Why Every Marketer Needs A Swipe File (feat. Corey Haines)

In this episode, you'll learn one surprising way Corey has been a part of my building public journey and this podcast from the get-go, and I'll share exactly how at the end. So stay tuned.

Oh, I love it. The stair-step approach to company building and entrepreneurship has been like probably the most guiding framework I've used in my career so far. Really, it takes a lot of humility at the end of the day because what it's about is it's saying, hey, you probably shouldn't jump to playing entrepreneurship on hard mode, on legendary mode, and going straight to, you know, the marketplaces and the social media ads apps and the hardware startups of the world. You should start with something a little bit easier and work your way up to those things.

Oftentimes I found that actually great curation is better than bad creation or poor creation. You know what I mean? Because great curation is actually hard and it's a service to the world compared to shitty creation. Tell me about the journey. You know, what have you learned about podcasting? What did it teach you about yourself?

Yeah, well, one, podcasts are like the hardest medium of content. Yes. Or like channel to grow of Of all time.

Co-signing that, right? And real hard. Yep.

Yep. And it's not really our fault either. It's mainly— well, okay, so here's what I want to get into, which is, you know, what have I learned through it?

I got almost surprised and bummed out that, you know, even after having Gary Vee as a 4th episode guest, which is crazy, I didn't have a lot of downloads on. I think by the time I got to 8th episode, I almost gave up. But that moment taught me to actually go look for what is the most fun part of this journey. Hey everybody, welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I am your host, KP, and I am I'm incredibly thrilled to be joined with one of my friends, one of my co-podcasters, one of my marketing friends. I mean, there's so many overlapping things that, you know, our current guest and I have in common. Fan of Building an Audience, Building in Public, so many things. But I'm super thrilled to have Corey Haines on the pod. Hey Corey, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to it.

You know, I'm going to steal this thing from MrBeast, and I saw this like on one of his breakdowns. He said, in this episode, you'll learn one surprising way Corey has been a part of my Building in Public journey on this podcast from the get-go, and I'll share exactly how at the end. So stay tuned. Do you know, do you know how you've been a part of the podcast from the get-go? Do not answer it if you know. No. Yes or no?

I don't.

Okay. So hopefully you're going to learn how and why SaaS metrics lie to you. Also, you will learn how marketers can become entrepreneurs and build a portfolio of small bets. Also going to learn why you need a swipe file. So with that out of the way, I got my hook done, Corey. With that out of the way—

I know now, right? What? That I'm dying to know now.

I had no idea. That's it. That's that's

you got me

hooked. I know. Thank you. I can't. I don't know if you saw this, but this was basically Mr. Beast on MFM Pod with Sean Puri and Sam Parr. Yeah. And he was basically saying like how when they opened the conversation, like the first three four minutes, he said like this is not how I would do it. Like the way I would present open the you know episode is with this kind of here's what you're going to learn. You know blah blah blah. And I thought that was interesting. I was like you know what? You should get the time to value thing, right? You should like. talk about what they're going to learn about right away at the beginning. And if you're a cheesy— I mean, if you're a sneaky storyteller, you will drop a hook at the beginning and make them wait for the answer towards the end. But anyway, Corey, big fan of your work. I've expressed my admiration both on Twitter, on Product Hunt, every time you launch something. Grateful that you have been a fellow at ODNC, On Deck No Code, when I first started there. Been following your story, been following your journey. But for the folks who may not know who you are, tell us a little bit about your background and what you've been up to lately.

Sure. Yeah. Try to give like the TL;DR background without going too far into the weeds. Born and raised here in San Diego, grew up a very, very normal life and childhood. My mom was a schoolteacher, my dad was a bus driver. Really didn't know what I wanted to do in life until I was like 18 or 19. And then that was kind of when my worldview was really opened up to this world of entrepreneurship and tech. And I started just diving into reading books, listening to podcasts, following certain people, and just kind of, you know, opening up my worldview of what was possible and what I really wanted to do. I didn't know what I wanted to do exactly, but I just knew that that was the direction I wanted to go. So it wasn't until I sort of broke into tech, quote unquote, after college, got my first job as an intern at a startup here in San Diego called Cordial, that I realized that one, I really, really love SaaS and software and the world of tech. But two, I actually really do like this whole thing of marketing. I kind of fell into doing a marketing degree. That's a long story I can get into. I was basically like an accounting major, but then I switched colleges, but I didn't realize that they didn't have an accounting major. So they're like, you can choose between global business or marketing. I just chose marketing because it sounded, I don't know, more broadly appealing to getting jobs. But anyways, broke into tech, started working in marketing, realized I really loved it. And then ever since then, been kind of scheming and planning how I can start my own SaaS company and, uh, and be a SaaS marketer forever.

I love that. There's so much I can unpack from there, but I specifically want to focus on this framework that you share on your site and something that, you know, I've resonated with personally too, which is the stair-stepping approach, right? I think shout out Nathan Barry. Is that who wrote this first?

Uh, Rob Walling. Rob Wallen.

Okay, cool. I feel like there was a version of this that Nathan also wrote, maybe.

Yeah. Nathan has like the, like the stairs to wealth creation or like the ladders of wealth creation.

Yeah.

It's very similar, actually.

Yeah. I think it's like the core tenet of it is in essence similar. I'm a big fan of that personally. I've been advocating, you know, that to all my founder friends and everybody to do that instead of trying to do the opposite. Everybody starts with the marketplace and try to like do the opposite. So actually, why don't you explain what that is in your own words? And I'm very curious to see, you know, any experiments that you ran in that framework and any lessons learned.

