The Nathan Barry Show

[00:00:00] Nathan: In today's episode, I'm doing a Q and A to answer questions from founders, creators, newsletter writers, across a whole bunch of different industries. We get into how to find a solo SaaS idea as a non-technical founder, how I'd map out a business from scratch. And there's also questions on newsletter growth, picking the right niche, gathering feedback, early hires, and how I'd approach starting kit today with AI and all the new tools that are available.

[00:00:24] There's a lot to dig into, but also I'd love to hear from you on this format. We made the whole episode a bit more conversational and shared a lot more behind the scenes, so do you like that? Would you rather I do more rapid fire answers to get to more questions? Let me know in the comments.

[00:00:43] Hailey, welcome back to my podcast, which you have made your podcast. Even just your, your reaction there is like your podcast, please. I built the studio. I control everything.

[00:00:53] Haley: Exactly.

[00:00:53] Nathan: So as the, uh, wannabe puppet master behind the scenes

[00:00:56] Haley: wannabe, I mean, I'm fully committed to being the actual puppet master outside of maybe Kara, you know?

[00:01:01] Yeah, I was gonna say. Yeah.

[00:01:02] Nathan: That's why you still have wannabe status. We're gonna do a few things. I agree. We're gonna do a q and a episode.

[00:01:08] Haley: Yeah.

[00:01:08] Nathan: A few updates on what's going on at Kit. Yeah. What else? You have the laptop. What else do you have planned for actually at Craft

[00:01:13] Haley: and Commerce? Um, I had at least five people, and this is no exaggeration, come up to me and say some version of, are you Hailey from the q and a episodes?

[00:01:24] And then the second thing that they said after that was, I love how much you tease, roast, whatever, love your word selection.

[00:01:33] Nathan: The pause, the, you went through probably four words. Yeah.

[00:01:36] Haley: Mm-hmm. I love, uh, I love how much you tease Nathan, and so I was like, you just gave me authority to continue on this trend.

[00:01:44] Nathan: So you were already doing it, you just do it on camera.

[00:01:47] Haley: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you got, you notice how, um, thanks for calling me this morning and asking me what I was wearing today. Since we're matching, we

[00:01:56] Nathan: both have the knit polo going on

[00:01:59] Haley: since we're matching basically.

[00:02:00] Nathan: Yeah, exactly.

[00:02:01] Haley: This was unplanned. Just in case anybody is wondering and you're watching.

[00:02:05] Nathan: Yes, exactly. Which is a good call out to watch on YouTube because then you can see our outfit choices.

[00:02:11] Haley: I'm not gonna lie though, I do like shopping with Nathan. I do have a really great clip of pre craft and commerce. I did text him and ask him like, Hey, what are you wearing for your keynote? Just making sure.

[00:02:21] And we did go on a little shopping trip, uh, to make sure that you were, you know,

[00:02:25] Nathan: can we do a little teaser only for the people watching on YouTube?

[00:02:30] Haley: Like will you give them the clip of you coming out of the

[00:02:33] Nathan: Yes, yes we can. Okay. So if you're go watch on YouTube and subscribe and like, and comment and all of those things.

[00:02:39] Mm-hmm. And, uh, we'll drop in the clip of, uh, Nathan

[00:02:42] Haley: doing a pirouette. Hey,

[00:02:48] Nathan: few people know that I was on, am I really gonna say this back out loud? I am. We're going with it.

[00:02:53] Haley: Okay. I was

[00:02:53] Nathan: on the ballroom dance team in college and so

[00:02:56] Haley: Yeah.

[00:02:56] Nathan: Yeah,

[00:02:57] Haley: actually. Uh, even further teaser. I, I don't feel like I was fast enough to get my phone out, but we did recently go wake surfing and at some point while one of the people were wake surfing and like, you know, like doing their stride, like they were going, um, you and your sister-in-law got up and did some cha cha cha ballroom dance on the boat, and I was like, it was one of my favorite moments.

[00:03:20] Nathan: All right. Well, I think people want, um, maybe questions and discussion on the critter economy. Yes.

[00:03:24] Haley: Yes. Uh, well this, you know, as, as we've talked about, uh, these are the most beloved episodes, um, because of your co-host and, uh, we haven't done this in a while, so we are going to dig, uh, go straight into the questions, uh, because there is a bunch of really good questions.

[00:03:43] Uh, people love your insight and so let's dig in. Yeah,

[00:03:46] Nathan: sounds good.

[00:03:46] Haley: First up, uh, from menage, how do you find a SaaS idea that one person can build using no code tools? Is that feasible for a non-tech person?

[00:03:56] Nathan: Oh, okay. It's the most feasible it's ever been. Mm-hmm. So first, no code had this big rise, you know, a handful of years ago, and that was tools like bubble, uh, powered by Airtable and, and all of this stuff.

[00:04:09] And no Code is kind of dead now. I think I can say that. Like

[00:04:14] Haley: I thought it was. Oh, okay. So it is no code, not Vibe Coding?

[00:04:18] Nathan: No, no. Coding is not Vibe coding.

[00:04:20] Haley: Okay. No

[00:04:20] Nathan: coding it. That's like using these off the shelf tools in order to, I mean, build software without code. Mm-hmm. But it, it's this proxy for doing it the right way.

[00:04:30] Haley: Got it.

[00:04:31] Nathan: And it worked out for a while. There's some startups that were built on no-code platforms that have been acquired. Um, but uh, it, what ended up changing is that Vibe coding came along, which is an entertaining term, but really using AI driven, prompt driven coding on platforms like Rept and Lovable and V Zero and others.

[00:04:54] And so now you can do that, but you're, you're actually using dev tools that a professional would use. It's managed in GI for version tracking. It's using the correct databases. It's using all of this.

[00:05:05] Haley: Okay, so I'm gonna stop you for a hot second. This specific question is, is that feasible for a non-tech person?

[00:05:12] So I need you to dumb it down just a little bit.

[00:05:14] Nathan: Okay. So yes, it's more feasible than it ever has before. Okay. What I would do is I would use rept. Got it. Uh, and the reason is it's a fully hosted platform. Mm-hmm. Has an agent in there that you can prompt and you could tell it, this is what I want to do, and it will build it for you.

[00:05:29] And I use it every week, and it's, it's fantastic. So it's totally feasible to do. Mm-hmm. As a, as a individual non-tech person. Two things that I think really matter are, one, getting really clear on what you're building and who you're building it for. So a lot of people, like now you can build anything and so mm-hmm.

[00:05:46] Narrow down and say, okay, this is the exact use case that I'm building. And the second thing is I would get a developer mentor.

[00:05:54] Haley: Mm. And

[00:05:54] Nathan: so you're going to run into problems, things that you can't solve or figure out, and you're gonna need someone who explains it to you and says, oh, this is why you're stuck here.

[00:06:04] Haley: Mm. Or

[00:06:04] Nathan: let's take a step back. You know, your, your dev agent jumped three steps ahead to try to get this done. But like, that's not the best way to go long term.

[00:06:11] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:12] Nathan: Uh, so when I was starting, starting Kit, uh, Brennan Dunn is someone who mentored me in the early days where I was hiring developers, I was working with other people.

[00:06:21] And then periodically, every three to four weeks, I'd get on a call with him and be like, Hey, can we talk through like this direction that we're headed? And he's like, oh, you actually don't wanna go that way. You wanna go this way. Right. And, and just having that, that advice, so either find someone on social media, um, or you could even potentially hire somebody.

[00:06:37] Um, you know, who's going to provide you that, that technical support and advice along the way.

[00:06:42] Haley: Yeah, that's really good advice. And correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't your boys do a video game with Repli?

[00:06:47] Nathan: Yeah, so they did it with Cursor. Oh, cursor, okay. Which is another great, uh, dev tool. The downside of Cursor is that it doesn't have a fully hosted like environment to deploy it to the web and everything.

[00:06:58] Mm-hmm. So you have to be a little bit more technical, but yeah, I showed my kids cursor and within an hour. They had like a kind of Minecraft style video game where they were walking around, like mining resources and all of that stuff. All prompt driven

[00:07:13] Haley: and we would qualify your kids as non-tech, right?

[00:07:16] Uh, yeah. Great. Okay. So you, yes, the answer is yes. The answer is yes. The answer is yes. It is feasible for a non-tech person to vibe, code and create something magical. Yes. Alright, moving on. Uh, this question is from Dawn and uh, the question is, can you map out a creator business for someone who is brand new?

[00:07:36] This is quite a, this, this can be a really simple question or it can be a really complex question.

[00:07:42] Nathan: You go so many different directions on this, so many

[00:07:44] Haley: different directions.

[00:07:45] Nathan: Okay. So the first thing is you need an audience and then you need a pain point.

