Creator Business Expert: 7 Tools to Make $150,000 in 30 Days

All of us are excited by this idea of spotting the next trend. Well, what's interesting is you don't actually have to go by your intuition. You can actually leverage all of these resources that tell you what everyone cares about. There's data coming at us every single day, but the 1% that pays attention to the right data points does have an edge.

What's the difference between a big audience and the right audience?

How do you attract the people that you really want? It's really easy to overmaneuver and follow all of the tactics, but the tactics are for the average person trying to reach the average audience.

One thing that you're really well known for, the best person on the internet for deep internet research.

What I wanted to give people is a map of the internet and how to use different tools.

I'm curious, which probably means that everyone listening is curious, how much you've made off of selling this thing.

It's only been around for a few months. Altogether, it's made over $300K.

All right, Steph, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So it's good to see you again. Last time we hung out was in Austin. What, back in November, I think, for a live recording of Billion Dollar Creator where you came out to the show.

It was so fun.

That's one thing that I realized. Have you seen very many other shows do live events? Like My First Million's doing it. I know Huberman just did a tour in Australia, like they did a 4-week tour. But I want this to be much more of a trend because I don't know if I'm just a total nerd, but I would absolutely like go sit in the audience in a theater, you know, a community space or whatever to watch my favorite podcasters just nerd out on stage.

Totally. I think some, some other podcasts are definitely doing it, like The Founders Podcast. And I think it's interesting when you really think about it, because if you listen to a podcast not live, it's objectively better in terms of all the filler words are edited out, it's higher quality audio, you can watch it at 2x or at your own time, your own pace. But there's something so human about wanting to be in that room.

Well, yeah, you mentioned The Founders Podcast. They just did their Founders Only event. I didn't go to it, but I know a few people who did. And it was like 150, 160 people.

Mm-hmm.

Which I think from the way that they were talking about it, I thought it was gonna be small cuz it was like a $5,000 or $6,000 price point.

Right.

And then seeing that it was, I think 160 people, I'm like doing the math. Like what was that?

Yeah. What is that math?

800 grand, $850,000 in ticket sales.

Okay. Okay.

And I mean, Founders is a very popular podcast.

Mm-hmm.

But it being that popular, I was like, all right, listeners want these like in-person, uh, real-world experiences to, you know, it's like, okay, if you love this show, then you're probably into some of the same things that I am.

Oh, totally.

And so like, yeah, let's show up in person.

Yeah. I think it also does this really interesting signaling thing where once a podcast gets to size, everyone kind of knows it's of a certain size, but once you do an in-person thing, it's like we had enough pull. For people literally to get on an airplane to come see us and wanna hang out with us and be there. And I think that's just like one of the, you know, arguably hardest things to do is to get people to like clear their schedules. And so if you have a big enough podcast, not just in terms of scale, but that really close integration with your audience, it's a, I think that's like one of the best ways to signal it is by running one of these events.

One other thing that I was shocked by shocked is too strong of a word, surprised by when doing the live tour last fall is getting invited to speak at conferences where the conference talk was the live podcast. So we did FinCon, so the Financial Creators Conference in New Orleans. I thought they were going to stick us in a room, side stage, all of that, maybe 100 people, but we were the main keynote and it was in front of 1,200 people. And I was like, really? For a podcast? Okay. And I mean, I was thrilled, uh, a little nervous, but then I'm doing another event. I'm doing, uh, the Travel Bloggers Conference, same thing where like it's the live podcast on stage. And so I guess people really love the format.

Yeah. Well, well, let me ask you one thing, Nathan. How many people will listen to an average episode of this roughly?

Um, not that many, 1,500, 2,000.

Well, it's funny because do you feel nervous right now?

Oh, not at all.

Which is so interesting, right? Because I think about the same things. I've been on podcasts that reached like 100,000 people per episode. And I mean, those are the outliers that I go on, but I don't feel nervous just like sitting there recording in front of Riverside. And if I do a presentation in real life in front of like 50 people, I am shaking. And so it's just really interesting when you think about like Even a podcast, 1,500 people, just imagine those faces right in front of you.

Yeah. With that, I always tell when someone says like, oh, I have a really small audience. It's just, it's only 500 people on my newsletter. And I'm like, imagine, you know, like 500 people is a good size theater, you know, like, and so having that many people paying attention, but one thing that I'm thinking about with the size of the, of the podcast is with this show. I have a balance. I'm curious what you think about it of trying to keep the show relatively small and only have the right audience. So for example, I did an episode, I guess recorded in November, probably released in January, um, with Tiago Forte, where it was like a coaching episode, breaking down his business, building out, really coaching him on going from $2 million to $10 million, uh, in revenue. And after that episode, I had people like, uh, Jay Papasan, Mark Manson, like all of these really well-known creators saying, hey, that was phenomenal. Like, I love the podcast. Ali Abdaal was talking about, um, how him and Angus's general manager listens to so many of the episodes. And it made me think about the difference between a big audience and the right audience.

Oh, totally.

And so my thing that I'm now obsessed with is, okay, how do I get like 1,000 of the professional and star creators to listen to a show and enjoy that versus saying, how do I get to say 100,000 of just kind of a general crowd?

Yeah, I mean, it's tough because the, the metrics that we now have, which are exciting, often lead you in the other direction, right? Like, if you're— I think this is why, using Twitter as an example, people start tweeting there, they hear that there's some hack to write some thread or follow some engagement tactic. And while that sometimes, not always, but sometimes does lead to scale, it leads entirely often to the wrong kind of scale and the wrong kind of people. That you're ideally not really trying to reach. And then you actually, because the smartest people or the most experienced people in any given space are well aware of all those same tactics, it actually repels those individuals even more.

