019: Scaling From $2M to $10M/yr (Coaching Call With Tiago Forte)

at every stage of the business, right? Every time you double the business, the CEO has to cut what they do in half. Interesting. And that one is the hardest for me personally.

Million 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. Hey everyone. Today I've invited one of my favorite creators and entrepreneurs, Nathan Barry, Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit, the email marketing platform that we use, into the studio to talk about a really big idea and powerful message that he's actually touring the country to talk about, which is the idea of the billion-dollar creator. Welcome, Nathan. Thank you for coming in.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's fun to be here in the studio with you.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's start off. For someone who has no idea what this means, what's your, your best kind of explanation of what the billion-dollar creator idea is?

Yeah, so creators are incredible at two things. One, getting attention, and two, making money from it. Right? If we think about what happens in the world, if we were setting out and say, hey, I want to be a doctor or a creator. You're like, well, they both do a lot of public good. Maybe the doctor is more public service, but if you want to make more money, go be a creator, which is kind of a ridiculous idea. You know, you think about that, that at this level, you're going to make much more as a creator, the potential is, right? If we were talking and someone said like, "Oh, a friend of ours said, 'I make $1 million a year as a creator,'" we'd be like, "Okay." There would be no surprise on either of our faces. It would be entirely expected. Now, if you think about it, what creators do is they have attention, right? Creators are the best in the world at capturing attention and you have options as to where you're going to direct that attention. And so I actually have a, I guess, a point of view on this that On one hand, creators are the best at gathering attention, but they're wildly under-monetized. So when we talk to that creator who's making $1 million a year off of 100,000-subscriber email list and a quarter million subscriber YouTube channel or something like that, I'm like, "Yeah, I'm super happy for you. And also I bet there's a business in there where that attention is worth 10 or maybe even 100 times more what you're doing there." And so the Billion Dollar Creator is really asking that question of, if I have this attention, where could I point it that has the highest return on investment?

Yeah. I love that. It really reminds me, this is gonna go down a rabbit hole, but did you ever read the book Who Is Michael Ovitz about the founding of CAA?

I have not.

So Creative Artists Agency, the big, by far the biggest Hollywood agency. There was a line in that book. It was the 1980s and he was starting CAA with a thesis. And his thesis was, all the power is going to go to the talent.

Okay.

That was just the whole idea. Because at the time, actors were just like employees. They were just the hired hands.

Someone else.

Exactly. Oh, you want to do it? Okay. You know, they would dictate where you had to live, your schedule, how much you were paid. And he just said, no, over the next few decades, all the power is going to go to the talent. And he built CAA, a multibillion-dollar agency on the back of that idea. I feel like that's happening again now. Your thesis is almost like all the power, the influence, the money, the equity is gonna go to the talent, except this time it's not just within the confines of Hollywood, it's the creator economy and the internet.

Yeah, and it's really changing even further because not only has the power gone to the talent, but now the distribution has gone to the talent as well, right? And so if you think about, it's not, hey, will you cast me in this film because I'm going to be able to bring in, you know, this level of performance and then people are going to want to see, you know, Jennifer Aniston in a film and so they're more likely to watch it. Instead it's like, well, I don't need anyone to pick me. I'm going to pick, you know, choose myself and, you know, not only do I have people following me, but I also own the distribution channel, right? We own the digital theaters where we're saying like, I'm going to choose exactly what runs, you know, at the theater today.

Gosh, I almost think, I mean, we think of we see actors who have now accumulated so much of that power and influence. But from what you're saying, it's almost like the potential for that— currently the Holly— you know, Hollywood actors are sort of the biggest names, but maybe with the internet there's no ceiling to that. Like maybe eventually there will be even bigger names in the creator economy on the internet than we see in Hollywood.

Yeah, and I think there will be. And you're gonna see a crossover between these two worlds, right? You've seen Will Smith creating like YouTube content, writing a traditional book with Mark Manson. And so you see these crossovers where we're like, wait, Mark Manson is a friend of ours, right? He's a customer of ConvertKit, you know?

Is he?

Yeah, he is. Oh, cool. Will Smith, right, is going to Mark and saying, hey, like, I loved your book, like, let's collaborate. So you're gonna see these two worlds combine more and more and techniques be borrowed from each one. But I think what's interesting is actually that it's not that the creators should get on the level of, the actors and, you know, the like film professionals and all that, it's that both sides are realizing that the attention that they have is worth even more if they do something entirely different with it, right? So if you think about the wealthiest people in Hollywood and the wealthiest people in music, very, very few of them, like many have their like a level of wealth, you know, tens of millions, $100 million, that kind of thing from the thing that they are known for, right? But if you get into the multiple hundreds of millions or the billions of dollars, it's like 90% of the time it is not related to their core craft of being an actor or a musician. So if we take Dr. Dre, right? He is not at his level of wealth from his music. It's from Beats by Dre selling it to Apple for $3 billion. Right. Right? Or—

So his music career was just a— that was just a publicity stunt for the— Well, it's real.