[00:07:50] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:52] Nathan: So when we talk about audience, we're, we're looking for the intersection of a few different things.

[00:07:56] We're looking for a group that you have insight into, right? So either you have. You know, you, you've worked in this industry or you have a family member who does or something like, you have to have some sort of insight and understanding of what's going on. Don't just pick some random audience and, and go from there.

[00:08:13] The second thing is they have to have a pain point that you believe you can solve. And then the third thing that I believe is really important is there has to be money involved in some way. So if we wanna make this, you know, a, a sustainable business, we've gotta make money. So what matters to me is I always choose to teach a skill that makes money to people who have money.

[00:08:39] So we could have a skill that doesn't make money to people who don't have money. That would be like, let's teach knitting to teenagers.

[00:08:45] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:45] Nathan: That's not gonna make, uh, a very sustainable business, so it's gonna be much harder. Or you go to the other end and you say, Hey, I'm gonna teach design to, uh, professional designers.

[00:08:56] Mm-hmm. Right. Skill that makes money to people who have money. So those are the two ends of the spectrum. You can end up in the middle. You could say, Hey, I'm gonna teach career skills to college students definitely helps make money, but they still don't have money. And so then you're like, well, maybe it's still the parents of the mm-hmm.

[00:09:11] There's a whole range of things there. The second thing is to find a specific problem that you're solving and you wanna go as focused as possible here, because that's the way to stand out initially. If you go really, really broad, I'm going to teach software development or pottery or all of these things, right?

[00:09:30] They're very, very broad and it's gonna be hard to stand out or, um, attract an audience. But instead, if you went very, very specific, like, what's something in, in pottery that would be a very specific problem to solve that is maybe not as saturated, that someone could talk about.

[00:09:48] Haley: Ooh. Um, how to make plaster molts.

[00:09:52] Nathan: Okay. Yeah. So you're finding this niche, there's not enough content about it, and you're like, look, I'm gonna get very good at that, and then my YouTube videos are going to show up, right? Mm-hmm. YouTube is the search engine. That's the kind of thing that someone's gonna do at once and be like, ah, that didn't work.

[00:10:06] All right, how do I do this? Right? Mm-hmm.

[00:10:07] Haley: Also, seriously though, like I really wanna learn how to make posture, mold. It's highly annoying. And all of the videos are on YouTube are from like 20 years ago. Yeah. Uh, and they're just bad. There's a great, so someone

[00:10:19] Nathan: actually do that. Please,

[00:10:19] Haley: please. Yeah. I have a bunch of plaster molds, but I don't know how to make them on my own.

[00:10:25] Right. I want, I wanna make my own plaster molds.

[00:10:27] Nathan: Yeah. So if you went very niche as a content creator and you said, Hey, I'm gonna do this, that doesn't stop you from all aspects of pottery or even later branching out to other types of art.

[00:10:37] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:37] Nathan: But you're starting with this very specific thing and people will come to you with this problem now, like to run with our, um, you know, the money example of it are these plaster molds expensive to buy?

[00:10:51] Time consuming. They're,

[00:10:52] Haley: they're expensive to buy, they're hard to find.

[00:10:55] Nathan: Okay.

[00:10:55] Haley: Um, but also they're like other people's designs. So if you, let's say throw something on your wheel and you're like, I wanna replicate this exact thing, it's really difficult to do that over and over and over on the wheel. And so plaster mold allows you to scale your business, uh, right.

[00:11:11] And create a custom like, mold from your own designs.

[00:11:15] Nathan: So what's interesting about that is if you're, you know, it might be the, the inflection point

[00:11:20] Haley: mm-hmm.

[00:11:20] Nathan: Between someone who's doing it as a hobby and someone who wants to do it as a business mm-hmm. Is getting good at this skill. Mm-hmm. So then all of a sudden we're teaching a skill that makes money.

[00:11:29] Right. Right. And obviously people who are just trying to do as a hobby might care about that too.

[00:11:34] Haley: Right.

[00:11:35] Nathan: Um, but it starts to find, be in that, in that, um. The bridge between the different stages of business. Mm-hmm. And someone might be willing to invest money

[00:11:44] Haley: mm-hmm. To

[00:11:45] Nathan: do that. The other nice thing is that I imagine pottery is already somewhat expensive.

[00:11:50] Haley: Um, very expensive.

[00:11:51] Nathan: So that's another thing in a creator business, is if you choose a niche that mm-hmm. Money is already being spent in mm-hmm. That's such a different thing. Like, I, I don't, there's probably a bunch of niches where it's like we're extremely budget conscious, you know, it costs very little money.

[00:12:07] And then if you're saying, Hey, buy my $50 course or my a hundred dollars course on this, people are like, oh, how dare you ask for money on that.

[00:12:15] Haley: Mm-hmm. But

[00:12:16] Nathan: if you were take pottery or like a hobby of mine is airplanes. Mm-hmm. And in the category of airplanes, everything is absurdly expensive. So if you were to say, oh, this is a hundred dollars or $500, people would be like, that's it.

[00:12:27] Done.

[00:12:28] Haley: Yeah.

[00:12:28] Nathan: And so that, that plays a big part in it. Okay. So the last part in that is you need distribution.

[00:12:34] Haley: Oh, yep.

[00:12:34] Nathan: Um, or I guess there's, there's two more parts. Distribution and the product. Mm-hmm. So for this creator business, we need a way to reach our target audience. Uh, 10 years ago we might be doing that really heavily through search, you know, Google, SEO, all of that.

[00:12:48] And we're writing long form blog posts. Today we're doing it probably through, um, a social platform that's going to have algorithm driven content. So I would say choose one that both matches your interests, uh, your, uh, I guess your interest, your audience type, and then also the media type that you like.

[00:13:11] Haley: Mm.

[00:13:11] Nathan: So if we, you know, I'm not gonna go to X probably for my pottery content 'cause it's so visual and so that's going to belong much more on Instagram or TikTok. And so I would choose one. Uh, one platform and go all in on that. And I would just say, okay, I'm gonna create one new reel per day, and it's going to be about this thing, and we're just gonna be talking about.

[00:13:33] All the different aspects of, uh, you know, how to make these molds. Mm-hmm. Right.

[00:13:38] Haley: So one thing I'll just call out here, because I think it's an important thing to note about, like, the reality of actually growing an audience now versus 10 years ago if you're brand new mm-hmm. Is that on social media, we've, it's much more difficult to grow now than it ever has been before.

[00:13:53] And so is it, yeah. Have, are you trying to grow on Instagram? I feel like you've been at 8,000 for a while.

[00:14:00] Nathan: Okay. I feel personally attacked. Um,

[00:14:03] Haley: okay. 8,297 to be exact. No, I have absolutely no idea what it is, but I just, you're very close. Okay. But, um, we're gonna, we're gonna reference check that

[00:14:13] Nathan: I would argue, this is an interesting question.

[00:14:15] I would argue that it's easier to grow than ever before.

[00:14:18] Haley: Okay. It's actually 9,012 now.

[00:14:21] Nathan: Okay. So we just got a check from Kara, our producer, uh, 9,012. Mm. So you were off by. Multiple percent. Got it. Okay. Multiple double digit percent. Okay.

[00:14:36] Haley: Okay.

[00:14:37] Nathan: Okay. So being harder to grow versus easier to grow, uh, there's a huge shift that's happened in all the social platforms from being follower based to being algorithm based.

[00:14:46] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:47] Nathan: And so before you, it was harder to grow because all of the feeds were, uh, based on who follows you. But it was, so if you put out content, you know, it was really only reaching people who already followed you. So if that was 57 people mm-hmm. Or 8,200, um, it was pretty limited to just that group.

[00:15:08] Right. But every new follower you got, you really locked in that attention. Right. And now it's flipped where the algorithms are, are entirely interest based.

[00:15:17] Haley: Right.

[00:15:17] Nathan: And so it's easier to get attention from new audiences. Especially like Instagram has a feature where you can test a reel.

[00:15:25] Haley: Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. And they will only

[00:15:26] Nathan: put it out to new people.

[00:15:27] Mm-hmm. And you can see how it performs.

[00:15:29] Haley: Yeah.

[00:15:30] Nathan: But it's much harder to lock in those gains. 'cause a follower is worth probably a quarter or a 10th. Mm-hmm. Of what it was years ago. So that's like one platform wide aspect of it. The other thing where I think you're absolutely right that it, it's harder now is I think the bar is harder on quality of content.

[00:15:49] Mm-hmm. Uh, and then. You know, there's just a level of saturation.

[00:15:53] Haley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the way I think about this is, which is just important to note for me, is that on the social media side of things, right, in order, a lot of people put so much focus and energy in building the content that they plan to sell, right?