Yeah, it makes me think of Tim Grahl, who runs StoryGrid, which is a writer training, like a fiction writer training and publishing business. And he's grown his YouTube channel. I think it's maybe 10,000 to 20,000 subscribers. And people keep coming into him and saying like, oh, if you did this, it would grow in this way. If you did that. And he, his struggle is he's like, how do I get just the right people? I don't want, you know, the silver play button and to get to 100,000 and then have the channel go this entirely different direction. Exactly what you're saying of the platforms are here to get you a mass audience, a mass crowd following you. And yet there's some people who are trying to pick this very deliberate path and be like, No, no, no, you, but not you. I don't know. What do you think about, or does anyone come to mind of someone who has tried that path or would you have any ideas for how you really target one audience and exclude others?

Yeah, I think, I mean, it's, it sounds like obvious advice, but like starting with hopefully, you know, your audience and hopefully you would be in your audience. That doesn't have to be the case. Um, but paying attention to what you enjoy and let me give you a specific example of where following the like tried and true tactics for the masses just absolutely would not work. There's this YouTube channel. It's called Travel Alone Idea. And all it is is this person who loves Japanese passenger trains, and they go and they just film these Japanese passenger trains. And the videos are around, like, 10 to 15 minutes. They're not highly edited. They're not glitzy, and there's not all these fancy After Effects transitions, and there's not even sound. There's not even narration. This person literally is just walking around these Japanese passenger trains, and there's this you can just tell that this person is just like, they just appreciate the nuance and the, um, I guess uniqueness of these environments so much that they don't need to make it more than it is. And if you look at the thumbnails, even it's just a picture of the train and like a red arrow, but guess how many subscribers this YouTube channel has?

Well, I just pulled it up. I'm completely shocked. Like I would have guessed since you asked, I would have guessed 50,000, right?

Cause it has to be higher than you thought, right?

How many it actually has?

It has 1.5 million subscribers. But here's the most amazing part to me is if you actually just go and look at their information, they've only uploaded 30 videos and they joined the platform in October 2021. So around 2 years ago, 2 and a half years ago. So this defies all of the like engagement tactics. But coming back to your question about like how do you attract the people that you really want, it's not over maneuvering.

One other thing on this. Really quickly, the view counts are also— so it's not just 1.5 million subscribers over 30 videos, which is insane, but you're looking at view counts, 86 million views on this video from 2 years ago, 25 million.

Yes.

I mean, even 3.2 million views and even some of their—

look at the comments too. People are engaging with it. They like it. And so that's wild. I like to give this example because again, I think it's really easy to overmaneuver and follow all of the tactics, but the tactics are for the average person trying to reach the average audience. And so if we attack your question about specifically not doing that, it's like, what is something that I am obsessed with? In this case, this person literally just spends their life occasionally going on these passenger trains. And again, they're not, they're not trying to apply all of these things to the videos. They're sharing what they appreciate about these trains. And you can tell that, um, in this case, if you were to kind of describe how you feel or the type of people who watch this, they're not looking for something that's like a MrBeast, like in your face, like you'll never believe what happens next. In fact, the people who watch this are looking for something calming, for something like that they maybe watch before bed. And you may think, oh, how does that apply to a traditional creator or someone who's maybe not doing Japanese passenger trains? But I think this question of how do you want to make someone feel as they engage with your content? And some creators, if you really think about it, some creators make The extra effort to make you feel respected as a fellow creator, to make you feel like a fellow expert versus some other creators make you, you know, feel like a beginner, like you don't know what you're doing. There's all these nuances to, um, again, how you can, in creating your content, think through how you're making someone feel. And that sounds fluffy, but that's ultimately why people gravitate to different creators and not others.

Can you give an example of something you might do? Either using, you can use this show as an example or something else of like, you know, making someone make, feel respected as a professional creator or like kind of that nuance that you're talking about there.

Yeah. So, I mean, so let's, let's use Tim Ferriss. You mentioned him as an example. He does a few things and he's talked about this publicly. Number one, even just in the ad selection, he makes sure that he doesn't ever share anything that he hasn't actually vetted and that he believes in. He also goes to extreme lengths. And by the way, this is not, or this is why his content is often not on video, extreme lengths to clean up the content and to make sure it's only like the most interesting, most valuable nuggets. And then I think he also, you know, just from in terms of guest selection, make sure that he's not going to bring on someone that you as a listener are not going to be extremely excited about. And I think he's even said like he's not run interviews if they're not very good. Those are very simple examples, but All of that kind of accumulates to you as a listener, maybe not a fellow creator in this particular example, feeling like Tim Ferriss respects my time and therefore I respect what he's putting out there. And you can kind of just ask that question. You don't need to necessarily be a creator that exudes respect, but you do need to exude something. Is it excitement? Is it approachability? Is it humor? Um, and if you think about it, like Barstool, you don't get like a respect feeling from Barstool, but you get something else very real. And like, again, it's about figuring out, to your earlier question, who am I trying to, to reach? And how do I curate my content for that? Even if it means reaching a bunch of people who just want to relax while watching Japanese passenger trains.

Yeah, that's good. I mean, having an idea of the, the tone or the feeling that you're creating is really important. One thing that you're really well known for that I think of you as the best person on the internet for is like deep internet research and diving into exactly what's happening, you know, in the web, finding these, whether it's companies or stories or so much else, uh, that you do. And you know, you, you've shared a bunch of those when you, you came on, uh, on my show a couple years ago. Uh, I think you taught a bunch of this when you spoke at Craft and Commerce, but you've packaged a lot of this into a course called Internet Pipes. Can we talk about that for a second and explain what it is?

