182: Building Focused Flywheels, with Nathan Barry

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks.

Hey David.

Hey Mike, how are you today?

Doing great. And I'm very excited to talk to our guest today. Welcome to the Focus podcast, Nathan Barry.

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Absolutely. So Nathan is the CEO of ConvertKit and I just came back from the Craft and Commerce conference, which was amazing. Talked about it a lot, even on this show. So if you're listening to this, you should definitely go check it out. But Nathan, you weren't always the CEO of ConvertKit.

In fact, your website still says you're a creator, author, speaker, designer, and the founder of ConvertKit.

And anything else you want to add to that tagline?

I was just going to say the bio puts ConvertKit last. I might need to switch the order on that based on time spent now. But yeah, there's lots of things I do outside of, ConvertKit in the creator world.

So yes, but the reason I reached out to you and really wanted to have you on the show is that at the conference there was a documentary that was shared, which is kind of your story, ConvertKit's story essentially. But, um, there was a very powerful moment in that documentary where you kind of came to a tipping point on whether you were going to focus on ConvertKit.

Or not.

And I really wanted to have you on to kind of talk about your journey and kind of the result of that, that forced focus as you have focused on ConvertKit as your, your main thing.

Sounds good. Let's do it.

All right. So I guess let's just start at the beginning. You know, how did you get into this creator world and where did the idea for ConvertKit even come from?

Yeah, so creator world. I grew up in a family where we always made stuff. Um, I think after this call we're going to nerd out some about woodworking. Uh, I did lots of woodworking from an early age. My dad built the house that, uh, we grew up in. Uh, I, like, my first little business was selling wood, uh, products, you know, uh, plaques and decor and stuff like that that I made. So selling it door-to-door at craft fairs. So I was always into making stuff. I got into web design early on in high school, got clients doing web and logo design early on, and then got into software design on from there. Actually, a fun little Apple world overlap. In 2010, the company I was working for, we designed an app for the iPad, uh, and got to work on that before the iPad was released. And that was a fun challenge of like, you know, not having the device and being like, well, hold on, what are the dimensions of it, you know? And watching the keynote, you know, 25 times to try to understand what else we should do with the device.

I had some friends at the same time because I've been in the Apple community for a long time. Oh yeah, I had some friends, the Omni Group stand out to me in particular, where they got measurements of the iPad and they had little 3-dimensional printouts of plastic iPads and they would draw their icons and stuff with paper and move them around just to kind of get a feel for is this too big or too small. That's a real challenge when you don't have the hardware and you're trying to make software for it.

Yes. So it was a super fun time. Boise, where I lived then and still live now, didn't have an Apple Store. So I remember on the day of the release, we flew to Portland And there were all these people waiting in line for iPads and all of that, but we had made a business appointment. And so they're just like, "Oh, are you from this?" Like, "Yeah, come on in." And it was like, "Oh, does everyone know about this hack apparently that you could just make a business appointment and bypass a 500-person line?" And we bought a bunch of iPads, loaded our software, tested it, shipped a bug fix, and went home. But that was a pretty fun experience for me and that really got me into the world of iOS design, which got me into the content creation world. So to close the gap from there to ConvertKit, in 2012, let's see, so 2010, 2011, I started making my own apps on the side, just learning to code in Objective-C and selling them on the App Store. And then in 2012, I decided to leave my job and do freelance app design for people. And that went well. And then I thought, you know what? I should write a book about how to design iPhone apps because who would you wanna hire to design your app but the guy who wrote the book on it?

That's where I first discovered you was the App Design Handbook, yeah.

Yeah, 2012. So my goal from that book was to make $10,000 in sales over the lifetime of the book. And to get a bunch of clients, you know, and that's how I was gonna drive it. I made $12,000 in sales on the first day to an email list of 800 people on Mailchimp. And I ended up never taking on another design client because I thought like, this is way better selling digital products and all of that. So it was like $19,000 by the end of the first week. It just took off from there. I ended up writing another book and did a bunch of stuff, but in that process, I found that email was driving more sales than every social channel combined. And so I got pretty obsessed with optimizing Mailchimp. And then in early 2013, I decided I was gonna build a better Mailchimp for content creators like me. So that was 10 years ago, 10 and a half years ago now, and Uh, the business has grown substantially from them, but it all came from the world of Apple and trying to get more design clients.

I do like though that, I mean, you very early were kind of lasering in on, I don't want to just make a newsletter, I want to make a newsletter for people who are creators, you know, and, um, you know, people that want to, you know, there, there's a specialized set of needs for those people that probably wasn't being served up until then.

Well, I think there's something in that. A lot of people who build an audience or sell a product of any kind and struggle to get traction, often they're like, "Hey, I'm gonna make something for designers." And it's like, there's a lot of stuff out there for designers. How do you get specific? And so I said, "This is for designing iOS applications." And so we've taken all of design from graphic design to web to interface to mobile, everything, and said, "Nope." only iOS apps at a time when that was relatively small because you could only, you know, apps for the iPhone had only come out a year and a half earlier, or I guess 3 years earlier, but, you know, hadn't been around for that long. So I think that focus on a specific niche or a specific audience is absolutely key. Like another book that I remember seeing it a lot of early traction was this book called Mastering Modern Payments. And it was not a book about how to be a better programmer or how to do whatever in development, even narrow down like Ruby on Rails or something. This book was entirely about how to do payment processing in Ruby on Rails with Stripe. This is very, very targeted, but the book did phenomenally well, sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth over the years and resulted in a lot of consulting gigs for Pete Keen, the guy who wrote it, based on the fact that it was such a targeted focus thing. And so if you're like, oh, I'm trying to integrate my Rails app with Stripe, yeah, I can read the documentation, but like, why don't I spend $50 and get this extra resource and save me dozens of hours? So that extreme focus on a niche I've seen pay off over and over again.

Yeah. You know, it's funny because that is so common in the world today. I feel like it's not just independent creators, it's even people who have big fancy jobs. You know, my former life, I was a business lawyer and the people who focus on a very niche area of law usually do a lot better than the generalists. And so you've got this emerging kind of philosophy of be your weird self or some variation of that. But I think in a lot of ways, practically, what that's saying is find the thing that blows your hair back and become really great at it, and then people will find you. And I think that's kind of what you were doing with ConvertKit.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it took a long time to get traction, and we can get into that. But—

Wait a second. You mean it wasn't an immediate success? Didn't buy your island in the Caymans and just, just ride off in the sunset?

