How to Grow Instagram Followers from 0 to 300,000 Followers (Nathan Chan of Foundr Magazine)

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 Nathan Chan who's the founder of Founder Magazine which is a digital magazine that features entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson, Tim Ferriss, Barbara Corcoran, and much more. Nathan, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great, thanks Eric. How are you?

Good, good. Thanks for being on the show. So why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and we'll go from there.

Yeah, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. So pretty much I run a company. It started off as a magazine. It's called Founder Magazine. It's Founder, no E. It's a little bit tech. And it started off as just a digital publication targeting young entrepreneurs and early-stage startup founders. And it's on the App Store. And the Google Play Store for mobile and tablet devices. And yeah, it started off as a magazine and now we've kind of gone off to do all sorts of things. We were on a podcast, we're building quite a big platform, uh, especially on social and then also across other channels as well. And, uh, what we're trying to do with it is really show people what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur from the eyes of somebody that's never started a business before. I'm kind of just figuring it out all the way. When I first started, I never knew anything about apps, publishing, marketing, you name it, anything about running a business. I guess Founder is is essentially a reflection of all of my findings and yeah, man, that's for the most part what we do and a little bit about Founder.

Awesome. So, you know, 2 and a half years ago, I mean, you know, everybody's talking about, oh, you know, I need to make the next hot app and then, you know, you've decided to go in the direction of, you know, doing a magazine, a digital magazine. So I guess the question is, why a magazine and what is the ultimate goal of Founder?

So I guess I didn't— I wasn't like super strategic about it in the sense that I thought that this was going to be a really hot app. I just thought that I knew that there was an opportunity in the space because, you know, you look at Forbes, you look at Fast Company, you look at Entrepreneur magazine, HBR, a lot of these publications assume that you already have started a business. So, I felt that there was an opportunity there. You know what, man? When I started Foundr, I started it on the side. I know a lot of people might not think you should do this or they probably wouldn't imagine doing this, but I just started Foundr on the side. I've bootstrapped it from the ground up. $3,000 while I was working my day job. I built it up and it took me about a year until I could replace my income. Thinking back, it was growing so slow back then and it was just like, you know what, I'm just going to try this thing. I think there's something here. I've always wanted to become an entrepreneur. Let's just see where it goes. I just wanted to see where it went. I even remember saying to myself, I treated it as a passion project. And I said, let's see how it goes after a year. If it doesn't go anywhere, I'm going to quit. I'll just do something else or whatever. I just started it because I wanted to do something else because I was really passionate about marketing. Marketing is a big passion piece of mine. And yeah, I just thought that there was a need for this. Kind of publication. And I thought that print is dying, and I thought I could do something cool, something different, and something that could really make a dent in the publishing world. And then, after that, after about 6 months, I was like, yep, I'm onto something. And then, what we're looking at doing now is becoming a multifaceted media brand. And I'm really, really excited. So I never thought that we'd move into this space, but it's just something that our community is asking for. Like we're doing training products like courses. So we've got Founder on the front end and then we're having building up courses on the back end. And then another thing I never thought about, but where we're really taking it is we're looking to monetize in other ways, not just through subscriptions, obviously through the back end, but then also I'm looking at doing some events in the next couple of years and I think also the magazine, it's paid, so it's a paid subscription model. So what's interesting is a lot of people, you know, GigaOM, all these big-time publishers are struggling and we haven't ever had a problem to get people to pay for our content. We've always grown our subscription base and we've got that up to 6 figures now and we've bootstrapped it from the ground up. A profitable 6-figure business. But what is really interesting is I'm thinking of making it free because I've worked out a few things. One, if we're truly going to compete and make a massive impact in the publishing world and get not just, you know, we've got 20,000 monthly readers, but get hundreds of thousands of monthly readers and then millions of monthly readers, I think it needs to be free. Another thing is I think, in terms of impact, it matters much more now. I think also in terms of leads, I've realized that a lead is worth much more to us now than just getting someone to pay for the subscription. That's where I'm taking it. I guess in the next 3 to 5 years, I want to take it to becoming an 8-figure company impacting the lives of tens of millions of people.

Awesome, man. So, it's only been around for 2 and a half years and you've managed to get guys like Richard Branson onto the magazine. I mean, how do you— what's the process for doing that?

