Building a $2,000,000 Business Plan for a Creator in 62 Mins | 061

What are you actually optimizing for in this business?

Fun is a huge thing. I really dislike being away from my family. Yeah. Ideally, I would like $2 million gross, 50% net.

In today's episode, I coach a creator who's making $600,000 per year on how to get to $2 million. Justin Moore is a leading expert in sponsorship and creative monetization. What are some of the things that are working really, really well?

I have a pretty compelling referral offer that has been hugely successful at growing the newsletter and getting people into the audience. I had someone share their referral link on their once and they got 230 people to sign up.

Market selection is a very important thing that creators don't talk about enough. The best way to do it is to teach a skill that makes money to people who have money.

I have a goal to get the book in 100,000 creators' hands in 5 years, and I don't know how I'm gonna do that.

When I'm planning and positioning a book, I always think about what's the conversation that's happening that I want the book to be recommended in? How do we build a funnel that's actually gonna convert those right people?

My gut feeling is God, this is so interesting. I guess we're going to have to do another episode in one year after I sell 100,000 copies in one year. This has been great, man.

Justin, I was doing research for this episode and I was looking up revenue numbers for your creator business. Like, I know you're doing well as a creator, but they're just not out there. And I'm curious, why have you not really shared much?

You know, I've always been a bit uncomfortable having the spotlight on my own success, but I don't know, it's always felt I've had an aversion to it. And so, yeah, I guess we should probably just go into it mainly because, like, I do have aspirations, right? Both personally and professionally, and I need help.

Yeah, well, I'm excited to dive into it. Do you feel uncomfortable now? I mean, you have a literal spotlight shining on you in this moment.

No, because honestly, I think growth will help more people. And so I think that's a positive thing.

So before we jump up to the board, give the high level, like what is it that you teach?

So I call myself a sponsorship coach. So my tagline is that I help you find and negotiate your dream partnerships so that you stop leaving thousands on the table. And that came for this is like a pretty new model, I think, because, you know, the old model, I guess, if you're like an influencer, is to get a talent manager, right? Right. Someone who will go out there, find you business, and basically take a cut, 20%, let's say. It creates a lot of perverse incentives, I think. And so when I decided to start educating creators, I was like, maybe there's a new model here where it's basically fee-only. It's like you pay a flat amount, either you learn from me in a course, which is just one-time-only thing, or with coaching, it's like you pay a flat amount every month and we advise you, uh, completely unbiased. We will also tell you not to, like, not to take this deal because it's crappy, um, and you keep 100%. And And so that, that model has resonated, it seems.

Okay. And so now you have the book coming out.

Look at that. Look at that sponsor magnet. Let's go.

When does the book release?

January 21st.

Sweet.

So the subtitle is nice and juicy, Nathan. It's How to Attract, Price, and Execute Your Dream Brand Partnerships. This is like comes from doing over 550 deals with my wife personally in our own business, over $5 million in revenue, but also having run the agency for many years and paying out millions to other creators. And I've I've now been in the boardrooms with these big brands and I hear them saying, hey, this is why we're not gonna hire that person and we are gonna hire that person. And they'll never say that to your face as a creator. And so these are a lot of types of things I talk about in the book.

I love it. All right, let's get up to the board.

Let's go.

So we're gonna do two things in this episode today. First is that a business breakdown on your $600,000 a year business. And then second, we're gonna try to figure out how to take this book right here and use it to go from over $600,000 in revenue to $2 million. Sound good?

Let's go.

All right, so first let's get those revenue numbers up here on the board. Okay, so for the last 4 years, give me the business breakdown. What were you doing in revenue in 2021?

So '21 was about $88K. That was the first year that you could actually pay me. 2022 was $288K roughly. '23 was around $600K. And '24 was, we'll probably end the year about $630K.

Perfect. Okay, so talk for a second about the cohorts that you ran in this, 'cause that tells a different story here as you've switched the revenue from '23 to '24.

Yeah, so that was the primary revenue model for '21 to '23 basically, was I was running, a cohort-based course basically 3 times a year. And so I was having these huge capital injections throughout the year, and that, that's what I thought the business was gonna be. But like a lot of course creators, there was a lot of kind of pandemic boom associated with that. I was doing basically 3 cohorts in '21. I think I did actually 4 cohorts in '22, 3 cohorts in '23, and then I ended it and I did my last one in '24. And I basically shifted the business model for the course to be, on demand.

Okay, so that explains the huge jump from, you know, basically as the audience grew from 2022 to 2023, still a lot of cohorts, and you switched to the business model, started to focus on the book.

Right.

So that's the high-level numbers.

Here you go.

Now what I want to get into is how do you actually drive this growth? What does that funnel look like?

So for the last, like, basically 4 years, call to action for every piece of content that I've done. Social media, at the end of podcasts, it's always join my free newsletter.

Okay.

And so my newsletter—

Yeah, so let me actually put the news. So the newsletter is at basically the hub of everything you're doing.

It is the hub, yes.

And what are the ways that people are coming into this newsletter?

Okay, so there's quite a few different mechanisms. So of course, social media, you know, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, et cetera. I've got a free evergreen masterclass or webinar that people can join, and then they basically get added to the newsletter. I do speaking, so I will, you know, shout out the newsletter to a private community, or if I'm on stage somewhere, that's always the CTA. I have an audit tool Okay. Which is relatively new to my business, but pretty bullish on, you know, basically using that as an acquisition channel for the newsletter. And then of course I've got the book coming up, which heavily plugs the newsletter.

Yeah, we'll dive into that.

I mean, I think that sums it up.

Those are the main ones, yeah. Okay. Now do you have a paid offering that—

Yes.

Well, I guess let's jump over here and let's talk through the paid offering.

So this is all the free stuff.

Yep.

And then I do have a paid, so this is one other thing that I've tried, which is called, I call it the 7-Day Pitch Challenge.

Okay.

And that is a paid challenge. It's $97, and something we've found to be pretty effective at, you know, getting people into the ecosystem.

Yep.

Ascending into other, you know, the courses and coaching and things like that.

Okay. I guess I put the newsletter at the center, 'cause everyone's coming to that. Mm-hmm. And so you might have someone going straight from social to the challenge and then the newsletter. Like, those—

everyone gets added to the newsletter.

