Transcript of Founder of Kit Reveals How to Make 7 Figures Off a Small Email List

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We're in this weird time on the internet where most platforms, if you drive traffic off platform, the platform penalizes you. Instagram cares about watch time, engagement, all that, but they, they care about comments at the moment. And so you have this weird flywheel where if you say comment guide to get, you know, this free thing, not only do you get to drive people to your email list, but it also boosts your reel.

I always say there's only 3 roles of content: content to grow your audience, content to build your brand, content to monetize. And I make sure every single day we have a very specific split. And I know if I do that, I can pretty much guarantee what my income looks like every single week.

This guy in the audience, uh, Dustin Rieckmann, who's been on my podcast, he's a good friend. He goes, oh man, I hope to get there someday. He makes well over $1 million a year off of a 3,000 subscriber email list.

What? You get to look behind the scenes at businesses in a way that Very few people get to do, which is cool. So I have a whole list of things that I wanna know. Think about a creator that you know that makes the most per subscriber.

Okay.

What are they doing that everyone else isn't?

I'm gonna get specific in numbers, which means that I can't share the name.

Great. Nathan, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me on.

Okay. I wanna start with something that I think's gonna be a little bit shocking.

Okay.

To my audience, you said that you feel like We should be making a dollar per month for every single email subscriber we have.

Yes.

I know hands down a lot of women in my audience are not. Can you say more about that? Do you really believe that?

I do.

Okay.

And I have the data to back it up.

Okay.

So running Kit, I get to have the behind the scenes look into over 100,000 creator businesses, you know, who use Kit actively every month. And so we get to see the revenue data, what they're bringing in, and the trends across industries. And I can tell you that, you know, tens of thousands of creators are like hitting and exceeding that metric of more than $1 per subscriber per month. Here's the thing that makes all the difference is you have to be selling products.

Okay.

And a lot of people, if they come purely from the influencer world or maybe the blogging world or something like that, and they're used to advertising and brand deals, then they're like, there's no way, the CPMs don't make sense. I can't, I can't hit that and I need to have a much bigger audience. And then you have the people who are selling digital products and maybe they have an upsell, a cross-sell, any of those things. And they're going, yeah, no, I'm hitting that pretty consistently. So that's the biggest thing is first you have to be selling, um, you have to be selling products yourself. And then the second thing is you have to have automation set up. Too many people are just relying on what did I pitch this week? Oh, my launch is next month. And you, you want to have those launches, but the automations timed to when someone joins your list means those sales are happening on autopilot. And with those 2 things, you can definitely hit and exceed $1 per month.

So tell me a bit more about Kit so that I understand exactly what you're seeing behind the scenes.

Yeah, so Kit is the email marketing platform for professional creators. And so we run the email lists for everyone from Uh, Jenna Kutcher to, uh, Tom Brady and James Clear and Mark Manson to, uh, Dua Lipa and Matthew McConaughey. So it's just across the board of a huge number of creators. And they range from someone who might just start out and have, um, you know, 1,000 subscribers and be growing. Uh, we have a free plan that's up to 10,000 subscribers, um, all the way up to the biggest email list in the world. So. I think James Clear holds that record at 4.5 million subscribers.

Wow.

And, uh, you know, and so it's just that whole scale, but basically email marketing for creators. And it's really the creators who want to make money, right? When you're looking at, should I use this platform or that platform? It's, these are the creators who mean business. They're serious about, hey, this is a venture that is here to make money. I'm serving my audience. I'm creating as much value as possible. And the byproduct of that is that I should make a lot of money. And so that's why we see such a high revenue per subscriber on Kit compared to other platforms.

So when you're seeing this revenue per subscriber, are people purchasing through Kit or do you just have clear attribution data and people can see it in the platform?

Uh, both. So like one of our things with Kit is that we want it to be the most integrated platform into your tech stack. And so we build integrations with everybody. Um, so whether that is Kajabi and Circle and Stripe and whoever else, Squarespace, you know, we just build as many integrations. And so you could either sell through Kit itself, or if another platform is a better fit, we probably have that like natively integrated.

Amazing.

And then all that revenue is tracked in one place. 'Cause the other thing that we care deeply about is you having access to all the data in the most open way. Like in the future, we can talk about AI and like how all of this is changing, but we want, you know, your AI tools to be able to tell you, hey, here's what's working, Here's what's not, whether you're selling on Kit or Shopify or Kajabi or anything else.

Yeah, I think that's really powerful. We use Hyros to track where our sales are coming from, but I actually already am feeling like I would like a separate dashboard to just see my email revenue because I know organically that is where the majority of my revenue comes from. I love social media, but I think social media is an amazing tool for building your list. Yes, we can monetize on there, but being able to build your list through social media and then monetize your email list, I think is the best way. I have a question for you on that because I was just talking before our friend Maria went. She keeps telling me, Natalie, you need to be emailing your list even more than you currently are. She is the queen of quantity.

Yes.

Do you have thoughts on email cadence?

Yeah. Okay. So first, Maria's amazing. I got to stop by her office yesterday and see her. So on email cadence, what really matters is you should set a bar for quality and then, and say, this is the quality I'm always going to hit. You want it where people open your emails and they're like, oh man, this is another killer email from Natalie. And then you want to set the quantity or the frequency that you can always hit that quality bar.

Hmm.

So I would rather set a high bar for quality and only email once a month. And people go, wow, every time Nathan emails, it's fantastic. Then say like a high bar for quantity and frequency and have people go like, ah, I can skip that email or that sort of thing. So first, obviously sending more emails is going to make more money so long as you can exceed a bar for quality. And so I would just say, hey, based on the amount of time that I have, how prolific of a writer I am, and the quality of my content, how frequently can I send? For some people that might only be once a month. For others that might be like once a week is most common. Just make sure you can hit that quality bar. For people like Maria, she's like, I can send every day and I know the stuff is, I'm putting out is great and I know that my fans are eating it up. And so it's basically like more is better so long as you personally can exceed your quality bar.

Do you think that there's a balance between value-driven emails without a call to action and then specific sales emails?

I think it's a bit of a false dichotomy. Like, there's definitely emails that are purely to make a sale, but I don't know, some of the best sales emails I've ever written provide a ton of value. And then, you know, there's other emails where you're like, look, I just want to tell you the story because it moved me and it matters to me and it might matter to you as well. And so I would think about delivering as much value as possible, but then also, you know what, like, my sales emails can deliver value as well. And so just think about what, what is the version of the sales email that would make me excited to read it even if I didn't end up buying it? And usually, like, humans are such social creatures. We learn through storytelling. And if you think back, back like thousands of years, like sitting around a campfire or that sort of thing, like, that's how we learn and we find out what's possible. And so those are often stories, testimonials. So like maybe your sales email. Is just talking about what a student went through and that, and if someone doesn't buy, they're still gonna like internalize some of that and go, oh, that could be me.

But also that's the best possible sales email 'cause they're saying, oh, if I buy this program like the student did, then that could be me. And so I just always think about what would, what emails would I be excited to read and how can I make it as valuable as possible? And then to never shy away from selling.

Okay.