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something that's I guess when you're on the outside, it's like, wow, these guys are interviewing Richard Branson, Seth Godin. We've got so many big-time influencers, even more coming. When you have a magazine, it's actually not that difficult because I think that's the really powerful thing about a magazine. It allows you to position yourself as an authority. With Richard Branson, that was the biggest win that we had, man. That was issue number 8. I remember when I first started, no one would speak to me. I couldn't even get a successful person on the first issue, the front cover. I had a stock image. With Richard, I tracked down his head of PR. And instead of emailing her, I made a phone call. This is an important one, guys. You have to— I think pitching on the phone is so much more— like, people take you so much more seriously. And I just found his head of PR. That's the trick. So any of these people that I find, that I've interviewed and put on the front cover of the magazine or put in the podcast, it's all about finding the gatekeeper. And pitching them. And then from there, I played on the fact that Richard's first business venture was a magazine, and then we just took it from there. It was an email interview, and we just went up and back. I worked with his team at Virgin, and the rest is really history. And then we've really been able to springboard off having Sir Richard on the front cover of Social Proof, and then we kind of just worked with more and more influencers. And now, to be honest, it's really not a problem being able to interview anyone. Like, we'll pitch anyone, man. Like, even, you know, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk. There's all sorts of people that we're trying to track down, and we'll eventually get there. It's all about persistence. It's all about finding the gatekeeper. And also a good tip is to find the publishers. You need to find out what that person wants. Does that person have a new book coming out or a TV show? That's how we got in touch with Tim Ferriss. You need to also have relationships with not only the publishers, the PR people at these publishing houses like Random House and some of these other big ones, but also a lot of these startups like Airbnb, Dropbox, all the big startups, they all have relationships with PR companies that they pay like $5,000 or $10,000 a week to go out and get them press. So you need to find them and you need to tell these PR companies that you have a decent-sized audience and you can give press because that makes these guys look good. If you play on all of those things, you can really, I guess, hack the authority out of whatever you're doing if you're looking to get in touch with hard-to-reach people.

Awesome. So do you think, you know, one of your key takeaways here, at least what I'm hearing, is that once you get, you know, you follow up through, you follow up a ton, there's a lot of persistence. Once you get the marquee guy, it's a lot easier to get follow-up celebrities after that, right?

Yeah, yeah, because like you just have a really good email and you use that proof. Like, you know, our email, when we're pitching or up on the phone, it's literally like, you know, hi, my name is Nathan Chan. I'm a publisher of a digital magazine. We're one of the top 10 business-ranked magazines in the App Store. We have 20,000 monthly readers on the magazine. We can feature in the podcast. We've got these social channels and this is our reach and we've featured Richard Branson, Seth Godin, Barbara Corcoran. I've attached a front cover interview and this is what it would look like. And the magazine is really well designed and then we just— yeah, that seems to work really well. It's just kind of like using all the elements of influence, that book by Robert Cialdini, like social proof and authority. And stuff like that. It's really, really powerful.

Yeah, so maybe the hack here, you know, people are talking about getting back into podcasting, but they're, you know, it's already a pretty saturated world. But, you know, talking about doing an actual magazine, that takes a lot of time and effort. And really, I mean, you're kind of creating a moat for yourself. Maybe the solution is to do something that other people aren't willing to do, which is why people are so into, you know, being on your magazine in the first place, right?

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I, I knew that podcasting was getting hot about 2 and a half years ago, and I thought that this would be a cool alternative. So our podcast, you know, I, I, when I started the magazine, dude, I honestly thought I was going to become a millionaire. Like you said, the next hot app. And then I realized it's like so much more than that. Like, if you want to become a millionaire, it comes down to the impact you're making. And then also, it's all about the email list and all these other things, but for the most part, it's been a really smart play and it's worked out really, really well because I've just been super consistent with just shipping the monthly magazine every single month and we get more and more users, more and more readers, more and more people that are finding out about us, coming onto our database. You know, we're helping more and more people.

Awesome. It's fantastic, man. Really exciting stuff. And yeah, I've been, you know, following your growth and it's been super impressive. So one thing I really want to talk about is your Instagram account. So you're nearing close to 300,000 Instagram followers. Tell us the story about how you went from 0 to 300,000 Instagram followers.

