The Nathan Barry Show

[00:00:00] Chris: I don't know anyone else who does what I do without any sales team. What was revenue last year? About 10 million.

[00:00:09] Nathan: That's the power of a personal brand, and Chris Donnelly has mastered it.

[00:00:13] Chris: I got a billion views last year across my content. I now effectively have one strategy, which is I, oh wow.

[00:00:21] Nathan: In this episode, he shares his exact content creation process.

[00:00:24] How he uses automation and delegation to scale and why he can take three weeks off and come back to everything still running on track.

[00:00:31] Chris: Ordinary entrepreneurs like myself can become extra ordinary by building an audience. LinkedIn is like waiting for you to create high quality content. It's very systemizable.

[00:00:42] Most of it's written content. You can do big batch work and create great content and then post it throughout the week. Everyone's like, well, what's the thing that works in the algorithm?

[00:00:49] Nathan: And usually what you see, it's like very high quality content that gets people to stop scrolling and engage with it and stay engaged for a longer than normal period of time.

[00:00:58] Chris: Exactly. I'm creating content for my audience that's so good that they wanna share it with their audience. Right. From simply doing that, I'm selling 10, 20,000 a week of consultancy.

[00:01:10] Nathan: If you could instill one or two systems in any creator's business, what would those systems be?

[00:01:15] Chris: I think it would be.

[00:01:17] Nathan: That's amazing.

[00:01:22] Chris, you went on a wild ride of going from almost no followers on LinkedIn to over a million in 24 months. Mm. What did you expect to have happen when you started that journey and how did the expectations match reality?

[00:01:36] Chris: I think, to be honest, the, it was very intentional. As in, I remember at the time thinking I've just come off the back of like, you know, 10, 15 years of growing other people's audiences and growing businesses, and I was like, I can see the benefit that those people have had.

[00:01:54] I can see the benefit that, you know, people that I've helped build, audiences have gone on to become celebrities. And I was thinking to myself, well, there's not an amazing amount of good business content. Mm-hmm. And so if I could fill the gap. I feel like this could go quickly. And then actually it was a choice of like, do I wanna post on Instagram or do I wanna post on LinkedIn?

[00:02:12] Right.

[00:02:13] Nathan: How did you decide that's, so many creators that I talked to are like, okay, I'm, I've heard I should go all in on one platform.

[00:02:19] Chris: Mm.

[00:02:19] Nathan: But like, uh, I could kind of go between any of these three.

[00:02:23] Chris: So I had a few like tiny pieces of insight. One was in my agency that I ran in my twenties. When we sold it, there was a stat which was over 75% of all our new business came from LinkedIn.

[00:02:37] And then in my health tech business, 80% of new clients came from LinkedIn.

[00:02:42] Nathan: Okay.

[00:02:42] Chris: Half the staff did, and all the VC introductions did. And so I was like, it just feels like it's a platform that slept on Instagram. Looked hard.

[00:02:52] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:02:52] Chris: You know, and you had to be very video focused. Whereas I was like a natural writer.

[00:02:57] And I said, when I started on LinkedIn, I was like, I'll never do a photo. I'll never do video. I'll never do that stuff. Which obviously funny now, but it meant that I could just write a huge amount on the weekend. Mm-hmm. And then post it throughout the week. And so it was, I thought it was easy to systemize.

[00:03:11] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:03:12] Chris: And the payback window was actually quite quick because everyone's

[00:03:16] Nathan: already doing business and transactions on LinkedIn, so it's not like you're showing up on another platform, TikTok or YouTube or Instagram and being like, Hey, follow me for this great pithy wisdom and you know, pay money or whatever.

[00:03:29] It's like, no, everyone showed up to LinkedIn in order to build relationships, to

[00:03:33] Chris: transact, to do business. Exactly. And like it was, uh, I remember looking at the growth of LinkedIn, which was staggering at the time. It was like a billion people in 1% post. And I was like, wow, that is like opportune. Moment to like dive in.

[00:03:48] And I said to myself at the time, I was like, I'm gonna do this intensely for three months. Okay. And look at the payback window. And obviously by, by three months I was like, I have to go all in. I have to put a team on this.

[00:03:59] Nathan: Mm-hmm. I have to like relearn to design everything. 'cause it was just, it's interesting that you had this specific window.

[00:04:05] I've had Ann Laura on the podcast who's also, you know, we're here, uh, in person for craft and commerce and she's another one of the speakers. And her whole thing is tiny experiments where you're saying, for this fixed amount of time, I'm gonna do this exact thing and I'm not gonna judge it in the meantime.

[00:04:18] Right. She's a neuroscientist, uh, and she's like, I'm gonna look at it as a scientist would like an experiment. And so you, you kind of did the same thing of like. Three months, we're just gonna see what happens. And you got to the end and you're just like, okay, this is,

[00:04:32] Chris: uh, worth

[00:04:32] Nathan: pursuing.

[00:04:33] Chris: Absolutely. I mean, I had worked in, uh, e-commerce, digital marketing conversion for so long that I was pretty obsessed with the idea of AB testing things.

[00:04:43] And so when it came to LinkedIn, it wasn't like I was posting my thoughts and my feelings and like selfies and, you know, the occasional client win. I was like, what content is gonna get people to want to follow me? What content is gonna educate people? So they associate trust with me, and at some point I will be able to build a business off the back of that.

[00:05:01] Nathan: Right.

[00:05:02] Chris: And I think I was three months in and I'd gone from like 20,000 followers to I think 50,000 followers. Okay. And I was like, that's interesting. Like it's fast growth. I obviously haven't fully learned it yet, but like, where's the opportunity? And by six months I hit 80,000. And I feel like at that point when I locked in.

[00:05:25] Locked in. I mean, like I really systemize creating hooks. I really studied other creators. Like I would study hundreds of other creators and I would take a note of their following every day, okay. At 9:00 AM every morning. And then I would look at which individual posts drove the biggest followers before that technology was available.

[00:05:45] Right? And so I was like, okay, well it's the content on delegation, or it's the content on system creation or on habits that's driving massive growth. And so in many ways, I took all the things I loved and all the things I knew would do well, and I went all in on that. And from six months and 80,000, I then got to 350 by the end of the year.

[00:06:05] Wow. And that's when people were like, that's the fastest growing account. Mm-hmm. Like in the world. And I was like, I didn't know that. And uh, you know, all, all this sort of stuff, but the benefits started to be very significant at that point.

[00:06:16] Nathan: Yeah. That's amazing. You said this thing of 99% of people on the platform don't post.

[00:06:21] Only 1% actually do. Hmm. I think there's a lot of times. As a creator that there's this very fine line between you and the 1%. Mm. Where something that I talk about is how like 90% of out of everyone who has a dream, 90% of them say, oh, I'm gonna consume content about about it. 9% say, you know what? I'm gonna not just consume content, I'm gonna go do the thing.

[00:06:47] Mm. You know, I'm gonna go hike this trail, you know, this epic trail. Or I'm gonna build the tiny house that I wanted to, or you know, whatever cool thing. But then there's only just this 1% that posts about it. And what's interesting is the, that 9% is actually the hard part of saying, of going from consuming to being like, no, I'm actually going to do it.

[00:07:08] You know, from like reading content about business to saying I'm going to start and run a business. So you're, you're doing the hardest part there. And then the easier thing is actually saying, oh, and I'm gonna document the journey. Mm. Right. And then get you into this 1%. You're like, you already made the jump from not doing anything to doing anything.

[00:07:24] And like now just cross over this thin line. And what you're saying is on LinkedIn, it was just the, the ratios are extreme and I see that because, right. 'cause I go on LinkedIn and it will show me posts from two or three weeks ago. Yeah. And even posts that I've seen before, which the algorithm is only doing that if they didn't have enough content to show me.

[00:07:43] Chris: I mean that in itself as a point I think is so good. So well made, like people really, really should focus on that. If the platform is showing content from two or three weeks ago, there's not enough content. Right. Like the algorithm needs more content to distribute. And so I still think that if you were to start on LinkedIn today, you would be early.

[00:08:01] Mm-hmm. And I find that again, like really exciting in my position in that I've been all in on it for two and a half years. It's very systemizable when you get like a, most of it's written content and so you don't have to be on camera the whole time. You can do big batch work and create great content and then post it throughout the week, and you would be shocked at the quality of the audience on LinkedIn for, from a business perspective, I have ne never seen it anywhere else.

[00:08:27] What's an example of that where a time that you were shocked about the quality of the audience? I think that the, the two early pieces of data is what I said earlier, so most of our business, back before I took LinkedIn, seriously, most of it was coming from LinkedIn anyway, like I won Bugatti. From LinkedIn.

[00:08:44] Yeah. When I was 29 and that only happened. It's a pretty good client. That'll work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like, ah, we'll throw that logo on the website. Yeah, exactly. Like you get bug got on the logo. I think. I think in many ways that's that case study and, and winning them at that age allowed us to be like, we are so legitimate.

[00:09:00] Any luxury brand can work with us. Mm-hmm. But I had like those pieces of data and then in stepping back from my health tech, which was like 33 years old, I think I. Effectively went traveling with Lou and, and, and solo because I was like, I've done 15 years of startups, I'm exhausted. I was doing the LinkedIn thing and I was like, I should try and make some money when I'm away and I'm a tinkerer like an entrepreneur.

[00:09:24] Yeah. You know, I, I love to play with things and try things out and I put live a couple of slots in my diary that people could book me for to talk to 'em about, you know, building a business and growing on LinkedIn and they just went every week without fail, no marketing, just like a link on my profile.

[00:09:42] And I suddenly was like, it's so interesting that. From simply doing that, I'm selling, you know, 10, 20,000 a week of consultancy. So people are

[00:09:54] Nathan: just saying, Hey, I'll pay you for a half hour of your time. An hour of your time. Something like

[00:09:57] Chris: that. Yeah. And it was, it was anyone from, but it was really serious people.

[00:10:00] Right. Like it was entrepreneurs who would like, I think that personal brand would help my business. And I'm like, yeah, I think it would as well. Um, and here's some evidence. Yeah. I was like, the evidence is that you are here talking to me and this is my business now. Right. Um, and it got to the point where I was charging something like $750 an hour.

