Best of HeyCreator 2024
In this lightning‑round episode Matt Ragland distills the most impactful creator advice he shared in 2024. He begins by urging creators to flip the focus from personal goals to what members can achieve, emphasizing that audiences follow the person, not just the content. He advocates using a high‑ticket offer as the primary entry point for revenue, noting that most creators’ first $1,000 comes from freelance work rather than products. He introduces the "3 L's" framework for newsletters – Links, Letters, Lessons – as a recipe for a winning email strategy. Throughout the show he stresses community‑led product development, the importance of involving the audience before launching, and the need to ask "what can go right?" rather than only fearing failure. He outlines three phases of on‑camera confidence (horrifying, abiding, killing it) and argues that the only way to improve is to make more videos. He warns against over‑focus on gear and encourages creators to pick a narrow niche, dive deep, and become the obvious choice for a specific avatar. Pricing advice includes charging true value, using proposal bundles with optional items, and never offering discounts. He shares a concise cold‑email formula (quick intro, credibility, clear ask) and highlights memes as a high‑impact marketing lever that can generate viral attention and valuable connections. He critiques the traditional ascension ladder model, proposing a "Hershey‑Kiss" top‑down approach where creators start with high‑ticket offers and work down. Throughout, he stresses persistence, volume, and the mindset that nobody knows what will work, so creators must keep producing. The episode ends with a call to focus on a single problem, a willing‑and‑able audience, and to build a sustainable business without constant money anxiety.
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Hey creators, in today's show we're going through all of our best advice from 2024. I'm so excited and proud of what we did at Hey Creator this year. We had over 35 episodes on the show. We had some incredible guests, and I'm really excited to share their words of wisdom with you. This is a lightning round style pod, so we're gonna go one right after another, so lock in and get ready to learn. So much of the creator culture is about Well, what do I want to do? What's important to me? What are my goals? If you flip it and make it about what are your members able to achieve, what are they able to, to do? The fun of it is you're like, oh my God, like there's so much more that's possible to me if I've unlocked this for people. Largely, people don't follow you for your content. They follow you for you. People follow you for a specific reason. And it isn't just your editing. It isn't just, you know, whatever it a lot of times comes down to you and something that makes you unique, right? Because like when, when any of us think about our favorite creators, we spend more time describing the person, not the content. The content must be good, but the person is a key differentiator. Think about that top-tier high-ticket offer as what's probably going to be your best entry point into making a solid amount of money as a creator sooner rather than later. I did a poll on, uh, X last month asking people what was the most common way that they made their first— not just their first dollar, but say their first $1,000 on the internet. I think 60%, well over half of people, put like freelance work, uh, contract work, more than courses, more than digital products, more than things like templates. The days of being an email only without true connection to the humans reading it, because there's a ton of email newsletters. You get an appetizer of what I'm serving on social. You get kind of like this first course in my email newsletter. Mm-hmm. But the main course happens when we sit down and I hear about your problems specifically. Right. And that's why I think communities like the ones we're creating are so powerful. When I'm in a one-on-one coaching someone or creating their marketing plan, I I am now seeing 10 different tweets and 10 different posts and 10 different short videos that I need to create. I get DMs and calls from friends all the time who see me posting things like, I want to be doing what you're doing, I want to build an online business, I don't know where to start. And they typically go to that gear point. They're like, what camera should I get? They're so focused on the gear part. The outcome is the most important part. And it's the first thing I tell people is like, hold on, you're getting way too focused on like camera lenses right now. Like if you're making TikToks, you don't need a big camera. You don't even start because you think you have to get all this stuff and you've, you've punished yourself because you don't already look like the big creators who are doing it. The outcome piece is like, why start something that you don't want the outcome for? Can be a dollar amount, it can be a lifestyle, it can be just the thing that gets you up every day. The thing that you're so excited to do. 3 L's to make your newsletter a W. To get that W. Yeah. Eat a W. What's the first one? The first one is links. Having a link dump, a curated