Ep#67: Stop Renting Attention!! Why Founders Need to Own Their Platform - Nathan Gwilliam

The one of— other than AI, the biggest tectonic shift that's transforming business landscape today is credibility marketing, right? And it's gonna affect every single business out there. Just like the internet, the businesses that didn't take advantage of the internet, they went out of business or they lost market share. The same thing with AI, the businesses that are not adopting AI effectively, they're gonna lose market share or go out of business. Same thing with credibility marketing.

Welcome to Startups Decoded, the show that gets real about what it takes to build a successful startup I'm Andy Walsh, 2x exited founder, strategist, and your host. Each week I talk with top founders, investors, and operators to unpack the plays that drive real traction, not just headlines. If you're building something bold, this is where you'll get the honest insights to scale with clarity and confidence. Let's keep growing together. Hit subscribe and share with your community. It would mean the world to me. Hello and welcome back to Startups Decoded. My name is Andy Walsh. For a founder, getting attention is everything. It can help fundraise, it can help bring staff on, and it can help drive sales, of course. But founders need to ask themselves a question: are they owning attention or are they borrowing attention? And we're going to unpack that today with Nathan William. Welcome to the show, Nathan.

Thanks for having me on today, Andy Walsh.

This is great to be able to flip it around. I've been on your show and now you're jumping on Startups Decoded. And I love that you've got this really interesting intersection as far as a serial entrepreneur, you have PodUp, your own platform, and you have your own podcast. And for me, it opens up lots of opportunities. And I'd love to set the scene around who Nathan is and, and your path into being an entrepreneur.

Yeah, absolutely. I am an incurable creator. I have to be creating something or I, or I die. Uh, the first venture I created was, um, was in college. My freshman year in college, I had never heard of the internet. Like, I never heard the word one time, never used it. I'm sure it was there in some capacity, but it just was not, not on my radar in any way. That was back in 1992, '93. And I decided I wanted to be a missionary for a couple of years. So I went down to Brazil and volunteered get, didn't get paid a salary or anything. And I, when I was down there, I fell, fell in love with these street kids. You know, I'd give them the change out of my pocket, but, um, you know, quickly ran out as a volunteer missionary. And so I vowed to do something to make a lasting difference in their lives when I got back. And I, uh, when I got back, the internet had exploded. It was all over the place. Everything was the internet, um, in 19— by 1995. And so I was, I was doing this this program in college where I had to write a thesis and I was in studying entrepreneurship and I decided to write a, a business plan as a thesis. And I decided to, to write a plan about how to use the internet to help children through adoption. And ended up winning a couple of business plan competitions. I started it in a computer lab there on the third floor of my business school. Some of the TAs helped me start it and we grew that to be the world's most used adoption service. And I feel so blessed to, to have had had that opportunity. I had kind of felt like I was living inside a Hallmark movie to be able to help people find families and help children find homes and help people reunite. It was a huge blessing in my life to be part of that. Over the years, I've been able to do some other ventures as well. All of my ventures tend to revolve around building and growing and monetizing digital platforms. So I helped David Neeleman, if you know him, he's created 5 airlines. I helped him build, he did JetBlue, for example, is one of his you might know, and I helped him do an airline in Brazil called Azul. And I built a Brazilian travel social network for him and grew his Facebook following to where half of all the Facebook followers in Brazil were following him at one point. And, and he became the fastest growing airline in aviation history. There is such a huge power in owning your platform in almost any niche, right? You create an airline, you create a platform for your ideal customers. And instead of relying upon Facebook or Instagram or YouTube to have relationships with your and being dependent upon that algorithm, we've, we've really focused on building platforms that you own, right? Build a platform about Brazilian travel for a Brazilian airline, right? Another example, one of my businesses got purchased by a local media company in Utah. They have a newspaper, they have a TV station and a radio station. They're called Deseret Digital Media. And so Deseret Digital Media bought my company and they hired me to build platforms for their ideal customers. So we ended up building a series of family-focused websites for them because their audience was very family-centric there in Utah. We ended up reaching, uh, 280 million monthly uniques for Deseret Digital Media, according to Unmetric, that they had 40 million monthly comments, likes, and shares so that their engagement score was 40 million per month. And, uh, Unmetric said that they had more engagement than any publisher in the world. This little Utah media company. And it shows the power of just owning your own platform, right? Owning, owning something and publishing through the passions of your customers directly to them instead of just being dependent upon some third-party algorithm to surface your content.