Yeah, sure, man. I'd love to. So Instagram We started about 10 or 11 months ago. It's around 10 months ago. So we, I started our Instagram account in November last year. And that, that channel has been a massive growth channel, man. Like I know you like to talk about growth. Now that channel has been an absolute game changer, dude. Like that's really helped put Founder on the map. And the reason is, is because I first started it because I was bringing on an intern to help me. And I was like, you know what, I, I need someone to, to help run this Instagram account because we weren't really doing anything with it. And I had a few friends that were like killing it on Instagram. And, uh, excuse me, they're in the, they're in the health and wellness kind of Not wellness, but the health niche, and they were selling all sorts of other health-related products. Yeah, I had a few friends that were killing it on Instagram, and long story short, I was going to brief my intern around how to use Instagram, and I did a couple of posts, and I saw our sales spike in Google Analytics, and I just posted like 5 times over 15 minutes. I was like, we're onto something here. The thing with Instagram is you can only have one bio link and I had the magazine and that was like, when you talk about customer acquisition, that channel is a match made in heaven if you have apps because all I did was I put the magazine's link on iTunes and so many people were clicking through because one, people only look at Instagram when they're on their phone, so perfect fit for Foundr. Then I posted a couple of business-related quotes, and then anyone that liked these quotes would love Foundr, and a lot of people were clicking through. I can't remember the exact metrics around it, but I saw a big spike in sales. We made an extra $500 to $1,000 just from making those few posts. And I was like, whoa, we're onto something here. So I remember, and this is where it gets interesting, I remember that like 3 to 4 months back a guy contacted me saying, oh hey, look, I've got an Instagram account, it's 20,000 followers, I know, like, I'm a reader of Founder, I love it, I can get you more readers, let me post about it. And I remember we posted about it. And it was a fail. I tracked it and I didn't see any spike or increase to his 20,000 readers. He just posted about the Richard Branson issue. The reason it was a fail was because when we did the call to action, it was like, go to FounderMag.com/iTunes or Android, in the caption. On Instagram, it's very difficult to get people to do something apart from clicking the link in your bio. If you want them to go outside of the platform, the best thing to do is get people to click on the link in your bio or follow you. You tell that person to follow you. From there, I saw that that guy, his account was 80,000, and I contacted him. I said, man, because he told me he was from Melbourne and we actually caught up, and I said, man, how are you doing this? And then from there, it's kind of been a path of just learning how to rapidly build an Instagram account and we've kind of changed. For the first few months I was pushing to the magazine, but then I realized that the traffic was more powerful if I pushed people to a landing page and I could capture them for a lot longer and hit that person and speak to them at multiple touchpoints if we get them on our email list. That's been super, super powerful. We generate at least 30,000 clicks a month just to one landing page. It doesn't really cost us anything, and I'm generating at least 10,000 opt-ins a month now.

Wow, 10,000 opt-ins from your Instagram account. That's insane.

Yeah, man, I'm only getting warmed up. It's super targeted. I send people a How to Start a Business guide, but as I said, I've only Like, I don't really pay anyone, and that's all organic. So I'm going to make some big moves in the next couple of months where I will drop, you know, quite a bit of advertising dollars, but I'll also pretty much— I have networks with all these other business-related accounts that, yeah, man, like, I think we should be able to do at least 20,000 to 30,000 opt-ins in a month. But we'll see how we go.

Wow, okay. It's incredible. So, I guess what are, you know, what are some of the top tactics you can share that really helped grow your Instagram account? I know, you know, some of them you actually told me about, but we'll love the audience to know.

