014: Lessons from a Scrappy Launch

We didn't even have a name for this podcast. We had no idea what the hell we were doing.

I've had like 15 people come up to me and say that that moment where we go and buy the domain live on the podcast is like their favorite thing ever. So put the messy process into the final material and people will appreciate you for it.

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 under-monetized. Hi, I'm Rachel Rogers. My co-host Nathan Barry and I We believe you can be a billion-dollar creator. Sound impossible? Over the last 10 years, we've 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.

Do you know who Ali Abdaal is? Are you familiar with his stuff?

I am, but only because you told me about him and his podcast a couple weeks ago. And then I think Sahil mentioned it on the New York episode that we did.

Yep. Because they have business together and all of that. And then when we were kicking this off, I was recording with Ollie at his studio in London, which was really fun. But Ollie just launched this thing called Light Mode, which I saw it this morning and I was like, oh, this is a billion-dollar creator playbook. Um, we gotta talk about it.

Interesting.

Yeah, so light mode is— he talks about it as a new business for like productivity products, which I think is interesting. It's not him going down the path of like making one product. He's got all these tools that he wants to make around productivity, and the first one is this mechanical keyboard. He talks about how everything in the productivity world is like either gamer-focused or like business nerd-focused. And so gamer is like this dark aesthetic, you know, everything is, is black and a certain look and all that, right?

Black and red in particular.

Yes, exactly. There's neon going on as well, and you know, it's a certain look to it. Or if you're like, this is the most optimal way to type and to do everything else in productivity, it's like IBM or Microsoft aesthetic.

Yes.

And so he has this new brand, Light Mode, which I love that he owns lightmode.com. Like, you can tell he's making like a real brand out of this. And their first product is this mechanical keyboard, which I am not a keyboard nerd, but talking to people— we have people on the team at ConvertKit who are like really into mechanical keyboards and how they sound when you type and customizing them and everything else. I just thought this was super interesting because he's got this video where he's talking through it. He just like introduces the brand in a really casual way. But yes, where he's going is trying to make some of the best and most beautiful— I think he says beautiful like 14 times in that video— but tools for, you know, productivity and starting with a mechanical keyboard. So anyway, I was like, I love it anytime a creator has a big YouTube following. So he has like 4 million followers on YouTube for productivity, and then he's not saying like, oh, I'm, you know, just going to do a course, I'm going to do this other thing. He's like, how do I build what I think is going to be an iconic brand. Like, I see this, I'm like, ooh, this brand has legs. So anyway, I thought that was super cool.

Very interesting. I love it. I love the design of it. I like the colors. The mechanical keyboard, I guess it's like giving you the feeling of typing on a typewriter, but you're still using your laptop or desktop or whatever. Is that what that is?

Yeah, and you can— they're supposed to be like the most ergonomic, and they have the exact right feedback on the keys. And then you can customize them. Like, you can take off all the keycaps and change it around.

Wow.

Someone's going to skewer us who's like, no, but here's everything that mechanical keyboards do. I'm like, I don't know, but I know that people think this is really cool and, uh, yes, they get really into it.

What's the price point? Do you know?

Yeah, it was interesting. It's $159. So he talks about it in the video, how they're going not bottom end, but not also like, I think you can spend like $1,000 on a mechanical keyboard.

Yes.

And so they're trying to make it He has some interesting phrasing of like, it's your first one if you want to invest a little bit, or it's a good first upgrade if you're like, you got one that was cheap and you're like, okay, but now I want one that's—

Yeah, like I want a better one. I like it. I like it. So he's making it like accessible to the people and he's thinking about the price point in terms of who's in his audience, which is exactly what he should be doing. Because, you know, you can either go for higher volume, right? Or you can go for maybe less people buy it, but it's more luxe item. So that's really interesting. That'll be fun to watch. And we have to have him on the podcast maybe early next year and see how it's going.

Yeah. Because between this and then the YouTube studio that he's doing with Sahil Bloom called Hey Friends, he's got that and courses, right? He's making like $4 or $5 million a year selling his various courses. It's just, it's impressive. I'm like, you can tell he's thinking about it in The Billion Dollar Creator mindset of like, okay, yes, what can I channel this into? And I think my favorite thing, I mentioned this earlier, but is how he's building like the brand. Like I can tell this is a brand. It's not like, oh, here's a mechanical keyboard that we're making and then here's something else that we'll do next. You can tell it's like, no, this is just the first product of the brand and that's more important than the individual product. And so I think it'll, I think it really has legs.

Yes, I think so too. I like the branding of it. I like the look of it, and I like the long-term plays, you know, like he could sell a lot more courses. Like, this is Q4, it's December. He could sell a ton of courses right now at the end of the year, or he could focus on launching this new physical product. Maybe people give it as gifts to some of their entrepreneurial friends or whatever, or a gift to themselves, but then building that company to be the big play, which is exciting. So I think that this is a great time to experiment and try things, you know, especially like if there's a quote unquote recession or the market is down, like that's when a lot of great companies are made. So I feel like it's a good time to try things, right? There's a lot of people who don't have much to lose. Like if your numbers are down or things are flat, it's like you might as well try something new and see what happens.

I agree. Speaking of trying something new, we're back from a 5-city tour. We finished all of that. Should we recap that and just talk through? I don't know, was it worth it? Did we— would we do it again? With, you know, all of those things.

