Nathan Barry Archive

Packy McCormick writes the popular newsletter Not Boring, which is all about strategy and investing, from big companies to small. Packy was the VP of experience at a company called Breather, but when he left that role to start another startup he ended up creating a blockbuster newsletter instead! Not Boring has grown to over 30,000 subscribers.Packy’s newsletter is generating fantastic revenue, and his business model is a little different from the paid subscriptions that are popular right now. He dives into all the specifics. If you’re curious just how much you can make from a 30,000-subscriber mailing list, don’t miss this episode!In additional to business models and why he chose his, Packy also talks about the tactics that worked to rapidly grow his newsletter past 30,000 subscribers, the difference between being a writer and being an investor, and more.Links & ResourcesProf. Scott Galloway: Overhauling TwitterBreather - Unique Meeting Rooms, Hourly Offices & WorkspacesDavid Perell - Write of PassageRoam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.Benedict EvansClubhouse: Drop-in audio chatPacky McCormick’s LinksNot Boring by Packy McCormickHome page: packy - Beacons mobile websiteTwitter: @packyMEpisode TranscriptPacky: [00:00:00] It is about sitting at your computer for hours and hours and hours every week. And making sure that you’re getting it right. And then you’re finding the right angle. Find something that you actually care about if you’re not interested by the things that you’re writing in. So you could probably bake it for a little while, but I think it really comes through when the writer is really interested in the things that they’re writing about.Nathan: [00:00:25] In today’s episode, I talked to Packy McCormick who writes a really popular newsletter, Not Boring. Packy was the VP of experience at a company called Breather. And then he left that role to start another startup and then decided to start a newsletter instead. And Not Boring has grown to over 30,000 subscribers.He’s got some pretty fantastic revenue. He dives into the specifics. So if you’re curious how much you can make off of a 30,000-subscriber mailing list, we talked about that. One of my favorite things is we get into business models. Paid subscription, is that best, or selling products or sponsorships?And so we dive in Packy shares why he chose the model that he did and why he thinks that’s the best for his audience. So it’s a really fun, wide ranging conversation. I think you’re going to enjoy it. Packy, welcome to the show. Packy: [00:01:12] Great to be here. Nathan: [00:01:13] Thanks for having me. So I want to just dive in and hear a little bit about what are your, some of your favorite things to write about?Packy: [00:01:19] Yeah. So my favorite things to write about, and I actually, it took me a while to kind of get back to my favorite things to write about. I was writing about community and sleep and like just kind of all over, just doing the, I think the normal early newsletter thing of like thinking that you’re a fantastic curator of the internet.And what I really loved writing about recently is as business strategy companies, big companies, small, and mixing that with finance, that’s taken a couple of years, but I think I’ve kind of hit this sweet spot where it’s a more fun approach to these topics that are kind of. Not super fun normally, which is business analysis and finance and the stock market.So I’m just trying to, you know, make it approachable, fun, and enjoyable while you’re learning something. Yeah. Nathan: [00:02:01] So what’s an example of one of those, of like a business strategy for a particular company that you’ve, you’ve enjoyed. Packy: [00:02:06] So I, this past week I wrote about Twitter, and, and wrote about, you know, how Twitter is this company that has been, you know, that I think a lot of us use and are on all the time, but it’s done.An absolutely horrendous job of monetizing. So talked about it through the lens of professor Scott Galloway wrote a piece. And so what was wrong with that piece? And then what I thought that Twitter should do and why I think that Twitter is actually undervalued and this idea of like, you know, once things start kind of changing for Twitter, there’s so much love for the company that I think people are just gonna pile into the stock.A lot of this is about being lucky. I wrote this on Monday, they reported earnings on Tuesday and it’s up like 27% since I wrote about it. So just got super lucky on timing there, but there’s a lot of that like kind of combining how they should think about business strategy and then how that parlays into the market.So it’s less really quantitative and more like, here’s kind of what everybody’s saying about this company. Here’s what they’re doing. Here’s what maybe they should be doing. And if they do that, here’s what it might look like today. For example, I wrote about, Y angel at early stage valuations are not as crazy

Today’s interview is with Nathan Baschez. There aren’t too many people more familiar with the creator economy than Nathan. He started his own company with Hardbound and was the first employee and VP of Product at Substack in the early days.Now Nathan runs a company called Every, which is a bundle of premium newsletters. In this episode we dive into how Nathan creates tons of high-quality content every week, and how to facilitate your ideas with a newsletter “mastermind” group.We also get into a great discussion about pricing and churn for premium newsletters, and what it means for creators to have Twitter, Facebook, and other big media companies getting into the newsletter game.Links & ResourcesGimletThe Nathan Barry Show 023: Tiago Forte – Building a Second Brain & Lessons From a $1M/yr Newsletterscuttleblurb – A Value Investing BlogClubhouse: Drop-in audio chatAndreessen Horowitz - Software Is Eating the WorldSlow BoringSubstackTeachable: Create and sell online courses and coachingGumroadNathan Baschez’s LinksEveryTwitter: @nbashawEpisode TranscriptN Baschez: [00:00:00] At the end of the day, writing is an act of communication. It’s a good form of communication. When you have thought deeply about what you want to say, and you’ve really crafted it, but in order to get to that point, you want to start with the more informal, casual, everyday way of talking. I think the feeling that this is a fascinating conversation is the key thing we want to get to because that’s the spark that you’re trying to like recreate for readers down the road. Nathan: [00:00:29] Today’s interview is with Nathan Baschez. There aren’t too many people more familiar with the creator economy than Nathan. And so it’s really fun to talk to him. He’s got a great background. He started his own company with Hardbound and he was the first employee and VP of product at Substack in the early days.And he was at Gimlet Media for awhile. And now he’s running a company called Every, which is a bundle of premium newsletters. They’re really focused on incredibly high quality content. And this episode we dive into how to write great content, facilitating your ideas with sort of a mastermind group.There’s a fun discussion around that. We talked about Twitter and Facebook and others getting into the newsletter game and what that means. Otherwise monetize your newsletter pricing churn. There’s actually, it’s a great discussion on insurance. You’re gonna want to stay tuned for that. Anyway. There’s a lot of good stuff,So let’s dive in and I’d love for you to meet Nathan.Nathan. Welcome to the show.N Baschez: [00:01:20] Thank you for having me.Nathan: [00:01:22] Yeah, well, we can have the Nathan and Nathan talk newsletters show.N Baschez: [00:01:27] Two white guys named Nathan talk in the newsletter business.Nathan: [00:01:31] Exactly. We have all the diversity of newsletters represented right here. I just want to call it out right away. So I love, first at a high level for you to tell listeners whatever he is and, you know, kind of where it’s at right now and, and what you and Dan have done with it.N Baschez: [00:01:50] Yeah, totally. So Every is a bundle of business-focused newsletters. And basically we cover right now, mostly strategy productivity, and then we’re kind of getting into some industry specific stuff, but that’s pretty nascent. So we have a newsletter that covers the passion economy called Means of Creation.We also have some podcasts that we do that are kind of, they’re very related to the newsletters, but basically it’s just this cluster of people that work together to create cool stuff. But there’s kind of, a lot of, we don’t really publish anything under the Every name. We publish it all under one of our individual publications.And each of those are incredibly kind of like specific is the goal. and, the interesting thing about our bundle is we’re structured as this. Thing that we’re calling a writer collective where it’s somewhere between getting a job at the New York times and running your own paid newsletter, like, you know, on, on your own sort of like whatever convert kit or sub stack or whatever other platform.And it, it gives you some of the upsides of, you know, having an editor, having some financing, having some distribution, all that kind of stuff, that you’d get by working at a traditional media company. But. Unlike working at a traditional media company, you’re building your own creative vision. Like you’ve got the final say on edits and stuff.And you know, you have the most important thing is obviously the shared upside. So you get like a huge chunk of the profits. We typically split them 50–50, but it’s a little bit case by case, depending on like what kind of team we’re assembling around a specific newsletter. And sometimes there’s more than one, you know what more than one person working on one.But roughly it’s like a 50–50 split. And, we’re also trying to kind of come up with creative ways to split the IP. But a

