Build a $100,000+ Creator Business (Full Masterclass)

How in the early days, business is about serving the self, but at some point it stops becoming like once you made enough money, you're like, who cares anymore? It really does become about serving others.

What am I or people like me spending money on on a monthly basis? And how can I turn that into something that I'm profiting from?

The ladders of wealth creation. As you work up these ladders and you build these skills, you can earn more and more along the way. There's a few key insights that have to change at different stages of your business.

Yep.

One that you and I have both gone through is early on you get all of your success by saying yes. And then later on you have to say no. And should we draw this out?

Okay.

We can do before and after.

Ooh, I like it.

Move fast and break things. Go slow to go fast.

Yes, yes. Move— this is something that I'm trying to learn all the time. And so as I'm over here, I'm like, obviously we should move fast and break things. Yeah. It's like, I don't know about that. What's an example of, of like this pivot that you're making in your business?

Yeah.

So when it comes to creating new products, so move fast and break things, we have an idea. Let's create a YouTube course. Angus, come over to my house, Post-it notes. Within 3 days, the landing page is up. We're collecting sales. And we'll build the ship as we sell tickets for the ship. Oh shit, we've got 350 people in this community, let's just make it up as we go along and patch up everything with duct tape. Now it's more like, okay, we actually have a reputation, we don't wanna screw things up. A lesson that I've really learned is, I guess relates to this, is the power of focus. And when you focus on just one thing. Whereas I think in the early days when you don't really know what's gonna work, you try a bunch of different things throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. And this one is more like quadruple down on what's working. That sort of idea.

I have this thread that I did on X where it goes through my first 10 products. And it was like product 8 that actually made a bit of money, product 9 that made enough money that you could like pay rent off of it, and product 10 that became ConvertKit. I think it's the experiment versus double down. Something that I talk about on the show is building strip malls versus skyscrapers. And so early on you're testing different things. Did this work? Did this work?

And all of that.

And the tendency that people have is they say, okay, so if I got to $3 million in revenue or say $1 million in revenue with 3 things, then if I want to get to $2 million, I should add 3 more things. And the truth is you should find one of them that works and build a skyscraper.

Yep.

And so that's the, the do less.

That's, that's, that's so true.

One of the things that's interesting, it doesn't actually have to be this really unique thing. Like Hampton is not that unique.

It's not unique at all.

Even ConvertKit is not that unique, right? What I'm doing is not that unique either. So I think sometimes people think like in order to come up with that billion dollar idea, it has to be like some, some idea that comes down to your head from God. And it's like, Sometimes it's just like, oh, I see a version out there. Like, basically my business was because I went to conferences where everybody who was speaking was a white guy, and I was annoyed that there were no women and there were no people of color on the stage. And I went a couple of years and then I finally decided, okay, I'm going to stop being pissed and just create the competitor that's better, you know? And that's— that has diversity and inclusivity at the center of it. So I just created my version of it. Which has, you know, taken off because it was a need in the marketplace. So it actually, it's like the same business that so many people have, but just the, the one unique insight or the one unique perspective is what helps it to take off. So you don't have to come up with the most amazing idea. You can just see what's out there and see like, how could I do that a little bit better? Or just come up with an offer like in Ali's case, right? He's a productivity expert. So like he just needs to come up with either a software or planner or something And when he does, that's going to take off too.

If you've ever had that friend who was like, hey, I'm going to build the next Uber for this or the next Facebook for that. And you've been like, I don't think that's going to work, but I can't really tell you why. The reason is the ladders of wealth creation. But the way that I've broken it down is really these 4 different ladders and the skills that you learn along the way. Those are time for money, your own services business, productized services, and then selling products. They probably have skills from the very bottom ladder, right? Time for money, they're good at showing up consistently and maybe they have skills in an industry and they're trying to tackle a problem that is all the way at the very top of the most difficult ladder, right? Of taking on a marketplace or a social network. What's really important to understand as a creator is that there's a series of skills that you have to learn as you go. And if you want to skip way ahead, let's say that you want to go from having a full-time job at a company to taking on, you know, launching a software company, there's a huge amount of skills that you have to learn along the way. You can choose to learn them all in one giant jump across ladders, or you can work your way up over time. In this, if you were to work on your own, you learn how to show up consistently, you do a good job, but as you go into your own services business, you're going to have to do things like know how to build clients, how to close clients face-to-face, how to, maybe as we move up the ladder, You need to hire your first employees.

How do you do that?