Yes. Okay, I would definitely do it again. I would change some things for sure, but I actually love being scrappy. I actually— we just did annual planning for my company a couple weeks ago, and one of the things I think I'm adding it literally to our company values because I'm so obsessed with it, which is being scrappy. Like, there's something about that that really appeals to me. So I love the idea of just Starting something, doing it messy, doing it ugly, and trying it, and then working out the details as we go and learning. Because the amount of information you get back so quickly, like, how long would it take for us to get that much feedback about the podcast, right? If we were just doing episodes and waiting to get new listeners, but actually going out there, bringing people together, getting real-time feedback, that was extremely valuable to me.

Yeah, so we had an advantage going in that we both already have audiences, right? The podcast itself does not have an audience. But we separately have audiences. And so that allowed us to have, you know, at least 100+ people show up in every city that we did.

Yes.

So that was really good. I think what you said about the feedback loop, I really like because I think podcasts normally have a terrible feedback loop, like almost a non-existent one. You have to either actively solicit feedback, which I posted on Twitter yesterday, Twitter, X. I don't know, whatever. I posted on that platform yesterday. I'm like, hey, what feedback do you have for me on the podcast? Because, you know, otherwise you just don't naturally get it. I'm like, hey, I want to solicit unsolicited feedback. But with the tour, people would say like, oh, this was really great. You get to talk to them in real time, or even like getting to see their heads nod along as like one of the guests was sharing something insightful and someone's like nodding along or taking notes. And you're like, oh, this is good. Cool. I felt like it was good, but I'm glad that I can see on your face that this is a an invaluable thing.

Yeah. Getting the immediate laughs, watching them take notes, just having them yell at certain parts and get like really hype and excited. All of that was perfect to just know what's working. Sometimes too, like we're talking about like complex business ideas and I worry sometimes that I don't want it to go over people's heads. I want to make sure my audience is with me always, right? Like I'm not running ahead and leaving them behind. And I could see that they were. So that was really good too. To see that like, yes, some of this is kind of complicated to think about. People are interested in these deeper conversations and more complex conversations. So that was good information to have as well.

Yeah. So when we last talked about the tour, I think we'd done New York and Nashville maybe, but we hadn't. So since then we've done New Orleans, which is on the main stage at FinCon. So that was in front of 1,000 people. That was like not our own event. That was That was fantastic, but it was a different experience and really cool. And then we did Austin and LA in the same week. So I guess some of the, the lessons from that, one of the first ones for me is that it's a ton of logistics. I think I underestimated how, like, how much work would need to go into it because we were trying to do so many things, right? We were trying to do a live event, which is one set of logistics.

Yes.

Of like, can everyone pay attention live and all that? We were trying to record it, which adds this whole other element into it. And then we wanted a meetup afterwards and then we wanted a mastermind beforehand and like each one had its own set of needs. Like if you're optimizing just for that one thing, you would do a specific set of decisions and we're like, okay, so we want this and that. And then we said to our teams and especially to Haley, who, uh, is our events producer, like, bless her, she was amazing. But we just told her like, okay, Haley, here's what we want, like make it happen. And I think it was really tough to fit all of that into the same venue and to make all that happen together.

For sure. Shout out to Haley, she's the real MVP of this podcast tour for sure. She held it all together. But yes, and it's different venues worked in different ways, like some were better than others. I think out of all of the venues, my favorite was Austin. Austin was the best one. I really enjoyed, you know, the marquee outside. That was great. And just the setup— it was not ideal for the mastermind, but it was ideal for the podcast, the live show, and then the meetup afterwards. So I really loved that. But yes, there's a lot of data to review. I definitely have edits that I would make. Well, first of all, I would charge more for the tickets.

Yeah, we charged $39 for anyone listening, and I thought that was reasonable.

And I mean, we We weren't really trying to break even or whatever. We just wanted people to come out. I think in the future I would do maybe $95 and just make it a little bit higher so that, you know, like I want to start to have a pot that we're working from to produce the podcast. So, so that was interesting.

It's not just basic Scrappy.

Like, yes, exactly. Yeah. We started with Scrappy and, you know, use, you know, using our own funds or whatever. But now it's like scrappy plus break even, you know what I mean? Would be nice.

We probably spent $5,000 to $10,000 out of pocket, probably $10,000 out of pocket for every stop before paying for our team salaries. Cause we'd bring in, you know, $3,000 to $7,000 in ticket sales, $4,000 to $7,000 in ticket sales. And then you can drop a ton of money beyond that.

Yeah, exactly. Like covering drinks and all the things. And honestly, I have zero regrets. Like, I just think going forward, I would— I want to elevate the experience a little bit. So I always want more capital to work with so that we can elevate the experience. And just— I also am very into event choreography. Like, I want this is happening first, then this, then that. So I would tighten up the choreography a little bit. Like, who's introducing us, and where are we coming to the stage from, and what happens when the podcast is over? Who steps onto the stage to take over, right? Like, all I like all of that mapped out and just seamless and beautiful, you know?

Yeah, well, I mean, thinking about— I think most venues we were pulling together who's going to do the introductions like, yes, half an hour before, 10 minutes before.

I mean, you know, yeah, that was one.

