The Flywheel Effect | People Magic Summit with Nathan Barry
Nathan Barry walks through the flywheel framework that powers Kit, his creator platform. Three laws drive it: flow, ease, growth. He shows three working flywheels: how audience-sourced ideas fuel newsletters, how check-in calls turn customers into testimonials that boost conversions, and how Sahil Bloom reinvests sponsorships into creator partnerships to grow faster.
Chapters
Hello, hello, hello everyone. How is everyone doing? Thank you all for joining. As always, the best chat in any summit anywhere is happening right here. Thank you all so much for being here. I am jumping in and out of the chat all day, seeing everyone talk about what they're learning from these incredible sessions that have been happening today. Right, we said it right? It was going to be day two, a kick in the butt and day three, some tools for you to kick butt in your communities and leading up to January 2025. But thank you all again for being here. So much information has been shared, so much actionable tasks and action items that you can action on have been shared throughout the day. A lot of cool features that we shared at the very, very top. And, and this session coming up is going to be incredible. As always, our last session actually of the summit, so make sure to have your questions ready as we go through our next guest and this is a perfect time for me to intro him. Our next guest has previously been a designer, an author and a very successful blogger. But after learning about the power of email marketing and community, like we all have today, he gave all that up to build Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit. So like I said, this session is going to be an incredible one. Have all your questions and fire emojis ready and give a huge warm welcome to the founder of Kit, Nathan Barry. Hey, thanks for having me, Nathan. How are you doing?
I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here.
Yeah. So excited to have you and thank you for joining us. We have been going over so many different things about building community, about starting from zero, finding your ideal members. We have so much information we've given away and we're so excited to hear from you. But first and foremost, I think maybe like an intro to who you are, your journey and even what Kit is is probably useful for a lot of folks here that are just starting out on their community building journey.
Yeah, so I got my start as a creator in one way back in 2007, 2008, getting into the world of design. I came into this space from web design, software design, building for the iPhone and the iPad when those were first released. And then that got me into building audiences. I wrote several books on software design and so that was like in 2012, 2013, and then I just fell in love with the idea of building an audience, serving them and then earning a full time living from that. And so then in 2013 I founded ConvertKit because I wanted a tool. You know, I was using mailchimp for my Email. And I wanted a tool that did that, but was made for creators like me. And it was a slow journey. We've bootstrapped it all the way from the beginning. But, you know, we grew ConvertKit to tens of millions in annual revenue. All the biggest creators on the web pretty much use it. And then actually just 17 days ago, we rebranded from ConvertKit to Kit, which is a pretty fun thing and you can see all about that@kit.com but that was really just about building an even more established platform. So I guess the 32nd version of what Kit does is we're the operating system for your creator business. So, so we do all of your email and automation. You know, where you're going to grow your audience, how you're going to stay in touch with them, how you're going to segment. And then the coolest thing, I think, is we've built this app store where now all these other great products, instead of us trying to do everything, we want to partner with people who are the absolute best in the industry. And so they can build apps that feel really native and integrated so that, you know, professional creators can use all the best tools. And so my personal favorite, and I'm not just saying this because I'm on a Mighty summit, but my personal favorite is the Mighty app for Kit. And so I'm launching my own Mighty community in the next few weeks and just being able to. When I'm writing an email inside of Kit, I have access to all my content from Mighty right there in the editor. You know, all the purchases are synced back and forth. Like all of that, they feel a lot like one tool. And that's basically what we're building with the Kit App Store and ecosystem. So that's Kit in a nutshell. And that's my journey in two minutes.
No, Perfect. That's amazing. And that's for. There are some people who are unaware. Some people had mentioned some other platforms that we won't name, but that's what Kit does and we have integration on Mighty with Kit and that's where this partnership comes out. So thank you so much for saying so. We're so happy to have convertkit Kit to now be part of the Mighty Apps. Our integration on that side. Yes. And that's everyone asking this in the, in the chat. We will go fully in depth on what Kit can offer you, but I would love to explore the rebrand. This just happened a few weeks ago. A few days ago, as you said. What was the reasoning behind that? What was the impetus for that Yeah.
I think that ConvertKit as a name and as a product, you know, it feels pretty technical, which is what we do, honestly. Right. We provide services to help you convert your visitors to subscribers, you know, passing acquaintances to long term fans. But what we've built is a much bigger platform beyond that. And so we were realizing like, oh, we've built the platform like the kit to power your business. And then I think the one thing we found is that every creator business is unique. It's different. Right? I might earn $100,000 a year entirely through coaching. You might earn it entirely through 10,000 members in your mighty community who are all paying $10 a month. Right. There could be a huge range in all this and we need totally different tools. And so what we realized is that we need to build a platform where each person can assemble their own set of tools or their kit. And we're like, wait a second, we already have that in our name. Let's just drop part of it. Narrow in on helping you build the kit to power your creator business. And it's a whole thing. We realized we could acquire the kit.com as a domain name and really everything like the stars just aligned. And it was like, this is too good of an opportunity to pass up. And so it's been a big project, but we're really setting up the next decade of the company. I love that.