Yeah. Um, is that not normal? I, I was, uh, I don't know what I expected, but I did expect it to work faster than it did, you know, when I started in 2013.

I think I want that on my gravestone, honestly. Yeah, I expected it to go faster.

Wait, does that refer to death or what?

No, no, just every, everything I take on in my life.

Yeah. Yes, exactly. I'm always overly optimistic of what's possible or what will get done. At the same time, when you see— is it the Bill Gates quote? Talks about everyone overestimates what they can do in a year and underestimates in a decade or something like that.

I don't know who said it, but I've heard it many times.

It was probably Einstein or Lincoln at this point. I think we just, if we don't know, we just attribute it to Gates, Einstein, or Lincoln.

Or Churchill.

Or Churchill, absolutely. Maybe Roosevelt as well. But you know, we'll get somebody in there. Anyway, so with ConvertKit, I've always been this fan of like building in public because I learned, I had no idea, like what we all do of making money off of Talking on the internet, like, that's wild. If we can just pause for a second, like, that's wild. And I had no idea that that was possible. And so one thing for me is that in 2012, I came across these designers, um, who had small audiences, and they both launched design ebooks on the same day. Their names are Sasha Grief and Jared Drysdale. And purely by chance, they launched designing ebooks on the exact same day. And then Jason Cohen, who is the founder of WP Engine, saw that happen and invited them to come on his blog and write guest posts about how, like, they had very different pricing methodologies. And so he was like, write a blog post about why yours is better and this will be interesting. And it was great content. But one thing that stood out to me in that was seeing these people who had very small audiences, hundreds, maybe 1,000 people on an email list, drive considerable sales. I think Sasha made $6,000 in 2 days and Jared made $8,000 in 2 days. And so I watched them do that off of a small audience and I looked at that and said like, oh, that could be me. I'd seen like the Basecamp guys and whoever else, maybe a Tim Ferriss or someone else, do these big self-published launches or some other venture. And it's like, well, of course they can do it. But for me, seeing people like me in my exact niche with my size audience, like that was super inspiring to me. So I always had this idea of like, I'm going to work in public and kind of pay that forward. And so when I launched ConvertKit, I decided I was gonna build the whole thing in public. And so I had what I called the web app challenge. Which was to build a software business to $5,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue within 6 months. And to do it only with $5,000 of my own money, and the rest has to come from customers. Spoiler, I totally failed on that. But it did turn into ConvertKit, which, you know, did pretty well long term. So slow at first, and then And then much faster later on.

So you won in the end.

I did. I did. You know, being absolutely relentless is an underrated skill. Like, I think too many people are looking for what's the unique advantage that I have? What's the thing I understand about the market that no one else does, or the distribution method, or what is my unique skill? And it's sort of the one weird trick to make money on the internet. You know, everyone's looking for that. And if I had one, if my one weird trick to making money on the internet, it's like, never give up. Like, just be completely relentless forever. And maybe that has to end at some point. I'm more than a decade in and it hasn't ended yet. But there's just so many problems that I faced in my early content business. With ConvertKit and all of that where we've stalled out or plateaued or weren't sure how to handle it. And it's just kind of like push through it and figure it out.

I was just telling my kids, you know, the one condition of getting lucky is being in the room.

Yeah.

You got to show up, you know?

Yeah.

And I do think you're right. I think for the kinds of stuff we do, just being smart and having good ideas isn't enough.

Mm-hmm.

But again, I mean, I feel like it's easy for us to drift into creator talk, but I know we have listeners who are, you know, working in an accounting firm or whatever, and I think this stuff works that way too. I don't think there's any mystery to it.

Yeah, I think it's that constant— like, I add in, you know, not just being in the room, relentlessly showing up, but adding in probably two more things. Uh, the first is continual learning, right? If you're working in an office job and you can just tell that the person sitting the next office or cubicle over or the next Zoom square over now, I guess how we do it, they're just taking better notes and they're understanding things better. And you're like, oh, a month ago we had this call and you didn't know what was going on here. And now like you've done all this research or you came back from, like that continual learning stands out and it stands out in the creator world and in the corporate world in a huge way.

Yeah, and the inverse is true as well. I mean, I worked at a place once and the guy next to me was like a former submarine commander, but he was done. Like he had no interest in anything and it showed in his work. You know, you've gotta have that mindset to come up and want to be continually striving.

Yeah. Yep. That's huge. And then I think, so the continual learning is, maybe we have a 3-part equation here.

All right.

Show up relentlessly.

All right.

Continually learn. And then the last one is, I think, the one that people struggle with the most, 'cause it doesn't get talked about enough. And that's the teaching. You have to teach and share what you've learned. And it's easy to fall into a trap of like, okay, I'm the intern at this company and you two are directors, right? What do I possibly have to teach or write down or share? And I think, or if we take a creative version of that, it's, I'm just barely learning web design. I'm not an expert. I could never start a blog teaching web design or app design or whatever other thing they want to do. But if you can make that shift and say, "Oh, I'm not teaching as an expert. I'm just teaching what I just learned because I have a unique perspective as the intern who just joined the company or as the person who just downloaded Xcode for the first time." Do we still use Xcode? I don't actually know.

Yeah, they do.

We do. Okay, cool. Good. Just checking in.

I mean, now they have a 3-dimensional interface and they use Xcode, so it's all good.

That's right. Some things don't actually change. But I think about, like, if you were the person taking notes in a meeting and you didn't take mediocre notes, you took really good notes, or you get to choose as a person taking notes, you get to choose what to emphasize. I can't speak. It helps to be on a podcast and be able to speak. You get to choose what to emphasize. And in doing that, you get to have a voice. And so I think there's something really interesting, especially as more companies go remote, is that you can just make a plan for something. And you can say, hey, what if we did this? And ask questions and put out that plan. Even if you're working at the accounting company, you could be like, as you're learning, you're going, Hey, what if we implemented this process in Notion for tracking our clients? You know, and here's an idea for it. And you could actually just spend an hour and write it out. And then you'll get to the point where partners or someone else is like, I mean, that sounds pretty good. Let's do that. And so in teaching and sharing what you've learned, there's this level of credibility that comes with it that you don't get otherwise. One of my favorite examples is from Marco Polo. And if you think about Marco Polo as an explorer, the first person to discover the Silk Road, all these things that we might have heard about him, most of those aren't true. Oh yes, he was an explorer. No, he didn't discover the Silk Road. No, he wasn't the first person. He went along with his uncles who had done this trip before, and he's as a young man tagging along with them for the first time. It's like, well, hold on, why do we know his name and we don't know— I can't tell you his uncle's names or any of those. I can't tell you the people who went before his uncle and did this trading route. But the reason is that he wrote about it. Everyone else did this thing and they kept it secret and they're like, oh, we can't share that. And he just wrote it down and he's like, here I'm documenting my journey. And so if you get people who have that relentless focus, and relentless desire to show up, are constantly learning and observing what's going on in the world, and then just writing it down. That's phenomenal.

