Personal Branding Masterclass: How I Made $10M+ On LinkedIn - Chris Donnelly

I don't know anyone else who does what I do without any sales team.

What was revenue last year?

About $10 million.

That's the power of a personal brand, and Chris Donnelly has mastered it.

I got a billion views last year across my content. I now effectively have one strategy, which is I— Oh wow.

In this episode, he shares his exact content creation process, how he uses automation and delegation to scale, and why he can take 3 weeks off and come back to everything still running on track.

Ordinary entrepreneurs like myself can become extraordinary by building an audience. LinkedIn is like waiting for you to create high-quality content. It's very systemizable. Most of it's written content. You can do big batch work and create great content and then post it throughout the week.

Everyone's like, well, what's the thing that works in the algorithm? And usually what you see, it's like very high-quality content that gets people to stop scrolling and engage with it and stay engaged for a longer than normal period of time.

Exactly. I'm creating content for my audience that's so good that they want to share it with their audience, right? From simply doing that, I'm selling $10,000, $20,000 a week of consultancy.

If you could instill one or two systems in any creator's business, what would those systems be?

I think it would be—

that's amazing. Chris, you went on a wild ride of going from almost no followers on LinkedIn to over a million in 24 months.

Mm.

What did you expect to have happen when you started that journey and how did the expectations match reality?

I think, to be honest, the— it was very intentional, as in I remember at the time thinking I've just come off the back of like, you know, 10, 15 years of growing other people's audiences and growing businesses. And I was like, I can see the benefit that those people have had. I can see the benefit that you know, people that I've helped build audiences have gone on to become celebrities. And I was thinking to myself, well, there's not an amazing amount of good business content. And so if I could fill the gap, I feel like this could go quickly. And then actually it was a choice of like, do I want to post on Instagram or do I want to post on LinkedIn?

Right. How did you decide? That's so many creators that I talk to are like, okay, I'm— I've heard I should go all in on one platform, but like, I could kind of go between any of these three.

So I had a few like tiny pieces of insight. One was in my agency that I ran in my 20s, when we sold it, there was a stat which was over 75% of all our new business came from LinkedIn. And then in my health tech business, 80% of new clients came from LinkedIn.

Okay.

Half the staff did, and all the VC introductions did. And so I was like, it just feels like it's a platform that's slept on Instagram looked hard. Yeah, you know, and you had to be very video focused, whereas I was like a natural writer. And I said when I started on LinkedIn, I was like, I'll never do a photo, I'll never do video, I'll never do that stuff. Which obviously funny now, but it meant that I could just write a huge amount on the weekend and then post it throughout the week. And so it was— I thought it was easy to systemize.

Yeah.

And the payback window was actually quite quick.

Because everyone's already doing business and transactions on LinkedIn. So it's not like you're showing up on another platform, TikTok or YouTube or Instagram, and being like, hey, follow me for this great pithy wisdom and, you know, pay money or whatever. It's like, no, everyone showed up to LinkedIn in order to build relationships, to transact, to do business.

Exactly. And like, it was— I remember looking at the growth of LinkedIn, which was staggering at the time. There's like a billion people and 1% post. And I was like, wow, that is like opportune moment to like dive in. And I said to myself at the time, I was like, I'm going to do this intensely for 3 months and look at the payback window. And obviously by 3 months I was like, I have to go all in. I have to put a team on this. I have to like relearn to design everything because it was just—

It's interesting that you had this specific window. I've had Anne-Laure on the podcast who's also, you know, we're here in person for Craft and Commerce and she's another one of the speakers. And her whole thing is tiny experiments where you're saying for this fixed amount of time, I'm going to do this exact thing and I'm not going to judge it in the meantime.

Right.

She's a neuroscientist and she's like, I'm going to look at it as a scientist would like an experiment. And so you kind of did the same thing of like 3 months, we're just going to see what happens. And you got to the end and you're just like, okay, this is worth pursuing.

Absolutely. I mean, I had worked in e-commerce, digital marketing, conversion for so long that I was pretty obsessed with the idea of A/B testing things. And so when it came to LinkedIn, it wasn't like I was posting my thoughts and my feelings and like selfies and, you know, the occasional client win. I was like, what content is gonna get people to want to follow me? What content is going to educate people so they associate trust with me? And at some point I will be able to build a business off the back of that, right? And I think I was 3 months in and I'd gone from like 20,000 followers to I think 50,000 followers.

Okay.

And I was like, that's interesting, like it's fast growth. I obviously haven't fully learned it yet, but like where's the opportunity? And by 6 months I hit 80,000. And I feel like at that point when I locked in— and locked in, I mean like I really systemized creating hooks, I really studied other creators. Like I would study hundreds of other creators, and I would take a note of their following every day.

Okay.

At 9 AM every morning. And then I would look at which individual post drove the biggest followers before that technology was available, right? And so I was like, okay, well, it's the content on delegation, or it's the content on system creation, or on habits that's driving massive growth. And so in many ways, I took all the things I loved and all the things I knew would do well, and I went all in on that. And from 6 months and $80,000, I then got to $350,000 by the end of the year. And that's when people were like, that's the fastest growing account like in the world. And I was like, I didn't know that. And, uh, you know, all this other stuff. But the benefits started to be very significant at that point.

Yeah, that's amazing. You said this thing of 99% of people on the platform don't post, only 1% actually do. I think there's a lot of times as a creator that there's this very fine line between you and the 1%. Where something that I talk about is how like 90% of, out of everyone who has a dream, 90% of them say, oh, I'm going to consume content about it. 9% say, you know what, I'm going to not just consume content, I'm going to go do the thing. You know, I'm going to go hike this trail, you know, this epic trail, or I'm going to build the tiny house that I wanted to, or, you know, whatever cool thing. But then there's only just this 1% that posts about it. And what's interesting is the, that 9% is actually the hard part of say, of going from consuming to being like, no, I'm actually going to do it. You know, from like reading content about business to saying I'm going to start and run a business. And so you're, you're doing the hardest part there. And then the easier thing is actually saying, oh, and I'm gonna document the journey. Mm-hmm.

Right.

And then get you into this 1%. So you're like, you already made the jump from not doing anything to doing the thing. And like now just cross over this thin line. And what you're saying is on LinkedIn, it was just the ratios are extreme. And I see that, right? Because I go on LinkedIn and it will show me posts from 2 or 3 weeks ago. And even posts that I've seen before, which the algorithm is only doing that if they didn't have enough content to show me.

That in itself as a point, I think is so good, so well made. People really, really should focus on that. If the platform is showing content from 2 or 3 weeks ago, there's not enough content, right? Like, the algorithm needs more content to distribute. And so I still think that if you were to start on LinkedIn today, you would be early. And I find that again, like, really exciting in my position, in that I've been all in on it for 2 and a half years. It's very systemisable when you get, like, uh, most of it's written content, and so you don't have to be on camera the whole time. You can do big batch work and create great content and then post it throughout the week. And You would be shocked at the quality of the audience on LinkedIn for, from a business perspective. I have never seen it anywhere else.

What's an example of that where a time that you were shocked about the quality of the audience?

I think that the, the two early pieces of data is what I said earlier. So most of our business back before I took LinkedIn seriously, most of it was coming from LinkedIn anyway. Like I won Bugatti from LinkedIn.

Yeah.

When I was 29. And that only happened.

It's a pretty good client. That'll work. Yeah, exactly.

It's like, ah, we'll throw that logo on the website.

Yeah.

Exactly. Like, you get Bugatti on the logo. I think, I think in many ways that's— that case study and winning them at that age allowed us to be like, we're so legitimate, any luxury brand can work with us. But I had like those pieces of data. And then in stepping back from my health tech, which was like 33 years old, I think, I effectively went traveling with Lou and, and Solo because I was like, I've done 15 years of startups, I'm exhausted. I was doing the LinkedIn thing. And I was like, I should try and make some money when I'm away. And I'm a tinkerer, like an entrepreneur, you know, I love to play with things and try things out. And I put live a couple of slots in my diary that people could book me for to talk to them about, you know, building a business and growing on LinkedIn. And they just went every week without fail, no marketing, just like a link on my profile. And I suddenly was like, it's so interesting that from simply doing that, I'm selling, you know, $10,000, $20,000 a week of consultancy.

So people are just saying, hey, I'll pay you for a half hour of your time, an hour of your time, something like that.

