005: Building Creator Agencies to $10 Million per Year with Sahil Bloom

The only way to figure out what that thing is today that's gonna be the thing that people look back on in 2 years and say, oh shit, I should have done that. The only way to figure out what that is is by doing it every single day and figuring out what it is.

Attention is power and creators harness it better than anyone else, but they're not using that attention to create the biggest impact possible and are vastly undermonetized. Hi, I'm Rachel Rogers. My co-host Nathan Barry and I believe you can be a billion-dollar creator. Sound impossible? Over the last 10 years, we followed each other on our own quest to build billion-dollar companies. We've studied creators and seen how entrepreneurs build traditional audiences and use them as a launching pad for a massive business. And it got us thinking, if it can happen for them, it can happen for us. And if it can happen for us, then why not you? Billion Dollar Creator is a show teaching creators how to capture attention and turn it into real wealth. We will deep dive into brands, celebrities, and entrepreneurs who have done it before and show you how you can apply it to your business as an everyday creator. Join us weekly as we learn from both the wild successes and the missed opportunities, the grand gestures and the integral mistakes, and through that, help you become an expert at building your audience on your journey as a billion-dollar creator.

You actually—

we were talking about this— you actually have some connections to Roosevelt Island.

Yes, and I didn't even remember it until literally this morning when I was on the plane. So when I was a kid, my father used to work here on this island for many years, and it really wasn't that nice of a place to come. He worked at a hospital here, and they don't have police on this island, or at least they didn't then, so they had like peace officers. And I Googled this morning, I'm like, what does a peace officer make on Roosevelt Island? And it's $53,000 a year. So I was like, wow, that's freaking amazing that my father worked here for years. I remember going over that bridge and coming with him to get his paycheck because, you know, if he didn't work that day, he was like, oh, I'm gonna need that paycheck. So I would be in the car, drive over with him to get his paycheck. So yeah, he worked here for many years making $53,000 a year. And now I did not choose this location. The ConvertKit team chose it like before I even knew about it. And so I'm just like, wow, now I'm back here, you know, to talk about building billion-dollar businesses and as a millionaire, right? Like a full circle moment. So that was pretty dope.

Yeah. Yeah, it was fun. You were giving us a little bit of a hard time because you're like, it'll be hard to get to Roosevelt Island.

Yes, I was like, that's a terrible location. No, it's actually got beautiful views.

It has incredible views.

And this hotel is great. But yes, it is. It's a place that not a lot of people know about.

So yeah, it's fun to have people for the first time.

Yes.

One thing that we were talking backstage about, what actually even sparked doing a podcast tour and kicking this off, like doing it brand new. I mean, the show is 4 episodes in. This is episode— we're recording episode 5 right now.

And we have a really technical reason, like a scientific reason as to why we decided that we were going to go on tour right at the beginning and tell them our scientific reason.

Uh, I'm not playing it up too much. Very scientific reason is we want to build a giant podcast and we want to connect with people. Individually and have actual conversations, uh, from the beginning. And so just leveling it up from, from day one.

That is not what I was gonna say. What were you gonna say? But that is actually all true. What I was gonna say is 'cause we wanted to. Yeah. Which is cool. But why we wanted to was what you just shared. Yeah. We wanted to like connect with people and start to install this idea in your mind so that you can dream bigger for yourselves and see that like literally nothing is out of reach for us. And that's what I want you to know more than anything else.

Yeah. When just this idea of, you know what you want something to be long-term, and so kick that off today. Yes. Like when we were talking about the podcast, this is actually how some of it came about was we had the idea for the podcast and we're riffing on it and we're like, yeah, someday We could like even do a, a podcast tour and that would be incredible. And then we realized like, wait, someday, what? Just do that now.

Just do it now. Exactly. Like if you're going to take on a new project or if you have a dream or a vision or an idea, approach that vision or idea like it's the biggest thing ever now, right? Like give it that energy. And when you do, you're gonna be more committed to it and you're gonna see better results from it instead of being like, well, I'm small, so I have to do things small. No, you don't. right? Just assume that you're going to be huge, right? Assume that it's going to blow up. And how would you approach this project if you assumed that it was going to be a huge success? That's what I encourage you to do instead of tiptoeing your way in. It's like, no, no, no, like stomp all over it, okay? Yeah, I like that.

Okay, so you're not just going to have to listen to the two of us tonight. We have a special guest. Sahil Bloom is a good friend of mine. I guess we met 2.5, 3 years ago, and I've just been blown away by how he's created his audience, the path that he's taken. He puts in all of the hard work on writing and all of that, but then he also has this really interesting background and just his experience building businesses. And so as we're talking about who is living out the ideas of a billion-dollar creator, Sahil is someone that I wanted all of you to learn from. So just for a little bit of background, Sahil was a pitcher in baseball, a baseball pitcher in college. That's what I wanted to say. Um, so he's, he has the athlete background and then he went into private equity. And so he has this fascinating knowledge of the behind the scenes of how businesses work. I always tease him cause he's dropping jargon and I'm like, Sahil, nobody knows what that means. That's like some obscure finance term. But then at the same time, the way, like the, the thought and detail that he's bringing to building an audience. And so we'll dive into how he grew his Twitter following. Well, we'll save that for another time. Other places you can dive into how he grew his Twitter following to a million followers. His email list is over 500,000 people. He has the most incredible connections. I don't even know how this works, but Tim Cook invited him to Warren Buffett's annual gathering. Like, hey, let's sit on the floor for that, for the Berkshire event. And yeah, I'm just like, is that Tim Cook and Sahil Bloom. Okay. Sahil's just my buddy from Twitter, you know, but he's just built this incredible business and we'll dive into a little bit of what he's done to build a $10 million agency off of his Twitter following. So please join me in welcoming Sahil Bloom. We have this saying on the podcast. Where we talk about people who are playing chess, not checkers. And it's led to a bunch of fun examples that if you listen to the show, you'll hear like Reese Witherspoon and so many other creators who were just like, okay, that is brilliant. I didn't understand what happened there until you like see it revealed and you realize they're playing a whole different game. And so Sahil, you're someone that there's a version of your public persona and the audience that you're building, all of that, that We're all blown away with like the rate of growth, the email list, the Twitter following and everything else. And what's interesting is knowing you behind the scenes, I'm like, that is 1/10 of what's actually happening. And so I'd love you to give people a bit of a breakdown of how you think about using your audience to build a business that has like, I'm going to throw out a, uh, you know, a businessy private equity term, but that has enterprise value, right? Could actually be sold?

Yeah. So I would say like just as a foundational premise to all of this, I didn't come into any of it with a desire to build like a creator ecosystem. I was working— Nathan mentioned it— I was working in private equity. I was like doing the whole like finance dance of like working 80 to 100 hour weeks. And I like, I thought that was going to be my life, honestly. And I hated it and I found it soul sucking. And I was, you know, like putting a bunch of debt on businesses and like crossing your fingers and hoping that it goes well. I just didn't enjoy it. But, you know, it was like the gravity of that type of role and that track that you're on where like people have probably experienced this. You kind of start on a path and like people are telling you you're pretty good at it and your parents like that you're doing it. And there's all this like cultural momentum to the thing that you're doing. So you just decide you're going to stay on it. And frankly, for me, if not for COVID being the like shake the system, I probably would have woken up in 30 years and stayed on that path and been like, what the hell did I do with my life? And I'm sure there are people out there that feel that way about what they're doing currently. And for me, what it was was like taking the one tiny step to just start doing the other thing while I was still working at my job. It was like on the weekends during the early part of COVID when you were stuck at home and you had no life outside of it. I started writing and I knew I loved writing. I knew I loved storytelling, but there was never this like grand strategy in my mind that I was going to go build some business off of it. And so really what I came into it with was like a business mindset from the private equity days. And I didn't know the creator economy was a thing. Like, I didn't— it wasn't really something that people talked about pre-COVID. It hadn't become like the hot VC, you know, investing term that people wanted to, you know, go and back. And so there wasn't really like a pattern that I could match against. There wasn't like someone that I was going to try to emulate and follow their rise just because I hadn't been in that space. And so I took much more of the lens of just saying, how can I create value for people out there? Assuming that if you do that over and over and over again, day after day after day, that you'll be able to receive value in return in some form or function. And that was really the pursuit, was just like, I'm just going to show up every single day and create something that hopefully people find valuable and the market will tell me if they find it valuable. And I'll continue to do that and I'll continue to get better at it as a result.

