How To Partner With Anyone In 2026 (Proven Framework) | 113

I'm so, so excited to share this.

My guest today, Julia Taylor, is driven by a big vision.

We've got a big vision to reach 1 million women by 2030.

You track the number of how many women that you've reached so far. What's that at right now?

It's right around 115,000, 116,000.

That's a crazy number of people. Julia has worked with brands like Verizon and TikTok and developed an embedded partnerships framework for building connections and relationships that make a difference. You have a partnerships framework that has worked for you to drive partnerships with TikTok and Verizon and so many more from there. You're going to teach that framework.

The first step is alignment. The second one is win-win-win. The third one is a custom integration. Point number 4, co-creation and delivery.

I love that. What's the fifth point?

The fifth is—

Oh man, this is really standing out to me. She and I look at how those partnerships power her business model. So the B2B and B2C flywheels reinforce each other as she grows Geekpack.

We do surveys, we screenshot testimonials, we do a lot of of marketing for them, they can use that to kind of show to their higher-ups, here's the ROI, but here's also the ROE, return on engagement.

I love that. Julia, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Okay, so you and I both came to our current careers through web design, which is a fun thing that we have in common. Something that we don't have in common is that one of us worked for a 3-letter agency did some time in the intelligence community, was in Afghanistan and all of that, and the other did not. I think viewers are like, oh, I didn't know that Nathan spent time, you know, that's, you have a whole career before you got to your current company and all of that in the intelligence community.

Yes.

How did you come to that? And like, what was your, you know, you in college, you in high school, like what were your career aspirations?

Yeah, absolutely. So I always, I always wanted to join the intelligence community. In fact, I wanted to join the State Department first. I wanted to be Foreign Service. And in college, I did an internship with the State Department in Armenia, and I didn't enjoy it. It wasn't all that exciting, but I met someone from one of the three-letter agencies.

I love how you just say, you never specify which one. Even at dinner last night at small group, you're like, you know.

One of them. And he said, oh, you should consider intelligence. And I thought, okay, yeah, maybe I will. So I did. After that, I did a year in Russia, and then I came back to the US and I applied, and I did. I worked for the intelligence community for a handful of years. And the reason that's important to this conversation is I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. That was never something that was in my cards. That wasn't something I dreamed of doing. And when I was on my first deployment in Afghanistan, working for the intelligence community in 2008, that's where I met my now husband. And he happens to be British. He was in the British Special Forces. And we fell in love in Afghanistan. And we did long distance. And I ended up leaving this dream job that I had in DC that took me all over the world doing cool stuff. And I moved to the UK. And, you know, of course, we're still married now and everything's great. But I— my career progression took a real nosedive because we moved and I had to bounce around and I didn't have that same career progression. So I Googled, you know, what can I do from anywhere? And this was back in 2014. So it was still kind of early. We weren't into the COVID years yet. And I came across coding and I literally taught myself how to code, how to build websites. I fell in love with WordPress and I started my own web design agency and I built that up. And other people saw that I had this freedom and flexibility to move around and travel. After my husband retired, we ended up living in an RV for a year and a half, traveling all over the US.

What year was that?

This was 2018, 2019. And we were looking for somewhere to settle because He was from the UK and we came through Boise. We actually loved it. But when we found Durango, we loved it even more. So that's where we are now. And while I'm traveling, I'm sharing about being able to work and travel pre-COVID and everyone's saying, I want to be able to do what you do. Can you teach us? And I thought, well, I don't know how to teach, but I will tell you how I did it and I'll continue to share my journey and explain everything that I did, mistakes and everything. And that's where the company came to be what it is now. And I get to teach other women how to start businesses and be techie and geeky. And I absolutely love what I do.

Oh, that's amazing. And so talk about what the current business is.

Sure.

And then what the mission is.

Yeah, of course. So Geek Pack, we equip primarily women. We've lots of guys in the program, but primarily women, how to start and grow their company. We go through all the business building, everything, but we have a real focus on kind of digital skills, tech skills. And so much of that is because the confidence that comes along with it. I am so much more confident as a business owner because I know how to do all these things, and I want to give that to, to those women as well. And we've got a big, a big vision to, to reach a million women by 2030. So I'm hoping you can help us figure out how to get there.

Yeah, that sounds good. There's a lot that I want to dive into. You track the number of how many women that you've reached so far. What's that at right now?

It's right around 115,000, 116,000. Okay, so that's our number.

Crazy number of people. That you've reached already, if we were to put them in a stadium, I don't think there's a stadium in the United States that could hold that many people. I think we might be capping right around like 90,000, 100,000. Maybe as many as 110,000 if you like pack them in. But at the same time, you know, you're only at 11.5% to goal roughly. And so like a long ways to go, which is really exciting that you both have a huge amount of progress and huge ambitions beyond that. What you were saying about skills and the confidence that comes from that really stood out to me. So a few years ago, I was, I guess before COVID I was building a tiny house office in my backyard. And I was thinking about what I could do myself. And I know how to frame, I know how to, you know, a bunch of these things and what I need to hire out, like electrical. Sure. And a friend of mine was like, actually, you'd be shocked at how easy electrical is. Like, let me show you how to do the basics and then you can just have someone check it over at the end to make sure you're not gonna burn the place down. And so he spent like 2 hours showing me what to do. I did it all, had another friend who's an electrician check it over. Good to go. And that person coming in and saying, hey, you can actually do this. It reminds me, and like now forever I'm like, oh, I can do all of these things. And like to be able to give someone that confidence is huge. Like I had another friend who was remodeling a section of his house and found out that he had to like, like a whole section didn't have a foundation. Needed a new floor. Like it was a disaster, right? And it was like, it's actually pretty straightforward to pour a foundation. Like you just make sure it's level, here's how you do it. And then like frame the floor. It's like, really? Oh yeah, we'll do it on a Saturday. And like, I just love that. Not just the skill transfer, but the confidence transfer.

