How to Become A Billion Dollar Creator with Nathan Barry, Founder of ConvertKit

like you gotta choose the business model that's right for you but answering the question of like okay can this audience that i have make me a billionaire i have the one house since gonna pull off like fifteen thousand a month and it's just a single house so you'll be there by quite a no way really what's what's the house worth i bought it for nine hundred k that's dude that's crazy seven hundred in a night where where is it that yeah it's in in boise like right next to the boise state university stadium oh so do you get like basically like football tourists or what do you who who's renting this thing for seven hundred dollars a night in boise we're alive by the way they think we're live great no real who's renting it so you get like all graduation everyone coming into you know tour the university or whatever else and then just anyone coming to downtown it's like a five bedroom brand new construction sam actually looks like the kitchen looks somewhat similar to the place you just like me to so so why would you somewhere like sell shelves in the tile backs and all that why are you about like the same area it's my question yeah it's a million dollars it's a million dollar or nine hundred thousand or whatever you said under a million dollar house that's making twenty fifteen rate a month why don't fifty of them oh i i i just bought this one and so it's not making that yet but that's what we're like the bookings for the summer so it's at it just did eight thousand for january locked in and then the summer bookings are coming in at like quite a bit higher like so the january ones you know our last minute and boise is slow there but yeah the summer ones are coming in at eight nine a thousand dollars a night eight hundred nine hundred or a thousand a night which is wild and we haven't put a hot on it yet so i just bought a hot tub today and so we'll get that in there i should be able to charge a little bit more and it's gonna be good wow so we should start we should intro intro you well yeah so you're we're all we're live that michael live this is nathan barry nathan barry i've known nathan since a gum road meetup sean i went to a gum road meetup up in like for real i'm not joking two thousand twelve that sounds maybe twenty thirty two thousand twelve twenty thirteen nathan was doing gum road he had this book called authority right authority yep and i don't even remember what the book was about just making a living online but then you also had graphic designs stuff and you had a really cool blog and you you sold all types of stuff but i've been homie with you for a while and then you launched this thing called convertkit kit and i was like nathan like the other things working and just do that and anyway now it's a business that both sean and i i think or i didn't end that didn't end up doing it there's some mechanics problem with the way we get into we're an llc in it yeah gets complicated as like pass through funds and stuff like that but yeah but sam i'm in i'm in the cool club and basically his business convertkit kit does like twenty six i think million dollars in recurring revenue it's like a mailchimp competitor that's better and different they're the revenue all completely live so if you google convertkit revenue you have like twenty the revenue twenty two regret now that your business is actually kicking ass do you feel like i kinda wish this wasn't all super transparent or you know because it's good early on trans transparency is great early on and gets you a bunch of people interested but then when you start winning you know you're giving more value than you're getting back usually by that by doing that yeah so i think it's a great idea if it's for a mission and a terrible idea if it's for like a marketing reason and actually had two friends who sat made down at one point they're like nathan this is an intervention take down your like public metrics page and which they were right like they had talked to competitors who were like wow so helpful like scrolling through and they're like you know your competitors are doing this right i'm like i i know but really it's like it's a mission thing of the whole mission for the company has help creators in a living and so if we can put this public blueprint out there that's not just like the snapshot of time where you know you've done it with companies where you're going through and you're like oh they said here they're at ten million you know you're like trying to piece together the trajectory we we all have the same spreadsheets and so like actually doing it in real time means that someone can be like okay i'm at fifty k mr churn is absolutely brutal right now oh i wonder what convertkit churn was when they were at fifty k right and you can go back and you can find the date range and be like oh in this time here's all of their metrics here how fast they're growing and everything and so it's like this for anyone who wants it it's this masterclass class where you have to dig in and and find the data but you can find everything about our business and my hope is that it's like bread breadcrumbs the every feature entrepreneur who wants to how much recreate how much traffic does hopefully another industry do you know what's how much traffic does that page get i don't know it's not actually even our page it's convertkit dot bar dot com right and it's not even ours so wow so you've presumably not that much okay so so you're for real not using it for marketing if you don't even know how much traffic it gets okay now i believe you but when you said the mission thing i have a i i i have a a system of tuning out whenever anybody says values mission vision things like that i'm just like like default i do not believe anything you're about to say for the next thirty seconds how many how many people