Khe Hy’s been called the “Oprah for Millennials” by CNN, and his writing is all about transforming your relationship with time, work, money, and, ultimately, yourself. Today we talk about how he runs RadReads, his newsletter for over 25,000 people. It’s an incredible newsletter where Khe gets super tactical about Notion, but also goes deep on living a better life, organization, productivity, etc.The biggest highlight from this interview? Khe tells us about going from $100/hr work to $10,000/hr work. He’s not joking! Khe’s building a whole course—Supercharge your Productivity—on this very topic.Khe also shares useful insights for every newsletter author and online businessperson, including:• Finding the best marketing platform for your business. • How to get your content in front of someone else’s audience. • How to launch a premium product.And so much more!Links & ResourcesNotion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.Loom: Video Messaging for WorkFriday Forward Inspiration & Motivational E-mail - Robert GlazerPatrick O’Shaughnessy Invest Like the Best podcastKhe Hy’s LinksNewsletter: RadReadsTwitter: @khemaridhEpisode TranscriptKhe: [00:00:00] I often push people to ask, what’s this for? Right. So like, you want to switch from MailChimp to ConvertKit, like, what’s this for? Like, do you want to open it? Sorry, YouTube account. What’s this for? So don’t be satisfied with the first answer. Go one level deeper. Go to the second answer, go to the third answer.And actually ironically like copywriting, you’ll probably land on some deeper human need that you have.Nathan: [00:00:29] In this episode, I talked to Khe Hy about how he runs RadReads, his newsletter for over 25,000 people. It’s an incredible newsletter. I love everything that he features, where he’s talking about Notion, living a better life, organization, productivity, all this other stuff. And he takes it into some pretty deep conversations, which I love.Alright, few highlights that we dive into: One: $10,000 an hour work. Yep. He’s not joking. He actually means that; we dive into what exactly that looks like, what it means. We get into product launches. He shares the numbers from the launch that he’s in the middle of right as we record the episode. there’s a lot of great stuff.So I’m going to get out of the way and just let you dive in and listen to the episode with Khe.Khe, welcome to the show.Khe: [00:01:11] Nathan. Great to be here. Thank you for having me.Nathan: [00:01:14] So we were just joking before we, we talked, you and I have exchanged tons of emails, Twitter DMs, you know, Twitter mentions all of that. We have not actually ever talked until this moment.Khe: [00:01:26] You have just converted from a Twitter avatar to a real Zoom human and in the past five minutes. So it’s great to meet you. And that’s why we love the internet.Nathan: [00:01:37] Yes. Well, it’s fun to, I feel like I know, you know, your work really well and, and, um, now it’s nice to put a full, a full face to it. so I would love to dive in. Maybe if you could tell listeners really quickly about rad reads, give the high level, like why someone might subscribe and then from there, we’ll start to dive in your backstory.Khe: [00:02:00] Awesome. So read, read, I guess I would start by saying I’m the accidental entrepreneur and accidental creator. And I would just show my cards immediately that like I’ve rarely had a plan in this whole internet game thing, and it’s all kind of happened. And so. What is RadReads and what can you expect?If you sign up, when you sign up RadReads is, it’s a newsletter and the blog about that helps people live intentional and Epic lives. And so what does that mean? the informal tagline is come for the productivity. Stay for the existential. And so we will lure you in with a text expanders, financial independence, retire, early notion, and then it would be like, what’s the deep underlying need that that’s really trying to satisfy. And so that is kind of the, the ethos, the vibe it’s playful, it’s inspired by surf culture or hip hop culture. and I write, so I read a ton. And through the writing, quite, quite new, actually almost approaching two years. I’ve, started an, course business related to that, but I’ve dabbled in so many other monetization, harebrained schemes along the way, but mostly now newsletter blog leads to, online courses.Nathan: [00:03:31] Yeah, that makes sense. Well, we’ll dive into newsletter, monetization, and so much other stuff, but you did not set out to be a writer. You didn’t set out to, you know, run your own business or any of that. Let’s take us back. What was, what was your career before you drove it to this crazy internet world that we’re all in.Khe: [00:03:51] It was, as Charles Dickens said it was the best of times that it was the worst of times. So, I here’s a little detail important fact, in the stories, you know, I grew up as a child of first-generation immigrants and it was al

Louis Nicholls is the co-founder of SparkLoop, an email newsletter referral program where you can have each of your subscribers refer their friends to unlock cool rewards.SparkLoop is amazing. They’re growing really quickly in the audience-building space and ConvertKit actually gives away free SparkLoop accounts to all of our creative pro customers.In today’s show, Louis talks about how to increase your email list growth rate by more than 30% with a referral program. He also gives his (hot!) take on paid newsletters, discusses how best to monetize your audience, and so much more.Links & ResourcesJames ClearTim FerrissBrennan DunnAnne-Laure’s Ness LabsArt of Newsletters 018: Anne-Laure Le Cunff – Building a Loyal Audience & Growing Your NewsletterLouis Nicholls’ LinksSparkLoop’s Referral UniversityPersonal site: LouisNicholls.comTwitter: @louisnicholls_Episode TranscriptLouis: [00:00:00] I think you should be creating content probably in other places. Most often people who get to a hundred subscribers and carry on, they get there relatively quickly because they’ve been being useful in other places. For example, on Twitter, in forums, you should focus less on getting more subscribers through the door and more on being useful and creating content. Nathan: [00:00:25] In today’s episode, I talked to Louis Nicholls from SparkLoop and SparkLoop is an email newsletter referral program where you can have each of your subscribers refer their friends to unlock cool rewards. So, for example, if you refer three friends to a newsletter, you could get access to the special content, 10 friends, you get a t-shirt 50 friends, you get something extra incredible.SparkLoop is amazing. They’re growing really quickly in the audience, in the audience building space and, ConvertKit’s actually an investor in SparkLoop and we give away SparkLoop accounts for free to all of our creative pro customers. So the article is so good. Talk about how to grow your email list by more than, or increase your email list growth rate by more than 30% with a referral program, as well as Louis’ take on paid newsletters, how best to monetize your audience and so much more.So let’s dive in.Louis, welcome to the show.Louis: [00:01:17] Nathan. Thanks for having me, excited to be here.Nathan: [00:01:19] All right, so let’s talk SparkLoop right at first. you’ve been in the newsletter industry for awhile. You’ve been watching this whole space, building lists of your own. What was the impetus for wanting to start SparkLoop?Louis: [00:01:32] Yeah, I’m kind of half from me, but also half from my co-founder Manuel. So Manuel had been running a, like a generic referral tool called referral hero for a couple of years. It was, or it still is pretty successful at a lot of clients, you know, larger fortune five hundreds as well as smaller ones. And that was in like the generic referral space.So mainly e-commerce SaaS and so on. And I was at that point where I just sold my last company was kind of looking around for things to do and keeping myself kind of engaged. So I was running a small newsletter, doing a small course teaching founders, how to do sales and doing kind of like that classic.I call it marketing consulting, but really just kind of helping other founders who reached out with some kind of like consulting gigs. And one of them ended up being a paid newsletter in like the flight steals space. And they, I think they probably, at that point seeing what morning brew was doing with their referral program and they were really eager to add one in.So they asked if I knew of anyone who could help do that. And I said, well, I’ve done referral programs before. And the software I’ve used is from my friend, Manuel, who runs her federal hero. So I thought, well, if anyone knows what tool to do or what, what tool to use, it’s going to be Manuel. So I’ll ask him, reach out to Manuel.And he says, well, you can kind of make referral hero, do this with a lot of work. there isn’t really a better option out there. But it’s funny you say this cause you’re like the fourth person this week has asked me if we can get referral here at working with newsletters. So maybe we should look a bit into this together.And, that’s kind of, I think where it starts, if we didn’t originally planned the Spock week to be a new tool necessarily, we thought it could be kind of inside of referral Europe. But as we. Kind of understood more about exactly how it was supposed to work and kind of the integrations that newsletters need to be successful. We’ve realized it really needs its own dashboard and its own integrations. And at that point it may as well be a separate product.Nathan: [00:03:46] Yeah. And so we’re recording this in January, 2021. when was that? That, you two started working on.Louis: [00:03:55] I think the first time we probably started talking about it was in summer 2019. Yeah. So about a year and a half ago. Nathan: [00:04:03] Yeah. And so now, I mean, SparkLoop powering refe

