Productivity Strategies for Creators, Writers, YouTubers, and Podcasters

My name is Matt, and welcome to another episode of the Connect the Dots podcast. I'm so grateful and thankful that you're spending a little time with me, either listening or watching, however you choose to connect with me through Connect the Dots. So today what we're going to be talking about are productivity strategies, content pricing, and product strategies for creators. I've been talking a little bit more about the creator economy the last few episodes because I I'm seeing how I can kind of talk through the intersection of productivity and creativity, especially in the creator economy for content creators like myself. Perhaps I'm finding a new little niche here. I don't know. I'd love to hear your feedback on it. As a listener, the best place to find me really is either on Twitter or Instagram @MattRagland, but you can also email me just work@mattragland.com. But let's go ahead and get into the episode. Because one of the things that I want you to think about in terms of these strategies for success when it comes to being a creator, whether you're starting out as a side hustler like I did for a number of years, or you're already a full-time creator, or you know, you're kind of in that I'm about to be, should I do it? Well, I want to give you some content, product, and pricing strategies that you can use to be a more productive and profitable creator yourself. And the way that I want you to think through this, and this is kind of a visual example, so from an audio perspective I'm going to do my best with this, but I'm also going to be either writing an essay about this or putting a video up about it on YouTube that is like more YouTube-y and more visual. So make sure you're subscribed to the YouTube channel, just youtube.com/mattragland, and go to mattragland.com/daily to to make sure you're signed up for my daily emails. I'm going to be putting more creator content on there as well. So you're going to get the best stuff. But this first concept that I want to share with you is the hourglass effect. And when you think about an hourglass, you know, it's wider at the top, it narrows down to the neck, and then it widens back out to the bottom. Now, the way that I see a lot of creator journeys in terms of their audience, their content and engagement and it mirrors this hourglass shape. Let me explain it to you. There are really 5 different sections of this hourglass effect. So right at the top, when you're new, a lot of times you're talking about whatever you can talk about to be consistent with your content. And that's great. It's very important to be consistent with your content. We talked about that as like the number 1 thing in the 10 Tips for Content Creators episode. So you can check that one out. So whatever you can talk about, top, very wide, kind of broad, even if you kind of have an idea about what your topic is, just talking about different, maybe like subtopics or niches, even within a broader topic of something like fitness or cooking, find what works not just for you in terms of what you feel best about talking about, but as you're being consistent with content, you're going to go from that top first level into a slightly more narrow second level. And that's when you are figuring out what content works best for you. And since you've been consistent with your content, you're also starting to see which types of episodes or posts or emails are getting more engagement. What has more views? What has more likes? What has a higher open rate if it's an email newsletter? Keep paying attention to that. And like I said, you'll be able to notice when things kind of spike if you've been consistent. A good example of this is when I was doing my first year on YouTube. I was so consistent with videos that by the time I got to episode like 55, that's when I did my first bullet journal productivity video, and it did way better than all the other videos. But I may not have been able to see that as clearly if I didn't have 55 other videos to measure that against, to like see that spike as it occurred. So that's level 2. Again, we're going down. And then once you notice, once you see like what those 1 or 2 main topics and niches are that you can really focus on, that people are really resonating with, that's when you get to like the neck, the narrowest part of the hourglass. And that's when you're really focused, you're really niche, like really small. And well, you are going to be growing actually, but your topical focus is really small because you know that's what really resonates. And you're starting to like build as you are narrowing your content. Oftentimes your audience will start to grow more. So when you're big and broad at like level 1, people don't really know what to expect from you. And that can get a lot of creators stuck. But What's important is that you're just being consistent, but as you see what resonates with people, your audience will grow. And as you get down to that narrow part of the hourglass, you are going to be so focused that people know what to expect from you and your audience is going to grow even more. This is where you start to build in your true fans, that 1,000 true fans that we'll talk about in a little bit as well. But those true fans of your content, people who are really excited about what you're doing, that's where they really start to come in. Now, as you start to build this, like, audience of true fans, what's interesting, because in hourglass it starts to widen back out, right? But you're in this niche. What do you do? Well, the interesting thing about this is your true fans, they are going to start to ask you again about related topics to your niche. And they might, might not always be super related. But they're going to start to ask you like, hey, what do you think about this topic? What do you think about like, this type of productivity. Like, people