It's so interesting how life's journeys can set you up on a professional career. And I've had different conversations now. I recorded an episode just yesterday with a lady, Molly, and she's been to 68 countries and a lot of her personal experiences really fueled her professional career. And for you, it was quite literal, like seeing kids on the street and seeing just the hardship that someone's living through on the frontline and thinking, how do you build it? And to build a platform, but then to look at, okay, within that there's a structure and a strategy and approach about why it was successful that you can then apply to new ideas. And that feels like it became the common thread. And the thing that I like about first-party data is that there's a level community with it too. And that's the secret sauce, particularly today, is how do a group of people on a database ultimately be connected in a way through their passions or something that they have in common?

Yeah. Yeah. So that is one of the big secrets of creating a successful community. And so many people just ignore that. I gave a TED Talk on that. If your audience wants to Google my name, Nathan William, and just type TEDx next to it, I gave a TED Talk called Connecting Through Passion. And I tell the story of Deseret Digital Media that I shared a little bit with you about. And when I started at Deseret Digital, they wanted me to build new platforms for them and they wanted me to reach hundreds of millions of people with light and knowledge, but they didn't know how they were going to do that. So they asked me to do the research. They asked me to go write the plan, get it approved, and then go execute it. And we brought in their ideal customers and we used a methodology that I kind of figured out when I was at, when I was working for Azul Airlines. When I was at Azul, We didn't just create one Facebook page for them. We created 100 Facebook pages for them. And we tested 100 different Facebook pages. And we found 3 of the pages that just were through the roof. The growth was through the roof. The cost per acquisition was ridiculous. The engagement was ridiculous. And so then we went and turned off 97 Facebook pages. And then we doubled down, tripled down on those 3 Facebook pages. And we knew what was gonna work. Those Facebook pages were things like, eu amo Brasil, which is in Portuguese, I love Brazil. I love Brazil. And eu amo viajar. I love to travel. And they were all focused around these passions that people had, right? And I really got thinking about these passions and trying to figure out how do I find these passions? And we found a methodology that Toyota developed and they call it the 5 Whys. And they used it for something different than what we used it for, but we found it worked really well for surfacing and discovering these passions. Toyota developed these 5 Whys for their assembly line. And when something went wrong, like a screw was out, they couldn't just say, oh, the screw fell out or was loose. Let's go tighten the screw, put a new screw. They couldn't, they could do that. They had to say, okay, well, why was the screw loose? Right? And then whatever the answer is, well, we, we didn't properly have the proper maintenance schedule.

Okay.

