Coaching Session: Raising $10M With A Small Audience | 079

How much have you raised so far?

It's just under $1 million. We're trying to get to $2 million to greenlight the first 2 projects.

Yeah.

So 10 movies, $10 million over the next 4 years. It's going to be a wild ride.

My guest, Darren Smith, is an independent film producer who's raising money for his next batch of films. So in this episode, you're going to see us break down the 2 perfect flywheels for driving conversations with the right people. There's 3 laws to flywheels. First, we have flow. So does each step flow smoothly from one into the next? The next is ease. So does each rotation get easier over time?

And then the last law is— I didn't see that coming. Very cool.

Our hypothesis here is that the more people we close and get on board with our vision, the more referrals we'll get, which will make it easier to identify, outreach, and ultimately close more and more people.

Everybody talks about scale and size of audience. You look at all the success stories and you go, oh, they got 2 million followers. There was a moment where I said, okay, what if I'm reaching high net worth investors because they are seeing the very hyper-specific targeted content that I'm posting?

When you put out this great content, you can actually use it for outbound. And something that I'm seeing more and more creators do is—

I love that, and I have not done any of it, so that's going to be huge.

So Darren, we've actually known each other for a long time now. Is it like 12, 13 years?

I think we're going on like 13 at this point. Yeah, our relationship's a teenager.

That's right.

You sold me on the need for an email list and I've been on that train ever since.

So tell me about your first book, and then I want to go into just how you got into making films. And, you know, we'll get into like the plan of where we're going and all that.

But yeah, it's a weird journey because I introduced myself as, hi, I'm Darren Smith, I'm an independent film producer and an author.

And people are like, what?

No one does that. What are you talking about? Why would you write books if you're making movies? Because they see that as like a big capital P you know, producer or capital C creative. Like, why do the small creative thing? But like you, I've always just had a compulsion to teach what I know, to share the journey, and to help people that are on the same path but maybe a few steps behind. And so over the years, I've written 4 books. Actually brought a copy of my new one. This is, this is a one-of-one right now because it is the proof copy signed for you. And You know, what a cool moment to be able to share that with you because I wrote my first book because you wrote "Authority." I read it and I was like, "I could do this." And the first book was a little 125-page ebook called "The Indie Film Sound Guide." I think I sold 6 of them, you know, like, but it wasn't about that. It was about, can I do this? Can I write something that's helpful? And it was. So as things progressed, it's actually been a really huge point of leverage to be able to say, well, I wrote the book on this because now the mission and the vision of my career has expanded from being a creator to, you know, I'm producing feature films, I'm lining up the next batch of them, I'm raising money, like I'm doing bigger, bigger things, but I can point back to, well, I've got the leverage of an audience of people online or on an email list and these books that I've written and hundreds of blog posts to say, I'm a practitioner, I'm not just a theorist. I can point to, this is the experience I had that taught me this lesson, which is why I'm talking about it now, as opposed to, well, I heard this one person say on a podcast that's one time that this is how it is. And that's been really helpful and has brought me a lot of awareness as far as being a producer trying to do big things. There's that inherent trust that comes when people can spend hours with you online with your content before they ever talk to you.

When I think about the level of relationships that you have to have, right? If you're producing the film, someone is like, I think I want to, Like a director. It's like, I think I wanna work with this guy, but like, this is a big commitment. A screenwriter, like all of these people who are like, do I wanna spend a year of my life, or take some creative work that I care about so deeply and get married to this producer, right? And so they can dive in and listen to a handful of podcast episodes, read a book that you wrote, and be like, yeah, like this feels like we've built a relationship. This feels like something I can invest in and go from there.

[Speaker] Yeah, I think the kids these days call it a vibe check.

Right?

So how much easier to be like, oh, Darren's recorded hundreds of hours of podcasts that I can listen to and go, I like this guy.

Right.

Versus someone who just cold DM'd you on Instagram and said, hey, I hear you're a producer. I'm looking for someone to help me raise money on my project. I'm going, I don't even know you. Like, I've never met you before. You're proposing on the first date. Like, let's spend some time together first and see if this is going to work out. And so it's been extremely helpful for that.

I have that all the time when doing recruiting for team members and executives, where I'll get on a call with someone and they'll be excited to meet. I've got questions for them. They have questions for me. They're leaving some big important job to join. Kitta is still a small company relative. I'm talking to people when they're like, yeah, when I scaled this company from half a billion to $20 billion, or this or that, like these other things, it's another level. But they're like, oh yeah, I listened to, you know, you on these 3 things. I've watched the documentary that your team made about your story. Like all of this stuff, and you realize, oh, wow. Like it takes the pressure off of that one conversation.

Yeah.

It's like, oh, you know me in so much more than just like what I might say in a 45-minute Zoom call.

Yeah.

It takes a lot more time for people to understand your values and the mission that you're on and your purpose and those things, because those typically don't surface in the first conversation.

Yeah.

And so having those assets, I'll call them assets online that were created once and you can, you know, view them a million times. That's so much leverage, especially, you know, you start your journey as a solo creator. I still consider myself a solo creator, even though when I go into production, yeah, there's 150 people that we ultimately hire and work with over the course of 6 months. But then I go back to being by myself in my office. And so I still really see my business as a solo creator business. And yeah, the leverage is crazy.

Tell me about one of the films that you've worked on recently and kind of that process of pulling it all together. I think a lot of people have no idea, myself included, what goes on behind the scenes to go from an idea to a feature film.

Yeah, it's really fun. I'll talk about the last one we did. It's a movie called Faith of Angels. And this movie came across my desk, so to speak, right as we were wrapping the previous movie called The Carpenter. I filmed the movie out in Cape Town, South Africa in August, July, August of 2022. And my buddy who is the writer-director Garrett Batty, at the end, we're like flying home and he hands me the script. He says, "This is the next one." I was like, "Oh good, I did a good job 'cause he wants to work with me again on the next one." And it was this interesting thing 'cause we'd just done a movie that had a 7-figure budget and he said, "Here's the script. We're gonna try to do it for $300,000." And I was like, "You can't. Like, I don't know how to do that." I've only done like million to $2 million budget movies. I'd never done the super low micro-budget stuff.

But he's like, take a look, tell me what you think.

