Andrew Mewborn Takes Action to Lead a New Kind of BuildInPublic Movement

What's up, everyone?

This is Scott Levy, CEO and founder of Result Maps. And we're here for another episode of Rethinking Execution where we talk about strategy execution in the context of high performing teams, the CEO's journey, and all the things we need to make sense of and thrive in the modern connected world. Today I'm really excited to talk with Andrew Meuborn. He's developed an online learning platform. That's one way to discuss it, but it's really a community and a movement that he's gotten from zero to probably a thousand within a few months. And I think that it's important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is it gives you a working example of how people can come together very quickly and the things they need to be successful and sustain a real change. Now, the change Andrew teaches is how everyone can start a writing habit. Writing every day and finishing by hitting the post button on LinkedIn. And this works on any platform, but it becomes like a writing gem. And I've been very impressed with how he set it up, how organically it's taken shape, how he builds in public. And I think it's a fantastic model that we can all learn from. So we start off with me just asking him a few questions about how it came about, what are some of the surprising things he's learned, and we'll go from there.

We were talking about just how Brand 30 ends up working with the posts. And you're about to. Do you need the prompt again or you know what you're going to say?

No, I think I know what I was going to say. Which is, you know, posting is only like the first step of building an audience online. Right. I think 80% of it, I would say, like, if you were scared to post online, um, you might be able to grow a fast following just by adding value on the comments of other people's posts. Um, I mean, there's some days where I get more likes on my comments on people's posts than I do on my actual post. So, you know, to give you an idea there. And so, you know, the takeaway here is that, like, posting is only the first step. I think a lot of the results actually come from engaging on other people's posts. Right? Yeah. And people ask, okay, well, you know, how do I get in front of my target audience? You find the top 10, top 20, however many people in your target audience, and you just post on their post consistently. Right. If that person is your target audience, they probably are connected to people who are also involved in that target audience. Right? And so as you're commenting on those posts of your target audience, you're actually renting their audience as well. You think about it like that. Like, you're renting it because their audience is seeing it. And then they're gonna see your comment if it actually adds value, you know, asterisk there. If it adds value. If you say something like agree or 100% or, you know, whatever. Yeah, I do that too. Sometimes I'm just like, hey, someone asked me to comment, so it gets more views. I don't know if that's actually true, but I'll just say something like that, right? But like, you know, I take like 20 minutes every morning, so I'll write my, like, good morning post, which is typically like a stupid meme post. But, like, that's my sense of humor and I love it and it, it's fun for me. So there's that. And, you know, then I'll take 20 minutes after that post just to comment on key people's posts. I bookmarked, literally their, like, page so I can go to it and go to their post. And I have a list of like seven people, and I comment on their stuff every morning. And then I'll go on the feed and see some other people that post some stuff that I can add value to. Right? And it takes me 20 minutes. And I would say, like, that, you know, I don't have metrics on did followers come from my post or that. But I will definitely say that that stuff gets seen, you know, and it's. It's not online. If you add a piece of value, that being something useful that someone can take away in the comments, you can get as much visibility in that comment as you will the actual post. Right? Like, it's, it's not uncommon to see, like, people with hundreds of likes on just a simple comment that was like, oh, okay, this was actually better than the post. Right.

A lot of these insights, I think, come because instead of getting lost in a methodology or a given framework, you're, like, hyper optimized to what's my end goal? What's my end game? Well, yeah, I want to build my brand, but the best way for me to do that is by having conversations with the people I'm trying to deliver value to. And whereas I see a lot of really complex marketing diagrams drawn out, you're just, you're cutting right to the core.

Again and again and again.

And then here's a friction point. Let me move that out of the way. What fascinates me about what you're doing, though, is it's. It's become such a community and a movement.

Really. I like that. That was my goal. I'm kidding. I didn't want to create a movement, but it has become like that.

I'd love to know, like, did you just fall into this because you put some good thought into it? How did, how did brand 30 get started? Tell me a little bit about that, if you would.

