MBA2279 Extended Interview: Nathan Barry – How to Grow a Self-Funded Software Business to $34 Million and Beyond

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I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a special episode, an extended interview with Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit. Nathan and I are old friends that came up together in business, starting and growing in our entrepreneurial journey. At the same time, I was lucky enough to sit down with Nathan to learn how he grew one of the most popular email marketing softwares out there. Totally bootstrapped, no funding, no investors, nothing. ConvertKit does well over $34 million in annual revenue and has become one of the shining examples of how you can self fund a successful software company. But he started at zero and in fact struggled at first. I sat down with Nathan to find out how he got out of the trough of sorrow. Not getting enough traction at the Got some insights on how he makes his decisions and how he balances this huge business with his family life, personal life and ambitions. This one's special. You're going to want to stick around. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business Today's extended interview is with Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit over@convertkit.com whenever I have the chance to sit down with an entrepreneur and do this type of episode, the extended interviews, I'm always thinking about, what are some of the things that our audience at the $100 MBA Want to know from this expert? How can I pull out the gems? One of the challenges of pulling out these gems is having the guest open up. But that was a piece of cake with Nathan Barry for two reasons. Number one, we're old friends. We've known each other for over a decade. We've supported each other's businesses for a very long time. ConvertKit integrates with our software, Webinar Ninja, and vice versa. We're big fans of their software. We use ConvertKit at the $100 MBA and webinar ninja. We've seen each other at conferences. We've spent time together. So that makes it so much easier to have a candid conversation. But the second reason is Nath has been transparent about his entrepreneurial journey for a very long time. He shares his numbers publicly. He shares his journey very openly on Twitter. And by the way, he shares the wins and the losses. And today, he shares how he bootstrapped his software company, ConvertKit, with zero funding to $34 million in ARR. Annual recurring revenue. We're going to jump into the conversation right now with Nathan Barry, but I'll be back to wrap up the episode, give my takeaways. But for now, let's jump into that convo with the founder of ConvertKit, Nathan Barry.

Nathan Barry. It's been way, way, way too long. We were just talking about when we first met in person back in 2014. It was new Media Expo. I don't think that conference exists anymore. It was in Vegas.

I don't think it does. Yep.

And I remember us having like, weird breakfasts at 2 o' clock in the morning. First of all, just so everybody knows, this is like pre Webinar Ninja. I think you just started working on ConvertKit back then. This is January, early days. Very early days. We are still kind of putting together some money and having a life. We're all staying in fleabag hotels on Fremont Street. You know, we're all kind of just like, you know, wearing cargo jeans and trying to figure out what, what, what, what to do with our lives.

Right?

So this is early days. And the funny thing about that conference. Tell me if I'm wrong, Nathan. There were so many people there that right now are absolute rock stars. Like, we were all starting out at the same time. You know, if I look at Corbett Barr and Chase Reeves and, you know, Mike Vardy yourself, John Lee Doom, is there so many people that were at that event? And I want to ask you this question just to kick off before we go into, like, who you are and all that kind of stuff. Like, for me, that event was a huge, pivotal shift for me to kind of see people are doing things that I want to do. This is possible. I can do this, you know. And I want to ask you, did that event have any influence on you and your future?

Well, I remember as you're talking about, I was thinking. Thinking about Tim Ferriss talking about like, south by southwest in like 2007, 2008. And, you know, I was like, you know, you talked about, like, that feeling of the group and how something went and everybody was there and what was as you talking about it, like, I feel the same way about like, a bunch of events at that time. New Media Expo, Chris Gillebo's World Domination Summit was like that. You know what's interesting? It's not that you're meeting all these people who are, like, already famous. It's that I think as the community came together, everyone built each other up. Like, I remember at Chris Gillebo's World Domination Summit, the first year I went, I knew no one, right? And so I'm like, I'm gonna go, I. And I'm pretty introverted, and so I'm like, ah, I gotta, like, introduce myself and. Okay, here we go. So I walked up to these, like, two tall bald men who were standing like, across from registration talking to each other. And I'm like, hey, I'm. I'm Nathan. And one guy goes, oh, hey, I'm Caleb Logic. And the guy goes, I'm James Clear. Nice to meet you. And like, at the time, they hadn't built anything, you know, and like, obviously Caleb's built this amazing video company, doesn't work for so many incredible creators. And. And James has gone on to like, dominate the New York Times bestseller list. But I think it's less that like, oh, you happen to meet those people. It's that, I don't know, it's like we built a community where everyone built each other up and we're successful because of it. And so, you know, it's not like that one event was like a turning point. It's that I know you just like, by going to these events, you surrounded yourself with people who were trying to make something on the Internet. And it ended up becoming like the entire next generation of creators, which I think is wild to think about.

Yeah. And, and I, I agree with you. It's just like we all kind of are in the right mindset. We're like, I gotta meet some people. I gotta figure out, like, how do I fit in this world? What can, what value can I add to everybody else? You know, I, I look at, you know, some of the write ups that we get mentioned on whatever it's Webinar Ninja or the 100 LMBA show, and like, I'm included. I'm sharing pixels with people. Like, these were like my heroes. Like, why am I on this list?

Right.

And I realize along the way, you know, I did some work probably, you.

Know, and I just, just, just a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

And, and, but I think what you said is right. I think we all helped each other out. Whether it's just admiring each other's work, supporting it, even. Just feedback, even if it's just. I'm not even talking about, like, hey, I'll be your affiliate. No, it was more like just, you know, you know, sharing best practices, mentioning on your podcast, I use this product or I signed up for this course, all that kind of stuff. But I just wanted to kind of. That's kind of when we met and that's kind of when we kind of got to know each other a little bit. And we've been in touch ever since. But I want to go back a little bit further and I ask this question a lot when I speak to people here on the show. What was Nathan's life growing up like? What was that house like? You grew up in Boise or in Idaho?

Yeah, in the mountains outside of Boise.

Right.

And I know that it's out of town.

Yeah, yeah, I know you mentioned that you, you didn't grow up with a silver spoon. And. And one of the things I resonate with you is I can't. I'm still that person. I'm still the person that grew up in that, you know, for me was an immigrant family where money was Thai, where you don't. You take advantage of every opportunity it gives you. Like, one of the challenges I have is I have to learn to say no. And that's not in the vocab of. Of immigrants.

Yeah. If someone comes to you with an opportunity, you're like, oh, thank you for thinking of me. Like, yes, absolutely.

Exactly.

And then at some point you're like, wait, no, I have way too many opportunities. I need to be really selective. I need to like, double down on the things that have leverage rather than just taking whatever comes my way.

