I Asked a Speaking Coach to Roast My Biggest Speech

This is the most unique episode I've ever done on this podcast. I brought in my speaking coach, Mike Pacchione, back on the show to roast the keynote that I gave at Craft Commerce.

Why did you have that big pause there?

I'm not sure.

A lot of people fall into the trap of both hands have to do the same thing.

In this episode, Mike doesn't hold back.

This is actually a little bit of a miss.

It doesn't end up mattering, but Seeing a talk critiqued in real time with commentary from an expert coach will help you learn what makes a great talk in a whole new way.

Your instinct is to make a story here too, but it's like you can only have so many stories. I want the audience to forget that it's a speech.

Little things like the Stephen Colbert move where you show the joke on the slide but you don't say it out loud. In the moment I was like, oh, maybe this will get a laugh, and then it didn't. You also get to hear about some of the chaos happening backstage that nobody knows about. They have their hand out and they are stopping me from going on stage. So join Join me for this behind-the-scenes look at the biggest keynote I've ever delivered.

This is usually the Nathan Barry Show, and that is where you find this on your podcast feed. However, we changed this up a little bit this time. Nathan just yesterday did his annual keynote releasing products at Craft Commerce, and we're going to break this down. But whereas it's always the Nathan Barry Show, today it's the Mike Pacchione Show. Let's roll. So we're going to talk about what was good, what looked good to other people and secretly was less good.

Or chaos.

Yeah, a little chaos. I've had the privilege of coaching Nathan Barry. This is the 8th time for these keynotes and I've just seen such an improvement.

So we're going to break it down.

Let's, uh, let's start right here. Got Hailey on the screen. You're, I don't know, 10 seconds from coming out. And we have never done anything quite like this before. So please welcome to the stage my friend, our CEO, Nathan Barry.

Please, applause. No me.

Where's Nathan? Where's Nathan?

Do you notice Hailey's like a little like—

Good luck.

Did you hear her good luck?

Yeah.

So there's—

Amazing, because as an audience member, everybody thought she was being funny. Secretly, she's— Are you telling me actually she's like good luck?

Well, I think there's a couple of things she got. I mean, she managed to get an audience laugh even before I come out, which is great for setting the tone. Um, but the chaos is going on behind the scenes. The reason that she intros me and I don't come out, which is as an MC, that has to be your worst nightmare.

Again, uh, uh, also, oh, something I should have mentioned earlier.

Yeah, exactly. So we're doing a live stream of the event. And so there's like 3,000 people registered to watch the live stream of this keynote. But the previous speaker ends like 8 minutes early without people realizing, like there's just this chaos. Like he's about 90 seconds from ending when people realize, oh, he is about to end. And it's way earlier and we're, we're ahead of schedule and we're never like—

nobody in any event is ahead of schedule ever, but we are.

So what happens is two things happen at the same time. First, we're ahead of schedule. And then second, right as we're trying to— about to go live, the internet and the livestream start to go out. And so everybody, they're all in their headsets, the whole AV crew. Our AV crew is incredible for this event, but they, they're all like, stall, stall. And so on the speaker monitors in front of Hailey, they put in the notes like below her intro, like stall.

Oh my gosh, stop.

Which she does, I think, kind of. Maybe she adds 45 seconds. And so then I'm backstage and there's someone right there who's like helping with the curtain, like, okay, wait, now you go. And they're like, they have their hand out and they are stopping me from going on stage. And that's a really nice woman who I don't want to like push past, you know? And they're like, you gotta stop, like, you can't go out yet and all that. And I'm like, I'm not gonna leave Haley like just hanging out on the stage waiting. You know, I'm like, this is way better if I go out. Anyway, so I go out, no music, right? Which we rehearsed.

Oh my gosh. That is why. Because we did a whole thing the night before. You're like, hey, can you come up with a joke for me?

Yep.

Which I outsourced to Katie Day. And I think she came up with something good.

And I think it would have done well. I was going to do a slightly different version of it. Just to tell that story too, because I think it's funny. So I always walk out to a Taylor Swift song. The team chose Wildest Dreams, but the section that they chose is The line goes, he's so tall and handsome as hell, something, something, right? And I come out there. And so Steph on our team was like, that is heard very clearly. I think you have to at least say like, oh, thanks Taylor, you know, something to reference it. And so we're like trying to workshop a joke and it's like, okay, if we can get a first laugh right here, that's fantastic. Like years ago, I think it was the very first Craft and Commerce, I didn't realize They kept asking me like, pick a walkout song. I don't know. And so total surprise to me, I walked out to Shake It Off by Taylor Swift. Thanks, Barrett and Alexis, for choosing that.

Wait, like backstage it was like, we're gonna pick something?

They just didn't tell me.

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

And 'cause they were like, oh, if you can't be bothered to pick a song, then like, we're gonna pick a song.

Barrett has to turn it into a lesson, of course.

Yes, exactly. And so, but I walked out and the crowd was super welcoming and all of that. And so I just said, It seems like you all are just as excited as I am that Taylor Swift is back on Spotify, which got like a great laugh.

Yeah.

And so it's like, okay, we got to have a similar moment. And so what I was going to say, settle on, is something like, thanks, Taylor. I mean, I'm tall, but I'm not that tall. And, um, you know, leave the handsome as hell part alone. Um, but that didn't even happen. And so I walked out and now I'm like, I still have to stall. So the next, like, 45 seconds of the video is me just stalling before I start to talk. Good morning, everybody.

I wondered.

It's so good to see a totally packed house. This is awesome. This is just stalling.

Where are my slides?

Where are my slides? Oh, there's no speaker notes up. There's no slides. Um, so even if I wanted to start, I couldn't. Trip out. See that look down at the— Do we dive in? Let's do this.

Oh, look, look how dramatic I'm being because I'm comfortable.

You ever have those emails that you write? Okay, you can pause it.

Okay, actually, here's, here's that. I don't want this to be Mike teaching, but I will do that here.

Do it.

Because I was, I was thinking about this. There's something that happened. Oh, you know what it was? It's because you all, and I mean this nicely, are every year there's like I think that'll be done in time to talk about.

Yes.

And so what our, our cycle of working together is usually loosely like 10 days to 2 weeks before I get a Loom. That's you just saying, I know it's crappy.

Yeah.

Help me figure out what's good.

Yes.

And then within 7 days there's like, here's an actual— we'll talk about this and what do you think of this and what do you think it is?

Because the weird thing is most speakers, you work with them like for a period of time, they nail it, they develop a talk, it's added to the book, they do it for 3 years straight.

Yeah.

Whereas when you and I work together, we're writing a new talk every time.

Right. A new talk every time. And there's no chance that you have 3 weeks to rehearse it.

Yeah.

So I think we met on Friday, you're delivering this Wednesday, and I think it was Monday. You're like, yeah, this is like 75% new. Like, most of it has changed since we talked.

Yeah.

Which You know, to each their own, but it's not, it's not what I would say is like the advisable thing.

Ideal conditions.

And what I was thinking about that I think is helpful for people to hear. So, uh, there's this Canadian astronaut, um, why am I blanking on his name? Chris something. First Canadian astronaut in outer space. And I read his book, which is really good, even though I don't remember his last name. And he's got this concept in there that he's applying to jobs, but it also applies to speeches. The concept is be a zero. He says, okay, when you're starting a new job, you can be a negative 1, a 0, or a plus 1. And obviously nobody wants to be a negative 1. Everybody wants to be a plus 1. So what most people do is they try to impress immediately, but then they wind up like skipping steps and in trying to be a plus 1, they actually become a minus 1. So I think the same thing is true for speeches. I also think you can be like a minus 2 with a speech. So his whole thing is like aim to be a 0, like just aim to get the job done. I think for anybody who, whatever the chaos you feel is, the slides didn't work, the livestream hasn't started because Simon was unnecessarily concise, like whatever that is, in that moment you need to lose the drive for perfectionism to be perfect. Just be a zero. Like be okay with being zero doesn't mean bad, right? It just means like at least be good and let's not turn this into a disaster because Nathan can't fake being calm, you know?