Dan Frommer runs a popular newsletter called The New Consumer, which discusses topics on technology and consumer brands. Beginning his career at Forbes, Dan has a long history in the technology field. His extensive experience includes Editor in Chief at Recode, Vox Media’s tech and business news publication, and technology editor at Quartz. He also spent years building up Business Insider as its second employee. In this episode, Dan discusses how email is the most effective way to reach influential people, explaining how he leverages his newsletter, The New Consumer, in a way that will capture the attention of CEOs, board members, and investors.Dan shares newsletter insights, including:Important questions to ask yourself about newsletter tools.Avoiding the optimization trap.How he creates a quality experience for his readers.Links and ResourcesForbesRecodeVoxQuartzBusiness InsiderStratecheryHodinkeeBenedict EvansDan Frommer LinksDan’s Newsletter: The New ConsumerDan’s Website: FromeDomeDan’s Other Website: Points PartyTwitter: @fromedomeEpisode Transcript:Nathan: [00:00:00] In this episode I talk to Dan Frommer. He runs a popular newsletter called The New Consumer. He’s had a long career in tech, tech journalism, he started at Forbes and then he was at Quartz and Recode and was basically employee number two at Business Insider, and worked to build that whole business for a long time.And he’s always had this one-man-band sort of style, which really resonates with me. That’s basically where you learn to, design code, you know, put together plugins, build out your site, as well as writing and publishing and being a journalist and all this other stuff. So he’s done something really impressive and going from the editor in chief of Recode, which is a publication owned by Vox, which is quite large and popular, to running The New Consumer, which he’s had for two years now.It’s more than paying his bills. He’s earning a full-time living from it and he gets to control his own destiny. I love it. We dive into all kinds of interesting topics. We talked about why he has only an annual subscription, rather than going for just monthly, like most people do with paid newsletter, his tech stack, what he thinks about free versus paid subscribers and so much more. Let’s dive in.Dan, Welcome to the show.Dan: [00:05:00] Thanks for having me.Nathan: [00:05:02] So I want to go back a little bit, as we talked about in the intro, you’ve got all kinds of history and journalism and everything else. Now you’re running your own newsletter, so when you got into journalism, where did you think that that career would end?What was the pinnacle? You know, like, as we go through the, the years, like. Was it ending with editor and chief of, of Recode? Like how far ahead did you, did you think? And,sand what did success look like when you were just starting out?Dan: [00:05:31] Yeah. I’m from Chicago originally. I, you know, my background is both in, creating websites, web design. I started doing web design and, and building websites when I was in middle school, in the nineties, and then I went to journalism school at Medill at Northwestern. So my background and my interests have always kind of been at the intersection of.Journalism like real ethical. proper journalism, but also creating new things on the internet. So new media brands and building websites, building audiences, and I’ve always kind of, I guess, optimize my career for both of those things. so that’s, that’s one way to say, like, I never really sat back and was like, Oh man, I really need to work at the New York times or the wall street journal or something like that. snothing against those places. It’d be cool to perhaps, you know, contribute there one day or something like that. But there wasn’t some bucket list where I was like, I must work for. A big network or a big newspaper or something like that. I, you know, I actually started my career interning at,sthe public radio station in Chicago WBZ.And I really did a lot of,syou know, I trained to be a broadcaster. I was really interested in broadcasting, but,swhen I moved to New York to start my professional career, it was clear that. All the jobs were in what was called digital or interactive journalism. And also that’s where my skills were really helpful. sit, it actually was useful that I knew how to edit pictures and build webpages and. you know, and do video work because most, most of my peers were not trained to and, and thought that that wasn’t really part of their job. So,snot only was able to do that, but I really enjoyed it and I still do now.So, you know, thinking, thinking back now, 15 years ago, there was never a point where I was like, Oh man, I really need to get a big title at a big magazine or at the New York times or something like that. I didn’t probably know. Right then, you know, my first job was, was at Forbes, which was kind of, but the, the forbes.com.So it was like the interactive,ssubsidiary of Forbes mag

Tiago Forte is one of the world’s foremost experts on productivity. He runs Forte Labs, an education company that helps knowledge workers use technology to become more productive. He earns over $1,000,000 per year by using his 40,000-subscriber newsletter to sell his online masterclass, Build a Second Brain.In this interview, Tiago shares newsletter essentials, including: How to get your first 10 newsletter subscribers.The best time to send your newsletter.How many subscribers you need to launch a course.Tiago addresses fears about sharing too much in your newsletters, explaining how we live in an age where people want to follow real humans with real problems that aren’t afraid to be vulnerable.Listen in to find out why Tiago, despite having a successful newsletter and online course, is still traditionally publishing a book about building a second brain.Stick around to the end of the show to hear Tiago talk about how he’s using the revenue he earns online to help his family build businesses offline. Links & ResourcesDavid PerellBuilding a Second BrainJames ClearTeachable: Create and sell online courses and coachingGumroadTiago Forte’s LinksNewsletter: Forte LabsBlog: Blog - Forte LabsTwitter: @fortelabsEpisode TranscriptTiago: [00:00:00] In the short term, picking one theme and just hammering on that theme week after week after week after week, I’m sure is good for the early days.People know what you’re writing about. They know what to expect, they know what problem you’re going to solve. But I really think that’s short-sighted because in the long term they’re going to not have that problem anymore, or they’re going to develop more sophisticated problems or they’re just going to move their attention to some other part of their lives.And if you are this one-dimensional caricature of a person, you pretend you’re this person who thinks about SEO 24/7—which none of us are—they’re going to move on from you.Nathan: [00:00:41] In this episode, I talked to Tiago Forte about building an online course, growing his newsletter and so much more. There is a lot of great stuff in there. One: he’s earning over a million dollars a year off of his newsletter. He’s got 40,000 subscribers. We get into monetization, book launches, course launches, cohort based courses, so much stuff.And then actually, if you stick around to the end, we dive into, actually tiny houses and container homes and taking online revenue and bringing it offline, which I think is one of my favorite things. I’ve always seen me talk about that some on Twitter, but I haven’t talked about it a lot on the podcast or anything like that.So I love the idea of doing that, of getting family involved and really using it to teach business lessons to kids. So it’s a longer episode, but I think you’re going to love it.Let’s dive in.Tiago. Welcome to the show.Tiago: [00:01:32] Thanks, Nathan, really, really excited to be here.Nathan: [00:01:34] So you’ve done a crazy amount of stuff for the email,sover the last few years. And I think a lot of people look to you for successful strategies and all of that.sone thing that you did before we started recording this is you asked on Twitter,syou know, what should we talk about? You know,swhat your audience would like to hear.And one thing that that would be a fun place to start, w we’ll get into how to grow the audience and, and monetization and so much other stuff. I just love to hear it starting from zero. What are the first three things that you would do to grow your audience? So, you know, you’re giving advice to someone who’s has nothing going.All they know is I was told I should have an email newsletter and growing at I growing audiences. The thing I want to do this year,Tiago: [00:02:19] Yeah. Okay. Let’s see. Three top things. I think first one is manually add people.sin the early days, I don’t know if you want stories behind these, but if I had coffee with someone, last thing I asked, can I add you to my email list?If I met them on the subway, can I tell you it was one name and email address at a time? Because I knew there wasn’t much traffic to my website. People weren’t going to sign up just because I was really religious about getting people on there.Nathan: [00:02:50] but I’m just diving into that one for a second.sit’s so many people don’t ask right where they just say,sI’m doing all of these things. And over here, I’m trying to grow a newsletter and you can really grow an audience just by saying, Hey, will you join the list? And especially when you’re looking at a point where you’re say at the first.One two or three subscribers a day coming in you’re at that point, you’re going to wait. This is going to turn into 50 subscribers this month. Something, additional send an additional two to three texts, a day, emails, coffee meetings, any of that, like you could increase your growth rate by 50% by adding an extra couple of people.And so you could cut the time to a hundred subscribers in half just by asking. So I

