My 3-Step Formula for Introductions That Sell | Clay Hebert

Nobody wants to be pitched, especially like in a small metal box that they can't get out of. They can't get out of. Kill the elevator pitch. Meet the expert in million-dollar opportunities. Keynote speaker and marketing strategist Clay is revolutionizing how we introduce ourselves. We get asked this 3 times a day, 1,000 times a year. Why do we get it wrong? We never get taught. Before you can get the phone number, before you can close the sale, figure out which story do I want to tell. Using this little formula called verb, their, noun, it becomes A great headline, landing page, website headline, name of your course.

And so the ability to capture someone's brand in 3 words is remarkable.

The perfect intro, it's not about you, it's about who you help. The reason it works and the reason it spreads and the reason it makes them the money they wanna make, and this is gonna throw a few people, is—

Oh, that's interesting, yeah. Clay, thanks for coming on.

Of course. Stoked to be here.

So what we're going to do today is in under 60 minutes.

Yes.

We're going to teach the perfect intro and try to give a masterclass on how to introduce yourself. Because not only do you introduce yourself in conversation, but also creators are introducing themselves, you know, dozens or hundreds or sometimes thousands of times a day through their content. Yeah, let's dive in.

Totally. All right, let's go. So the question is, so what do you do?

Okay.

And we get asked this 3 times a day, 1,000 times a year. That's in person, not to mention all the digital times we introduce ourselves. So it happens a lot.

Yep.

So why do we get it wrong? Number 1, we never get taught. We never get taught how to introduce ourselves. I don't know about you, where you went to school, but I certainly did not have a high school or college class on how to introduce yourself. Or reason number 2, is we get taught poorly, which is this thing that I don't like called the elevator pitch. The idea is someday you're gonna get in an elevator with an important person and you're gonna hit the 68th floor, and by the time the elevator door is opened, you better have pitched them and closed the business and closed the sale. It doesn't happen. We're not gonna get in an elevator.

So we're gonna go from cold meeting to deal closed in 60 seconds.

Yeah, or you have to pitch your business. Nobody wants to be pitched, especially like in a small metal box that they can't get out of.

They can't get out of until the door opens.

So I want to recruit everyone here to help me kill the elevator pitch. And when you hear people say you need an elevator pitch, the answer is no, you need a perfect intro, and we're gonna explain why. And 3, the reason is we believe in the 3 myths of introductions. That's why we get introductions wrong. So that leads into the next part, which we're gonna jump into now. So the 3 myths of introductions. Myth number 1, and these myths aren't horrible things about introductions, they're just sort of the way that we get taught to think about introductions. Myth number 1 is that it's about you.

Hmm, okay.

Your intro is actually not about you. It should be about who you help and why. And even that flips it from, I mean, you talk a lot about copy and messaging and talking about your customers, not about yourself, right? This is the introduction version of that. The best headlines on a kit landing page talks about the customer's pain and problem. This is very similar. Myth number 2 is that it should be 100% complete. Okay. Again, like I said, these things don't seem bad or wrong in a vacuum because there are lots of things that should be 100% complete.

Well, so completeness is normally seen as a good thing, right? And so if you were to do something and you're like, hey, Clay, could you do this? And yeah, I come back, I'm like, 80% done, right? And that's with my kids, right? They're like, hey, could you vacuum up that mess? Yeah, no problem.

Sure.

Come back, I'm like, All right.

Not fully done.

So we want 100% completeness normally in life, but in intros you specifically do not want 100% completeness.

Exactly. When you look at poor introductions, and sometimes this is when you ask someone, "So what do you do?" and they tell you their life story, that means it's probably too complete.

Yeah, you're gonna go to sleep.

Exactly. They included too many details, etc. And the last part is, and this is going to throw a few people, is that it should be 100% accurate. Okay, now I'm not saying to lie, but I'm saying that our desire to be 100% accurate typically causes us to use boring clinical words, buzzwords, etc. And we'll get to buzzwords later. So these things, like I said, if you look at it, this is sort of how we get taught to introduce ourselves. Make it about you, try to make it complete, and try to make it accurate. I think it's our like our 8th grade English teacher who teaches us these things, right? Yep. The perfect intro instead is structured sort of differently. It's not about you, it's about who you help.

Okay, so we've covered the myths, and there's the typical intro that really follows the myths here, right? But the perfect intro about who you help.

Yeah, and the reason it's about who you help is because The goal for an introduction is not to present all of your credentials in a resume format. It's to create a human connection. The best conversations in the world create real human connection. So before you can get the phone number, before you can close the sale, before you get anything that you want to happen out of that conversation, there has to be real human connection. The problem with introductions, and part of the reason we get them wrong, is they're not designed to create real human connection. And that's what the perfect intro is really all about, is let's get to real human connection. Let's make a connection. And from that, you might be able to get the phone number, meet your soulmate, close a sale, whatever. But can you do any of those things if you never pass the point of human connection? So let's design for it. So you make your intro about who you help instead of being complete. So, yeah, right. So the typical intro is these things. Instead of trying to be, 100% complete, you want it to be interesting. Okay. Think of your favorite movie. It probably doesn't open with something boring. The first, maybe the first 10 seconds, 30 seconds, minute, it's probably an interesting conversation. Great storytelling is often not linear.

So if we're going, like, thinking about completeness, accuracy, all of those things, we're thinking in terms of start at the beginning, tell it from there. But yeah, you're right.

It was—

we're thinking about the movies that we watch. They have that scene, and then for the rest of the movie, they're giving you clues that unpack that scene. Then you realize like, oh wait, that scene hasn't happened yet. That's coming up. We're building up to this moment. Totally.

If you do something— I don't get nervous when I make coffee in the morning because I know how to make it, because I've made it thousands of times. You're not like, oh, what did I do?

Oh no, I'm not going to get this.