[00:10:18] The demand was outstripping at continuously, and so I moved it to $2,000 an hour. Mm-hmm. And it was still selling. Right. Every week, every slot I put live was selling. Uh, and I was suddenly like, the power of this platform is just, you know, completely different to anything I've worked with before.

[00:10:37] Nathan: That's amazing.

[00:10:37] I wanna dive into exactly what worked. Yeah. To build that, because you've studied this. I mean, you've taken the, the level of rigor that you've always had in your entrepreneur journey and, and put it to this, it's not a like, oh, let me just throw up a post and see how it works. Uh, but I wanna go back to your entrepreneur journey.

[00:10:54] 'cause I think most people see these creators come out of nowhere, uh, three people that immediately come to mind. So you, I saw Hill Bloom, uh, and Andrew Huberman. Mm of people who start, who have like an amazing level of success, like Huberman, it wasn't that far into his podcast that he was topping the charts and all of that.

[00:11:16] Uh, and for Sahil, you know, he, we had a joke where, uh, you know, I tease him, I'm like, Sahil, you think the creator economy was invented during COVID, right? Because that's just when you found it, you know? Yeah. Well, um, you know, but you get these insane growth rates. But it's usually from someone who has done an insane amount of work.

[00:11:35] Or has a, a huge amount of expertise already, and then they're showing up as a creator. Mm. Right. So in Huber Man's case, you know, he's already like, he's at Stanford, he's teaching all these classes. Right. You know, he has decades of experience and all this credibility. He just wasn't public about it. And then in Sa Hill's case, right, he understands business inside and out.

[00:11:54] He's, everyone's like, wow, you're making so much more in your creator business than you would've ever made in private equity. And he is like, no, actually, like private equity was a pretty amazing, you know, he's like, uh, working in ST hours, but like, he understands business inside and out. And that's what I've seen from you is the, you know, the 15 years of, of startups.

[00:12:12] So why don't you start, like, where did you get into entrepreneurship?

[00:12:16] Chris: So, on my show, I always talk about this, this, with other entrepreneurs, it's just like, where does the entrepreneurship come from?

[00:12:23] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:12:23] Chris: And I. I don't know yet 'cause I haven't done enough episodes. But I sit here and I think to myself that the correlation of having entrepreneurship exposed to at a young age mm-hmm.

[00:12:33] Is so significant in your belief in yourself that you can go on and do the thing. And so my dad was an entrepreneur when we were younger, which meant that I have a crystallized view of the fact that at all sports games during the week, no other parent was there other than my dad. Okay. Which is like crazy.

[00:12:50] I remember it, I used to play rugby at like a, a a a school where we had Wednesday and Thursday, and then I played rugby on the weekend. My dad never missed a game,

[00:12:59] Nathan: but he

[00:13:00] Chris: also was very successful. And so I remember being like, dad's obviously worked out the code, like he, he's the one that's cracked it, you know?

[00:13:06] Like he might not be the wealthiest, but he's got like freedom. Mm-hmm. And choice and so forth. And so we were exposed to that very early on and he encouraged entrepreneurship. He would ask you. You know, how do you think this works? Or like, uh, why do you think that worked? Or he would say this thing where he would almost parrot something someone had said to him growing up, which was, um, if you ever wanna make real money, it will never come from having a job.

[00:13:31] It will come through owning the equity and like, again, like it stuck with me. Yeah. Growing up. Um, those are pretty great things to have stuck in your head from an early

[00:13:39] Nathan: age.

[00:13:39] Chris: I mean, I, I would always say, you know, had it not been for my dad, none of us would be entrepreneurs. Uh, my older brother is an entrepreneur, which, you know, he's three years older than me, so that was a huge impact on me.

[00:13:48] Right? Um, he was like a, he's like, uh, you know, a, a a million startups, uh, uh, you know, every year he's releasing new ones. Like he's had great successes. He's had ones that have failed, but he is fundamentally, you know, like a type entrepreneur. Like, so I'm just gonna do this thing. Um, and then we started a like.

[00:14:10] When I was younger anyway, I started selling things at school.

[00:14:12] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:13] Chris: And so, like everyone does, I was selling like, you know, laser pens, I was selling things that jumped off tables, watches that turned TVs on and off. And it was to annoyed teachers. You know, I was, I thought it was funny to bug a teacher during class.

[00:14:26] Yeah. And it was, and you know, people would buy these things from me. I started selling them online, so I built my first website at, you know, 15, 16 type thing. Yep. Which, you know, all of us kind of do. You know, we get into the playing around with websites, um, at that age, or at least that's our version of it.

[00:14:43] Nowadays, it's kids playing with ai.

[00:14:45] Nathan: Right.

[00:14:45] Chris: Um, and I think at like 1920, my brother and I launched a company to help students go to university. And it was like a search platform. And it did quite well. Made some money, but ultimately kind of failed. Kind of left me in a position where I had lots of digital skills, but I didn't have any money and had lost quite a lot of money on that previous business.

[00:15:10] And so I was like, Hmm, I'm just gonna build websites for startups and try and take a bit of equity and get paid and, and see what I do. And that was basically what I did in my part-time. You know, I built websites, I did social media marketing, I took equity in lots of different businesses, none of them worked.

[00:15:28] Um, and, but I built this skillset, which was, you know, idea generation, uh, how to market something, how to get customer to buy something. And, you know, found myself in a position where when we came to graduate, I was making. Five to $10,000 a month. Mm-hmm. And the job I would've got in professional services was gonna pay me four.

[00:15:52] And I was like, okay, well decision made, I'm gonna start my agency. And then I started verb at 21.

[00:15:58] Nathan: That's amazing. I, I mean, I did very similar things, probably, uh, introduced to H TM L and coding at 14. Yeah. And then, you know, on from there at through college paying for it, building websites for people. And then I got my first $10,000 web design project, and I was like, wait a second, I'm, I'm, I'm here in college to learn how to make money.

[00:16:19] Like build those skills. Uh, that's enough money. That'll work. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so I, you know, I dropped outta school and like, uh, you know, called my mom and was like, Hey, um, I'm gonna go do this instead. She, she was very, very supportive of it. Um, but just realizing like, oh, I've already learned the thing, uh, that I need to do here.

[00:16:36] But then those skills around, you know, web design and marketing and copywriting and all this stuff that you just learn Yeah. Through client services end up being insanely valuable.

[00:16:45] Chris: I'd still say like, my skillset is not too different now. Yeah. To what it was then. It is just, I've deployed it and it's something I talk about a lot.

[00:16:53] Like I've deployed it in lots of different business models and now I simply deploy it with a much greater leverage. Mm-hmm. You know, and a much greater, um, you know, asynchronous delivery as opposed to, you know, my twenties, I built a big marketing agency, which like bootstrapped it was fucking difficult, you know, it took 10 years.

[00:17:11] But, you know, got to a hundred staff, biggest clients in the world. But we were a service business. You know, we, you would come to us and you'd say, I wanna do marketing for Aston Martin or Bugatti or these brands, and we would do it. And it was a great business. But the, the fact that you are always delivering for clients, right?

[00:17:28] I always found quite, quite tough. So when we had the opportunity to, to sell that, which was actually pre COVID, I was like, okay, I think I can, I think I can sell this. And then obviously COVID sort of destroyed the business. So did you, you ended up, you sold, sold and completed the transaction before COVID?

[00:17:45] No. So we were in negotiation with a company to buy us. Oh wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually so crazy. But again, I, I actually really thankful it happened in retrospect because, you know, at the time I think we were offered like 20 million to buy the business and I was like, huh, we can get way more than that. Um, and it was me that was putting off the deal.

[00:18:04] It was me that was forcing the deal back. Uh, and then I, we were skiing, COVID hit. The deal was pulled and I lost 80% of the revenue. I had to furlough pretty much everyone in the business and had to mothball the business for a whole year. Um, and so, because you just didn't have clients coming in, spending money?

[00:18:23] Yeah. I mean, luxury brands were traditional. I mean, they did not really have big digital presences. Like e-comm wasn't even that big for luxury. Right. And so it was a complete wipe out. And then I remember thinking to myself like, for seven, eight years, I've run this from the outside. Incredible company.

[00:18:40] Like beautiful brands, beautiful work. Everyone thinks I'm an entrepreneur. And like that means a lot to me because I went a different path than life. Mm-hmm. So I don't want people thinking I'm an idiot who really does, you know? Yeah. And, uh, got myself into a position where I had sort of a year off in COVID, reconnected with friends.

[00:18:58] It was an amazing time for me. But then after COVID I was like, okay, I have to rebuild this thing. Okay, this thing has to come back. Mm-hmm. And so I went all in, like maybe the hardest I've ever worked. Um, you know, from home. I started doing like webinars. Um, and this was still bringing verb back to life.

[00:19:15] It was bringing verb back to life. And we went from, you know, the 10 of us that were not on furlough, everyone else is on government support. Um, we then came back to be almost twice the size we'd been before Oh wow. In a year, because digital took off luxury. The digital, we were perfectly positioned. I mean

[00:19:34] Nathan: 2021 at least.

[00:19:35] I mean, here in the US brands were spending a ton of money again. Like they'd had this huge pullback and they're like, wait, are we good? I think we're good. Yeah. Okay. And interest rates were super low. And so, you

[00:19:45] Chris: know, it was growth at all costs. Exactly. And so we had, we had this, you know, we are down here thinking we're bankrupt.

[00:19:53] I'm personally. I had no money. Mm-hmm. Like, I'd never paid myself. Well, because I always thought my money was in the company. Right. And then the company value was wiped out. And so I was like, okay, I have to build this back. Mm-hmm. And we went on an absolute tear. Like we didn't lose a pitch for like six months.

[00:20:08] We won everyone in the sort of luxury space we're doing LVMH, all the car brands, so much e-commerce. And quite quickly it was like, okay, bring everyone back of government. Mm-hmm. But, uh, at the same time, let's, let's hire like crazy. And we just went on this tear and then I had an offer. Come in through a private equity firm who were like, we wanna buy 49% of the business for X million.

