Leveraging Your Audience: How I Raised $10M From One Tweet

When I think about the highest revenue per subscriber in an audience, Nick Huber is at the absolute top of the list.

I made a tweet that I have an opportunity to buy a company and that I needed to raise $20 million.

As we're hanging out, you've got DMs coming back.

We're 2 weeks into that and I've got over half the money committed. I think so many creators have this mindset that money is evil. I don't want to be an entrepreneur. Why do I need this money? I'll challenge everybody who ever says that.

Let's say that you're great at content creation and you don't have some of the business skills.

Creators are notoriously horrific at selling. They think that they can make 100 tweets and if one of them is asking somebody for money, it's gonna tarnish their brand. I tweet 40 times a week. 7 of those tweets are direct sales tweets.

Give me an example of one of those tweets.

You tell me if you think that tweet worked. We might be able to charge $400,000. Wake up. Ask for fucking money.

Uh, Nick, good to hang out with you.

Thanks for having me, man.

Matt has hosted us here, beautiful Cabo, back again. The whole crew here is amazing at building audiences, but you're going through something that is pretty fun to share. Like, when we talk about the power of an audience, you fired off a tweet the other day about buying a business, and we're just— as we're hanging out, you've got DMs coming back for the money you're raising for that. Why don't you give a quick story there?

Yeah, I, uh, I guess to start at the end here of how just how big it can get and how fun it can get, I made a tweet 2 weeks ago. Yep. That I have an opportunity to buy a company for a majority ownership stake, a controlling interest in a company at a $52 million valuation, and that I needed to raise $20 million. And, um, we're 2 weeks into that and I've got over half the money committed. And I'm sure that the people that I'm in contact with and taking meetings with now will Finish this out and I'll take controlling interest in a $50 million company.

Based on like your audience.

The opportunity came to me, the opportunity came to me through my audience. The operating team that I put in place to run the company once I closed came to me through my audience and the money came to me through my audience. Those are the 3 things you need to do business at a high level.

Yeah, and you have this whole network of businesses that we'll get into, all 100% driven by the audience.

My audience accelerated my career 20 years within the first year of building it. And then it took it to places I never would have been able to get in my wildest dreams.

You're probably at 20 years ahead now or more, would you say?

I think, I don't think I would have been able to accomplish this in a 50-year career.

Without an audience.

Yes.

Okay, so since we're starting at the end deliberately, 'cause this is the power of an audience, and then we'll go back a little bit.

Give me the breakdown on a handful of the businesses and Yeah, so there's a— I own 9 businesses now, not counting my actual personal brand. A real estate engineering firm that's less than 2 years old, $400,000 a month of revenue. Enterprise value is a tricky thing, but I wouldn't sell any interest in that company at a $10 million valuation. Right. I'm a big part of a company called Support Shepherd that hires and recruits international employees. That's a really great thriving business. 100+ employees, you know, over 7 figures a month of revenue. I'm a founding partner in a web development agency, an SEO agency with $150K+ of MRR in less than a year, a pay-per-click marketing company called Ad Rhino, a US-based recruiting company called RecruitJet, a property insurance company called Titan Risk, a business brokerage called Nick Huber, a sales and executive coaching business called Huber Method, and, uh, Yeah, life's coming at me fast.

It's all from the audience.

I did a, I actually added up all the employees, we're $44 million a year of revenue if you take this month's numbers.

Yep.

282 employees, it's big. This is getting really big.

Yeah, and it's the rate that it's compounding, you know, like we're sharing numbers and details in our group text threads and all of that, and the rate that it's compounding is pretty insane.

I'd say through my audience, through my newsletter, and through Twitter, I'm adding, $3 to $5 million a month of enterprise value across my portfolio.

Yeah. That's pretty insane. So, okay, now let's go back before you started The Audience.

Yeah. Right.

And you're thinking about this might be something that would help accelerate your career in some way. No, I raised money. What drove it?

I like attention. I'll be honest. Yeah. I've always been a guy who's a goof off loud. I'm having fun when everybody else is having fun. And so I decided to start a podcast about small business and I made that—

was the podcast was the first thing?

The podcast was the very first thing. It was called The Sweaty Startup. I made 10 episodes and nobody, zero people listened. I tried to get my friends to listen and realized they didn't give a shit about entrepreneurship. So I had zero way to get people to listen to this. I knew nobody who could help me. I had no audience. So I went on Reddit, founded by the Hoffman guy, and it was an 8-month warfare of me writing copy, trying to get people in the entrepreneurship subreddit to read what I had to say and then click the link at the bottom of my post to go and listen to my podcast. I got better at writing copy. I had a little knack for it. I practiced nonstop for a year. I was super into it. When a guy named Moses Kagan found me on there. He became a friend of mine and said, Nick, you gotta get on Twitter. That's where people are doing deals. You're in the real estate business. You gotta get on Twitter. And I ignored him. 3 months went by. I'm like, no way. Twitter's where people go to argue about Donald Trump. Like, I'm not gonna go there.

Usually when we get that great advice, we ignore it for a long time. I had that when someone like pulled me aside, was like, you have to stop treating ConvertKit as a side project and double down. And you know, it's one of those things where you wanna say like, yeah, I heard great advice and I acted on it right away. And it's like, nope. 3 to 6 months later?

I'm a super confident guy, and I've— I look back at myself when I was 21 years old making business decisions. I've been an entrepreneur since I was 20.

Yeah.

And I cringe now thinking about how cocky I was and how— at what level I was actually playing at, right? Now I'm getting wiser to know that there are so many levels to this game, right? I'm leveling up now, but then there's levels of these guys who own these beachfront properties for $40 million. There's levels all the way up to the Elon Musks of the world, and I'm, I'm middle of the pack guy, right? So I'm getting way better at changing my mind on things, but I still have the confidence and the swag and the ego and the things that it takes to do crazy things that take risk. So I got on Twitter finally at the second, he called me the second time and said, Nick, you're wasting it on Reddit, get on Twitter. I went on Twitter and did a full thread about one of my self-storage facilities. I broke down the profit, the loss, how I found the deal, how we made it more valuable, and how we made like a million bucks. And nobody had ever posted a profit and loss statement on Twitter before. I just shared wildly open, and Moses retweeted me. He had 2,000 followers and I had 3. He retweeted my third post and gave me another 300 followers. And then I had a couple threads really pop off over the years and got me to where I'm at today with 340,000 followers on Twitter and a newsletter with 220,000 subscribers, 2 podcasts, The Nick Huber Show, Sweaty Startup, a YouTube channel. So it's just starting to compound and really get rolling.