Well, what's interesting is it ended up being a reset moment for me where I came out and it was like, instead of being freaked out about how, like, 10 seconds earlier someone was talking like, no, you can't go out yet. And I'm like, no, I'm going to, you know, people are like, stall. And, you know, it's chaos backstage. And I know that the livestream isn't working and I know all of this stuff.. But instead, like, you know, like, okay, if I can stall even for 45 seconds or something, it was like this reset moment for me. And so hopefully it came across to the audience of like, oh, it's like you just come out and like, to your point of being at zero, you're just like, I'm here. I'm there. Like, I'm present with all of you.

I had no idea. And like the, I guess this wouldn't be negative one, but maybe negative half would have been, hey, who knows how to pronounce Boise? Who flew in here from the furthest away? Like stuff like that.

Mm-hmm.

Doesn't sink the speech, but it kind of tells the audience like, hey, you got a cliché coming.

Okay. There's another cliché that I'm curious how it landed for you. We talked about this a little bit on one of our calls. People always say like, oh, this is Nathan Barry's Steve Jobs moment. Yeah, right. And like, does he have the sneakers and the turtleneck? Because, you know, and I realized that I was falling into like presenter voice and all that, and I was really trying to get out of that. And I think the thing that I said to you and Katie on one of our calls was like, okay, help me get into like, like what I want to convey is just your friend Nathan Barry. He's a creator. He has written some books like you have. He built a software company for you and he's, he just kind of wants to sit over, like sit across from you at the coffee table and be like, hey, here's the things that I made. I'd love to show it to you versus, and today, you know, or like whatever else.

We are pleased to announce 3 new products.

Yeah, exactly. But in rehearsal, I kept slipping into like speaker voice.

Speaker guy.

Yeah. How did it, how did it land in the, in the talk?

I can, I can see a little of what you're saying with the opening story. So I think, I think the opening story is, no, I'm going to do the opening story as 2 different parts. So there's the, there's the, do you want to just play it? Yeah, let's play it.

Important enough that you write them a week in advance and you have time to tweak and edit each one.

This part feels a little speaker guy.

But they're so important that you don't dare schedule it because you have to be the one to hit send yourself. But when it actually comes time to hit send, it's not just a matter of like, oh, it's 10 AM, let's go hit send.

Yeah, that's less speaker guy there. Like, that's good.

You hover over the send button. And you think and you wait and it's like this nervous moment because you have no idea what the response is going to be.

Why did you have that big pause there? That's just, I don't know what to say.

In 2012, I'm not sure. I was trying to play up the like, you don't know what's going to happen. My book, the App Design Handbook, and it went out to my entire email list.

This part gets a lot better. And there's something that I love that you do with this.

Of 798 people.

798, did you see that? This specific number is fantastic.

It's true. That was exactly the number. And there were two questions on my mind. First, was anyone going to buy? And second, if I was lucky enough that one of those 798 people was going to buy, how long—

I thought you were going to wait an eternity.

Well, the answer is just three days. Okay, pause it for a second. What do you mean? Uh, like I thought, like I have to wait a long—

798 people on the list. Like not everybody's on their email every hour of the day, let alone like, cool, I'll buy this for $179.

Right.

I thought this was going to be like Nathan Barry building up to like I had to wait 4 hours or 90 minutes or whatever.

And it was 3.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know if that's better. Good.

But, uh, I mean, you know, in the other episode we were talking about tension.

Yeah.

Right. I was trying to build a little bit of tension, but then I don't know, maybe it released it immediately or the number of minutes was 3.

Well, okay, listen, I can wordsmith it a little bit. So I think, yeah, here's what you could do. We could, we could go in your brain even a little bit more, which is like 798 people. Okay. Well, I don't know if everybody's in America. So, and I'm in Boise and it's 3 o'clock. So a lot of people are out of work, right?

Like run through that.

I might be, I didn't know it, but 3 minutes later, my life was going to change.

Yeah. Yeah. I like that. The downside of these talks is that I never do them again. All right. The first sale came in and it was for $179 for the full package that honestly, I didn't think anyone would buy. I just did it as like a decoy price thing so that the cheaper package—

That's so good.

Like a better deal.

Decoy price thing.

That was all I lived for. I was so ecstatic. But then I looked at who purchased. And it was a designer at 37signals, the legendary product firm. Now, first I'd followed this company and everything they built and used their products and I was obsessed with them. But second, I had actually applied to work here a year earlier and did not get the job. Which in hindsight, I think it worked out better that I didn't get the job, but—

Yeah, unnecessary.

I had no idea that someone from 37signals—

I mean, it's not a big deal, but yeah.

$700. No, the script did not have that in there. And I— but those sales kept rolling in. So first it was $12,000 in the first day and then $19,000 in the first week.

I kind of loved that it was double zeros before the— whatever the first—

when everyone was talking about social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, right? That's where all the growth and everything was happening. But when I looked at the numbers and the attribution, Email sold more than every other channel combined.

Okay, let me ask you a question here, because in the version that I saw, you had—

there's two more slides there.

Well, no, in the version I saw though, you had coffee with your friend Ron and he tells you like, yeah, man, people who know this stuff know email is better than Twitter.

Yep.

Is that cut for time? Is it cut because you felt like people knew that already? Like what?

Mostly cut for time. So I did two run-throughs and it's on my farm, right? I have a guest house. And which you're actually going to stay in one of my guest houses in a couple of days. And so our whole growth leadership team is staying in the house next door. And so at like 11 PM the night before, we've got designers, we've got marketers, we've got, you know, we're like staying there and doing these run-throughs and we just cut everything that we felt like didn't add to the story.

Okay.

And that one was like not necessary.

Yeah, it wasn't a bad story.

It was just like, is this essential?

Yeah.

And we cut it. Now, the ironic thing is then as I'm ad-libbing, as I'm trying to not read the speaker notes, I then end up adding some other things.

But this is what happens when you don't get to rehearse for 3 straight weeks. Yeah, exactly.

And that kicked off an obsession with email best practices that eventually— In hindsight, I would have done a different graphic here. I would have done something about Kit, or like obsession with email, and then done all that. But I thought of it way too late.

And the model that we built Kit around So I'm gonna talk about the slides now. The slides are stupendous. My goodness.

And so that's views, followers, traffic, and then revenue comes out the other end. Yeah, this is, uh, Charlie, our creative director, who made this graphic.

Well, this is like the stuff that I always want to happen and I've mostly given up. Like there's never, there never winds up being enough time to do things like this. But like that visual, first of all, like higher perceived value because of good design anyway, but like. It illustrates exactly what you're saying out loud. So even if you were screwing up, I don't know what Nathan's talking about, but that—

I understand it. Yeah. As a number, because behind every email address is a person. Think of a stadium, 50,000 people. And at first glance, it's just a crowd. Everybody blurs together. But if you were to focus on only one fan— oh, sorry, not like that. More like this.

Let's pause that, because I know that there was a People didn't want you to have the Coldplay thing.

I put that— I wrote in Slack, like, can I make this joke? And the consensus was no, don't make it. But then Katie came back and was like, I actually like the joke. And we ran it by you and you're like, I like the joke too.

Yeah, it's just such a good example of that. It's like, that only works because it was so popular and you don't have to talk about it.

Right. Because if I had explained the joke or anything else, it's like, oh, back last summer, you might recall that.

Yeah. No, no, no. Uh-uh. Visual is the joke. I think you did a great job of playing off it. And then we move along quickly because the reason why people didn't want to do it, because they said, but that's not actually what you want.

Like, it's a negative example of spotlighting, right? We're trying to spotlight subscribers.

Yeah.

So that you create this great experience for them and whatever else. And he was a very negative example.

Yeah. So then going immediately over to Taylor's girlfriend.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I almost— an earlier version, I almost explained this whole thing like, yeah, Right. And so, you know, in the tour, she gives a hat at the end of the song, and it's always— and sometimes it's Kobe Bryant's daughter, somebody— it's all— it's always a kid that she gives this hat to. Or I was like trying to play a video of it.

Yeah, yeah.

And again, in all of this, it was like, you don't need any of that.

Yeah.

And like, if something generally— like, worst case, someone sees a fan being spotlighted, or like a personalized experience for one fan, the Taylor Swift fans who have watched the documentary and all that know all of the backstory, and that could just be for them.

Yeah.

And so that was another thing where I like cut. It was like another 30 seconds and it was like, oh, I'm actually not even going to cut it.