Yeah. So like you said, I think I've kind of accidentally stumbled into this persona where people realize that I kind of spend too much time online and then they ask where I find the things that I do. And while it is a function of time, it's also a function of the tools that I use, the different content channels that I pay attention to and don't pay attention to. And ultimately, I, you know, I previously worked on a product called Trends, which was more about, hey, let me just give you all these trends each week. And that's exciting, but no one ever knew how we found them. And it's not just about replicating trends, but really what I wanted to give people is almost like a map of the internet and how to use different tools to navigate it and to find these things, to surface these things, uh, that are all there. And maybe one other thing that. I'd say is that I think we are at a unique moment in time. When you really think about when the internet was created, there was a wave where, you know, in the early 2000s, all of these websites, whether it was Amazon, Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, they were all being created. So there was a phase where all the information needed to, uh, be brought online. And then over the last 5 to 10 years, what we've seen is those not only continue to grow, but all of these data tools come to be that allow you to analyze what's happening on all of those platforms. So a lot of people are familiar with SEO. That has to do with Google, biggest website in the world, where you can see exactly what people are searching, what they're afraid of, what they're excited by, what they're confused by every single day at scale. But all of that also exists for all the products people are buying on Amazon, the communities that they're engaging on Reddit. And so Internet Pipes was in effect trying to bring all of these tools, which again are, are actually kind of new, especially in the grand scale of time. To people so that they can realize whether they're trying to create a business and they wanna validate it a little bit before they, you know, jump headfirst, or they wanna create content and they wanna make it more interesting. Well, what's interesting is you don't actually have to go only by your intuition. You can actually leverage and lean on all of these resources that tell you what everyone cares about. Um, so that was the idea of Internet Pipes is really like bringing those ideas and those tools. To people who aren't as familiar with them.

What are some of the tools that you use the most? Like to get into that in a little bit more detail. If you were to, you know, give a high-level introduction to your methodology of, of research, you know, and you're like, okay, these are the 2 or 3 tools that you have to learn first.

Yeah. So there's, there's a few tools I'll call out and I'll break them down by, um, channel. Cuz I think what I actually do in Internet Pipes is I talk through some of the biggest websites in the world. I just mentioned a handful of them. So if we think about Google, you gotta have like, that's like the number one. I think people ignore SEO way too much.

Mm-hmm.

Not for the purpose of over-optimizing your site and trying to, um, generate a bunch of organic traffic, although there's value in that. But again, really to understand what people want. And so there's endless SEO tools. I use Ahrefs. It's, it's a paid tool. So there's other ones. Um, one that I do recommend that people use is Keywords Everywhere. That is a Chrome extension, and basically the reason why I think that extension in particular is valuable is because it lets you see trends passively. So all of us are excited by this idea of like spotting the next trend or understanding what has a lot of search volume, but, um, we can't dedicate all of our time and mindshare to looking for those things. And the thing that Keywords Everywhere does is basically as you're browsing natively, just looking something up, buying hard kombucha, looking up a golf course, like looking up a creator, it'll tell you the search volume, the related keywords, the trend over time, just embedded in your browser. So again, you don't have to think any harder or look any harder for these trends. It kind of surfaces for you. So that's one. Another one that I've been playing around more with is one called Gummy Search. So that's, you know, if we think about Major website, not Google in this case. Now this is Reddit. Reddit has millions of communities and guess how many of those communities have more members than Yankee Stadium, which by the way has 46,000 people.

How many communities have more than 46,000? Uh, I don't know, 1,000, 2,000?

Over 7,000 communities are bigger than the number of people that fit in Yankee Stadium. And so, wow, to some people they might be like, 7,000 is not that big a number cuz we're so used to internet scale. But again, like 7,000, imagine 100 people and each one of those is a community the size of Yankee Stadium. And then like imagine 70 times that to get to 7,000. It's like a crazy number of communities that are talking about everything from embroidery, 3D printing. Um, these are all big communities by the way, that have, I think like 800,000 members or more. The point is that you can learn a lot from these communities the same way that we can learn a lot from the keyword searches that people do on Google. And so the tool that I'm increasingly using there is one called Gummy Search. Similarly, you know, you see an immense amount of commerce that happens on Amazon. So that's our, you know, we got Google, we got Reddit, now we have Amazon. There's tools like Jungle Scout or Helium 10 that allow you to analyze that. There's also a really interesting tool called ImportYeti, which uses Freedom of Information requests requests when any supplier ships something by sea into the United States, which is a lot of the freight. And so basically you can look up any manufacturer that, again, that follows the shipments into the United States. And this website, Import Yeti, asks for all this information via Freedom of Information requests and just like shows you exactly who their suppliers are, what they're shipping, what kind of goods they're shipping. And so that's an example of where you can use the data on something like an Amazon via Jungle Scout and then actually identify if you wanted to build a, build a product, like who you would actually work with. Um, which is exciting because I think we're going past the layer of just knowing what's happening, um, in terms of like what trends are emerging to also having the tools to be able to analyze, um, what existing companies are doing as well so that if you wanted to participate, that data is all online. As well.

What's an example of something you've done, like maybe in your own business or a business that you've consulted with where you've taken something that you've learned and like kept pulling that thread all the way through to a decision that you made?

Well, so one of the, one of the things I'm exploring right now in terms of a trend that I'm excited about that I may create a product in, um, but I've been following the threads across all of these channels that I just mentioned. Is just air quality. There's many reasons why there's, there's kind of like the meta trends underneath air quality. There's a lot more forest fires happening. There's a lot more data coming out across not just the, like a lot of people think of places like India with bad air quality, but also in North America and Europe. There are a lot of papers that you can look up on tools like Elicit. I don't know if you're familiar with that, or there's another great tool, I think it's called Consensus. Anyway, point being, you can see a ton of these products like on Jungle Scout that are, that are doing doing well, but most of them are from like older companies that aren't really doing anything. Um, they're not very compelling, you could say, the products that they're creating there. Um, they're not very software integrated. And so, um, I'm looking at things there, uh, in terms of like kind of aggregating all of the different resources, some of the ones I mentioned, and focusing in on an industry that I think is exciting. TBD on exactly how I end up tackling it, or if I do. But I think sometimes it's just interesting to be like, oh, now I'm more well aware of like this thing that does impact me. It's gonna impact more people. By the way, if you look at, uh, the subreddit trends of r/airquality, it's kind of like r/sleep was a few years ago, which was kind of like r/meditation a few years before that. So you can kind of see these health trends like as they're coming up. Um, and again, who knows if I'll actually build something there, but I think sometimes it just pays to be a little more educated as well.