Well, why didn't we have the proper maintenance schedule? Well, we didn't do the right training. Okay. Well, why didn't we do the right training? And that you had to go 5 levels deep and you had to find the 5th problem, and then you had to fix the fifth problem, not just the first problem, not the surface problem. And that's why Toyotas are so great. Like every car I buy is Toyota. They last me so long. The quality is so good. And it's a lot of that is due to these kinds of methodologies that they put into place. And so we decided to take that same methodology and, and ask why 5 times. So we, we brought in the Deseret Digital Media customer and we said, okay, well, why do you use this service they provide? And they gave an answer. And then whatever the answer was to that question, we turned it into a question. And we asked their answer as the next question. And we did that 5 times. And you got to the end. And at Deseret Digital Media, for example, they started giving answers like, you know, I want my children to feel my love, or I want a more loving marriage. You know, those kinds of answers were the things they were giving, just things that just drove their lives. And we started calling these Level 10 Passions. And when I started at Deseret Digital Media, their whole social strategy was focused around brands. And so like their, their primary Facebook page was called Deseret News. And they only had about maybe 10,000 people that were following Deseret News and they pushed all content through one channel. And the reality is when you try to push all of your content to everybody, nobody cares about it, right? Because 80% of your content is irrelevant to everybody that's consuming it and they start ignoring it. Even the guy that was running their Facebook page didn't follow their Facebook page. And so we, we switched it up and we started creating Facebook pages around and social channels around these passion statements where it was like, I love my family, I love my mom, I love my kids, I love my husband, I love BYU sports, whatever the passions were of their audience, we started, started creating channels around them. And then we started creating content around those passions and pushing them into the channels. And then people cared, right? Because if I care about BYU Sports, I'm going to follow the BYU Sports channel, where I'm not going to follow the Desert News channel because it's a fire hose of stuff I don't care about. But I can follow exactly what I care about. And it worked really well. And that's how we, we reached— we went from less than 100,000 total follows across all of their social channels to reaching more than 130 million social follows. And then the engagement was so much higher because it Everything— it wasn't built about a brand they didn't care about. It was built around something that drove their life. I remember sitting in an executive committee meeting of Deseret Digital, and these are like the top people in that company. And I remember saying, on a scale of 0 to 10, how passionate are you about this Deseret News brand? What do you think their score was? The average score that that room of the top executives from that company and top leaders from that company gave for their, their brand?

I'm going to say around like 3 or 4.

Yeah, it was a 2.5. And when you try to market something through a passion of a 2.5, like people don't care, right? They're just, there's so many higher level priorities in our lives that are 6s and 8s and 9s and 10s. We just don't have time in our lives for things that are 2.5 and 3 and 4. And they get ignored. So when you try to market through something that's a level 2.5 passion or a 3 or a 4, it's like trying to market through a brick wall. It just, it costs so much more money. It's like you're trying to force feed it. But then when you can switch and you find the level 10 passions and you build everything around the level 10 passions and you try to market through the level 10 passions, everything works magically, right? And you look like a genius, but you're just, you just found what your audience cares about the most and your marketing through that.

You're 100% speaking my language. My background and my startups were focused around music, art, and fashion. And music is a cultural universal, right? Everyone around the world loves music. And if you don't, it's probably at 1%. It's the type of music that they love is very different from like Eastern versus Western as far as different composition structures.

Country music versus—

Yeah, 100%. It's all very different. The, the, the thing that centers and connects community is passion. And I give the example regularly, but I talk about people that go and see a live music show. You could stand beside a perfect stranger, but because you love the artist that you're watching, you can start singing side by side and become friends with a stranger in the space of an hour live show and connect in a way because you've got this commonality. So to step it back out from a startup perspective, what you're talking about there is pure ICP. It's, Who is your audience? What are their passions? And what are the things that they like to know about? And being really single-minded and focused on what you're doing. So it, it allows you to think about that because founders get so caught up in trying to be something for everyone. That's, and you basically just become a bunch of noise to everyone and don't make sense to anyone. So it's, it's really complex. So I love the connection around passions in that side. I'd love to flip it.

And can I add one comment on that with ICP? A lot of times ICPs are focused on problems and pains, right? And problems and pains can be level 10 passion, right? If you have cancer and you're trying to heal cancer, that is probably a level 10 passion in your life. So that analogy that you gave of the ICP fits really well. Bring problems and pains as some of those passions that you're exploring.

I like the other end of that scale too, because yeah, it could be a problem, but there's also opportunity. And the opportunity is a, is a reframe of the same situation, right? Like, how do you tap into something that someone really genuinely cares about? And that can be a way in to solve a problem, but the opportunity in the way that you actually show up is very different.

That's right. So going back to Deseret Digital Media, maybe the problem was I have, I don't have a great relationship with my kids, right? And then the, the solution is, or the passion, I would I want a more loving relationship with my children, right? So, so try to reframe it in the positive and you'll probably find the pain or you'll probably find the passion.