I mean, but that is, that is maturity. That is the courage to press delete. I mean, it's not storming the beach at Normandy, but I'm just saying like an insecure presenter is like, no, no, I got to explain this one. I have to be talking all the time. And just being able to say, nope, this will do the job is awesome.

Um, the other thing is Stephen Colbert is the word where the jokes are on the slide. You don't have to deliver them. All I had to do was be like, oops, not like that. Yes. Something being up on screen for one second was enough to get a laugh that I was really happy with.

Yeah. That was a great, uh, effort to laughter ratio.

Yeah, exactly. And it's totally stress-free. I was slightly nervous that someone would be like, that was tasteless or whatever, but like, I think that it, it went well. I don't know.

I just think that's funny.

Vote for any one fan and spotlight them and give them a personal experience. And the people are still laughing. That would be really special. Because in that stadium, every single person—

Was there any reason why you zoomed in on her? It was just random.

They have their own story and they have their own reasons for being there. John Koenig has a word for this.

I love talks like this.

It's called sonder. And sonder is the realization that every person— This is the story that we originally built the talk around. Like this quote— As your own. Steph on our marketing team found out this, like— I suggested it and she was like, "I was thinking about the exact same thing." And so we're like, okay, this is—

You both thought about founder?

I remember the first 10 people who signed up for my email list.

What are the odds 2 people have heard that word before?

Yeah, I mean, you have to be obsessed with a specific YouTube channel. Like, I've heard it in the past. But I knew why. And I had, you know, I knew what they were working on. I totally lost the script right there. Like my brother-in-law, Philip, he was early in his design career. And so when I was writing to him and when I was writing my second book, I could directly write that to him cuz I knew it'd be useful to him. I think I just said to him 4 times. At 100 subscribers, you can keep that kind of content. Also more great animation from Charlie. It's hard at 10,000.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. It's so good.

At 50,000 subscribers, that feeling is nearly—

How long did these slide, like, does this slide take? Do you have any idea?

The individual are lost in the crowd. Well, that's Claude design.

Like, but is that like, uh, I don't know.

She's probably an hour into those 3 slides.

Okay.

I think I just, I couldn't see them to get the actual count of 50,000 and all that. But that's AI design helping out a lot.

I love this.

I'm sitting in the back seat and my dad's driving and my mom's in the front seat and my mom has, this is me by the way, if you weren't sure which one. Um, I wasn't sure if it was needed to point out who it was. I wasn't sure if that was needed or what I thought about doing is in the slide.

Yeah.

Yeah. Having it say, and then, and I was like, whatever. It's not that it's not important. And then in the moment I was like, oh, maybe this will get a laugh. And then it didn't. Or, you know, it got a chuckle and it's like, okay, so it didn't, it didn't add or take away, but it was one of those things where I ad-libbed it and I was like, I didn't need to.

I definitely didn't know which one was you.

Yeah.

You could have, if you wanted to just do like running Taylor Swift jokes, you could have been, but this is where it gets weird because I want to be like, you could put Taylor's future husband, but like, it's not, you're happily married.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, I just don't know how far you want to take that. But to answer your question, I think everybody wondered who you were.

Okay, great. So I answered the question.

I think, I think, uh, for ad-libs like that, The by the way, this is me being perfectionist, right? But you don't need by the way.

Mm. I just say that one's me. My mom has the church directory out and she is quizzing my dad on the names and families in the church.

Great way to illustrate.

It's just a weird thing. Like why are, of all the things to memorize, why are you memorizing that? So I asked my dad like, what are you doing? And he just said, it's hard to love and serve people You don't know. And my whole mission is to serve my audience.

It's great. Like, we can picture that whole thing happening.

Turns out I wasn't the only one.

We can picture that whole thing. There might be something even better if you gave the name of someone, but it has to be a real name. Like, it can't be like, yeah, Smith family. Like, it needs to be— I was remembering on Seinfeld, the, uh, the gym teacher's name was Mr. Bevilacqua. Right, it's like, it's like, so it needs to be a real person. So maybe it has to be a real person who has a unique name.

Yeah, and especially if it's a name that could— you could form a picture around who that person might be.

Yeah, so no Johnson, Jackson, Smith, anything like that, right?

Yeah, so it was interesting. So I almost cut this, and in our, um, rehearsal 2 days before, everyone was like, I, I had an in the cut everything that doesn't matter. Yeah. Um, so it almost got cut along with the, you know, the coffee with the friend Ron, you know. And so I went back and forth. Instead of deleting the slides, I hid it in Figma to be like, because I wasn't sure if I should delete it.

Oh, I thought this was like founder power move. Like, okay, if they think it's done, I'm going to sneak it in. Oh, that wasn't it? Okay.

No, so what it was is I was on a call with my friend Andrew East, who I don't know super well. So he's a former NFL player. Um, he and his wife Shawn Johnson have a book coming out, and we're like helping them with some, um, some stuff. And so he was like, hey, you got the keynote coming up, like, what stuff are you releasing? And Andrew and Shawn are— they're all in on serving their audience. They don't care about the marketing or the funnels, all of that. They're like, they just want to show up as authentically as possible, and they care so deeply about their audience. And so I knew, you know, any amount of like Oh, we're building this thing called Signals and it's, uh, going to help you identify the CEOs on your— yeah, they don't care. Yeah. And so I, for the moment, I told him this story and I said, that's what we're building for your audience. So you can do that for 100,000 people. I told him that on a call and he loved it. And I was like, that slide's going back in.

That's awesome. You know, I need to come up with a name for this where it's not— so a story should be something that happens on a certain date and time. I'm not saying that you tell the audience that, but it's like, it happened this one time. This actually isn't a story, and you can tell because it uses the word would. So you're really like repeating, you're going through like a repeated memory. And that actually is what makes this effective, is that it happened all the time. And then you land it on the point, which I think a lot of people would assume the point was evident, and it's not evident. So like, that would have been kind of cool to picture, but I think everybody would be like, wait, what? What is the church thing?

Yeah.

Landing it. Like, it's hard to serve people that you don't know. You said it better than that. Like, that's, that's what we want.

Heard from a lot of creators who are piecing information about their audience together in surveys and spreadsheets. Robert Glaser was going into his email list and copying and pasting domain names into Google to see if anyone had a relevant business.

This is such a good setup for what Signal does.

Has anyone else done this? Where you do this manual research? Yeah, there's a bunch of you that have. And the reason that Robert was doing it is because the right person could book him to speak or could make a bulk purchase of his books, and that might be worth $25,000 or more from a single deal. Then I heard a story from Greg Eisenberg. So Greg signed into his Kit account one day, and he happened to recognize that one of the— I never know what to do with my hands. That's something I gotta learn. You'll see me like Like, what is the half interlaced fingers?

What is that?

And he ended up closing a $500,000 design contract for his design agency. I was worried this— that's a real example, but I was worried it was too big of a number to be relatable. I was really curious about one thing. Greg has a fast-growing list. There's a lot of people signing up.

The calculation is what makes this so—

What was the window of time that Greg could log into his Kit account And that person would be one of these 8 slots, right? They subscribe and then they work their way through each of those slots. So I did the math based on his growth rate and it was 45 minutes. If Greg had not logged in in that 45-minute window, that one subscriber would have been lost in a sea of 140,000 subscribers and I don't think Greg would have ever noticed.

Yeah, I mean, if you went the hands thing, like just bigger gestures would be a good place to go.

Okay.

Particularly when you're pointing, it's like, firm, instead of like—

They're probably not people who are responding to every email or all of that. They're just reading, enjoying our content, and they're going on with their lives and businesses.

But if you want something you're doing well, you're— A lot of people fall into the trap of both hands have to do the same thing.

What your subscribers are doing.

You're at least like having them do different things.

But it rarely tells you anything about who is actually going through there and why might they be important to your business. You end up losing sight of the humans behind those actions. And as a result, you don't know who's hiding.

Okay, so why are you looking at your notes so much here?

Um, yeah, it's a good question. I think I just didn't, I didn't have it memorized enough.

Okay.