I like it. Uh, so I wanna know about, you know, the process of building and launching the course. What, But there's so many decisions that go into that as a creator. One, like, is a course the right platform? I was actually talking to a really well-known creator the other day who was thinking about doing a course, but then thinking about the perception of it is, um, you know, is that going backwards in their career? Um, would they need to teach it at like Stanford or, or is, you know, is there some environment that they would need to package it within in order to get like a lot of credibility with it? So there's, there's the decision to make a course overall and then how to price and deliver it and, and all that. So take me through some of your, of your thought process as you, you know, launched into this world.

Yeah. And by the way, I feel like I've gone through the same questions in my own head. I think a lot of creators do. Even just the term course has this negative connotation. And I think it, I think it makes sense because there's a lot of information online that's misguided or, um, a lot of people run courses and they've never actually done the thing that they're They're teaching. And so there's just, yeah, there's, it's, it's murky. Um, and so even when I released it, I, I don't mind other people using it, but I tend to not call it a course. Um, I don't really know what I call it, but it's some form of information community. Um, and then I'm also trying to figure out how to make it more interesting than just that. Um, so a few examples, um, we're doing like in real life events, but I'm trying to figure out how to make the, the events that happen very correlated or, um, tied into the things that we're talking about. So if we're talking about all of these interesting trends, I'll give you a couple examples of what we're doing at the meetups. We did one in San Francisco. We brought people to an accelerator. They got to see all these cool demos of like 3D printing and this like AI teddy bear. We plopped them in a Waymo, so they got to experience like a self-driving car. Um, and then we went to like a bar and played internet trivia. We're looking at doing this. There's this really good documentary that I saw recently called Join or Die. Have you heard of Bowling Alone, the book?

No, I haven't.

It's this really interesting book, speaking of trends, that came out a couple decades ago, actually. And it was about this phenomena where people were increasingly bowling alone, which sounds funny, but it's— there used to be people who would join leagues or do it with their friends. And then if you actually looked at the bowling statistics, people are bowling alone, but it was really a microcosm for all the other things that people were doing alone and not really joining clubs or memberships or, you know, really, really congregating for a cause. And so this guy wrote this book. More recently, one of his students, because he's a university professor, took his course and created this documentary called Join or Die, which is like this call to action for people to start, you know, joining things again. Like, it could be anything from— it doesn't have to be like a political group. It could be literally like a bowling league. It could be like something where you go learn an instrument with your friends. Anyway, there is this, this documentary, and they actually require, because they're trying to, I guess, like push people to congregate, that you run these screenings. So you can't, you can't just like show up on Netflix and watch it. And so I'm trying to organize all of these screenings across the world, um, within Internet Pipes, cuz now there's over 1,500 members to go watch this documentary. Coming full circle, that's an example of where, like, what do you call that? It's like, it's, I guess it's a course with the community, with events, but it's also like exposure to things that someone hasn't experienced before, whether it's a self-driving car or this interesting documentary that you can't watch alone. Um, so I don't know what you'd call it, but, um, I think there's ways to take something like a course. And make it more than a course and not just have that be a marketing slogan. But I, I think we also probably need another word for information-based products that probably are courses, but don't want to be, uh, kind of positioned that way.

Well, so much of what you're saying resonates with me because I've put out all of this material on flywheels and building flywheels into your creator business, and I've taught, I don't know, maybe 8 to 10 workshops in person on Flywheels, probably groups as small as 12 people and as big as 100 people, um, over the last 6 months. And I have a digital version of it that I've taken people through, and I'm just like, is it a course?

I don't know.

I did 2 pilots. One was, uh, 10 creators, and then the next one was 15, like, as I kind of refined the curriculum and all of that. And I'm trying to decide what to do with it next. Because it's such hands-on material that if you just watch a bunch of videos, I don't think you're really going to get your money's worth. You know, it requires actually, you know, building out your flywheel, watching other people build their flywheels and like that, that coaching aspect of it. I'm not sure that I want to launch a group coaching program. That's like, uh, I have a, I have a company to run.

Yeah, you're busy.

I have a day job, but I struggle with exactly what you're talking about of how do you first, what do you call it? Overall, like if none of the existing terms feel like they fit. And then how do you form a real community around it? Because exactly what you're saying, it'd be really easy to do meetups and we go to a bar, we all get a drink, we chat about it. Oh, how do you come across Steph's work? I like her work too. What have you researched lately? I've researched this thing. Cool. Good chat. You know, that's like, that's, that's the default and you're doing something entirely differently. And so when I think about flywheels, you know, how do you create a community around it? How do you have the curriculum that people are really going through and how do they apply it? If you host a meetup, what's happening? Are people in breakouts like sketching and improving their own flywheels? You know, there's so much more to it.

Yeah.

And anyway, it's something that's very top of mind. So if you have any ideas, I'm, I'm all ears.