Okay.

Any, anytime you become— whether it's you're opting in for free or you become a customer, you get added to the newsletter. Because, you know, I— that's the primary mechanism I use to, like, remind people about upcoming sessions and things like that.

Okay. And then, uh, you have two more products here.

I do. So I have a course which is now on demand. It's called Brand Deal Wizard, um, and that is $1,497. And then I have asynchronous coaching.

Okay.

And so there is either a group support option, which is $297 a month, or a private support option, which is $1,000 a month.

Okay. So basically we've got 3 paid offers and then 4 basically inbound options of how people can come in to everything. And so if I understand correctly, when someone comes in, From the masterclass, you're directly pitching the—

At the end of the masterclass, I am pitching the course, but if they don't opt in, they're still on the newsletter and can get ongoing value.

That sounds good. And so all of this gets pitched. So you're able to move people around quite a bit. And then from the brand deal course, I imagine you're upselling into coaching? There is.

I need to work on that though, because the coaching is still relatively nascent.

Okay.

We've got about 50 creators in there right now.

All right. What are some of the things that are working really, really well? Like imagine if you had thousands of creators watching and you're like, hey, here's the thing that's awesome that I wanna tell you about.

I think the thing that's working really well, actually one thing we didn't cover, which is important, is referrals, newsletter referrals. Yeah. So whether it's Creator Network or like SparkLoop type referral, I have a, I think a pretty compelling referral, offer. There's different tiers, essentially. But, but that has been hugely successful at growing the newsletter and getting people into the audience.

Okay. So I want to dive into that because newsletter referrals are something that everyone thinks like, oh, that worked for Morning Brew or whoever else. Like, I'll just turn it on and then on autopilot it will give me thousands of subscribers. And I would say 9 times out of 10, that does not work because like everything in life and business, like there's no silver bullet. Like you actually have to put in the work. What are the things What are the things that differentiate an email referral program that works from one that's just gonna flop?

So I made a ton of mistakes when I started. The first being that my first tier was too steep. I had it at 5 referrals.

Okay.

And so that just seems like a lot. A lot of people are like, I don't know, 5 people, like I don't know if I'm gonna do this. And so I got some advice from Louis early on that like, hey, make it 1.

Okay.

And make it really juicy. And so the referral tier is basically we do this like reverse engineered research every week where we see creators that are being, that brands are partnering with right there. And then we reverse engineer, okay, who's the person that actually is the decision maker? What's their email address? What's their LinkedIn URL? It's like really, really valuable stuff. So we made the most valuable thing tier number 1 and super easy to get. I like that. And so that has driven, and then there's other tiers like all the way up to like getting free access to the course and things like that. So it's like, I basically calculated a lead value. I was like, okay, if I can, you know, get this, what do I value a lead at? And it was pretty high.

What did you come to?

So I think, uh, it's been a while since I've checked, but it was around $30. Okay. Uh, for, for like a newsletter subscriber based on like the LTV that I had calculated.

So you're like, I could pay Meta or I could give that level of value to—

and I did that for a long time. That drove a lot of growth for me when I was spending a lot of money on referrals. Back in the day, but then I also did about an 18-month trial with paid cold traffic, which was an adventure. Jury's still out on that, but yeah, I was very happy to do it and it drove a lot of referrals early on.

Okay, so that was having the first referral tier quite low and easy to access and be really juicy.

Yep.

What other things stand out in a referral program that works?

So I think having a, you know, a reminder in basically every email that people can actually get referrals. I think there's another mistake that people make is they just— people don't know they have a referral program. So I have basically a PS at the bottom of literally every single email that shows people's progress of where they're at. And there's like a secondary hub where people can click out and see the next. So you see the next tier, and then if you want to see all the tiers, you can click to the hub and like see everything.

Okay. I like that. Yeah, 'cause a lot of people, they'll roll it out, they'll launch it once, and then they'll think, oh, that's enough. Right. And it never is. No. Anything else come to mind?

My general philosophy is like, give away as much as possible. You know, I— Be generous. Yeah, yeah, be generous. I mean, I think that there's like a, of course there's like a marginal cost to like allowing people to take my course, for example, but like people value that very highly, and it's like a pretty low marginal cost for me.

Yeah.

Other than overhead. And so I'm like happy to like, you know, get as many people onto the newsletter as possible through referrals. And sure, I'm happy to give that one person free access to this course. Just as a quick anecdote, I had someone share their referral link on their YouTube community tab once, and they got 230 people to sign up and got instant access to the course. So I was like, let's do more of that.

That's great. Yeah, I mean, you think of the potential lifetime value of those hundreds of people. And it came with an endorsement.

Well, the beautiful thing about my audience is that they are also influential.

Yes.

So there's this meta factor which really juices the referral program.

Well, I think about that a lot with these creators. Yeah. Who have sort of a meta topic, right? Or where they're reaching other creators and you have this ability for virality and sharing and all of that. That's why, honestly, so many people are like, hey, can I speak at Craft and Commerce? Versus some other conference, right? When they have a book coming out or something else, because they're like, there's 300 people in the room who all have, you know, on average 10,000 people listening to them. And so that reach and influence is huge. We see that, you know, with our friend Jay Clouse, right? Where the way his stuff spreads, right? He goes on Creator Network and he has, I think he has hundreds of people recommending him on Creator Network because, they're all like, you have all these creators who have audiences who are like, yeah, Jay's awesome. Like, of course I'd recommend, right? You know, it's like him and Pat and others like just have this huge advantage built in. I love it. Okay, so what I'm most curious about now that we have the big picture and the breakdown of the price points, like what's the revenue contribution from each of these offerings?

So of course it's, you know, up until now, basically it was like the, it was the cohort course that was like the vast majority of the revenue. But I would say the major buckets now are the on-demand course, of course, probably makes up around 40% of revenue. Coaching makes up probably around 30%. And then sponsorships also make up around maybe 15%. And then a smattering of other revenue with the challenge and other things like that. I like it.

Okay, so we said the course.

Course is around—

Can I draw a pie chart in real time and get the— We'll see.

Let's try it.

So maybe let's go there. Okay, so I love having that breakdown of the revenue. So the course is the biggest thing. You said, I mean, coaching is relatively new in this format, but that's driving a lot of revenue. It is.