What if I screw this up, right? Yeah, I know how to make my coffee. It's not a big deal. You can make your intro equally not a big deal, then you can play with it. Then you can have fun telling the story.

Right.

And ask the person questions and be engaged and create that human connection.

Yeah. Number 3 here, then it's confident?

Yes. So you wanna be interesting and you wanna be confident. Okay. So those 2 things combined, like I said, think of your favorite actor, actress, Clooney, Jennifer Lawrence, whoever you like. They are— George Clooney was not a confident 1-year-old.

Mm-hmm.

It may seem that way now 'cause he's so confident and swell.

Right.

But he has some of the best writers in the world writing a few lines. He memorizes them to the point where they're in his bones, and then he delivers them and gets a few chances at it. We all have the same opportunity, right?

We're going to do some writing in advance.

We're going to craft some words. We're going to craft your intro, do it in advance, practice it, and then rehearse it and test it in these different reps. You can go to Craft and Commerce, introduce yourself 20 times and practice it and see what feels good. Try this on. But so we'll start with the base format. You want to jump to that? Okay. So the base formula, this is sort of the, I won't say boring, but it's sort of the basic white rice version of this. And then we'll add some spices and sauces.

So in the base formula, this is better than the generic intro?

Better than the elevator pitch, better than a generic intro.

So I might, like, what's a common intro that you would hear someone like, so what do you do?

Yeah, yeah, so it's a great question.

Like what's bad? Right. Common but bad.

Common but bad is, Your industry, your role. So say industry.

I'm VP of, oh, industry.

It's very specific. Industry's like, I'm in real estate.

I work in medical sales.

I'm in medical sales. I'm in finance.

Yeah.

I'm in industry.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

It's not wrong, right? It's accurate and it's not complete, but it's accurate. But it's boring. Yeah, someone could say, I'm in real estate. Okay, that tells me almost nothing. Right, about you. Because even within real estate, there's 100 different things that you could be doing, because you never know who you might be sitting with. Kit works with creators, typically younger people, not all, but typically younger people. You might sit next to a 70-year-old lady on a plane, and you might be like, well, she's not a Kit customer, so, and I'm busy, I got some work to do. But you never know, she might have 6 kids, or her daughter might be a huge YouTuber or something, right? It could be—

who knows what connections come up.

And Jason Fried had a great quote and he said, I think Jason Fried and then maybe Steve Jobs had a version of it too, which is like, you can only connect the dots looking backwards of where we are now and Kit Studios and everything else. And you've written a lot about this, the connections, and then I met this person that led to this person that led to this person.

Well, it's the idea of like luck in your luck surface area.

That's a great term.

And so, you know, people talk about like being lucky or creating opportunities for luck.

Yes.

You know, and so if you're having a random conversation with someone on the plane or at a conference, like, that's a little bit of luck surface area. Yeah. You know, something could happen here. Probably won't, but there might be an opportunity.

Speaking of luck surface area and serendipity, and Tony Hsieh used the term collisions, you know, with Zappos, and Steve Jobs would architect them at Pixar, which is a great story. When Steve Jobs got to Pixar, The original design for the buildings was like, we're gonna put the animators in one building and the engineers in another building, different admin teams in another building. And Steve Jobs was like, absolutely not, because he wanted to create that luck surface area and serendipity and collisions. So the story goes, he built this big atrium and he put the bathrooms off of the atrium, but you were not allowed, you could not park in the far part of the parking lot and sneak into your cubicle through the back.

You had to come into the—

You had to come in through the atrium. And you couldn't have architected and predicted like this film in 3 years is gonna be, but everyone who worked at Pixar during that time can remember, oh yeah, Toy Story 2 or whatever came from me meeting this person or I was waiting for the bathroom or whatever these luck surface areas. So the perfect intro is not a physical atrium, but it's a toolset to create better conversations.

To maximize the opportunity from each of these things that come up.

Yeah, yeah. The base formula is a better version of any of those perfect intros. So the base formula is the white rice version, and then I promise, it's gonna start very basic and simple, and then we're gonna make it fun.

It's, I help people.

So we're 75% done. I need your help on this last part.

Okay.

Achieve a result. We're gonna help people do or achieve or become something. And if we can, yeah, right, achieve a result up there. If you're able to frame the achieve a result using this little formula called verb, their, noun, that's gonna make a lot of things easier and have some kind of fun magic tricks later on with regard to your landing page and stuff like that. So this can be verb, their, noun. Could have left you a little more space there, but. And what I mean by verb, their, noun is Your customer has a noun they want verbed. And what I mean by that is I used to do a lot of stuff with Kickstarter, crowdfunding, Indiegogo, all that other stuff, right? Now a terrible intro would be, I'm in crowdfunding, or I'm an Indiegogo guru, or I'm a Kickstarter expert. Those are common intros, but they're terrible. The best one is, I help, and we'll customize people in a second, but I help entrepreneurs Fund their dream.

Okay, fund is the verb. Yep. And dream is the noun.

They have a dream. Now, if you were launching an app, for you it's your dream to launch that app. Someone else, it might be a film. Someone else, it might be a hoodie. Jake Brownstein had the 10-year hoodie, right? That was his dream. So the magic of turning down from the specific object of the app or the film to the dream, it brings it up a level. And funding is what they want. So anyone who is hoping to get their Kickstarter or Indiegogo project, you know, raise money on that platform, all of them have a dream, they want funded. So what is the noun that your customer wants verbed and what is that verb? So dream applies to all of it. Funding that dream is what they wanted. So reverse engineer that.

Yeah, so for K, I might say I help people grow their audience.

That is perfect. And we're gonna jump ahead actually because the verb your noun thing, I like what you said. Change their to your.

Okay.

What does it say?

Grow your audience.