Lenny Rachitsky sold his company to Airbnb years ago and he spent a bunch of time there as a product manager, working on growth.Now Lenny’s full-time job is his simply-titled “Lenny’s Newsletter”, where he shares everything he’s learned about building products and teams. With over 3,200 paying subscribers, Lenny’s Newsletter brings him a larger income than he had at his tech job!In this fun interview, Lenny shares his journey—how he went from wanting to found another startup to being a one-man newsletter business, and the lessons he’s learned along the way.You’ll learn the “value-add” for a paid newsletter that’s been a great success for Lenny, and how he’s avoiding the trap of workaholism as he builds his business.Lenny also shares how he never runs out of topics, and how he stays interested and curious so he can enjoy running his newsletter for years to come.Plus, as popular as paid newsletters are, they come with some important downsides! Lenny reports from the trenches on what they are and how to deal with them.Links & ResourcesAirbnbCoda - A new doc for teams.Why a Paid Newsletter Won’t Be Enough Money for Most Writers (And That’s Fine): The Multi-SKU Creator - Hunter WalkLenny Rachitsky’s LinksSign up for Lenny’s NewsletterTwitter: @LennySanLinkedIn: Lenny RachitskyEpisode TranscriptLenny: [00:00:00] I find there’s any time not spent creating high quality content is not time well spent over the long run. It’s all about just valuable content. You know, if you provide value to people, they’re going to want it and they’re going to subscribe and follow and pay.Nathan: [00:00:18] Today’s interview is with Lenny Rachitsky. Lenny’s company was acquired by Airbnb more than seven years ago. He spent a bunch of time at Airbnb as a product manager, working on growth, where he became fascinated with things like, how do you manage a team? How do you grow a company? What are the product management best practices?All of these things after leaving Airbnb, he started a newsletter just called Lenny’s Newsletter, and it now has over 3,200 paying subscribers. he’s now earning more from his newsletter than he was at his tech job. Quite a bit more actually. And we get into so many things, but how to keep writing newsletter really fun, how to grow and scale your audience using guest posts to get those first subscribers so much good stuff.Let’s dive in. Lenny. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me. So you actually kicked off our call and kind of a fun spot. So I want to start the interview there. And that was, you just said, so did you read the New Yorker article, you know, and, the New Yorker just did another article about newsletters.Why don’t you give us a high level? Cause it kind of takes us into the state of newsletters, you know, on the web right now. Lenny: [00:01:28] Oh, so I find, I generally try to avoid pontificating on the state of media and newsletters, because I feel like that’s not my depth. There’s a lot of newsletter writers that like come from media, I’ve thought about, you know, this whole space of newsletters for a long time.And it’s fun to think about it and talk about, and, and tweet about sometimes. But yeah, I don’t have the most thorough opinions of the whole industry, but. What I find is when people do this kind of like overview of what’s happening, it’s always this interesting combination of like, Oh, here’s all the good elements.People can write whatever they want. And they have freedom. They’re running their own business and creating their own kind of life. And then there’s like, Oh, but all these dangers, what are they, what’s going to happen? They need health insurance. And how do we moderate all these folks? And who’s going to win.And how do you, how do you not create this? Just like 1% that does well. And so, so the post is kind of essentially going through a bunch of stories of all those things happening. And I think the conclusion as always, as it’s complicated and there’s good and bad end, we’ll see where it all goes. Nathan: [00:02:32] Yeah.It’s been fascinating to watch how the landscape has changed over the last, you know, seven or eight years since I’ve been working in this space. But you know, particularly the last say 18 months as Substack has gained a ton of traction. I think a lot of people, this is kinda what I want to talk about next.Who maybe in the past would look at newsletters and go, that’s an interesting business. Like that’s a thing. Maybe that’s your lifestyle business. I don’t know I’m going to go do a startup, you know? that was all the mindset. And now Lenny: [00:03:05] that’s exactly what I did. That was my whole plan is start a company.And then I started this newsletter on the side just to like play around with something and magically, it turned around and the newsletter became the main thing that I do. Nathan: [00:03:16] Yeah. So let’s talk about that more. Cause you spent what? Seven, eight years at Airbnb working on, on growth and product manageme

Byrne Hobart is a chartered financial analyst who loves writing about the intersection between finance and technology. He writes The Diff, one of Silicon Valley’s most popular newsletters. In this episode, we dive into how Byrne launched his newsletter, how much he’s earning, and how he publishes five times a week!You’ll learn why Byrne isn’t worried about pirates getting their hands on paid newsletters, and why you should worry about selling hard enough, instead.Byrne talks about how to build recurring revenue, and writing for different types of readers. He also points out an important factor that affects the churn rate of your newsletter!Byrne shares further insights on using free social media to lead people to the channels you monetize, and why he competes for readers’ highest-value time, instead of appealing to the lowest common denominator.Links & ResourcesJonathan Haidt - Social psychologist - Author - ProfessorManhattan Project - WikipediaApollo program - WikipediaStratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.BitTorrent - WikipediaSnopes.com - The definitive fact-checking site and reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.Byrne Hobart’s LinksSign up for The DiffMedium: Byrne Hobart on MediumTwitter: @ByrneHobartLinkedIn: Byrne HobartEpisode TranscriptByrne: [00:00:00] I wasn’t really thinking of the paid newsletter as this is going to be the main thing I do. you look at tech companies, they often have multiple lines of revenue, one thing they do is 95% of revenue. And the next thing they do is 2% of revenue, and when companies get more mature, it’s sometimes spreads out a little bit, but early on you find one thing that works really well. And that’s what you focus on.Nathan: [00:00:25] Today’s interview is with Byrne Hobart who writes The Diff. Now Byrne is a chartered financial analyst who loves writing about the intersection between finance and technology. What’s really interesting about his writing is that he’s read by basically the who’s who of Silicon Valley. So it’s not just, you know, a larger email list that we’re talking about today, but really we’re talking about writing the kind of quality content that, You know, billionaires are reading that.Like I first heard about him from Patrick Collison at Stripe. So this is the kind of thing that a lot of really important, really interesting people are paying attention to.So in this episode, we’re going to dive into how he launched his paid newsletter, how much he earns. He publishes five days a week.These are long form detailed con detailed articles that Bern is posting basically five days a week, which is, is a crazy consistency. So his writing process, what inspires them and so much more what’s that then.Byrne Welcome to the show.Byrne: [00:01:23] Great to be here.Nathan: [00:01:25] So I’ve been following your newsletter for awhile and I’d love if you just gave a quick intro from your side what you write about and why you find it interesting.Byrne: [00:01:35] Yeah, sure. So the idea is that I like reading history and I found that if you read We contemporary coverage of things that are happening at any given time you do get a lot of the details and then you get a lot of stuff that ends up being totally irrelevant And a lot of really interesting developments just are below the surface or they they matter in retrospect but no one really understood them at the time And so what I’m always trying to do which is a really high bar to reach is to write Right things today from a perspective that will still make sense it’d be relevant in the distant future So it’s basically trying to spot the important technology trends trying to spot what mattered what people thought mattered didn’t matter how those perceptions changed how how perception and reality have interacted and the way to do that is one to talk about financial markets because financial markets are Aggregating knowledge preferences expectations et cetera from everyone around the world And then the other thing to do is talk about technology particularly technology companies And the nice one of the nice things about those companies is that they have to be somewhat open because they’re all constrained by their ability to hire people And one way to hire people if if you’re trying to compete with Facebook and Google and Amazon and Microsoft and they can all offer a really generous comp package The way to hire people is to to give them some expectation that this company is going to be totally transformative and amazing So even if the base pay is not quite what you get at Facebook it’s still worth doing either to make an impact on the world or to cash in some stock options So a lot of companies have this incentive to actually tell their story in a way that that doesn’t happen as much in in other fields But at the same time companies have an incentive to hide their story Because if the story is we’re doing X but we’re actually goi