Exactly. So tell me a little bit about, like, how did you grow up? What was like your life like as a teenager and how did that inform your life as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, so I am the fourth of six kids. So I grew up in a big family. We lived about 45 minutes outside of Boise up in the mountains. And I was born in this tiny little house. Like before, tiny houses were cool, you know, like it was just, it was just, it was just a very small house. It was not Instagrammable and you know, it was like the downsides of a tiny house. I'm recording this podcast in a tiny house office that I built myself because I want to have a tiny house office. But anyway, we grew up when just the limitation was money and had a very small house. But a couple things were defining about my childhood. One is that my dad, when I was born, my parents bought the land they wanted to build, you know, our family home on. And then my dad built that home himself. So there, there. I grew up in this environment, like this construction zone where things were always in progress. A week after I was born, my dad poured the foundation for the house. A year later we moved in because he's working on this like with his job and working on the side and all of that. When we moved in, there was. I didn't yet have running water. Like it had walls up and from the outside it looked done. And then it was weather tight, but it didn't have insulation. It didn't have, you know, power running water. Like the power was an extension cord running in. And I have a bunch of photos of it. My parents said I used to go around with a measuring like as a two year old with a measuring tape and say like hold it up to things and say feet and half, you know, or like pound nails into the floor or things like that, which is fine because the floor was plywood.

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So one thing on that, like I always got to watch my parents work with their hands and like continually make life better. And I don't, like, it took me a long time to notice that like things were really scarce. The other thing is that we were homeschooled. And so that ended up becoming really important later on when I. Well, a couple things like the pace of learning is something I care about a lot. And I remember a time being 12 years old, probably, probably 11, and it's snowing outside and just like the most beautiful snowflakes you could imagine, you know, and like the snow is building up and you're just like, oh, fresh snow sledding. Like I want to be out there, not in here with my algebra or I don't know if I was doing algebra at 11, but you know, like, and my mom just said, you know, school doesn't have to take a certain amount of time. Like it's a certain amount of work, right? And you don't have to be here for four hours. You can like finish your math lessons, finish these other two things and like go play. And that was a huge thing for me because I was like, oh, this is within my control. And I've always been someone where, when you put it within my control, like I'm gonna make it happen. And so that, you know, I think like you've never probably, probably never seen another like that motivated of a 11 year old before of like get all this done, you know, and an hour later, like whole days where the school is done and I'm out there sledding like having the time of my life. So that was one example. Another one is, you know, I had older siblings and I always try to keep up with them. And so a lot of my friends were older than me and that just didn't really matter. Like my siblings were and, and their friends were super inclusive with me and, and so I just, I, you know, I was like 13, hanging out with a bunch of like 16, 17 years. And then there was a moment where I realized like, wait, they're all finishing up high school and they're going to go to college and this age gap that didn't seem to matter, like is about to really matter, right? And so I went to my parents and said, like, like, what. What can I do about this? And also, is high school, like, is it four years or is it a set amount of work? And they went, you know, just like with the sledding example, it's a set amount of work. We've defined the curriculum for your older siblings who have, you know, are going through or have finished high school. Like, you can graduate whenever all of this is done, you know, like. And so I remember thinking, we do these road trips from Boise to Seattle, which is like an eight or eight and a half hour drive. And I remember thinking, like, I'm really bored on these drives, right? I'm also really bored when I'm doing algebra. So, like, why not combine those two?

Why have two boarding boring times?

Yeah, combine it. It's one. I like my older brother, who's six years older than me, you know, was sitting next to me on the, the road trip. And so, like, whenever I got stuck on a math lesson, I can get his help. And, you know, I do like a month's worth of. Of math lessons on this drive over. Cause I can just. Just churn through it.

Wow.

And so the end result is that I graduated high school when I was 15, right. And went off to college. I spent two years first in. In art and graphic design and then marketing. I learned to code during that time, and then I was there to. To learn how to make money. And so I started getting web design clients. And when I got my first $10,000 web design gig to build this, this, like, software app, I decided to drop out. I was like, I'm here to learn how to make money. I made money. I have checked that box. Like, I'm out. So I ended up dropping out of College at 17 with half a degree. So that was kind of like the defining elements of, like, I just always, I don't know, colored outside the lines or like, whatever constraints people put on me, I'm like, okay, but what if it was different? And I very thankfully had parents who always showed off that creator mindset. And, and then, like, let me. Whenever they'd see those inklings, they'd be like, yeah, run with it. Sure, if you want to do, you know, wow, a month's worth of math lessons. Like.

So what, what I'm. What I want to highlight is a few things. First thing is you grew up around a family. Your dad building a house. He was a creator. He created this house, right? But the one thing is that you learned that if you want to create anything, it takes time, right. It's going to take a bit of sacrifice and work, and it's not going to be perfect. It's going to be, you know, half finished for most of the time. And that is really a business, you know, like, that's a business. Right? There is. I just described a business. Most of us don't have the beautiful house in our head or beautiful business in our head ever. Like, it just never gets there. You're just constantly trying to make the business run and get better and improve. And some people understand this because they have these references like you growing up. And some of them don't. And they struggle and they think that, what's wrong with me? I'm a loser. Like, no, you're not a loser. It's just how it is.

Right.

The other thing I want to highlight is, you know, my sister, she has three kids. Two of them were. Went to traditional schools, public schools, and the other child, my. My niece, she was homeschooled. And homeschooled children, in my opinion, are far more autonomous. They. They question things a lot more. They understand what the end game is. Like, you got to college and you're like, oh, I'm here to learn how to make money. And that came from. Well, the end game of, you know, passing this grade is finishing this work or learning this curriculum. Like, you just fast forward, right. And most people that are in regular school or public school. I grew up in public schools. It's like, you just think you have to go to school. You don't understand why you're there in the first place. Like, you get. You're supposed to learn, but you're not. You don't, like, have the understanding. Okay, it's seventh grade now. Seventh grade, it's all about mastering geometry and this and this and this. You have passed seventh grade once. You know this stuff. No, we thought you passed seventh grade when it's June.

Right, Right.

Which is job mentality. Right. Where you're just burning time.

Right.

And I feel like that really helped you. It may be in a subconscious way to understand that, like, you know, the marketplace is all about what you produce. And same thing with homeschooling. So I, I really think you want to maybe send another gift to your parents for, for these opportunities. They. They probably had their own reasons why they homeschooled you. But, yeah, these are some great benefits that I think they're great. So when you were in university, you got your first gig as a designer to design a website. Was that the first moment where you realized, oh, maybe I can do this entrepreneurial thing.