I love that. The whole summit is about looking towards the future and January 2025. So that's a perfect one to one analogy for a lot of people that are looking at their community, maybe rebranding, starting a brand new one from scratch. It can be done on your scale as well as anyone starting from zero for their community. So I love that and that's phenomenal.
One other quick thing that I'll just throw a shout out in, I am recording. So with Kit, we want to expand beyond just providing software. And so that was part of the name. The name change is to have a brand that can do that. So I'm recording right now from Kit Studios in Boise, Idaho, which is this like great production studios that all of our customers can use for free. And you might be like, well, I don't live in Boise or I live more than like a couple hour flight away. And so that's part of where we're expanding it. So we're looking to expand Kit Studios to New York and other cities because we just want creators to produce the best quality content and we want to remove every barrier possible for that. And so we have these plug and Play Studios. And that wouldn't make sense as ConvertKit, that's very much a software company, whereas Kit is a company to make creators successful.
That's phenomenal. Can we just reiterate that? That you're going to have studios that creators can be in, people that are building their communities can utilize to then shoot the content they need at your studios?
Yeah, exactly. So here at the Boise location, there's five studios. Each one has a different look. I've got one where I'm looking right into the teleprompter and I actually recorded my mighty course in here on Tuesday. So instead of like hiring a film crew and all this stuff, I was in this room. I think it took me 10 hours to record the whole course, you know, and it was just plug and play. Like, I didn't have to worry about stressing out. My video team or anyone who's made a course can relate to this. We always think as creators, we're like optimists in the best and worst ways. We always think like, oh, I could knock this out in five hours. Right? And so we book a video crew and we rent a studio and all of that for five hours. And then at five hours, you're like, shoot, I'm only halfway done. Yeah, but in this case, because I like, it's all set up and ready to go, I could just keep, keep recording. I could have come back the next day. And so it was just, you know, I'm super proud of the quality of what I'm building because of the space. So we've got creators flying in from New York, from Salt Lake, from Austin, all that, because they're like, oh, I can use this space for free. And why not have like two dedicated content creation days and end up with something that looks really, really good. And you're really proud to get it in front of your customers.
Amazing. Amazing. I have so many people in the chat saying, come to this area. Come to the D.C. area, San Diego, please. Like, yeah, this is. This is phenomenal. He's going to expand and you will all have access to this. That is a phenomenal, phenomenal utilization and tool that you're giving people to kick butt on day three. This is, this is great. So, you know, seeing that Kit has evolved and the name change and you're working on expanding outside of just email market, I want to talk about, like, the company's growth, things that you've seen and learned as Kit has evolved. And then maybe we can talk about, like, the Flywheel effect, how that's been utilized within Kit and what you've been seeing for your own evolution for the company.
Yeah, that sounds good. So we've always taken a creator first approach to growth, which on one hand might seem like a tagline or someone's trying to sell into the creator market. So they're like, oh, they're just saying that. But we have this line that we've said for years of kit is built for creators by creators. And so that's where we all came from. I started as a creator like Charlie, our creative director, who led this whole rebrand. She's got a 200,000 subscriber YouTube channel, she's got a podcast. Everyone's building, living the creator life and then building the tools we wish we had. So there's a bunch of things that we get into there. You mentioned flywheels. This is something that I've talked about a lot, actually. The course that I've recorded here two days ago is all about flywheels. But that's one of those things that I think it's a phrase that most people say and no one actually really knows. I'm curious. I'd love for people to drop in the chat. Do you know what a flywheel is? Could you explain it to someone else? So let's go with that. If you think you could explain to someone else, give me a yes. If you don't think you explain it, go with a no. And then I'll show you videos and all of that in just a second to walk through it.
Yeah, I'm seeing a correct. There's people saying, nope, I guess we have to define it for them. And that's perfectly fine. No worries.
You know, we get these terms, but it's like, wait, what actually is that?
Exactly.
So let's see, let me see. Is it a phishing tool? I love that. Let me. If we can pull up my screen, I will show you what a flywheel is and walk through it. So at a very high level. Oh, Katie said, better than a pump. Yes. Okay, we're onto something. So I first came across flywheels in 2008, and I was in a small country called Lesotho, which is landlocked inside of South Africa. So all the way around the world from Boise, where I live, and we were working at an orphanage there, and we're working to put in a well. So we drilled a well, and in this process, we knew that electricity was not very consistent. Like the city of Missouri, where we were would have electricity really well. And then it would go out for a few Days it'd be in and out. So we realized, okay, we need a way to pump water that doesn't require electricity. And so normally, if you think of something like that, you would think of like a hand pump, Right, like this. Right. It's got a little bit of leverage, nice long handle. When I went camping as a kid, you know, this works great for the campground, right? We're pumping our water, doesn't require electricity. But this is not what you want if, like, this is the source of water for 100 kids, you know, it's not. It's not going to work at all. And so it's not what we installed. Instead, what we installed is a flywheel. And that is a large metal wheel sitting, sits on top of the pump in the same way, but has this circular motion, this momentum that keeps building over time. And it starts out slow and difficult, but then as it builds up, then you can get more and more momentum from there. And if you compare these two side by side, you can start to see some of these differences. Right. The hand pump gets you immediate results. Right? That's great. As soon as you start pumping, you get water. As soon as you stop pumping, you stop getting water. The flywheel starts hard, but then as it rotates, it builds momentum and it goes up from there. Right. We have this linear up and down motion flywheel. We have this circular continuous motion. And this is all you might be like, okay, what does any of this have to do with, you know, business or all of that? Right. We're getting into a metaphor. Oh, I like that. Someone in the chat said consistent results is always better than immediate results. And that's totally true. So what I found. You're asking how we grew kit, is I found that I was just struggling. And so I found that, like, without flywheels, I was running my business on hard mode. And basically I was working really hard and not getting consistent results. Or I would do some of these, like, disconnected activities and some would work and then it would drop off. And it just wasn't predictable, it wasn't measurable. And that's when I was like, okay, I need something better. And someone in the comments mentioned Jim Collins and good to great. And he's actually the very first time that I heard the word flywheel mentioned in a business context.