There's a lot of attractive things about the coaching. Obviously it's recurring, which is really nice. Honestly, it came in response to a lot of the alumni of the course who were saying like, okay, these 4 weeks were awesome, or I went through the, you know, on-demand program. This was great, but hey, I just got this email today and I don't know what to do about this particular situation, right? So there's always like novelty or something. It just feels a bit more esoteric sometimes when they're asking for things you've never done before. And so being able to support people in an ongoing fashion felt pretty exciting. And so I believe that the coaching is going to become the signature offer, okay, one day. And I think my, my My wish is that everyone got access to the course who is, I believe that the coaching should be the primary offer because there's the most, it just, the ROI is so insane. You pay us this flat amount every month and a lot of the, I have like creators that are making 6 figures a month on sponsorships in the coaching program and they're paying us either $300 or $1,000 a month. The ROI is just insane. And they tap us as much or as little as they need. And it's a backstop. It's like having a coach on speed dial. I just think the value is huge there. And so I really would like to say, hey, you join the coaching program, let's say you do an annual commitment, and then you get access to the course for free.

One of my like business philosophies that I've had, I think probably since like 2012, is if you wanna make money online, the best way to do it is to teach a skill that makes money to people who have money. And the thing that stood out to me the most in what you're doing is like there's this huge, amount of deal flow, right? Brands sponsoring creators, and that money is happening and all of that. And you've just inserted yourself into that process as, hey, here's how to do it better, here's how to get paid what you deserve, and all that. And so you're not over here like trying to do something entirely different, being like, but here's how it's related to money and you should pay me. It's like, look, I'm gonna build a $2 million business because I'm just directly inserted into this line. And I think that Market selection is a very important thing that creators don't talk about enough. All right, so one other thing that I wanna get into is the newsletter.

Okay.

How many subscribers are on the newsletter now?

So we've got around 33,000 creators on there now. And I'd like to talk about that a bit because I feel as though I've plateaued a bit on the newsletter growth, primarily because I think we increased the cadence of the newsletter. So we're doing 4 times a week now.

Okay.

3 broadcasts and 1, evergreen sequence.

Nice.

And two things. One, basically because I'm not doing any sort of concerted acquisition efforts, churn basically has been flat for the last like 6 or 8 months. Also because just the more sends we do, the more people that unsubscribe.

Yep.

But because we've doubled the cadence, revenue has also gone up.

Right.

So it's like this trade-off where it's like, you know, I know that I ultimately need to grow the audience, But I'm trying to figure out what is the best method. I frankly think that the audit tool is gonna be a big lever for that. I haven't really juiced that yet. But as of like a month ago, it's an amazing tool and it's automated. So—

Yeah, what does the audit tool do?

So, oh man, this is something I've been dreaming about forever because— so I've done hundreds of audits on people's social profiles where I basically say, hey, here's some facelifts that you can do to be more attractive. To sponsors. Because when I was running the agency, a lot of times we were needing to, uh, basically soft vet people to see if they'd be a good fit and recommend them to our client, which was the brand. And sometimes we would be like, this person doesn't even have their email address in their bio, or some— I can't figure out a way to freaking contact this person.

Yeah.

Uh, or, uh, you know, the way that they talk about themselves in their bio is just disharmonious with what they're actually posting. Or like, there's all these like mistakes that I saw making. And so what I did is I audited these people's profiles and I said, hey, here's like the top 5 things I think you should do. But I was doing this manually. And so the audit tool automates it. And so I basically am using AI and other tooling measured against my own recommendations to deliver a basically an email saying like, hey, here's the— you can enter like your IG, your YouTube channel, or your TikTok, and here's changes that you can make to actually be more attractive to brands. And so it's hugely valuable and it's customized too. So it's like, hey, you posted 3 times in the last like week. Great job. You know, so like it's like really customized. And so I feel as though I may even wanna run paid ads for something like that to a tool like that.

I love tools because they stand out from what most people can offer. As much as what we do as creators is unique and difficult and all of that, like kind of anyone who's willing to spend some time can say like, take information that's out there on the internet, bundle it together in a nice PDF and say, give me your email address and I'll give you this thing. Like that's pretty commonplace. But the tools really stand out as unique and they're getting easier to make, right? As you bring in AI and, you know, as you've scaled to your business, you can hire someone to build a tool like that. But it's just, it's still unique. And so I think of like HubSpot got a ton of traction with their website grading tool where they would tell you like, oh, here's how you're ranking at SEO, here's your site speed, here's, you know, here's 5 things to fix. Or there's a creator named Brian Harris. His site is Growth Tools. You know, he did a ton of these where he's like, wait, I could, I could make all of this content or I could do this tool. I remember talking to the folks at Buffer who make the social media scheduling software. They're getting some insane number of, well, email subscribers, but then, you know, people using their free tool. I want to say it's to the tune of like 10,000 a day kind of thing. It was some absolutely ridiculous number. It was way bigger than Kit's total acquisition. And we get, we're 33,000 new accounts a month. So then they were like 3x that or more. But it's like people want tools. And so I love what you're doing with this because I think that it's not just about having a tool. It's like have a tool that has a point of view.

Yeah.

And like a strong opinion. And when you bake that in with the content and it's like, cool, do these action steps or you don't know how to do those action steps, here's either free or paid training on how to implement that. I just think it's huge.

Let me, let me tell you, okay, you're just making me think of new things. Here's how much I suck, okay? SEO is another huge channel for me for the newsletter, and I do not optimize for it. I rank number 1 for how much to charge for a brand deal.

Okay.

And I do not have that page optimized. Like, I have like a simple like email capture thing on there, but like there's a ton of— I have so many articles on the blog that I rank number 1 or number 2 for, and I'm just not doing a good job at like— I'm building the plane as I'm flying it. That's really—

Right.

I feel like a common theme with a lot of creator businesses is like, I just don't know what I'm doing, man.