[00:16:08] So that's the pottery course, whatever. Um, and then they don't have a method to actually, they don't have an audience to distribute that to, right? And so when you're looking at your flywheel and you're saying like, where do I spend in, uh, all my energy and focus on first, oftentimes the social aspect, like growing your audience has to be the first component because they're putting, they, they spend, you know, hours and hours creating this, um, product, and then they go to sell it and they have no one to sell it to.

[00:16:34] And so there should be like an early emphasis on growing your audience initially. And then from there, when we talk about growing your audience, um, and we. Do work for an email platform. So I feel like we should talk about this, but it should be converting your email audience or your social audience to an email audience, right?

[00:16:52] Yeah. And you can still do that through the very traditional ways that have always worked, like opt-in incentives and creating something of value and giving it away for free. And then putting those super fans right into an email funnel. And then, then you have something to sell to. So if your goal, for example, if you're trying to grow, you grow a hundred followers on social media and then you convert 10% of those to a, we'll just say 10% of those to an email subscriber, and then you have a 20% conversion rate, then you've sold to right of your courses or whatever it is that the product that you're selling and.

[00:17:25] That might be what success looks like. And then you're just continuing to always essentially scale and grow that funnel.

[00:17:31] Nathan: Yeah. And that that balance basically because the social platforms have gone from being follower based to being interest-based. Mm-hmm. It's now more important than ever to have something like email that is entirely follower based.

[00:17:43] Mm-hmm. Or subscriber based, but to lock in that attention. Yeah. And so those two really go hand in hand if you get great at driving attention in an algorithm. Mm-hmm. And then capturing it in email and those, you know, you're so good at going back and forth between those two things. I would say that most of the most successful creator businesses today are just built on those two principles.

[00:18:04] Haley: Yeah. Gosh, this has got me thinking, I mean, I feel like I'm an expert at creating events. Mm-hmm. Maybe I should just, you know, create an events course, sell that, and I'm joking, but not, I mean, I should focus on kit maybe. What do we think?

[00:18:16] Nathan: We could debate whether or not,

[00:18:18] Haley: okay. Yeah,

[00:18:19] Nathan: that's a good, alright,

[00:18:20] Haley: we're gonna move on because Dawn, uh, we could go another hour on that topic.

[00:18:25] Okay. And, uh, go a thousand different rabbit holes on, uh, starting from scratch for a creator who's brand new. So all Simon, uh, you are up. I'm curious about your take on this Nathan building a music artist career from scratch again. So we're starting here from scratch. Most musicians try to make music first and build an audience around that.

[00:18:45] However, if they eventually get to a million streams that doesn't necessarily pay the bills, how would you go about it?

[00:18:53] Nathan: Oh, okay. First with the caveat that I know nothing about music. Mm-hmm. I know we need Lars in this. Yeah. Well, that's who I was gonna say is. Mm-hmm. Uh, people should check out the episode that I did on the show with Lars, uh, on how he built his whole music catalog, uh, and.

[00:19:07] You know, he's earning over $50,000 a month off his music catalog. So

[00:19:11] Haley: living his best life in Provence, by the way, side note, like passive income, he works, what, two hours a week?

[00:19:17] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. And even a bunch of his work is him sitting at his studio.

[00:19:20] Haley: Yeah.

[00:19:21] Nathan: So yeah, things are, are going very well for Lars, and, and he would be the best one to answer this.

[00:19:26] And he does put out content about, uh, you know, a career as a musician. So I think it, it depends a lot on the goals that you have. If it's to be someone in Lars's shoes of really making money off the streaming catalog, that's gonna be one approach. Or if you're in the other side where you're like, look, I wanna be a touring musician, that's probably going to take another approach.

[00:19:49] One thing that I, whichever path you take, that I would rely on is storytelling along the way. You know, how you've gone on this journey, how you make your art, all of that. I think that's something that we've done well. Building kit is even from the very beginning, you know, I had the web app challenge where I'm talking about.

[00:20:06] Like, here's the lessons learned along the way. Mm-hmm. You know, week over week. And we've always been transparent with so much in the business. So I would do the same thing in the music career, and I would set specific goals. And I would say something like, okay, my goal is to play 10 live events, you know, in the month of June.

[00:20:26] Haley: I don't know. Mm-hmm.

[00:20:27] Nathan: And so you're like, here's the open mic nights that I'm doing. Here's this or that. And you use a platform like Instagram to, you know, you're doing the point of view videos, you're doing the, uh, you know, today's day 27 of trying to play, you know? Mm-hmm. Trying to do this. Like, here's my goal.

[00:20:43] Go on a journey that you can bring other people along with you.

[00:20:46] Haley: Yeah.

[00:20:46] Nathan: And be honing your craft along the way and show people that. Right. There's so much of the perfectly polished music video and everything else, and people just aren't as into that these days.

[00:20:56] Haley: Yeah.

[00:20:56] Nathan: They want to connect with you as a human.

[00:20:58] Haley: Yeah. There's, this one is a hard question to answer, I feel like, because there's also so many different ways that you can earn a living as a musician, right? Mm-hmm. So whether it's publishing, whether it's, um, like you could just be a writer and focus only on that, right? You could say, I wanna be a touring musician.

[00:21:12] You could say, I wanna be, you know, there's so many different ways that you can earn revenue as an artist, but I think what's. What's the theme throughout all of this is the storytelling component. Actually, there's this local kid who's a friend or who's a a, um, a friend's son, and right now he is doing, uh, shout out Lance Dawson.

[00:21:32] Uh, right now he is doing a cover until he gets to a thousand subscribers or a thousand followers on Instagram, and I love it. He's great, right? He's like, I think he's in eight, eighth or ninth grade, and I know his mom, but I don't know him very well. But I am fully invested in this journey, so much so that our old, the show creator sessions, I'm like, I've got this old mic.

[00:21:51] Like I know where to put it, you know? Right. Like, I've got a mic stand. Like I'm invested in this success for him now. Um, and I barely know him. And that's just a, a, that's just me following along on this storytelling journey that this young musician is, is, um, just getting started on.

[00:22:07] Nathan: I think every type of creator should have a stated goal of where they're trying to get to.

[00:22:13] It should be something probably. Achievable within a year. Mm-hmm. But it's like a big stretch and you see these with these accounts where someone's saying like, okay, we're trying to get to 50 thou, we're doing this until we get to 50,000 followers or

[00:22:25] Haley: mm-hmm.

[00:22:26] Nathan: Something like that. And I, I love that the goal is a thousand.

[00:22:29] Mm-hmm. Because the other thing is when you hit it, you can be like, sweet, now it's 10,000.

[00:22:32] Haley: Yeah.

[00:22:33] Nathan: Um, and follower accounts are, uh, you know, one type of goal, but it could be something else of, um, you know, something on a much, much bigger scale that really makes you want to follow along. Mm-hmm. Like, um, this filmmaker Matt DLA had, I don't, I don't know if he's still running his podcast.

[00:22:52] He's done a bunch of things. He, uh, shot the documentary for the Minimalists. Mm-hmm. So he's got stuff on Netflix and he's, you know, has this amazing YouTube channel. And he always had this public goal for his podcast to have Dwayne Johnson on his podcast. And it became this like, recurring joke where he.

[00:23:10] In his studio, uh, in his kitchen actually was where he had his studio set up. He had this photo of the rock, like that early photo where he is got the fanny pack and Yeah. And all of that. Yeah. But like framed on his wall, like kind of small. Yeah. And it was just, it became this almost third character through the podcast and all of that.

[00:23:29] And everyone knew like, oh, Matt's trying to get the rock on his podcast. And so people would do things to try to help make that happen.

[00:23:36] Haley: Uhhuh,

[00:23:36] Nathan: even though it was both a serious and not serious goal,

[00:23:39] Haley: Uhhuh.

[00:23:40] Nathan: And so I think as a creator, you need to set a goal for that, a, a goal of some kind that people can fall along.

[00:23:46] For me, it was to get to, uh, to grow kit to 5,000 a month in recurring revenue. My other goal is to get Taylor Swift on the platform. So

[00:23:54] Haley: I feel like we're just a couple of degrees away.

[00:23:56] Nathan: We're getting there.

[00:23:56] Haley: We're getting there.

[00:23:57] Nathan: We're getting there. Um,

[00:23:58] Haley: okay. In case anybody is wondering, this is real, we would like your support and help on this.

[00:24:03] If anybody has a one to two degree connection away to her team, please. For the love of God, help Nathan reach this goal. Okay. Be real.

[00:24:15] Nathan: I just wanna say that like for any musician songwriter, like so much is in to the lyrics and the words and the storytelling. Like that's a newsletter. Oh yeah. And I wanna, I want to read Taylor Swift's newsletter written on kit.

