085: Building an Aligned Audience with Brian Clark

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Most people don't really care if you're an expert. They only care if you're an expert who believes like they believe and politics comes to mind. But beyond that, if you take time and look around, it's like that with everything, right? We trust our friends more than an authority figure for recommendations on most things, right? And if we do want to turn to an expert or an authority.

Especially when it comes to content, we're judging them right away whether we vibe with them or not. Right?

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question. Here at the Freetime Cafe you can your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello hello my friends. Oh my goodness. Today's guest is one that has been a beacon for me throughout my business building and blogging earliest days. We are very lucky to have with us today Brian Clark. He is a writer, traveler and serial digital entrepreneur. The founder of so many successful businesses. One of them you probably know, Copyblogger. He has also recently been working on his main passion project, the Midlife Personal Growth newsletter Further and now paid community as well. He has a podcast, seven figures Small and is the co founder of Digital Commerce Partners, a content marketing and SEO agency for digital business owners. Most of all, Brian Clark is one of the OGs in the blogging space. Brian, I started my blog in 2005 and then turned it over to WordPress in 2007 and there was copyblogger always providing the how tos. So thank you for being here.

Well thank you so much Jenny. It's good to reconnect with you.

You say on your about page that you are featured in Dan Pink's book and I think you and I both are big fans of his work. I feel like Dan Pink is one of the visionaries. The books that he writes are just years ahead of their time, A Whole New Mind, his book on the freelancer economy. And you strike me as one of these people too. So it's a little complex, but my first question is kind of at a meta level. What is the skill you have or the curiosity that you have that gets you to be so early to the game on emerging tech or building the audiences that you have? And I feel like your pivots are always years ahead of really what's to come? And I'm just curious what drives that? What do you think generates that in you that gives you that trend spotting ability?

Wow, that's a great question and something I think about a lot now that I didn't think about over the preceding 20 years. I actually, after we sold the business in the copy blogger business and two transactions, took a sabbatical and took my family around the world on a trip, which really solidified that traveling is my primary thing that I want to do now, which is why I list it first. It sounds perfectly idyllic, right? I'm sitting at the base of the Alps in France, sipping a Bordeaux, probably, I don't know. And I'm just finally, I had been going, going, going for so many years and was able to refle.

And I think one answer is that I was an attorney, graduated from law school in 94, worked at a big law firm, everything was supposed to be perfect, but I hated practicing law. And at the same time, starting in 94 until I quit in 98, I just kind of went home finally at the end of the day and would stare at this square compact computer at the Internet and go, there's something here. This is amazing, right? And so when I decided that I wanted to find a way to make a living writing, I didn't turn to New York or Los Angeles. Even though I thought about it. I actually studied screenwriting before I ever studied copywriting. And then I just decided that I could reach an audience online and there had to be a way to make a living that way. And keep in mind, I was a liberal arts major, psychology and sociology, which turned out to be perfect, but no one thought so at the time. So that's why I had to go to law school and had no business background, never taken a marketing class, not even read a book. So I was a tabula rasa when I came to the Internet and really was just trying to figure out how I could be creative and write and somehow make a living for that. So the first business I created was centered around email newsletters, which were all the rage in 1998 and are all the rage in 2022. Some things never change. I find that fascinating. But yeah, I had to learn everything basically at that point there were no books, courses, conferences like we have now. And that was how I figured everything out, which I think I'm a natural researcher, a naturally kind of very curious person. So I would go on deep dives into various trends and later what I realized, I would latch on to emerging trends that were becoming movements of some sort. And I realized that every business I started, and this continues to this day, are generally me becoming a leader in a movement, even though I didn't start the movement myself. You could look at blogging, you can look at WordPress content marketing, which is what I was teaching at Copyblogger before it had a name. And even with my current projects, that's what I latch onto. And it's not just because there's money to be made. It has to be something where I identify with the sense of purpose that the people who are already there have. And then if I can do that and I have something to teach them or offer them specifically. Let's use blogging as an example. Since 98 and 99, I was doing what we now call content marketing, which I just kind of stumbled upon fortuitously because I wanted to write and I wanted to make a living and that I was good at attracting people and that's what we call marketing. Again, I was just like, okay. And then I learned copywriting and that's what we call sales. So it was very geared around my desire to create and write. But then I had to learn the more nuts and bolts aspects of things. So you Fast forward to 2005. Like you said, you started a blog in 2005, right? A lot of very smart people saw the opportunity to where, hey, I can communicate, I can express myself, attract an audience and hopefully then I'll figure out what to do. I can write a book like Pivot, or I can create an online course or even as a non technical founder, start a software company, right? By collaborating with others. Because I had the most valuable asset. I had the people, right? And that allowed me to collaborate with others. And that all stemmed from the fact that I had learned certain things about trying to make money by writing online. And the first one I learned through that first business, the only business I've ever started that failed had an advertising business model, because that's what media companies did, right? That's all I knew. And then I read Seth Godin's Permission Marketing, the first marketing book I ever read. And he's like, the Internet is a direct marketing medium. You have to build an audience and you have to sell them things. And I'm like, oh. And literally, that's all he had to say. And I'm just like, okay. So I got to study direct marketing and copywriting and then just extrapolate it to the Internet and everything's good. But that's what I did. And so it turned out at the beginning of the quote unquote, professional blogging, people were trying to make money with advertising models. And I'm like, no, don't do that. Number one, you have to apply copywriting techniques to your content to make it more engaging. And number two, you have to sell products and services, not advertising. And that should not sound shocking one bit. And yet I was a heretic at that time. I don't know if you remember how Kumbaya blogging was back in the day, right?