Yeah, so the first one has got to be consistency. Since I've started in November, I've only missed one day like that I haven't posted. Otherwise, every day we've posted. And the most frustrating thing is, you know, from the day— from, I don't know when this is going live, but literally yesterday and the day before, Hootsuite announced that they were doing scheduling for Instagram. It's all bullshit, man. Like, Hootsuite, you cannot schedule on Instagram. You still have— you still get a notification on your phone and you have to approve that notification. Exact same as a tool called Latergram, which I highly recommend for scheduling. So that's the most frustrating thing, you can only post from your phone and you can't really schedule. So I've had to post every single day, and it might sound a little bit stupid, like people always say, Nathan, why do you spend so much time on Instagram? We spend anywhere between half an hour to 2 hours, I do, a day. Not 2 hours a day anymore. For me, it's about half an hour, but in the early days I was spending a couple of hours a day. And the reason is, it's not something that I can hand over to someone in my team just yet because we've got so many core relationships in place that are really, really key that I manage because a lot of it is business development. So the first thing, to answer your question, the first piece of the puzzle is to be extremely consistent. We haven't missed a day. I've missed one day of posting, but apart from that— Every single day I've posted. And then the next thing is to post frequently. We post anywhere between 4 to 8 times a day depending on just my schedule and stuff where I'm at. The next piece of that puzzle, because the more you post the faster you grow, the next piece of that puzzle is to have brilliant images. And you want that design of those images to be so good that people want to share them, they want to screenshot them and get people to share them around. And then when people are sharing them around, make sure that you are watermarking all of those images because now so many people, if they are not on our email list or they don't know about Founder, they would have heard about it or seen because there are so many images hundreds of thousands of people have shared our images with the Founder Branding and they are just all quotes, man, or startup facts and tips. And I know that it might sound a little bit weird, but this quote thing, it's very, very powerful in terms of people just love sharing quotes, they love tagging in their friends, they love just liking them, and from there, that's really— and the content is really good and it's branded content, and then another piece of the puzzle is hashtags. You have to always make sure that you're maxing out your hashtags and make sure you post hashtags related to your niche. You can— a quick little tip and hack for people, a quick win, is I promise you if you post 30 hashtags once you've posted an image, so you write it in the comments, don't write it as the caption, that if you post 30 hashtags as opposed to 2, after you've posted one image and then post another image, you'll notice the difference in engagement because, you know, that's just a quick little win. And then another big piece of the puzzle, man, and something that we've kind of gone up and back with a bit is— and this is the biggest growth hack out there— is on Instagram, you want to get other accounts to share your stuff and you share their stuff. And from there, you can build a following quite rapidly, and you can drive a lot of eyeballs to your page. And then I guess, you know, the next thing is what do you do with all these followers? Well, you tell them about whatever your offer is or whatever your lead magnet is. That's really, really important. You don't get the sale if you don't ask for it. Don't get me wrong, organically we still get a lot of clicks, but if I don't post an image about our special guide or whatever that we have going on that you can click through to in our bio, people won't click on it, which is quite kind of amazing. You would think that if you have a link for people to click on and they follow your account and they love what you do, that they will click on it. They don't. They really don't. So that is some great stuff that people can start with.

Okay, now the share for share, I mean, I know you've kind of built it up organically, you've done a lot of business development, but I also understand that there's people that you can actually pay. So do you have any input on paid versus organic share for shares?

Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is thinking every— thinking about this stuff as like a partnership. Like, you want to know a secret hack on how to grow your Periscope, and I haven't even I haven't even started on Periscope, but I think that's going to be an amazing channel. But on Periscope, you can share someone else's feed. If you had like 10 friends and you all have similar type followings on Periscope, or even if you don't, it doesn't really matter. A lot of people only have a few thousand followers. What you can do is you can just get like once a week or whatever across all those 10 people, get each other to share each other's feed, and that will grow your Periscope followers massively. That's all we're doing with Instagram. So, you know, this partnership stuff, it's, it's, it's, it's really happened since the test of time where you see so many companies pairing up and be like, oh hey, I'll promote your stuff to my audience and, and You promote mine, and it's the exact same thing. You can do it on all social media channels. Just no one's ever done it, and Instagram has been the eye-opener for me that you can do it. Like partnerships are very fucking powerful, man, and I think it depends on your goals with the account. Like if you're bootstrapping and you don't want to pay, you can definitely grow it without paying. But for us now. You know, we we're trying to find leverage however we can. So you know, I've got a I've got a big budget set aside that I'm prepared to pay certain accounts because I know our metrics, I know our numbers, and I just want to explode Instagram with our lead magnets and really put put a ton of people through a funnel that was just set up. So it just depends really. Like I've got a friend, one of my friends Daniel DiPiazza at Rich Twenty Something. He's generated at least off Instagram at least $50,000 of product selling, of selling at least $50,000 of product in a couple of months. And he's doing— but he's doing a lot of paid stuff, and but he's built it up, you know, 100,000 followers. And it's a fast way to grow your account, it's a fast way to grow your authority, it's a fast way to really, really build your list. And It just depends on how fast you want to grow it. It depends on where you are at with your business and if you want to pay, you can do it, but it is going to be a lot slower if you don't pay and you just have to treat it like any channel that you are investing in or any marketing experiment. You just got to do the numbers right. You need to know how much a customer costs to put them through any funnel or whatever you have going on and start doing some testing. Tests, and if the numbers weigh up, it makes sense. I interviewed a company called Frank Body, and they're on track to do $20 million in sales, and it's mainly through Instagram. They're paying so many people, it's out of control, man. But then they also send a lot— like, they're an e-commerce coffee scrub product. What they do is they give away a lot of samples to influencers, and they get those influencers— the influencers might charge them or they might not, but they're just getting You know, every day they've got like 10 people just posting to, you know, 70,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 or 300,000 people about their product, and I think it's just— it's a very, very lucrative channel, but yeah, it depends on the numbers really to answer your question.

