How to Build A Content-Driven Speaking Business with Nathan Barry

I do think it's interesting to think about the intersection of what you enjoy consuming and what you enjoy creating and where your audience is. You really need all three of those things to be able to do it for a long time. And that longevity is very, very important for any kind of success.

Hey friends, Graham Baldwin here. Welcome back to another episode of the Speaker Lab podcast. Today I'm super excited to bring you a conversation with my very good friend Nathan Barry. If you have been a speaker for a while, you're looking for ways to scale your speaking business and continue to build your platform, this is an episode that you're really going to enjoy. Nathan is the founder of KISS, formerly known as ConvertKit, which is an industry-leading marketing platform for creators. Nathan is here to break down how speakers can grow their online presence and community through things like content creation, monetization on a wide range of platforms. He's got some great tips to share about how you can grow your email list, how to balance engagement with discoverability in your online presence, and so much more. This is an episode that you really don't want to miss, so let's get right to it.

Here's my conversation with Nathan Barry. Enjoy. Hey, what's up, friends? Grant Baldwin here. Welcome back to the Speak Lab Podcast. Hey, super excited about today's conversation with a very good friend of mine. Yet we were just discussing somehow we haven't had him on the podcast and I really like this guy. We're talking with Nathan Barry, founder of Kit, the artist now known as Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit. And so Nathan, we have a lot to cover. We really just want to talk about flying. Nathan and I geek out on flying. We are pilot aviation nerds. How are you, sir?

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on, even though it took, you know, what, 12 years of our friendship?

I was going to say, like, I feel like we've been friends for well over a decade now. I remember we met at a conference years ago. I remember I was one of the first customers of Kit way back in the day. And I remember at one point—

And now you're a shareholder.

This is true. We do have to disclose I am an investor. Yeah, that all these things have led to aviation ultimately is what we'd like to geek out on. But we will spare the listener on that because we've already done a lot of that. We got to hang out a week or two ago in person in Atlanta, which is super fun. And some one of these days we will get to go flying together. I look forward to that.

Yeah, it'll happen soon enough someday.

Okay. First of all, once we kind of paint the picture for what Kit is, because it has— I would say version 1.0 would have been like a kind of an email marketing service platform. But today I know that your vision for it is so much more than that. And I think this rebrand to Kit is kind of an evolution and step toward that direction. So for a speaker who may or may not be familiar with Kit, like kind of paint the picture of what it is that you guys do.

Yeah, so we are really the hub of your business as a creator, right? We would think of speakers as creators. You know, you're creating content, you're getting it out there, sharing it with the world, either on stages or, you know, on the internet. So Kit is, is the hub of that business. So it starts with where you would, you know, gather your email subscribers and, you know, let people opt in. That could be from speeches, from social content, anything like that. And then all the way through to, you know, if you're selling products, digital books, courses, that kind of thing, that can all run through Kit, all the reporting analytics. Everything from there. So yeah, it really started in like landing pages and email and then expanded into commerce. And then the most recent move that we did this year is we launched an app store on top of Kit. And so that's where any developer can build and extend the platform in some really interesting ways. So an example for speakers, you might market one-to-many as, as most content creators do, right? Where I have 10,000 people on my email list. I send out, you know, my weekly newsletter or I'm like, I'm going to be in these cities. I might narrow it down to a meetup or track a few different things in there. But it's really this one-to-many type thing. And anyone who comes from B2B sales is like, oh, that's not how we do it. Instead, I'm like, oh, today I was on the phone with Grant, you know, I'm like logging notes, I'm tracking, you know, spouse's name. I'm like all of these things that I want to keep track of. To win that one deal. And so you get tools that are very segmented where it's like it's either one-to-many or one-to-one. Yeah. And speaking is actually kind of interesting business because it spans both. You know, you're trying to do one-to-many to your audience, but then within that audience there might be people who will book you to speak, you know, or you need to actually close, like follow up, close deals. Plan those next gigs. And so one of the apps that someone built is called Kitboard, and it is a one-to-one style CRM. You know, it's like the different columns, like Kanban style. You move, you know, your sales leads across the columns. Like, here's all the, you know, everyone who's filled out my interest form for speaking. Yeah, here's who's actually serious. Here's who, you know, we have contracts out to. Here's the closed deals. And you can move them across, track leads and all of that. but it's the same data as Kit. So instead of like two totally different systems and gluing it together.