Yeah.
And he was talking about how, you know, the best companies, the companies that go from good to great, they have a flywheel. And he talked about it at the highest level. Right. Like Amazon using their scale to lower prices, to get more customers, to get more scale to lower prices and how that flywheel feeds itself. But I was like, look, I'm not building Amazon. You know, I need. I need systems. I need a flywheel to serve me right now. And so what I'd love to do is just dive in and show like a very simple flywheel that I think is very helpful for creators. Does that sound good?
Let's do it. Everyone in the chat is so excited about this. So this is great.
Okay, let's talk about the content idea. Flywheel. I would love to hear in the chat if someone has written. If someone writes a weekly newsletter or has like some key piece of content they put out each week. And then I'll get into the pain point that comes from this. So what I run into as a problem is I write a weekly newsletter when I'm on top of things. That newsletter comes out every week. I'm not worried about it. I'm not often on top of things. This is a safe space. Right. I can admit that. You know, sometimes it's 10pm the night before and I'm like, shoot. What should I say in my newsletter that goes out tomorrow morning?
Yeah.
Okay. We've got some great things people are saying.
Yep.
Send a weekly newsletter on Friday. Two YouTube videos each week. Yeah, weekly newsletter. Lots of people have this. Okay. So what I would do is I used to run this scattered, chaotic process and it was so stressful. Now what I do is I run this content ideas flywheel and it is so much better. So let me map it out really quick. What we're doing is up at the very top, we've got this new subscribers coming in, Right. So when new subscribers join our list, they then move to this next stage where I send them an email. This is all automated through kit. I send them an email and say, hey, what's your biggest struggle related to learning this topic? Early on, when I did this, it was about learning how to design iPhone apps. That's where I got my start. What's your biggest struggle with learning how to design iPhone apps? Hit reply and let me know. People would reply with all kinds of things. They'd say, now I'm going to use an iPhone example. But they'd be like, I don't know how to do this in xcode or this thing in interface builder. Doesn't make sense. Or as a developer, I'm stuck here. I would log all of those responses and then I put them in a Google sheet or a label in Gmail. And then when it came time to write, when I Was like, shoot, what should I write about? Then I would go to that list and be like, okay, what is my audience struggling with? And I'd get this note. Philip would say, oh, I'm really struggling to understand this one thing. Sarah would say, here's another frustration that I have. And I could look at that and go, oh, let me create, Let me write the newsletter just to Sarah solving that problem specifically. And then once I finish it, you know, I change her name at the top, you know, to everyone. I make it just a little more generic so it's more applicable. And that's my newsletter that I send out. So then what happens is sending out the newsletter, sharing it on social, all of that helps me bring in new subscribers. And then around and around it goes, right? So the more subscribers I get, the more people I have sharing their frustrations or their struggles, which gives me more responses, which gives me more ideas to write about, which helps me get more new subscribers. So instead of this scattered hand pump process that we had before, now we have a flywheel where a bunch of things are true. Actually, we'll get into all three laws of the flywheel. But does that make sense at a high level?
How's everyone feeling in the, in the chat? Because that makes perfect sense for me when it comes to, on mighty specifically. And I think some people were asking. It's the same way with people like you're, you're, you're getting some members in, you are welcoming them in with, you know, their questions, and then you answer their questions, create the response or the value on, on platform and then they bring new people in. It's the same type of flywheel that we've seen for people. And I love this content idea. Flywheel. This is phenomenal. Yeah. Everyone's saying genius, awesome, sounds brilliant.