Pretty good headline for a landing page. Grow your audience and then, you know, with Kit or whatever. Right. This works magically because you change your, you change their to your and it becomes a great headline, landing page, website headline. Name of your course. Fund Your Dream was the name of my Kickstarter course back in the day, crowdfunding course back in the day. What you're saying is the interchange of their and your, you change their to your and it becomes a headline or a course name or whatever.

That makes sense.

Grow Your Audience is the great name for a book, a headline, whatever, right? Because you're speaking to their desires of what they want, which is very different than I'm a Kickstarter expert or whatever, right? Yep, that makes sense. So that's a really, really good hack. And I would recommend people, like, you can do this in a spreadsheet. You could make a little spreadsheet. We can actually, I'll send it out to anyone who's watching. I, and then we'll get into the we. You can change help to a bunch of verbs, change people to a bunch of different verbs, and then verb your noun. Try a bunch of different versions of that. Basically, we can break down each one of these into a column, and then you can brainstorm a bunch of different ways and sort of try different intros. But sometimes with this, we're gonna talk about, is this kind of like a slot machine. Imagine your perfect intros laid out on a slot machine instead of cherries and bars in Vegas. We're gonna pull the lever now and start changing the different wheels and changing the words to test that out. This is the thing that like every person that I've ever seen that's actually done that part, the relatively simple but maybe boring part of just like searching a bunch of verbs, they'll come up with one that they're really excited about and proud about. This is something you're gonna say a lot, you know, while you're running this business or anything you can have. Draw an infinity symbol here because one point I wanna make is you can have as many intros as you want. It's called the perfect intro. It could be called the perfect intros. You can add a little S there. The idea behind this, don't get stuck on I have to have one because that's where people try to make it 100% complete. They try to put, making one intro for everything that you do is like trying to put every item you own in the trunk of your car. It literally just does not fit. And so you can have as many as you want if you're going to a particular— if I'm going to Craft and Commerce, I would, using the Perfect Intro, as I get out of the car or get off the plane, be like, what am I going to use at Craft and Commerce this weekend, right? What Perfect Intro am I going to use? And eventually, which story do I want to tell once I'm there? So the rules: number 1, no buzzwords, okay? Because as we learned from, uh, early kit client Albert Einstein.

Exactly.

If you can't explain it to a 6-year-old, you don't understand it yourself. And I really think that's true. If you're, if, you know, if your kids can't understand your introduction, it's probably too complex. And what people usually do is they insert buzzwords. Now, what's interesting is they usually insert buzzwords to sound smart, and yet usually what they're doing is it ends up being less clear. Right.

Talk about the stories in Atomic Habits, you know, or so like James Clear and Simon Sinek. 'Cause I think it really illustrates the point around buzzwords.

Yeah, absolutely. So the way that ideas spread through culture and through the market is usually word of mouth. I do obviously a lot with marketing and branding. People think that marketing and branding is, I need a lot of seeds to seed the cloud and then I'm gonna rain on everybody.

Right. How do you just— Cover as much ground as possible.

Blast everyone. People, whenever anyone says, I just, I have this great widget, this great product, this great service, Clay, I just need to get the word out. And I was like, what's the word and where do you need to get it out to? Like, it's just lazy shorthand of I'm trying to rain on everybody because they're not doing the rigor of what Seth Godin calls the minimum viable audience, getting to the center of the bullseye. And a lot of people talk about like, okay, core bullseye, and then it spreads, but they don't really talk about how it spreads. The leap from one center of the bullseye to the next ring and the next ring is word of mouth, and what Portable Stories is, is basically engineered or reverse engineered word of mouth, codified word of mouth, packaging it up so that it's easy for someone to pick it up and take them with it, yeah, with them and give it to someone else and spread the word. That's what portable means, is like I can take your hand and and give you the portable story. Right, now you have it, and that's word of mouth. So what James did brilliantly in Atomic Habits is he codified a number. In a book like that, 3 to 5 is really good. You don't need 50. But he said, which I believe is a repurposed old military quote that he customized for his book, is we don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. Because in that part of the book, he's talking about building systems for your habits. Pretty simple phrase, but back to no buzzwords, the most complex word in that whole thing is the word systems. It's 2 syllables and what, 7 letters?

Right.

That's no buzzwords, right? Yeah. And if you look at, and what the reason it works and the reason it spreads and the reason James went from selling 1 million books when he launched it with his marketing plan to 10+ million books, and it'll probably be more and more over the years, 'Cause Atomic Habits was one of the most talked about and referred and recommended books.

Mm-hmm.

But that phrase was not buried in body copy on page 182. Mm-hmm. That phrase was highlighted in the book and he talked about it on his blog and he posted about it on social. So for anything that any creator wants to spread through the world, of course, make it great. But if its greatness is buried in body copy on page 172, only the people that see that and happen to highlight that part and then take that forward, you're reducing your luck surface area of your idea spreading.

The buzzwords introduce friction to be able to tell that story further.

And similar with the Simon Sinek stuff, people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. What's the longest word in that? People?

I mean, every, that one, like almost everything is one syllable. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's super short and simple, but What's interesting is people inject buzzwords to sound smart. And yet the reason Atomic Habits and Start with Why spread is people wanted to sound smart recommending that book at a cocktail party. And someone said, "Oh, I'm not selling enough widgets." I said, "Actually, Nathan, that's because people don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it." Most of the people that said that didn't say, "As I read in Simon Sinek's great book earlier today." But when they say it enough, enough karma comes back. Enough people get the result. Or later in the conversation, it's like, Oh, that's brilliant. Where did I hear about that?

And like, actually, there's this book that I should have attributed from the beginning, but you know.

So it's not on here, but figure out your portable stories for, and we can include a little resource or something like that for that. But portable stories is codifying how your idea spreads. And the key thing is it's gotta be a little bit contrarian and it's gotta make the person repeating it say that the way they want to sound.