So it was like I was getting hit up on LinkedIn a ton on like, hey, love your content. Hey, like your stuff. You know, what do you recommend to, like, for me to start posting? I had a lot of people at work asking me, right? And so I was like, you know what? Like, what I need to do is just rather than, you know, one off, try and help people, because I truly wanted to do that. And that was the way I was providing value to a certain extent, right. Besides my day job. And for me, it was like, hey, how do I systematize this feedback that I'm giving people so that I'm not just saying it to one person, I'm saying it to. I can say it to many at one time. Right. And so I studied systems engineering and electrical engineering in college. So my mind works like that, right. Like, that's how I think. I think of, like, how do I create a system out of this that's repeatable? Yeah. So it's like, what's the end goal? Let me reverse engineer what the end goal is and then put all. What are all the inputs I need in order to achieve that end goal. So I started just writing and saying, all right, what would a course look like? And I just, you know, it was one of those, like, inspiration moments where I was just like, all right, cool. And I just. For like a week straight, every day, I'd spend a couple hours of my free time just writing, writing, writing. And then, you know, spent some time editing and, and putting different pieces in different places. And then it all came together. And, you know, I was definitely inspired to do that. And it wasn't like I just came up with all like, the curriculum stuff, you know, in that week period. It's all stuff I've been seeing before. It's all recycled stuff that I've already sent to other people or stuff that I've never put on paper that, that I've learned over the years, you know. Cause I work at, you know, full time. I'm at outreach right now, which, you know, we systematize the sales same Thing. And you know, so again, like, it comes back to that for me. Right. And so that's what I'm passionate about is like systems thinking. Right. And so, yeah, after doing that, I was like, okay, let me put, you know, this knowledge into a system and use it so that when people post about brand 30 it, we're like billboarding brown 30 as well. So that it actually creates this flywheel that kind of markets itself. And that is, you know, kind of how I thought about it, right? It was like, look, I have a day job. I don't want to put a ton of work into marketing and doing all this. How do I have it market itself? So the more success it gets, the more actually markets itself. Yeah. So it's pretty interesting.

I love that because for two reasons. One, I'd be thinking about it already, but you actually called us out, your material theory of constraints. Right. So I've got these constraints and the constraints, if we embrace them so often, create creative solutions. I love that going, well, I've already got a full time job. I'm not going to go market it. What can I do where it'll market itself? And what's the cohort headcount this time around?

It's 441. This cohort, this is only the third cohort, right. And so a total total in the community. We had like 150. The first cohort, which was great for the first one, right. It was just kind of like, hey, I'm doing this thing, here's a landing page, let's do it. So proved it out. Cohort one, cohort two. We had about 400 signups. This one we had about 440 signups. And so it's great. I see it growing probably about 400 people every cohort. So in total we got about a thousand ish people in like two or three months. Right. As part of the community. So that will, you know, again start to extend too as we get more people in, different people in, they start pushing, you know, their stuff to the network. People are like, hey, I want to do that. Oh, Brian 30, it's billboarded everywhere, you know, so once again, the success kind of build. It's like compounding, right. Which is amazing. So, and that wasn't like necessarily intentional. I thought about it, but I didn't know if it was going to work. I wasn't like, oh, I'm going to do this thing, that's going to do it. It was just like a test and it happened to work.

I think what's fun about it. Everything's now changed. There's a before and after Covid and that's like there's a dividing line.

Yeah.

And you are looking for ways have connection that's meaningful and not exhausting and and is also advancing business. I think it's just, it's just super interesting to watch. It reminds me most of, of kind of like what I saw CrossFit do in fitness. Like I'd always worked out, I knew people who had worked out. But CrossFit really like made it digestible. Here's what you can do if you, if you go address things this way and by the way do the things every day, have this in mind every day. And I love that whole idea is like a gym, like you're just going to go right every day. What surprised you the most?