Yep, I love it. Okay, so there's three laws to a flywheel. And I want to talk about this because it really gets at what we should hope for, for creating a system like this and why we would want to build a business and build processes that are really, you know, flywheel versus hand pump. So the first law is flow. That's where activities should flow smoothly from one into the next. This isn't a whole bunch of scattered, random things. This is very deliberate. Each one flows into the next one and then it loops around at the end and closes that loop. The end comes back into the beginning. The next one is ease. So lot two. Each rotation is easier than the previous rotation. If we go back to our flywheel, we think about this one that I first encountered in Lesotho. It started out really slow and hard. It actually, when we got this going, I struggled to turn this flywheel the first time by myself. My friend Luke had to come over, and together we got it turning. But then as it built up momentum, pretty soon he stepped away. And I could turn it with two hands and then one hand, and then eventually I could just keep it going with a couple fingers really, really easily. But it's important to note that it started hard, started harder than a hand pump would have. But that second law is that it gets easier with each rotation, even if it's a tiny bit easier. And then the third law is growth. Each rotation produces more than the previous rotation, and we're just getting a little bit more momentum each time and a little bit more results. And if you think about it, laws two and three are kind of crazy when you put them together. It sort of sounds like one of these infomercials where you're like, wait a second, wait a second. You're telling me I'm going to do a decreasing amount of work and I'm going to get an increasing amount of results? Like, what are you selling me? Right? And that's one where I just say, it sounds good. Too good to be true. But it works in real life physics. Like, we have the actual example, like, flywheels work. We can see them demonstrated. I'm applying it to, you know, a water pump. But you have a flywheel in your car. Right. Someone came up to me the other day after a workshop, and they're like, hey, I. I have a farm. I have an Internet business, and I have a farm. And our John Deere combine has a flywheel in it. Right. And so they're used everywhere. And so it works in both cases. And so you can absolutely get this where you get decreasing effort and increasing results. There are more flywheels that I want to show that demonstrate this process a little better. I'm trying to decide which one that I want to go to.
Sure.
So many good ones. Let's go to a video testimonial. Flywheel. This is something that I think everybody who does video in their mighty community in some way, I know a bunch of people do. But just say video in the chat. If you are actively creating videos and putting it out there, or you have a video course where you're putting out content. Because I think this could really help. Yep. Carrie. Care. Angela. Yep. A bunch of people do. All right. One problem that we all run into is not having enough testimonials inside of our community. We know we're creating transformations, but we don't have that captured in a way that other people can talk about and see and help them make a buying decision. So in this example, let's say I have a course and I sell it for $1,000. Well, for a price point like that, I need examples and testimonials and I need it from real people. We've all been to those sales pages where we're like, is John from Missouri a real person or did you just put a random photo and a name and a made up quote? Right. Video actually makes me trust that. And so let's build a flywheel that just collects video testimonials. And so here's how it works. The very first thing is that when a customer comes in and purchases, we're going to give them time to get ramped up and to get they go through that initial onboarding experience in your course. They go through the first lessons, all of that. Then what you're going to do in an automated way is offer a check in call. You're saying, hey, I'd love to just check in and see how's the course experience going so far? What have you learned? And then I can help coach you along the way and refine the process. Now what's going to happen next is we're going to say like on that call we get on, so it's me and my customer or my student and I just say, hey, if you don't mind, I'm going to record the call that way as we talk through things in your business or your course experience, you have it to refer back to later, right? So I'll send you the recording afterwards and we go through and just ask, hey, where are you stuck? What hang ups do you have? And this is going to be really valuable for two different things. One, you're going to actually find out what people found, right? They watched all 25 videos in your course, but they're actually still stuck on this one thing. You might realize, okay, I need to tweak video 4 or I need better homework on video 10.
Right?
So you'll learn a lot of that. But then you also just help them get a better outcome, right? Because you can. And they're going to feel like, man, I got my money's worth. This was awesome because I just got one on one help for my particular problem. And then you finish that and then what you're going to do is bring in the testimonial and what you really want to Say there is something like, I'd like to wrap up by asking you a few questions about your experience. Would you, Would it be okay with you if I use this for a testimonial almost every time? They're gonna say yes. And the reason is you just help them a bunch for free, right? And so then what you do is you go and ask them questions and you're saying things like, okay, what was the biggest aha moment for you in this course? Right? If a friend of yours was thinking about buying this course, what would you say? And you can go through questions like that. What was your thought process right before you purchased? And what would you go back and say to yourself? Now you have these questions that are prompting really good testimonials. And then what you can do is you can go clip out the part of you asking the questions and just edit it together into a nice tight version of their testimonials where they're saying, oh, I love this course because I learned X, Y and Z. The breakthrough that I had, you know, before I bought, I was really thinking, oh, is this going to solve this exact problem for me? And now that I'm inside of it, it actually did. And so then what happens, right? If we go back to our flywheel, we've done the check and call, we've coached them through it, we asked for that testimonial, now we have this testimonial that we can put on the sales page. And now every person who comes in is going to be more likely to convert because they're going to see someone who has a business like them, who looks like them, and has this real life testimonial which is then going to increase sales, which means we get more customer purchases, which means there's more people that we can offer check in calls and create this transformation for gives us more testimonials and so on. And I've seen this work to the level that people have said, I actually had to stop the flywheel. And I'm like, wait, why did it not work? And they're like, no, no, it's not that it didn't work. It's that it worked too well. And I was like, I have a perfect testimonial for every demographic use case. And I actually don't need more testimonials. And I'm like, you know what? If we get to that point, when we get to that point, that is a huge win. And, you know, it's good to shut down the flywheel at that point or put it on Pause for a quarter or something.