Yeah, I mean, the stair-step approach to company building and entrepreneurship has been like probably the most guiding framework I've used in my career so far. Really, it takes a lot of humility at the end of the day, because what it's about is it's saying, hey, you probably shouldn't jump to playing entrepreneurship on hard mode, on legendary mode, and going straight to, you know, the marketplaces and the social media apps and the, you know, hardware startups of the world. You should start with something a A little bit easier and work your way up to those things if that is your end goal indeed. So me again, being, you know, wanting to be humble and wanted to have some, you know, self-awareness thinking, okay, I know I want to get into building a SaaS company, but I think that SaaS companies are like, you know, on the harder end of the spectrum, not the hardest thing, but they're definitely not for the faint of heart. Like you need to have a lot of experience and really know what you're going into. So what can I do before then to step up those stairs, get the experience that I need to work myself up to a SaaS company? And so the way that Rob breaks it down is he says you start with Like the first step is like a single channel, kind of single offer sale. So you have one channel, maybe like SEO, and then your like product is maybe something like a blog, right? It's content or it's like a ebook or it's a—

Is there a plugin? A second step?

Yeah. Or a plugin. Yeah. Yeah. It could be a plugin as well. Or maybe like a lifetime sale of software or something really, really simple. Like just what's the simplest version of the product you want to build and have one channel. Step 2 would be sort of like the next version up from that, which might be, you know, you have multiple channels and maybe you're taking your plugin and you're making it a little bit broader for other platforms, or you're— you have your content site and now you're adding on other products on top of it. Or maybe you have your course and now you're writing a book as well, but you're just becoming multichannel, kind of multiproduct if you want to think about it that way. Right. And then you keep stepping up the stairs to more complex and complex frameworks and types of businesses and ideas. I think step, you know, then you can go more like the productized service route where you're doing consulting or maybe doing freelancing, you're doing consulting, then you're doing a productized service and then you're doing an agency. Right. So these are all just, you know, ways of thinking about complexity, but also financial reward and the skills necessary to do those types of businesses. So, you know, early on, I'm trying to think like, how can I just get the reps in? Like, how can I just start practicing, right? Place that are really low risk, right? Where, you know, I thought a lot of times like, I should start building my network of angel investors. I just, you know, just raise some money for and pitch an idea, or I should. And then like, the more I started following guys like Rob, the more I started reading books, the more I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna crash and burn if I go down that route. Like, I need to, I need to get some experience under my belt. Yeah. So I started doing things like, I think my very first like product was a newsletter. It was the TL;DR in SaaS marketing. I did it for like a year and then I kind of got burnt out on it. I only had like 500 subscribers. There was no real product. I never even got to like the monetization stage of like getting sponsors and stuff like that for it. But then I kind of shut that down and built a job board for marketers called Hey Marketers. Yeah. And that was my first foray into the world of no-code and Webflow and Airtable and, you know, all these like automations and sort of hacking together a solution to build a product that really is the sum of a bunch of other products that are prebuilt. And then I built courses and then I started this membership site with swipe files. I've done other small projects on the side with people where I'm doing the marketing and they're doing the product side of things. Like we did a video directory for all of the MicroConf talks and we made that into like a no-code site where you can filter and search instead of having to go through YouTube. So, you know, things like that. There were just like these really small things where I'm getting experience. I'm learning, you know, how do you launch on Product Hunt? How do you work with someone and tell them, here's what I envision this thing to be? How do I scope out a product for myself and say, this is what I envision this thing to be? Nice. I'm building a job board, for example, like how do job boards work? What are all the things I need to have in place? Oh, invoices. Oh, receipts. Oh, SEO. Like I just have to go and learn all these things that I never would've gotten exposure to if I had not built these things on my own. So yeah, that's kind of like the, I guess my experience leading up to where I am today and how this framework has helped me get to this step now that I'm at.

Yeah. I mean, the framework, you know, I think is something that I think about from time to time and it's so funny how it is so obvious, but also it's so often overlooked in our, you know, world of founders. Because if you think about it, you know, any other domain, you would never do something like that. For example, you don't go to NBA or you don't go to basketball and say, all right, I'm going to be the center of the Golden State Warriors. Like, that's not where you start, right? That's the eventual goal. Yeah. So like, you don't say like, oh, I'm going to wake up and be like a Mark Zuckerberg. I'm going to be the next Facebook creator or Airbnb Brian Chesky. You start, you know, way at your little— like, you start way at your, you know, I don't know, streetball. And then you go from there to a local league and then you go ago, and then G League and eventually NBA, right? So it's so obvious for us who are not part of the NBA to look at someone who's trying to be an NBA star without any of the reps and sets and the practice and the skill that it takes and be like, why are you trying to do this? But when it comes to founders, I feel like, you know, this is not how most founders start and think. You know, they try to emulate directly the ones who made it, and they forget all the 10 years it took. One of my recent insights has been like how, like when you talk about musicians, like like, think about musicians like Jay-Z, Rihanna, whoever. They were like child prodigies, or they were like— is it child prodigy or prodigies? They were child prodigies.

Yeah, yeah.