Wow, okay, so hold on, you just said there's a company that makes a lot of its revenues from Instagram, $20 million a year, right?

Yeah, on track.

All right.

Yeah.

So, and then I'm looking at another one. I'm staring at my Instagram. I mean, Flavor God, I know they do like, you know, I think they do $1 million a month just off Instagram. So, I mean, clearly it's great for consumers. So, I guess my question to you, you know, let's say I'm Salesforce and I'm selling enterprise software. Does it make sense? I mean, have you seen anybody doing Instagram well and having it translate into the enterprise?

Yeah, that's a really good question, and I've had a couple of people ask me if they— if I think it'll work for like enterprise, or you know, if you run a SaaS or something like that. And I think Shopify is doing it really well, um, which is really interesting. And I've seen that they actually— they actually pay some influencers in the business niche. Um, so it just depends really. Uh, Salesforce, yeah, I think Salesforce force could make it work for sure. It just comes down to connecting with your kind of audience and posting content that connects with them. You know, I had a friend who said he had a— who he posted for a friend that sells Ferraris. He did one post and he got that person a lead that sold a Ferrari. You know, you wouldn't think that that kind of stuff is possible because people say, you know, Instagram is just for young people. and whatever, but man, you know, if someone could sell a Ferrari off one post, you would think that there's, you know, something there for most industries, right?

Right. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, it's all about where the people are hanging out. I think it's about finding the right people. So I guess this leads into my next question. How do you go about finding these power accounts that are relevant to you?

So I think there's a few little hacks. I'll give you one, it's quite a good one actually. So if you type in— hold on, let me find it exactly word for word because I want to get this right, give me one second.

Sure.

But what this hack does is on Google you can actually use Instagram's search functionality to find high-trafficked accounts. Just give me a second. Okay, so what you can do is if you go into Google and type inurl:instagram.com and then space whatever kind of followers you're looking for, you can find a lot of influential accounts. So if you type in, go to Google, you go to type in inurl:instagram.com/entrepreneur-followers, and always have followers at the end, entrepreneur-followers, weight-loss-followers, health-followers, activewear-followers, it will show you the top accounts. Now I'm not very good with the code and all that stuff, but That works. That's a great way to start off finding these high-traffic accounts. I guess another way to do it is start looking around, like, you know, look under like whatever your niche's hashtags and find, find these images that are getting a lot of engagement and then tracking it back to find you know, a big account. Um, you know, the thing is you should know who the influencers are in your niche so you can find, you know, what they're doing on Instagram. And then you can also see, I guess, what people are posting through the hashtags. And then also just, just looking around, it doesn't take that long to look around to find, you know, these top, uh, accounts that do these paid shoutouts. And you know, if they're doing paid shoutouts or anything of the sort if they have their Kik, K-I-K, which is a messaging service, or their email in their bio.

Okay, that's awesome.

So there's some good hacks to start off with, and I guess it's all about finding like-minded accounts that are a similar size following to you or finding where you can have that leverage. It's all about leverage, man. I get people to do all sorts of things that you couldn't imagine. I get people to make images for me as long as I shout them out. We've got deals where they create 10 images for me because they've got an epic graphic designer and I shout them out 5 times and they do that. They send me 10 images once every couple of weeks. So yeah, dude, I'm always trying to find leverage with our Instagram account. That's a great way to get interviews. I can say, That adds weight to that. You can do all sorts of things and find that leverage. And that's like any good partnership, you always have to find a mutually beneficial exchange in value. You've got a high-traffic podcast, man. If there's someone killing it, I'm sure you could work out something. You just got to always try and find that leverage. It does take a little while to invest in the platform, but When it comes to marketing, man, you just got to throw things at the wall, see what sticks, and we've found so much growth in this channel. We'll spend a lot of time there, we'll invest a lot of time, and we're going to really, really— from that channel alone, we should build at least 100,000 database just from that channel in a year easily. Wow.

How long did it take you to get from 0 to 300,000?

10 months. So I've been doing it since November.