set of links, recommendations often should be related to your niche. The letter is the second one, and that's more personal. You could also think of it as like very observational. Here's what I'm seeing. Here's what I'm learning. Here's what is interesting to me. But it is more in a letter format. The third L of type of newsletter, and that's lesson, right? So we're talking how-tos, ultimate guides, manifestos. To recap the 3 types. Links, letters, and lessons. We're trademarking that. Don't stop talking to your audience. I think this goes into when we start creating a lot of content and we start putting out a lot of offers, we're focused on like either what we're listening to on business podcasts, not to be too meta, or what we're learning inside of a course that is not ever usually centered around like, what is our audience asking us for? What do they want to see from us? Before you launch something, before you put so much effort and energy and hopes and dreams on any kind of launch, like how involved has your audience been in the creation of said thing? If you can look back and say, I haven't actually talked to any of my community followers, audience about this, I'm not saying that it's going to fail, but I think that you would potentially create something better having done it with your community. People, they're always thinking about what can go wrong. So if you leave Wall Street, it's like, what if I could never make that great paycheck again? But there's a question that's missing here in this. What can go right? And we're so wired to over-index on everything way it can go wrong. So yes, I walked away from a lot of money on Wall Street. I will never come close to reclaiming that. But I also work 60 to 80 hours a week since the years that I left Wall Street. Never set an alarm. First time I wore a suit, my daughter, who only knows me as kind of after Wall Street, she turns to me, she goes, Daddy, why are you dressed like Barack Obama? Because in her mind, only presidents wear suits. We were walking down the street, my daughter was 9, in the summer. She saw these people going to the subway in New York. We don't live in New York. And she said, Dad, do people work in the summer? So what can go right? Not to mention I've served 1,500 days. There are 3 phases of being on camera. The first phase is horrifying. That's when we see ourselves on camera and we are just like, oh my gosh, why does my family still love me? Like, oh my God, that, that's terrible. But trust me, it's not always that bad. The next phase is, well, I don't love what I see. But, you know, I'll deal with it. It's the abiding phase. But the third phase is you see yourself on camera and you think, man, I'm killing that. I'm telling a really good story. I'm doing a good job. I seem calm, collected. The best way to do it is just to be on camera. The answer to everything is to make more videos. How do you become a better editor? You make more videos. How do you get more calm and collected on camera? Just make more videos. Every second that you spend in front of the lens talking, is one more step towards you getting better with this stuff. So at the end of the day, that should be your watchword, how you think about this. If you're starting to become a creator, like, it's not a common profession, right? Like, so I'll sit around with my friends on weekends. The idea of being a creator is just so foreign to them. It's— I got a text from like an old friend. It's like, hey dude, nice podcast, like, when we launch this. And it's like, those kinds of things are gonna pop up. And if you can't handle the fact that other people are going to like make fun of you or roast you or joke about it, that's the very first step. I made gaming videos as a little kid, call it like middle school, early high school. If someone at school found out, that would have been like DEF CON 1. Like, I— it would have been terrible. Like, I was so, so anxious about it. Greg Eisenberg, Jason Levin both say this all the time, like, cringe is the new cool. Like, if you're doing this and it's cringy, that's— you know that you're on the track to do something well. I'm constantly looking for the point in which the dollar amount or the follower amount, like, at what point does it go from cringe to cool in the minds of these, like, skeptical friends or not friends, you know. Most people don't have that patience to do something in the dark for years and hope that it turns into something eventually. Those of us who grew up with the earlier versions of these networks are kind of blessed with a little bit more patience for these things. When I got started in the internet marketing world, it was really just like SEO and maybe Facebook pages. You knew it was going to be a year or two before your site was fully indexed and showing up in search results, and there was a 0% chance of you taking off immediately. Maybe if you got a viral Reddit post, but that was super unlikely. Like, it just didn't happen, right? So if you wanted to start building an audience, you were looking at minimum 2 to 3 years to start to get traction. And that's just not the case anymore. You could blow up in a week if you hit the algos right. That possibility, I think, really screws