Very cool.

So that's just one example. There's tons more of apps that people are building on top of Kit.

I remember like when I first started, um, speaking that I, I just kind of felt like speaking was just kind of a, a one-off thing. I would go speak and that was kind of the end of the transaction. And yeah, I, I quickly was learning about like the importance of building an email list. And I think this is something that is certainly like more common today, um, within just like the, the creator space. Uh, like you said, like speakers would kind of be a subset and category of that. That. But maybe just even painting the picture of— help us understand like why building an email list or having an email list is important, especially relative to all the other ways that we could be building an audience.

Yeah, so the one that stood out to me the most is if you read Kevin Hart's biography and he talks about his early journey as a stand-up comedian, right, which is very similar to speaking where, you know, you're needing to to fill rooms.

Yeah.

You got to have connections to whoever is booking, you know, booking comedy shows, all of that. And he actually talked about the thing that made a difference in his career was when he had a clipboard and he started passing it out at shows and collecting email addresses. And what would happen is he would be getting booked for shows and he's like the opener for the opener, you know? Yeah. But he'd show up in a city and he, from the previous 3 times he'd been there, he had an email list of like 200 people.

Yeah.

So the people booking started to realize like, wait a second, Kevin is actually, even though we think he's the smallest of the 3 names we have for the night, 30, 40% of people came for him. Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

He's drawing a crowd.

Normally, like 95% came for the headliner and then the opening acts were, were basically nothing. They kept tying it back to the, like, the, the email list. He could say, I am in Charlotte on these dates, and people would show up.

Mm-hmm.

And so that's the simplest example where, you know, you need this ability to, to push it out to people. You know, so many people, like, I run a conference, and so I know what it looks like. I think we're 7 or 8 years into running the conference, and when you're booking, you're thinking about Okay, who fits with our mission, the, the story, the message that we want to send, and who's going to draw a crowd? Right. And so as a speaker, having this ability to sell tickets, to draw a crowd, you know, if you have that approach versus the approach of like, I don't know, I got paid, you know, I got booked and paid to speak. It's their problem to fill the room. Yeah, that's only going to get you so far. But if you're like, hey, it's my problem to help fill that room, then I'm going to be known as the kind of speaker that fills rooms.

Yep.

And I'm going to build more and more of my ability to, to do that, which means that, you know, that $2,000 speaking gig is now a $10,000 speaking gig or up from there.

But I guess one of the counterpoints or the, you know, the arguments would just be, you know, email is a way to do that. But, you know, if I have a decent following on whatever, fill in the blank social media platform, couldn't I do it through that? Like, why email versus or relative to some of the other options that may exist?

Yeah. And I think you should be building it on all these platforms. Or more specifically, I think you should pick one or two social platforms that you go all in on. Yeah. And then email as well. So if you think about each platform on a spectrum between like depth of engagement, maybe if we were to graph them, it's like depth of engagement and then discoverability.

Yeah.

A platform like TikTok is very, very shallow for engagement, right? If I follow someone on TikTok, it doesn't actually mean that much.

Yeah, yeah.

But the discoverability is very, very high. Correct. Because it's like 95% algorithm driven.

Yeah.

So it might be like, oh, you say you like this content, but what we know is you actually watch TikToks about airplanes all day long. Right. So even though you're subscribed to something about like health and wellness, it's like, we know what you watch. It's airplane content.

We're going to feed you airplane content.