No, I had a bunch of entrepreneurial ventures. The first one is we had a little wood shop and I like to build things in it. And so I'd make these like wood carvings and stuff like that and then sell them around the neighborhood, like door to door or there was a small, like craft fair in our. I say neighborhood, you know, like the whole, the big. There's maybe 200 houses in like this big community, like mountain community. And I remember they had a craft fair at one point. And so I had a little booth there. And then I do some other, you know, other bigger things in, in Boise and, and all of that, you know, like art in the park type thing. So that, that was the first, first venture in that way. We had a pet sitting business.

Right.

You know, like, hey, for $10 a day, well, you're gone.

It's a steal.

I thought, I thought it was. I thought we were printing. I couldn't believe that someone was going to go on vacation for, you know, a week and pass like a hundred bucks or more to like come feed their cats. You know, I thought that was amazing. Yeah. But, yeah, so we had that, that kind of thing. But then I think when I was 15, kind of around that time period, I got into web design. Got a copy of Photoshop for my birthday, Photoshop Elements for my birthday, the cheaper version. And then, you know, started doing logo design for people. That first logo was 75. That first website was 300 bucks.

Why is it 75 bucks? My first logo, 75 bucks too. Why is that the number always. It's not a hundred, it's not a hundred.

Right.

I don't know. But yeah, like, you know, people didn't know how to do things on the web. And so it's like, oh, I know how to, I know how to code and I can teach you these things. And it's just like gradually ramped up from there. I was actually talking to someone the other day. I ran into him again. He was like a financial planner and all that. And I met him. He was reminding me of this because I met him when I joined the Chamber of Commerce. I was 17. 17 into 18 and I joined the Chamber of Commerce and like started to go to those events and joined like a leads group where they would, you.

Know, you get the business.

Yeah. And you're like. And all of that. And I was just. I always appreciated this guy because he, you know, here you have like a 17, 18 year old, like just Showing up, trying to figure out like business. And he was just always so helpful about like, oh, you should talk to this person, here's why, or like, you know, and all of that. And it was fun to connect with him again. But yeah, I did that whole thing of trying to build a, like a freelance web design business for four years and I mean it worked out like, yeah, I earned a living doing it.

I love it. So when we got to know each other, even online, prior to New media Expo in 2014, you're doing a lot of design work, you're selling design courses. I have your book authority, that's on my bookshelf. You wrote about writing and publishing a book. So you, you were in the/service businesses plus product businesses.

Right?

And you're basically, you're a creator who you serve right now with ConvertKit.

Right.

Making the jump. And I'm speaking out of my own experience making the jump from selling products and even services, coaches, coaching or courses to SaaS, to selling a software. Okay. Is a bigger jump than people think. It's a different beast altogether mostly. And I'm maybe kind of getting ahead of my skis here, but mostly because it's a type of business that you just can't do on your own. You have to rely on other people and a team to make it happen. Versus as a creator, you can run a seven figure business selling courses, selling your books, selling your content and beyond and be in total control. Right. There was a point where you decided to go all in on ConvertKit, probably around the time that we met in New Media Expo. What was the trigger for you to say, you know what, I'm gonna put aside all the things that have made me money. And I remember at the time you were saying making something like $300,000 a year, not, you know, a few cents. Right, that's, that's a good income.

Right.

I'm gonna say no to that money and I'm gonna go all in on software, make this scary jump. Like, what was a trigger for you to say, this is the bet I want to take?

Yeah, it was interesting because I was doing the digital products they'd taken off and done really, really well. And I mean I, I was a very prolific content creator at the time. I was writing a thousand words a day. I had done that for 600 days in a row. I wrote rebooks in that time period and like self publish a ton of content and so that worked really, really well. And then I was trying to start ConvertKit. I was, I, like, I wanted an email platform that was built for creators. Because I became obsessed with email marketing. But then I was trying to hack mailchimp to, like, do all these best practices, and it was just a pain. So I was like, okay, we need something built for this. And I, I think I was very attached to this idea that, you know, if you build something and you target the right market, like, it's just going to take off. And that is not at all what happened with ConvertKit. Like, it got some initial traction and then it totally stalled out. And I think what you're pointing to of, like, software is just very different from, like, if you buy an ebook from me, I might answer some questions about it. You know, I might occasionally, you know, I might like that one customer in Germany. I might make him a customer seat because the one that he gets automatically isn't good enough for his accountant. You know, there's like, some support, but it's. It's not.

The onus is on them.

Yeah, yeah. The soft and software is just entirely different and you have to compete for that. Backing up. Everyone talks about how recurring revenue is incredible. And it is, it's.

Incredibly hard.

It's incredibly hard. Incredibly, incredibly powerful. Right?

Yeah.

Like, I don't know if it's Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger. I don't know, we could probably attribute all quotes to Einstein or Abraham Lincoln or something. You know, about, like, compound interest being one of the most powerful forces on earth. Recurring revenue, like, is an amplifier on all of your efforts. And so it's, it's so powerful what it does. And you get this compound growth on top of recurring revenue, and you can build some of those valuable companies in the world with that. But it's like any form of leverage, it cuts both ways. And so with recurring revenue, you're fighting to earn that customer's business every single month. And then if you're doing it in a competitive market, which email marketing is an absurdly competitive market, like, there's so many companies out there in this space, less so in the creator niche that we focused on. But it was just so hard to get it off the ground. And so what happened is I ended up finding myself in this place where I built a company. The 2,000amonth in recurring revenue burned through the money that I was planning to spend on it. And then, like, it gradually declined from there, and being at about 1300amonth in revenue is no longer covering its server costs. And I had a friend of mine named Heaton Shaw who actually just kind of pulled me aside and Said like, look man, this isn't working. You, you've been successful with the ebooks, there's other things that you can do. Like stop trying to like grind it out on this, try something different. And I remember being really discouraged by that. And he, because like that's not something you say to a friend. And he just let me sit with that for like just a minute and feel it. And they said like, or you can take it seriously. Stop treating this like a side project. You know, go all in on it. Give it the time, money and attention it deserves. Like build this into a real business. But like what you're doing now is not working. So shut it down or double down.

And he bring it on heat. Yeah.