Not realizing that once you have this attention, you can translate it into a business that's potentially way bigger. Another example of this in the Hollywood side is Ryan Reynolds, where he's getting paid, you know, who knows what, $1 million to do a TV commercial or something. He's like, great, I show up for a day or 2 days, we shoot, I get paid $1 million, this is fantastic. But it sort of begs the question where you're like, well, hold on, if this is worth $1 million to you as a brand, to pay me, like what are you actually making off of? It has to be, like we all know it has to be more than $1 million. Is it $1.1 million? Is it $5 million? Is it $10 million? Is it more? What is that attention that Ryan is able to direct to something actually worth? And he went out and he was like, let's find out in the free market. Right? And so he went and bought into 2 companies, right? Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile. And he said, "All right, I'm going to— I think that one of the best in the world at marketing, right? He has this production company called Maximum Effort and we're going to produce all our own commercials. We're going to go all in on this." And I mean, they built both of them into massive companies and MidGlobal— or so first Aviation Gin exited for $600 or $700 million, right? And Ryan had a really meaningful stake in it. And then also Just last year, Mint Mobile exited for $1.3 billion. Incredible. And I posted a story about it online, like explaining how it all worked, and someone replied and was like, "Yeah, but Ryan only owned 30% of that." I was like, "Fair enough. Like, poor guy. He only cleared, you know, he only got $400 million or something like that out of it." And if you look at all these examples, there are people who have taken that attention and directed it somewhere else, right? So giving a really like a traditional creator example, there's a blogger and content creator named Mark Sisson, and he wrote a blog called Mark's Daily Apple in the like health and wellness and like paleo space. And so in like 2013, 2014, I think he was about maybe 100,000 subscribers, which at the time was a giant email list. And what he did is I think he was making about $1 to $2 million a year off of that. Which 100,000 subscribers, 1 or 2, you know, again, like now that is amazing but also a little commonplace, right? Like it's not so out of the ordinary. Then like it was pretty remarkable. He was one of the biggest. But if you look at that, the attention that he has, what's the highest ROI place he could direct it? And he started, you know, realizing that people were asking him about not just the recipes that he was putting out for like avocado oil mayonnaise, right? Or some of these other things that— salad dressing that matched the paleo diet. People were saying, "Hey, will you actually, like, I just want to buy this." And so what he ended up doing is starting a company called Primal Kitchen, which is selling these products. Using the audience, he's able to meet minimum order quantities, right? He knows he could sell enough that he can pursue this. He's not trying to start it from scratch. And so he can launch that. The other thing that it lets you do, I'm just imagining how these conversations played out. What the email list lets you do is get into traditional distribution methods, right? Because you're not gonna sell that much salad dressing on the internet, right? You need to sell it in Whole Foods or other grocery stores. And so what a creator can do is like talk to the buyer at one of these grocery stores and say, "Hey, will you carry this?" And they're like, "I don't know, is it any good? Do people want to buy it?" And you're like, "We think it's great." It's like, "Well, yeah, of course you do." So you convince them, "Hey, do a test run in one store." They're like, "All right, we're gonna run it in one store." We'll see how it goes. And then I like to imagine that Mark was like, "Cool, that sounds great. Just which store, by the way?" And they're like, "Oh, we're gonna do this one store in Austin." He's like, "Sweet." Goes to his email list, you know, says, "Select everybody who is within 50 miles of Austin." Yeah. "Send them an email and say, 'Hey, great news. Whole Foods is now carrying Primal Kitchen products. Do me a huge favor, go buy it.'" Yeah. Go back to the conversation with the buyer from Whole Foods later and be like, "Hey, how'd the test go?" And they're like, "It sold out completely." Monk's like, "No, really?" And they're like, "Yeah." And, you know, the buyer is like, "So we're gonna run some tests in more stores." Monk's like, "That's perfect. By the way, which stores?" You know? And you can repeat this process because you have attention to drive into these traditional markets. And so then what happens from there is you're able to create like almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the more sales that this is getting, the more a store is like, "Hey, let's take it from the middle of the shelf and put it on end cap." Totally. Right? Put it in more stores, which drives more sales, which then they're saying like, hey, Whole Foods started this and rolled it out a bunch, so let's go to Kroger, let's go to, you know, carry these lines.

Becomes, yeah, this like snowball effect.

Right. But it takes something to kickstart that. Yeah. And so what's interesting is Mark ended up building that company and selling it 2 years later to Kraft Foods for $200 million. So if you think He's making $1 to $2 million a year off of the audience. And then you're asking, is that the highest ROI place to direct it? Right? He's selling digital products, advertising, affiliates, very traditional things. And it's like, well, it turns out that was not the highest ROI place for that attention.

Yeah.

Right? So he created 100 years worth of revenue in 2 years by going a different direction. Oh my gosh. The other thing for any tax nerds, the original business is Ordinary income.

Mm-hmm.

Long-term capital gains. Mm. Right? So he's paying half the taxes on it.

Oh my gosh.

And so that's the thing that I'm obsessed over is creators are the best in the world at capturing attention. And so where should you direct it?

So this is fascinating. I've been listening to your excellent podcast where you really dive into these ideas, the stories, the case studies. But to be perfectly honest, I really wanted to get some free coaching from Nathan. I am super open about all my numbers. It's something that's always been very important to me. I know it's important to you. It's where I do some of my best learning because people can see what's actually happening in my business. And it's funny because I love all these stories and examples. They're so inspiring, so motivating. But the contrast between that and my day-to-day life sometimes feels really extreme. We have 2 young kids, a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old. Often, I know, I know you know what that's like. Often the house feels like a battlefield. We're in that kind of post-pandemic slump that a lot of creators have experienced. So just to make this very concrete, at the peak of the pandemic, 2021, we did $3 million in revenue, which was like, I mean, everything before that is negligible. It would just explode it like 10, 20, 30x. I don't even know, probably 30x. I was a solopreneur before, but then we, you know, like so many creators thought that line would just keep going, right? And so I started hiring a lot. So as the pandemic ended, 2022, we did $2 million in revenue, which is still, you know, doesn't sound like a catastrophic drop, but profit dropped like over 90%. Just basically wiped out our profit because of the cost of labor essentially. Labor is like 80 to 90% of our costs. Yep. So 2022, we barely eked out a profit, maybe like $100,000. This year, 2023, we're probably gonna do more or less what we did last year. $2 million revenue, barely any, maybe a little bit of profit. So we basically flatlined. And we're working hard. I mean, I'm not sitting back. I'm like throwing everything I can at this just to stay even. I have no free time. I can't really work anymore. I don't feel like I can hire anyone because there's no profit. So I feel like I have no doorway, no next step to start to build that leverage that you're talking about. At the same time, one more, one more data point, we have this amazing audience. We have 130,000 30,000 subscribers on ConvertKit, 50% open rate. So people love us, they're opening our contents, they're getting huge value. I don't know how to square these different things. I feel kind of like you said, like 125,000, 130,000 raving fans could support a much larger business, at least a more profitable one. What are some of the things you would look at or the questions you would ask?

[Speaker:NATHAN_BARRY] So the first thing I'd say in that is that short-term cash flow and long-term enterprise value are often at odds with each other. So cash flow being how much money you're bringing in, in a given, you know, month or year that you can actually, you know, use to spend on expenses or, you know, take home as profit. And then enterprise value being what is this business worth if it was sold. Not to say that you have to sell it, but there's a reason that investors value certain types of businesses in certain ways. And so if you pay attention to that, it's important to understand even if you don't plan to sell. So ConvertKit is actually my method of following this billion-dollar creator playbook, right? I started selling digital products, so I was making about $200,000 to $250,000 a year selling ebooks and courses back in 2013, 2012, 2013. And then when I tackled this like problem of email, it ended up You know, taking that same audience and using it to grow ConvertKit. Now ConvertKit at this point is valued at $320 million.

Amazing.

That's $40 million a year in revenue. And so I have a long but clear path to get it to a billion-dollar valuation, right? I know that if I can get to $100, $120 million in revenue over the next, say, 5 years, that'll be a billion-dollar business.

Wow.

But there's been a ton of time in there. That we have not taken home any profits, right? There was a big dip in profits, you know, and, and take-home pay to be able to do that. Okay. The other thing that I would say is, well, so going back, expect that dip, right? And I think you're experiencing some of that now. The other thing is that it will probably take an entirely different product in order to reach a different scale.