That's all you're going to get. Hypothetical example, just, just off the top of my head. Yeah, exactly. Now Instagram is a little further down that spectrum. Yeah, very algorithm driven, but has like, they weigh a follower a little bit more. Uh, X is somewhere in there. LinkedIn, you know, weights followers a bit more. And then email is all the way on the other spectrum. There is zero discoverability algorithm. Yeah. And which has extreme pros and cons. Mm-hmm. The con is like, an email doesn't go viral. The only times an email goes viral is when it's like Apple and Samsung colluded to prevent, like, hiring employees, you know, and Supreme Court to hear the case, you know, like, and the email is proof of that. Um, so emails don't go viral, but it means in the spectrum, you can't have high discoverability and high engagement on a single platform because it's either algorithm-driven or follower-driven. And so what you do is you split it across two platforms. You, with email, we want high engagement. If I am pushing content out to you, I want to make sure that you receive it, um, which email does really well. And then I'm going to use social platforms for the discoverability side. And so I'll put out great content for free. Here's what I'm about. Here's what I'm doing. And then, uh, give away something, you know, that's usually related to what I'm teaching, uh, you know, if it's wellness or speaking tips or any of those things, I'll have either a video that they have to put in the email address to get, or a free guide or something that will get them on my email list. And then I'll maintain those two things where I'll have both the discovery connection and then the deep, uh, engagement.

You touched there a little bit on like, how do you actually— like, the formality of capturing an email address. And so, you know, uh, we've advanced from the Kevin Hart days of passing around a clipboard, um, but in the nature of being a Speaker, you know, there's a lot of different ways you could do this. You know, we went through a, you know, text this number to this number or text this word to this, this, you know, key code to this, this number. You know, there's a lot of QR code things today. There's a lot of just go to XYZ.com and put in your email address for this thing. Any like best practices or strategies that you've seen that are particularly more effective than others?

I think the first thing is making sure that whatever you're offering is both really relevant to the topic at hand and desirable. So to give an example, I give a talk about creating flywheels in your business, and I've tried out a few different things. And if I— if at the end of that I said like, hey, if you enjoyed this, sign up for my newsletter and I talk about things like this, it's somewhat relevant, but not really because I didn't tie it into the topic very well and it's not that desirable. Yeah. What does really, really well is saying, hey, if you know, I covered 4 different examples of business flywheels in this. I have a library of 15 flywheels. And if you go here, you can download it, right? It's at creatorflywheels.com. Anyone's curious. Um, and that people are like, oh, I want that whole library of all these examples. Like these blew my mind with 3, like give me 15 so I can make it really applicable to my business. So it's both relevant and desirable. And then you just need from there, like that's what's most important. Then you just need to make it easy, like reduce the friction. For them to go from hearing the thing either on a podcast or, you know, in the audience. And I think, you know, QR codes work great for that. It's kind of funny. I thought that QR codes died out. Yeah, like 2019, 2018.

Like COVID brought them back.

COVID 100% brought them back and it coincided with them being built into the phone, like into the camera. Yeah, you didn't need a separate app. So those were great. I would buy a vanity URL. You know, or a use a QR code. Okay. Or really do both because then, you know, people have the different, the different options.

I think part of what makes it a little bit tricky is in any given audience you may have any number of people. And so kind of thinking through like, okay, let's say I'm collecting a whole bunch of email addresses and then it's trying to figure out like who's actually in that list. Okay. So for example, like you mentioned, let's take yourself as an example. You know, someone may opt in as a on the Creator Flywheel flywheels.com website and they say, hey, I know nothing about Nathan or Kit, but I'm interested in learning more about this concept of flywheels. Or someone else may say, you know, I'm just interested in Kit and I'm a customer or I'm a user of Kit. And someone may say, I'm not a user of Kit, I'm not even familiar with Kit, but I could be a customer and I'm kind of intrigued by it. And someone else may say, I'm not interested in any of that, I'm just kind of interested in Nathan and his content. You know, like, I know for you, um, there's a financial email list of yours that I'm on, which you used to put out stuff for.

Maybe one day you'll get back to it, but follow you, you know, for that.

So how do you kind of think through, like, in an audience of speaking to 100 or 500 or 1,000 people, you may have a bunch of people that opt in, but they may be like, some people are decision makers who want to hire you for something else, or someone may know of a decision maker and someone may just want your book or your product or some other thing. So how do you kind of differentiate? I got this like hodgepodge of of a list and I'm just trying to figure out now what, what, like, what do I do with these people?

