How To Build A Million Dollar Content Business (feat. Justin Welsh)

Or was it really where you had like an intuition, you landed on hub and spoke model?

No, I mean, it's relatively new. Thank you.

Makes you feel a little bit more human.

All right. Yeah, it's relatively new. I mean, the fact of the matter is where it came out of is I was struggling to find enough time to do all the things that I want to do and I know how to go viral.

Yeah.

Like, and I don't mean that in like an arrogant way, but— Right, right. I know what is— what type of content is more likely to go viral. My goal rather than to go viral all the time is to show off my expertise. Yeah. And to say like, okay, this won't be as popular with as many people, but the people that it is popular with will get tremendous value from this guide, this thread, this LinkedIn post.

The question that I ask myself is like, is this the kind of content that I would be proud of 10 years later? And more often than not, like even when I'm doing the tactics, the mechanics of writing a rich listicle or a thread, because that's the tactic according to the algorithm that will work, but I try to like think about the purpose behind the tactic and like try to like drench that tactic in value and then put it out there. What did you think about niches? Like, were you intentional about arriving at a niche and sticking with it? And second, why do you think the solopreneur niche makes a lot of sense for you? Hey everybody, welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host KP, and on this show I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildingpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Build in Public podcast. I'm your host KP, and I am super thrilled today to invite one of my fellow creator entrepreneurs, especially right now he's in Nashville. So it's like close to my heart because, you know, I, a lot of you might know that I was in Nashville for 3, 4 years and Went to school there, but I will read out his bio. It's a pretty prolific bio. But first, I want to say welcome to the show, Justin Welsh.

KP, thanks so much for having me, man. I'm excited to be here.

I cannot thank you, and I can't skip on this bio, man. This is prolific. Over the last decade, you've helped 2 $50 million companies, teams of 150+, you know, people raised over $300 million in venture capital. And then you got burnt out and you decided to choose a brand new path of helping solopreneurs, helping founders, and through your digital products, and through advising. Now, when you're not advising and building products, you're an angel investor, mentor to entrepreneurs in LATAM with Finder Startups, and an LP at GTM Fund. All in all, you're one of the most prolific internet Twitter creators that I've come across. And I was trying to like figure out a phrase that would summarize who you are in my head and probably would introduce you well to our audience here. And I thought about this and I thought like maybe the most leveraged disciplined creator turned entrepreneur that I know of. So with that said, welcome to the show again.

Thanks, man. I really appreciate that. And it's nice to hear that. It doesn't always feel that way from my perspective, but it's nice to hear that it does from yours. So thank you.

It definitely, definitely does from outside. And so I got like a few prompts that I want to ask you questions on. I'm not going to go super deep into your backstory and your journey into this new chapter because I feel like that was covered in some of the episodes that I watched, some other interviews. But I want to ask some more tactical things that I don't know if you got the chance to talk about publicly on video or audio. So maybe that could be part of the content that you can share with your audience later too. So let's kick it off with one thing that I thought was super interesting in the last month that you shared with the Twitterverse, which is this concept of hub and spoke model of creating content.

Yep.

And I thought that was very unique. And it was, you know, of course some essence of that was obvious to many people, but I think your spin on it and the way you've executed it, you even have a visual in that newsletter edition where it's like there's a little hub in the center and then there's all these spokes around it. So do you want to sort of take us through what that was, first of all, and then tell me why you landed on that as a strategy?

Yeah. So it kind of much like a lot of things that I do, it came out of just necessity, a need for a better process or system to deliver the things that power my business. So to provide some context, what generally powers my business is content. Getting people from Twitter or LinkedIn or other social media platforms off of social media and onto my website to browse my products and services. So with that being the sort of core, you know, goal of, you know, my business, I wanted to build a system that would make it much more likely that people would do that on a regular basis. And so I had a few different pieces in what I create on a weekly basis. So I create a newsletter. I create, you know, 10 pieces of LinkedIn content, generally 10 to 15 tweets, a thread. There's a whole bunch of content to create. And I was having a hard time figuring out how to keep going, how to always have something new to write about, how to say something differently than I've said it before. And also not just that part of it, but also how to use that content to drive website visits and familiarity with my products and services. So I started to build this system where I decided to use my Saturday newsletter as essentially my hub piece of content. So the core pillar, not too dissimilar from pillar content, right? Right. Which you've probably heard people like, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk and other folks talk about. So I start by writing my newsletter and I write my newsletter using a template. My newsletter is relatively similar each week. It generally teaches you how to do something in 4 or 5 steps that you can read in less than 4 minutes. So I ideate twice a week and I write that newsletter on Monday. Once I've written the newsletter, rather than think about the different content that I want to write, write, I kind of push that newsletter into a new process, which is I immediately write my teaser. So how am I going to tease people about the newsletter the day before it comes out? I write my post teaser, which is what am I going to say the day after in case you missed it to get you interested in going back and reading it? And then I start pushing out 6 different pieces of content. And I might forget what one of them is because I don't have it in front of me. But generally, it's a story, An observation, a contrarian take, a listicle, past versus present in a Twitter thread.