work there now sixty nine because when you you wrote this blog post to you year i forget i've been reading your blog for so long i don't remember the years but you wrote a blog post and you're like oh we making let's say eight million dollars a year but we basically had twenty thousand dollars in the bank or that's i i don't remember the exact numbers but it was almost as extreme as that right yeah so the company totally is self funded there's no outside capital and so when we hit like this period of rapid growth we grew from two thousand a month to a hundred thousand a month in twelve months and you know that was just on fifty grand that i'd put in we spent all of that money and so what happened is the company was growing and profitable but we were doing like three percent profit margins and so we gotten down the point where we had i i think like ten to twelve thousand dollars in the bank and like that was growing but we were like expenses were increasing by so much more that like our day's worth of expenses was getting shorter and shorter and so that got super scary here's wanna know okay random story so i i think you all know and warner mix i was at a mixer meetup in san francisco like he would did these scotch nights and after one of those like i think we were walking out of the building and he's like dude you know i kinda pulls me aside he's like did you seem super stressed and and i was like yeah like and i kinda told him the financial situation we're like bank balance is growing but you know you're like now paying all these people and you have no money and so i told him about that and and he said okay here's what we're gonna do i'm gonna wire you twenty five thousand dollars tomorrow you're going if you need the money spend it do whatever you whatever you want with it whenever you feel right like pay me back or if you don't need it like just put it in a savings account like just let it be in then you know like a insurance blanket for you and then wow you know wire it back at you know him only if you we'd hung out in person i think twice before so i knew him a little bit done the podcast and what we're gonna say the only thing what oh the the the thing he said is like if you do decide to raise responding like convert that into you know like i'll be the first person in for that if not while that smart move okay but the thing good move the thing that he said is the only thing that will piss me off on this is if you ever try to pay me interest on it like don't try to make this alone in any way and so i held onto the money it's sat in the bank account for like eight or nine months we grew our bank account to the point that we had plenty of savings in the bank and all of that and i wired the money back and like andrew is for one of those people where i'm like thank you just because he pulled me aside and was like dude you seem stressed and he was like let me loan you a security blanket that's one of the coolest stories i've heard that's frankly that's amazing shout out to andrew you gotta it and we gotta have andrew on now just for that story we've joked about it before but we should have him on for sure because it it's if he's done it to you he's probably done like some weird stuff like that to a bunch of people so that's he's probably had some interesting stories yeah i mean he knows everyone too so he's he's i'm looking at your guys revenue short there's a huge spike every november what did you do is like a black friday deal or what what causes this huge yeah we can talk about whether that's a good idea or not so early on right when you need cash the thing that you do in saas is you push annual plans right because you have this cash flow problem and so we started pushing annual plans as part of our black friday sale you know to bring forward a bunch of that cash and so we kinda just kept doing that and then it what it did is it aligned a whole bunch of renewal you know annual payments right around that same time so it just keeps getting bigger and bigger right till it gets to the point that you're pulling in like four and a half million dollars in a single month you're also getting all the churn at the same time so i don't know that like i like we're not gonna keep doing by way there's so many things like that but i'm like we're doing this i can't really say if it's a good idea or a bad idea i wish i could we're just gonna keep doing it from now and then like i just kinda feel like it's gonna work out but i could totally see that like we didn't need to do any of this or that this like long term is hurting us more than the short term gain what's an example like in my d business as far kinda thinking think about this is we do this model that like drops new products all the time every single week we drop new products and it's great because it causes the sales spike but it also puts you on this treadmill of new products that you have to release every week and that means you gotta do photos shoots of those products every week and then that means that you have to have inventory whether you sold your previous inventory or not you gotta buy new inventory like most brands they they don't do that they only buy your inventory when they're out of the old stuff so even though inventory sucks out cash you know it's like well it's i'm buying it because i there's i'm them sold out we're not even doing that but on the other hand it's creating like the i when i look at his chart it's creating this spike every single week and i'm like okay so that's good but these other three things are bad and like i don't know how to weigh these against each other because they're like in different categories that speak different languages and on different timescale scale so it's just hard to hard to know if this is like a dumb idea or a bad idea or a good idea i think the thing to look for in that is something that served you