[00:24:27] Haley: Okay. This is another point going back to the music, since so many people are asking about music right now. Um, I've always thought this musicians are like the absolute best people to have a newsletter because they are writers. Yes. That is their form of like, the way that they communicate with the world is writing first, right?

[00:24:45] Mm-hmm. And then it becomes like the performance component, but still lyrics are just written words and like that transition from to a newsletter. Like, please come on. Yeah. Just so you know. Okay. Alright. Moving on.

[00:24:58] Nathan: There's are, as I, but yeah, going back to the, the journey and the, and the public goal, I just think that's so important to put out there.

[00:25:05] Mm-hmm. And then people will come alongside and help you. Like, that happened to me so much with Kit, where people who understood building software companies and all this mm-hmm. Would say, okay, I see where you're trying to go and yeah, I can help you with this. I can help you with copywriting, with design introductions.

[00:25:19] I'll be an early customer. And so people can only do that if you have a stated goal. So yeah, I would make sure to do that.

[00:25:25] Haley: One thing, I also really wanna encourage people to do that. I actually really, I feel like this is a bit of a trend that's happening on social media right now is where they're talking about being cringe.

[00:25:34] Uh, and sometimes stating that goal feels extremely cringey. You know, if you're like, I'm, I'm trying to get to a thousand, subscribe a thousand followers, and like, they're more embarrassed about making that, like, stating that. Mm-hmm. But once you put that out into the world, you'd be amazed at how many people are actually gonna be cheering you on.

[00:25:51] Like I said, I wasn't necessarily cheering on Lance Ds Dawson before he said that. Now I'm invested in this journey to getting a thousand subscribers or, you know, Instagram followers. So all that to say lean into being cringe is the point. Um, because sometimes that's like the first step in success.

[00:26:09] Alright, next one. Uh, Raymond, this is from Raymond. For those consistently writing newsletters, what's the best way to distribute their newsletters to more people?

[00:26:20] Nathan: Okay. The single biggest growth thing that we've seen in newsletters is the Creator Network. Yeah. That is Kit's platform for connecting creators to each other.

[00:26:28] And you know, when someone subscribes to your newsletter, you recommend someone else. And then vice versa. We have invested a huge amount of time, as you know mm-hmm. Into helping find and connect other creators. So things like, you know, here's creators who write similar content to you mm-hmm. Who are, uh, who you subscribe to, who subscribe to you, who, uh, yeah.

[00:26:50] You know, you're, are recommended by your friends. All of those things. You can search by content type, all this, uh, you can search by location now. Mm-hmm. By the time this comes out, you know, you could say, here's creators in my city. So connecting with other creators is the single biggest thing, both on the creator network.

[00:27:07] And off of that,

[00:27:08] Haley: let's put some numbers to it though, because, um, what is the average conversion rate for gaining a new subscriber off of an opt-in incentive? I know this is a big a, a wide variety. Yes. Because it really does depend on how well your opt-in incentive is positioned to your audience, but just in general.

[00:27:23] Nathan: Well, I would say if it's a dedicated landing page with like targeted traffic going to it, it might be like 30 to 50%.

[00:27:29] Haley: Okay.

[00:27:30] Nathan: Um, if it's like on a site. You know, or like at the end of a blog post, it might be one to 3%.

[00:27:36] Haley: Right. Okay. And then in the creator network, we're seeing the conversion rate look like

[00:27:41] Nathan: in the, call it 20 to 40%.

[00:27:44] Haley: Yeah. So, um, I think that's just a really interesting indicator because so many people are looking at, um, optin incentives and they're saying like, you know, I, I didn't expect you to say if it was a dedicated landing page, 30 to 50%. I do actually think that's a little bit high.

[00:27:59] Nathan: It, it just all depends of like, if you have that reel on Instagram right, and then you're pointing traffic directly to it, then right.

[00:28:06] It's going to be really high. 'cause someone came with intent. Yeah. But otherwise it's gonna be, you know, the one to 3%. Yeah.

[00:28:11] Haley: Especially I'm thinking of like a food content creator, for example. Oh yeah. You

[00:28:13] Nathan: know, like someone's there for the recipe. Exactly. You know, hey, download this other thing and

[00:28:17] Haley: yeah. But, um, I'm thinking of a specific creator.

[00:28:19] I won't say his name, uh, but his recommendation, uh, very valuable recommendation because his conversion rate is 67%. Now he's recommending somewhere around 15, 15 to 20 different creators. At least last time I looked. Uh, but he. By way of his recommendation. It's a 67% conversion rate when the popup window comes up within the creator network.

[00:28:41] And what that looks like is essentially a modal that pops up and it says, if you, you're just subscribed to my newsletter, here are three other creators that, uh, you'd be interested in, um, that have similar content. Right. And then it takes them to their creator profile. But I agree that is the fastest way to growth right now.

[00:28:57] Yeah.

[00:28:57] Nathan: I think the next fastest way, which. Still involves collaboration with other creators, is to make an opt-in incentive. Some, you know, we call a lead magnet, whatever it is, make something valuable and give it away for free. Mm-hmm. And get on other, in front of other people's platforms. So that might be a collaboration on YouTube or Instagram that might be a guest post in someone else's newsletter.

[00:29:18] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:19] Nathan: Um, or you know, it could even be like workshops or something that you're teaching in person. Yeah. And you say, Hey, if you wanna download this. Go sign up for free here.

[00:29:25] Haley: A really good example of the guest post, actually we did this, um, or we saw this, uh, within one of our newsletters is Ryan Holiday, who's the Daily Stoic.

[00:29:33] He wrote a newsletter about how Tom Brady the Goat, uh, leveraged and used stoicism throughout his football career, right? And then inside of that newsletter, there was a one click to follow embedded, um, opportunity for him to follow Tom Brady's new newsletter. And so that's great because it's not based off of the essentially new subscribers that are subscribing to his newsletter, but it went out to his entire newsletter list.

[00:29:57] And so that's an example of a collaboration that works really well, um, when it comes to the creator network and the guest posting.

[00:30:03] Nathan: Yeah, there's a, you can tell this. Like, collaboration with other creators is really important to us because we spend thousands of hours of our engineers time building these features for like one click recommendations and all that.

[00:30:15] Yeah. The

[00:30:15] Haley: other thing I really like about this, um, this point is referencing Chris Donnelly, who he was just on one of your, your last episodes. Um, we've spent quite a bit of time with him, I feel like over the last couple of months. Uh, he's building an amazing creator business, but he talks about like this initial pod that he created, and we talk about this idea of pods all the time, right?

[00:30:34] So he had a pod of, it was like Chris Sahil Bloom, Eric Partaker, Simon Squibb, right? And it, it goes beyond just the creator network, but essentially any time that they were creating content, uh, the, they were all promoting each other's content. And so that idea of a pod of support is really important to, um, your success as well.

[00:30:54] You get

[00:30:54] Nathan: the, someone cheering for you, you get the accountability. You know, if you have that like text group where people are like, you know. Hey, Nathan, you what? Like you haven't posted anything this week. What? Like what's up? Do you actually take your business seriously or mm-hmm. You know, that sort of accountability is really, really helpful.

[00:31:09] Haley: Alright. All right. Uh, this is from Brian. Nathan. Your journey with Kit is an incredible example of finding a blue ocean. By focusing on an underserved niche in the HR tech space, we are seeing a similar opportunity. Many startups try to serve everyone, but we are narrowing in on a specific group with unique challenges.

[00:31:29] What advice would you give to founders who are identifying a blue ocean in a crowded market? How do you know when you have found the right niche and what are the first steps to truly owning that space?

[00:31:41] Nathan: Okay, so first we went into the most crowded space there is. Mm-hmm. Like most industries are kind of a winner take most, uh, environment where like, especially in, um, like B2B software

[00:31:54] Haley: mm-hmm.

[00:31:54] Nathan: Where one player has taken like 80% of the market and then everyone else has the scraps. Uh, email was insanely competitive and, and MailChimp's the biggest. But then there's, you know, there's tons and tons of platforms that are hundreds, a hundred plus million a year in revenue, and so it did not feel like a blue ocean at all.

[00:32:13] Now the difference, and this is what I think the question is about, is by going after creators specifically. Mm-hmm. Like that was saying, crowded market, well-established problems, but here's our very specific focus. It was such a specific focus that in the early days when I tried to raise money. Every BC I talked to was like, this market is way too small.

[00:32:32] Mm-hmm. It will never be a thing.

[00:32:34] Haley: Mm-hmm. Um,

[00:32:34] Nathan: and thankfully that was, well, two things I'm thankful about that one, that I failed to raise money and, uh, ended up keeping the company totally bootstrapped.