Now, these 6 are ingredients of the newsletter or are they separate pieces?

They are spokes that come off of the newsletter. So for example, instead of sitting down and saying, I have to write 6 pieces of unique content, so what do I talk about? I look at the newsletter topic and I say, let's write a story about this topic. What's a contrarian take about this topic? What's an observation I had about this topic? What's a listicle that relates to this topic? And by pushing it through the lens of the newsletter, I suddenly have a topic to talk about and writing those 6 different pieces of content becomes much, much simpler.

Right.

And often I can write 2 of each kind, 2 observations, 2 stories, whatever, and have 12 pieces of content. And once I have that content, I can stagger that content out across the next 3 to 4 months. And since it comes off of the newsletter, I always have something to refer back to. So a month from now when I'm posting a story that's related to the newsletter, at the end of the story I can say, If this is interesting to you and you wanna learn more about it, go check this out.

Link back, right? Link back to the thing.

That means all of my content is linked to my newsletter so I can always send people to my website where they can do a couple of things, subscribe to the newsletter, buy a product, enroll in a service, so on and so forth. So that's sort of how I think about creating the content.

I think it's genius. And I, you know, just as someone who's sort of, you know, dabbled in the same space with you for a while now, I feel like I struggle with the same struggle that you talked about where, I'm doing all these things and a lot of the times they are whimsical that I do them based on my day or what I'm thinking top of mind. Sometimes I have like, oh, here's an interesting story that I want to share. And they all, like the justification that I give myself is that they all sort of serve the larger purpose that I have for my niche, which is building in public. They all sort of add up. But what I love about the way you've gone a little bit more concrete is saying, all right, there's this mega niche that I serve, of course, but also there's this almost like a chapter-level journey that I'm taking people through. Yeah. And each chapter can have bullet points of content, all these 6 or 7 styles of content that lines up really well. It's super tangible, practical, and actionable. Like all of your content, man, I love how you break it down that you just can't miss it. I appreciate it. One other question I had was, it seems super crystallized, distilled, and almost like you just woke up and found this, but I'm wondering, All the experiments you ran that got you to this, or was it really where you had like an intuition, you landed on hub and spoke model?

No, I mean, it's relatively new. Thank you.

Makes you feel a little bit more human. All right.

Yeah, it's relatively new. I mean, the fact of the matter is where it came out of is I was struggling to find enough time to do all the things that I want to do. And content being a large part of my business was taking up a significant portion of that time. So I actually reached out to another creator who I'm buddies with, Dan Koe, on Twitter. And I said, you know, he had written a piece of content about a system, a writing system. And I had seen it and reached out to him and said like, hey man, can you just walk me through these 3 or 4 steps? And he sent me over this Notion page with a little Loom video and he is like, here are the 4 steps I go through. And I saw that and I was like, oh, that's really cool. But I think that I can customize this to make this more my own. And so Dan had kind of shared these 3 or 4 steps and I turned it into 10 steps. So it's like most things, it's not uniquely mine. It is a riff off of something else or somebody else's. Remix. Yeah. is tactic, right? And so I just made it uniquely mine by customizing it to the way that my brain works. And that's where it came from.

You know, another thing that I appreciate just as another creator in the space, also, you know, sometimes even audience member, is a lot of the stuff that you talk about right now in the podcast or through your newsletter is actually free. It's out there. You're not really charging for that strategy. And I feel like there are some people who could charge for that strategy. And, you know, there are some people who would pay for that strategy. But What I appreciate though is, you know, similar to Gary Vee model where I think, you know, you just give it away and you build this affinity and a bit of a trust and this reciprocity factor of kindness and saying, hey, just— I'm just giving it away. I just learned something new hard way, giving it away for you for free. Use it. You know, let me know how it works. And maybe one day down the line you'll buy one of my courses or something else, right? Is that intentional? Because that's the way I read it and I felt so connected to it.