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So Nathan, one of the things that you talked about at the conference was the creator flywheel, and I really liked this model. You have some laws for flywheels, which I feel like are very relevant for anyone listening to this show who wants to gain a little bit of momentum with what they're trying to focus on. You mind walking us through some flywheel basics?

Yeah, so first, I think flywheel might be a term that people say and don't actually understand. I put some visuals to it once and someone on my team was like, "Oh, I've heard that word like 100 times and I didn't actually know what it was." So maybe for a quick intro to flywheels, my first experience with flywheels came in the country of Lesotho, which is inside of South Africa. I was there in 2008 working on various humanitarian projects. And we're at this orphanage and we had drilled a well and we were going to put a pump on the well. And electricity was pretty inconsistent at the time. And so we didn't want to put in an electric pump where it's like, here's water. Oh, but when you don't have electricity, you also don't have water. Oh, and this is supposed to provide like, you know, there's 75 kids at this orphanage. Like that wouldn't work well. So when you think about a hand pump, it'd be like that traditional thing that you would do at a campsite, right? There's a long lever coming out and we're pumping up and down and getting that motion. Again, works fine for a weekend up camping. Not great when it's your primary source of water. Like it's gonna be a lot of work. And so I didn't know how we were gonna solve this, but we had this engineer on our team who was like, "Oh, we're gonna put a flywheel in place." I was like, "Okay, okay, tell me what a flywheel is." So it was this big metal wheel that sits on top of the pump and turns this individual motion of when you push down on the pump handle, you get water, into this continuous circular motion. And the way that it worked is it uses the force of the wheel to build up momentum. So it was really hard to push. Like when we got it started, uh, my friend Luke and I like braced our feet and leaned into it to really get it turning. But then it got easier and easier as it went. And, uh, so we got to the point, you know, it's continually producing water, um, and then, you know, as, as a steady stream, it starts to be disconnected. The, the point is that the effort and impact become disconnected. And so what that means is that you're able to get to the point, I mean, with this flywheel where you can stand back and spin it effectively with one hand and still produce the same amount of water. Now, people might be thinking like, okay, what does this have anything to do with creator businesses or anything else? But the point is that we're trying to make design systems and design a business that's much less of a hand pump, you know, where there's a direct correlation between how much effort you put in and the results that you get, and instead design a flywheel. So there's sort of these 3 main laws for a flywheel. And so the first is that activities should flow smoothly from one into the next. So it's not a scattered process. Where I'm like, what do I wanna work on today? How should I jump around? What should I focus on? Or even a linear process where it's like, okay, every time I publish a blog post, I'm gonna do A, then B, and then C, right? And I follow that. A flywheel, it actually completes the loop where the very last step flows into the first step and it's this continual motion. The second law is that each rotation should be easier than the previous rotation. So it might be really hard and slow to get started, but then it gets easier and easier over time. And that could be, we could dive into the specifics, but that could be for a bunch of reasons. Like for example, it could be that each time you're onboarding new customers, you're building more of a reputation, or each time the flywheel goes around, you have more efficiencies that you're able to optimize, um, and it's improving in that way. Or it could be that you're able to hire and delegate aspects of the work. But the point is, each rotation it gets easier. And then the last law is that, um, with each rotation it produces more than the previous rotation. So an example with this that I'd like to share is there's a creator named Sahil Bloom who is on a mission to grow his email list to 1 million subscribers. He has this amazing content that he puts out about living a better life and mental models and habits and all of this. And I love it. I read it every single week. And he's like, okay, I want to get this out to 1 million subscribers before my book comes out. And so what he did is he designed a flywheel that is entirely made to grow that email list. So, so basically at a high level, you know, he has new subscribers coming in from, uh, social, like Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. And then from there, they're going into ConvertKit's Creator Network. And that's where he can recommend and partner with other creators, uh, to grow faster. So it's sort of a magnification or multiplication that happens at that stage. Then they're on his newsletter, which goes out every week. He sells sponsorships in that newsletter. So there's a correlation between, you know, how many subscribers he has and how much money he makes. And then as you continue around, he takes all the money he makes in sponsorships and reinvests it on paid recommendations to pay other creators to recommend his newsletter. And so what's interesting about this is when the newsletter is small, let's say he has 10,000 subscribers. I don't know why I just said that's small. If you imagine like a basketball arena full of people, that's probably like 10,000 people.

Yeah.

But numbers these days in the creator world are getting ridiculous.

The Sahil Bloom that is small.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, 10,000 subscribers, maybe he's able to sell sponsorships for $5,000 a month, right? And then he's taking that money and reinvesting it. ConvertKit has a product called the Partner Network where you can, you know, pay for every engaged subscriber that another creator refers to you. And so he's like, hey, I'll pay $2 per subscriber that's referred to me. He can take that money and say, I'm gonna get 2,500 new subscribers a month off of it. And that grows the list faster, which then means he can, the newsletter's bigger, which means he can charge more for advertising, which means he's producing more money that can then go into spending on it from there. So like an early rotation of that flywheel might produce 2,500 subscribers, maybe 5,000. Now as that flywheel has gotten bigger and that same cadence, like a monthly churn, it's producing 50,000 subscribers because he's making $30,000 or $40,000 a month in advertising and reinvesting all of that. So that's kind of the interesting in flywheels that you can design them where both laws 2 and 3 coexist, where law 2, it's getting easier with each rotation, and law 3, it's producing more. And I mean, it sounds like way too good to be true because you're like, wait, I'm putting in less effort and getting more results? No way. And it actually works in physics and it works with flywheels as well.

It's not linear, it's logarithmic.