And most likely they practiced for 10 years, putting in reps and sets to get to a point where they, once they open their mouth, they're crushing it. And from there it takes another 10 years to build out your actual work portfolio, you know, of albums or songs or whatever. And that's what you get paid for. You don't get paid for the first 10 years of practicing shit. And I think as people like you and me, as we delve into entrepreneurship, you know, becoming The first— I'm in year 2 or year 3 maybe, you know, I'm very early in the practice and I'm shocked at the responses and results I'm getting already. I'm really grateful, but also I have to keep in perspective, like, this is just the beginning. I cannot expect outrageous results. Like, no rapper gets outrageous results at year 3, right? DJ Khaled had to freaking like work 15 years for free. It was one of these things he talked about recently. He just did all the things for free for a long time. And then, you know, he could— whatever he touched feels like, wow, this is a golden album, right? Yeah. So I think it just reminded me of that recently, and I was like thinking about it. And I thought, man, you know, you need way more humility, way more patience being an entrepreneur. And, you know, I'm sure you're seeing a version of this lesson, you know, in your life too. Tell me a little bit about the portfolio of bets approach. You know, how is it going? And how do you decide, like, how many bets do you want to place on that journey?

I want to be clear about one thing. I think we've kind of created this language of portfolio of bets. I don't know if that's actually sort of what I'm doing, or like my strategy, you know, because I think it can go a couple of different ways of how you can interpret that. You You could take like a portfolio of bets to mean something like, well, I'm going to equally allocate my time and energy across, you know, 5 different projects, let's just say, for example, right, all concurrently, right? And I'm going to work on all 5 of those, hopefully indefinitely. Or you could take, you know, a different meaning. And this is all sort of like semantics. Yeah. It's all subjective, right? So I'm just telling you kind of my thought process so people don't like make too many assumptions about what that means, right, for me. Another approach could be something entirely different where it's like, I'm going to work on one until that thing, you know, sort of peters out or shows some promise. And if it doesn't, then I'll move on to the next thing, right? Move on to the next thing, move on to the next thing, right? Or I might have, you know, sort of a quote-unquote portfolio of 2 or 3 things concurrently at any given time, but none of those things are supposed to be permanent fixtures in my life, possibly. Yeah, I'm sort of always open to the idea of like, I'm gonna let this thing play out to be what it should be and what I can make it be, but I'm not gonna force it to be any more or any less than its sort of potential, right? Right. So my approach has been on my own individually, I'm gonna do things that are fun, fulfilling, that I wanna see built in the world that I just wanna see exist. I wanna play around with that. I think that can push my skills to the next level and help me learn in a very practical way. 'Cause I think that's the ultimate form of learning rather than just watching someone else or hearing about someone else doing something. And then if some of those things show promise, I'm gonna figure out the best way to allocate my time accordingly and appropriately in a way that I think makes the most sense to again realize the potential of that thing. Right. So I'll tell you, you know, a lot of the projects have been sort of like a means to an end for me. Yeah. Where it's not really like, yeah, I don't— I can't see myself doing this forever. And like, I don't have huge expectations of— I'm not trying to build 12 startups in 12 months. Yeah. And let you know, hopefully all 12 of those are going to work out. Like, I think a lot of people, if they really were honest with themselves, they know that there's going to be a very high rate of failure. Yeah. But you have to get through those in order to get to the one that does work. Yeah. 2 that do work. Yeah. And they might work at very different degrees, and that's totally fine. I'm okay with that. I'm not going to be dogmatic about it in any way. I'm not going to evangelize the idea of, oh, you should spread yourself thin and you should work on so many things all at once. I think you should do whatever you think is best for you in your stage of life, your goals. And because some people, like if you're an Elon Musk, yeah, he's working on like 10 different things right now, or maybe more like 3 between Tesla and SpaceX and the Boring Company, like what he's actually directly involved in day to day. But the guy is absolutely maniacal. Yeah. very focused in certain time periods in his life on each one of those individually, or he'll delegate a lot. I have a lot of issues with anyone comparing themselves to Elon and trying to correlate some patterns of success from him because he's just such a one-of-one anomaly. But all that to say, I think that you have to understand what your goal is. And so for me, this kind of portfolio of bets approach to kind of answer your question is more just to figure out what works, what do I enjoy And what's the quickest, most effective way that I can get there for myself? Because I really don't like seeing ideas just kind of sit on the shelf forever and just be there. Like, I want that thing to exist. Or if I think that's a good idea, I'm excited about it. And I at least want to kind of chip away at it just so that my mind isn't fixed on it. Like, I have to remember it and I have to— it's not swirling around in my brain. Like, if I either write it down or I chip away at it, then at least I actually do have the mental clarity to go and work on other projects that should have more of my attention. Right.

So you're releasing the idea into the world, right? So that it's no longer like stuck in your head. Yeah, no, I can relate to it. I think probably another, you know, metaphor here that I've been noodling on was, you know, like think of it like a scientist being in a lab and you're trying to discover a particular drug that would be the solution for a particular, you know, I don't know, you're trying to come up with something that's like alchemy or whatever, and you will have to go through certain bad experiments that, you know, they didn't turn out the way you would want it to be. But one of them could be like, you know, I don't know, Madame Curie or whatever. And suddenly, like, you've hit gold or you've hit a particular element that was very valuable to the rest of society. But each experiment, you have to assume that it's going to be that. Otherwise, you're not going to be driven. You're not going to be fun. However, when it doesn't turn out, you can't be sad or mad or anything. You could move on to the next experiment. Right. I think detaching them— people like— one of the things I found to struggle with, I noticed, is having a healthy detachment from the thing that they're building. their actual self-worth is so hard. But you have to attach yourself to the process, not a particular milestone or a particular specific example or project.