Oh, so, so good. I'm. I'm seeing people in the chat saying, this is such good stuff. This is the tactical, tangible things that they can walk away from. And we will have this replay again in our community. PeopleMagic. MN CO. You can take everything that Nathan is saying right here. This is phenomenal. This is great. Sorry, but please continue. This is so good.
Yeah. So I would just say that I think about everything in my business, in my life, in terms of a flywheel. Oh, Ben. And saying, another. Another. Yeah, we can dive into more. I got tons of these.
This is great.
Before we dive into another flywheel, though, I just want to point out that in your business, there's three different ways of doing things. And it's important to notice this because, like, you can look at your calendar, your goals, and just say, like, okay, which one of these three methods am I using? And the first one is scattered. And honestly, this is what 90% of us do probably 90% of the time. And that's where we sit down at our computer and we're like, all right, what should I work on today? And then maybe we open email. And there's an email from someone. It's like, oh, maybe I'll let this random person who dropped in my inbox drive whatever I work on today as things pop up, or whatever inspired me on social media, or I listen to a podcast on, you know, the drive to the coffee shop. And that made me think I should Double down on LinkedIn marketing. And so that's what I'm doing now. And, you know, we just. We're all over the place.
Yeah.
Now the next method is linear. And this is much more like, this is how most professionals show up. And they say, hey, I build standard operating procedures in my business. I know what I do each day of the week. Monday is dedicated to content. Tuesday is all about social growth. Right. I've got systems for each of these things. When I publish a new video to YouTube, I do these five things to promote it. Right. Linear is how professionals show up. I would say, still, most people don't do this, but if you look at professionals, that's how they show up. And then the third way is the flywheel. And it can be linear, like an sop, Right. The steps are predefined. You know what you're supposed to do, but it actually curves around, and the first or the very last step goes into the first one, and this is where you go from. Maybe if we're doing the water analogy, scattered is Like, I don't know if anyone's been out backpacking and you're, like, using a little water purifier to get water out of the stream or something like that. That's the scattered one. Linear is like, hey, we actually drill the well and we've got a pump and we've got consistent results. This is pretty good. And. But then the flywheel is like, oh, what if this could compound over time? And, you know, you can build so much up from there. So I think of everything in terms of flywheels. They take a bunch of effort, they're hard to do, but you can get to some really, really interesting places with that.
Phenomenal. Yeah, sorry, just to pause there. Yes. Reiterate that point. You can be trying to catch rainwater. You can dig a well, or you can make the flywheel. That's a perfect way of thinking about that, because I think a lot of people that are coming into this summit have went through probably the first two back and forth trying to figure out what works for them and how to build their community that way and structure it around how do they get people in. And they've done it either the scattered way, trying to collect that rainwater using the straw to, you know, any. Any puddle of water that you find to try to drink it, or trying to dig their well and then still seeing not the results that they want. So this is a great reframing to think about things in the flywheel way, not just for the value that you offer in your community, for the, for the people when you bring them in as well. This is. This is great.
I love it. I'm now going to have this analogy of someone, like, running around to a bunch of different rain puddles with like, their life straw and like Dr. Each puddle dry, and then be like, all right, we could. Let's at least drill. Yeah, let's go from there. Okay, so I want to talk about the last flywheel show. I. I queued up three to. To show you all today. So this is how Sahil Bloom has grown his newsletter. I think he's at 750,000 subscribers now. And when we implemented this flywheel in his business, he was at 150,000. So this flywheel, if I can tease it just a little bit more, is all about how do I grow as many subscribers as possible. Because when his. He has a book coming out. I think it's coming out in maybe March or April. Quick plug. It's called the Five Types of Wealth. You should go on Amazon and pre order it help a creator out. So he's built this massive newsletter, and he's averaging over 10,000 new subscribers per week. And this is the flywheel that he does with it. So I call this the million subscriber flywheel, because that is Sahil's goal, right? Build the newsletter to a million subscribers. And what he's doing is he has new subscribers coming in, and those are coming in primarily from social, some ads as well. But he's got a big presence on LinkedIn, on X and on Instagram. And then when people subscribe to his newsletter, he has something called the Creator Network, which is a kit feature. And what it does is he partners up with other creators. And when someone subscribes to his newsletter, it says, why don't you check out these other creators as well? Right? So he's partnered up with James Clear and Ryan Holiday and others. And then what's cool about it is when someone signs up to those other creators, it pops up and says, why don't you check out Sahil and other creators, right? So it's sort of this multiplication step that he has when someone joins his newsletter where every new subscriber turns into like 1.3 subscribers. Now, what he's doing there is he is sending out two newsletters per week. And he pours a lot of time and effort into making sure that this newsletter is really, really high quality. And people want to read it, they want to share it, right? Which is going to help them get more new subscribers. But then he's very set on how he makes money. And what he does is he sells sponsorships in his newsletter. And actually the KIT team sells sponsorships for him. And so we're dropping in all of these one sponsor per newsletter. And what most people would do, right, this is pretty normal. We're getting new subscribers. We get them on our newsletter, we send that out, and we make money from it. Most people would take this money and say, like, all right, cool. That's my business. But you gotta remember that Sahil has only one goal, and that's to grow this really engaged newsletter to a million people. And so what he does is he takes all of this money from sponsorships and he pours it back into reaching more new subscribers. So what we