Yeah. So there's two things in that that I think we should get into that are both like fancy sounding words, but are actually not that complicated. And that's automation and segmentation. And so if we think about automation first, when we're putting out content on the internet, almost everything happens in real time, right? I post something to Instagram, it is there, it gets a spike of views and then tapers off and You know, it's in the back catalog. People will come across it. Yeah, but it'll get, say, 95% of its lifetime views in the first week. Yeah, 2 days, you know, something like that. Email does something really interesting where you can automate the emails based on when someone signs up. So that means I can craft this experience for someone as they join based on, you know, what they came in for. Right. So they might— let's say that I go speak in front of 1,000 people. I throw up, you know, that relevant, enticing guide that they want. 300 people take me up on that. Well, I could actually customize that sequence based on people in that room. Hey, thanks so much for subscribing. I had a ton of fun speaking at the Tampa Business whatever, right? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I might even throw in a photo of me on stage at that event, right? Yeah. And it could, it could sit there and and go through, and then it could drop me into, you know, hey, if this is the first time that you heard about my work, here's the stuff that I talk about, right? And then we could build up from there, um, and share different content. I could have a generic one for all of my speaking events, or I could have that first email change based on where people, you know, if I, if I did a different landing page or something for, for each one coming in. So that's the first thing is that I can automate all of this. And like that, the money newsletter that you mentioned, it's not something that I actively promote right now, but instead of writing a weekly newsletter forever, what I did is I wrote— it started out 10 issues that when you sign up for it, they come one after another. Now you just gradually added to it. So now if someone were to buy it, then they're going to start at the beginning. They're going to go— I think there's 18 issues in it right now. Yeah. And so that's like an automation that's working for me. And then the other side is the segmentation, and that's where you could, you could ask questions in your newsletter, you know, or early on in that automation you could say, hey, what type of business are you in? What, you know, why do you follow my content? What's your biggest problem? What can I help you solve? And you could actually talk to people differently. Like, I might tag everybody who books speakers.

Yeah.

You know, and I like to them, I might be like, oh, What I want to show them, I want to show momentum. I want to show that I sell out audiences and I want to show that I have a lot of great content. So maybe my emails to that group of 200 or 300 people might be different to my group of 10,000 people. I've got like fans and then I've got people who are booking speakers. And I know that if I stay top of mind with that second, you know, the second group who's booking speakers, then I'm going to get a lot more gigs. Yeah.

One thing you kind of touched on there is like as you do your segmentation and you kind of figure out like, okay, here's kind of the couple of buckets there, it seems like it'd be possible to almost slice and dice that too far where to the point where I've just got— I have so many— I have one major bucket where everybody's in and then so many other sub-buckets that I then trying to figure out. I guess the next question would kind of be like, what do I even write? You know, I got people to opt in, which is step one, but go on. What, what do I what do I say to these people? So if we go back even to the Kevin Hart example of going like, okay, I got a list of 100 email addresses from the show I did in Charlotte, but I'm not going to be at Charlotte for another year, but I don't want to send them an email a year from now and be like, hey, you remember me? You know? And they're like, you know, who is this guy? So how do you kind of think through like, what do you write and like kind of what's the, you know, what's the, what's the point of it and how like how should we be thinking about that? Yeah.

So I think of the definition of a creator as someone who sets out to like make original work to educate, inspire, or entertain other people. And so it's like, what is the thing that you make? What are you known for? Kevin Hart's all on the entertainment side. Other people are, might be entirely like, these are my, you know, I lecture about quantum mechanics and it is as dry as can be, but I have my my niche for it, right? Yeah. And most, like, really good speakers are somewhere in between, right? They found ways to be really educational and blend that entertainment in there. And so I would try to keep content that is consistent with what I talk about on stage, you know, and I would blend in some elements of my life. I probably wouldn't do it unless you wanted to be like a full-time content creator and you're like, hey, this newsletter is what I really want to go in on. If, if you think like that, then go weekly, but otherwise go monthly and say, hey, once a month I'm sending out an update and I'm going to maybe balance things of like, this is what I find most interesting, you know, here's what's going on, here's something that I can teach, and here's where I'll be next. You know, there's a lot of newsletters that have a good cadence to it where it's actually not like, oh, let me write something from scratch every time. Yeah, it's like I actually just have 3 sections. That I'm gonna fill in.