That makes sense. Okay, so no buzzwords.

No buzzwords.

Buzzwords limited.

Fewer words and syllables, which is sort of what we were just talking about. About with James and Simon. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Again, write these out and just notice how simple they are. And when you want to put, you know, when someone wants to put implement CRM methodology, it's like, no, no, no. Every industry has buzzwords, right? And just stop yourself from doing that. And then shoot for intrigue over info.

Okay.

You want to shoot for intrigue over information. Kind of back to the movie scene thing. One of my favorite perfect intros, my great friend—

Intrigue over—

Over information or info. Info is fine. You can get to info later on. You can get to info deeper in the conversation. Back to our sitting with someone on a plane example in the exit row. If you have a great intro and they say, so what do you mean? And then you have this great conversation, the info can come later. You're going to be an hour up in the sky and now you're getting into the intro. We gotta get intrigue. Yeah, yeah, you're gonna get, well, you'll eventually get to the info if you start with intrigue. Intrigue creates the conversation and eventually you'll get there. People are worried that if they don't dump all the information, we sort of create these conversations like we're like sending, emailing in a resume, right? Like it's not a back and forth. Like we're sending in all the information, but we want it to be like the pickleball match last night with this nice back and forth. You hit it over, I hit it back. You can ask a question, And that's what a good conversation looks a little balanced, right? Just like a great podcast, you have eventually some back and forth.

Yep, that makes sense. What's an example of a perfect intro that really creates intrigue?

Yeah, so one of my favorites is Doug Brackmann. We teach people how to meditate at gunpoint. If you meet Doug on a plane, he says, and you say, so what do you do? He'll look you in the eye and smile. And he'll say, "We teach people how to meditate at gunpoint." And slight pause after meditate. So he used guns and long-range sniper shooting. It's all very safe. Nobody has a gun pointed at them to teach how to calm your brain because you're not gonna hit the pie plate at 925 yards if your whole brain and body isn't calm. And he teaches you how to breathe and how to exhale when you're shooting the gun and stuff. So essentially, but we teach people to meditate at gunpoint is better than, We created a feedback loop for meditation. That's like too complete, right? And maybe not as intriguing.

Or typically he'd say, you know, he said like, well, I used to be an Army Special Forces sniper. And so then I got into the world of entrepreneurship and then I decided that I really kind of fell in love with meditation, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And that's actually better than what most people would do, but still.

But it's only better because the content of his life is so interesting.

But the at gunpoint thing opens this loop that You can't just ignore the person and go back to your phone or your computer. It's such a blasted open loop. And that's part of the goal of the perfect intro, is not to shock the person. The goal is not to be so contrarian and shocking, but if it can open a loop that they're curious about, they're going to ask you a question. And now we're going to pull the slot machine again, and we're going to change the word people. So we changed, um, we're going to change the word people to who it is that you help. So for Kit, This is pretty clear. You guys help not just people. You don't help 3-year-olds in Africa. You help creators, right? That's the word that you guys own, which is actually, I'm glad that came up because people think personal brand is about number of followers or, you know, subscribers or email subscribers or anything. No, a personal brand is about owning a word or a phrase in the marketplace. And you guys have spent a lot of time and money and effort and attention to own the word creators. You wrote a book called I Am a Creator, right?

Yep.

When people think of creators, they think of Kit, and that is very intentional. So for everyone out there, it's a slight tangent from perfect intro, but if you're trying to build a personal brand, don't wake up and only think about, I need to increase my number of Twitter followers or Instagram followers or TikTok or whatever. Think about what word am I owning in the marketplace? Back when I used to do the crowdfunding stuff, I was the crowdfunding guy and the phone would ring off the hook because people would be, you or Dan Martell or somebody was there and like, I'm trying to get funding for my app or Indiegogo this or Kickstarter that. There was 20.

Have you talked to Clay?

Yeah, we just come talk to Clay.

He's the crowdfunding guy.

So if you're trying to build a personal brand, pause on the followers for a second. You'll get the followers if you get really clear on the word or phrase that you wanna own. Back to like the change people, creators. Now creators is kind of the top level of who you serve, but there's sub within that. What are some words under creators of types of creators that you serve?

Yeah, we could be YouTubers, authors. It depends on the context of where we're going.

Right.

If I'm showing up to a conference where I know most people are written content creators, then I'm gonna say authors or bloggers. If I'm going to VidCon or VidSummit, then we're gonna be talking about video creators.

Yeah, YouTubers.

Totally.

Yeah, I can totally see you guys probably going to, let's say, a writer's conference or an author's conference specifically. It's not incorrect or, um, in any way ingenuous to say we help authors because you guys do help authors. You have a ton of authors, and if you're at an author's conference, we help authors, right? Right. Easy. Um, so now change help to a different verb if you want. Help is great. It's kind of like creators. It's sort of at the top. But you might do something different than help. We're both friends with Jason Gaynard from MMT. When I think of Jason, the verb that comes to mind is connect. He's a connector. Right? So you could change help to connect. I connect incredible entrepreneurs. When Jason says that, it automatically doesn't make it about him. He's the one doing the connecting, but the adjective amazing is on the entrepreneurs. He's like, man, I'm just the— I just introduced Nathan to You know, so change help to the different verb you do. It could be unlock, right? Unlock is something that feels like it's inside of you. I just figured out the combination or the code, right? Now back to the formula. I help people, or let's just say I help women unlock their best body or whatever, right? If you're a personal trainer that works with women, and then again, change their to your, unlock your best body. Not a terrible headline. Yep.

So when other examples, right, we're talking about teach was one we used, right? With Doug.

Right.