Yeah, but it does require that you have focus on what is the result that you're trying to get. Like the story you mentioned with Sahil Bloom, you mentioned at the very beginning of it, he wants to grow his newsletter. Reach a million people basically before the book goes out, right? And newsletter is the way that he's going to do that. And I kind of get this picture like we could design this flywheel, right? And it's going to take some effort at the beginning, but then once it gets going, we'll get results from it. But that's going to take some faith that it will actually produce those results. Or we could run from pump to pump, you know, a little bit here, a little bit there, try some paid ads, all these other things. Uh, and then at the end decide that none of them worked, right?

And it wasn't worth doing. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

You bring up an important point because when I talk I ask people about flywheels, the first thing, the first mistake that I see them make when they get the difference between hand pumps and flywheels, right? Like, and they're actually focused and they're like, okay, I'm gonna make a flywheel and I'm gonna stick with it. And the first mistake they make is they say, okay, this flywheel should get me more subscribers, make me more money. And you know, and they start listing off all of these things and I'm like, no, no, no, the flywheel has one job. You only get to choose one goal for it. It might have other byproducts that come out of it. But like, Sahil's flywheel works really well because he's like, I don't care about making money from this. The money is entirely a vehicle to get me in front of more people. And so he's just reinvesting all of it. And you could say, hey, I'm gonna reinvest half of it, right? But in his particular flywheel, it spins faster if he reinvests all of it. And so it makes it really, really powerful. But you make a great point that the first mistake that everyone makes is they try to make a flywheel that like serves 3 or 4 goals and it doesn't work.

It can only pump water.

Yeah, yeah, it has one job.

It also kind of reminds— so in the previous segment you're talking about the, the person who's at the, the day job and they're taking the ridiculous notes, right? Because they just want to develop their skills, right? And so I'm thinking of the flywheel concept for someone in that situation. One of the pieces of advice that I love the most is, uh, Jim Rohn, who said, work harder on yourself than you do on your job, right? And so you're talking about a flywheel having one of the mistakes being trying to get it to do all these different things. If you're in that situation, You could either make everybody at the day job happy. Assume that you're the intern who just walked in, you know, you got the job, you're trying to figure out how things are working there, and you could just acquiesce to the norms of the business, take home the paycheck because it's a steady job, or you could go into it with that mindset, I'm going to learn and extract as much as I can from this experience, but you really can't do both, right? You're either going to maximize your ability, and that's going to be the most important thing in that situation, in that season of your life, or it's going to be, I'm going to earn the paycheck and pay the bills. But when you try to find the balance, that's where things I feel like can get difficult.

Yeah. And I mean, it's really just a lesson on split focus.

Yep.

Right? Like exactly as you're saying, if you're trying to do all of these different things, you're probably going to do them poorly. Derek Sivers, I don't know if it's in his book, Anything You Want, or if he just talks about on his blog, if you haven't read Anything You Want, you should definitely read it. It's one of my favorite reads. But he talks about this idea of you can do whatever you want in life. All the things that you want to learn to do, all the careers you want to have, all of that, you can do all of them, but you need to put them in sequence instead of in parallel. And so he's like, if you want to become a world-class programmer, you know, Do that. Go all in for 5 years, 10 years, be great at that. Go from when you're 20 to when you're 30, or from when you're 40 to when you're 50, whatever it is. Dive all in on that. And then put a pin in that and go do a different career and use those skills. And I feel like something that's worked well for me, I still consider myself a designer and I do still design, but I don't make money as a designer. And I was all in on that world for a long time. And even though now that's not how I spend my time or earn my living, what I'm able to do is use all of those skills that I learned. I was in Figma earlier today designing something that just took 10 minutes because I know how to design even though, and it just brings me joy. But so as you put these things in sequence instead of in parallel, and you do them one after another, they do still build on each other and you get to pursue all of these things. So it's true for a flywheel where it's like, look, we're not trying to— it's like Sahil's not trying to make $1 million a year and build this newsletter to 1 million subscribers. He's like, look, the goal is 1 million subscribers. The money made is a byproduct. And then at some point later he can say, okay, We've achieved that, the book launch is done, you know, we're on from there. And now I want to optimize for, might be more subscribers, or it might be a balance between subscribers and revenue, whatever else. It might be something entirely different. But yeah, focus, one thing at a time.

The other thing I like about that, and implicit in that, is that you never lose anything. That by doing it in this way, you carry a skill set that you develop in your 20s into whatever you're doing in your 50s. And suddenly that makes whatever you're doing in your 50s much more informed, better, you know, whatever.

Yep.

And I think it's really easy in the modern world to like try and write off phases of your life and things that happened and You're like, "Well, that was a big interruption and that got in the way of me doing things." But in hindsight, it's what informs what you're doing now. Nothing is lost. People talk about like, "Well, I waited until this." I personally waited to become a full-time creator until I was in my mid-50s. And I don't mind that because I feel like everything I did ahead of that is what made me what I am when I made that decision. And you can't have any regrets. You just gotta like build on it. And I think it's an uplifting message if you think about it that way.

Yeah, I think so too. And Pat Flynn had this talk that he gave actually at Craft and Commerce, our event, years ago about how there's no unique messages, only unique messengers. And it was actually, I love this talk. It's available on YouTube and so someone can go look it up. But he starts off by reading the book Llama Llama Red Pajama, the children's book, which I have. I've read to my kids before. And he just comes out on stage and he starts reading this book and everyone's like, "What?" They're expecting Pat Flynn, this keynote, and here he is reading a bedtime story to them at 11 in the morning at a conference. And then so he reads that and everyone's a little confused. And then he plays this clip of Kendrick Lamar rapping the same book on an LA radio station. And so his point that he's making is like, it's the same message. We delivered the exact same words in entirely different settings in entirely different ways. And so David, the thing that I love that you were saying is with entirely different career backgrounds, we might make the same point about focus. We might be trying to convince someone to do the same, to make the same changes in their life or whatever it is, but we're going to do it in an entirely different way because of our backgrounds, because of our ages, because of our careers and everything else. And we're probably gonna end up resonating with slightly different people because of it. And so like all of that experience that you built up before making the creator shift is what gives you the unique voice that thousands and thousands of people specifically listen to this podcast to hear.

Yeah, and that's true for all of us. And if you're beating yourself up about some decision you made, I shouldn't have done that. No, actually it's good you did it because it made you who you are today. Now what are you going to do with it? That's the question.