Script's amazing. And I'm like, I want to do this, but we cannot do it for $300,000. So I put a budget together, I got it down to $400,000, and I said, please don't do this movie at $400,000. It's a period piece set in 1989. There's 40 speaking roles and 12 locations. Like, this is not a low-budget movie. It needs, my best guess, like back of the napkin math was $1.5 million to do this movie properly. With the leverage that we have shooting in Utah, non-union, all those kind of things. So we were supposed to do it with this company. They had financing in place. We're moving forward. I'm like really regretting this choice. So like, how are we gonna do this on $400,000? And they pulled the financing the day we were supposed to start pre-production.

Oh, wow.

Pulled it completely. We had people lined up, we had locations scouted, and they were just like, we can't do it. And I was secretly like, Thank goodness, because now we can actually go raise the money. So the financing conversation is a fun one. My buddy Garrett, we sit down to lunch to kind of get an update on where it's at. He's raising all the money. He says, look, I've got $150,000 against a $500,000 budget. I was like, why are you still doing $400,000 or $500,000? Like, why aren't we trying to get $1.5 million? He just didn't have the mindset of I can do this, I can raise $1.5 million, 'cause he'd never done it before. So over lunch, we mapped out on my iPad, like, here's how to speak investor. 'Cause you're pitching them a creative project and they're giving you $150,000 that they're okay losing. That's the context of where you're at right now, which is why they didn't give you the full amount 'cause they don't want to be on the hook for the full amount. If you go back and you pitch it this way and you speak their language, I bet you can get $1 million from this guy 'cause he's a billionaire, right? Like $1 million, $150K, what's the difference?

Around the same number.

So he takes all the lessons from that conversation, goes back 2 days later, pitches the guy an investment opportunity where if we spend a little more, we can get bigger names, get distribution, put it in theaters, et cetera, et cetera. He goes, "Oh, that's exactly what I wanted to do." So he calls his tax guy and he says, "What are the tax implications of raising a million or giving this guy a million dollars?" And 2 days later, we had a million in the account and a green light to make the movie. And so that was fun to be involved in the financing piece. And then production and everything went super smooth. We were filming in the middle of two strikes in Hollywood. First the writers' strike and then the actors joined. But we still were able to film because we're in Utah. It's a non—

it's a right-to-work state.

We were able to bring in actors from LA and people from all over to work on the movie. It ended up doing really well in the festival run and we put it in theaters, kind of self-distributed last year along with The Carpenter, which was the other movie we had shot the year before. So at one point in 2024, we had two movies in theaters between like 30 and 400 screens on each one.

Oh, wow.

So it was a decent release for little indie films that were shot in Utah. And now they're streaming and you can watch them online. And so we kind of did the full gamut with that one. Everything from the development, financing, production, all the way through marketing and distribution.

Yeah, it was fun to hear about the behind the scenes process.

Yeah.

And so now you have this goal of raising $10 million in order to finance the next bunch of films that you want to produce. Talk to me about what's behind the goal, and then let's jump up on the board and map out a system to be, you know, a flywheel to be able to bring that goal to life.

Awesome.

I'm very excited for this.

So as I was producing the, I've done 4 movies, and on each one, I just was noting down things I would do different, lessons learned. I would've done this differently. Why didn't we line up distribution before we got the financing, for example, right? And I just had this long list. And by the time we were putting these 2 movies in theaters last year, I was like, I can't just sit here with a list of complaints unless I'm willing to do something about it. And I realized that one path that I was on was I'm gonna keep waiting for the next person to give me permission to work. I'm waiting for the next director to call me and say, "I've got the money and I would like you to produce it." And I didn't like that position. And the alternative is, well, I've gotta expand my impact. And instead of just being a producer for hire during the pre-production, production phase, I need to expand through financing and development and through marketing and distribution. And as soon as I started thinking about, you know, kind of your question, what would it take for this to happen, it opened up a lot of answers.

And it quickly put together kind of a back of the napkin, like, oh, if I did it as a fund, I could do it this way, I could spread the risk, I could leverage these things across a number of projects, et cetera, et cetera.

And then it was about a year of talking to investors and talking to people about, stress test this for me. Tell me where I'm making huge mistakes in my logic. And we finally got to the point where it was like, no, it works. Like this, this is sound. And that was about 4 months ago. We started raising and now we've got the first batch of investors in. We've got the first amount of money in.

And how much have you raised so far?

It's just under $1 million. And so we're trying to get to $2 million to greenlight the first 2 projects.

Yeah.

So 10 movies, $10 million over the next 4 years. It's going to be a wild ride.

Yeah, that's a big goal. And so for this, you need the right people paying attention.

Yeah, definitely.

We're not trying to go out and make the biggest audience possible. We're looking for high net worth investors who are able to put in not $10,000 checks, but $500,000, $1 million checks. Is that right?

That's correct. And to complicate it or constrain it even more, they need to be aligned, right? Because we're not making R-rated horror movies. I'm making movies that I can watch with my kids. So they're gonna be family friendly and PG-13 and uplifting. And, you know, they're gonna be movies you wanna watch with your kids that they're gonna wanna watch in 30 years with their kids 'cause they're that high quality. And so they have to be online or aligned with that because yeah, horror is all the rage right now, but I'm not interested in that anymore.

So yeah.

[Speaker] Okay, so, but there's also another constraint on this and you brought up your kids. So typically if someone says, I need to raise $10 million, there's a tried and true path for that. And that is that you get diamond status with Delta because you are on the road all the time. You're making this constant loop between 6 or 7 major cities, just meetings after meetings. And you're like, I was in LA 2 weeks ago, but I'm gonna be back because I finally got this meeting that I get. And I talked to these people and they're like, yeah, I was gone from home 200 nights last year. And I know you just a little bit over the last decade or so. And that's not something that you're willing to do.

No, no, no, no.

I have lots of family responsibilities that I love. I have church responsibilities. I have volunteer responsibilities. Like, I'm very involved with all of that. And yeah, that's a big constraint. And I look at the guys that are out raising money and they're doing that model, but they're also a generation older than I am. And I'm sitting here going, there's gotta be a better way.

Right.