My dad said he tried to sell his music album on the early days of the Internet and people ripped him to shreds. How dare you commercialize the Internet? How dare you put something for sale.

I swear, when I say this, younger people listening are like, that's not true. You know, because we have various degrees of shenanigans at all levels, and it's just kind of the way things are. Which is unfortunate, but no. And that's why for the first 18 months of coffee Blogger, I didn't really try to sell anything. I had to build trust. They were kind of like, why are you giving all this away for free? What's the deal? By the time we got to the first product, people are like, will you just take my credit card? And that's what you want, right? You don't want to have to convince someone to buy from you. You want to have formed a relationship with them where they're like, I trust you. You're giving me great value. Anything you create is probably going to be great. Let's do it. So again, for a non marketer, a non business person to be in that position, because I effectively used, I guess, the talent that I had to write, but just an emphasis on giving value to the other person. And I credit copywriting with teaching what's in it for them, right? I think a lot of the early bloggers wanted very much to be the star of the show, or looked at other popular bloggers and said, look at them. They get all this attention, but that's the wrong mindset. It's an old saying, if you can help other People get what they want. You can have anything you want as well.

What I find is so interesting about this is that a lot of us who did start in those early days were kind of hobby bloggers. And even now, a lot of people have a hobby podcast or they wish they could monetize it, or even a newsletter. And yet you brought this unique business mindset to it. And so, you know, I love. I was listening to an interview you did on the Reach podcast, and you said, if you build an audience, you can figure out how to build a business. And it sounds like from reading that early Seth Godin book, your focus on building the audience first, like you said, to the point where they're asking you, how can I give you my credit card? How can I spend more? But I guess I watched a kind of fork in the road where there were people like me that, yes, we were trying to learn how to sustain our little small shop content production. But then there you were building out Copyblogger at one point, have 60 employees, and then building Rainmaker and all these, like, huge companies. And I don't know exactly where I'm going with this other than it's been very interesting to watch your journey of creating these, what I would call big businesses around all of it. And then it was cool to also see you transition. You were so generous to have me on Unemployable when Pivot came out, transitioning to the new name of the show, which is Seven Figures Small. So just the arc of your career of like, going big and then maybe to where you're ending up now. How do you define Seven Figures Small?