Yeah. So there's a lot of skills that go into being a creator. I think when we talk about, I talk a lot about like, oh, everyone should be doing this in some way, but there's two ingredients that you had that I think most people don't have. One is a lot of real-world business experience to talk about, right?

I have something to say on that.

Yeah. Like let's, let's dive into that because a lot of people come in and everybody wants to build an audience.

Like everybody says, Oh, I want to build an audience. The truth is, is that everybody on social media is super selfish. They're scrolling social media, what can I extract from this person? The people that I want following me, the business owners, the entrepreneurs, the people who are very ambitious and do big things in the entrepreneurship world, they're selfish on social media. They're not trying to get a laugh, they're trying to learn something. And so I realized that I had 3 seconds less, I had a half a second of somebody scrolling past my post where they're thinking, what can I get from Nick? So I had to give them that. I had to show them, hey, this guy's actually doing something I can learn from. I can— I have something to gain. So boom, they're selfish, I'm selfish because I want their attention. I have to give them what they want. And in order to do that, I had to be actually doing something. Everybody, oh, I want a following like Nick's, I want to build a bunch of followers. Nobody wants to follow you if you're not willing to actually do something. You look at the most followed people in the world, it's LeBron James, Garth Brooks, it's Taylor Swift, it's the presidents, it's people who are spectacular, it's people who have done something incredible. They have built a skill set that's unbelievable, and therefore people follow them to learn something or because they've done it. If you try building an audience before you have done anything, it's a fool's errand in my opinion, especially in entrepreneurship space.

Yeah, there are definitely people who have done it, but you don't have the credibility. I think the best way to be interesting on the internet is to be interesting off the internet first. Yep. And then go from there. 'Cause the other thing that stood out, like you could have come in and said, hey, I'm trying to do my first self-storage deal. Here's everything that I've learned. And you can take a quest or a journey approach to building an audience where you're saying, I'm here, I'm trying to go there, follow the journey. And that will work. And you'll get a lot of smart people helping you out along the way. But I think the reason that your stuff on Twitter really popped is because you're saying, this is what I've done. And being willing to be transparent too.

Yeah, I started a student storage company in college. I was an Ivy Leaguer. All my buddies went and got jobs for $100,000 a year in New York City. I moved boxes. I ate shit for 5 years. I learned how to run a really hard company. I hired people, I fired people. We did almost $3 million of revenue in our peak. I was in the trenches building a business. I was actually there. I was doing it. We had 300 part-time employees at our peak. We sold that company for 7 figures. And then I built a self-storage facility from the ground up for $2.5 million. It went really well. I bought another one with my own money at auction, at public auction. I wired $150,000 that I barely had. To buy the second property. I had done some uncomfortable things from an entrepreneurship perspective. So therefore, the thing about advice on the internet is that everybody filters it based on the quality of the source. If you sit down here and get business advice from average Joe on the street, you're gonna filter that. And if you sit down here and get business advice from Warren Buffett, you're gonna hang on it a little harder. Everybody filters everything based on the quality of the source, whether you like it or not. So I guess a side piece of advice here is, so tell people what you've done, There's so many people on Twitter and everywhere else that in their bio they put some kind of obscure bullshit because they're afraid to brag on themselves. And that sets them back in a major way because they want their ideas to stand alone. And the truth is, ideas don't stand alone. Ideas are judged by everybody based on the quality of the source.

'Cause you post that thread and say, like, some of them have a lot of details in it so it might tell the whole story, but others might be more general business advice. Then I'm immediately going to click through to the bio And my bio used to say entrepreneur, bring you together people, all the stuff that people put.

And people would see that and be like, this guy's not worth following. As soon as I changed it to sold a business for 7 figures, built a real estate private equity company with 45 employees. We own 63 properties, 1.9 million square feet of self-storage. We've raised $40 million. We bought $100 million worth of property. The conversion rate from a good thread, I would get 3,000 followers instead of 1,000. That was massive for me. And it was, uncomfortable to put a very arguably egotistical post.

To be bragging about that. But that's what you have to do.

You have to be comfortable bragging on yourself.

Yeah. Because people are saying, should I pay attention to you? And you're like, no, you know, I talk about very— and it's like, all right, I won't.

Yeah.

And instead of you say, here's exactly why you should pay attention to me, then someone will go, oh, I don't care about real estate, self-storage, whatever. I'll move right along. And for the right people, they'll hone in exactly.

Social media is an interesting game. When you're trying to build relationships in real person, I would never go to a dinner with my wife and tell everybody what I've done.

Yeah.

That's absurdity. But when you're on the internet and you're trying to get the attention of thousands of people, there's no other way. It's cringeworthy, it's uncomfortable. In person, I like to be very relatable, very humble. I don't brag on myself when I'm— many of my friends in Athens don't have any idea what I do.

Yeah.

They don't know because they've never asked a question about me and I'm sure as hell not going to tell them what I do. That's who I am. Yeah. But on the internet, you have to get over that. Right. So if there's one takeaway from this, that's it.

Yeah. So the other skill that you really developed early on is the ability to write and create content consistently. Yeah. And Reddit, Twitter, any of these places are a great place to do that. Someone that I followed early on in the SaaS world is Jason Lemkin. Yep. And he got his entire start, first he had a ton of credibility. He built, sold a company to Adobe.

He had the resume.

He had all of that. But then to create content, he responded to threads on Quora and answered questions over and over again.

Yep.

And just became insanely useful. And then it teed up so much content 'cause people would be like, oh, you wanna know about that? Oh, I know a lot. I didn't realize that was interesting, but sure, I can answer that in detail. And then that turns into a post or more, but it builds those reps of getting good at writing. 'Cause other times people show up and they're saying, okay, I've done interesting things off the internet. I have this whole resume.

But I'm gonna pay a ghostwriter to build my Twitter account.

Yeah, and the soul of it is not there.

It doesn't ever work. I've never seen that work.

What's the difference between you or I writing our own content versus doing something and then saying, now let's get someone else to tell the story as me?

Somebody DMs me and says, Nick, I wanna build an audience. I can click through to their profile and in 5 minutes I can tell if they have what it takes or not. Yeah. And I can tell that—

What do you see in that?