Well, I mean, we're all figuring it out as we go because we're also like kind of inventing the industry as we go as well. One thing on that, if I could step onto a little soapbox for a moment. I see that all the time. I mean, it's even in my own business, right? Both as Kit and my personal brand where, you know, there's all of these things. This email funnel doesn't tie in as well. The brand deal doesn't go to coaching. As well as we want, right? And what we do is these all live in our head. And the thing that I think makes the biggest difference is if you do a business audit and you just say, let's see, you have to separate figuring out what's wrong and the work that needs to be done and actually doing the work. And so if you come in as an outside consultant to your own business and you make a list of all of these things, okay, we need to optimize that page for SEO. We need to build out the masterclass, the newsletter funnel, because that could be 10% better.

Right.

You just list them all out and then go rank all of them for effort and go rank all of them for impact. Sort by those two columns. And then separately, you're like, okay, cool. Well, that Justin guy should probably work on this in his business. And then separately you go, okay, now I'm going to spend a week and I'm going to look and I'm going to pick out one high effort, high impact thing. It's going to take a ton of work and then maybe 2 or 3 maybe medium impact, but very low effort. And I'm going to clean those up. And I think the act of switching from like, oh man, I just someday I'll get to all of that, to actually turning it into a concrete to-do list and saying, hey, each quarter I'm going to do 3 of these things, will make a huge, huge difference.

One of the things that I think perhaps this will resonate with you is that from the beginning, I always looked at this business as kind of like a skunkworks project. I never looked at it as like, oh, I'm building a business. And so I've always pretty much reinvested most of the profits back into, you know, things like newsletter growth or things like hiring a copywriter or all these things that, 'cause I was looking at it kind of as a game a bit because we were making revenue from our other business types of things with my wife and I personally. And one thing I'm starting to reckon with, I think, to try to get to cross some of these chasms that I have, the goals, is realizing that it's not a skunkworks anymore. It's a business. I have multiple full-time employees now, and I still have this mindset that like, I'll just take the extra money I'm making and like go hire, you know, a blog strategist or whatever, which is not good because, you know, I run into this trap where I'm like not paying myself enough, and as long as I'm meeting payroll, it's fine, and like all this stuff, which is not a good mindset to be in.

What do you think would change if you switched into that like professional operator mindset?

Well, we're gonna get into some, psychological trauma from my last business that failed, unfortunately, which is, you know, I mentioned I ran this agency and it failed spectacularly. And I have like a YouTube video about that. I had to lay off all my employees. It was awful. But I've grown this thing really slow, this business very slowly because I'm terrified of that same outcome of it failing and having to lay off everyone again. And so I've tricked myself into thinking like, this is just like a hobby. It's a fun little thing. Like, yeah, I have a few employees, I have payroll, but not like the $50K, $60K a month of what I was with the agency. And so I think it's probably like needing to flip in my mind that like, no, this is a business. It's a fundamentally different business. The economic engine is way better than the agency was. And like feel the conviction to like double down on it. I think that's probably where I need to go. But I'm just, I don't know.

That resonates with me a lot. The last startup that I worked for, I joined, I think we were, employee 14, and then at the peak we were 90 people, raised a huge amount of money. This was in June 2009, left in 2011. And they raised, like now it's not crazy amounts, but back then it was like $35 million over that time period, which just burned, at some points burning a million dollars a month. And in that process, I watched them go through 3 rounds of layoffs. Now I just led the design team. I wasn't like an executive there. And I watched all of that happen, and my version of that was like, oh, I'm never going to be in a position where I have to lay people off. And so it's made me very conservative and methodical of how I've grown. And you see it creeping in in some of these things of like, oh, I'm not gonna do this. Someone's like, why? And you're like, oh, because blah, blah, blah. And then like, if someone pushes you on it and you go a few layers deeper in the why, and it's like, because if I do this, then that means I have to do this, which means that if it doesn't work, I might have to lay people off. And it's entirely the, like, emotional side of it, which is really important. But then when you break it down intellectually, you're like, well, hold on. Actually, if this started to decline, I'd see it coming and I'd be able to make, you know, I can make these 5 changes before I had to lay someone off. Or even if I did have to lay them off, I could help them find a great job with one of my other friends who created businesses. And so I had to really catch myself in those mindset things because I was getting hung up on something like that and wouldn't realize like, oh, the actual reality of that is like 5 bad things have to happen in a row in order to get anywhere close to that in this business.

So this coaching thing here, I mentioned that I think I have a feeling like this should be the core offer. I've resisted growing this because —there's a playbook here. It's like, okay, the certification route, right? The Hello7 route or the Dave Ramsey, you know, certification route where it's like you do a training, you are a certified sponsorship coach from Creator Wizard. Now you go off and I get a royalty or something like that, right? But the prospect of maintaining standards across hundreds of coaches, I just like play that out in my head and I'm just like, ah, choke me. I don't want to do that. And so literally where I've been thinking to like get to here, I've been thinking, okay, like, Maybe there's a world in which I have 5 to 10 coaches who are each servicing X number of creators. And like, that's a great business. That sounds awesome. You wanna call it a lifestyle business, fine. But I feel like that's also held me back a bit because I'm just like thinking about life design stuff, you know? Yeah. So I don't know, it's tricky.

Well, I mean, let's get into that. Like, what are you actually optimizing for in this business? I mean, it sounds like fun is a big thing. Like you've had a lot of fun.

Fun is a huge thing. I really dislike being away from my family. This is an exception 'cause this is a lot of fun. But it's like I was doing the speaking circuit. I was traveling, going to conferences in the growth stage 'cause it was really exciting. And, you know, to some degree now that I've kind of established myself a bit, I feel like I don't need to do that as much. And I just, I don't know, my kids are getting a little older and I just, I don't know, I like being home with them. And so I think it's kind of like growing a lifestyle business where I have a really, you know, healthy take-home. I have people that I love working with. I've got a handful of coaches on my team, and that's kind of like enough.

And then scaling within those constraints. Scaling within those constraints, yeah.

'Cause like, you know, I've had 2 acquisitions offers for the business already, both of which I turned down. You know, I just, I feel very, like fixed on this idea that like, I don't need much to like be happy and like love what I do every day. And maybe this will tie into kind of why I wrote the book, because I feel like maybe it'll get me closer to the like the ideal life that I want to ultimately lead.

Yeah, that sounds good. Well, let's dive into how the book fits into all of this. So we talked before about you want to scale this business to $2 million a year. What profit margin do you want to have with that?