Like, we just went through the pandemic and Zoom is a thing now. And like, why can't it be be that. And that's the way I've been doing it. It's a lot of Zoom calls, hosting my own events, having people come into town. So I drive an hour, they fly from North Carolina to me instead of the other way around. So that's been working too.

All right, well, let's get up on the board and try to design a flywheel that works within those constraints.

Love it. Let's do it.

Okay, so something that I do when I'm mapping out flywheels is I like to do it on stickies.

Sweet.

And the reason is we have no idea yet if this flywheel's gonna work.

Right.

And if I do it in this fancy metallic marker on this black paper, then we're gonna be like, no coming back.

Yeah, we're just, We're just rolling with it.

So this first flywheel that we map out, let's just get really clear. What is the goal of it?

I think the goal here is to reach the right people and no one else. It's really like a very hyper-targeted outbound, whether you call it direct sales or direct outreach, or I mean, we'll figure out what it is, right? But we need to reach only the right people who are aligned with the mission, have the money. There's currently a demand that already exists with them. They're looking for this.

Okay, we reach only the right people. Yeah, that's our goal. I don't know, I'll put that up here. One thing that I feel confident on that I can write in, you know, more of a Sharpie is that this is an outbound flywheel.

Yeah.

And so it's very important that, you know, we know This is gonna be driven by effort that we put it, put out. All right, so we're going for an outbound flywheel to reach only the right people.

What do you think the first step of the flywheel is? The first step I really think is identifying the right people. Like you need to have a list of prospects. They're not quite leads yet, right? 'Cause they're not in your ecosystem. So it's who are the people that are already doing this thing?

Okay, sounds good. What comes next?

If you're using the terminology of flywheels, right, it's this sense or this feel of it can't help but happen.

Yeah, it's inevitable.

So the next inevitable step is, well, you're gonna wanna reach out to them. If you find somebody that has the thing that you're looking for, you're gonna wanna reach out. Like I can already feel the pull of, yeah, I wanna go do that right now. Can I go make calls right now? Yep. So reaching out, yeah.

All right.

And I don't know how you do this if you ever split or do various things, but I can see outreach. Of direct or referrals or getting through people like bridge, I call them bridges. So people that are one degree removed from me and from the person I'm trying to reach out to. So in this process, the way I currently do it, the reach out step typically starts with referrals, getting on LinkedIn, who do I know, who's connected to them that I'm not connected to.

Okay.

So I don't know, putting that up there.

I wonder if I would put that. So I think referrals are important.

Yeah, but I'm going to say warm intro. Yes, that's it.

I don't think it's a separate step. It's a way of doing the outreach and that's just a good practice. Okay, so I'm going to hang out here because I bet we're going to use that one later. So identify, reach out. What would come next?

Having a conversation, an initial call. A call. Yeah, it's really a more of a question call than a pitch call. It can turn into a pitch call, but it's really— I want to find out if there's someone that's already interested rather than someone I'm going to need to convince, because I have had zero success in my career convincing people to invest in film. It does not happen. There has to be— there has to be an intent there. Yeah, right.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm gonna do that.

Yeah, it's great because it could be that they're looking for something to do with, uh, their donation dollars, right? And that's a very different intent than I want a return on investment. But either way, I need to know it before I start pitching that. Yeah, presenting the fund.

I like that.

Yeah.

Okay. So after the call, where do we go from here?

That can either be in the same call or a follow-up call, which is, okay, well, I'd definitely love to show you what I'm working on and how it helps you get these things that I found out about in this step. So whether it's a second call or just the continuation of the first call, a lot of times these first calls are also just intros, like an intro email. Or I met them at a networking event and someone said, oh, you should talk to so-and-so.

And so you're just meeting for the first time.

So you're just meeting for the first time and you go, what do you do? What do you do? Oh, well, we should talk. So then it's a real presentation or a pitch call.

So find intent. And then maybe under here, I'm trying to decide. I'm gonna write on another sticky just in case. It's share vision, right?

Yeah. And that I almost think of it as like, is what I'm selling or supplying to the marketplace fulfilling the demand that they have. 'Cause I don't want to, again, it's not about convincing them. It's not, well, I can fit this square into your circle, right? It's not about that at all. It's does it match?

Okay, so as we're going through here, we've shared the vision.

Yeah. What comes next? Then there's like a real scheduled pitch. It's like there's a call, there's a calendar event, we're gonna hop on Zoom or we're gonna meet for lunch and that is the pitch.

Okay.

So in between, I should say, they're at some point they're getting materials, right? They're getting a pitch deck and a strategy document or a business plan.

They're getting a video of me pitching the thing to a group of people.

So they have, they've spent more time with me at that point.

That makes sense. I'm gonna leave, I think share vision.

I think it goes under that.

Yeah. And then.

Yeah, materials.

We'll say materials here. And then I'm just gonna put the pitch on here as well. Yeah, because I think that these— there's similar activities here.

Yeah. And it's different for every investor. Yeah.

So it depends on what altitude we're at in the flywheel, right? We might map out— these are all steps, but then there might be different tasks underneath that specific step.

I guess you could do that.

You can do whatever you want. Do whatever you want. Okay. So in this, you've shared the vision. What comes after that?

It's the actual—

Close.

The close.

Yeah. Are you interested? Are you in?

Right.

How is that for a solid pitch? Are you? Yes, it's the close. Can you tell I'm not a salesperson by trade?

Okay.

It's the ask. It's the close. It's the let's do this. And then it's onboarding and getting them into the fund because it's one thing for them to say yes.

Yeah.

And there are steps in between. To actually have their money committed.

Things underneath this.

Yeah.

That are going to—

Yeah.

That are going to play out. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so then this is the hardest part of any flywheel, which I'm surprised. I think we wrote it down already, but the going from you've closed an investor and if you go from identify to close, we've got a funnel or a linear process. Yeah, but how does closing an investor get you more investors?