with people's heads, because as long as it's possible, there's a question of, well, why hasn't it happened yet? We all have those friends. I had those friends as I was growing my business in the early stages where every like 16 weeks, maybe 8 weeks, they were coming up with a new version of their business and reinventing their brand and changing their offers. Like in the beginning, you have to try things to kind of figure it out. So I encourage people to like put out a couple offers, say yes to a couple of different things, but then once you've been doing it for a little while, choose one thing and really go all in because that's when people know who you are, they know what problem you solve. And the other thing is when your brand is confusing and when you are unclear, you're not referable, right? Like when you're telling me, oh, I'm struggling with X, Y, Z, I can be like, oh, I know the perfect person here, let me send you their website, right? We all love to be that hero that's like, oh, I got somebody for you. I know how to help you solve that problem, right? We love to do that for our friends and people in our community, but we can't do that if we don't know what the hell you do, how you do it, who do you do it for? Like if it's constantly changing, people are confused. It took me a while to charge my true value, and that's why it's beneficial to ask around. And ask other creators, how much are you charging for your work? And having very real conversations that are sometimes uncomfortable, but seeing how much they're charging in the market. And I was very fortunate to ask people that were in the industry how much they're charging, as well as people that actually work for companies that hire creators, right? And just saying like, what do you pay? The more input you get, the more confident you will feel in charging your true value. So you should feel a little scared, a little nervous when you're pitching. If you hear yes all the time, that's actually not good. Because it means you're undercharging, right? There should be some kind of negotiation, some kind of friction. And the way that I structure my contracts, not— or my proposals, not to get too detailed, is I'll have like 5 things I can deliver. So 5 things, I'm gonna charge you $20 for it, and they might say yes to only 3 things, so I make $6. But at least I gave myself a chance to make the full amount that I wanted to. Give them something to say no to besides everything. This is one of my pet peeves, especially about people. Who go crazy are not sending newsletters that are like, well, it doesn't match my voice, dude. You have not been writing anything. People do not know what your voice is. And I understand, I would agree that the writing voice is a little different than the talking voice. You wouldn't write exactly the way that you talk and vice versa. It would sound too robotic or too free-flowing on either end of the spectrum. When I hear is like, well, I've never sent a newsletter. I send like 3 per year. But it definitely has to match my voice. I was like, what voice are we talking about here? There is none. You don't write. You understand at this point that a newsletter is valuable, but you're, you're so worried about what's actually inside of it, the voice, the tone, the style, to the point where you're not sending— you're missing the forest for the trees, right? You're so worried about how the words sound that you're not actually getting to a number or getting to a reputation for your newsletter that can get you these financial goals that you actually want. This might sound weird, but like, hopefully people will understand as I, as I talk through it, but I don't necessarily think about my audience. I write for me. I, I write everything I write is a love letter to myself. And like often what I'm writing is not something I've figured out. It's something I'm scolding myself about. Like that's a lot of what I write because I assume that if people are trying to build a business and life in the way that I'm doing it, that they're often going through the same challenges that, that I'm going through. I think about, okay, what's something that I'm, I'm not doing well enough or a reminder that I need today. And that often comes out as my content. So it's less about my audience, but it's also useful at the same time as my audience because they're following me to go through the trials and tribulations that I'm that I'm going through, I can only assume they're going through the same ones. I think about a lot of what I write as kind of like movement creation. I don't think about it as like idea creation. I think about it more like I have strong opinions about how I want to live my life, how I want to build my business, how I want to spend my time, and I write about those things. And my goal is to do this test that I have, which is called the self-select-in versus self-select-out test. When I write something, I want someone to look at the piece of content or the movement that I'm creating and say, I unequivocally, 100%, am so in on this movement. If you're not down for that movement, I want you to self-select out. That is a better outcome than someone being like, whatever. I'd rather, like, I'd rather have people be