Yeah, it is. It is intentional and it's intentional, but there's also like a piece of luck attached there. I've, you know, I had a good career before I became a creator. So I was an executive, I was a VP of Sales and a Chief Revenue Officer. So I've been fortunate enough to be in a steady financial position for a long time. And therefore, I don't need to try and take everything that I think is interesting or unique that I produce and turn it into something that I monetize. Hmm. So the way, the way that I think about it is there are opportunities to monetize. And of course, I take those. I have 2 digital courses, I have, you know, coaching packages, I have all that different stuff. But my whole goal really throughout the rest of 2022 and the early part of 2023 is just to build incredible top of funnel, to build a tremendous amount of trust, and to really play that long game with the monetary side of the business where, you know, if I don't make another dime the rest of 2022, I'll be okay. I hope I do, by the way. Yeah. But in— I think I will. But I think that by being patient and by really putting a ton of effort into the top of funnel and trust, that I'll have a much bigger 2023, '24, and '25. So that's sort of how I think about it.

I love it. Decades and not days, right? The other thing that I wanted to riff on and appreciated about the way your content comes off is, first of all, it's so authentic. Most of that stuff is like stuff that you struggle with or you found out or you discovered. So it's very much your narrative on what's happening, your lens. But so much about it is something I talk about in all my attempts and all my advice sessions is that don't just aim for attention, aim for attention and trust. Because I think a lot of the times creators are just trying to aim for short-term attention, which means that they will take some short-term steps like You could like gain attention by doing some dumb shit, right? Like I could just, I could insult somebody and gain attention on Twitter, or I could just like dunk on someone, or I could just like say something super crude or, you know, like, I don't know, polarizing, gain attention. But am I gaining trust? Am I gaining brand? Am I gaining like this long-term effects? Probably not. I think what I loved about the way you've built your career, or at least in the last 2 years that I've followed you, is so much of it is built on trust. And it's not— sometimes it's not about optimization for attention. So sometimes I notice that some golden gems you drop don't go viral and you're okay with it and you're still like going back and trying to like build that trust as much as you're trying to build that attention vehicle.

Yeah. I know how to go viral.

Yeah.

Like, and I don't mean that in like an arrogant way, but— Right, right. I know what is— what type of content is more likely to go viral, right? And so like if I really wanted to sit around all day and only put together content that just went crazy, right? I could do that. What I've found generally is like, for example, like there's certain people on social media, and by the way, I don't, I try never to pick on anyone who's trying. So like, that's not my goal is to downtalk anybody. But like there are certain people who just do listicles or, you know, just do, you know, Twitter threads that are books and, you know, tools.

Or Wikipedia articles or whatever.

Yeah. I mean, by the way, I'm guilty of doing some of those things. Yeah. So it's not like, you know,

no one's got the high, you know, no one's got the, what do you call the pedestal here? Yeah. Yeah,

right, right. Totally. But my goal, rather than to go viral all the time, is to show off my expertise and to say like, okay, this won't be as popular with as many people, but the people that it is popular with will get tremendous value from this guide, this thread, this LinkedIn post. And it's funny because when I see a lot of folks, especially on my primary channel, which was— is still LinkedIn, There's a lot of talk around, oh, like recently, Mike, I have 250,000 followers and my content might get 1,000 or 1,200 reactions. And there are people with significantly fewer followers that get higher traction than I do. But I drive a ton of traffic to my website.

Right.

I drive the right traffic to my website and I get the right customers buying my products and services. Right. And I'll take that any day over, you know, just viral money.

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, The other thing too is, look, you— and you look back, like, I think my— the question that I ask myself is like, is this the kind of content that I would be proud of 10 years later? And more often than not, like, even when I'm doing the tactics, the mechanics of writing a rich listicle or a thread, because that's the tactic according to the algorithm that will work, but I try to like think about the purpose behind the tactic and like try to like drench that tactic in value and then put it out there, as opposed to just leveraging the tactic and just putting some random shit that I'm not proud of or something that like not even relevant to me. So at the very minimum, I'm trying to like solve for n equals 1, which is like me. Would I read this? And so even when the tactic is listicle, but if it's the stuff that I would read and I care about, I feel like the persona behind me, thousands of people like me, hundreds of thousands of people like me who want to know about this will read it and find value. So that's where I think it's slightly different to your point. Like also in the long run, the ripple effects, you know, my joy comes from not watching like the reactions and the responses and like everyday stats. It comes from like a random DM. From some guy in Kenya saying, KP, I listened to you in like January. Like you told me that you should check out Bubble or whatever, one of the no-code tools. And I built this thing, check it out. I dedicate this to you. I'm like, it's wild to me. That's like, wow, I don't even remember, you know, saying about talking about Bubble back then. So I think those are like the intangible stuff is my real driver. And I hope that I'm sure like you feel the same way, even despite all the tangible metrics and conversions that are great, the joy comes from something that's beyond them.