Interesting. Say more about that.

So I don't think it's possible for me in a design and development, like, education business to reach $100 million in revenue, $50 million in revenue. It has been done, right? If we think of Lynda.com, teaching Excel workshops, right, in person, and they actually went online. Someone the other day talked about the creator economy. Yeah. Yeah, how the creator economy really started in 2020. And I was like, What do you— You know.

No, that's when VCs started calling it that.

Paying attention to that. But it was interesting talking about an inflection point in that. And I was talking to my friend Todd Herman about this and he was talking about some of these big inflection points, right? Like 2008 was a huge time for a bunch of creators coming on. 2020 was a huge time for a bunch of creators. But he was like, go back. 2001 was a huge time. Lynda.com came out of September 11th.

Really?

Yeah, because what happened is she was teaching Excel workshops in person.

I didn't know there was a person called Linda. Yeah.

No, Linda is a billion-dollar creator.

Oh my gosh. Right?

And so she was teaching Excel workshops and then that business died. All public, all speaking, these giant like business conferences that were broad, all of that completely died when all travel ended after September 11th and the economy crashed. And all of that. And so she took her workshops online and then she expanded it from her workshops to other people's workshops and on from there. And then I should know the numbers, but exited to LinkedIn for at least a billion, $2 billion, somewhere right in there.

Did she build— because there's underlying technology, there's a platform there, right? Did she build that technology herself or just sell it and then they built that technology?

They built the technology. Right. It was a full course and learning platform. Okay. Where they were hosting it, you know, Udemy I think was a competitor and all of that. So they ended up just reaching a massive scale, especially in the corporate training world.

Right.

Where there's a huge amount of money being spent.

Right.

So often the, if you have this audience intention, often it's going to require a pivot to a different type of product. Right? Like Lynda is not going to reach that valuation.

With Excel courses.

With Excel courses. It's not going to happen.

This is fascinating to me. Okay. So I want to dive into this because it's something I've thought about. But then this speaks to another one of your principles, which is you have to build more than a personal brand. Yeah. Which I understand. I believe. And I've kind of tried several times to go beyond my personal brand. But it's really tough because it's like— I'll give you one example. We've considered going into corporate training. We have quite a bit of evidence that Building a Second Brain, which is my book— you can see it back there somewhere. I probably should have a copy to hold— is a new approach to productivity. Many, many, most people that use it are using it at work in their companies. A lot of potential to go into corporate training, but I am not personally interested in corporate training. In fact, when I even— like the corporate world, this is why I became a creator. The corporate world drains me of energy so fast that even talking about it, I'm like tired. So in theory, like I could hire someone, but I can't yet afford. It's like the chicken and an egg. I can't yet afford to hire someone to go after that. Without the cash flow. So how do you, in fact, I'd like to know for you too, you can't be personally interested in all the initiatives that the company takes on. How do you, how, or how would you for someone like me that's much smaller think about making a pivot to something that you're not personally passionate about?

[Speaker:NATHAN_BARRY] Yeah, so I would think about two things. One, you know, you're talking about making that hire, which maybe that's a really expensive hire, maybe it's not. Maybe there's a way to do it on contingency or commission to test the theory, right? Knowing will this work work in corporate training is a hypothesis that we can test. And so how are we, like, how are we going to do that? We're going to do pitches to these 25 organizations, or we're going to get in here, you know, and partner with someone who will sell into it. So basically our options are like full-time employee, you know, an employee working on commission, right? Because that's not going to cost you anything out of pocket initially. And then the other one would be licensing in some way, right? Who's an organization that already is very, very good at this, has that distribution channel, and you can sell into it. In these ways. So I would look at it like that.

Hmm.

But I like to take these ideas that are in my head of like, okay, I can always do corporate training. Maybe I want to, maybe I don't. But I want to take those ideas and pin them down and say, I actually have a hypothesis that this could work well in corporate training. How would I test that hypothesis? And then try to find a way to do that, like get that out there. And then you can forever be like, yep, that would work. We'll see if I want to That is a playbook now that I could run. Or you've tested it and you go like, cool, I can forever get that idea out of my head because I don't believe that my hypothesis was accurate.

Interesting. So what I'm taking from that is to sort of instead of, okay, we're gonna marshal all these resources, create a 3-year timeline, all this stuff, you do a series of small experiments, test hypotheses, validate. And it's interesting, commission or contingency or something that is not full-time employment and also not a contractor. I guess I just have no experience with— would that be like a commission salesperson or someone like that?

Yeah, something like that would work. Or if you're working with an organization that's already selling, right? There are people who are selling this training. I don't know that industry, but there have to be people who have these like many distribution points into corporations. And so talk to them.

Interesting.

Now, I'll add a caveat to the test. There's a lot of people who are saying like, test this. Look at the data, you know, what's your hypothesis? And on one hand, I love that. And then on the other, I believe that most things in business, it's not that they can't be tested, it's maybe almost that they shouldn't be tested. And what I mean by that is if you like put something out, a test kind of implies that you should be hands-off with it, right? Like we put something in our little petri dish, we're like, okay, what happens? But we don't mess with it. But in business, everything is so difficult that I believe it requires like a force of nature level of effort to like will something into existence.

Yes.

So you could easily test corporate training and then be like, okay, yeah, that didn't work. Yeah. Never mind.

Yeah.

And someone else might later come in and say, I'm going to make this happen no matter what. I'm going to, you know, grind through this for years and years and years. ConvertKit, it took 2 years to get to $2,000 a month in revenue. Right? So if you were to test it, you'd be like, nope, not worth doing, shut it down.

Yeah.

American Rookie now makes $3 million a month in revenue. And so it requires that level of effort. And so you have to find that balance between little tests and saying like, I'm going to will this into existence.

I'm so glad you said that because that is my experience as a creator is like everything that I've done that has worked is because I personally was that force of nature. Right. I just believed in it in the app, like on faith basically. I mean, my cohorts that I, that until very recently was the main business, the first 9 cohorts weren't really profitable. And then the 10th, it was like when the pandemic hit, it was like hitting a spark. But then, but then that's kind of the concern I have with corporate training is like I know that if I dedicated myself to it, I could make it work. I would just find a way. I would just keep testing hypotheses, keep trying things, find a way in. That's what I do. But the only way I know how to do that is, like I said, throwing myself in it, you know, completely. But you're kind of talking about a balance between those force of nature mode versus iteration and testing mode.