I mean, I've been thinking a lot about, uh, in particular in real life events, and I think the same learnings can also be applied to digital communities, but something that sounds very obvious and I'm shocked that more people aren't kind of responding to this, again, very obvious revelation is that people don't bond over talking. They bond over doing things. And if you think about your closest friends, a lot of them probably are earlier in your life, um, or a lot of people that's the case. And it's because you like experienced a breakup together. You did problem sets all throughout school together. You played on a sports team, you did things. And in fact, I think that's also why people as they get older drift away from their close friends because The times that they see them are catch-ups where they're discussing what they've done elsewhere and they're not actually creating new experiences. And so if you take that again, very simple learning and apply it to something like a meetup, of course every meetup is going to find, feel exhausting and basically like the same thing that you've experienced at every other meetup. If you're just going and you're just randomly being dispersed and expected to like converse and come up with something interesting. And so that's why for every meetup I've run, there's always some sort of activity. And breakouts are fine, but they still have that flavor of just like go self-organize and talk. And so what are the activities that you can run? For example, in San Francisco, where I have a little more control because I live here, the next meetup we're going to the Internet Archive headquarters where they have like a tour and you get to experience like the early Relics of the internet. That's something where you do that first, then you can go sit down at a bar, you know, and, and things will emerge just because what you saw. But I think the same thing can be applied to digital communities where it's like, yeah, you can give someone a problem set. That's not fun. Like, how can you get people playing a game together? How can you get them like solving some sort of challenge together? Um, that's where like real communities are formed. And then after that, you get to some of the more normal conversation.

I like that. I'm going to play with it a bunch more because it's something that I really want to exist in the world.

Yeah.

And I want to get this training and methodology out there so much, but I think that's what a lot of creators struggle with is like, I don't want to do the exact same thing that's been done before. And, uh, I don't want to, you know, just put another set of video training on the internet of really good content, but you know that people aren't going to watch, even if they watch it, they're not going to internalize it. And even if they internalize it, they probably won't take action on it.

Maybe, maybe one quick thing there, uh, from my experience, one of the things that people have latched onto the most, which has been really surprising, has been my pricing model, which I've done for my book and now this quote course. Uh, we need a new word for it. Uh, but it was this tiered pricing model where it increased over time. The reason I'm mentioning it is because I actually think there are ways that you can make your digital products more interesting and unique just, um, through the packaging of it. And, and so that it doesn't show up in the same way that everything else does. Let me give you an example of ways that both incorporate some of the challenges that courses have inherently with this idea of showing up differently. So instead of shipping your course at one price, could you have a price that's slightly higher? That is reduced as people go through the modules, or is reduced as you have Easter eggs throughout your material that if people find, you, like, they earn their, like, 30% refund, or it could be more, you know, you could be as, um, I guess extreme as you want. And that would probably get attention too. Imagine a course where it's $300 and it's $0 if you finish it, or if you're the first to finish it. And that again helps with the problem of people actually not engaging with the material. Out, which is a win, but then also the virality of it. And also it's showing up just a little bit differently. All of a sudden, is it a course? Is it a game? Maybe you add a map element to it, right? Like there's, there's ways to, and these are all things that I'm, I wanna play with internet pipes over time. Like I launched it within 2 months and it was V1, but all of these ideas of how do I kind of convert this from something that's very simple in Notion where there's videos and a lot of the classic elements. Of a, of a quote course to something a little different where all of a sudden people are like, I haven't seen this before and I don't really know what to call this. And maybe I'll talk about that because I think it's interesting. And you know, even the tiered pricing, which again is so simplistic, I've had so many people throughout the years just tag my products for that reason, which, you know, generates, uh, attention for it. Um, but I also think it, it reflects on the things that I'm doing where people you know, for whatever reason are like, this person, yes, they're creating a course or writing a book, but it feels like something a little different. Or I like respect the project a little more because it doesn't feel precisely like everything else out there.

The pricing is really interesting. It makes me think of a project that I did years ago with, uh, Paul Jarvis and Jason Zook, and that we called it the, oh, and I'm trying to remember, Product Creation Masterclass, maybe? I don't remember. It was like a live, a live thing that we taught, and then you got access to the recordings and all that. But one thing that we did is, uh, this was Jason's idea. We did this bump sale pricing where it started at $1 and every time someone bought it, the price went up by $1.

That's cool.

And we might've actually started at $25 or $20 or something. It was something crazy low though. And you know, by the time we sold 500 of them at the end, people were paying quite a bit more money and it was totally worth the $400 or $500 price point that it was getting to. And it did reach a cap, right? Of like, okay.

Yeah. But you can also let the market decide. Like if it keeps going, the market says that someone's willing to pay for it. I, I actually originally did the tiered pricing because of that. I was like, I don't know what to price something. And so let me see if people will buy it $10. Okay. They will have a $20, have a third, like, and it just kept going. And the same thing was true of internet pipes where I did end up capping it. It's currently at $400, but I was like. I don't, I don't know what this is worth. So let's, let's let the market decide.

So what price did you start for Internet Pipes?

Internet Pipes was $30.

$30.

It went up by increments of $20 for sure. And I want to say it was every 30 sales and it just kept going. And then, like you said, eventually it hit a point where, um, I don't know. I, I, people probably, some people do tell me that I should be charging $1,000 or more for this. Um, but I ended up just capping it, but you can. If you want, and I think it's, it's kind of a fun experiment, you can just truly let the market decide what your product is worth.

Right. The hard thing is coming back down or if you, of course, you know, there's lots of things to do in that. When you said tiered pricing at first, I was thinking much more of, you know, there's two packages, right? This one is $250. This one is $1,000, which can also be really effective. Like that's one of the best things that you could do from a monetization perspective. Is, you know, I'm talking about what is this worth? What does the market say this is worth? Well, you and I might have two totally different ideas. I might be an indie creator who wants to learn these things, and I'm like, oh, that's worth $250. And you might go, I got the company credit card, you know, uh, I don't have to, you know, anything under $500 I don't have to, you know, fill out an expense report for or whatever. And so it might be an instant buy at $500. And so if you do this, you know, tiered pricing, then you can let people, you know, kind of self-select into what it's worth for them, even though the offering is a bit different.