I feel like Robert in New York really set the bar. Now he's like a professional performer, like he's world-class at what he does, so I would hate to be compared to him in any way, but just the way that he was going to people and saying like you know, before the show, you all have to subscribe right now. And then afterwards, the way that he's like somewhere between requiring, guilting, you know, cajoling, whatever, getting people to like— he's like, you just listened to a whole episode of the show live, so like write a review. And he did it in a really fun way. And I think he said like— and we did this at other tour stops as well— where it's like, hey, if you want a drink instead of drink tickets, it was like, go over to the bartender and show me that you have rated or reviewed the show. And actually, in Austin, I went to go get a drink after the show, and the bartender's like, so have you rated or reviewed the show? I'm like, well, I'm on it, like, I'm on the show. And she's like, cool, I'm happy for you. Have you rated or reviewed the show? So I had to pull out Spotify and show that yes, I had given 5 stars to my own podcast.

Listen, it's a good point. Why not, right? Why not?

I was kind of proud of her that she had pushed that hard, that, you know, for everyone to—

I'm impressed as well. I also thought the masterminds were great as well. We did a mastermind for about 4 hours each time with like a handful of invited folks, anywhere from like 15 to 25. I feel like we had in the room, and those were great. I feel like between the podcast conversations and then also the mastermind, I was like taking pages of notes and had my own insights about my business to go home and apply after every tour stop. So even from that perspective, it's almost like this mini— it was like a mini mastermind, not just the mastermind part, but also the podcast conversation and just insights that I'm getting listening to our guest, or you, or even hearing myself give advice that I need to go home and take, you know. Yes, exactly.

And you should do this, and by you, I guess— oh shoot, I mean me. Okay.

Yes, I guess it applies to me too. How annoying.

Yeah, we both really like the annual planning session, or like the— not even annual planning, the 3 to 5 year planning session that Tim Grohl led at our Nashville Mastermind. We both took a ton of notes.

That was one of my absolute favorites. And the notes that I took from that is actually what I presented as my vision for my annual planning that I did for my company. Because in that process, he's like, you know, we're talking about like 10x-ing your company. What does it look like to 10x it? And I just reverse engineered 10x-ing it. And so by the end of that exercise, I had my 10x plan. So I'm like, okay, great. Well, now I'm prepared for annual planning. Wonderful.

Listen, everyone, our mastermind is so good that even as we teach and lead it, We're the ones who get the most out of it.

Literally. And that was interesting. At the LA stop, someone came up to me and said, I would have paid thousands of dollars for this.

Yeah.

Like, this was so incredibly valuable for me. So, so yeah, maybe next year.

The funny thing is, yeah, you pulled her out. You were like, come over and tell Nathan this, because I've been the one who's like, no, let's not charge for it.

Right?

Because you and I are both in the position that our businesses make a good amount of money and we don't need this to, to make money in itself, right?

Yeah.

And so I was— you were saying we should charge for this because this is really good. And I was like, no, like we charge for other things. Let's just pour this back into, you know, our community and all that. And so what was interesting then when you pulled her over and she was like, I've, you know, she basically reinvented her whole business in that 4-hour session. And had like clear actionable plans of how to do it and had met 15 or 20 other creators that, you know, I like watched her getting everyone else's contact info and all of that. And so that was a good reminder of like, okay, yeah, we could legitimately charge, you know, $1,000 to $3,000 for this. And people would probably show up more professionally, like, and get more out of it and all of that. But you know what?

Yes.

Say what you're going to say. And then I want to dive into why, like what I realized my resistance was.

Yes. Oh, I can't wait to hear that. You know, I've heard actually on your podcast, Laura Roder say value for value, right? So we're providing value, so we get value in exchange. And that makes it, that just makes it an even exchange, which makes sense. But even beyond that, right? Otherwise the, it's almost like the opportunity can be wasted on people if they don't recognize the value of the moment. Right? So even being on your phone, when you have all these dope creators, you're sitting next to somebody who just sold their company for, you know, 8 figures, right? And you're sitting next to somebody else who has millions of followers on YouTube and somebody else who is just building a dope agency. You have so much opportunity here and you're on your phone, right? Like, when you've paid money, when you've paid $5K for the experience, you're not going to be on your phone. You're going to be fully focused. You're going to think about how you want to prepare for the moment before you get there. And even for us, right, if we sell it, right, and have people pay for it, we can also have a survey going out saying, okay, what's the status of your business? What's going on for you? We can Customize and tailor the content to fit the people who are coming. We know the people are going to show up. They're not going to cancel last minute. And then we could also elevate the experience, which, you know, I always want to elevate the experience. I think those are all really good reasons to charge for the mastermind.

Yeah. What was interesting to me is realizing about halfway through, or I guess it was after you had the conversation with the, the attendee who was saying we should definitely charge. And I don't know if it was later that night or the next day or what, but we were chatting about, I guess it wouldn't have been the next day because you flew home at like midnight that night out of LA.

Oh my God. I was like, worst flight that I've taken in literal years. That was the, I won't even tell you why it was terrible, but it was.

Yeah. There was just that moment you had this long line of people talking to you. It's like 10 o'clock at night at the meetup. You talk to basically everyone there, but you still have like 8 more people that want to talk to you. I'm in the middle of a conversation. I realized like, wait. Rachel needs to be at the airport right now. Like, go, Rachel. Like, this is great, but you need to go.

Yes, thank God. Yes, you were— you got me out of there. You were like, you have to be responsible and leave right now. Yeah.