For sure. I mean, I think about my business and my content and the creating that I do in a very similar fashion to how I think about or thought about building big sales organizations when I was a chief revenue officer, which is people are especially, you know, the more metrics-driven you are, people say like the answer's always in the data. And that's quasi-true. Right. I think that like reactions and engagement and all that kind of stuff are all good indicators that you're doing something right. But it's like you said, It's the DMs, it's the, hey man, I read this thing and then I did this thing and it worked. Or I took your course and then I wrote 5 things and started a business and made 10 grand. Like those are the best, those are the sort of qualitative things on the side of the quantitative, you know, metrics that you're measuring. So that's definitely the dual-sided sort of way I measure my business success.

Right, 'cause this, I was just like, 'cause that the prior, the former race of trying to go after metrics all the time is always draining 'cause there's always somebody who's gonna beat you at some other metric. metric, right? Like if they come up with the brand new metric of like measuring EPI, engagements per impression or whatever, and like suddenly you're like, there's somebody else who's gonna do so much better at that. So I feel like that chase is always like a, you know, it's a distraction from the real purpose of content creation in my view, which is to serve people and help people.

Mm-hmm.

Now, if we can reach a lot of people and if we can really influence a lot of people, that's great. But even if it's just one person, sometimes if we can change their life, help them make a really tough decision that they're struggling with, that's worth all the highs that I think I get sometimes. So I mean, it seems like you're thinking the same thing. Another thing that I wanted to jump off to is this concept of niche and niching and like figuring out what your niche is. And I think that's another thing that a lot of people struggle with, especially early beginner content creators, beginner entrepreneurs too. Like I'm sure you feel the same way even with startups. Like they're trying to like build everything for everybody. What I loved about how you've arrived at your niche and you've stuck with it was the solopreneur niche. And again, you're not the first person on the planet to discover that niche, but you've embraced it. And I feel like there is a sense of like the way you embraced that niche was so unique and refreshing and you stuck with it and you were still with it. And that's so refreshing and different compared to so many people who are like window shopping niches. Tell us a little bit about how, first of all, what did you think about niches? Like were you intentional about arriving at a niche and sticking with it? And second, why do you think the solopreneur niche Yeah,

I think that trying to be everything to everyone is probably never a good strategy. And so I'm a fan of having sort of a niche and staying focused on a particular topic or subtopic to a group of people. I think, and by the way, I've used this phrase before, the more I think about it, the less I like it, which is like choosing or picking a niche. It kind of sounds like you're at a buffet and you just like like pick something off the table, you're like, this is what I'm gonna talk about. And I don't think that's necessarily how it happens. So for me, I arrived at my niche in a strange way, which was I quit my job in 2019. I started talking about SaaS sales 'cause that's what my background was. People liked it. And so I started to gain some following on LinkedIn, but then all the questions were about LinkedIn, building following. So I was like, oh, I'll talk about this more. And so I talked about LinkedIn more and then I started to make some money by doing that. And so I started to share how I was doing that. And then people were like, How do I make money? How do I build digital product? And then I built 2 or 3 other revenue streams, started talking about that. So people are like, how do I build more revenue streams? So like, it was less about me picking a niche and more about me finding the intersection of 2 things.

Hmm.

What my audience is interested in and what I'm obsessed with at the moment. And so the reason that I feel like what I'm doing with the solopreneurship sort of niche, as you call it, The reason that I think it's resonating is not necessarily because it's all that interesting, you know, versus other folks who have talked about it in the past, but because I'm obsessed with it.

Mm-hmm.

Like, it's gonna be— and again, I'm gonna— I wanna say this and make sure that it doesn't come— it's not intended to be arrogant. It's intended to just be how I feel about it, which is it's gonna be really hard to beat me talking about it because I like it. I love it. Like, I wanna talk about it every day, and other people are slogging through their content Because they feel like they have to put it together and that's never gonna win.

Yeah.

And so I know my audience loves it, I love it. And so it's not about really choosing a niche, it's about embracing an obsession.

I love that. I think that was one of your newsletter articles too, right? Yep. Which was awesome. I loved how you phrased it around obsession. And I think it's so important 'cause it's not something that you're just, you're able to cruise through or just surf high level. You know, like case in point, the way I think about like my niche, it's building in public and When I chose that niche, it was not really a choice. It was more so like I was at the time, I was building a lot of side projects, a lot of the no-code stuff in public. And I was sharing screenshots. I was like showing stuff that people had never seen before. It's kind of like your revenue charts. And I was just like putting it out in the open and asking things in open. And I think a lot of people were referring me under other threads and saying, okay, you know, tagging me saying, KP's this guy building public, blah, blah, blah. And I decided, you know what, this is something that I think I would do for the rest of my life. At least for another 2 decades easily, because I don't see going back and building in private ever as a pathway because it makes no sense to me. So I'm like, that makes sense. And it's also another topic. It's a topic that I— the way I think about a niche is what is the topic that somebody could wake you up at 4:00 AM in the morning and you would not misskip a beat and you would just talk about it right away and then go on for hours? What is that? This seems like the answer. I mean, the right phrase is what are you obsessed about?

