Dynamics of the Creator Economy | Nathan Barry, ConvertKit

Welcome to Media Empires, where we sit down with the most influential media creators right now to learn exactly how they built their empires. Our aim is to extract the secrets of top-tier podcasters, newsletter authors, and media creators who are breaking the old rules for media success. Whether you're looking to start your own empire or simply curious about the nuts and bolts behind media businesses, you'll find valuable insights and tactics in each episode. Grab your headphones, let's dive in.

This week on Media Empires, we have Nathan Barry, the founder and CEO of ConvertKit. In this conversation, we dive into the changes in the creator economy and the potential for creators to build businesses. We talk about the importance of focusing on long-term equity and building a flywheel approach to audience growth, the choice between cash flow and equity, and more. This conversation was recorded in early 2023.

Nathan, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining.

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

So Nathan, let's pretend that we were having a conversation, this conversation in 2013. Okay. But we knew everything that had transpired in the next 10 years up until today. And you were telling me still in 2013, what was going to happen with the creator economy and how your company, also how your company was going to fit into that and you were going to fit into that. Why don't you unpack what's happened like tell me from 2013, what's happened in the creator economy since, maybe the biggest inflection points or something like that. Where are we today? And also a little bit about how your company's played a role.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing that has happened is the creator economy's gotten a name, right? It, you know, people refer to it a bunch of different things, different ways, right? They were bloggers, newsletter creators, actually not even creators. I don't know when YouTube started to really popularize the term creator, but I think it was well after 2013. So, so getting a name, it got interesting and I guess popular in the mainstream media, like in— so I started ConvertKit in 2013, maybe 2015 time period, I was going around trying to raise funding for ConvertKit. We had amazing stats. We were at $100,000 a month in recurring revenue, we were growing 25% month over month. And we were doing email marketing for professional bloggers, because that was like, the creator economy wasn't a thing. But there were lots of bloggers. And just about every venture capitalist I tried to raise money from was like, the blogging market isn't big enough. So one of the really interesting things that happened in that time is that, you know, bloggers, content creators like that has really shifted into being the creator economy. And then like it's become really trendy, more so than I even ever expected. And that's where, like, that's the biggest thing is that basically it's gone mainstream, um, across a bunch of different platforms. Um, but, uh, you know, Instagram, TikTok, uh, especially YouTube. And then what's interesting is that like email, especially in the last couple years, has had just this huge resurgence. It's always been like the heartbeat of, um, a lot of these you know, professional content creators a lot, like how they run their business. Um, but it's actually like become trendy and exciting and interesting. Um, rather than everyone saying, you know, I think even 4 or 5 years ago, people would be like, oh, email's dead, right? Like Snapchat's the new thing. And it's like, sure, like all these other things come and go, but, um, you know, email stayed consistent. I think also, you know, what's happened on the ConvertKit side is we've bootstrapped a company from you know, me building something like trying to build a better Mailchimp for a content creator like myself, you know, wanting to sell digital products on the internet, to a company now that we're $34 million in revenue, we've got 45,000 paying customers, over 500,000 free users, and then used by pretty much all the biggest newsletters on the web from the content creator perspective of like Tim Ferriss, James Clear, Susan Cain, like all those big authors. And then even getting into like from the internet famous space into that like actual famous space of, you know, Tim McGraw and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Like actually yesterday, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his new Netflix TV series in his ConvertKit newsletter. And so it's kind of like come full circle as we've, you know, really, really scaled it up. But the market's just, it's just incredible. And even, you know, as we talk about newsletter companies, whether it's us or Substack, or like, we're just barely scratching the surface of the whole market. I just tweeted earlier today that Mailchimp's at $1 billion a year in revenue, which means that ConvertKit is at our $34 million a year in revenue. We're not 34% of their revenue, we're 3.4%. And so you're like, even You know, as we play in our little creator economy circle, we realize like, oh, it's, it's so much bigger. And like Mailchimp is the biggest email provider out there. But there's, you know, we could spend, we could sit here and list off tons of providers that are $50 to $250 million a year in revenue. So anyway, it's wildly exciting. And it's constantly changing.

Imagine explaining someone like MrBeast to someone in 2013.