[00:20:32] You get to take this off the table, but go on and buy lots of agencies and do a massive buy and build. Yeah. And I was very close to accepting it. And then I think at the end I was a bit like, I'm not passionate enough to do another 10 years.

[00:20:45] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:20:45] Chris: And so I also thought, and I would say this to a lot of entrepreneurs, there are moments in time where you should take some chips off the table.

[00:20:52] And I was like, okay, I will sell and I'll be 30.

[00:20:55] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:55] Chris: And I'll have these skills and I can, I can go again if I want to. So, um, had a, a pretty competitive, uh, process and then sold the business to a company called Crowd.

[00:21:05] Nathan: Okay.

[00:21:05] Chris: Are,

[00:21:05] Nathan: do you share any numbers of

[00:21:07] Chris: the exit? Yeah. It's about 25 million exit. And it was a bootstrap business, so it was myself, Ben ASINs, uh, it was my business partner, and we gave equity to the staff.

[00:21:16] That's awesome. Yeah. It was an awesome exit. It was an awesome journey and story like no regrets.

[00:21:21] Nathan: Yeah. Was there anything that, uh, like how you changed as you related to money or, you know, any huge fun splurge that you did after, you know, the money hit the bank account? Um, well, funny question.

[00:21:36] Chris: Yeah. I mean, I'm not proud of this in any way, shape, or form.

[00:21:40] Um, but I had one splurge, um, and I felt like I needed it, but buying it in many ways showed me that I didn't and will never need it, which was I bought a Richard Mill watch, um Okay. Like pretty, pretty close after selling. And for some reason, like I bought it and I was like, this is gonna be amazing. Like, you know, I wear it everywhere and it would like signal, you know, and then I wore.

[00:22:06] On my like, uh, wedding day and I've never worn it again.

[00:22:10] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:11] Chris: But you still own it? Yeah, I still own it. Not, I don't own it out of choice. I obviously bought it close to the top of the market for watches, and so it's not worth what I bought it for. So I will sell it whenever, you know, it's, it makes sell to sell.

[00:22:24] But I think it was important, and I do think to an extent you kind of have to go through that. Mm-hmm. You have to make good money to realize you don't want good money in many ways. Like, it's nice to have, but you don't end up spending loads of money. I only spend money on holidays.

[00:22:38] Nathan: Yeah. I mean, it's

[00:22:39] Chris: a

[00:22:39] Nathan: great thing to spend money on.

[00:22:41] That's how I feel as well. I, I think there's something about like changing your relationship to money. Mm. Making some of these big purchases. Like I had a fear that if I made some big splurge purchase, that would be like the start of the slippery slope and I would lose my. Like bootstrapped, super frugal.

[00:23:01] You know, I can live on basically nothing mental and like that would go away. Mm. And I would turn into something different, some to someone different. And so it ended up like, I would avoid spending money ultimately outta fear. Mm. And so it took a few big, uh, like splurges and, and uh, usually travel related, um, to be something like, oh wait, no, I can do this.

[00:23:22] And then still be the same person. Yeah. And it's not like, oh, well now I always have to fly first class or, you know, whatever else it is, and it'll be fine. Like, I, I actually still have agency and can do all of that. Yeah. And so then I, I felt like I understood myself better and had much more confidence after doing, um.

[00:23:41] Chris: You some exposures. I think that's true. I mean, I would say I'm a much more confident person in realizing that I didn't need money and these things to make me happy. Whereas I thought originally maybe I did. Mm-hmm. And there's not none to take away from the fact that I think making money, I, it's such a bizarre topic, but people seem to think it's bad.

[00:23:58] I think making money is a, is a great thing. You give yourself incredible agency in life. Uh, but yeah, I mean nowadays, if I'm honest, you know, I have investments and all the rest of it, but it's like my holidays might cost X. Everything else in my life is down here. Yeah. Like, I literally spend money on nothing.

[00:24:13] Um, apart from always nice holidays.

[00:24:15] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:24:16] Chris: I like it. You

[00:24:17] Nathan: know what you're saying about making money being a good thing, it's such a good thing for you as an individual. Mm. Um, and then also we all do it by. Creating value for other people. Like, and so it just means, it means that you created a lot of value for a lot

[00:24:31] Chris: of other people.

[00:24:31] Yeah. I mean, it's, it's so funny that, that it is demonized so much, right? Because unless you're like the, the, the one-offs, the 1% or whatever, who get it through doing something bad. Yeah. You're doing like corporate takeovers. Yeah. And selling it o like, which is a very slim, but in the main, you make a lot of money by providing a huge amount of value.

[00:24:50] Right. And so I feel like nowadays in, in, in what I do now, like I, I, I effectively help entrepreneurs to level up their businesses. Yes, it's expensive to work with me, but at the same time, the value that I'm delivering for it, I always feel very comfortable. Yeah. And happy with that decision. And so, yeah, I think it's a great thing as long as you're providing the value.

[00:25:10] Yeah, that makes sense. So.

[00:25:13] Nathan: You know, we've got all this time view as an entrepreneur and then you and working for all of the biggest brands and all of that. It feels to me like you then said, wait a second, I'm gonna take the skillset that I've amassed over more than a decade and, uh, I'm gonna be the brand.

[00:25:26] Chris: Is that right? Yeah, I mean, kind of the, there was a small, uh, pit stop in the middle where I'd kind of had the, uh, realization that I wanted to build personal brand and that I wanted to do that sort of stuff. And so I had started posting on, on, on LinkedIn, but at the same time we were also growing this company, Lottie, my brother and I, it went and what did lot do?

[00:25:48] Lottie helps, um, elderly people find care and it builds software for care facilities and care homes and, and home care and stuff. And that was a wild experience that kind of hit me out of nowhere because my brother, who's younger than me this time, uh, he had said, I have this amazing idea. Our family had had a lot of problems in, in elder care and.

[00:26:09] I was like, okay, well I've got experience. I know digital, he knows care. I know I would be able to raise money. And so we joined up and, um, that business, I mean, it's a bit of a blur, but it went from him and I to about 50 people in a year and Wow. A 45 million valuation. And then in the second year it went to 70 and like nowadays it's like a hundred plus people, you know, hundreds of millions of valuation.

[00:26:35] Mm-hmm. Um, making, you know, millions and millions a year and providing a huge amount of value.

[00:26:41] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:26:41] Chris: And so when we got, when we got to like 80, 90 people, you know, we were in this position where the company was doing really well and I almost blinked and I was like, wow, where did three years go? And like, this was Will's mission.

[00:26:54] Right. You know, it wasn't my mission. But I was glad to help him. Mm-hmm. And do it with him and build an amazing company together. But I, I sort of said to him over a coffee, I was like, look, I mean, you're off, you're off. I mean, you are beyond off the races, you know, you are killing it. Um, and you'll go on to build, I believe my brother will go on to build a multi-billion pound company there.

[00:27:10] Mm-hmm. Um, and so I said, look, I'm gonna take a step back and I'm gonna take the break that I was meant to have after selling verb. Right. Oh. Because you just dove right in. It was like day, like back to back. It was, you know, I, I was in my earnout and I started lotti at the beginning of my earnout. Mm-hmm.

[00:27:26] And so it was like finishing verb, starting Lottie overlapped. Uh, and so I'd never had time off. And then I went backpacking solo. Um, and it was in that time that I remember, like I put 12 slots back up for one-on-one. Mm-hmm. Training with me at $2,000 a slot. And they sold out all of them within like a day.

[00:27:50] And I had 30 emails being like, can I book a slot? Right. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. Yeah.

[00:27:58] Nathan: Um, so yeah. Yeah. You're seeing 24, 20 $5,000 show up instantly and then another $50,000 or more of demand be like, Hey, where's yeah?

[00:28:07] Chris: Yeah. You know, like, where are the slots? And I was like, you promised me sluts.

[00:28:10] I was like, I'm kind of in, in Guatemala at the moment, like traveling. I, I don't really wanna be locked to my computer. Um, and it gave me like the, the principle that I think a lot of people don't understand about business is like, if you have enough demand and there's a limited supply, you control the price.

[00:28:24] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:28:24] Chris: And so I was like, how far can I push it to test the demand? And it turned out I could push it quite a long way.

[00:28:30] Nathan: Hmm.

[00:28:30] Chris: Um, and that's kind of where I was like, okay, this is a really serious opportunity in career, so I'm gonna finish out my travels and I'm gonna go back and totally lock in on the idea of doing this.

[00:28:41] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:42] Chris: And so that was a year into putting personal brand. I then launched a newsletter. A year in. Yeah. Like I always think my only regret is not launching earlier. Yeah. Because now it's like the, it's like I, I, I dunno, it's like the piping, it's everything in the business. But I launched that, I came back from traveling, launched that, launched Instagram, and I was like, okay, I need to build a product that allows me to teach in a group setting.

[00:29:06] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:07] Chris: And then I started sort of investigating the cohort style business that I eventually ended up launching. Yeah. Let's dive into the cohort style

[00:29:15] Nathan: business. And then after that, I wanna go back to like, tactics for growing on LinkedIn specifically, but what's the business model today of how you go from the attention on LinkedIn, uh, all the way through to, you know, someone paying you for your, uh, for your program.

[00:29:30] Chris: So I effectively create high quality, really well researched, very. Strategic content on how to grow. Mm-hmm. And that might be how to grow as a person. It might be how to grow in your resilience. It might be how to launch a startup, might be how to find an idea, how to validate. So it's very entrepreneurial content.

[00:29:50] And it's, there's a a, there's a certain strand to it that's about personal brand. And that's what I really, and so much of it is just high quality, free educational content. Mm-hmm. And so I have built this big audience. So I got a billion views last year across my content, which I now effectively have one strategy, which is I use the content to garner views and attention and build audience.

[00:30:15] I then say, if you wanna go deeper on this, then subscribe to my newsletter. Okay. And my newsletter, it's once a week, sent on Sunday. Very entrepreneurial, very tactical, like how to build, how to grow. And from there I do a Thursday evening webinar, no matter where I am in the world. I did it this morning 'cause it's normally my evening.

[00:30:33] So I did it this morning from the hotel, wherever I am, I'll do a webinar. And two to 3000 people turn up to the webinars. Mm-hmm. And I will do some form of topic that is either interesting to me at the time or specific to personal brand or business. And at the end, I basically say to anyone who's ever been on one, I say, look, if you're gonna do one of my cohorts, they are incredibly hard work.