Wow, okay, incredible. Yeah, you know, the hack that you just gave us, I mean, just typing in the inurl Instagram, I just searched entrepreneur, I'm looking at the tags right now. A lot of these people are relevant and yeah, I'm seeing the Kik messaging pop up for a lot of these people. So very helpful. I think no matter what niche you're in, health and wellness, even try enterprise software, it's going to work. I think you just have to try it. So, you know, obviously, I mean, you have a lot of good-looking images. I think that, you know, I found you originally through Instagram, so it just shows that, you know, your stuff's working. But how—

Oh, really? Wow.

Yeah, that's how I found you organically.

I thought you found us actually through a blog post I wrote because you signed up to one of our cheat sheets.

Yeah, I signed up for a cheat sheet, but I think I found you— I was looking at Instagram first. I was like, okay, I saw one of your things and impressions just kept popping up. I was like, okay, what's going on here? So then I clicked through and I think I downloaded— I was like, oh, this Instagram thing, this cheat sheet's relevant to me, so I downloaded it. So that's how it happened.

Ah, gotcha.

Yep. So my question here is you have a lot of consistent content. So first of all, do you have an outside designer helping you with this stuff? I mean, how does that whole process work where you're just pumping out really good-looking images?

That's a really great question. So I don't have a designer doing it. You can actually do it yourself or you can train someone up in your team and they don't even have to know design, that's the best part.

Tell me more.

So there's some tools that I highly recommend, these are apps and believe it or not, there are apps on your phone that you can use to create beautifully looking images really easily. So some of those images you will see that we post, you know, I already mentioned that one partnership we have around Leverage, but for the most part all the images are done by my VA in the Philippines and I'll tell you the process. So she has access to 2— she has her iPhone and she has a few different apps. One, Typorama, a brilliant app on how to create images. If you create any sort of visual content and you don't even want to use Canva, I find Canva, there's a learning curve still. I know they're trying to democratize design and stuff, and I think what they're doing is great, and I want to support an Australian startup, but I'm a little lazy. And, uh, you know, me personally, I, I, I couldn't take Canva up as fast as I thought I could. But apps like Typorama or Word Swag, all you have to do, dude, is actually just type in like what the quote is or what the startup fact is or what the text is and then you just choose the font. They've got like 30 or 40 fonts and then you can just randomize it and do different types like different display or mixing it around different ways and then literally boom, you're done. You can watermark your image within those apps, so Typorama and Word Swag, and then off you go. You can create these beautifully clean looking images. I, you know, I've got a virtual assistant in the Philippines and she's got a task that she creates like, I think, 50 images a week for us and she uploads them into a tool called Latergram. And Latergram is a brilliant tool because what it does is it pretty much is like a buffer but for Instagram. However, the only piece missing is you have to approve the post. So I've got push notifications on my phone. So she uploads it on Latergram on her computer, or— and then on the Latergram app on my phone, I've got push notifications. So I get notified like every couple of hours. And, you know, we've just got a ton of images in there, and I just approve whichever one that I want, and then it's pre-filled by— so then you just press in Latergram, yep, I want to post this, and you can pre-fill the caption and everything. And then off I go, like I just choose an image that she's created I've liked and then I post it. And for the most part, that's how we're doing it in terms of content creation. And another little trick is, you know, I know people might think, oh, you know, you post 8 times a day, that's too much. Well, if you think about it, we're doing a lot of share for shares, so we're sharing other people's content. So if we're sharing other people's content, that's a great way to lighten the load around how much content you're putting out. And yeah, that's how we're doing it, man. So Typorama and WordSwag with Latergram and trading up someone in your team.

Holy shit, this is gold, man. I think we got to keep going here because there's so much good stuff. All right. So, you know, you're obviously creating a ton of images. I mean, how often do you continue to refresh images until you decide that, okay, this is outdated, we should lay this to rest?