Right. So that's interesting. So much to unpack there. But all I did was take the next logical step based on what the audience was telling me, as opposed to what I thought would be cool to do. I mean, I tell people this now, and I think people are shocked, but around 2008, that was just two years into it, I was like, I can't believe I'm still doing this copy blogger thing. Can you imagine it was 10 years later that we sold Studio Press. So I'm like, that would have been foolish of me, but I am that way. I had other ideas and things that I wanted to do, but what kept me on track was there was always a next obvious indication of what the audience needed. And then once we got into software, I was just so pleased that I was able to be involved in something, you know, that I had no business being in, as far as I was concerned, because I'm not A coder. But then I learned, and I think a lot of people understand this now, that architecting software is really about understanding the user's needs, not the code. The code is an expression that brings to life the features, that allows people to use it in the way that they need. And in many cases I was the audience as a non technical content creator. So that helped quite a bit. But there was always the next year would be. For the first three years it was three startups, each one of them. This is where the seven figure small thing comes from. Three startups were launched off Copyblogger in three consecutive years. All three surpassed seven figures in revenue in one year.

And there was no investors and oddly no employees. Right. It was always me, a co founder and contractors. Years later, looking at trends and what have you, there's an increased number of what are called, I guess non employer businesses that are reaching 25 million. Yeah, you know, it's just one person or it's a couple of, maybe a husband and wife team or a couple of co founders and they're making serious money like we did, without necessarily having employees. So I had never planned to go to where we went in 2010, which was eventually to 65 employees and eight figures in revenue. I never aspired to that. Remember, I just didn't want to starve to death after I quit my big law firm job. That was my entire motivation. And then when I started Copyblogger, it was like, I don't want to take clients anymore and I don't want to do real world service businesses. If I can just make enough money to support my young family completely online, then I'm happy. Well, that attitude led to amounts of money that I hadn't really contemplated, but there was no grand plan to do that. In fact, I went against. What I said when I started Copyblogger was that I would never hire an employee. And next thing you know, you have 60 of them. But that's still a very small business in the grand scheme of things, right?

Yeah.

A business of 60 people who don't operate in the same location. We were remote first right from the beginning and we're making a million dollars a month. It boggles my mind a little bit on one hand and on the other hand, having lived it, I just understand. Exactly. Thanks to the audience. First business model that you don't strike out on a product if you're really in tune with the people you're serving. Right. I'm not saying it's necessarily easy, but it's basically if you think about the Lean startup concepts that Eric Reiss popularized. The principles are very the same, except for one thing. This is interesting to me. Eric never thought that having an audience first was part of the lean startup dynamic. But how did Eric launch his book? He started a blog, built an audience, and the book's a bestseller.

And he did hundreds of workshops that were so popular that he turned those workshops and the case studies from them into a book. You're right.

Absolutely right. He was right there interacting with the audience and then building a specific audience. So he knew that he had a hit on his hands. And it's just a fascinating thing. So I point that out to people who are familiar with perhaps Lean Startup principles, but not what audience first means. And I'm like, it's just like the Lean Startup, except you build an audience first, hence the name.

So we're almost glossing over this notion, like you're saying of audience first, and all you have to do is listen and the audience tells you what's next. But that might be a skill that you have that's almost invisible or a superpower. I talk in the new book Free Time about Always be Listening and ways to systematize listening in the business. I'm curious how you listen. Like, how do you have the pulse of what your audience wants in the first place? Like, what little tips and tricks did you discover along the way?

That's so on point. Because it may be a superpower. I can't tell because I have to try to teach people this stuff. And so I'm deconstructing what I do and trying to put it in frameworks and techniques, but in reality, it's very messy. I'm very messy. Like, one time I was talking to Seth Godin. I'm like, what's your writing process like? And he's like, brian, I'm not going to tell you because number one, you'll think I'm insane. And number two, it is not relevant because you're probably completely different. And I'm like, no, I'm also insane, but. But, yeah, it's probably a different level of insanity. I think this may be true for you, or maybe you're just perfectly. You just show up at the desk and you knock things out in a perfect sane fashion.

But all the mess is just out of the camera view right now.