Can I ask you a question? What did you decide to write about? You knew you'd like to write. How did you decide that? Because I think that's one of the things that keeps people stuck is like, where do I begin? Or what do I say?

Yeah, failure to launch is probably the biggest thing that everyone experiences. And the reason, at least in my mind, is that you think that what you do has to be perfect. And the reality is like, yeah, it's like no one here resonates with that. No, I mean, like The reality is anyone you go find, like, it's successful in any endeavor, creator or not. The first version, like the V1 of it, was garbage.

Yes.

No matter what. And like I had done, no one knows this. I've never talked about this. Like before any of the stuff that has built an audience, I had an email list of like 20 family and friends that I would send out an email once a month of like what I was reading, like just books that I had read during the month. And it's sort of just like over the span of 2 years that I was doing it once a month, it had grown from like the 20 people I was originally sending it to, to maybe like 1,000 people. And it was garbage. I mean, like, I recommended good books. People probably liked it, but it wasn't pretty. Like, there was nothing about it that was a business. But I flexed the muscle on a monthly basis every single month for a long period of time. And so I'd started to build this, like, this muscle memory on the bad version of it that then when you're ready for primetime and the lights turn on, you've already flexed that muscle 100 or 1,000 times over and over and over again. And so That's probably the biggest thing is like, I've now tried to apply that lesson to any new thing I'm going into because I know my bias is to be scared. Like when I wanted to start doing Instagram or video stuff, I was like, oh, well, the video has to be perfect. I need the perfect production quality or I need the perfect editing. And then you realize like, no, I just need to take my phone and go like this and say something. And like, if people like it, then, you know, I'll start to learn and I'll start to get better at it and it'll get better over time. And I have to fight that at every phase of my journey still.

Yes.

And doing it is a great endeavor because what you learn is that bad becomes good. Like you can actually just get better at something over time and whatever the new thing is.

Yes. I think you just have to be willing to be bad. Badly willing to be bad.

Right?

Like that's what it is. Just be willing to be bad at something. You should see my early YouTube videos. They're still up there. I don't take them down cuz I'm like, I just wanna remember that thing.

I actually, I try to look back It's really easy to lose sight of progress that you're making on anything because you're in the weeds day to day. Like, you're ultimately zoomed so far in on your own life and on your own journey that you lose sight of any progress you're making. You're like, oh man, I'm in the, I'm in the trenches. I just don't feel like I'm getting better at this. My growth isn't what I thought it was going to be. And the best way to get over that is literally to go to something that you created 6 months ago and go watch it if it's a video or go read it if it's a piece of writing and realize how bad it is relative to how you feel today.

Yes.

And you will marvel at the progress that you've made over that period. I guarantee I mean, it's crazy, crazy, crazy. Highly recommend doing that. Honestly, I try to do that once every 6 months. Whenever I'm feeling down on myself, I go back and do that and realize how bad my writing was, and it really changes it.

A version of that that I'll do is when I'm struggling, hitting some business problem that I'm really stuck on and it feels overwhelming, I like to go back to the list of the other times that I felt completely stuck. And then I look at the problems that were so overwhelming to me in 2020, 2021. And now I'm like, oh, those seem so easy. I would, you know, like, wait, but that was, that felt crushing. Like, how am I going to navigate that? And you realize like, oh, for me then, that was a very difficult problem. Today, this feels like an insurmountable problem, but you get enough perspective to say, okay, I'll, you know, hopefully a year from now I'll look back on whatever this is and realize like, okay, I learned how to deal with that.

Yeah. I call it mental time travel. And it's actually like, even just as a gratitude, a point of gratitude to be able to zoom out from your present state and realize how in awe of where you are today your younger version of yourself would be, no matter where that is. Like, yes, went back in time 5 years, you'd be blown away by the progress you've made at whatever it is that you're working on. And then similarly, 30 years from now, you would give anything to be back in the shoes that you're in today working on the things you're getting to do. And so I just find it to be an unbelievable activity for like just presence and feeling a little bit of gratitude for the present moment that you're in, to do that quite regularly.

Exactly. Like where I used to dream of like, if I could just work from home and make like $50 grand a year, I'd be thrilled. Like, I just want the flexibility of being able to like own my time and work from home. And that was, you know, so amazing to me. Like that felt like, oh, if I could accomplish that, that would be like the key to life.

And now you fly to New York to get to go on stage in front of a bunch of people. It's like really crazy when you think about the time spans that these happen on, you know, we all like dramatically overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. And it's really, really true.

Agree.

So thinking about the, like the concept of this podcast, it's really as a creator, we're some of the best in the world at building audiences. Right. And we take that attention and we get to choose where do we direct that attention? And so I want to talk for just a minute about how you've grown your audience. And then I want to go into where you choose to direct that attention and the ROI, the return on investment that you get from that. But let's start, just take us through a little bit of the last year and a half, 2 years of audience growth. What are some of the things that have really moved the needle on that?

Yeah, my biggest principle was always to own one thing before moving on to the next. One thing I see people go wrong with is you try to go into 10 different platforms at once or 10 different mediums at once, or even 3. Or even two, it's just too much. You can't figure it out and you can't really get into the weeds with it. And so for me personally, like I've never been able to successfully outsource anything from a content standpoint. Like if I try to have someone else run my TikTok account, won't grow, can guarantee it. Like they can do great videos, they could do all this stuff, but if I'm not in there like really understanding the pulse of a platform and how it works, I know it's not gonna work. And so my whole approach has been like, I'm gonna really figure out and try to own one platform figure out how to make it work, figure out how I can like create sort of an autopilot or set of systems around it before moving on to what the next one was. So the first one for me was Twitter, X, or whatever we call it today. I'm gonna change, it's gonna be like Y and Z soon here. So it was Twitter first. I figured out kind of like short-form punchy writing, really felt like I had a good handle on that. And then people were sort of pulling me into longer-form writing. There were people that were like, oh, I'd love for you to go deeper on this or this that you're writing about. And so newsletter was a natural next step of that. It was like, okay, I'm just going to go deeper on it. And then from newsletter, it was like, okay, the deeper version of that is a book. And so that's what I want to go do next and what I want to go pursue. Video started for me only maybe like 9 or 10 months ago and was a natural byproduct of just like, I love being in front of people and chatting with people and learning about their experiences. And so podcasts, you're creating a whole bunch of video content naturally by going on those that can be converted into cool short-form video clips. And so figuring out Instagram and how to do it and what works and what doesn't was sort of the next pursuit. So now I'm kind of like focused on really nailing that down and continuing to push there. And the reach of short-form video is completely insane relative to written content and relative to Twitter in particular. I mean, like, if you have something go viral on Instagram, I'm having my friend's 80-year-old grandmother from Alabama like seeing the video that I did. That never will happen on Twitter. You can go as viral as you want, like it's just a tiny audience relative to the reach of an Instagram. So that's really where I'm focusing much more of my energy today.

Okay.

And do you have a team helping you do that now?