What surprised me the most honestly the accountability partner partners part where, you know, having an accountability partner is I think super important, like for forming any type of new habit. But you know, I would say it makes it a lot easier. And you know, when I put this together, I was like, hey, there's going to be some accountability partners. That's how we're going to keep people accountable for posting every day for 30 days. I wasn't sure if people were going to like that, right? Like someone kind of like, hey, did you do your post? But I'm sure people don't say it like that. And that seems to be one of the main factors of this that people love, right? Like I get hit up all the time. You know, some people don't respond to be an accountability partner, don't want to be. And you know, there's some people that are like, hey, like my accountability partner, I reached out, you know, one or two times. They haven't gotten back. I need someone else. Like I need an accountability partner. So like people understand the power of accountability, which is great, right. And so I think that was a very surprising part of this. Right. And, and with that, why it excites me and why I love it is because it helps with active learning, right? Where versus like most courses out there today are like, oh, hey, here's a course. You have access. Go and read all this on your spare time and good luck. Right? Like, you know, it's tough to learn stuff like that on your own, right. But if you go through it in a systematic way with an accountability partner, with small chunks at a time, you know, everyone on the same timeline, essentially going on the same journey, then that I think is, you know, gonna make it more successful. So Yeah, I mean.

Reminds me, thinking behind me, I've got these encyclopedias from a friend, encyclopedias of taekwondo, which I studied. Oh, no, I didn't get those first. I got those like, he gave me those to borrow to study for a black belt exam. And when you, when you start taking action and then you get the support material, it's so much more impactful. Like you, you don't go to class and they're like, here's a stack of encyclopedias. Get started. It's, let's just start acting. Let's start moving. What do you see hold people back when it comes to taking action? Because this is such an action based course. Like, could you put your finger on a couple things that you see getting people's way?

Oh, yeah. I mean, so many. And we do this in onboarding survey, right? I have an onboarding survey which I should create a word cloud on it. It's actually interesting what people say is, this is also surprising. It's also similar. It's like, I feel like I don't know enough. Imposter syndrome. I'm not a good writer, right? I don't have any ideas, you know, so stuff like that, that, like, I still encounter that stuff every day. But what you do is you trick your mind, right? It's all a mind game. 80% of the, you know, posting online and building an audience online is, is a, is a mind game, right? It's you playing with yourself. Because everyone can. Most people that see this can write. Everyone can write something, you know, at least my target audience here. So it's giving them a way to get in the mindset of eliminating that fear, right? It's a fear of, like, what are my friends gonna think? What are, you know, my family gonna think? They're gonna think I'm trying to be someone I'm not. And, you know, I talked about this in our last session, but the way to reframe that is that like, you know, a lot of it comes down to imposter syndrome. And when you have imposter syndrome, you're competing with someone else. But our goal is not to compete with someone else. Our goal is for you to create your own world. And if you create your own world, the only person you're competing with is, is yourself, not other people. So that's the way to battle imposter syndrome, right? And that's, that's essentially what I try and teach throughout this course.

I mean, that growth mindset right there, my friend, I love.

Yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, the Way to reframe that. And I think that in itself combats a lot of those issues that people have in posting in one. Right. Just reframing it. Like, I'm creating my own thing here. I'm not competing with anyone else. And so, yeah, I think that's the. That's kind of the big takeaway from people. And it's mostly mindset, right. And I think a lot of courses go straight into tactics. Do this, do that, do that. But, you know, they don't warm up people's brain on how to think about it first. Right. Like, you know, if you went into a Taekwondo fight feeling like crap, eating crappy the day before and not getting into the right headspace, your mind, you're going to tell her, start telling yourself, I didn't prepare well enough, I didn't do this well enough. Right. And so the same thing goes into, like, personal branding, right? Like, you need to, like, part of the homework is to, like, get your mind in the right place. And, you know, most writers don't need. They just need encouragement. That's what it is. Does most people just need encouragement in anything? Not just brand 30, but like doing anything you want, you know. And so I think that's. That's the starting point. That should be the starting point of every course. What mindset? Totally agree.

But what I will say for anybody who's in, you've got some really, like a wealth of very practical things to do to help people get those systems set up. It's not like I've seen so many things that are just like, here, go right, look at my posts. Here's what I did in this post. And you actually take that time. Mindset, setting up your systems, giving people ideas they can make their own, and frameworks they can make their own. That's one of my favorite things about the system. If I had to point to one of the top, I'd say three things about the differences. You really set people up for success in that first week.

