You don’t need to build an audience (or create content)

You can build a business that does $100,000 a year with no social media, no content, if you want to. I interviewed my friend Brian Harris, founder of Growth Tools, about his strategy for growing businesses in stealth mode using other people's audiences and how you can do the same thing. I couldn't believe the success that he's had by completely opting out of the content game. Let's go ahead and jump in.

If your goal is a 6-figure business, you need 10 clients at $10,000.

That's it.

You don't need an email list for that. You don't need to build an audience. That is a total waste of time. Instead, just borrow other people's audiences. Like, they already exist. Just go to the honey holes. Like, you can go fishing by like ignoring all fishing advice that's ever been given and every fishing chart and understanding where fish are, and you'll never catch fish. Or you could have the local expert just tell you where the fish are and what bait to throw in and do that, and you'll catch fish. Literally, like, there's a guy that lives 2 blocks from me. He fishes all the time with his kids. My kids want to fish. I don't really care about fishing. So when we take them out, I want them to catch stuff. So I just say, hey Dustin, Where should I fish and what should I use? And I do that, and literally every time we catch fish. If your volume of client is low, go build an audience, I guess. It's fine, but like, it's not— it should not be where your primary focus is. Instead, go to the honey holes, go to the people that already have those people corralled, and go fish there and borrow their audience instead. Get them to promote you instead. That just is way quicker. You'll accidentally build an audience in the process. Creator shouldn't be the name. It should be, I have decided to enslave myself to content production creator. Like, that's what I actually Yeah, it's a little close to home, but continue. And I think it's primarily done not intentionally. It's primarily done because people like me in the past had courses about how an audience is everything. And there's great things with an audience, don't get me wrong here, but most people do not need to focus on that. Like, I found this— I'm 6 years in, I have an email list of 50,000 people, and I'm like, well, how do I get people to buy from me? I thought my business was writing blog posts and growing my list. That's not true. Like, that's called a nonprofit that happens to produce content. If you're in business, it means you have a product that people pay you money for. Yep. At the bare minimum. Most, most creators think of their business as their content, and that, that's not, that's not what it is. Their business is the product they sell. Like, what's the service you provide? That's the thing. And most people, the most efficient path I've ever— I found, again, I'm a decade in, there's people that have been in longer than me, the The most efficient path I found is go high end and don't focus on building an audience, focus on borrowing an audience, and you will get there 10 times quicker than anybody else. And it'll be easier and you won't be enslaved to the content hamster wheel to death in the process. Produce content, that's fine. I love content. I love writing and all that stuff. But like, at the end of the day, what you need are clients. And what's the most efficient path to that? And it's not trying to build an email list from scratch or build a podcast from scratch or build an Instagram account from scratch. It's almost never that. I know so many people that have gigantic accounts. And have no clue how to actually make money at all, right?

Yep. No, some of those people do.

If you start with how can my Instagram be big or how am I gonna email this be big, it's the wrong starting point. Like, it's literally not the point of it at all. What if you could do it without that? But if you need 1,000 clients and 1,000 new people a month to pay you $50 for your thing, well, like, you're gonna need a lot of volume and you better get in that game. But like, that's a game, man, that it gets harder to win by the day, and you don't even need to play it. One, you don't want to try to get Oprah as the first person you ever partnered with. Yeah, don't email Joe Rogan, don't email Dave Ramsey, just stay away from them. So our general rule of thumb that we found to be effective is shoot for about the same stage or maybe 2 or 3 rungs above you. So if you have an audience like an email list of 500 people, hey, partner with people 2,000, 3,000, totally fine. 50,000, I mean, you can actually make that work, but like most people can't handle that and they get all in their head. First off, shoot for people about the same stage or 2 or 3 rungs above you. Second thing is we track this across all of our clients daily, the yes rate to their outreaches. So when you reach out to someone, literally like we actually, this is one of every one of our clients' goals. How many pitches are you sending a day and what's your yes rate? And we track those religiously because that's the leading metric of all. It's like your ad spend.

Say that again. I think that's really important. I want to like really emphasize it. What are the two things you track every day?