have is he's using another kit feature called the Partner Network, where he can actually go on there and pay other creators, and they can say, oh, this is awesome. Like, I love Sahil's newsletter. I would happily get paid $1.50 or $2 per subscriber that I refer to Sahil's newsletter, which gives him more new subscribers. So let's play this through. For example, as Sahil gets more new subscribers, his newsletter grows. The bigger his newsletter is, the more he can charge for sponsorships, which makes him more money, which he can then pour, like, reinvest all of it into advertising in order to grow faster, which gets him more new subscribers. So if you imagine a snowball rolling down the hill, actually, I want to hear in the chat, it's mid October. We got winter coming up. For those of us in the northern hemisphere who's made a snowman before, just throw a snowman in the chat if you've made one. When I'm out there making a snowman with my kids, you know, you like, make the snowball, it's like this big. You start rolling it and it basically adds nothing. You're like, what's even the point of this? This is going to take forever to make a. Oh, I like the snowman emoji. Yeah, nice work. You guys are on it in the chat. Um, so it starts out really, really slow. It's like that flywheel, right, where it's really hard to get going, you know, and we're just barely getting any results. But then as it builds up, gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And those later, like later on with the, the snowman, you know, or that big ball of snow that you're going to make in the snowman, it's adding a huge amount each time. And like, okay, we just added, you know, multiple inches in. In diameter with each rotation. And I like the analogies. We got Santa in the chat now. This is great. So you're getting this momentum. So the, the same snowball is happening with Sahil's flywheel, where an early rotation is maybe giving him a thousand subscribers. Right? He's got 500 coming in here. It's turning into 700 by the time he goes to the creator network. And then as you know, he might be making a few thousand dollars in sponsorships, which he then reinvests, which gets him, you know, a thousand subscribers more or something, right? So it starts out small, but then later on as the snowballs, you know, he's making 80, 70, $80,000 a month in sponsorships now because the newsletter is six or 700,000 subscribers. And so that's a huge amount of money that he can get paid to get in front of way more creators and on from there. So if you go back, right, and we think about the three laws. Let me pull that up. Right. That third One is growth. Each rotation produces more than the previous rotation. And Sahil's million subscriber flywheel is the perfect example of this. Right. Because it just compounded from a little bit all the way up to this massive level. And he's going to crush his. His growth goals because of it.
Wow. Wow. Incredible. Yeah. In the chat, people are like, saying, this is the tactical advice they needed. They didn't understand, like, how to get things started. And that flywheel that you just showed for Sahil is phenomenal. Yeah, this is. This is. This is great. Reading the chat now, seeing everyone saying, wow, and build a. Build a Nathan snowman. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Would you build that snowman with your kids? You know, this December, you could be like, why is it called Nathan?
Yeah, I don't worry about it.
You can.
You can name it Nathan. That's right.
Yeah, exactly.
This is who I like, the frozen references.
Of course. We want to build a snowman.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is. This is great. Yeah. So this is exactly what I think people are thinking about when it comes to their community. With Kit's integration, you can utilize those specific tools that are proprietary to Kit and start that flywheel. It's not a continuous thing that just. You just let go and you can always come back to it. You do have to get the pump going and then let it run and then you can turn it off. Then you can come back and do it again and then do it. Yeah, yeah.
Well, someone. Someone mentioned in the chat earlier, they're like, hey, where does the momentum in the flywheel come from? That's a really important point because we have not invented a perpetual motion machine. Right, Right. You know, at that time as a kid, we were like, okay, hold on. I know that water coming down a dam can spin a wheel and generate electricity. And I know that I can use electricity to pump water. So can't. I just. Can't. Like, can't we just generate endless electricity with the same water? I'm like, well, actually, no, you can't. Right. It doesn't work that way. You have to have some outside force. And it's really important to note that with flywheels that, like. It's not a perpetual motion machine. And I think a mistake that a lot of people make is they figure out something that worked in their business and they might systematize it or even turn it into a flywheel, but then neglect it in some way. And they're like, all right, that works. Now let me come on to the next thing. And we'll build that up. Oh, and that works. Now let's go on to the next thing. Perfect. Wait, hold on a second. This first one, like, slowed to a stop.
Yeah.
And it's like, well, in that flywheel example, I could turn it with a couple fingers, but if I took my hand away, it would eventually slow down and stop. And so it's really important that you build in those checkpoints so that you keep putting in that effort, even if it's 20 minutes a week. So something that I do when I'm running a flywheel is I have two calendar invites related to the flywheel. So let's say, I guess one other thing. Every flywheel has a cadence that it runs. It might be a daily flywheel, weekly flywheel, or a monthly. Right. A lot of flywheels are weekly or monthly. And so if, for example, I'm have my weekly newsletter, flywheel, well, I have times pre scheduled on my calendar for me to do each of the steps in the flywheel, and then I have another block of time in order to measure and report on the flywheel. So it might be 10 minutes on a Friday at the end of the week. And I'm like, cool. How many new subscribers did I get? How hard was it to write the content? How many ideas did I source from my audience? And I'll just note that. And that's important for two reasons. First, because I get to see the progress and see, like, is this improving? Am I getting results? And then I can see, like, okay, where did I feel friction in that? How could I improve that for the next rotation? But then the other thing is, it keeps me doing it. Like, human nature is to be like, oh, squirrel, like, let me go do this other thing right Y. And so it just keeps me on track. Because the worst thing is to build a flywheel, get it running smoothly, and then get distracted and forget about it. Yeah.