Because that's the other mistake that people do is they say, I just have to overdeliver on value. And hey, I made this thing and they get in like this little timid, you know, timid voice. And if it's okay, maybe if you wanna buy it, you know, here's this thing. It's like, no, you made something you're proud of. Like talk about it, sell it and sell it proudly. Uh, cuz people can feel that.

And then when it comes to email list health,

mm-hmm,

do you have a general baseline for people in the a digital space that sell courses, coaching, digital products.

Yeah.

A general open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, things that you really wanna look at to make sure if you do up your cadence, you're not losing that.

Yeah. So everyone wants to compare to the industry or standards cuz we all wanna know how, how am I doing against everyone else? I think the best thing to do is just to compare against yourself in the past. It's sort of like going to the gym. Someone else is going to be able to exercise longer, lift more, run faster, whatever else it is. And comparison is kind of a losing game in that. But comparing to your previous progress, absolutely. Like, am I personally doing better or worse than before? That said, there are some metrics. Um, if we're talking open rate, I would look for, uh, anything above 40%. Um, I'm generally like, that's healthy. The larger the list gets, the, um, generally the lower the open rate is. So if someone's like, oh, I have a 90% open rate, and then you dig in and you're like, you have 84 subscribers. That makes sense, you know? Uh, and they're like, oh, I only have a 30% open rate. It's like, okay, you have 200,000 subscribers. So, you know, you're gonna see some fluctuation there. And then on click rate, it just really depends on the type of email.

You know, an email, some people might say, oh, I have a 0.3% click rate, that's bad. And And it's like, well, you're delivering a ton of value and all the value is in the email itself. Whereas someone else might send a super quick, hey Natalie, I just wrote this blog post I think you're gonna love, enjoy. Right? And it's like, oh, that has a 5% click rate. It's like, well yeah, all of the value is in that click. And so of course everyone's gonna do that. And so that's why the comparison in your own style against your past performance is what matters the most. And then you can spot trends because then if there's a deliverability issue or something else, it's like, oh, we were at 45% and then it dropped off. Um, and then you're like, this, it's probably not just a bad subject line or something else. It's like, ooh, my website team made a DNS change and they didn't tell me. And, you know, now somebody needs to jump in and fix this.

Do you have strong opinions on deleting people from your list when they haven't opened in a while?

Okay, so this has actually changed in the last little bit. Um, and this ties into the maximizing revenue per subscriber as well. So I do have strong opinions. The inbox providers, so this is like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, they will penalize you if you're sending a bunch of emails to cold people who are not opening. So it is really important. Like people will say like, oh, you should never clean your list because like they might open eventually. It's like, No, you should, because you're going to hurt your reputation long-term. And I don't know how much people want to nerd out on deliverability.

Oh, they do want to nerd out. Yes.

There was a lot of changes, particularly that Yahoo and Google made a couple years ago, where your reputation is based a lot on your domain reputation. And so what you individually matters a lot more than it used to. The provider still matters a bunch and it has to be properly configured, but your reputation personally matters. And so it's really important to keep a clean list. The nuance that I would add to that is I used to say like, okay, I have 50,000 subscribers, 10,000 are cold, delete them off. But you always wonder, ah, is there someone good in there that I could reactivate if I tried? And, but you, you don't know. And so we built this product called Subscriber Signals. And what it does is it takes your entire list and enriches them with demographic data, income data, gender, age, all of that. And what I think is most interesting is social data. And so we will tell you who the most influential people are on your list. And so what you might do is you're saying, oh, I'm going to delete these 10,000 cold subscribers because they haven't engaged in 6 months. And I want to improve my list health.

But here's 500 of them that all have over 10,000 followers on social media. Maybe I want to reengage those people. Maybe this person is actually like somewhat famous and I'd love to meet them and I can't believe they're on my list. And so let me go follow them on social media. This is something that I do. If there's people I'm like kind of sad, like, oh, they subscribed, but they don't actually read, I will go follow them on social media, engage with their content. And then I will see them start opening my emails.

Oh,

because, you know, they, they have tons of newsletters they're reading and all that. They're like, oh, I've read Nathan's once. It was good, you know, and all that. But then they're like, oh yeah, I've, you know, I saw Nathan post a comment here. And then the newsletter comes in and they jump in and they're like, oh great, let me read that. And, uh, so it totally changes how list cleaning works.

Who have you found that was interesting that was reading your emails?

Okay, so when we were first building this product, I ran the early version on my list. So I have 50,000 subscribers and someone popped up who had 2.4 million followers on LinkedIn. And I was like, wait, who follows me that has 2.5 million LinkedIn followers? And I clicked in and it was Gretchen Rubin, who's one of my favorite authors.

Mine too.

Yeah, she's amazing. And, uh, what I was like, wait, Gretchen Rubin reads my newsletter? And if someone had said like, uh, you know, oh, are you, do you know Gretchen Rubin? I'd be like, yeah, as a fan in the audience when she's speaking to 5,000 other people. And we had met once before on a group Zoom call with like 12 other authors, you know, I wouldn't have guessed she knew my name. And, uh, but I saw that she was on my list and I clicked in and I could see, oh, she's not only on the list, but she reads like not every newsletter, but Quite a few. And I was going to be in New York, uh, in 2 weeks. And so I emailed her and I was like, hey Gretchen, I'm coming to New York. Um, just wanted to reach out and I'd love to get lunch if you're up for it. And she just replied and said, yeah, I'd love to. I read your newsletter. It's great. And it was one of those things where, you know, part of me is like, you read my newsletter? I had no idea, you know, but I had this data.

So I was like, oh no, that's, that's how I know. And we emailed back and forth a little bit. She's like, could I invite my friend Susan Cain? She'd also love to meet you. And I'm like, yes. Um, and so we had this really lovely lunch and it never would have happened because the thing that I didn't know is that Gretchen was on my newsletter for 3 years before I found her. And so if you think about like 50,000 people, uh, or 50,000 email addresses, you're not going to scroll through, you know, whoever237@yahoo.com, or you're never going to look through who that is. But like 50,000 people is like a Taylor Swift concert level stadium, you know? So there's probably some interesting people in there. And so we built this product that just filters it based on that. And so we've had creators on Kit who have found CEOs, NBA players, like all these people who regularly read and engage with their content, and they had no idea. So now it's how they're booking their next podcast guests. It's how they're, they are booking like speaking gigs or bulk book buys. Because they're finding, oh, this person who runs, you know, corporate education for Adobe reads my newsletter.

You know, all of these different things. They're finding, um, podcasts to go on, newsletter swaps to do, all of that, because it's just finding all of the gold in their email list and bringing these people right to the top.

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And so coming back to the unsub— the, the people that aren't engaged, would you recommend if they haven't opened within 90 days, you kind of exclude them, or would you say longer, shorter?

I go longer than that.

Okay.

Um, I'd say like 4 to 6 months.

Okay.