Exactly. Just hide the piles.

There's an iceberg in this office. Exactly.

Like, I'm trying to put together the next version of a course that we did a couple years ago. Right now I'm like, I've got things, bookmarks and scraps of papers and journals. And I'm like, okay, that was great. You've got all these little tiny ideas that you have to relocate so that you can put this back together. And that's, of course, in addition to the thinking process. But for observation, before the mainstreaming of social media, where back when we had blog comments and those were the most active aspects of the interactive Internet, those were a gold mine to me because people aren't going to tell you the product. They're going to tell you what the pain point is. And again, maybe I'm good at seeing pain. And also, as I said, since I'm similar to my audience and that's intentional, I literally teach people to try to attract people that are similar in worldview and core values. And that's not a little guy Internet strategy. Apple does that. They've all. Well, until they became like the biggest company in the world, Steve Jobs era, Apple was always very much focused on core values. We're the crazy ones. Think different. The 1984 creative, right?

Yes.

And they had a villain. And the villain was IBM originally. But the greatest expression of that was in the 2000. What are they called now? The aughts, I guess the Get a Mac campaign where you had.

Oh, yes, Justin Long.

Justin Long is the Mac, and the nerdy, lovable but bumbling guy is the PC. And that's literally archetype or Persona marketing exemplified.

And people are like, I don't know how that was so successful. You're never going to get hardcore PC people to switch to a Mac. And I'm like, you don't understand. They weren't targeting. They knew the hardcore PC people would never change. They're going after the swing user. Think about the personal computing revolution. People started using computers at work. They were routinely using Microsoft Windows because that's what business uses. And so when they bought their first home PC, they bought a Windows machine. So here comes Apple at the turn of the century and says, you know, you really should be on a Mac because you're much cooler than that. And it was their most successful. Like I think Advertising Age said, it was the most successful campaign of the decade. But think about it. It's two guys talking in front of a white screen. It looked like a YouTube video campaign. And it worked phenomenally. Just by creating that sense of identity. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be this guy or this guy? And.

Right.

That's the essence of it.

Yeah. Before the iPhone became ubiquitous, there was a very clear sense of who the Apple avatar was.

Exactly. Now they're so big. I always say that Steve Jobs, that's true, would just shake his head at Apple commercials now. Like who is this for?

Right.

But they're too big. We should have these problems, Jenny, that we're so big, but we have to abandon, you know, speaking or we're staying.

Delightfully seven figures small. I mean, I'm delightfully six figures small.

It's a damn good life. You know, I think honestly the seven figure companies, if I would have just stayed there, it would have been fine. Because once you get over 10 million in revenue and this is not a well kept secret, almost anyone who's done it will tell you it gets hard because your margins start shrinking, your expenses go up and it doesn't get good again until you pass like 20. Right? So when we were there in 2017, early 2018, I had a decision. Either dance with the devil and take private equity. We were completely bootstrapped, no investors. Right.

That is totally dancing with the devil.

And we had an offer on the table and some of my partners wanted me to sign it and others were like, I don't know. And I just thought about my kids are in high school. This is going to eat up five years of my life and I'm going to miss that. Right. They're going to be gone. So we sold. Which is also not a bad outcome. Right. Because then I got to start to focus on the next projects that I've got going, which is incredibly fun.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Love what you're doing with further. So it's further.net, we'll put the link in the show notes. I want to come back to this avatar idea because it seems like a lot of business owners struggle and there's so much advice. Pick your ideal client avatar to find them. You know, all of this. But what you're saying is also like, speak to yourself. You know, Tim Urban wrote this article about imagine a stadium filled with 10,000 of you. Like just create for the one person.

I hadn't heard that, but I, yeah.

Yeah, we can imagine a stadium of 10,000. Brian Clarkson. That's the further. You know, to an extent. And so I wonder, why do you think it is that businesses or small ones like the ones we're talking about struggle so much with who to serve and how to serve them, when in fact they could technically serve a variation of themselves that's just a few steps behind on the journey.