Ideally, so I'm at about 25% right now. And ideally, I would like to increase that to 50%. $2 million gross, 50% net.

All right. So trying to get to grow to 50% profit. Now, what else do you hope that the book does for your business? I hope—

I'm kind of looking at it as an extended business card to some degree. Let me tell you my fear first. Okay. Okay. The fear about the book, which was that If I wrote the book, no one would hire me for the course or the coaching. Okay. I've had a lot of anecdotal conversations with a lot of other creators that I respect. Our mutual friend Tiago Forte, for example, wrote this really interesting article around how he saw course enrollments go way down after writing the book. And so I had a lot of fear about like, am I gonna like destroy my business by writing this book? And ultimately I got some advice from Pat Flynn who basically said, look, you can do a 1-to-1 copy of the course into the book and people will still hire you because they need help with their specific situation. And so that was the fear for sure. The hope though, you go ahead.

Well, yeah, so I just wrote down two things. First, the hope is for growth, especially top of funnel. And then the fear is cannibalizing all of this. I understand that fear and I could absolutely see it happening. I do think that there's always these macro things going on. And so my take on Tiago's essay is that there's probably 50% truth to it. And we'll never know. Like, we didn't run a double-blind A/B test on, you know, in the alternate universe, Tiago didn't write the book and revenue to continue to climb. But yeah, I understand that fear, but I'm not too worried about it in this case.

So this sounds really cheesy probably too, but it's not just about growth for me, it's also legacy. Okay. I feel like this next chapter of my life, after all the amazing success that my wife and I have had over the years, I kind of feel like it's almost my duty to educate the next generation of creators. My hope with the book is specifically about attracting people who are creator or who are sponsorship curious. This has been my challenge is that this business has been built off of the backs of people who are having an active issue with sponsorships. Right. They're like, I have a brand deal in my inbox. I don't know what to say. I don't know how much to charge. I'm having a tricky situation with a brand. And I just like, I crush those leads because they just need, It's like very, it's a painful thing, right? And that is 0.0001% of creators are like actively searching for information about sponsorship strategy. And so like what could I do to like serve them? And for a long time I thought it was the newsletter. I thought it was the free social or YouTube. But I realized like what if I had a slightly higher bar, the $15 price point or whatever for the book, which is a bit of more of a commitment where I could actually speak to those types of people. That's a big, that is the real bet that I'm making, that I'll be able to serve people who previously didn't think sponsorship's worth them.

Yeah, I think that's gonna be great. And it's packaged up in a way that it is complete information, you know? And you can really dive in. It's giftable. I think all of those things are gonna make a difference. Where I always imagine when I'm planning and positioning a book, I always think about what's the conversation that's happening that I want the book to be recommended in. And when you play those out, I can think of a ton of conversations where someone's like, hey, I was thinking, I heard this example of someone getting traction with sponsorships, but I don't know how I would do it. And someone says like, well, I read this book that helped, or that sort of thing. And it actually gets directly mentioned there. And that's when these things spread. In the same way, essays can kind of do it if it's like, oh, here's this one essay newsletters honestly don't do it that well because they tend to solve very broad problems. Like if you generally want to get better at sponsorships, if you want to live a better life, you know, form better habits, right? These are these broad topics that newsletters tend to serve, whereas the book is like solving a specific pain point. Okay, so we have this business right here. Okay. And we're thinking about scaling, you know, from $630,000 in revenue to $2 million The book is a big part of that. You know, this huge bet that you've made. How do you see that playing out with the book?

So I have a goal to get the book in 100,000 creators' hands in 5 years. Okay, when did you write that down? So that's 100,000 copies in 5 years. Okay. Which means basically, you know, 25,000 a year. Okay. Or 20,000 a year. And I don't know how I'm gonna do that. And so I'm doing all sorts of crazy things. Like I'm in talks with like the largest creator-focused conference to get a copy in every person's swag bag. You know, I'm doing a 100-podcast tour right now. Right. Like this. Right. Like this. Like this. And so I'm trying to pull every party trick that I can do. I've recruited a street team of, 100 of my closest friends to recommend the book. And so I'm trying to do all the things that I can as like a basically a self-published author. But I don't care if this is copies sold. Yeah. I, you know, one of the things that Rob says is like, just get your book in 1,000 people's hands. Right. And, you know, if the book is good, it's going to spread.

That's such an important distinction because I see a lot of authors that either we really respect today or we're going to really respect very soon, they have that same goal. And if you look at Atomic Habits, for example, it hit the New York Times list at launch and then it didn't hit again maybe for a full year. And then it built this momentum and all that, right? So it got it in readers' hands and then it started to spread and spread and then it became this insane powerhouse. And I also think about Dan Martell with his book Buy Back Your Time, which is again, very focused on a very specific problem. And he has the exact same mentality that you do where he's like, hey, I know that this book has a viral coefficient. I know that for every one person that actually reads the book, they'll recommend it to one or two other people. So we list that as a K-factor of like 1.1, 1.5. And so you have the same approach of, this is what Dan's doing, he's like, look, I will give out anytime I think it will end up in the hands of a reader. I don't want it, like, I don't want someone to do a bulk buy of 500 books and it sit in a warehouse or something like that. But like, if you can get it actually in the hands of readers, I will give away books. I will speak for free. I will do any of those things because I trust that those books will spread over a long period of time. Right, right. So I think that initial goal of 1,000 makes sense. Before we dive into getting to the 100,000 copies, I want to take this further and say, okay, say we hit 100,000 copies, how does that go? What impact does that have on the business, right? If we have 100,000 copies and then, you know, 2 million here. Yep. What's in the middle? How do we actually bridge that gap?

So here's my suspicion. I think that, I have no data to back this up, but I think that 25% of the people who read the book would have bought the course. Okay. And so I think it's going to reduce course revenue. Okay. But I think it's going to substantially increase coaching. This is my suspicion. And so coaching is really the lever that I think is gonna bridge is, you know, 'cause I plug, I talk again, this is, you can read it and go on your merry way and get a lot of value. But for those people who need extra support, I talk about the coaching and things like that in the book. And so I think it's twofold. It's like, I'm hoping that there'll be like an effect that the book will have on increasing coaching, but I'm also doing other acquisition efforts, like potentially hiring a sales team. Okay. For coaching, which I've never done before. Yep. And so, 'cause that's one of the challenges. If you look at these price points, this is basically $3K a year, that's the, or $10K a year. Yep. Those are pretty high price points to just sell straight off a page. And I've, you know, I've gotten 50 people basically in the coaching program right now straight off the page, had never had a sales conversation. And so the, The question in my mind is always like, what would this turn into if someone could click here, schedule a Calendly link, and like talk with someone for 30 minutes about this big investment that they're gonna make?