Yeah. And it really depends on what the goal is, right? And so actually maybe let's get clear on that for a second and put a framework around this so that people can think about the types of businesses. So you talked about build more than a personal brand, right? So there are 3. Why don't you write some of these down and I'll talk over them if you want to write down. The first principle is that you have to build more than a personal brand. And the reason that this is important is that it has to be something that's sellable, right? It has to be able to scale beyond you. So even like I was studying tons of examples of billion-dollar creator businesses, and what stood out to me is all of them were more than a personal brand, even the one Let's use an example, Kylie Cosmetics, right? So Kylie Jenner is on the COVID of Forbes magazine and people are arguing over like, you know, first self-made billionaire.

Oh yeah.

The first self-made female billionaire. And they're like back and forth, like, is she actually a billionaire? Was she self-made? They're like quibbling over all of these details. I'm like, who cares if she's worth $950 million versus a billion? One thing that she did is she built a business that was in a totally different space. So more than a personal brand is interesting. Like her name is on it, Kylie Cosmetics, but it like is investible, sellable, and all that. The other thing that she did brings into point number 2, which is you need to sell products, not attention. So if you think about, you know, the Kardashians, right? They all have this attention. They're getting, I think I heard a story that, you know, Kim Kardashian would get paid $1 million for an Instagram post. Sounds like a pretty damn good business. But in that, you know, you could stack that up, you can make a ton of money off of that. But then why is Kylie, as one of the less famous members of the family, making the most money? And the reason is because she went here. She's like, I'm not going to sell attention. I'm going to build this products business and scale. Now, it's fascinating to think $1 million for an Instagram post versus a billion-dollar cosmetics brand. Like, that is a wild difference. I don't think people realize the difference in scale between those two numbers. No, they don't. The joke that I like is what's the difference between $1 million and $1 billion? About a billion.

Right?

If you think about it. I think that 1 million seconds, I'm gonna get this wrong, but it's something like—

I've heard this, yeah.

I think it's like 13 days. Yeah. And 1 billion seconds is like 33 years.

Yeah. It's like completely counterintuitive.

Like absolutely wild.

Yeah.

And so if you think about the scale, right, that you're able to do. It's night and day. And actually, I think Kim Kardashian is fascinating in this world because now she's running a private equity fund where she's buying businesses and then pointing her attention at it and scaling. Like, she understands these very, very well. But Kylie was the one that really did it first.

So it's funny because I almost— this one I understand, or at least I have a taste of because courses are more than 90% of our revenue. And people can buy that, especially now that it's a self-paced course. People can buy it whenever they want. Also, it's funny, in the world of creators, this is gonna sound strange, but I don't have like an Ali Abdaal audience. I'm not the best at creating the most massive audiences. My audience tends to grow kind of very linearly because it's kind of niche, kind of nerdy, kind of technical. And so I've never been able to make money with ads. I just never had scale for that. I've had to build products. But then the reason I— so it's funny because we could just create courses all year long. Courses and more courses. There's an infinite amount of content. But I'm kind of like, do I really want to just create courses upon courses, mountains of courses? Which is another one of your principles. I don't know if it belongs here, but it's like, it's something like fully capitalize on what you've already done rather than new thing, new thing, which is what I see so many creators doing. They don't even eke out 1% of the potential of something before they move on to something else, and I don't want to do that.

Yeah. So I talked about this in the forms of skyscrapers versus strip malls, right? And so if you think about in a rural area, right, you have the strip mall of all these little stores and businesses, each one doing a small amount of revenue or has a small amount of value, right? And a lot of people will say like, you know, especially someone who's like, oh, I'm a serial entrepreneur, and they're building all of these different businesses.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And what I think is you either haven't found one that's worth doubling down on or you are so distractible that you're not willing to stay focused. And so instead, what if you got like 100 times more space in that one building by building a skyscraper on that same footprint?

I like that.

And so I got rid of a bunch of other products that I had and was selling that made money because I, like, ConvertKit is the skyscraper that I'm building. And so everything that I do has to go back into growing that business.

That's fascinating. I love that. I love that. I mean, this is why I keep coming back to the thing that I've already done.

Right.

Building a second brain. It's like the leverage, like doing one, a little more on that, putting a little more effort into that, the leverage is so much vaster than anything else I could do.

Right.

It's like its own little mini empire. It's its own ecosystem.

Yeah. So there's a few things in here. There's a third principle that I want to get to and that is that all these businesses have recurring or repeat purchases. And they're a little bit different in that, right? Of, I say recurring or repeat, right? A software subscription is truly recurring, whereas a salad dressing is a repeat purchase. I was thinking that, and I went through all these examples, that almost every single one had either recurring or repeat purchases. And there was one that bothered me. It was Beats by Dre that didn't, right? It was a one-time purchase. Though I guess like we lose and break headphones all the time, so like you buy them more often. But then another friend, Dan Runcie, who runs Trapital, which is like a music business newsletter, I had him on the podcast and he talked about how the acquisition was really only half about the headphones and half about the Beats by Dre, the music streaming service they'd started. Right. Which became the precursor to Apple Music.

Right.

So when Apple bought them for $3 billion, they were going for a recurring purchase of the subscription. And so this is something that I'm curious about in your business is like, so you have more than a personal brand. I'd say you're halfway to having more than a personal brand. You definitely, like, you're all in on products rather than attention. But do you have recurring or repeat purchases?

No. No, we don't. So we launched a membership, a subscription membership. It's like $500 a year or something. It's basically for people who take our course or read our books or whatever and want to be part of a community. That has one event per week all year long. So we support it, we invest in it. The thing I've run into in that, it's like on podcasts and things, people are always just like, oh, just make it recurring. Whatever you do, just make it recurring. But it's like, it's like I've been studying community-based subscription, you know, membership-based businesses. It's hard. The standard has gotten so high for the value that's provided, for how much engagement, for how passionate people are. I don't know how to— basically what makes me hesitate from investing more in that is I don't know how to make it much better without people's time. And again, I run into that same problem of I don't really feel like I can do— you know, we don't even have like a full-time community manager. That feels like too much of an expense.

Well, I mean, first there's lots of things that you can do. There's nothing to say that that full-time community manager has to be US-based or something like that, right? A lot of these businesses find leverage in different ways of hiring someone in Latin America or the Philippines or— and expanding from there, right? So there's a lot of options in that world, but community is one of the, like, in these examples, if we're trying to go for something 10x or 100x what you're at now, right? So if we're, if we use the barometer of this business must get to $100 million in revenue, I don't think a community is going to do that. No. Because, and like, look out there. How many communities do you see that are $100 million in revenue? I don't even know.

There's so few that are even a fraction. Like, they tend to be run almost like hobbies. Like, there's some person who is very extroverted that is just like personally keeping it afloat.