Onboarding is something I'm maniacal about, whether it's a course, whether it's a product I'm building, whether it's, you know, a side business I have. Like, onboarding is so important. That's your first impression. That's your, you know, in writing, I talk a lot about this. In Brand 30, if they don't read your headline, they're not going to read the rest of your piece. So your headline, you spend 80 cents of your dollar on your headline, right? And then the rest is, you know, just, you Know if they don't read the headline again, nothing else matters. Same thing I believe in building a course, building a product. 80% of your dollar is spent in the onboarding. And I've seen that fail with different SaaS products. That's my world, right? People are just like, oh, here's the product. Without like getting people into like, well, here's the basics, here's the foundation, you know, before jumping into this huge platform, right? So I've seen that just fail completely throughout the past six years and helping build SaaS companies and their sales process. And that's all I do every day is look at sales process, how to make it better, how to systematize it. And so same thing there with reps. It comes down to how they're onboarded, right? Like if they're onboarded to a new process in a shitty way, then you're going to get shitty results. So it's really so important. And the most underrated part of anything is the onboarding, whether that's teaching people something new in enablement, a course, whatever. So I would spend honestly on this. I spent 80% of the time on the onboarding, right? And like the other stuff was the tactics you can find online anywhere. But the onboarding was setting up for why those tactics, you know, throughout the four weeks are important and how to use them and what it all means and what your outcome is trying to be and like what we're in this for, right? And honestly, it took me the longest because I knew it was the most important. The other stuff is like, you know, basic tactics and again, it's all about mindset, like a majority of it. So the tactics are easy. It's, it's, you know, getting this right. It's not.

That is super interesting. I didn't know we were going to go that heavy and onboarding, but we're, we're. No wonder I like this stuff so much. So our company, I went on one on board, everybody, everybody, the whole, the whole company. And it makes such a difference because you see a lot of the nuances and things you need to adapt and change on the one hand, but everyone gets better. And now you've got a system and you can build and fill in everyone else. So there's two threads that are super interesting to me. One is that you've brought up improv.

A lot, or it seems like you.

Have, and then the other is salsa dancing, which I'm really passionate about. And we probably haven't talked about this, but in a past life, I was a Musician. And a lot of what I bring to how I approach our company comes from music and the process of learning to do it effectively. What kinds of things have you found useful from domains like learning to dance and learning improv really, really impacted you?

This question just got me super excited because each one of those was a different journey in my life, right? And each one of those three components. Improv music, myself. I'll start there. So I. I studied classical music my entire, like, teenage and adolescent years. I actually. I actually have one of my classical guitars right here on the wall, right? Like, here we go. So, you know, I am a big guitar kind of nerd. I spent, you know, I study classical music. People look at me and they're like, you studied classical music? I'm like, yeah, I can play classical music. I can read notes. I can do it all on that.

Beautiful.

So, yeah. And so studying that, that, honestly, I think, is what set me up to think in systems. That is why I studied engineering, because I looked at, like, a sheet of notes and I would say, okay, how do you study? Like, it's a system, right? It's patterns, it's a system. And, you know, what your output is, which is the full beautiful song with, you know, not, hopefully not missing a note. But you don't just try and play the whole song through. You take one bar at a time, right? And so you do one bar at a time, whether it's four counts, eight counts, whatever, whatever. And you learn that bar, and then you go to the next bar, and then you put the two together, right? And then you learn the third bar. And after you learn the third bar, then you put all three together and you just stack like that until you get to the end of the song. You can play it all together. That same way of, like, formulating and systematizing something is how I systematize. Like, you know, everyday things. Like brand 30, right? Onboarding. That's that first bar, right? And then you need that. And then I add the second week or the first week of the curriculum, which is associated with the onboarding, and then you put it all together. So it's kind of like just putting things in pieces, right? And then putting them all together. And so music taught me that. Improv. All right, let's go to the next phase of my life, right? Like, this was like, right after college. So improv taught me so many things.