Absolutely. And I had Smirnoff as a client for a few years. I'm going back to 2008, 2009 when Facebook was starting to get sticky and I'd spent probably a year or two working on acquisition of email and it was like first party data doing everything there and then All of a sudden Facebook came in and they doubled down and pivoted all of their money into Facebook. And then of course the classic bait and switch came in the sense of you could only access all of your audience if you paid for it and you like, you hit 5% of the people. And the way that they built that platform was through passion content. A lot of it was anchored around music, like I talked about, and the way they engage people. But then all of a sudden, like the foundations that they built were taken away. And one of the things we're addressing today is very much that. So you, we're talking about passions, you bring people in, but then you need to find a way to retain them and engage them. And, and today in the world of AI and starting companies, first-party data is critical, like feeding LLMs and how you operate, et cetera. And we'll go on to that a little later, but I'd love to get your take on this because you're very passionate about creating a platform where you have all the information yourself rather than tapping into someone else's platform to try and get their attention. And you're competing with so much in that space, I'd love to just set the foundation, like the importance of first-party data. Well, like, where do you sit on that?

Yeah, let me tell a couple of stories that I've either seen firsthand or I've— people close to me have seen firsthand. This will help you understand why this is, this is so critical. I was, I was at a company called Family Link. I was helping them build platforms. We became the fourth largest Facebook app, 90 million app installs. I added $5 million of revenue in the first 12 months to this company. The first 12 months. And what do you think Facebook did? So, so we, well, let me step back. We had this little app where it helped you connect with your family members and display your family members on your Facebook profile. And all of a sudden we have 90 million installs. We're the fourth largest Facebook app. What do you think Facebook did?

Yeah, they made it a default feature in the platform, I assume.

That's right. They said, thank you very much for figuring out what our users want. And they built it in the core offer. And then once they build it in the core offering, what do you think they did?

Monetizing, maybe targeting your people.

They removed the app that people had installed to show their family on their profile. They got rid of it and they made it really hard for us to contact our users, right? We had built a skyscraper on land that we didn't own. It was rented land. Facebook owned the land, right? They owned the platform. They owned the domain. They owned the brand. They owned the relationship with the customer and they owned permission to contact them. We built something amazing. But then they changed the rules. And this happens all the time. Um, these platforms make decisions that are in the best interest of their shareholders, but not in the best interest of the creators that are on their platform. I'll give you another example. When I was at Deseret Digital Media, we got to 130 million social follows, um, on Facebook. And then Facebook introduced a new policy where you had to pay when you posted on your Facebook page, you had to pay to be able to reach all your followers. I think they sent it to like 3% of your followers by default. And then if you wanted to get to everyone else, you had to pay for it. And that isn't how it used to be. I'll give you one more story. When we were at Family Link, there was an intern that worked for us. His name was John Rampton, really smart guy. And so he left Family Link and he created this little device called a Scrap Trap, a little plastic device that you put on your kitchen counter. When you cut up your fruits and vegetables and you scrape them into the Scrap Trap and you just use that throw it away, right? Just a simple, no big deal device. He was making $96 million a year selling that on Amazon. Okay. This guy that had been an intern was making $96 million a year just on Amazon. What do you think Amazon did when they realized this little kid was making $96 million selling a little plastic device on their platform?

Yeah, they're creating their own version. I've heard different versions of this too. Like once you reach a certain revenue level, they just mirror and do an Amazon brand and cut price by 20, 30%.

Do an Amazon Basics. So then once they, once they had created their Asian manufactured scrap trap, right? And put it live on their platform. What do you think they did to him?

I assume blocked him in some capacity.