So there's all kinds that you could put in there. You were mentioning one last night of decode. Yes. Right? That's one. If we're going for intrigue, that's a more interesting word than like—

Explain or whatever, right? Or articulate. Yeah, like if someone said, I decode personal finance, For a lot of people, personal finance is a complex thing and they're scared of it or money issues or whatever. Or you could even say I decode the stock market. For a lot of people, you either work in the stock market or the stock market's confusing to you or you don't wanna deal with it, right? So if there's a thing, if you're serving an audience that wants help with something that they deem as complex but they would like to understand it, Decode is a really, really good word.

That makes sense.

Yeah, I'll sneak that in. And again, you can Google just verb lists online. It'll alphabetize A through whatever.

Put it in our spreadsheet with 5 columns.

Yeah, we'll create a little spreadsheet template and send it out to people. I like it. Change I to we. So introduce your company. There's a great article in Quartz years and years ago.

I haven't heard Quartz in a long time. Yeah, they used to put out all kinds of great articles.

QZ.com or something like that.

Yep.

The headline of the article, it said, "Startups can't explain what they do because they're addicted to meaningless jargon." And I was like, 20 people sent me that article that day about Perfect Intro. But it's not just startups. I think one of the examples in there was, "We visually organize your cloud-based content for cross-platform synergy and distributed access." That's like the buzzwordy, you know, it's just put buzzwords in the Vitamix and dump it out and that's your intro. Terrible. Who wants to invest in that? You don't even know. You're not gonna get money or customers if they don't know what they're doing. As you talk about sometimes, like, you have to get to the point where you have to get past clarity to know if they want it. People think, oh, I have a poor conversion rate because people understood it and they didn't want it. But really it's upstream at they didn't even understand it.

When the number of times that someone doesn't understand something and then they're like, Yeah, it's not worth the effort to try to understand it. Always. Like, I don't want to look dumb. Maybe everyone else understood it and I didn't.

Exactly.

I don't have time, right? If I ask you to explain this thing, then you're like, well, actually, dinner's starting. And if, you know, yeah, there's all kinds of reasons, right? When if you had just spent 30 minutes to improve your copy. Yeah, right. You could have gotten something that I would understand or intrigue me enough that I would want to ask more.

Back to like James or Simon and those most complex words being people or systems or these simple words, simple to understand. I'm a big fan of, I love clever copy when you can get there, but it's gotta be clear first.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so going from I to we, you're basically saying as an individual, I help, but really as a company, we help, we connect, we decode, whatever it is.

And if you're on a, you know, you can swap these out and choose whatever makes sense in the context. You could, you know, if you're at a conference introducing the company, you could be like, at Kit, we, you know, and then that makes sense, right? That makes sense. So we'll talk about a few alternate formulas because like I said, we started with sort of the white rice basic peanut butter and jelly, change out people to who you help, change help to a different verb if you want. And then there's a couple of alternate formulas I like a lot. The analogy, which is I'm X for Y. Okay. So I'm X for Y is where X and Y are both things that the person you're talking to knows, but they're typically not paired like that together. So it's not peanut butter and jelly.

Yeah.

So if I said, if I was introducing a startup and saying I'm building Pinterest but for guys, you can close your eyes and imagine what that is. It's not wedding dresses, it's leather bracelets and whatever. So in the intro version, you could say, we all know what a personal trainer is. We all know what productivity is. You could say, I'm a personal trainer for productivity. Personal trainers come to you. They work with you one-on-one. We're not talking about a group class. And productivity, you know, you could even carry the analogy through and say, you know, we all know what it's like maybe after Thanksgiving and we haven't worked out, we let ourselves go a little bit. Well, maybe you did that with your inbox or your downloads folder or your desktop or whatever, right? Your morning routine.

We know exactly what the service is. Yeah. When you go back to the idea of referable or portable or any of these things, then I'm either like, oh, I need that.

Yeah.

Or I know someone who needs that.

Bingo.

And then when I'm going to talk to, I'm like, hey, you gotta talk to my buddy Clay. He's a personal trainer for productivity. And it's one of those lines that as it even rolls off, I'd be like, "Get this." Yeah. He's a, you know, and you'd say it that way.

100%.

And people would be like, "Oh." Yeah. Either they would say, "I have no need for that." Right. "I'm God's gift to productivity." Sure. Or they'd be like, "Oh my gosh, that is the thing that I need more than anything." Yeah, so think of the two.

That's spot on. And being referable, you can even write that down right here. Being referable is one of the most important reasons why this works and one of the biggest benefits of the perfect intro. Is because of what you just said. There could be someone who's just as talented with productivity, but if their intro is this 4-page-long thing and the people close to them don't really understand what they do. Yep. Extra R there. That's right. Bonus R. Yeah, exactly. This personal trainer for productivity, once you hear it once, you're like, you could recommend that person all day. So you want to be the person who's recommendable.

Right.

Sometimes I'll tell people like, you know, we're all building our brands, building our email lists, website traffic, et cetera. And some people get into like, you know, if you're on Twitter at all, you get people pitching you for cold ads or a high-converting landing page or whatever. Most people have a phone, and in that phone there's at least 500 contacts, people you actually know in real life, friends, family, the circles of your actual relationships. If they all knew what you did as well as, Nathan's a personal trainer for productivity, you would probably have as much business as you want, especially for a lot of creators, anyone who's service-based who's trying to get their client book full. You probably don't need paid ads. You probably need the people that already know and want to send you business to understand. And it's funny because like I see people being proud on Twitter and social media of like how poorly their parents understand what they do, and I get it, but like Wow.

Your parents don't even understand it. Like, how does your target market understand?

It's like being proud of bad handwriting or whatever. It's like, or you could fix that and be booked out. It's up to you either way.

Yep, that makes sense.