I'm gonna sound, this is gonna maybe sound hopeless for the people listening, I don't know if you can really learn it. I think it's some people get energized by writing, some people want the attention, some people want the eyeballs. You gotta have a fair share of ego, and then you gotta get energized by ideas and they gotta come to you. And I don't know why, but I am a prolific writer. I can't stop writing. I have notes in my phone for days. I have a notepad by my bed. They come to me nonstop and I just write. I have friends who are way more impressive than me. They've done way more than I have. But they just can't do it. They sit at a computer, what idea do I want to write on? And for me, it's energy. I get energized by an idea and I think it's interesting and therefore I have the energy to continue to write. They put what could be an awesome idea and they just, there's no energy behind it, there's no motivation, they don't get excited about it and they don't have that urge and desire. Because look, we, these ideas, these business concepts that I write about, they're not sexy, they're not fun, they're not, oh my God, this is a groundbreaking idea. All these ideas have been talked about before. I'm just applying them to my life and my business when I write content. So you gotta be able to get excited by these things that other people just, it doesn't, it doesn't make 'em really click. Yeah.

I think when you and I first met, it was maybe 2021 at Cody Sanchez's conference.

Yep.

Uh, then your business looked quite a bit different. You were heavy in self-storage and then as you're playing this long-term game, right? Building up a ton of enterprise value, doing real estate for the long term. Then you had the course and coaching side of the business.

Yep.

And I remember it being really interesting because you had this insane amount of cash flow coming in from the course.

And that's— Yeah, it was damn near, I made almost $1 million in course sales in 2021.

And then you were offsetting it with all of your depreciation from your real estate as a real estate professional.

Yeah, paid zero tax.

Yeah, talk about that for a second. I think that's something that people don't fully understand and it won't apply to a lot of people who don't wanna go all in on real estate, but—

Yeah, so real estate has a part of the tax code called bonus depreciation where Parts of these buildings have different lifespans and you can accelerate the depreciation and you can take losses that are not real losses. Like if I buy this house we're in for $20 million, this piece of glass is not a 30-year cycle, it's 5. So I can put a value to this and depreciate it quicker. If I buy this place for $20 million bucks, I might get $6 million of bonus depreciation year 1 to offset my other income. Taxes off the deals. If you're a real estate professional, there's a lot of nuance to this. I started a cost seg firm, so we actually do this exact thing. It's one of my largest businesses. But I had this real estate private equity engine that I had built. My audience gave me the cash to fund that for the first time. Real estate is incredibly capital intensive. I needed to raise money to buy storage. I'm not a country club kid. I don't have wealthy friends and family that I could go raise millions of dollars from. I literally built these relationships on Twitter to launch my real estate private equity company. No Twitter, I have maybe 10 properties right now. It's the only business I'm in, just self-storage.

Yeah.

2021, it was the only business I was in. I just sold my student storage business. I only had the real estate private equity company. We were growing fast, we were buying a lot of real estate, and I was selling courses to people about real estate.

Yeah. And you know, there's always this trade-off between long-term enterprise value, which is what real estate is all about, and short-term cash flow.

Yep.

You and I have a mutual friend, Sean Sweeney, in Minneapolis. Yep. And so he's doing these beautiful condo developments, and he's got the long-term enterprise value side figured out.

Yeah.

You know, he just—

He's made some investments that are gonna create generational wealth over the next 20 years.

Yeah, but a lot of conversations he and I have had are about the short-term cash flow side of it.

Yeah.

You know, like, okay.

Yeah, real estate's in a down cycle now. So the fees that he gets to build buildings and the fees that I get to buy storage, they're not coming in now. So my personal cash flow from my real estate portfolio went from $500,000 a year to $100,000 a year over the last 2 years because real estate slowed way down. So if I didn't have these secondary, you know, cash flow methods, I'd be stressed.

Yeah, and so Sean, you know, has so many people following him for his stuff. How do I build buildings like that? You know, he builds his audience on Twitter in a very similar way. And as you know, he's been able to say like, hey, I'd love to teach a 2-day workshop on this. Let's get 25 people together. And you know, a couple grand and sells out immediately. And then he has this, you know, it's like, oh wait, I can play both sides of this. And then the cardinal rule of real estate is never run out of cash.

And you can make sure that you never run out of cash because of the power of The only way to go broke in real estate is to run out of cash at the wrong time. Yeah.

And so, yeah, I mean, that's the power of the audience is insane on that.

Yep.

So then you made a pivot, like that move from an audience, which was helping you raise a good amount of money for the private equity business.

Yep.

Courses and teaching that content is a very natural next step. People say like, I want to learn from you.

Yep.

And that's where most people stop with the audience.

Yep.

Right? Let's say we scaled to 1 million in courses to $2 million a year and then just keep playing the long-term game. What made you go into all the other businesses?

One thing changed my life. Marshall Haas, who owns Support Shepherd, reached out to me in April of 2021 and he said, Nick, I have this business. We recruit Filipino and LATAM talent to work for US companies. You have a US company, you're an influencer. Let me get you some talent. And in exchange for me getting you this talent, I want you to talk about my business on the internet. He set up an interview with 3 Filipino employees and my mind exploded. I hired all 3 of them. Since then, I have 200+ employees. 80% of them are in LATAM, in the Philippines, because of that moment that changed everything for me. And I started talking about Shepard on Twitter. And he said, I'll give you 15% of revenue from that you bring into this business as an affiliate deal. Yep. Talk about it. I did what I do best. I marketed and I pissed off the entire internet by saying you can find people that will work way better, way harder than American employees for $5 an hour. The internet lost their mind. It got millions of impressions. 3 months later, he was writing me a check for $20,000 a month. That's serious money for me. Oh yeah. $20,000 a month for a tweet once every 20, 25, 30 days. A tweet once every 30 days was making me $20,000 a month. And I thought I was the shit. And then I looked at what it was doing to his business. When he came to me, he was doing $30,000 to $50,000 a month in April 2021. One year later of me, I think maybe 9 tweets later, no paid marketing, Shepard was doing $250,000 a month. It's 7x in size. That's amazing. And I realized, holy shit, that business is worth $8 or $10 million now.

Right.

I'm on the wrong side of this deal.

Yeah, you didn't have equity. One of our rules on this podcast is that if you want to build real wealth, you have to have equity more than just an affiliate deal.