will ask me, Matt, what do you think about these productivity apps? Matt, what do you think about morning routines? Matt, what do you think about habits? And all these different things that previously I may not have considered when it came to bullet journal-specific content. But because y'all are so wonderful and you're asking such good questions, like, well, let me tell you about these habits, let me tell you about this morning routine, let me tell you about these different apps like Notion, Roam Research. All of these things fit together really well. So It's strange because when you have those people that trust you, that audience of true fans that you're building, your content starts to widen back out again. And eventually you get to the 5th and final level of the hourglass where you have grown your audience and you have such trust with them that really, like, to a point, you can make content about almost anything that you want because you've built that trust and rapport with the audience that trusts the things that you are going to be talking about in the content that you create. Now let's talk about some content strategies that you can use in order to create that early content and start to create the follow-up content based on the things that people are interested in. Now I already told you, you can use just the metrics and the engagement rates, the open rates of just seeing how people are are, like, responding to the content that you're creating. But some other things that you can do to just kind of tease that out and request some feedback so that you know things are interesting to people. The very first thing that I always recommend people start with when it comes to creating content is when it comes to your topic, or even just like you as a person, what do you wish that you knew about this topic when you first got started? So when I first got started with productivity, and especially with bullet journaling, I wish that I would have known it doesn't have to look like a piece of art for the Bullet Journal to be effective. And I wish I knew how, like, simple I could keep it, that I could just have, like, the daily log. I wish I knew, like, how to structure my Bullet Journal a little bit better so that I didn't have to do a whole lot of layouts and then feel really bad that I wasn't filling each, like, spread or layout out. And I wish I would have known those things. And so just asking yourself the question of what do I wish I knew about my topic when I got started is a really good first prompt to start with. The other thing, and again, all of this is in regard to your primary topic, especially as you start to niche down a bit, is asking yourself what are the questions that people are normally asking me about, like, this topic that I, I know about. One of my friends, uh, Ben Collins, he has a course that's all about, like, Google Sheets and how to be really excellent, amazing. I've taken his course. I'm not amazing at Google Sheets, so I've taken his course. It's really good. But people are always asking Ben like, hey, how do you do this thing in Google Sheets? Or how do you do this thing? How do I like create this macro? I think that's the right word. And so I'm the kind of person that would have asked Ben about like how to do something in Google Sheets. And he realized this and he's like, well, people are normally asking me like these 5 things about Google Sheets. Another friend of mine, Tammy, she is a relationship coach and she starts making these lists of like, what are the common things that I'm telling people about in relationship coaching, in marriage coaching? And she can start to create content, podcasts, all these different things based on the advice that she is normally giving people, based on the questions that they are commonly asking her. And so these are two ways, or this is a way to start to build up like early, early pieces of content just by asking yourself two simple questions. What do I wish I knew about this topic when I first got started? And what are people— what questions are people normally asking me about this topic that I'm giving like the same responses to over and over and over again? Because if people are asking you a question multiple times, that means that there is a piece of content waiting for to create on it. Another way that you can find feedback that is really effective for creating content is to look in the comments or the responses to content that you've already created. So whether that's comments on your blog, replies to your email newsletter, on YouTube, you know, things, Twitter threads that you post, any kind of question that people ask about, like, hey, can, can you clarify this a little bit for me? I didn't quite understand like this piece of what you were saying. Can— or just, I thought that— or they might say, I thought this thing that you just went over really quickly was super interesting. Can you tell me more about that? This was how I created my first like 4 or 5 like big bullet journal videos. After I did the 2018 annual planning in a bullet journal video, people were asking in the comments like, hey, I saw this thing about the 10 blocks in there, but you didn't really talk about it that much. Can you tell me more about the 10 blocks? I was like, oh yeah, I can totally tell you about the 10 blocks. And then when I was going through the 10 blocks, people were also saying like, hey, it looks like you have this particular way that you plan out your week. Can you tell me how you plan your week? Like, oh yeah, totally. Let me tell you how I plan out my week in a bullet journal. And there were like 4 or 5 videos that I just kept creating at the start of this like bullet journal super niche that I was doing that just helped me see and create good content because I was literally just answering questions from the comments that people had about videos that I had already made. And you can