These are all things that in hindsight are easy, but when you're doing it for the first time, they're very daunting. I remember the first time that I filed paperwork with the Secretary of State in order to form a limited liability company. You're like, how do you even do this? And there, I don't know what it is in Canada, but in the US, you have to have a registered agent. And that sounded so official. I see a few head nods. Like, how do you even do that? It just means an address that they can send the Nobody notices. But as you work up these ladders and you build these skills, then you can earn more and more along the way. So you're talking about the CEOs becoming a creator, well, not just within their company, but far beyond that. Yes.

Because people are far more interested in following people, not brands.

Correct. Which then means the leader has to—

Show up.

Show up as a person. Show up as a person. that is a brand.

Yeah.

So one of my theories is a modern CEO, or they could also have an audience co-founder or somebody on the senior team, right? It's gotta have 10% of their time spending creating. An example of that would be the company Ahrefs, which is an SEO company. I'm trying to remember the founder and CEO's name. I think Dmitry, maybe? He's a very, very technical, brilliant guy, brilliant coder, but the kind of person that goes and builds a product that indexes the entire internet just because it's fun, and then maybe rewrites it a few years later just for the heck of it. Tim, who's the CMO of Ahrefs, is the face of everything. Not the original founder, but to your point, there needs to be someone that everyone's like, ah, that's the guy. Tim has built a very effective personal brand Another example would be Cameron Harold from 1-800-GOT-JUNK. I just had him on the podcast a couple episodes ago, COO, and he's the one, you know, he built this massive personal brand that he used to help grow the company substantially. So there's, there's definitely examples of, of people doing it. I've seen a lot of creators and running ConvertKit, I've had a front row seat to the growth of so many creators and there's a standard playbook that works really, really well for monetizing audiences. And you do not follow that playbook at all. Right. And I think most people, they see what you're doing and they're like, oh, okay. Yeah. So he makes his money through sponsorships. It's like, yes, there, there's revenue driven from sponsorships that you reinvest in audience growth. But then there's this whole other side that most people don't know of these agency businesses. And we were talking about this when you and I did another event together of turning cost centers into profit centers, like following the Amazon model. And so why don't you give people a behind-the-scenes look on the agencies that you run and then how you use your audience to grow those?

Yeah.

So as I was starting to build the business, I quit my private equity job. I was going to go all in on doing this thing that I was working on and the platform that had been built. This is like mid-2021. Basically what I decided was that I didn't want to make money in the way that I thought most creators were making money at the time, which was like courses, products, sponsorships, ads, et cetera. And so the first sort of venture into that was looking at what am I or people like me spending money on on a monthly basis and how can I turn that from something I'm spending money on into something that I'm profiting from? Because I know that if I'm spending money on these things, there's a whole hell of a lot of other people that are spending money on this exact same thing. So one of the first examples of that was like video editing services. I was spending $5,000 a month for people to edit clips for me and to turn them into short-form video clips. And I was sending referrals to this like random agency that was doing it for me and they were paying me $250 or something for every referral I sent for clients that were then, you know, paying them $5,000 a month on an ongoing basis for long periods of time. And I was like, well, shit, this doesn't make much sense for me to do this anymore. And so I told the guy, I was like, hey, do you want to partner? And he was like, well, I don't know what you mean, whatever. And I was like, all right, see ya. And I had a friend who I had been musing on ideas with for a while who had just come off two successful agency businesses. He had built to eight figures and exited. He was looking for like his big thing that he was going to do next. And so we came up with this idea of building effectively a creator-led holding company where we build and scale— started with services businesses, but it'll be much bigger than that eventually— that have sort of a creator that sits on top that is the distribution engine. So rather than having to spend money on Facebook ads or Instagram ads to scale these businesses, you use the creator for distribution and we offer services that all of these people need. So video editing was one of the first ones. We did a short-form clip agency business with Cody Sanchez and Sam Parr as the creator partners for it. Basically they are, you know, involved and then our business runs and operates the entire thing in the backend and they, you know, are a partner in it.

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

Yeah. Partner with one person who has like a very real resonance with that end market that you need them to. So Ali Abdaal, we partnered with for a YouTube production business recently that we launched, and he has a massive audience of people that want to make YouTube videos like him. So when he goes and says, hey, if you want to make YouTube videos like me but you don't have the time to do it, I have this agency business that will work with you and make these videos that are beautiful like mine, a lot of people sign up and we bring in $2 million monthly revenue of leads in the first day from him launching it. And the whole game then becomes like, how do you go actually service that and have the backend systems to do it? Which is what my partner is really good at.

What's something that you've, you know, either helped a client with or, you know, a friend who's another creator, something maybe that they've ended up delegating after following this process that, I don't know, they thought they never could?