So I went to Marshall in April of 2022. One year later, and I was like, Marshall, I need equity or I'm gonna go start a competitor. Right. I was doing the same for a cost seg guy. I had a cost segregation guy who I was talking about and his business grew from $300,000 to $1 million a year of revenue.

Yeah.

And he was sending me $15,000 or $20,000 a month. So I was making $500,000 a year, $40,000 a month, $500,000 a year as an affiliate for these two businesses. I went to both of them at the same time. Well, Marshall first and said, look, I need equity.

And he—

and we made a deal where I bought some equity and I was a 15% shareholder in Support Shepherd.

One really quick thing. A lot of people come into that scenario and they say, I need equity, give me equity. Very adversarial. And then they say the equity should be a gift. And I think what's smart, you came in very realistic. Here's all the facts. Here's how the business has grown. Here are all of my options. Like, all cards on the table. Like, I've realized the value of this.

I basically told him, we need to make a deal where I can get some very cheap equity. I'm gonna write you a small check, and I need equity in this business, or I'm gonna go start my own. No hard feelings. Your life has changed for the better because of me. My life has changed for the better because of you. We will remain friends. But I'm gonna start this business unless you get me in on this business.

But then also coming in and saying, I will buy in, I think is really important. Because it changes the tone of that conversation. Because it says, it shows that you understand the value of what they own. Yeah. And like, it shows a good amount of respect.

I had no leverage too.

Yeah. You did that on the Shepherd side.

April of 2022.

And then on the Cost Segs side, you had a very similar conversation that went a very different way.

I went in and said, hey, I wanna own, this was about a year later from the Shepherd deal. Okay. I only owned 15% of Shepherd. I look back on that, I did not own enough of that. That was a big mistake. It's just a great business. Obviously it's not a mistake because Marshall has helped my life in so many ways. But me only owning 15% of Shepherd was a big mistake.

In hindsight, you should have pushed way more chips in.

I should have bought more of the business or went and started my own, right? So I had— I was wiser and I went to the cost seg guy and said, I want to own 30% of your company and I don't want to pay you. I need equity and you're going to give it to me because I knew how powerful it was and I knew what I was going to do. Or I said, I'm going to go start my own company. No hard feelings. Your life's better because of me. My life's better because of you. This has been an amazing partnership. Your business has accelerated. I'm willing to walk away, but you need to give me equity in this business. And he called my bluff and said no. 3 days later, I had an operating agreement signed with Mitchell Baldridge to launch a cost seg firm because he was a cost seg specialist that I was able to launch with. It's kind of a sad deal because the guy came back to me a couple days later. He was like, Nick, Nick, we need to keep talking. Like, and I was like, no, you told me no. And I made it very clear that I was going to go start a company and it's in the works. It's done. And I'm actually very lucky because I own 45% of our cost seg, and it's a $10 million business now.

Do you think that had you come in offering to buy equity, it would have gone differently?

Let me be clear, I didn't pay very much for Shepherds, so I don't think that— it was almost even.

You didn't think through that?

No. Okay. No. I realized the leverage. Marshall realized that it was a fair deal. Yeah. We made that deal. The cost seg guy made a big mistake. Right. Looking back, I think. And here I am today with a better deal. And let me put this in perspective. We're recording this in March of 2024. This conversation with the cost seg guy was June of 2022. Yep. Less than 2 years ago.

Yeah.

In less than 2 years, on the back of zero paid ads, RECostSeg.com has 35 employees. It's done 2,000+ cost segs and it's doing almost $400,000 a month of revenue.

Yeah. With incredible margins.

It's a great business, but It's a very hard business, very specialized business. Not everybody can start one. It's very high touch. You got to have a very good CPA as a partner. So it all— like, we— I made some very good decisions about bringing people together. Now, the audience is amazing for customers, but the recurring theme here is that I'm getting in the room with spectacular skilled people, the operators, the operators, the people who know how to build businesses. And fast forward to where we are today of buying a big company to pull into my portfolio. Before the deal is even done, I have a CEO picked out to run the company that I found on Twitter. I have a CRO, Chief Revenue Officer, that I found on Twitter. And we're building a sales team and 3 of those candidates have come from Twitter. So I have everything. I'm playing business on easy mode. I'm not going after affiliates. I'm building enterprise value. I'm building massive cash flow. February of 2024 was my first $500,000 month of personal cash flow to me. Half a million dollars in one month.

That's wild.

All because of Twitter and what we're doing on there.

Yeah, I'm thinking about, you said playing business on easy mode, and that's something I've said a lot, like an audience is a cheat code to everything. And people can take that two different directions. One, you can say, I want this outcome and I could do it with this amount of effort, but with an audience I can do it with half the effort, a quarter of the effort, you know, as it compounds. And you can continue to do that same outcome, way less effort. Or what you've done is you say, okay, now I'm gonna continue to put in this high level of effort and I'm going to get 10 times the results because of the audience and let that come.

So to do business well, you need 3 things. The first one is you need experience on bringing people together and running companies. I had that from 10 years in the trenches of building a business. I'd made shitty partnership agreements. I'd hired the wrong people. I'd learned how to run a company. Most creators don't know how to do that. That's one thing that you have to have. The other one is you need the audience, you need the eyeballs and the, or a sales funnel or a bunch of capital. Right. And then you need a network of operators who can work for the companies. I have all three. Mm-hmm. If a creator all of a sudden decide, oh, I'm gonna build a team and build a big-ass company, we are, we're glossing over all the stress and hard part, right? Of being an entrepreneur. As you know, you're playing business on easy mode as well with your audience. And it's still very difficult to hire, to fire, to build teams, to invest. Is very difficult. So I don't know that this is for everybody. The affiliate deals can be really good for a lot of people, but I'm doing incredibly big things all because of my audience.

Yeah. Maybe we were talking to someone, and I can't think of a good example off the top of my head, but someone who's at that, say $500,000 to $1 million a year off their audience, a lot of it is course, affiliate, maybe they've got it dialed in, they know how to launch, they've got the content schedule.

And that's running a business in and of itself. So they're getting that experience too.

Yeah, they are. But what would you look for or how would you talk someone through that if they're like, hey, I think I might want to, you know, launch a full-on business with this. Like what sort of things would you say like—

I looked at what my audience could buy.

Yeah.