100%.

And then how that goes to everywhere else in life.

100%. Yeah, exactly. That's what we're all about at Geekpack.

Are there any stories of, you know, someone who's gone through your program or any of that that really stand out where you're like, oh, here's someone that we're able to give that skill transfer to.

Yeah, I get this question a lot and I always feel like people want to hear about like, oh, they went from zero to now they're making six figures or all these big numbers. But the ones that stand out the most to me is when, and years ago we used to host event called Geek Week and it was a whole week and we would just build things and it was awesome. One of the things that we would always do, you're probably familiar with inspect tools. Yeah.

In the browser, what's the code behind this page?

Yes. I would live hundreds of people on Zoom and I would pull up and I always share my screen and I teach live all the time. I know what it's like when things don't go right and things mess up and tech glitches and I do that on purpose so that people can see me struggle and work through things. I would pull up inspect tools and I'll show people and I'll show them how they can make changes and they see it immediately and we get them to do it. At the same time. And the comments are just, I had no idea that I could do this. It's that small wow. Like, if I can do this, what else can I do? And that is what gets me so excited. And that's why I've got such a big number because I know that we can instill that confidence and that skill transfer and help women go, wow, if I can do this, what else can I do? And it's just that first level of getting really comfortable with tech stuff. So I love inspect tools and showing that off.

People always like see a screenshot and they're like, oh, is that Photoshop? I'm like, no, it's easier to just right-click, inspect element, change the text.

Yes, exactly.

It's so easy to go. Okay, so I want to give a very quick summary, like snapshot of the business today. And then you have a partnerships framework that has worked for you to drive partnerships with TikTok and Verizon and so many more from there. And so You're going to teach that framework and I'm going to write it down as you talk about it. Cool. But first, what is, just to give a sense of the size of the business and all that, what's revenue expected to be in 2026?

2026.

Sorry, 2025. Yeah, I forget what year it is.

Sure. Expected, I would say about $600,000, which is the lowest it's been since 2019. But our expenses are also a lot lower.

So you've streamlined the business.

Yes.

And so, so maybe we'll go 2024 and 2025. Okay.

2024 was $867,000.

And then 2025 revenue, you said about $600,000. Should be about $600,000.

Yep.

But much higher margins.

Yes, actual margins.

Positive margins.

Yeah, '23 and '24 were negative margins.

Yep, it's a very important thing. Everyone always talks about the revenue growth and they don't spend nearly enough time talking about—

I am more than happy to share that.

Yeah, margins and all that. How many people are on the team?

There's 4 full-time and then we have a handful of contractors.

Okay, that's perfect. And then Let's get a sense for audience.

As in across kind of social media and places like that, or—

Yeah, I mean, the newsletter is a big part of it. Um, or a few of the things—

Sure, newsletter is 25.

Okay, 25,000.

Yep, on kit.

I like it.

Um, with an excellent open rate. Um, and then our social media across all the platforms, I want to say, is about 180. 1,180.

That's perfect.

Our app, we have over 1,000, and that's brand new, a couple months ago. So really pleased with that.

I think that's great to give people a sense of the business and all that. Okay, so this revenue that you're talking about is really split between the consumer side and the B2B side. And so what's the, the balance there?

So this year, one of the reasons I'm so excited about the partnership strategy that we have, it's 70% of our revenue. Last year it was 5%.

70% partners. Okay, so the reason I wanted to get to that is like this is driving a huge amount of revenue for you from a small team. Like it's very, very impactful and it's quite new.

Yes.

So let's dive into that. You have a framework and a process for scaling partnerships?

Yeah, so I'm so, so excited to share this because it's something that we've only really started to do a lot this year, and we call it the Embedded Partnership Framework. And the reason I'm so excited to share is because so many content creators can do this because we— I hope we know this— we have leverage, we have trust with our audience, and there are companies that want to be able to borrow that and leverage the trust that we've built with our audience. And this is a way that we've done it and it's worked really well for us. The first step is alignment.

Okay.

And this is all about when you're looking at potential partners, are they values aligned? Are they mission aligned? Do you want them to be? We do in our case, because we're— we have an audience of women small business owners and we want to make sure that the partners that we work with want to have a positive impact and serve those women. So we're always looking for alignment first. That's kind of the first step.

What's an example of a very aligned brand for you and one that might have come across your desk or a type that is not aligned at all?

Yeah, sure. Let's see. So one of them in Verizon is a great example. It's excellent alignment because they have, they have a program called Small Business Digital Ready and they are trying to reach small business owners, but they weren't having much success with military-connected and rural. And that's something that we—

Living in—

Yes.

You're like very military-connected and you live in Durango.

Exactly. So that was a really nice alignment for us to be able to go, hey, Verizon, you know, we can get these folks into your ecosystem. Let's partner. So that worked out really well. We get a lot of offers kind of like influencer marketing or one-off. Can we just put our logo somewhere? And I can't think of any actual company names, but that's absolutely what we're not doing. We are embedding the partner within our full ecosystem. So one-off things we won't do. Influencer marketing, we won't do.