do this like for yourself. And a little trick, because one of the common things that people used to say to me is like, well, I don't, I don't have any comments on my videos, Matt. No one responds to my emails, Matt. Well, I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you a little trick here, a little bit of investigation that you can do. What I want you to do is go to another YouTuber, another podcast, or whatever it is, people who write Twitter threads, And I want you to— or Reddit is another great place for this. Go through different types of content or forums about the topic that you create content for and just look for questions that people are asking. Questions that seem— I don't— they don't even need to be complicated, but questions that are asked several times or questions that appear to be unanswered and are asked several times. Those are questions that you can answer for that person, for other people. Because if you see something that is kind of popular that is being asked and you don't feel like is being covered properly and you have or can form an opinion on it, those are questions that you can create content as a response to and for. So those are the main ways that you can create great create content early on, create consistent content, just asking yourself some basic, basic questions. What do I wish I knew about this topic when I first got started? What are questions that people ask me or advice that I commonly give about this topic? And then as you're creating early pieces of content based on those prompts, also seeing what are people responding to and commenting about, looking for more clarity on, what can I expand on in this, like, first piece of content that I've created? And if even that doesn't work, or when that's not working, then go to other YouTubers, go to, like, Twitter threads, see what people are asking about, looking for clarity on in the piece of content that's being created. You can also go to Reddit and look through— there are literally millions of subreddits. Maybe not literally millions, at least literally thousands of subreddits about a specific topic. You can find a subreddit about a specific topic that you're interested in and just look for popular threads. Look for things that have been upvoted a lot and find and create answers to those questions. Okay, we've talked about the hourglass effect and the creator journey from kind of broad content to super niching to expanding it back out, talking about broad content but to your true fans. We've also talked about early content strategy and things that you can apply day after day, week after week to keep asking questions and keep, you know, helping people out, providing value. Remember, we talked about the creator, the creator loop, the virtuous cycle of creativity where you create content, you share it with people, you learn from their feedback so that then you can create better content going forward. Simple 3-step loop. Really, really simple. Not always easy to do, but simple to think about. You just have to keep creating so that you can share, so that you can learn from what you share, so that you can create more. So let's talk about product types for the creator, because remember, I want you to be productive and I want you to be profitable. And some things that you can do to create a product as a creator— there are several different types of products. That you can create or sell to your audience, and that's perfectly all good and well. I hope that you do that. So let me give you some ideas here. One of the most popular types of products for a creator is the online course. You can do either a self-service, like here's the course, go through it at your own pace, self-paced course, or you can do a live cohort course. I have courses in both, but But cohort courses are ones that you kind of help people through. You have live aspects to it. There are Q&A sessions. It gives people more access to you and can be a lot of fun. And also something that usually if you are giving your time and your presence to, you can also charge a little bit more for as well. The downside is you can only launch those occasionally, usually. And so most people do cohort courses 2, 3, maybe 4 times a year. Whereas a self-paced course can be sold, pretty much can be sold at any time. Other types of creator products are things like digital downloads. Those could be ebooks, music, individual videos, or like video, video series. But those are all digital downloads. They don't necessarily have to be organized into a course model. That's why there are courses and then there are digital downloads. They can also be things like files. Let's see, Lightroom presets are really popular on Instagram. All those different kinds of things. It's a digital download, you get it, you're ready. The other things you can do are things like live workshops, and I've done a bunch of those. I really like live workshops. You can do them just as a one-time thing. You could also do them like, we're gonna do 5, 5 workshops over the course of a week to kind of help take people through. And what I like about doing like 2, 3, or even 5 workshops over the course of a week is it can give you a little bit of insight If you've never done a cohort course before, just say like, okay, I'm going to do like 2 or 3 workshops here just to get a feel for what type of content, how I can interact with people. And that can be a really good way to test the waters of a cohort-based course. Another type of creator product that's really growing in popularity is the membership or subscription model. This is especially true of newsletters. A lot of newsletters charge a monthly or annual fee to get their newsletter content. And so that is definitely one way. You also see this sometimes with YouTube channels. It's a really popular way to— or just like regular communities. My friend Anne Lohr, who runs the community at Nest Labs, started her