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Nathan, there's a video you did— well, they did about you on YouTube, but it's really, really good. I want— we're gonna put a link in it. I'd encourage everybody to go watch it. It's such a great journey that you've been on, and we've shared some of it already in today's show about you know, your initial success with the books and leveraging that into ConvertKit. But then you had some rough, rough patches there, too.

Yeah.

And you're really honest about it. And, you know, that's something about you that I really appreciate because with your success, it'd be really easy to gloss that over. But I think that was really the point of the video is that, no, I had problems, got through them. And I really think that, that that really resonated with me. And so tell me, I guess first of all, how did you feel about sharing that? And secondly, how did that experience kind of inform who you are now?

Yeah, well, one of the early sections of the video, and this is actually when we sat down to film it, 'cause we do these creator stories about creators who use ConvertKit, and I really appreciate like, watching those stories about creators. And so Isa on our team said like, hey, we'd love to do one on you, right? Something we care about a lot at ConvertKit is that ConvertKit is made by creators for creators. Like a lot of people on our team, you know, have YouTube channels, have newsletters, you know, all of that. And so that informs the product. And Isa's like, hey, we'd love to do your story. And I was like, no, we don't need to do that. And I thought it was funny. She actually started the documentary when, or the, yeah, the video with this question. Instead of just like saying, you know, we asked Nathan if we could tell his story, he said no. And when we sat down to record, actually in this office that I'm in now, the first question she asked was like, why did you keep saying no? I think she asked me every few months for 2 years before I finally said yes and was able to do it or willing to do it. And the first thing I said is like, I don't need to or want to be the center of attention. And I think that clip is in the documentary. But the other thing is like, I mean, the story, like if someone's willing to actually share like what's going on, like it's a deeply personal story. And so a lot of my story that I end up sharing in the documentary is about like how I grew up in an environment where money was really scarce. And like the things that made me feel like I was a burden on my parents, my family, and all that. And so I decided, hey, I'm going to get really good at making money. I'm going to figure this out so I'm not a burden on other people. When I heard Jason Fried from Basecamp talk about how making money is a skill, just like playing the drums or another instrument, it's a skill that you can get better with over time if you like have deliberate practice. Then that resonated with me. I was like, oh, I'm gonna get really, really good at that. And so it had a couple things for me. One, I studied that for years, you know, from how to, from design to sales to pricing and packaging to how to build an audience, everything from there. Like Jason's 100% right. It's not one skill. It's, The collection of 1,000 skills in the same way that playing the piano or something is timing and reading music and music theory and all of this. Business and making money is the same thing. So I got really good at that. But something that happened in there is I realized that so much of my self-worth was tied up in what I created. Right? Like, I'm the guy that wrote 1,000 words a day for 600 days in a row. And that turned into 3 books and an audience and hundreds of thousands of dollars and revenue and everything else. And I could make sure that I wasn't ever a burden on anyone else because I took care of everybody. Right? And so the kind of how that ended, I talked a lot publicly about, like my writing streak, because I made an iPhone app to track a streak. And I, you know, had the 600-day writing streak. And everyone's like, oh, what made it end? You know, like, why did you stop? And it's like, well, I ended up getting really sick and got to the point that I could barely take care of myself, let alone my young family. And it ended up sending me into this path of— I don't think I realized how dangerous it is to tie your self-worth to what you create. Because it doesn't feel dangerous at all when you have the virtuous cycle side of it. But if you end up on the vicious cycle side of it, then it ends up being a really dangerous thing because The more you struggle to create, the less motivated you are and the less you create. And so the more like you struggle to create and on from there.

Yeah, the flywheel can go backwards too if you're not careful. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. We talk about, you know, you hear terms like network effects, leverage, flywheels, all of this, and you're like, oh, those are all good things. It's like, no, they're entirely neutral. They are neither good nor bad. They just magnify whatever is already happening. Right? Leverage can be the thing that allows you to record one podcast episode and have 10,000 people listen to it. It can also be the thing that takes, you know, your real estate empire and causes you to lose all your money, right? Like leverage, it's not good or bad. Flywheels are not good or bad, they can, they can go both ways. And so for me, like you get into that vicious cycle. And I ended up spending quite a while of really struggling with depression and suicide and working to really separate that idea of— I have this line in the documentary of basically saying, going from, "I am valuable for what I create, what I contribute to the world," to just, "I am valuable," and being able to put a period and just end that sentence there. So it's been a long journey, but getting to the point where I'm able to create from a much healthier place.

Well, I mean, the fact that you share that, I feel is really special. And I think it's something that I really like sharing with our audience because people that listen to the show are interested in things like productivity and staying focused and achieving big things. But it is a very slippery slope to have those thoughts and then get to the point like, so if I don't do those things, then I'm a defective person. And I hear it from our listeners sometimes. I get emails from people who are struggling and it's like, no, you have to separate them. And, you know, and Nathan experienced that firsthand. But, you know, going into this, I think the stuff we talk about is great and I think it can help you get far, but it doesn't matter if it doesn't work in terms of who you are. You will always be that special snowflake and don't forget it. And I know all of us struggle with that because if you have big dreams, it's very easy to just make the— there's a very thin line between saying, "I want to do something great," and "I need to do something great to be valid." Oh yeah, that's a very good point. But you did. You got through that. And then another thing you did was somebody— tell us about that story where your mentor gave you the ultimatum. I love that.