Where my ads were working, where my affiliates were working, and I had an entrepreneurship audience of people who are building businesses. So business-to-business services, pay-per-click marketing, SEO, website development, property and casualty insurance, recruiting. Those things were right in the wheelhouse of what my audience needed and that I could sell to them. So if I were Sahil Bloom, he has a productivity audience of people who want to be disciplined, they want to be fit, they want to be productive, they want to be better humans. Supplement line.

Yeah, protein.

He needs to sell AG1, that's Bloom powder. Or that's just one example, right? Find something that you know you can sell. And a great way is if you're selling ads on ConvertKit, look at what type of traffic buys.

Who keeps coming back over and over again to buy more.

Yeah.

Right? And we know his Twitter audience is insanely engaged. And absolutely massive. And then also with his newsletter, right? I mean, he talks about this, I can talk about this. ConvertKit sells all the ads in his newsletter and the public numbers that he shared is he's doing $70,000 a month in sponsorship deals. And his newsletter is about the easiest to sell.

So he's selling, he's making $70,000 a month of cash flow, but he's adding $500 grand a month of enterprise value and profit to the businesses that are advertising. On his platform. Now we kind of go up a level to influencer private equity. Matthew McConaughey with his business endeavors.

Yep.

George Clooney with Casamigos. The Paul brothers with Prime. All these massive businesses and massive brands that have been launched. Kylie Jenner.

Yeah.

All— Oprah from the beginning. She's a billionaire not because of her talk show proceeds, but because of all of the investments in businesses that she's gotten involved in because she had that audience and she could sell. That's the next level. The level that I'm trying to get to is I have everything I need. I have the audience, I have the operators, I have the capital. I'm going to go buy companies and I'm going to buy companies for $50 million. I'm going to turn them into $500 million companies, and that's going to make me mega wealthy. Sahil knows private equity because he spent 7 years in that business, right? He's got the audience. He can attract people that are phenomenal operators, the best operators in the world who want to work with him. He's got the trifecta to do business with a cheat code.

Yeah. It's still hard.

He's still gotta make investments. He's still gotta hire people. He's still gotta structure these deals in the right way to make it work for everybody, which is really difficult. I made a lot of mistakes structuring deals, not owning enough, giving operators too much, taking too much risk myself for too little reward, not seeing how much value I was actually adding. Of these companies that I'm starting, I'm the majority owner in 6 of the 9 businesses. I'm the majority owner as the influencer. We're not talking about a 15% affiliate deal. We're talking about me being the controlling partner. That's the level that Kylie Jenner and some of those are at on a much grander scale.

Yeah, but it's the same style. Going back to Sawhill, thinking about the 3 attributes that we talk about of a billion-dollar creator. One is you have to build more than a personal brand. Two is you need to sell products. Rather than attention. And then 3 is you need to have recurring or repeat purchases.

Or services. You said product, services.

Services work as well.

Yep. Yep. I don't sell a single product.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah. Everything I sell is a sweaty startup, small business that has been proven in the past. Yeah. No new ideas, no products that I gotta ship. It's all have people do work to collect cash. Every single one of my businesses.

Is that deliberate that you're avoiding products or?

Yeah, products are super competitive. There's a lot of CapEx that's required. You gotta raise money. You gotta ship something to somebody, the payment terms are horrific, a ton of logistics to the business, whereas I can build a team of people on the other side of the world to give a product to American business owners and charge $10,000 and pay my people $5,000.

Yeah, it's interesting. And that's really what Sahil has done with all of his agencies, with the agencies he's done with Hunter through Assembly, with Paperboy and all of that. They're all service businesses.

Now, this is just one example, one wild example, but any creator, you tell me a creator I could think of 5 or 6 products or services that they could sell and build businesses on the back of very easily.

Well, let's go Cody Sanchez.

She could build any of the businesses I'm building. Pay-per-click marketing, recruiting. She could build a suite of B2B services very, very easily because she is talking to business owners just like I am, which is a phenomenally valuable niche.

Let's go a different angle. Do you know Dan Go?

Yeah, another one very similar to Sahil of just people who want to be better. So you could sell children's books on discipline, you could sell, and all this applies to the side hustle, you could sell a skincare brand, you could sell consulting, you could sell executive coaching, you could sell executive search.

There's tons, there's tons and tons of options. I think about a lot of these creators might do one-on-one coaching or something, right? Like Mark Manson works with Dan Go for everything on the fitness side. But then you get these slight pivots where people scale it up in a big way. You know, like a My Body Tutor or Macro Factors or some of these others where—

Exactly, the SaaS, the software place. Where they start to bring it into, you know, much more of a product as service.

And so they're—

Bryan Johnson's the best. I mean, he was such a great marketer, posting those weird photos of him naked, holding his sons and stuff like that, talking about his erections. He's just, he's a master at the clickbait, rage bait bullshit to get people right into his funnel. And people are willing to pay unlimited money to not die when they're rich. Rich people are willing to pay unlimited money to not die. And he is—

Yeah, what's the willingness to pay in your industry?

And it's infinite. Yeah. Brian Johnson's selling the blueprint to not die.

Right.

And therefore he's gonna, he is using that funnel to build what will become a billion-dollar business 'cause he knows entrepreneurship. He has built a huge business in the past. Then there's Huberman doing massive business opportunities. Creator-led entrepreneurship at a very high level is something that's not talked about enough. I'm talking high level of, and look, it takes a certain level of drive to try to be a billionaire. I wanna make $1 million a month and I wanna be a billionaire by age 50. That's my goal. Not every creator has that goal.

Yeah, that's a lofty goal. I share that goal, but you know.

We're different. Yeah.

Maybe if we riff on a few others, what about Tim Ferriss, right? He's got a massive audience.

He built a supplement company to make people smarter at work before he even had the audience. He did it on hard mode through customer acquisition and paid ads.

Do that again.

Oh God, anything. B2B services. He has the wealthy upper middle class business owners and not a— he has an extremely affluent audience of people who want to better themselves. He could sell any of the things I'm selling, including supplements and products and all this stuff.

So it's interesting as creators have this balance between these small investments, right? Taking a little stake in something or up to a 10 or a 15% stake versus taking the big swing and saying, I'm going to start or fully acquire this company.

Yeah, and you got to work your way up. Yeah, but there's a lot of people with totally worthless audiences too.

They have a crowd.