Yeah. I push back on that a little bit because I think that like Rachel Rogers, my co-host on the Billion Dollar Creator Podcast, you know, her community, she was sharing last night, right? The community by itself is $3 million a year.

Really?

Yeah. And then she's got coaching, coaching certification. Right? There's all this stuff. So her business, which is a similar model or could be a similar model to yours, is about a $10 million a year business.

Really?

Off of about the same size audience. Really? Yeah. And so now she's trying to figure out the 10 to 100 million leap. Right? And that, like, there's some, she's got a lot of ideas in there and she's exploring and testing hypotheses on that.

Right?

But her business, is, you know, a core monthly membership. She calls it the club. And that's— I think she's got maybe 2,500 members that are paying for that. I can't remember the price point. And then inside of the club, she has coaches and she needs coaches trained in her method. And so she then also has a coaching certification that people go through. And so she has a flywheel in that, right, of she is finding members in her club who want to you know, they kind of rise above and they want to be coaches. Then she's making money teaching them her methodology, exactly what works. And she's very revenue and results driven. And so like I've met a lot of people in her community and the number of people I meet who are making $1 million a year off their business is way higher than I've seen in any other community. Really? Yeah. And so like her methods are really, really good.

It's a community based on entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship. Yeah. Her business is called Hello 7, as in hello 7 figures. And so in that, as she's having the best people in her community who want to be coaches, they're paying to go through a certification which they could use outside, you know, in the business world, or they can also, you know, be a coach in that community that she's paying, right? And then she also has like a, you know, a higher-end mastermind where she's helping them like scale their businesses at another level. So I think those are kind of the 3 main products that she has is the recurring community, the coaching certification, and then the higher-end training mastermind and like coaching practice.

Interesting. That's something else.

That's $10 million a year.

So it is possible for this model that we have to scale to $10 million. There are examples.

Yeah.

It's having almost these like other product lines, not just like one thing to buy, but multiple entry points.

Yeah, and so in that, I think we're looking at what step functions do we want to reach, right? Like if the goal is $10 million, that is the path that I would take. If the goal is $100 million, we've got to take a different, a different path entirely. And I think one thing that's helpful is maybe just drawing some examples on here is thinking about average revenue per user per year. Right, so I'm going to use an acronym here. So ARPU, average revenue per user. And then I think about this in terms of per year, right? So let's take James Clear as an example. He has 2.5 million subscribers. It's a massive business. The book has sold 15 million copies. He is absolutely printing money in his business. But let's say he woke up tomorrow and he absolutely had to, for whatever reason, he's like, oh, I I'm making up numbers, I don't know exactly, you know, instead of running a $10 million a year business, I must run a $100 million a year business or greater. So how do we want to tackle that? And I think there's ways that we could do it, right? So if we think of like different options, so if we wanted a low ARPU business with a lot of customers, I would build Calm for habits. So Calm is a meditation app, right? We're going to have, we can sell this to a lot of people, 2.5 million people, a bunch of them can buy it. What is the app that is going to really drive people to adopt their habits? Remember, it's a product, we're not selling attention. It's more than a personal brand, right? It's going to be like the Clear Method or something like that, right? But it has to be a recurring or repeat purchase. The worst thing you could do is say like, "Hey, I'm gonna sell this as a $5 one-time purchase or $20 one-time purchase." Like, no, no, no. Total waste of time. But $100 a year, right? That makes sense. We could do the math on this, but you'd have to sell a crazy number of these, but it's doable. Now, if we wanted another business, let's say we want a medium ARPU product.

Say a little bit more about, this is actually a question I've had is like, so like we're doing $2 million a year on 125,000 subscribers. That's something like $20 to $25 per subscriber that we're generating. How do I benchmark that? How do you know if that's a low, medium, or high? Like are there guidelines? Are there standards to know, you know, where that falls?

Yeah, that's a good point. There's probably actually a difference So ARPU is a term that comes mostly from like the software world, right? So ConvertKit has, we charge anything from $9 a month at the very cheapest thing we charge for up to, you know, the James Clear of the world and all that are paying, you know, $5,000 a month. But we average out at like $65 a month across 50,000 customers. Okay. Now what you're pointing to is an average revenue per subscriber.

Per subscriber, yes.

Right? And because you have all of the free people.

Yes.

And if we did that for ConvertKit, we'd be I think there's like 500,000 free accounts. Wow. And so it'd be driven much lower. Yeah. What I would be thinking about in this model or for this example is what's your average revenue per customer?

Per customer, which I don't know off the top of my head.

Yeah. And public math is hard on the fly. So $25 per subscriber per year is a pretty good subscriber value, right? That there's nothing about that that jumps out at me like, oh, we should be trying to get that up. That seems solid. But I think running through a couple of these examples, I'm going to throw a per year on here just because it's so, so important. And this is the thing, you know, like this part of it is what we have to change in your business. So here's the problem. I know you're acutely aware of this, but I will emphasize it just for everyone watching. January 1st, you have no revenue, right? Right. Yeah. And so your revenue, let's see if I can draw boxes, right? Each year is looking like this, right? Of whatever it is spiking to for each year. And, you know, year 1, year 2, year 3. Well, year 4 starts and your revenue is there and you're building up throughout the year. In my business, because it's recurring revenue, I'm like here and in year 4 You know, I'm already up here and I'm saying, hey, where can I go in year 4? Because it's recurring.

It's so powerful.

Now I have churn in that, right? So churn is whoever is canceling every month. And it can be— there's all kinds of things in the growth that are hard to overcome that. But you're not going to grow this business beyond the point that it is now without recurring revenue. So now as we're chasing recurring revenue, we have to decide where we want to fit in the market. So if James, you know, we're building Calm for Habits, $100 a year, that's one option. What if we did like a, there's a product called My Body Tutor.

Oh yeah, I used it.

Yeah, another one called Noom, right? Why don't you explain really quick what My Body Tutor is?

It's basically like a workout. It's a workout app. Gives you different options for workouts. You can like filter, sort them, save favorites, stuff like that.

Yeah, so then they also, I believe, have a product where they do coaching.

Oh yeah, you can use it basically as a library of content or you can add on like a like a virtual, you know, personal trainer.