Okay. What's the second one?

Okay. The second one is win-win-win. So we want to make sure that we as, as the company, there is a win for us. We want to make sure that there's a win for the partner, and we absolutely want to make sure there's a win for my community. So we look at each of those pieces when we're chatting with a partner, and is it going to be valuable? So a good example there is Make. And we approached Make and we said, hey, we want to run an AI agent workshop. Are you interested in being a part of it and kind of helping out and providing free accounts for folks for a certain period of time? And they said absolutely. So we got to share our expertise as teaching tech and building AI agents. The partner got to come in and they got new users and people who signed up and the community loved it. I have women in the community that are going, oh cool, look, I built this AI agent and I went home and I showed my husband and he was so impressed. Those are the stories that we love.

Making sure that you're hitting on each aspect of it. And 'cause then you have that filter of like, oh, I can see why this would be great for us and great for the partner, but like, does this really help our audience?

Yes, absolutely. To make sure you're hitting all those. So it has to hit all of those 3 points.

Yep.

Okay, the 3rd one is probably the one that I'm, the 3rd and the 4th are, I'm really excited about. So the 3rd one is a custom integration. And what this means is we get to sit down And we get to go, okay, where does this partner fit in across our entire ecosystem? And how can we make it really custom for them? So this is the strategy side. And we sit down as a team, we work with them, and we say, okay, do they, can they be a part of our virtual events? Maybe in-person events, which we're gonna start next year. How do they fit into our app or in our newsletter or embedded into one of our courses? Okay, which is working really well. So an example there is Relay, which is an online banking platform. And in one of our courses, we have students going through starting a business, and they get to a point of making it legit. We call it Get Legit, and we say, okay, LLC, EIN, business bank account, slide them right in. So it's just— that is just the thing that they do. Of course, there's other options, but they're fully integrated into that across social media and everywhere. So we make sure or where will this partner work best across our entire ecosystem? Because we want every partner to have hundreds of meaningful touchpoints across the entire kind of term of the contract, which ideally becomes multi-year. That's really where we want to get to.

Okay, so the integration points, you said the app, courses, what are the main ones?

Yep, the app, courses, the newsletter, social media, The events are the most popular.

And then events. Okay. I ran out of room, so we're going with that. But people get the idea.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and this is what I think a lot of content creators and other entrepreneurs, this is when I talk about this point, they're like, oh.

I was just gonna put a sponsored thing in the newsletter and that was it.

Exactly.

You know, or like we tweeted about it. One more.

Yeah.

One more. Yeah.

And this is so much more impactful for all of these, 3. And that's really where we, we keep kind of coming back to this because if, if my students, my, my members, they trust me and a lot of them have been around since 2018. And when I say, hey, you know, in the newsletter or, or all these other places and they sponsor an event, they're, they're seeing them over and over and they're a lot more likely to sign up to use them and to stick with them.

Yeah.

So that's where I want a lot of people to kind of go, okay, yes, cool, I can do that.

Yeah, I love that. All right, what's point number 4?

Okay, point number 4 is co-creation and delivery. And this is the other one that I'm excited about because it's all about execution. And this is where I get to have a lot of fun being creative and delivering something that is really fun and valuable and memorable. To my community, I'm going to keep kind of coming back to them because the community is the thing. They're everything. They drive everything at the company. So whatever we're doing from a delivery perspective, yes, of course, we want to make sure that it's a win for the partner. That is very important. But what does that actual delivery look like? And we, we run 6 to 8 week long cohorts and these are kind of learning partnerships, the ones that we do with Verizon, with TikTok. And we also, we just ran a something with Bill. It was like a Mad Lib pitch-off. And we had representatives from Bill, our partner, and they came in and we had this live event and my audience got to witness them, excuse me, like building a pitch of a made-up AI company and everyone loved it and it made Bill memorable. But I get to be really creative here and this is where I come back to, falling back in love with my company and what I do because I heard it on a podcast recently. Someone said, oh, as the CEO, you're basically just marketing 99% of the time. And I don't mind that, but I want to add value to my community. I want to bring them awesome tools and I want them to have confidence using them. So I get to be really creative about what that looks like. And because the partner is paying us, I can provide it to my community for free or very low cost. It just gets me really excited to think of things that I haven't done before. That's co-creation and delivery. We work with them and that's where the make thing came from, building AI agents. We're constantly like, how can we add value, bring them what they need and want, and just make it a fantastic experience for everyone? This is the execution side that Again, as entrepreneurs, as content creators, we love to be creative. So we get to do this in this model.

Yeah, I love that. All right, what's the fifth point?

The fifth is measurement and momentum. And one of the things that I learned last year from Cartier, of all places, is impact, the value of impact. Reports and impact reporting. So at the end, and we, we do surveys, we screenshot testimonials, so everything is all about our, the impact reports that we provide at the end. We do a lot of marketing for them. We get testimonial videos from our students that we provide. We screenshot, so it's qualitative and quantitative. And they can use that to kind of show to their higher-ups, look, here's the ROI, but here's also the ROE, return on engagement, that they can use from a marketing perspective. So, and then momentum is how do we turn that into the next contract?