Well, so let's do that breakdown. Yeah. No, actually first, before we get to the breakdown, I think that's a key difference that if we go back to Tiago's example, which I'm very, very grateful for Tiago for sharing all of that. Yeah, totally. 'Cause most of the time people share big wins and they don't share like the byproducts or side effects that might not have been so good. And he sold 300,000 copies of that book. Probably more by now. And so it's a huge win with this unintended consequence. But I think you're right that if we look about the fear of cannibalization, the way you're talking about it, if it cannibalized 50% or more of your core sales, that would be a hit to short-term revenue and that would suck. But like, it's not that big of a deal long-term because you're betting so much of the business on coaching. Is that right? I would say so, yes. Okay. So with that in mind, at $2 million a year, and we're just making up numbers here, but what's the breakdown of the business at that level?

Where's revenue coming from? So just a quick snapshot in time, the 50 creator breakdown is 40, so 80% on group coaching and 20% on private coaching.

Okay.

And so, uh, if I extrapolated that same percentage out, um, I think this will probably look— I, I, okay, I think selfishly that the group support is the, is really the offer. It's a sweet spot of a price point where it's like in most creators' affordability, where it's like $300 a month. And if I'm making that back by negotiating a bit, one deal better, um, this this number is out of reach for $1,000 for the mid, you know, long tail, even a lot of mid-tail creators. Uh, this is still a lot. And so I feel like this is the one that I would— like, for example, when people join the course, there is a— before the checkout page, there's basically an upsell page that says, hey, you know, 72% of people who are alumni of the course are also in coaching. Uh, and this is the offer that we show on the upsell page, which is the group support. So I really think like this this sub-offer right here is gonna be the biggest part of my business. And so if I looked at here about how to bridge that, I would want most of it to come from that.

Okay, so, but thinking as a whole, like $2 million, what percentage is coming from coaching as a whole? Is that 50%, like 30 growing to 50? Is it 80%? I want 80%. Okay, let's write that down. Okay, so 80% from coaching. So almost nothing else matters, right? The other things are all just in support of that.

Yeah, which is why thinking about like the current flow of how people are entering into the business, I'm so confused because if I want to optimize for this goal, right, everything probably needs to be retooled to like get people into the coaching program.

So we're talking, what is that, $1.8 million? Is that right? Is that 80% of? I had 1.6. 1.6 million. 1.6 million is 80% of that revenue. And so now it's all about like deal flow validation.

Well, also that's why, 'cause right now the majority of people are on a monthly option and I have, there's an annual option. We've had a handful of people, we've done promotions around. Doing annual and stuff, we just tried a quarterly promotion. Yeah. Because that is oftentimes tied into how brands allocate budgets on a quarterly basis. So it's like, hey, brands are allocating their Q1 budget right now. Join the program now so you can like take advantage of that type of idea. And that was pretty successful. And so this is another thing I'm trying to optimize is like what's the best payment cadence and things like that. So, but yeah, I really would prefer everyone, it's just so much easier for everyone to have the access to the course, the templates, the resources, the calculators. I really dislike, we recently, by the way, opened up anyone to join the coaching. Before it was alumni only. Okay. And so that was another change that we did recently too, where it was like, there's a lot of creators who are making 7 figures right now and they're like, I don't wanna do the course. Just help me. Yeah, just help me. I don't wanna have to do the course first as a prerequisite. Can I just join? And I said no enough times that I was like, this is kind of stupid. Like this person probably is like eligible to do it. Yep. I just want everyone to have the course. Like, so join annually, you get access to it. I fear that like if I give access to the course for just the monthly people, they'll churn immediately, you know?

So I guess what we're talking about here is that getting that 80%, we're talking 100,000 copies resulting in 1.6 million a year in coaching. One, the coaching is recurring revenue. I love recurring revenue. Everyone who watches this show knows that. And so that's gonna be easier to compound. We're gonna have to fix some churn issues. You know, there's a bunch of things in that. Okay, so there's two problems that I see here in as, as we're making this jump. Okay. Problem number 1 is top of funnel. How do we get to 100,000? The second problem is conversion. So as we break this down, it's basically at first, how do we get to 100,000 copies? Yeah. Right? In the hands of actual readers. Second, how do we build a funnel that's actually going to convert those right people into coaching? Right. So let's go back to top a funnel. There's a bunch of things that I think that we can do here. If we come all the way back to, you know, your creator business and where people are, like the growth levers that you have right now, I think you're right, that audit tool is going to be a really big step. It points to this, like, are you making— am I making a mistake right now? I could know what mistake I'm making, right? There's a, um, a question that can be answered in, I don't know, 4 minutes, you know, less.

It's literally like 10 seconds. You just enter your handle.

And so as you're going from like, you know, the question to the answer, it's really, really quick. And so I think that you could My gut feeling is a lot of paid traffic on the audit tool driving into the book is gonna be really, really effective.

Okay. So audit to the book, not audit to a coaching call or like a sales call for coaching. So still drive to the book or like that should be the main thing that we're, this is the question is like.

Mm-hmm. It's a good question.

What do I, 'cause you're saying, okay, you got an instantaneous answer "now go read this 250-page book." Like that feels like I just put up a big roadblock to get people to hear.

What I want to get at is how do we find the right people and then split them and go to a call?

Right, so I have a scoring mechanism on the audit. So like maybe people who exceed a certain score.

So then you have that data, you know how many followers they have. Right? Yep. Because they just plugged in their social handle and you just scanned it all. And so I think what you're going to end up doing is having a few criteria that are going to segment them one path or the other. Yeah.

Based on that.