For sure. I think that's the— that's the— and by the way, you can be obsessed with lots of things that people won't pay for.

Yeah.

So, you sort of have to think through it. And that's why to me, it's the intersection of those 2 things. It's not just what I'm obsessed with, it's also what my audience wants to hear about. And if you can find those— the intersection of those 2 things, you're probably off to a good start.

It's a golden— yeah, it's a golden intersection. Awesome. Thank you. And so, let's chat about this other thing that I thought you were doing that was so unique. And so this is about Twitter growth. You've built your Twitter really well, really intentionally. But one thing that stands out in your story and your journey to me, Justin, is using Twitter replies as a growth strategy. I don't think I've seen any other person execute it that well. Maybe I know it, a lot of people know it. I do it here and there, but you like really do it. You're like obsessed about it to a point where, if I'm right, if I'm wrong, correct me, but I think you spend about 45 to 1 hour Minutes, 45 minutes to 1 hour a day replying to other people's tweets. That's wild. Tell us a little bit of why you chose to do that strategy and has it worked? Why do you think it works?

Yeah, it's— so there are 2 different engagement things that I do. I call them strategies, but they're not really strategies, just things I do, which is each morning when I release my social media content on Twitter and LinkedIn, I engage with my audience for 45 to 60 minutes, just depending on the day. Today is like the first day in a very, very long time that I didn't, just needed a break. But— and then I might spend 15 to 20 minutes engaging with other people's content. But generally it started as a habit. So when I started writing on LinkedIn in late 2018 and then gave it another shot in early 2019, I'm just like everybody else who's getting started with content. You're like reading about like, how do you get more engagement? How do you get more popular? All those different things, right? All the blogs we read. And everything that I read was like, make sure that you engage with your audience for the first 45 to 60 minutes. I'm like, I'll do that every morning. Mm-hmm. 'Cause as a reminder, I left my job in the middle of 2019. So it was harder in the beginning and I just was doing it because I was like, I want to grow and I want to check this out and I want to learn. And it became a habit. And so I wake up, pour coffee, post my content, engage with people. And so after a couple of years of doing that, I finally decided to embrace Twitter. And when I embraced Twitter, I was like, I think that you have to do the same thing. I don't know, right? It's not like a rule, right? It's not like anyone's holding, forcing me to do it. But I was like, I think if I want to grow that I should be interacting with the audience who interacts with me. And so I just So I just cut that time out in the morning and said, all right, here's the time I'm going to spend each morning doing that. And as I started to do that, I started to form a small network of relevant people, right? You, Dan Coe, you know, Nicholas Cole, Dicky Bush, Sajil Bloom. Bush, yeah. All these different guys just started to reach out to me and we started to form small friendships. And so I decided, okay, they're all relevant to what I create and I like these folks. So I need to figure out a strategy for being able to engage with their content if it's relevant. I don't force engage. It's just like, is this relevant? I'll engage with it. Right. I use Blackmagic by Tony. Yeah. And I installed that and what that did was allowed me to form a favorite group. Once in the morning and once in the evening, I go through, check out all their content, add some value, and that's it. Nothing too complicated.

It is complicated, man. I think, I mean, it's definitely, I mean, it's not complicated, but it's super high impact. And I really like, you made me use that strategy a couple, you know, in the last, I don't know, a couple months, a lot of the time. Every time I do it, I think about you. Every time I'm engaging with somebody else, I think about you. I'm like, dang, Justin must be doing this like in his freaking sleep. And I appreciate it because I think, again, maybe it was commonplace behavior in LinkedIn, in that world, definitely not in Twitter. I've never seen anybody do it the way you've done it. You do it almost every day. It's almost like a religious, like a serious, sincere, earnest habit. A lot of the folks, you'll be surprised, a lot of the top 1%, 10% content creators on Twitter, Even when they drop their own threads, don't engage, right? Like, it's just after they go to like, I don't know, 100K or 20K, 30K followers, they don't ever engage with their own threads. Forget about engaging with somebody else's threads. Now, the ones you mentioned so far are slightly, you know, an anomaly, like Sahil Bloom and Dickie Bush. They're anomalies, but like majority of them don't engage. I think they're just like, it's more broadcasting. And what I loved about you and this group that you talked about is it's become much more of a back and forth. Yeah. conversation. And that's where I think they see the person, you know, they see the creator, not the brand, you know, behind you. And I think that's what makes it much more relevant and readable is, you know, is what I was looking for.