Yeah. And I think Lenny does this with his, uh, product manager community, which as you'd imagine has a large number of people who are expensing the product. So he just has a button where people can pay double, which sounds kind of crazy, um, for people to opt into that. But since. You know, it's not that expensive and a lot of people are expensing it, then a lot, I don't know the exact percentage, but I remember him telling me that like a non-trivial amount of people just opt into that. And then what I've done on the other end is to your point, I don't want a product, especially a digital product, to be out of people's means just because they happen to be, you know, born in a country that has a different currency or exchange rate. And so I just have on the page a scholarship program. Where people can just email me and say like, hey, you know, this is too expensive. And we evaluate on a case-by-case basis. Um, but like, I, I think you can do things that make your product available to all these different kinds of people in these different tiers, like you're saying.

Okay. So I'm curious, which probably means that everyone listening is curious. As you've launched the course, you said you have 1,500 people, uh, that have gone through it. And again, I apologize that I just called it a course, but—

No, it's okay. I call it— I— we should actually have a— if this goes up on YouTube, Someone should comment how many times we together called it a course because I call it a course too, even though I try not to.

Even though— yep, exactly. There needs to be another word. But I'm curious about this, of how much you've made off of selling this thing that is not called a course.

So yeah, it's been over 1,500 people, like you said, starting at $30, now $400. So altogether it's made over $300K so far.

That's awesome. And everything you do with this is above and beyond You know, your day job at a16z as a podcast host, right?

Yeah, that's correct. And I should note, obviously there was a bigger spike during launch, but this only launched at the end of January. So it pre-sold at the end of December, the product came out in January, and then we're now in March. So it's only been around for a few months.

The leverage that you get from, uh, you know, both asynchronous teaching, right, of making, uh, content in a community that you can sell separate from your time. And then you combine that with the leverage of an audience is just insane when you're like, all right, 2 months, $300 grand. Also, I bet some of that revenue, you know, now you're selling it at a price where every sale means significantly more incremental revenue, you know, 10 times the incremental revenue as, uh, you know, the pre-launch or when you first came out. And so I imagine it'll keep going for a long time.

Yeah. And I try to think like that. I think asynchronous teaching. People kind of dunk on sometimes because yes, the conversion or the, the completion rates rather aren't always great. But I like to think about how do I create, now that the thing exists, I now exist where I can, everything I add to it, like you're saying, it's a building block, like Lego blocks that I can add. Oh, we're missing this demo. I'll add it and then it's there forever. Oh, people wanna hear more about this tool or bring in this founder or have a deal on this tool. Like all of that, if I do it, if I secure it. It's there forever. And so I, I do think of like Internet Pipes in particular compared to other things I've built as this kind of foundational product where it's just over time going to include all of the things that I find interesting, all of the tools that I run into. And because it's asynchronous intentionally, it can be built on top of over time, which you just, you can't do with a synchronous course. And I realized I called it a course again, so.

That's right. As you're thinking about it and building the community, how did you choose what platform? Because this is another thing that I'm thinking about of like, you know, Facebook, Circle, Mighty, Skool. There's so many different platforms that everyone's using and considering. You ended up on Discord, but like what went into the thought process there?

Yeah, so we just talked about things being asynchronous. So the, the first frame I used for choosing a platform was if I wanted it to be asynchronous or synchronous. I've run communities on Facebook, on WhatsApp, Telegram, actually for my book that was on Telegram. And you can kind of think about the Telegram, Signals, WhatsApps of the world. Those are all very synchronous and they typically don't scale well. So if you are running a community of 30 people, it works really well. All of a sudden, if it's 300 and certainly 3,000, it breaks down very quickly. People can't read the full thread. Threadings exist on some of them, but you can't really organize information in a way that people can access in, you know, in the selective ways that they need, right? Where they only care about some fraction of the things happening in the community. Then you take something like a Circle or Facebook group, which is intentionally asynchronous. And what people are probably familiar with is like a more forum-based community. The problem, especially with Circle, is how do you get people there? Because it's not the channel that people just natively spend time on. Now, maybe that's changing a little bit because more communities are on Circle, but you have to think, oh, I should go visit that community, or they are getting better at notifying users of what's happening in the community or posts that might be relevant to them or some sort of digest. But I ultimately didn't go with Circle because I felt like that would be difficult over time. I've seen it happen where communities start strong and then again, just that, that friction of getting people there ultimately dominates the calculus and the community dies. So then I thought about Discord, which I don't know if people are familiar. It's a bit of both. This is kind of new because a lot of people think of Discord as that, uh, synchronous nature where you just have a chat and there's a few different channels, kind of like a Slack. Um, but what Discord has added are these forum channels. Uh, which are really nice. So I have this forum channel, for example, called Seeking Help. So anyone looking for help posts something there. And that channel, it's interesting cuz it's like it shows up as a channel in your channel feed just like everything else. But when you go in there, each thing looks like a kind of traditional forum post where it's all in its own thread, all has its own emojis and reactions, and you can kind of sift through it like a forum. And so the combination of the. Async and sync optionality within Discord and the fact that more people use Discord. Now, I know a lot of people still don't like it, but more people use Discord than something like a Circle. So it has that inbuilt, hey, I just happened to be on Discord phenomena. That's why I went with it. Plus it's just, I haven't used these features as much, but it's extremely extendable, right? There's apps you can integrate. You can play games in there. They just released, you know, a new feature set yesterday that allows you to basically build way more integrations. And by the way, you, you might think of something like a Midjourney and why it's been successful is because the user behavior in something like a Discord is already known for many people and you don't have to reteach it. Um, so that's why I went with Discord. It still is hard. The hardest thing with any of these platforms though is figuring out how to consistently get people to show up in your community because they just have so many other channels. That they're like, people can't keep up with their phones, right? I can't keep up with my texts. So like, you know, how are you going to get people to keep up with your community?

Is there anything that you've done besides putting it in Discord, a place where people already are? And I think like Lenny's Slack channel is helped by this, right? Um, most of his, uh, customers are, you know, already community members are already in Slack. So they have that, uh, right there. But are there other things that you've seen maybe, I guess with when you're running Trends, you had the same thing that was in Facebook. So. You've defaulted to more of these places where people already are rather than trying to like convince them like, no, no, no, please come over to my little corner of the internet and please remember to come back. Yeah. Is there anything you've seen work for that?