Yeah. So I think, you know, in 12 weeks and beyond, you can probably reuse an image. And, you know, you use that— those posts as a testing ground. And always look for like the best performing images. When you do a share for share or you're using someone's image, the best practice is don't use any of those repost apps. They're really crappy. All you have to do is just screenshot the image and then tag that person. You can actually tag that person like you would tag someone in Facebook, like this is my friend, this is their name. So make sure you tag that person and mention them in the caption by linking back to them, and that's all you have to do. That's the standard practice for a share for share. You screenshot the image, you post it, you tag that person, and then you mention them in the caption. And you know, you want to find those people that you're finding their images, use their images as a testing ground for finding the best curated comment, best curated images or the best curated content. So look through and be like, okay, I can see that they get, you know, they've got 100,000 followers, I can see that on average they're getting 3,000 followers, but oh, here's an image that got 4,200 likes. So yeah, on average they're getting 3,000 likes, here's an image that's got 4,200 likes, this resonates with me. I think our followers would like this. I can see that this one works really well. They've got a similar audience to me, so why wouldn't you post that image? So use your account as well as a testing ground so you can go back, you know, 12 weeks ago or 8 weeks ago, and it comes down to how much content you're posting as well. So if you only post once a day, maybe you can't go back that far, but we go back, you know, 8 to 12 weeks, and I'm like, okay, this was a really high-performing image from our average engagement. And I'll repost that one. So I'm always testing to see the best performing images and that's something that's really, really helped our growth because people have said to us, oh, you know, Nathan, you always like— or either Nathan or Founder, you guys have the best images. So that's one of the ways that we're really striking and I guess playing on people's emotions to really hit what they really like because we're testing, we're using, letting other people test for us or testing our own stuff and what the best performing stuff is. And you can do that, like these practices that I'm talking about, Eric, you can do this on other social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, you name it.

Okay, all right. So, you know, I'm looking at a lot of these entrepreneur images and it seems like obviously you have to give a, let's just say a library or maybe some links to your virtual assistant to kind of say, okay, here's where you can get images from and here's where you can get quotes from, right? Is that how it works?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, yeah, got it.

Is there— okay, so what does the— and you don't have to go into too much detail here, I just want people to get an idea of how that process looks, if you can go into just any detail.

So what's really cool about both of those apps that I just mentioned is they have built-in databases with like hundreds of thousands of stock images So that's the first piece of the puzzle. So I've— the first piece of the puzzle was I've said, here's a list of accounts that are doing amazing stuff, here's the images that we've created that I like, here's the apps that you can use, and let's do some test ones and keep coming back to me And I want you to get to a stage where you're creating stuff that's of really high quality that we can post out. And it's kind of just— we've just gone up and back around here's where you can get the images, here's some great looking images, and here's the process. So I use a tool called SuiteProcess and it's brilliant for assigning SOPs, standard operating procedures. And in that standard operating procedure, it's got like, you know, images, examples of images that we like, and then where and the apps to use, and then, you know, how often she needs to upload these images to Latergram. And then we just kind of take it from there. And I've just kind of— when I first trained her up, we've just gone up and back quite a few times of the kind of images, and I've actually said with the apps which exact fonts that I want her to use which are consistent. I've given her access to the founder logos for the watermarking, and then also I've, I've shown her accounts that are in our niche that— and I've got her to say— I've said, you know, find the high— like, look at the average engagement and find the ones that are performing the highest and then repost those and put them in Latergram too. And then, you know, obviously add where it came from in the caption and then I can take care of the rest and then yeah, that's pretty much what it looks like. Does that help?

Yeah, that totally helps, totally answers my question so that was gold. One thing I want to touch upon is the way your team is organized. I mean, you've managed to build this, everything's been impressive across the board so your team, I'm interested in how your team is organized.

Oh, well thank you, man. We've got a hybrid team. We've got a full-time content marketer that just started with me a couple of months— literally a couple of months ago. We've got a full-time content crafter/marketer that just helps me with all sorts of things and is starting to help out with the magazine. Then we've got contractors all around the world. We've got a graphic design team We have an editorial team based out of Bangalore in India, and Karan, he runs that team. He's our art director, and he's amazing. I've got to give props to his company, Animus, and they're brilliant at design. I've worked with Karan since the start. I just came back from the States, and we traveled around together, and I went to his wedding, and we've become really great friends. So Karan's our art director. We've got an editor for the magazine, Tate, who's in the States in Boston. We've got like 10 to 20 freelance writers all around the world that are checking in with me and they give me content for not only the blog but the magazine. And then also we've got an AV guy who does all our audio/video editing in Hungary who's another contractor. We've got our web developer who is another contractor who does all our web stuff and he is a great graphic designer and does bits and pieces for us also. Then we've got a virtual assistant in the Philippines and then we are looking to hire another virtual assistant plus probably in the next 4 to 6 months a business development guy. So that's what the team currently looks like and then there is me and I just pretty much project manage everything. So yeah, that's pretty much where we're at.

Awesome, man. Sounds like you built a well-oiled machine.

We're getting there.

Just a few more questions from my side. Tell us about one big struggle you faced while growing Founder.