In terms of the— oh man, the scale. Okay, I think the most, uh, interesting thing about it is not even like the maybe the ConvertKit side of things or whatever else, or the like what people are making in advertising dollars. I think the most interesting thing happening in, in the creator economy right now is people like MrBeast, uh, Ryan Reynolds, whoever else, taking attention and turning it into, you know, equity in a company that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And obviously they're the most famous, but we could go down the line of tons of people who have, you know, turned a blog into like equity in a meaningful business. Like, well, a favorite example of mine is Mark Sisson, who had a blog called Mark's Daily Apple, which is one of the early like paleo, primal diet, you know, health and fitness sites. And I think he was making a couple million dollars a year, you know, maybe, I don't know the timeframe, 2013, 2014, 2015, like really successful blog. That was kind of the pinnacle of it. And he's selling his own products and doing advertising and kind of all the typical creator stuff. But then what he does is he goes and says, you know what, I'm gonna go start a, Paleo diet-friendly mayonnaise. And like, we're basically gonna make a paleo sauce company called Primal Kitchen. And with his audience, he's able to get this initial traction. He's able to get it into, you know, limited runs in certain stores. And what that turns out, you know, so say he gets into like Whole Foods, right? And they're like, oh, we'll test it out in a couple stores. Well, guess what? As a creator, he has an email list and he's like, can say like, oh, we're in these 3 stores in Austin, right? He can send an email targeted to people within 50 miles of those 3 stores and make sure that everyone goes and buys it in the store and it sells out. And so, you know, Whole Foods or whatever other retailer is like, wow, this is great, that works so well, let's try it in other places, right? And, and to fast forward the story, he ends up selling Primal Kitchen to Kraft for $200 million. And so I think the most interesting thing happening in the creator economy is people saying, wow, I've been able to capture all this attention, and then what's the highest leverage place that I could direct that attention? And it starts out where someone's like, wow, I could sell an ebook, and I, you know, I made $10,000 without having to like show up in person for it, and, you know, now it's selling $1,000 a month. And then as it scales, you know, people go into a course or they go into other things, and then it eventually turns into like, you know, we Well, I use that attention to build a software company that's worth hundreds of millions, or I use that attention to build a burger company or a chocolate company or whatever else. And then you realize that these creators are becoming some of the wealthiest people in the world because they've learned to harness that attention. So anyway, creator economy is basically the most interesting thing happening in the world right now, and I could talk about it forever.

It used to be that it was maybe easier to convert financial capital to attention. But now it used to be hard to convert attention to financial capital, but it's become much, much easier. Got a durable attention. And you had this insight a few years ago when you had to post a billion-dollar creator. And at some point that seemed crazy. But now it seems, you know, it's like, you know, when someone breaks the 4-minute mile, then all these other people start to break the 4-minute mile. They think it's possible. And similarly, like MrBeast or whoever the earliest creators who built businesses that are worth hundreds of millions or billions have transcended their creating capacity. And so it'll be interesting to see how many— one, what is the ceiling for someone like MrBeast? Could he be worth $100 billion in a couple of decades? What is the ceiling? How many of these can he build? MrBeast is interesting. Feastables, He's crushing it, whatever, that's cool. But like, I wonder, like, should he like build like a, like, what would he mean for everything bigger? Like a Venmo competitor or Square Cash competitor or Cash App competitor? Like a bank or like, you know, software company, like even his own YouTube competitor. Maybe that's the wrong place to play. But like, I want just the idea of like, right now creators are realizing, you mentioned it starts with a book, it starts with commerce. Commerce is easy, it's straightforward, but commerce has a ceiling. Whereas like software companies are better businesses if you can make them work. I saw one, you know, car influencer, Cars and Bids, like have a car marketplace. That's pretty interesting. Like, could a real estate creator do like a Zillow competitor? Like how big and how many of these like software companies can really be built on top of creators is one question.