So we go, the analogy to the transformation, the transformation is we turn X into Y. And this could be like, we do a lot, you and I both know a lot with like books and publishing and stuff like that. This could be as simple as we turn ideas into books. X is ideas, Y is books. If someone wants to write a book, you have books and you're writing another one, I have a book, I'm writing this one, like you have an idea, you want to turn it into a book. That is a good, perfect intro and a pretty good headline for a publishing company, right? Yep. So that's a simple example. Dr. Jeff Spencer, do you know Jeff Spencer? He was Lance Armstrong's chiropractor for like, 7 Tour de France victories. He didn't know about the doping and all that, but he would get his back and, you know, on the table and all that. He still works with, uh, champions and athletes and stuff. So he's got kind of like the entrepreneur aspect of his business and then also, um, athletes. So he can turn— he says, I turn— he uses I because it's just him— I turn athletes into Olympians. Do you see the, like, the clarity of that?

The transformation there.

The transformation.

And I can picture Olympians Totally.

100%. And you can picture an athlete that wants to be an Olympian, and you can probably picture his training methods too. It's also pretty ownable, sort of like we teach people to meditate at gunpoint. Yeah, it's very ownable, right? Yep.

That makes sense.

Have fun with it. Do you know Shawn Stevenson? Eat Smarter, Sleep Smarter?

Yep.

Amazing dude, right? Incredible, funny, incredible podcast. You know, if he follows the rules, it could say, I help people "Improve their sleep." Verb, noun. And then if he did a website, it'd be like, "Improve your sleep." Not terrible, but a little dry and boring. Shawn does anything with dry and boring. So he could say, "I put people to sleep." It's like, "What? You put people to sleep?" Or, you know, Shawn's ripped. He's got the abs on his website. He's probably got a picture of him shirtless. He could be like, "I help people in the bedroom." And if you meet Shawn on a plane, that's his perfect intro. He could say, I help people in the bedroom.

And you're like, oh, is he a sex therapist? Or no, he means sleep and—

Yeah, yeah, melatonin and dark and cold and all that stuff, right? Okay. So you can have fun with it. The point of this is because it's the beginning of a conversation, if you can start with a laugh or a smile, especially if this is on brand with your personality, right?

Yep. Yeah. And that carries the intrigue through. Yeah, I like it. Okay. What do you mean, how short can you go?

So you're in the world of creators. Let's think of some of the most sort of legendary folks that if there was a pyramid, they would climb up to the mountain to talk to Mr. Seth Godin or Mr. Gary Vaynerchuk, right?

Yep.

When people ask Gary Vee, "So what do you do?" He says, "I day trade attention." And he's been saying that for as long as I know, 15 years. And he's always said that. Sometimes he says, "I day trade attention and build businesses." But really, "I day trade attention." 12, 13 years after the first time I heard him say this, he wrote the book, "Day Trading Attention." So on brand and consistent. It's also fairly ownable in that nobody else says they day trade attention, right? So that combination of words, if you do hear it, you think of Gary. And then Seth Godin, also 3 words. That's 3 words. One of them's hyphenated, one of them's I. Seth has the same thing. He says, "I notice things." I heard someone ask Seth Godin on a podcast, they knew who Seth was, but they said, "For our audience, you know, explain to them what you do." And he says, "Well, really more than anything, what I do is I notice things and then I speak about them and then I blog about them and then I give speeches and write books and things like that." One of my favorite examples, not a Seth Godin one, but Mike Cessario who built Liquid Death, he noticed a guy who cracked a Monster Energy backstage at a performance, and he dumped it out in the can. And Mike Cesareo's sitting there, he heard, you know, it's a very unique sound, the crack of a new can. And so it kind of caught his eye, and he looked, and the guy dumped it out. So he's watching this blue liquid going to the garbage can.

It's like, what's that about?

Why would someone crack a new thing? And then he went over to the water thing, and he filled it up, and he took it out on stage, and then he jumped and performed and was doing his thing. And Mike Cesario said, what's that about? Why did he dump that out and fill it with water? Oh, he's sponsored by Monster Energy, but he doesn't want to be all monster jittery while he's doing his performance on stage. But he filled it with water, so he needs to drink water. There's no water that's cool. There's no water that's rockstar. There's no water that's edgy like that. And so it took him years. It wasn't like the next day he launched Liquid Death, but he noticed that water wasn't cool and built a billion-dollar brand selling a product that's the same water that's in all the rest of it.

One thing that I noticed about both of these, speaking of noticing things, is they represent Seth and Gary, like their personalities. Like day trading attention, it's frenetic, it's active. We're doing all these things, working 18 hours a day. We got all this stuff going. And I noticed things, you also get a visual I get this like something you're sitting on the park bench and you're like, oh, I'm not— Yeah. And so the ability to capture someone's brand in 3 words is remarkable.

And what Seth does, even though he's got 20+ books and all these different projects, those are all the result of him noticing something. So like you said, it's not just the energetic on-brand, it's like it matches their energy and their heart rate. It's also very ownable. Day trading attention. And now Gary just wrote the book, right?

Yeah, that's awesome.

So yeah, so why it works. Referable might even be number one, but it's memorable, it's referable, it helps you stand out. There's a lot of copywriters, you have a lot of copywriters and creators and stuff. If they don't write copy themselves, they work with copywriters that do it. Think of this as a headline for the conversation that you're about to have. And that headline is probably— it can be in person or it can be digital, right? It can be an actual headline on your, on your website, on your landing page, on your social media.

That makes sense. Yeah. So, okay, so what's this? Your case story? Yeah, it's another— it stands out to me. Yeah. Because I'm like, oh, you meant to write case study.

Yeah.

And it's like, no, you didn't. I know you're always intentional with words.

Yeah.

So it's not a typo, right?