Dan Runcie is the founder of Trapital, the newsletter that breaks down the business of hip hop. We learn all about his favorite hip hop artists, of course, but he also shares what indie creators can learn from the world of hip hop and so much more.Having switched from a lucrative paid newsletter to a consulting business, Dan explains the thinking that went into his new business model, and what it means for anyone trying to monetize their newsletter.Dan shares his opinion on Substack—the out-of-the-box newsletter service that seems to be everywhere these days. You’ll find out why Dan started Trapital on Substack, and why he later switched to ConvertKit.You’ll also learn unexpected insights from the world of hip hop, including lessons indie creators can take from Beyoncé’s sales funnel, and why Master P’s cutting-edge albums in the ‘90s show that consistency might just matter more to creators than quality!Links & ResourcesSubstackConvertKit - Email Marketing for Online CreatorsGhost: Turn your audience into a businessBlog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS — WordPress.orgOnlyFansDan Runcie’s LinksSign up for TrapitalTwitter: @RuncieDanInstagram: @RuncieDanLinkedIn: Dan RuncieEpisode TranscriptDan: [00:00:00] If they’re using Gmail or using any other service, they see my face in the icon come up, they see my name there. And it’s a familiar thing where it is coming from a person. I want to make sure this reads like an email you would get from someone, not just like a marketing email. So I try to make sure that even though I am sending the email, it’s not just the straight copy from the essay, they are getting something that reads like a note that they would get from a friend.Nathan: [00:00:33] In this episode, I talked to Dan Runcie who runs Trapital, which is the newsletter that breaks down the business of hip hop. He’s really fun to talk to. We learn all about his favorite hip hop artists, right. Specifically what indie creators can learn from the world of hip hop and so much more. So let’s dive in.Nathan: [00:00:50] Dan. Welcome to the show.Dan: [00:00:51] Nathan, thanks for having me.Nathan: [00:00:53] Yeah. Well, I want to dive right in. You have a love for specifically the business of hip hop and I would love to hear from you where, where that started.Why. You know why you care so much about the business side and, what brought you to this point?Dan: [00:01:09] yeah, for me, the love for the business of hip hop really started with loving hip hop. I was pretty early on with gravitating towards this culture and. It was deeper than music. I mean, I remember elementary school. I was really getting into different artists who were the people that are making moves, but it’s also the people that were making movies behind the scenes.Right. I was very interested in the persona of someone like a show ignite or someone like a Puff Daddy and the people that were both being very deeply involved with what was happening. But. Pulling the strings and making things happen and all of the criticism and successes that both of those people achieved.And I think as I continued to grow up, seeing what that was like at the time, I never truly saw that as a career path for myself, but I was intrigued with it. So it was almost like a hobby and something I pursued and kept up and would always talk about with friends pretty much all through life, but it wasn’t until.Let’s see, six, seven years ago. And this was when I was in business school. We were doing case studies on all different type of topics. And one of them that stuck out, we did this case study on Beyonce. He had just released this surprise albno one had done albums, surprise albums like that at that particular timeframe.And it was this huge marketing case study on how these things happened. And it was a case study that was done by Harvard business school. It spread across to other schools. And that stuck out to me almost like a reminder, like, Oh, Hey, you know, this is something that is huge. And. It stuck out for a few reasons.One, the topic, the subject matter, I’ve been a Beyonce fan since the Destiny’s child days, but second, it stuck out to me just how big of a deal that case study was, how it was from a business perspective. And there weren’t that many articles or breakdowns that were talking about hip hop artists or.Artists in entertainment that we’re doing and making the same type of strategic moves that other industries were making in the type of jobs that I was working in and was playing into working thereafter. So for me, it was really an opportunity to look at that. And that was how I had started doing some freelance writing on the side.Started a blog. It was a personal endeavor just to explore hobbies, my own interest topics that snowballed into publications, reaching out where I started writing for them. But then that snowballed again into writing for more and more reputable spots. And then eventually I saw where media was going. I saw hip-hop’s continued

Dan Oshinsky was the Director of Newsletters at both Buzzfeed and The New Yorker. Today he runs his own email consultancy called Inbox Collective. Dan has seen newsletters from the early days, and has been instrumental in developing the newsletter strategy for some of the largest publications around. In this fantastic interview, Dan shares takeaways for large newsletters and indie creators alike. He shares how his newsletter led to the Buzzfeed job, and how, once there, he discovered the building blocks that make newsletters resonate with their audience (spoiler: cats ARE involved).Dan also warns us of the danger of obsessing over open rates (or any “silver bullet” metric), and how Job #1 for your newsletter is to earn its place in people’s inboxes.After talking about the importance of carefully defining your newsletter’s audience, Dan answers these burning questions:Can I really build a business around an email newsletter?Is email going away?Tune in for the answers, and so much more!Links & ResourcesBuzzfeed NewslettersThe New Yorker NewslettersThe Wall Street Journal NewslettersDan Oshinsky’s LinksDan’s Website: danoshinsky.comLinkedIn: Dan OshinskyTwitter: @danoshinskyInbox Collective - Together, let’s make better newsletters.Sign up for Not a NewsletterEpisode TranscriptDan: [00:00:00] It sounds kind of corny, but you kind of have to have a mission. When you start with the newsletter you have to have, this is the thing that I’m doing for this audience.This is why I think I can be useful and how I can be helpful. And if I do a good job, I build that loyalty. I build the audience in the long run. there’s going to be a return on that investment. Nathan: [00:00:24] In this episode, I talked to Dan Oshinsky, who was the director of newsletters at Buzzfeed, and then the same job at The New Yorker. And now he runs his own email consultancy called Inbox Collective, and Dan has seen newsletters from the early days. He’s seen multiple waves of newsletters become popular.And then of course he’s run, some of the largest publications around. So it’s a fantastic interview. He has a lot of takeaways that are good for, you know, large newsletters and indie creators alike. So I’m excited to dive in. All right, Dan, thanks for joining me today.Dan: [00:01:00] Thanks for having me.Nathan: [00:01:01] So let’s, let’s dive right in. You’ve got an interesting background in that we have all of these newsletter creators who. Come into it from, you know, any number of things, but, but they’re often indie creators where they’re brand new to the space, you know, or they’re growing up through one path and you’ve taken a different path of building newsletters at Buzzfeed than The New Yorker.And now you’ve got a bit more of the indie path as you’re doing the consulting and everything else, but I’d love to just take us back to when you first started to get into running newsletters at Buzzfeed and what, what started that path?Dan: [00:01:36] So it actually started a little before Buzzfeed. The first newsletter that I really launched was a newsletter called Tools for Reporters. It launched in 2012 and it was.I’ve been doing it a little while. It was Tools for Reporters is exactly what you think it was. It was a newsletter where we share tools that reporters could use.It’s actually still going. I went to the university of Missouri journalism school and some Mizzou J school grads have picked up that mantle and run with it. And it’s all it just hit earlier this year. Something like 200 additions of this thing has been going for a long, long time. despite my efforts over the years to, to accidentally kill it with, you know, having a job and having other things to do, it turns out when you get hired at Buzzfeed and you have a thousand things to do the like side newsletter, you’re working on becomes a little less of a priority, but it’s my entire newsletter story really starts with this thing Tools for Reporters.I was playing with lots of different types of tools. And it had stuff that I wanted to share figured a newsletter would be a good place to share it. set up a fairly basic, you know, at the time this was MailChimp. I went to MailChimp, set up a newsletter, pretty straightforward to get something off the ground.And in a couple of, you know, first couple of weeks, I got to a place where there were a few hundred subscribers. And for me, the game changer with email was I had, I don’t know how many Twitter followers or Facebook, you know, Followers or friends I had at the time, but I had more of those than I did newsletter subscribers.But if I put something out into the world on Facebook, or I sent out a tweet, nothing would happen, literally nothing would happen. I’d say here’s this exciting new thing I’m working on and nothing would happen. And then I would email a few hundred people and say Hey, here’s this thing I’ve been working on.And I would get Requests from people that, you know we want you to come in and sit down with us and h

