How to Turn Your Passion Into a Creator Business ($1Million+)

If someone tells me like, I'm earning $1 million a year off of this audience, I'm like, yeah. There's nothing at all surprising to me about that 'cause I've seen it so many times.

When it comes to understanding the creator economy, there's really, I don't think anyone that I look to more than you.

People might get to hundreds of thousands of followers and not have a meaningful business of any kind. How can I serve people in that audience? What value can I provide? Bigger might not be better. You want the right people.

How do you take this fork in the road versus that one? Leads you to build an audience?

The first thing is to understand what I call the 99-1 rule. Most people only consume content. A few people actually do the thing. The 1%. Missouri Star Quilt Company does over $100 million in revenue, and it has gotten so crazy. This is the power of an audience that they purchased the town. And this is off of a 700,000 subscriber YouTube channel.

What is your recommendation in 2024 for how people start monetizing with their knowledge?

The first thing is to understand, and when you view things through that lens, it makes the whole creator economy make sense.

I want to give a little bit of context, uh, around why I wanted to have this conversation, this particular conversation with you in particular at the summit, and not just at the summit, but on the main stage. And this is for everyone, probably you included. Why am I here, Tyler? Every creator I know who sticks with it, who is sustainable, who is not just a flash in the pan, who keeps it going and actually has an impact and even makes a living from it, they have some kind of system, whether they call it a second brain or digital notes or a content calendar or a content pipeline. There's many terms for it, but as a creator or just as an artist, you realize at some point that you can't just sit down every morning and, oh, the first thing that comes to mind. It's systematic. It's something that has to be documented and searchable and retrievable. There's organizing involved. It's, it's a process. When it comes to understanding the creator economy, there's really, I don't think anyone that I look to more than you. I actually did a search of my second brain preparing for this interview of your name. It's always the first thing I do. And there were 14 mentions, 14 mentions of your name. The earliest one is from 2013.

Okay.

Yeah, that's way back. You were a designer or some design thing. And so I just went through those notes and essentially traced the history of me following you. And you started off as a creator, so you understand what it's like to sell eBooks, to sell courses, to try to pay the rent using the, the internet. Then you go through this arc of starting ConvertKit and then scaling it and growing it into this incredible company that is not just essential to, to our business, but I think email generally is the very core of the creator economy. There's like all the stuff, the passing trends and the platforms that come and go. Email is like the lifeline that is just at the very core foundation of it all. And so for all those reasons, I wanted to have a conversation about the creator economy, the creator economy today, what it looks like, how it's changing, what it means to succeed. Uh, one final little piece of context is, uh, Nathan has a podcast. Which is excellent, in which he's interviewed, I think, over 30, around 30 creators so far. Yeah, there's a lot. Including people big and small, people early and late in their journey. And you've just discovered different principles and lessons and patterns about what that success looks like. And so why don't we start there?

That sounds good. Thanks for having me.

I'm going to try to get you to summarize a little bit 30 conversations, which I know is a real challenge. But when you think back on those conversations you've had with a wide variety of different creators, what jumps out at you that was most surprising or unexpected of everything that you, that you heard from them?

Well, I think it depends on like surprising to whom. There's, as far as surprising to me, I guess I'm just watching all of this unfold in the creator economy. Like I have a very unique seat in the creator economy in that we power over 50,000 newsletters from creators. So I could see behind the scenes of what's working, you know, from the very largest newsletters, like someone like a James Clear who's got 4 million subscribers, up to, you know, someone who's just getting started and launching their podcast or newsletter or something like that. So we get to see these trends over a long period of time and look at not only the, the anecdotes and the conversations, but also the data as a whole. Like there's 900 million unique email addresses inside of the Kit database. And so we get to see what's happening across all of these industries and all of that. So as far as what's surprising though is I think the sheer scale of how many people are building really established sustainable businesses. And actually how I'd say the creator economy is maybe bifurcated right now. There's a public narrative that you'll hear where people are talking about how maybe it's hard to earn a living as a creator, or the creator economy has no middle class. People are just getting started making no money, or at the extreme, people are making incredible amounts of money and there's no in-between. And so from our position of having the amount of data that we have and watching it, we're like, actually, there's a thriving middle class in the creator economy. And it's actually people who take a different approach. So what we see is that those who are building, I guess I call it a crowd rather than an audience, who are trying to get anyone to pay attention, right? You're chasing views on Instagram or TikTok. Maybe you're just providing entertainment without substance. That people might get to hundreds of thousands of followers and not have a meaningful business of any kind. but then there are those who are building an audience. And the way that we think about an audience is an audience is just the right people paying attention. And so an audience could be 10 people or 100 people. It's usually a much more specific niche. It's usually that I, as the creator, am providing value to that audience. And so realizing, I, I guess that distinction of an audience versus a crowd, and now I see everything through that lens. And I realize when someone's talking about, oh man, I built this audience to this level and the comments are kind of nasty and I can't earn a living off of it. And, you know, I feel like it's just views without substance. And I'm like, oh, you don't have an audience, you have a crowd. And then you get these other people where they're saying, I can't believe it, I have 500 people on a newsletter for this. Niche topic that I thought no one else cared about, and I opened up and said, hey, I'll take on coaching clients to help you with this. And I had 25 people sign up, and it's way more than I can handle, and the conversion rate is ridiculous. I thought it should be 2%, and like, it's 10%. What is even happening? This doesn't make sense. It's like, well, you built an audience. You have the right people paying attention. And when you view things through that lens, like, that's something I just realized in the last, probably last year. Like, and it makes the whole creator economy make sense to me.