Like day traders, attention. It's like, which is a good lesson. For your folks too. Name and claim. We try to make things— we want to stand out and we want followers and we want a different brand and to be the choice, and then we look over our shoulder and try to name things, you know, the Entrepreneurial Scorecard. Well, 27 other people have named something the Entrepreneurial Scorecard, so give it a name. So I call it case story. We all know what a case study is. A case study tends to be PDF, tends to be pretty boring. It's this study of a case that happened, right? Your story of your customer. But it's not a story. It's typically packaged up in a boring way. Often, not always. To me, your case story is an interesting story about a customer that you helped. Because when we do this, we teach people to meditate at gunpoint or any of these interesting, you know, I'm a personal trainer for productivity. You want your intro to prompt a question. Something like, "What do you mean?" or "How do you do that?" You gotta give yourself the permission to have it be not fully complete, not fully accurate, interesting, confident, right? Open that loop. And the whole point is you're opening, you're saying this thing that is not fully complete. So like, "What do you mean?" or "How do you do that?" And then you get to say one of the most magical questions in the world. They say, "What do you mean?" or "How do you do that?" which is a question. And you get to say a magical question. "Can I tell you a story?" It's one of the most amazing things humans can say to each other because nobody's ever like, "No, I filled up on stories this morning at breakfast. I'm good, thanks, bro." All we want is stories. All we buy is stories. Netflix is stories. Game of Thrones is stories. Billions is stories. Books are stories.

I think about like growing up in church, right? Sitting there as a kid, you're 12 years old, you're super bored, and the pastor's like, Let me tell you a story. And all of a sudden you're like, I'm paying attention now. Yeah. Or like one, Tim Graw spoke at Craft and Commerce.

Okay.

And he did this masterfully. First, he had no slides. He memorized his talk. Nice. And which I'm already just impressed by. But then when he goes out, he's like partway through, maybe, I don't know if he deliberately did it in a spot where he's like, oh, maybe this is like a little bit of a lull or something in the talk. Yeah. But he goes, I want to tell you a story about Nathan that I don't have permission to tell. So there's a few things. One, the intrigue of the story. Like everyone's immediately paying attention.

Yeah.

About Nathan, right? Like I organized the conference, you know, everybody knows me. And then the line of, I don't know if I have permission to tell this.

I don't know that I have permission. That's even better.

Or I didn't get permission. You know, any of these. These things. It's not that it's a story that I would be upset about. And it's not that if he asked, he thinks I wouldn't give permission. It's just that he very deliberately didn't say, hey, Nathan, can I tell this story? So that he could use this perfect copywriting line and get like complete attention.

Perfect. That's so good. And I bet you could hear a pin drop in the room when he said that. Oh, that's a great example. What do you mean? How do you do this? And then you say, "Can I tell you a story?" The answer is always gonna be yes or smile or nod or whatever. Nobody says no to, "Can I tell you a story?" unless they're literally running late for something. The structure of the story that you're gonna tell is, first of all, you're gonna tell a story of one of your favorite client or customer transformations. So somebody that your business has helped. Even if you've only ever had one client, if you're a freelance copywriter and you just started your creator business, and you've had one client, tell that story. But it doesn't have to be your biggest client, your best client, the highest revenue. Choose the one that's the most interesting sort of before and after picture, right? Okay. Imagine you're a personal trainer. This is like— it's not a story, a photo, right? Show somebody who was out of shape in some way and you helped them get in shape the way they want to be. That transformation is what we're trying to capture in this story. So the light structure for this is When so-and-so first came to us or first found us, they were, and now you might think they're gonna say, oh, they were terrible and then we fixed it. No, no, no. They were 99% amazing. They were so good at this. Then they did this. People loved their XYZ, but they had one problem. They were struggling, they were blocked. There was something that wasn't working. It's maybe 1% of their identity or 5%. And your product or service helped remove that splinter or remove that block from their success. So you're no big deal. You're just like, they were stuck in this way, so they worked with us and we were able to do this and this. And now, so it's like, you know, 48% about how awesome they were, but they were blocked, 4% about your product or service, 48% about how awesome they are now and they've taken off. So you want them to fall in love with who your customer was even before they found your product or service, and then you just help them remove this block. We're all humans, we all have blocks, we all have things, and we need tools and systems and people and connections to get through those. You were just, you know, Donald Miller will occasionally use the Star Wars analogy, and I think it applies here. You're Yoda telling the story of Luke Skywalker, the hero's journey, right? This is like a micro, micro hero's journey. When so-and-so first found us, they were amazing, they were doing all this stuff, but there was this one thing that wasn't quite working, And so they worked with us and we were able to help them, da da da da da. Then you tell the story of where they are today and their accolades and their success and their, maybe not even monetary success, maybe there's like, and now they're home with their kids and they're not pulling their hair out because of their business. Their business is smooth, it makes them the money they wanna make. So that's what we do. And you end the story with, so it starts with when so-and-so first found us, when your client customer first found us, They were awesome. They had this block. Now, oh my gosh, they're off to the races. Okay, that's what we do. And if you end with, so that's what we do, if you've told the story well, they're so kind of compelled or intrigued in the story that it hasn't been about you the whole time, and they're like, oh, that's what you do. And it just makes it— it just ties it up in a perfect bow.

We do a lot of this at Kit.

And I can tell because in your new studios here you got, uh, posters down the wall, which I love. And I think Every big company like this should, every company, highlight your people, highlight them on your website, tell the stories of the people that you help.

Yeah, our art gallery is—

And your new website, your art gallery, the hallways here.

So a creator on our homepage, her name's Nisha Bora. She, so I guess I should tell it before and after, right? In the format. Let me think if I can do this.

Should we do the whole thing? Should we walk through it?

Nisha is a vegan food creator. Okay.

Right?

So she's making videos, blogs, all of that about vegan recipes. And she built a successful business, was able to go full-time on it, and through that process just really hit a few specific blocks, particularly around sustainable growth and scaling it beyond just her.

Sure.