You know, and that, that was like, that was such an impactful moment because he was right. Like I was working on it part time. I was doing the books and, and courses. I was making good money there. You know, I had this like build it and they will come approach to, you know, ConvertKit and like it wasn't working. No one wants to like convert is software that powers your business, you know, like, you know who I want to do that? Like the guy who's doing a side hustle. Let me have him. Let's use his software to power my business, you know, like, no, not a chance. And so what ended up happening is I decided to Double down on ConvertKit and I, I took all of our savings from the ebook business and poured that into, into building ConvertKit. I hired an actual team, not just contractors but like full time employees. I focused in on a niche. So we started doing direct sales. You know, we decided this is going to be email marketing for professional bloggers instead of like serving like all customers that would come in. Yeah. And then, and then with the direct sales, like started to try to close accounts one by one and within two months we got from 1300 to 2000amonth in revenue. That year it would have been 20, 2015 went from 2,000 to 100,000amonth in revenue and the next year was 100,000 to 500,000. So it like took off but it required like it was two years of grinding it out and then you know, getting that overnight success.

So you built a team and obviously you're, you're building a small team at the start, you know, just to just cover the major bases. When you say grinded it out, walk me through what were the things you did every day or you had a post to note about on your screen that you needed to focus on to get to A hundred million ARR. Sorry, 100,000 ARR to a million ARR. What are those stages like? Because what you do changes as you grow the company and what your responsibilities are. So what are some of the things that were like top priority is like I need to do this or there's no business.

Yeah, well the first thing that the, like, the first turning point was hiring someone to run the product and engineering side because being a coder myself, I was heavily involved in that. And so once I hired someone for that side of it, I could afford to spend my time elsewhere. And so that immediately like doubled my leverage. And I remember being in all these conversations because I think people talked about that. I don't know if that's still the case now is like being a solopreneur, like that was the trendy thing. How big of a business can I build without any full time employees? You know, I never want to have to lay people off. I don't want to have to answer to anybody. I don't want to be responsible for anyone else. Meetings, meetings, exactly. Screw meetings, you know.

Yeah.

And so it was this big leap where I was like, oh, I'm building with contractors, you know, I don't need any of that. And the thing that unlocked all of this is basically cloning myself and hiring someone actually who is better at product and engineering than I was. And then so like that was absolutely crucial. And then the second thing from there was pivoting from trying to make sales through content. Like I wanted to only sell through like scalable ways. And I was used to content marketing. You know, like, let me talk about something on a podcast, let me write a blog post, you know, I don't, I don't do one to one sales. I want to sell in bulk. But like if you don't have momentum, it's, it is not a good way to sell. And so I ended up switching and saying the whole approach was one to one sales. Like how do I get on a call with people, find out what's frustrating them about email, see if we can solve it with ConvertKit and then do the migration for them for free. And so it ended up being this work that was like $3 an hour, $5 an hour, you know, like I distinctly remember having two large monitors in front of me, putting Netflix on one of them and then opening up people's accounts, you know, like a new customer's account and like copying and pasting from Mailchimp to ConvertKit. Like, you know they have a 3030 email automation. We'd switch it all over and then they'd be paying us $50 a month. And like the payback period on that was so long, you know, or the hourly rate or whatever. But I realized that every account that we got made the next one just the tiniest bit easier. Okay, right. Because we like, oh, I heard that this person's using ConvertKit or like you started to build, build momentum. And so everyone was talking about like, oh, only grow in a scalable way. And you know, later I ended up hearing like Paul Graham talk about do things that don't scale and that put it in. I mean I was living it out before he wrote that essay. But like that phrased it in a way.

Wow.

Because the other thing is all these things that don't scale, you can take and make them scalable whether it's through, you know, if we're like, if I'm doing a one to one demo, right, that's not scalable, right. That is using my time. But you know, a year later I was teaching a workshop, you know, a webinar to a hundred people, right. I'm getting, I don't know if it's quite a hundred times the leverage because it's not quite as personalized but pretty.

Close, you know, like, and you've nailed everything now, you know, the demo perfectly because you've done it so many times, one on one, you're, you're better as a presenter, all that stuff. Yeah, you know what? Well, the hot spots are these little lines, right?

Like I was at a food blogging conference just this last week, you know, we had a booth there and we're talking to a bunch of creators. And just as you test these things, right. I had this line where I talked about like, I don't have time to run, you know, to run everything. Like time is the most limiting thing that I have in my business, in my business, in life, you know, I'm running a full time business. I've got the side hustle as a creator, I've got three kids, you know, I like all of this. And so then I talk about like I really rely on automations, right? And you could see someone's eyes light up when I was basically describing their life. They're like, I don't have time either, you know, and I could have led in with like, here's why automations are important, you know, but like you learn these, yeah, you learn these, these lines or this positioning that resonates, right. In the unscalable conversations, right? And then when you do that In a webinar, like you can't see someone else's reaction. You might get a, a sound off in the chat or something else.

But, but you're totally right. And, and I'm going to drill in a little bit more into this because you learn a lot about the language people use, like you mentioned, so you can use it in your marketing on your sales pages. Even if people prefer to hear 20 off or two free months, whatever, like all that kind of language, you're kind of monitoring while you're doing these one on one calls and these demos and these sales calls. So you're doing these, these calls. You're literally just shooting for them to sign up for a monthly plan, not even annually. You're just like, get them on board. I need a customer.

Right.

Do you have a target? Like, are you saying like I get one customer a day? Are you trying to get 10 a day? Like, how do you, how do you know? Is it, what's enough?

Just as many as I could. I think I had a target for how many outreach emails I would send.

Okay. And that would be like the baseline. Okay.

Yeah. I'm trying to remember. I had heard this mixergy talk from someone who was talking about direct sales. You have to pay attention to what you can control because you actually can't control the outcome. And if you set your goals around the outcome, that can be really discouraging.

Right.

Especially before your system gets moving. Right. If we're doing direct sales, I might reach out to 50 people and make no sales, but one of those 50 people, I might actually close six months from now, you know, or like you just, you can't control that, that timeline. So remember in this interview someone's talking about how in their sales process they had two cups on their desk and one cup was empty and the other had 50 paperclips in it or a hundred paperclips in it. And they, every day they would do cold outreach, you know, like personalize an email as much as they like research personalize email, send it off and move a paperclip. And they, because they, they knew the thing that they could control, they, they couldn't control how many deals they closed, but they could control how many people they reached out to. And so they would do that part every day. And of course they, they'd work to refine their pitch and you know, like, keep getting better, but really emphasize what you can, can control. And so I, I don't remember the numbers, but I had some goal around that. It definitely wasn't A hundred a day. It was probably like 20.

But that's great information and a good barometer. Like, hey, focus what you can control. As long as you're reaching out to people, you know, soon enough they will convert, but they'll never convert if you don't reach out to anybody.

Right?

So that's, that's a great little insight.