Yeah, because I think at some point the, the audience is really there to kickstart it. It depends on the size of the audience, right? If you're one of the big— if you're MrBeast, that's one thing, you know, and like we get in the entertainment space, right? Jessica Alba has made her money not from movies, but from Honest Company. Kylie Jenner, right? Is like Kylie Cosmetics, right? You know, all these, these people making billions of dollars off products. Rihanna is the same thing, right? She's got, I think, $2 billion companies. So there's one thing on that side where you have just a huge amount of scale in your, your— to use the reference earlier, like you're actual famous, not just internet famous. What I think is most interesting is the people who are internet famous who are doing this because— or even like internet famous in a niche. Are doing this. So an example that I like is, um, on— in the online marketing space, there's this guy named Derek Halpern who wrote a website called Social Triggers years ago, and he was, um, really good at copywriting and digital marketing and all of that. And he, he was known for that, um, and he's basically stopped all that. He's, he's out of that industry. And so you're like, I wonder what Derek's up to these days. Um, and I was just talking to him the other day And he partnered with someone named Vani Hari, who ran a blog called Food Babe. And they ended up creating this, working together to create this consumer packaged goods company called TrueVani. They're now in all kinds of retail stores. They've grown it and he's having the time of his life being like behind the scenes and putting all of the marketing stuff that he's learned into practice. And so I think basically it's most interesting. It's interesting as an example when it's when a celebrity pursues equity in something, right? Like Ryan Reynolds with Mint Mobile or Aviation Gin. And like, that's interesting as an example. But what I find most interesting is the small scale of someone who's like, oh, I had 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 fans and I use that to kickstart something. Much bigger. To your question of how big can it get, I think you either need a huge amount of celebrity to grow one of these businesses, or you need like the, say, like the internet famous or famous in your niche creator aspect and like really good business acumen. Yeah, because it's one thing to build a business that could sell for $10, $20, $50 million. But if you're talking about building something that's worth billions, like, that's going to take a lot of time. And that's going to take, like, just a really, really great team of operators. Because for MrBeast to get to the point where he's worth $100 billion, right, you got to build some of the most valuable companies in the world at that point. So we'll see. I mean, he's what, 28 years old or, you know, even younger.

Yeah. The, um, uh, given that the idea that a lot of these creators will build their biggest businesses on top of their kind of media empires, I'm curious if you've thought of helping facilitate that in some capacity. You guys are creating the platform which they can build their media empires. But you know a lot about building a business. Is there a— have you thought about either one, you know, investing in them in some capacity, not that they necessarily need capital always, but, or providing like almost an incubator for them to help build companies beyond? Or how do you think about that?

Yeah, I haven't thought about it beyond like being a student of this and just trying to like learn something. I feel like you don't really— you haven't learned or understood something until you can teach it. And so a lot of what you see is when I write essays like The Billion Dollar Creator, or I have another one called The Ladders of Wealth Creation, it's me trying to like observing things in the world and then trying to describe the patterns and be like, this is why it is a certain way. These are the traits that matter. And then usually riffing on it with my friends. Like, both those articles are collaborations with James Clear, because I'm like, I have these ideas, and we'll sit down and like brainstorm it. Like in The Ladders of Wealth Creation, there's this idea of the different shapes of revenue, like step functions, or like stair steps, linear and exponential. And a lot of that is influenced by James's ideas as he's riffed on it and built on it. So I'm at the stage right now where I'm trying to, I guess, observe and document what's possible in the world and then really help creators build that initial audience. But I think it'd be fascinating, and other people have done this, you know, to, to have that, that product incubator to say like, hey, what do you care about? Oh, you care about software, you care about consumer packaged goods. You know, we will help you as a content creator who has 100,000 subscribers on your email list, you know, go to the next level. But the hard thing is the value. This is both the pro and the con of it, and I'm trying to think through this in real time, but the value is not quite in the email list or the audience. Like, that by itself is, let's say, 25,000, or we'll go 100,000 email subscribers. That's worth a lot of money. Because you can turn that into a $500,000 a year income stream, maybe even more if you're really savvy. But, but that's not in itself is not worth millions or tens of millions, right? It's not really like you can't put— and I'm sure you've thought about this a ton from, from your perspective— you can't put millions of dollars of venture capital behind an audience, right? But the audience could be the thing to kickstart something that has true scale that you could put millions of dollars of capital behind and has much better leverage. So it's interesting where the audience is both insanely valuable and also doesn't have— it's not the right leverage in economics to be investable.