And it was, it was anyone from— but it was really serious people, right? Like, it was entrepreneurs who were like, I think that personal brand would help my business. And I'm like, yeah, I think it would as well. Um, and here's some evidence. Yeah, I was like, the evidence is that you're here talking to me and this is my business now, right? Um, and it got to the point where I was charging something like $750 an hour. The demand was outstripping it continuously. And so I moved it to $2,000 an hour and it was still selling, right? Every week, every slot I put live was selling. And I was suddenly like, the power of this platform is just, you know, completely different to anything I've worked with before.

That's amazing. I want to dive into exactly what worked to build that because you've studied this I mean, you've taken the level of rigor that you've always had in your entrepreneurial journey and put it to this. It's not like, oh, let me just throw up a post and see how it works. But I want to go back to your entrepreneurial journey because I think most people see these creators come out of nowhere. 3 people that immediately come to mind. So you, Asahil Bloom, and Andrew Huberman of people who start, who have like an amazing level of success. Like Huberman, it wasn't that far into his podcast that he was topping the charts and all of that. And for Sahil, you know, he— we had a joke where, you know, I tease him. I'm like, Sahil, you think the creator economy was invented during COVID right? Because that's just when you found it, you know? Well, you know, but you get these insane growth rates, but it's usually from someone who has done an insane amount of work or has a huge amount of expertise already, and then they're showing up as a creator, right? So in Huberman's case, You know, he's already like, he's at Stanford, he's teaching all these classes, right? You know, he has decades of experience and all this credibility. He just wasn't public about it. And then in Sahil's case, right, he understands business inside and out. He's— everyone's like, why are you making so much more in your creator business than you would have ever made in private equity? He's like, no, actually, like, private equity was a pretty amazing— you know, he's like, uh, working insane hours, but like, he understands business inside and out. That's what I've seen from you is the, you know, the 15 years of startups. So why don't you start like, where did you get into entrepreneurship?

So on my show, I always talk about this, this with other entrepreneurs. It's just like, where does the entrepreneurship come from?

Yeah.

And I, I don't know yet because I haven't done enough episodes, but I sit here and I think to myself that the correlation of having entrepreneurship exposed to you at a young age is so significant in your belief in yourself that you can go on and do the thing. And so my dad was an entrepreneur when we were younger, which meant that I have a crystallized view of the fact that at all sports games during the week, no other parent was there other than my dad.

Okay.

Which is like crazy. I remember it. I used to play rugby at like a, uh, a school where we had Wednesday and Thursday, and then I played rugby on the weekend. My dad never missed a game, but he also was very successful. And so I remember being like, Dad's obviously worked out the code. Like, he's the one that's cracked it, you know? Like, he might not be the wealthiest, but he's got like freedom and choice and so forth. And so we were exposed to that very early on and he encouraged entrepreneurship. He would ask you, you know, how do you think this works? Or like, why do you think that worked? Or he would say this thing where he would almost parrot something someone had said to him growing up, which was, if you ever want to make real money, it will never come from having a job. It will come through owning the equity. And like, again, like it stuck with me growing up.

Those are pretty great things to have stuck in your head from an early age.

I mean, I would always say, you know, had it not been for my dad, none of us would be entrepreneurs. Uh, my older brother is an entrepreneur, which, you know, he's 3 years older than me, so that was a huge impact on me. Um, he was like, uh, he's like, uh, you know, a million startups, uh, uh, you know, every year he's releasing new ones. Like, he's had great successes, he's had ones that have failed, but he is fundamentally, you know, like, A-type entrepreneur. Like, I'm just gonna do this thing. Um, and then we started a— like, when I was younger anyway, I started selling things at school. And so, like everyone does, I was selling like, you know, laser pens. I was selling things that jumped off tables, watches that turned TVs on and off, and it was to annoy teachers. You know, I was— I thought it was funny to bug a teacher during class, and it was. And, you know, people would buy these things from me. I started selling them online, so I built my first website at 15, 16 type thing, which, you know, all of us kind of do. You know, we get into the playing around with websites, um, at that age, or at least that's our version of it. Nowadays it's kids playing with AI, right? Um, and I think at like 19, 20, my brother and I launched a company to help students go to university, and it was like a search platform, and it did quite well. Made some money, but ultimately kind of failed and kind of left me in a position where I had lots of digital skills, but I didn't have any money and had lost quite a lot of money on that previous business. And so I was like, hmm, I'm just going to build websites for startups and try and take a bit of equity and get paid and, and see what I do. And that was basically what I did in my part-time, you know, I built websites, I did social media marketing, I took equity in lots of different businesses, none of them worked. Um, and But I built this skill set which was, you know, idea generation, uh, how to market something, how to get a customer to buy something. And, you know, found myself in a position where when we came to graduate, I was making $5,000 to $10,000 a month, and the job I would have got in professional services was going to pay me $4,000. And I was like, okay, well, decision made. I'm going to start my agency. And then I started Vrr, but 21.

That's amazing. I mean, I did very similar things, probably introduced to HTML and coding at 14. And then, you know, on from there through college, paying for it, building websites for people. And then I got my first $10,000 web design project and I was like, wait a second, I'm here in college to learn how to make money, like build those skills. That's enough money. That'll work. And so I, you know, I dropped out of school and like you know, called my mom and was like, hey, I'm going to go do this instead. And she was very, very supportive of it. But just realizing like, oh, I've already learned the thing that I need to do here. But then those skills around, you know, web design and marketing and copywriting and all the stuff that you just learn through client services end up being insanely valuable.

I'd still say like my skill set is not too different now to what it was then. It's just I've deployed it and it's something I talk about a lot. Like I've deployed it in lots of different business models. And now I simply deploy it with a much greater leverage and a much greater asynchronous delivery as opposed to my 20s. I built a big marketing agency which bootstrapped. It was fucking difficult. It took 10 years, but got to 100 staff, biggest clients in the world. But we were a service business. You would come to us and you'd say, I want to do marketing for Aston Martin or Bugatti or these brands. And we would do it. And it was a great business. But the, the fact that you're always delivering for clients, I always found quite, quite tough. So when we had the opportunity to, to sell that, which was actually pre-COVID, I was like, okay, I think I can, I think I can sell this. And then obviously COVID sort of destroyed the business.

So did you— you ended up—

you sold, sold and completed the transaction before COVID No, so we were in negotiation with a company to buy us.

Oh wow.

Yeah, yeah, it's actually so crazy. But again, I, I actually really thankful it happened in retrospect because You know, at the time I think we were offered like $20 million to buy the business and I was like, huh, we can get way more than that. Um, and it was me that was putting off the deal. It was me that was forcing the deal back. Uh, and then I, we was skiing, COVID hit, the deal was pulled and I lost 80% of the revenue. I had to furlough pretty much everyone in the business and had to mothball the business for a whole year. Um, and so because you just didn't have clients coming in and spending money. Yeah, I mean, luxury brands were traditional. I mean, they did not really have big digital presences. Like, e-com wasn't even that big for luxury. And so it was a complete wipeout. And then I remember thinking to myself, like, for 7, 8 years I've run this from the outside incredible company, like beautiful brands, beautiful work. Everyone thinks I'm an entrepreneur, and like, that means a lot to me because I went a different path in life. And so I don't want people thinking I'm an idiot.

Um, who really does, you know?

Yeah. And, uh, got myself into a position where I had sort of a year off in COVID, reconnected with friends. It was an amazing time for me. But then after COVID, I was like, okay, I have to rebuild this thing. This thing has to come back. And so I went all in, like maybe the hardest I've ever worked. Um, you know, from home I started doing like webinars Um, this is still bringing Verb back to life. It's bringing Verb back to life. And we went from, you know, the 10 of us that were not on furlough— everyone else is on government support— um, we then came back to be almost twice the size we'd been before. Oh wow. In a year, because digital took off. Luxury needed digital. We were perfectly positioned.

2021, at least, I mean, here in the US, brands were spending a ton of money again. Like, they'd had this huge pullback and they're like, wait, Are we good? I think we're good. Okay. And interest rates were super low. And so, you know, it was growth at all costs.

Exactly. And so we had, we had this, you know, we're down here thinking we're bankrupt. I'm personally, I had no money. Like I'd never paid myself well because I always thought my money was in the company.

Right.