Yeah, it's always, who else should I be talking to? Because they have a network that I don't have. Yeah, they have maybe even co-invested with some of these individuals, and they know who's out there. They know they're having those types of conversations. Oh, I just backed this company, I just backed this film, I just backed this investment, just got into this fund. So they're having those conversations. So it's turning them into, okay, well, how do I get the next 3 How do I identify the next 3 individuals I want to talk to? And can you introduce me? Can you put us in an email? Can you send— can you put us in a text thread? It's funny how many billionaires just prefer text. I just like, oh yeah, well, let me just put you in a text. And 5 minutes later you're in a text with another billionaire. You're like, that was way easier than I've— I've been doing all this stuff. Where's my text message? So it's amazing when it works. And that's the best time to ask for that referral. Because they're hyped up on that investment. They just made that decision. You want to reinforce it with like, that's amazing. Let's get more people in too, because it's going to protect your investment. It's going to make it more robust. Like there's all these follow-on effects that really help if you ask for the referral right there. If you wait a week, you might not get even a response from them.

Yeah, because when they're excited, whatever their attention is on, that makes a big difference. And so I think in this case, as we go back to identify I always, always ask, like, does this loop closer actually work? Because there's a lot of times that you run into some and they, they don't quite work. But this one I think does. Yeah, because as you're, you're working through, then you're— it's a, it's a strong loop closer because they're doing the work to identify the right people. You might also get one or two referrals from someone you close, but then you might go, oh, I didn't realize that that was a category of person who cared about this thing. And so you might say, as you go to this next round of identifying more people, not just the ones they identified for you, but you might be like, oh, now under this list, I'm like that kind of person and that kind of person. And so my next round of outreach is going to be more targeted. Let me back up. There's 3 laws to flywheels, right? So first we have flow. So does each step flow smoothly from one into the next? I think these do. This makes sense. The next is ease. So does each rotation get easier over time? And that's where we're noticing, okay, my outreach, my warm intro, not only that, do I have more people who can make the intro as the network grows, but let's say it's a lukewarm intro. Like it's not quite, you know, as strong as I'd want. Well, now I can say I have people invested in my fund like A, B, and C. And so my close rate is gonna be higher or my intro acceptance rate is gonna be higher and we get to work our way up.

Yeah, you're not doing cold outreach anymore because you have connections and you have momentum, so.

Yeah, and then the last law is growth. Does each rotation of this flywheel produce more than the previous rotations? And before I commit to a flywheel and like set it in, stone or permanent marker, I want to make sure it meets all 3 laws. So how, as we move through this flywheel, are we getting more results with every rotation?

Yeah, the answer really is here because that's where it kind of gets more exponential.

The referrals, right?

The referrals. If it's 2 or 3, then the R value, so to speak, is positive. So if, if one referral even turns into one identify, that's an additional one that I didn't have to generate myself. And so that's how I look at it. Is there inbound that's also happening at the same time because people are introing me without me asking them? Or as I identify people, that's expanding to other groups of people. So each step, it does feel like the growth thing is happening. I can speak to that's happened 3 separate times where it's like, oh, have you heard of DAFs? No, I've done— what's a DAF? Oh, Okay, well here's an entire marketplace of people that I could start talking to in a different way. And so yeah, it certainly is happening. I wanted to stress test this with you today because this is what I've been doing and it is working, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't skipping steps or breaking one of the laws. So that makes me very happy.

Yeah, and I think also of these referrals, you end up with these mini hubs where now you have people who might continue to make referrals for you. They might only make one per quarter, Yeah, but one person making a referral per quarter and then later you have 5 people making a referral per quarter. Yeah. And that can scale from there. So I think we hit all 3 laws. Sweet. All right, let's go ahead and write this down. Actually, just from a video perspective, if you do me a favor and give me like a snap transition. Yeah.

Hey, that's pretty cool.

Look at that. Nice.

I like it. So, okay, really quick though, here's what I'm noticing as we've drawn it out because I've never actually drawn out the flywheel in my mind. I know enough about this process to go, here's what happens next. And I've got a whole tracking sheet that says, here's where each individual investor is at in the process. But man, if I'm in this mode for 3 hours on a Tuesday—

Just reaching out to people.

Just reaching out.

In the grind.

A, I'm burnt out by the end of that to do the next bits. And it really, it feels weird to be, it's like that forest for the trees. Experience of, am I doing the thing that's going to naturally progress it to the next step? Or like, what do you do if you find yourself in that situation?

Yeah, well, I think the first thing that we— that you pointed out is like, zoom out and think about the big picture. Yeah, because you, you will get fixated on an individual person. Identify this person. Oh man, they'd be perfect. Yeah, if I can get them in. I reach out to them, they don't respond. That's so frustrating. Like, we're in this back and forth that's quite challenging. And so it's to have this bird's eye view of say, oh no, I actually have lots of people moving through here and I can still treat them all very personally, handle each relationship individually, but I am moving them through this process. And I think the measurement is really important, especially in these sales-focused flywheels.

Yeah.

Because people will get caught up in what a specific lead did or If you think about the difference between lead measures and lag measures, like what are the things that you can control versus what you can't? You can't actually control how many closes you make. Yeah, right. There's inputs in that. You have influence on it. Yeah, but you don't have control. You can definitely control how many people you identify and how many people you reach out to.

Right.

So one of my favorite things to do is to measure this and to measure a flywheel. The first thing you have to do is decide What cadence does this rotate on? In this case, this is either to me a weekly or a monthly flywheel.

Yeah.

And do you have a gut reaction on that?

Definitely more like weekly or even daily. Like it's, if I haven't identified that week, then the reach out is minimal because there's not enough people to reach out to. And yeah, they have to be very different blocks of time because they're different activities and trying to identify one and then reach out to them and identify the next and reach out, I tried that, so ineffective.

Like that's basically taking, in your factory, you're taking one thing all the way through the stations and then going back to the beginning.

Yeah, that lasted a day and then I was like, never doing that again.

So I like that you say weekly because that points to this is really important and we're going to measure it. You could measure it daily, but like that doesn't give enough time and then you spend way too much time on measurement and improvement rather than actually doing the thing. So this is a weekly flywheel. What we do is we make a Google spreadsheet and we're going to outline, uh, let's see, all the columns. You can do either way, I don't care, but the columns would be the weeks and the rows would be the tasks.

Yeah.

So how many leads did you identify this week? How many did you reach out to? How many calls? You know, how many moved into that second call, closes, etc.? Now this is not cohort-based, right? You're not taking the same group of leads all the way through. Yeah. You're just tracking how many calls do we have this week? And they might be people that you reach out to a week ago or 6 weeks ago that finally converted to a call.