For sure.

So, yeah, Arvid Kahl does a great job too, by the way.

Definitely.

And definitely, you know, Sharath and a few others. So, I mean, I think this is a behavior that's picking up and I'm happy that it is. So, actually on that note, I wanted to ask you, because you'd seen both the worlds of LinkedIn and Twitter, and I had— I have not much exposure with LinkedIn. What was your— if you have to like summarize the way you approach LinkedIn and context switch and summarize and the way you approach Twitter, how do you view them differently? Or are they even different or are they similar in a sense?

They're more similar than people think. You know, LinkedIn has a longer character limit. This is really tactical, but I do think it matters. You can write 3,000 characters on LinkedIn where you can do 280 on Twitter. Of course you can do Twitter threads. So So every LinkedIn post that you choose to— actually anything relatively medium length is kind of like a thread because LinkedIn— in Twitter you scroll and you see full tweets. And if someone does a thread, you have to enjoy that sort of hook tweet in order to open up and go down the thread. Every LinkedIn post is like a thread. So 3 lines and then a see more button. So you gotta have a sharp hook, you gotta be compelling, you gotta get straight to the point. I think it was Sahil Bloom who said that Sam Parr talked about your first line kind of punching the reader in the face. think about that when writing LinkedIn content. And so there's just a different style, and I'm glad I started on LinkedIn. Like, I feel like LinkedIn is a much happier sort of professional place than Twitter, which can be a little, you know, different, you know, meaner, a little harsher. So I kind of cut my teeth on LinkedIn. I got trolled plenty of times in 3 years on LinkedIn, so by the time I came over to Twitter, I had thick enough skin where nothing really matters when people aren't very nice. But But the difference is the writing style. And I think the difference is right now, LinkedIn engagement in organic growth is much faster than Twitter for most people. I'm finding it to be the opposite right now, but I think that's because—

You're probably saturated, yeah.

I've sort of saturated on LinkedIn, but most people can post something on LinkedIn and the same thing on Twitter and get much higher organic reach on LinkedIn. But there's this stigma around LinkedIn that was created on Twitter around how it's cringey and not cool and all these different things. Like, I think I just was talking with Jay Clouse the other day about this, which is like, I don't really care. Like, it's another platform. It's a box and you put words into it and you hit post. Who cares if it's LinkedIn or Twitter? Right. It's great. It's great for business. It's great for meeting new and interesting people. And so like, I was never interested in being cool. I was interested in, you know, engaging, building an organic business. And LinkedIn is a really, really great platform to do that. That's why all the Twitter creators are now coming

Right. A lot— I've noticed the shift in that. Yeah, a lot of people embraced LinkedIn lately. So in terms of content creation, let's say both on LinkedIn and on Twitter, if you had to pick, try to reflect on your early days and pick out maybe 2 or 3 non-obvious lessons for people who are like just getting started. I think the hard part from what I've noticed is you can get to 300 followers on Twitter, After that 350, 400 to maybe like 5K, that stretch seems like a really long stretch for a lot of people. What would be your advice? And then we'll talk about LinkedIn in the similar setup.

Yeah, I think most people on Twitter forget that. And by the way, I'm like pretty new to Twitter, right? I've only been posting there for 10 months or tweeting, I guess you would call it. But I think most people forget that it's really important to give people a reason that they should follow you. So I see a lot of new accounts sort of tweeting into the ether where they're like,

yes,

You know, just random sort of nebulous things that aren't like focused on, here's who I am, here's what I do, and here's why I think you should pay attention to my journey on Twitter and why you should click the follow button. The follow button is something that you have to earn.

Right.

And so if I could give people one piece of advice early in their days on Twitter, it's 2 things. Number one, set up your profile. Who are you? What are you doing right now? And why should someone follow you? What will they get if they follow you? And then the second thing is to ask yourself 3 questions anytime you're about to tweet something, which is, does this educate the person or my audience that has chosen to follow me? Does this challenge the way that my audience thinks about something? Or does this motivate my audience to take some sort of action? Interesting. If the answer is no to all 3 of those things, it's probably good to go back to the drawing board and educate, challenge, or motivate. Downstream, when you've built 100,000 followers, you can share yourself eating a sandwich or having a— like, whatever. But early on, it's really about getting people to hit that follow button and that's the kind of content that I think at least generally does it.