And then the company value was wiped out. And so I was like, okay, I have to build this back. And we went on an absolute tear. Like we didn't lose a pitch for like 6 months. We won everyone in the sort of luxury space we're doing. LVMH, all the car brands, so much e-commerce. And quite quickly it was like, okay, bring everyone back off government, but, uh, at the same time, let's, let's hire like crazy. And we just went on this tear. And then I had an offer come in through a private equity firm who were like, we want to buy 49% of the business for X million, you get to take this off the table, but go on and buy lots of agencies and do a massive buy and build. And I was very close to accepting it. And then I think at the end I was a bit like, I'm not passionate enough to do another 10 years. Yeah. And so I also thought, and I would say this to a lot of entrepreneurs, there are moments in time where you should take some chips off the table. And I was like, okay, I will sell and I'll be 30 and I'll have these skills and I can, I can go again if I want to. So, um, had a pretty competitive, uh, process and then sold the business to a company called Crowd.

Okay. Do you share any numbers of the exit?

Yeah, it's about a £25 million exit and it was a bootstrap business. So it was myself, Ben Askins, uh, who's my business partner, and we gave equity to the staff.

That's awesome.

Yeah, it was an awesome exit. It was an awesome journey and story. Like, no regrets.

Yeah. Was there anything that, uh, like how you changed as you related to money or, you know, any huge fun splurge that you did? After, you know, the money hit the bank account?

Funny question. Yeah. I mean, I'm not proud of this in any way, shape, or form, but I had one splurge and I felt like I needed it. But buying it in many ways showed me that I didn't and will never need it, which was I bought a Richard Mille watch. Okay. Like, pretty, pretty close after selling and for some reason, like, I bought it and I was like, this is gonna be amazing. Like, you know, wear everywhere and it would like signal, you know. And then I wore it on my like, uh, wedding day and I've never worn it again.

But you still own it?

Yeah, I still own it. Not— I don't own it out of choice. I obviously bought it close to the top of the market for watches, and so it's not worth what I bought it for. So I will sell it whenever, you know. Yeah, it's It makes sense to sell, but I think it was important. And I do think to an extent you kind of have to go through that. You have to make good money to realize you don't want good money in many ways. Like, it's nice to have, but you don't end up spending loads of money. I only spend money on holidays.

Yeah. I mean, it's a great thing to spend money on. Yeah, that's how I feel as well. I think there's something about like changing your relationship to money, making some of these big purchases. Like, I had a fear that if I made some big splurge purchase, that would be like the start of the slippery slope and I would lose my like bootstrapped, super frugal, you know, I can live on basically nothing mentality. And like that would go away and I would turn into something different, to someone different. And so it ended up like I would avoid spending money ultimately out of fear. And so it took a few big like splurges and usually travel-related to be something like, oh wait, no, I can do this and then still be the same person. And it's not like, oh, well now I always have to fly first class or, you know, whatever else it is and it'll be fine. Like I actually still have agency and can do all of that. And so then I felt like I understood myself better and had much more confidence after doing, you know, some big splurges.

I think that's true. I mean, I would say I'm much more confident person in realising that I didn't need money and these things to make me happy, whereas I thought originally maybe I did. And there's none to take away from the fact that I think making money— it's such a bizarre topic, but people seem to think it's bad. I think making money is a great thing. You give yourself incredible agency in life. But yeah, I mean, nowadays, if I'm honest, you know, I have investments and all the rest of it, but it's like my holidays might cost X, everything else in my life is down here. Like, I literally spend money on nothing. Apart from always nice holidays. Yeah.

I like it. You know what you're saying about making money being a good thing? It's such a good thing for you as an individual. Mmhmm. Um, and then also, we all do it by creating value for other people. So it just means that you created a lot of value for a lot of other people.

I mean, it's so funny that it is demonized so much, because unless you're like the one-offs, the 1% or whatever, who get it through doing something bad—

Yeah, you're doing corporate takeovers and selling it out. Well, like, which is a very slim—

but in the main, you make a lot of money by providing a huge amount of value, right? And so I feel like nowadays, in, in what I do now, like, I, I effectively help entrepreneurs to level up their businesses. Yes, it's expensive to work with me, but at the same time, the value that I'm delivering for it, I always feel very comfortable and happy with that decision. And so yeah, I think it's a great thing as long as you're providing the value.

Yeah, that makes sense. So, you know, we've got all this time of you as an entrepreneur and then you and working for all of the biggest brands and all of that. It feels to me like you then said, wait a second, I'm going to take the skill set that I've amassed over more than a decade and I'm going to be the brand.

Yeah. I mean, kind of the— there was a small pit stop in the middle where I kind of had the realization that I wanted to build personal brand and that I wanted to do that sort of stuff. And so I had started posting on, on, on LinkedIn, but at the same time we were also growing this company Lottie, my brother and I.

And what did Lottie do?

Lottie helps elderly people find care and it builds software for care facilities and care homes and home care and stuff. And that was a wild experience that kind of hit me out of nowhere because my brother, he's younger than me this time, Uh, he had said, I have this amazing idea. Our family had had a lot of problems in, in elder care, and I was like, okay, well, I've got experience, I know digital, he knows care, I know I would be able to raise money. And so we joined up, and, um, that business, I mean, it's a bit of a blur, but it went from him and I to about 50 people in a year and a $45 million valuation, and then In the second year, it went to 70, and like nowadays it's like 100+ people, you know, hundreds of millions of valuation, making, you know, millions and millions a year and providing a huge amount of value.

Yeah.

And so when we got, when we got to like 80, 90 people, you know, we were in this position where the company was doing really well, and I almost blinked and I was like, wow, where did 3 years go? And like, this was Will's mission.

Right?

You know, it wasn't my mission, but I was glad to help him and do it with him and build an amazing company together. But I sort of said to him over coffee, I was like, look, I mean, you're off. You're off. I mean, you're beyond off to the races, you know, you're killing it. And you'll go on to build— I believe my brother will go on to build a multi-billion pound company there. Um, and so I said, look, I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to take the break that I was meant to have after selling Verb, right?

Oh, because you just dove right in.

It was like date, like back to back. It was, you know, I was in my earnout And I started Lottie at the beginning of my earnout, and so it was like finishing Verb, starting Lottie overlapped, uh, and so I'd never had time off. And then I went backpacking solo, um, and it was in that time that I remember like I put 12 slots back up for one-on-one training with me at $2,000 a slot, and they sold out all of them within like a day. and I had 30 emails being like, can I book a slot?

Right.

And I was like, oh, this is interesting.

Yeah. Um, so yeah, you're seeing $24,000, $25,000 show up instantly and then another $50,000 or more of demand be like, hey, where's—

yeah, yeah. They're like, where are the slots?

You promised me slots.

I was like, I'm kind of in Guatemala at the moment, like traveling. I don't really want to be locked to my computer. Um, and it gave me like the, the principle that I think a lot of people don't understand about business is like, if you have enough demand and there's a limited supply, you control the price. Yeah. And so I was like, how far can I push it to test the demand? And it turned out I could push it quite a long way. Um, and that's kind of where I was like, okay, this is a really serious opportunity in Korea, so I'm going to finish out my travels and I'm going to go back and totally lock in on the idea of doing this. And so that was a year into building personal brand. I then launched a newsletter a year in. Like, I always think my only regret is not launching earlier. Yeah, because now it's like the— it's like, I don't know, it's like the piping, it's everything in the business. But I launched that, I came back from traveling, launched that, launched Instagram, and I was like, okay, I need to build a product that allows me to teach in a group setting. And then I started sort of investigating the cohort style business that I eventually ended up launching.

Yeah, let's dive into the cohort style business. And then after that, I wanna go back to like tactics for growing on LinkedIn specifically. But what's the business model today of how you go from the attention on LinkedIn, uh, all the way through to, you know, someone paying you for your, uh, for your program?

So I effectively create high quality, really well researched, very strategic content on how to grow. And that might be how to grow as a person, it might be how to grow in your resilience, it might be how to launch a startup, might be how to find an idea, how to validate. So it's very entrepreneurial content, and it's— there's a, there's a certain strand to it that's about personal brand, and that's what I release. And so much of it is just high-quality, free educational content. And so I have built this big audience. So I got a billion views last year across my content, which I now effectively have one strategy, which is I use the content to garner views and attention and build audience. I then say, if you want to go deeper on this, then subscribe to my newsletter. And my newsletter, it's once a week, sent on Sunday, very entrepreneurial, very tactical, like how to build, how to grow. And from there, I do a Thursday evening webinar no matter where I am in the world. I did it this morning because it's normally my evening, so I did it this morning from the hotel. Wherever I am, I will do a webinar and 2,000 to 3,000 people turn up to the webinars. And I will do some form of topic that is either interesting to me at the time or specific to personal brand or business. And at the end, I basically say to anyone who's ever been on one, I say, look, if you're going to do one of my cohorts, they are incredibly hard work. They take up a huge amount of your time. But if you put in the work, you will transform in 10 weeks. And then that's the only plug and that's it. And I have no sales team. There's no follow-up. There's no anything. It's just you sign up or you don't.