Yeah, all the time. So they say, oh, Simon, yeah, I want to delegate editing my YouTube videos. But every time I do that, the quality is miserable. I keep firing them. I keep having this back on my lap. And so I said, okay, what about if we try— tell me, if I'm your editor, tell me exactly what the best video looks like. And they told me this for 5 minutes, and I was just recording it. And I gave it back to them, transcribed and cleaned up. And I said, this is the process. Give them this process. They gave the process. To the editor, and voilà, it worked. There is only this little boring piece that myself included, we try to skip it. The boring part of writing down the process. And I agree with you all, guys. Yes, this is boring as hell. That's not why we are entrepreneurs, to do boring stuff. But once you have to do it, only once, then you write it down. You can tell it to the camera and let's have it— have your assistant transcribe it. And then hand it over, the quality that comes back will be higher. And now you don't take it back on your desk.

Yeah, I like it. I mean, I do that all the time of saying, hey, this is what it should actually look like. Here's how to write in my voice. Here's how to like the way I like things edited, all of those things. And it's usually recording a Loom video and then walking people through it. My team actually now has a document that my Kara, my head of content made. She's gotten very good at writing in my voice. You know, as I'm writing video scripts and course training and even like social media content, right? For this podcast episode, you know, we're going to come out with a whole bunch of clips. I'm not going to be the one writing those individual clips or like the captions on it or that sort of thing. And so Kara went and made not just a guide to writing in my voice, but then also like a whole bunch of do this, not that examples. And so, you know, over time as the team, as the social media team went to create a post, she then rewrites it, but then she put it in the doc of saying like, cool, here's a firsthand example of like, you might want to do this, but here's the Nathan version of it actually. And so now when we're onboarding a new writer, you know, or a new team member, there's so much information for them to go through, like training and very practical examples. And like, it just removes those bottlenecks.

One day I was like in my car and I got this email and it was the same email, like it was an offer for something, I don't remember what it was. And then immediately after I read this email, there was a voice in the back of my head that was like, what makes you think you deserve this? And I was just like, where'd that come from? Whoa, that was— it scared the crap out of me because it was almost like a foreign voice and I was like, who the hell was that? And I immediately immediately had to like talk myself down from that. So I've definitely experienced things like some versions of imposter syndrome.

Yes.

Especially for those of us that have come from like marginalized communities, impoverished backgrounds. When you're the one person who makes it and you can't hand carry everybody with you, that comes with an insane amount of pressure.

Yes.

And so some of that, you know, That's a whole different conversation.

I used to do these events. We had this thing called HustleCon. We did it for 4 or 5 years. And I remember I used to, I had a lie that I would tell people. I would say, you're speaking at 3, but you gotta come at noon for the mic check. Just like this event, there is no mic check. Mic checks at conferences, they work, okay? But we had a green room and it was just my opportunity to hang out with these amazing people. And so I would get to hang out with like the founders of Grammarly or back then when we thought WeWork was awesome, the founders of WeWork. And I said like Casper and Away Travel and like all these like multi-billion dollar companies, I got to hang out with them. And what I noticed was that they would be maybe 10 or 100 times more successful than I am. They would freak out still. For example, Sam Yagan, he's the guy who started OkCupid. He was the CEO of, I think, Match and now the company that owns Match. I forget, it's a public— I, it starts with an I. IAC. Yeah, IAC. And he was pacing back and forth in the, in the green room. And I was like, hey man, do you need something? Can I get you some water? Um, and he was like, snapped at me and he was like, just leave me alone. And I was like, hey, look, Sam, like I'm, I can help you. You seem really nervous. And he was like, I'm sorry, I'm just nervous to speak in front of these people. And I was like, but why? You have like 20,000 or 10,000 or something employees and, And it gave me so much confidence that the people that I admire that were like ballers, they were freaking out all the time. And I remember like I hung out with this— I remember when I hung out with this other company and they had just raised a thing of funding and they were in the New York Times and they were like, this woman was like the it girl. She was like so cool and successful, whatever. And she was telling me that she didn't fire this one person for the past 12 months, even though this person was imperfect for the role because she was just afraid of the conflict. And I was like, wow, really? Like, I admire you so much and yet you're— and so it was almost as if I had bad eyesight and I finally was putting on eyeglasses and could like see. Like, I was like, oh, this is awesome. Like, I could be like really uncertain and not brave about certain things, but as long as I do it anyway, I'll be okay. So that gave me so much confidence because there was very few people that I met that were like 10 times smarter than me. There were a few that does exist, but like, for example, the founder of Grammarly, when I would hang out with this guy, I was like, oh, we just don't have the same amount of horsepower. I can't keep I— there's no nothing in this world. There is no nothing I can do that I can keep up with you. But there was many others where I'm like, we're in the same ballpark.

Yes.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to the YouTube channel, just search Billion Dollar Creator and go ahead and subscribe. Make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also who else we should have on the show.