So how do you, assuming everyone hearing this once would much rather have an audience than a crowd.

Yeah.

And assume they're doing something online, creating some kind of content. How do you take this fork in the road versus that one? What leads you to build an audience?

I think that an audience comes from a service. If you think about, okay, if I'm putting things out there on the internet, why should someone pay attention to me? Am I funny? Do I have great dance moves? Am I— do I have great educational content? Like, what, what is it? And so if you think about that for yourself, and then you step aside and think, okay, why do I pay attention to other people? Usually it's because I get something out of it, right? There's so many people in this room that I consume their content because they help me, you know, run a better business, right? Take better notes. All of these things that I'm trying to do more effectively. And so if you think about it in terms of, okay, the way that I get attention is by serving and providing value, then you provide a serve-first mentality. So Pat Flynn wrote this book called Serve First, and it just sums it up like serve other people first and then the value will come back to you. And that is really the entire approach. And so you say this is a topic or a category that I want to pay attention to. That I am in love with? How can I serve people in that audience? What value can I provide? And that is absolutely the way to go versus the opposite, which is like, okay, how can I get attention? How can I get you to pay attention to me? This is about me. You should pay, you know, and that's a totally different, totally different way to go.

Basically making it about them, their needs, their problems instead of you.

Yeah, exactly. And you have to narrow it down, right? Someone will come to you and say, Oh great, you were amazing at teaching me how to use Notion. Could you now teach me gardening? And you're like, no, no, no, stay in your lane with that. So it's not about all of their random needs. You have to stay focused, but within that it's thinking like, okay, what was useful to me? What would be useful to the audience?

In your conversations, a bunch of which I've listened to in depth, you really get into the nitty-gritty of what it means and looks like to build a business, the right way to build a business, the different mental— you have a whole variety of different frameworks and mental models, which I'm not sure we'll get into. But I'm curious, you went into this podcast that you created with a certain thesis, which was around that creators were the future. You sort of have bet your career on that, that more money and influence was going to flow to them, but that at the same time they were under-monetized. Underleveraged. They weren't essentially, they weren't fulfilling their potential as creators, but also as business people. I'm curious after like 30 conversations later, what has changed? Like, were there any expectations you had going in that were violated? Any assumptions that you realized you were making that were invalid? Like how have you had to change your thinking? I guess it's related to my previous question about what was surprising, but surprising to you. That you did not expect going into those conversations?

Yeah, so the first idea that I based the podcast around is one that I call the billion-dollar creator. That is this idea that an audience or that attention is one of the most powerful and most valuable currencies on Earth. If you think about the entire advertising market, hundreds of billions of dollars spent to buy attention, which as creators is the thing that we are the best at cultivating, right? We provide value, we put things out there, and in return, people pay us back with their attention. And so realizing that once you have this attention, you can direct it at really anything you want. And there's a very typical business model in the creator economy where I'm going to say monetize a business through sponsorships, affiliate links, you know, promoting other people's products, ebooks, courses, any of those things. And one thing that stood out to me or surprised me is realizing that like, wait a second, there are higher value ways for, for the individual as a creator to direct this attention than than that, which on one hand, it's crazy 'cause you get people who have built an audience to one level and they're earning just a huge amount of money, like more than a doctor, more than someone who went to school for like 8 years to do this. And then you get someone who's a creator who's like, yeah, I'm actually making $250,000 per year as a creator. And I'd be like, yep, that makes sense. If someone tells me like, I'm earning $1 million a year off of this audience, I'm like, yeah, there's nothing at all surprising to me about that because I've seen it so many times over and over again. When you think about having this attention and realizing that like, wait, I can direct this at kind of anything I want that's relevant to this audience, then it opens up a whole range of things. And I think it stood out to me is when you look at celebrities, since we're in L.A., The number of celebrities who you actually look at how they made their money, and it's not from their movies or music that they're most famous for. George Clooney made most of a huge amount of his money from Casamigos tequila. Ryan Reynolds has done this playbook over and over again where he's, how do I take my attention that I have and then turn it into these established businesses? And that's like Mint Mobile, but even like a sports team. And that's really what I've done with Kit, where I built an audience as a creator, I sold ebooks, I sold courses, I provided a lot of value in that world and then scaled up and now promote a software company that has a lot more equity value. Another example of this would be there's a creator named Nathan Barry who runs a product called Lex, and you can find that at lex.page. Nathan and his business partner Dan created a really great newsletter called Every. They put out all this great content. They're really, really great writers, and they built this newsletter community and everything. That caps out at a certain amount from a business value, equity value, all that. Now both of them have taken that audience and that attention and everything they've learned, and they've turned it into, directed it towards software. So Lex is like Google Docs that is AI-powered. So it's this great writing experience. And we actually just released a feature where now you can import all of your Kit broadcasts and train the AI model on all the broadcasts that you've written over the last year. But this is the kind of move where you're saying, okay, how do I take this attention, capture it and harness it and direct it towards something that has long-term value? Equity value. So I think it just continues to surprise me the huge range of examples of where I see this applied.