It's kinda like a Mad Libs template.

I'm gonna tell a story about something I've been up to. I'm going to tie it into a lesson that I wanna share, and then I'm gonna maybe have a couple quick hits of, this is what I found interesting. You know, my favorite book that I'm reading, my, uh, like Bill Gates has a newsletter and it's just about his favorite books that he's reading. Mm-hmm. You know, and he puts out that, like, whatever is already in that flow that you're talking about. And then I would add in that personal element, right? Like, you know, headed to Tampa for that. Yeah. Speech, right? Or I flew my plane to get here. Here's a photo of that. No, that's just you and I.

Okay. You made a good reference that we eventually had to get back to something aviation related.

We did. I have a timer. I have to get a reference in every 6 minutes. That's fine.

That's part of our agreement as pilots. These are the things that we sign up for. So part of it is, again, like thinking through like, what am I actually saying here? But let's shift gears for a second because one of the things you touched on there is like, kind of how you view creators. And so you, you know, you work in the creator space. And so I guess like one thing in my mind is like, how do you differentiate creators and speakers? Because it feels like in some ways creators are typically— the way I would view it is more like a, almost like an online personality and brand. But in a lot of ways, speakers are a version of that, you know. So a creator and/or speaker is some combination of I create content, I speak, I write, it could be a book, I coach, I consult, I have a course, you know, and for most people who are watching, listening, they say speaking is just one thing that I do, but I want to do a variety of different things. And so maybe another question would just be, or a way to think about this would be like for someone going like, yeah, I'm a speaker, that's one thing that I do, but I also am looking for ways that I can, I can spread and monetize my content. And so for a speaker, for a creator, like how do you advise and challenge people to think about that? So we are We're going deep on something, but also not becoming a one-legged stool, but we're also not spreading ourselves so thin that like, yes, I— what would you like me to do? I do all these things and I provide my content and I sell it in a, you know, a thousand different ways and they're not good at any of them, right?

Yeah. So I think of creator as a very broad umbrella and then speaker is one aspect underneath that.

Yeah.

And many people are a speaker. You know, I'm an author and a speaker. I'm a podcaster and speaker, right? Something like that. If you think about the way that social media is going right now, it's so video heavy. If I were a speaker as my primary profession, I would be creating a ton of content around that. Like, I would pay someone at the event. They may not be someone who follows me, the same person who follows me around everywhere, right? But I would be paying someone to, even if it's an intern with an iPhone, to be filming clips and asking me questions and making sure that not just the main talk is recorded, but the Q&A afterwards. And I do it for two reasons. One is the actual content that I can share where, you know, I want those clips of me talking to the line of people. You know, it like, it adds credibility to my brand and all that. But then the second reason is that I want all of that content captured. And we're all at this point where, you know, you get 2 or 3 talks kind of dialed in for your different audiences that you usually speak to. And those get stale after a while. And so it's usually in the Q&A and the one-off conversations later or the riffing on a podcast or all of that where you're actually writing your next talk because you're trying out these ideas. And so you want all of that recorded so you can go back to it and be like, oh, that one thing that actually resonated, right? I could tell the audience said that, or people brought it up to me afterwards. And so having all of that recorded, then, you know, especially today, and since transcripts are so easy now, then you can go find all those best moments. You can ask AI to find the best moments in everything that you said. Yeah. That can be really important. And so I think the blend between like speaker and then creator and all the other senses can be really, really fluid right now. But I would say, don't look, kind of what you're touching on, don't try to do everything. Yeah. People are saying like, oh, I'm going to grow on Instagram through short-form video. That's the big focus. And someone says like, oh, but YouTube really has better engagement and like a better relationship, long-form. So like, okay, I guess we're going from 60-second Instagram Reels to 10-minute YouTube videos. And then the next event we're at, someone's like, oh, but I'm crushing it on LinkedIn. And you're like, okay, yeah, never mind. I guess I got to go pivot and go do LinkedIn. You know, you just do 10 things really, really poorly. and that's a good way to, to not succeed. Like, it's actually like, pick your lane and double down on that.