Yeah. So Facebook in particular was the best for that. I opted not to go on Facebook just because I feel like less people are there, but a couple of years ago, that was amazing about trends is Facebook was really prioritizing in the algorithm. Community posts. And so if people just happened to be on the platform, they would see all of these posts algorithmically served also, which meant that they probably were relevant to them in their feed, which meant we didn't have to push them there. However, something we did at Trends and that I'm doing here now, uh, with Internet Pipes is just like weekly or monthly digests, sending people back to the best things that you're finding in the community so that they just build a behavior there. Another behavior building tactic is anytime we run an event and we actually run quite a few digital events, the chat is always in Discord, not in Zoom. You're just always sending people back to Discord. The calendar is announced in Discord, right? When we announce new speakers, it's always in Discord. The links, if I, if I share some resources, it's always in Discord. And some people might find that annoying cuz they're like, oh, I gotta open Discord, but it's building that. Behavior of like, here you are in Discord again and again and again and again. And eventually I feel like every time that they're there, hopefully they're, you know, going to find something that they want to engage with. And so I'm also just like through every piece of the course or the product, I'm trying to push them back to Discord. So there's that habitual nature so that eventually it's just inbuilt where they want to be there.

I like it. I'm taking a bunch of notes for what I'm doing for my own Not course that I'm launching soon. Maybe going a little bit of a different direction as we wrap up, one thing that our audience loves is hearing about creators who are like doing something unique, like, you know, playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers or, you know, playing a long game when everyone else is playing a short game. Is there any, any creator that comes to mind, uh, you know, with that prompt?

Yeah, I like to think of creators that, um, you almost are surprised that they are able to do this full-time, or you're, you're surprised that, you know, they make enough money to, to support themselves. And the one that comes to mind is Neil, uh, Neil Agarwal. He's the creator of neal.fun, N-E-A-L.fun. And if you look up his website, like just plug it into, you know, Hacker News and see how many times it's trended there, plug it into Ahrefs and see how many links are built back to all his projects. They only monetize through ads. Ads, uh, as in the project's only monetized through ads and then some donations to Neil. But he basically is the archetype for me of this question that people get asked all the time, which is, what would you create if you just had unlimited money, unlimited time, right? Like, what would you create if money or, or really having a job that takes up your time was a non-issue? And that's what he does. You just look at his projects, you can just tell they are purely the kind of things that he wants to see in the world. And obviously when he was first starting there, these are not necessarily, at least at face value, commercial entities where you're like, oh, this is great. I'm so glad you're doing this, but how are you ever going to monetize this? But he has this massive audience now that is just waiting to hear from him. And if you were to think of a slightly more commercial version of what he is doing, I don't know if you've heard of Mischief, M-S-C-H-I-F. Yeah.

They do all these wild projects.

Yeah. They've, they, I don't know how many drops they've done. They've done dozens at this point, but they, they started with just these viral internet drops where they would do these experiments. Like one of them was like, let's have everyone battle each other to do the SAT. Right. This was during the time where like standardized tests were kind of not in vogue and some people are unhappy with that. So they're like, you know what, we're not just going to have a standardized test. We're going to have people compete. And we're going to have people compete and cheat on the test. Like, you have all the resources available to you. Now go see who can get the highest score. And they've done tons of kind of like silly experiments like that. They had these Gobstopper— I think they're called Gobstopper shoes— where, you know how most shoes, like, they start off white and then they get scuffed up? In this case, they're called Gobstopper shoes because as they get scuffed up, they basically reveal these like rainbow patterns that look like A gob, like a gobstopper, you know how they like reveal their colors over time. So they, I think, partnered with Jimmy Fallon on this. And so they've really got scale now, as in for those shoes, but they've do all these drops. And that's an example of now that they have a ton of people listening every time they drop some kind of wonky wild project, they actually can make money from it. But I think, you know, something that you've talked about and a lot of other creators talk about is just, it's really competitive today. To create things. And the hard part is not finding, you know, often a product to build or a supplier that you can reach. We talked about some of the resources earlier that all of that stuff is online today. The hardest part is distribution and getting people to pay attention. And so if you think about this, like chess, not checkers, it's kind of like if you've ever played chess, the people who have these really boring openings, just really slow, they're not attacking. And then like all of a sudden, like you're at the end of the game and you're like, oh, this is easily a draw. Out, and then they just like pull out a checkmate. And, and those are like the best chess players. I, on the other hand, I was very good at chess, but I would go full force. My mom would always make fun of me because she's like, you either like crush it, you like destroy the person, or you get destroyed. And I feel like a lot of, a lot of creators are like that. Um, but I really respect these people like Neil who goes slow and they're almost unassuming, and people are like, does this guy even make any money? And then all of a sudden He's got like a website. I actually don't even know how many page views does his website get now?

Well, you're looking that up. One of these projects, there's so many on here, but one that I came across is Spend Bill Gates Money, and it is like an order checkout page. It has $100 billion at the top. Let me make sure I counted my commas. Yep. I got my commas correct. And so you scroll through and you're like, oh, buy a Big Mac for $2, uh, luxury wine for 7 grand. You get up into, okay, a yacht for $7.5 million, Super Bowl ad, $5 million. So it's like, okay, I want to buy a Super Bowl ad. Okay. That made no dent. Okay. A $45 million mansion. That also made no dent. Let's buy a cruise ship for $930 million. Oh, I accidentally bought 10 cruise ships. Um, we still barely, we barely made a dent. Yeah. So like, this is a super entertaining project.

Yeah. So he, as of, so the last 3 months. His site got 40 million page views. To compare, Emojipedia, you know that website that everyone goes to when they're like looking up an emoji, they're trying to pull something specific?

Oh yeah.