Interesting. Yeah, I remember one of your examples was like a quilt company, and this really struck me because we at my company and our team are just obsessed with YouTube right now. So we just spend all week, all day, just how, how make number go up. And we go so deep into it. Oh, this number needs to go up and it needs to go up this fast and it's not fast enough. And then you cite an example of a, I think that, I think they have less YouTube subscribers than we have right now. And I think in your article you said they were making like $40 million a year.

Yeah. So the, it's actually crazier than that. The, the Missouri Star Quilt Company is, uh, started as a YouTube channel and, uh, it's this woman who She and her son and daughter, so her adult kids were like, mom, you love quilting. You talk about this all the time. Let's get you a YouTube channel where you can talk and we'll see what comes from this. And so they built it up to 50,000 subscribers, 100,000 subscribers, and up from there. And they realized the value that this attention was bringing in. And then they always looked for the bottleneck. One of my favorite things— this is a very brief tangent— but one of my favorite things is the theory of constraints. We know, big fan. Has anyone read Tiago's The Theory of Constraints essay? Give me a show of hands. Okay, after this tonight, after you hang out with everybody, like, go read that if you haven't, because it's so good. And you can read the goal that it's based on and all of this, right? But in theory of constraints, you're looking for the bottleneck. And they realized that the bottleneck in the quilting industry is that once you put together this whole quilt, it has to be like, or like all your patchwork then has to be made into a quilt. And the waiting list to have this done is like months, which is kind of crazy. So they pulled together money, spent like $25,000 to buy this quilting machine. And then from the YouTube channel, the first like product that they're selling is like mail your, your quilts that you've made to us, and then we will do all the quilting and send it back to you. So that was the first business. And that attention, they could have said like, oh, buy a pattern, buy a course. But they did it in this way and they scaled up. And then now they're selling fabrics, patterns, training. And it has gotten so crazy. This is the power of an audience that they purchased the town of Hamilton, Missouri. And they have made— you can look this up— they have made the Disneyland of quilting where over 100,000 people travel every year to go and visit this. It has all of these shops. It has sports bars for the guys to hang out at who don't want to do anything with quilting. It has all of these things and it's going so well that Al, who's a friend of mine and the CEO of this company, has just purchased the neighboring town, and they're going to further expand this. And this is off of a 700,000-subscriber YouTube channel. So the business as a whole, Missouri Star Quilt Company, does over $100 million in revenue because they've continued to say, when we have this attention and we have this audience that loves quilting, how can we just keep serving them more and more and more? And it's just wild to watch the power of that.

This kind of speaks to your one of, I think, your other ideas around mindset because so, so what I saw in our YouTube example was, oh, because as a creator you get so sucked into, okay, just make the follower counts because that's what's— or the view counts, the most public front-facing number go up. And then I thought, wow, maybe we have enough followers and enough top of funnel and enough of an audience, maybe I should focus on the underlying business, on the backend business. And you have a call to action around that where you really encourage creators to think of themselves as entrepreneurs and to make that jump from just attention, attention, attention to something else. What have you found about that or learned about that? For example, why is it so hard? What stops creators, say small-scale creators, from making that jump? What have you learned?

Yeah, the first thing is a lot of these platforms really encourage chasing views and followers, which can have a bunch of problems. One, it doesn't encourage a depth with the audience. Two, you can end up chasing things because it worked, and then you want to— it's that drug, you want the dopamine hits, and you're like, well, I don't love making a video about this thing, but it did really well, so maybe let's make a second one. And then more people love that. I've run into a lot of creators who have built an audience that they don't care about, and they got there, and they're not having any fun, but they got there because they followed the view count and what progressively went viral, and then they've had to reel it back and be like, okay, hold on. I love being a creator, so what do I not like about this? They've said, all right, I'm gonna delete this channel and start a new one, or I'm going to say, hey, actually, this is what I'm about, and really shift gears. The second thing is you can't clean your followers on any of these channels. Mm-hmm. So it's pretty common to end up with a YouTube channel, say, that you've been running for 5 or 10 years, and maybe you have 100,000 followers and you're putting out videos that are getting 1,000 views, 3,000 views, 5,000, and you're like, what's wrong with the other 95,000 people? And it's like, well, many of them moved on with their life, right? They were interested, in my case, I was trying to learn how to code in Ruby on Rails, how to design. I don't search those kinds of tutorials anymore, but I'm probably still subscribed to all of those channels. And YouTube knows you don't actually watch that, so we're actually never gonna show it to you again. And so you could end up having this disappointing feeling of like, I have, the number says 100,000, but, engagement is way less. And if it was an email list, we would just delete the people who didn't engage. And so we'd say, okay, we got it down to the people who actually want to be here, or we'd segment.