They completely removed his listing. Okay. He built a skyscraper on land he didn't own. His company was making $110 million a year. $96 million was coming from Amazon. Then he had some coming from other places, but he lost lost his whole business off of this because he built his platform on land he didn't own. So I've learned the hard way. I've seen this over and over and over again in my career where businesses build their whole business on rented land. And I've, I have developed this core philosophy that we help businesses build their skyscraper on land they own. We help them build their own platforms where they own the brand, they own the relationships with the customers, they own the content, they own permission to market to the customers, and it changes everything. For those businesses.

What does that look like today? Like we're seeing a world evolve in the last 2 years, call it, where content creation has become easier and easier, which means that there's more content in the world and it's just noisy, period. And to be able to cut through on those platforms, you still can, and they're all actively trying to find ways to filter the good from the bad. But ultimately on those third-party platforms, with a content creation machine, that works for free for them that they then monetize to advertisers. And we may get a small clip of that, but the problem— there's two problems in that. One is that they're making majority of the money off our time. And two, we don't know who those people are. So the alternate to that, what does it look like today? I'm on Substack and I have email addresses and names and not much else, but at least I have those people and I can extrapolate them at any point and do something direct. What's the modern version of a platform without doing a massive build? How do you start to think about acquiring data and have those people in that tower, as you said, on your land?

Yeah. Yeah. So first, so there's several answers to that question. So the first question is, what do they, what do they look like? There's lots of different types of platforms you can create. I could rattle off two dozen of them right now for you. A podcast can be, excuse me, another one coming here. A podcast, for example, can be a platform if you do it right. If all you do with your podcast is you put it out on Apple, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, then it's not your own platform. You're still doing it on leased land. But if you do your own website, right, and then you do a lead magnet, you give away something for free, some maybe an ebook, maybe a little mini course, maybe a little challenge course. Um, maybe a cheat sheet or a checklist. You do something that you give away for free or a series of somethings. And every episode that you create, that you push out, because it's still okay to use those other platforms. That's a quick way to grow. But then with every episode you're pushing out to those other platforms, you give away your lead magnet. And to get your lead magnet, they have to go back to your website. And when they download or get access to your website, they have to give you their contact information and have to give you permission to market to them. And they join your email newsletter, right? And then every time you start publishing your podcast, now you're sending a newsletter directly to all of your subscribers. Then instead of being dependent upon Apple Podcasts or Spotify to surface your content, you now have direct relationships with these people and you are sending that newsletter directly to them. Then even if you got— over time, that email list becomes the greatest asset of your venture. And even if you got deplatformed from Apple Podcasts, you still could send your, your content directly to your consumers. And then as time goes by and you have a bigger and bigger and bigger following of people that know you, like you, and trust you, you've given them all of this value, you then can start selling things into, into that community, right? Because they trust you. I'll tell you a story. I have a friend, I love to garden and I have a guy that I've taken master gardening classes from. His name is David Gilmore. He lives in rural Idaho. He likes emergency preparedness and he likes gardening. And so he created a show called LDS Prepper. And last time I checked, I think he had 250,000 followers of his, of his show just on YouTube, not counting his other platforms. And he just goes and whatever gardening projects he wants to do anyway, he just films it and then goes puts it up on his show. Whatever emergency preparedness project he wants to do, he films it, puts it up on his show. And he's provided so much value and gained so much trust that he has hundreds of thousands of people that come to him for information. And it's really smart guy. And one of the last times I talked to him, he found this little emergency, this is like a battery backup unit. And so he sells them to people. He didn't even make the product. He just buys it from somewhere wholesale or does an affiliate program, has people put it under their table and keep it plugged into the wall. And then when battery, when the power goes out, you have this battery bank that has power in it and you can plug things into it. So you have a backup when you lose power, which is really important in rural Idaho. And, um, I believe he made well over $1 million in a very short period of time, just selling, reselling someone else's product to his audience. And so he goes around and he just finds different products and services that he likes now, and he just recommends them into his audience base. Where else can a guy that loves gardening and emergency preparedness that lives in rural Idaho make a million dollars in a month or two, right, of revenue. Like, what other business model could he do to make that kind of revenue, right? It's a, it's an amazing opportunity today for people to provide great content, build great audiences, have those direct relationships, and then recommend great products and services into that audience base.