That was one thing where I like where to stand on the stage. They were telling me the further back you stand on the stage, the less, the less obvious it is. The less obvious it is. When I did the, a full run through that morning, like on the actual stage, and there's a lot of stuff that we were still trying to fix. I realized I knew how to like go side to side, gradually working my way forward on the stage. And I was like, how do I, how do I back up? And so I just kept getting all the way to the front of the stage. And then I'm like, my notes are straight below me. I rely on them a little too much. And so I had to realize, actually, that's why I went to the screen for the Greg Eisenberg example and walked up all the way up to the screen and pointed right at it because it let me retreat all the way to the back.

I can retreat.

I can retreat.

So good. I love that detail.

Anyway. And we can know who someone actually is. We know their background, their social influence, and we know their purchasing power. And that kind of identity data has been available for a long time, but it's, it's usually locked behind enterprise tail, uh, enterprise tools used by big sales teams. And this costs tens of thousands of dollars. This I was worried about getting right.

Those aren't the tens of thousands of dollars.

Yeah. And so I tried too hard to read it.

Yeah.

But personally, and I should have just like— deserve access too.

Okay. Let me pause here. This is a good teaching thing. I learned this from working with Jenny Wood. Man, I can learn, Jenny's, gosh, learn a lot from her. Okay. So if there's something like that, that's either a tongue twister or you're just not saying the right way. I always would either, like a lot of times I would cheat by just writing it as a slide. The thing that I couldn't say, I was like, let me just make it a slide so people can at least read it if I screw it up.

Right now, I know I have subtitles.

Jenny taught me you just say the thing like 30 times in a row.

Oh yeah.

Enterprise sales teams can da da da. Enterprise sales teams can, like, she just did da da da da da da. And then I'm watching, I'm literally, this is like this bionic speaking woman. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is a really good idea. Pass this along.

Yeah.

Shout out Jenny.

So we're building a new product that we're adding into Kit and it's called Subscriber Signals and it's built specifically for creators. And what it does is it identifies your best subscribers from the beginning. I thought it worked well to keep coming back to the same animation, but it being different. We were worried that it wasn't different enough. I think it came through.

I think it came through.

Your audience is made up of people, but all you see is this. Let's change that. Subscriber Signals shows you a clear picture of who your audience really is. And notice the later version of this, the team added subtitles to it. It didn't have that until like the day before, and that was smart to do.

Are these real people?

No, they are deliberately fake people. It's my real account.

Yeah.

With everybody swapped out.

Ah.

Because your audience is full of people who could change your business. You only knew they were there. So there's a demo mode that you can toggle in. It's time for you to get to know them.

I love what you do here.

Thanks, Nathan Barry.

Not enough people I've never heard that. That is funny.

So this voiceover, I recorded like 8 times. I've recorded it here in the studio in Boise. I've recorded it in New York, and then I've recorded it here in the studio again when they're like, it's still not good enough. And I just thought it was so weird that they wanted me to record the voiceover because it's going to go on the web. It's going to go all these places. But I'm like, I'm talking, and then is it AI me that's talking?, and then it's me again. I'm like, this is so awkward. They're like, just do it. It'll be fine. So I'm like, I got to make a joke about it, but I couldn't figure out what to say. And so, because I was like, oh, thank you. You know, like, oh, that's AI me. Or, but then people are like, no, it's not AI, right? Or like, um, so I didn't know what to say. And so I was like, I don't know what to do with this. I don't want to record the voiceover. And then Dave, our CRO, was like, no, just say, thanks, Nathan Barry.

It's so good. I kind of like it less knowing that Dave gave you the line, but, but what I'll say is 2017 Nathan Barry would not have felt comfortable doing that. And you are way more comfortable feeling like you deserve to be on the stage and there's not like some script that you have to do exactly right. Yeah. And even with Dave giving you the line, there's a way of doing that where it's not funny and, or there's a way of doing that where it's kind of like, did you guys hear that joke? It was funny. Did you hear that?

Right. But just the little throwaways.

Yeah.

Yeah. I like it. And I saw the data from my own list. We hadn't even built a UI for the product yet. It was just account IDs and follower counts in a spreadsheet. And I saw someone on my list who had 2.4 million followers on LinkedIn. I thought, wait, who's this? Who on my list has that big of a following on LinkedIn? So I clicked in and it was Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project. Someone who sold millions of—

I do think there you should be like, and it was Gretchen Rubin. Is she enough of a household name? That's enough of a household name.

I think so, yeah. Especially to this audience.

Yeah.

And so I emailed her and I said, "Hey Gretchen, I'm gonna be in town and I'd love to get lunch." What blew me away is, 'cause we'd never spoken before, and she wrote back immediately and she said, "Yes, I'd love to. I read your newsletter." And I had no idea. The opportunity to meet one of my favorite authors had been on my list for more than 2 years.

Side note, in that email, did you actually explain— No, you were just like, you want to get— I'm in New York, or what?

I have never told Gretchen how I knew she was on my list. So, hi Gretchen. I just told— Until now. Until now. That's always been a hidden thing, and that's what Signals fixes. The opportunities were already there. Signals finally makes them visible and gives you everything you need to act on them. Okay, so what— Timestamp are we at now in the video? We're 12 and a half minutes in. This is something that stressed me out. Whereas like, and granted we showed what Signals was. We played the video earlier, right?

Right.

But we're, you know, we still got to 9, 10 minutes in before we actually like said it. That I was worried about, or like, did I wait too long to get to any substance?

Well, this is the thing. Theoretically, yes, but it wasn't a long 12 minutes.

Yeah.

So that, that's, that's the actual thing.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, it is nice that it's, he had a long speaking spot, right? But, but because it didn't feel long, like as an audience member, I wasn't like, come on, go tell the good stuff.

Here's what happens. Let me show you inside. So first, Signals is going to show you who your influential subscribers are, what they do for work, where they're based, if they're high earners or not. For my newsletter, we have 850 subscribers who have a significant— I don't know, should we jump ahead?

Yeah, let me just say one thing real quick. Just notice this. When you are looking down at your notes, your voice is not just less, less loud also than the soft, but it's, it's less full.

Yeah. Yeah. And so you can see the difference.

Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. And that's the thing where exactly as you said, like we often finish feature, some of these things that were in here made it in at the very last minute. There's actually a bunch more stuff that we could have released that we didn't. Cause our product team was like, this is too, too many things to put in. I think that the the buildup that we had ended up being really good because we were releasing something that didn't exist before.

Yes.

Like it wasn't like, oh, here's our version of this. It's like I felt like we had to even really set the stage of why you would care.

Well, and it's easy to skip over that. And again, when you know about it already, it's easy to forget that the audience doesn't know. It's like when you— okay, 2 or 3 years ago, whatever, you changed from ConvertKit to Kit.

Yeah.

Remember the original run through? He's like, said it real fast. I was like, dude, you're changing the name of the company. Like, you can't just like say it like, there has to be buildup that lets people know like this is a thing. The thing that I was, I was nervous, too strong word, but the thing I wondered about, thought could be some fuzziness that you avoided with, so Signal is just a regular word. It's not, it's not iPad or something like that, right? So when you have a regular word and you're launching, it's just, if someone doesn't pay attention for a half second, it's like, wait, what?

What is it?

Is it a traffic signal? Like, what is this signal? And you did a really good job of this is the product name.

Mm-hmm.

This one we debated a lot. It almost got cut.

Hmm. I thought it was helpful.

Before when we ran through it, it didn't have the slides. Let's say I'm teaching a 90-day cohort and we're pricing it at $1,000. It didn't— when I was talking through the script, felt super long. This is actually a use of AI. I used AI to then say, hey, I need this in 25% less words. And I still had to tweak it a little bit, but it— That's $114,000 in revenue and it's a great launch. But it didn't work at all until we made the slide stepping through it. And it was like, okay, now this isn't too long. This works. So if you think about funnel-based marketing—

Well, so that's also like a good slides question for yourself. So one of the things I have people do sometimes is read through your script, highlight anything that feels long.

Mm-hmm.

Because it's, that's often a key that a slide can help you be more efficient.

Yeah.

Which is big time last year.

If you weren't that interested, or— I almost added like 3 more slides. I just didn't have time to like illustrate some of this better. Generic blast is going to drive a few more sales, but it's ultimately going to fall flat. And so with signals-based marketing, we can actually treat each person. This is something I was really trying to get a difference between funnel-based marketing and signals-based marketing, and I don't think I nailed that as well as I wanted to.