Just didn't want to do jazz. So you had to find another.

Yeah, I had to do another thing. Well, and I was like, you know, actually, who Inspired me. Inspired. So someone inspired me. I had a. I still have a mentor. And he was friends with the ex Twitter CEO Dick Costello. And I was asking him, I was like, hey, everyone seems to love Dick. Like, what. What did he do differently? And my mentor was like, hey, he was a big improv fanatic. And I was like, oh, interesting. And so that kind of got me my wheel spinning. I was like, oh, well, you know, I want to run a company one day myself. Seems like everyone likes this gu. Seems like that's a. That's a secret to, like, business and communication in general. And like, you know, communication is everything in business and writing online and everything. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna do that. So I took it one class. I fell in love. I did it for like four years. And it. It. You know, most people think improv is being about. Is about being funny. That's an outcome of improv. But really what it is about is, like, there's so many things you learn to do, which is like learning to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, right? So many things. Like how to make your partners look good, right? Like, that's all. Like, that in a business setting is so important. How to build on people's ideas with. Yes. And Right. Like, how do you do that? Fourth, how do you tell a story? Right? And then how do you create an emotional reaction out of someone? There's so many components of it, right? Because what you're doing is you're trying to get emotional reaction out of your audience. Whether that's funny, sad, it's both. You know, funny is part of it, and it's an art and it teaches you. I think it's like the fastest 0 to 1 business communication thing you can do, which is improv. So, yeah, that was that phase of my life. Now, salsa music, which was the latest kind of phase. My wife and I actually did a lot of salsa practice twice a week, you know, for a couple hours for our wedding originally. But we're keeping it going just because it was so fun. It's something to do, you know, between with me and my wife. And the other parts is it's got that music, you know, kind of background. So it brings me back to my roots, studying classical. And then when you listen to salsa music, you can't not be happy, right? And like, it's like riding a jet ski, you know, you can't not smile when you're doing it. So it just. It's a way to, like, enjoy life for me and kind of like get away from the phones, get away from the computers and do all that.

So that makes me happy. It's fantastic, man. Just.

Thank you, man.

Really congratulations on this. And I know it's going to lead to tons of other things. I'm sure it already has. The most exciting thing is now I'm getting to share it with others, and I'm hearing great people from them as well.

So amazing.

It's really great.

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. And yeah, you've been super active in the community, and so thank you for that, which is great. Right. So this thing is made up of. Of all people like you that are, like, putting in energy, getting others involved. And so it wouldn't be as successful as it is today without people like you doing that.

So I think that there are new models emerging, and I think that.

This.

Idea of, like, getting out of our silos and, hey, our identity as a company, while this is not new to all of us, it's new to a lot of us. Our identity as a company isn't defined by our walls. And then how do we connect and come together and learn? Like, the ground has already shifted. And going back to that onboarding, the onboarding really sets you up for what do I need to do? How do I need to think about it? Where do. As a CEO, for example, where might I need to rethink a couple things, and where do I need to just let them fly? Because you've laid this out so nicely, it's very easy to tweak things for whoever you are. And I think that that is a big differentiator. But it just fascinates me. You can. You can jump in and learn this way. And I'm seeing that from everybody from kind of office managers to seasoned leaders who have started companies. I'm hearing the same thing, which is kind of people I've recommended.