The formalization of various platforms, and you think about Base drastic growth from e-commerce with putting your credit card down on a website and people would be very nervous and now don't think twice about it. Their card details are probably held everywhere and are probably very public as well. But the, the way that that changed how people buy, sell, and create opportunities with platforms like Etsy and eBay and all these things are still hanging around, but the resale market, et cetera. The part that I'm curious about is where we go to next because you talk about lead magnets and I've seen so many on LinkedIn and people have done some really interesting work that they're sharing for free and their workflow is as you described. You DM them, they'll send you a link, takes you to a page on their website where you have to put in your email address and name to get access to the book and they're collecting data that they can then use. But it feels like there's a level of saturation that's happening and the cut-through is now starting to dilute heavily as everyone does the same thing and as AI catches up with the buying and selling of products as it gets automated. I feel like that everyone's doing these little hacks now It feels almost like the last bastion of that and not in a pessimistic way. I feel like that's reality. It's like, how do you actually stay ahead of these huge companies?

When you buy from random people, you get burned a lot and it's hard to have trust. It's like going to a new city and there's a taco restaurant that says best tacos in town on the restaurant. I would bet most of us don't believe it, right? They assume that businesses are not telling the truth. And, um, you get burned enough times like I did with the suit of armor, like we have over Bad Tacos. And, um, I think the current statistic is 96% of people don't trust ads. Um, 77% of people don't trust essentially anything a business says about themselves. And so the solution is credibility marketing, right? What does work? Well, reviews. We all know reviews work, right? When we go to a new town and we want to find great tacos, we're going to go look at Google reviews and and go find which taco restaurant actually has the best reviews, right? And we'll trust that testimonial videos work. We know that credible influencers like David Gilmour that I was telling you about that have built this trust, that works.

But what's the—

and then there's a lot more things that fit within that. What's the common theme that fits within what is working, right? They're all credibility marketing. They're all marketing through credible voices. So a platform like Etsy doesn't have that credibility because I don't have that relationship of trust with any of those vendors, right? Amazon, they have reviews and so that's good. So they have some credibility from that, but the vendors, I don't have any credibility with those vendors. So where is it going in the future? Other than AI, the biggest tectonic shift that's transforming business landscape today is credibility marketing, right? And it's going to affect every single business out there. The business, just like the internet, the businesses that didn't take advantage of the internet, they went out of business or they lost market share. Um, the same thing with AI, the businesses that are not adopting AI effectively, they're going to lose market share, go out of business. Same thing with credibility marketing. We have to find much more credible ways to communicate with our ideal customers. And there's lots of great ways to do it. We can do it through reviews. We could do that through testimonial videos. We can do that through influencer marketing, through credible influencer marketing. We can also do that by building our own shows. Right? We can do what David Gilmour did and we can build a show for our ideal customers. We can give them lots of value. We can get it so they know us and like us and trust us so that when we go recommend something, we're not having to sell it to them. We're prescribing it like a doctor. Like, think of when we, when we get a prescription from the doctor, how many of us say, well, can you give us your, me, your 5 best ones? And then I'm going to go look up reviews. And then we don't, right? The doctor prescribes it. I mean, nowadays we might look it up on AI and make sure, but check, just get a second opinion. But most of the time we take the recommendation from the doctor and we fill his prescription, right? And the same thing happens when we build a show that is giving great content and builds that trust is we can start prescribing to people. So what is the future? The future is credibility marketing. And I think having a show and building an audience that knows you, likes you, and trusts you is positioning yourself for that future. And if they trust you, they're gonna buy from you. There's great stats that show people are willing to pay more, a lot more, if it comes from a brand that they trust, right? Building that trust is the future. And one of the great ways to do that is having a show. Now, now you've said there's all these people that have done it and that's true, but more than 80% of podcasts podfade, right? And so what happens is, is they go out and they, they do their first 8 episodes or their first 10 episodes, and then they quit. It and there's this effort that is having to be put into doing that podcast and it's higher than they expected. And then they're expecting they're gonna make all this money and you talked about how they get very little money out of that from those channels that they're publishing to. And there's this big gap between what they're having to put in and what they're getting out of that. And this gap in expectations causes podfade. More than 80% of those podcasts are podfade. Creating. And so, so we are— this, this company that we've created and spent 6 years and $6 million doing exists to get rid of pod fade. So, so we've created 74 tools in one platform, right? Instead of having to pay $2,000 and, and having to make these tools, try to duct tape them together and try to make them work, it's one platform for $100, $149, depending which package you buy. Um, so it costs a lot less and you get a lot more tools. Um, I I think the software saves you 4 or 5 hours for every episode you publish, right? Takes a lot less money, takes a lot less time, right? Brings that down. And then we have 11 different monetization tools, and I think there's 20 different ways you can monetize. And then it helps you make more and more and more money to where all of a sudden it makes sense, right? Where what you're putting in is less than— you're getting more out of it than what you put into it. And then podfade stops. So, so that's the solution. That's the future is make it easier, make more money from it, get more trust. And I think there's a great future for people who do shows and follow that kind of a method or model.

