlement, it's a privilege. So I purposely dial those things up. And I think if you're going to be a writer or someone who's going to be in the public eye, you have to figure out what is interesting about you and your story, and you need to dial those things up as well. If you look at someone like Tim Sykes, Tim Sykes dials up the fact that he's very flashy and obnoxious with money.

Tim Sykes was a client.

But you know what I mean? I, you know, I, I watch what he does and it's interesting. Then you look at someone like Jim Cramer, he's obviously dialing stuff up when he's breaking things, you know what I mean? All personalities dial up these parts of their personality that make them memorable. And if you're going to be that personality, or you have someone that wants to be that personality, you have to find your same things and do the same thing. Just do the whole dial-up thing as well.

Got it. Love it, man. Tell us about one big struggle you faced while growing your business.

Oh dude, where do I even start? I've had a lot of experience building large traffic numbers and turning that traffic into products and getting people to buy stuff. I do that very, very well, and that's how we took our company from just being some rinky-dink blog to the fact that it's a multimillion-dollar company now. But now we're at the point where we're trying to break out of being a multimillion-dollar company and we're trying to do $50 million, let's say. And to get to that next level, you need to really be great at hiring and building a team and delegating. And for the first 3 years of Social Triggers up until 2014, so the end of 2014, I only had 2 full-time employees and then a handful of contractors that I worked with, and we were already doing 7 figures in revenue. 2015, I had decided that I want to take this to the next level, not because I want money, not because I only care about working, but because I think that what I'm doing is really helping to change people's lives.

Yeah.

And I believe revenue is a way to monitor that impact, right? So we went from 2 full-time employees last year to now we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, like 8, 9, like 8 or 9 full-time people, I think. It's hard to know because I just hired all these people in the last few months. And then another like 6 or 7 contractors that we're working with regularly. So, building the team was definitely a struggle for the first few years, but now as of 2015, we're really focusing on team building and trying to really expand our reach. I guess that answers your question of what my personal challenge was, which was team building. And I guess, is there anything else you'd want me to elaborate on?

Yeah. I mean, what did you— how did you kind of deal with it initially? Because I think we all like to think that we're good at hiring. At the end of the day, it turns out to be, damn, hiring is pretty It's horrible.

It's actually— it was really horrible. So I did what I usually do when I want to learn something new. I bought every book I could find on the topic. I read every book I could find on the topic. Then I started to reach out to some other people that I knew that recently did the same thing. So I reached out to mentors, asked them some for advice. Then I also looked into hiring a high-end hiring consultant. To help them get me up to speed on hiring and how to do it the right way. And then once I kind of did that, I kind of developed my own internal system for hiring and it's been working great. It's helped us, you know, go from 2 people to where we are right now and we'll be continuously refining that system over the next year or so, but if— Someone here is curious about how to broach any new topic, my first personal default action is to buy like 5 books on that topic and read all the books before I read blog posts, before I read articles, before I do anything else. And the reason why I do that is because when you read an article, an article might be 1,000 or 2,000 words and it might be interesting, But if you have no basis or background of understanding that goes alongside that article, you won't know if that article is legitimate or not. So I always say to read 5 books so you can figure out what you believe in, what you don't believe in, and then you can read articles later. But you read the 5 books first, then go start seeking out experts.

Love it. What's one piece of advice you'd give to your 25-year-old self?

Yeah, don't join corporate America.

But I thought you were doing so well.

I was, I was, but I look at my trajectory and I have very few regrets in my life. I was lucky that when I graduated college in 2006, my first year out of college, I made a real lot of money doing the web thing. I felt like corporate America was, or my experience in corporate America was a step back from my success that I had already had. Now, this doesn't mean I'm not one of those people that'll tell people you should never work for somebody because I think working for someone is an awesome way to build a life and career. And I think it's a legitimate way to do real positive work. I just knew for me personally, it wasn't right for me because I knew where I wanted my growth to go in my life, right? So, and I knew I was capable of doing it because I had already done it. So if you actually look back to what I did, and this is very interesting, this is why I say it was a mistake, but I actually made more money In 2006, no, 2007, when I, my first year out of college, 2007, I made more money in 2007 than I did in, than when I worked for corporate America. I actually generated more revenue. So I actually took a step back. And the reason why I took a step back at that point wasn't because I didn't love being an entrepreneur. The reason why I took a step back is because I didn't love the current business I was in.