[00:30:56] They take up a huge amount of your time. But if you put in the work, you will transform in 10 weeks. And then that's the only plug and that's it. And I have no sales team. There's no follow up, there's no anything. It's just you sign up or you don't.

[00:31:09] Nathan: And so people sign up, they're on the webinar. Yeah. And then is, are the cohorts like open and close?

[00:31:16] Uh, yeah.

[00:31:17] Chris: So the model is, and I think it's really, it's really important to understand this in that people don't buy something. People don't buy things unless there's like a real reason to buy it. And so I always ask entrepreneurs like, why would I buy your product today and not tomorrow? Right. And they're like, what do you mean?

[00:31:35] I'm like, well, that's often the challenge that you have is like, how do you get someone to buy now? Mm-hmm. And so the thing with the cohort model is that we do four, 10 weeks a year, and that's it. Mm-hmm. So if you miss it, you miss it, and then you have to start again in like four months time. And so people are, people will self-select whether that time of the year works for them.

[00:31:54] And then sometimes I'll take a break, and so it might be a six month wait for the next cohort. And so that, that urgency pushes people to, to sign up.

[00:32:04] Nathan: Yeah, that makes sense. We had that in the early days of growing kit where, you know, I just did a lot of direct sales to recruit people onto the platform, but it was exactly what you're saying.

[00:32:12] It's like, oh, you can, I, I can sign up tomorrow, or I don't know, next month, next year. Like, there's not really, and you're like, well, I'll give you, you're trying to like add scarcity in some way and they're like. I dunno. Next one sounds fine. You know, and then webinars was the thing for us that we, it gave us an event to market and drive everyone too.

[00:32:30] And then through a bonus or you know, something we could get it where it's like, no, it is genuinely way better for you if you sign up today. You know, or part, you know, part of this, this mini launch basically, instead of just leaving it open-ended. Yeah. '

[00:32:44] Chris: cause if it's open-ended, especially with, uh, you know, software product, I'll just sign up next month.

[00:32:48] Yeah. Or the month after,

[00:32:49] Nathan: which rounds to never

[00:32:50] Chris: Yeah. Which rounds never they could discover a new product. Yeah. Whatever it is. And so a lot of the time, historically, I've been advising authors. Mm-hmm. And so you have that perfect thing with an author, but it's like, I want 'em to buy my book right now. And the person's like, oh, I'll buy it.

[00:33:05] It's some undefined point in the future.

[00:33:06] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:33:06] Chris: And so authors then release. You know, accompanying value adds with the book, but then they leave them open forever. Mm-hmm. And so it's like, again, I could just get the value add in a year's time. And so you have to really, to your audience, they have to understand that when you say something, you mean it.

[00:33:22] Mm-hmm. Whereas like with the author, they say, you can only get this thing now and then next month they're giving it away again. You've gotta be very, very careful that people will trust what you say. Right. And Will will, you know, we'll act on it. Yeah. I

[00:33:33] Nathan: think Alex Ramzi, he, he did a huge webinar for one of his book launches and he had, I, he hadn't done something like it before and I, I think he had pushing like a hundred thousand people watching live.

[00:33:45] It was insane. But the thing that he really wanted people to leave with, obviously he wanted them to buy his book. Mm-hmm. That's what it was for. And he put in all this extra value and people thought that he was gonna sell something for like hundreds or thousands of dollars. And ultimately it was like, buy the book in like these little packages and get all this for free.

[00:34:04] But he was like, uh, you cannot get this. This, these additional values, unless you do it right here, live on the webinar. Mm. And he just said like, I am here to train you that, I mean, what I say, and you should show if I do something live, you should show up for it. And like you're gonna, you know, there's gonna be tens of thousands of people that email me afterwards saying, oh, I school drop off whatever else.

[00:34:25] I missed the thing and I wasn't there live. And he is gonna be like, cool. Well I hope, you know, when I do another book, maybe in a year or two, like, I hope you make that one.

[00:34:32] Chris: Yeah. You know, and it's, you know, he, he's a master of the the game. And I think that it's important, it's important to be so honest and so transparent and, and then keep your word to your audience.

[00:34:42] Mm-hmm. Because when you tell them you have a business or you have a, a product where we were gonna do something, if they don't believe you, then the likelihood of building more trust is, is right. Is gonna be, and you have to follow it up because

[00:34:53] Nathan: there's so much fake scarcity. Yeah. Like we, we've been running craft and commerce, uh, for seven years now.

[00:34:58] This is the first year that we've sold out and people were like, oh, I know you're sold out, but like, Hey, can I still grab a ticket? I'm like, no, we're actually just physically at capacity. Yeah. In the building. Like

[00:35:06] Chris: obviously we are here now, and so I was at the event last night and I'm speaking tonight.

[00:35:11] It is packed. It is like packed. And so you couldn't get more people in,

[00:35:16] Nathan: right?

[00:35:16] Chris: Yeah.

[00:35:17] Nathan: But I think everyone's used to fake scarcity. Yeah. And so they're just like, oh, you're, you're saying that? And it's like, yeah. They're like, yeah, exactly. A little wink there. And it's just, it, it's not, and so finding those ways to be really transparent and authentic and then, and put in actual scarcity that matters.

[00:35:35] Yeah. I think it's important. Okay. So diving into the business model. What's the price point on the, on the program?

[00:35:43] Chris: The flagship program, as it were, is the Creator Accelerator. Mm-hmm. And it's 10 weeks long and in that time I will effectively be training entrepreneurs how to build personal brand. Yep. With the benefit of, you know, improving and growing their business, which you learn effectively about LinkedIn and newsletter in that 10 weeks.

[00:36:01] And alongside that, we will also tell you how to grow on other channels, but the main focus is LinkedIn. And so it's like 50 out the top a hundred people on LinkedIn came from our programs, which I think is, that's pretty interesting. Staggering. You know, the fastest growing female creator in the world came from my first cohort.

[00:36:18] Yeah. Um, and so it's 6,500 for the 10 weeks. And then we do have another program, which is the digital business accelerator, and that is 10,000 for the 10 weeks. And so typically for that though, I don't really market that. That's too, that's too people who are super serious. 'cause I want, like, it's amazing when you get.

[00:36:38] A group of seven, eight figure entrepreneurs together.

[00:36:41] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:42] Chris: Because they, they gel and they vibe off each other and they push each other this competitiveness. Right. Whereas if you were to like mix up that group with everyone, it wouldn't work.

[00:36:50] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:36:51] Chris: Yeah.

[00:36:52] Nathan: The stat on and basically half of the top 100, like did creators coming out of your program is pretty insane.

[00:36:58] Yeah. It's

[00:36:58] Chris: smart. It's like completely mad. Um, but it

[00:37:01] Nathan: also goes to show, like on one hand it's a very competitive space.

[00:37:05] Chris: Yeah.

[00:37:06] Nathan: On the other hand, it's still just not that competitive. And it's like this weird duality where I'm like, the number of people that I see who take it really seriously, who are growing like crazy is, is wildly high.

[00:37:18] Chris: Yeah. I mean, I was lucky in, I mean, you say lucky, like I chose the platform 'cause I thought it was early. Mm-hmm. But I was lucky that my assumptions were correct. Yeah. 'cause a lot of the time you can make assumptions and they're wrong, but. I was able to be a bit casual when I came to the platform. Mm-hmm.

[00:37:33] You know, I, I was, I was able to make okay content, whereas now everyone has realized that you can build huge wealth off the back of LinkedIn. Right. And so it has completely changed the game. Like you're now up against professional content creators who have teams and systems and processes and researchers, and they're making, like, they're making textbook level content every day.

[00:37:56] Mm-hmm. Which is a completely different gear to when I started. And so yes, it's, it's, uh, it's still, it's still a huge opportunity. And I think that the thing that I think is most fascinating is ordinary entrepreneurs like myself can become so much greater. You become, you can become extraordinary by building an audience.

[00:38:20] Right. And so, I, I talk to entrepreneurs all the time. And if you were to ask business owners who you know, what is your greatest challenge? They say new business. And so always, you know, leads and new business. Mm-hmm. And so a normal, ordinary entrepreneur, if you wanna make your business go faster or better or stronger or more profitable, get more high quality leads, and LinkedIn is like waiting for you to create high quality content.

[00:38:45] So like, if you don't take it now, I do think like all platforms, it will become saturated at that point. Yeah. And so it's like, you should go all in now. Mm-hmm. What does it look like to go all in? I mean, it's looked different at different times. Um, at the beginning I did everything. So I was, you know, writing the hook, the body text of the post.

[00:39:08] I was writing the CTAs, I was creating all the imagery. I was making carousels and infographics. And that basically meant. I was spending two days out of the week fully just on LinkedIn. Fully on LinkedIn. Mm-hmm. And that was the content creation. And then you've gotta be quite present in engaging people, right.

[00:39:27] If you ever wanna build trust and you have to have a a a, a rapport and, you know, discourse with your community and your audience. And for me, it took me a couple of months to work it out, but after a period I realized that what people were missing was high quality content. You know? And, and especially in the era of ai, everything's become easier.

[00:39:50] Volume has become easier, right. But in some ways it's taught people to be quite poor at content creation. The example I always give is, uh, so I live in London and whenever I go around London with my dad, he knows every street with no phone. He knows every street, everywhere he's going. He knows I know nothing and it's, 'cause I grew up Google Map.

[00:40:10] Yeah. And so, yeah, we don't rec, we don't memorize phone numbers, we don't memorize directions, don't, I don't know my wife's phone number, it's never changed. She's for 13 years, she's had the same number. I don't know it. And so, but the same thing is happening with content. Mm-hmm. So because all the AI tools are out, people are making what I would consider like 80% quality.

[00:40:29] They're not putting the nuances. 'cause you can do 80% quality in 30 minutes. Exactly. Yeah. And so whereas me, I was like, okay, I'm gonna create the best content in the world. Mm-hmm. On personal brand growth, business growing, startup, scale up delegation, automation. And so I was like paying researchers, I was doing hours of research, I was creating unique intellectual property and frameworks for my content.