The trust conversation is happening a lot because right now everyone's self-declaring themselves an expert at everything under the sun AI. And it's, it's not been around long enough as in the modern format. AI has been around for a few decades now, but it's changing too rapidly to Absolutely. But people say they're an expert and no one asks for them to prove how they're an expert. And it's ability to demonstrate and show your work and show your skills and show who you are. And it comes down to human relationships. Technology has evolved at such a rapid rate, and even over the last 20 years with social media included in that, but the human evolution process takes multi-generations for us to adapt. Adapt and learn. We know how to use it. But as far as things that we trust, like us having a conversation here in person, like I'm going to have a much deeper trust with you now because we're having this conversation versus if I saw a few videos of you just saying you're an expert at something and there's no context as to why. It's that self-declaration doesn't prove anything. So the human relationships are interesting because community and first-party relationships with people. I'm not talking databases now. I'm talking about in person. I love that it feels like almost like a reset going back to our communities where, you know, you had people that had a farm and they shared crops and they shared supplies with each other and people had their one expertise. There's this little micro community part that's coming back, which I love personally.

I completely agree. And I think. The big marketplaces are going to get hurt really bad because they don't have that trust. Now, to the extent they're building it, like Amazon has Amazon reviews, that's going to help them a lot. But the platforms that aren't effectively able to, to have that trust, I think they're going to go away. I think Craigslist is in a world of hurt right now, for example, right? Because they don't have that credibility. And, and it's going to open the door for the people that do build the credibility.

Absolutely. Nathan, this is a great point to finish up. Today we're talking about owning audience, building trust, and as a founder, it's critical today. It's not even a nice to have, it's part of the fabric of being a founder is understanding who you are, articulating your story, your strength, et cetera. And I love the examples that you gave because it's been happening over a period of time and we can track these patterns with enough confidence now where you're talking about credibility marketing being the future. Really valuable conversation today.

Thank you for having me on today, Andy, and thanks for the great job you're doing and the valuable service that you're providing to everybody. To the people that are listening, if you're grateful for Andy Walsh and this content he's producing, make sure you go to Startups Decoded wherever you listen to or watch this podcast and make sure you comment, like, and share. That's how you can best say thank you to him.

Appreciate the shout out, and I love giving giving back, paying it forward, sharing, letting people be educated. So this is a passion come true for me.

Yeah. Well, thanks for letting me be on it today.

Thanks for listening to Startups Decoded. If today's conversation helped you think differently, share it with a founder in your network. And don't forget to subscribe for real-world startup insights every week. We really value your support. If you're interested in partnering with us, email hello@startupsdecoded.com. I'm Andy Walsh. I'll see you next week.