That also has 40 million page views.

So they're the same size and this is a random indie creator.

Neil does everything on his own where I almost guarantee every time I talk about Neil, people are like, who? I don't, I don't know who you're talking about. And then when they actually go to his site, they find a project that they have 100% stumbled on before. There's another project in there where it's like draw a perfect circle. And people have spent so much time on that. There's his recent one's called Infinite Craft that's gone super viral. Like every single one of the things that he's built ends up being shared widely across the web. And so he is, you know, if you were to say a lot of people talk about this idea of investing in creators and there's been all these like coins and things that people have tried. If I were to invest in a creator, a lot of people would probably start with who's making a bunch of money, but I would start with someone like Neil who is like, who has the best taste and also has the most patience. And to me, he's like gonna over time figure out how to monetize this and it's gonna, I don't know exactly how he will, but he's solved the hardest part, right? Which is getting that distribution.

Okay. So from a monetization perspective, if you were like chief revenue officer for Neil and you have 40 million visits, uh, you've got all these projects that go viral and you're like, all right, we've played this long game and now it is time to make a bunch of money. How would you go about doing that?

It's a good question. I mean, it, I think it has to come from products, um, as in not a, you could, you could partner and do affiliates. You could like join some company and kind of like what you mentioned to me before the call of Marques Brownlee, you could partner with a company, but he has such a strong independent brand. I don't think he needs to do that. I think he would go more of the like. Create your own energy drink, but not that. He has too much taste to do that. He has too many good ideas. So one creator that comes to mind that's done this is, have you heard of Unnecessary Inventions?

No.

He's this guy who has just become incredibly adept at using a 3D printer. And he creates these unnecessary inventions, per the name, which are all these things that just like, you don't need to exist, but you absolutely do want them to exist. And so I can't remember, uh, specifics, but it's— imagine like a backpack with a fan on top or something like that, where you're like, everyone needs a fan at some point. There's just all these silly things, but all of them are the kind of things where you're like, oh, I guess I didn't realize I needed a toilet paper holder like that, or I guess that's actually kind of clever. Um, and so what he did for his first after amassing this massive audience, and we can look it up as I'm talking how big his audience is. But what he did is, it sounds kind of silly, but it was this coffee table that the top of the coffee table was a puzzle. So again, kind of unnecessary invention, but it sold out immediately. And I could see Neil doing things like that where it's not completely unnecessary, But it's the kind of thing where he's just like clued into this idea. Maybe it's a board game where you spend Bill Gates money, but I would push him in that direction of creating products.

Yeah. One of the, one of the principles in the original Billion Dollar Creator essay is that, you know, if you really want to achieve the step functions, you have to sell products rather than attention, or you have to use the attention, you know, and channel that into selling products. So one thing I was thinking about with Neil, so many of these are like, games of some kind.

Mm-hmm.

And wondering if Neil actually has the idea for the next Flappy Bird or the next, like, uh, game. I'm looking at one right now. This isn't quite the game, but this is, uh, Asteroid Launcher. And that's where I can just choose how a 1,500-foot asteroid going 38,000 miles per hour. Let's just choose that. Oh, apparently it's landing in New York. Okay. Well, 647,000 people were vaporized by the crater. This is a terrible game, but sorry, Queens. But you know, there's things like he clearly has this wild sense of humor that I could see translating into a game that goes from, or some project that goes from fun and silly into like long-term entertaining.

Yes.

You know, basically, and then he could monetize that in so many ways. If he gets someone to come back and play with the same thing, over and over again.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think there's something about his style which incorporates retro, and like he does this like internet artifact museum, and like you can imagine something like, imagine a Magic 8 Ball, but there's something like new, like it's like an AI version of it, or like it, it allows you to talk to a billionaire, right? Because like you could use AI to like talk to Bill Gates, but in this like weird Magic 8 Ball version. There's this, I feel like if, if you sat down with Neil for long enough And you just like probed him on what he finds interesting. There would be products in there. And the key really is where I feel like people go astray when they enter the product space is they diverge from like what their audience loved about them in the first place. So they're like, oh, I guess we sell merch or we sell like, uh, yeah, an energy drink. And maybe there's some alignment there for some creators, but with Neil, it's like, why do people like him? Well, it's like. They, they learn about things that they otherwise wouldn't have, um, if they didn't stumble upon his project, or they just feel like something's so clever. And so whatever he builds would have to allow them to signal that same thing or feel that same thing where they're just like, oh my gosh, this is so clever. Or I just like need to like gift this to a friend. Um, which is the same feeling when someone's like, I need to share this website with a friend.

Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. The tie-in anytime you're like an audience is all about creating a feeling, right? The best audiences, the best communities. And so when you're trying to make this connection between a product or monetization of any kind and the audience or community, then it really, to be successful, it needs to evoke the same feeling. And I think that's a really important point.

Yeah. And that's why, like, it's not just physical products. Like we talked about events earlier. It's like why with Internet Pipes, I'm like, I need the events to not just be the average event. I need the events to be an Internet Pipes event where that's that linkage, not just in terms of information, but that feeling, that kind of like quirky, I love the internet. I love data. I love spending time with people and talking about trends like that comes through in the activities. It comes through in the locations we go to. And so yes, I think it's true, not just for physical products, but just anytime a creator goes and like extrapolates anything pure distribution related to something that they're, especially if they're charging for, it's like, how do you, how do you continue that thread in an obvious way?

I love it. I think that's a great place to leave it for today. Steph, where should people go to follow you for, uh, more podcasts for Internet Pipes?

Uh, yeah.

Weird research on the internet.

Yeah, I know. So if you follow me on Twitter, you will hear about all these like random, like we heard me jamming on air quality. Um, but just these different rabbit holes is Often where I share them on Twitter. So Steph Smith IO, my website is StephSmith.io and Internet Pipes is just at InternetPipes.com.

I love it. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.