Yeah, I can absolutely resonate with that. I think in the last, maybe, maybe in the last year for me, I think I've gotten some clarity around, you know, I'm not just trying to reach some sort of milestone or build some sort of thing or reach some sort of like personal financial milestone for myself. I am committed to the craft and the practice of marketing. And I enjoy that most in the context of SaaS software.

Right.

And I just want to do that forever. And if I'm doing my best at that, and if I'm committing myself to that process, then everything else will kind of take care of itself. Yeah. Outcomes will happen, the milestones will, will be achieved, the things will get built. You know, inevitably, all the things that I do also want to happen will, but I'm not forcing myself to do something that I don't like or that I don't want to do just to do something kind of arbitrarily rewarding in some way. And so I'm a big fan of that. I kind of stay in my lane in a lot of things where I don't touch a lot of other things that I would like to get into or that I think are interesting or that catch my eye or that maybe seem more lucrative because I know this is what I enjoy the most. This is where I have the most core competency. And there's a lot of upside for me in that area. Yeah. So why would I distract myself with other things or be obsessive about things that only have these kind of extrinsic Rewards of, you know, money or fame or recognition in some sort of way.

My hack to that is, you know, I know what I'm obsessed about or what really gets me going. And then everything else, I like to interview them on the podcast because I'm like, that's right. I'm rooting for them. I'm happy if someone's crushing it in Web3, if someone's crushing it in, let's say, I don't know, like some other domain that I have no clue about or no passion about. And if it's giving them a great extrinsic reward, I'm really happy for them. Right. That's what I would, I would want for me or want for anybody who's obsessed about something. But I'd rather either interview them on the pod or maybe be a small investor in their journey, you know, like to get to be a part of something cool. But you're right, like I think flip-flopping and switching lanes makes no sense. It's early on, definitely if you're in the explorer phase, right, where you're exploring, you know, you're trying to figure out like where do you feel home or where do you, you know, what is the craft that feels like at home for you? But once you're there, I think it's all about exploiting, as Naval would call it, which is not really that negative word, but like just obsessing about it and then, you know, staying the game. So you mentioned on your personal website this great insight that I fully resonate with. And I want you to unpack it for us here. Why SaaS companies should aim to do marketing like a media company. Couldn't be more— I couldn't like, you know, I couldn't say like more good things about that quote, but like why?

Okay. So yeah, I love this rabbit trail because I think that it simultaneously is really interesting to marketers and product people for 2 very different reasons. For marketers, I think that the whole thing is that we don't want to do marketing that's just like performance-oriented and that's hacks and tricks and manipulative that we don't feel good about. We want to do marketing that is fun and entertaining. entertaining and educational and helpful and valuable, and that people point at and go, whoa, that's awesome. I love that. Or look at what they made. That's really, really cool. And so Marketing Like a Media Company kind of encapsulates this idea of treating marketing like a group of personalities and content creators rather than a bunch of like, you know, growth hackers and sort of shady SEOs and all these tips and tricks and things that, you know, maybe were acceptable back then, but now we're sort of pushing marketers to higher levels. Yeah. Let's really take this and become not just a company, a product company, but a media company as well in terms of marketing, become a fixture and a destination for our audience that they know, love, and trust and recommend to other people like them.

Right.

For product people, I think that product people really like this idea because how I encapsulate marketing like a media company is that you, instead of treating your content and your marketing like a means to an end, it is the end in and of itself. It's treating your content marketing like your product. And you're not going to sell a bad product, right? You have to have a really, really good product that actually solves a problem. people enjoy using, that they would recommend to others, and that you're proud of at the end of the day, where you're engineering at a very high level and you're strategizing about how does this fill a gap in the market for people. Yeah. So those are the kind of the, the two, you know, different ways that I like to frame it for people, whether they're more like the product side and the way that they identify themselves, or more on the marketing side and the way they identify themselves. But really, you know, I kind of went down that rabbit hole because I kept hearing these kind of people on Twitter talk about like, oh, you know, don't build a marketing team build a media company. Like, that sounds really nice, sure. But like, what does that actually mean? Right? How does it actually look like? Who who is doing this? Is is this just a nice idea, or is this something that's actually practical and tangible and real, and that's beneficial? Not just like a you know this is cool surface level, but it's actually driving business results in a differentiated way, in a better way, right? And you know than what people were doing before. So I came into it very skeptical, very a lot of humility as I always try to, and actually. And I found that, yeah, this is a superior approach. Like, this is actually working. And really what I noticed is that all the companies that I saw that, one, were really pushing the boundaries on the product end of things, but two, also had the strongest brands, most encapsulated this idea of marketing like a media company. Hmm. So I was like, man, if all the, like, companies that I respect the most and are doing the coolest thing on both the marketing and the product side are really living this whole marketing like a media company thing out, then there has to be something here because it's already captured my attention in a way that is different from a lot of other companies.

While you were doing this research, like, what were some examples of companies that you thought were doing such a great job of this?