[00:40:51] And I remember, I remember the first post that that exploded, um, and it got 24,000 likes in a day. Which was obviously crazy and it was a new style as well. And I'm gonna come on to why that's so important. It was a cheat sheet, which didn't exist at the time. Right. Uh, and it was, it was exploring all the different methods of productivity improvement.

[00:41:12] And so 24,000 likes in a day. I gained 20,000 followers that day. I was like,

[00:41:18] Nathan: that's wild.

[00:41:19] Chris: I was like, that is wild. Okay. That worked. I was like, okay, that worked. And then I had lots of other stuff on that week and I was like, I'm canceling everything. I'm like going into my own lab headphones in, and I just made so much high quality content in that style, this new like cheat sheet style.

[00:41:35] Mm-hmm. And that's when I, you know, I went from 80,000 to 350 in the back end of that year. Because what I realized is that. With all social media platforms. The platform wants the As in LinkedIn, want the platform to be new and interesting and different continuously. Right. And so they prioritize different types of content and I realized that the longer that someone dwelled on your content, the more it's likely to be distributed.

[00:42:01] Nathan: Yeah. And

[00:42:02] Chris: so I was like, that's an interesting, it's like watch time on YouTube. It's like watch time on YouTube. Exactly. So like I had that insight and then I was like, anytime someone posts a carousel and I would crunch the numbers myself in Excel and I would take other people's content manually, pre any of the tools.

[00:42:15] I was like, carousels are like seven times on normal posts. And I was like, I'm just gonna do carousels every day. Well,

[00:42:22] Nathan: what I think someone would assume, oh, LinkedIn wants more. Some product manager at LinkedIn wants more carousels. And so they have adjusted the algorithm to be like, carousels are good. I don't work at LinkedIn, so I don't know what's happening exactly.

[00:42:37] My assumption is that they're saying time on site and time on posts and all of that is good. And carousels happen to be very good at driving that because you're like swiping through it. And so everyone's like, well, what's the thing that works in the algorithm? And usually what you see, it's like. Very high quality content that gets people to stop scrolling and engage with it and stay engaged for a longer than normal period of

[00:43:01] Chris: time.

[00:43:02] Exactly. And I think that, that, that was like broadly my insight at the time. And so I was crunching all this, this data myself manually, which when pe when eventually like when eventually my account became big and like, you know, a year, years later, people would be like, how did you grow so fast back then?

[00:43:18] Mm-hmm. And it's like, I put in more hours than everyone else on the 1% of everything,

[00:43:23] Nathan: right?

[00:43:23] Chris: Like, I had, I had like sheets and sheets of the best hooks I'd ever seen anywhere. Sheets and sheets of, um, pre-validated content, which is a topic I talk about a lot, which is like, I want, you know, if you're an entrepreneur and you come to me and you own a marketing agency or, or something like that, you need to design your content.

[00:43:43] Strategy. So it's like, what? What would your client want to read? They might wanna read about marketing strategy. They might wanna read about paid marketing, they might wanna read about organic, they might want to see historical marketing or psychology of marketing. And so you have to start piecing together your personal brand.

[00:44:00] And for me, at the time, I was like, okay, I'm deeply interested in loads of things, but what content already works? Content has easy lift, right? Like I don't wanna push things uphill, I wanna like be in the flow. And so I designed my personal brand around six topics that were already super successful. And I was obviously like caught the AI wave.

[00:44:23] Mm-hmm. I learned in public. And so I remember posting and being like, I'm gonna become an expert in AI over the next 60 days. And my audience just came with me on that journey, right? And by 60 days I was an expert and everyone was like, this content has been the best content of the year. Um, and so for me, like pre-validated content was huge.

[00:44:41] Finding things that have already worked, putting your own spin on it. I think the action and the habit, you said this in your talk last night, like there is no substitute for the consistency of this, of this stuff. You know, you've built a business over 13 years or Yeah. You know, like if you were to look at your year one self, like it didn't look great, you know, and like, so comparing your year one self to Nathan Barry, like right.

[00:45:06] That's, that's a losing game. Um, and so building the habit of posting every day mm-hmm. Building an audience that expect to receive awesome content every day. These things became like cornerstone for the teaching. And so I then wrapped that content, you know, uh, system into the program. And my greatest hope is that entrepreneurs can do it without.

[00:45:30] Taking over their life. Right. Right. I, I bet we'll see it when we're here at the conference, but like around lunchtime, you'll see loads of people, like on their phone commenting and all this sort of stuff, and it's 'cause they haven't systemized it. And so they've let it take over and therefore they're not leveraging it in a, in a way it's taking all of their time.

[00:45:48] And so I try and teach people about like, systems building micro teams. Like my keynote tonight is like how to build a creative business as an entrepreneur. Mm-hmm. So like how do you understand, you know, building teams delegating, whereas creators tend to be more do everything themselves.

[00:46:04] Nathan: Yeah. They, they often came from being a freelancer.

[00:46:06] Exactly. And so they're bringing a freelancer mindset into it

[00:46:08] Chris: and they have that mentality of, I don't wanna spend money 'cause I wanna make profit. And it's like, okay, you gotta spend a little money to make a bit of money. Yeah. You know? Um, so yeah, that was the, the, the, the sort of genesis of, uh. Yeah.

[00:46:22] Nathan: I love that.

[00:46:22] If you could instill, like, or install one or two systems in any creator's business related to, you know, like growth on LinkedIn or another social platform, what would those systems be?

[00:46:32] Chris: I think it would be, don't make the content live.

[00:46:35] Nathan: Okay. Sorry, you, I shouldn't just pull, you know, pull up X or LinkedIn. No, no.

[00:46:40] And, you know,

[00:46:40] Chris: type it on the fly. Like, definitely not. And like I know a lot of people who make their content first thing in the morning. Mm-hmm. And I'm like, I find that really challenging as a, as a concept. So I do mine in like fixed batches, three hours, four hours at a time. Yeah. So I'll do ideation only, I'll do post writing only and design briefs, and then I do approvals.

[00:47:00] So it splits into three specific batches, which just means that like, if you're doing ideation headphones in or walking, I do a lot of like ideating while walking. Yeah. Um, and you just, you get so such better ideas. You can then take them through into the writing and then take 'em through the design. And the other thing I would say is like, surrender.

[00:47:19] The posting of it to someone. Okay. Or something, because maybe it's an automation or maybe it's a va, but the first thing in the morning I want to do is work on the hardest challenge in my business. Mm-hmm. I don't wanna distract myself on social media with all these like bizarre dopamine hits and comparisons to other, where you're like, also where you're like, wait, what am I

[00:47:38] Nathan: even here for?

[00:47:38] Yeah. And like 20 minutes I'd be like, I showed up here to post my Yeah. LinkedIn post for the day, or my Instagram post. And you're like, wait. It's like, I even forgot that for the last half hour. Exactly.

[00:47:46] Chris: But, but I've seen my competitor got 10 more likes than me. And like, oh, you know, like you don't want that.

[00:47:51] You don't want that energy and you don't want that dopamine hit like that in the morning. You want to do your best work in the morning and then have a system in place that posts your post that day. And if you want to, you can jump in and do some commenting maybe. Or you can have a team that support you in doing most of that work themselves.

[00:48:07] Mm-hmm. Because, mm-hmm. As we know, like nowadays, if you're trying to scale something, you could use something like Delphi and just pull all of my, you know, thousands of social media posts, my Notion database, you know. Right. Millions of hours and me on video, and you can just make me, yeah. And that's what we did.

[00:48:25] That's wild.

[00:48:26] Nathan: Yeah. I, I think both those systems make a lot of sense. So on this show we do two, two types of conversations usually. Uh, one is kind of the expert interview that we've been doing, and then the other is like a coaching style episode where usually there's an entrepreneur at some level and trying to achieve a result and we'll get up and, and coach through it.

[00:48:43] I wanna do that, but in reverse. Mm. So you have so much of what you do is helping entrepreneurs who are running successful businesses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Grow personal brands. Yeah. You know, particularly on LinkedIn. Uh, I've got a personal brand that's done well, but I'm, I'm in this position of, um, you know, spending 50, 60 hours a week.

[00:49:04] Building a company. Yeah. And then also over here, I know the power of personal brands and I know that a professional creator, like a, a lead of a professional creator is probably worth more to me than maybe anyone else on the planet. When you think about the value of them being in Kit and the Creator Network.

[00:49:22] And, um, you know, I, I co-own an agency with Sahil Bloom and Shane Martin called Paperboy, which I've worked with for a long time. Yep, exactly. And, you know, and so all of this, right? And so I'm thinking. You know, I have to get very serious about building my personal brand, particularly on LinkedIn, but it can't consume my life.

[00:49:40] Mm. Because exactly. You know, I've got a, we're pushing 50 million a year in revenue from Kit, and so I, I like that needs to be the focus. And so I'd be really curious what advice and coaching you would have in that situation of like, I've already picked LinkedIn as a platform already starting to double down on content.

[00:49:56] Our mutual friend Daniel Priestly. Mm. You know, he's someone who has had all this content for years and now he's really, really starting to blow up as he, he brings it out. And I feel like I'm in a similar, uh, situation to that.

[00:50:09] Chris: So I'll stop talking and hand it over to you. I would agree. I'd say you, and you and Dan are similar.

[00:50:13] I, I had lunch with Dan the other day and we were talking about his. His, you know, he's talked about personal brand for 10 years or something. Yeah. And yet his personal brand has only really exploded recently. And he said to you, didn't he? He was like, I'm just borrowing other people's audiences. Yeah. And that's the, you know, his, his stylistic decision that his own content probably wasn't breaking through, but now it is because he platformed it.

[00:50:37] Right. And so, you know, diary the CEO Ali, he's been on Chris Williamson's podcast recently.

[00:50:41] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:42] Chris: It's a strategy that I'd never really thought of, you know, but he had such, he had such good ideas and intellectual property that were unique to him. Right. That. People want to hear, and that's why the videos do really well.