I think the biggest struggle with any kind of, I guess, content house or publisher is building, uh, building up that audience. Like, it, it was— it's never been build it and they will come, or, you know, build it and it'll go viral. It's just been just long, hard slogs of being so extremely consistent and just shipping, like, product every single day. Like, whether it's, uh, you know, a social media image, whether it's a blog post, whether it's the magazine, whether it's a podcast episode, like You know, a lot of people try and get into this game of building a platform, you know, a platform that has a decent-sized audience whether it's in any kind of niche. When you produce a lot of content and you become a content powerhouse, even if you do it for 4 months, it takes so long, man. I think that's been really difficult Just, it just takes time. You just got to be so extremely patient. You just got to be providing so much value that people just find your work because people are speaking about you and just, just showing up every single day. That, that has definitely taken a lot longer than I planned, but I'm a very patient person and, you know, I'm very hungry, dude. So I'm just constantly just relentless with I hear that. And then the hardest thing, the hardest part for me was around the time when I first started the magazine. It actually wasn't called Founder. It was called something else and I was sued for trademark infringement. I can't actually say who sued us, but it was one of the biggest business magazines in the States. So that was a really tough time, but I'm just blessed that it happened early on in the piece, and also I'm blessed the fact that we changed the name because the new name, Founder, is much better.

What was going through your head when they came after you?

You know, it was just like, oh my God, am I going to— because it happened in the first 4 months. So I'm like, oh my God, is all my hard work going to go to waste? Am I going to go bankrupt? Because this is my first business, man. I knew nothing about this kind of stuff. I was really stressed and it was a really traumatic experience. I do not wish upon anybody for them to be served just randomly and you just don't know because it's like, especially when it's your first business, man, you just don't expect that kind of stuff to happen. Like, especially when you just, you know, create something and it's just like a passion project, just a side hustle, and it's just like, yeah, it's, it's a, it's, it's such a, a weird feeling. Um, but, uh, it was a really, like, really, um, tough time, man. But I'm, I'm glad I went through it, and I got some, uh, very good lessons on, uh, trademark, trademark law. And I was lucky enough to have some really key mentors that helped me through the process, and it worked out fine, you know.

I admire the persistence, man.

Thank you, bro.

How do you structure your day?

So, as you know, I just, you know, I'm meeting up and networking with so many people. A lot of what I do is just catching up with people and learning from people that are killing it in certain parts of business or our business, certain areas that are really important. So I might be catching up with an SEO person or someone that's killing it. So I try and find leverage with that, always trying to serve first and ask later, but I'm trying to find people that I can connect with and people reaching out to me. So a lot of what I do is catching up with people. Every single day, I just look at my calendar. I'm like, "What have I got going on?" Now that I've got my first, I guess, full-time team member, you know, first thing I'm doing is jumping on Slack, checking in with him, looking at my email. I try and meditate if I can. You know, my day is pretty random, dude. Like I wish I could say I'm super structured, super organized. But you know, I look at my calendar. This is what I've got going on. Whether it's an interview or a catch-up. And then I've got my little Post-it note, my little yellow Post-it note of things that I'm working on that are most— like highest priority. I check in with my team member on Slack, and then I might have a look at his I Done This. I use I Done This to keep us all accountable and keep us both in check on what we're working on. Yeah, just smash it out. I'll obviously do an Instagram post when I wake up. And, yeah, it's just really random what I'm working on. It just comes down to what point of the month it's at. If we're at the middle of the month, we're shipping a new issue of the magazine. Whether it's the start of the month, we're always working on something, whether it's content, and I'm just overseeing a whole ton of different projects.

Awesome, man. Impressive. Yeah, I think it's— everybody has their own methods of making it work, and I think that's what it takes to make a digital magazine work. So it's always interesting to hear people's responses to this question. What is one must-read book you'd recommend?

Influence by Robert Cialdini. That book is— I really like marketing, and that's a really, really powerful book. And if not that, If you haven't started a business, I think, you know, your audience is like people that are looking to do marketing, so yeah, probably that one, or yeah, I think if you haven't started a business, The Lean Startup, I really like that.

Cool, great books. Also, I mean, you know, everyone make sure you better at least check out Founder Magazine. It's super, super cheap and it's well worth it, and the content's exceptional. So Nathan, what's the best way for people to find you online?

Just go to foundermag.com, F-O-U-N-D-E-R-mag.com, or you can find us on Twitter, FounderMag, or you can contact me personally, Nathan H. Chan on Twitter, or you can email me. I'd love to hear from you, nathan@foundermag.com.

Awesome, man. Thanks so much for doing this.

You're welcome, man. Absolute pleasure.

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