And so people sign up there on the webinar?

Yeah.

And then are the cohorts like open and close?

Uh, yeah. So the model is— and I think it's really, it's really important to understand this in that people don't buy something, people don't buy things unless there's like a real reason to buy it. And so I always ask entrepreneurs like, why would I buy your product today and not tomorrow? Right. And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, that's often the challenge that you have is like, how do you get someone to buy now? And so the thing with the cohort model is that we do 4 10-week cohorts a year and that's it. So if you miss it, you miss it, and then you have to start again in like 4 months' time. And so people are— people will self-select whether that time of the year works for them. And then sometimes I'll take a break, and so it might be a 6-month wait for the next cohort. And so that, that urgency pushes people to sign up.

Yeah, that makes sense. We had that in the early days of growing Kit where, you know, I did a lot of direct sales to recruit people onto the platform, but it was exactly what you're saying. It's like, oh, you can— I could sign up tomorrow or I don't know, next month, next year. Like there's not really— and you're like, well, I'll give you— you're trying to like add scarcity in some way. And they're like, I don't know, next month sounds fine, you know? And then webinars was the thing for us that we— it gave us an event to market and drive everyone to. And then through a bonus or, you know, something, we could get it where it's like, no, it is genuinely way better for you if you sign up today, you know, or, you know, part of this, this mini launch basically, instead of just leaving it open-ended.

Yeah. Because if it's open-ended, especially with, you know, software product, I'll just sign up next month. Yeah.

Or the month after, which rounds to never.

Yeah. Which rounds to never. They could discover a new product. Yeah. Whatever it is. And so a lot of the time historically, I've been advising authors And so you have that perfect thing with an offer. It's like, I want them to buy my book right now. And the person's like, oh, but at some undefined point in the future.

Yeah.

And so authors then release, you know, accompanying value adds with the book, but then they leave them open forever. And so it's like, again, I could just get the value add in a year's time. And so you have to really— to your audience, they have to understand that when you say something, you mean it. Whereas like with the author, they say you can only get this thing now, and then next month they're giving it away again. You've got to be very, very careful that people will trust what you say.

Right.

And will, you know, will act on it. Yeah.

I think Alex Hormozi, he did a huge webinar for one of his book launches and he had, he hadn't done something like it before. And I think he had pushing like 100,000 people watching live. It was insane. But the thing that he really wanted people to leave with, obviously he wanted them to buy his book, right? That's what it was for. And he put in all this extra value and people thought that he was going to sell something for like, hundreds or thousands of dollars. And ultimately it was like, buy the book in like these little packages and get all this for free. But he was like, you cannot get this, you know, these additional values unless you do it right here live on the webinar. And he just said like, I am here to train you that I mean what I say and you should show— if I do something live, you should show up for it. And like, you're going to, you know, there's going to be tens of thousands of people that email me afterwards say, oh, I, school drop-off, whatever else, I missed the thing and I wasn't there live. And he's gonna be like, cool, well, I hope, you know, when I do another book, maybe in a year or two, like, I hope you make that one.

Yeah. And it's, you know, he, he's a master of the, the game. And I think that it's important, it's important to be so honest and so transparent and, and then keep your word to your audience. Because when you tell them you have a business or you have a product or you're going to do something, if they don't believe you, then the likelihood of building more trust is Right.

And you have to follow it up because there's so much fake scarcity.

Yeah.

Like we've been running Craft and Commerce for 7 years now and this is the first year that we've sold out and people are like, oh, I know you're sold out, but like, hey, can I still grab a ticket? I'm like, no, we're actually just physically at capacity in the building.

And obviously we're here now. And so I was at the event last night and I'm speaking tonight. It is packed. It is like packed. And so you couldn't get more people in. Right.

Yeah. And but I think everyone's used to fake scarcity and they're just like, oh, you're, you're saying that.

And it's like, yeah, they're like, yeah, exactly.

A little wink there. And it's just, it's not. And so finding those ways to be really transparent and authentic and then, and put in actual scarcity that matters. Yeah, I think it's important. Okay, so diving into the business model, what's the price point on the, on the program?

The flagship program, as it were, is the Creator Accelerator. And it's 10 weeks long. And in that time, I will effectively be training entrepreneurs how to build a personal brand.

Yep.

With the benefit of, you know, improving and growing their business, which you learn effectively about LinkedIn and newsletter in that 10 weeks. And alongside that, we will also tell you how to grow on other channels, but the main focus is LinkedIn. And so it's like 50 out the top 100 people on LinkedIn came from our programs, which I think is— that's pretty staggering. You know, the fastest growing female creator in the world came from my first cohort.

Yeah.

Um, and so it's $6,500 for the 10 weeks. And then we do have another program which is the Digital Business Accelerator, and that is $10,000 for the 10 weeks. And so typically for that though, I don't really market that. That's to— that's to people who are super serious because I want— like, it's amazing when you get, you know, a group of 7, 8-figure entrepreneurs together because they gel and they vibe off each other and they push each other, this competitiveness. Whereas if you were to mix up that group with everyone, it wouldn't work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The stat on basically half of the top 100 LinkedIn creators coming out of your program is pretty insane.

Yeah, it's mad. It's completely mad.

But it also goes to show— Like, on one hand, it's a very competitive space.

Yeah.

On the other hand, it's still just not that competitive. And it's like this weird duality where I'm like, The number of people that I see who take it really seriously, who are growing like crazy, is, is wildly high.

Yeah, I mean, I was lucky in— I mean, you say lucky like I chose the platform because I thought it was early, but I was lucky that my assumptions were correct because a lot of time you can make assumptions and they're wrong. But I was able to be a bit casual when I came to the platform, you know. I was, I was able to make okay content, whereas now everyone has realized that you can build huge wealth off the back of LinkedIn, right? So it has completely changed the game. Like, you're now up against professional content creators who have teams and systems and processes and researchers, and they're making, like, they're making textbook-level content every day, which is a completely different gear to when I started. And so yes, it's, it's, uh, it's still, it's still a huge opportunity, and I think that The thing that I think is most fascinating is ordinary entrepreneurs like myself can become so much greater. You become— you can become extraordinary by building an audience, right? And so I, I talk to entrepreneurs all the time, and if you were to ask business owners who, you know, what is your greatest challenge, they say new business. And so always leads and new business. And so a normal ordinary entrepreneur, if you want to make your business go faster or better or stronger or more profitable, get more high-quality leads. And LinkedIn is like waiting for you to create high-quality content. So like, if you don't take it now, I do think like all platforms, it will become saturated at a point. And so it's like, you should go all in now.

What does it look like to go all in?

I mean, it's looked different at different times. Um, at the beginning I did everything. So I was, you know, writing the hook, the body text of the post. I was writing the CTAs. I was creating all the imagery. I was making carousels and infographics. And that basically meant I was spending 2 days out of the week fully just on LinkedIn, fully on LinkedIn. And that was the content creation. And then you've got to be quite present in engaging people, right? If you ever want to build trust, then you have to have a, a rapport and, you know, Discord course with your community and your audience. And for me, it took me a couple of months to work it out, but after a period I realized that what people were missing was high-quality content, you know. And especially in the era of AI, everything's become easier, volume has become easier, but in some ways it's taught people to be quite poor at content creation. The example I always give is, uh, so I live in London, and whenever I go around London with my dad, he knows every street with no phone. He knows every street, everywhere he's going, he knows. I know nothing, and it's because I grew up with Google Maps.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, we don't—

we don't memorize phone numbers, we don't memorize directions.

I don't know my wife's phone number, it's never changed. She's— for 13 years she's had the same number, I don't know it. And so, but the same thing is happening with content. So because all the AI tools are out, people are making what I would consider like 80% quality They're not putting the news—

you can do 80% quality in 30 minutes.