And then even then someone was like, okay, but one more photo. And I was like, all right, and then get out of here. No, so the realization that I had is a lot of my resistance to charging for the Mastermind meant that I would need to show up differently and deliver at a different level because I was able to have a bit of a cop-out, right? Like no one's— I know my content is good and I can show up and teach it off of the fly. And so, and no one's paying for it, right? This is all free. And so I can, their expectations are here. I can make sure that I exceed the expectations with not that much work or preparation. But as we're teaching like this, the Flywheels content, what I found myself wanting is like worksheets and like a workbook and other content to go with it and, you know, printouts and well-designed and produced material.

Yeah.

And I felt like my slides were good, but the experience delivered— maybe the end result for many people was worth many thousands of dollars, but the experience was not worth that much of how it was packaged. And that was fine with me because they didn't pay for it. And so really, if you came and said, hey, this is $3,000 per person, they're paying almost $1,000 an hour to be here, you know, or $500 an hour or whatever, then I'd go, oh shit, I have to level up my game in a huge way. And that was my resistance, is that I didn't feel like I had time to do that, even though I absolutely want to. And when I realized that, I was like, well, yeah, I want this to be world-class content, so let me charge for it. So I forced myself to show up with the level of preparation and material and handouts and details. So I know you're going to get that much value from it.

Exactly. And here's what I would argue. I would argue all of the work, all of the preparation has already been done in building ConvertKit, right? Like all of the learning that you've had, all of the experiences of building your business. Same for me, right? So it's like it's 10+ years of entrepreneurial experience and results and success that you're bringing to the table that I think is more valuable to them than your preparation. You know, I think the time itself and the insights that you just naturally already have in your brain are worth that, worth charging for already. And also too, like even just like the workbooks and all that can be outsourced because the content is really created already pretty much. It's just about downloading it and putting it into, like you said, just a little bit of prep. And even some of the spaces, like there was one room where It was all windows, which seems like a great idea. Natural light, beautiful, right? But then like someone sitting in direct sun, you know, while trying to learn.

Welcome to Los Angeles, Venice Beach. Please roast in this spot of sunlight. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. So, so yeah, I think that there's so much opportunity to— I feel like basically we had a meeting on our flight from Austin to LA. And I feel like what we've done is maybe potentially by accident, we went to start a podcast and we've accidentally started another business, which is the last thing that you or I need right now.

But yes, we did.

It's absolutely hilarious, but it makes perfect sense because I'm like, oh, clearly we need to create a billion-dollar creator playbook because we're taking in all this information, right? We're gathering all these examples and then there's like, this criteria, you know, and then we're even refining the criteria. And so we're like, clearly there needs to be that playbook. And then I'm like, well, if we're going to do masterminds, let's do a mastermind where we walk everybody through that billion-dollar creator playbook and a step-by-step process to like find the billion-dollar creator opportunities within their current company. So yeah, I think it just needs to happen.

Well, on that note, the day after we did the LA tour stop, I went down to Long Beach to Tiago Forte's studio. So he has the course and book Building a Second Brain, just amazing content. He's built his business to a few million dollars a year in revenue. And he said, hey, why don't we instead of doing like a regular interview, right, where you came on, I interview you, all that, why don't we do it as a live coaching session? He's like, here's where I'm at in my business. Here's what I'm trying to get to the next level. And you do a teardown on it, give me feedback, I'll share all of my numbers and all of that and we'll record it. So he— I showed up at his production studio. He had a whiteboard there and we like wrote out the numbers, mapped out his business and walked through the Billion Dollar Creator methodology. And, you know, it was fascinating how quickly we came to the problem in that he doesn't have recurring revenue in his business.

Wow.

He had the other tenets, right? He was selling a product rather than attention. He'd built much more than a personal brand. And he did not have recurring revenue. And I walked him through this. I was just like, oh, like, this is it. And we dove into fixing that. We copied over some, some playbooks from, you know, what you've done at Hello7, what the executive coaches have done at Reboot, like in their business model. And so it's like showing him kind of borrowing from a few of these different models. And he's now got a really clear plan to scale from $2 million to $10 million a year in revenue. And we decided like, hey, we'll at that point we'll revisit, you know, the $10 million to $100 million. But it just made me realize how much the training and material matters to like really break down. Because then to hammer it home, I was in the Uber back up to, uh, Venice, and my friend Daryl, who he introduced us, he played Robert at the Nashville tour stop, but he texted me and he's like, hey, What material are you gonna create? What educational content are you gonna create around Billion Dollar Creator? And then I'm still like, uh, probably nothing. I don't know. I have a full-time job. But just realizing like we can create this material to really take people through it in a detailed way. So we, we've gotta do more of that. And I think what it's gonna come down to is like workshopping it live on the podcast and then having our team members who can package it up and turn it into the concrete material. And like, these are the steps that you should go through.

Yes, exactly, exactly. I think it'll be awesome. I'm excited for more of the coaching on the podcast. We did that with Paula Pant in New Orleans, and people really responded to that. She got so much value from it, but then the audience came up to us after and they were like, that was absolutely amazing. And for people to just see, like, you have a $2 million business or you have a $200,000 business, and the opportunity to create a much bigger business is right there. You know, you just have to see it and step into it. And sometimes it's hard to see when you're in it, you know, and getting outside of it and also just learning how to think bigger. Like, it's all the value of coaching and education, right? So I'm excited that we've challenged people to think bigger. I'm also excited that people, some people hate us for it. It's great. Like, that makes me happy.

There have been a few more think pieces that have come out about why, you know, I don't know what's wrong with society right now, but you know what, I'm okay with being like, what's wrong with society?