I like that. Okay, I wanna dive into the momentum a lot, but the impact reports are interesting. We hired this agency called Casper Studios and they're an AI implementation agency. Agency. Jay has actually been on the podcast multiple times. And so they really led our growth team through building AI agents, all this workflow improvement. And I had never received an impact report. I hired a lot of people before for various things, and they came back with this fantastic impact report. And it was exactly what you're talking about. It was, here's the metrics, like quantitatively, here's the impact that we had. Here's the specific projects that people implemented. Here's who implemented it, how much time they said that they'll save on a weekly or monthly basis going forward. And then here's the qualitative side of it. And it's like our creative director saying this and our, one of our creative growth managers saying this other thing, right? And listening through where they're like, ah, I've been trying to do this on my own, but thanks to Casper's guidance, I did it so much faster. And having that to be able to forward around is so helpful. And then someone else was asking me, hey, you guys worked with Casper, right? Are they good? And I texted Jay, I was like, hey Jay, is it cool if I forward the impact report? He's like, yes, absolutely. And so I just forwarded that and was able to say like, maybe don't tweet this whole thing 'cause it has some internal stuff in it. But like, there you go, there's the full impact report. And so exactly what you're talking about, if you have one contact inside of, Verizon or TikTok who's like, this is amazing.

Yes.

And they're like, we should do it again. And someone else is like, I have 10 other budget priorities. Why? I don't know. I don't know anything about this.

Yes.

And they're like, well, read this doc and let's chat about it.

Yeah.

Like you're just making their job so much easier.

Yeah. And these have been wildly popular. We love putting them together and we love being able to see it as well and hearing from our community and how much value they get from it. Of course, ROI is important, but that leveraging that trust is, I think, really, really, especially now. I mean, buyers are fickle and they're funny and it takes them a longer time to buy things. So having a partner organization come in and leverage the trust that we've built over the last 8 years, I love that.

Yeah, that's amazing. Okay, let's talk about momentum. So what works for, you know, driving these repeat partnerships?

The ones that we've, and again, this is a thing that we've started this year, but we have seen a handful of our contracts re-up, which is great. And the impact reports are huge. One really cool thing that we just recently did is we, with one of our partners, we saw in the news that they're shifting and they're changing their priorities. And we said, you know what, We're helping them with that new shift that they want to go to. So we surveyed our audience and said, hey, you know, how likely are you to do X, Y, and Z? We got the responses and we sent that directly to them because of something that we saw in the news. So we're keeping an eye on what our partners are doing to make sure that we can continue to add value and that our community is seeing that as well. So yes, being very proactive and that has helped a number of times to keep us top of mind. And when they're looking at, you know, whether it's us or someone else, those sorts of things will continue to come up.

I mean, again, you're just trying to make their job easier.

Yes.

And so if someone's saying, I have all these goals, and they're like, all right, so my director is asking for this thing, how do I handle it? And then in their inbox shows up and says, hey, I saw that Verizon, I saw that you all are trying to do this thing. Our audience has a strong overlap on it. So we ran a survey, here's the results. Let me know if that's helpful or if there's any other questions I should ask.

Yeah, that's exactly what we did.

Thank you.

Yeah, literally yesterday we did that. So, and that was all the team, so I gotta give them a lot of credit. But yeah, so that's it.

Is there a process, I'm used to going one-to-many, right? Where you're, you're selling to thousands or tens of thousands at a time and in a small ticket basis, right? In this case, you're selling much more expensive partnerships with a smaller group. Do you have a process internally for like monitoring their news cycle or understanding what's going on or what their goals are for how you stay top of mind?

We have kind of Google News alerts.

Yep.

But that's, That's the sort of thing that, you know, how can this be a flywheel? How can this be more efficient? How can we stay more top of mind? And we've thought about a lot of things, but it's one of those, we've thought about it, we've written it down somewhere, but, you know, at the end of the day, there are 4 of us. So we are trying to figure out how to make this more of a flywheel.

Yeah, I mean, looking at it, it's almost a flywheel, right? So we're aligning on that partnership, figuring out what makes it win-win-win, doing the integration, co-creating and really delivering this content measurement. And then as you said, the momentum is both measurement and momentum. Like that can be a loop closer.

Sure.

Because what's our rebook rate, all of that. You know, the impact reports are gonna help you if there's a version that you can share with potential clients.

Yep.

Right. That's going to help you close deals more effectively and all of that.

We're also, um, I mentioned we're running 3 in-person events next year that we've never done before, and the following year we're planning on doubling that to 6.

Okay.

Because we know that that's really where partners get excited, and my community, we've told them, and they're, they're so excited. They're already waitlisting what city they're going to go to. So we are kind of using that I don't know if that makes sense to kind of bring that back of saying to current and past and going, hey, you know, this virtual event worked really well. We're doing in-person next year. We've got 3. Do you want to, you know, do you want to be the headline sponsor for all 3, for just one? Do you want to run a workshop? Because we can, we can get everyone in a room. We can say, hey, you know, pull up your laptops. We're all going to build an AI agent or we're going to, you know, set up email marketing or whatever. We're going to do it together. And so we are saying to current sponsors, current partners, we're doing this cool thing next year. Do you want to be a part of it? So we're— I don't know if that's—

when— what the other thing that you're doing is you're taking it and putting it in a category they're used to spending money on.

Yes.

Right. And so a virtual thing, most brands are now, but they're always used to being like, okay, cool, where do we have a booth? Where, where are you getting a few hundred people together that we can put our logo?

Yes.

And then I can share that screenshot in an impact report with, you know, my boss and say like, yes, I spent my quarter million dollar events budget on sensible things.

Yes. And with our in-person events, we're going to get to do, you know, all of this as well. So it won't just be one in-person event with a logo on a banner.

Yeah.