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ConvertKit is, in my opinion, probably one of the best SaaS success stories I've seen in the market, period. Just because of the way you built it, the steady growth you've had. From my understanding, it's been self funded, correct? Yep. Right. It's been self funded from day one. You are now doing something close to 34. You publish your numbers publicly on barometrics. 34 million ARR for a self funded software company, which is really unheard of. Like no one ever sees a company other than Basecamp when they started, when the computer was invented.

Right.

You know, like no one ever hears about this because most companies get funding, they get investors, they go VC route or they exit way before they get to this point. Was this always your goal or were you always, were you trying to say, hey, I'm going to get to a point and I'm going to sell it or I have other ambitions, I want to take this company to a certain point. Or is this a lifestyle business for you? Is this like I just want to build this business to fund my building tiny homes and you know, Airbnb or whatever it is you do. So like, I want to understand, like, did you have a vision for this and what is it now?

Right. Yeah. Early on the vision was to build a product that had a recurring revenue because, you know, I felt like I'd gotten pretty good at information products and like the, the launch driven businesses. Right. But you'd see a business, right? You, you might do a product launch and make 25,000 or 50,000 in a month, and then 5,000 the next month. And it has amazing leverage. But, like, I didn't want to hire employees based off of a peak month and then be worried if the next launch doesn't go well. I thought if I could get to $20,000 a month in recurring revenue, that would be incredible. Now, actually, the first goal was legitimately 5,000amonth in recurring revenue, because my wife and I were talking about opening a coffee shop at the time. And I thought that the best thing to open a coffee shop, because I knew it was a terrible business, would be if our living expenses were totally covered. And so living in Boise, Idaho, in 2013, if we had $5,000 a month in recurring revenue, like, we'd be fine, you know, so that. That's specifically why that was the first goal. But then as it got bigger, it was like, okay, can we get this to 20,000, maybe 30,000? I remember hearing about someone who's doing. Had a SaaS business, actually Amy Hoy, who was doing a business with 50,000amonth in recurring revenue. And I was just like, I remember that. That is so much money. And she always talked about how it came from a whole range of customers. Right, I know. And so she's.

I could buy a Mercedes every single month.

Yeah, like, all of these things. I mean, because the other thing with recurring revenue is it's replenishing every month. Right. Like, you don't start at zero on March 1st. And so that's amazing. So I had those targets, and it gradually got bigger. I was just looking. I gave a. Like, taught a workshop a little earlier today. And so I was going through, like, a bunch of old decks and stuff, other workshops that I taught. And I found one where I was talking about ConvertKit, and I hit $5 million a year in revenue. It was just interesting. Cause, like, ConvertKit's seven times bigger than that now, basically. And I was like, I didn't feel like that long ago that I taught that workshop, but apparently it was a while ago. Around that point, I realized that we were building something that could be way bigger. And that's when we started to establish, like, a mission for the company beyond, I don't know, build something sustainable. And we ended up making the mission for the company just saying, we exist to help creators earn a living. And there's actually a little plaque. That's what that little plaque behind me says. And the reason for that, like, I grew up in an environment, you know, we talked about a lot of the. The great things about it. But a Lot of downsides is that money was super scarce. Like, I watched my parents fight about money. Like, they ended up, you know, they're causing a huge amount of conflict, making a lot of us kids feel like a burden on them for what, what we cost. And, and yeah, I've been there.

Yeah.

You, I think you know that. That world very well.

Yeah.

And like, there's a point where as an entrepreneur like, that you and I have both learned where making money is a skill and you just want to, like, preach that from the rooftops. Like, did you know this is not just chance and luck? Like, you can learn a set of skills and you can build an audience, and then that audience can make you more money than as a doctor or whatever else. And like, and so probably about that point when we were doing 5 million a year for ConvertKit, I realized that I was going to hit every one of my financial goals. Like, we were set basically forever. And so then it was saying, okay, what do I want to do with this company? And so that's when we established the mission of we exist to help creators earn a living. And we're going to build the tools and training to bring these, these skills of making money on the online, with an audience to as many people as possible so that, like, they don't have money. Be this point of conflict between them and their spouse. Right.

Huge.

Kids don't grow up, like, in that environment of stress and everything else. Yeah. Now there's plenty of other things.

No, but you're, you're totally right. But, you know, I, I grew up where I was. I would never ask my parents for money because I knew there was pressure. I would never ask for lunch money when I didn't want to make lunch or whatever was the first day of school. I say to a lot of people, like, hey, it's not that I just, you know, it's all about money. But, you know, money will not solve all your problems. Will solve your money problems. Right. Which, which is a lot of your problems. If you think about it like, a lot of people are not healthy because they don't. Can't afford a trainer. You know, a lot of people are not right, you know, satisfied with, you know, their environment. They want to leave the city they live in. But the cost of living is more expensive in the big cities. Whatever it is. But so your mission to help people alleviate themselves from this burden of financial stress, which is one of the worst stresses in the world because we've all experienced it at some level.

Yeah.

I want to say all But I know you and I have, growing up or even in our businesses sometimes be like, am I going to be able to, especially in those early days in ConvertKit, am I to be to going able pay my server costs, I'm able to do all this stuff, you know, and that's like the worst stress in the world. So I think it's one of the best gifts you can give the world is to give them the tools to never have to worry about that stress. Which is. Yeah, yeah.

So that's what we've been been building. And we also just changed our ambition, right. For the company. Because I realized like, wait, if we can build this to 5 million a year in revenue and we believe in our product, then let's build it bigger. And so that's when I set a goal of building it to 100 million a year in revenue.

Yeah.

But not because like I'm gonna achieve self actualization when like it tips over, you know, from 99 to 100 or something.

You never know. You never know, Nathan.

That's true. It could absolutely happen. But basically thinking like, if we really believe in our product and what we're offering, then like, absolutely, and let's find out what we're capable of.

Right?

Because I don't know, I'm the kind of person that, you know, if you have a goal. Yeah. I don't know, like I've been working on getting better at running, you know, and so like if you can run a 5K at 7 minute miles, I'm like, yeah, can I, can I beat that? You know, can I do 650? Can I, you know, like any of those things?

Right.

And so it's the same thing of like, look, other people can build businesses this big, why not? Why not me? And so that's been the ambition and now what we're building is trying to make a platform that's uniquely great at helping creators earn a living. And so like all the ways possible, you know, we built like the ability to sell digital products. We've built integrations with absolutely everyone possible. All of that of like, how can we make it so that we have the best place on the Internet for you to earn a living as a creator. And that's basically the North Star now.

Love it. I absolutely love it. I'm gonna ask you a very earnest question. How, how much of the journey has been pull pushing the boulder up the hill and how much of the journey has been pushing it down a hill? Like at some point did you feel like, okay, this is actually not as Hard as it used to be, and now it's getting easier and easier to hit my goals. Or has it been hard the whole way or easy the whole way?