Ultimately, you know, maybe you're pushing everyone to the call and the book. Like you can, there's obviously you have their email, you've got them on the newsletter. Right. There's things that you can do. But you're going to say, hey, these people, are really worth getting in there. The episode we did with Clay A. Bear, which is inside my Flywheels community, he did this great breakdown of his speaking flywheel and how he does audits for people's intro and all of that. And he has one question that depending on how they answer it, he either does the audit for them over email, which is what he promised, but if they have a certain answer to this one question, then he upgrades them and says, hey, why don't we get on a call and I'll help you through that. And it like drives a whole bunch of speaking leads for him. And but you end up with these, these differences. And so what I love is that you could drive a ton of traffic to the audit and then in your funneling based on those criteria, go call or book. That way, if someone's like, I've got 107 followers on Instagram, I think I could crush it with sponsorships, you're like, great, read the book. You know, I believe you, right? Let's chat. You read the book, let's chat in a year, you know? Right.

How does that land? It lands, okay, so two things are coming up for me about this. This is a great idea, I'm gonna do this. I have two segments of my audience, influencers and kind of like non-traditional creators. Okay. So like, you know, newsletter operators, event organizers, podcasters, bloggers, people who like are not dancing on TikTok basically. And so the audit tool is not as good for them, or maybe the answer is I should invest in supporting more content types or platform types maybe to get more, you know, because right now it's like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. So like you think that probably is a good move to like audit LinkedIn or like audit the blog.

Let's go to the coaching that you have now. You have 50 people in the coaching right now. What's the breakdown of people in the coaching between those two groups?

I would say it's like 75% influencer, 25% non-traditional creators.

And now we scale that program 5x or whatever. Yeah, okay. What, is it the same breakdown?

I think if I do paid traffic, it's—

Do you want it, like, should it be, forget the top of funnel, all of that, we're gonna optimize for that in a second, but what, if you're running your ideal business based on what's working, where you're providing value, who's coming in already, who it resonates with, is it still gonna be that 70/30?

I think it's a much easier ROI conversation for a traditional influencer. Okay. Because they're getting active deal flow oftentimes, and a non-traditional creator isn't. That's more of a proactive speculative outreach strategy that still works really well, but it's just like a more of a delay between results.

Is the creator influencer market in the niches that you can serve with your content, right, where this is valuable, is it big enough to support a $1.6 million coaching business?

I mean, this is, it's big enough to support a $50 million coaching business.

I think that's what he's getting at. Yeah. So it's huge, right? We don't have a total addressable market problem. Yeah. And so if, as we're talking about, should we double down on this format for the audit or should we build a second funnel that's for these other type of people? My gut feeling on it is when the other people come in, that's great. They're welcomed, all of that. We don't need to pursue them. You only pursue them when you either already have amazing top of funnel for that group and you're like, oh, I know how to scale this up really easily, which it sounds like you don't quite have that yet 'cause the audit's focused on the other group, or you run into a total addressable market problem where you're like, okay, I need to grow both of these equally because I'm gonna saturate one market if I focus only on that. Got it. The biggest thing, people on the show will hear me go on this rant, is like skyscrapers versus strip malls. And so many creators say, oh, I wanna build this and then this other thing and then this, and I'll have all these things and together that will add up to $2 million in revenue, right? You've gone the skyscraper approach from a revenue perspective where you're saying, all right, we're going— coaching is the thing. Yes, there's other businesses that, that will support it, but we know what's the number one goal. You can actually do the skyscraper approach in traffic as well, and you can say, look, this is the one thing that I'm going to figure out and dial in. I'm not going to neglect the others, but I'm going to say, hey, what would have to be true for me to spend $100,000 a month on driving traffic to that audit, right? Because we know if you're spending $100,000 a month, $4 per lead, something like that— I don't know if you can get that lead price, we'll see, right? But then we're talking 25,000 leads per month, like We can hit this no problem with the 100,000 subscribers, you know, the 100,000 copies, you know? And so then you need to be able to make money on the backend. The question still exists.

Are we driving? So, you think that this segmentation thing is the true like magic of this part of it is like really being able to— I think it's the new magic.

I think that the true magic is an audit tool that people love and get some results. Because you can on the front end for that, you can have a bunch of different ad copy partnerships, all of that, right? So if we have the audit up here, I can have all these different things, right, that come into it from a ton of different directions, right? Let's say that I'm doing a webinar, like the audit might be the thing that gets people into the webinar, right? Like I think that the audit is going to be amazing for lead capture. And so I can have all these different types of traffic, all these different reels content. Yeah, right. Like so many people when they're doing paid traffic, they're just like, oh, I have these 3 pieces of creative. And it's like, no, you could— if this is really working, you could talk about this 50 different ways. You could have an affiliate or an influencer program of people talking about the ad. Oh God, this is so interesting.

So should this be the CTA for everything? For the next 2 years and not the book?

You would want to test what works better. I believe things are gonna resonate with different audiences. Okay. Where there's some things that the book is going to get in front of. But I think the audit, the audit promises instant value. I gotta work for the book. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But the book can deliver at a low price point on, you know, on so many things. And so I really think that you know, the traffic sources coming into the audit, segmenting it into the book, or, you know, the call is going to get you the return on investment where you're going to be able to actually spend more on paid acquisition, right? Because you've got recurring revenue in the coaching business that lets you spend on the paid acquisition.

Can you give me any pointers on the call and the sales stuff? Because I get I've had 50,000 DMs. Hey, let me set, you know, pay on results, you know, for sales calls and all this stuff too. I'm terrified of this. Right. Do you think that that's necessary to get to this number, to have a sales team at the price point?