Yeah.

But then you can notice these trends where you're like, man, I don't have any calls, but I did lots of outreach. Oh, but I didn't do outreach 3 weeks ago or 4 weeks ago. And you can start to notice these trends of, oh, when I didn't do one activity, weeks later I saw the dip. Or, wow, I have so many calls this week. What happened? Oh, that's right, I buckled down and did a ton of outreach. Yeah. And so just that regular measurement makes a big difference.

Yeah. When it just— it also reinforces how essential each part of this flywheel is, because if it's missing, the momentum stops. Right, right. If you don't do the outreach, you don't get calls. And it also like where I'm feeling it right now is like, oh, it's probably not even a thing where I'm missing steps. It's just a scale. It's just a matter of, oh, did I identify enough people to do enough reach out to get enough calls? And, and, and, and, and, and that's the thing.

Yeah, that's where I like tracking all the data because then I can graph, like identify an outreach.

Yeah.

So, you know, by themselves and see how is just that week to week and like, yeah, Oh sweet, I am trending better and better. And the reason is because I implemented a better system for identifying. Or every flywheel has a hypothesis behind it. And our hypothesis here is that the more people we close and get on board with our vision, the more referrals we'll get, which will make it easier to identify, outreach, and ultimately close more and more people.

Yeah.

And so if we have data, we can see, oh, this is true. And so under the identify step, I might split out the measurement. How many people were identified based on the work that I did versus the work those referrals did, right? How many referrals did I get? And so you can see like, man, my effort is consistent. I'm putting the same 3 hours a week in these 2 scheduled blocks on identify. So I might see my effort is consistent. I'm spending the same 3 hours a week on identifying leads, but my calls are going up. Why is that? Oh, because the referrals are steadily gaining on that.

Yeah.

And I can see the impact and, and I can pay attention to it long term. The other thing that I would do is I, every single one of these steps would have calendar blocks. And so I know Monday morning from 7 AM to 9 AM, I'm doing, I'm identifying. After that, I'm doing the outreach. And then I've got 3 blocks a week where I've got ready for calls. Yeah. You know, I have this specific time Wednesdays at noon is when I'm doing all of my follow-up and going back through this.

Yeah.

And et cetera. So that, oh, and then Fridays, you know, at 3:00 PM or 9:00 AM or whenever it is, is when I have 30 minutes where I take a step back and I measure the flywheel. I say, hey, what worked well this week? What are my numbers to put in? What was the friction that I felt?

Yeah.

You know, oh man, there's a lot of friction here. And then what improvements do I want to make for the following week? Oh, I want to write, I'm using the same script for outreach. I want to write 3 different scripts that I can just pull from to get to the right person.

Yeah.

Amazing.

I have a lot of that in place. So like, honestly, this feels just really reinforcing of like, okay, I'm not missing anything. I'm not doing anything in reverse. I don't have any, like, things that trail off to the side instead of continue the flywheel. So that's really helpful to see it this way. Like I said, I've never mapped it out, and so to see it in that, in that order and that cadence, really, I can already see adjustments that I can make because I'm spending so much time in one or two areas, right, that I'm not giving enough time and effort and focus to other areas that actually help the flywheel turn into momentum.

And that's where the wheel analogy works, because we've all seen, you know, the bicycle wheel or something with the bent rim and it like spins and it rubs on the brakes in this one area or like has this wobble to it. And you're like, oh, it's going really well. And then right here it's stalling out.

Yeah.

And we do that. Okay. So since you feel good about this flywheel, we've got a whole other piece of paper.

Oh man.

Like, okay, we can dive in. This is the outbound flywheel.

Yes.

But you're a content guy. Right?

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I immediately want to know what does the inbound flywheel look like? Because these can go hand in hand.

Yeah. Well, that's been really interesting to think about and figure out and test over the last about 6 months. To use your analogy of the strip mall versus the skyscraper.

Yep.

I burnt down my strip mall back in August of last year.

Okay.

So I had a strip mall that was generating about $150,000 a year. From creator stuff. I'd been doing it for 4 years, written books, had the community, had the coaching, consulting, all the different tiers of do-it-yourself and done-with-you and done-for-you, and I burnt it to the ground because I was spending 80% of my time on that and only 20% on this. And this is what I want. This is the 3-year, 5-year, 10-year, 30-year goal right now is this film fund. And the impact I can have making these types of films. So that was a hard decision. But what was amazing was, I still struggle with this, so maybe you can help me with this part, which is everybody talks about scale and size of audience, and that's where the leverage comes from. You look at all the success stories and you go, oh, they got 40 or 400 or 2 million followers. They have an email list of 150,000 people. And you go, okay, until I'm at that point, I'm not gonna be successful. And there was a moment where I said, okay, what if I could get this from this? What would that look like?

If you get the high net worth investors coming into you from inbound.

Yeah.

But not necessarily needing to have 10,000 people or 100,000 people on your list.

Right. So what would the content look like? What would the structure look like? What would the world I built look like? So that it kind of dissuaded other people from coming into it and only attracted the people that it was built for.

Yeah, I like that.

Yeah.

Well, and that's, I mean, that's the power of content and the power of an inbound flywheel. So let's map out an inbound flywheel that really complements everything you're doing on outbound.

Sweet.

And we'll go from there. Okay, so what do you think the steps are for the inbound sales flywheel?

Well, it starts with content. And when I was thinking about that, maybe this informs what you write on the sticky note there is, who's it for? Who's the audience? And so I really wanted to test this theory of, Can this work with one audience, one channel, one offer? Like, can I strip it down to where I'm not on 4 social media platforms and doing 8 different types of content and doing it 7 times a day like everybody says? Like, I don't have time for that, right? I got to do this. This is more effective. But if I can get this to work in the background and start growing, then it's great. So for me, it was I'm reaching high net worth investors, people who are interested in investing in indie film. And that informed what the content was going to be.

Yep. So that's a lot of words for your sticky note, but, uh, it's content. So why don't you write down that goal? We'll write it in the center. You go, goal, and then reach indie film, or reach film investors. Yeah, so the goal is to reach film investors.