community in March 2020, and she recently passed 2,000 paying members and over $100,000 of annual recurring revenue. So it's a really good way to like not just make money, but also to give ongoing value and engagement and interaction with your biggest fans. Another way that you see creators monetize and create products for their fans are things like the donation or patron model. Now, Patreon popularized this— it's a lot of Ps— Patreon popularized this model, and it's really effective. It can be really great. I find that for the most part, donations and patron models only work at scale when you have an audience at scale. So if you only have about 100 readers or viewers or subscribers and you only ask them to pay like $3 or $5 a month, you're probably only going to get like $30 or $50 a month. And we want you to make a lot more money than that. And so there are ways to do that. It could be a nice little like beginner way to do it, but I find that a little bit higher of a subscription or membership model is a more effective way to go when it comes to creating that type of product for your audience. Now that I've covered the common types of creator products, I want to give you some advice on how to kind of structure some of those product types into different pricing tiers. And some products fit into particular tiers very nicely, and I'll tell I'm not going to tell you about all of those. But others can be scaled up and down, depending on the size of your audience, depending on how much time you've put into them, depending on what stage of the product you are at. Because to me, there are 5 different pricing tiers. And you can, you know, kind of split hairs about like the number of tiers or what the kind of pricing levels are at.. But let me just tell you what mine are. The first is the micro product. And micro products to me are things that are under like $30, definitely under $50. Those are things that are relatively low cost. They are different products that shouldn't take you necessarily that long to make. Like you don't need to spend 6 months working on a $37 product. Okay, you should spend maybe 6 weeks, probably more like 6 days working on a $37 product. And I'm going to get onto all of this in a little bit more, in a little bit more detail once we go through these other tiers. So we have the micro products, which are things under $50. I would even say under $30. And then you have your sub-$100, maybe your sub-$200. And those are your relatively low price products. Those could be things like a live workshop because it's your time. It could be different digital downloads. Digital downloads also fit really well into the micro, the micro product tier. But these are like those kinds of products that you are putting time into. You, they have more content to them. But again, don't spend a ton of time working on something that is less than $200, definitely something that's less than $100. Mid-tier products are in the $100, even up to $1,000 range. And you could like say there's a split at $500, but something that's in the 3-figure product price category. And these are things like those self-service courses, maybe ones that are a little bit longer. You could say like a short course could be a low-price product. But these are your self-service courses. This could also be a type of cohort course as well, especially if it's a pretty early cohort for you. Like for example, I'm in basically cohort 3 of the Productivity Power-Up Cohort course. And the Essentials version that I just published was $550. Eventually, it will build a little bit higher and get to around the $800 to $1,000 mark. But I'm not particularly in a rush to do that. And it will probably always stay around, you know, a mid to high 3-figure price. But those are your mid— those are your mid-tier price category of products. Okay, high price, something I would say over $1,000 starts to get for most people into like, people as in buyers, as in your customers, and start to think like, oh, it's a pretty high price, over $1,000. Now, there are certainly lots of cohort courses that charge over $1,000. And I think they have every right to do that. And I think if you are delivering on a plus $1,000 value, then you should charge more than $1,000. But a lot of times what I see is once you go over $1,000, and this is still true of cohort courses, you are giving some of your own time, expertise, and feedback directly to your customer, because that's a lot of what a cohort course is—people getting to interact with you live about the course material itself. Now, other things that I've charged over $1,000 for are things like group coaching, like a weekly group coaching call, maybe 8 to 10 people. Another thing is when you start to get into one-on-one coaching, very common to charge more than $1,000 a month, much less like if you were to charge someone month over month. And that could also be seen as kind of like a membership model as well. But things where you are charging more than $1,000 a month or more than $1,000 for for a particular product. That is a pretty high price tier for most customers, not all, certainly not all. There are plenty of people that would look at $1,000 and be like, hey, you're going to do the job for me? You're going to get this thing done? Totally, here's your $1,000. And we'll come back to that in just a moment. Your like more high to maximum price products, those are things that are going to be like say over $5,000. Or over $10,000. And certainly you can price something as high or as much as you need to for something. The most I've charged for a product at this point is $10,000, but it was— and we'll get into this in a second— it was actually a like done-for-you service that I had for a client. So there are all these different ways that you can price your products or your services. You can also see services that you offer as a professional, as an expert, even if you are doing much