I have people that do like sort of specific skill-based tasks like video editing. All of the content is created by me. That goes to my point of like, if I'm not really in it, it's obvious to the audience that I'm not really in it. I am in awe of anyone who can figure out a way to like truly ghostwrite or have things done for them and still have it come across as authentic. Because for me, it's just abundantly clear to me when something doesn't have like my soul in the content in the way that I need it to. And so I've never wanted to outsource that. I'm probably sacrificing growth.

I think you can SOP your soul.

You think so? I don't know. If you figure out a way, let me know.

I really do think you can, but I do, I agree with you that you have to sort of figure out your formula. I think a lot of business owners think that if I just hire this person, it's gonna solve my problem. And it doesn't really work that way. You have to solve the problem. And then once you have the process for solving the problem, you can hire the person to run that process. But if you're just like, I'm just gonna hire Joe Schmo and they're gonna fix it for me, they are not. It's probably gonna be a fail. Um, it usually doesn't work that way. But if you figure out how to solve it, you install somebody and then it works that way.

The challenge, the nuance with personal brand that I will say is like, for a true content creator, if that's what your primary thing is gonna be, the creative work, no one is gonna take your personal brand as seriously or have as much love with the content as you will because it's your face. It's like your name and your face that's on it. No one is gonna take that as seriously no matter how much you pay them or, you know, what you, what skin you put in the game for them. All of those things, it's still your face at the end of the day.

And so I disagree with you again.

Tell me, I, I, I would love to be proven wrong here and to like have a, have a reason why I can do this.

Well, that's what, it makes it more interesting. I'm glad we disagree, but I think I think that if you have a mission that you're on that you're trying to accomplish, you can find people who have a heart for that same mission and who agree with that. And over time, right? Like, it's not like you're gonna hire them today, they're on the same mission, and then they're gonna go out there and speak in your voice. But over time, shadowing you, learning from you, creating like brand voice guidelines and all of those things, they can learn how to speak on behalf of the brand. And I think there's a difference, like there's a difference between Rachel Rodgers' voice and the voice of Hello7. They're not exactly the same. They're a little bit different, but they're similar, but they're a little bit different. And so my team can definitely speak on the Hello7 brand and they are very passionate about the mission. You know, like they are so hyped, like they will yell and fight me over the, over the mission, right? So I think you can find those people. It's not easy and you don't find them necessarily on day one, but I think the more clearly you express what your values are, the mission that you're on, why you're doing this work, The more you can recruit people to this mission army that are almost as passionate, maybe more passionate in some cases than you are.

That makes sense.

And I used to think what you think, but I think over time finding the right people helped me to realize like, oh no, those people are out there. We just haven't found them yet.

Sometimes the zoom out you did to like mission and values level had it click in my mind. Awesome.

I'm glad I could help you out.

Do some more live coaching with Whoever wants.

Yeah, that's right.

Um, Robert will have the mic later. So, um, so yeah, I think the level that you're taking your audience is fascinating, but what's most fascinating to me, cuz I've seen a lot of creators and running ConvertKit, I've had a front row seat to the growth of so many creators and there's a standard playbook that works really, really well for monetizing audiences. And you do not follow that playbook. Week at all. Right. And I think most people, they see what you're doing and they're like, oh, okay. Yeah. So he makes his money through sponsorships. It's like, yes, there, there's revenue driven from sponsorships that you reinvest in audience growth. But then there's this whole other side that most people don't know of these agency businesses. And we were talking about this when you and I did another event together of turning cost centers into profit centers, like following the Amazon model. And so why don't you give people a behind-the-scenes look on the agencies that you run and then how you use your audience to grow those?

Yeah. So as I was starting to build the business, I quit my private equity job. I was going to go all in on doing this thing that I was working on and the platform that had been built. This is like mid-2021. Basically what I decided was that I didn't want to make money in the way that I thought most creators were making money at the time, which was like courses, products, sponsorships, ads, et cetera. The reason I didn't want to do that at the time was I was coming off of a track that had a very clear, like, 20, 30, 40-year career arc and horizon. The creator economy was so new that that didn't exist. There was no concept of like how you're going to do this for the next 20 or 30 years of your life. The idea was like, oh, I can make really good cash today off of doing ads or off of doing courses or whatever it was. I knew that there was a path to like making money now, but could I do that for 10, 15, 20 years? I didn't think so. And so my concept was like, I want to figure out a way to actually build sustainable enterprise value and cash flowing businesses that are built sort of adjacent to the thing that I'm creating. And the whole thing was based on this like broader principle I had that distribution was the power and it was being decentralized rapidly. Like if you think 50 years ago, distribution was massively centralized around people who commanded the airwaves, which was like big TV company, like all the ads were owned by like P&G and Johnson Johnson, like these massive conglomerates. Owned all of the airwaves and the ad space, and they were the only ones that commanded attention. And so commerce followed that. That was— those were the companies that made money. And rapidly, because of social media and the things that were happening, commerce was being decentralized to all the people that owned distribution. And that was like originally some of the early creators and some of the celebrities that were able to do it with their brands. But in a permissionless world, that could be any of us. We go out and create whatever you want. You can have a micro-audience of 10,000 people and go create commerce around that micro-audience. And so I wanted to do that. And I wanted it to be business-based with things that were operating without my time involvement on a daily basis. I'm not particularly good at managing people. I didn't really want to go like manage massive teams around all of these things. I wanted to partner with incredible people who spiked, their skill set was like off the charts in that area so that I could focus my energy on the things where I feel like I'm off the charts around some of the creative things I was doing, around being in front of people, spending time with people, etc. And so the first sort of venture into that was looking at what am I or people like me spending money on on a monthly basis and how can I turn that from something I'm spending money on into something that I'm profiting from? Because I know that if I'm spending money on these things, there's a whole hell of a lot of other people that are spending money on this exact same thing. So one of the first examples of that was like video editing services. I was spending $5,000 a month for people to edit clips for me and to turn them into short-form video clips. And I was sending referrals to this like random agency that was doing it for me, and they were paying me $250 or something for every referral I sent for clients that were then, you know, paying them $5,000 a month on an ongoing basis for long periods of time. And I was like, well, shit, this doesn't make much sense for me to do this anymore. And so I told the guy, I was like, hey, do you want to partner? And he was like, well, I don't know what you mean, whatever. And I was like, all right, see ya. And I had a friend who I had been musing on ideas with for a while. Who had just come off two successful agency businesses he had built to 8 figures and exited. He was looking for like his big thing that he was going to do next. And so we came up with this idea of building effectively a creator-led holding company where we build and scale— started with services businesses, but it'll be much bigger than that eventually— that have sort of a creator that sits on top that is the distribution engine. So rather than having to spend money on Facebook ads or Instagram ads to scale these businesses, you use the creator for distribution. And we offer services that all of these people need. So video editing was one of the first ones. We did a short-form clip agency business with Cody Sanchez and Sam Parr as the creator partners for it. Basically, they are, you know, involved. And then our business runs and operates the entire thing in the back end, and they, you know, are a partner in it.

So it's like influencer marketing, but like more intense, like one influencer.

Yeah, partner with one person who has like a very real resonance with that end market that you need them to. So Ali Abdaal, we partnered with. For a YouTube production business recently that we launched, and he has a massive audience of people that want to make YouTube videos like him. So when he goes and says, hey, if you want to make YouTube videos like me but you don't have the time to do it, I have this agency business that will work with you and make these videos that are beautiful like mine. A lot of people sign up and we bring in $2 million monthly revenue of leads in the first day from him launching it. And the whole game then becomes like, how do you go actually service that and have the backend systems to do it? Which is what my partner is really good at. So very quickly that went from being, I mean, in 6 months since we launched it, we'll hit over a $10 million revenue run rate at 40 to 50% net margins on that business by the end of this year.