Every year we remove around 15% of our list. And it always amazes me because part of me is indignant. I'm like, the whole freaking year we just send you every week just all this free amazing content. And then I feel resentful of those 15% of people that we just have to remove. But then I feel grateful that I no longer have to pay for those people. Yeah, your cap bill.

Down and our deliverability improves. It's actually a win-win. And that's the thing about having, with a crowd, bigger is better. You want higher numbers. With an audience, bigger might not be better. You want the right people. And you've all felt it when you're in a room of thousands and people don't really want to be there. They're not really paying attention. There's not a uniting theme versus times when you're in a room of hundreds and there's like this energy and everybody is in it together and all of that. I probably lost the train of where you were headed with that question.

No, it's just around the mindset. Like what, what stops? So, so I kind of want to add a caveat too, which is creators. We keep using the term creators and when I use that term, I really don't mean only professional full-time creators. And I kind of think like almost everyone is a creator. Like I know some people on usually now like Facebook or Instagram who post content that is so beautiful, tasteful, interesting, thoughtful, and they have no interest in making money online, never had that thought, but they're creating content. I talked to say professors at universities who have to, you know, now title their papers using like hooks. They need a hook like on YouTube for their paper or else no one is gonna read it. And if no one reads it, then no one's gonna cite it and they're not gonna get tenure, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like any knowledge worker, I'd say the definition of creator has expanded to almost be synonymous with knowledge worker. 'Cause if you're a knowledge worker, you have to acquire attention for whatever it is that you're doing. So I'm curious what stops, let's say someone is creating content, and as I said, that is practically everyone who's on the internet. What keeps them from sort of changing their identity upgrading to think of themselves as a business person, an entrepreneur, a founder, those types of things?

Yeah, I think the first thing is you have to either love that side of it or fall in love with it. I was having a conversation yesterday with Mark Manson, who has sold 20 million copies of his books. At this point, he could retire, he could move on, and He just loves, like absolutely loves the creator business and talking about it. We sat down to record a podcast episode and 3 hours later his team is like, I think you have another meeting that you need to get to. And we're like, oh, we could actually just talk about this forever. And so there's something, I think you have to, if you wanna be successful in a creator business for a long time, you have to learn to fall in love with the other aspects of the business. And that might be how you teach, how you connect with your audience, how you price and package things. But you have to just apply that curiosity to every part of it. And those people who say, you know, I just want to do this aspect of it and I, you know, want to ignore the rest, will either always just have a modest living from it, which is totally fine, but not reach the full potential of income. Or they need to partner with someone who's the chief operating officer of their business, who's really going to love that side of it. And you see a lot of these creators now who have a really great COO or chief of staff or someone who loves that systems and processes side. The business side of it. And it's such a powerful, such powerful pairing. I think even just in the operations side, the biggest thing that I see causing burnout within creators is they don't have the systems. And so I look at a group of people like all of you here who I imagine, I'm stereotyping a little bit, but I'm imagining love systems and automation and process and all of that. And often you can go really, really far by pairing up with someone who loves to be in front of the camera. And so you see those businesses do really, really well because you get two founders in a creator business playing to their strengths. So you basically either need to fall in love with the business and system side of it, or you need to partner with someone who does.

Which of those paths did you take?

I fell in love with the business side. Out of it.

And is there any—

And partner, you know, now I have a large team, but both. Yeah, but I really, you know, if you want to get into the finer points of tax structures for LLCs versus C-corps, like I could talk about it for an hour straight. So don't ask questions about that because we want them to enjoy the conference.

Yeah. Interesting. Do you have any— I mean, I feel like I'm kind of there myself is I've reached the limits of how much I like operations. I'm a pretty— I'm a pretty process-oriented person. but I find it difficult. I just don't care beyond a certain point. And we do have a general manager, Julia, who now runs the business as of today or yesterday. But I wonder what you would— well, let me put it this way. I'll just use my own business as an example because I'm very transparent about it. For a creator-led business that's plateaued, that is just at the same level of profitability, revenue, which is fine. It's not an existential crisis. I'm sure you must have had points in your business where you plateaued or where growth slowed down or whatever it was, especially from your perspective as a creator, as someone who's interested in the content, in the creative side. What are the questions you asked or what do you look at or what, I don't know, forcing functions did you bring into play to bring you out of that?