Yeah.

And for some reason, I didn't just create a new business. I decided to go join someone else's business.

Hmm.

So I don't want to say don't become a— work for someone because it's bad. I think working for people is great. And had I just graduated college this year and I didn't have a business, what I would do is I'd probably go get a job somewhere for 5 to 7 years so I can get my my feet wet in the business world, you know what I mean?

Right. Yeah, I totally— I don't regret, you know, working full-time for anybody at all. I mean, it was, you know, I think the experiences were great and it's always a learning opportunity. So yeah, I'm not against it at all, but I think at the end of the day, it's just, you know, I think you decide what you want to do, right?

Exactly. Cool.

How does Derek Halpern structure his day?

You know, I love when people ask that question because everyone I know who answers it lies. And oh, I wake up in the morning and I don't check my email because they say you're not supposed to read your email in bed. And then I go to the gym every single morning and then I eat breakfast and then I roll into the office about 10. No, I don't do any of that. What I do, I don't really structure my day based on anything other than when I wake up in the morning. I wake up usually before 5:30 in the morning. And it's not because I'm a morning person, it's because I can't sleep. So I'll usually wake up around before 5, you know, 5:30, 5, 4:30, whatever time it is. And at that point, I'll either do some reading in the park or on my couch. And the reason why I'll do reading at that point is because I'm hoping I fall back to sleep.

Wow.

Then I'll wake back up about depending if I Fall back to sleep, great. I try to definitely get out of bed by 7:30 in the morning. Then at 7:30 in the morning, I shower usually within 10 seconds of waking up. There's a lot of people who like to wake up and then stroll about the house and get started with their day. I like to shower within 10, 15 seconds of waking up.

Is this a cold shower?

No, no. I'm not—

Just making sure.

I'm not crazy enough for that. But I like to wake up immediately and hop right in the shower. It's a nice hot shower. We don't live in— I don't live in New York City in a luxury building with hot water just so I can go jump in a cold shower. You know what I mean? Then I shower, at which point I'll usually put some of my hardest work that I have to do, whether it's writing, tough decision-making, vision stuff, all between 8 AM That's when I'm most productive. Then I eat, and then from probably about 12:30 to 2:30, I do some afternoon work, which is usually some more tedious stuff, stuff that I don't really like doing as much, but I don't need to have full brainpower. I go to the gym with my trainer at about 3:00 or 3:30, and then by the time I get back at like 4:30 or so, that's when I start to have meetings. This podcast that we're recording right now.

Hmm.

So, I guess if I were to structure my day, there's no real time structure around it other than the fact that I wake up early, I read, hoping I fall back to sleep. Then if I do wake up again, I shower, work from 8 till about noon on the hard stuff, work on like from 12:30 to about 2:33 on the tedious stuff, do the gym, and then I do the meeting stuff at the end of the day when I'm already ready to stop working.

Got it. Yeah, I think it's good that— I think, you know, I really like asking this question because everyone tends to have their, you know, a different style. Sometimes you hear the canned responses, but I think this really helps give people ideas as to, hey, what the hell do successful people do, right? Okay, what's one productivity hack you can share?

Yeah, stop trying to be so productive. I'm not the most productive person that I know. I'm not even remotely the most productive person that I know. I don't really think that you should focus on being so productive, especially if you're in a creative role, because sometimes you can't really produce, be productive when you're trying to be creative. There's some days where I will spend a full 4 hours or 8 hours or 10 hours writing 4 sentences. You know what I mean?

Yeah, totally.

So my productivity hack is to really stop being so productive and be okay with it. Now, this doesn't mean you want to be lazy and not do anything, right? Don't use that as an excuse, but use it as permission to have an off day. And when you give yourself permission to do that, you find that you don't stress yourself out when you're not productive, and that allows you to free up time to actually be productive at a later point in time.