Well, or they have audience with no ability to pay for things. Like if I was an audience for thru-hikers, yeah, those are the brokest people, less, less, least ambitious people I've ever met. The budget travel genre, you know, and you're like the people who will buy a $30 backpack because they don't see it worth investing in a $300 backpack. Right.

If someone was watching and they had an audience like that where they realized that, you know, I don't know, teaching knitting to college students or something like that, skill that doesn't make money to people who don't have money, what would you do?

It's just keep it as a hobby.

Keep it as a hobby.

Go make money doing something else. Yeah. One of the most exciting audiences that I've seen built recently is Preston Holland.

Yeah.

On Twitter. He, he is building an audience around private aviation. He, one year ago, he did not know how the industry worked. Right. He got in with Craig Fuller, who's a friend of mine, great guy. And they're in the aviation business through flying.

Right.

And Preston tweets about how much it costs to own and fly private jets. Yeah. And he is building a newsletter of people who are interested in buying private jets.

I subscribe to the newsletter. I read it every week.

If Preston knew what he was doing, he would— I don't want to say this on the air, but he'd get the hell out of his job and build a massive company brokering airplanes or selling insurance to airplanes or doing whatever else, because he's building that audience himself. If I were Craig, I wouldn't let him build that. Like, my operators build an audience that I own on Twitter. Like, every one of my companies has its own handle that I am building. Because if one of my operators had the audience, then all my leverage goes away.

Yeah, 'cause the audience is so valuable. Now, what's key about what Preston is doing is he's attached himself not just to the broad category of business or something like that. He's attached himself to an insanely expensive transaction only made by very, very wealthy people. So just the table stakes in that, if you're like, oh, I'll take 1% of a transaction and the transaction is $12 million or $5 million.

A great example, I don't know if I wanna share this on the line because you and I talked about it and, but let's just paint a picture of a guy in New York who is an airplane blogger. He gets in planes and films himself going on journeys, teaching people to fly.

Yep.

I don't know if the person you had told me about.

Oh yeah, you can talk about it fully.

Yeah, so guy in Boise, He's a blogger, vlogger really, about how to fly airplanes. Yep.

Fly with Trent is his YouTube channel.

Fly with Trent is his YouTube channel. At first, the audience came with people wanting to learn to fly with Trent. So they would pay him $200 an hour to fly.

He realized really just $80 an hour is the going rate for flight instruction.

He realized real quick, probably that that wasn't the best way to make money. So he started selling those leads to flight schools that pay him $2,000, $3,000, $5,000 for those leads to go to flight schools. Those flight schools are paying $3,000 because that's an extremely valuable lead. The level up would be him starting his own flight school with a good operator. Find somebody who has built a flight school before, raise a little bit of capital or buy a flight school and then use his audience to fuel that flight school so that all that enterprise value, all that cash flow is going to him. There's 3 levels to the game, right? There's get customers to trade my time for money, $80 an hour. Yep. Then there's the one of make $30,000 a month because I'm sending 10 customers a month to this flight school. Damn, I'm feeling like I'm on a high hog. The next level is owning a flight, buying a flight school for $2 million and turning it into a $10 million flight school and either holding it and making $1 million, $2, $3, $4 million a year, or sell the company and make $8 million. Right.

Yeah. So when Trent is an interesting example, because he has a bunch of these skills going in, right. He, he has built and sold multiple businesses. Uh, he already knew how to create content on YouTube. And he decided that he wanted to be an airline pilot at 53 years old with a mandatory retirement age of 65. He's like, you know what? I'm going to go for the airlines right now, man.

I can't think of anybody that's like, that's like wanting to be a doctor or a lawyer. I don't know why anybody would do that. There's some, there's some careers that are on my, I can't believe anybody wants to do this. It's doctor, it's lawyer, it's CPA, and it's airline pilot. Quality of life relative to compensation is horrific.

Now, as you get well into the career, right? An airline pilot's making $300 grand a year not working that hard when they're well into their career.

Yeah, most doctors and lawyers get happy about 52, but they're on their second wife and they're overweight and everything else.

But so, so Trent decided to go on this, this journey. First, you know, starts the channel, starts to get people following him because he's trying to do this in a really accelerated path. So he went and did something of getting, I think, 6 or 7 ratings in— he did it in 91 days when most people do it in 18 months.

So he's phenomenally talented.

He's very, very talented. And he like created content about the whole story.

Is he charismatic as well?

Oh yeah.

So he's going to be very wealthy as a creator.

But so the crazy thing is to me is the audience is going to get him to his goal of 1,500 hours and being hired as an airline pilot in a quarter of the time. He's going to make way more money in the process. But so not only is it going to shortcut everything that he's doing, but once he gets there, he's going to be making 10 times more as a content creator and as an influencer than he would ever make as an airline pilot.

And then if he shifts to being an entrepreneur, it 10Xs again.

Yeah. It's wild. Cause the thing about being a flight instructor is you actually make $25 an hour because the $80 an hour is paid to the school. And then they pay you a subset of that. And so he's making, as an independent flight instructor, he's making the $80, but yeah, he'll keep scaling it up. But I think the crazy thing is realizing that the audience is so much more valuable than even the journey that he's going on or his original goal.

And I think we can't do this interview without talking about money a little bit because it's what drives everybody. And I think so many creators have this mindset that money is evil, capitalism is bad. I don't want to be an entrepreneur. Why do I need this money? I talked to my friend Justin Welch and he's like, I got everything I need. And he's a unique case because he's making a shitload of money. But he's like, I don't want to go bigger. No need to go bigger.

Yeah.

I'll challenge everybody who ever says that. I'll challenge them. Maybe it's just because I have an insatiable ambition to make a shitload of money. Whether you like it or not, whether you're willing to admit it or not, Good comes from money. It amplifies your ability to do good. It amplifies the amount of people that you can impact. I have a friend who his goal is to positively impact a massive amount of people. The best way to positively impact the most people is through entrepreneurship. The more money you make is directly correlated to how much value you're adding to other people's lives. Right. So you want to make a big difference? Look around at who's making a big difference. It's the richest people in our, in our country. And then there's the camp of, hey, I want to make a huge difference. I want to positively impact a lot of people. I also want nice things. There's no job in the world that'll get you one of these houses in El Dorado and Cabo.

Right.

It's entrepreneurship.