Yeah.

And so that's a lens that we want to view all content.

Perfect.

Which most people would say Oh, I want to get views.

Yeah.

And this is the difference between building up a crowd, which is anyone, versus building up an audience, which is the right people paying attention.

Yes.

And so I love that you wrote this down to start because that is the lens that we have to view every single thing that we're doing.

When that pull for vanity metrics is so strong because that's reinforced by everybody out there because that's where they derive their value. They're not able to do this. And so they're saying, well, my content got 100,000 views or I just hit 10,000 followers. And you're like, but that doesn't help me get this.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

The pull is there every single time you open the dang apps.

Right.

It's crazy.

Okay, so you're saying we're going to start with short-form content.

Yeah.

To reach those people. Yeah.

Yeah. I chose LinkedIn as a platform because that's where those people live.

Yep.

That's where they're spending some time getting their news from. So I chose LinkedIn as the one channel and this audience, the single audience of investors. And yeah, the content is the kind of the offer in some ways.

I like that. Look at that one stuck. Great job.

All right.

All right. Short-form content on LinkedIn.

Yep.

Where are we going from there?

From there, I have a little— I'm stealing André Chaperone's term of tiny digital world.

Okay.

So it's a world that is built for exploration. So there's no funnels, there's just a lot of doors in, and every piece of content has a link to something, some entry point. So it's long-form written content. Okay, next step, the next sticky note. And those are blog posts, they're manifestos, they're teaching everything I know content. It's all that kind of stuff, specifically again towards reaching film investors. So the thing I point to the most are either the individual posts or the catch-all page, which is called Learn How to Invest in Indie Film. So who's that for? It's for these—

yeah, it's pretty clear.

Yeah.

All right, so we're going from short form capturing attention, and then we're going into long form written content. One thing that stands out to me on the short form is something that happens a lot with advertising these days, where it used to be that when you ran Facebook ads, you would spend a lot of time getting the targeting Exactly right. And now what everyone does is they do targeting with their ad creative.

Oh, interesting.

Where they say the right person, they try to put it right in there. Like early on in their video or in their text, like, hey, film investors. Exactly, 100%. So people go, that's not me. And instead of like in your Facebook targeting trying to get really detailed and Facebook's like, I don't have that level of detail for you. Instead you do that with your creative and then Facebook learns like, oh, all these people are just ignoring your creative. Your creative is garbage for these people, but for this group it resonated. They're like, well, you did your targeting with your content. And so you can do that with your short-form content where you're really trying to be immediately useful and interesting to the right people and an immediate turnoff for everyone else.

Well, the problem with the ads, the ad-focused way is that's demographics, right? You can't target demand in those little bullet point selectors, right? And so yeah, you're 100% right. The very first post that I wrote was how to visit set as an executive producer.

Okay, who's the audience for that?

5 people on LinkedIn. But guess what? It worked. And it identified people that are now investing in the fund because they are seeing the very hyper-specific, targeted, demand-focused content that I'm posting on short-form. I want to go to two ways.

Hit in something I'm going to come back to. Outbound sales for content. Okay. There's the thing, we'll come back to that. All right, so long-form written content, what comes after that?

So at the end of each piece, it's a call to action.

Okay.

It's one of two things, and there's usually both on a page. One is read more. So this leads to this, so you should go check this out, or go back to the big page that has lots of this stuff if you wanna keep reading, or get on the email list.

Okay.

It's always, always, always, get on the kit email list. I looked into camera for that one for you.

I like it.

And there is, I should say, there is, um, you know, lead generators involved with that. So it's not just join my newsletter. Yeah, yeah, there are definitely—

you're following best practices.

Yes.

But for shorthand, that's what we're trying to do. All right, so once people are on the email list, where are we going?

This is where the magic happens. So somewhere in this process We're fans of Brennan and Right Message, right? So I've got that implemented on the site. I was one of the lifetime customers when he did the new one. So I'm just like, I'm all in on Right Message. So there's segmenting that's happening before, during, and after the email signup that informs what happens inside KIT once they're on the email list. So I've got 3 segments that I've identified for the people that are coming onto my list. Either they're an investor, they're a filmmaker, or they're a film fan. So they like movies, they are interested in it, but they're not a filmmaker, or they're a producer, filmmaker of some sort, or they actually are investor. They can certainly have multiple, but if they're identified as an investor, better guarantee that they're taking the expressway compared to the long route, which is read more content, look at my podcast, do all this stuff if you're interested in film. So I've got multiple paths and I don't know how you handle that with flywheels because this is to me where it all just kind of falls apart.

Okay.

It feels like it just grinds to a screeching halt at that point.

I would say when everything falls apart, you should come back to one thing. Yeah. And that's the goal, which you've conveniently written in the middle of our— So who matters most?

It's the investor.

It's the investor.

And so it's not that the that the fans or other people involved in it are useless. It's that they don't matter for this flywheel. And so what we can happily do is just have an off-ramp for them, right? Segment and automate. We're not getting rid of those people, but they'll go into something different.

Gotcha.

We're not mad that they signed up. We're like, hey, this was not for you. What are you doing? Did you not read? 'Cause it might be the director.

I like their off-ramp is a smooth exit on the bottom of the flywheel. 'Cause in my mind, if it was up here, they'd be like flung into it.

Good luck. But they can go into something else. You might have some content that is out of everything you've written. You're like, hey, this is useful for you.

Yeah.

Maybe there's something one day you're inspired to write something and you're like, oh, here's how to be a great fan. How to be a true fan of an indie film. Yeah, because you just felt like writing that on a whim.

Well, then that right now, that might be something those people get, right?

Right. Just because—

and it's not for the investors, and that's a different segment. It's easy to target because of kit.

Yep.

And so I can just email them. I love that.

That's perfect.

I've been really thinking of it as like this single path opens up to three, and then somehow one of them goes back.

And that's how we introduce friction in a flywheel, and And it never starts spinning.

Gosh.

So let's focus on the investors. Those are who matter. What comes next?

Love it. So at some point in an email sequence or in a weekly newsletter email, which all of them have calls to action links that are tagged and segmented. So at some point they raise their hand by clicking on a link. They say, I'm interested in that. And that takes them to a page to get on a call where they can then probably, I don't know if it jumps over to this flywheel or if it's just part of this flywheel, We'll get there, I guess. Yeah.