[00:50:54] And in podcasting, if you are, you know, this is my second podcast ever. Yeah. You've, you said the last time you've been a guest on a podcast. The first time was like many years ago. Oh, five years ago, I did a podcast for a dyslexia and a DH ADHD podcast. They were like, we wanna launch it. I have dyslexia and a DHD and I don't really talk about it very often.

[00:51:12] And so I did that first episode to help them get going, but I didn't really, and

[00:51:15] Nathan: then now this is your second time being a guest on a podcast. Yeah. It's

[00:51:18] Chris: wild. I mean, I run my own show and so I just don't, I've never got round to it, but I think, yeah, Dan's an interesting, uh, an interesting one. Dan Priestly was in with me in January, 2023.

[00:51:30] Daniel Priestly, Simon Squibb, Eric Partaker, Dan Murray, and Tim Amu. Yeah. The six of us didn't know each other. We joined a WhatsApp group together, which Eric Partaker put together. Uhhuh. None of us had a LinkedIn following. Barely any of us had any followers. We're two years on from that moment. Now, Simon Squid might be one of the biggest entrepreneurs, like on the planet in terms of viewership, priestly, again, the same thing.

[00:51:55] Tim Amu, huge audience. Eric Partaker, same as me. Massive LinkedIn following. Yeah, massive newsletter as well. Massive newsletter. Um, and then Dan Murray, like big personal brand as well. And I think that's like if you find a good group of people who wanna do the same thing. Partner up and, and get it done.

[00:52:13] One, one quick thing on that,

[00:52:15] Nathan: people hear stories like that and they're like, well, I'm not friends with Simon Squibb or Dan Priestley or, or whoever else. Um, and I have a story like that of, you know, my like core group is, includes people like James Clear and all of that. But the key thing is we formed a core group before we were anyone.

[00:52:33] Yeah. And we built each other through this whole process. So it's not like, okay, shoot, how do I go look at the keynote speakers of this conference, try to become friends with them, and even though they have a following or influence like a hundred times mine, it's like, no, that's not it at all. Like, you find people who are at your level who have similar goals and then you pour into each other and then you end up in this situation where we're like, oh yeah, it all, it worked for all of us.

[00:52:56] Chris: It's, it is wild. But like yeah, to your point, like, uh, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have thought to team up with. Dan Priestly, Simon Sri, Tim Amu and, and Eric part, I mean, Eric had like 17,000 followers on LinkedIn from being in business for 20 years. Right. He had no following, and yet he was like, guys, I think we can do this together.

[00:53:13] Like he was a big motivational force. Mm-hmm. Um, but I suppose to your point about the systemization of personal brand, I adore your content. Mm-hmm. And it's super technical in many ways. Like I think it's, yeah. You know, it's the sort of stuff that I love watching and listening to and, and, and it really makes me think, and I think to an extent you would probably need to be crystal clear about what it is that you talk about so that you could create a system so that your team could do 80% of the work.

[00:53:41] And so for me it's like, I talk about AI startups and scale up. I talk about, um, personal brand, I talk about digital businesses and I talk about, um, like leadership and culture.

[00:53:52] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:53] Chris: They're, they're the things I talk about. And we were able to synthesize effectively my five pillars, the types of posts I do.

[00:54:01] And what I would talk about within those pillars. And so the team are really able to do 80% of the work, right? So like ideation, I would say nowadays I'm heavily involved in, and I'm heavily involved in approvals, right? I don't do the middle part anymore. My team does the writing, the creating, and I just approve and give feedback.

[00:54:20] You are the same, like you would have to be very, very clear about what you wanted to talk about, and then you'd have to get into the habit of posting more frequently than you do. Yeah.

[00:54:30] Nathan: Grace, who is the, uh, head of marketing for di of CEO and a lot of, you know, flights, flight studio and a lot of what Steven does, uh, we were having dinner when I was out in London visiting you, and there's just this funny moment where, you know, Hailey on my team was like, Hey, grace, pull up Nathan's, uh, social profiles and like, just give it a little criticism.

[00:54:50] And she's like, and she pulls up and she's like, is this uh, like an example of a carousel? She's like, is this, you know what you usually post? She's like, yeah, that's one that I just posted. And she goes. It says five days ago, in my world, that doesn't count as just posted. And I was like, yep. I mean that

[00:55:06] Chris: team, you know the, I mean, because, so Steve, I mean, I don't know Steve, but we're similar age.

[00:55:12] Both ran agencies in our twenties and he got on the personal brand hype way before, you know, people would say like, he became famous, but it's like, no, he, he engineered becoming famous Right. With very, very tactical work. But they post like two or three times a day. Yeah. On every platform. The volume.

[00:55:30] Nathan: But, but to your point of like increase the frequency, uh, all of that, what, what are the other things that, you know, as you're coaching entrepreneurs through building those personal brands that you would really emphasize or, and you can make it very specific to me if you want.

[00:55:44] Chris: Well, I thought one of the best. Pieces of, uh, content you ever produced was the creator flywheel.

[00:55:49] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:50] Chris: Um, the essays. And the essays. The, the,

[00:55:53] Nathan: yeah. Everything from there, which

[00:55:54] Chris: I don't have much on LinkedIn about it. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's where you're going. That's kind of where I'm going with it. So a lot of your stuff is like deeply understanding the mechanism Yeah.

[00:56:04] With which you turn organic traffic into de platformed, like superfans. Right. And I would say that so much of my strategy was built off reading your essays. Mm-hmm. And yet that stuff is not on LinkedIn. If that stuff was on LinkedIn, the dwell time on that stuff would be so much greater then most other content because it's it's depth.

[00:56:24] And so your challenge would be once you exhaust all the essays and stuff that you've created previously, a bit like Daniel Priest he's doing nowadays. Right. He's putting all of his 10 years of writing onto social. You would then be faced with, I have to create new content. And you would just have to find a way of creating as good a content now as then as the library.

[00:56:42] Nathan: Yeah. But now you

[00:56:43] Chris: make 50 million a year and I dunno what you're making then, but not, not that, you know. Yeah, exactly. So it's all about, you know, amazing team. And that's why I think that, you know, I teach entrepreneurs how to scale.

[00:56:53] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:54] Chris: Their creator side. Teaching creators to scale, to be entrepreneurs is very different because they have to learn the opposite thing to each other, you know?

[00:57:02] Yes. Oh yes. Like they are, they're both good at the thing and the others than the, the other side is bad at the other thing. Right.

[00:57:09] Nathan: But when you combine those two skill sets, the leverage is absolutely insane.

[00:57:13] Chris: Yeah. I mean, it's what I'm gonna talk about tonight in the conference to an extent, which is like a, I feel like entrepreneurs are very good at spotting rising tide moments.

[00:57:23] Mm-hmm. So the most famous of all is like, uh, Jeff Bezos, 1994. You know, web statistics, 2300% a year growth for web usage. Right. He's like, okay, well I should build a business in that builds Amazon. Yeah. Like huge blow up. Like he didn't

[00:57:38] Nathan: even, he doesn't know what

[00:57:39] Chris: business,

[00:57:39] Nathan: but he is like,

[00:57:39] Chris: I have to build a business on the internet.

[00:57:41] Yeah. And he thinks probably an easy product. Books are easy fit through doors, you know, easy packaging and then goes on to build effectively like e-commerce of the future. Mobile phones 19, like 85. By 1990 there's like 25 million. The app store, you know, like, oh yeah, two years to 50 billion downloads or something.

[00:58:00] No, 50 million downloads. It's like if you can get, if you can spot where these, these. Consumer trends and technological trends are going and position yourself there. That's sort of the skill of entrepreneurship, right? 'cause they're then able to pull teams around them.

[00:58:16] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:16] Chris: And they're able to delegate and systemize, whereas creators burn themselves out on the business side, right?

[00:58:23] Because they don't know how to create system around their, around their, um, around their personal brand. But they, they could do a lot to learn from each other. And I sit in the middle of those two camps. So I spend a lot of time in the entrepreneurship world and I spend a lot of time in the creator world.

[00:58:37] And I see, I see the inspiration in both.

[00:58:41] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:58:41] Chris: I like that.

[00:58:42] Nathan: Okay. I wanna push you, let's get really specific. 'cause I think the creator flywheels examples, uh, there's not a lot of people out there talking about flywheels. I do have really a lot of them. But like, what are the, what are the specific formats or types of content, or how would you do the hooks around flywheels?

[00:58:59] You know, if we wanted this to really

[00:59:00] Chris: grow on LinkedIn, the. Most important thing to get our heads around right now is that the platform will have a state today. Mm-hmm. That will be different in two months. Right. And so the advice is always going out of, uh, it's like out of style. It's going out of style.

[00:59:17] So a few years ago I invested in a company that does data for LinkedIn. Mm-hmm.

[00:59:22] Nathan: What's the name of it?

[00:59:23] Chris: It's called Say What? Yeah. And it helps people write and all the rest of it. And I invest in that so that I could produce a report four times a year on the algorithm. And so at the moment, right now, carousels perform two times better than any other piece of content.

[00:59:38] Mm-hmm. And then it's infographic and cheat sheets, second text and photo third videos around there. LinkedIn are gonna push video heavily, and they have been for years and it hasn't quite worked. Um, but if you are posting high quality content, like if you took the creative flywheel stuff and made it into a carousel, that's your best bet.

[00:59:56] Nathan: Right.

[00:59:57] Chris: The other things I'd say is like the, the hook is about, um, it's about. Doing exactly what it says, it's pulling someone off the feed. Like if you are looking down the feed and you cover the rest of your posts and just read the hook. Mm-hmm. Is that good enough to stop you? Right. And so I say to people like, it's not the algorithm, like your content is shit.

[01:00:15] You know? And so like the, the, you know, you gotta be really harsh. You gotta look in the mirror and say, is my content good enough that it would stop me in the feed? Mm-hmm. And if it's not, then you have a content problem.

[01:00:24] Nathan: Right.

[01:00:25] Chris: And so I would say that, you know, your content would be around conversion, it would be around growth, it would be around the tactics for de platforming.

[01:00:33] Like you could probably make an incredible brand around the insight that I have 1.1 million followers on LinkedIn, and on an average day I might get three or 4,000 likes. Okay. Like, where is my audience? You know? Right. I can't reach them. My own audience. And so I find that the, the reason I regret not starting a newsletter earlier is that the way I see social media is it will always change.