Yeah. And so I think the virtual personal trainer, I think they have two packages and it's something like maybe $200 a month is the cheaper one and maybe $400 or $500 a month is the more expensive one. So they'll do the virtual personal trainer, but then they'll also like really get in on the diet side of things. And so you'll be like texting with your coach to say like, here's my food plan for the day, right? Here's exactly. And so it has accountability built in. But they're able to charge quite a bit more, right? So $200 a month is $2,400 a year, $500 is $6,000 a year, right? So now, you know, say we're $2K to $5K. So that's significantly more. The number of customers that we need is a fraction, you know, as we've made this jump. You're already playing in this territory, right? You're not selling a cheap mass market product. But just for the sake of argument, what if we jumped into a different world and we said, "All right, I want to get to $100 million a year and I want to do it with the least number of customers." Okay, maybe we're building a product. Again, I'm not sure, I'm speculating on what people might want to buy from James, but maybe we want to do a high-end performance lab, right? And we're targeting $50,000 to $100,000 a year that people are paying. Well, now we really don't need that many, right? And so, okay, so let's put some math to this, to the number of customers that we need in this sense. So I'm not going to try to do math off the top of my head, but if we're doing $100 million in revenue, right, this one is simple math. But in that case, we're going to need 1 million customers, right? Here, grab another, another color and jump in. So 1 million customers right here. If let's say that this one averages out Let's do red. Red, that sounds good. Let's say that this one, what do we want to pick? Let's say $3,000, right? So again, we're just very simply $100 million on the calculator divided by $3,000 that we're making per year. We need 33,000 customers right here. And then again, very simply for round numbers, $100 million divided by $50,000, 2,000 customers. And so you think in these terms, these are very, very different businesses, right? We need a million people continuing to pay us, right? So we're gonna have churn, like top of funnel needs to be huge. But if you think about this, there are completely different ways to monetize your audience. Now the other thing is they don't have to be mutually exclusive, right? You can, like, you could actually do both of these. This could potentially be the upsell in this. Right. What kinds of things is this sparking for you as you're thinking about your business?

Yeah, it's interesting because part of the problem is having so many options. We could go in so many different directions. We're so flexible and have so many different skills. You know, we've already talked about corporate training. We've talked about like a certification is an option. We actually see significant interest in that. And software, like in some ways software is kind of almost the obvious one because our courses are about software. We do, you know, what we're teaching is how to use software more effectively but how to do that on other people's, you know, platforms. So, maybe that's, you know, something worth considering too is creating an app, creating the ultimate note-taking app or something like that.

Okay. So, I love to brainstorm these different ideas. And go through a few of them. You said corporate training, software, certification.

Yes.

Any others?

That we've mentioned? No. I mean, there's more courses.

Yeah.

There's also—

I think more courses is going to get us there. Okay.

So let's just not even include that one. One thing we've considered is like Notion templates has kind of taken off. So creating products in terms of like templates or starter kits or something like that for Notion or even other other platforms.

Yep. I'm gonna put more courses on there because it depends on our goals, on our goal. And there are course businesses that have gotten really massive, and it's important to study them. You know, we hear about like platforms like Udemy or Lynda, but then even in the corporate training space or in a specific niche, there's a business called Pluralsight. Let's see, there's a business called Pluralsight, and they are massive. I think they are even publicly traded. And that's, you know, in the developer and tech world. And so often you're going to look for more in this niche space. You're going to find some businesses that you're like, really? That is that big? So I think these are all reasonable ideas. And there's two different lenses I want to put on it in a second. But what is the most ridiculous idea that you could think of that would never work? Or like you maybe wouldn't want to do, but something that just sounds silly even to throw out there. I think it's this one. Software?

I mean, yeah, creating a note-taking app or any software feels like impossible.

Okay.

It's just so far from my home base. I'm not technical in any way.

Right.

I mean, in fact, I hear about, you know, the inside stories of what it takes to build Notions and Obsidians and Evernotes and it like—

Right.

The code bases to manage, the technical debt, the salaries you have to pay, all of it just feels was totally daunting to me. Despite being, like I said, in some ways so many people tell us like, "Instead of teaching how to use Todoist and Things and Evernote and all these things, just make the app that we—" It's kind of like the Primal Kitchen example. Make the thing that you're saying is the best and I swear I'll just buy it from you.

Right. Yeah. So, okay, this is interesting. What— this is where it comes back to the goals, right? So if we are— Today, right, we're at $2 million. Let's say that we also have $10 million and then $100 million. Courses, Notion templates, those are $2 million offerings. Or say there are ways we're going to tweak, we're going to optimize, we can get to $4 million, right? Corporate training, certification, maybe a very different style of courses, but I think really corporate training and certification that's a $10 million business, right? I can see, you know, if you copy Rachel Rodgers' playbook, right? That's gonna get you here. I think the only thing on here, actually I think there's two on here that have potential for $100 million business. Corporate training and software. And so the question is how much do you want? Like, are we just trying to make this leap? Yeah. Like, I can't really even fathom.

This might as well be $100 trillion.

Yeah.

My imagination can't, I can't expand that far currently. This I can kind of, I know people that are doing this. I've, you know, gotten closer, a little closer to this, so I can kind of envision it.

Yeah, we could list out a bunch of, like we did a research project and let's say, okay, let's find 25 businesses that have made this leap, right? We could do that. Yeah. And you would ask, you know, that's one of those things you'd ask someone like Rachel, okay, who did you follow to do that, right? And you'd go through it. And that's different than something like a Ramit where he's going off of a much bigger audience, you know, and in more generalist courses, that sort of thing. So I think someone like Rachel is a better fit. Okay. So I would, like this, that leap, we're trying to 5x the business, I'd go here. Really? Education. Yes, education community.

So it's funny because I always just think of this as one path. You just have to go along the path so you get there. But you think of it almost more like where you're aiming is completely different trajectories.

Yes. I'm just making sure we have community on there because we have to fix the recurring revenue problem, right? Like just for stress levels, budgeting, and everything else, right? If you don't want a launch to go poorly, there's too many businesses that have gone there. I know a lot of businesses that, you know, scaled to 25, 50 employees or more and then found that like a launch didn't go well or they're really counting on that. Even like Vermeet Sethi, right? He built a massive, massive business and then he was like, I don't want the, like the high revenue, low margin that he'd gotten to. Right. And so he simplified, right? They stopped doing custom software. They stopped doing all this. They, you know, they're going off the shelf tools and they have a small, like a, a small team compared to their revenue because it's a much more comfortable business to run. So in this, to your aiming question, right? If we, you know, map this out as like, obviously these tiers are not, not to scale, but a lot of people think like, I'm going to grow linearly into, you know, from $2 million to $100 million. And it's really important that it is step functions. These are, this is a different business. Than this, than this. Interesting. There are people who have scaled that, but it caps out. But this never scales to this without changing the business model. Interesting. It just does not happen. Interesting. In my essay, The Ladders of Wealth Creation— I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I have like the shape of earnings section of you get linear, you get step function— or sorry, stair step, linear, and then exponential. Right. This requires an exponential growth curve, right? Like the, it all has to work in there. So what I would do if I were running your business and is I would aim here and then have a clear path, a place in my, you know, in note-taking and all of that where I'm writing down all of these ideas. Because the thing is, because this is stressful right now, I don't think you have the brain space to tackle this. No. But like if this is working really well and you have a lot more resources, audience will grow and then you can go another place. So I would be writing down, okay, if I were to build my dream tool, here's exactly what would be in it. You know, I'd be logging all of those notes. Interesting. And I just wouldn't execute on them right now. Huh. And I would be focused entirely on the other sides of it. So the things that I would do is I would launch a community that is paid for on a recurring basis. Right? So that you have that cash flow and that stability. And I would try to fund basically all of your operations off of this. Because it's going to be very predictable. You're going to have churn. Right. Everyone's like, oh, recurring revenue is amazing. And it is. But churn is also like a very frustrating thing. And it always gets outplayed. But run the business off of the revenue from the community. I would launch a certification, have those certified coaches you know, helping in the community, but then also have a program. It's not a job board. It's basically where businesses, individuals, organizations can come in and say, "Do this for me." Right?