Yeah. I was actually gonna bring up Justin Welsh earlier in our like, what should someone with a big audience do? But I didn't because I know that side of him, having talked to him a bunch, that he doesn't have that ambition to take it much, much bigger.

I think he's got the ambition. He's just hiding it for a little while and it's gonna come out because he's just so phenomenally good.

Yeah.

He comes from the world of building businesses. He's ran large teams. Like, he has all the tools to do big things. We're going to watch him rock the world, in my opinion.

Why do you think he's hiding it?

Because he's, he's a guy that realizes that once you get pulled into this, you can work really long hours, you can sacrifice things. It's like that— there's another side of this, which is the dark side, which is we are out here on a journey. We're at, we're at in Cabo right now with 6 other badass entrepreneurs. We all have money taken care of.

Yep.

We all could not work another day in our lives and be completely fine. Yet all of us are talking about how we have balance and how we can enjoy more things and how we can come on this thing and not get on calls and how I don't have to check my email every day and how do I separate from this stuff. So there's this pull. And as the opportunities come and there's opportunity cost of all these things, it gets really hard to balance in your mind. So I think that's what he's weighing is do I really want to lay it down again to take some big swings?

Well, I think there's also maybe it's like playing different levels of a video game or, you know, climbing scaling one mountain and then staying there and like kind of that recoup to decide, okay, do I want to scale the next one? And so he's absolutely won the games of building an audience, earning a phenomenal living from that. And I think it's totally fine for a while. And you could, if you want to do it forever, I don't care. But to stay at that level and say like, ah, this is nice. Maybe I'm gonna hang out here for a year, 2 years. And then you sort of look and you're like, all right, I've now stockpiled $5 million of cash. I've tested a bunch of things. Played with affiliate deals to see what my audience buys, you know, that kind of thing. And now I'm looking and I'm like, all right, I'm ready to scale that next cliff and go, you know, play the next level of the video game. Because that's ultimately what we're doing. We're just—

Absolutely. I kind of look at it as this audience came to me and with it comes a massive amount of opportunity. Yeah. I have opportunity to work 40 years and build a billion-dollar empire, which is going to change my life, not only my direct family life, but my extended family's life. It's going to change a lot of my employees' lives. The philanthropy that I'm going to be able to do is just going to be amazing. I'm already able to do some philanthropy that's just, it's small, but it's making a massive difference. I would look at it as it's my duty now at this point. It is my duty to capitalize on this audience that I've built. I don't want to do the work sometimes. I want to sit here in Cabo and make my little bit of money and drink beer and hang out with friends and do nothing, but it's my duty now because this audience is insanely powerful.

Yeah. And you just think about all of the things I learned about real estate cost segregation from one of your Twitter threads.

Yep.

Right. And I've used that a bunch when, you know, I don't buy a lot of properties, but as we've built out a short-term rental portfolio—

You're an already cost seg customer.

I am. All right. Yeah.

Awesome.

And so it's not just what you're doing, you know, through the money that you earn, it's also the content and then the businesses that allow people to do so many other things. Right? You're able to, with Ari Costa, you're able to offer us a service significantly cheaper than—

Yeah. The great thing about making money is that literally people won't give you that money unless they're getting more value than that money.

Than they would get somewhere else.

Yeah. If I asked you, said, Nathan, let's do a little bit of work together. Let's exchange a bunch of emails. Let's let us, let our company do some work for you. You give me $1,000 and I'll give you $1,000. It's like, why? No value was added. But the way entrepreneurship works is that there's, it's an abundance mindset. You can give me $1,000 and I make $500 on it and you make $500 on it. So you get $1,500 of value. You pay me $1,000. I get $500 spread there too. When you find good businesses, you have massive amounts of value on both ends of the equation and everybody's life gets better. Yeah.

Let's say that you're great at content creation and all of that, and you don't have some of the business skills. Where do you go to start to round out the business skills?

Sales is the most important. You can get away without having a lot of business skills if you're good at sales. If you can sell, and creators are notoriously horrific at selling. It's one thing that I gotta shake my buddies that we've mentioned in this conversation. A lot of people who I've pulled aside and been like, they think that they can make 100 tweets, and if one of them is asking somebody for money, it's gonna tarnish their brand. I tweet 40 times a week. 7 of those tweets are direct sales tweets.

Not even, not a casual mention.

No, it's give me money. Open your wallet and give me money. Click this link and give me money.

Give me an example of one of the tweets.

I could pull— you want me to? I'll pull one up. Sure.

Yeah, let's browse through some of them.

My team posted— it's Friday. They posted one yesterday, so let me pull it up. But yeah, it's me literally directly promoting one of my companies. Yesterday at 6:07 AM. Last year, I co-founded a business brokerage with my father, and it's been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. We now have 2,000 interested buyers, and we have more investors on our list hunting for deals. If you think 2024 is the right time to sell your business, fill out this link. 44,000 views, 79 likes. Now let me go in my email and I'm gonna pull up the amount of leads that came from this. You tell me if you think that tweet worked. Don't read any of the names, but just count them.

Yeah, we got 8 yesterday basically.

8 owners of businesses that went into our hopper to potentially sell their companies. I looked at them. One of them is a home service business that's worth $10 million plus. We get that listing, we sell that business. That's a $250,000 commission if we charge 2.5%. We might be able to charge 4% or $400,000. Wake up.

Yeah.

Ask for fucking money. Nobody hates me. Look at the comments. Now you look at the comments on my tweet. Follow the people that sell well. Follow Tai Lopez. Follow Grant Cardone. Cody sells really well now. Follow these people who are comfortable selling and just watch. And it's Gary Vee talks about it. It's the jab, jab, jab, right hook. I add a lot of value on my Twitter. I'm teaching people about a lot of shit. I'm making them smarter about business. So therefore they can follow me. They learn, then they learn again. Then Nick asks them for money. It's the jab, jab, jab, boom, right hook. Gary Vee talks about that. So watch people who sell, don't be afraid to sell and realize that you've built trust. People like you for who you are. You're not gonna lose that trust by putting an ad every now and then.

Yeah.

People get advertised to all day, every day. You watch the Super Bowl and 30, 40% of the airtime is ads to you. You watch a TV show, 30, 40% is ads. You walk in the subway, ads are on the top of it. Ads are everywhere. You can't get around them. People are not gonna stop following you because you write a couple ads.