Yeah, yeah. And going back to that, it's. It's your classic cliche. Like, you dive into the deep end. Like, the best way people learn, in my opinion, is just diving in and doing it. There's no better way to learn. Right. It's almost like a startup mentality. It's. Right. Like you. You just dive in and you figure, you know, you build the plane on the way down. And so throughout this, because we're doing systems thinking here, the way I thought about it, too, and how I coordinated the live sessions to the curriculum is how do the live sessions support the curriculum? Right. And so that's important. Now, the system I came up with is execute, learn, re, execute, Right. So do learn, redo and so the curriculum, right? Or you go and I tell you, hey, go do the, you know, go do these things. Go post whatever you're posting, you're learning some stuff. And then I provide you with material after that point that says, here's some stuff you should know. And then you're like, oh, I didn't do that in my last post. And then you start to automatically think, hey, here's how I could have changed my last post to do that. And then when you redo your next one, you now have that stuff in mind, right? So it's. It's like throw people in. Teach them something after you've thrown them in and they've kind of like, don't know what they don't know, and then show them what they don't know. They look at that and say, oh, I could have changed this, I could have changed this. Whereas if you just flood people with information, they can't consume all of that, right? And so the way to consume it, and it's. This is like a psychology experiment too, which is fun, but like, you know, you need to have people try what it is that they're doing before you go and throw them any information. And then you need to like, kind of seed that information. And so, you know, the way I came up with that was, how do I learn, right? It's diving in, deep in and saying, oh, shit, I should have done it this way based on what I learned. Let me go and redo it, right? Or let me take that into account when I do something else. That's just a feedback loop, right? And that's, that's really the goal, learning anything new. And I think that I'm a big. I'm also pretty crazy about just diving in and taking action, right? Because you can read a book on how to do something. But guess what? I don't think. I think wasting, you know, reading a book is if you don't take action on anything in a book, it's waste time, right? So a business book at least, right? Not all books are.

I was thinking about this with somebody this morning, so. So I went and did some graduate work at University of North Texas here. Incredible, incredible music program. And they were, at the time, I mean, they were known for this. I don't know what all the reputations are now, but somebody was asking me, like, well, what was the difference being there and the real difference? It wasn't just theory and it wasn't just performance. You were going to bring it on both and that was it. Like, you're going to be playing. Here's our big practice facility. You're going to be working, you're going to be doing all these things and we're going to give you tools to make sense of them kind of. You know, if I think about it, I would have said that not realizing you had some of that in your background, that that's a big part of what brand 30 does. Execute, execute, execute. One of the talks I gave to a group of students and it was about strategy, execution, teamwork, all those things. But I, I ended up starting off with, oh, and I learned a lot of this in music. And I remember afterwards when we debriefed the Prof. Who's very seasoned CEO I really respect, he's like, look, you can't leave with that shit. Like, you gotta help people understand what you're bringing them. Just leave that out. You don't have time. There is so much to learn from these other areas. And that was. I kind of suspected you were bringing in things from other areas. I didn't know about the electrical engineering, but there is a lot we can bring in from these other systems, I think to business, especially at a time like now where we're in this massive shift that I kind of think continual shifts are the new reality.

Yeah, yeah. And one thing that just came to mind when you said that is like some of these pieces, you know, that I'm putting together not just the system, but the learning portion of like the copywriting frameworks. What happens is those, like, I've learned more about psychology, studying copywriting than I have reading any psychology book, right? Like, and I swear by that, I'm like, you want to learn psychology? Study all the best copywriting books, right? And because what you're doing is learning the different desires of people, why they do things the way they do, how to get them to take action. And there's formulas for this that have been used for thousands of years, right? And you start to see like, oh, people, if they don't read the headline, they're not going to read the rest of the piece. So your headline has to be important, right? Like everyday stuff like that, right? You just learn like, oh, you know that that's important formatting of posts for copywriting. You learn that people skim things, you learn about their patients, right? Like how they like to read things. I mean, you just learn so much about like humans that. And you can take that on to build anything you want, right? Like whether it's a course, whether it's a website. Whether it's everything, the basis of everything is copywriting, right? Like that's the basis of everything today. So if you're an entrepreneur, then I think the number one skill you can have or a salesperson, just because that's my world, is copywriting.

I mean, where it's hard to think of a place where writing doesn't help you.

Yeah.

What I like here is the format. It's uncomfortable at first. That friction. It's not that big. You perceive it as big. But once you get into the habit, it's like every other thing. Suddenly it gets easier that doing it every day but then having a meaningful way to do it every day and seeing others around you doing it every day, it's pretty cool. I feel like we have not come close to hearing the last of ran 30. Something's happening here.

I hope so too, man. I hope so, man.