Because, uh, If you're doing that on a consistent basis, you're keeping your list clean. I would say if you, certain traffic sources are gonna have lower engagement. You know, you're just gonna see organic, someone like followed you on social for 6 months and then they opted in, like they're a fan versus, you know, paid ads from Meta. They didn't know who you were 30 seconds ago. They're like, yeah, this seems mildly interesting. And so I will tend to clean people off the list faster if they come from a colder source. Um, and then I clean them off slower, uh, otherwise. But it's also meant that like I can spend more money now on Meta ads, on paid recommendations, um, doing more newsletter swaps with people because if someone interesting comes in through that, Kit is going to bring them right to the top for me. And so I can see, hey, in the last 30 days, who are the most influential people that subscribed? And I'll just send them an email or follow them on social or start like an organic connection. Because I don't just want to broadcast one-to-many. Like, I want to become friends with these people.

That's so smart. That's such an interesting take. I've just never heard that before.

If I can jump in, part of it is if you obsess over certain metrics, then these things become obvious. Like, I had never heard of this before. we just obsessed over revenue per subscriber, which is what you started with. Like, okay, how could you maximize revenue per subscriber? And we've already— we've dialed in our funnels, our copywriting, our ads, all of this, like everything that professionals like you and I do, it's dialed in. And so it's like, okay, well, are all subscribers equal? Obviously not. But how do we know? And so then we realized like, oh, If Kit could tell me when a CEO joins my list and I could talk to them differently and get them into my executive coaching program that I'm selling, or an agency owner or any of these things, then obviously I would handle that differently. And so now you have the subscribers who are buying digital products and they're worth, you know, a dollar per month or like that's averaging out. And then you have these like flagship subscribers who they make sense for a high-ticket offer. You know, they're buying a mastermind for $10,000. They're all this and they're just popping right to the top.

And so, you know, it could be that 10 subscribers a month, because they're worth thousands of dollars, are dragging your average up substantially. And before you were just treating them exactly the same as the person with 500 followers who came in from a Meta ad.

Yeah, it's definitely interesting to me. One really specific question I have, so A lot of my audience listening are on Kajabi. Mm-hmm. I have been talking about Kajabi for many years. Yeah. And a lot of us are in that ecosystem.

I was at the Kajabi office 45 minutes ago.

Yeah. So I was hearing you have an integration with Kajabi. So I have a question for you because I currently use Kajabi and Beehive. Now I'm tempted to move to Kit, and I've talked about those 2 platforms a lot, but what I don't love is they don't speak to each other.

Right.

So I can go into Kajabi and one thing I have my clients do a lot is go and look at your most profitable subscribers. Yeah. And it's in Kajabi. But then if I have to create my own segments in Beehive, so let's say I was to move to Kit.

Yeah.

But I have all my revenue per subscriber inside of Kajabi. Will that historically link up or will I be starting fresh in Kit to start learning that?

Yeah, so Kit tracks all of your revenue and, and purchases no matter where they happen because that's such a key point of data for segmenting and whatever else, right? If you want to launch a mastermind, then you're going to bring it up first to the people who have already spent thousands of dollars with you. And so all of that is pushed in from Kajabi or anywhere else that you sell products. Um, and then you can segment and filter based off of that. And so you could make a segment in Kit that said, show me the people who have paid me at least $5,000, uh, and have at least 10,000 subscribers and are based in the United States. Right? Or show me the people. Let me give you a very specific example. Let's say we're running a course, um, and it's, it's a cohort-based course. And so it's, uh, let's say $2,000, right? It's more expensive. And so there's a lot of people in my audience who can't actually afford it. And so Maria says, send more emails. And so we're going to send more emails, uh, as we should. And, but we're getting down to the tail end of the launch and we're like, okay, should I send this last email?

I've got people who have expressed interest, they've clicked the links and all that, but maybe one more email is too much. So let me filter down just to the people who have clicked and engaged in all the launch data and have either at least 10,000 followers or the demographic data that Kit has stored shows they have an income of at least $100,000. And now I can push harder because I get, I have confidence that, oh, you can actually afford this. And I'm not telling someone to buy a $2,000 course who makes $25,000 a year,

right?

Because they shouldn't do that. And so you can, you can sell with confidence because you can sell to exactly the right people.

And so what if I sign up to Kit now and all of my sales are historically in Kajabi? Would Kit pull all that?

Yep.

Okay, I'm signing up. Great. I'm gonna put all the links below.

We'll also do the, uh, migration for you entirely for free.

Great. Okay. We're probably all running over to sign up. I'll put all the links below. Um, I think we're all sold. So there's something specifically we're talking about here, maximizing revenue per subscriber.

Yeah.

I love this conversation because it is such a big needle mover in their business. And for anyone listening who is maybe wanting to grow their revenue in the next 30 days, I would almost guarantee you will make more money by focusing on your email list than trying to get more followers on social media. I love both.

Yeah.

But if you are just going after revenue, I think email list is where it's at. And so I wanna talk about that. And there's one thing that you talk about, which I'm sure is relevant. You talk about the creator flywheel.

Mm-hmm.

Versus traditional funnels. Does that play into maximizing revenue?

Yeah, I mean, I'm obsessed with a couple of things. Okay. Uh, building audiences, business systems, those would be flywheels. And then how do you make the most money with the least amount of effort? And so that brought me to an obsession with flywheels. So I don't know, have you ever read the book, uh, Good to Great?

Yes.

By Jim Collins? So he talks about how all these, what he considers truly great companies, all have a flywheel behind them. And it's one of those things, he talks about it a bit in the book. He has a little additional chapter book that you can buy, but there wasn't enough information. And so I just dove in and I was like, okay, I'm going to be obsessed with what makes a flywheel. And I, I like to contrast a, like a hand pump and a flywheel because it's sort of the 2 systems. And the way the hand pump is a direct correlation, you know, we imagine, I don't know, we're out on a camping trip or something and, you know, we're using this hand pump to, uh, to get water. Um, that's this like linear up and down motion. The moment I stop pumping, I immediately stop getting water. Whereas a flywheel is this like continuous circular motion. It feeds into itself. And it does require effort, but it's going to, um, get easier with time. And so this is something that works in real life physics. Like I've actually installed a flywheel on top of a pump and used it myself.

Um, and so you're like, okay, how can I design a system that recreates, like recreates this? And so it has to actually close the loop and it has to come back around. So an example of this. is Sahil Bloom, uh, had it, he built his newsletter to 100,000 subscribers on Substack. And then he switched over to Kit. And we're like, okay, let's, let's design the best system for you to grow as fast as possible. And his goal was to have 1 million subscribers by the time his book came out. And, uh, the spoiler alert, we didn't hit the goal. We only hit 830,000.

Oh, only.

Poor guy. If you're okay hitting like 83% of your goal, this story is for you. If you're like an achiever, like pass on that. But we were thinking, how can we make a system that accelerates? And so what we did is we, we said, okay, we need everything. Instead of being one-off effort, we need to close the loop at the end. And so what we said is like, okay, we're going to have a world-class newsletter. Like the content is the most important thing because that's when it was going to keep people engaged. We're going to sell advertising in that newsletter. Uh, and the newsletter is going to go out twice a week because that's double the advertising inventory. Then we're going to take all of the money we make from that. I say we, I just, cause I helped design it. This is all him implementing it. Um, that's going to be reinvested into, uh, paid growth on, uh, Meta ads and then through SparkLoop, which is a business all around like paying other creators to recommend you. Um, and that's going to grow the newsletter faster. And so what happens is there's basically 3 laws to a flywheel.