I'm okay with it as well because I think we're encouraging people to, right, see the full value of what they're creating and get paid what— based on that value that they're creating. I think we're helping good people earn more money so they can do good things with that additional money, right? Like, just like we have a lot of wealthy people, some of them make decisions that are bad for society or for our climate or whatever. And we need good people who have money who can make good decisions about, you know, for our society, climate, et cetera. So I'm excited to be helping creators get more money in their hands. And I'm okay with taking some heat as part of it. I actually find it entertaining and fun. And also too, I feel like we're here for the ambitious people, for the people who are like, I know I'm meant for more. I know I can do more. I know I can create more value for people. And I'm missing a piece and I just need to put that piece in place so that I can feel like I can get to where I'm trying to go. So we're filling that need and I think that's amazing.

Yep. I like it. Okay. A couple other quick takeaways for me. I don't think I realized how hard recording a podcast in front of a live audience, how hard that actually is and how not showing up and sitting down and talking and whatever else, but the AV side of it. Yes. It's serving a bunch of different needs. And then even little things where you're like, oh, we're, we're filming all of it. And so we want a camera to be able to show who's asking the question, you know, make sure the audio is good from the Q&A. Well, that's really hard to do. And no AV team that we hired had a clue what they were doing, right? As far as the combination of this, they were like, okay, cool. So you want a mic? So do this. I'm like, well, no, but we also want to— we actually want 3 mics simultaneously. And well, 4. With the audience mic, and then we want to record all of that into one system and going from here. And so this is another time that, that Haley and people that she pulled together, like figured it all out and we ended up just building like partway through the podcast tour, we built our own kit that we just traveled with, right? And we're wheeling these Pelican cases. Like when we went to Cody Sanchez's office. To record the episode with her.

Yes.

First of all, like, we're like, keep texting to push our flight back because we're like, we're not going to— this is taking too long. But, you know, to be able to roll in with a full, basically a full studio setup. And that came from trial and error and realizing that like, okay, the hotel AV team or whoever you bring in doesn't know how to do any of this. And we basically have to learn it ourselves and make our own playbook.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the podcast has sounded great. So the fact that we've successfully pulled it off, and by when I say we, I mean you and your team, because I had nothing to do with it. If it was dependent on me, it would be a disaster.

Tom, who's our head of social media, he knows audio and video really well, and he came to the Austin event and he leveled up some things there. Or like Alyssa, who's our head of all things creator growth and has a podcast herself, her husband runs a recording studio in Nashville. And so his name's Thomas and we were like, you know, Haley was making calls and be like, Thomas, okay, how do I do this one thing?

And he's like, all right.

You know?

Yes.

It was good.

Gotta rely. You rely on the community, right? This is why networking is so important. So you have people to call when you hit a snag.

Yes. So I think overall on the tour would 100% do it again. Were there any other things that you would change or do differently or did we hit all of them?

Schedule. I would change the schedule, which, you know, because I complained about it the whole time.

You don't want to just do meetings all morning, teach a mastermind all afternoon, and then roll into a live podcast followed by 4 more hours of networking? What's wrong with the 18-hour day, Rachel? What's the problem?

I'm like, surely there's a better way. I clearly am very pampered at this point, but— and also too, just the travel, like traveling and jumping time zones. And then sometimes I was traveling in the morning of and then going right into— we met for an hour to like game plan, then we were right into the mastermind for 4 hours. Then you have like 5 minutes to change and like, you know, put on lipstick if you're me, and then you are in front of an audience, right? So it was just like one thing after another. So schedule-wise, my preference would be that day 1 is all about the podcast and we just focus only on the podcast. Maybe even have a little happy hour beforehand. I want people drinking before they listen to me talk. They'll laugh at my jokes more, you know what I mean? And then afterwards, having more networking, I think could be great. And then I would do the mastermind the next morning and then have like a sort of, I don't know, 10 to 1 or 10 to 2 mastermind the next day so that day one, we could just be hyper-focused on the podcast. And then day two, we have this amazing mastermind after being inspired by the podcast conversation. That would be my right.

I think we could get more, we get further in the mastermind if we weren't introducing some of the concepts. Like, we know that everyone there had listened to the episode the night before. For me, there's a tension between like the best experience when we're there, both for us and for attendees. Like, attendees, we're going to take care of that, and I put that first. I think I'm still more in the like sacrifice my life to minimize— I'm like trying to minimize the time away from home, which I know you are too.

Yes.

And then I'm at least these last, like, for a few of these tour stops, I was just absolutely packing in everything I could, you know. And I think that week, the Austin LA week, I think I recorded like 7, 8 podcast interviews. 3 were Billion Dollar Creator, and then the rest were going on other shows and And just like constantly— Yeah, I got a ton done. And so I think it was that balance of like, is this going to wear me out and make it less enjoyable as I do all of this? Or is this like, no, this is what I'm signing up for. And like, you know, I've got 3 kids at home. And so I'm going to try to be totally focused on family and growing the company when I'm home and then totally switch into You know, like network community mode for 5 days and then sleep on the plane on the way home.

Well, also too, like at some point you have to get the rest in, right? So when you come home from that trip, did you still feel, did you feel like you needed a day or two to rest or did you feel like you were right into family mode and energized for family mode?

I felt like I needed rest and I definitely did the like pretend I have more energy than I do. And then 8:30 rolled around or, and, and it was like, all right, and everybody's off to bed, and everyone includes me.