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Let's deep dive on some of these business creators. And I don't know if business creators is the right term, but it's worth having, I think, a different term for the Lenny Rachitskys, the Sahil Blooms. That's different than, you know, MrBeast, because they're just, they're doing fundamentally something different, right? And so you mentioned, you know, mentioned like there'll be, you know, different niches. And so is it, will there be a Lenny for every position, for every vertical who is making more money teaching people about sales or HR or whatever than they were even being an HR professional or a sales professional or whatever it was?

Oh, absolutely.

Early on that trend.

Yeah. And it's been developing for a long time. And we've got tons of those creators on ConvertKit. One thing that we do for anyone watching on video, we do a book every 2 years called I Am a Creator, which is these, like, telling stories of these creators. And one of my favorites is a guy named Dave Stewart Jr., who is a schoolteacher, and he loves to be like— he loves teaching in the classroom. That's what he feels like he's put on this planet to do. But I don't know if you know, but schoolteachers don't get paid very much money. And so if you're like, this is my passion, and I also like want to have a meaningful career and, and build wealth, a schoolteacher probably isn't the way to do it. But he, he, using that example, well before Lenny was doing it, he's the Lenny Rachitsky of like classroom education. Yeah, right. And so he's teaching teachers, here's how to manage your classroom, here's how to do lesson plans, here's how, you know, all of the stuff that you want to know. And he's making a huge amount of money doing it. And guess what? He's still teaching in a classroom in, I think, Missouri, where he lives, right? And he dropped down teaching part-time. So he's teaching half-time, and then he's doing his online business the other half of the time. And he's found this ideal life where he, you know, he's making more than like, you know, a doctor who's specialized, right? But as a teacher, and so I think you're gonna have that in all of these industries. It's happening in real estate, either in people, not just people like teaching or selling content, but especially when they learn that, oh, I can use Twitter or a newsletter to raise capital. And when I have the ability to raise huge amounts of capital at favorable terms, that I can do more bigger deals, and I can build wealth so much faster. So yeah, I think it's happening in every single industry. Another example that I love is, uh, there's this woman named Bonnie who is making $1 million a year designing patterns for fabrics, right? And so the actual, like, floral prints or whatever else that you would see, a repeating pattern on fabric, um, she has tons of licensing deals of selling the patterns that she's actually designed, and then she has a course on how to learn to do that and break into the industry. And she's just making insane amounts of money from it. And that's her passion. And that's one of the things people would be like, oh, I'm glad that's fun for you, but you'd never make, like, you'd never build wealth at it. And she's like, please. I mean, she wouldn't say this. She's, you know, she'd be super humble. I'll say it for her. Right. She's like, I'm making more than, you know, an anesthesiologist or like a lawyer at a high-powered firm or whatever. Right. And like, here's a creator. Working from their home office, doing what they love. So yes, I believe it'll happen in every single industry.

Totally. One case study we were talking about offline was Sahil Bloom.

Yeah.

And you were talking about how he's got flywheels that both build his audience and make him a ton of cash. Why don't you unpack that case study in terms of what he's doing that's so special and what other people can learn from it or should follow?

Yeah, Sahil is one of the most talented content creators, um, I've ever met. What's crazy is he's been at it for 3 years, 2 and a half, like not very long, you know. So if anyone doesn't know his story, he went all in on Twitter at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, got his first 1,000 followers, 10,000, um, built up from there. Just a very prolific and consistent content creator, which is so, so important. Somewhere around this time, he decided to double down and focus on his newsletter. And so he grew that to 10,000 subscribers, 100,000 subscribers. And then, you know, about a year ago, maybe a little less, he switched it from Substack over to ConvertKit to really like amplify this flywheel. And he— we worked together with him to launch something called the ConvertKit Sponsor Network, where we will sell sponsorships in your newsletter on your behalf because we have you know, all of these brands coming in and we'll say, hey, okay, you in the food industry, okay, why don't you sponsor these 11 newsletters or do a deal like that? Or like we represent James Clear's newsletter. And so like Duolingo wants to sponsor his newsletter, you know, build a language learning habit. And then it's like, perfect. You know, that's the inroad. They do that deal and it's like, for the same amount of effort, do you want to sponsor the, like this, these 10 other like long tail of newsletters at the same time? So one example that, that Sahil is doing is he signed a book deal with Penguin Random House and he's trying to build, you know, a massive email list by the time that that book comes out. And so his whole thing is how do I grow the audience as fast as possible? You know, he's doing all kinds of things on Twitter. He's built up an Instagram, you know, he's got all of those social media flywheels going really well. But what I think is really interesting is not just how he's taken that to email by doing a lot of traditional things like, hey, here's a, here's a book that I wrote, like sign up for my email list and I'll give it to you for free. Um, or, you know, an annual planning, like year-end review worksheet or things like that, um, that work really well. But he's also taken all the money that he makes from the ConvertKit sponsor network I don't know that I can say the amounts, but it's a significant amount that he makes every month. And he's taking 100% of that. And he's spending it on advertising to grow his newsletter faster. And the key thing there is that's tax-free, right? Because it's still a business expense.