[00:32:43] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:43] Nathan: And then two, the market ended up.

[00:32:45] Haley: Yeah.

[00:32:46] Nathan: You know what's funny about this?

[00:32:47] Haley: I have this very vivid, gosh, it had to have been Craft and Commerce 20, I don't know, maybe 2019 or something.

[00:32:54] Mm-hmm. You're getting up there, you're on your keynote. Uh, and you were talking about the landscape of email. Remember that? Do you remember this? Yes. Okay. And you're basically saying like, you know, here's all the different competitors. We had Drip and we had AWeber, and we had MailChimp, and we had us. And over time, all of these folks have left the creator economy.

[00:33:14] Right. But our focus has always been on serving creators. And what's interesting is that we continue down that path. Mm-hmm. And then all of a sudden there were some new competitors Yeah. That came into the market. Right? So now you have Substack and you have a few others that have come into the space. Um, but our focus has always been laser focused on creators.

[00:33:34] And I think that's, to answer your question specifically, that's the thing that made us realize. You know, that we were in the right space focusing on the right group.

[00:33:43] Nathan: Well, and I think you'll see a lot of, within a, a market, you'll see people who show up in a specific niche or say, Hey, we're gonna serve this group within the market out of opportunity.

[00:33:54] Like this might be a little too inside baseball. But as the market was shifting, uh, we competed a lot with a platform called Drip.

[00:34:02] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:03] Nathan: And then they made this very deliberate pivot to go into the e-commerce side of things where they said, oh, we're going to, you know, focus more on Shopify stores and all of that.

[00:34:12] And I think they did it out of opportunity rather than like the core DNA of the company.

[00:34:17] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:17] Nathan: And I don't think it worked out well, even though it was probably a very good strategic decision.

[00:34:21] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:22] Nathan: And so for this example in in healthcare, like if you're choosing a specific niche, make sure that it is all the way through the DNA of the company and like core to your mission and everything that you wanna be long term, not just a strategic move.

[00:34:36] Because I think that's why the focus on creators has worked so well for kid. Because it's just through the DNA of the company and always has been. And it was our focus before it was a good strategic decision. Mm-hmm. And, you know, it will continue to be our focus for a very long time.

[00:34:52] Haley: Yeah. I will say, if we go even further back though mm-hmm.

[00:34:55] In our DNA, um, you said email marketing for bloggers, right? Yeah. Email marketing for writers. Mm-hmm. Now, bloggers and writers were the original creators. Right. There has since been an infusion of different types of creators, like the podcast industry blowing up and Yep. Um, you know, influencers and so on and so forth, but that's even more narrow and more niche.

[00:35:14] Uh, and then the term creators sort of adapted over, over the last several years. Yep. Exactly. So another question, uh, from Brian Kaplan, we're just gonna keep going down this list. What kind of feedback mechanisms did you implement as you grew kit, uh, to make sure that you were staying on point? I feel like forms are too generic and won't get the kind of raw insights of founder needs, but individual video chats can be time consuming when you are spinning plates.

[00:35:41] Any tips here?

[00:35:42] Nathan: Yeah, I think that the individual conversations are everything, and you have to, this is why you have to choose an industry that you're deeply passionate about and you have to be in it with them. And so if you're saying, Hey, I'm gonna have, uh, 10 coffee meetings with my ideal customer in the next two weeks, are you excited about that?

[00:36:01] Or you're like, oh, here we go. And, and if you feel the second way, then probably. Choose a different industry or don't start a company, right? Mm-hmm. You have to be excited and want to do it. That's why I feel so privileged to serve creators. 'cause I can talk to creators all day, every day and be really excited.

[00:36:18] Haley: Same. That is by far my favorite part of my job is just like getting to sit down and be like, what do you, what do you do?

[00:36:24] Nathan: Yeah. What do you do? How can I help? Like, yeah, what problems are you running into? Wow. Like,

[00:36:27] Haley: never thought of that. Like, there is literally a niche for everyone in there. Like there is somebody that is doing, or teaching or talking about every possible topic, uh, in the creator industry, which is so fun.

[00:36:38] Nathan: And I, and I would say, you know, sometimes we summarize all, all of our research down to a transcript or a, a note that we're gonna give to our dev team or something else. But if you were to, to put the value on, you know, user interviews and research conversations, I would say that the, um. The text snippet, the reply to a form or the comment is worth one.

[00:37:00] Mm-hmm. Maybe the zoom call is worth 10. I would say the face-to-face conversation is worth 50 or a hundred. Mm-hmm. Like, it is so much more valuable. 'cause you're gonna learn so much more, you're gonna demonstrate so much more care.

[00:37:11] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:11] Nathan: Even if you paid for a $5 coffee for them, they're gonna be like, yeah.

[00:37:14] I mean, this platform took them, took me out to coffee and Yeah. They, they wanted to know how to help me more.

[00:37:20] Haley: Yeah. There's more to come on this, but we are working on an initiative, uh, on this internally, but, um, being in person with creators is ultimately one of the biggest leading indicators Right. To, to kit growing.

[00:37:31] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:37:31] Haley: I believe, um, that's why we

[00:37:33] Nathan: struggled so much during COVID Yeah. Is because we had built that into the DNA of the company, of show up in person, be at events. Mm-hmm. Uh, meet with people, you know, masterminds, all of these things. And then during COVID we're like trying to do digital versions of it. And I think we didn't feel the effects of that until like 2022.

[00:37:51] 2023. Yeah. Um, but I would just say yes, the, the Zoom chats and the in-person conversations take way more time and they're worth every bit of it. Now you might use the survey or the comments to source those conversations.

[00:38:09] Haley: Mm-hmm. Right. If

[00:38:09] Nathan: you had a thousand customers and you sent out a survey, you're gonna probably find that 20 of them have strong opinions.

[00:38:15] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:16] Nathan: And then you're like, great, I don't have to get on calls with all 1000.

[00:38:19] Haley: Right.

[00:38:19] Nathan: Let me get on, start with calls with these 20 and I'll really learn more and 'cause others are gonna be like, oh, I don't know. It works fine.

[00:38:26] Haley: Right, right, right. Okay. I'm excited about this one because it comes from another Nathan who's a plastic surgeon from Brisbane, Australia.

[00:38:33] He says, I started an email newsletter, 1200 subscribers who are all doctors. After you highlighted the importance of building a personal brand, I'm currently deciding on whether to offer in-person coaching, build online courses, or start a community. I'd appreciate your opinion on what you think would generate the most revenue.

[00:38:51] My goal is to operate less and to spend more time with my family. Okay.

[00:38:56] Nathan: So first, this might be one of the highest value audiences ever.

[00:39:00] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:01] Nathan: Right? If you think about, you know, do you want 1200 high schoolers? Do you want 12? You know, all these, it's like plastic surgeons who are actively pra practicing all have money to spend, all, have money to spend, and they'll probably implement that feedback.

[00:39:14] You know, that like all the things they do mm-hmm. They're gonna take it very seriously. So a very high value audience. So that, that's fantastic. If we think about this model, I would wonder like who already does it? I think that as a creator, you should have role models and you should have maybe one or two from your industry and then a couple from very separate industries and say, you know what?

[00:39:38] I wanna build the, I don't know, like I am Cody Sanchez, but for

[00:39:44] Haley: this

[00:39:45] Nathan: mm-hmm. You know, I don't know what it would look like. Right. But if you said, I wanna be the Cody Sanchez of plastic surgery training

[00:39:52] Haley: mm-hmm.

[00:39:53] Nathan: Then that would get you into this weird, where you're like, okay, so then I'd be running events like this and I'd be doing investing and, you know, down this whole stream, and you might like write out that plan.

[00:40:01] Haley: Mm-hmm. And then

[00:40:02] Nathan: go, okay, not that. And then you say, okay, I want to be the, uh, Dan Martel or Marie Forleo or you know, like you could try on a few of these different business models and see if those, those work. But I think it's really important to copy from other industries. Yeah. Like for example, when I was, when I was in the software space, um.

[00:40:21] I would copy a lot back and forth from the online marketing space and the startup space. Hmm. So I would bring in long form sales pages with like really good copy into the startup and design space where they'd never been seen before. Mm-hmm. But I would do them with really good design. Right. And so then in the online marketing space, people would see that and be like, these are so well designed.

[00:40:41] Like we, here's something that we see time and time again, but yours actually look good. Mm-hmm. And so you can copy from those different industries or in, in, um, when I was designing websites, I love to copy from clothing brands, like Walk into Banana Republic and copy design inspiration from the textures on their tags or, you know, their fall collection or something like that.