Yeah. That's so good. That's so good. Having it at. Someone just asked about the flywheel schedule. Having that in your calendar, letting you know that, okay, this is when you have to do this much of work or this much of work, and then letting that whole thing turn. That is. That is phenomenal. That's great. Yeah, this is. This is. I see a lot of people in the chat saying, like, there it's finally clicking for them. We did have a reference to squirrel before, and that scattered, like, you know, attention span that happens when you get caught into, like, the. What we call the hamster wheel of, like, content creation. All these things being direct Utilizing that flywheel instead of getting to a hamster wheel against that flywheel, where you can see progress going, and you can utilize Kit, which has an integration with Mighty, to do so. Everything that Nathan just laid out can be implemented in your community.
Well, and that's something that I think is so impressive with Mighty in general, is the thoughtfulness around how to create and maintain engagement in a community. Right. Because we've all been part of those communities that just die out, you know, and you're like, oh, there's like a post a week kind of, and it's all from the same person, you know, and so you end up with a flywheel of if you built it out well. And like, I've talked like, Gina is so good at teaching all of this.
Yeah.
Of. Okay, here's how, you know, we create steady engagement. Here's the question that we ask every Monday. Here's how we call back to it on Friday. Right? Here's all of these things that end up building a really, really good flywheel. There's a question that I saw of Kelly asking, how many flywheels do you have? I have three that are running really well, and then I have one more that's like, limping along and I'm trying to get it going. I would say what's important is to really narrow down and just start one flywheel, right. And to not do the most exciting flywheel or something like that. Focus on the one that will free up the most time for you, and then get that going really, really well. And only when you have that dialed in, should you start to work on the next flywheel. And actually, as a. As a quick aside, if anyone's looking for examples of flywheels, one, send them to me. Like, if you have them, send them to me. I am a, a collector and a curator of flywheels. My email is just nathanit.com so I would love, you know, if you're like, hey, here's a flywheel that I use in my business or in my community or whatever else, email it to me. And I'd love to showcase it. But the other thing is, I have a library of flywheels that I'd love to give out. I'm assembling this, and so I will throw this up on the screen, actually, if you guys can throw it up on the screen. But if you go to creator flywheels, then there's just a page there. And when I finish this library of flywheels, I will send it all out to you. And that way you can see. I'll include these slides as well. But then you can also see like the. I think I'm at 10 or 11 flywheel examples right now. Wow. That I've curated from different creators. And so that's just@creatorflywheels.com and yeah, that's totally for free. I don't have anything else.
Amazing. So then they can utilize that them theirselves. Everyone in this chat, everyone part of this community, you have clear examples that you can copy take for yourself. Thank you, Chloe, for pinning that. Go to creatorflywheels.com learn how to set up your own and start pumping, start getting the water flowing is essentially what we're trying to do. That is phenomenal, phenomenal stuff. All right, so I know we're coming up on time. I did want to allow some of the community did ask some questions and I feel like you've got to a lot of them.
You've been.
You've been keeping your eye on chat for most of this. This is great. Okay. Susan had asked, is your new community on Mighty for Kit?
The community that I'm launching on Mighty is specifically for flywheels. So I am launching a group coaching program about flywheels. This is not an ad, but it's just the topic that I. So, yeah, it's launching over the next few weeks. And yeah, it's a topic that I'm obsessed with. And so I want a group of people where I can coach them through their flywheels, add to my collection and just see like, okay, how do we apply this in as many different types of businesses as possible?
Got it, Got it. Yeah. People are saying they're so glad they stayed to the last session to get that information because this is. This has been so helpful. Next question we saw from Maggie. You talked about this, how to take off with momentum. So hopefully, Maggie, that was answered for you. And there's a lot of examples@creatorflywheels.com to understand how you can add your own flavor to each of those flywheels and gain the momentum that you need. Rex had asked, can you dive in a little deeper on setting the video flywheel up automatically instead of interviewing each person one by one for those testimonials? And we did talk about that earlier this week. The testimonials can unlock a lot of things for people, but. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts around that?
Yeah. So there's a lot of things where areas in your business where you want to introduce a lot of scale and leverage and then areas where you might not need that much scale, so it'd be easy to think about. Okay, can we do group testimonials? Right. How could I collect like one testimonial at a time is great. Could I get 10 at once?
Yeah.
And maybe. Right. We know we can get 10 people on a zoom call, so could I do that? You could record a feedback session and then like popcorn around to different people. Hey, what was your biggest takeaway? That could work. It doesn't feel like there's as much value for the individual in it.
Right.