Yeah.

So through, you know, social and other channels, he's growing his newsletter as fast as possible. The bigger his list is, the more advertisers pay to sponsor it, which means he has more money to spend on advertising in order to grow his newsletter faster, which means that his newsletter grows faster, which means that it's bigger so that he's making more money. And as you watch this flywheel happen, um, he started the year at 130,000 subscribers to his newsletter. So January 1st. And, uh, I think a week ago, you know, February 20th or so, he passed 250,000 subscribers. So the man, through this flywheel and just insane hard work, um, has doubled, you know, almost doubled an already large newsletter in 45 to 50 days. Um, and like, continue like he is, he'll, he'll hit a million subscribers by the end of the year, no question.

Wow. That's incredible. I mean, and you think about building an audience for yourself as well. Mm-hmm. Like what should people learn from the Sahil story of like what email is most important and like triple down on, you know, like bringing people back or like what are the lessons applicable?

I think the first thing is to know what's most important. Sahil does not actually care about making money from his newsletter. He only cares about making money from the newsletter so much as it helps him grow faster. Right? So a lot of people are like, oh, I want to earn more money here and grow the newsletter and this or that. And that, that's fantastic. It works super well. You'll do just fine. In fact, you'll do great with that. But in Sahil's case, he's like, growing the newsletter is the only thing I care about. And so that flywheel is entirely focused on newsletter growth. And so he's actually making his money from other things so that he can reinvest 100% of what the newsletter makes back into growing the newsletter. So that's the first thing, you know, be very, very focused on the one thing that matters. The second thing is to position it like a flywheel. Jim Collins has his book Good to Great, and in it he has this little bit about like great companies, you know, have found their flywheel. And it's just a little footnote in there. But he wrote a second book, which is kind of like an additional chapter to Good to Great called The Flywheel Manifesto. And it talks about how to position your work and your entire company around a flywheel. And basically what a flywheel means is every step is feeding into the next one and each rotation of the flywheel. So everything works in a circle, right? The way we described it with Sahil's newsletter, where each thing feeds into the next. And then every rotation of the flywheel, it either creates more output, right? In Sahil's case, every rotation creates more money, creates more subscribers, um, and all that, or it takes less effort. And so, and ideally you combine the two, it creates more output and takes less effort. Uh, I'm assuming people know what a flywheel is, but if they don't, uh, You know, like if you thought of a well pump, right? We can have a handle that we can go up and down. It's always the same amount of effort. A flywheel, you know, sitting on top of that. And it might take a huge amount of effort to get that cranked and going, but then once it's spinning, you could stand there and you could spin that thing with one hand as it's, you know, producing more and more effort. So I think the biggest thing is as a creator, like you have to design your flywheel, um, and, and make sure that each thing feeds into the next, because most creators are doing sporadic effort in like 5 different directions. And they're trying to keep, I don't know, these individual fires burning or whatever analogy you want to use. And if you do it as a flywheel, it's just a game changer.

So there are people listening who might think, oh, I want to do that too. I want to have the type of audience or impact that Sahil has. But the question is like, where to even start? One, is there a service that you just pay X amount a month and they're like, Sahil Bloom is like, across all platforms, we'll create great content based on everything you've you've done, written, said, like that should exist.