[00:41:01] Haley: Side note, I did just learn there was a great piece of content on Banana Republic's origin story and just like, go look it up. Okay. 'cause it's like pretty actually like funny and also like wildly surprising. I had no idea that it was like a safari. It's actually just, it's a very cool story. So it side note, go

[00:41:18] Nathan: look it as an aside.

[00:41:19] Go check out. Yeah, yeah. Uh, banana Republic. Okay. So that's a couple different things on, you know, copy and learn from different industries or from individuals. The other thing I would think a lot about how you wanna spend your time, you know, like let's say this is a, a group that would happily pay for $5,000 seminars.

[00:41:39] Mm-hmm. Right? They have the money for it. You only need 20 people to show up to a $5,000 seminar and where all of a sudden a hundred grand in revenue, it's gonna take a lot of $39 eBooks to add up to a hundred grand in revenue. Right? Right. So that's, if you were saying, Hey, how do I go from 1200 subscribers to a hundred thousand in revenue, then something very high ticket, like that's gonna matter.

[00:41:59] But then you might say like, okay, well I actually don't wanna be on a plane to do that, or, I'm in Australia, more of my audience is in the us. Mm-hmm. I don't want to be making that trip all the time. So there's gonna be some constraints on it. And so I would put out those non-negotiables

[00:42:13] Haley: mm-hmm. Of like, Hey,

[00:42:13] Nathan: I'm willing to get on a plane for this six times a year.

[00:42:17] Right. Or, or whatever that is. And then I would just have conversations. The great thing about a high quality audience of 1200 people is you could talk to 25 of them

[00:42:26] Haley: mm-hmm.

[00:42:27] Nathan: And say, Hey, what can I do to serve you more? What problems are you, you know, what problems are you encountering? And you could have that list.

[00:42:33] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:33] Nathan: And then what format would most help you with this mm-hmm. Coaching community, you know, uh, the content. Yeah. All of that. And you're gonna get like. 20 of those conversations and you'll, you'll find some themes pretty quickly. Yeah,

[00:42:46] Haley: I think one of the ways that I would, um, what I would suggest as far as backing into this, um, backing into the goal, his goal is stated that he wants to spend more time with his family.

[00:42:56] And so from an income perspective, what has to be true about the income that you need? To, to gain, right. To allow you to do that. So for one-on-one coaching, right? It's like how many one-on-one, how many, essentially how many clients would you need in order to replace the amount of income that you would replace from actually practicing plastic surgery?

[00:43:15] And how, what does the time commitment actually look like for that? And so, you know, Barrett Brooks, who's coming on as a guest in the next couple of days, so it'll air somewhere around there. Um, you know, I know from him personally that spending time with his family is really important, right? And so he's built a business around that.

[00:43:32] And you can reference the episode 'cause they're gonna talk about that. But, um, I would back into that a little bit more too and see, um, you know, maybe if you have a community that often requires a lot of work inside of the community to continue to foster it, unless it's of course, a cohort-based community where you're doing something like a 30 day cohort inside of a community.

[00:43:51] So. I think the one-on-one coaching for him particular in particular, could be really valuable just because the type of people that he would be coaching have money to spend. So it'd be a high ticket offer. Um, and that's,

[00:44:06] Nathan: you know, the model that I'm seeing people have probably the highest income with the highest quality of life from relatively small audiences is group coaching.

[00:44:17] Haley: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[00:44:18] Nathan: That I'm seeing it over and over again. I was talking to a friend who lives in LA who's been a restaurant, uh, founder and operator, and then investor and all this for a long time. And he was getting going with this creator side of his business and he's very well established and he is consulted with lots of restaurants, uh, and even was friends with the owners of some of my favorite restaurants here in Boise.

[00:44:40] You know, so we met in, I guess it'd be January and we're talking through, and then, I dunno, five months later, I caught up with him like, Hey, how's the creator venture going? And he is like, great, we're on track to do a million in revenue this year. And I was like, wait, what? How? And he had implemented a group coaching model and he had a relatively small audience, but you know, he's group coaching for restaurant operators.

[00:45:02] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:02] Nathan: He had all the credibility in, in the industry. So this is similar if someone coming in, do you have 1200 plastic surgeons on your Yeah. You probably have a lot of credibility. And he was like, it's really good. Like I operate this business 10 hours a week.

[00:45:15] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:15] Nathan: And I'm still doing my investing in restaurants and, and all of that.

[00:45:19] Haley: So the other thing I really like about group coaching is that it ends up also facilitating a community within the group. Right? Right. So if there's five people that are within that group coaching, uh, cohort, they can also serve one another. Mm-hmm. So you end up being the facilitator of those relationships, but they can still lean on each other because they're all experiencing the same problem.

[00:45:36] Whe when it's one-on-one, they don't have accountability from other people that are in that group coaching cohort. So yeah, I think that's another thing to add. Alright. We've got two more questions, maybe three, but these next two are kind of linked even though they're from two different people. So, uh, this is from Jamin.

[00:45:52] Uh, apologies if I said that incorrectly. But if you had to start over and build Kit today, how would you approach it? Would you use AI as your developer? What growth channels would you focus on? And interested just to hear your general thoughts on this.

[00:46:06] Nathan: Yeah. So first I would absolutely use AI for development, but I would hire experts as well.

[00:46:13] I think that you could mock up a prototype, you could get maybe a first version off the ground for a narrow use case with ai, and that would be great. Mm-hmm. Maybe your first 10 or 50 customers, but it's not gonna be a stable platform to build on long term. Mm-hmm. So you, I believe you would either need to become a developer yourself or hire one in that process.

[00:46:32] Mm-hmm. But you could go zero to one, uh, much faster. I would still focus a lot on direct sales because I think that that really matters to get early feedback.

[00:46:41] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:42] Nathan: And then the other thing is I would choose one content channel. Um, you know, a lot of companies don't build through content or don't, you know, don't grow their own audience and it's just, it's worked so well for us.

[00:46:53] Haley: Mm-hmm. And

[00:46:53] Nathan: so I would still absolutely, you know, share content along the way of the journey. Um. And I really try the creator aspect of it.

[00:47:02] Haley: I think that's one thing that we've done really well is that you are a creator yourself, so you focus so much just on education and on service, and so you are always serving and teaching.

[00:47:10] Um, I. Teaching, which I think really helped, uh, people rely on Kit as a platform and then become obsessed with you. Yes. So, uh, okay, this is the next one. Uh, let's see if it can pull any more additional insights out. This is from Ryan Craig, when you were starting Kit, what were the key Early hires made The biggest difference.

[00:47:33] Nathan: Why are you laughing, Hailey? I'll get there.

[00:47:36] Haley: If you are starting over today with tools, AI, and resources we have now, who would be your fir? Who would your first hires be and how would your overall approach to building the team change? There is only one answer for this. Who would

[00:47:51] Nathan: your, I would hire a head of creator community who would get us deeply involved in the creator community and,

[00:47:58] Haley: all right.

[00:47:59] Just, just make right answer. Correct. You could say me by name if you'd like, you know, but, um, thank you. The one, one only daily. Janet, thank, thank you for the tee up, Ryan. I appreciated that I did not plan that question.

[00:48:14] Nathan: I saw the, I saw the question unfold on LinkedIn, so I did know that it was Oh, yeah. Oh, that's

[00:48:18] Haley: right.

[00:48:18] That's right. Okay. You're right. The only answer is me only answer. That's right. Okay.

[00:48:22] Nathan: Okay. Early hires, I, I think they're different than they were years ago. Um, like everyone has to be very proficient in, in AI no matter what their role is. Mm-hmm. Right. Someone who would build a customer experience and customer success team way different today than they would five years ago.

[00:48:40] Right. They're going to probably implement, uh, an AI team like fin or para help or one of these tools from day one. Mm-hmm.

[00:48:47] Haley: So they're

[00:48:47] Nathan: basically, everyone plays more of a manager role than a boots on the ground role. Mm. They might be managing agents. Like, you know, in the early days of Kit we had this period where we were scaling ridiculously probably from, I'd say July, 2015.

[00:49:03] I wanna say we were 10 KMRR. Mm-hmm. And by uh, January 1st we were a hundred KMRR. And so if you imagine 10 x in six months, it was insane. We were all just doing a huge amount of grunt work mm-hmm. To keep the business operating, you know, customer support tickets, bug fixes, all of that. And so all of that work.

[00:49:23] So a lot of our early hires were around that work.

[00:49:26] Haley: Mm-hmm. But

[00:49:26] Nathan: now you would say you're basically hiring the managers who would be doing that work, but they have to be very hands-on and scrappy. Right. That's something that I, I think people fall into two buckets of like, I want to create this outcome, but I don't wanna do the work, and so I'm going to build the team that will do it, or whatever else.