We will say to someone, yeah, you can have that, but we're also going to do all these other things. We're going to overlap the digital so that our community continues to kind of see you, not just the 200 people that are in Denver.

So as you talk to other creators or people in masterminds and you walk them through this process, what are the biggest questions that they have for implementing it in their own business?

Yeah, sure. The one that we hear the most, and I think this is going to be common across the board, is how do I even get started? Who— where do I find the person at the, the company that's the decision maker?

The sales process.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So what's worked for you?

Well, speaking on stage, that has been really successful. Last year I spoke on stage and one of my KPIs as a CEO is how many times a week do I say publicly what our vision is, which is to reach a million women by 2030.

Can I borrow your marker for a second?

Sure.

So let me just underline this.

Yep. And I was speaking on stage and I said that and employee from Verizon was there and they came up afterward and said, that's our vision too. We should partner. And I thought, huh, Verizon. Yeah, right. And here we are a year later coming up on our third contract, which is cool.

So I want to talk about that KPI for a second because it is very much a leading indicator. Most of the time CEOs set lagging indicators and they're saying like revenue is going to be this or these other things. But you're saying, what is it? How many times do you say on stage? How many times a week? Publicly. Just publicly.

Yeah. So how many times a week do I publicly say what our vision as a company is? Because people remember that.

So you should say it right now so that you can hit one more.

Yes.

Your mission is to—

I said it last night at dinner. I'll say it on here. And that's something, and people remember it. And the amount of times that people repeat it back to me and my students, they say to me all the time, I'm one of them. I get to be a part of that. They're a part of your journey. Yes. And they love that.

So what's, uh, you track how many times in a given week?

Yep.

What is a, like, what's the band here of like what's a good number? What turns that cell in the spreadsheet green?

Um, my goal is 10.

Okay.

And I know I can do more because I, I don't do a ton on social media, but I need to do more, and when I do mention it, but I know I could do more. I'm going to do a lot more podcast guesting. So there are ways for me to increase that number. So for 2026, I want it to be higher because that's a thing about our KPIs when we set them at the company. It's what can we control? I can control that.

That's so interesting because someone else would set a goal of I'm going to guest on 5 podcasts a month, right? Or something like that. But your goal includes that. But I'm going to publicly say our mission 10 times per week. I'm really intrigued by that, right? Because Kit operates in a very similar way. We exist to help creators earn a living. That is why the company is built. That's why we do all the training. We build all the tools that we have. Everything is around that. We have a very similar mission. And I say it, Ooh, 4 times a month.

Okay.

And so if people don't know that, remember it, like you would not be surprised at all because 4 times a month is not particularly often.

Yep.

But if I had this like, this is why we do, this is what we do, not only does it differentiate from every other company in the space, it re-centers our 100-person team, our thousands of customers, everything around. And it's not even a, you don't, like, I've never heard you make a big deal about it. I asked you to introduce yourself at dinner last night and it was one of the things that you said.

Yeah.

You didn't like stand on the table and say. I could have. You could have. But it was just this anchoring point in a broader conversation.

Yeah. And my team knows it. They can rattle it off just like I can. My community knows it. Our partners know it. And it's something something that so many people can get behind. And what I like so much about it is it's a number that can be tracked and there's a time period, like by 2030. And that's something that I, when I learned how to build a vision, you need those two things. You need like, what is your number? Maybe it's revenue, but what is your number and what's your time period?

So those are the two things that I say over and over and over again, and everyone knows Oh man, this is really standing out to me because I'm just, I'm seeing how much I could change, like a tiny tweak in my own behavior, right? Of coming on a podcast and saying, hey, yeah, I'm Nathan, I'm the founder of Kit. Our mission is that we exist to help creators earn a living. Like, that's not really, it's not more syllables, it's not more work than saying like, yeah, we do email marketing for content creators, blah, blah, blah. But it's recentering everyone around and it leads to a follow-up question of like, well, why? Why would you do that? So much more. So I love that.

Yep.

Okay, so we were, oh, in sales. Yes. Right? You having this KPI directly resulted in you being on a stage. Yes. And you said that.

Yes.

You got, then got alignment with Verizon. Yeah. 'Cause they listened to it and they said, you know, just, okay, here's another speaker. Hopefully I'll learn something. They're like, oh, we are aligned. Yes. We have the same goal. Let's, you know, can we, like, they came to you and they're like, can let me walk myself through your process basically of like, can we make a win-win-win partnership?

That was our first real partnership was with Verizon. And it's only after having multiple this past year that we've kind of, and I have people say to me all the time, how are you doing what you're doing and how is it, tell me what it is. And this is where we've kind of said, okay, this is exactly what we do. And how you can do it too. But it was the first one was with Verizon.

Okay, and so then as we move further down the sales process, that's where the team comes in.

Yes.

Right, and so of these 4 people, you have 1 person who runs sales and partnerships.

Yes.

And so if I understand correctly, you're not running the sales process end to end. You are doing your part. You're meeting the person, making sure there's alignment, and saying, handing it off. Why don't you meet this person on my team?

And I said this to my husband a couple weeks ago, like, I think some of my proudest moments as a CEO is when team members reach out and they say, oh, you know, we've got this, we're re-upping on this contract or, you know, this and all this great stuff is happening. And look at the impact that we've had on all these thousands of students. Verizon's super happy or whoever the partner is. And I say to my husband, I literally had nothing to do with that.

The best.

I started the introduction and then it's all been done. And that is like, that's winning, I think. As a CEO, that's, that's the dream for sure. Yep.