Yeah, so I think at a very practical level, like, no matter what stage that you're at, there are a lot of founders building a public— like, there's the founder of Copy.ai, there's Patrick Campbell over at ProfitWell. They're actually massively, you know, huge and successful, but just the way that they, that they have like the recur network and podcasts and shows. Wistia, Buffer, you know, just like the open startups and also with the 110/100 series and making video a core part of their media and their content that they're creating. But then at a really high level, you have companies like HubSpot acquiring The Hustle, which is literally a media company. Yeah. And you have Coinbase launching Coinbase News, and you have outreach.com acquiring saleshacker.io. I'm sorry, other way around. Anyways, Outreach acquiring Sales Hacker, Stripe acquiring IndieHackers, AngelList acquiring Product Hunt. Like, yeah. more of this M&A as marketing strategy. So there's two ends of the spectrum, right, at your level of budget and sophistication and, you know, what actually qualifies as, you know, media for the sake of media. But yeah, those are just a few examples of like what that actually looks like in the companies that I studied.

I love it. I love it. I think it's the one company that came to mind when— which I thought you were going to say, but you talked about so many other companies, which is amazing— was Drift. You know, I thought Drift was doing for 3, 4 years, right?

Definitely.

Yeah. They were doing such a great job of this. this. And, uh, but you're right, there's all these, you know, other companies too. So you are, in my head, the sort of the mnemonic I have for you is the swipe file guy. And it's bad, broken, it's lazy, but I think it's kind of accurate. It helps me keep you top of mind. But a lot of people don't know what swipe files are, you know. So by the way, I don't know if you saw last year I launched my Build in Public swipe file, you know, uh, which I'm bringing it back with 2.0. I'm super excited. I got a lot more content now, a lot more long-form stuff, which I'm, you know, I'm going to announce at some point. But what is a swipe file? And why do you think it's so, so important or underrated, you know, for marketers or founders to have it?

So a swipe file is a name and a thing that marketers made up to describe the process of stealing and remixing and collecting ideas from other people and other companies that you like, that you can use for inspiration for yourself and your own projects, your own landing pages, your own emails, your own ads, your own social media, whatever it is, your own content, so on and so forth. But really the idea goes far back. Like, this isn't like a new thing or a new idea. Designers have mood boards. You know, I think that any artist who looked at a blank canvas, you know, they're not just gonna like— they have to go off of something, right? Mm-hmm. Like, we're very— as human beings, we like to imitate and we learn by example. And we're always looking at what other people are doing, you know, picking out the things that are working and then tweaking the things that we want to And so a swipe file, you know, really I think where like the term swipe file got popularized was kind of in the Mad Men era of advertising where you had all these, you know, big names like David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett and, you know, all the kind of classic advertisers who would actually keep a massive swipe file of what all their competitors were doing. Wow. A lot of, you know, examples for different industries because it speeds up your workflow. It's a flow lot easier to find things. massively when you can see, okay, well, here's— even though I don't know why this works, this is what worked. Now if I can see another example, another example, another example, I can start to see the patterns. I can start to draw conclusions. Even there's a, you know, Sam Parr has this Copywork course. Mm-hmm. Neville Medhora has another one. But like, even literally the act of copying someone else's writing in advertising or just, you know, recreating what they've done helps your brain kind of programmed to the way that they were thinking and writing and create work like them that you already know is good, right? Is exceptional. So anyways, a swipe file is just a collection of marketing examples that you think are good that you want to save for later. And a swipe file could also include, you know, anything. I'm mainly talking about in the context of marketing because that's kind of its origins and its main application, I would say. But this can work for design, this can work for content, this can work for architecture. Like, I don't I don't know, you, you know, fill in the blanks. It can work for pretty much anything, right? But yeah, it's a very like innate, I think, human like creative practice of keeping a source for inspiration and then using that for your own creative work,

right? Yeah. I mean, I have one. It looks very disorganized, but it's the place that I go to when I have to come up with my building public content or when I'm like hitting a wall with writing Twitter content. I have 2 actually, one for Twitter, one for just building public stuff. But it reminds me of kind of like, I don't know if Scrabble books, like, you know, or some of the collages and stuff that we used to, you know, as kids used to collect.

Yeah.

Right. Something similar. You're expressing yourself through what you're curating. One of my other frameworks that I've been testing a lot is that a lot of folks who want to get going as a creator, right, be in any niche, I think they directly jump from being a consumer to being a creator. And they think that that's the only way you have to generate new ideas, new ideas. And oftentimes I found that actually great curation is better than bad creation or poor creation. You know what I mean? Because great curation is actually hard and it's a service to the world compared to shitty creation, right? So you could use that as a stepping stone, becoming a great curator first and be world-class at it, be really good at it. And then eventually, naturally, somehow because you're consuming all of this and inhaling all of this greatness, you are inevitably going to produce something that's great as well over time. I feel like a lot of people overlook that step.

Definitely. Well, I think that the reason behind that and why curation is such a— not only a, you know, a service to other people and to the world, but also intrinsically powerful for yourself is that it helps you understand what good is. It gives you taste. You know, imagine like only ever eating McDonald's for your whole life, and you thought McDonald's was like tip-top, right? The best burger of all time. There's nothing wrong with McDonald's burger. They're actually, you know, they're, they're good. But then you have like a, you know, artisan-made burger with, you know, all these sauces you've never had before, And you've got bacon on there and it's, you know, this really juicy, high-quality beef and all these like seasonings, you know, now your kind of worldview and your palate has just expanded. You have a new taste, a new potential where, you know, this is actually— this is better. This is what good actually looks like. And that happened, you know, your sort of palate expands and you become a better— you have better taste, the wider variety of foods that you eat and just things that you consume in general. So that when you go to create your own thing, you're going to make your own You make something better, you produce something better because you've done the work of giving yourself good taste because you've curated all these things in the past. And so, yeah, that's such a really good point. I never thought about that or really framed it that way. But like going from just consuming to producing is really hard or consuming to creating. It's consume, curate, create.