[00:49:44] And that was one old model. Mm-hmm. And then you got these other people who don't care at what level they are, they're just like, I'm going to create the outcome no matter what, like force of nature style.

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

[00:49:55] Nathan: And weirdly, you have to hire someone who's the, the blend of both of those where they have to think like a manager and act like an IC and, um, it's just, it's so, so important, especially in this new world.

[00:50:09] Haley: Yeah. Um, great answer. All right. Anique Singal, um, this is the final question, uh, for this episode. Curious about your biggest strategic mistake and what you learned? I love this question because I love failing that, not failing specifically, but you know, I just think there's so many lessons that come out of failure, and so I'm very excited about this one.

[00:50:32] And also sometimes in order to be wildly successful mm-hmm. You have to take big swings, uh, strategically, and sometimes they don't, they don't always hit. So I'm anxious to hear this one biggest strategic mistake and what you learned.

[00:50:46] Nathan: Okay. First one that came to mind is a product mistake of something that served us for a period of time and then didn't.

[00:50:54] Mm-hmm. After that. So in the early days of building kit, we did not have beautiful email templates.

[00:51:00] Haley: Mm.

[00:51:01] Nathan: And we learned that plain text emails, we ran the test actually performed better. Right. If you. Made an email that look looked like you just fired it off in Gmail.

[00:51:09] Haley: Mm-hmm. It would

[00:51:09] Nathan: get a better, um, click through rate and better engagement than the like, beautifully designed email template.

[00:51:15] And so I went and wrote blog posts about that and we made that like sort of a flag of mm-hmm. The product and it served us really well, I would say up until the maybe 200,000, 300,000 a month in revenue mark. Then we got other people who came in who said, great love what you're doing with the platform, the sequences, the automated, like, all of this is good, but I want beautiful email templates.

[00:51:35] And we were like, no, you don't want that. Mm-hmm. You want this instead. And you know, we're just like hammering them over the head with this. And so we didn't invest in our email editor for a long time mm-hmm. Because we had this like hard line stance even though the market was changing and we were going out to a broader group of people and I think around.

[00:51:54] 20 19, 20 20 that really left this market open for float desks to come in.

[00:51:59] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:00] Nathan: And to just say, look, this is the only problem we're going to solve. And we were just purely gonna do beautiful email templates. And they nailed it. And they built a great business off of that. And so I think even a few years later when we rebuilt our editor, we have the whole marketplace where you can, uh, mm-hmm.

[00:52:16] Buy and sell templates. There's free ones, there's paid ones, all of this. And the editor is very, very capable. Like some of those early, uh, impressions that people have about the product still stick around even though it's not true anymore. So what I would've done is, if I could do it all over again, is still have the same early strategy of find the things that are absolutely true and play to your strengths and double down on that.

[00:52:42] But then constantly evaluate or, you know, once a year, once every six months, evaluate, is this still serving us? Does this still match where the market is? And then instead of subtly changing mm-hmm. Like very deliberately changing and say, Hey, we're still the best at these plain, authentic emails. But we're also incredible at the mm-hmm.

[00:53:00] The, you know, the really visual templates.

[00:53:03] Haley: Yeah. Um, another one I'm thinking of, what about our, um, acquisition of Fan bridge?

[00:53:09] Nathan: Oh yeah.

[00:53:10] Haley: This is a good one because monetarily mm-hmm. It chalks out. Right? And it, we could say that it was a success, um, but I do think that it took away from certain focus, um, at the time.

[00:53:22] Curious on your thoughts.

[00:53:23] Nathan: Yeah. This is an interesting one. You have to rewind the clock to, I'm trying to think. It would be 20 18, 20 19, maybe 2020. Somewhere around that time we started to notice a trend that was happening where. We were getting pulled more and more into the direct response marketer group.

[00:53:42] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:42] Nathan: Basically what happened is we had a product that was amazing for making money.

[00:53:45] Haley: Mm-hmm. We had

[00:53:46] Nathan: killer deliverability, you know, we had these plain text emails mm-hmm. That converted really, really well. All the automations were great. And so this group of people who were amazing at making money on the internet started to say,

[00:53:57] Haley: oh,

[00:53:58] Nathan: go use kit.

[00:53:59] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:00] Nathan: And they often didn't have the best reputations. Like they weren't doing anything shady, but they were the ones where you sort of raise an eye. No, they were for

[00:54:06] Haley: sure doing shady things. Well, some of them, some of

[00:54:09] Nathan: them were. And you can get pulled in this direction. We saw it happen. Yeah. And this is actually, um, you know, I've had conversations with it, but like Alex Ozzi is all over the mm-hmm.

[00:54:21] Um, you know, social media conversations right now. 'cause he just did his huge book launch at the time that we're, we're recording this. And he's been promoting school as a platform. And I'm friends with Sam who runs school and friends with Alex. I just told them both directly, like, you guys have a huge reputation problem because as you've built this platform, you've done it with the Penny stock traders and the get rich quick on the internet people, and it's resulted in a ton of revenue.

[00:54:46] But if you don't very deliberately do something with this, the whole brand will pull there. And like the gravity of it will be so extreme, right. That you won't be able to recover from it. So we, I think, identified that problem early and said, okay, it's not just, we don't wanna like, just avoid more people like that.

[00:55:03] We have to actively pursue something else.

[00:55:05] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:06] Nathan: And so we went to, okay, what type of creators really inspire us? And we're like, well, musicians, you know, for a lot of the reasons mm-hmm. That we've already talked about. And so, all right, how do we get more musicians on the platform? We're going after it.

[00:55:17] And then there's an opportunity to buy Fan Bridge, which was a, a venture backed company that had grown like crazy and then stalled out and, and they were very focused on email marketing for musicians. And so we acquired the company, we integrated it. Uh, like migrated everybody over and, you know, pursued this whole mu music strategy.

[00:55:39] And it was interesting. 'cause on one hand it totally failed.

[00:55:42] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:42] Nathan: There were so many things. I mean, as you learned about music licensing Yeah. You know, as we did creative sessions, like in

[00:55:46] Haley: case anybody's wondering, music licensing is incredibly expensive. Yeah. Okay. Maintaining music licensing. Oh. Also, you know, why Lars is doing so well.

[00:55:56] That's why.

[00:55:58] Nathan: Yeah. So it was interesting, like if we were to go back and put retroactive success metrics

[00:56:04] Haley: mm-hmm.

[00:56:05] Nathan: On, on it. 'cause we, so the, I guess the first mistake is we didn't have clear success metrics for this push into music.

[00:56:11] Haley: Yeah.

[00:56:12] Nathan: We didn't know. We didn't know. So that was mistake number one. But if we put retroactive metrics on it, I think the, the original primary goal would be to.

[00:56:23] Expand our brand.

[00:56:25] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:25] Nathan: And I think we did that very, very well.

[00:56:27] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:27] Nathan: Like, you know, it was pretty early that we were like, we got Tim McGraw and then Mandy Moore, Leon, you know, like mm-hmm. We really latched onto a handful of these names. Mm-hmm. Drew Holcomb. Right. Matt Kearney. Mm-hmm. Um, and that helped us so much and we started to immediately pull out of like the area that we were getting pigeonholed into.

[00:56:47] Then the next goal would, was drive revenue.

[00:56:50] Haley: Mm-hmm. And

[00:56:50] Nathan: we were dead wrong about our ability to drive revenue wrong. Like it could not be more wrong because we were trying to convince people to use a product that they didn't want to use in a way that they didn't want to use it.

[00:57:05] Haley: Well, at the time, musicians primarily and only used email to essentially sell tickets.

[00:57:11] Nathan: Yeah. For tour.

[00:57:12] Haley: Yeah. For tour. And so it. Essentially that we were in an uphill battle. Mm-hmm. Trying to convince them why email was a valuable tool for storytelling and connection to their audience. Yeah. And they just weren't there yet.

[00:57:25] Nathan: And even the ones who got it, still

[00:57:28] Haley: didn't do it. Still didn't do it.

[00:57:28] And you know what's funny though, is how many musicians now do we have that are actually leveraging and using email? Because the narrative has changed a lot.

[00:57:38] Nathan: Well, like an, an interesting example would be, uh. Little John had a fan bridge account.

[00:57:44] Haley: Mm-hmm. And

[00:57:44] Nathan: that's where he ran his newsletter and did all of that.

[00:57:48] It was not very active and it was very transactional.

[00:57:49] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:50] Nathan: And I think somewhere in the process of migrating to Kit and all of that, he canceled it, didn't move forward with it. And then we had this whole roundabout thing where, uh, we made friends with this guy named Kabir, who showed up to Craft and Commerce.

[00:58:03] Mm-hmm. And he is like, I just wanna meet you guys.