That is brilliant. So instead of like, like Facebook ads is checkers, right?

Yeah.

Tess is saying, let me actually just partner with the influencer who has all the audience that I would need to reach anyway. And just be done with it.

And for them, it's an incredible business because they have to do nothing other than just promote it, drive a few leads, and they get a check every single month for doing literally nothing. There's zero involvement in the operations. It's entirely run by our team on the back end. And that's an— it's an unbelievable business for them. It's a great value proposition because they get to go talk about other businesses they're building and involved with, which is great for their brands in a lot of these cases. And for us, we get this diversified pool of a bunch of agency businesses. So the knock on agency businesses is always is, oh yeah, but it's concentrated. You have one of them and you're doing like, you know, web design, but it's just that one. So now we have, we'll have 10 by the end of this year. We have 7 today across a bunch of different verticals. There's design businesses, video clip stuff. The YouTube is like longer form. We have a podcast business launching soon and it'll become this diversified pool of cash flow streams that create a really, really interesting, you know, overall business profile.

Yes.

And you know, I think the coolest part about it now that I'm most excited about is, the like long, long game, the real chess to it is agency businesses have an amazing cash flow profile. They bring in cash up front and then you pay people over the course of a month as you deliver services. That means that you have this huge pool of growing cash flow that you can go and invest in more high upside opportunities, things that actually create real enterprise value long term. Agency businesses, if they trade at, you know, 2 to 3x revenue on the high, high end. If you go create a software product, you go create an actual physical product that you can go and grow, they can trade at many, many multiples of that in terms of the actual enterprise value. So we can take the cash flow from these services businesses, which is a nice recurring cash flow engine, and go invest it in these moonshot kind of call option upside-like opportunities that can create hundreds of millions of dollars of potential value on the back end. So the way I think of it is like using finance terms, you have like the bond which is paying you this cash flow from the services business, and then you have the cash flows being turned into a call option on the upside opportunities from these new things. So that's what I'm like most nerding out over, over the next 12 months is the opportunity to go and figure out what are those call options and how are we going to go and pursue them.

Question: Did you— were you friends with all of these influencers or did you have to approach them and just pitch them on this idea?

Yeah, fortunately, because I had been like in this world for the 2 or 3 years before, that was the real advantage of this partnership with my friend Hunter, who I launched this business with. He was unbelievable with the actual business and operations. I had the network in the space to go and actually launch with different creators. So, you know, partnering with Ali was like, I was going on Ali's podcast in London. I flew over, we did the podcast, and we had dinner together after, and I was like, hey, I have an idea for you that you could make money on. And literally a month later, we went live with the business and he's making great money off of it. And it's a big scale business today.

I think it's also a good enough pitch that it can be a cold pitch and still work if you can work that relationship.

And now that we have actual evidence on the board of it working, we're having people reach out to us wanting to do business because they know that we can launch these things quickly. We— they know it's high quality. We're servicing customers well, like The actual brand is now being built to the point where there's pull from the market. And, you know, people always ask like, oh, well, what's the moat? Honestly, it's really freaking hard to run these businesses at scale. And there aren't that many people that have my partner's skill set to be able to do that well. There's a lot of people that can do it at like, you know, $50K a month of revenue, $100K a month of revenue. It's really, really hard when you start talking about $1 million a month because you just have so many customers that you're needing to service. You know, now we have a COO, we have GMs, at the individual businesses. There's just a big apparatus. And in 6 months having to scale that up, he's just been working 16-hour days for the last 6 months to get it rolling. But probably by the end of this year has created $50 to $100 million of enterprise value across it based on where it'll be profit-wise. And so a pretty good ROI on his time even there.

What role does your audience play in this business?

So it depends on the business. I am a consumer of almost all of the products that our businesses produce. And so I'm naturally promoting all of them. Our short-form video clip agency I'm using to grow my own platform. And so every time I'm posting that and people are DMing me asking who I use for videos, that's the immediate response on all of those. Similar with the YouTube one, which I'll roll out soon. And then strategy, like over at the higher level, the relationships, strategy, you know, partnerships, et cetera.

And your face is not attached to these businesses.

My face is not attached to any of them other than as a user. Yeah.

Other than that's my favorite part.

Yeah.

Um, yeah, I, I mean, it's, that's by design because we do have a creator partner that really is the face of each one of the, and it's their business. Like they were hugely involved in the design and how it looks and the feel of it and wanting it to match their brand. And like you go and look at Hey Friends, which is the business that we launched with Ali for YouTube. Go look at the website and it's like so beautiful and aligned with his brand. That's kind of like, light and airy and sort of flirty. It's just like his personality came across in the brand and that's really important. And that's important for them because they're putting their neck on the line with these businesses. They need it to feel like it's part of them and not just some random thing that they're suddenly doing.

Yeah. Awesome.

One thing that was interesting to me watching you promote these services and these different businesses, especially early on, there was a little bit of time where you felt like you were kind of dipping your toe in the water you know, you had some behind the scenes clients or other things, but I'd watch you do like a carousel on LinkedIn or something. And then like it would end and say like, subscribe to my newsletter. And then if you went one more, it'd be like, oh, and if you, if you like these, these graphics that were designed, this is the agency that did it. And so it was very, it was very subtle and like bottom of the funnel, like you, you buried it a little bit. And so what was interesting is someone who got all the way to the end and then saw that was like, oh yeah, I'm It was a very targeted lead and I thought that was interesting how you approached it. Now you have done the big launches for the agencies as well, but yeah, what was the thinking behind kind of burying the lead and making sure that it's the high quality?

I've never gotten comfortable with selling to my audience. This is like a bad thing about me, you know, like as a creator.

Yeah, I know.

I'm going to hit you up after about that. My whole thing has always been like, I actually don't want to sell anything. I want my book to be the first thing that I ask people to buy and to a fault. And so like, like I don't do brand deals. I have a pretty large Instagram account now. Like brands constantly want to pay me to do whatever post or thing and I just don't do it. Like, yeah, if I buy your product and I use it, I'll talk about it, but otherwise I'm not going to do it. And so I was always like really apprehensive about it was really the genesis of it early on. And then I realized that people actually really wanted to know more about the things that I was using or involved with or doing because they were aligned with the ecosystem I was building and what I was trying to do. And we, you and I did a launch together for a newsletter growth agency and we announced it and like in a day it brought in like $500 grand a month of lead volume or something like that. Like crazy for a high ticket service, like a $5,000 a month service, that much. And so that kind of stuff started to blow me away and I started to realize that you shouldn't be afraid of selling. If you're proud of the thing that you are putting out into the world, you can never be afraid of selling it.

Correct. You, because you realize the result that you're providing for people and how you're helping people. So you want to share that more because the goal is to help more people. So if you hide it, then there's more people that are not getting that result that you can provide.

So it's like the whole thing that people criticize, like shameless self-promotion. But if you're not willing to promote yourself and you're not proud of the thing you're putting out, why should you expect anyone else to be willing to promote you?

Exactly.

And I've had to coach myself on that, so I'll continue to take lessons from you.

This reminds me of James Clear though, because he He did the same thing. I remember being at an event with him and he had like a list of like, I don't know, probably a million people back then. His mailing list was so huge because he was so consistent with creating content. And I remember there was like some group discussion, it was like a mastermind thing. And all these women in the group were like, give me the list, I will sell to them. Like, what the hell are you doing over here? And he wanted to wait. He was doing the same thing that you're doing. He wanted to wait until his book came out. Because he wanted to have this like epic launch of his book. I don't think that not selling them anything, like I think if you sell them something else, we talked about this, like that's not gonna stop them from buying the book. I think if they get value from you, they're gonna wanna buy the book even more. So that's my thought process.