"Set it all up and coach me through the process." That's almost like a new idea, like a, almost like a marketplace, like a services marketplace. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, it is. I'm trying to not use the word marketplace. Let me think about why. A marketplace implies these are all, it's not they're independent contractors, but a marketplace implies that I'm trying to choose the best person and you're just facilitating the transaction. What I want is someone who, an implementer in your method, right? So it has like more endorsement behind it, right?

Because you certified this person. Right. Credibility, authority.

Yeah. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna say coaches. This might not be the term that you use, but this is where someone comes, or implementers, right? That actually might be a better, better term. Though implementer, another problem with it, that implies a one-time thing. Right. Right. You actually want it where this is a recurring service as well. And so now if you're coming into someone's business, like, so we just did this where we paid someone to come in and clean up our whole Notion setup, right? And Hap would pay $5,000 for someone to do that. And, you know, it's like if it's following a specific methodology, then I'm going to make sure that I'm hiring a coach or an implementer from the list of people that you said. And you could do it. I guess the difference is the marketplace is that you're saying, here's 50 people, you choose what to do. Let me give you an example, a different example. I use an executive coaching firm called Reboot. Oh yeah, I know them. Yeah. And I think they're absolutely amazing. I've paid them for years. They charge something like $2,800 per month per coach. Right? So I pay them $16,000 a month, I think, for coaches for all of my executives. Oh, you have multiple coaches. Yeah. So I believe in them that much that like all of my executives—

$16K a month to this one company.

Wow. Now, so their process, they're not like, here are the Reboot certified coaches, go on there and choose the right person. And I'm like, well, okay, do I want Andy or Dan or, you know, what's the right fit? No, they have an onboarding process where you get on a call with them and they understand about your business and they get to know you and, you know, personality, what the fit is and all of that. And then they make a recommendation and they say, this is the coach that we think is the right fit for you.

So you have so much confidence in that recommendation.

Yeah. And so I'm saying, okay, let's say, let's work through this. You've got the certification, you now have all these coaches or implementers and they have different specialties. And so now I come to you and I'm like, hey, I need, I need the second brain implemented in ConvertKit. And you're like, okay, well, what's your experience level, right? With all of our principles. Okay. Either you have a lower experience level. So this type of coach, what type of business? Oh, you're in software. Okay. So it's narrowing down. Now it's going to be one of these three people. Okay, what time zone are you in? All that. And then you're saying, Nathan, this is the implementer that is the best for your business. Here's the price point, all of that. I'm not paying them separately, right? I'm paying you as the company and you are paying them. Right. Right? Or, you know, they could be still an independent contractor rather than a full-time employee. But that transaction is happening. The trust is all through you. And all of that. It's a very, very— it's a high price transaction and a very high trust transaction. Right. And so the combination of that, right, if we were to go back to the previous page, we're all the way up here in price point. And so that— oh, that's a big business. And now I'm like, I'm just getting excited thinking about it because I can just say like, I'm getting someone who's the right fit. You're not going to put someone on my project and supporting Ken Burkett, who is like, oh, I work with creators to help them, you know, creators who are early in their career to help them get organized. You might have coaches who that is their specialty, but I have confidence that you just assigned someone to me who was like, oh, I actually used to work in SaaS in a previous company. And I became obsessed with this and I love coaching and— Right, right.

That makes so much sense. So it's not just that you're sort of building blocks on top of each other, it's that they reinforce each other. Yeah. It's something else that I'm hearing. Ah, flywheel. That's where that comes in. Yeah.

So the things that we're doing, we're doing those 3 things. And we maintain the course, right? You need— the training is key, right? Because you need to be able to take people through all of this.

This is like the almost the just the doorway, the entry gateway that everyone has to pass through on the way to those things. Yeah. 4 Cs. It's like a new framework that you just invented.

Somehow we'll get corporate training in there. Oh yeah, 5 Cs. But this is really interesting because it plays into itself because you're going to, you know, the course and the community, you'll have to figure out the balance between these two things because they could take away from each other. They could cross-sell on a really nice, like they could be complementary or competitive. Since we're only using words with the start with C. But like, that's an interesting balance, you know, $2,500 for a course, $200 a month, you know, you got to figure out what the ongoing value delivery is or that kind of thing. But as you have that, you've got plenty of revenue coming in from there. The certification takes it up a level. This should be expensive. I think Rachel's certification is $25,000. Wow. I might be getting that wrong, but it's up there. Wow. Right. Because they're going through like another level of training. Right. Right. She has events just for her certified coaches. They can either take their knowledge and go out into the world and do their own thing, or they can train and coach through her system where she's providing lead flow. Right. Right. And so in that then of course you've got a new revenue stream. I see it.

I see these four. We're currently doing one of these things and starting to do this one, but I think that them reinforcing each other, actually making each other potentially easier and better is the key thing because otherwise you're just doing like we talked about before, spending more time, more effort, which just doesn't scale.