Right? That's a key point because you are not the audience. If you're doing your job well, you have to be a few steps ahead of the audience at minimum. But yeah, there's a pervasive mentality of I don't want to turn away business, but by doing that, you're appealing to no one and you're turning away business. It's just one of those things that it's very simple and yet it's hard for a lot of people to swallow. And I think in our space with digital bootstrapped entrepreneurs, they feel that the answer to that is by choosing a well defined niche because therefore it's only this many people. But that can actually be counterproductive because you assume at that point, okay, this is small enough to where I can just talk about the topic of interest and I can talk to everyone and treat them the same. But anyone who understands what's going on in the world today understands that it doesn't matter what the topic is. There are all different types of people, different tribes, and if you try to speak to them the same way, some of them will like you and some of them will not like you so much. So why not choose sides and get one side to really love you?

And again, I don't know. I put it this way, when you think in terms of a niche, you're like narrowing down by topic only and then you're hesitant to have a strong voice that may alienate someone. That's a mistake. What if you think of it instead of a niche as a mission? I'm going on a mission with like minded people. I'm starting a movement or I'm Becoming a leader in this movement of people who want to see something other than the status quo, which is generally how most niches work. If you were going on a mission like that, would you just take everyone who wanted to sign up? No. You would choose a cohesive, unified bunch to go with you. Right. And that's how you succeed. It's that principle of unity. Because most people don't really care if you're an expert. They only care if you're an expert who believes like they believe. And politics comes to mind. But beyond that, if you take time and look around, it's like that with everything. Right. We trust our friends more than an authority figure for recommendations on most things. Right. And if we do want to turn to an expert or an authority.

Especially when it comes to content, we're judging them right away, whether we vibe with them or not.

Right.

So I think if you talk to people about this topic in one context, like we're doing right now, they'll be shaking their head yes. Then tell them, okay, only talk to those people. And they're like, well, wait a minute, what about. So it's just something you gotta get past.

Yeah. I'm curious with you. We've both been navigating careers out loud, if you will, so. And again at very different volumes. But I went from life after college to pivot to now free time. And at every step, I'm kind of choosing part of that group to double down on and some to honestly leave behind. Not on purpose, but it's just how it goes. And I'm wondering for you, with going from something as big and vast as copyblogger, I know there were many steps in between, but when you thought about going all in on further, did you have a moment of hesitation where you're like, I want to specify that it's for midlife for these types of people, this audience. Was there any hesitation of the concentric circles of who you might be leaving outside of that in going into this more specific direction, but knowing it seems really connected to your heart as well, which is such a draw.

When I started Further, it was just a general personal growth kind of newsletter, curated almost.

100% based on what I was reading for myself. So it was a true side project. Didn't make money, didn't have to. And it wasn't until we sold Studio Press and Rainmaker that I pivoted to midlife only. And I just realized that was also very purpose oriented.

And most people at midlife are Generation X and it's the smallest generation I think other than Gen Z, our own kids or another small generation makes sense. But there's still 96 million of them in the US alone. And I'm not speaking even to all Gen Xers because that's a big group of different people. There are Gen Xers that stormed the Capitol last year, right? I mean, I'm not talking to them, so my voice is still tuned to people with a worldview and a shared experience. One interesting thing about Further, because I'm pretty straightforward, I don't interject too much of my personality into it. I make obvious references, and my choices of what goes into the content reflect who I am, of course. But one of the best ways that whether you can figure out further is right for you or not is the flashback at the end, where I choose music videos from the 80s and 90s, and only certain type of people like the kind of music I like. There's no Garth Brooks in the flashback. So you see, it's always a way. You don't have to be outlandish and controversial and say awful things and to alienate people. You can do anything and alienate people, so just don't be afraid of them. People say, be yourself. Be authentic. That's not necessarily the end of the analysis. Be you in the right context for that audience. I mean, think about it. You are a different person based on context all the time. The way you speak to your mother is different than perhaps your girlfriend's from college or. We play multiple roles of ourselves daily. We don't think about it much. But you need to, because when you're dealing with an audience, you have to pick the part of you. It's like, be yourself, but be your best self. Right? And best self is contextual. It's another Seth Godin thing. I always reflect back on him. Oh, yeah, he taught me quite a bit.