You want continuous momentum. Like every step has to flow smoothly into the next. Uh, it has to get easier with every rotation and it has to produce more with every rotation. And so in this flywheel, the more, the more subscribers Sahil has, the more he can charge. Newsletter sponsorships, the more money he makes, the more subscribers he can buy through Meta ads and paid recommendations, which means the more subscribers he has, the more he can charge and on from there. So an early rotation of this flywheel was producing a few thousand subscribers a week, right? Or actually a few thousand a month because he only had thousands of dollars to spend. But then as the newsletter grew from 100,000 to 200,000 to 500,000, we can charge way more for sponsorships. And that gives him way more money to reinvest, which makes it grow much faster. And so because he had this like closed loop that he was just, he didn't need to take out any profits. He was making, you know, paying his mortgage from other sources. He could just pour money into this and it gave him the exact same tasks to do every single week.

And not only did he make more money to grow faster, but he also could see like, okay, how can I reduce friction? How can I make this easier in these little steps? Um, and around from there. And so that's what I look for in every business is like, how can I design a flywheel where I can just do the same things over and over again and get better results and have them be easier?

I love this so much. I frame it to my audience around social media like an exchange rate. If you post X amount of times, what does that generate for you? You have to have some kind of formula of this many posts to grow your audience, this many posts to monetize, this many posts to build that know, like, and trust factor. And you have to stick with it if you want to then see the consistent output. But I think it's so easy to post sporadically as a creator founder because you might not have the team, you might not have the data behind it to say this works, this doesn't. So for a beginner who's listening and knows they need to up their game when it comes to flywheel and getting more consistent, where could they begin mapping this out?

Yeah, I would pick one goal that's most important that you're focused on and say, hey, I'm going to do this for even just 30 days and say, this is the thing, I'm going to post every single day and every second or third post is going to have a ManyChat automation to send people to my email list. Because that's a mini flywheel in itself. Like, we're in this weird time on the internet where most platforms if you drive traffic off platform, the platform penalizes you. Like YouTube cares about watch time. And so if you link people like, go do this other thing, YouTube's like, well, that decreased watch time, so let's not push the video more. Instagram cares about watch time, engagement, all that, but they care about comments at the moment. And so you have this weird flywheel where if you say comment guide to get, you know, this free thing, not only do you get to drive people to your email list, but it also boosts your reel. Right. I bet if you and I picked, pulled up a random, uh, Instagram profile, say they had 50,000 followers and their average reel is getting 5,000 views, and we scrolled through and one of them did 250,000 views, I would bet you that had a ManyChat automation on it.

100%. Yeah.

And so you're like, wait, you're getting rewarded for growing your email list here? Like, that's definitely a flywheel. And so I would say, you know, this is my one goal. I'm trying to grow my, uh, grow my newsletter. And this is the way that I'm doing it, and I'm just tracking it every single week. And so 2 other details that I always add. One is I always run the flywheel from my calendar, meaning that if I have 5 steps to my flywheel, you know, it's like, uh, ideating content, uh, posting, you know, like ideating, creating it, you know, actually posting it, that sort of thing. Those are always blocks in my calendar every week. And then I always have a block at the end of that week. It might be 15 minutes to just analyze the flywheel.

Mm-hmm.

And to ask questions like, okay, where did I feel the most friction? What could I change next week in order to reduce that friction? You know, I ran out of ideas. Okay, well, how could I make my, my flywheel produce more ideas? So maybe I ask my subscribers, hey, what's your biggest struggle in your business right now? And have that in an email automation, right? Like, just hit reply and let me know. And they say, oh, I'm really struck— stuck on Like, how do I get my first clients or all that? Okay, well, now you're just going to get all these replies of like, hey, would you make this content for me, please? And so you're like, okay, great. Ideas are no longer the problem. And so when I have this like end of the week Friday, it's basically like check my numbers, check the friction, see where I can improve my flywheel. Then you end up getting these great results because the last thing that it does is probably the most magical in business, and that's that it forces you to do the same things over and over again for a long period of time.

Charlie Munger has this, this line where he says, uh, the first rule of compounding is to not interrupt it prematurely.

Oh yeah.

And as creators, we like understand compound growth because we see our friends do it and we, we know if you're making $100,000 a year in as an accountant and you're like, next year I'm gonna make $500,000, we'd be like, yeah, BS. Like it's not gonna happen. But as a creator, we'd be like, Yeah, there's probably 10 different ways that you could 5x your revenue next year because we have access to insane leverage and compounding. But the thing we do as creators is we listen to podcasts like this and we're like, oh, now I have to implement this strategy, and we jump like squirrels from thing to thing to thing. And so the reason I love the flywheel is it makes you do the same thing over and over again so compounding actually has time to kick in.

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And distraction is actually the worst one.

It's so easy to get distracted though, and then you get distracted, so your results plummet, and then you're discouraged, and then you're just stuck in this cycle of Nothing's working. So you're trying so many different things and it, it's hard.

This is something that I've heard you talk about of like really encouraging people to stay focused on one offer instead of, you know, here's my 5 different offers and then I'm gonna launch this and I'm gonna that. It's like, no, no, no, just stay focused and do it for a long time.

Yep. I'm such a big believer. Stay focused on one specific thing and sell that one thing over and over and over again. We think people need fresh and new all the time, but we don't often give ourselves a chance to succeed. Same with social media, same with email list. We do not give ourselves a chance to succeed because we're onto the next. Oh, this made a few sales. Now it's time for the next thing. Well, what if we give this a chance to succeed? I've had one of my digital products for 12 years now and I still love it and it's, I'm still selling it and it works.

You know what? So I just talking to the founders of Kajabi, um, I asked them, hey, what are you most working on? What are you most excited about? And they're like, you know what we're doing? We're making the core of our product work really, really well. And they're just like, we're just focused on the fundamentals, the user experience. We're signing up for our own product. We're on calls with customers. Right. And that's the same approach that Kit is doing. And we used to chase like the shiny new thing.

Yeah.

And it's just like, no, what's working and do more of that. As we're talking about flywheels, I'm really curious, is there a flywheel that comes to mind in your business where you're like, oh, this is a flywheel and something that we're doing repeatedly?

Yeah. Social media is our biggest flywheel and that's the thing that drives the most growth across the board for us. So We post a very specific amount every single day without skipping. And I always say there's only 3 roles of content: content to grow your audience, content to build your brand, content to monetize. And I make sure every single day we have a very specific split. And I know if I do that, I can pretty much guarantee what my income looks like every single week. And listen, it fluctuates. Some posts will do well, some posts will flop. But if you're consistent with it,

right,

it evens out.

Yeah.

And we have a formula and we rinse and repeat the formula. And I don't get distracted by the trends and what other people are doing and the font that people are using. I stick with my content,

right?

The proven formats. And I do it day in, day out, day in, day out. That's our biggest flywheel. And then when it comes to email, we have one-ish. It mainly runs on a launch model right now and we have a newsletter. I think we could dial it in even further to reflect more of the social media one we have. But for me, social media, it does everything. It grows my list. It builds the trust I have with my audience and it monetizes because every ManyChat comment to a free thing, often not every single one, but 20% of them lead to sales.