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is the founder of Ness Labs, which applies neuroscience research to productivity and creativity. In addition to writing articles and running a growing community, Anne-Laure also writes a newsletter subscribed to by over 25,000 “mindful makers”. In this conversation, we talk about building up a newsletter audience from zero. Anne-Laure tells us why newsletters grow differently from other platforms, like YouTube channels, and why you shouldn’t get discouraged when your subscriber numbers hit a plateau—often, if you just keep writing and sending great emails, the next wave of growth is right around the corner.We discuss the difference between Twitter and SEO as channels for gaining new subscribers, and the importance of saying “no” to all the things your business shouldn’t focus on right now.Anne-Laure also explains why she’s not pursuing brand awareness for her newsletter, and why she’s focused on maintaining the contract with her readers first and foremost.Links & ResourcesChris GuillebeauTropical MBA PodcastProduct HuntHacker NewsQuick Chat with Anne-Laure Le Cunff of Ness Labs - The Indie Hackers PodcastSparkLoop & ConvertKitThe Nathan Barry Show e017: David Perell – Mastering Twitter to Grow Your Newsletter and Make Money - Nathan BarryAnne-Laure’s LinksWebsite: Ness Labs - Make the most of your mindTwitter: @anthilemoonSubscribe to Anne-Laure’s NewsletterEpisode TranscriptAnne: [00:00:00] Saying no. And always asking yourself, why am I doing this? And is it the right thing to do? That’s the most important thing I thinkNathan: [00:00:13] In this episode of Art of Newsletters, I’m joined by Anne-Laure, talks about her journey from a product marketer at Google to running a very popular fast-growing newsletter. We talk about how she’s earning a living her fresh products and so much more. So let’s dive in. Anne-Laure, thanks for joining me today.Anne: [00:00:30] Thanks for having me, Nathan. Nathan: [00:00:31] So I would love to start with just why you started a newsletter. You’ve got a newsletter that’s quite popular now, you know, you’re, well-respected in, uh, all of our friend groups and all of that got a course that came out a ton of things. But going back to the beginning when you’re like, all right, I’m going to create a MailChimp account.When I get going, like, what was the impetus behind that? Anne: [00:00:54] Initially that was more of a personal challenge. I went back to university a couple of years ago to study neuroscience and I wanted to have a forcing mechanism to write about it. And I’m someone who actually feels quite uncomfortable with disappointing people.So publicly committing to sending a weekly newsletter about the topics I was studying at school was a way to force myself. To keep on doing it. I didn’t want people to be like, where’s the newsletter. I should say she would have it. Right. So that’s like, that’s where I was just, I just told people, Hey, every Thursday you can expect an email about when you were a science for me.Nathan: [00:01:35] Yeah. So were you able to hit the every Thursday? Did you stay on that? Anne: [00:01:40] Actually pretty much. So I only missed three newsletters. In one year, two of them were planned. The other one is when was when I lost my grandmother and that was on the day I was supposed to send a newsletter. And what’s crazy is that I almost went like, okay, I don’t want to think about it.I’m going to keep on writing. And then I was like, that’s like, no, that’s not healthy. Are you doing stuff? Writing? This is okay. And, um, the two other times, I actually announced it in the, the edition before, because I read it out about mental health and balance and mindful mindfulness. And this is part of it too, knowing when it’s better to just skip one newsletter so you can stick to it over the long run.Rather than burning out because you’re trying to be overly sustainable to a point where you’re hurting your own mental health. So I did skip a few ones, but I’m okay with it. I think what’s more important is to be able to stick with it over the long run. Nathan: [00:02:37] Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. And I like your point about being intentional about it and saying.I’m not missing a newsletter, I’m taking a break. And I think that’s something that, um, Paul Jarvis has done really well where, you know, he’s had his newsletter going for many, many years, and then he’ll say like, okay, I’m taking December off or I’m taking the summer off, you know, something like that. And it’s just, uh, a good way to give yourself that break so that you can, you know, have the consistency and then, you know, readers know what to expect.We are consistent with newsletters, so that. Readers can check in and know, uh, you know, really consistently what to pay attention to. I remember one of the, the first people that I followed is Chris Guillebeau. Uh, he wrote the a hundred dollars startup and a bunch of other great books. And he would post every

David Perell is known as “The Writing Guy” on Twitter, but did you know his email newsletter has over 40,000 subscribers? Not only that, but he sends THREE newsletters a week… every week! In this in-depth conversation, David shares exactly how he uses Twitter to grow his audience, how he maintains consistency with such a high rate of output, and how he’s built an amazingly profitable business by monetizing his newsletters with his breakthrough writing course.We discuss the top 3 ways for a writer to make money from their work and reputation. Should you: • Become a consultant?• Sell courses?• Start a company?David breaks down when each model makes sense, and whether people like Ben Thompson of Stratechery would be better off starting companies instead of selling paid newsletters. David explains why new writers should focus on quantity over quality—and when to flip that around. He also covers the small tweaks that turn your articles from flash-in-the-pan to evergreen. You’ll learn what to focus on when you’re just starting your newsletter, and the language to use on subscription forms to get people to sign up (hint: it’s not, “Sign up for my newsletter!”) Plus, how David sends 3 newsletters every week with less than 2 hours of work!Links & ResourcesConvertKit - Email Marketing for Online CreatorsThe ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth - Nathan BarryThe Billion Dollar Blog - Nathan BarryPat FlynnJames ClearPaul Graham - EssaysTim Urban - Wait But WhyAli Abdaal - Part-Time YouTuber AcademyStratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.David Perell’s LinksWebsite: perell.comTwitter: @david_perellYouTube: David PerellSubscribe to David’s NewsletterCheck out David’s course, Write of PassageEpisode TranscriptDavid: [00:00:00] This is one of the things I think a lot of people get wrong about getting more email subscribers is they’ll say something like sign up for my newsletter. No one cares. I say something like you will learn how to take ideas and then turn them into structured writing. Then you will learn how to distribute that structured writing.And then you will learn how to build a system to do this. It’s very specific and it’s very useful to the reader in so far as you have those three things, your conversion rates will go way up.Nathan: [00:00:34] Today on Art of Newsletters, I’m joined by David Perell, who has an incredible newsletter that he’s grown to over 40,000 subscribers. We dive into how he uses Twitter to grow his audience. He blows my mind with what he does on Twitter. we had a new, his research processes, how he sends out three newsletters a week really consistently.And then the biggest thing is how he monetizes list. he just makes an incredible amount of money off of the courses that he puts out there really, really high quality. And I think it’s a great model for anyone looking to build their audience and earn a living from their audience in particular. So with that, let’s dive in.All right, David, welcome to the show. David: [00:01:14] Thank you, Nathan. I’m a huge fan of both you and the company that you’ve built. I ConvertKits one of the most important platforms in my life. And thank you very much for all that you do. Nathan: [00:01:26] Oh, that’s great to hear. Well, I’m excited to share a lot of your story. We’ve known each other.What? Only a year or two. Maybe not, not that long, but I dunno, we both admire each other on Twitter and you know, I see you post stuff and I’m like, Oh, That’s an idea that I had, but phrased way better. So I’m excited to tell your story and to share a lot of the tips and tricks for building a billion newsletter.Why don’t we start just tell people about the Write of Passage, your newsletter, you know, kind of like give the high level view of the newsletter and your business and how it all works. David: [00:02:03] Yeah. So the way that I think about newsletters is that I guess I would segment it into two buckets. The first is the weekly newsletters that I send, which are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Monday is Monday musing, sort of a update of my life.And just the coolest things I’m learning. Wednesday is a email that comes out with every podcast that I publish. And that is quotes from the podcast links to YouTube videos. And then Friday. Is four or five links that I find every single week and that those are really the weekly ones. And then there’s a whole other thing or element to how I think about newsletters.And I run a writing course called Write of Passage. And whenever we open for enrollment, which is twice a year, we have 10 days to basically take emails and. People who have signed up and said, Hey, I’m really interested in this. And then other people have just been following along. We might be able to tip over the edge and we have two enrollment periods to get them in the course.And so for that, we use more advanced tactics like lead scoring, which we hadn’t had as native integration

In this episode I sit down with Tim Soulo, the CMO at Ahrefs. He shares behind-the-scenes on how they've built a company to over $1M in revenue per team member.