Exactly. And so whereas me, I was like, okay, I'm going to create the best content in the world on personal brand growth, business growing, startup scale-ups, delegation, automation. And so I was like paying researchers, I was doing hours of research, I was creating unique intellectual property and frameworks for my content. And I remember, I remember the first post that exploded and it got 24,000 likes in a day, which was obviously crazy. And it was a new style as well. And I'm gonna come on to why that's so important. It was a cheat sheet which didn't exist at the time, right? Uh, and it was, it was exploring all the different methods of productivity improvement. And so 24,000 likes in a day, I gained 20,000 followers that day. I was like, that's wild. I was like, that is wild.

Okay, that worked.

I was like, okay, that worked. And then I had lots of other stuff on that week, and I was like, I'm canceling everything. I'm like going into my own lab, headphones in, and I just made so much high-quality content in that style, this new like cheat sheet style. And that's when I, you know, I went from 80,000 to 350,000 in the back end of that year. Because what I realized is that with all social media platforms, the platform wants the— as in LinkedIn want the platform to be new and interesting and different continuously, right? And so they prioritise different types of content. And I realised that the longer that someone dwelled on your content, the more it's likely to be distributed. Yeah, it sounds like—

it's like watch time on YouTube.

It's like watch time on YouTube. Exactly. So like, I had that insight, and then I was like, anytime someone posts a carousel— and I would crunch the numbers myself in Excel, and I would take other people's content manually, pre any of the tools— I was like, carousels are like 7 times a normal post. I'm just gonna do carousels every day.

Well, what I think someone would assume, oh, LinkedIn wants more, some product manager at LinkedIn wants more carousels. And so they have adjusted the algorithm to be like, carousels are good. And I don't work at LinkedIn, so I don't know what's happening exactly. My assumption is that they're saying time on site and time on posts and all of that is good. And carousels happen to be very good at driving that because you're like swiping through it. And so everyone's like, well, what's the thing that works in the algorithm? And usually what you see, it's like very high quality content that gets people to stop scrolling and engage with it and stay engaged for a longer than normal period of time.

Exactly. And I think that that, that was like broadly my insight at the time. And so I was crunching all this, this data myself manually, which when, when eventually like when eventually my account became big and like, you know, years later people would be like, how did you grow so fast back then? And it's like, I put in more hours than everyone else on the 1% of everything, right? Like I had, I had like sheets and sheets of the best hooks I'd ever seen anywhere, sheets and sheets of, um, pre-validated content, which is a topic I talk about a lot, which is like, I want, you know, if you're an entrepreneur and you come to me and you own a marketing agency or something like that you need to design your content strategy. So it's like, what, what would your client want to read? They might want to read about marketing strategy, they might want to read about paid marketing, they might want to be organic, they might want to see historical marketing or psychology of marketing. And so you have to start piecing together your personal brand. And for me at the time, I was like, okay, I'm deeply interested in loads of things, but what content already works? What content has easy lift? Like, I don't want to push things uphill. I want to like be in the flow. And so I designed my personal brand around 6 topics that were already super successful. And I was obviously like caught the AI wave. I learned in public. And so I remember posting and being like, I'm going to become an expert in AI over the next 60 days. And my audience just came with me on that journey, right? And by 60 days I was an expert and everyone was like, this content has been the best content of the year. Um, and so for me, like, pre-validated content was huge. Finding things that have already worked, putting your own spin on it. I think the action and the habit— you said this in your talk last night— like, there is no substitute for the consistency of this, of this stuff. Like, you know, you've built a business over 13 years, or, you know, like, if you were to look at your year one self, like, it didn't look great, you know. And like, so comparing your year one self to Nathan Barry, like, that's, that's a losing game. Um, and so building the habit of posting every day, building an audience that expect to receive awesome content every day, these things became like cornerstone for the teaching. And so I then wrapped that content, you know, uh, system into the program. And my greatest hope is that entrepreneurs can do it without it taking over their life, right? I, I bet we'll see it when we're here at the conference, but like around lunchtime you'll see loads of people like on their phone commenting and all this sort of stuff, and it's because they haven't systemized it, and so they've let it take over, and therefore they're not leveraging it. In a way, it's taking all of their time. And so I try and teach people about like systems, building micro teams. Like my keynote tonight is like how to build a creative business as an entrepreneur. So like, how do you understand, you know, building teams, delegating, whereas creators tend to be more do everything themselves. Yeah, they often came from being a freelancer, and so they're bringing a freelancer mindset into it, and they have that mentality of, I don't want to spend money because I want to make profit. And it's like, okay, you've got to spend a little money to make a bit of money, you know. Um, so yeah, that was the, the, the, the sort of genesis of, uh Yeah, I love that.

If you could instill, like, or install one or two systems in any creator's business related to, you know, like growth on LinkedIn or another social platform, what would those systems be?

I think it would be don't make the content live.

Okay, so I shouldn't just, you know, pull up X or LinkedIn and, you know, type it on the fly.

Like, definitely not. And like, I know a lot of people who make their content first thing in the morning. And I'm like, I find that really challenging as a concept. So I do mine in like fixed batches.

I do 3 hours, 4 hours.

Yeah, so I'll do ideation only, I'll do post-writing only and design briefs, and then I'll do approvals. So it splits into 3 specific batches, which means that like if you're doing ideation headphones in or walking— I do a lot of like ideating while walking. Yeah. Um, and you just— because you get such better ideas You can then take them through into the writing and then take them through the design. And the other thing I would say is like surrender the posting of it to someone or something because maybe it's an automation or maybe it's a VA. But the first thing in the morning I want to do is work on the hardest challenge in my business. I don't wanna distract myself on social media with all these like bizarre dopamine hits and comparisons to other—

Where you're like, also where you're like, wait, what am I even here for? Yeah. And like 20 minutes later you're like, I showed up here to post my LinkedIn post for the day or my Instagram post. And you're like, wait, it's like, I even forgot that.

Exactly. But I've seen my competitor got 10 more likes than me and I'm like, oh, you know, like you don't want that. You don't want that energy and you don't want that dopamine hit like that in the morning. You want to do your best work in the morning and then have a system in place that posts your post that day. And if you want to, you can jump in and do some commenting maybe, or you can have a team that support you in doing most of that work. Themselves. Because as we know, like, nowadays, if you're trying to scale something, you could use something like Delfi and just pull all of my, you know, thousands of social media posts, my Notion database, you know, millions of hours of me on video, and you can just make me.

Yeah.

And that's what we did.

That's wild. Yeah, I think both those systems make a lot of sense. So on this show, we do two types of conversations usually. Uh, one is kind of this expert interview that we've been doing, and then the other is like a coaching style episode where usually there's an entrepreneur at some level and trying to achieve a result and we'll get up and, and coach through it. I want to do that, but in reverse. Hmm. So you have, so much of what you do is helping entrepreneurs who are running successful businesses.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Grow personal brands.

Yeah.

You know, particularly on LinkedIn. Uh, I've got a personal brand that's done well, but I'm, I'm in this position of you know, spending 50, 60 hours a week building a company. And then also over here, I know the power of personal brands and I know that a professional creator, like a lead of a professional creator, is probably worth more to me than maybe anyone else on the planet. When you think about the value of them being in Kit, in the creator network, and, you know, I co-own an agency with Sahil Bloom and Shane Martin called Paperboy, which I've worked with for a long time. Yep, exactly. And You know, and so all of this, right? And so I'm thinking, well, you know, I have to get very serious about building my personal brand, particularly on LinkedIn, but it can't consume my life because exactly, you know, I've got a— we're pushing $50 million a year in revenue from Kit. And so I like that needs to be the focus. And so I'd be really curious what advice and coaching you would have in that situation of like, I've already picked LinkedIn as a platform, already starting to double down on content. Our mutual friend Daniel Priestley, you know, he's someone who has had all this content for years and now he's really, really starting to blow up as he, he brings it out. And I feel like I'm in a similar situation to that. So I'll stop talking and hand it over to you.

I would agree. I'd say you and, you and Dan are similar. I had lunch with Dan the other day and we were talking about his, his, you know, he's talked about personal brand for 10 years or something. And yet his personal brand has only really exploded recently. And he said to you, didn't he? He was like, I'm just borrowing other people's audiences. Yeah. And that's the, you know, his stylistic decision that his own content probably wasn't breaking through, but now it is because he platformed it.

Right.

And so, you know, Diary of the CEO, Ali, he's been on Chris Williamson's podcast recently. It's a strategy that I'd never really thought of, you know, but he had such, he had such good ideas and intellectual property that were unique to him. That people want to hear, and that's why the videos do really well. And in podcasting, if you're, you know, this is my second podcast ever.