You sound like you have Nathan in your ear. He's been like, he texts me like once a month. He's like, hey, when are you ready to roll out new email sequences for selling, you know, email course or something?

I'm just trying to help you get paid. Yeah, exactly.

I think he's struggling actually. So I think he does need your help. But I do think I just want to point out the audience building, right? Being consistent. You built your audience over what, 2 years?

Yeah, just about.

And like what, just writing Twitter posts every day for like the first year?

Yeah, basically just showing up every day.

Exactly. And even doing it kind of terribly for a little while and then getting a little bit better. But that consistency, you know, we all want to have, oh, I dropped my thing and it instantly is sold out and I have a waitlist of interest. And the way that you do that is by showing up beforehand and providing value and content and just being consistent. Like, consistency is key. So just forcing yourself to show up and do it badly every day, right, for a little while, so that way when you're ready to launch something, boom, it takes off. And I think you can even be selling something, making a little bit of money, and consistently growing your audience at the same time. You can do it at the same time. That's what I did, because I needed money on day 1. So I couldn't wait till day 30 or day 120 or anything like that. But you can be showing up consistently, and the value of that is so— I think people are just like, tell us the secrets. And it's like, oh, I'm so sorry. The secret is work.

Yeah. Yeah, wrote 300,000 words. Yeah. Yeah.

You actually just got to show up and do the thing. That's it. There's no other secret. Just show up and do the thing.

Yeah. I mean, it's— and it's figuring out what is the thing that's going to be different about what I'm creating, which is the only way to figure that out.

You have to show up and do the thing.

Like, you know, the thing on Twitter when I was first starting out was I was one of the first people that used threads as like a format that started to take off and it started to grow. And I was just showing up every single day doing that over a long period of time. And now people look at it like, oh, it's dead. You know, you can't do that. Well, there's something else right now. I don't know what it is, but the only way to figure out what that thing is today that's gonna be the thing that people look back on in 2 years and say, oh shit, I should have done that. The only way to figure out what that is is by doing it every single day and figuring out what it is. And so like every time a platform rolls out a new feature, you can bet I'm gonna be trying it and using it a bunch. Like Twitter, I know they're doing long-form posts and they're promoting it, or they're trying to get into video more. And so I'm gonna be showing up daily doing those things because That's my bet on the future is like one of these things is going to be the thing that people wish they started 2 years ago.

Exactly.

And if I just start, I know that I'll be one of those people that's there and that was around it. So I completely agree with you.

One of the things that annoys me is when people are like indignant about I'm not trying new things, right? Like, so like Threads came out recently, which is a new, new social media platform from Facebook and Instagram. And the brilliant thing is like you can port over your Instagram followers to this. So it was really smart. And so anyway, it came out and then all these people are like, I'm not joining another social media. I can't be bothered, right? And like, you know, as if like that's something to be. And I'm like, cool, but this is an opportunity to be early. And if you haven't built an audience yet, this is a place where you can actually, like, you can be heard, right? Because there's not so many people there. It's not so saturated. So if you get on there and just show up every day and start figuring out what works there, that's an opportunity. So sometimes you gotta just jump on things and see what happens. And who knows, it could be a waste waste of time. There's no guarantee, but it also could be something that takes off. So you just got to be open to trying things. Just another aside that annoys me, since I'm going on a rant, is when people are like, I'm not buying another course. And I'm like, okay, so you're done learning? All right, why are you indignant about being done learning? You should just be— shh, be quiet about that. Don't tell nobody, okay? Do not share that on social media, okay? Because listen, like, we got to be open to learning new things. And trying new things. And if there's somebody who's figured it out and I can learn it by, you know, watching 5 hours of video and paying $500 for their course, that's smart. Okay? Even if you bought another course 5 minutes ago, right? Like, that's smart to invest in your education. So I hate when people are indignant about stuff like that. It's like, just show up and learn and try new things and be open to figuring it out.

I mean, if you get one tiny insight from that $500, you don't think you're gonna make $500 off like one real insight. I mean, it's like you don't have to learn something from every single minute of the 5 hours of video. It's like one insight that changes how you think about something. I mean, like the way that even just sitting here, like you were talking about the values and the mission, I'm like, you'd pay $500 for that one tiny insight that you just get because it might— Yeah, no, seriously. You would. Venmo me. Yeah, I will. The other thing is like, like really pay attention to people and relationships that you're building around what you're starting to do. Like if you— when I was first starting, there was like a group of people that were all trying to write and create at the same time. We were all trying to build platforms and none of us had a big platform at the time. We were all just writing and creating and in the trenches on it every day and like sharing what we were learning and supporting each other, et cetera. And now those are the people that we're partnering with to launch these businesses. Like Sam Parr was one of those people. He didn't have an audience at the time. He was working on The Hustle. Like it was a different thing. Or like Ali, like a friendship that was built there. Cody, like she was just starting out and now those are the people that we're launching multimillion-dollar businesses with. And it was started as like a stupid DM conversation that led to something interesting. So the people that you're interacting with now when you're just starting out that are like tiny and are, you know, really crawling through the mud with you, those might end up being 8-figure relationships that you go and build something really cool with. They will only become that if there's just a mutual sharing of value, not like a quid pro quo transactional, you do this, I'll do this for you, etc., but like genuine relationships that are built on the ground last for so, so long because you were in the mud with those people like that shared struggle of trying to like, you know, pound your head into a wall over long periods of time when things weren't going well. It lasts forever when you felt that with someone.

Yes, it's so true.

Yeah, I think connections. This is why we always talk about coming to events or masterminds or meeting other creators, because every step function in my career has come from conversations, partnerships, insights from other creators. So spending the time on that.

Sometimes it's not even like the conference talk, it's like literally over coffee somebody says something to you and you're like, oh my God, that just solved all my problems.

The text thread that you form afterwards. Yeah, any of those, the Those are good.

Yes.

Now, so the premise of the show is that attention is insanely valuable. Creators capture it better than anyone else, and we get to choose where we direct it. And most of us are not choosing the highest ROI activities. And so I love your example because you're running— you're running a different playbook. And so one thing I'm curious about is, as you watch the space, either from the creator side or the private equity side, who are some creators that you're thinking of who you see running a really interesting playbook where they're actually taking their attention and turning it into $100 million of equity value or $1 billion.

She's already very rich and successful, but Kim Kardashian and the private equity fund that she's partnering to launch, I think is maybe the most brilliant value play that I can imagine anyone doing with attention. And this comes from my private equity background that I feel like I understand the math of this, but a lot of people dunked on her and dunked on them for doing this when it launched. They're like, oh, she doesn't know anything about finance. Stupidest dumb take I can imagine having about that, because what she does understand is people buying things and everyone buys the things that she wants to support and gets behind. And private equity funds have been raising money with the thesis of creating value for the companies that they invest in for the last 30, 40 years. And it was mostly bullshit. Most of them it was marketing. They put together a nice deck and were like, oh, we're going to create value. And what value meant was we're going to send in a bunch of like high-priced consultants to the company. They're going to like make some spreadsheets and do all this stuff. And we're not actually going to do anything for the company. We're just going to like hope that it continues to do well. But it sounds good to your investors to say that. If Kim Kardashian buys a company and gets behind whatever the product is, she can dramatically alter the trajectory of the sales of a business. Create actual, actual value in like real dollars that are going to transfer to the bottom line. And as a private equity fund, if they raise a billion-dollar private equity fund, which is what they're targeting, if you go and triple that fund, which is a good return for a private equity fund, it's not astronomical, and they take 20% of the profits because that's the economics of what one of these funds makes, there's $400 million of carried interest that gets distributed out to the partners, which she's probably at least a 40 or 50% owner of off of one fund. So doing a few good deals, she can go make $200-ish million of low-tax dollars that come in because of the carried interest tax loophole too that exists. So you do one of those, then you do another one that's a bigger fund. It's a $5 billion fund and you go and double or triple that. It's, I mean, the clearest path to making a billion dollars of any creator that I've seen is doing something like that, especially with no dollar upfront investment. Like she doesn't, other than investing a little bit of her own money in the fund if she wants to, you're just borrowing other people's money to go and make a whole bunch yourself. It's like it's an unbelievable business model and it's why there's all these rich white men that have made tons of money doing private equity. But it's disrupting that in a big way because she's realizing, and she'll be the first of many people that I think go and do this, that it's an incredible way to leverage the distribution power that she has.