He's the best.

But when he said authenticity is determined by the audience, not you, I was like, oh, gosh, that's very insightful. Cause if they don't think you're authentic, you're not, even though you're being completely honest.

I have that experience when I'm listening to scripted podcasts where, like, a host does a solo episode, but they're clearly reading from a script. I feel like I get why they're doing that. They have things they want to say in that episode. But how it comes across to me is very stilted and somewhat inauthentic, even if what they wrote was from the heart. So I don't know. That's something I think about as a podcast listener.

Yeah, I have dabbled in that. We actually launched our Rainmaker SaaS product off of a podcast mini episode thing, which I don't think too many people did at that time. I think that was 2014 and they were scripted, but I worked so hard to try to make it sound like they weren't. It's challenging.

Last question before we wrap up. What do seven figure small companies do that the aspiring mid six figure companies are not?

Well, so this is something that is talked about a lot now as we're entering web 3. There's a very bright writer named Packy McCormick who has written about the one person billion dollar business or trillion dollar business. And that sounds mind boggling until you realize that Bitcoin was founded by one guy, probably not named Satoshi, but it was either one person or a very small group of people. And they built a community around themselves and they don't really control the thing. It's the ultimate decentralized project that nonetheless made those founders, who knows how, immensely wealthy. And when I first heard bitcoin as a startup analogy, I was like, that's different. But that's what is intriguing about it. We're entering a phase where the lines are blurred between the inside of the company and the outside of the company. I think probably Ethereum, which followed Bitcoin, is a good example of that. So we won't get too deep into the crypto weeds here. But what I'm saying is even 2007, 2008, 2009, me and a co founder could make a million dollar business with just us and some contractors because of the audience. Right? You can escalate that exponentially.

And do you mean audience size or what the audience is interested in? What is it that allowed you to create with just a co founder and no full time employees?

That scale, it was product audience fit as opposed to product market fit. Now some of those obviously did in some cases extrapolate out to a broader market, but I always think in terms of product audience fit first because you can hit a lot of, to use a baseball analogy, singles, doubles and triples and never have to hit a home run if you're connecting with enough people. And those are the people that you have in the audience. I also want to push back a little bit about something you said. You're like, copyblogger was so huge and vast. I mean, do you know how tiny a couple hundred thousand people is in the world of broader media? It's.

Well now, now, but at the time you're the big fish.

And yet you've watched all these newspapers die, right? Because they're in the middle. But it's the individuals and small companies that can reach an outsized audience for them, they have outsized influence for what it cost to run that company and to develop the product. Right. Meanwhile, you have legacy media that. I mean, I'm not happy about it, but they're either dead or dying because of the way that specifically Web2 turned out for them. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you've got Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, these companies that are essentially aggregators. Right. So the little people over here are able to thrive because of vast reach. The publishers in the middle have vast reach, but their business models died and they just got hammered into oblivion, mostly due to Facebook and the other aggregators. Right. It's interesting how things play out, especially from the more idealistic days, for example, of early blogging. But they did get one thing right in the early days of blogging, which is that an individual has outsized potential thanks to this environment. And I think you'll see that accelerate with Web3 and the emphasis more on community. That's another thing we've been doing since 2007. Wasn't always in fashion to have paid member communities, and now all of a sudden, it's all the rage. So mainly I just feel very fortunate that my instincts. Maybe again, you go back. Is this a superpower? I don't know. But I think anyone can do it if they have the right mindset.

I'm wondering. I said that was our last question. But I have to ask you this. Peak newsletter, so. And you have a newsletter. What I'm wondering. I have stopped reading, not just blogs and blog posts and articles. I just. It was too much. But we have this big substack trend now and, you know, we've known about email Fine, 15 years. 10 years in my case. But I'm wondering. It seems like everyone's writing this trend wave of creating newsletters and paid newsletters, but there's going to come a saturation point where people don't want to read that much stuff. So I wonder where you think that's heading.