No, uh, it should. Uh, I, I think that the thing is the fuel for Sawhill's flywheel is the content that he's created, right? So if you're not at the point where you're a prolific content creator, um, and you're, you know, you're consistently doing the work on social media, on email, week in and week out, um, Like, none of this matters. That's, that's the table stakes. And unfortunately, the table stakes are really hard. And I never want to downplay that because it's like, on one hand, it's easy to be a creator. But like, if you're the kind of person who's built habits, where it's like, yeah, I, you know, the, like, I only write when I'm inspired. I just happen to be inspired every morning at 9 AM, right? And then, you know, if you have that discipline. So that's one side of it. There are services that, that handle more things. Um, how long until this episode comes out? Like a week or 3 weeks?

No, no, no. Like, like 2 or 3 months.

2 or 3 months. Perfect. Then I can talk about it.

Yeah, please.

Uh, Sahil and I are starting an agency together, uh, that does newsletter growth, um, specifically because just from like ConvertKit sends 2.2 billion emails a month. I have behind the scenes access to many of the largest newsletters. And then we have the playbooks that we've run on his newsletter that he's doing. And so we're just turning it into a productized service basically and saying, look, we're going to help make that happen. That's on the growth side. And then, you know, on ConvertKit side, that's a lot of what we're trying to do with the sponsor network, because if Sahil was having to build out a team to sell sponsorships, Um, right. That's, that's a time-consuming thing. And that's actually not what he's best at. That's not, not a, you know, um, like a core strength. And so we're trying to say, how can we automate more parts of this flywheel for you or like let you plug in pieces to it? Um, and so that's what we're trying to build into ConvertKit as much as possible is like, here's the automations that are automatically promoting your ebook. So it's generating, you know, like. All of that. And so we want to build all the component parts so that then you can assemble your flywheel as a creator.

That's really powerful. And yeah, I've been spending some time with Greg Eisenberg, so I appreciate the power of agencies, um, because coming from the venture— so having spent the last 7 years in venture capital and now intrigued by this creator space, I'm asking myself like, what's the best place to play? And there's one version of it where I become a much more rigorous content creator. I've been kind of casual, you know, Twitter and podcast, but I haven't really thought of it as like a business or in the way that, you know, Sahil does. And then I'm also excited about this trend, the next Lenny, the next, you know, with the work he's doing. And so I'm like, hmm, maybe I should be funding these people or hiring them or helping them get off the ground. Do you have any advice for me in terms of the, where should I be playing? Given, you know, the limited of what you know about me and my position in the ecosystem?

Well, I think there's, there's two different games to play, and they overlap, but they are different. And there's probably 10 different games, but I'm going to simplify it into two. One is cash flow, and one is equity, right? And so are we building something, you know, an agency that's trying to make $50,000 a month? Right? You know, or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, where like, that's a fantastic business, and you're helping people get off the ground, or, you know, scale these audiences or whatever else. Or are you trying to do a business that is built around equity, where it's saying, how can we take this one, either, either this one thing and build it as big as possible? That's what I'm doing with ConvertKit, where I'm, you know, The game that I'm playing is not how can I make the most cash from ConvertKit in the short term, it's how can I build this business that's ultimately worth $1 billion or more. So equity in that side, right, that's building the skyscraper as tall as possible, or taking the funding approach, right? You could do a product studio where you're saying, we're going to partner with creators and build you know, help them build a direct-to-consumer brand, you know, where they're starting the next, you know, who knows what, right? Beats by Dre, or like, it could be anything where you're doing that and taking an equity stake in each one. So I guess I'd probably start there is what's most interesting, the thing that's building long-term equity and might not make you any money, any meaningful money for a decade. Or the version that like gets early traction and cash flows?

The long-term equity. I'm optimizing for long-term wealth.

Yeah. And then from that, is it more interesting to make a bunch of small bets or build one skyscraper?

I'm open to that. I mean, to the extent that I built a skyscraper, you know, I built a I built whatever, I built a fund, Village Global. I built On Deck, which is a company that turned into a fund basically. And I built Product Hunt, which is also a company that turned into a fund. So like all my companies have sold to founders as a customer. And it turns out like investing is a pretty good business model for entrepreneurs. So yeah, either or.

Yeah. So I think Um, yeah. And what's interesting is it doesn't have to be like, it can be, and it doesn't have to be.

Yeah, totally. That's what you're doing, right?