This is something that I need to do a lot better, but an example is I'll post a tweet. We've been hitting records each month for the number of migrations that we do to bring a customer over to ConvertKit. I think it was in February, I posted a tweet of like, oh, we just hit a record in January for the most migrations ever done in a month. If you've been thinking about migrating over to ConvertKit, fill out this form. And I was shocked at how many people, 'cause I had this assumption that like, oh, if someone follows me, they know ConvertKit, you know, they would've already switched over. Like I was doing the thing.

Your audience is a parade. People get excited about Nick Huber. They get excited about me for a window in their career. Maybe it's a year they're following Nick and then they kind of know me and they're gonna glance at my stuff every now and then, but they're into me for a little while. When they find this podcast, they get into this podcast, they listen to a lot of this podcast, then they'll go 2 years without ever thinking about Nathan Barry, but they're gonna always know who you are. They're gonna maybe check in. Yeah. So I literally have a schedule right here on Google Sheets. Every Monday, every Tuesday, and every Thursday, I promote one of my companies. Yep. There's 9 companies, and that's a 3-a-week schedule. So every 21 days, my company gets a promo on Twitter, and it's scheduled. I am promoting and selling myself on an actual schedule so that Every 21 days, the business brokerage gets promoted. Every 21 days, Shepherd gets promoted. Every 21 days, Ad Rhino gets promoted. And people start to see it. People start to feel it. You have to do it that way. You can't just, oh, when I feel like it, I'll make a tweet. And then all of a sudden, 4 months goes by and you're not capitalizing on your audience.

Right. And then if you build a business with a great operator, you've got the team in place. You know, if you were flooding them with business 1 month and then forgetting about them for 3 months, you're screwing over your operator. So by doing this, you're saying, hey, Here's the exact cadence.

I have 5 people on my content team and my head of content before he posts that tweet will go to the operator and say, hey, are you ready? Is your calendar cleared? How's your— are you ready to handle more leads? And sometimes they'll say no and we shift the schedule around and you're going to get a— like right now, 3 of my companies cannot accept leads. Titan Risk is overwhelmed. Ad Rhino is overwhelmed. Web Rhino is overwhelmed. The operators got 40 sales calls in the last 3 weeks from my promo. They're like, Nick, I got to hire 3 more people. Yeah. Back off for a while. So they tell Colin, Colin moves them on the schedule and somebody else gets promoted. So Colin's job as my head of media is to send customers to my companies. If that's our, there's one north star, send customers to our companies. Everything else is secondary.

Yeah, and a secondary metric would be, you know, grow top of funnel and all of that. 'Cause the larger top of funnel is, the more customers you can send. But if you set the primary goal as grow top of funnel, then you might be off like, how do we get all of the college kids to watch our entrepreneurship content? Which is the last thing that you want.

You're not optimizing for what is most important, which is money in my wallet. I don't have my wallet because I'm in Mexico, but I'd pull out my wallet and say, this is the metric. Money. Money is the scoreboard. I mean, I guess I'm a different guest than you usually have on here.

No, I think that's the exact angle that we go with because being able to really drive towards the income and results that you want and get really clear on, I have to sell. I have to get clear on what I want. So many people are saying like, oh, You know, I'd like to make a little bit more money, but not a lot. And so you and I are like, if that's what you actually want, just own it and say, yes, I want to build, you know, I'll say it, I'll say it right here.

I came to Cabo last year on this mastermind one year ago, and I was making about $125,000 a month personally.

Yeah.

That's good money, man. That's, that's over a million a year. I was pumped. Now I'm at average about $300,000 a month. One year later, my goal is right now my personal scoreboard is I want to make a million dollars a month. Personal cash flow. If I do that, I can do whatever I want to do.

Yeah, that's amazing.

And the audience is going to get me there. Yeah, which is pretty mind-blowing.

And then talk for just a second about the team. So you've got Colin running it.

So you have one person as head of content, head of marketing, running head of ops almost. I need to hire a second person to help him with ops because he can't do as much now with the content because he's just doing so much. He's running two podcasts, he's got the newsletter, he's got all these things going on. My schedule across Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and YouTube videos, um, and sending all the customers. Like, that's our main goal. And he runs two of the accounts for my individual businesses that have 30,000 followers each. So he's overloaded, but he's got 5 employees. They're all overseas. They work directly for him. I've never talked to any of them. So my team is— I have Colin, who's head of ops, head of media, and he has people that are helping him execute.

And that keeps you out of the logistics of Yeah, like yesterday I didn't tweet, but there were 7 tweets sent that Colin's team created.

If I die, if I get hit by a bus or shot by a machine gun on my way to the airport here in Mexico, everything will just continue on. There's a plan in place for my attorney, my CPA, my wife, and my trustee to be in the room with Colin.

Yeah.

And it's all going to, it's all going to keep going because this is too valuable to stop.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Any advice to someone starting to build out that team? Maybe they have the social media assistant and they're realizing it's time to scale it up.

If you're making Justin Welsh money, 7 figures a year, you need a team. Yeah, I've been all over him because it's him and his wife.

The opportunity is just so massive and it's just so much easier when you have—

it's delegatable— really smart people. I'm not always tied to my phone. I could go a whole day without Twitter. I went to New York and went on a snowmobile trip for 4 days and didn't get on Twitter once, and the leads kept coming to my business. Like, I don't want to be a guy who is I'm the bottleneck for everything that happens in my company. So get uncomfortable, hire somebody at low risk in the Philippines through Support Shepherd. If you don't want to hire an American, you know, I pay Colin a lot of money, like a good head of content, a quarter million dollars a year worth every penny. Like I need another one, but you know, it's a little uncomfortable just to start there. So I would start with a $1,500 a month hire in LATAM that you get through Shepherd. Yeah. I love it.

I love how all your businesses are so well integrated into everything that you're doing. Thanks for hanging out. This has been a lot of fun. I think you're going to blow people's minds on what's actually possible with an audience.

Good.

We're just scratching the surface because I think—

parting words— I would urge the creators to more ambitious goals. Ambition. Like, there's nothing wrong with ambition. You don't need to be ashamed of making money. You can talk about it. You buy nice things. You can do a lot of philanthropy with it. You can change the world in positive ways. You have cash.

I love it. Set bigger goals.

Thanks for having me.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to the YouTube channel, just search Billion Dollar Creator, and go ahead and subscribe. 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 who else we should have on the show.