Right.

And every single one of them leads to an email subscriber. So it's growing like that. And it just unlocks a lot of scale for us because I think about, okay, if we want to make more money, Here's our levers. We know what levers to pull. And for a lot of people in business, when I think, if I say, okay, could you double your income next year? If you are very confused what that would look like, most of the time there isn't a rhythm there.

Yeah.

Another reason I love the way you are describing it rhythmically, putting things on your calendar, is because it shows you very easily what you can delegate.

Right.

If you are running this exact same rhythm week in, week out for months, and it's really working, Well, why don't we take one calendar block and give it to somebody else? And then it frees you up to strategize, how could I double this? How could I? And I think that's our role as founders to just continually promote ourselves. And I'm sure you have opinions on what to delegate when it comes to content. You know, I, I, I've never delegated out my newsletter. I like to write my newsletter. I like to be very involved there. And I think there are some things we can delegate, some things we should keep ourselves, but having that rhythmic block on your calendar. Is very much opening up the job description for the next person you need to hire.

Yeah. And that next person right now might be AI, right? And being as clear as possible on that makes, makes a huge difference.

So in this age of AI, I'm curious to talk about some changes that you might be seeing, cuz I'm seeing a lot of changes. The first question I wanna ask you is, in this age of information being available everywhere, are lead magnets dead?

That's a good question. I think lead magnets have just shifted. So, you know, everyone likes to say this new model came out and then just fill in the blank is now dead. Right. And that's a clickbait headline that will probably get 100,000 views on YouTube. And so people use it over and over again. I think the industry is actually shifting more slowly than we think, and it's just lead magnets have changed. And so people often want a task done for them rather than just the information. So if your lead magnet is just something that I could ask ChatGPT for that information, then yes, it's probably dead. But a lead magnet that performs really, really well now is, hey, I made this Claude skill and someone's like, ooh, I can just do that and apply it to my business. Great. And those lead magnets crush. Or anything that feels like it comes from a point of view that I couldn't just get from my $20 Claude account. Like, it's like, no, no, I don't want an aggregate summary of all the information in the entire world about this thing. I want Natalie's take on it.

Yes.

Right. That's going to do really well. There's a phrase that I love is the best way to be interesting online is to do interesting things offline. And so that's like, go live an interesting life because we don't just— we don't follow you for like a set of facts about how to run a business. Like, no, I— it's for who you are and the type of life you're living and, you know, and all of that and how we connect and everything. And so it's like dial that side of it up. And so I think that's true in, in lead magnets where the 2 things I would dial up are how much more of this can you do for me instead of just giving me the information? And then the second thing is how can I add much more personal connection and storytelling where someone will see themselves in the story that I'm saying and go, oh, I could do that too.

I really agree. I think in this age of AI, we are moving away from the expertise and into the experience. So we can get expertise from Claude, from chat. We can have it aggregate the best thinkers in the world on fitness, health, whatever. But if we are learning from someone who can tell a story that we can see ourselves in and we're moved by that, we're way more likely to buy. And yes, they can sum up the information, but we're not buying from them because they're the biggest fountain of knowledge, but maybe they understand us more.

Yeah. And I think that there's so many things that people are saying are dead. You know, someone will say courses are dead. It's like, okay, tell that to Sam Vander Wieland, who just did a $500,000 launch to a good size but not huge audience right after she just did a $300,000 launch. Like, courses aren't dead for her. Go tell Maria Wendt that courses are dead. She's like, really? Shoot, I didn't, I didn't know.

I didn't get the memo about that.

Nobody told me. And so it's like, yeah, if you're doing the same thing over and over again and you're doing it in the exact same way and you're not learning and you're not iterating, then like, Yeah, it's going to die. Like, that's just, that is the nature of the world. Things, things decay. But if you're innovating and all of that, you're building a deep personal connection, you're bringing in lots of new people to your audience. Like, I think we see, we all feel like we're behind because we see like the absolute cutting edge. We're like, I'm only doing 10% of that. I must be so far behind. And we forget that our audiences are doing 10% of what we're doing. And you have to meet people where they're at. It's not about like, I have these crazy agents doing everything and someone's like, I can't even, you know, I just wanna know how to use a Claude skill, you know?

Yeah.

Help get me that outcome.

I completely agree. Um, what I will say I've found really fun with the lead magnets is creating tools on Replit too. So calculators, things that are interactive. I actually did it with my book, which has been so fun. So when people are in the book, they can scan a QR code and they, they go to an AI platform and it asks them a bunch of questions about their business. And then it tailors, um, a platform to them of the chapters they should read the most, the PDFs that they would find most useful. There's, uh, an AI version of me they can chat to, and it just brings to life the book versus here's a bunch of templates to go alongside it. And so I don't think it's dying. I think it's just, okay, how can we just make this easier? How can we make it more interactive? Hyper-personalization is possible in a way that just wasn't a few years ago.

Yeah. And so if you think about a spectrum between just providing information and fully creating the outcome for you, the— to be interesting and to stand out in any kind of content, you— we've just moved further down that spectrum. And so the course, you know, or something of like, hey, here's how to calculate these numbers in your business. Okay, we're all the way over here, right? And then saying, just click this link and go to this calculator. Like, now we're halfway, like, The calculator is not creating the revenue for you, but it's showing you exactly the metrics, um, and, and all of that. And so I'm a huge fan of tools like Replit. Uh, I actually use Replit pretty much every day.

Yeah.

Because you can just say, oh, this was a spreadsheet, it should be software. And you can spin that up and launch it. They used to cost tens of thousands of dollars just to pay engineers to do. And now it costs like $150 and some credits.

It's the best. Okay. Some questions that I have for you.

Yeah.

That I feel like only you can answer. Okay. That I'm very, very excited to get into. So you get to look behind the scenes at businesses in a way that very few people get to do, which is cool. So I have a whole list of things that I wanna know. So think about a creator that you know that makes the most per subscriber.

Okay.

What are they doing that everyone else isn't?

I'm going to get specific in numbers, which means that I can't share the name. Great. I can always do 2 things. I can share the numbers.

I'm great with anonymous. I just want to know the spicy stuff.

Yeah. So the things that they're doing, they're probably $2,000 to $3,000 per subscriber per month.

Amazing.

And it's a good-sized list. So this is like a 50,000, 60,000 subscriber list. So, you know, we're well over $1 million a year in revenue. And the things they're doing is They obsess over automations. Um, have you ever read the book, uh, The E-Myth?

Yes, that was one of my first business books.

Oh yeah.

The best.

It's so good. The thing that, uh, Michael, the author, really stresses is like, when are you working in your business versus on your business? Writing your broadcast for that week to go out for the newsletter, that's working in your business. Tweaking your automations so that they're a little better, the CTAs are better, you know, it segments all, that's working on your business. Because it's dialed in and it keeps working for you. You know, you step out to, um, take vacation with your family, to raise a baby, any of those things, like, it still, it still works. So they're, they're obsessed with, uh, automation. And so they just have a very high revenue per subscriber on the front end. The second thing is that allows them to spend way more money on ads. Can I, why can I spend more money on ads than someone else? It's like, okay, well, it's because I make more on the backend. I used to see this in, um, like the website hosting space, like Bluehost and all these others. You'd see them pay like huge commissions upfront, uh, for affiliates. You're like, how can they afford that? You realize it's because their backend funnel is so good and they have the cash that they can front it.