before might not serve you now so like that served us really well for a period of time because it brought in this cash you know and you could tell the team like hey like payroll is good we're set for a long time and it gives that level of comfort and also like in the early days churn is off and high in a business just because you don't have very many mature accounts and so locking that in really good but then if you get to this long you know much later in the business you're like look we're on accrual accounting it we don't really care we have plenty of cash in the bank like this spike at this time doesn't make a difference right and so just i'd watch for those things where it's like this served the business well for a while and it doesn't anymore who built the early version so i did all the design in front end development and then i hired freelancers to you know write the rails back end and then that went okay and then it went much better when i hired a long time friend named david to come on and like full time built it but that was two years in and you and it was making enough it was making enough money to pay him no that was where i paid him out of the fifty grand that i put in which is like our our savings and everything it seems like a pretty good return i mean fifty k and and you're able to get that bill and turns into what it is now or at least it got you to enough revenue to pay people yeah yeah and it i mean as while what you can do when one you're doing a lot of the design and code yourself you know so you gotta count that in in the cost but but but yeah and then you just fund it with and that makes it sound easier than it is but you know you find it with growth simple and not easy simple money's so sean nathan he's got those blog post called like how to how to build well i think it's called last we another blog post ladders the wealth he's got this actually this other great blog post called the billion dollar creator i think it's called or the billion dollar blog yep no let's do the billion dollar let's do the billion dollar one or i'm sorry i understand i know where you're going with that well well i just wanna say so this whole thing about transparency so nathan i don't think you public publicized this but i'm on this email list and every month or week at probably month i think he sends out dude i it's the craziest shit i've seen he sends out his entire net worth and you could see like how much cash he has how much like which docs he owns of and of how much like his angel investments like you'd see his entire all of his finances i gotta get on this list the sounds amazing might be on the it's all the content that i wanted to that i wanted like other people to publish like sam you talk about fat fire and like that's a of reddit and i just want like more of those conversations because i've written a ton about people who have but like how to get from say like zero to a hundred thousand dollars on the internet you know that's you mentioned my book authority that's what that was but like once you kinda get to the point where we're making a hundred thousand two hundred thousand or more online like people don't talk about what you do with their money because you know if you do that someone's like oh you know like they're sam just bragging about how much money he has again or you know something like that and so i like okay i'm gonna make a private newsletter and i just charge people a hundred bucks like just to filter out the the anyone who's gonna complain about it guess or say that i'm bragging and then just say i'm gonna write about all the stuff that i wish i knew when i made like my first two hundred fifty grand online and so the way that i i described your blog or that email is it's kinda like face tattoos in corn rose i think it's super cool when other people have them but i don't want it like yeah you know that not for me but i i i it's cool but others have them there's only two hundred on that list so it's it's a small group right now dude i don't know man but alright sean what was your question about it i walk through the the the frame here so you have this blog posts that's kind of like i know you worked on that for a while kinda shaping your thinking here and and then we also have sam who's somewhat bearish on the idea of the creator economy thinks it's kind of over hyped over over buzz word and you're mister creator economy in a way nathan so i think this be this this might be good but let's walk i don't think our opinions are opposites by the way i would i would say probably our opinions are not opposite think of argument let's just yeah let's just walk through so you basically have these four rules of building a billion dollar audience so i guess like first why did you even wanna do this like kind of like what got you interested in this and then let's walk through the four yeah so the article asks a question like the whole premise of it and that is what is the most profitable place to direct attention right so everything we right we're we're recording a podcast now whatever you're doing on on tiktok or if you're movie star or everything else right you have attention and brands want and they're willing to sponsor you know all of this stuff and so it's like okay you have the opportunity to point that attention somewhere what's the most profitable way to do that long term because you look at people you know maybe who taking sponsorships right five grand you know to sponsor the newsletter you know five hundred bucks for a sponsored instagram post or anything like that and that's actually not that profitable and then we when you dive in you learn that the most profitable thing to do is to create your own product and to drive that attention to something where you actually build equity long term so it's like a longer article talking about that but like the richest movie stars you know like take