Yes, exactly. She has more distribution power than like Good Morning America, you know, more than most people in the world.

I mean, like if Lionel Messi went and did this or like, there's plenty of people that could go and do something like this. And I think she actually will have like opened the floodgates on this if you look at it in hindsight in 10, 15 years.

Right. And if you think about, okay, so where did she start? She was, you know, well, she has her show, right? If you take that, but she has a large following on social media. And I remember people talking about her getting paid $1 million for a post to post about some product. And that's the whole point is, and that might be something that even some of you do right now, right? Where you are, getting paid to do brand deals and they pay you some small amount of money. What we're saying is get paid in equity, right? So instead of just promoting that product, say like, oh, can I get an ownership share? You know, I'll actually promote it all year long or for the next 5 years in exchange for equity in the company, right? So as the company value goes up and as you continue to add value by sending customers their way, right, you're— the value that you own from that company goes up. That's how you make money a whole lot faster than just getting paid per post. Yeah, and that's what she's doing basically at scale.

And she's doing it at a massive scale. I think it becomes really interesting because you can think about doing that at a much smaller scale. Like there are going to be people that go and do that with a $10 million fund and you can go buy a small business. And if you go and triple the value of that fund or whatever it is, there's a lot of money at a, you know, a smaller scale with a smaller audience where you can go and do that. There's plenty of businesses you could go buy, like interesting consumer businesses where if you have the niche that you could sell that into and go and create get a bunch of value around. You can do that large-scale PE model that she's doing on a micro PE scale and benefit from the exact same insane economics that exist.

Exactly. The New York Times had an article a couple weeks ago about baby boomers wanting to retire. They own all these businesses that their kids don't want to take over. All they want is to get the hell out of it, right? Because they want to be done working and go enjoy their lives. And so that's a huge opportunity for people to go buy those businesses right? And now, you know, get that equity as well, especially if you already have an audience. Now you can buy a business that makes sense that you can marry with the audience that you have and send customers there, and then you have an instant increase, right? And then of course you can continue to grow it over time. So there's so much opportunity and that's the whole point is like, don't just look at, okay, I can create a course or I can sell this service, but what other plays are out there, right? It's time for us to get more sophisticated so we can build more wealth faster.

[Speaker:NATHAN_BARRY] Yeah. And also just start treating your business like an actual business and not like a personal bank account. So many creators, I think, suffer from this where it's their bank account. And so every time they think about dollars going out of it, you're like, oh, you feel the pain. I mean, I feel that. You spend money on something and you're like, oh. When you separate it and you just think of it as a business, you unlock a whole lot of psychological benefit from just realizing that you can reinvest in it. And if I'm going to reinvest my last month on ConvertKit's sponsor network where they place ads in your newsletter. They sent me like $70,000 or something for my newsletter ad revenue, which is great. I think I reinvested like $50,000 of it back into growing the newsletter into future stuff pre-tax because it's just coming through my business. Like I don't have to pay taxes on it if I'm going to go and reinvest the entire thing back in because it exists in a business bank account. You're just like playing a completely different game now. So rather than like taking it out and having to pay 50% taxes because I live in New York, I can just reinvest it back into growing the business and the overall engine of it. So that's another thing is just like start treating the business that you're building like it's a real business and start optimizing around those different ways that you can actually reinvest at a really, really high rate of return.

Yeah. You're talking about delayed gratification, right? So I think you can enjoy some of it, but also taking some and reinvesting it for the future so that you can build something so much bigger, faster. Makes sense.

And you're never like, you can't invest that money at a 20% return anywhere in the economy right now. So your business is the best rate of return that you can reinvest it into. So why wouldn't you want to invest it there? You're effectively investing it back in yourself, which has the highest rate of return possible. You're not going to go put it in treasuries at 5% or put it in the stock market at God knows what. It's like the best place that you can be reinvesting the money is back into your business to go grow so that you're building a longer-term future.

One thing on that, of the investing in yourself, Richard, you said something earlier of like, pay me in equity, which I think is a really important point. But I want to tie back to something, Sahil, that you said earlier, which is you were talking about this business that you were getting paid a small referral fee from, and you said, hey, let's partner up, let's do something with equity. And they were like, no. And I think a lot of creators have that experience where they realize the value of what they're delivering is higher than what they're getting paid. And they ask for equity. And I think 9 times out of 10, the answer is going to be no. And so the shift that I would make on that, it's not you pay me in equity or you pay me in equity, it's I'm going to pay myself in equity.

Right.

Right. And so that's where you go out and you create that business. You know, you're investing in yourself, you're putting that money back in because people aren't going to realize the value of your distribution. And if you realize if the value of my distribution is higher than how other people are valuing it, then I'm going to point that at my own business where I own 100%, or I've teamed up with a great operator who's running it, and so we each own 50% or something like that. But just know that most of those conversations around pay me in equity is going to result in a no. And if you believe in yourself, then the next move is, okay, understood, I'll pay myself in equity.

Yeah, the whole— I mean, what it's really about is like cutting out the middleman, right, at every What, like, what are all the middlemen and how can I cut them out? And I'm that guy now.

Yeah. It's also when you say pay me in equity, I think most of these like more unsophisticated operators that you would be working with, it just gives them a headache. Like even when you say that to me, I'm like, oh, the tax ramifications and like that business was in the UK. Like, I don't know. I honestly, I don't know what it would have even entailed. And so the other thing that you can go to is like, okay, if you're not going to do equity before you go and launch your own thing around it is ask for just a lifetime revenue share. Just say like, if this is a recurring customer that you just got, you got to pay me 20% of every dollar that this person generates for you in perpetuity. And that's effectively— I mean, that's like an— it's like a profit margin that they're going to make on that client that they're paying you out. And that works functionally the same way where you're getting like a recurring check from this thing that becomes passive for any new customer that you bring on. And there are brands that actually like, you know, Athletic Greens does that. Like there are people that that have been really successful with scaling their business around it. And it's incredible for creators because if you know you're going to actually convert customers and create value for them, it's an amazing way to do it without some of the like headaches, logistical headaches that can come from taking equity.

On the logistical headaches note, I was talking to a few creators earlier today and they were talking about how like the bigger the business grows, the more work it is. And then They're imagining like, okay, if I double revenue, you know, I'm already working 50, 60 hours. Like I'm already stressed. And if I double revenue, I'm going to have to, you know, be even more stressed. And so I think a lot of people self-sabotage in their goals because they're, they're saying, oh, that's what that future might mean. But I'd love to hear from both of you on how you think about scaling the business and it actually taking less and less of your time. Cause I know in your case, right, or you're involved in, more businesses than most people.

I've got my venture fund too. You forgot about that.

I didn't mention the venture fund, but you have a whole bunch of time that you're spending writing a book and all these other things.

I mean, I probably only spend an hour a week on the businesses.

And you mean that collectively on all of them?