or all of the work as a high or maximum price product tier that you are able to offer to clients and to customers. So let's recap those 5 pricing tiers. Again, you can split hairs with me on the number of tiers or like the amounts for each one. But let's go from micro to max. And micro, micro price tiers are products that are usually under $30. Definitely under $50. Low price are things that are in the, say, like $100 to $200 range, or, you know, whatever is just over micro price for you. Mid-tier are those like courses, like whether they're self-service or on the higher end cohort-based courses that are in, say, like the $200 to $2,000 range. And then there is a big range of what I think most customers would consider maybe a high-priced product, especially if you're looking at courses. Of over $1,000. And then more in the max tier are courses or services or coaching that go over $5,000 or over $10,000. And again, depending on what you're offering, I know lots of people that charge well over $10,000 for their services or for their coaching. I've paid for coaching that has resulted in more than $10,000, and it's been a good investment for me. So It just kind of depends, but keep in mind those are those kind of like 5 pricing tiers and you can think about where your products sit in those tiers. Now you may be listening to that and think, wow, could I ever get to a point where I'm charging $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, or $5,000 for something? And I can tell you that about a year ago I thought I had a mentor, a coach tell me like, oh Matt, just, you know, do some coaching and charge $1,000 or $2,000 a month for coaching. And you know, you'll have the money that you need to become a full-time creator. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, I cannot charge $1,000 a month. No one's going to pay that for me. And I started to do the work though. I put myself out there. I got over my fear and like my limiting beliefs. And I had a call with someone. I was like, yeah, it's $3,000. I said it very confidently, but inside I'm like, yeah, Yeah, and it's $5,000 for 3 months. And then just stop talking. That's like when you're pitching and you're nervous, just say the price and stop talking and let the other person like say the next thing. But don't let yourself be limited by thinking right now about what you're able to price. Here's what most people do in terms of scaling their offers. This is what most people do. This is the most common way. I'm going to show you a different way. Right after this, but I want to show you, tell you how you can take a micro product and scale it all the way up to a high-priced coaching offer. You ready? So let's just say, and let me give you for example, that I have a micro product of how to set up your bullet journal for less than $30. Okay, sounds pretty good. People would buy that. People have bought that. Well, after that, let's just say that I have a low tier, a low price offer, relatively speaking, of under $100 of, hey, let me show you how you can use your bullet journal to have your most productive week ever. Great. People go from here's how I can set up my bullet journal, or add to here are 5 videos about how to have your most productive week ever in the bullet journal. Great. Now let's say I have a mid-price program, okay, and that is the Productivity Power-Up, you know, live cohort course. And it's around anywhere from $350 to $750 depending on when you buy and what tier you join. But now people have gone from, I'm gonna set up my bullet journal, I'm gonna learn how to have my most productive week ever, and now I want to learn more productivity principles from Matt. Now I'm in the— now I've scaled up to taking the same principles taking some of these same ideas and moving customers from micro up to mid, around $500. Now from those people, I can, you know, say, make an offer and say, hey, would a few of you like to be in group coaching with me? Small number, could just be a small number, but then that is over $1,000 is the offer. Okay, so now I've moved into something that's a lot more high-priced, and I could go a little bit higher on that. I could say, you know, $1,000 a month for group coaching, whatever. Is. A few people take me up on it, and then I take, you know, just a couple of people from that, or however many I can convert, and go from a, say, like, high to higher, or even to a max offer, like, hey, let's do one-on-one coaching. And all of those prices just kind of scale up, okay? So there are a lot of people that are going to get a micro— a micro product, micro tier, for under $30. But I only need a few people to get group or one-on-one coaching for that to be really profitable as well. And it's using a lot of the same concepts, a lot of the same lessons, just expanded, more interaction, more feedback, more expertise, more coaching from me. So you see how all of that works, all the way up from micro product to maximum service or coaching offer. Now that's what most people do, and it is really effective. Because a lot of people have done it. But I want to totally flip that on its head for you. And I have to give credit where credit is due that my friend Brian Harris— this is, this is who I first heard about this model from, and he calls it the Hershey Kiss business model or the Tesla of creator content. And what Brian realized, who's like, you know, it's interesting that Tesla started on the very high end of the car market. Super expensive, high priced. But then they use the profits from having just a relatively small number of people buy their high price max offering to then have a, like, midsize— a midsize car, a mid-price car. Now they're developing even cheaper car that you can, that you can get from Tesla. So they started on the high end and then use that to understand and to fund development of the mid to low-end Tesla vehicle. Okay, so how can we apply that? So