Any thoughts on hiring that person? Because also, it's not— the deal flow is not all just coming through you. They're going out and sourcing their own deals and partnerships as well.

Now, we didn't mention this earlier, but every single team member that I've had, and current as well, all students first. So they came through my community, they know our ethos, they know what we stand for. They believe in it. They're part of the mission, the vision, and they want to be a part of something bigger. And so they're all— so I'm a big believer in you hire for personality because skills can be taught, especially in Geekpack.

Right.

Yeah.

You're like, we're very good at teaching skills. And so we need personality, we need mission alignment.

Yes.

And you're going to, if you hire from your audience, you're going to do that so well.

Yep.

I love that. And that's a huge advantage that creators have.

Yes.

Because they're like, I'm really, I need the perfect person for this and they need to have the skills and care about what we're doing and love our audience. And oh, do you think I should go to the 25,000 or 50,000 people that read our stuff every single week to see if any of them are or know the right person? It's like, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

I love that. Okay. So those are the biggest questions that people ask. What about the biggest mistake that we run into?

What we see most with other companies or content creators that have tried something like this before and gone, oh, that doesn't work, is maybe just slapping a logo on something or one-off influencer marketing, which is fine if that's what you do. We meet at the end.

Yes. With a social post.

Absolutely. And what we are trying to do in these two points here is have the partner leverage our trust and have that hundreds of meaningful touchpoints. That's what makes this different and what the partners really like.

Yeah, so it's the difference between saying, we're teaching you how to do this thing, and if you want, you can do it with our sponsor, Make, or whoever. And then the version that you do is we're running this workshop where we're all going to come together and we're going to use the product to achieve this goal.

Yes.

And this workshop is free thanks to Make. And at the end, we've all like, we know the product super well. We've all used it.

Exactly.

Much better. That's perfect. Let's talk about where you want to go from here. So you have this amazing goal of 1 million women impacted. What about on the revenue side for you? You have to run a profitable business in order to achieve that goal.

Yep.

What are we looking at?

So my first goal is to hit $1 million in revenue.

Okay.

While keeping expenses below that. Yep, profitable. We did have a couple, a couple years where we weren't profitable. So $1 million in revenue. And ideally, I would love to see what it would look like to scale to 5. Plus, plus, but that's, that's in the short term. 2026, um, I'd like to hit a million.

Okay.

Um, 2026, my handwriting isn't great. And then maybe 2028.

Okay.

Is kind of what I'd be looking at.

2027 and 2028 are going to be big years.

Yes.

But I mean, the idea is that you have this dialed in and you're like, great, let's do these at a quarter million dollars apiece, or, you know, not only are we—

Multi-year contracts. The in-person events, I think, are gonna be a big revenue driver for partners.

So something that you and I talked about before is you watched the episode with Ryan Beck from Prey.com, and he talked about this like double flywheel of how they integrate B2B and B2C. And you have the same aspect of this where, you know, you were very much a B2C business, Yes. And then you've moved into a B2B business, but the B2B is entirely dependent on you having the consumer audience and having 1,000 people show up to learn this new skill.

Yep.

Can you map out or like, yeah, explain and kind of sketch how you think about that double flywheel?

Yeah, and that episode was incredibly helpful because it was a light bulb moment for me to go, oh wow, someone else is doing what I am doing, but I'd never articulated that way. So in the basics of, we're looking at, we'll call it B2C and B2B. And really, I don't know if they need to overlap, but we have these two revenue-generating parts of the company. And we get bigger, longer contracts here, the bigger this audience is and engaged. So We're not going for size like your Audience Shortcut essay. We're not— yes, we're going big, but I know that I can go big and still have an audience, not a crowd.

You need the right people. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Because the right people are engaged people.

I love that you're plugging the essay. It's one of my favorite things that I've ever written. And so if anyone wants to dig in more on Audience versus Crowd, that's at nathanbarry.com/audience. So I love the way you have these two sides mapped out. One thing I'm curious about is that, say a million in revenue or $5 million in revenue, what do you think the revenue split is directly from these two sides?

I'd like to keep it at 70/30, like what we've done this year, and we didn't, that wasn't planned, but yeah, really pleased with how that's turned out.

It feels right.

It does, and to be honest, chatting with my bookkeeper before coming here and getting all my numbers, I said to her that for the rest of this year, what I love so much about the revenue here is it's known. As content creators and as entrepreneurs, this is stressful because it's not as known unless you have, you know, SaaS or you have that recurring revenue, which we do have some. So if I rely entirely on my operating expenses and everything else, knowing what's coming in, that feels really good. Yeah. And then I get to have fun over here and I get to be creative and I get to build stuff that I love because I'm not reliant on this revenue. So, and that kind of comes back to just being able to fall back in love with the company that I started, teaching cool stuff, bringing in cool tech, showing my audience, giving them that confidence and if that generates this amount of revenue, awesome. If it's more than that, fantastic. But I want to enjoy all of this knowing that this revenue is coming in.

Yeah, I love that. Because you know what accounts receivables look like, you know what the contracts are, and you're working with companies that are going to pay their contracts. Like, yes, that's very good. So as we scale this to $1 million next year and then $5 million, what are the biggest bottlenecks that you're going to face?

Probably me.

Your time?

Yes, my time. Because, you know, as, as we mentioned earlier, because I am the founder and the face of the brand, I know that if I spend more time here, whether it's speaking on stages or whatever that looks like, we can probably have more leverage there. But honestly, like, this is— I love this. This is like what gets me excited. Maybe not showing up on social media, but being with my people, the right people Engaging with them, adding value, and I know they feed each other, but I constantly find myself in this kind of weird place in here feeling like I'm doing two things.