How many pitches sent and what the rate of acceptance is of those, the yes rate. Okay, so it's really easy to make all this complicated, but it all just gets down to math. At the end of the day, how many people do you have to ask to do it until someone says yes? And what we found is the low end, meaning our worst client, has a 30% yes rate. For every roughly 3 pitches, 3 people they reach out to saying, hey, I would love to help your audience and teach them about X, Y, and Z, they get 1 yes. Let's say it takes an hour to write that email. And send it. That's 3 hours for someone who then has agreed to promote you to their audience. You now have an Oprah to your— Robert Kiyosaki. That's the worst person. The best is around 60%. And this is cold outreach, not your friends and family and everybody. So a couple keys are: one, don't reach for people 70 steps ahead of you. You weren't even ready for that. It'll break everything in your business. Second thing is, like, getting yeses is not the problem. Everybody thinks about it. Any teaching we do, sales training, we always have to talk about it. But like, it's just never an issue for anyone, like, getting yeses. Another key is when you're reaching out to people and hey, we'll do a little resource bundle just for anybody. If you want to go in depth on BOPA, burn other people's audiences, growthtools.com/heycreator. I'll put a pitch template and a couple of examples for people to just read it for themselves. So when reaching out to people, so we have kind of a 3-part approach. First is the very first thing you have to do anytime you reach out to somebody is prove you aren't a weirdo. So like when you're writing the email in the first few sentences, is their weirdo meter going off? If so, like it don't matter what you say, they're not answering you. We call that the anchor. You have to anchor yourself to something that they're related to. And there's all kinds of creative ways to do this. One of the simplest is to show them that you've consumed content of theirs and maybe even have done something with it. So let's say if I'm reaching out to you, Matt, I'm like, hey, I wanna be on the Hey Creator Show. I've identified y'all. I want y'all to promote me. And the way I want you to promote me is have me on the podcast, interview me, and I'm gonna share resources with people. So I might reach out and say, hey Matt, I listened to your 3 episodes ago and saw Johnny on the interview taught the ABC formula of how to grow my Instagram account, and I went and did it and tried it and like had some cool results. Check out my screenshot. That would be the first half of the email. And I'll tell y'all, if you send that email to Matt and you actually did that, he will read the rest of the email 100% of the time.

I will read the rest of the email, absolutely.

Yeah, buy their product, buy their book, read their content, and just tell them, hey, this was good, here's the specific reason why. And if you want to get extra bonus points and bring it to nearly 100% read rate. Show them you did something because no one does that ever. Like, I've been around for a decade and I count on one hand the number of people that have actually sent emails like that, and I teach it all the time. So first you get an anchor. Second thing, you got to tell them what the win is for them. Like, what's the win? Here's how most pitch emails read: Hey, my name is Brian, I'm with a company called Growth Tools. Here's my entire story. Here's another story about the product I sell. Here's all the things I want you to know about me. Do you want to get a coffee and chat? I'm like, I don't even know what you're talking about. You're probably a weirdo. This email sucks. But if you write an email like, hey Matt, listen to the podcast with Brian. I really like that. In fact, I went and did the BOPA thing. I went and reached out to 3 people and got somebody to promote me. This is awesome. Thank you so much. This is a really good episode. I would love— I noticed Brian talked about partnerships as a main marketing channel, like Barna Libel's audiences. I'm a— and I'm just making up something here. I specialize in running Facebook ads for people and have an agency. I would love to come on and talk about an alternate marketing channel that works really well with Barna Libel's audiences. In fact, I've worked with a handful of people that you might not know, but like we've had good success. And the last part of the email is, are you interested? So anchor, prove you're not a weirdo. Middle part, tell them what the win is. And the win there is I get to share something that your audience would really like, and here's the specific topic, and here's a specific tie-in to your show. And the very last part is ask. So anchor, win, ask. And the ask is almost always, without exception, are you interested, question mark. That's it, that's the whole thing. So that's your whole pitch. Go to growthrules.com/heycreator, and I'll put a couple examples of that where you can like see this in real time. But if you just send an email, even a crappy C+ version of that out, to 50 people, you'll get 10 people that agree to promote your office, right?