Yeah, so this is probably late 2014. So I'd been working at ConvertKit for a year and a half. I'd grown it not to the $5,000 a month in recurring revenue that I wanted to, but we got into about $2,000 a month. And then it was flat. And then it kind of started to decline. Everyone talks about wanting recurring revenue, and that's amazing, but they don't talk about churn like that. Like, revenue doesn't recur forever. Like, people cancel and you, you get churn. And so we started to decline. I think we were maybe $1,500 a month in revenue. And I was at a conference, and we were walking back from dinner. I was with my friend Heaton Shaw, and Heaton had made a bunch of great companies, Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, a bunch of really well-done software companies. We were talking about something, I don't know what, maybe business-related, but not on the topic of ConvertKit. And he goes, "You know, you should shut down ConvertKit." I remember being totally shocked because it was as if we'd been talking about like, "Oh, how was dinner?" And then he was just like— Shut down your company. Yeah, shut down your company, do this other thing. I had a bunch of thoughts that ran through my head of like, one, that's not a very nice thing to say. Two is why? And three is like, I don't know, who are you to even decide or give that advice? It was a bunch of things running through my head at the same time. We kind of stopped and I was like, what? And he was like, yeah, you're going to be successful at whatever you do. You've proven that through writing books and self-publishing and design and all that. You've been working on ConvertKit for a year and a half now. It's stalled out. Do something else. And then he just started walking again. And I remember standing there still just kind of stunned and then realizing that he was now 20 steps ahead of me. And so I kind of caught up to him and then just watched him for a minute. And he goes, you know, or you could take it seriously. You give it the time, money, and attention it deserves and like build it into a real company. But this thing that you're doing of like writing and selling books and courses and spending your time building ConvertKit and all this time with Nathan Barry, it's like it's not working. So either shut ConvertKit down or double down on it. But this middle road approach is not working. So make a change. And I thought about that a lot. And I did what I think everybody does when they hear really good advice. And that's just completely ignore it for like 6 months. And we got to the point where revenue declined even further. And we were really at this point where I had to make a decision. Like, we were— it was no longer covering its costs, you know, now subsidizing this company. And so I had to decide what to do with it. I talked to my wife about it, and she really encouraged me to double down on it. I learned later that it was at a time because of that, like I was really depressed at the time and she just wanted me to do something. She saw like a little bit of spark related to this company and she was like, you should like do this and see what comes of it. But I ended up making the decision to put like our savings into it. To stop the, you know, selling the ebooks and growing the audience and really just go all in on ConvertKit and do direct sales. And I did concierge migrations, which is a fancy way of saying that I got access to your WordPress site and your Mailchimp account, you know, and I like copied everything over to ConvertKit and I changed all the opt-in forms and all that. Ended up taking off from there. It took a while, like the flywheel starting really slow and then building momentum from there. But we ended up, I mean, building an amazing business. And I credit so much of it to Heaton giving me very direct advice that I needed to hear in that moment.

I had a similar experience. I don't need to tell the story today, but again, I was doing two things and people talked to me and it took a while to sink in. But I think anyone listening that's trying to straddle two things, it is really hard to do that effectively. I mean, there are very few guests that come on our show that say, "Oh yeah, I'm running two things at the same time and it's all great and nothing is pain, nothing is suffering because of it." But boy, it is hard.

If you want to talk about focus, everyone says you should focus. And that usually means eliminating something.

Yeah.

Which is not like— focus is such a positive word. Obviously, you should focus. Absolutely. And you're like, okay, but that requires a negative thing. You actually have to like, we need subtraction. We need to say no. We need to eliminate. And you're like, eliminate? That's not a positive word at all. Like, oh, that sounds violent, you know? And it can be. Right? Like, these are tough decisions. I ended up making a little framework to help me decide just in two questions, like, should you shut something down or should you double down on it? And the first question is, do you still want this as much today as the day that you started? Like, we all have things that we're like, I'm gonna write that book, I'm gonna start this company, or learn to play the piano, whatever it is. And like 3 months, 3 years, whatever timeline, and you're like, this isn't going how I wanted. Just ask, do you still want this? Is it that you decided a year ago that you wanted this and so now you're sticking with that decision because that's what we do? And you're like, really, I've learned things, I don't want to do this anymore. Then just like shut it down, move on. So that's the first question. But if you get to the point where you're like, yes, I still want this. And in my case, I said like, yes, I still want to build a software company. I want that challenge. I want the recurring revenue. I want to build it up to scale. So it's like, okay, great. Go to question number 2. And question number 2 is just, have you given this every possible chance to succeed? Like, is this truly your best effort? Another way to think about it is, If you were to look back and say, like, let's say you shut something down and you were to look back a year later, 5 years later, and if you were to think like, "I could have made that work if I had just done X," well, that kind of points to that you didn't give it every possible chance to succeed. So I looked at the answer to these 2 questions. I said I still really, really wanted it and I had not given every possible chance to succeed. I really wanted this and I was working on it part-time, split focus between other things. And like, there was a disconnect in what I said I wanted and what my actions showed and a level of like hypocrisy in that that I wasn't okay with.

You're definitely a developer 'cause you built a framework for the decision.

I did. There's a little flowchart.

I would add one more. I'd add one more to your framework is, are you— do you want it bad enough that you're willing to disappoint other people? Because I think so often that's where people get stuck. Because if you're doing two things and you decide to give up on one in favor of the other, you are going to make other people unhappy. And that, so I think for most people, is where, where they get stuck.

Yeah. Oh, that's really good. Um, but yeah, where I ended up was just thinking like, I'm gonna be that guy who, you know, 5 years from now is like, ah, you know, I think if I'd just given ConvertKit another shot, I could have made it happen. And I was not willing to have that level of regret. I knew that if I wanted to shut it down, it had to be after I'd given it every possible chance. You know, it's like, look, if the market doesn't work out or something else, we get beat by a competitor, like, I can live with that, but just like, my own lack of effort being the thing that kills it or stalls out, I couldn't live with that. So I decided that at least for the next, like I was going to give everything I had for the next 6 months and see where we got. And we actually got to a pretty good place.

That's nice. I call it the no regrets theory of life. You throw so much at it that you will never have regrets if it fails. It's like, hey, I did what I gave it my all.

Yep. I love it.

And you did it. You did it. I mean, ConvertKit is, is a huge enterprise. I'm one of your tiny customers, but I love it. And I love the idea of a company that has a focus on people that do what I do because it means that you guys are always innovating in a direction that favors me. And that kind of gets back to the beginning of the show about niches and finding your space. It's remarkable to me. I'm going to be a fanboy for a minute. You know, you're a company that makes an electronic newsletter product, right? You know, you're not building houses for people that don't have houses. You know, you're not out, you know, a company that's out curing disease. It's an email marketing company, but you manage to do it in a way. In fact, email marketing has this stigma attached to it, right? I mean, if anything, it's almost like You know, you're right next to used car salesmen to some people, but no, you do it in such a mindful way. And the people that are your customers, I guess I'd call your customers. And also I think the people that are my customers, I think the emails, you've created a platform that allows us to do this mindfully and in a way that we don't feel icky. And that is not an easy task.

Yeah, well, thank you. I think The creator-first focus that we've really built into the company has paid off in a big way. We were joking about talking woodworking. I made these little plaques that sit, you can see one behind me. Yeah. Well, everyone listening can't, but there's one behind me that has our company mission on it and just says, "We exist to help creators earn a living." And every team member has one of those plaques sitting on their desk. It came out of my shop. When I went to our last team retreat, I got pulled aside by customs in Mexico, 'cause they were like, what is in this suitcase? You know, they open it up and it's just all, you know, like 50 wooden plaques all lined up.