They're not wasting money. It's just they make more per subscriber or, uh, or, or per customer. And so if you dial in your automations and, you know, your sales funnel, then that means you can outbid all of your competitors on ads, which means you get the top rankings, whether that's in Google or Meta or wherever else, which means you get way more impressions. And so this is a flywheel, um, that goes up from there. So they, they obsess over automation, uh, they obsess over their earnings per subscriber. And then the other thing is they pull out a small number of those subscribers and, uh, sell them a very high ticket. I think in the case of this creator, they have an agency that they run that provides a service that all creators use. Um, I'm gonna make it a little more generic. Let's say that it could be, uh, like bookkeeping, newsletter growth, any of those things that like everyone's paying for. Mm-hmm. And what that means is that they're able to make thousands of dollars per month from these people 'cause they're providing services. And so you have the front end of the funnel that works really well.

They can spend a bunch on ads. And then because on this back end, you're getting to the point where, you know, if customers are paying, in this case, of the product, I'm thinking of $2,500 to $5,000 per month for a recurring service that provides real value that they were paying a generic provider for before. Now they're paying a creator specialist provider. Then it just, it works really well. And the revenue per subscriber is pretty insane.

Love. Okay. Smallest list you've seen making serious money. How small and how?

I hosted this mastermind at Craft and Commerce, which is our annual event. And, uh, someone asked me one of these data questions of like, hey, what's kind of the tipping point when you see someone be able to like run a, like when you have confidence that they're going to be a professional creator, they're going to make it as a creator. And it's really in this like 3,000 to 5,000 subscribers mark. If you get to that, you can typically make enough money to allocate enough time to compound from there. If it takes you years and years to get to 3,000 subscribers, like you're probably gonna stall out. And, uh, this guy in the audience, uh, Dustin Riekman, who's been on my podcast, he's a good friend. He goes, oh man, I hope to get there someday. And he's joking, right? He's in this mastermind that like James Clear is speaking at. Like it's all these, you know, and he's joking because he makes well over a million dollars a year. off of a 3,000 subscriber email list.

What?

And so we're teasing him like, yeah, Dustin, someday, someday you'll make it. Like, we believe in you. Like, you'll get there. And, um, so what he does, uh, his business is called 7 Figure Leap and he teaches, uh, business owners how to successfully guest post on, uh, or sorry, uh, be podcast guests, how to get booked for, how to make the most out of that for your business, all of that. Because you have these people who maybe have their own high-ticket offer, their own agency. Like, being on podcasts is an insane way to grow your business, but like, who teaches that? So he has a $10,000 accelerator program where he teaches people here's exactly how to do it. He takes them through it in 90 days. And then I think his mastermind on the back end is somewhere between $500 and $1,000 a month. And he both does virtual calls twice a year. He brings people in person for the mastermind. He like pours deeply into these people. And when he was a guest on my podcast, he taught his whole methodology. Uh, and then of course people were like, oh, I want to work with him.

And so he sold over $200,000 worth of, you know, coaching accelerator slots just from being a guest on my podcast.

Wow.

And his email list is yet to break 3,000 subscribers. And, uh, you know, we're still rooting for him. We think we'll—

He'll make it one day.

He'll make it one day. You know, and I wouldn't be surprised if my numbers are a little out of date and he's like getting right up to $2 million a year off of a very small email list.

I love talking about this stuff because I think people have in their head you have to have this huge audience to make money. So interesting because recently I polled 19,777 people to find out their average social following and how much they make. And what I found was of people making between $10,000 and $25,000 a month, their median social following was 6,000.

Okay. Wow.

And so I— that dispels the myth that if you wanna make 6, multiple 6 figures, you need hundreds of thousands of followers. You don't. But just the perfect example, that is be known for one thing, own one thing, have an offer that crushes, demonstrate your offer. It's just like doing all the things that we all know works.

So in that, um, there's an idea that I talk about of the difference between an audience and a crowd. Because I think we say, oh, you have 10,000 people, like you have a killer audience. And, or you, or you have millions of people, like that's an incredible audience. And we actually saw this at one of the, I want to say it was, uh, at VidCon when they had, you know, all these YouTubers. This is years ago. And they saw like short form rising like crazy, like TikTok. And so they said, okay, when we have these top YouTubers in, there's lines out the door. Everyone, you know, the fans are there. thousands and thousands of fans waiting to meet, you know, the big YouTubers. We should bring in the TikTokers because they have audiences even way bigger. So they ran the same meet and greets and very few people showed up. And I was like, I don't understand the difference. Like, this person has a million subscribers and had a line out the door. This person has 10 million and there was like a couple dozen. And it points to this difference between an audience and a crowd.

And so a crowd is just attention from anyone. Right? It was like, oh, your TikTok dance video was funny. I laughed, but I don't empathize with you. I don't, you know, we don't have a relationship, but, but you made me laugh. Thanks. An audience is the right people paying attention. And so you see this with creators like, um, uh, Taki Moore, who has done, instead of going really broad with his social content, he makes it exactly like, what do my buyers care about? I don't care about views. I care about buyers. Alex Hormozi is doing the same thing where he has his main channel that has millions of followers, but he made a second channel that has way fewer views, but it's all about reaching his target demographic. He doesn't care about views over here. He cares about, okay, what do professional business owners who are looking to scale, what are the people who could spend $10,000 or $100,000 on a coaching session? What do they care about knowing? Let's make that content. And so I just always think about, okay, am I just chasing views or am I really trying to get the right people paying attention?

Because in Dustin's case, he has the purest audience ever where you're just like, he is known, as you said, he is known for one thing. He's very, very good at it. And so he might have, when he came on my podcast, maybe he only grew his email list by 100 people, but he made $200,000, you know? Mm-hmm. And that's only, That was only 20 sales of his program.

Yeah,

right. That's, that's not even that many, but it's, it's the power of an audience.

I really hope people rewind and listen to that again because it's so incredibly true. But I think there's something harder in that where we do live in a time where it feels like your social following reflects your worth,

right?

And we feel like, okay, if we don't have the followers, if we're not seen to be succeeding, then I won't be invited to the fancy rooms. I won't fill in the blank. And so, it's very interesting to acknowledge that and then come to the root of, well, what do I want? Do I wanna be in the fancy rooms but be broke? And I'm just kind of, you know, to make a point. Or do I actually wanna build a really amazing business and be willing to look like I don't have that many followers or I don't have that many clients, but on the back end be crushing it? Right. And I think often the people that are willing to not care about what people think and focus on their businesses, they're the ones winning.