I also remember seeing you share that you have almost a theme like educate, like you said, educate, challenge, and motivate even for your publishing schedule that some of the content will fall under one bucket and that goes on a certain day. Is that true? Like how does that work? Like can you give us a rough outline?

Yeah, to an extent. I don't want to be so rigid where it's like, oh, every Monday you're going to get this from me Tuesday. Like, but for the most part, I try and look and say, okay, what is the highest performing content? What are the best performing days? Like to match those things up. When do I feel like people are more likely to buy? What days? What times? I kind of match that up. The same thing that any startup founder or chief revenue officer would do at a SaaS business, which is why I'm so fortunate to have had that previous experience. Right. So I try, but like there are plenty of times where I just, I wake up with the intention of posting one thing and I swap it out for something else just because it feels right, right? There's a lot of subjectivity, I guess, to it.

Right. Do you have a content bank like where you have a lot of your older content or repurposed content or some high-performing content you've saved up?

Yeah, I use Shield for LinkedIn. So that's the great thing about Shield app. It's shieldapp.ai. It's essentially like an extension of LinkedIn Analytics built by a guy named Andreas Johnson. And it's sort of the go-to LinkedIn Analytics platform where it gives you more in-depth analytics, but it also saves your content as a repository.

Nice.

And so you can tag your content, you can sort your content. So I go back and find all my high-performance content from, you know, previous years. I rewrite it, I repost it. Sometimes I post it, you know, verbatim. So that's how I think about LinkedIn. And then on Twitter, I use a combination of Twemex and Blackmagic. Yeah. Like, I don't really have a bank. It's just like between Twemex, Blackmagic, and advanced search, I can find all my high-performance content. So I don't store it anywhere, not in Notion, nowhere.

That's actually good, man. I feel like a lot of people actually have crazy documentation, you know, tactics and all that. And I always felt like, am I the weird one? Like I have nothing. I have some in a Notion doc. I've just like pulled from my advanced search. If I ever hit a, you know, if I ever hit like a, what do you call that? A writer's block. I go to that doc, but I barely hit writer's block because I always have something to say or something that might have— like one of your content pieces would've inspired me. It's always so— my other favorite part about Twitter is that you can actually be inspired by what other people are talking about consciously or subconsciously. So you would say something on Tuesday and then that would be— I would be thinking about it on Wednesday and then I would post something on Wednesday evening, right? So I think there's a great sense of riffing off of each other's thoughts too.

For sure.

So let's talk about courses and your experience, your journey with building these out. So you have 2 courses in the market, correct? One's the LinkedIn one, the LinkedIn Playbook.

Yeah, I have. It's interesting. I've built 3 courses in my life, 4 actually. Started in 2019 with the LinkedIn Playbook, or 2020 actually. And then I turned that into the Operating System, which was like version 2 of the LinkedIn Playbook, originally called the LinkedIn Operating System until LinkedIn found out about it and told me I couldn't. And then I created—

What is it called now?

Just the operating system. Okay. Yeah. It was a panic-stricken moment of renaming. But, and then I built something called the Content Operating System, which I'm currently not selling right at this moment because I'm actually rebuilding it to make it even more robust and to be a little more relevant to how I build content today. And then I actually have a sort of like a, what I would call like a hidden course called Idea, Audience, Proof, Product: Build Internet Income. And that was like a course that I released in 2021 early when I first started figuring out how to make money online. I just made the mistake of making it like 3.5 hours long. And so I I plan on also rebuilding that probably in 2023 into a more digestible course for solopreneurs.

What was your shortest course among all these?

The Content Operating System at about 60 minutes.

60 minutes. Like, how was the process of building that course for you? Like, what did it entail?

Yeah, I mean, so many things, but generally, I just timebox production. So, I'll choose based on what I think it'll take, I'll choose 21 days and say, okay, you know, I'm going to give myself 21 days to build this course. And then I'll just— I have a public— it's public, anyone can see it, course launch checklist. And so I just start from step 1. There's like 30 steps on it and I just do them as fast and as good as I can possibly do them.

This is a video course, correct? Yeah,

it's a video course. Yeah, it's a video course.

With slides, correct?

Yeah, with slides, all one take, no editing. So like, I generally, I generally create the art and the landing page first. I pre-sell. If I get enough buyers, I build. If I don't, I won't. And then once I have enough buyers and I can see that there's interest in the market, generally I'll start by creating the agenda. Once I've had the agenda, I create the slides. Once I have the slides, I get it all into Kajabi, which is where I host my platform or my course, excuse me. And then I'll record the videos. And my last course took 91 hours to do across 21 days. And, you know, I try and value my time at $1,000 an hour. So once I make $91,000, like, I've hit it. And then every dollar past that means it's higher than my, you know—

What was the most sucky part for you in that 91 hours?