Uh-oh. Somebody's gotta go bail Nathan out.

Yeah, exactly. Elizabeth, someone on my team, was going through customs with me and she was like, I really wanted to like, She was just ahead of me and she was like, "I really want to take a picture of this, but I also know that cameras aren't allowed right now and I don't want to get him in more trouble, but I really want the photo of him being interrogated by customs." So, but anyway, that ethos being so instilled in every person on the team and that constant reminder, whether it's through the documentaries we do or the stories or any of those things, of like, this is who we're here to serve. This is why we do what we do. And I'm glad that it comes across in the brand.

Was there ever a point where you had identified this, this niche, we're going to do email newsletters for creators, but you shared that it struggled at the beginning. Was there ever a point where you thought maybe I niched down too far, maybe creators just don't need a bespoke email tool?

Yeah, um, well, at first I tried a few different, a few different niches. First we were trying just email marketing in general, you know, email marketing for people who had problems like the problems that I had. Then we went to— I tried to focus on a specific niche, so I went email marketing for authors. That didn't quite work out because it attracted a lot of beginners whose, like, idea was Maybe I'll sell a book on the Kindle store for $1.99 eventually. So the churn was way too high there. What ended up resonating was email marketing for professional bloggers. And then eventually we, so that was pretty niche and focused. And that got us a lot of like the Chris Guillebeaus of the world and plenty of other people like that. But I actually went really, really specific because people are like, I talked to investors and they're like, professional bloggers? Like, you can't build a business off of that. And what I wouldn't tell them is like, I'm actually, like, my sales lists are like paleo recipe bloggers who are women. And I would like try to find, you know, 'cause I'd find one customer that was doing really well with us and then be like, okay, who else on the internet can I find that's like them? Men's fashion bloggers in New York City. All right, great, let's go after that, you know? So I would go absurdly specific to the point that I could list every single person doing that. And then I reach out to them. And what it ended up doing is it created this like big fish in a small pond idea. I had this fitness content creator tell me, I feel like everyone on the entire internet is switching to ConvertKit right now. And I remember thinking, we're not even like $10,000 a month in revenue. Like that, there's no way that can empirically be true. But, you know, I thankfully didn't say that. I just said, oh yeah, what, what makes it seem like that?

Well, everybody in his orbit— I mean, that's what, that's how I became a ConvertKit customer. Everybody in my orbit was saying, oh, because I wasn't happy with my current vendor, and they said, yeah, they'll make it easy, go over there, they'll take care of you. And so that's why it makes it like everyone on the internet, because the people you run with are all doing it.

Yeah, it's exactly that. Someone in their mastermind group had just switched Someone else was talking about switching. Someone else had been on ConvertKit for a while. And it's like, well, yeah, the one that was on ConvertKit for a while was the customer that was doing well that I was like, okay, who else is like them? And then I ended up making a list of like 20 other people like them. And that ended up being the entire orbit of now this new content creator I was talking to. And so you can create this momentum that otherwise just doesn't exist. And now what's fascinating in that is someone takes a half step outside of that circle and they're like, ConvertKit? What is that? I've never heard of it. Is that something for like, I don't know, are we souping up cars? Like what are we converting here? And that's just how that focus and niche play goes. But then you can just expand and go to broader and broader circles. So to answer your question, it's not that creators is too small of a niche. Creators is actually us broadening our niche from being absurdly obscure to now we're going broad to all of creators. Which is still considered very small compared to like all small business.

ConvertKit, increase your email sales or spice up your Dodge Charger.

Exactly.

So, so Nathan, the show's called Focused. I always like asking the question, what does focus mean to you?

What does focus mean to me? I'm terrible at focus. If you just ask my wife, like I'm trying to do everything. And I love, even going back to the advice from Derek Sivers of like put everything in sequence, I definitely want to follow that advice. And in many ways I have, right? Like, I'm able to do a lot of things now because I focused on ConvertKit and that's paid off. But I'm the person right now that's like, hey, let's do some woodworking on Monday night. On Tuesday, you know, I'm taking flying lessons and I'm studying for my private pilot's exam and I've got the kids and we've got a farm and all of this stuff. So yeah, I do all kinds of things, but I try to have some sort of Venn diagram of how they all overlap. It's like I have both my personal audience and ConvertKit, and it's not an accident that it's the same people that care about those two things. On my newsletter, I'm talking about marketing and design, building audiences, And guess what? It's a pretty good overlap with, with ConvertKit.

I think you're being too literal though with that idea of one thing at a time because you have a family and you have interests and I think that all kind of feeds into it. I mean, when you were trying to write books, be a developer and run ConvertKit at the same time, I think that's where you were having problems. You know, guess what? Me too. I had the same experience.

Yeah. Now I do have like 5 draft book ideas that because of focus I've had to set aside. But I did have that conversation. Like, I try to write out what's the goal that I'm most focused on, right? So in this case, it's growing ConvertKit. And then I was thinking about what's the best way to achieve that? And I, you know, list out a bunch of product ideas or for marketing. What's the best way to do that? 'Cause sometimes, you know, going all in on marketing ConvertKit directly would be the best way to grow. Other times I might get, like by actually publishing one of the book ideas that I have and finishing that, that might become the best vehicle for growing ConvertKit. 'Cause like no one really invites, no one really invites like SaaS founders onto Good Morning America to talk about whatever, right? But if you were an author, you would get, like, that's a very normal thing to invite like a well-known author onto a TV show. And so that writing and publishing the book ends up being a better way to achieve the end goal. So I think about those kinds of things a lot. In this moment, I've decided that the books are on hold and some of the other things are the focus.

Now you had said earlier that, you know, earlier in life, you, for a variety of reasons, had decided to optimize to get good at making money. What are you optimizing for now?