Right.

And that's a much more natural path.

Yeah. It's kind of like the Rob Walling's stair-step approach because I feel like a lot of times I get the same question. They're like, KP, this is great. It's natural for you to come up with all these ideas and tweets, which is, first of all, both of us know that's not how you operate. Like, we all struggle initially. And, you know, but they're like, how do I get started? I'm like, then why? My question is, why are you trying to create? Just curate. It must be easier to curate. Like, just take my tweets, take Corey's tweets, take Ryan's tweets, take Sharad's tweets, and just like curate them. And this, by the way, this is how Dickie Bush literally got the first 100K followers on Twitter. He literally just curated Tim Ferriss podcast Naval's podcast, and then he literally just like took best ideas from what was discussed and wrote them down literally word by word. He would just type up transcripts, kind of like the copy, those Ampar stuff you're talking about, right?

Yeah.

And he learned how to express an idea succinctly in a powerful way that would resonate because great thinkers have already done it before. And I thought that was super smart. I was like, wow, then you learn how to write in a compelling way, which is part of the game anyway. So that was fun. You know, of course, you probably know this. I think there's an amazing curation platform that I think we're overlooking here. Pinterest, right? Like the— like, I feel like— so when are you acquiring Pinterest?

Yeah, when we have the funds, I don't know, we'll do a hostile takeover.

SwipeWell acquiring Pinterest is the news I'm looking forward to.

That's right.

But Corey, I really wonder, like, I think, is there a SaaS? I mean, is that what SwipeWell is? Because I feel like, you know, the mood boards you're talking about that designers I feel like there's that kind of product needs to exist for marketers. It's a broad term. I know marketers has copywriters and all these other content creators, all these people. But I think broadly, I don't think anything like that exists, like mood boards or Pinterest for like especially marketers.

Well, now, yeah, that's what we're building with Swipeable. That's the whole thought. That's the whole platform. You know, we're sort of like tip of the iceberg for us is a Chrome extension. Makes it really easy to just like one One click, take a screenshot, grab a section of a page, save a tweet, grab the URL of anything that you want to, and then put it in your dashboard. But then really, your actual swipe file lives in the Swipeable dashboard, which you can create collections, you can tag, you can organize. And that is your database, your source of inspiration. That's where we want you to— we want you to have that tab open when you go to sit down and write the copy for your landing page, or when you're thinking of an idea. ideas or brainstorming for emails or ads with your team. Like, you want to— we want you to have your SwipeWell collection open or your SwipeWell dashboard open. Tip of the iceberg is just the Chrome extension. You know, we've been, we've been building since February now, so it's already been about 6 or 7 months. We're still like in this like pre-launch kind of early access phase because we're taking things very seriously of just wanting to deliver a really exceptional experience to everyone. And I've been onboarding every single new user over a call. Until like last week, we finally kind of opened the floodgates. But yeah, that's the whole idea. Like, this is something that I've wanted to exist for a long time. I've been surprised. I've tried literally everything else out there. They all sort of fail for the same reason, which is that you end up— they're really good at capturing whatever you want to save, but not good at organizing and saving and searching for that thing later. So you never end up using it because, you know, how am I going to go filter through my Google Drive folder? Yeah, there's so many. A thousand examples. Or yeah, or same thing with Pinterest, same thing with Evernote, same thing with Apple Notes. Like, it's really hard to actually make use of a swipe file unless you do things in a very specific way, which is how we've architected SwipeWell.

Nice. I can't wait to check it out. Do you want to give a shout out to the URL so that I'll include it in the show notes too? Where should people—

Sure.

Yeah. Learn more about SwipeWell?

We have swipewell.app. Super easy.

Very cool. Awesome. So one last question and then we'll call it a wrap. You've had your hand at podcasting as Well, I'm very, very curious. You know, you've done what, 72 episodes with the Defaults Alive podcast? Is that right?

Yeah.

Close to 72. Okay. And then you've, you have another one called Everything in Marketing, Everything Is Marketing, sorry. And that's your solo podcast. And you have about what, 54 there?

I think so. Yeah. Somewhere around there.

Insane output-wise, you know, huge fan. I'm 34, 35 with Building Public and, you know, 50s and 70s feel like, wow, it's just a lot of work myself. gone into it. Tell me about the journey. You know, what have you learned about podcasting? What did it teach you about yourself?

Yeah, well, one, podcasts are like the hardest medium of content. Yes. Or like channel to grow of all time.

Finding that, right? And real hard. Yep.