Collectively on all of them. I don't do calls. I mean, I've been really judicious about my time on these things because I know the highest leverage use of my time is creative activities. And the highest value I have to all of these companies is my platform becoming larger, having more relationships, you know, more insights into what the future of all of this stuff looks like and more leads that I can drive to all of them. It's not me being on calls, doing sales things, you know, focusing on operations. I'm bad at that. Probably like I would hurt the business if I was spending 10 hours on it. Honestly, you're like, get out of the way, dude. You don't want to be involved in this. And so that was like the radical insight was it's totally disjointed from my time that I'm actually spending in the businesses because there's incredible people that are actually doing the things they are very good at on all of them. And that was by design. I was like, I don't actually have desire to take on, you know, an operation. I work 80 to 100 hours a week every week for 7 years. Like, I don't really want to do that anymore. Actually, I have a young son, I have a 16-month-old son that I love hanging out with every single day and going on walks with. And, you know, like that is my designed life. And so I wanted to figure out a way to go build a billion-dollar business without having to spend 100 hours a week working on it, which is probably going to be difficult, but I think it's possible. And so I was very— I mean, I was just very, very clear on that from the upfront.

I mean, I put in a lot of hours to get started, and I also put in a lot of hours learning how to be a leader and learning how to manage people. But now I have the exact same answer. Like, I basically, in my business, it's true, right? The biggest value that I can provide is is, you know, continuing to build and grow the brand. And so we have operators in our team, we have a whole team of leaders, and, you know, it's 25 employees who run the day-to-day of the business. And I'm basically treated as talent, right? I come in, I do a call, I come in and I do, I do media, I do the podcast, right? So I'm mostly doing that and also showing up for calls for my clients because I still enjoy doing that. But yeah, it's just like you're sort of like the talent. Like, I come in, I do the thing, and I leave.

Yeah, I mean, the separation of inputs from outputs is like the most liberating feeling in the world when you first experience it. I had never— in my days in finance, everything was like, yeah, you're going to work a ton of hours and you're going to make— you know what you're going to make off of those hours. And yeah, you're going to make more and more each year and that number is going to go up, but it's never going to be truly dislocated, the inputs and the outputs. And figuring that out to where you can say, okay, the game is actually not about generating the most possible output. The game is about generating the most output per unit of my input. And then I can decide how much input I want. And if my input is like my son is only going to be under 10 years old for a few years and I want to actually not have that much in the way of input. And then once he's off in school, I can go, you know, much more into a whole bunch of businesses that I want to get involved in and spend more time on. But figuring out what that is like, where is your unit of time generating the highest amount of output is an exercise everyone should try to spend time on.

Exactly. Efficiency. It just comes from building the team. And the sooner you do it, the sooner you get better at it. And then the sooner you are able to stay up here, cuz if you're in the day-to-day, you can't see the opportunities. But if you're up here watching everybody else in the day-to-day, you're like, wait a minute. And so actually every time I have an idea, it doesn't actually create more work for me. I just go to my team and I say, hey, I have this idea, who should we assign to do it? Right? And so someone gets assigned to that project and then we do it. You know, so it doesn't actually need to create more work for you. And actually, one of the people I was going to mention is Pinky Cole, and she talked about how like every time she has an idea for another business, she says yes to it, which I'm like, girl, you got more energy than me. But she says, right, like, I just hire somebody to run that business, which is exactly what you're saying. You just, you, you know, hire an operator. So she has American Sesh. She started with Slutty Vegan, right? That was her restaurant that, that she's known for. She just got investment that allowed her to you know, open other restaurants in more locations. She has several in New York that she just opened, but then she's got her personal brand. She has a book that's coming out. She has a Netflix show that she's working on, and now she's also getting, you know, Slutty Vegan products in frozen food stores. So she's like playing a lot of different games. And then she has the American Sesh, which is another business that she created. So just so much opportunity if you're willing to like say, okay, I have an idea, I'm gonna invest in it by giving the money, the profit from it initially to someone to run it, and then I'll wait for my money. Right? So that I can have somebody running that and get that going. And now I have a really massive upside from each line of business. So that's another great opportunity, but I have a lot of ideas and I don't do most of them because I'm like, oh, it's too much. You know, I have, I have a lot of distractions.

A lot of them are distractions too.

There's not all of them are good.

And it's, it's like a great example of just all of these things, like all of the examples of billion-dollar creators that you're hearing about that you'll continue to hear about on your show. They're all like someone that thought differently about the system. Like there's this case study that I shared recently of it was a Stanford business professor gave her students a kind of group activity and every group got $5 and 2 hours to go make the highest ROI that they could on that money. And most of the groups went out and did like a pretty simple thing. They went and like bought something for $5 and then tried to basically trade it for different things and trade up and then sell the eventual things to make more than $5. And they made like a decent ROI. And then a couple of groups said, well, we have 2 hours of time, let's just go make as much money in 2 hours as we possibly can. And so they went and like got restaurant reservations at fancy places and sold those restaurant reservations to people that wanted them. And they made a pretty good ROI. The group that won did something really interesting, which is what they realized was the actually valuable thing was the 10-minute presentation they were going to get to give at the end in front of this class of Stanford Business School students. And so they went and called up a bunch of tech companies and asked who wanted that ad slot, 10-minute ad slot, and they made $650 to buy the 10-minute ad slot on the show. And so they made an astronomical ROI. And it was like an amazing, amazing case study of like they just avoided the distraction, which was the $5. It had nothing to do with the entire challenge. It was just a distraction. And they focused on like, okay, what is the actual highest value asset that we have here? And it's this 10 minutes in front of a group of Stanford Business School students. And then they reaped value from it at an insane, insane level. And so it's such a cool case study to me of just thinking differently. And whatever system you're in, there's always going to be a distraction that you need to avoid. And there's always going to be a really interesting high-value asset that you just haven't figured out yet. And so if you can just look around and spend more time observing and find that high-value asset, there's unbelievable returns to be made.

Yeah. Particularly if everyone starts talking to you like, oh, you're— this is not what you should be doing. That's probably what you should be doing.

You're on the right track.

The more they tell you no, the more you're like, this is it.

Yeah. True.

So one of the things I was curious about with how you spend your time, video is really important for all of us, but I feel like you two are much better at it than I am of, you know, growing an Instagram following. I'm talking about hiring a team. How do you two think about the leap to like, I feel like Gary Vaynerchuk was the first one to do this of like just have a social media person or a videographer follow you around and create all of this content. Is that something that either of you are thinking of hiring your team?

No, um, because I don't want somebody following me around. I really don't.

Creepy way. And it's employed by you. It's just like this.

No, but, um, I was on a run the other day in my neighborhood, and, you know, we have golf carts in our neighborhood, and there was a guy running with like some giant weight on his back or whatever that he was pulling, like, you know, and doing this like intense run, shirt off, sweating, like, whatever, right? And then there this woman in a golf cart behind him filming him. And I was like, this is mortifying in front of all of his neighbors. I'm like, I'm embarrassed for him. And also she looked mortified, like the actual person filming it.

There's always a wife or girlfriend mortified by the thing that they're having to do in those situations, for sure. I think my wife's probably been there before.

But I, I actually think I— the way that I think about this, there's another version of this, right? Like, I don't actually want somebody filming me and when I'm sitting in my house, or like every time I drop a gem, right? Like, I don't— every gem doesn't need to make it onto the internet. But what we do do is just film every event that we do. So every time we do a live event, or if we're like going somewhere, gonna be like doing a speaking gig or something like that, there's always video and a videographer that's hired for that purpose. And so we, because of that, have a ton of raw material that can be turned into clips and content on video, which is exactly what my team is going to be doing over the next couple of months. So we just have, and if you think about it, like we have years worth of videos that we have created, you know, just from all different settings, including online created videos. Like everything doesn't have to be in person. So I think you can just say like, if I just have, if I go to enough events a year and then just bring a videographer for those events, you can just from one event, you can get 3 months worth of content from it. You know, so I don't actually think you need someone to follow you 24/7. I think they just follow you sometimes, you know, when you're doing something significant, you can get enough content from that.