Yeah, I mean, even just asking a few questions of, no one expects the plateau. And so if you ask, okay, why did I expect this to keep growing? Then you're like, oh, because it should always, it grew last year, it should grow this year. You start to break down the assumptions underneath this, then you start to realize that growth is not inevitable or not the default. And so if you think about it in terms of a funnel, so let's say revenue is what we're optimizing for, and our primary product is a course that we're selling for $200. And maybe we launch it twice a year, and launch 1 was $50,000, launch 2 was $100,000, launch 3 was $250,000, launch 4 was 5— oh no, it was only $250,000. That's weird. It doubled every time. What's different? And so we're getting into that. And the first thing that you want to— that you tend to do is look at the audience size. Like, I had 20,000 people on my newsletter when I did a $250,000 Strava launch. I have 25,000, so I should do like incrementally more. This is especially true when the launch decreases. But you have to realize it usually comes back to the growth rate of the audience. Often you no longer have the same number of new people coming in, right? If I have 20,000 people on my newsletter and then 20, like for one launch and 20,000 again for the next launch, I don't really have many net— I have no net new people. I, you know, I lost some and I gained some new ones. So there's, there's some totally new, but But you realize like, oh, I've launched the same product to this same community pretty often. The other thing that happens a lot is people in their businesses tend to oscillate between externally focused and internally focused. I've seen this at Kit at times where there are times that we're very out in the community. Hey, what features should we build? How do we get you on the platform? All of this. And other times we were thinking about, ooh, how do we train or level up our team? What hiring do we need to do? How do we need to change our processes? And the results of the business tend to, tend to follow about 6 months behind whichever one that you're doing. And so, you know, whether in a business like Kit or as a creator, as you get very internally focused, you realize like, oh, we're not getting in front of new audiences the same way that we used to, you know? And you're like, okay, what worked back then? It's like, oh, I did lots of direct outreach. I was going on everyone's podcast. I would say, hey, can we do a newsletter swap? Let's teach a workshop together about this topic. That would be really fun. You were doing all these things and it brings all these new people and all this new energy. And then, you know, as you go internally focused into optimization and all of that, that works for like the next launch. But then the one after that, it's like, I actually don't have new people coming in. Yeah. So I think as you break it down of what's the total attention, then next, who are we getting onto our subscriber lists? And then from there, what's the conversion rate? And you gotta keep updating and improving all that.

Finding the bottleneck.

Finding the bottleneck.

In that sequence.

And then the last thing is people really miss, often fail to look at macro trends. So this is something that Mark Manson and I were talking about. If you had a blog about baking sourdough bread during the pandemic, I bet it grew really, really fast. I bet a lot of those people who subscribe to the YouTube channel aren't following it to the same degree that they were before. Now when they're like, actually, I'll just go to my favorite bakery, I no longer need to make this myself. Now there's this smaller group that are diehard fans and they're gonna stay for a long, long time. But the macro trends make a really big difference in what happens to your business. What's popular at the time and all of that. And it's hard to quantify.

I'm thinking of a certain kind of person that I, a definition I think fits a lot of people here, which is the fledgling creator or maybe even the pre-fledgling creator. So we've been talking about some larger businesses or intermediate stage businesses. Let's go back to the beginner. To the beginner. And let's be even more specific. So take someone who say has been working on their second brain, has been, you know, documenting their knowledge and expertise, really defining it, collecting it, writing it down. And I often meet these kind of people. There's probably many here, the dedicated second-brainer. And I almost always ask, well, my go-to question is, have you written about this? Or have you, when I say written, I mean created any content on it? Usually because if they have, I want them to send it to me. I usually don't have time right in that moment to dive into the rabbit hole, but if they send it to me, I will actually receive the email. I will probably forward it directly to my read later app, and then it may take anywhere from a few days to a few months for me to get to it because it's in the queue. But still, and I'm always amazed and a little bit saddened as the answer is almost always, or not almost always, but is usually no. Maybe 70% of the time.

Oh no.

Like the classic example is I've been researching this for years. I've been writing notes for years. I have 5,000 notes, or whatever it is. They've done a lot of work and effort, and there's little or no public-facing evidence of that. So hold that up for a second.

There's a rule around this, but yes.

But I want to add even more criteria, which is when I'm talking to this person, I often feel this tension between I'm such a true believer in email. I really think the only people that are really following you, that are really fans of what you're doing, that are really in your community are the people on your email list. And yet you look at TikTok especially, or YouTube, the massive audiences that are being built, which you've defined as a crowd. So I often don't know which direction to tell them, like where to start. What is your recommendation in 2024 for how people start publicizing and monetizing and doing that kind of stuff with their knowledge?