But it could definitely work. But I would think about how many for any given flywheel, how much output does it need to produce in order to be successful? If we are selling a $20 book, we need that flywheel to spit out a lot of them to pay a multi thousand dollar mortgage every single month. Right. We need volume. Right. And email subscribers. Right. That's a volume game. Testimonials. I actually don't think testimonials is a volume game. I think it's a quality game. And so I don't need. There's diminishing returns. Right. I would rather have 10 great video testimonials than 50 average ones or 100 mediocre ones. And so in this case, I would refine that flywheel where it's okay, if I had maybe five calls initially and then after that I had two a month, that'd be like, I. And then I just started swapping out like my best testimonials or started doing some other things or using them in different places. That would be enough. Right. And so look at each flywheel and say, is more better? Maybe in this flywheel, I actually, if we go to our three laws, right. It flows smoothly from one end to the next. It's easier with each rotation or it produces more with each rotation. Well, maybe in this flywheel I get to the point where I'm happy with the number that it's producing. And so my next iterations, I'm like, hey, how do I make it easier over time? Oh, sweet. I automated the scheduling of the calls. Okay. Now I went from spending two hours a month on this flywheel to now I'm only an hour a month. Right. Because I removed some friction there. So the point of the flywheel is not always as much scale as possible. It might be to reduce friction so that you can stay consistent on it. I just imagine that testimonial library if instead of like doing a blitz and saying, I'm going to get 50 testimonials because I'm going To grind it out all, like, for a month straight. If you're like, what would have to be true for me to just focus on this for years, where I steadily going. Two new testimonials. Three new testimonials a month for multiple years. Like, that would be killer. And so I would say it's about consistency and longevity, often more than it's about scale.
I love that. I love that it's about quality, not quantity. There can be diminishing returns. The water could run dry depending on what you're trying to do. You want to make sure that you're getting the quality and utilizing it not simply for scale, but also for just removing any roadblocks. That's what you want it for. Which are.
Yeah. You mentioned diminishing returns. If we use the water analogy.
Yeah.
What if there's a point that's like, I don't need more water.
There you go.
Right. You're like, I'm already taking two showers a day. You know, like, we're watering all the landscaping. Right. Everything's lush and green. Like, I'm good.
I'm fully hydrated.
Yeah. So I can just keep. I need to maintain the same level. But now let's just make it easier to get that. That water. And that's like a really great, satisfying place to be because then you're like, sweet. That's running really well. I'm happy with it. What other flywheel can I start next?
Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. That's such a good. I love the analogy. I hope that sticks in everyone's mind that you do not want to be with that life straw. You do not want to be trying to just dig a well and pump it yourself. You need to have the flywheel, have your friends and co hosts that you might have on your team when you are opening your community. Have other hosts with you to make the flywheel turn and then the water will start pouring. That is phenomenal. Last question. I'm trying to see if we can get one from the chat, but we always try to end as this summit is going to January 2025. What is your January 2025 look like? We got a little taste with the community coming, but anything else that you want to let people know when they start using kit?
Yeah. I think the big thing is flywheels are easy to talk about and I do want to let people know that they're hard to implement. Like, I want to set expectations properly and that's been my experience in my own business. And so when I look to 2025, everything I'm doing is like continuing to rein myself in from getting excited about something and saying, oh, let me go jump over and do this in a scattered way instead saying, no, no. What's the flywheel version of this? And so I'm doing a lot fewer things than I used to do. There's a quote from Warren Buffett that someone said to me yesterday, and that was the difference between successful people and really successful people, is that the really successful people say no to almost everything. So as I look to 2025, it's like, okay, now how do I narrow it in and just, I don't need to do seven new things. I just need to build one new flywheel or fix this one thing in my existing flywheel. So one of the flywheels that we're working on at Kit is this app store where we're saying, hey, how do we build these systems so that the community can build way more apps? Like there's a crazy flywheel there. If you think about it like the, the bigger Kit gets, the more developers want to build apps on top of it, which makes the platform bigger and more effective, which then gets more customers, which brings in more developers and on from there. So yeah, I'm going to be focused on building the product, building the app Store and then honestly just scaling my mighty community because there's nothing more fun than like hands on with your community, spending time with customers and going from there. So that's my 2025 plan.
Amazing, amazing. And you gave so much that people can start thinking about themselves. They can think about their newsletter, they can think about collaborating with each other, utilizing the creator Flywheel. If anyone heard that noise that is almost letting me know that we're almost at our time. But you can, you can utilize everyone here. In this chat, people have already spoken about, they've shown up every, every day this week to talk about how they're setting up like a, like an in person Twin Cities meetup. There are so many people from the Twin Cities that represented inside here and utilizing creator flywheels. You could see where your circle intersects or venn diagrams with someone else's community and figure out, okay, here's my community, there's their community. This interlapse, let me try to use Kit to then showcase their community for their newsletter. You can utilize that, that tool and that's the way that you can kick Butt in 2025. I think that's phenomenal the way that you broke this whole thing down. Everyone's saying so in the chat. Also, thank you all so much for such a phenomenal, phenomenal, tactical and tangible presentation. And you talked about all the things that people can start implementing for themselves and not have to worry about this hamster wheel. People said flywheels, not hamster wheels. So I love that. This is. This is great.
That's perfect. Thanks so much for having me.