in one of these two camps. And oftentimes I'll write something and someone will write back on social media and say like, yeah, but you're not thinking about this type of person or that type of person or this situation. And you're right, I'm not writing for, for every situation. So how do you find your clear purpose or your unifying belief? I think about this as a lighthouse in the dark. If I'm in a boat on water and I am feeling a little bit lost and I'm trying to get somewhere but I don't know where, a lighthouse can kind of give me a direction. It's very noisy out in the internet right now, but if you are consistently putting out your signal, your unique thoughts, perspective, idea, eventually that's going to cut through to the right people like a lighthouse. You need to think about what is the thing that you talk about, that you present, that attracts people to you. You don't have to be inhuman to ask people to give you money. One of my good friends just hired me as a consultant and paid me well into 5 figures. I had no problem because I'm the best at what I do. He believes I'm the best at what I do. And I'm like, if you want me to show up and do my best work, I have to get paid. It's very time-consuming to do this work, and he understands that. And so I sold him. There's no weirdness. And if he had said no, he's like, I can't do that, I'd been like, okay, that's totally fine. It doesn't hurt my feelings, but it's like, I'm the best at what I do. If you want me, this is how much I'm going to charge you to do that. And he got zero discount. I don't give discounts. Do you have a great product? Do you have a great service? Do you actually believe that? If you actually believe that, when you're talking to somebody and you find out they need what you have, it should be relatively easy to sell them. Like, dude, you should work with me. I can change your life, right? So again, the confidence comes from I've got something I know is amazing. I had a follower DM me me after about 6 months, and she said, whenever you make posts about sponsorships, that really does seem like your wheelhouse. You should stop talking about all these other things and focus on sponsorships. I don't know what it was, but when she said that, it was like a light bulb moment for me. And so I thought— I realized to myself that like, wow, if I just talk about sponsorships, that's the only thing, I can now think of like 1,000 content ideas around this topic. Every week I'm attacking this topic from every single angle and just going deeper and deeper and deeper and getting these insights that probably I would have never arrived at had I not picked such a focused topic to kind of be known for. And so anyone who might hear this is kind of struggling to figure out a niche, or what should I talk about, don't be fearful of like picking something that's within yours. You think it's too narrow, or I don't know, there's not a lot of people that's going to be interested in that. But I feel like I'm proof that there's so much that you can learn and grow from if you just pick, pick one thing. What do I want out of this creator content? Is it for fun, or is it a business? It took me way too long to answer that question. Because like looking back, I realized I was doing too much of the content for fun. You might think to yourself, well, content is supposed to be fun. And yes, it is. But when you're just thinking like, oh, I'm going to have fun doing this, then often we've talked about this, it can lead to too many differentiated topics. People don't know what to associate you with. You need to figure out pretty quickly if the answer to this is money and it's okay and great. If the answer is money and figuring out the business of it, that's where you need to figure out what's your niche, What's the primary topic? What's the ideal customer profile? What kind of problems do they have? Understanding each of those pieces took me a couple of years to figure out. And even when I was starting on YouTube, I spent 10 months having fun. And I do think that's important because you need to get the reps in. But eventually, if the outcome is I want to have a business around this, got to get focused on what the elements of that business is. If you can't articulate why out of a crowded field of people who are similar to you, you're the person that people should trust their time time, money, and energy with, you're going to struggle. I often see people say things like, I'm the best, I can do it the fastest, I'm the cheapest, I have the most experience. All of those things can be true until someone can do it faster, cheaper, better, and with more experience. Then what? Those are not unique identifiers of your business. And so people often ask about what tools, you know, how can I write better on LinkedIn or Twitter? And all those things are important. I get it. How do I make myself the absolute the obvious choice to my most ideal customers. And I built the whole module in the Creator MBA about this, and I think it's one of the longest modules, because if you don't understand your customer's objections, if you don't understand their aspirations, if you don't know how to go deeper on firmographics, psychographics, demographics, you can never