picture a Hershey Kiss, you know, really tiny at the top, broadens out at the bottom. We can apply that to our 5 pricing tiers. So let's say we start on the max or high end. This is easier, I will say, if you already have some established expertise in your topic. And there are ways to do that without creating too much content early on, because especially if you've been working in a particular, you know, domain or field, you have established credentialed expertise through education or from awards or things that you've done for your work. All of these are ways of establishing expertise that will allow you to charge a high price for either services, consulting, or coaching that allow you to start on that high to max end. But let's just say, let's just say we're starting on the high to max end. So what if we wanted to make our first $10,000? Well, if we're starting on the high end, can I find, based on my expertise, based on my experience, based on my education, can I find just one person that I can do a service or coaching or consulting agreement for at $10,000? It's actually easier, oddly enough— this may blow your mind— it's oddly easier enough to find one person to pay you $10,000 than it is to find 100 people to pay you $100. Because first off, you have to find 100 people. And I can tell you from experience and seeing hundreds of thousands of other creators do this, that even if you have 100 subscribers, that doesn't mean you have 100 customers. Even if you have 1,000 subscribers doesn't necessarily mean you have 100 customers. So just finding one person to pay you $10,000 for the expertise, experience, and education that you have is actually easier. Okay, so we have— or maybe we have two people at $5,000. Regardless, we have a small number of people at tippy-top that are going to pay us a very high price for the expertise that we provide. So now from that high end, we are going to work worked really hard to make that person— give that person a great experience. We're going to walk them through every step of our process. We're going to coach them, and we're going to take the lessons that we learn, the things that we understand. We're going to take the light bulb moments that we share with that person or with that company, and we're going to make that into a group coaching program where we say like, hey, here are 6 like productivity frameworks, let's say. That I can take you through to be more productive and focused in the work that you want to do. I turn that into a group coaching program, and it's still a pretty high-priced thing, but it's not $5,000 or $10,000. Let's just say it's $1,000. So I do that with a group of 5, 6, 10 people. That's my group coaching program. And I start to see more and more, this is what's resonating, these are the things that matter to them. I didn't even realize this other thing mattered. This thing that I thought was really important, they didn't care about at all. So now I'm taking my best lessons and the things that I'm learning from this group coaching program, and I'm going to create a course out of all of this content that I'm sharing with my group coaching program. This course could be a cohort course that I'm making a little bit cheaper, starting on maybe the high end of that mid-tier. So say anywhere from $500 to $1,000, and now I'm getting more people in at a lower price, like for me, but still like making it more accessible. You see what we're doing here? And now we're just going to keep going down and we're going to take the same content that we have for our cohort course and make that a cheaper self-service, self-paced course. Okay, so now we're on kind of that lower tier of that lower price point of mid, maybe in the $300 to $500 range. And then let's say you're going to take 3 or 4, take like 20 to 30% of the best or most, you know, helpful lessons of your cohort course and make those like the starter sessions or like the do these first. For me, that's Most Productive Week Ever. I like the 3 or 4 or 5 best lessons from the Productivity Power-Up. You know, not everything, it's maybe like 30% of the total content. But it is something that people can get started with. That is my low tier offer. And those are things that I've helped people with on the high to max, like direct one-on-one coaching. See how everything is starting at the top and it's scaling back down. And then you can take like, you know, just a couple of things like say some print, some digital downloads, maybe a couple of videos, make that a micro product in the micro tier. That is like under $30. You see how we can start from the bottom and scale up all the way to high or max coaching or services. We can also start at high to max coaching and services and scale it back down into group coaching, into cohort courses, into self-paced courses, into micro or short courses, into digital downloads and micro products. Yeah, you You can do all of that. You absolutely can. Because let me tell you, friends, there are many paths to being a $100K creator. It is within the realm of possibility, totally is, for you to be a $100,000 a year creator. But there are many paths to $100K. The most popular path that has been like on a lot of creators' minds comes from the 1,000 True Fans essay that Kevin Kelly wrote many years ago. And in it he says a creator really only needs 1,000 true fans to like make a living doing what they love with their work. And he basically says that if 1,000 people pay you $100 a year for whatever you're making, and that could be on a membership subscription, that's one of the easier ways to think about it now. But you could also think, if I do like a series of like, you even just low-tier products every year, and they just buy one, and 1,000 people buy one every year, then I've made $100,000. So the 1,000 true fans at $100 per person is like the oldest model for it. But Li Jin, who is a creator newsletter writer now, used to be, uh, used