Learning and fun. I think those are the two things. I like that better. Learning is a very broad thing, but so take ConvertKit as a company. It makes $35 million a year in revenue. I live in Boise, Idaho. We have plenty of money. There's no need for more money. We're doing lots of big impactful things. And then I'm over here saying, I want to build the company to do $100 million a year in revenue. And I think it'd be pretty fair criticism to be like, why? Like, what's different between $35 and $100 million? Like, they're both ridiculous numbers. Is there anything actually materially different? And I think about two things in that. One is, The journey that I'm going on as a creator or as an individual, how does that change me? Let me back up for a second. I have a bunch of friends who work in the world of book publishing. And in nonfiction publishing, if you want to get picked up by a publisher, you write a book proposal and a single chapter and you sell that. And that's what it's all based off. You get a book deal, then you write the rest of the book. In the world of fiction, you write the entire manuscript and then you try to sell that. So it works different in those two worlds. So a friend who's a book editor in fiction, and so they're getting books submitted nonstop. And I remember asking, wait, so you're just getting dozens of books that show up on your desk every single day and you're supposed to decide I want to buy this one, but not this one. Like, do you read all of those books? I'm like, of course not. There's no need to read all the books. I'm like, well, how do you know? Are you judging a book by its cover? It doesn't even have a cover yet. You know, it's just a manuscript. And she goes, no, all you do is you open the book at the beginning, you read just enough to get an idea for who the main character is. And you skip all the way to the end and you read just enough to get to know who the main character is. And if it's the same person, like, and I mean, it's the hero should stay the same, right? It's consistent. Yeah. But if they themselves are the same, then no transformation has occurred. So probably there was not a worthwhile journey. And I don't think the book is worth reading and I toss it out. But if there's a transformation that has occurred that's interesting and engaging, you're like, wow, this, character is different, they've undergone some meaningful growth because of the journey that they went on, I think I'll read that book and see if it's worth, worth checking out. And so when I think about my own life, then I go, what has to be true in the middle so that I come out a different person, like with substantial growth? And I don't optimize for the outcome. Like it's not actually about building a company to a certain size or a specific number or like selling a company for an exit. I really optimize for the journey. Like, I think that's what we have is the time today. And I want to spend time going on a journey that's going to fundamentally change me. Like, I have to become so much better of a leader to build a company to $100 million than to build a company at $20 million. And so I know that like all the areas that I'm bad at of like, delegating and leading in front of a team and making these tough decisions and so many other things, or have to grow substantially in that to achieve this journey. And so I'm trying to pick a journey that's hard enough that results in that level of change.

So you're looking at the metric of $100 million not as the desired result, but the outcome of the desired result, that you grow as a manager in such a way that the company grows.

Exactly.

I like that. I like that.

Yeah. And there's so many things in that because it also points to there are plenty of ways that I could hit that goal. Like, maybe said differently, so I grow as a manager, a leader, a father, you know, a spouse and partner, all of those things that makes me, that allows me to achieve that goal in line with my values. And so there's a lot of ways that you could achieve the numerical goal and totally fail on the value side of things. And so it gives you good goals and anti-goals and a clear understanding of it. And so I think a lot of people are really capable and they're either headed on the wrong journey or they're just, it's like, look, if you continue on the path that you're on, I think you're going to end up as one of the books where it's like I flipped to the end, it's like, oh, the character's the same. This is not a compelling story. And so I think a lot of people need to take on bigger challenges that actually force them to grow.

We all need our own hero's journey.

Yes. Little Joseph Campbell in there.

Always, always.

Nathan, you talked a little bit about the values. That's always been one of the things that fascinates me about ConvertKit is the values that you have and you've got 'em printed on the t-shirts so the people who come to the conferences.

Yep.

And every time I see those, they really resonate with me. I think I bought like 3 or 4 of them. Can you talk a little bit about how those values affect the goal? You kind of touched on like you want to grow and you want to become the type of person who can achieve that goal in alignment with the values, but how did you kind of align or arrive at those values and how do they guide you along the way?

Yeah, there's actually 4 values or mantras that I kind of set out. And they are: create every day, teach everything you know, work in public, and then default to generosity. And those actually, the very first time they showed up, were in posters that actually said the secret to growing your audience is to create every day. The secret to growing your audience is to teach everything you know and on from there. And so it was very much, they started from a, this is the mindset that you need to have to achieve these results. And even Default to Generosity, people would have this question in their minds of how do I decide what to give away for free versus what to sell to my audience? And it's like, look, Default to generosity. If the stuff that you're giving away is as good or better than what other people are charging for, I guarantee you're going to grow a very successful audience and you'll have plenty of things that you could charge for and you'll earn a great living. And so that really started from the audience growth perspective and it's ended up carrying through to every other part of the company where if you take default to generosity, people ask questions. Hey, how, like a customer's asking for a refund, like they signed up and forgot and blah, blah, blah. Like, what should I do? And it's like, well, our mantra is default to generosity. What do you think we should do? And they're like, I think I should give them a refund and, you know, and do this for them as well. It's like, great, good chat. You know, like they become ways to make decisions. Even things like, work in public and teach everything you know, I'll quote revenue numbers. We actually have a dashboard that shows our metrics in real time. And that's part of paying this forward of saying, hey, if you want to build a software company, you can look up exactly what ConvertKit did and win. If it goes all the way back to, we talked about Jared Drysdale and Sasha Grief, the two designers that I followed. Because they were working in public, I thought, oh, I could do that too. And that became an important thing. And so you'll see us do posts on how we do compensation at ConvertKit, how we run team retreats, all these things. It's just teach everything you know. And that's become such a mantra throughout the company that I will come across our engineering blog. I'm like, oh, I had no idea we wrote a blog post about the finer points of this complicated engineering thing. That dozens of engineers are commenting on saying, "Wow, thank you so much for sharing this." On one hand, that has almost nothing to do with our core business for creators. And on the other hand, you know what, teach everything you know. And then maybe it's not chance that we have a whole bunch of developers who end up as customers. So anyway, those mantras are all through the ethos of the company. And yeah, it's interesting. I hadn't thought for a long time about where they actually came from. So I'm glad you asked the question.

Well, Nathan, thanks again for coming on today. Um, for Deep Focus, we're going to be talking about woodworking, so buckle up, gang. In the meantime, I want to thank our sponsors, our friends at Squarespace. And indeed, Nathan, where can people go if they want to learn more?

Yeah, so all of, uh, my content is at nathanbarry.com. I'm just Nathan Barry, B-A-R-R-Y, uh, throughout the internet. Uh, Twitter is probably where I'm most active. And then you should definitely check out ConvertKit. We power the biggest newsletters on the web and would love more great creators to, to come on as customers.

Yeah, join me and Mike as customers.

I love it.

We are the Focused Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm/focused and we'll see you next time.