I've definitely done that where I wore myself out on a business trip and then got home and pretended I had all the energy in the world for my children when I just really needed a nap so bad.

But I think consciously realizing that you need to do that, because you're like, okay, what's the experience that I want my kids to have? They can have the experience that not only is mom or dad gone, but then when they come back, they're out of energy, which is an authentic experience. Right? Where you're like, okay, no, actually what we're going to do is I'm going to show up and give you a ton of energy. And then, you know what? We're not going to like be like, oh, I'm exhausted. So I guess we'll watch a movie. We're going to be like, we're doing family movie night. You know, it's like the same thing with a very different tone. And I mean, they'll be thrilled regardless. But like that experience of like, wow, I come back and I feel really— or, you know, dad comes back and I feel really special. And, you know, prioritized even though I'm annoyed at the time you spent gone or whatever. And then realizing that like the kids will go to bed relatively early and, you know, yeah, I can go to bed then too.

I think there's a happy medium there where there's like doing the work, building in some rest for yourself, and then having energy for your family as well. You know, like, is it worth it to— like, for example, what I did, I got on a flight Immediately following the happy hour, I was exhausted. I took a red-eye. It was a terrible red-eye for a myriad of reasons. And then, you know, I got home, was absolutely exhausted, but I powered through the evening and then fell asleep. Like, I got home the next day, the next afternoon, you know, because going from LA to Puerto Rico, it's a far trip. Like, it was gonna suck no matter what I did. But anyway, was that worth it, or would have been better for me to get some sleep Fly home Friday, power through all day Friday. I would've missed Friday night and then been fresh for Saturday and rested. I don't know. It's a tension that I think every creator entrepreneur who's a parent can relate to. And I think depending on the trip, we make different decisions, you know, but it also, there's also a tension between doing the thing and then selling the thing or marketing the thing, right? Like putting the effort into creating the product or delivering the best product possible. But then you were also marketing the product, right? Because you were recording podcasts. Other podcasts where you're promoting, you know, part of that is promoting the Billion Dollar Creator podcast while you're on other podcasts. So it's like, do we just prioritize doing the thing and that's it, and then go home and rest and be with our families? Or do we do the thing, market, sacrifice sleep, right? And there's different times for different things. This is a new baby, right? Like, it's a new project, and so it's going to require more effort. And that's what I said at the beginning, because there was one point where Nathan texted me and was like, should we just cancel this whole tour? Why are we doing this? Our families are going to be annoyed. And I'm like, you are correct, our families are going to be annoyed, we are going to be even annoyed at some point. But with a new thing, to get it off the ground, right, it's just like a flywheel. It takes more effort in the beginning.

Yeah.

But then it starts to just spin. So I think this was that extra effort, and there was huge wins as part of it. There was some downside, but I feel like there was more upside than downside for this tour.

Yeah.

And I think there's ways to optimize and get it better. And I think it's just sometimes we're going to put a ton of effort in and go really hard and exhaust ourselves. And sometimes we're going to be like, yeah, I'm going to sleep and then I'm going to take my ass home.

You know, one thing that I would do differently, as you mentioned, the flywheel— I realized where our flywheel was broken is around creating the video content as we went. Yes, we got it dialed in to capture all of the footage. And your team did a good job of creating some reels when we had Sanira on in Nashville. You know, she had a great reel after the event. I realized I didn't put any infrastructure in behind the scenes with a video team. Yeah, to like quickly turn around video content that would build the hype for future events. So I didn't post a single reel or, you know, a YouTube video or any of that. And that's something, you know, even as we're recording this, we just got our video team up and running to launch the video version of the podcast. So yes, like if anyone's listening, very soon, if you go to billiondollarcreator.com, there will be a link to the YouTube channel and where you can, you know, follow and subscribe there. But that's something that we were so busy doing all of this that we missed that, which is really like a third to half of the podcast is the clips and the, the video side. And so ideally we would have done that sooner because what we did, right, and all this will roll out over time, so it's, it's totally fine. Like, we didn't lose it other than maybe a little bit of momentum, but we ultimately created what will be an incredible amount of great video content. And then we were missing the video step in the production flywheel. And that's when I was like, okay, big lesson learned.

Yeah. We both have like decent sized teams. And so we were both like, okay, there's no one person that's perfect for taking this over. So we just kept adding more people. So we had a Slack channel at one point with like 35 people in it and nobody knows who's doing what, who's actually in charge, you know? So that's the part of being scrappy is like you just start and you just get it done and it's sloppy and messy. And then you realize where all the mess is. And one of the things Haley did was create like a step-by-step process for the podcast. So there's, you know, we launched it ugly. So y'all in episode 3, you got to listen to us. Like we didn't even have a name for this podcast. We had no idea what the hell we were doing.

I've had like 15 people come up to me and say that that moment where we go and buy the domain live on the podcast is like their favorite thing ever. So put the messy process into the final material and people will appreciate you for it.

Yes, exactly. Because it's real, right? It's showing like, this is actually what it looks like. It's messy, but it's also been super fun and very rewarding just hearing, you know, we've gotten emailed feedback, reading some of the reviews. So that's been awesome. But yes, it is. It was a bit of a hot mess and we already have plenty of things to do and we chose the busiest quarter of the year to choose to do it. We nailed it, Nathan.

You know, Entrepreneurs are not always the best at planning, so we'll just roll with that stereotype.

But you know, we do have— we have vision and we get it done, you know.