[00:58:05] Haley: Also, Kabir is a musician himself. He has like 12 Grammys, right? Like, he, uh, I think it's like

[00:58:10] Nathan: 18.

[00:58:10] Haley: 18 Grammy, sorry, like 18. What he, what he

[00:58:13] Nathan: told me was, uh, if you remove the classical composers,

[00:58:16] Haley: yeah.

[00:58:17] Nathan: He's number four for most Grammys. Um, it's incredible.

[00:58:20] Haley: And he,

[00:58:21] Nathan: I hope I can say this, he said that, uh, Kanye was just ahead of him, but he is like, I don't think Kanye is winning any more Grammys.

[00:58:27] So he's moving up the innings. He just won two more Grammys this last year, so.

[00:58:32] Haley: Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing.

[00:58:33] Nathan: But Kabir came into our world and he's had the same vision. Uh, he's like. Musicians, they write lyrics, they're storytellers like, help me. Mm-hmm. Show all these people. And so then through that he started a conversation with Littlejohn again.

[00:58:48] And then Littlejohn ended up launching this great newsletter called Wellness Wednesdays, which is all about mindfulness and meditation and mm-hmm. Like, he's telling his stories and in his authentic voice. And so like a lot of these things came around full circle. So, okay. I guess going back to, uh, was this a strategic mistake?

[00:59:06] I think it was.

[00:59:08] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:09] Nathan: Because if we were to, the thing that we didn't understand is how hard it would be to have musicians as a core customer base, um, that we earned revenue from.

[00:59:21] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:21] Nathan: Which revenue is pretty important for operating our business.

[00:59:24] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:24] Nathan: And if we were saying, look, we only need musicians.

[00:59:29] Because we love them and because they'll do great things for our brand. We could have gone out and, and recruited 10 musicians the platform and given them the product for free. Right. And something else, right? Like spending ultimately millions of dollars to acquire a company and do all this other thing.

[00:59:44] Um, yeah,

[00:59:46] Haley: I think what, where we failed there is that we didn't, we tried, but I still don't think that we did enough education on the value of email within that mm-hmm. Specific cohort in niche, but, and I think that could have changed aggressively. I agree. But I don't

[00:59:59] Nathan: think you should be convincing people that they need your product.

[01:00:04] I don't think you should be convincing 'em that the pain point exists.

[01:00:06] Haley: Hmm.

[01:00:07] Nathan: I think they should feel the pain acutely. This goes back to the other questions around

[01:00:11] Haley: Yeah.

[01:00:11] Nathan: Um, niche selection and everything else. Like they have to already feel the pain. Yeah. And you have to be a solution. You can't come in and convince them or you shouldn't

[01:00:19] Haley: Yeah.

[01:00:20] Nathan: That they have this pain and

[01:00:21] Haley: Well, we talk about this though, right? Because with email and email right now is sexy. Okay, let's, it is, it is sexy. It's having its moment. It is having its moment.

[01:00:29] Nathan: Ask pretty much every celebrity right

[01:00:31] Haley: now, but I have this slide in, um, in a talk that I give, right? And there's always a moment where creators realize, oh crap, uh, I need email, right?

[01:00:41] I need a more direct relationship with my audience. And, um, I really want to figure out a way to tell people before they experience that problem, there is a way to do it. I, I, I haven't figured it out exactly yet. I mean, we will say on a percentage basis, maybe I'm successful 30% of the time, but I should be successful a hundred percent of the time because they always come back and they're like, it's like a, you are right.

[01:01:06] I told you so. You were right. You know? And one day we'll get there. One day we'll get there. But I mean, without a doubt, like that relationship, that one-on-one relationship mm-hmm. They always realize at some point in their creator career that they need it.

[01:01:21] Nathan: Yeah.

[01:01:21] Haley: Um, and so I really wanna figure it out. If you figure it out or you have some advice, let me know.

[01:01:26] Email us, you know, email, email us.

[01:01:28] Nathan: So going back to the question of the big mistakes. I think we could probably brainstorm a whole bunch more. Mm-hmm. And that might be a fun episode to do some, you know, like maybe when we hit a hundred million in revenue, we'll be like, the 10 biggest mistakes we made is gonna get to a hundred million in revenue Nathan made.

[01:01:42] Um, so the, the, it sounds like the win is ours and the mistakes are mine.

[01:01:48] Haley: Is that, that's exactly what a best leader, I mean, do we Hundred know, obviously, you know,

[01:01:54] Nathan: uh, but I think the, the things that we've done well in that process are owning the mistakes. Mm-hmm. And then learning from them. Like, I think as we've really, like within all of creators, we've focus a lot more on authors and, uh, not just because we think authors are amazing and we love them, but also because they're really good at running businesses.

[01:02:17] Mm-hmm. And so we're not having to convince them of the value of email and some of those things. And so, like in that niche selection within creators. We went to a group that already knows how to make money and already knows how to use email to do it.

[01:02:29] Haley: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:30] Nathan: And so I think we've done a good job of learning from a lot of these mistakes along the way.

[01:02:35] Haley: I love it. Well, I'm feeling like I just didn't have enough opportunity to rag on you with this episode.

[01:02:42] Nathan: You tried.

[01:02:42] Haley: I saw, I tried like

[01:02:43] Nathan: some good effort.

[01:02:44] Haley: Yeah. There was some, there was some fair effort, but I didn't, I'm feeling like I failed a little bit. You let down the fans. Yeah. I might have answered or asked a lot of really great questions, you know, from all of these folks, but I just, nobody teed me up except for Ryan.

[01:03:00] And it was just for, you know, me saying that I was the most important hire that you ever made, which certainly isn't true.

[01:03:07] Nathan: I mean,

[01:03:07] Haley: the, you know, we'll ignore the date on. I think you did a great job, Hailey. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Um, alright.

[01:03:17] Nathan: Kara, Kara from the producer seat says was a great episode. Yes. Yes.

[01:03:21] Kara, how would you rate this episode on a. Five, one to five scale.

[01:03:26] Kara: I

[01:03:26] have high standards, Nathan.

[01:03:27] Nathan: Okay. Okay. Oh god. High standards. Yeah. That's not a good leading indicator, the way that she just phrased that.

[01:03:32] No, I would say 3.5 to four.

[01:03:35] 3.5 to four. Okay. Okay.

[01:03:37] Haley: This is actually really good. Yeah. For a q and a episode.

[01:03:40] Nathan: I'm, it's good for any episode.

[01:03:42] Haley: Okay. Oh, okay. That's very high standards. Yeah. Um, I'm advocating that Kara come out. From behind the camera into, in front of the camera because she just hits, you know, she's spicy. You know, the, is, you'll know if

[01:03:57] Nathan: she's going to do this based on the fact, if she cuts this whole segment

[01:04:01] Haley: or if she lets the air.

[01:04:02] Yeah. No, and I,

[01:04:03] Kara: Hailey and I talked about it beforehand a little bit.

[01:04:05] Haley: Yeah. I, I'm advocating for it. So if you'd also like Oh yeah. To know more about Kara, the, the woman behind the show

[01:04:13] Nathan: who kinda lurks in the shadows in the studio,

[01:04:16] Haley: who also, um, I, I think I joked that I was the most powerful person on this, this, uh, whole podcast because I get to ask the hard hitting, creative questions.

[01:04:24] Yeah. But really, it's Kara, who has all the power are, are you gonna tell them we talked about me being a character? Oh yeah. I actually said, I said Raven's favorite. Yeah. I said, when are you gonna be a character? But I just said character and then Kara said, character Kara act. Couture. They hate it. They hate it.

[01:04:46] Nathan: I'm cringing so much. Uh

[01:04:48] Haley: uh. You love it.

[01:04:49] Nathan: Put it in the comments if you think that is the worst joke ever. Right.

[01:04:52] Haley: Wrap it. Okay. Okay. Sorry. We were told to wrap it up. Um, Nathan, I love your shirt. Thanks for matching with us. Uh, thanks for, there were so many good questions, but in all seriousness, um, these episodes are really fun because we get to dig into like, you know, just what really people wanna know from you.

[01:05:10] Yeah. And uh, I'm always surprised at some of the questions that come out. Everybody loves to know about what it's like to build a software company, a bootstrap software company, and some people wanna dig into those creator questions. But, uh, if you have questions. I ask them so I can hold all the power and true more questions.

[01:05:28] If you guys don't ask questions, then I can't come back.

[01:05:31] Nathan: Oh, that's what it is. Okay. If you don't ask good questions,

[01:05:34] Haley: then I can't come back.

[01:05:36] Nathan: Alright, sounds good. Alright, well thanks so much for listening and uh, we'll see you on the next episode. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Berry Show.

[01:05:46] Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. 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.