Okay, so we're raising your hands now. We just did this episode with John Meece.

Okay.

And there was something that he said in that that really stood out to me. He was talking about everything. I'm an email marketing guy, so I'm like link tracking, clicks, automation, all that. And he was like, you should definitely do hand raisers. And I was like, oh yeah, absolutely. I do those all the time. And he was saying as replies.

Hmm.

And because he was talking about how the friction is so much lower, and I was like, well, you click the link and then you go into the survey, and then based on how they fill out the survey— and he was like, nope, just ask them to reply and have this really clear value that you're describing and say, hey, if you, you know, are this kind of person who wants to invest in indie films, let me know.

Yeah, interesting.

And then you just— you have really— so super simple email. Hit reply, and then you would start those conversations rather than relying on the automation.

I like that in theory. The size of my list for this is like 200 people. Mm-hmm. And so my hand raise, hit reply and let me knows get zero right now.

Okay.

So.

But your, do your link click hand raise?

Those will get 2 to 5 every email. Where it'll take them to the next step, to the next step.

So I'm not saying he's wrong.

I'm curious if it's a function of scale and size and frequency, or if I'm, maybe I need to read his book and figure out what is the right hand raise email to use. Like I'm totally open to that. But this is the current experience. Is that I get, I get nothing.

So I think what you could do is, in that case, I would tweak the messaging that we're using for the hand raise. And I would look at maybe we just need more people in the funnel and maybe we need to have multiple of these hand raise options throughout the email sequence. Yeah, like maybe if someone clicks something that makes me think they're interested, then I might have an email to start this one-on-one conversation. You know, hey, it sounds like you're interested in investing in indie films. Have you invested in one before? Yeah, super simple. Personalized email from Darren, right? And that feels like this one-off thing rather than this automation. And that might start conversations.

That's actually what's happening currently is I have automations that will notify me if someone does an action and then I can personalize the next one.

Yep, that sounds good. So I would play with replies more and see if you can start these organic conversations.

Yeah.

But so you've got the hand raiser, where do we go from there?

Hand raise goes to similar to here, goes to either a first call or an actual pitch, like a presentation. So depending on where they're at, because I'm also an email marketing nerd, I can go in at this point, as soon as they raise their hand, I can go in and look at all the details that I've captured about them from right message, from the different custom fields, from the tags that they have and go, oh, I know how much time they spent with me. Me, how much content they've looked at. And I know, are they pitching me on something? Are they interested in investing? Are they wanting to learn how I set up my investment? So I know a lot about them. And I can either, you know, reject the call if they're just trying to pitch me something.

Right.

Or I can go, oh, I need to do some digging on this person because they look like a perfect target.

I like that. And I think this is the case where I'm just going to throw an arrow in here because this is really where we pick up. It's the same.

Yeah. At that point, it's the same.

This is a new way of identifying and reaching out to more people and doing it at scale. So now I want to talk about the loop closer. And this is how do we come around here? How does more calls get us more content? Yeah.

The way I've always thought about it is the loop closer is results. Okay, so if I can share a really great call that I just had, yeah, turn that into content. Or I just was able to answer this question for an investor. I just had a conversation with investor, they had a really great question. That turns into short-form content.

Yep.

So results is what I typically put there, but I'm curious how that sits with you. Does it count?

It can. You're— if your content was entirely about like sort of the status of like, I'm talking to this investor and then this person is in, so you should probably should to, but it's not. Yours is entirely about education. Yeah. And this behind-the-scenes look. So results is interesting as a loop closer, but what I want to know is what questions did they ask? I'd have a process in this call like, so what are you curious about as it's related to indie films? Because now you have your target person on a call And you can basically ask them, you're not saying, hey, what content should I make to reach more people like you? But you're asking—

What are your struggles? What are your frustrations?

What are you curious about?

Curiosities, yeah. And turn those—

And then you can answer those in the content. So it's really the synthesizing research. And so like if you're recording all of these calls and then you're using Grain or Fathom you're piping in all the transcripts into a broader AI tool that then is constantly reminding you on a weekly or monthly basis like, hey, here's the themes across all of your calls. People are confused about these things or the misunderstanding is this. And so then you sit down, you're like, what should I write about?

Yeah.

And all right there, all the transcripts of your calls are like, well, I mean, the last 12 calls with your target client said this.

How do you make money?

Right.

Oh yeah.

Right, so the biggest thing is, you know, like say it comes up over and over again, how do I know if an indie film is a good investment? What time period should I expect a return on my investment? You know, should I think of this as like backing a mission-driven project and maybe I get money back, or should I think of this, you know, compared to real estate or 100 other things I could put money into.

Yeah.

And you get to use the words that they use themselves.

Brilliant.

And so that means that this first call takes an entirely different form because it's really about, well, like what you said when we were talking on the outbound flywheel, it's about understanding them, their goals, but you're going to be tweaking those questions to really synthesize the research.

I love that shift. That's a big, Big idea for this flywheel. Get out of here, result.

You're wrong.

All right, I'm just gonna throw that up there. Our loop closer is synthesized.

Amazing.

Okay, so I feel really good about this flywheel. We've got a strong loop closer and all of that, but let's, let's make it look pretty.

Okay, deal.

All right, fist bump transition.

Oh, I love it. Whoa!

And there we go.

Nice.

All right, so let's recap this flywheel, and there's a few details that I want to talk about.

Awesome.

So we've got our short-form content that is really targeted on reaching film investors.

Yep.

The long-form written content, that's where we're pulling people into that, getting them— I love what you're saying, getting them deep into your world.

Yeah, they can click, they can explore around.

I've definitely had that experience where I think the first time I came across Chris Guilbeault, oh yeah, I like read his entire website in one go, and he'd been writing for years. Yeah, just start to finish, binge it, binge the whole thing. There's a moment, a thing here that I wanted to come back to of the long-form written content. And you think about an inbound flywheel versus an outbound flywheel. When you put out this great content, you can actually use it for outbound. And something that I'm seeing more and more newsletter creators do is identify their target person and then send cold outbound emails to them and say, hey, I wrote this piece of content, I thought it might be interesting for you. And so you don't have to wait for the short-form content to take off to drive to the long-form. You can go—

The algorithm to reach them someday.