Probably because I don't remember what you're talking about.

Yeah. Segment of everyone who has 10,000 followers or more and an income level above $100,000. Let's say that's 150 people. This is also a hard product because everyone's going to use it in a different way.

Yeah.

It's like giving people a generic hammer or a saw and it's like you use it in your own way for your thing.

But like, here's how to use a hammer.

Okay.

Push harder. I can ask sharper questions. Because I know that this group of people, they have—

I will say right around this part, this part, Allie Grumert was right in front of me and she kind of like turned around and mouthed like, why?

So I like to think of signals as panning for gold in your animation. Okay, so this one, it had a circle around it before, and all I could see was a petri dish. And so then I said that in Slack and I was like, oh yeah, now that's all I can see. And so Charlie redid it so it was a spotlight instead. Instead of a magnifying, it will make a huge difference. So Terry Rice is already putting this to use. Terry's a keynote speaker, a consultant. He's a Data 4.

There's a great example.

Engaged audience. When he sent us this email, cause he wrote it all out in an email and he's like, hey, sorry, I'm so late to respond, to give you feedback on this, but it's Kit's fault.

And we're like, what? And we keep reading.

He's basically like, this changed so much of what I'm doing. And the launch did so well and all that. Like, it works so well that I forgot to send you details back because I was too busy loving engaging with my audience.

You want a good example of your product regardless, right? But like what works particularly well about this one is it's unlikely in the sense of it's not something that you would think to look for.

Once in his newsletter and the first sale came in.

The demographics are, you know, like, even if you were to say demographics, it would be like money, things like that.

He said that that subscriber who bought the first copy, Yeah, households with children. When I looked at all the reports from what we built and the data we got back, I wouldn't have picked that out at all. Like, I was like, I don't know why that's useful, but sure. So that was 4 days.

I thought to myself in the moment, like, oh, should I be doing that?

Hmm.

Should I be talking about that more? It's cool as a product user to think like there's something in there. It might not be parenthood, but there's something in there for me that I should talk more about.

So when I hear stories like Terry's, it just reinforces something that I've believed for a long time. That building an audience is the single most valuable thing. I should've done a slide for this.

Yes. Yeah.

And all the value from funnel-based marketing, that's still there. It works incredibly well. Signals just makes that audience twice as valuable.

So what you could do in this slide actually is funnel and signal right next to each other. I'm not 100% confident in that 'cause it might look too similar and people are like, that looks the same thing.

That data's probably really expensive. How much are we going to have to pay for it?

This is so good. This is a Nathan Barry has arrived moment. Like, I was just— this— nobody else in the audience cares about this, but this sounds— again, my whole thing with the speech, even when you're a founder launching a new product, is I want the audience to forget that it's a speech. And most people who are in speaker mode are like, and now you are wondering about cost. And like, what? Yeah, we are. But doing it this way sounds more like you're just talking around the dinner table. I was like, now you might be wondering, cool, but it sounds like a lot of money. Like I can hear someone saying it versus speaker mode. And I was, yeah, I mean, that's another place where I was like, 2017 Nathan doesn't do this.

We're going to include it all in our Creator Pro plan. So you don't have to pay anything else, uh, on top of this. It's all included.

Should have gotten bigger applause.

It should have.

Do people not know what plan they have? Is that possible?

It could be. All the extra feature enrichment, we're going to get all of that in and bring it for you. So it's available in beta. In my notes, I wrote down applause moments. Like, that's probably what something— if we think about notes for next year or other speeches that I'm working on or all that, like, that's a skill that I want to get better at is how to guide, you know, through, through the script, through the slides, and probably most through the, like, the tone and pacing. To guide to like, and now you applaud without it being like, where's my applause?

You could have done, uh, one of these, like, how much, wait, how much does it cost? Click and it's just free. And it's like super big. It says free. You could do that.

I think the hard thing where we're navigating is like, it is in the pro plan, which, you know, statistically speaking, most people are not on. It's not that expensive to upgrade to the pro plan relative to the cost of the data.

My thought was, I have no idea what plan I'm on. I would pay for this. But I might be on Pro already.

Yeah.

So I wonder how many people are like that.

Probably quite a few.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was, it was tough to figure out how to articulate, but that's something, you know, I always think of like, what's a micro skill that I'm trying to build?

And that would be waiting for people to love me.

Yeah, exactly. Get our Pro plan and we'd love to, uh, show it for you and help you get it set up for your own list. That's actually some good whooping.

That is good whooping. Okay, so you can't do this every time, but I do think one time it is funny to do like a— Yeah, taking a bow.

How long they've been with you and whether that would— if you were to do it, that would be the moment.

Yeah.

But it's also hard in the moment, like, wait, wait, there's a better part later, you know, like, what do I say before?

And it's going to help you go really deep on how your audience is engaging over time. I don't know what made me laugh right there. Maybe somebody said something. Let's break it down. These reports show you how your subscribers and unsubscribes, uh, by source. So we have all the attribution. You can filter by UTM. You can see exactly which channels are bringing in the right people. So let's say you're running LinkedIn or Meta ads and you wanna know, are those people engaging and how's that different from the people who signed up from organic social? You can see all of that right there. And then if we want to get really nerdy, we've got cohort analysis.. So you can see your engaged subscribers week over week. You can see exactly where the fall-off happens or where people get excited and stick around.

These things are hard because your instinct is to make a story here too, but it's like you can only have so many stories for—

You can go and tag those subscribers and you can have that segment flow straight into Kit, ready for an email or an automation. So I've been building Kit for over a decade. So that, I would've let, like that could have been, that was the— The conclusion of a feature.

Yeah.

But I didn't cue the audience at all.

At all. Yes, totally.

Audience data, building deeper connection points in Kit and finding more ways to put all of these insights to work for you. Now you might think, wow, Nathan, you're such a talented designer and developer. You built all of this yourself and you dreamed up all of this yourself.

I'm bigger smile here from being nitpicky.

That is not the case. All of this would not be possible at all without the person, all of the teams, but especially the person who's been leading the charge on our products. And so we give— will you join me in giving a warm welcome to Kit's Chief Product Officer, Katie Swettmeller.

She gets music.

Yeah.

This is a small but important point. A lot of times people transition from speaker 1 to speaker 2. And I'm like, do they know each other?

Right. Cause they just, they just, here's the clicker.

So you don't need 3 minutes of every, like Katie's backstory, but I do want to know that you know each other and like each other.

Yeah. So something that you and I have talked about, uh, before is being able to build up a roster of people on the team.

Yeah.

And so this is Katie's second year taking half the keynote. One, for me, it's so much better because the amount of prep and rehearsal that I have to do, you know, I have 20 minutes that I've got to do. She has 20 minutes or so. Also, there's this article that Wes Cow wrote called The State Change Method, and she wrote it during COVID And because everyone's going to online presentations, everything that before was interesting and in-person, all this is like on Zoom and slides and it's so boring. And so her core point is like, you need a state change every 3 minutes or so. And a state change can be Switching speakers, asking questions, something interactive in the Zoom chat, uh, playing music, starting or stopping screen sharing. Like, she has a whole list of these. She's like, every, at least every 3 minutes, you gotta have one of these if you wanna maintain.

3 minutes is aggressive, but okay, sorry, keep going. Yeah.

Yeah. And maybe she said something slightly different, but to keep that. And so in this case, switching speakers got us one of those, right?

Yeah.

And you know, cuz if I was presenting the whole thing, it's just way too long of a presentation. And we ended up—

it's hard for you. Like, this is the thing that the founder trap is like, I must do it. Nobody articulated it this way.

Yeah.

But it's, I must do it all.

Right. And so in this case, being able to build up the team and invest in them and give small opportunities. Um, I, I think for this venue, two speakers is perfect, but I think that's part of why Apple does, you know, some of those, they'll do four or five. They'll bring someone out for a little two-minute demo. Um, yeah.

That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of times. Yeah. Several people. That's true.

Well, let's dive in to see how she starts it. He was a killer.

First, how awesome was that? Are you guys excited to hear about product updates? Okay.

So you would want her to just dive right in.