The thing, when I find myself in like a business coaching scenario, the question I ask the most often is just, what are you optimizing for? And then they'll say like, oh, this, this, and this. And like, okay, but if you could just pick one, what would that be? And then they usually dial in a little more and they say, okay, and why? You just keep peeling back those layers. And then usually they say, oh, I want this amount of money so that I can feel financially free. I can no longer stress about this. This like burden that I've carried ever since childhood will no longer, but like be living over me. I can take care of the people that I want to the way that I want. I can spend my time the way that I want. And it's like, okay, cool. Well, now that we went through all of this to get to that, it's like, all right, well, let's solve backwards from there. How many, you know, how many people do you need to serve? What offer could you have? Okay. If we just did this one thing over and over again, would that get you there?

Yeah. And you usually end up with a business that doesn't look like this hamster wheel that all the creators are on and they're talking about burning out and getting the next brand deal and whatever else. And they're like, no, I actually, I genuinely love my life and the way I spend my time and I only do the things that I want to.

Yeah.

It's a totally different world.

It is. I built the former before building the latter. And I can tell you,

many of us have,

the latter is way more fulfilling.

Right.

It really is.

And it often just works way better without the same level of effort.

It does. And it's, that is, you know, we were talking earlier, you know, I, I was able to hit the New York Times list without burning out.

Right.

And that is because my business is structured around what I want. It's structured around my priorities. It's structured around intention versus what looks good. You know, what is gonna make my ego feel really good? All those things, my top line revenue, all of those things.

Mm-hmm.

On not moving the needle to how, what does my bottom line revenue look like? How am I spending my time? Am I really proud of what I'm building? When I structure things that way, I can often get to the goal cuz I like the fancy goal as much as anyone else, but I can get to the goal with way less effort. Instead of the 90 podcasts, I do the 9. Instead of 40-hour weeks, I could do 20. You can get there a lot faster if you cut the fat.

Yeah.

The shiny stuff. 100%. Okay, a couple more questions on this because I just am so curious. Yeah. Um, someone with a big list who was making a lot less than you think they could be making, what mistake are they often making?

They're usually just selling advertising and sponsorships instead of selling their own products. Um, or there's this idea, and I feel like authors are the worst at it, where they say, oh, the book is the only thing that I want to sell, and so I don't want to offer— I don't want to pitch anything to my list until the book comes out. And then I will have overdelivered on value so much that then people will go above and beyond to buy the book. I think that's true. That totally works. I think what's also true is people who buy from you like to buy more from you.

Yeah.

And so often you're missing the opportunity for people to raise their hands and say, hey, I'm a true fan. You have made an amazing impact on my life. tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunities and businesses, things I've made because of what you taught me, how you inspired me. And I would love to pay even a small amount of that back to you. And so it's not like, oh, because you charged me this $200 course, I'm no longer going to buy the $20 book. It's like, no, no, no. Like,

give me it all.

Give me, give me it all. I want more.

Yeah.

And so I just see so many people who, especially if they're more academic or they're really focused just on the writing, then they're, they're just not earning, uh, what they could. The other mistake that I see is people selling a whole bunch of different products, um, in a way that isn't coherent. They got inspired, they made a bunch of random courses or things like that, and there's just not a real product ladder between them, um, or there's like a bunch of very similar price points. I would just always encourage someone to like get out a blank piece of paper and just draw their funnel at the highest level. Okay, someone buys this, they should, here's the 3 ways they could come in, then they should go up this product ladder, they should buy these things. My best people should have bought this from me. Um, that kind of thing. And, and usually, like, I see a lot of businesses that are at this like $500,000 to $1 million, uh, number. And they're trying to get to, call it, $2 million to $5 million. And almost always they achieve that by simplifying.

Always. That was me for sure.

Which is counterintuitive.

Yeah.

I think of this as building skyscrapers versus strip malls. So if we imagine the creator business, you know, you come out with an offer and it does $250,000 and you're just like, this is insane. And let's pause for a moment because that is absolutely insane. Like my last job was making $63,000 a year as a software designer, and I was pretty happy with that. Uh, within a year of leaving that, I was making $250,000 a year as a course creator. Right. And like, it's insane. But so you have this $250,000 product that's brought in that much. You're like, okay, I want to make more. Let's make something else that I sell to the same audience. And so here's another offer that's either higher priced or adjacent, and that makes $100,000. Okay, now we're at $350,000. Here's another one that I could do, uh, high-ticket mastermind that makes $50,000 or $100,000. Now we're, you know, $450,000. And what you've kind of done is you've, you've built the suburban strip mall. You've got a Radio Shack. Is Radio Shack still around? I don't know. Um, but then there's a Subway next to it. Now, you know, the product that didn't work out is probably the vape shop that's there.

Yeah. You know, and you're like, okay, how do I keep doing this to get to $5 million a year in revenue? I was like, I'm sorry, but you're never going to get there. You might get to $500,000. You might even, if you kept doing it and you execute that really, really well, you might get to a million. But what is the one thing that you could do over and over again? And you could just, instead of going adjacent, you could just keep stacking floors and keep building. And so for me, I mean, I realized that I love software and I, you know, I was able to build Kit. And so I went from, you know, making a few hundred thousand dollars a year as a creator to now, you know, fast forward a decade later and Kit makes $55 million a year. Like, it is quite the skyscraper. And I've just seen that over and over again with creators where they focus on the same thing over and over again. I think Marie Forleo with B-School is a good example of like, she's been running B-School for a very long time and she keeps iterating on it and all of those things, but it makes millions and millions of dollars.

You know, and you see this where people say, hey, I found something that resonates. Well, actually what most people do is they say, I found something that resonates, and so now I'm gonna do this other thing. And you're like, well, hold on, what was the first, you know? And the people who really succeed say, I found something that resonates and I'm going to deeply invest in it and make it better and better, you know, over like for a long period of time.

I could not agree more. Anytime that I've made a big leap in revenue in my business, it was always from taking stuff away, not adding stuff. Every time. Because things work and you get distracted and you, you wanna do a good job. You wanna listen to your customers, you wanna build what they want, and before you know it, everything's messy. You don't know where to focus. You simplify again and you multiply. Okay. Speaking of books.

Yes.

You've got a book coming out.

I do.

Tell me about it.

Yeah, so it's called The Ladders of Wealth: How to Master the Skill of Making Money. So this is something that I am obsessed with. Uh, so I grew up in a family where money was very scarce. I always joke that I was born in a tiny house before tiny houses were cool. It was just like kind of a little, you know, 500 square foot house in the mountains. Um, and I just grew up thinking, like, I didn't understand why some people had money and some didn't. And it didn't make any sense to me. And it, I felt powerless and out of control. And when I was, I guess, coming out of high school, Uh, I heard Jason Fried talk about, uh, this idea that making money is a skill. And you wouldn't expect to sit down at the piano with no experience and like play a concerto, you know, or the drums or something like that. Like, that'd be ridiculous. You know, like, why aren't you good at this? Because you haven't practiced. You don't know the skills. And he just said like, making money is the same thing. And we're like, wait a second.

