48 Hours in Austin: Filming 3 Podcast Episodes + Creator Meetup

So we're on our way to Austin, Texas. The plan is to record a bunch of podcast episodes and just hang out with creators. The main event is a live podcast recording for my show with Ryan Holiday. He's been a friend and an inspiration for a long time. The man's written like a dozen books, built his audience at well over a million followers. We're just gonna interview him. We're gonna do that in front of a live audience and then do a creator meetup afterwards. It'll just be a great opportunity for Kit customers and other creators to all meet each other and hang out in Austin. It's our pleasure. Welcome to Austin. Local time is 12:18. A lot of big authors and podcasters, James Clear, Tim Ferriss. We just passed $50 million ARR and we're 95 people. So, yep, exactly. Something that's made a big difference in my career is being in person with other creators and founders. So it goes back to like 2012 when I met James Clear and Barrett Brooks and all those other great creators at a conference. So we actually first got Pat Flynn onto Kit, was meeting up with him at Social Media Marketing World. And so just always try to spend time like getting on a plane, showing up in person, which seems a little counterintuitive when so many people are saying like, dude, just do a Zoom call. But I think it's totally different and you can build relationships so much faster and it's just worth the time. If you're wondering how you find creators who live in the same area that you do, there's actually a really cool feature that we launched inside of Kit's Creator Network where you can search for creators by location. And it's all about what we're trying to do to make it as easy as possible for you to connect with other creators, because that's what made all the difference in my career. And I think it will in yours. As well. I have the world's largest chai. When they say large, they mean large in Texas. Okay, what are we doing? We are— there's our car. I'm gonna get in the car. So next we're gonna go record with Noah Kagan and dive into how— are you guys like vlogging? He built his audience from 0 to 1 million subscribers on YouTube, which I'm fascinated by. What I'm more interested in is why he then stopped uploading. This is quite the setup. How'd you guys find this place? I don't know. Chelsea did. Chelsea, how'd you find this place? Google. Is that still a thing? Good thing my SEO is working. Are you on iPhone or where are you? We can do it on cam too. Yeah, so I'm thinking about a lot because I think about content formats because Noah had this thing on his YouTube channel where he was talking about finding a format they could do over and over again. His was going into really wealthy neighborhoods and knocking on doors and asking how you made your money. Curious if you have a few minutes to chat. What kind of things do you guys do for a living? And I like that idea of finding something that works and that is repeatable. And then we had another section of the conversation where we talked about how do you build content run by the team in the company rather than by the CEO or the content creator. You're saying that's really hard. It's really hard. Very few people have pulled it off. Why do you think that is? I think it ends up being so personality driven. I think the people who can do it well just go do it for themselves, right? Because content creation is a fairly lucrative business if you're great at it. So I was asking Noah what ideas he has for things that Kit could do. And one that he had was anything behind the scenes about Kit creators, how they're running their businesses or any of that. If you could go into Andrew Huberman's studio and ask him all these questions and learn behind the scenes his process and all of that, and then tie it into how he grows his audience and newsletter in some way. I think that could be interesting. So Nathan, what's next? We are headed to the hotel and we're going to do a creator dinner with a bunch of cool creators in Austin. Then it should be a good time. Dinner was great. We had a lot of fun. It's kind of interesting. A bunch of those people I've known for a really long time. So Nick Gray, Catherine Mowbray, uh, Clay A. Bear, Nat, like, uh, known them many, many years. So it was a lot of fun to have them all there for dinner. Just get to talk all things kit and newsletters and life and everything else. Now I'm tired. It's time to go to bed. And tomorrow's a big day because we've got an interview with Chandler Bolt for the podcast and then hosting a workshop and then doing the live interview with Ryan Holiday as well as a big meetup afterwards. So if anyone asks, I'm moving here for the winter because the weather is perfect and like, look at this pool. Though we don't have time for the pool today because it is all about recording content. So we're gonna go record with Chandler Bolt in just a few minutes. And then host a live workshop with Ultra Speaking, which will be really fun. They're the best at teaching you through games how to be a better communicator. We all know I need that. And then the live workshop with— live workshop? Live podcast with Ryan Holiday and the creator meetup afterwards. The fun thing is a bunch of people have been texting me. Brandon Turner, Matt Kepnes, a bunch of friends are in town randomly, and so we're going to have a good crew tonight. Awesome. She's got my ear.