This is one of those moments in my career where I've been like, oh, this is new. This is exciting.

Yeah. I wanted to discover it.

I'm going to bring it to all of you. We actually have more to share with you.

Here's what I want Katie to do. Again, this is Mike being, looking for an A++. What I want Katie to do, she might not actually have been able to do, I don't know how the music works behind the scenes, but what I want her to do is to take the clicker from you and before she gets to the center of the stage, start talking. So it's less of a, I'm now in the center of the stage and I am Katie and I will talk to you now. It's more like there's momentum.

And just carry it through.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's interesting.

So Nathan shared a little bit more, um, about, wrong slide, um, who's on your list and how they're actually engaging with your creator business. And the next question whenever I talk to a creator is, that's great, Katie, but like, what do I do with that information?

Yeah. This is set up really well.

How do I take everything that Kit knows?

She's doing the, whenever I talk to a, yes. That you were mentioning in the previous episode.

Yeah. The actionable. And helps me. And so that's what I want to walk you through today, starting with something that has changed the way that the creators who have used it are using Kit, which is our Kit MCP. How many of you have tried it? We have some hands. Yeah? OK, great. We've launched it.

Something else that stands out, I guess we haven't gotten into that level of detail yet, but the animations and the graphics, I feel like the team just did it. Stunning job on all this. And that made a huge difference. And like, it carried a lot of the weight of it.

Yeah.

Old 2017, if we're contrasting.

Yeah.

It would have been screenshots or screen recordings where you have to filter through a little bit more.

Yeah.

To see. Actually, 2017, we did live demos. Oh, damn. And then I think 2018, we realized like, why are we doing that to ourselves? Like, if the Wi-Fi goes out, like, this is terrible.

Burn some paper on the side of the stage while we're at it.

Yeah, exactly.

See what happens.

But anyway, so later on, uh, you can keep playing it, but later on we, um, go into more animations and all of that. Oh, jump to, uh, one of the examples of— maybe it's further back, uh, when we're showcasing people on the screen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I watched part of this from backstage and then I came around and watched some from front stage, so there's a little bit that I missed. You had mentioned something about— was it that she's trying to find Dan in the audience?

Using someone in the audience is a great move. It gives them a little bit of spotlight if they want it.

Yeah. Or someone's like, oh, I've— I talked to that person earlier this morning.

Yeah, totally. And then Dan later, I'm sure someone was like, are you the Dan that was on the screen? You know, that sort of thing. The trap that a lot of people fall into that Katie did not fall into is there's this sheepish, like, dance here, dance here.

Then nobody— shade from the— and they're like looking like—

yeah. And then, and then it When you can't find Dan, so what happens a lot of times is you can't find Dan in the audience and then you act as if that like someone refuted your argument and you're not even making an argument. What I loved is she allowed there to be time for someone to find Dan. I was watching him. He tried to not be found. He was like backing away. But she allowed that time and like people around him just like, yeah, I don't know if they'll pick up on the audio, but in the audience people are like, he's right here. And I just love that it didn't kill her confidence.

Yeah.

But yeah, that's a good point of like, you could say Dan, who's here at Craft and Commerce. Yeah. And the trying to find the person, which, you know, our MCs have done it a few times and all of that. And like, it's just not needed.

It's not needed. Well, I mean, sometimes it's just like Dan wasn't there.

He's not required to go to the bathroom.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But I love that when it took a minute, it wasn't like, oh shoot, Dan's on here. That's gonna suck.

Yeah.

Which is, it's easy to, to have that deflate you.

Okay. So I wanna jump to, uh, okay. So we, we, a bunch of stuff that we launched, right? The apps, the MCP. One key thing that we are really trying to do in this is bring everything back to the MCP, which this is a hard thing cuz there's, it's such a technical term, but basically like to be able to interact with it, with AI. And so Katie had a few touchpoints, just again with landing pages of like bringing it back to like, and you can interact with it through your AI tool as well.

This is something that's really hard is when you've got people in the audience that are all over the place technically, right? You've got the power users and then you've got— what did Liz Wilcox say? My only feature is press send.

Yeah. Yes. She's like, that's the only feature I use. And I teach email marketing.

And it's, it's it's hard to, on one hand, Liz Wilcox, and I don't mean literally Liz, but the Liz Wilcox person very well might just be like, MCP, okay, I'm just going to not pay attention for a few minutes. On the other, it's easy to make the Liz Wilcox person feel stupid. You don't know what an MCP is. So one thing that you can do, I don't remember if Katie did this in the speech or not, but one thing you can do is you can just declare this is an advanced skill for you advanced users. You can da da da da.

Yep.

And you know what she does at some point, I don't know where it is in this, but at some point she does say power users, start her sentence, power users, rest of sentence, I'm talking to you power users right now.

Right.

Most people are uncomfortable doing that because it feels too direct, but it's actually a great move.

I like that.

In total, yeah, here she's summarizing all of the App Store, which is really excited about.

One little behind the scenes thing that we did with the way that you run your business is when we first made the App Store, it was very fragmented.

Yeah.

And it did not look like visually pleasing. And we're like, how do you handle that at scale with like 70 and then 100 and several hundred apps? And what we ended up doing, we talked to the team at Framer, which is a design platform. And they were like, yeah, we just design custom graphics for every single user-submitted app in the store. And I was like, wait, you can do that? I guess it's not that expensive. And so we hired an agency, actually, Rafal, he's a, uh, Craft and Commerce attendee.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And so his team designs 4 custom graphics and an icon for every single— even if a random indie developer makes an app, for every single app in the App Store. And it results in a very cohesive experience like this. So when Kitty goes to demo it, like, that's what it all actually looks like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's cool.

There was something I thought was way too expensive, but then when you did it, you're like, oh no, that's actually manageable. All right, let's jump ahead to the landing pages section.

That's a good behind the scenes right there.

Okay. So, so some context about landing pages. We don't want to overhype something where we're like going from not good to like good. Right. And I think it's a weird thing if you come out and you're like, and this is the best thing ever. And so we really, we're not sure how to do this. So we can play through it and then we'll comment on.

She never would have expected before. And this is exactly what this product is built for. And all of this works better having the right people on your list, which brings us to landing pages. You weren't shy telling us what you thought about our landing page builder.

Did she throw that up on the slide?

Yeah, pause it right there. This again, I don't know, maybe courage is too strong, but it's not easy to just not say words that you were looking at when you're speaking. And it was so much more effective to do it this way. Okay, so let's play it out. She, instead of having it as a slide, she just says out loud, you weren't shy about sharing this with us. Some of you said your landing pages are the worst. Like, that's not funny, right?

It might be mean.

Yeah. And it sounds mean.

Yeah. In this case, Because she also has like this little grin, like it's just, you know, like it's clearly true that someone said it, but it's a joke and it's meant to be laughed at. And it's also interesting that it didn't get a sharp laugh. It got a rolling laugh. And I was kind of thinking about that, like, oh, people are like reading and they're laughing at their own.

Well, so I don't know the— I'm not like a neuroscientist or anything, but I've noticed this same thing with Tim Urban's TED Talk. There's like a moment where people are like, Oh, it's a joke. Like there's this one punchline. It's like, oh, it's a joke. And I think like hearing someone next to you laugh, you're like, wait, there must be something funny.

Ah, right.

I don't know. I'm psychoanalyzing fractions of a second in my brain, but you're right. Rolling laughter.

Okay. Keep playing it. Cause there's a—

last year, John Meese, who actually is in the audience today. Hey John. And is a Kit power user, pulled Nathan aside and said, And John.

So there's two things I like about this. One, it wasn't a big laugh, but she got a second laugh by saying, and he said, and just played the slide again. But then what got another laugh, and I didn't catch this cuz I was probably going right next to John.

You're right. I did not tell him to do this. It was just, you know, greatness, sheer instinct. He yelled out, your landing page, your landing page is the worst.

So then that got another laugh.

Oh, it is. Oh gosh. That was so good.

You have a point. Our builder was 6 years old and it did not have the design or visual quality that I wanted.

Actually, can I do one more thing? This is not the most important part of the talk, but I do think it's worth letting people know the thought that went into this. Because there's a way of doing it where John Meece said this and John Meece sounds like a jerk.

Right.