to work at A16Z, which is a venture capital fund. But she wrote a great article that kind of like narrowed that down even more and said, what if instead of 1,000 true fans, you just needed like 100 raving fans that paid you $1,000 a year? Hmm, very interesting. So if you had like a high-priced cohort course around $1,000, you just needed 100 people to sign up for that every year. And if you ran it 4 times a year, well, you just need 25 people to sign up for it every time, and boom, you've got a $100,000 course on your hands. So that's another way to think about it. Could you narrow the number of people? Because remember, it's often easier to get people to pay more than you expect than to just find more people, but not always. Which leads me to this— let's, let's narrow this down even more and think about, well, if— what if we went from 1,000 to 100 down to 10, and all I had to find is each year were 10 great clients. And some of them could just be clients from the previous year, but 10 great clients who are excited to pay me $10,000 for the consulting, the coaching, for the services that I offer. So we've gone from 1,000 true fans at $100 a year to 100 raving fans at $1,000 a year to 10 incredible, amazing, great clients at $10,000 a year. All of these are paths to being the $100K creator. Now there's one other that I don't want you to forget about because I know many friends who follow this model, and this is the micro to low tier. Because a lot of times this, this gets, this gets forgotten or like pushed to the side. You're like, I'm just going to charge more. And a lot of times you probably should charge more, especially if you are afraid to charge more because you don't want to like seem skeezy or anything, you can charge more, I promise. But my friend Justin Welsh, just saw him the other day as of recording this, and what he basically looks for are 2,000 happy customers, 2,000 to 3,000 happy customers each year, because Justin normally prices his products in like the micro tier, anywhere from $25 up to like $50, maybe a little bit more. But what he does is he just tries to help as many people and make it as accessible as he can. And he makes— he has like 2,000-3,000 happy customers every year paying anywhere from like $35 to $50 on average for the products that he creates, which is again leads you to, you know, about $100,000 for the year. So you can see that there are many different paths to pricing and creating different types of products, just doing that math to help you figure out what's going to be the best fit for me. I do want to— I do want you to keep in mind that if you're early on with this, and especially if you have some experience and expertise in a particular field or topic, then I would encourage you to at least test and try to see if you can create an offer that would make someone excited to pay you $5,000 to $10,000 for your service, for your consulting, or for your coaching. Because if you can do that, and that's when, that's when my business really changed in the summer of 2019. I stopped trying to find like 400 to 500 customers every year. That seemed like a lot, and I wasn't having much success with it, at least not quit your job success. And I flipped that around to say, like, can I find, can I find people on the high end who on average would be paying me $1,000 to $2,000 a month for this particular, like, group coaching program? And can I get a couple of one-on-one clients? And when I started on the high end, that really, like, changed things for me because not only was I making more money than I was, but I was helping specific people people, solve their problems, overcome their challenges. And when I did that, it really helped illuminate for me the ways that I could create better courses and better lessons for people who, you know, weren't able to, or yeah, basically weren't able to do one-on-one coaching with me or group coaching. And so that Hershey Kiss business model really was one of those things that helped like turn my business around from a profitability standpoint. So don't be afraid to start on the high end, basically, because it will better inform every decision in price and product choice that you make as you go from the high end, from the max all the way down to the micro. Okay. Okay, friends, this was a big creator episode. I hope that you liked it. It went a little longer than I expected, but I just had so much to get into. And just as a little meta lesson from this, One of the things that I'm realizing just as I'm wrapping it up is there are probably going to be questions about this, and based on these questions, I can create more content for you. I can like dive deeper into a particular point. So if you have questions about this or you want me to expand on something or, you know, whatever it is, again, just reach out to me at work@mattragland.com. You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram @mattragland. And the other thing that I'm doing, I already mentioned to you my daily email list, mattragland.com/list. Daily. But I'm actually going to be putting together a specific like email list and newsletter for the productive creator, productive profitable creator. So if you go to creatorstack.io, that's creator stack like a stack of pancakes, dot I-O like in out, creatorstack.io to get on my creator-specific newsletter. So Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Connect the Dots. I'd love to hear from you about it. Also be very thankful if you left a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts particularly. And if you just search for Connect the Dots Matt Ragland on Apple Podcasts, I'll come up. You can leave a rating and review there. And again, I'll be very grateful. I'll give you a shout out on the next episode after, after I see your review come up. But thank you so much for listening, watching if you're seeing this on YouTube, and I'll see you next week. Bye.