You're split.

Not great.

Yeah, that makes sense. Getting very clear on what aspects of your job, because it might be showing up very specifically in the co-creation and the delivery. Yeah. And also being on as many stages as possible, or, you know, virtual or in person. Sharing your mission. And you might say, look, I need to be spending at least 5 hours a week on delivery, and I need to be saying our mission publicly 10 times per week to bigger and bigger audiences. And if I do those two things, that's successful. Now, you also need to hire and recruit, right? But yes, so maybe those are three things that you break down.

Yeah. And we're doing pretty well with the team size that we have. And we are using AI a decent amount and bring that in to help a lot. But it's interesting that you said my time here and here because this gets me really excited.

The delivery.

Yes. And this does as well because I'm so passionate about it and I'm kind of already doing those. But hearing someone else say it is almost permission to go, oh, cool. Okay, I can lean into those.

There's a version of of showing up in those worlds where everything is done for you besides the part that you actually do. I made a joke when we were not recording about like, I'm just a puppet, like a marionette, and other people are pulling the strings. And there's an element of truth to that because I will sit down and say, here's what I need to deliver to the team or to, you know, a new webinar. And the slides are done, the script is done, any of those things, I make some tweaks to it, I throw it up on the teleprompter, and I deliver it in a studio that's ready to go for me. And like the old version of me was like, okay, I need to create this from scratch. I need to set aside time. I need to set up the lighting and this camera and everything to do it and all the way through. And what used to take half a day now takes 30 minutes because other people did all of that. And so this is all about doing the highest leverage things possible that only I can do.

Yes. Okay. And that, that's what I need to hone in on is what are the, the highest leverage things that only I can do? Because I love getting in the weeds and doing, you know, doing the, the busy work because it's comfortable.

I would say mission, marketing, delivery, and recruiting. Now they won't all be equal at different times, but when you think about the things that you truly do best, right? The mission, we've already covered that. That's so important to everything you do. The marketing, you being out there, you're going to be able to get in rooms that others can't. People are gonna be more interested to listen to you than someone else. You might just be the figurehead. There could be a lot of marketing. If you imagine this kind of thing, right? There's all of this, work that's happening in marketing, and you're just right up here. Like you are just the final delivery of this entire pyramid behind marketing. Other people are running strategy, they're doing all of that. So that's what I mean, not like you are now the head of marketing. Like do it all. Delivery, same thing. The partnership is queued up from everyone else. It's good to go. It's something that you've aligned on and you totally believe in, and that can, but you're just the final delivery. And I would still encourage you to have other people deliver things as well.

Okay.

Like, don't make it, don't get your audience so hooked on like—

Just me.

On just you.

Okay. And we do have one of the team members is in the new year going to be like all learning and development delivery.

I like that. Yep. And then the last one is recruiting. Like in order for the rest of this pyramid to exist, it needs a great team. And so you always want to know who you have on your team and how you're invested in them, and then what your bench looks like. There's an example of my friend Jay Papasan was talking about this where he had a team member leave after 5 years who had done amazing work and all that, but they had reached a natural transition point and you could have seen it coming. And then it was very painful for that person to leave. And one of his mentors said to him, you are in pain right now because you didn't do your job.

Oh.

Your job was to build a bench of talent. So when this person's ready for the next thing in their career, which you could have predicted, you were like, that's amazing. I'm so happy for you. We're going to miss you so much. And I have these 3 people either internally at the company that I can promote or external.

Or someone else bring them.

And when he told me that story, I was like, oh, that hurts so much because it's so accurate. The number of times you're in pain right now because you didn't do your job. And so recruiting and developing the team is always in the back burner because it's so important. And then you're thinking about it of you might have something going out to your audience in this whole B2C side where you're saying, hey, just so you know, we're not posting these roles yet, but in 2026, we're going to be hiring for roles like, and people might say, oh, okay, that might be, you know, and you can start to develop talent in that way.

Oh, interesting. Okay.

If you'd ever want to work at Geekpack, we have a roundtable where we're talking about that and we're pulling people together, right? And that might be a 25-person Zoom call where you kind of talk about that. There's a lot of ways you could develop talent well in advance.

Okay. All right. Yep. I hadn't thought of that.

Okay. I want to get to one other bottleneck and then we'll wrap up. As in this, what it, as we go to $1 million and then $5 million, what's the next bottleneck that you're going to run into?

Leading onto some of these things, probably team. And I think I, in the COVID years, we, you know, we rode that COVID wave and I hired. And this earlier this year, I had a real, oh, things are not good moment and had to, you know, scale back. So I'm still a little like, I can do it with just this. I know I can't. And so the bottleneck is probably the investing and kind of putting money in knowing that we're going to get ROI. And part of that is hiring folks to help us out next year with the in-person events because I don't know how to run an in-person event. I don't want to know how to run an in-person event. And I know that we need to pay a good amount to have that handled and taken care of to make sure that Everything is really good for everyone.

Yeah, I think that's so important. And so then you're saying if you know that you're gonna need to hire for events, like how could you start to build the bench of those people? How could you go around and ask everyone you know who runs events, hey, behind the scenes, who runs, is this internal? Is this an agency that you use? What have you learned? You could have 10 conversations and that might be a KPI that you have of like, all right, we're going all in on events. I need to have 10 conversations with people who've run events.

Who've done them.