jessica a alba for example right she has made a lot of money from movies but the bulk of her wealth is from starting a company using you know being the spokesperson for her own company and then my other favorite example would be ryan reynolds who you know right he's doing ads for other people and probably getting paid a million bucks here ten million dollars there you know that kind of thing and at some point he goes like forget that i'm going to buy my own companies with mint mobile and aviation jin and i'm gonna be my own spokesperson so i don't get cash i get equity and so you know you just watch this process of people doing it over and over again and that's actually my hypothesis with convertkit right of i have attention on the internet through running a blog and a newsletter and all of that how do i wanna monetize it sponsorships ebooks membership a bunch of things and like nope i wanna monetize it through convertkit building a saas company like that's my version of the billion dollar creator so that's the whole premise of the article and it's like so you yeah i have a couple examples so okay so rule number one is you have to build more than a personal brand so what does that mean you give the example of jessica gal alba of mark from primal kitchen so what what is the nuance here it's like it's not just your face your name you need to actually create a brand around around your lifestyle or your interest is that by the by the way sean primal kitchen is the sugar free catch up company that i like so this guy named mark he's like kinda looks like the sixty five year old version of me but like even more jacked and he like has a health and health blog and he starts selling ketchup up and he sells that for like three hundred million dollars yeah so i mean what marked with blog was called mark's daily apple and it was like the leading you know like paleo you kinda health blog in that space and a blog like that you know when he was doing this two thousand six two thousand ten that kind of thing you can make a million bucks a year off of that block and he was right but you play that forward on that's it's all about him all about his name all that ray name is in the name of the site but i you can build substantial wealth that way what he didn't said is he started primal kitchen you know kick started this whole brand by saying like i have the most popular site in the space let me you know make these paleo friendly catch up mayonnaise that kind of thing and then he goes you know how his audience was do you know how he because how much traffic it he had at the time or it it wasn't huge huge like he was like ours yeah a hundred thousand subscribers in the email as me so hundred thousand of kind of like trusted audience size to kick kick off you remember audiences were a lot smaller like even just twenty fifteen twenty twelve like that kind of time frame but yeah then he sells it to craft for two hundred two dollars you can't sell a blog to like a blog doesn't sell for two hundred million you know like all of these things and the crazy thing is he still owns the audience right the thing that that kick this whole product he still owns and he can sell off the that whole brand talking to him at a at a conference you know he's just onto the next thing figuring out what he wants to do next and he didn't have to sell his his name and an whole identity with it and craft is so so it's thrilled with their first kylie cosmetics is probably the biggest one that people know about because you have tons of attention through instagram tiktok whatever yep the tv show whatever and instead of just saying hey i'll you can pay me is it people will used to say wow you have to pay twenty five thousand dollars for a tweet from kim kardashian or then it that was twenty five thousand and they went up to like two hundred two thousand then two million dollars for instagram post from is it two million dollars it got it got up to that range where it was like either hundreds of thousands or low millions to get like a an actual like endorsement post from from one of them and and so then you you know cool you can make a lot of money doing that you're right you can you could stack up quarter million dollars at a time but kylie cosmetics was a billion dollar brand i was like well who wants to who wants to pay me to promote their products well it's mostly like skincare products makeup up products or for kim kardashian it's her shape wear like you know like and khloe kardashian it was like you know fashion or whatever so chloe launches true american jeans kim kardashian launches i think it's called what was shape sci sci is it like the shape brand dude sean you're on top of it keep going kylie kylie cosmetics kanye yee shoes right letters like they all turned to say who whoever is the the most willing advertiser actually you become my competitor and i'm gonna launch my own brand my own and have my own equity in this thing and there's a guy in the nba who gets made fun of for this which is this guy la lamar ball i don't know if you guys know this guy but basically he has three sons all three wanted to make it to the nba and this guy is like loud mouth guy they got like a reality show around them because they're sort of like the like you know basketball version of the kardashians so there's his three brothers and like a kind of an over bearing parent who is like are architect their business strategy and when they were gonna the guy was gonna get picked second in the draft and nike offered of a contract adidas and instead he created big baller brand you know triple bb b he created his own shoe line and like the shoes kinda sucked and like you know he didn't have the full business plan and people were making fun of them for like oh wow you turned down a guarantee ten million dollars from nike to like launch this thing ten million dollars a year or