[01:00:59] And so I should do everything I can every single day to take as many people off social media onto something.

[01:01:05] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:01:05] Chris: That doesn't have an algorithm. 'cause the algorithm is most useful 'cause it spreads the word, but then it constricts you. I can't even talk to my own followers.

[01:01:13] Nathan: Right.

[01:01:14] Chris: And so I think you could make amazing content on that and that would be very aligned with your business and Yeah.

[01:01:19] Nathan: Um,

[01:01:19] Chris: that,

[01:01:20] Nathan: yep. I think that makes a lot of sense. 'cause then it's just the value of email and, you know, which, uh, is valuable both to me and to the creator. Exactly. Yeah. Nice value trade. So, uh. What about like, as you, as you, what you're seeing, you know, to bring people off of the platform, things like, uh Yeah.

[01:01:36] On Instagram using, you know, DM automation that's, you know, comment flywheel to get the Yeah. Many chats. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Does ManyChat work on LinkedIn? No.

[01:01:45] Chris: No,

[01:01:45] Nathan: they don't have that. Is there anyone that automates that? Or is that really a manual thing? So there's

[01:01:49] Chris: been a few at the moment, I would say no, it doesn't mean that they won't be one.

[01:01:52] Um, LinkedIn are a bizarre company. They're not particularly great at the moment technologically in supporting that stuff. Right. But, so for example, I just take the view that I want to do that stuff badly enough that I pay a VA to go and reply to all the comments.

[01:02:07] Nathan: Okay. And just dm everybody, just DM everyone

[01:02:09] Chris: who, who post it, which is agonizing.

[01:02:11] But you know, if it's, if you are building a really good business, paying an a, a, a va, you know, $500 a, a week or something, right? To do that work is worth it.

[01:02:20] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. But those things of, like, those comments are counting as engagement, that's feeding. The

[01:02:27] Chris: algorithm of that post. Yeah. So a lot of people do that style.

[01:02:31] I mean, I wouldn't say that I necessarily do that style a lot. I do something slightly different. But you'll have people doing like 50 best GBT prompts or, or, or, you know, the best way to design on Canva or, you know, the best sales tactics. And it'll be like comments, sales, and you'll get it. And it, yeah.

[01:02:44] The post will get, you know, 300 likes, a thousand comments and the post will get like, pinged out continuously. I think that that is, people are getting tired of that. Okay. As a strategy. But what the, the strategy I've always taken, and it's so funny, last week I sat down with one of the biggest creators in the world and he was like, I can't make LinkedIn work.

[01:03:05] And I was like, yeah, but your content is lightweight. It's like, uh mm-hmm. You know, when you're posting inspirational quotes all day, how can you expect someone to buy into your business? Right. You know? And so I was like, why don't we make really in-depth educational experiences for your audience? He did it and he's now getting like two or 3000 subs a week on newsletter.

[01:03:27] And it's like, okay, LinkedIn is working for you now. Right? But you gotta coast right, because you went to depth.

[01:03:31] Nathan: Yeah,

[01:03:31] Chris: yeah.

[01:03:31] Depth is deep.

[01:03:32] Nathan: And that's always been my approach. Like, uh, so many of the things that I've written. Are like these long essays, you know, it's 4,000 words diving into a full concept, which you can absolutely do a light version of that, which is still gonna be five times the depth or 10 times the depth of average content on LinkedIn.

[01:03:48] Chris: Yeah. And I think that the more that AI becomes, you know, used and these sort of AI image generating tools are used, the nuance, the intellectual property, the depth of your content is what will make you stand out. So. No one really grows as fast as we grew in our first year on LinkedIn these days. But we are still some of the fastest growing accounts.

[01:04:09] My, my, my friends and I, and I still think that people will be like, oh, it's 'cause you like, comment on each other. And it's like, guys, if you think that's the thing, like if you think that is the, the tactical, the strategy that gets our accounts to do better, then like you, you fundamentally don't understand, right.

[01:04:25] The value exchange with your customer. And so also I would say to your point with James Clear, which I find so amazing that he was in your group before he was James. Clear. Yeah. It's like if you back your friends, then you support 'em in everything. Mm-hmm. You know, like if my friend was opening a lemonade stand, I'd go and support it, right?

[01:04:41] Like me commenting on a great piece of content they've made, like if that's the hill people are gonna die on then, you know, in entrepreneurship you take every opportunity, every angle, every chance that you can get to grow. Your business. Right. And yet, when it comes to, to social, people seem to have this like, uh, you know, uh, suddenly for the first time in their life, they're the most authentic person ever.

[01:05:02] And I always think it's like, you should be working for yourself and creating the best opportunity for yourself, right. And supporting your friends. You shouldn't try and limit that stuff.

[01:05:10] Nathan: Yeah. I, I totally agree. Uh, a lot of listeners are gonna wanna know about your team. Mm. And specifically how you're building a team.

[01:05:19] When we, uh, when I was out at your studio, you were talking about how deliberate you are about building a team in-house Yeah. For the, the type of content you want to produce and all that. So tell me about that philosophy and then the team that you've built.

[01:05:31] Chris: So the in-house thing is because I think that I like to have control and I like to build for the long term.

[01:05:39] Mm-hmm. And so when I mean build for the long term, I plan on building my personal brand forever. Like it's a, that's the thing. It's pretty,

[01:05:45] Nathan: pretty closely tied to you.

[01:05:46] Chris: Yeah. So you're like, as long as I'm breathing, I'd like to have this. It's an asset that I think grows in value continuously. It compounds in value continuously.

[01:05:54] It gives me an unfair advantage, outsized opportunity everywhere I go. Right. No matter what. And so I think I'm gonna be all in on that forever now. Like I have, I did a book deal last year. The personal brand was huge in that, but the personal brand will be the thing that drives that. And so the long-term thing is like, I could hire agencies and freelancers and all the rest of it, but I want my team who are with me, and I feel like they will be with me for a long time to become incredible.

[01:06:18] Mm-hmm. I wanna support them and give them everything they want so that we come together on a mission of, you know, building this, this personal brand and achieving our goals with our customers. And so in my team, I have. Um, my sort of chief of staff who she is just unreal operationally, organization, like administrative, everything.

[01:06:41] She like predicts things that I need before I need them. That's awesome. She, you know, she will be in my email before I'm in it. She'll be, she'll give people things that they wanted from me and that gives me freedom of like, Headspace. Um, she runs the business broadly now. I then have Josh Saunders, who's been with me for ages.

[01:07:00] Like he was my first personal brand manager when he was like 23. And I've taught him to think like me, but also he's taught me so much about writing. And so he runs my content now. Mm-hmm. And so nothing can go out unless it goes through him. And then we have, uh, my podcast lead Rosie, who's incredible. And then we have editors like Tom and Ethan and others who are sort of the backbone of the content creation.

[01:07:23] And then I'm lucky in that I do own a personal brand agency. Mm-hmm. And that agency works for like some of the biggest creators in the world. And so I do plug into them for support as well. Uh, so they have a designer, they have, um, you know, people who will do the engagement out of hours and, and all the rest of it.

[01:07:41] So I, for example. This is obviously mad at the stage I'm in now, but I can go on holiday for three weeks, not check my phone, come back and we're like on track. Yeah, everything's on track. And that is where I wanted to get to. Um, the, the, the plan for me, if I'm honest, and I think it will be realized soon, is like I wanted to build a startup, uh, launcher.

[01:08:03] Nathan: Okay. An incubator and that, like an incubator

[01:08:05] Chris: of sorts. I would be involved in the businesses and so now I have audience, I have like all the structure and we have been launching businesses and I, that's what I wanna do moving forward. I wanna build the personal brand, I wanna do and teach and train entrepreneurs and at the same time, like launch businesses that I find interesting.

[01:08:24] I love that.

[01:08:25] Nathan: What are the metrics that you look at on, say, a daily or weekly basis, and then how do you align your team to care about those

[01:08:31] Chris: metrics? I think that the, the golden metric for LinkedIn for us has always been daily follower growth. Okay. Because reach, we don't care about, uh, like comments, we don't care about likes, we don't care about like that.

[01:08:45] All of that stuff will kind of line up with follower growth. So it's follower growth, and then it's repost ratio. Okay. So the repost, you know, if back in the day, I would always say like, if in the first hour you have a 20% repost ratio, so 20% repost to likes, the post is gonna go viral. Mm-hmm. And nowadays it's not too, too, you know, uh, different.

[01:09:06] But it, it makes, it takes a different mindset to create content that's repostable. So I'm creating content for my audience that's so good that they wanna share it with their audience. Right? And so you have to get a little bit, it can be, it has to be a little bit less personal, less about me. Okay? Like, take me out the content and just make, because their audience has no clue who you are.

[01:09:25] And also like, care, they care less about that. And so I wanna create the best tool on. Team and delegation building. Mm-hmm. And so other entrepreneurs are like, this was so useful to me, I wanna share it with my audience. And that's where I think we have done so well historically, is that our content is so reshared.

[01:09:44] Mm-hmm. And so when you look at accounts, I always think these days it's quite funny. Like you have some that always get a couple thousand likes a day every single day, but no one ever reposts their content. And I'm always like, Hmm. The, the measure as to whether content is good enough is, is whether people will share it with their own feed.

[01:10:00] Um, and so that's, you know, reposts and. Follower growth. And then the golden one, which is obviously like relevant, you know, still here, um, is subscriber growth.

[01:10:12] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:12] Chris: To the newsletter. To the newsletter. Yeah. And so like obviously on kit you can see your, uh, like where the traffic is coming from, your sources.

[01:10:20] Yep. And so we will have it broken down from like, LinkedIn, LinkedIn featured LinkedIn posts. Sometimes we'll, UTM the individual post, we'll have it from YouTube. Uh, and so daily, uh, subscriber growth. And then obviously the better you do, the more likely the creator network's gonna work better for you and who you can partner with

[01:10:39] Nathan: and up from there.

[01:10:39] Yeah. So

[01:10:40] Chris: I mean, the, the, the one I care about most is the subscriber growth count every day. But again, that is fed normally from the growth of the, the, the followers that day. Yeah.