And you went to great lengths to be power user And like, he's a friend who has given us real feedback rather than like some a-hole said, yep. Yeah.

So we rebuilt it from the ground up.

This might be the biggest applause.

The new editor, you can now completely customize your layout, change fonts.

That's funny because it's such a felt pain point.

Exactly your brand.

It's the single biggest friction point. Yeah.

Everything is.

The people listen.

Customizable the way that you want it to be. You've got 20 beautiful modern templates to choose from. And whether you're building a lead magnet, a core sales page, or even a launch page, you can build it, customize it, and publish it directly in Kit without needing different tools.

You can tell people are just excited about landing pages.

Everyone can start using this new landing page builder today. It's available for you, and whatever you build, we are so excited to see it. But what's even more exciting is where we're taking it next. So when we shared that we were rebuilding landing pages publicly, one of the first things that we heard was, these updates are great, love the templates, but Can't you just have AI do that?

This one, I couldn't think of the joke. There, there's a sharper joke to make here that I couldn't quite figure out. But the, the main thing that we wanted to do is I always think of like Eminem and 8 Mile.

Yeah.

Where like, what are all the negative things that someone's gonna say about you, about your launch and all of that? Right. And you know, in that, that rap battle, he goes, lists off all like all of the things that you might say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And now, now you can't say them about me because I already said them about myself. And so this was an example where we're like, okay, we've made progress, but it's not amazing yet. So what's the thing that it needs to, like, that people are going to look for? And even though it's not quite ready, because we, like, it's real code and everything that's about to be demoed, that part is just not 100% live yet because that was like the alpha version was finished on the Friday before. Okay. Yeah. And, but that was one thing where we're like, okay, we have to address, and Catherine Lavery is a good friend and, you know, um, but we have to address like the actual thing and give the full moment to be like, okay, it's turning into what everyone's going to expect.

Got it. Got it. Okay. That's cool. That's good to know.

So this is a part of the talk that we're really trying to nail. And so what we feel like is over the last like 2 years, we've been playing a different game. Than everybody else, because we've been building towards an app store being connected data, like the relationship between your subscribers and you is the most important thing. And here's how everything is integrated together and it's all AI first and how the creator network, you know, all of this stuff, whereas everyone else is just like, here's some features. And so this was our attempt at articulating that. And I'm not sure how much of it landed.

I don't think you emphasize that you're playing a different game.

Yeah. Cause it felt too on the nose to say it.

Hmm. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, the only time I can remember you really talking about other companies was several years ago. And you were kind of like looking at all the—

where everyone's moving away from the creator economy and we're doubling down on creators.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's the only time I've done it.

What felt bad about it? I'm not saying you made the wrong decision, just what felt bad about it?

I think I just couldn't figure out the phrasing to— Um, yeah, to do it. But this is something I think that you'll hear us talk about a lot more in the future as we sort of get all this out there and then build on it. Thank you. Thank you, Katie. So the music there is on purpose. It's an instrumental version of what's coming. We've shown you a lot today. A lot of AI, a lot of automation, and, uh, huge win for the Knicks the night before.

Can't plan that.

It does more things for you. That's right. That's where the whole world is moving and it's really exciting. But the more powerful that technology gets, the more we want to be deliberate and intentional about the other side of it. And that's real human connection, community, right? Being, yeah.

Are you like tired of using your hands at this point? Like this is like people who share the same values you.

No, I mean, I mean, I've been off stage for 20 minutes. It's easy to say, everybody says community matters, relationships matters, but this is something that we are actively investing in. And so that is why I'm really excited to share with you our next community feature.

This is actually a little bit of a miss. It doesn't end up mattering because it's such a killer announcement, but I'm going to overdo it right now, but this would be a place for the, our next big, like, that bring up then. Yeah, that crescendo. Yeah, yeah.

And so what the thing I'm doing right now is I'm in the middle of the screen, and so I'm walking off to the side.

Yeah, this is a classic, right? Yeah. So your brain is somewhere else.

You're like, I gotta get off, I gotta get off, and move off to the side as the video plays. Yeah, I love that they, uh, switched from the— so the previous years it was 3 separate screens, and then this year they went to the full wraparound.

It's actually the same LED panels, but are you feeling weird now because there's no more music?

Come to life in New York City. It was— I was trying to figure out the timing of when to move on for the video because it looped. And I know a friends and family event there last week. And seeing, but I like that it no longer says Craft and Commerce in the background.

Yeah.

It's like, huh? It's like immersive. There's a mastermind area. There's places for workshops. There are 6 video recording studios, all with different sets and scenes that you can use.

Do they have Taylor Swift names like these?

Yeah, they do. There's something new we're trying out. This one is called Blank Space. It's an immersive recording studio where it's actually a TV as the background. This one before the lighting in the real studio is actually slightly better. Yeah, his Brooklyn apartment, all of that. There's a bookcase that folds down into a stage because it's New York City and you gotta, you know, make the most, like, the best use of space, where we hosted live podcasts. There's room for about 60 to 70 people to listen in. It's all recorded on high quality.

Not necessary, but it would have been cool to see it fold down.

That would have been— that would have gotten the full— yeah, uh, watch as well. And there is so much more that I can't wait to show you in person. It's been amazing to see so many creators record content. Both Sam and Michelle were there in the audience, and so it's fun to have their clips. Uh, cool.

I didn't even realize it was Sam.

Yeah, you can consider this your official invitation to come to New York or Boise or Chicago, come in person, record content, attend an event, network with other creators, and just be in the community. Uh, Brian, our new COO, afterwards he was like, okay, you killed it. It was so good. Nicely done. You just missed one thing. And I was like, what did I miss? And he's like, you forgot to tell them the studios are free. I was like, oh, share this.

Yeah.

Who are here to serve their audiences. And do something really, really special.

Yeah, that's a little bit of a miss for the— customers know that already, but for the livestream, it's a little bit of a miss. So let's do a behind the scenes here. Your concern was this is about Kit, is about users, for creators, by creators. Also, let me tell you about my first book and my book that's coming out.

It's all about me. Yeah. Yeah.

So unpack that.

Yeah, we went back and forth on it. Um, So I wanted to show this idea of like going back to the Steve Jobs versus your friend Nathan Barry.

Yeah, right, right.

I want to end this on your friend Nathan Barry was writing a book and had a pain and he solved it. And I had versions of this where I was like, and I couldn't write another book until I felt the product was finally good enough, you know? And it only took me 12 years or something like that. I mean, it's 14 years.

That's funny. Do you have like weird years? This is off topic. Do you have— I find that I never calculate from 2026. Like 2020, like 2018, I feel like is not 7 years ago.

No, 8 years ago. Yeah, right. Yeah, no, it's, it's weird to do the math on it. And now the number is getting so big. Like, yeah, we've been at this for a long time. Yeah, I didn't want it to feel like it was all about me. Mm-hmm. And I definitely didn't want to make it feel like a pitch for my new book.

Yeah.

And so I was trying to walk this line of, hey, we— I built this product for you and I built it for me as well. And you know it's for me because I'm building the things that I want to have when I launch this next book. Yeah. The idea that I'm a creator.

Right, right, right. Oh, that's interesting.

For creators by creators.

That's interesting. That would have been an interesting way to go. I didn't think about it.

798 subscribers. Hovering over the send button. And that started my obsession with email marketing and earning a living as a creator. 119 days after hitting send, I wrote the first line of code for Kit, which is my attempt to codify all the email marketing best practices that I learned into a product. And our ethos has always been for creators by creators.

Maybe that's a helpful slide to have, but I guess there's like so much happening, maybe not.

Only took a decade.

That's cool.

It's called The Ladders of Wealth. Thank you. And, you know, my email list is a lot bigger now. I have a whole team behind me. And yet, I think I'll probably still hover over that send button just as nervous as I did a decade ago. Some things just don't change. I didn't deliver that line as naturally as I wanted to. But your life is going to be different. I'm doing these talks with everything that I showed you today. So I've got signals to find the right partners, the right people to help me. Host launches in each city.

You feel a little like tired here, honestly.

I've got landing pages to bring new people into my audience. I've got the MCP to help me act on all of it. So I think the best version of this, by the way, this is my dream.