Yeah, you've, you said the last time you've been a guest on a podcast, the first time was like many years ago.

5 years ago I did a podcast for a dyslexia and ADHD podcast. They were like, we want to launch it. I have dyslexia and ADHD and I don't really talk about it very often. And so I did their first episode to help them get going.

But I don't know, this is your second time being a guest on a podcast.

It's wild. I mean, I run my own show, and so I just don't— I've never got around to it. But I think, yeah, Dan's an interesting, uh, an interesting one. Dan Priestley was in with me in January 2023. Daniel Priestley, Simon Squibb, Eric Partaker, Dan Murray, and Tim Amu. Yeah, the 6 of us didn't know each other, and we joined a WhatsApp group together which Eric Partaker put together. None of us had a LinkedIn following. Barely any of us had any followers. We're 2 years on from that moment now. Simon Squibb might be one of the biggest entrepreneurs like on the planet in terms of viewership. Priestley, again the same thing. Tim Armoo, huge audience. Eric Partaker, same as me, right? Massive LinkedIn following.

Yeah, massive newsletter as well.

Massive newsletter. Um, and then Dan Murray, like big personal brand as well. And I think that's like, if you find a good group of people who want to do the same thing partner up and get it done.

One quick thing on that. People hear stories like that and they're like, well, I'm not friends with Simon Squibb or Dan Priestley or whoever else. And I have a story like that of, you know, my like core group includes people like James Clear and all of that. But the key thing is we formed a core group before we were anyone. And we built each other through this whole process. So it's not like, okay, shoot, how do I go look at the keynote speakers at this conference? "Try to become friends with them, and even though they have a following or influence like 100 times mine," it's like, no, that's not it at all. You find people who are at your level, who have similar goals, and then you pour into each other, and then you end up in the situation where we're like, "Oh, yeah, it worked for all of us." It's wild.

But, like, yeah, to your point, like, you wouldn't— You wouldn't have thought to team up with Dan Priestley, Simon Scribe, Tim Armoult, and Eric Parton. I mean, Eric had, like— 17,000 followers on LinkedIn from being in business for 20 years, right? He had no following, and yet he was like, guys, I think we can do this together. Like, he was a big motivational force. Um, but I suppose to your point about the systemization of personal brand, I adore your content, and it's super technical in many ways. Like, I think it's— yeah, you know, it's the sort of stuff that I love watching and listening to, and, and it really makes me think. And I think to an extent you would probably need to be crystal clear about what it is that you talk about so that you could create a system so your team could do 80% of the work. And so for me, it's like I talk about AI startups and scale-ups, I talk about, um, personal brand, I talk about digital businesses, and I talk about, um, like leadership and culture. They're, they're the things I talk about. And we were able to synthesize effectively my 5 pillars the types of posts I do and what I would talk about within those pillars. And so the team are really able to do 80% of the work, right? So like ideation, I would say nowadays I'm heavily involved in, and I'm heavily involved in approvals, right? I don't do the middle part anymore. My team does the writing, the creating, and I just approve and give feedback. You're the same. Like, you would have to be very, very clear about what you wanted to talk about And then you'd have to get into the habit of posting more frequently than you do. Yeah.

Grace, who is the head of marketing for Diary of a CEO and a lot of, you know, Flight Studio and a lot of what Steven does, we were having dinner when I was out in London visiting you. And there's just this funny moment where, you know, Haley on my team was like, hey, Grace, pull up Nathan's social profiles and like, just give it a little criticism. And she's like, and she pulls it up and she's like, is this, uh, like an example of a carousel. She's like, is this, you know, what you usually post? Like, yeah, that's one that I just posted. And she goes, says 5 days ago. In my world, that doesn't count as just posted. And I was like, yep.

I mean, that team, you know, the— I mean, because so Steve— I mean, I don't know Steve, but we're similar age, both ran agencies in our 20s, and he got on the personal brand hype way before. You know, people would say like he became famous, but it's like, no, he, he engineered becoming famous with very, very tactical work. But they post like 2 or 3 times a day.

Yeah.

On every platform. The volume.

But, but to your point of like increase the frequency, all of that, what, what are the other things that, you know, as you're coaching entrepreneurs through building those personal brands that you would really emphasize? Or you can make it very specific to me if you want.

Well, I thought one of the best pieces of content you ever produced was the Creative Flywheel, um, the essays.

Yeah, everything from there, which I don't have much on LinkedIn about it.

It was exactly— yeah, I mean, that's where you're going. That's kind of where I'm going with it. So a lot of your stuff is like deeply understanding the mechanism with which you turn organic traffic into deplatformed, like, super fans, right? And I would say that so much of my strategy was built off reading your essays, and yet that stuff is not on LinkedIn. If that stuff was on LinkedIn, the dwell time on that stuff would be so much greater than most other content because it's, it's depth. And so your challenge would be, once you exhaust all the essays and stuff that you've created previously, a bit like Daniel Priestley is doing nowadays, he's putting all of his 10 years of writing onto social, you would then be faced with, I have to create new content, and you would just have to find a way of creating as good a content now as then, as the library. But now you make $50 million in a year, and I don't know what you're making then, but not that, you know. Yeah, exactly. So it's all about, you know, amazing team. And that's why I think that, you know, I teach entrepreneurs how to scale their creator side. Teaching creators to scale to be entrepreneurs is very different because they have to learn the opposite thing to each other, you know.

Yes. Oh yes.

Like, they are— they're both good at the thing and the others, then the other side is bad at the other thing.

Right. But when you combine those two skill sets, the leverage is absolutely insane.

Yeah. I mean, it's what I'm going to talk about tonight in the conference to an extent, which is like, I feel like entrepreneurs are very good at spotting rising tide moments. So the most famous of all is like Jeff Bezos, 1994, web statistics, 2,300% a year growth for web usage. He's like, okay, well, I should build a business in that. Builds Amazon. Yeah, huge blowout.

He didn't even— he doesn't know what business. He's like, I have to build a business on the internet.

Yeah, he thinks probably an easy product. Books are easy, fit through doors, you know, easy packaging. And then goes on to build effectively like e-commerce of the future. Mobile phones, 1985. By 1990, there's like 25 million. The App Store, you know, like, oh yeah, 2 years to 50 billion downloads or something. No, 50 million downloads. It's like If you can get— if you can spot where these, these, you know, consumer trends and technological trends are going and position yourself there, that's sort of the skill of entrepreneurship, because they're then able to pull teams around them and they're able to delegate and systemize, whereas creators burn themselves out on the business side, right, because they don't know how to create a system around their, around their, um, around their personal brand. But they, they could do a lot to learn from each other. And I sit in the middle of those two camps, so I spend a lot of time in the entrepreneurship world, and I spend a lot of time in the creator world, and I see, I see the inspiration in both.

Yeah, I like that. Okay, I want to push you. Let's get really specific, because I think the creator flywheels examples, uh, there's not a lot of people out there talking about flywheels. I do have really a lot of them, but like, what are the, what are the specific formats or types of content, or how would you do the hooks around flywheels, you know, if we wanted this to really grow on LinkedIn?

The most important thing to get our heads around right now is that the platform will have a state today that will be different in 2 months, right? And so the advice is always going out of, uh, it's like out of style. It's going out of style. So a few years ago, I invested in a company that does data for LinkedIn.

What's the name of it?

It's called SayWhat. Yeah, and it helps people write and all the rest of it. And I invest in that so that I could produce a report 4 times a year on the algorithm. And so at the moment, right now, carousels perform 2 times better than any other piece of content. And then it's infographics and cheat sheets second, text and photo third, videos around there. LinkedIn are going to push video heavily and they have been for years and it hasn't quite worked. But if you're posting high quality content, like if you took the creative flywheel stuff and made it into a carousel, that's your best bet, right? The other things I'd say is like the hook is about, um, it's about doing exactly what it says. It's pulling someone off the feed. Like if you're looking down the feed and you cover the rest of your posts and just read the hook, is that good enough to stop you, right? And so I say to people like, it's not the algorithm, like your content is shit, you know? And so like the, the, you know, you've got to be really harsh. You've got to look in the mirror and say, is my content good enough that it would stop me in the feed? And if it's not, then you have a content problem, right? And so I would say that, you know, your content would be around conversion, it would be around growth, it would be around the tactics for deplatforming. Like, you could probably make an incredible brand around the insight that I have 1.1 million followers on LinkedIn, and on an average day I might get 3 or 4,000 likes. Okay, like, where is my audience?