Yeah, I think I'm mostly in agreement. I would say the way I think about it at least is like different stands out and I'm always looking for ways that like my content that I'm creating can be a little bit different than what exists out there. And I think like with video, the reason it's enticing to me to do something like not on a 24/7 basis ever, but But to do more actual real life shooting is, it just looks different than the traditional talking head stuff that you see on Instagram.

And there's more connection when people see you in your setting.

Yeah, you're actually real. And the liminal moments of just random conversations you're having where you actually drop a knowledge bomb on somebody casually or they drop one on you and it's really interesting and a lot of people would find value in it and learn from it, but it's not captured. And you can't capture the essence of that in a performative setting like doing a podcast because it feels then like like it's rehearsed and that the person has a line or a bit that they're going to drop.

I disagree with you again.

I love being proven wrong, so please.

Well, I think you can have really authentic conversations in a podcast setting, but I get what you're saying as a whole.

Yeah, I just think it's different when you see people do a really good job of that natural organic shooting. You see people, I have seen people on a golf course just walking around talking about something or even like Alex Hormozi has done some of it, like just day in the life stuff. And sometimes you're like, you feel cringy at it. And then sometimes it like, you feel like it hits and you're like, oh wow, that was a cool conversation that they just had with a fan or with someone that asked a question or something. And you feel like you see a more like raw, real live insight. Like reality television shows really did drive incredible connection with these celebrities. That's on a very different level than if they were just acting on a TV show.

Yeah. Something you just said is like the willingness to be cringy, I think is very valuable. I don't think people understand that. Like, if you're not willing to just embarrass yourself a little bit, yeah, like, that's where you find those gems and like what's hitting for people. And that's the stuff that helps you to stand out. And you're like, is this standing out in an embarrassing way or is it standing out in a cool way? Like, for example, I'll give you a quick example. My sister and my best friend don't like my socks that I have on that don't match my outfit, but my niece does though. She's Gen Z, so you listen to the Gen Zs when it comes to fashion. Um, but they were like, what is this? This is weird. And I'm like, yeah, that's the point. It's like a little bit weird and that's the vibe that I want. You know what I mean? So it's like everybody doesn't have to get it as long as you get it and it actually helps you to stand out and then creates a conversation piece or an opportunity to connect. So I think that that's so crucial. And I will say you're helping me to realize that two videos that I did recently on my golf cart, people are obsessed with it. They're like, oh, I love you driving around your golf cart talking to your, And I'm just like, oh, I'm just talking because I just finished a run and I'm on a high and now I have things to say, you know? But it has—

usually people too, like on the cringe thing, usually when people say something you did is cringe, they're just being haters.

It's just like, yeah, they were hating on my socks.

It was just like—

but they're cute though.

I'm not talking— I'm not— I'm talking more about it in terms of like content, not like, you know, family and things like that. But like when people are like, oh, I hate that cringe content that so-and-so is putting out, usually it's because they're jealous or envious of the person Hating. And like, I don't have time for that. You shouldn't have time for that in your life. Like, if someone is saying that about you or like, hey, so-and-so said your thing is cringe that you put out, like, you know, screw you.

Do y'all know how many people hate me? There are like actual Facebook groups, I'm told, of people who are just like, let's hate Rachel Rodgers in the Facebook group.

Usually that means you're doing something right.

I mean, and I'm like, the way that I am so unbothered because I know the people that I am reaching I'm changing their lives, right? I'm helping them accomplish what their goals are. So like, if I'm going to sit here and stress about somebody who doesn't like me, that stops me from focusing on the thousands of people that I could be helping right now. So just allow people to not like you. It's okay. Like, you'll be fine. They don't need to— not everybody needs to like— you don't even like everybody, right? So it's okay.

Yeah, I love that.

So I guess to wrap up the conversation around how you're producing social media content, one thing that I'm hearing in it is there's a spectrum between, you know, my Instagram stories, it's just me with my phone, or only do reels if they're produced on a podcast, all the way to a cameraman following me around all the time. And you can do things like you're talking about at events or when you're traveling, or you're like, okay, this is going to be a bunch of time with me with clients or something else where it's going to good content, and I'm gonna book somebody for that. Or like you're saying, Sahil, of having a— you want more of that lifestyle content. You're thinking about what people are experiencing as they scroll through, and you know, it's 4 clips from a podcast, and then there's something that's actually like—

you're making your eggs. Well, he's always in the cold plunge. I don't know if y'all follow him.

That's true.

What's up with the cold plunge?

But it does all my days, and I almost brought it actually.

Be in the cold plunge while he's on the podcast.

Out of here to do this.

But it does stop you, right? Because if you're watching everybody else is just straight to camera, if you see somebody in the cold plunge, you're like, what is he doing? You know what I mean? I gotta— let me unmute this one. But I think you could also, you could also do something just very strategic and say, I'm gonna hire a videographer to come one day a month.

Yeah.

And they're just gonna like follow me as I like drive to drop my kids off, and then I'm gonna be making eggs and they can just talking to them while I'm doing that. And it's just just captures some kind of conversations in different moments throughout the day. So I think there's ways to do that that are not as painful as somebody in your business 24/7 and not as expensive.

Yeah, I mean, like one of the big—

as obnoxious.

Yeah, I'm just like, you don't have to do— I've never— I spend money on like high-end edits, low-end edits, and then I'll do like, you know, my own face on this, just like my phone holding it up. I have never seen any data on anything I've put out that proves that like when I spend money on the higher-end edits that it performs performs better, reaches more people. And so that's like very empowering when you're starting out is just to realize it actually doesn't matter. Like great content is great content, great insights are great insights, and whether they're like highly edited and beautiful and like an amazing 4K film crew that follows you around, or whether it's filmed on your phone, like turned around sitting in a cold plunge, if you deliver like a cool insight that people find value in, you can do really, really well with these things.

I love it. Okay. We're going to end there, but I want to leave you all with one last thought. Rachel and I were talking about with this podcast, this idea of, you know, starting a tour, like starting with the big thing that we wanted to be at eventually and just start that from day one. And it sparked a conversation of like, well, who chose you to be able to host this podcast or have these people in the room? Or I was thinking about it. I was at an event. I was at Social Media Marketing World. In San Diego years ago, 5, 6 years ago. And Michael Stelzner was up there giving in front of like 3,000 people. And he was giving a talk on the state of social media, right? That's the State of the Union, the state of social media. And he, he gives this talk every year. And I was thinking about it. I was like, hold on, who decided that Michael Stelzner is basically the president and gets to give the state of social media? He did a great job with the talk and all that, but I was just thinking like, What did a council appoint him? You know, was that the Supreme Court? Like what? Congress? You know, but he was self-appointed, right? He chose himself. And so I think as we're having all of these conversations, we're thinking about what it means to build a business, like with the ethos of a billion-dollar creator. Like it requires choosing yourself. It requires going down this path of saying, oh yeah, I'm the one who's going to do this thing. I'm the one who's going to start these businesses. I'm not waiting for someone to come pitch me the idea. I'm not waiting for someone to give me equity that I deserve. It's like, no, I'm going to pay myself in equity. I'm going to choose myself. That's the thing that I want to leave you with of that's the shift that you make of realizing this is where I want to be 5 years from now, 10 years from now. I'm going to start on that journey today. I'm going to bet on and choose myself.

Yes. Tuning in to this episode of Billion Dollar Creator. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave us a review. We read every single one. If there is a company you want us to profile on Billion Dollar Creator, send us a message on social media and we will consider it. Thank you, and we will see you next time.