Yeah, it has not been even so hard or easy the whole way. There was definitely a point, maybe about 25 to 30 people in the company who had been with us for. So not hitting that headcount. But like 25 to 30 people that had been with us maybe for at least six months. So people had a little bit of tenure with us. Where most problems that came up, there was someone else who was the front line for it. Like, I stopped bringing my laptop everywhere I went because, you know, there were three other engineers who were more qualified to bring the app back up or make sure that something bad didn't happen than I was. Right. Like, that was a very important moment. And for us, it happened about that. We scaled very quickly from 15 to 30 people. So it was somewhere in there that that happened. Actually from three to 30 people was like a, I don't know, a nine month ramp up, I guess a year, probably a year. So that, that made a big difference. The other thing, company growth, people think of it as being like linear or exponential, like a hockey stick. I actually think that most companies, if you really looked closely, are they're all S curves. They start flat, they hit inflection point and they take off and then they level off again. And that level off might be still a little bit of growth, but usually. So what worked before stopped working.

Yeah.

Or they. I actually think what a lot of companies do is they find something that works and it takes off. And in their excitement to find the next thing that works, they stopped doing the thing that was currently working. Yeah, I may or may not be guilty of that one, but. So if you look at like this collection of stacked S curves, then as you're figuring out how. How to get through this, the flat spot and into the next inflection point, like a lot of those things are really hard or you have to invent something new. Like, we've probably reinvented Kinver Kit a few times. We're actually in the process of reinventing the company right now as we've like planted seeds from things that are really taking off and, and change the business. So the feeling that you don't want, and this comes at times, is when you're working really hard and not getting any results.

Yep.

And I've definitely had seasons of that. Right now we're in a season of working really hard and getting great results. And I guess Maybe the ultimate goal is to not have to work that hard and get great results, and that can happen too. And I think there's also a stage in the company that I'm at that I'm trying to navigate of really separating myself from the business so that people can make, you know, more and more decisions without me, so that I'm not a bottleneck. And so that's a lot to figure out as well. So, yeah, it's, it has been unevenly challenging. Yeah. But like, I feel us. I, I can see in the numbers and everything else this, like, the next phase of this, like, inflection point starting to take off, that, you know, we're definitely kicking off the next S curve and that makes it really fun.

Yeah. Especially when you're working on new things in the product and, and you know, that that's what people need and what they've been asking for or where the market's heading. I think I could definitely resonate with that. And you start to realize, oh, wow, like, I, I can see the future.

No. Yeah. No.

But also I can, I can, I've known these people for so long. My, the people I'm serving, I understand where their needs are, and it's just a matter of how quickly I can, I can offer that. One of the things I want to say to you, Nathan, because I would say I'm a late comer to convertkit. We joined convertkit webinar ninja four years ago. The 100 MBA. We just joined maybe a year ago, moved our list over there. But I remember you, you pitched me ConvertKit at the time. And obviously at the time I was just like, oh, I can't move my email list. I think it was with ActiveCampaign. And I was just like, basically hiding from you. And then, and then I was like, let me give it a look. Because I wasn't happy with what I was using at the time. And I realized how much innovation you guys made since I last looked. And it was maybe like 18 months, two years or something. And ever since I've been with you guys, there's so much innovation happening inside the app. Some of the stuff I use, some of those I don't need. But what I love about it is nothing is half baked. I, I, you know, I run a SaaS company. I, their company is run on like a stack of, like, I don't know, 40 different apps. Right. And I would say half of them are guilty of having, like, half of their features. They don't really do what they're promising Right. And I think one of the things that you do really well with ConvertKit is that you just do what really matters. Like I always say when people ask me, why do you convert? It's like, well, it just does what I wanted to do really well, and it doesn't do anything I don't need. And it's not confusing and it's easy kind of to navigate, which is important because if you have a team, it's not. I'm not only using it, everybody else is using it. I need to make sure they know how to use it and all that kind of stuff. So I. I just wanted to take a moment to say that I know that that was deliberate, and I think that's a great way to build a product, which is like, we're going to put out important features that really matter, and we're going to do it well even if it takes us a little bit longer. You know, even if we don't launch a new feature every month. Some people think they have to launch a new feature every month or something like that in. In their product. But just to piggyback off that comment, I want to ask you, like, as your team grows and your velocity can go faster, are you conscious of the fact that, hey, I don't want to push out too many things that are maybe not as polished as it used to be?

Yeah. There's an idea from a guy named Ryan Singer, who was the designer for Basecamp, and he talks about a product footprint and being very deliberate about, like, understanding which features increase the footprint of your product versus which ones, like, go taller or deeper, you know, whatever, like, go vertical versus horizontal. And I think a lot of companies are really eager to check off more boxes in the feature comparison against competitors, and so they're just going horizontal as fast as possible. They're like, how do we become the all in one? You know, let's. Let's add. Yeah, HubSpot. You know, I think from going back to the early days, like, I think Infusionsoft was.

Yeah, that was. That was the HubSpot of our day. Everybody's like, I got an Infusionsoft account. It does everything. It's like, oh, yeah.

And then you're like, okay, try to use it, you know, because, like, they went horizontal as much as possible in order to check all of these boxes, and then you end up doing, you know, you don't do anything very well. And I think companies do the math and say, like, oh, we can do this, because they're basing it off of how much time it takes to build the feature. But what you actually have to keep in mind is how much time it takes to maintain the feature. And I don't know about, you know, you know this very well.

The more bugs, the more issues, the more complications, the more UI changes they gotta make because they don't get it like this.

Yep.

Yeah.

And then there's also. Actually there's a talk. Who was it? I think it was maybe one of the founders of Stripe talking to one of the founders of Intercom, and they were talking about at some point, you can build at their scale. Right. You know, hundreds and hundreds of engineers and all that. You can build software faster, build features faster than your customer base can even comprehend to implement them. And I was like, oh, that's fascinating. And so it's just like, there's a lot of constraints that you don't think about. And we were always very, very deliberate about increasing product footprint. So, like, people for a long time would ask, like, oh, are you gonna process payments? It's like, nope, nope, not gonna do it. Because it's a huge, like the moment you increase product footprint there, it's a huge change. And. And so we waited until we were certain that we could, like, go, you know, if we're going to add all of that, can we go more than an inch deep? Can we actually build that part of the product to its full height? So it, you know, I imagine like.

A.

Like a neighborhood or something, you know, and you've got your features that are these fully built out houses, and then some of them are like, yeah, you did something there, but it's like a tree house.