You know, right?

I can't reach them. With my own audience. And so I find that the, the reason I regret not starting a newsletter earlier is that the way I see social media is it will always change. And so I should do everything I can every single day to take as many people off social media onto something that doesn't have an algorithm. Because the algorithm is both useful because it spreads the word, but then it constricts you. I can't even talk to my own followers, right? And so I think you could make amazing content on that. And that would be very aligned with your business.

Yeah. Yep. I think that makes a lot of sense because then it's just the value of email and, you know, which is valuable both to me and to the creator.

Exactly. Yeah. Nice value trade.

What about like, as you, what you're seeing, you know, to bring people off of the platform, things like, yeah, on Instagram using, you know, DM automation, that's, you know, comment flywheel to get the many shots.

Yeah.

Yep, exactly. Does ManyChat work on LinkedIn? No, no, they don't have that. Is there anyone that automates that, or is that really a manual?

There's been a few at the moment. I would say no, it doesn't mean that they won't be one. LinkedIn, a bizarre company, they're not particularly great at the moment technologically and supporting that stuff, right? So for example, I just take the view that I want to do that stuff badly enough that I pay a VA to go and reply to all the comments. Okay.

And just DM everybody.

DM everyone. Agonizing. But, you know, if it's— if you're building a really good business, paying a VA, you know, $500 a week or something to do that work is worth it.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. But those things of like those comments are counting as engagement that's feeding the algorithm of that post.

Yes. A lot of people do that style. I mean, I wouldn't say that I necessarily do that style a lot. I do something slightly different. But you will have people doing like 50 best GPT prompts or, you know, the best way to design on Canva or, you know, the best sales tactics, and it'll be like comment sales and you'll get it. And yeah, the post will get, you know, 300 likes, 1,000 comments, and the post will get like pinged out continuously. I think that that is— people are getting tired of that, okay, as a strategy. But what the strategy I've always taken— and it's so funny, last week I sat down with one of the biggest creators in the world and he was like, I can't make LinkedIn work. And I was like, yeah, but your content is lightweight. It's like, uh, you know, when you're posting inspirational quotes all day, how can you expect someone to buy into your business, right? So I was like, why don't we make really in-depth educational experiences for your audience? He did it, and he's now getting like 2,000 or 3,000 subs a week on newsletter. And it's like, okay, LinkedIn is working for you now, right?

But you've got to post depth.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's always been my approach. Like, uh, so many of the things that I've written are like these long essays, you know, it's 4,000 words diving into a full concept, which you can absolutely do a light version of that, which is still gonna be 5 times the depth or 10 times the depth of average content on LinkedIn.

Yeah. And I think that the more that AI becomes, you know, used and these sort of AI image generating tools are used, the nuance, the intellectual property, the depth of your content is what will make you stand out. So no one really grows as fast as we grew in our first year on LinkedIn these days, but we're still some of the fastest growing accounts, my, my friends and I. And I still think that people will be like, oh, it's because you like comment on each other. And it's like, guys, if you think that's the thing, like if you think that is the, the tactic or the strategy that gets our accounts to do better, then like you, you fundamentally don't understand the value exchange with your customer. And so also I would say to your point with James Clear, which I find so amazing that he was in your group before he was James Clear, it's like if you back your friends, then you support them in everything, you know? Like, if my friend was opening a lemonade stand, I'd go and support it. Like, me commenting on a great piece of content they've made, like, if that's the hill people are going to die on, then, you know, in entrepreneurship, you take every opportunity, every angle, every chance that you can get to grow your business, right? And yet when it comes to to social, people seem to have this like, uh, you know, suddenly for the first time in their life, they're the most authentic person ever. And I always think it's like, you should be working for yourself and creating the best opportunity for yourself and supporting your friends. You shouldn't try and limit that stuff.

Yeah, I totally agree. A lot of listeners are going to want to know about your team and specifically how you're building a team. When, uh, when I was out at your studio, you were talking about how deliberate you are about building a team in-house for the type of content you want to produce and all that. So tell me about that philosophy and then the team that you've built.

So the in-house thing is because I think that I like to have control and I like to build for the long term. And so when I mean build for the long term, I plan on building my personal brand forever.

Like, it's a thing. It's pretty, pretty closely tied to you.

Yeah.

So you're like, as long as I'm breathing, I'd like to have this.

It's an asset that I think grows in value continuously. It compounds in value continuously. It gives me an unfair advantage, outsized opportunity everywhere I go, no matter what. And so I think I'm going to be all in on that forever now. Like, I have— I did a book deal last year. The personal brand was huge in that, but the personal brand will be the thing that drives that. And so the long-term thing is like, I could hire agencies and freelancers and all the rest of it, but I want my team who are with me, and I feel like they will be with me for a long time, to become incredible. I want to support them and give them everything they want so that we come together on a mission of, you know, building this, this personal brand and achieving our goals with our customers. And so in my team, I have, um, my sort of chief of staff, who— she is just unreal operationally, organisation, like administrative, everything. She, like, predicts things that I need before I need them.

That's awesome.

She, you know, she will be in my email before I'm in it. She'll be— she'll give people things that they wanted from me, and that gives me freedom of like headspace. Um, she runs the business broadly now. I then have Josh Saunders, who's been with me for ages. Like, he was my first personal brand manager when he was like 23, and I've taught him to think like me, but also he's taught me so much about writing. And so he runs my content now, and so nothing can go out unless it goes through him. And then we have, uh, my podcast lead Rosie, who's incredible. And then we have editors like Tom and Ethan and others who are sort of the backbone of the content creation. And then I'm lucky in that I do own a personal brand agency, and that agency works for like some of the biggest creators in the world. And so I do plug into them for support as well, uh, because so they have a designer, they have you know, people who will do the engagement out of hours and all the rest of it. So I, for example, and this is obviously mad at the stage I'm in now, but I can go on holiday for 3 weeks, not check my phone, come back and we're like on track. Everything's on track. And that is where I wanted to get to. Um, the, the plan for me, if I'm honest, and I think it will be realized soon, is like I wanted to build a startup, uh, launcher.

Okay, so incubator, like an incubator of sorts.

I would be involved in the businesses. And so now I have audience, I have like all the structure, and we have been launching businesses. And that's what I want to do moving forwards. I want to build a personal brand. I want to do and teach and train entrepreneurs, and at the same time like launch businesses that I find interesting.

I love that. What are the metrics that you look at on, say, a daily or weekly basis? And then how do you align your team to care about those metrics?

I think that the, the golden metric for LinkedIn for us has always been daily follower growth. Okay. Because reach, we don't care about, uh, like comments, we don't care about likes, we don't care about like that. All of that stuff will kind of line up with follower growth. So it's follower growth and then it's repost ratio.

Okay.

So the repost, you know, if back in the day I would always say like if in the first hour you have a 20% repost ratio, so 20% repost to likes, the post is going to go viral. And nowadays it's not too, too, you know, uh, different, but it, it makes— it takes a different mindset to create content that's repostable. So I'm creating content for my audience that's so good that they want to share it with their audience, right? And so you have to get a little bit— it can be— it has to be a little bit less personal, less about me, like take me out the content and just make—

because their audience has no clue who you are.

And also, like, they care less about that And so I want to create the best tool on team and delegation building. And so other entrepreneurs are like, this was so useful to me, I want to share it with my audience. And that's where I think we have done so well historically, is that our content is so reshared. And so when you look at accounts, I always think these days it's quite funny, like you have some that always get a couple thousand likes a day every single day, but no one ever reposts their content. And I'm always like, The, the measure as to whether content is good enough is whether people will share it with their own feed. Um, and so that's, you know, reposts and follower growth. And then the golden one, which is obviously like relevant, you know, because you're here, um, is subscriber growth to the newsletter. To the newsletter, yeah. And so like obviously on Kit you can see your, uh, like where the traffic is coming from, your sources. And so we will have it broken down from like LinkedIn main, LinkedIn featured, LinkedIn posts, Sometimes we'll UTM the individual post, we'll have it from YouTube, uh, and so daily, uh, subscriber growth. And then obviously the better you do, the more likely the Creator Network is going to work better for you and who you partner with and up from there. Yeah, so I mean, the, the, the one I care about most is the subscriber growth count every day, but again, that is fed normally from the growth of the, the, the followers that day. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think so much of what we do is learned from studying other creators. And so I'm always curious, who is it that you find really interesting, or who are you watching and studying?