come up with a true statement that encapsulates why your ideal customer should choose you and why you're the absolute obvious choice. What goes into a cold email for you guys? Okay. Overall, less is more. Start with a really quick intro, you know, one-liner. Here's who I am. I try to sort of establish some somewhat credibility, you know, hey, we're building this brand and we've achieved X, Y, and Z, showing your admiration for the person that you're trying to reach out to or why you are looking to connect or how you appreciate something, whether it's a business that they're building, a project they've worked on. Next is the ask. Keep it straight to the point. What exactly are you looking for? Hey, let me know if you're available. Is it coffee? Is it a 10, 15-minute Zoom? I think people overlook and overestimate the subject line. I don't think it needs to be so complicated. You know, sometimes if you're asking something more complicated, it comes off salesy. So I feel like people aren't as inclined to maybe open it. But like, even to this day, we've sent thousands of cold emails. Like, Cole and I still go back and forth with each other on the semantics and the inner workings of, okay, what if we use this word or that word, or if we phrased it like this. The book is called Memes Make Millions, but at the end of the day, memes are a lever to get attention on your products, right? It's a lot better title than Memes Get Attention on Your Products That Make Millions, right? That's— Memes Make Millions is a lot sexier of a title. So you got to have good products that you are selling. And so for me, I've had launches where one meme goes viral and, you know, getting hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars of signups for, for either my newsletter, for clients coming in. It's not just about that. It's also about the connections. The followers, like, you know, I posted a Huberman meme and Andrew Huberman follows me and we start DMing, right? Same with like Marc Andreessen, right? A lot of my, you know, connections on Twitter come from posting memes and like, you know, making people laugh on the internet. And there's kind of an intangible financial amount with that. If you really want to make the real money with memes, then my recommendation would be like build a brand. Don't just become a meme lord, but actually build a brand and a company with a valuable product. And then use memes to market it. Knock on wood. Just about to close this deal for a new coaching client. Here's the thing, like this person's been on my newsletter. This person has been following me on LinkedIn, so they have an understanding of what I do and how I can help. But here's where it really like went to the next level. I noticed that they were like, hey, I need some feedback on this landing page that I have. And so I went to the landing page and I recorded a 5-minute Loom saying like, hey man, I would fix this. I would move this here. This is too wordy. You can get rid of this. Don't worry about this form field. You shouldn't have this link to another page. Do these 4 things and you'll increase conversions. That's the kind of cold DM where like this person was familiar with me, but it was that they're like, this is just what I needed. I know we've talked about coaching a little bit in the past, or I've seen you offer it. How do we get started? Cultivated, build a sense of trust, provide value through regular public content, but then deliver something really specific and helpful. From seeing his landing page to recording the Loom to sending it to him, 10, 15 minutes tops, and it's going to turn into a multi-thousand dollar coaching program. Let's assume the objective is to create a business that sustains us with some kind of regularity where we're not stressed about making money every month. You've got to pick one niche. You have to create a customer avatar that needs what you have to offer. So to me, there's like a little bit of a quadrant here. You have to find a problem that needs to be solved. The scale of that problem will determine the scale at which people will pay for it. That problem has to be something that you have some level of competency solving that people are aware of. So this is another problem that I see often happen is that people solve problems that the people aren't actually aware of. A lot of times people are like, well, I'll just teach them. Well, then you're spending all of your money trying to talk somebody into solving a problem that they don't— aren't like super aware that they have. And then the fourth quadrant is that they're willing and able to pay. People may be willing to pay for it, but they're unable. Picking a niche is actually just picking an avatar and a problem.. And that's the niche. If people are confused about how you can help them solve a problem, they're going to go to somebody who is very clear how they can solve the problem. I had a coaching call with a member of the Hey Creator community yesterday. His Manuel, shout out to Manuel, the Daily Yogi. He's been writing a daily newsletter for almost 2 years now. And he said, I was doing YouTube videos, but I got too burnt out on them because they were taking up a lot of time. I encouraged him. I was