Yeah, it's like a toilet. Yeah, yeah.

You didn't actually go build something substantial. And so like, waiting to do something until you know that you can really invest in it and, and build that up. And. And so that's what we did with ConvertKit Commerce and, you know, now you can do paid newsletters and sell digital products and everything else. So I, I think that's, that's so important of, like, only building what you can build well, and then most importantly, what you can maintain.

I love it. It's awesome stuff. Nathan, I've taken so much of your time. We reached the top of the hour, but I want to wrap up with, with a question, because I know that you do a lot of different things outside of ConvertKit, like you share on Twitter, you know, you have some investments in, with your real estate and airbnb. You led your work woodworking. I followed your journey when you built this tiny home that you're in right now. Are you ever worried that you're going to want to build? I'm not worried. Maybe the words of the road, maybe you have ambitions to build the next convertkit, another business as big as this? Or are you the kind of person's like, I got line in a bottle. I don't know if I could do this again. I'm just gonna stick with what I got.

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't like the early stage of building a business, especially like a SaaS business where I know you know this well, where you're, like, about to close a customer, and then they're like, oh, do you have an integration with whatever? And you're like, no. And they're like, well, Mailchimp has integrated. And you're like, yes, Mailchimp's been around for 20 years. Like, they've. You know those early days where you just hit these.

I'll zap it for you. Okay. I'll put it. Yeah, I'll make a zapier integration for you.

The number of times they're like, yeah, exactly. I'll pay for your zapier account, whatever it is. That early momentum is really hard. And I really like the scale that we have now of, like, if we build something, then, like, 45,000 people can use it right away. And that. That's amazing. Dan Martell has a new book that he. That just came out called buy back your time. It's really good. But he talks about how the biggest risk to your business is not competitors. It's not that your product goes stale or any of these things. It's that you lose interest or burn out as a founder. And so I think a lot about what are the things that keep me excited and keep me interested as a founder. My friend Sean Blanc has this saying. He says, if you work with your mind, you should rest with your hands. And so there's a lot of that that you see me doing. I live on a farm. We have nine acres. We have chickens and pigs and goats, and I have a wood shop. And, you know, I'm really doing things like if I have an idea or something separate from Convertkit, I'll. I'll play with that because I think it helps to give me a break and some space from, like, grinding it out in my core business the whole time. And I used to feel. I used to feel guilty about that because, like, I have really big ambitions for Convertkit and I'm trying to scale this as much as possible. And I have this 70 person team that I'm like, everybody's working super hard and I want to be right there at the front, you know, and everything else. And I think when Dan phrased it this way of like, look, you burning out or you losing interest is the single biggest risk to these people. Losing the job they love or this product that, you know, like you decided to sell it off and then some PE firm being like, oh, you know, I think we'll take a different, different direction, whatever, and customers losing, you know, losing something to care about that just made me think like, okay, I've gotta, I've gotta be really deliberate about protecting my energy and excitement and motivation. And so that both means taking some time away from the business and then also like making time to pursue the things inside of ConvertKit that I find are like, really exciting. And so I'll do things like I'll hire a couple people and carve out an idea and, you know, that I just want to know, can it work? So I think that's a lot of what we're doing. Like inside of ConvertKit, we've got two different businesses or two different. I don't know if they're features or businesses or what. One is a sponsorship network. And so we're toying with this idea and we actually just passed a million dollars in sponsorships that we've sold for creators. It goes back to paying creators. Like, can we spin that up? And so we got a team, we're, we're trying it out. It's still, it's still early, but you see all the signs of it working and we're looking for what are the ways where this community of creators on ConvertKit can benefit each other. So we can sell sponsorships across like 15 or 20 creators with much more easily than they could sell a single sponsorship by themselves.

Right.

And then the other thing that we're launching is something that we call the Creator Network, creatornetwork.com and that is a way for creators to recommend each other. Going back to the experience that you and I had in Las Vegas at those early conferences, that early network matters so much, so much. And so how can we productize that? How can we build it into the feature set so that when someone joins my list, I'm like, you know, recommending like, I don't know, I think about like Justin Jackson, who was in the community early on, right. Like, if we're talking about these, we're building newsletters on similar topics.

That's the wrong answer. Nathan, you recommend Me. Okay. Justin can free up on his own subscribers.

They're just kidding. That's exactly. But, like, that whole, you know, like, if we can partner together and grow faster. Yes, that's what I'm excited about. I love basically about how can we build network effects into this business and help creators grow.

I want to, I want to share something. I hope you're okay with this. But, yeah, I'm going to share something that for our listeners. Nathan runs a $34 million SaaS business. When he launched this idea for the creator sponsorship network, okay, he did not say, I'm going to dump $50 million or whatever or less a bad number. But, like, let's say I'm a dump 500,000 dol an interface, make sure it works, make sure that the network is, like, all automated. I actually reach out because I'm a big believer in sponsoring newsletters. That's how we grow the show. We sponsor all these different creators that you have in the network. And I reached out to your team and I'm, I, I, I saw what you did. Basically, you just, like, it was over email. This guy's like, hey, got on a call. Tell us about what you're trying to sponsor, what kind of creators you're looking for. They emailed me back a bunch of sponsors that that would or a bunch of creators that I could sponsor. These are the creators, and this is what they're all about. And this is their open rates. And this is, I was just like, I'm doing this over email. I'm like, this guy knows how to mvp, right? Because a lot of us, we think, oh, no one's gonna buy something like that.

No.

At the end of the day, if.

It fulfills my needs, if I get the right sponsors, I get good value. If I get the right creators that I could sponsor and I get, you know, I get the conversions I'm looking for to grow my show. I'm happy. It doesn't matter if there's a ui. In fact, it's more white glove. I get to have a conversation with somebody on this team. I get to learn about the creators. I get to understand what are my chances of them opening the emails. And for me, I wanted to pass on this lesson on the show because you have full ability to throw money at this problem. You have full ability to say, here we go, let's throw some money. But you're, you're fiscally responsible. Even though you're making a lot of money, you're saying, hey, before I start creating an interface and Creating a UI and creating a little tab menu inside of everybody's account so they can start doing this. I'm going to first just MVP this gets CPU can do this quote unquote off platform.

Right.

Do it on, on email, get the ball rolling, get proof of concept where you have a million dollars made for your creators now. Okay, let's take that million bucks or the profits we made from that and help help build out an interface. And I just gotta say, even, what is it, eight, nine years later, you're still MVPing your new features, which is amazing.