So that's right, there's that.

We do.

So yeah, we did 5 tour stops, that went well. We're on a break for a little while, Ross and Rachel style. No, just kidding. And, uh, the next tour stop is at ROI, which is your conference in Puerto Rico. What are the dates on that? I'm going, but tell me the dates.

January 17th through the 19th. I'm really excited. So our guest for the Billion Dollar Creator Podcast will Jackie Aina, and she is— she's a huge YouTuber, massive YouTube following, and is running the Billion Dollar Creator Playbook with her own products. So I'm excited to talk to her about her content that she creates. I mean, it might as well be a TV show, like it's so high quality. But yeah, I'm really excited to interview her. So that'll be the episode in January. You should join us if you go to hello7.co/ROI, you can still get tickets. For that for the next week or two. And then we're also going to Craft and Commerce next year where we're going to do an episode at your event in Boise in June.

So I'm excited about that too. Yeah, that'll be June 5th to 8th. So, and I think we'll get some other tour stops in there. We'll, we'll see how the rest of the year fills out and then we'll probably do a few more stops and get some more masterminds in and all that.

We discussed 4 and I think that we should really make that our max. We'll see what happens, y'all. Of course it'll wind up being 10, you know, or something ridiculous.

You know, the other thing that I appreciated from Haley is like her focus on pinning us down on things. Like she kept asking one of us like, hey, what about this? Or what about that? And then when she had us together on the flight from Austin to LA, she was like, all right, I have a doc. You have said this and you have said that, and we're going to reconcile all of this in the 3 hours before this plane touches down. Yes. And it was really good.

It was really good. And one of the things that we talked about doing that y'all can look forward to is creating an opt-in, like creating a download, like some cool content. Content from the podcast related to the Billion Dollar Creator, you know, process that you can download. So that's something that's on our to-do list. And then potentially planning some more masterminds for next year as well. So that'll be good. If there's something else you want us to do, let us know. We also want to do a little bit of coaching of some entrepreneurs and live on the show. Yes, exactly. So we probably should create like some kind of survey or form for people to apply for that. We'll get around to it.

We'll make one and we'll put it on billiondollarcreator.com. Where you can apply. We'll have some threshold. I don't know, you got to be already making $250,000 a year or already having a— have a sizable audience. And then we'll brainstorm how to take that to the, you know, $10 million and beyond, $100 million level.

Yes, I'm excited about that. That's going to be fun.

Clearly the survey already exists. Heading to DollarCreator.com. You know, we have what, 4 days before this episode drops? So no problem.

It'll happen. We'll get right on that.

All right. Speaking of the episode, let's wrap up by talking about 2 different creators that we both have been intrigued by. I'll go first and talk about Mark Rober. He is— how old is he? He's probably 40, somewhere in there. So he is a, like, scientist and engineer. He worked at NASA for years, worked on like some big projects like the Mars Rover and stuff like that. And then he ended up working at Apple for a few years, and now he's full-time on his own thing. He's built a YouTube channel about like science and physics and all these fun things to 28 million subscribers. So he is—

wow, massive.

And his projects, he'll have things like— so first, my kids absolutely love his content. Like, my 4-year-old is like, Dad, can we watch a Mark Rober video? I'm like, sure, why not?

I'm especially interested now that it works for kids. Yeah, I'm definitely gonna listen and watch.

Yeah, it's very much kid-focused content, which is interesting to me. Like, that has a massive audience. We're all over here like, we're gonna teach business on the internet, you know? And like, the audience is very small. You know, you think like food bloggers, they serve a much bigger audience, right? Like people who want to cook is way bigger than like niche internet business. And then, you know, up from there, when you're like teaching science to children in a fun, entertaining way, like massive audience, and turns out 28 million subscribers. So he'll do these crazy projects. Like one of my favorites is he made a dartboard dartboard that has motion capture on it and all the physics. So if you throw a dart, it will automatically move to catch the dart exactly in the center.

That's wild. I'm obsessed.

And then he walks through, like, not step by step of how to build it because it's crazy complicated, but like why certain things work. And he introduces computer vision and all these things. And then he adds another element to it where it has like facial recognition. So if he throws the dartboard or the dart It's perfect. But then like he goes on Jimmy Kimmel's show and Jimmy Kimmel throws the dart and it like deliberately moves out of the way. So it's like, so Mark can't miss and Jimmy Kimmel can't, you know, even get on the dartboard. So he does these projects and the channel grows. And I was watching an interview with him and he talked about how early on, 90%— well, early on, maybe up through 20 I think 2020. So probably the first 5, 6 years of the channel, 90% of the revenue was from sponsorships, and then 10% was from YouTube ads, like the algorithm-driven ads. And then as the views got huge, that switched where 60% was from YouTube ads, and I didn't realize how big that could be, you know. And then 40% was from sponsorships. But what I thought was really interesting is he used to always have you know, a range of sponsors, like, you know, I don't know if you ever had like the VPNs or Squarespace or some of these brands that you see on a lot of podcasts or channels, but he had one in particular that was a monthly like science box. Like he would send you, you know, here's a science experiment. Yeah. Or a kit or something that you can do. And he would sponsor it or like they sponsored it. He would talk about it and he was probably getting paid a lot of money for those because I'm sure he sold a lot of units. And I have no idea what happened behind the scenes, but somewhere in there it went from this monthly subscription box sponsoring his channel to now they're gone and he has this amazing product called Crunch Labs where they do their own monthly subscription box. And like, the quality is way better. You know, you can tell that this is someone who's deeply passionate about it. The content is integrated very closely. Like he'll make this giant Nerf gun and or like Nerf gun style thing and then make it have another version that like, and by the way, this is what you'll get in the monthly subscription box, the smaller version.