And so she came to Kit and we were able to help her build lead magnets for each of her YouTube videos, build automations so that when someone subscribes to her list, they could get her best content, you know, personalized to them. We were able to help her segment that audience, talk to them in the right way. And then she really needed a way to earn a more sustainable living than you know, pure advertising. And so we helped her sell a digital product, which is her meal plans on subscription.

Nice.

And so fast forward to today, she has grown her audience from 28,000 subscribers to 140,000 subscribers.

Wow.

She now has over half of all of her revenue— revenue is up like crazy— and half of it now is digital product sales of these meal plans.

Nice.

And then Her book came out and it debuted number 3 on the New York Times list.

Wow.

So that's what we do.

That's amazing. That's great.

No, the ending of that is so helpful.

That's super good. Yeah. So that's what we do. You can just, you can just use it over and over. And that's the first time you've told Nisha's story, right? And you can literally, you know, take the tape, write it out, clean it up, move it around. You get better at telling it. And I want to give people this ability, this I don't want everyone to leave with a perfect intro. I want you to leave with a tool set that's as easy to assemble as like red, yellow, green before you go into any conference. But we've talked a lot about the intro and not as much about the story. But start with the story. Start with, like, for you, it'd be like Nisha. And at companies, you have how many people who work at Kit?

90.

So 90 people can all have a favorite creator within Kit that they helped. Nisha plus 89 other stories, or anyone can choose whatever they want. And get a chance to tell those stories. So now you have 3 times a day, 1,000 times a year, 90,000 times a year someone's asking a kid employee, "So what do you do?" And now you have 90 people with not just interesting intros. The intro is great, but the whole point of the intro is to get to the story, tell the story of Nisha, and then, so that's what we do. So that's what we do.

Yeah, and I think about the scalability of that, 'cause like right now I've got team members at an event in London. They're at FinCon in Atlanta. —sure, you know, all around. And so if we get people, our team, trained on this and dialed in, then they go from being, you know, oh, I work in software, to SaaS.

Yeah, and these transformations all of the places, you know, social media, email signatures, even business cards. Business cards are an interesting thing right now because now even with phones you can do the whole buzzy thing or whatever. Everyone's like, why would I need business cards when I can just do that? Well, that's true if the goal of a business card is to transmit my basic information, right? Name, rank, serial number, phone, email. Yes, the phone is better at that, but there's a company called MOO. They've been doing cool business cards for a long time. The difference with MOO that you can get thicker, nice card stock or whatever, but the back of MOO can be 50 different cards. So take these different stories. So for the, let's just say for the kit business cards, a pack of 50 should be Nisha, it should be Pat, it should be James, it should be all the creators and highlight that you do. And then a little bit of their story, or, you know, it could be a testimonial. If you're a realtor, why wouldn't the back of your 50 business cards be the 50 best houses you've sold with a testimonial right next to it? Because back to like interrupting the pattern and creating a moment. When someone's like, hey, can I get your info? Can I have your card? You don't just say, here is my phone number and email address, because the phone does that better. But you can go, oh yeah, of course. You fan out your business cards and it's like, pick a card, any card, and they're all different, which is a pattern interrupt because nobody ever— who has business cards where the backs are all different, right? You walk around, you put your portfolio in your pocket. It's really magical to see.

Well, I could imagine that as a conference, even where someone's like, that's a great story. What other creators have you helped? And then I pull it out and say, actually, like, this is all that we do. Yeah. And I've got 10 right here. And like, oh, let me tell you about, you know, Bonnie. Let me tell you about James.

Or, you know, or you just let them chew the book here, you know, and you spread them on the counter. People love it. They love going through. Right. So where you can use it: website headlines. We talked about verb, your noun. Um, take the I help people verb, their noun, change their to your, just flip their to your. And you can use on a website So landing page, business cards, social media, and one intro touchpoint that a lot of people forget about is email signatures. So you've got 90 people. Those 90 people, I'm not talking about Kit sending out a subscribe, your customers who send out subscriber email newsletters. I just mean external emails that Kit employees send to vendors and to conferences and everything else. What if there was a linked thing in the email signature that said Nisha's story? If that was that employee's, if Nisha was her favorite story, James's story or whatever, and then that links to—

We bring case stories all the way through everything that we're doing.

kit.com/nisha/this/that. You guys do a great job of that already.

It's just taking— But that's a new touchpoint that we don't use. Sure.

And like, you can see how each individual employee gets to be like, well, yeah, I'm here because of people like Nisha, or everyone's got their favorite creators, right? Are our employees' favorite creators in their email everywhere else.

What's this, the two most powerful words?

Yeah, so to wrap up, it's you and your. So this is the your, because by using you and your, it's not free, it's not 100% off, it's not sale. You and your, because that makes it about the customer, not about yourself. So this is the difference between I'm a Kickstarter expert versus I help entrepreneurs fund their dreams, and then your, fund your dream. Makes it about them. So it really goes back to what's the noun that your customer wants verbed, and then what's that verb? A really useful exercise is to go through your entire website, landing page copy, email signatures, and look for every instance of I and we and things like that, like what we do, and try to rewrite it with you and you are talking about your customer.

'Cause that's going all the way back the 3 myths of introductions, the very first one, it's about you. Right. And you're saying, no, no, no, it's about who you help. And so you and your, like, brings you into that. Like, this is who we're helping. This is who it's about.

Right. Like you said, grow your audience is a good high-level one for kit, right? Yeah. And you can repeat the verb, your noun over and over so people really land with it. That's awesome.

I love this. This has been a complete masterclass in basically an hour. Where should people go to learn more about what you're doing? And we'll—

I'll put all this in a really nice, clean little document and we'll put it at clayandnathan.com. There you go.

There's even something in that, the custom domain. So clayandnathan.com, you should go check it out.

Clay, thanks so much for coming on. Of course. Thanks, brother.

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