[01:10:52] Nathan: Yeah. That makes sense. I think so much of what we do is learn from studying other creators. And so I'm always curious who is it that you find really interesting or who are you watching and studying?

[01:11:01] Chris: A great question. The the, the advice I'd give to entrepreneurs always is. Study and, and pre validate your ideas before you implement them. I had a a, I did a podcast with Richard Harin recently. He's a multi-billionaire and his first rule in business is copy and pivot.

[01:11:19] Nathan: Okay.

[01:11:20] Chris: And so when I started out in this sort of creator space, I was like, I wanna go as fast as possible with as little work as possible.

[01:11:27] It's always been my thinking. Like I'm such a disciple of like the 80 20 principle. And so I was studying everyone, like everyone I was implementing daily and studying every single day. And so, like Ali Abdullah, I always think is like incredible. Oh yeah. You know, and I think what he did with his audience and then into his, um, part-time YouTube Academy has been amazing.

[01:11:50] I'd say that was a huge inspiration at the time. Um, there was a lady called Sarah Turner who ran a copywriting cohort. Uh, and I, I think I saw that it was like eight weeks or something to learn to be a copywriter. She did one hour a week. It was like seven grand or something. I was like, that is an interesting model.

[01:12:07] And I spoke to loads of her customers and they were like, we loved it, we love her, she's great. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. I didn't wanna run a big business. And so I was like, I want a few years off minimum team and see how I can, you know, build this thing. So I saw Sarah turn his business, I saw Allie's business, and I was like, I'm growing fast on LinkedIn.

[01:12:24] Can I build the LinkedIn version of what these two have done? And so I knew the model was pre-validated and so I sort of. I sat down and I said, what's important to me? And it was like, have a tiny team. Yeah. And so I didn't have an office until recently and it was just like me and two others running a business that made like a million and a half a quarter or something.

[01:12:44] It was crazy. That's insane. Um, I think there was a point where I had one staff member and we did a 1.7 million quarter, which is obviously like insane. So

[01:12:53] Nathan: that

[01:12:54] Chris: profit margin is in the 90%. You know, like, because the first time we did it, we didn't even have like expensive tooling, right. We had no ads, it was just organic.

[01:13:02] Um, and so I, I was very intentional. It was like tiny team, big business mentality because I was so burnt out by what I'd done before. And so the idea was that I couldn't have a sales team because then I would have like bloat, I'd have to manage the sales team. Oh yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. I mean, it's quite unique in that I don't know anyone else who does what I do without any sales team.

[01:13:23] And we have just run ads for the first time. Wow. So no ads, no sales team, and so, and, and what was revenue last year about? 10 million, $10 million in revenue. No sales team, no ads. Yeah. So 10 million from just the cohorts. Yeah. The business did better, the book deal, the media stuff, et cetera. But that's good to know that you did better than 10 million.

[01:13:47] I was worried for you from the, the cohorts specifically. They, like the combination did about 10 million. Um, and the, the, the, the expense mm-hmm. Of running a cohort is like your time. The, the, the systemization, the technology. Yeah. And then it's the other coaches. And so unlike other cohorts, I was like, of course I have, I'm not doing sales and ads, so I have more margins.

[01:14:11] So I was like, why don't I just pay the best LinkedIn creators in the world to be the other coaches?

[01:14:16] Nathan: Right.

[01:14:16] Chris: And so the fastest female. Creator last year is one of the coaches, like three of the fastest growing in the top 20 of the coaches. So everyone is incredible. Yeah. Uh, and they're speaking from their own lived experience.

[01:14:29] Yeah. I mean, they only grew in the last year. Right. You know, like most. And so they're

[01:14:32] Nathan: like,

[01:14:32] Chris: this is what works now. This is what we've Yeah, yeah. This happens now. And so the, the model is, was, was kind of half accidental, half pre-validated, like very much learned from a few other creators that I was studying.

[01:14:44] And then because we didn't do sales and because we didn't do ads, we had all the margin to pay incredible coaches. Mm-hmm. Uh, and that effectively became the model. And the first time I launched it, it was meant to be 50 people and we didn't close the checkout and we did 67 sales. Uh, and I was like, whoa.

[01:15:03] And then it's basically been, you know, 200 people on the create accelerator a quarter. Which has been, which has been really good. Um, but nowadays, who do I look at? Um, I love Mark Manson.

[01:15:15] Nathan: Yeah, that's good. I mean, one,

[01:15:16] Chris: I love his book because I feel like in life people pay too much mind to everything. You know?

[01:15:23] Like you should try and not have an opinion on everything and, and really practice the art of, um, you know, not letting things bother you. Mm-hmm. I think that if more people did that, so many people would be happier and more successful. Um, Dan Martel is a total beast. Yeah. I only discovered him honestly like a few months ago because he dmd me on LinkedIn and he was like, how are you doing this LinkedIn thing?

[01:15:46] Um, and I was like, oh, hey dude. Like, who are you? And then I looked him up and I was like, oh my God. He's like a juggernaut.

[01:15:52] Nathan: But only very recently, like Dan and I have been friends for, I. 11 years. How do you know everyone? It's insane. A lot of time in the space. Yeah. But he and I both come from the software world Yeah.

[01:16:03] Of building software startups. And he's been doing YouTube. Uh, he probably first interviewed me for his, uh, podcast about building SaaS companies maybe in 20 15, 20 16. And so, and so he's been doing content consistently, but in the last three years, he's been serious about it. In the last 18 months it's been.

[01:16:21] Chris: Taking off like crazy. Yeah. And his YouTube, I'd say is probably the best going right now. Yeah. It's an absolute juggernaut. And the nice thing is that, so he reached out to me and I was like, talking about opportunities coming your way. I was like, yeah, but, but it's like, uh, because you get all these professional, you know, content creators from other spaces.

[01:16:40] Mm-hmm. I was with Thomas Frank last night. Yeah. Having a beer. And it was cool because like when I built my Notion product, I used his stuff. And so last night I was like, you are Thomas Frank. And he was like, yeah, I know who you are. And I was like, oh, this is quite cool. Um, but like, you get to, you get to learn so much from, from these people.

[01:16:55] And with Dan Martel, he was like, look, we're we're doing well on these other channels. I wanna learn LinkedIn. And so his team coached my team. My team coached his team now. That's awesome. And like he's now crushing it on, uh, LinkedIn. And we are starting to do much better on YouTube. That's amazing. Yeah. So good.

[01:17:11] Nathan: Chris, this has been fantastic. One, thanks for flying out to Boise and hanging out in the studio. It was a long flight. It was a long fly. I know, because I just did it two weeks ago to go visit you. Yeah, yeah. Uh, but also just seeing the level of detail that you've put into this business and seeing how you've taken, you know, well over a decade of entrepreneurship and taken that same level of drive and attention and said, all right, I'm gonna apply this to a personal brand, I think is amazing.

[01:17:37] And then the approach that you've taken of constantly telling creators, go build businesses, and then telling business owners, Hey, go build a personal brand. Like you can have the best of both worlds, I think is just such an important message. So thanks for coming on. And, uh, where should people go to follow you and, and what would you tell them if they want to engage with everything you're doing?

[01:17:57] Chris: So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm prevalent on, on, on social posting regularly. I think that, you know, if, if anyone ever is interested in working with us, I would say. It's not for the faint of heart. Mm-hmm. It really isn't. Like, it's so, it's so much work to do this,

[01:18:11] Nathan: like we talk about. It's so much work, it's fun, it's exciting, it's insanely rewarding.

[01:18:15] And it will also be probably the hardest thing you've ever done.

[01:18:18] Chris: Yeah. And it, and it will shock you with how hard it's, uh, and, but the thing is, it is a, it is a but compound thing. The more you do it, the more you get out of it, the more you put it in the beginning. Mm-hmm. The more you get out later. And so if you ever sign up for one of our things, just be aware that it's like people will say, this is like funny American phrase, I think like, uh, drinking from a fire hose.

[01:18:37] Yes. Then I'd never heard that before. Everyone was like, that's what it's like. Um, that, that suppose like, if I can give one bit of advice to people, it would be. The, the rise of AI means that information is losing its value in so many ways. Mm-hmm. And volume has become easy. And so in some ways it's the depth and it's the uniqueness and the intellectual property that is gonna build a unique trust with your audience.

[01:19:01] And so for me, that's what I'm focused on right now. It's, I'm trying to build businesses and AI and I'm trying to create content. Ironically, not with ai.

[01:19:08] Nathan: Right. Oh, that's fascinating. I'm, I'm excited to dive in more and I'll keep you posted on how my LinkedIn growth journey goes. Uh, and then, uh, is there a particular, actually, you know what, we should plug people towards your podcast.

[01:19:20] Chris: Yeah.

[01:19:21] Nathan: Because growing a podcast is insanely hard. Yeah. And you've got a great one. And, uh, people can go check out the episode that I did on your, on your show, so we can Yeah. They should Yeah. Go back and forth.

[01:19:30] Oh, thanks for having,

[01:19:30] what should

[01:19:31] they search for, uh, to see your podcast? Uh, wake up with Chris Donnelly.

[01:19:34] So I'm like six months into YouTube now. And as with everything, like if I didn't know that hard work at the beginning, compounds for the future, I would've given up. Yeah. YouTube is tough business. Um, and, you know, the, the podcast has been really fun. I think that there's a, there's a value that comes in the podcast that's not easily, you know, identifiable day one, which is like.

[01:19:57] You actually make incredible connections and deep relationships with incredible people. Right. And the unlock of that is worth way more than the views. Yeah. You know, so and

[01:20:06] but the cool thing is you get that value of the relationships immediately.

[01:20:10] Chris: Yeah.

[01:20:11] Nathan: Because as you and it, and it compounds much more downstream, but everyone's like looking for the views and they're like, but, but it got 300 views or it got 5,000, you know, or whatever.

[01:20:20] And they're like, this is so small and so yeah. You have to judge it based on something else. Yeah. Alright, we can talk forever. Thanks so much for coming on and it's great to see you.

[01:20:28] Chris: Thanks for having me.

[01:20:29] Nathan: If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Berry show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment.

[01:20:37] I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else do you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.