How do you, like, to that end, though, how do you kind of think through, like, what's that Venn diagram between here's where the opportunity exists and where the market is and also like, what am I interested in or what am I good at? You know, so like you mentioned, short-form video at this moment in time is really, really popular. But someone may be watching this and going like, I just don't enjoy creating short-form content, video content, or I don't like, you know, video at all. But I'm really, really good as a, as a writer or podcasting or audio or something to that effect. And so how do you kind of think about for creators going like, what is that overlap between— just because something is, you know, popular at the moment doesn't necessarily mean short-form video is going to be relevant a year from now. So what advice would you give there?

Yeah, I think that video is just going to keep growing. It has over the last 10 years, just very, very well or more, but just continually. And I think that we're going to see more and more of that. So you don't have to worry about that dying out. It's the same thing with email, right? People have said that email is dying or what if trends change and all that. It's like it just for the last 25 years just keeps growing. So yes, some big pivot could happen, but it hasn't yet. I do think it's interesting to think about the intersection of what you enjoy consuming and what you enjoy creating and where your audience is. Mm-hmm. Like, you really need all three of those things to be able to do it for a long time. And that longevity is very, very important for any kind of success. So like, we have a mutual friend who absolutely loved, uh, or was, saw a bunch of people growing like crazy on, on Twitter or now X. And he was thinking like, okay, I should do that. I should grow on X. And so he did it for like 2 weeks and then he remembered like, wait, I hate X. Like the way people are talking on there, the like, how trivial everything is. I don't use the platform myself. What am I even doing here? And he was like, I really like YouTube. And so let me just get back to staying in my lane of creating well-scripted videos, putting out things I'm really proud of, taking the time you know, and let me just do that.

Yeah.

Whereas for me, I create a lot of written content and I have for a long time. And so platforms like X and LinkedIn are great for growth there. Yeah. And my default reaction is to go to X. Like, that's the platform where I spend a lot of time. I have a lot of friends and, and all of that. And now that LinkedIn is doing way better for written content. I like— I still find myself posting something to X and forgetting to post it to LinkedIn. Yeah, because it's just not where I enjoy spending my time. Yeah. And so you either need to change your habits, you know, and what you enjoy, or you need to say like, okay, now I'm just going to stay and focus on the platforms that I actively enjoy, you know, creating content for and consuming content on.

How do you find the balance between like wanting to stay relevant, growing your brand, keeping people, you know, growing your audience. But also, like, the danger is like you can just get caught on this content treadmill and hamster wheel of I got to have something else to say and it's got to be good. And doesn't matter like what my best post was, like it's got to be relevant and it can just become over time it can become like discouraging and frustrating of like, well, I guess I got to, you know, okay, LinkedIn is working well, so I guess I got to post there now, you know, and falling into that trap of what it is to be, you know, a personal brand. Brand or a content creator. So like, how do you, how do you think about that of doing something? And again, maybe a kind of a different Venn diagram of what's appealing, interesting to me, but also what's something I'm excited about and not just feel like I'm going to get, you know, put painting myself into a prison here.

Yeah, people take different approaches. Sometimes, you know, some people are posting 3 to 5 times a day, like either little thoughts or they're Quips or, or these other things. That's one end of the spectrum. The other is someone like Tim Urban with Wait But Why. Yeah. He built a massive audience not publishing on a set schedule. He only published when he had something substantial to say.

Substantial is an understatement, but yes, massive.