Let me show you guys the content studio, um, and then we can get set up.

Or—

yeah, so this is the studio suite. We've got kind of two settings depending on what you want here. This is more of the selfpublishing.com side of things. This is more of the Chandler Bolt side of things. What we're kind of figuring is we'll pull this bad boy out.

Kara, did you realize that How to Build a Personal Brand video with Daryl is 125,000 views now? No.

Is this recently? Is it popping right now?

It's— it must be popping right now. I did not know that was happening.

So did we hit our revenue target for the day? That's up there on the dashboard. Also, when we do hit a green day, all you got to do is say, hey Alexa, go green, and then the lights go green on the ceiling. It starts playing this song. Like, it's a fun— I want to make it Fun.

A lot of people get obsessed with the lagging indicator and they just beat their heads against the wall. Yeah, this work is all happening.

Yeah.

And it's going to materialize. Or if it doesn't, then I can at least spot the problem. Okay, maybe it's in our conversion or some other step. That's great. I mean, Kara says the episode was a 5 out of 5, so that is a very high bar to hit. Chandler has so much energy and he's got a framework for everything. You can tell He's someone who like actually lives out all the things in his business and is putting in practice all the time. So really fun episode. Can't wait to get it published. We are going to a workshop that we are hosting with the team behind Ultra Speaking. So it's gonna be a smaller group of creators and helping them become better speakers and communicators. Then after that, we got the live episode with Ryan Holiday, a creator meetup. It's gonna be a good time. This is good, Kara. You can get footage of me wheeling all the gear. Yeah. I'm basically— And the people. Exactly. I'm the roadie. Yeah. With a hug. How you doing? Doing great. Happy to be here. How you been? Good. You gonna do some speaking exercises for us? But just their attention to detail in speaking, the games they play, the approach to it has been so good. And then we've also just become good friends over a period of time talking business. I've turned to this fine gentleman here for lots of speaking advice and coaching, and so you're just in for a real treat. Yeah, thanks so much. All right, so the Ultra Speaking Workshop finished. We're now waiting for everybody to show up, just the transition between that and the live show with Ryan. It's been a great afternoon, really excited to do all of this. And the construction noise is actually not bad inside, but outside it kind of freaks us out because it seems like really a lot for recording a live podcast. Yeah, it's been good. We'll get to the show. All right. There's your mic. Hello, everyone. How far? How far do I have to travel? That's to Boise. Yeah, there's, there's not a direct flight, but don't worry about that. Nathan's a pilot now. Yeah, I'll come. I'll come get you in my small plane. Does not make it more attractive. Well, we did the thing. Pretty much everybody's gone home. The room's put away. The podcast was so good. Ryan's someone that you just ask him a question and he just goes, shares all this wisdom. And it was so fun because he talked about all the things about running his content business and the team, things that he just doesn't normally talk about, right? You see all the outward-facing stuff, and here we got to see behind the scenes. So it was a ton of fun. I'm now exhausted, and, uh, we gotta pack up the bus a little bit and go to bed. Okay, so it's day 3. We're headed home. It was a nice quick trip. Like, it's a lot easier to get on a plane and go meet people in person than we think it is. We make it out to be this big deal, and it's not that difficult. So this weekend we have some plans to keep working on farm projects, so August and I are building a hobbit hole on the farm, and, uh, I'm excited to dive into that and get a few things done. This is the first time doing vlog-style content in like 10 years, so if you enjoyed it, if you like seeing behind the scenes of what it takes to produce an event and record all these podcasts, definitely let me know in the comments because I would love to hear about what you enjoyed, what you want to see more of. And, uh, you know, as I say, like the video, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.