The videos, because I don't know how to edit. I mean, I do. I can like edit like a—

But you don't enjoy it.

Like a toddler. But I don't know how TikTok works or how iMovie works or any, I don't know how to do any of that stuff. So I don't. So I'd much rather stand in front of the camera or sit in front of the camera and try and knock out an 8-minute video without screwing up. Sometimes it might take 6 different tries and on the 5th try, I might get 7 and a half minutes in and screw it up and so, my wife can often hear me cursing upstairs when I'm recording my videos but for the most part, I've got it down to a science by now.

I love that. Yeah, I mean, the reason I asked some of this is because I'm planning on creating a course. It's my first course and so, I'm like a little nervous and unsure about what the journey would feel like. And so I'm like, similar to you, I have a deadline of 4 weeks. I mean, not 21, but like 28 days roughly. And I almost gave up after the first week because it was so frustrating to advance. And I think one of the things that I think a lot of people don't realize is actually so much of our course creation is building it in private or like you're kind of doing the stuff ahead of time. So you're not getting feedback loops. Right. As opposed to our Twitter content or LinkedIn content where you have an idea, you formulate it, and then you take it to market within 1 hour. In this case, you got to wait 91 hours unless you do it building in public, like maybe you show bits and pieces, but nobody— I don't know if there's appetite for people wanting to see how the course is made, you know, because it's so—

It's interesting. I did build my course that I talked about, the 3.5-hour one in public. I sent out a weekly update in terms of like everything, website visitors, sales, presale revenue, everything. People actually really enjoyed that. Really? Wow. And it led to a huge launch. I had like a $91,000 launch or $90,000 $100,000 launch in 30 days. And so that was—

I was skeptical about that. I was curious if people would care because I understand product building, right? Because it's like you're building a product, then you're like, oh, you have an idea. You're, you know, let's say we launch a landing page and there's an excitement on landing page. Then you're like V1, V2, V3. With the course, the way I thought about it was like the course is an accumulation of content. And so if I just share chapter 1, that's just like a piece of the larger puzzle. Would they get it? Would they appreciate it? Would they give me feedback on it? I was really curious about that. But yeah, so it works well. So then let's double-click into it and share that story because this is the Build in Public podcast. Share that story of how you built that course in public. What was the first smallest bit that you shared with the world? Landing page?

Yeah. I mean, I shared landing pages, I shared the agenda, I shared a hypothetical—

Did you have a pricing plan at landing page or were you— or like—

I had like a mocked-up landing page with an assumptive or hypothetical price and sort of a hypothetical message and outcome for the buyer.

Right.

And I solicited a lot of feedback by building in public. And then I shared how the slides were coming along. I shared teasers, but I also shared like how I was marketing it. So for example, I would send an email out to my email list and I would post on LinkedIn and Twitter. And then in a spreadsheet, I would literally break it down from impressions all the way down to revenue for every source so people could see how powerful email versus LinkedIn versus Twitter was.

Wow.

And people found that really interesting and they would write back and say like, why do you think email Why do you think LinkedIn converted higher here but not on this day? And so, it kind of started getting some conversation going. The cool thing was it was a 30-day journey. And so, by the end of the journey, like, then the basic next step for everyone was to buy the course.

Right.

It's like they can see the finished pack, you know, it's sort of like the last episode of a season of television, right? Where it's like you've watched the whole season, you're not going to skip the last episode.

Right.

So, it naturally leads into being a good—

Was there presales on this or was all the prep work and all this stuff was free and then eventually the sales page dropped at the end?

I was preselling the whole time.

Oh, wow. That's wild, man.

Yeah. And the way that I drove urgency was rather than just be like, oh, it's $150 and I'm going to presell it for $99, essentially I titrated the price up. So it was like the more— I was like, okay, it's $99 today, then it's $105, then it's $110, then it's $115. And so as people got deeper into the journey, they were sort of like, I better grab this now before it goes out. Yeah, exactly. And so it was a combination of driving urgency through price increases, but also people getting deeper and deeper into the journey.

Oh my God.

So that was—

Blew my mind, man. You blew my mind. Can't believe the way you executed it. I'm so happy you did. I will probably, you know, do the same thing, maybe customize it to my audience, you know, but I think it's super, super inspiring to hear that from you.

Thanks, man.

All right, I think we're, you know, at the top of the hour. Wanted to be conscious of your time. I want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your insights and playbooks. And I'll drop the links to your courses and your main website in the show notes. And thank you so much, Justin. Hope to see you again in one of the future episodes.

KP, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me, man.

Thank you. Have a good one. See ya.