You know, and sometimes they would be a 2,000-word essay and other times it'd be a 20,000-word, 8-part essay, you know? Yeah. He focused on You know, putting out these things that he cared about really a lot, and he didn't care about, you know, being super consistent or posting 3 times a day to stay top of mind. So I think it's a mix of personal preference, you know, personal style, uh, and you can make it work with either one. What will not work is poor quality content posted inconsistently. I can guarantee that one's not going to work. My approach has been I try to put out regular content, so I do a newsletter every week cuz it's an important part of how I structure everything. I put out social media posts as I think of them, and then I have a library of my best content and I link back to that. And so I will recycle that basically every 6 months. I will take something, well, every week I will take something from my library of my very best content and repost it, and then that ends up repeating. Basically every 6 to 12 months.

Gotcha.

That's something we'll get repeated. And then I try to have these new ideas, like these flagship essays that I write on something like creator flywheels, or I have one on, um, building wealth and another one, uh, on like building called the Billion Dollar Creator, building equity in your creator brand. Yeah. And so I like every once a year, every other year, I try to come out with one of those essays. Yeah. And that's sort of how I balance it.

Yeah. Let's shift gears. And one kind of like final thing I'm curious on is, is you, you kind of alluded to this earlier, but you as part of Kit, you guys host an annual conference, Craft and Commerce, which you've done for what, 6, 7 years, 5 years?

Yeah, we had a COVID break, but I think we just— it's hard to keep track, but I think we've hosted 7 events.

All right. 7 events here. And part of the event is like you're bringing in outside speakers. And so you mentioned like sometimes you're looking for a speaker who can help put butts in seats. And just flat out sell tickets and some that you're bringing for— most people may not know them, but once they hear them, like, this person brings insane content and they're really, really good at what they do. And so for someone who hires speakers, multiple speakers on an annual basis for, you know, a significant industry conference for your— for the company, how do you kind of think about like what it is that you are looking for? And for a speaker who's going like, hey, I'm I'm getting started. I want to speak at more events. I would love to speak at something like KITT. What's the balance of like, how do I get in front of people like Nathan Barry and also like not be annoying and not, you know, pester and spam and knowing like, you know, you're probably a voice, you're probably not the only voice who's making, you know, speaker decisions. So kind of talk us through like what happens behind the scenes of why do you pick some speakers and what can speakers do to get on radars like yourself for your events?

Yeah. So the first thing is knowing that you're always, you're assembling a full package of speakers that touch on a lot of different things. So a lot of people talk about like the diversity of everyone on stage. That's important, but we think of it even in, in terms of, okay, who's delivering like very inspirational talks versus very actionable. And we want a blend of that. Who's someone that you've like absolutely heard of before that's going to get them to buy a ticket. And who's someone that's going to go, oh, I'd never heard of this person, but they were my favorite talk at the conference.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so that whole blend of things, obviously having speaking experience and a good demo reel, even if it's a workshop in front of 20 people, can you carry your own? How much work are we going to have to do? One thing that we do is we hire a speaking coach for every single speaker. And it's just something we hire one, you know, one for the event. His name's Mike Pacchione, and we make him available, you know, to all speakers. I think when Seth Godin keynoted for us, like, Seth passed on working with Mike. But, you know, it's like, all right, well, Seth knows what he's doing.

He's doing okay.

But one of my favorite things to do is to take someone that someone's never heard of and then have them deliver an absolutely killer talk. And it's like, well, yeah, we like worked with a speaking coach. We just made that dialed in because we also want for them if that person wants to pursue a speaking career, like our, you know, our talks are released on YouTube. Like, hopefully that is like, they're like, yeah, I'm great at speaking. Here's me on a major stage that looks fantastic. My talk was, you know, super tight and dialed in. So we do a lot of that. I think if there's anything in your content that's unique, like really thinking about that angle, you know, I talk about how to grow a business from $100,000 to $500,000 in annual revenue. Okay. Yeah. Like, tons of people could do that, but I would really spend the time on what is your story? Let's say you and I are hanging out and you're like, hey, what are you up to next weekend? I'm like, oh, I'm actually going to go to this conference and you want to come. Like, I don't know who's speaking. And we had like, if we can have that angle where in one sentence I can tell you about a speaker, you know, this person speaking, she's amazing. Because she did this in this way. Yeah, right. She did a very credible thing in a totally unique way. And I would spend a lot of time workshopping that because that's the pitch is going to have to happen all the time. I'm going to come to my team and be like, hey, I want to bring the speaker on. And it's like, okay, great. Why?