Yeah, that's a good question. The first thing is to understand what I call the 90-9-1 rule. And this is what separates and puts creators, those who share their content, in the most rarefied air. It's a very uncommon thing in the population. So if we break this down, the 90%, this is those who only consume. Let's say that I love hiking in the outdoors, I just watch content about it. National Geographic, YouTube channels about hiking, all of that. I don't actually do it. I just consume content about that. Or like, I want to build a tiny house. That's something I binge lots of content building tiny houses. Tons of people do that. Almost no one actually builds a tiny house, right? So I, I moved from the 90% to the 9% when I took action and built a tiny house office in my backyard. Right. And so it's a person who goes on the trip that they've been dreaming about or whatever, right? They've moved into this really small group where most people only consume content. A few people actually do the thing. And then there's another step from there, and that's the 1% of those who actually share about it and talk about it. Those are the people who write and actually put things down. Has anyone heard of someone named Marco Polo? Are you familiar with him? What's he known for? Traveling, exploring, map making, spices. Yeah, so he discovered the Silk Road, right? That's what we know him for. He 100% did not discover the Silk Road. But we know him for that. So you wonder like, okay, why? And if you break down, you realize like he tagged along with his dad and his uncle on the trips that they made from Venice to China. So like, hey, why? I don't know his dad's or uncle's names. Why do we know Marco Polo and not them? The answer is really simple. He wrote about it. He's the one who documented it. So if you think about being the one to write about it, you already did the thing. Being the one to write about it puts you in this rarefied air, and you're like, whoa, you're the 1% that actually wrote about it. But one thing that was very surprising to me when I really thought about this is I realized that the difference between the person who does the thing and the person who does the thing and writes about it is a very small difference. Yeah. 60 minutes, maybe? 3 hours? If you were to go on that epic hiking trip, or you built the tiny house, to actually write about it and break it down, handful, in my case, building a tiny house, I didn't really write about the process, but I spent hundreds of hours building the thing, and I probably could have spent 5 documenting the process and telling the story. And so we think that it's incredibly hard to get into the 1%, But the hardest thing is actually moving from the 90 to the 9, from the consumer to the doer. And so when you realize that, then if you're an organized person, you realize, oh, I need to change something in my calendar. I need to first not let my calendar be dominated by consumption, and I need to set up dedicated times throughout the week where I'm going to make something, I'm going to do something, I'm going to get out and put all this knowledge that I've consumed and I'm gonna put it to use. We're gonna go on that hike or do whatever it is. And then I'm gonna have another content block in my calendar. It could be 1 hour a week, and that's where I'm gonna talk about it. And I just have to put it out publicly. And so when you think about that, the 99/1 rule, then you realize, oh, it is a very small difference to go from a doer to a creator, someone who's sharing about it. And so to go to your question of like what platform, how would you think about that?

Wait, let me respond to that and then we'll get to the implementation because this is such a great point. I didn't have a framework for it, but I've thought about this too. It's like leading an interesting life is the hard part. Having an experience, doing something that takes some effort, that takes a risk, that requires some out-of-the-box thinking, that is the hard part. And what I love too is, I'm now going to adopt your framework, is going from the 90 to the 9 is, is the hard part, like you said. But it's also synonymous with just living an interesting life, right? Has nothing to do with being a highly monetized creator or whatever. You would do that whatever the subsequent steps of building a business or whatever. Like it's, it's worth moving. In other words, it's worth moving from the 90 to the 9, even if you never go to the 1%. It's inherently valuable, right?

And then the other thing is From there, when you go on to that 1%, you think about, there's a quote that I heard years and years ago from a, now I'm trying to remember even his name, but a software founder who lives in Australia. And he said, the best way to be interesting online is to do interesting things offline. And so it's like what you're saying, to live an interesting life. And so that's the hard part, but at the same time, What's weird is that feels easier. It seems easier. It's not as scary. And so then when you think about, to get to the last part, okay, now I just have to document the life that I'm living or the lessons I've learned. And so what you can do if you want it, if you want to bring some automation into this, is you could put together a bank of questions and a calendar, like a recurring calendar invite, and just have Notion or whatever you're using, choose a question at random each week. What's something you learned this week?

Mm-hmm.

And you write about that or document it in some way. I'm gonna make a 2-minute video about what I learned this week and was looking at, oh, all that. What's something interesting you did this week, right? You could have what surprised you this week, like, you know, any number of prompts about, uh, the week. And that gets you into the creation habit. And then I would say just share it somewhere. I think that Instagram is a great place to start to get in the habit of that. It, you know, you can post it and upload it to no one and that's fine. I think email is really good. Email's harder if you don't know that you want to do this long term. But there's a lot of people who have created email lists to a very small group of people. Kay is here who started Rad Reads. It was a newsletter of him telling his friends and family, here are the things that I read and I found interesting. And so even if you're just saying to a small group of 10 or 20 people, even if it's BCC in Gmail, and you're like, here's what I found interesting this week, here's what I learned, here's what's going on in my life, you really exercise that muscle of creating and you'll go a long ways. And I would just encourage whatever format you do it in, do it in a way that you get, you build a repository over time that you can look back to. And then maybe you'll do something, maybe you'll store it all in your second brain and you'll look back and be like, oh, that was when I learned that lesson. You'll do a search for something and it'll come up and it'll be like, oh, way back in October 2024, that was when Oh, I unlocked this lesson and that changed things. And you can piece things together down the line. So even that, the act of making things for the public can help refine and improve your life and your much more private processes.