Trying to avoid center stage? You can get all the benefits of building an audience without putting yourself in the spotlight. In fact, you don’t even have to be the center of attention to connect with your peers and build relationships with your clients. Allowing your brand to take center stage can bring your business the returns you’re looking for and the email list you want.Ruben Gamez is here to tell us how you can stand back and let your work and your products speak for your brand. He is the creator and lead marketer for his website BidSketch.com, but you’d never know it. He and his team put together professional business proposal templates for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone looking to find work and build a business online, but you won’t see him speaking at conferences or selling on tv spots. That’s because he prefers for his business – his tool – to speak for itself. Find out how he built his audience through his own specially designed content marketing campaign, and how he designed a product that practically sells itself.Topics DiscussedCreating and using drip campaigns to your advantageUsing your email list to your advantage for pre-sales and promotionsHow to build an efficient contract teamDeveloping your skills and uncovering your skillsetHow you can do content marketing for your blogFind out why we don’t always trust GoogleResourcesCheck out ConvertKit.com/blog for conversion tips and tricksGet a proposal template from Ruben at bidsketch.comFollow along with all of the great things Ruben is putting together @bidsketch and follow him personally @earthlingworks on Twitter.

If you’ve ever felt like your blog posts are a shot in the dark, this episode of the Nathan Barry Show is for you. Working to build an audience never has immediate results, but don’t be discouraged by your lack of response! My guest today will tell you how to produce valuable content over time in order to generate the right kind of response you need to see your business succeed. As a professional freelancer, Brennan Dunn knows the ins and outs of creating an audience and a viable client list. His style of content creation and content marketing has been a huge influence on my own business style. He first started by writing a business blog about the conversations he was having with his own customers as an ingenious way to get new customers and build his email list. This pro-active approach to business, including writing and publishing an e-book, creating his own content, and using paid acquisition through Facebook, is what he’s talking about with us today. You can apply his insight to your own marketing plans to develop something that works for you.Brennan has probably had a bigger on impact on the way I do online business more than anyone else.Brennan has built an audience by communicating with them regularly: regular emails promoting new/regular blogs, direct conversations, free advice, promotionals – Brennan pre-sold his e-book to his Planscope emailing list. He also offers a range of products to better serve your clients that results in more income for you.Topics We DiscussWhat the very early days of audience building look likeHow consistency converts your early subscribers into customersPaid acquisition and why you should be using it alreadyHow to use Facebook’s Target to promote and communicate with clientsWhat to do for a product or book launchPros and cons of payment plans for customers (spoiler alert: it’s worth it!)ContactSubscribe to Brennan’s list at www.freepricingcourse.comLearn more about Brennan and his insights on freelancing doubleyourfreelancing.comIf you have a minute, I would really appreciate if you would write a review on iTunes about today’s episode. Whether it’s good or bad, let us know what you think by posting a review in iTunes.This season of The Nathan Barry show is sponsored by Kajabi. Check out how you can create, market, and sell your own digital products through the power of the platform at Kajabi. And let them know that The Nathan Barry show sent you.

Today we’re sharing what sorts of things you should give away to build your brand and how to create them. Content is a great way to up your value and really fine tune your audience. There are a few important things to consider when picking an audience, and it’s important that you choose wisely. Strive to maintain a personal brand, instead of a subject-based brand; that way, even if you deviate, you’ve created an audience that follows you. Paul Jarvis dives into his biggest mistakes when trying to begin a career in writing, why he ended up releasing a vegan cookbook, and the success story behind it. He shares a lot of great information with us today, including:What he’s pursuing and who his audience isThe one thing that all content marketers are getting wrongHis top tip for a person with a budding audienceHow he attracts clients by focusing on business and “what’s in it for them”The unexpected benefits of having an audienceWe wrap it up by talking about the importance of over delivering now to get great results later, how we batch our content and articles, and how Paul used Medium and Amazon to boost his articles to the number one spot. Paul has distributed over 100,000 copies of his book “Everything I Know”, and currently has about 25,000 e-mail subscribers. He’s been crazy successful, and was happy to share a wealth of tips and advice with us today from his journey. Links and resources:The Audience Building Challenge by Nathan BarryThe Freelancer podcastInvisible Office Hours podcastPaul’s websiteThe Creative Class by Paul JarvisPaul on MediumPaul on AmazonBe sure to check out Paul’s stuff, and if you have a minute, I would really appreciate if you would write a review on iTunes about today’s episode. Whether it’s good or bad, let us know what you think by posting a review in iTunes.This season of The Nathan Barry show is sponsored by Kajabi. Check out how you can create, market, and sell your own digital products through the power of the platform at Kajabi. And let them know that The Nathan Barry show sent you.

Wracking your brain trying to develop the best marketing campaign? When you think about it, marketing is really just big companies competing for attention. But I’m here to tell you about one of the biggest cheats these companies are missing out on. While they’re too busy fighting each other over a few seconds of everyone’s time, you can be working toward building an audience. That’s right, an audience. When you have an audience, you already have a group of people who want to pay attention to you!I’ve created this podcast to help those of us running our own businesses online build our audiences and our success. I’m talking about personal experiences, I’m bringing on guests who have used social media in unique and interesting ways, and I’m going to teach you how to build yourself an audience that goes beyond creating a simple email list. On today’s episode, I’ve invited Jason Zook to talk about how his audience helped build his brand and helped him succeed as an entrepreneur.“Building a really great audience that you have a conversation with is only going benefit everything that you’re doing tenfold,” Jason says on today’s show. And he offers advice on email marketing and building an online community that you can start using today in order to start that conversation. Along with his insights, this podcast is chock full of tips for:Getting your customers excited about your brandLearning the difference between hard work and luckBuilding an online community that’s dedicated to your brand and your productsJason’s peculiar insight on what it’s like to auction off your own last nameListen in and let us know what you think! Share your audience building tips, let me know what topics you want to hear about, and leave us a review on iTunes.This season of The Nathan Barry show is sponsored by Kajabi. Check out how you can create, market, and sell your own digital products through the power of the platform at Kajabi. And let them know that The Nathan Barry show sent you.

Nothing I do is completely original. In fact, so many ideas that people credit to me are originally from someone else.In this episode I want to give credit to the people who’ve provided some truly impactful ideas to the world. This is not a complete list by any means; I’m sure I’ve missed someone, so I plan to add to this list over time. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to leave a comment if you have something to add!Show Notes1. Slow, consistent progressLifehacker article on “Don’t break the chain”(Seinfeld said he didn’t come up with this, but I’m still going to believe he did :)2. Writing 1,000 words per dayChris Guillebeau first introduced me to the idea of making consistent progress in order to actually finish a book. Here’s his post on the topic: How to Write 300,000 Words In 1 Year.3. Writing to a painAmy Hoy and Alex Hillman gave me a solid introduction to copywriting. Through plenty of direct feedback on my sales pages I learned all about writing to a particular pain in my headlines and copy. Amy and Alex go on to talk about the pain, dream, fix model of writing sales pages.You can find Amy & Alex here.I haven’t taken their course 30×500, but I’ve heard wonderful things about it.4. Multiple packagesAn offhand comment by Chris Guillebeau has made me tens of thousands of dollars. 5. Selling digital productsTim Ferriss talks about drug dealers in 4HWW.6. Making a living from self-publishing to a small audienceSacha Greif and Jarrod Drysdale showed me how it’s done.7. Travel hackingChris Guillebeau is the master of this hard-to-believe travel methodology. 8. Focusing on a few core productsJeff Goins, Laura Roeder, & Sacha Greif are excellent examples of this.9. Syndicating content instead of guest postingJames Clear taught me that your best content should appear on your own site.10. Webinars to grow an audienceBrennan Dunn, Danny Iny, Jeff Goins, & Brad Fallon taught me everything I know about how to run profitable webinars and joint ventures. 11. Email marketingConvertKit Academy is something I built for authors who want to learn how to connect better with their audiences and apply email marketing best-practices so they can sell more books.