I like that. I mean, you know, you can't always set expectations to be this quote-unquote perfect person just because it seems like on the surface level everybody else is perfect, right?

Yeah.

Cool. What's one must-read book you'd recommend everyone? And I know you read a shitload of books and it's hard to pick one, but if you had to pick one, what would it be?

Can you give me more specifics on type of book? Because like I said, like you know, I read a lot of books. And the book that I say right now might not be a must-read book for your audience. But if I were to say the book that I love is Titan, it's the story of John D. Rockefeller Sr.

There you go.

It's a biography. And that book is the perfect example of how someone who came from nothing built one of the world's most profitable companies. And he was the world's first billionaire. And when you turn his money to today's dollars as a percentage of GDP, he would have had like hundreds of billions of dollars far outstripping Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim all combined.

Wow.

So, he's the guy to read.

Dude, that is a thick-ass book. So, you went through that book?

I read it twice actually.

Wow.

But if you want a smaller book, the other book I'd recommend is As I See It by John Paul Getty. This is an autobiography by J. Paul Getty, who was the world's richest man from like the 1950s to the '70s, and he was also in oil. But this is a book about how he sees life, from how he started in the oil business working for his dad's oil company, and his dad used to make him work drilling with the other blue-collar workers. And all the way up until the fact that he was already a millionaire by his early 20s and he took a vacation for a few years before he came back and said, you know what? I'm going to go build one of the biggest companies in the world, and that's what he did. But the thing that I love most about J. Paul Getty, and this is something that I think all ambitious entrepreneurs will struggle with at some point in their life, is he wrote this book right before he died and he made this funny offhanded quote that's not funny as much as it is sad. But he said that, I've been married and divorced 5 times in my life and I realize now not all 5 women could be wrong.

Wow.

And this is a very interesting thing because especially as hardworking people who are trying to pursue a goal or changing the world or whatever it is you're trying to do, you have to decide at what cost. And here's this guy who's about to die and he realizes on his basically deathbed as he's writing this book. that he messed up his personal life. Now, he didn't express regret, mind you. I read it. He just expressed the fact that maybe they weren't to blame, you know what I mean?

Right.

But it's just something to keep in mind, and it's something that I've personally been thinking about as it relates to the things that I do now, you know what I mean? So it's just one of those things I have in the back of my head as someone who works 12 hours a day. I have to keep in mind if I want to make sure that I'm building what I want to build but also making sure I'm going to be happy in 20 years.

Right. I think it's interesting that you chose 2 autobiographies because, you know, a lot of times it's not— it's really the lessons that you kind of decide on, you know, what the lessons are in terms of, you know, your personal life, right? And I think that's good. And I just, you know, to your credit, I just one-click ordered that on Amazon. So, thank you for that.

Great.

What is the best way for people to find you online, Derek?

The best way to find me is at SocialTriggers.com, and I highly suggest you hop on the email list where we share all different types of things that you won't find on the website. But other than that, it's SocialTriggers.com. You can find me at Twitter @DerekHalpern, but I very rarely use Twitter anymore. I mainly just focus on my own website.

Got it. So everybody, this is Derek Halpern, SocialTriggers.com. We also haven't talked about ZippyCourses that much, but I'm going to save that for perhaps another conversation in the future because I love online education. So Derek, thanks so much for doing this.

Hey, thank you for having me. This is fun.

What's the number one problem all businesses face? It's not sales, marketing, or product-market fit. It's hiring. We know just how hard it is, so we've compiled 25 hiring tips from top CEOs that I've interviewed here on Growth Everywhere and put it into a free resource just for you. Text 25TIPS to 33444 to get the free resource now. Again, it is 25, the number 25, tips, T-I-P-S, to 33444, and you'll get the free resource.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Growth Everywhere. If you loved what you heard, be sure to head back to growtheverywhere.com for today's show notes and a ton of additional resources. But before you go, hit the subscribe button to avoid missing out on next week's value-packed interview. Enjoy the rest of your week and remember to take action and continue growing.