Yeah, a couple things strike me. One is I never thought of this before, but I kind of have an answer to the question of which platform to start on, which is just answering the question, in what way is your life interesting? If it's visually interesting, go on Instagram. If it is sort of interesting in terms of either intellectually interesting, Twitter or X, right? It's like, it's like we now have so many options, which often just feels overwhelming, like there's too many options. But each one is just a mode. What is your preferred mode of creative expression for you to share and document the aspect of your life that is most interesting? That's probably where you should start.

Yeah, I think so. And the other thing I would say is, where do you like to consume content? Remember, if we think to the 99/1 rule and we just realize like, all right, most all of our time naturally is gonna be spent consuming content because the absolute smartest engineers in the entire world are like thinking, how can we get an extra 27 seconds of this person's attention today with our TikTok algorithm or whatever else? So I would encourage you to just say, hey, where do I enjoy consuming content? Like a friend of mine, his name's Tim Grahl, and he was talking about like, oh man, okay, I'm really into writing, I should build an audience on X. And he did that for a while and he's like, I hate X.

What am I doing here?

And so don't fight those, don't go upstream and fight that.

And so a YouTube guru I was talking to recently was like, so which channels do you watch on YouTube? And I was like, oh, I don't watch YouTube. He was like, I think I found your problem. Yeah.

So that combination of in what way is your life interesting and what platforms and types of content do you love to consume? And the intersection of those is where I would create.

You mentioned the email being a more long-term game, but well, I'll just say the way I think of it is like email is like my backup. It's like my, it's like my go bag in like the back of the house. It's like if all else burns down, I wouldn't go get the passports. Those can be reissued, and I'm not traveling anywhere anyway. I would go and just download a CSV of my email list and put it on a thumb drive and take it with me and then head into the forest. That's like my—

Well, part of the reason, I mean, we're joking. Part of the reason that I would do it is like you need help from community. So you just make sure that you had the location column in that CSV, and then you're like, well, so I ended up, I mean, all right, we're joking around, but if something happened right now, I would email my list. Of people in LA and be like, hey, I need a place to stay tonight. And a few hundred people would email back and be like, oh man, we got you. In all these ways, you would pull in community.

I actually do, we didn't plan on this, but I do want to open up for questions. Is that okay?

Yeah, let's do it.

So I was just talking to my wife who was sitting right next to me, what places I like to consume content. It tends to be Instagram, 30 minutes a week, but I do end up creating content on a podcast. So, or, and promoting it on LinkedIn, which is where I get the most traction. So I just feel like there's a disconnect between where I consume content and where I actually end up promoting it.

Why do you think that is?

I do think I struggle with creating like content on Instagram, just the creative side of it, maybe like it needs to be perfect or maybe it needs to like have these pretty images. And I think the text-based content is what ends up resonating with me the most. And yeah, I think the audio podcast is just so easy for me. I just turn on my camera or just start talking and it's just easier. I find it much easier.

That makes sense to me. Something that I've started to do is take moments from my podcast where maybe we've explored an idea live and we've talked through it and the editors are like, all right, we're going to make a clip of it. But you said it in 4 minutes. We try to chop it down. It's not quite good enough. 'cause you were riffing an idea and figuring out live, is to then document that, make a note of it, and then say, okay, what's the 60-second version of this? And you can actually just sit down with someone else and have them ask you questions. And if they have high standards and good taste, they'll be like, okay, yeah, that was good. And then they'll ask you the same question again. And so what I would do is I would take the best moments from your long-form podcasts and not necessarily clip them out, but I would save them and then I would get a batch of them together and then have someone ask you questions that lead to that and do it multiple times. So like one of my first products was a course on Photoshop for web design, and I was really struggling with how to create it because if I scripted every tutorial, it took a crazy amount of time. And then if I just said like, screw it, we'll do it live, it was too long. And what I found ended up being the perfect process is to do it live, like not in front of an audience, but just to be like, okay, here's the thing I wanna talk. I have like 3 bullets of what I wanna talk about and demo it and show it live and then end the recording and delete it and then reset my screen and do the exact same thing over and again. and what was like a 7-minute tutorial when I did it again, had just as much content, but it was in 4.5 minutes. And it was the perfect blend of letting my brain just go, no, no, no, we know how to do, run it back. We know how to do this better. And so that's how you can take somewhere that's easy for you to generate ideas in mass, in mass and low quality, and then have a process to come back and refine the quality over time. And there's little things like the 99/1 rule. That's something that I wrote into a little draft, and then I tried it out on a podcast a few weeks ago and that seemed to work. And then I tried it out tonight and I was like, oh, that seemed to work there too. And I'm just refining and improving that and seeing what works. And so just with the repetition.