Yeah.

And if I can say, if I, if I can get to in one sentence, get to who they are, why they're relevant, the credible thing that they did in the unique way that they did it, then you've got something that's great. Okay, that's going to absolutely nail it.

And you mentioned like the, like the messaging is a big part of it, but then also the, the demo video because someone may, someone may be actually really, really good on short-form video content or even like a 10-minute YouTube video that is like highly produced and edited. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they are great on stage. And, you know, there's certainly people that are like that, that are who are phenomenal on stage, but it just doesn't translate to YouTube and vice versa. You know, and so having some type of demo video there of watching that person in the setting that you are hiring them for is really, really important versus just like, here's some media clips or here's a, you know, my most popular Instagram reel, which may, may, may not work the same way.

Yeah. And I think the editing on those demo reels makes a big difference too, just in the initial perception. Like, I would get an editor who's used to editing for YouTube. They're going to have much tighter editing. The music will be better, you know, like all of those things versus just a few much longer clips. Yeah. Now, if you have those longer clips and I'm booking, I'm going to go through and I'm going to click it. Okay. How is their opening? How is that intro? Cool. What are they doing 10 minutes in? What, you know, I'm going to jump around. Yep. But those examples of having done it before, either your story needs to be insane and you're pitching it from a, I have not told this on stage before. Like, that's a pretty good angle. Actually, our mutual friend Tim Grahl, when he spoke at Craft and Commerce, our event, one, I thought it was badass, like no slides, totally memorized talk, just more than I can do. I need all the crutches, you know? But then he had this line where he goes, you know, the story about Nathan Barry, which actually I haven't gotten— like, I didn't get his permission to tell this, but here it goes.

Everyone's hooked.

It's not that he didn't have my permission.

Yeah, he's just very—

or that I would be like, no, what are you doing? Stop. You can't tell the story. Yeah, he's just very deliberately did not say, hey, can I tell this story so that he could use that hook?

Yeah.

And, you know, everybody was leaning forward. I was like, ooh, okay, where is Nathan sitting in the room?

Where is he? You know?

Yeah.

Where's Nathan?

Yeah. So that can be a great angle where if you're like, hey, I have this thing that I've pulled off and I have not told this story on stage. Yeah. And I would love your event to be the one where I tell the story for the first time, and I'm going to make sure it's absolutely dialed in. With the speaker who— she's a director of photography for a bunch of different TV shows. So like Chef's Table, she shot like the Friends HBO reunion.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah. Bunch of stuff like that. And she's actually very randomly my wife's cousin.

Okay.

And so we're like, you have to come like tell these stories. And she's like, no, I'm a behind the camera person. Yeah. And so, but getting her to come out from behind the camera and tell those stories. First time she's ever done that on stage. She killed it. And but it had that like never been told before angle.

Yeah.

And that's amazing. The other thing that you can do is if you're like, I deliver talks on A, B, and C, but you're like, okay, I'm now pitching this talk that's totally different, right? I can be a speaker who's spoken hundreds of times and still tell a never told before angle. And that can be really, really interesting and a good pitch too. Yeah.

All right, there's a lot more we could cover here. I got a couple more questions, but for sake of time, we'll, uh, we're gonna put a pin in it right there, uh, and you know, we're gonna wait another several years and then we'll have you back for part 2. Um, so we'll just, we'll open, open that loop. Uh, in the meantime, if people want to find out more about you, what you're up to, both with Kit or your own personal brand, uh, where can we go? Where can we follow you?

Yeah, the two places would be nathanbarry.com. I write a newsletter every week, uh, it's easy to sign up to and, uh, has everything I'm working on. And then go to kit.com. And check out the product. There's a lot of great stuff for speakers there.

Nathan, always enjoy chatting with you.

Thank you.

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