I think that the best version of this in terms of gestures is— so in general, just bigger gestures I think would help you with energy too. It's always weird to talk about like hands and stuff, but right. I think the best version of this as it relates to gestures is thing one, hand down, thing two. I mean, less robotic than I'm making it, but like, I've got the da da da, I've got the team to help me, I've got da, and it's like a little bit faster, but in terms of faster and bigger.

Yeah. So my last book launch was on MailChimp. I didn't get to see who was on my list. I didn't get to understand how they were engaging. I just, I wrote emails, I hit send and I hoped. And this time I have everything that I need. To do it right on Kit. So for the last decade, we've been learning from you. Your feedback, your creativity, and your ambition are all over this product. We didn't— I didn't say your fingerprints. I skipped that accidentally. And it's not just about using software. You all are part of a creator network and a community that helps each other grow. So in just a second, I'm gonna wrap up. You're gonna applaud. It'd be weird if you didn't.

It was well delivered. You got there.

But as I do that, I want you to know one thing. Behind the scenes, we're all cheering for you. The Git team is cheering for you. This community is cheering for you. And we cannot wait to see what you build next. Thank you so much. Okay, so some context, like that closing slide aside. That's all what you wrote. Yeah. And it worked really well. I thought it was good for one laugh. It was good for two right there. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. Because when you said, because you're going to applaud, like that got a laugh. That was good. And then, yeah, I was happy with the delivery on that one because I waited just long enough.

Yeah.

And then it was an aside of like, it'd be weird if you didn't.

Yeah.

And that got the second laugh. So that worked really well. It was like, I feel like that was a good example of perfectly walking the line between, and I can say this because you wrote that, between a serious heartfelt moment, which can drag on too long if you let them, and like punctuating it with like, we don't take ourselves too seriously and this is still fun.

Yeah, because you know what, and I hadn't thought about it in that way, but yeah, we don't take ourselves too seriously. It's also by John Meece, can tell you that the landing pages are the worst. And why you accept feedback and why people love this brand.

Yeah.

Oh, that's a lot of fun.

I'm curious. Well, I'm curious, two things. So you immediately, you walk off 10 seconds from now. Are you like, oh, thank God that's over? How are you feeling?

I felt great. Okay. Other than the beginning, the chaos at the very beginning and knowing that the livestream didn't, but I had actually processed all of that when Katie was on stage.

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. You got to break it.

And so I was, I was really excited. We had spent extra time on that, on the New York moment, like figuring out, okay, Empire State of Mind, we're gonna, you know, like the song, we're gonna do the full takeover. And so I felt like, okay, that worked really well. And I honestly liked having the closure of just coming on for a few minutes and closing it out. Um, you know, rather than it, I didn't have the same feeling of coming off of a big talk, which also to your point earlier, I needed to reset my energy because I could have been like, I think I hyped up before, uh, before the talk and, but not again, like when I came back out.

Oh man. Yeah. That's hard. That's like a starting pitcher. And then like the team scores a bunch of runs and you're like, but I need, I want to pitch again. Like it's like a long inning and you're like, um, like my energy's gone.

Yeah.

Oh, that's interesting.

But I was, I was very happy with how it turned out.

So right after this, we go to a break. I mean, one of the things that's hard about a speaker is you want every single speech to change every single person's life. And we go to a break. And from the audience's standpoint, just the sheer math of it, we've been in the room for 90 minutes now, or close to it.

Yeah.

Between intros, Simon's speech, and then this one.

Yeah.

And that's like the absolute limit that people should be doing, like where people should go without a break. So I don't know if you were literally like this, but a lot of people want to walk off the stage and then you're picturing 800 people waiting to talk to you. Did you, uh, well, first of all, did you come out of the green room or did you just like stay back there?

Um, I think I stayed back for a couple minutes, but then came out because it was into a break. So I just started talking to people.

Yeah, you did start talking to people. So like, what are some of the things you're hearing afterwards?

Yeah, people were really excited. I was, I'm always surprised at how many people come to Craft and Commerce who aren't customers.

I find that strange, but it's cool.

It's great. Yeah. I think it's like fully 30% of attendees, um, which means we put on a great event.

I did hear one person next to me and not John, obviously. A lot of John Meece shoutouts here, but there was someone in our area who said, who muttered, he's like, I'm going to have to go back to Kit.

So I heard a lot of that, a lot of, oh, I got to upgrade to Pro. And so I was like, okay, this is working. I would always ask the team or ask people, hey, you know, like what resonated the most? And I always say like the team who built it, I want to be able to tell them what resonated. And I heard Signals the most and then landing pages.

Well, it's also a good question for anybody who just gave a speech because everybody Everybody will be like, I was good. And it's not terribly helpful.

But yeah, we heard a bunch of good feedback. It went really well. So yeah, there's a ton of work going into it, but it was totally worth it. Before we wrap up, any final thoughts on—

I am curious how— oh, you know what would be cool for people to hear is your evolution of rehearsal. So I'm saying when you start rehearsing, And then what that looks like, and I can tell you what you do if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Are you talking about the LIMB videos?

Or what?

No, no, no.

The thing you told Katie about how to rehearse.

Okay, tell me.

You're like, rehearse with speaker notes. And then once you feel like you know that reasonably well, run through it without the speaker notes and just see how it comes out.

Yep. And then compare the transcript of the speaker note version with the no speaker note version and see which one was better.

Yeah.

Because usually there's a line or two that's ad-libbed and you're like, oh, that's way better.

That was really good.

Yeah.

Like in the script, I was like really trying to massage it, trying to get it right. I was looking at Claude to give me a better idea of how to phrase it. And then when I had no notes and I just said it, I was like, oh, turns out that was the natural way. Uh-huh. The other thing that I do, which you're on the receiving end of many of these, is I will write, usually I will voice dictate ideas for something. I will then turn it into a script. I'll then record me talking through the script to see how it sounds. I'll massage it from there. We'll turn it into slides and then I'll do a run through recorded in Loom of those slides and I'll draw, I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you at the most polished version this time. Usually you get a really rough version.

I think you sent it on a Friday. It was a Friday night. It was, it was after hours. I remember that it was after hours and I saw it come in and I was like, I can't do this right now. Cause I was expecting the rough version. Like I was, we were like cooking dinner. I was like, this This is is not, this is not the time for a Nathan Barry Loon video. But it would have been fine.

Yeah. Um, but then that gives everyone the chance to comment on it and be like, this works, you should phrase this better, like inline comments. And then I'll incorporate all that. And so then I'll just do run-throughs. And then you don't feel as bad sending it to someone because you're not like, hey, will you practice with me? You're like, watch this on 1.75 speed.

And that's a great thing that you do is you give permission to people to not watch it sped up.

Unless you're giving feedback on timing or delivery, but we're not doing that.

No, we're not doing that yet. Yeah. Uh, Loom is the proper way of doing that and more people should do that.

Yep. Yeah.

How do you feel? Do you feel like with the script in general, how, how much do you feel like you have to get the wording exactly right?

If I had more time to rehearse, what I would have done is deleted most of the speaker notes out of the script. Because it— they serve you until they don't.

Yeah.

And so I had more times where I could have said something just fine on the screen or based on the slides and what I knew was coming next. And I read the script.

Yeah.

And I, I should have deleted it down to like the 3 words.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My suggestion to people who have— whose presentation is done more than 7 minutes before they go on stage is only put things in the speaker notes that are hard for you to remember.

Yeah.

So like for me, and I know I don't speak very often, but I just have trouble with statistics. For some reason I'm always nervous that like someone's going to get mad if I said 3.7 instead of 3.8.

Yeah.

It's like down in the speaker notes and I just know when it gets to that part.

Yeah.

All right. Well, I'm getting the cue from Kara that, uh, we're supposed to be back at the conference because it turns out we're running a whole conference for 450 people.

Well done, my friends.

Thank you.

Well done.

It was a lot of fun to share behind the scenes.

Yeah, that was awesome.

All right.

Till next year.

Sounds good. If you enjoyed this one, be sure to check out the last episode where Mike broke down how to take any talk from good to great. He shares the thinking behind a lot of the critiques he gives me in this episode, so you can apply them to your own talk next time you're on stage. Like the video if you enjoyed it, hit subscribe on YouTube or wherever you're listening, and I'll see you next week.