That's a great question. The, the, the advice I give to entrepreneurs always is study and pre-validate your ideas before you implement them. I had a, I did a podcast with Richard Harpin recently. He's a multi-billionaire, and his first rule in business is copy and pivot.

Okay.

And so when I started out in this sort of creator space, I was like, I want to go as fast as possible with as little work as possible. It's always been my thinking, like, I'm such a disciple of like the 80/20 principle. And so I was studying everyone, like everyone. I was implementing daily and studying every single day. And so like Ali Abdaal, I always think is like incredible, you know. And I think what he did with his audience and then into his, um, part-time YouTube Academy has been amazing. I'd say that was a huge inspiration at the time. Um, there was a lady called Sarah Turner who ran a copywriting cohort, uh, and I, I think I saw that it was like 8 weeks or something to learn to be a copywriter. She did 1 hour a week and it was like 7 grand or something. I was like, that is an interesting model. And I spoke to loads of her customers and they were like, we loved it, we love her, she's great. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. I didn't want to run a big business, and so I was like, I want a few years off, minimum team and see how I can, you know, build this thing. So I saw Sarah Turner's business, I saw Ali's business, and I was like, I'm growing fast on LinkedIn. Can I build the LinkedIn version of what these two have done? And so I knew the model was pre-validated. And so I sort of— I sat down, I said, what's important to me? And it was like, have a tiny team. And so I didn't have an office until recently, and it was just like me and two others running a business that made like a million and a half a quarter or something. It was crazy. Um, I think there was a point where I had one staff member and we did a $1.7 million quarter, which is obviously like insane. So that profit margin is in the 90%, you know, like, because the first time we did it, we didn't even have like expensive tooling, we had no ads, it was just organic. Um, and so I was very intentional. It was like tiny team, big business mentality because I was so burnt out by what I'd done before. And so the idea was I couldn't have a sales team. Because then I would have like bloat. I'd have to manage the sales team.

Yeah, yeah.

So I don't know, I mean, it's quite unique in that I don't know anyone else who does what I do without any sales team. And we have just run ads for the first time. Wow. So no ads, no sales team.

And so, and what was revenue last year?

About $10 million.

$10 million in revenue, no sales team, no ads.

Yeah, so $10 million from just the cohorts. Yeah, the business did better with the book deal, the media stuff, etc.

But that's good to know that you did better than $10 million. I was worried for you.

The cohort specifically, they like— the combination did about $10 million. Um, and the, the, the, the expense of running a cohort is like your time, the, the, the systemization, the technology, and then it's the other coaches. And so unlike other cohorts, I was like, of course I have— I'm not doing sales and ads, so I have more margins. I was like, why don't I just pay the best LinkedIn creators in the world to be the other coaches, right? And so the fastest female creator last year is one of the coaches, like 3 of the fastest growing in the top 20 of the coaches. So everyone is incredible.

Yeah. And they're speaking from their own lived experience.

Yeah. I mean, they only grew in the last year, right?

You know, like, so they're like, this is what works now. This is what—

yeah, this happens now. And so the, the model is— it was, was kind of half accidental, half pre-validated like very much learned from a few other creators that I was studying. And then because we didn't do sales and because we didn't do ads, we had all the margin to pay incredible coaches. Uh, and that effectively became the model. And the first time I launched it, it was meant to be 50 people and we didn't close the checkout and it did 67 sales. Uh, and I was like, whoa. And then it's basically been, you know, 200 people on the Creator Accelerator a quarter, which has been, which has been really good. Um, but nowadays, who do I look at? Um, I love Mark Manson. Yeah, I mean, one, I love his book because I feel like in life people pay too much mind to everything, you know? Like, you should try and not have an opinion on everything and, and really practice the art of, um, you know, not letting things bother you. I think that if more people did that So many people would be happier and more successful. Um, Dan Martell is a total beast. Yeah, I only discovered him honestly like a few months ago because he DM'd me on LinkedIn and he was like, how are you doing this LinkedIn thing? Um, and I was like, oh hey dude, like, who are you? And then I looked him up, I was like, oh my God, he's like a juggernaut.

But only very recently. Like, Dan and I have been friends for 11 years.

How do you know everyone?

A lot of time in the space. Yeah, but he and I both come from the software world of building software startups. And he's been doing YouTube. Uh, he probably first interviewed me for his, uh, podcast about building SaaS companies maybe in 2015, 2016. And so, and so he's been doing content consistently, but in the last 3 years he's been serious about it. In the last 18 months it's been taking off like crazy.

And his YouTube, I'd say, is probably the best going right now.

Yeah.

It's an absolute juggernaut. And the nice thing is that— so he reached out to me and I was like, opportunities coming your way. Yeah, but it's like, uh, because you get all these professional, you know, content creators from other spaces. I was with Thomas Frank last night having a beer, and it was cool because like when I built my Notion product, I used his stuff. And so last night I was like, you're Thomas Frank? And he's like, yeah, I know who you are. And I was like, oh, this is quite cool. Um, but like you get to, you get to learn learn so much from, from these people. And with Dan Martell, he was like, look, we're, we're doing well on these other channels, I want to learn LinkedIn. And so his team coached my team, my team coached his team. Now that's awesome. And like, he's now crushing it on, uh, LinkedIn, and we're starting to do much better on YouTube.

That's amazing.

Yeah, so good.

Chris, this has been fantastic. One, thanks for flying out to Boise and hanging out in the studio.

It's a long flight.

It's a long flight, I know, because I just did 2 weeks ago to go visit you. Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, but also just seeing the level of detail that you've put into this business and seeing how you've taken, you know, well over a decade of entrepreneurship and taken that same level of drive and attention and said, all right, I'm gonna apply this to a personal brand. I think it's amazing. And then the approach that you've taken of constantly telling creators, go build businesses and then telling business owners, hey, go build a personal brand. Like you can have the best of both worlds. I think it's just such an important message. So thanks for coming on. And where should people go to follow you? And what would you tell them if they want to engage with everything you're doing?

So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm prevalent on social posting regularly. I think that, you know, if anyone ever is interested in working with us, I would say, like, it's not for the faint of heart. It really isn't.

Like, it's so much work to do this.

Like, we talk about work.

It's fun. It's exciting. It's insanely rewarding. And it will also be probably the hardest thing you've ever done.

Yeah. And it will shock you with how hard it is. And but the thing is, it is a, is a compound thing. The more you do it, the more you get out of it. The more you put in the beginning, the more you get out later. And so if you ever sign up for one of our things, just be aware that it's like people say this like funny American phrase, I think, like drinking from a fire hose.

Yes.

I'd never heard that before. Everyone was like, that's what it's like. Um, and I suppose like if I can give one bit of advice to people, it would be the, the rise of AI means that information is losing its value in so many ways and volume has become easy. And so in some ways it's the depth and it's the uniqueness and the intellectual property that is going to build a unique trust with your audience. And so for me, that's what I'm focused on right now. It's I'm trying to build businesses in AI and I'm trying to create content, ironically, not with AI. Right.

Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, I'm, I'm excited to dive in more and I'll keep you posted on how my LinkedIn growth journey goes. Uh, and then, uh, is there a particular— actually, you know what, we should plug people towards your podcast because growing a podcast is insanely hard and you've got a great one and, uh, people can go check out the episode that I did on your, on your show. So we can go back and forth. Oh, what should they search for, uh, to see your podcast?

Uh, Wake Up with Chris Donnelly. So I'm like 6 months into YouTube now. And as with everything, like, if I didn't know the hard work at the beginning compounds for the future, I would have given up. Yeah, YouTube is tough business. Um, and you know, the, the podcast has been really fun. I think that there's a, there's a value that comes in the podcast that's not easily, you know, identifiable day one, which is like you actually make incredible connections and deep relationships with incredible people, right? And the unlock of that is worth way more than the views. Yeah.

But the cool thing is you get that value of the relationships immediately. Yeah. Because as you— and it compounds much more downstream. But everyone's like looking for the views and they're like, but, but it got 300 views or it got 5,000, you know, or whatever. And they're like, this is so small. And so, yeah, you have to judge it based on something else.

Yeah.

All right. We can talk forever. Thanks so much for coming on. It's great to see you.

Thanks for having me.

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.