I don't think it's going to kill email, but the same thing happened with blogging. The same thing happened with podcasts. I mean, who doesn't have a podcast now, right? But only a fraction of those are actually successful commercial ventures. So, yeah, substack to me is ridiculous. It's the most unnecessary product ever.

I was thinking the same thing. You could easily monetize your own newsletter. I don't know.

I know, I know. It's just anytime something's free, people jump on it, but. And what about Substack's business model? If you succeed on Substack and you end up having to share 10% of your revenue or whatever they're charging, you're going to leave at that point and go sign up for a ConvertKit account, right? Because the economics just don't work. I don't understand it at all, but me either. It's fine. But yeah, there'll be a shakeout. I think it may already be happening, but the newsletter thing for me has been great because as soon as I find something's not holding my attention or it's just not up to what I thought it would be, I just unsubscribe. But there have been some finds, some voices, and a lot of former New York Times journalists. You know, other major media, they're doing quite well because they realize what we just talked about. I can take my sliver of an audience and make six or seven figures. The New York Times is doing fine, but most other newspapers are not doing all that well. So there's this great unbundling of things. And then I think just to give something to think about as we enter web 3, you'll see a rebundling of collaboration, but it's fluid, it's not within side a traditional company. You can hop around from this project to this dao to, you know, what.

Have you, all the different discords. And I know people say, oh, I don't get NFTs. They don't understand, yes, you're buying a digital art token, but you're also getting into a community.

So that's why the boarding community, the membership, the status, all of that stuff that drives us is there's a great article out there. I forget the author's name, he's X Amazon. But he calls us status seeking monkeys. And that's completely true from a psychological standpoint, right? So when people say, I can't believe people are spending this kind of money on a jpeg and I'm like, how much you spend on that Birkin bag? I mean, why don't you just carry a brown paper bag? It works, right? Oh, not as enough status, right?

Oh, totally. I just mentioned this on another episode before I knew Louis Vuitton luggage was supposed to be so fancy. I'm like, this is the ugliest logo I've ever seen. It's brown.

No, you're not wrong. It is ugly, but it doesn't matter.

It's a horrible icon. The iconography of it's ugly happened along.

The way that said, this ugly brown bag is a status symbol.

They're horrendous. We actually take a step back. The joke is on us. I know. Oh, my goodness. So, last question. If you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I think the most important thing. You don't need my permission for anything is the first thing. And that's the beauty of this environment. If we can go back to my beginning, I. I didn't go to New York or LA to write. I went to the Internet because there are no gatekeepers. But I also had to just do stuff and see what happens. And I am a person who thinks things through rigorously before I'll start a new project, but only up to the point where I'm like, well, I don't know how this is going to go, but I've run through the angles and I need to start. And that's the thing. People are like paralyzed to start because they're afraid to make a mistake. But mistakes are awesome because they tell you an answer. Before you had no answers and now you've got one and build off of that. It's hard advice to take and yet it is what you have to do. You just have to do something. Now, again, I'm not saying jump in without a net or a plan. I'm just saying be willing to pivot on that plan. And we just brought it all the way back to Jenny's last book, Way to Go.

Like a total fro. And that therein was what makes us all unemployable as well. That ability to keep trying had to bring that in too. Thank you so much, Brian. It's been such a joy to have you here, listeners. Be sure to check out further Net and is there anywhere else you want.

To send people if you're interested in basic digital business? My son's about to graduate high school and I'm going back permanently on the road. I have a site called Future Freedom. It's really focused on building these kind of small, powerful businesses based on trends and change and what have you. But there's also a component of the digital nomad aspect or just living and traveling wherever you want to. So that's@futurefreedom.com there's a free course. You can check it out. But other than that, just. Thank you so much, Jenny. It's been great to catch up with you.

Likewise and I'll put future freedom in the show notes. Can't wait to check it out.

Thank you.

Thanks again Brian and Big thanks everybody for listening.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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