In the previous part of this episode we met three talented people – Brandon, Samuel, & Jason. We chatted a bit about their successes with self-publishing and learned how they used my book Authority as a roadmap for creating and publishing their work. In this episode, we dig deeper into how each of these fine gentlemen came up with the topics for their books, dealt with technical challenges, and got the word out. They also share several ways in which their lifestyles improved as a result of their successes; you definitely don’t want to miss that section.Hope you enjoy!Show NotesBuild a Ruby Gem – the book Brandon Hilkert launched after reading Authority Professional Email Design – the latest project by Jason Rodriguez following the success of his first book The Elements of User Onboarding – author Samuel Hulick claims to have botched his book launch, but still managed to land some lucrative consulting gigs (and over $37,000 in revenue) ConvertKit – a tool I built to help creative people get a landing page up faster so they can build their email lists, launch products, and get more sales.Real people have used the information in Authority to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars selling educational products to their enthusiastic audiences. Get your copy of Authority to find out how you can too.Or you can check out what a few people have said about Authority on Amazon.

Have you ever wondered if it would be possible to make an independent living selling your expertise? In my book Authority I lay down an end-to-end plan for how to research, write, and publish a book to an excited and profitable audience so you can do just that. As it turns out, the methods I outline in Authority work extremely well for many people. Luckily I was able to get a few people who’ve had amazing success on a hangout; we talked for a while about their experiences publishing their first books (and earning very impressive revenues from them). Keep in mind that none of these talented folks had big audiences when they started.This is part 1 of a two part episode showcasing some of our most successful Authority customers. Hope you enjoy!Show NotesBuild a Ruby Gem – the book Brandon Hilkert launched after reading Authority Professional Email Design – the latest project by Jason Rodriguez following the success of his first book The Elements of User Onboarding – this breakthrough book by Samuel Hulick landed him some sweet consulting gigs (and over $37,000 in revenue) How to make a full-time salary from one book – an article I wrote since this recording outlining what I’ve learned from multiple book launches.Real people have used the information in Authority to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars selling educational products to their enthusiastic audiences. Get your copy of Authority to find out how you can too.Or you can check out what a few people have said about Authority on Amazon.

Why don’t people share financial numbers? In this twenty-minute audio essay I delve into some of the reasons why people are afraid to be financially transparent, and why I’ve chosen to ignore those reasons in favor of exposing my revenue numbers (and why you should too). Show NotesSacha Grief – one of the people who’s inspired me most to start publishing books and be transparent about the process. Jarrod Drysdale – a great designer and one of the inspirations behind my design books. The App Design Handbook launch – here’s the blog post I published where I revealed all my launch numbers – and got accused of bragging as a result :-D Want to try something fun? Leave a comment below with a financial number you’re comfortable sharing. It could be anything from your latte budget to how much your most recent product launch made!

One of the most effective ways to show potential customers how your product could be useful to them is to feature it in a promo video. Well-made promo videos can be inspiring, insightful, and fun. The problem is, video can take a bit of time to learn how to do right. Luckily I have a good friend who runs his own video production studio. His name is Caleb Wojcik; you might know him from Fizzle, which he recently moved on from to run his studio full time. If there’s one person I’d recommend to take video production advice from it’s definitely Caleb. I recently asked him to hang out with me and talk video for an hour; we dug into gear, production techniques, and some sweet hacks to make your editing workflow quicker. This episode will be especially insightful if you’re thinking about making a promo video for your product. Enjoy!Show NotesCaleb Wojcik’s DIY Video Guide – if you’re getting into making promo videos for your business, I can’t recommend this guide enough. Caleb Wojcik’s gear guide – we talked a bit about gear, but it’s way too easy to waste time figuring out what gear to buy instead of actually making videos. Luckily Caleb’s done all the work for you in this free guide. Pat Flynn’s website – we mentioned our friend Pat a few times; here’s his site if you haven’t had a chance to see his work yet. Wistia’s “down and dirty” lighting kit – for less than $100 you can make your own professional lighting kit, my friends at Wistia show you how.Caleb and me hanging out – the live hangout this podcast recording is taken from.

If you dream of selling your own products and creating a lifestyle of flexibility and independence, it’s going to be pretty tough to do that without an audience. Not only that, but that audience must be comprised of people who love what you do and have the financial means to pay you for solutions to their problems. There are many ways to build an audience, but very few of those methods lead to a profitable audience.In this short audio essay, I share with you three habits which helped me build an audience of amazing people – people who not only love what I do, but also get a ton of value from my products. They’ve been the key to my success, and if you build your audience the right way, it can be a game changer for you too. Enjoy this quick listen! Building a profitable audience takes time, and it can be a difficult process without guidance. Luckily I wrote an entire book about how to build a profitable audience from scratch – and how to create a valuable product you can sell to them. Real people have used the information in Authority to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars selling educational products to their enthusiastic audiences. Get your copy of Authority to find out how you can too.Or you can check out what a few people have said about Authority on Amazon.

This is part two of the live event Sacha Greif and I put together in August of last year. As a reminder, you can watch a video of the event here, and you can listen to part one here if you missed it. Enjoy part two of The Self-Publishing Hangout!Sacha, Justin, and Paul are all super helpful, knowledgeable, and experienced in their respective fields. You should definitely follow them and subscribe to their email lists. Here’s where you can find them online:Sacha Greif Justin Jackson Paul Jarvis

In August last year Sacha Greif and I put together a live event called The Self-Publishing Hangout. We brought on Paul Jarvis and Justin Jackson to round out our panel. You can watch a video of the event here, or checkout my podcast episode below. Since recording that episode each of the guests have gone on to do amazing things. You should definitely follow them and subscribe to their email lists. Here’s where you can find them online:Sacha Greif Justin Jackson Paul JarvisSee you in part 2!

Today I’ve got my absolute favorite product creation and launch story to share with you! Sean McCabe started as a web design consultant, then built up a following for his true passion: hand lettering.He then started teaching and grew a massive email list and then launched a training product. He shares the story and all the launch details (including exact revenue numbers) in this episode. Here’s where you can find Sean on the web:His main site, Seanwes.comThe seanwes podcastHis new book, The Overlap TechniqueHis tshirt and print storeAnd finally, the wildly successful Learn Lettering courseHere you can see the very first tshirt Sean sold in his store. Don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes.

Few things have paid off better in my business than a focus on email marketing. In building my list up to 18,000+ subscribers I’ve learned that email is the most profitable marketing channel around. Easily beating out Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.To learn more about email marketing I brought on three of my good friends: Brennan Dunn, James Clear, and Corbett Barr. All three have built highly profitable email lists in the last few years.Enjoy the episode!You can find each of their businesses (and subscribe to their lists) here:Corbett Barr — Fizzle.coBrennan Dunn — Planscope.io, BrennanDunn.comJames Clear — JamesClear.comPlease go to iTunes and subscribe and write a review. It would really help me out!See you in the next episode!

In January 2013 I wrote a series of goals for the year. One of them was “launch a podcast.”How does a goal like that take 18 months to be realized? Well, first I created all kinds of reasons that a podcast was much harder than it actually needed to be. Finally after recording episodes and working sporadically on it for over a year, I’m ready to launch!This first episode is a short book I wrote called The Productivity Manifesto. If you read my last post you know that productivity is something I’ve excelled at in the past, but am struggling with right now. So it seemed like a good topic to revisit for episode one.After listening please do me a huge favor and write a review on iTunes. Good reviews are critical to getting an audience for a brand new show.See you in the next episode!