So along with Tiago's point of someone just starting out that's interested in a lot of different things, finding a niche in the beginning, do you have any recommendations as far as condensing that down or keeping that umbrella pretty big while you're just kind of following your interests and then kind of seeing where that takes you? Any thoughts on that?

Is there a topic that you're most interested in? What's the thing that if you're at a party, you can't stop talking about and like your friends or your spouse or significant other is like, okay, like I think, is there something like that that you, you talk about a whole ton? Okay, so quantum mechanics is that topic. Probably, probably not like cocktail conversation, but here's the thing about the internet. There's a lot of people on the internet, and the amazing thing is they do— you don't have to like find them. It's not like here where we have to find the people who care about quantum mechanics. There's two of you. You know, we're trying to find like the 4 people in this room who want to have a conversation about it. By the way, the quantum mechanics meetup is in 20 minutes over. But on the internet, you get to talk about that with everyone in the entire world who wants to narrowly talk about that, and often finding the most like niche, content and focus, like gets people who are really passionate about it. And so you'll find that, oh, actually there's hundreds of thousands of people who want to talk about that endlessly. I actually saw an example on Instagram yesterday, and it was someone who takes these reels that have gone viral on Instagram. So it's somebody like jumping off of a cliff and like, so the one I saw yesterday was they jumped off a cliff and threw a ball as they jumped and it like, hit the water and bounced up, and they're like, it went so high. They said like, it went hundreds of feet high. And he like pauses the video and he's like, well, actually, based on, we can see that the ball left your hand at this time, and it touched the water this many seconds later. And so based on that, based on here, and then we can hear the sound, and so based on the speed of sound, and the swing, and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He like uses all of this math that's like way over my head, but he does it in a really interesting way to be like, actually, we can know that you jumped off of an 11-foot cliff, and this is what happened. So it's like very, very nerdy math content that in this case had hundreds of thousands of views because he did it in a really interesting way. So that's the thing that you, in, I guess two things. One, you can always find a group of people on the internet who care about that thing as much as you do. And often the more niche, the better. And then two, there's some really fascinating ways to take niche topics and make them interesting to the general masses. And so I would just— if you want to do those two things, at least for the second one, I would collect examples of people who do that where you're like, wait a second, did I really just watch a 12-minute YouTube video on that topic I know nothing about? Like, save that. What made it so that you just, as someone who knows nothing about quantum mechanics or anything like that, you're like, what made me watch that video? And then if you build up a library of that and you realize like, oh wait, there's actually a lot of principles that we can use to take obscure topics and make them interesting and accessible to the masses. Anything you'd add, Thiago?

Yeah, it just struck me that the in-between— we've been talking about going from consuming to creating, and there's sort of a little in-between step that you sort of touched on that is highly relevant to us here, which is collecting. And I, thinking back for so many years, I didn't think of myself as a creator, an entrepreneur, an artist, a writer, any of those. I just liked collecting. I was such a collector. I collected baseball cards, even though I never played baseball. I collected, you know, Pogs. I collected Star Wars cards. I just was like a little squirrel. I just like whatever I liked, I just like would hoard it. And that instinct I'm realizing was a stepping stone. It was an intermediate stage to creating. Because once you have enough cool stuff, you're just like, whoa, what if I just like make a collage of it or make, make it into a list or tell other people my favorite ones and curate the best.

You mentioned something, a very, very important word. So collecting is a key step, but there's one that follows after that, which is curating. And so you could— there's a lot of people that have built great audiences by curating, by having taste and saying, hey, this is what I like. And, you know, you're like curating the art gallery. You know, you're going through each of these things. And so I think of a— there's a Mac news, Apple and Mac news website called Daring Fireball. And I'm seeing some head nods, lots of people who have read Daring Fireball, which is basically just him curating the things that he found most interesting in the Apple tech ecosystem, often with as little as 2 sentences of commentary on it. He built a massive audience and a great business and all of that. If you love collecting and then you always have a point of view on why you collect this but not that, then you're acting as a curator. Maybe other people would like to be able to view the world through your perspective and see the collections that you've curated, whether it's knowledge in your second brain, Or, you know, the music that you listen to or something else. There's all kinds of things that people love to curate.

So we've developed a new framework, which I'll dub the 4 C's: consuming, collecting, curating, and creating. There we go. There you go. That was a collaboration among all of us. Let's end on that note. Nathan Barry, thank you so much. This has been super insightful and just really fun to talk with you here. And thank you everyone for the wonderful participation and questions.

Thank you so much, everybody. 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.