Yep. And it's not really our fault either. It's mainly— well, okay, so here's what I want to get into, which is, you know, what have I learned through it? One, I think that it's been a lot of like, it's a really good source of self-reflection and learning and networking. And there's a There's a lot of just like inherently valuable things that you get out of doing a podcast regardless of how many people listen and stuff like that. But honestly, like selfishly as a marketer, I've learned a ton just in all the challenges of trying to grow a podcast. I've learned a lot through like, you know, open web protocols and why RSS is like a really good thing for just democratizing access to the web and making content really easy to consume, but really bad for like sharing data that's useful for growing your podcast, knowing who's listening, when, how, where, what device, and which podcast player. Just the podcast medium in and of itself, just being in someone's ears, it's not inherently shareable podcast, which is why I think a lot of things are moving to video, right? You have to just do a lot of work of repurposing and remixing the content into, you know, tweet threads and LinkedIn posts and summaries and, you know, trying to SEO and optimize for, you know, the people that you're interviewing or just the topics that you're talking about. But yeah, I mean, ultimately for me, I think the main thing that I've taken away from podcasting has been the network and the people that I've met through it. And just the practice also of, you know, creating the content, interviewing, you know, producing, picking out the questions, facilitating a conversation. You're doing a fantastic job. It's not easy. It's a really hard thing to learn. Yeah. Especially when there are technical difficulties. But, you know, I think when you do have something, you have a really good premise, when you have high production quality, and when you're serving a need in the market, like it's a really— it's probably like there's no better kind of like content you can create out there. I've always said if I was just a really lazy marketer and like content creator. I didn't want to get into SaaS. I would just do whatever I could to produce a really popular podcast, and then I would only do that podcast. I would work like 5 hours a week, right? Just do 1 or 2 interviews a week, have everyone else do all the other work for me, because I think it's an amazing job if you can make it work, right? But it's difficult to get there. There's a power law for sure. It is crazy power law.

It reminds me of Danny Miranda, who I— shout out to Danny, who you probably know him, but he's living that life, which is described. He's living 5 days, 6 days just podcasting, nothing else. And no, I fully agree with so many things you just talked about. Podcasting is such a hard media avenue, and it's literally, you just have to find your own intrinsic game here. Like, there's no way you will survive more than 8 episodes. I almost quit at the 8th episode because I was like, because I was still downloading other people's playbooks about metrics and analytics. And you should, by now you should have 300 downloads or whatever. And I never had that. And it's like, I got almost surprised and bummed that even after having Gary Vee as a 4th episode guest, which is crazy, I didn't have a lot of downloads on. I think by the time I got to the 8th episode, I almost gave up. But that moment taught me to actually go look for what is the most fun part of this journey. And it became the conversations. It's also an excuse to connect with my— reconnect with my old friends like you in public. Mm-hmm. And it's a great way to pick someone's brain that they would probably hesitate to if they were super busy, but they would always say yes to a pod. And it's also a great way to basically talk about every possible thing within your niche and point to that one podcast. Like, there's a lot of people who are building in public. They may have covered 1, 2, 3 parts of the ground. I've covered freaking everything on the ground because I've done 33 episodes and I've written so much.

Yeah.

So it's like outpacing everybody just by living. I'm not doing anything like that's so hard, but just by existing and doing this part, I'm outpacing everybody. And if I do this 5 years, it's so like, it's just hard to keep up. So you have to really find the intrinsic game. And I think that's my lesson.

Well, here's the thing too, is that it's one directional. Feels like no one's listening. I'm not hearing a lot of stuff. I'm not getting a lot of feedback. I'm not getting like random shoutouts on Twitter or whatever it is. But really, like, I am a mega fan. Like, my favorite content to consume is podcasts. I'm a mega fan of like 5 or 6 podcasts. I listen to every single one religiously, and I've never even remotely interacted with any of the hosts. Right. They would never know, right? Like how much value I actually get out of it. Some of those podcasts are wildly popular. Yeah. So they We can like see, oh, we're doing a good job here. But some of them aren't. They're not that popular. They maybe get a couple hundred to a couple thousand downloads per episode, which, you know, if you compare that to any other medium like a newsletter or a tweet or a, you know, whatever, like it's just kind of pale in comparison. But it's my favorite content to consume. Yeah. And so you have to keep that in mind. I think the content is better. It's just, it's harder to consume. And so it's this kind of weird paradigm.

Yeah. The way I think of it is like you're actually building a different, like a different dimension of connection with your audience, right? It's a different— it's just different, right? 2D versus 3D kind of thing, like in movies. It's hard to compare what it is like versus the other one. You feel— I mean, a lot of people who come talk to me later, you know, like the other day I got a DM from somebody who said, oh yeah, I listened to your podcast in January. I'm like, dude, why are you DMing me in freaking July? Like I had 7 months of like sadness. I'm just kidding. But that's what's happening all the time. They're listening and then they're moving on and they're happy and wow, they feel great. But they think of you like later and they're like, wow, that episode was awesome, or this was awesome. So you just have to, like, you know, earlier, like what we're talking about, you just have to do it for the love of it. And in the moment, like if I have a great guest like you where I can connect and easily like have fun, that's just the ROI right there. Yeah. So before you go, one last episode. I think I'm in 30s, Corey. You're like, you're definitely in 50s and 70s. these. What is one tip that you wish you knew when you were in my shoes? In terms of 2 tips, one should be the growth tip. 2, I would love to know in terms of cadence or frequency, or just this, like making this a repetitive process thing.

Let me address the second one first, which on cadence, I think that whatever is sustainable and enjoyable for you. Some people are like, I can only make this work if I do it once a week at the same time every single week. That's totally fine. Do your thing. Some people are like, I know, like Tim Ferriss, I think that he said actually, he kind of revealed it kind of very subtly that he batch records all this podcasts in like a week. Yeah. And so he'll do like, like 7 or 8 interviews in a 5-day span, and then he won't for like 6 weeks.

Wow.