Right. Another thing, because this is the most important, remember if we go back to the three rules, we've got the one that we're not doing right now is the recurring recurring or repeat purchases, right? And so we have to have that in each part of it. And so with that, right, so we've got more than a personal brand, we're selling products and attention, we have to do recurring or repeat, but we have to do recurring or repeat purchases. And so in this, a very easy— let's see, one more— a very easy trap to fall into is that we'd say, "Oh, the community is our recurring or repeat purchase and the rest is one-time." Or we will take a placement fee for like matchmaking a coach to a business as a one-time thing. No, no, no, none of that, right? We're taking— we want to do recurring in every area of the business. Really? Maybe with the exception of the course, right? So, take the certification. Let's say it's $25,000 to get certified. Well, that's naturally a one-time thing. Uh-huh. But let's say that I get my stamp of certification and then now I'm out in the world. I decide, hey, I want to run my own practice entirely. Mm-hmm. But certified in the Second Brain methodology. Mm-hmm. So I paid that one time and now I never have to pay it again. Mm-hmm. That's not good. Mm-hmm. So instead, let's say that it's $25,000 one time. Mm-hmm. And then it is $5,000 a year. To maintain it, right? Or if you're coaching, that's if you're independent, right? If you're coaching through us, you don't need to pay the $5,000 a year to make it. Ah, interesting, right? And so then there's that balance. You don't have, like, if someone is sort of competing with you out in the marketplace, yeah, if they want to maintain their seal of approval and their recurring training, right, because you're improving the methodology and the tool, right? If they want to stay current, then they're still participating in the recurring training or if they want to, you know, go directly through your organization.

And they're making money from it, so there's a justification for the recurring nature of it.

And so then you're getting to the point where maybe you have 10 coaches internally and that's all going to depend on your top of funnel, how popular is the Second Brain methodology, how much deal flow is coming through here. And then you might have 25 or 50 or 100 that are actively marketing out here. Right? So even if, even if we only had 10 recurring at that $5,000 a year, well, that's $50,000. If we get to 100, that's $500,000 a year of people who are coming back in in that way. But that's the thing that I need you to focus on is that everything you do, you better have a damn good reason to not make one of these things recurring going forward.

I really like that. So it's recurring by default. Recurring by default, yes. Not as a special future thing that you're gonna do. Yes. Interesting. What I like about this too is it keeps me, you know, when I think about what I like spending my time doing, how I want to spend my days, which is a question I always ask, is I just love being immersed in ideas. I just I'm a kid in a playground of ideas. That's what makes me come alive. And that's something that has made me hesitant to do this or this. But with this sort of flywheel you've designed, the value that is being offered is exactly the value I know how to create, which is the constant stream of ideas and insights and metaphors and new innovations that I'm always coming up with just naturally.

Well, that's a hard thing about this billion-dollar creator idea is that often it requires something entirely different. Right, for Mark Sisson, running a food, you know, business is entirely different than running an information business. And that was the best way to achieve that scale. But you have to be excited about that, that growth. Whereas this is not a complete diversion. Now, it's also not gonna get us here. But let's play a game over time. Let's say 3 years from now, we're at $10 million a year, this is blended really well, you understand what's needed on a different level, and maybe you built some software that helps facilitate the coaching experience. And you're like, okay, software is hard, but it's not that hard. And now this starts to move into the thing you're like, I have no idea how to do that. And what's like using Mark as an example. Wait, you're going to manufacture food at scale and package and ship it? Like, that is an insane leap. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And he did it and there's plenty of people that have done it before. You can hire the right people and all that. But let's say you ease into it.

I want to ask about that though. For that leap there, say, you know, I just envisioned in my mind someone doing $10 million a year. They're relaxing at their freaking estate out in who knows where. They have the life, no constraints on their— lifestyle, their consumption, what do you find is typically the, what goes on in their brain that makes them think, no, I want to risk changing things, risk trying something new to go there?

Yeah, there's a big motivation question in there. For me personally, I absolutely love this and I love the mission of the company, right? For ConvertKit, it's we exist to help creators earn a living. So I believe in the product and I believe in the mission, right? It's almost my obligation to scale it and as much as possible. I also love just the game that we're playing. I also think that I'm looking for the personal growth, right? The CEO of ConvertKit at $5 million a year in revenue, you had the CEO of ConvertKit at $100 million a year in revenue. They're gonna have the same name, but they're gonna be different people. Yeah. So same name, same values, all of those things, very, very different skillset, resilience, operational style. And I'm excited for that personal growth. Interesting. And then the other thing, and one that I'm working through myself right now, is we can run into this trap of, okay, I have a bunch of problems and a bunch of work at $2 million or $10 million. Say $10 million. I'll get to this stage and it's very, very challenging. And so you're like, why would I want 10 times the work and 10 times the problems? Yes. And so we end up in this limiting place where we're like, I'm not even gonna go there. Like subconsciously it's like, please don't grow the business because that would be stressful.

Yes. I find myself doing that.

Yeah. I think it's really important.

Turning down opportunities because it would stress me out too much.

Yeah. And so the thing is a CEO has a few different jobs, you know, hiring, making sure there's enough money, setting the vision. I think you could summarize a lot of that in that a CEO's job, especially in the hiring, is to work themselves out of a job. Right? And so you were gradually doing less and less. My friend Tim Grohl was talking about how at every stage of the business, right, every time you double the business, the CEO has to cut what they do in half. Interesting. And that one is the hardest for me personally because I'm like taking on more things. Yeah. But if you think in terms of flywheels, your job is to like plan out a flywheel and maybe get it started. And then, you know, you've got someone on your team who's making accountability that keeps spinning. And runs it. But this business should take less of your time and be less effort than this business. That's just wild.

Yeah. That is a wild idea.

And so like Rachel is someone who's so good at this, right? We were hanging out, we were on a flight Wednesday this week and I was sending a message to the team and she goes, "You have Slack on your phone?" And I was like, "Yeah, why?" Well, why wouldn't I? And she's like, "Oh, interesting." And I was like, "You don't?" And she's like, "No, of course not. Why would I be involved in that day-to-day level in the business? I'm going to call the president of my company and talk through strategy or make sure they know about this idea, or I'm going to write up a bunch of notes and send it to my assistant so that we can dive into it in annual planning next week." But she was like, "No." And that's like an intentional strategic choice.

Yeah. She might enjoy or get some value out of being in there, the Slack messages. Is a feeling of, you know, of everyone kind of working hard on something, but it would actually be against her goals to do that. Yeah, exactly. Wow, Nathan, my head has already exploded. We could talk for another 2 hours. This has just been incredibly valuable. Thank you for creating this Billion Dollar Creator Framework and then for coming here to kind of apply it to a business that is quite short of that level, but in some ways kind of seems to have some of the same dynamics already at play.

Oh, it absolutely does. And I mean, if you think about it, you've already got 2 out of the 3 factors. And then like, I love this method that we've come to of, you know, we're going to go through one step function and then once that is established, then we're going to think about what could go on from there. Absolutely.

We'll have you back once we get there.

Sounds good.

Hope you enjoyed this conversation and little impromptu coaching session with Nathan Barry. Highly recommend you follow him. You'll see the links to do that in the details below. Check out billiondollarcreator.com, and of course, if you want to do some email sending, use what we use, which is the fantastic ConvertKit platform. Thank you for 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.

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