I love that. Yeah. Because you can launch all these things and you know, I think people think about it as I might be right or I might not on this first version, you know, like, did I build the right thing? Let's say I'm 90% confident that I built the right thing and you know, and we'll iterate from there. I'm like 90 confident that the first version will be wrong. And so I am like, I don't know. We have this idea and I'm like, great, let's, let's try it out. Let's see what works. There's so many things that we thought, oh, it's going to be this way. Didn't end up being that way, you know, but as you build, you like, iterate over time, then you learn so much and you have all these conversations and I think that you can both, you can fall into this trap on both ends of the spectrum when you're just getting started. You can go away and build and then try to come to the market, be like, look, look what I have. And everyone's like, oh, that's nice, I don't care, you know, and move on.

Yeah.

Or once you have a certain level of success and you can throw money at a problem, then you can pay people to go away and build something and come back. And the market's like, what's that? Oh yeah, no, we still don't care. And so you have to get in there in conversations with customers and see, like, is this a viable product? And then if it is, then build it.

And one of the things I learned in my journey of the last eight years of Webinar Ninja is in the beginning I thought, oh, I'm like the ultimate user. I know exactly what people want. Because I'm like, I built this for myself, blah, blah. That becomes a whole lot less true as the years go by. I'm the worst person to ask what is good for our users because I don't need anything Explained, I know exactly what I want, I know exactly how to use it, you know, like, and I realized, oh, when we were doing our product meetings and we're doing like, the first thing I have to say to everybody is like, where's the data to prove this? Do we. Have we done interviews? Have we gathered information from our intercom to find out what people are requesting? This sounds amazing, but let's first poll somebody on our next webinar if they want to see this in our software. Like, because. And I have to resist the urge of saying, man, that's brilliant. I want to see that in the real world because I'm the worst person asked now, because I'm way beyond. It's like you're asking somebody, you know, who is a woodworker or, or a shoemaker, you know, like, you know, what do you want to see in a shoe? Like, they've seen every shoe in the world. They know exactly what they want. And it's going to be way out there to be like, so fashion forward. Like, that's not a shoe, that's like a mini car or something like that. Whatever. The point is that, you know, like, we are just the wrong people to ask at this point. Have you. Do you feel the same way?

Yeah, I try to use ConvertKit as much as possible myself, so I notice the things in real time and like, can smooth out all those rounded corners. But you also have to spend so much time talking to customers because people use it in ways that didn't expect. Or like, the market changes, like what works in webinars, what works in email, and all of that is just different than what worked eight years ago.

Totally.

And otherwise we'll be stuck like, preaching the same systems and the, the like same techniques and then building the same features for those techniques and like the market will leave us behind. So yeah, talking to customers. That's why I love conferences. This whole thing is like an ad for go to conferences and meet people in real life. Because restrictions, it matters so much.

Totally, totally. And the network is so true. And throughout this conversation we talked about how many of those people helped you along the way when no one does it alone. Whether it's that chat with Hit and Shaw, like, you had to get to know this guy in order for you to have that chat, all that kind of stuff. So, Nathan, thank you so much for your time. I love this chat. As you continue the episode, guys, I'll talk a little bit more about what ConvertKit's all about. How you can get started for free if you want to learn more about Nathan's journey, and I highly recommend following him on Twitter because he's super, super open book about the finances of his business, the struggles he's going through. And one of the things I love about him is that he's not afraid to say, my product's better than my competitors. And he'll pin himself against competitors and say, hey, why are you going with these guys when we're better? And that tells me that that's somebody who believes in their company and is. Is putting their mouth with their. Where their money is. Thanks so much, Nathan. It was awesome. Thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

If I were going to give an alternative title to today's episode, it would be Sic Parvus Magna, and that's Latin for greatness. From humble beginnings or small beginnings. Nathan didn't start out with a lot, but he was determined. He was resourceful. And being a friend of Nathan's, he's always been an inspiration to me because of that. I can relate to that. I didn't grow up with a silver spoon either. And he was proof that you could do it. You can break through and have huge successes regardless of where you started. So I'm here to tell you, if you didn't go to an Ivy League school or have rich parents or whatever it might be, don't see it as a disadvantage. See it as motivation. Also, if you didn't grow up with much, you're a really resourceful person. You know how to make a lot from a little. You know how to make the most out of what you have. In fact, till this day, one of the metrics that Nathan evaluates his success in his business is how much the business earns per employee or per team member. Meaning, if I can find the best talent, train them, cultivate them, manage them, and get the most out of them, my company will win. I'll make more money per employee than companies that are twice, three times, five times my size. That's beyond being thrifty. That's being smart, being productive, being efficient. And yes, he had bumps along the road. He had difficulties. We couldn't cover everything, but I could tell you I followed his journey. I know him. It wasn't always explosive growth. Every business has its challenges. Even with growth, you know, being able to meet demand is a challenge in itself. They say it's a good problem to have, but it's still a problem you got to solve or you're going to lose out on an opportunity. But one of my favorite Takeaways from the conversation is he understands he has to balance his role in the company, in serving the company, leading, staying interested, staying active, while also serving his own needs, his own life, his own family, his own ambitions. Because when you suffer, when you're not doing well inside, when you're not feeling your best self, if you're not enjoying your life, you best believe that's going to affect the business. It's going to affect what you're doing, affect your team. A few times in my career, I learned that the hard way. But this was a great reminder to take care of yourself along the journey. You can't be a sacrificial lamb. You got to make sure that you feed the business, feed yourself, feed the people around you. When I talk about feed on, I talk about money and food. I'm talking about even just energy, positivity, happiness, being delighted with what you do. Be mindful of this because it could cost your business. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I hope you loved today's episode. Go ahead and share it. If you did, go over onto your favorite social platform and send them over to 100- MBA-NET, let them know that you just listened to the Nathan Barry episode and tell them what you think. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. No one builds a business alone. Not only does it take a team, it takes a network. Right? You heard Nathan and I chat about that conference we went to and how all the people that are at that conference, we still support each other, we helped each other, we were each other's biggest fans, but we also helped each other out when we had difficulties or challenges. I mean, even recently. A few months ago, I had a big question. When it came to email, I reached out to Nathan. He basically gave me his team at my disposal. So he was just like, here's my team. Here are the people that work on my team. They can help you out directly and advise you how to move forward. I was so grateful, but also conscious of the fact that that's years in the making, building that relationship and taking the time to really value these relationships. And that's just one, right? That's just one situation, one person. Over the last 20 years, I've built countless relationships. Not thinking, oh, I can cash in this relationship on a rainy day, but knowing that the journey is just better with other people. It's easier, it's more fun, it's a delightful experience when you're doing it with others. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then.

Take care.

Of.

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