No one has ever told me that before. It's always been like, we'll get the right career, become a doctor and you'll make money. Do this. And that one mindset changed everything for me because I was like, wait a second, if this is true, then it is, you can just be deliberate about it. And you can say like, okay, what are the skills? For us to learn the piano, it's like, okay, well, I need to be able to read music. I need music theory. I need timing. I need finger position. Like, we could break it down to a bunch of component skills and we could learn them one by one and we could practice them every day. Okay, so in business, okay, I need to know how to create an offer. I need to know how to get customers. I need to learn copywriting. I need all of these things. And it's like, all right, there's a whole bunch of component skills. And I realized, okay, we can distill this down to a framework and we can teach people, no matter where you are in your career, these are the skills you need to learn next.

And this is how to get to the next stages. So it's the topic I'm most obsessed with. Because it's the book that I wanted to write for like 14-year-old me. You know, if I had that, then I wouldn't feel like, uh, you know, I was a burden on everyone else and there's no way that I'm going to be able to make money or my family's going to be, you know, it's just like, no, this is a learnable thing. And so, uh, yeah, the book is my huge passion project that I've worked on for the last, uh, I guess 5 years now.

I love this so much. And what's true is If you speak to anyone making really good money, they will agree with you.

Yeah.

But when you aren't making good money, it's so hard to believe that.

Right.

It's so, so hard to believe that it is a skill you are capable of learning. Right. Because we have so many stories we tell ourselves. And I know for me, before I was making money, I, I didn't believe it. And then I thought, you know what, I'm gonna humor these people. I'm gonna learn marketing. I'm just gonna see what happens. And it worked. And I see it all the time though, when you are in those earlier stages and you're throwing everything at the wall and it feels like the only way to make more money is just more time, more effort, working every God-given hour. And we all know that's not really the truth. Effort does not equal money all the time. So what would you say to that person who's listening? They're like, oh, I don't know that you could teach me to make money.

Well, it's the hardest thing because I remember listening to Chris Guillebeau. who's a content creator who's been around the space for a long time, and I learned a ton from him. And he had some blog post where he said, you know, it's easier to make more money than it is to cut expenses to build wealth.

Yes. Oh my goodness. I could screech this from the rooftops. Yes.

But I remember reading it. I did not have the reaction you had. I had the like, well, yeah, easy for you to say, Chris. Yeah. You have an audience, you have all of these things. And I was like, You know, it didn't land for me because similar to what you're saying, I was just like, I don't know how to do that. And so something that I've done is I tried to break it down into a framework. Because if you're trying to learn these like very advanced skills that someone on a podcast told you you should know, you're not going to apply them the right way. It's like at the piano, if someone's like, okay, let me teach you how to transpose this into a different key. And you're like, I don't know what keys are. You know, like. Define key. Yeah, exactly.

That's me.

And, um, what I did is I broke it down into 4 separate ladders. And so what those are is time for money. And those are, that's just the hourly or salary job. And then there's working for yourself. Then there's a productized service business. And then there's finally selling products. And the skills that you need are different on each one. And so people look at what you and I are doing now. We're selling product. We're very high up on the most difficult ladder. And so they're saying like, I can't do what they're doing. It's like, yeah, we've worked our way up to this point over time. We've learned a whole ton of skills. So there's, there's 2 things that really define the differences between the ladders. The first one is leverage. And so a product business has infinitely more leverage than me working my $5.25 an hour job at Wendy's, right? There's no leverage in that. And then the other thing is just the level of skills that we learn. And so on that very first ladder, you, you're just learning skills like how to do what you say you're going to do, how to show up on time, you know, uh, how to present yourself, like all of those basics.

Then on ladder 2, you're jumping over and you're like, okay, the first time I work for myself, there's a lot of things that are really hard. and so intimidating that now you and I would be like, that's easy. Like filing for an LLC, you'll come across this field.

That's a lot.

And it'll be like, oh, and they'll be like, oh great, and what's your registered agent? And you'll be like, what?

What does it mean?

What's a registered agent?

Yeah.

It just means an address where you can receive mail.

Yes.

You know, but it sounds so official.

It does.

Like someone else I have to pay. And so before you've learned that, it's incredibly hard. But if you can learn the skills on that ladder, right? Uh, how to invoice a client, how to land that first client, how to, Deliver the service there, then you can start to move up and then you get more leverage, right? Because the next bit of leverage that we're going to get is, uh, charging by the project instead of hourly. Because now in a small way, we've disconnected time and money. We just achieved a little bit of leverage. And then you add a team, that's leverage. Then on the next ladder, you know, if you're doing a productized service, we're adding recurring revenue, we're standardizing each component of this, and then just more and more leverage and learning new skills to do that. And then finally, when we're on the product ladder, then you're applying all this, right? You are making a sale without ever talking to a customer. We take that for granted. That is a skill. Processing credit cards, writing copy that someone will buy from, putting it all on a website, you know, driving traffic to it.

Like, that's a combination of a whole ton of— that is some very fancy piano work that's happening there. And so what we end up doing is, as a beginner, who's just now learning how to keep our promises and show up when we're supposed to and do it without outside accountability. We're like, you know what, I'm going to jump all the way up here. And it's like, you're probably going to fail because you're trying to jump 3 ladders at once. And so my whole goal is to just break this down into a simple process and say, look, this is how you do it iteratively, this is how you learn the skills, and this is how you systematically build leverage to the point where you can build really meaningful wealth.

This is going to be a very, very powerful book. I'm very excited. You're doing something really cool for listeners of this show too, aren't you? Can you tell them?

Yeah. So if you go to laddersofwealth.com/bossbabe, um, and you buy or preorder a physical copy of the book, because it has all these illustrations in it and I'm a visual learner, uh, then we'll give you the audiobook for free as well as the digital edition. So if you want to have it on your Kindle, listen to it on Audible, all of that. Uh, and the cool thing is, so the book comes out March 2nd. Um, this episode is airing well before that, and so you can actually get the audiobook well before it releases. So—

That's huge. Thank you for doing that.

I want people to build wealth. I want them to see— I know what it feels like to sit there and think, I'm never going to be able to make money, or making money is just about luck, and other people are lucky and I'm not. And that's just not the case. It's, it is a set of skills that you can learn. And my biggest hope for the world is that people will get to the point where they're like, oh, I learned these skills and I am in control of my money and I'm in control of my time. And then I will pass that down to even more people.

I couldn't agree more with this. And what I think's really cool is hopefully when someone pre-orders the book, they get the audiobook, they can listen right away. Maybe they, they Implement. They see themselves as ladder 2 right now. They implement and get to ladder 4. Cool. When the book arrives, you can move from 4 to 5. Like, you can already get ahead of it, which I think is really cool. So I'm gonna put all the links below. I'll also put links for Kit, cuz I think I'm gonna move over too. I'm convinced. Let's do it. Sounds incredible. Um, thank you so much for being so candid on this episode and just sharing so tactically. This was mind-blowing for me, so I already know it's been really valuable. And beyond the book, beyond Kit, where can everyone find you?

Yeah, so I write my newsletter at nathanbarry.com. I send it out every Tuesday. It's just about like how to build an audience and build wealth and whatever I find interesting. Um, so yeah, nathanbarry.com. And then I'm just @nathanbarry, and Barry's B-A-R-R-Y, uh, on all social channels.

Amazing. Thank you.

Thank you so much.