Or 8 weeks. And that's what he's found worked for him. And some people will be a lot more sporadic. Well, they'll do 2 one week and then, you know, none for the next 2 weeks, and then 3 and then 1. You know, it kind of goes all over the place. I actually don't think that it matters at all because again, it's such an intimate form of communication and relationship with your audience that you just think about how it's delivered to— like, I don't have to wait for a feed or an algorithm to show me which podcast episode to listen to. Like, it just pops up in my RSS. Like, my podcast player just catches it, right? And it's there in the queue. In fact, I have them on auto queue, right? So whenever you publish, it's going to go in people's ears and it's going to run the queue and they're going to listen to it. So I would say don't put any, like, arbitrary pressure on yourself. I have to stick to the schedule, or I tell my audience I'm going to be here every Friday morning. It's like, who cares? Like, they don't really care. They're going to be fine Saturday morning, right? Right. Monday, or if it's been 2 weeks, right, they'll forgive you. The hack though, I think, you know, the, the trick, the growth, the thing that I wish I would have known going into it, I think that, I think that going back to all of it, I really would have put a lot more emphasis on creating little clips, video clips, not even like publishing the full video interview or the video podcast if it's me and my co-host Chris, but just grabbing like 1 or 2 clips. What are the hooks? What are the fun parts? What are the things that are going to draw people that are like the most interesting. It could even be like 15 or 20 seconds. Make sure that they're captioned, you know, publish them as you, you know, market the podcast, as you publish the podcast and release it, but have that be kind of like the headline promotional piece that draws people in. Because I found for myself, that is the one thing that will get me to listen to a new podcast or a new episode that I skipped over is if I see a clip and I'm like, oh geez, I can't— I have to go back and listen to the whole thing now because, you know, what else in there am I missing? Right. Like this that I just saw, right? That's happened a bazillion times with, you know, Huberman Lab podcast, with Build Your SaaS, with Justin Jackson, with even my First Million episodes that I skipped. Oh, they're masters at that. Interesting.

Yeah, but they're masters though. I mean, they're— yeah, yeah,

yeah. But you find the little clip and then you really just, you know, one or two clips is all it takes per episode. You know, I could have done that a long time ago and it would have helped. I think the numbers is just making it more inherently social and shareable. Yeah. And, and reach new people.

That is a great tip and something that I have been sporadic about here and there. I do a quick clip here and there sometimes, but I think I'm going to lean into it. And I fully agree when you say it out loud like that. It is the trailer, right? It is the trailer to— or is the teaser to what's happening inside. And, you know, Harry Stebbings does a great job of this. Danny Miranda does a great job of this. Of course, they all have more than 1,000 episodes now or 500 episodes now. I think that's the thing that I wish, to your point, like a lot of people started earlier, you know, doing earlier. So definitely keeping that on my top of mind. And I just want to say thank you for being here, man. It was fun. Yeah, I had a blast. And

wait, did I miss the part about how I factor into your building public story or journey?

The podcast, right? Especially the podcast. I'll tell you how.

Oh, okay. Okay. The podcast. Yeah.

Because this mic that I have been using religiously was basically by your recommendation, the ATR Technica. Oh, really? You remember this audio So when I was in desperate need for getting a microphone for Gary Vee's interview, I think I DM'd you on Slack and you sent me a link to this and you said, this is the one that I use for my pod. And I didn't believe you at first. I was like, let me just check on the audio quality. Let me see if Corey is really giving me a high quality thing. And I was like, I listened to it like 10 seconds and I'm like, yeah, this is the one I'm getting. And I never bought anything else after that. That's, this is the only The microphone I've been using since when I first bought, thanks to you. So you've always been— your recommendation has always been part of every episode.

Yeah. You think of me every time you speak into it. Yeah. Yeah. There's a— yeah, a lot of people, you know, I think the microphones especially are interesting because it's like the technology can only go so far to just capture what we hear as human beings, which is already limited in some sense. Right. And so like you don't need a $1,000 mic. You need a $100 mic, which is the ATR. But like the Yeti, don't buy a Yeti. In fact, One of my friends, James McCaffrey, if you know him, but he had a whole site that's like don'tbuyyeti.com or something like that. And because there's all these, you know, quirks, but it's just somehow it's like tapped into the zeitgeist stuff. Like if you're a podcast and you need a Blue Yeti, something about the name or the branding or something. But that's why I got the recommendation from this one from Tim Ferriss.

Oh, nice.

Wow. That's what he used.

Is that what he uses? That's crazy.

Yeah. I don't know if he still does, right? But at least he might have something fancier. Yeah. For the first like 4 or 5 years. Yeah. He just uses this one. And this is the old one too. I have the old one still. Oh yeah. It sounds pretty good.

I think I have the new one. I mean, it's sort of like similar. It's the same thing. They just like launched a later edition. Right. But man, so again, thank you for the recommendation. Thank you for, you know, even, uh, I remember, you know, I think we were episode 2 or 3 when we were chatting, you gave me a much needed nudge at the time of saying, KP, you should do this. And, you know, this is fun. Like you, you, you should do it. And I don't know if you really knew what you were doing or what you were saying at the time, or you may probably just like casually said it, but it, it meant a lot at the time because I needed the nudge to lean into that practice of podcasting. And here I am, 33 episodes later.

Here we are. And here I am. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, man. It's been a lot of fun.

Yeah, same here, man. Awesome. I hope you have a great rest of the day. All right.

Thank you.

Thank you. Bye. See ya.