Yes.

And then of course, he's instead of it being a random sciencey thing, like he's actually teaching the physics concepts behind why this works in videos that accompany it. So a few things that I love about this. One, I feel like a billion-dollar creator concept is be your own sponsor.

Yep.

And he did that. He came in and said, you know, the sponsor's making more money off of this than they're spending, obviously. And the quality isn't as good as I would like. So why don't I increase margins and increase quality? Like, hell yes.

Yes.

And then the next thing is, this is a recurring revenue business, which one of our core principles is you got to have recurring revenue. And so at $300 a year, right, he's got this recurring business. And then the last thing about it that I love is he's able to do these deep integrations. Like I've seen people kind of launch something and it just doesn't really fit. Like you can tell when they're like, oh, I should have something that I have equity in. So I guess I'll bolt this on.

Yes.

And it usually doesn't end up working. And so in this one, you can tell like it's so natural for him to talk pretty constantly about his boxes and it doesn't feel like he's selling because it's such a perfect fit. So I think this is going to be a huge business. I couldn't find any numbers, like not a single thing has been released that I could find about like they're making $10 million a year or $50 million a year in revenue. But if it's not already, you know, tens of millions to $50 million a year plus, I think it will be really soon.

Yeah, no, I love that. And I think $300 a year is such a reasonable price. I would 100% pay that. you know, for my kids to have it. And then I have 3 kids, so I'd pay $900 a year for all 3 of them to be able to participate. But I love the tack on. And you know what that funnily enough makes me think of? I feel like that's— be your own sponsor is essentially what the model is that we're thinking of with charging for the Billion Dollar Creator Mastermind Day.

Yep, that's true.

Because then that Mastermind Day can sponsor like the video team that we have, the audio team that we have. All of the travel, the venues for the live events. It makes sense. And I think creators have been doing that on some small scale, right? Like, who do their own podcast and then they advertise their own products on the podcast. You know, that's one example of it. But yeah, this is, this is very interesting. I'm sure he's going to be printing money if he's not already. I mean, he's been on Jimmy Kimmel. Sounds good.

Yeah, he's definitely printing money. I just think it's gonna go like all the way into household household name even further. There's one other thing that I saw him doing that was like, oh, this is such an interesting flywheel, is he's built out Crunch Labs, which is both the company and a physical office space where it has all the things that, you know, anyone would think is super cool of like hidden entrances and, you know, sciency stuff and everything else, a go-kart track.

Yeah.

What he does is with these Crunch Boxes, they go out every month. He chooses, I think, 2 or 3 and he puts like a Willy Wonka style golden ticket in them. And if you get that, then you get to come visit the headquarters and he'll make content about that, which then wants people to do it even more. And so you're getting these things where it's like, Dad, buy me this because I might be able to get, you know, the golden ticket to come see it. And so it's just an interesting flywheel of how this like feeds itself more. And then he gets content of people enjoying the product more and on from there.

Yes. It feels like a closing the loop step by saying, I'm going to create content with the kids who are enjoying these physical products, right? They get to come to my headquarters and experience this. And then that feeds more people wanting to buy the box, wanting to get a golden ticket, wanting to watch the videos. So it seems like it's a loop closer, you know, that golden ticket piece. That's really interesting. I have been thinking about that and I really want to find more billion-dollar creator examples with physical locations, because just a little preview of what we decided in annual planning, we are going to create the first Hello7 physical location. And that's all I'm going to say. I'm not going to say more about it yet, but I'm very excited about moving in that direction and having physical locations be part of our model. So I'm interested to see other examples of billion-dollar creators that are using a physical location of some kind as part of their flywheel or their model.

I like it. I'm curious to hear more about the physical location. I may or may not have also started looking at physical spaces after I came back from touring so many people's like beautiful podcast studios and all of that. Like we went and met with the Dear Media team and they, their office in LA or not in LA, in Austin is the one we went to and they just have this insane podcast setup and office. And I was like, Someday I'd like to have this, and then I realized like, wait, I could have this today.

Yes, exactly. Today is someday. Yes, exactly. I have been thinking about having a clubhouse for a very long time, and so I'm like, you know what, it's time to make it happen. Let's go do it. So yeah, so we're working on executing that sometime in 2024, but we've already begun the process. And having podcast studio space space is part of the vision as well, because I agree with you. I'm like, why am I in my half office, half den right now instead of a fabulous studio? You know? So yeah, time to level up in all ways.

I like it. You've had Sheila Johnson on the list for a little while. I'm curious what you've seen from researching her and, you know, takeaways from the Billion Dollar Creator space from an actual billionaire.

Yes, from an actual billionaire who has actually a physical space. So Sheila Johnson is— you know what, let's not do this. You know why? Because I just realized the time.

Actually, that's all the time that we have because you and I both looked at the clock and realized we have other things we need to jump to, to run our day-to-day businesses. So I think what would be good is we'll kick off another episode talking about Sheila Johnson, who is a billionaire that we can learn from directly, you know, Billion Dollar Creator lessons from an actual billionaire. We'll do that in the next episode.

Yes. Can't wait.

All right. Sounds good. Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll see you soon.

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