like, you probably need to be on YouTube. Here's the good news. And I could like just see that he got a little— he's not against being on video. He has in his mind, it's going to take like so much time for me. So this is the other element of like knowing the limitations on time that you have. You could do this highly edited 7-minute video and like crush yourself trying to get it done every week on top of the other things that you like. He's already committed. He's in to a daily newsletter for nearly 2 years. He can't just really stop doing that. It's the backbone of his business. Turn on the camera on your phone. And film yourself talking about these emails that you already have. It was Hormozi said, like, read the tweets, just read the tweets, man, for your video, like read the emails. If you understand the time that you have and there's not really any wiggle room around that, or you're not willing to like kind of change around your deliverables, then how simple can you make it? I get asked this question a lot. How much ROI can be tied to a ghostwriter? And my response to that is every bit of ROI in your company. And they're like, no, no, I want it. I want it line by line. I was like, it's not a slot machine because you can't— it's immeasurable the impact that content has on a business. Yeah. When you write daily content from a founder-led standpoint, you are literally lifting up every phase of your business— sales, HR, internal, external, every single phase of your business is good. And you cannot possibly measure who is consuming that content, when they're consuming that content, and when the decision— whether it's a top talent wanting to be hired by you and your company, whether it's a client wanting to go with you over a competitor, whatever it is— you can't measure that moment. You can only measure that this is an overall marketing spin for my entire business because I know the impact it's going to have over the longest period of time. Most online creators, teachers, people that teach a thing, have a course, membership, software, something, have grown up in the era of the ascension business model, the ascension ladder. Best I know, Brian Dice, digital marketer, popularized it years ago. And the core concept is you start with a very cheap item, a $9 PDF or something equivalent, you work your way up to a $97 thing and a $997 thing and then a $10,000 thing and $100,000. You work your way up from a cheap thing to an expensive And that's one model that can work, I guess. Sure. Takes a lot of sales at $9. Right. And all the things I've ever seen work in business, which is most things, most things work. Like if you see the case studies and the headlines, it's like most of that's actually true. The one thing I personally have never seen work completely is that. I've actually never seen it one time. I've seen plenty of people sell low-ticket things as Legion for the real thing, all that. But the actual ascension model, in full production working, I've yet to see it work one time. And that's just a sample size of one— me. Years ago, I was reading a blog post by Tim Urban on Wait But Why. I think it was his blog post about Tesla. So if you just Google Wait But Why Tesla, he diagrammed out how Elon builds his businesses. And it was literally the exact opposite of the ascension ladder. It was the dissension ladder. So if you map it out, it kind of looks like a Hershey Kiss. You start at the very top of the model, the kind of the thin part of the Hershey Kiss. You don't start at the bottom of the market. You start at the top of the market and you work your way down. So you start with like the first one of the first Teslas ever sold. Maybe the first one was to George Clooney and it was a $250,000 Tesla Roadster. The car was fine, cool parts, kind of clunky a little bit. But when you're selling stuff to people that have money, it's easier to sell a $250,000 car than it is a $25 PDF to somebody that's broke. They just have two different hats on. The high-end buyer has the ROI hat. They're not thinking how much does it cost? They're thinking, how can I pay more to get more ROI, like investing. Nobody thinks when you're in pure investing world, how can I invest less? No, you're asking the question, how can I get a higher return, thus invest more? But when you sell to the bottom of the market, you're selling to people who only think about cost and that's it. Their only goal is to spend less, not more. By doing the Elon model, the Hershey Kiss model, when you start at the very top of the market, you're starting with people that have money, and it is easier to sell things to people that have money than people that don't have I'll say it until I'm blue in the face, but I think it's the most important advice anybody can have when it comes to sharing their ideas on the internet. And it's that nobody knows what they're doing. Nobody knows what's going to happen. Your best bet is just continue to put volume out there because eventually something will happen. I can guarantee that if you keep doing it, something good will happen. But if you do everything with an expectation that like this has to be great, you're going to fail. You just will.
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