This whole thing somehow you can go identify, yeah, you know, 100 or 500 people.

Oh man.

Send one-off emails and be like, hey, wrote this thing, thought you might like it. Okay, that's based on, you know, why do you think you might like it? You know, so you could go through the investor list for 50 films that, you know, are in your genre or niche and say, hey, I saw that you invested in films A, B, and C. I wrote this thing. I thought you might like it.

Amazing.

And so you can actually do outbound that way. And then it starts conversations like we might bypass. Yeah, whole chunks of a flywheel.

Mm-hmm. Okay. I love that. And I have not done any of it. So that's gonna be huge. That already feels like a 10x idea of—

Yeah.

Instead of waiting for my following to grow from 5,000 to 50,000 so I can 10x this, it's like, oh, I can instantly drive 100 more people a week to this site manually. So you're using an automated short form plus the manual and it's, oh, okay.

One little tweak on that. You can test it both ways, but I have a hypothesis of which one will work better.

Okay.

Is option A is to include the link in it. I wrote this piece of content, here it is. Yeah. You know, read it. Option B, hey, I wrote a short guide on this thing. Would you want me to send that to you? And that's the whole email.

Yeah.

And my guess is you'll have a higher conversion rate by not including. It kind of kills me because it's a little less useful. But it's like, yeah, I want to read that. And so, you know, they hit reply and you're like, oh yeah, here it is. You send it to them, the PDF or whatever. And then if, you know, you could follow up a few days later, hey, did you get a chance to read that? If you enjoyed it, I write a weekly newsletter about the same thing. Mind if I add you to that list?

Yeah.

Right? And then you're bringing people through here. And again, you don't have to wait for the algorithms or them to take action.

Well, and it's almost like you're not waiting for the flywheel to get up to speed.

Yeah.

Force, right?

Because a flywheel is way harder than a hand pump to get going, right? And so you're like, I'm not gonna— I don't want to wait months for this. Like, I'm going to put in the effort.

I need it now to get it going. Yeah, very good.

But there's a key difference here, because most of the time when someone says, I mapped out a flywheel, but I need instant results, so I'm going to shelve the flywheel and I'm going to go over here and do the hand pump version, and then they get instant results, but it never turns in— like, Right, 'cause it's not working in the flywheel, yeah.

It's different activities.

And so in this case you're saying, I'm gonna stay focused on the core goal, but I'm gonna put in the effort to accelerate it.

So cool, okay.

Okay, so we've got people on the email list, we're segmenting. Again, it seems like it was a really important moment of saying, all right, we've got 3 possible types of people. We're just gonna have a nice offering of somewhere else. You matter, you're valuable, you're just not valuable to this flywheel.

You're part of a different flywheel that's gonna serve your needs needs and demands better than this one will. So I love that.

And you could build up a 5-part email sequence for those people. Yeah, when you feel like it or have time. It's not a priority for this goal.

Exactly.

Then we're into the first call. This is really where we just move straight from one flywheel into the other. Yeah, there's not a new process that has to happen there, you know. It's, it's a true sales process at that point.

And then on those calls, we're capturing all the notes, the questions especially, the frustrations, needs, pains, jobs to be done, all that stuff. Yeah, the terminology that they use, the words they're using.

Yeah.

And that is what generates— and the loop closer.

Yeah.

Generates new content.

And so every rotation, the content is getting more and more relevant to your exact target market.

Yeah, it's already hyper-targeted and it's just going to get more and more hyper-targeted. To speak to the 200 people that I need in order to start this fundraise. That's it.

And so in this case, I love the way that an inbound flywheel and an outbound flywheel play off of each other.

Yeah.

Because people treat them as entirely separate tasks, but really they go hand in hand because if we come back to the outbound flywheel, now the outreach has more credibility because then you can point to a piece of content that you have, it's getting better, You can point to a growing audience on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

You know, 2,000 people turns into 5,000 to 10,000 followers and you're like, oh, you're the guy who's all about this. Yeah. And so there's more and more credibility, which gets higher conversion rates. And then as you get closer to your goal, right through this process, we close more people. We're at $4 million, we're at $8 million. Then you can do content about, hey, we just raised $8 million for our film. Here's what works. Here's the kinds of investors we're looking for. Yeah, they just, they feed off each other so well, like a flywheel. So you can have these two different flywheels.

This is awesome. It works well. Well, I love this. Like, visually, I'm thinking of almost like a bicycle where you've got two wheels, but you've got a crank in the middle. Yeah. And it's really your effort. I can see how these are connected. I can see how these are connected. And they're not really overlapping, but they're they're benefiting each other. Work over here is going to crank this wheel, work over here is going to crank that one. I didn't see that coming, so nicely done. Very cool.

Well, this was a ton of fun. This is the kind of thing that I nerd out on nonstop. If anyone watching is like, hey, I want in on this kind of thing, it's what I do at creatorflywheels.com in the course community. We have tons of stuff like this. But I'm just, I'm really curious kind of how you're feeling coming in. Versus how you feel, you know, now that we have this clearly mapped out?

Part of me was super nervous to put my flywheel on the wall and have you, the flywheel guy, look at it because you could have laughed me out of here and been like, I thought you knew what you were talking about, Darren. Like, who let you in here? So it was really reaffirming to get some good feedback of like, I wouldn't change a thing. This has been super helpful, adding this second one and seeing how work over here is not pulling away from effort and focus over here. It's actually contributing to it. So I have a lot of work to do, but it's work that I know I can do that I'm already good at. Like, I can just see the, the aftereffects of this hour spent together. So thank you. And yeah, I can't wait to see how it plays out and how it starts to pick up steam.

Yeah, that sounds good. All right. So if someone is watching and they're like, I want to know more about what you're doing I want to know more about potentially investing in independent films, where should they go to follow you?

Awesome. Yeah, my website is craftsmanfilms.co, and that's a fun little world for you to explore. So there's lots of ways in, but there's a link right on the home page for how to invest in indie films, and so you can check that out, you can join. It's a really great place that we've built there.

Sounds good. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks, Nathan.

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.