I think you should test it. Okay. When I look at people, you know, so if we go to Dan Martell, Bonnie Christine, a bunch of these people who have, you know, higher-priced coaching offerings that are doing very well, you know, $2, $3, $5 million plus a year in revenue, most of them are going to a sales call. But here's the beautiful thing about traffic. You can test it and you can say, hey, we're going to push people to recording. Like, you can, you could set up a few of these funnels and play with it. What I would do if I were in your position, and this is what I'm planning to do for my Flywheels course, because I have this exact same question, is I'm going to do this first launch was entirely direct-to-sales page, right? And we did 6 figures in sales through that. And now I'm like, okay, as I play with it, I'm gonna take maybe 10 to 20 sales calls myself, and I'm gonna record them all and figure out what worked. And I'm just gonna learn in real time, right? And then I'm gonna get some of my smart friends to watch some of the better ones and be like, oh yeah, fix this, fix that. So they're giving feedback on very specific things. The scripts, all of those details. And then I'm gonna distill it down and say, okay, can I get this to something that I can teach to someone else? And we're gonna record all of those calls. And, you know, we'll hire a couple of salespeople focused on exactly that. And they're not creating scripts from scratch. They're able to leverage and improve the things that I've already done, how I talk about it in my language, and go from there. And I think it's a process that you can test and iterate on. But I think if you really, really solve this top of funnel, I think you're in great shape. And this gives you a lot of money to invest because you could even start. What's the total revenue from coaching right now per month?

Per month, I think we're at like $14K MRR.

Okay, so let's say you took $3K to $5K of that and said, hey, that's my ad budget. That's what we're going to play with every month and start to see what's working and what's going from there. And then you can also, if you want to test other parts in the funnel, you could say, hey, I've got these sections of creative, but then this other one is going to be webinars that I'm teaching, you know, in front of other audiences. Or if you go to speaking, right? Have you done the audit as a CTA from the stage? No. I think you'd crush it. Because you're like, hey, I've taught all of these things. If you want to know how you rank in these 5 categories based on what we see in your profile. Go here right now, plug it in, and I'd love to shout out a few of you from the stage. Everybody do this. And now you. Okay, I'm going to do yours live, right? So 2 people get the live experience, you know, and then 300 get the automated. And then your, your conversion rate from the stage is going to be absolutely killer for getting email addresses, right? Because you got email addresses from every single audit. I think it's going to— I think it's going to work really, really well.

All right, so I'm hearing invest more in making this killer. Yep. Have the segmentation to maybe multiple funnels, sending some people to the course and some people to this. And A/B test copy, use a percentage of the current coaching revenue on cold traffic. Yeah, you know, the one thing that is, I'm a bit hesitant about the cold traffic stuff is I've spent probably around $100K straight to the masterclass registration over the last 12, 18 months or so, and I'm basically breakeven. And the biggest problem was being able to find the right types of audiences who are resonating with the offer. And some of it could have been the price point for sure of the offer, but I don't know, cold traffic still scares me.

So I don't know. It's hard. There's a lot that goes into it. And the biggest thing that matters here with cold traffic is your payback period. Right.

Yeah, and this is something I need to get better at.

Right, and so something that you might find is that the coaching is not a good payback offer. And so you might find that you need the 7-day challenge, you might, right? So you get to test these different things and say, hey, do we go straight into a sales call? Do we go into these other things? Right, depending on their answer, they might, actually go into the challenge. I'll just say the 7-day, right? Because that has a price point on it. And then that might give you— the $97 might pay back your ad cost that you can spend a bunch more.

What is the title of the person who would help with this optimization? Ah, it's Darryl Westervelt. Who is my current coach? But it's like marketing operations. Like, I see all this and I'm like intuitively like, yes. He's a growth marketer. It's a growth marketer. Marketer.

Yeah. Derral's very good at this stuff because he's done it a lot. Helps you two share a flight on the way out here. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, if you talk through some of these things in a very specific problem in that way, you can get into it. I do want to bring it back to the book a little bit because that's where we came to this. Yeah. I think you have the right approach to being able to just give away as many copies of the book as possible. And so all the things that you're doing, you know, the street team, the podcasts, like just getting that message out there is absolutely what you should be doing. And the book is the moment to do that. So like really, really capitalize on that, like on that moment. For how long? A year. Okay, a year. Yeah. As you build up these other things, but they're, you know, like a lot of people will do a book launch for 2 months and they're like, well, that went well. And it's like, okay, what are you doing for the next 10? Like, keep going. And then these other things give you the ability to like just give away the book, right? And get it in front of as many people's hands as possible and spend money on like paid acquisition and all of that. The book is not gonna get you your payback period. I don't think I've really seen funnels that do that well.

I mean, a lot of, I've heard this from a lot of people who DM me and they're like, okay, yeah, just book is free plus shipping. You just pay shipping costs. And then you upsell them onto a call or whatever, and I don't know.

Yeah, and it's probably worth testing. Yeah. But I really think that as you focus on giving away as many copies of the book, getting it in the hands of readers, you know, so stages, all of that, stages, podcasts, et cetera, I think also the audit is a killer conversion thing when you're on podcasts, right? Like each of those things you could test, what actually worked. And I would track the results. So when you're on a podcast, I would do a custom link, right? And so, you know, if you're creatorwizard.com/podcastname and see, okay, did that get me 3 leads or did that get me 300?

Can I share my biggest takeaway from our conversation? This has felt, even though I am employing the kind of skyscraper strategy for sure, which thank you for that, that absolutely like ingrained in my brain. What we talked about at the top of the episode was very resonant, which was just like, there's this endless to-do list of like optimizations I can make for all these tactics, right? But as we talked about like what actually matters and what could potentially drive the business results, even though it still feels a bit overwhelming as like a small team, it feels easier to accomplish when I know like, okay, this is all that matters, kind of. It's a bet. Right. But like, if I just like draw a circle around this thing right here, and I'm just like, okay, it's the audit. What are all the different levers that we can pull within this? If we do have conviction that this is a useful tool, which I do, this is really all that matters. And we can just kind of let these to the beat of the back burner for now until we have enough data or a large enough sample to test whether this is true.

Yeah, we have a hypothesis around where to apply leverage. And we'll test that, we'll find out if it's accurate. But there's a lot of data from other, you know, related industries. We have a lot of anecdotes that this will work. And you have early intuition and early data that says, hey, this is worth focusing on. And so I think that's a great takeaway.

Well, I guess we're gonna have to do another episode in 5 years or in 1 year after I sell 100,000 copies in 1 year. But this has been great, man.

That sounds good. Okay, so Justin, where should people go to take the audit? Because we're going to get that CTA in there. And then also to check out the book.

To do the audit, it's sponsormagnet.com/audit. Nice. And if you want to grab the book, just sponsormagnet.com. Sounds good.

Thanks for coming on. Thanks again, man. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show, then hit subscribe and 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 just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.