Yeah. And like now on the, on the content side, you know, I won't make, uh, it's entirely different levels. The reason actually that I'm starting an agency with Sahil is that we have these creators who are saying like, oh, I have parts of the flywheel going. But I don't have all of it going, right? Um, you know, I need someone to come in and like build out the rest of it. And, you know, we've, we've referred to a bunch of agencies, but like this doesn't exist. And it, it's not that we're doing it or that I'm doing it for the cash flow that an agency generates, though. I love cash flow. Like I'm not turning it down. But it's really the more creators that I can turn into like Sahil Blooms and help them run that playbook, it's insanely valuable for ConvertKit. And so I'm basically saying, you know, we're taking the agency approach because it creates, you know, this incredible enterprise value for ConvertKit and for the creators. Um, so yeah, I think probably what's most interesting as you're exploring ideas is to start, you know, in the, maybe the agency world or something simpler and scrappier, and then always be on the lookout for the billion-dollar creator version of it. Like, I am a huge Andrew Wilkinson fan, um, because that man has just taken you know, a design agency, which I relate to because I— my, my career before all of this is in software design, you know, designing iPad apps when the day the iPad was released and, and all that. And so he took a design agency, scaled it really big, and then, I mean, he's ultimately turned into a company conglomerate, you know, the Berkshire Hathaway of, of the internet, uh, that's worth somewhere near $1 billion now. Like, it's absolutely wild. And, and the key ingredient to all of that was, you know, all the way along is the cash flow from his design agency. Right? None of that would exist without the cash flow from, from Meta Lab. And so I think in trying to do like, often we can get ahead of ourselves trying to design the grand plan from the beginning.

Yeah.

And it's like, find a business model that's, that's fun. Drives value, you know, and then just keep playing it forward into something bigger. Like going back to Sahil, you know, I fully believe that he's going to be like the next James Clear. You know, he's going to be that person that everyone's annoyed with because like they launch their book and I tried to get number one New York Times, the number one Wall Street Journal, but like, damn it, Sahil's still got that spot. Like my friend Dan Martell just launched his book, hit number 2 Wall Street Journal, didn't hit number 1 because years after launching, James Clear still has number 1, right? And so like Sahil is going to do the same thing. He's going to build a multi-million subscriber email list. He's going to have a book that, you know, is delivering tons of value and is at the top of the charts and all of that. But then I expect he's going to move from something that's saying, hey, you know, what's making me millions of dollars a year as a content creator? And I think he's going to then make one of these billion-dollar creator plays. And who knows what it'll be? He'll— he might, uh, you know, build the next AngelList if he stays in the investing space, or, or he might do something entirely different. Um, but I think he'll launch it from that platform. And so I guess all that to say, you don't have to have all the steps figured out from the beginning. But, you know, if you pick the one thing, keep focusing on it, then the next steps will become a lot more apparent.

That is an inspiring note to end on. Is there, is there anything we didn't get to that's top of mind that you want to, wanted to get in or close us with?

I don't think so. This has been a lot of fun. These are things that, like, I don't get to riff on very much, but, like, if you looked at my notebook, it's just completely full of like creator business model stuff. And so it's really fun to talk about it with someone who's spent a lot of time like playing in that world and observing it and then also thinking on a large scale.

Totally.

Because I think the biggest thing that I encourage creators to do is know that they're building— like, they're playing with the currency that everyone cares about the most. Capital is a commodity and attention is the thing that everyone wants. And so if you have attention, like really, really think about how, where can you point that attention to get the highest ROI? And if you're still thinking about, oh, maybe I could monetize with an ebook or advertising, like absolutely, that is so true. And that could power the next many years of your business. But like, I really encourage people to think about like the billion-dollar creator aspect of it and like, how could I kickstart this or use it as leverage to, you know, build a massive business if you want that? I'm into that kind of thing, you know. So anyway, that's what I leave people with is, is, uh, keep playing the game that you're playing, but like, step— keep, you know, every 3 months or every 6 months, like, step back and say What's the billion-dollar creator version of this?

Yeah, that's, that's an inspiring note to close on. I've learned a lot from listening to your podcast and reading your blog posts and just the work that you've put out over the years. Nathan Barry, thanks so much for coming on this podcast and sharing some of your learnings with us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.