What are the biggest mistakes you make? If you're starting from scratch, what would you do differently? Okay. What type of team did you develop? How did you make this event profitable?

Yes.

There's vastly different versions of events.

Yep.

Where people are deliberately losing money versus it is their whole goal and to scale the business. You'll see very different aspects of how someone runs an event. Like this multi-day, more expensive thing might be designed for profit, whereas the single day, there's a whole bunch of things.

Yep. Okay, and team, any suggestions there?

On the team, I mean, it's very similar. It ties into the event side of things. I would get very clear on who you need to hire exactly as you're doing with AI of like, hey, we're going to keep this as limited as possible. I think that many of us have done what you did during COVID of scaling up the team too fast and then you have to downsize or you have to back off. So I think everything, like I'm not as worried about team for you because I think you've got all of these aspects. The thing that I would distill in the, or like instill in the culture is this idea of we can do more than we think we can. And hiring is the last tool that we reach for. Because there's so many things where it's like, actually, we can scale this. And then, as I think you mentioned earlier, always looking for the leverage points. Like what actually breaks? 'Cause we have this assumption that if it takes 4 people to reach $600K in revenue, it's gonna take 8 to reach $1 million, and it's gonna, you know, that there's a linear scale. And so I always look for like, Where are these actually growing in connection with each other?

Mm-hmm.

The last bottleneck that I think you're going to have is just audience growth.

Yes.

And that's going to be an important thing. Is there anyone on your team right now who's responsible for audience growth?

Me and my marketing manager.

In the same way that you have really clear KPIs for yourself, does your marketing manager have really clear KPIs For audience growth?

No. And interestingly, on the plane ride in, the internet wasn't working. So I actually went through and I was trying to come up with some KPIs that are within our control that would help with audience growth. And I mean, one thing that we've done recently is SparkLoop. Oh my gosh, it's unreal. I was just telling a mastermind the other day and I'm showing them and I'm giving them all the stats. And they're looking at me like, what is this?

What is this uncovering?

Yes. Yes. So that has been— I mean, talk about minimal work.

And, you know, for anyone who doesn't know, explain what SparkLoop is and how it works.

Oh, gosh. Let's see if I can.

Yes.

Yeah. So our newsletter is on Kit and we— so SparkLoop, the best way I know to explain it is is we pay for engaged leads. And like, that's the key that so many of my other kind of entrepreneur friends didn't get. Because I put money into, you know, Meta's hands all the time. And our cost per lead is a lot, but they're not necessarily engaged.

Only a portion of them are engaged.

Yeah. So with SparkLoop, you pay a certain amount every month and you get all these new leads. And they go through this magic automation in Kit. And if they're engaged under your parameters, after a month you pay that very small amount.

So like $2 per engaged subscriber?

Yes, we're like $1.13. And I said to my team member, let's pay more, raise that budget and get more because we know we're engaged.

And you're paying it to other creators who are recommending Geek Pack and saying, I think what you're doing is great. I would love to get paid too. Further your mission.

It's unreal. So we're really pleased with that. The getting folks onto the app from the newsletter is going really well. We have a really high engagement rate on the app. Social is where I know I need to do more. And it's, that's really, I mean, you talk about a bottleneck, it's me. Because when I show up on social, if I'm doing reels and things, things, it's a lot more effective.

Okay. I just don't love it. So to wrap up with like two final things. So I think audience growth is going to be very, very important. And I would get to the two metrics that your marketing manager, not you, are responsible for. And I would have them be newsletter growth and social growth on a particular platform.

Sure.

Your job is not to make social content.

Okay.

Your job, are you nervous or excited?

I don't know.

Your job is to show up and to be the puppet that makes the social content that you are told to make.

Okay.

And of course it has to align with everything you're doing, right? Okay. But I'm pretty sure that if you have a tight-knit team of 4 people who deeply believe in your mission, who are hired from your audience, they're going to lean towards making content that's in line with what you're doing.

Okay.

So it's not like, how did you spend half a day making content? Or, okay, now my full-time job is to make Reels on Instagram. It's like, no, no, no, uh, for 4 hours once a week, okay, I step into content creation mode, okay? And in that, I go to the Notion doc, okay, that my team has already put together with tested reels, all of these things, okay, uh, like these ideas, and I create that content and I just approve it before it goes out, okay? Right? So again, going to this pyramid, yeah, we're going— if the, the, if the whole pyramid is growth on social, we're making your role just the tip of it.

Sure.

The part that only you can do.

Okay.

And that with clear metrics of how often are we posting on social and are we learning and getting better with each post?

Yes.

And then a metric around newsletter growth.

Newsletter growth.

And those two things I think would go really far with them.

Okay, newsletter growth and probably Instagram, I would assume. Yeah, I would assume. Considering my audience. I've spent months growing my LinkedIn and it's like, oh cool, our people aren't there.

And that's good to know. And you can repost to LinkedIn, but there's always one place that like, this is the primary. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. The breakdown on partnerships, I love you giving the deep dive of like how in the last 12 months really you've transformed your business and then to share like, this is actually what's working. And then to dive into where you're going from here, like, it's so much fun.

Oh, awesome.

And I love the mission of what you're doing. Like, we're very aligned in that. So if people want to learn from your content, pick up new skills, follow Geekpack, follow you, where should they go?

Sure. So geekpack.com is always the best place to go. But if anyone is interested in any more of this and want to hear more, I love having conversations with people, especially one-on-one. And they can email me julia@geekpack.com.

Amazing. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you so much.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.