whatever and it's like actually that was the right move now maybe his execution was slightly poor but that was actually the right move and and a lot of these nba players would have been better served it had they done that themselves well how's is it going now the shoe thing so the shoe thing is not going good basically the guy they had running it like was like kinda stealing from them so they fired him that was like a a black mark on it the second brother never made it to the nba so that was like a little bit of an issue the the first brother kinda under performed his potential at that time and actually now that it woulda worked because the the youngest brother the one who was like the the the one who's kind of like he kind of like a a fuck boy a little bit he was you know was like had a goal you know like a diamond grill had like a lamb at fifteen and was like you know he was kind of off the reservation he actually turned out to be the best one he's actually a star player and if they had kind of built it properly around him it probably would have done a lot better so i nathan you'll get a kick out of this so like three or four weeks ago we did this thing where we said we're gonna get five g's to one or two three people who take our clips download it posted on tiktok and get views there's this kid who did it and i don't remember how many views he got but like our hashtag i think got thirty million views in like two weeks and this guy accounted for a lot of them and multiple of his videos got a thousand or sorry a million views one video got so big that we drove thirty five thousand new members to the subreddit fat fire and like that and they complained and i was like reached out to this kid i'm like who are you and he replies back with like michael at u michigan dot org or to something like that or dot you or whatever it is and i'm like wait dude are you in college and he calls me and i face facetime with him and he's in his dorm room and he's young he's in still in college he's in university think and and he's really cocky not in a bad way but he's like he's got hot spot but he goes man i knew i was gonna do this i would to prove to you guys that i could do it i want you to pay me money to do this now and i'm gonna do it for other people and we're gonna change the media game and i'm gonna raise money and i was like okay hold on dude hear me out and he goes i'm gonna i'm gonna go raise money for this thing do you wanna invest i go bro listen you do not wanna raise money for this here's what you should do you are so talented at this that don't raise money for this but get it big and start launching other stuff on top of it and if you wanna raise money raise money for that stuff and own all it he owns this thing called like i forget what it's called future but he's got like eight handles now that have like a million something value followers i'm like no don't raise money for this thing man own that forever and that's your piggy bank and your audience raise money for like this other thing that you wanna do and funnel it through there but don't sell that thing because i raised a little bit of money for my thing which was like that and i i don't regret it because i got the outcome that i wanted but i do regret it because it definitely hit you're massively handicapped because of it yeah one that's i i think it's such a good point because you can have that platform to launch whatever you want in the same way that you know marxist this and can use his platform to then go launch the next thing right he probably has contracts that say he can't compete in the exact same space but he could do a fitness thing or he could do something else right like you have the mcgregor once i was gonna give an example conor mcgregor is doing this pretty brilliantly in the u so like you fcc gets knocked a lot because of of they have like low fighter pay right like the the percentage of revenue that they give to their fighters is way lower than other sports nba is fifty percent nfl like fifty percent ef sees is like kind don't know fifteen or twenty percent so the fighters are you know they go out there they get their you know face beat and they're they'll they'll make twenty thousand dollars off that fight or forty thousand dollar or eighty thousand dollars and then they only get to do that two or three times a year so it's like a pretty brutal sport for a low pay what conor mcgregor did was instead of selling the attention try of trying to make money as his kind of like service fee he created a brand around literally every part of his lifestyle so he's like alright this thing gonna get me famous but then okay what am i famous for people like my suits at the press conferences is cool i'm launching a suit brand okay i'm irish i'm gonna launch an irish whiskey irish whiskey i think just sold for i don't know if you know he million yeah like he walked away with a hundred exactly then he's like cool i'm super fit because i'm a you have fighter my body is amazing here's my p dx x program it's called mcgregor fast you can you can buy my program and subscribe to that and you can get fit with me oh you're getting fit and guess what else do i do i recover okay here's a recovery spray that i spray on my leg that's like you know like makes my leg recover faster after workouts and the guy is literally just selling like every piece of his lifestyle as a independent brand like you know i think at one point he was thinking about launching a sports betting exchange it's like what is the best business who wants to pay me out draft kings wants to pay me maybe i instead of draft king's is mac mcgregor kings now and i will i'll launch a competitor he just he just opened up a bar called the black ford exactly oh you know i had good good has whiskey what else do we do i doubts okay i'm gonna so he bought a bar not that the bar is accurate good i could bar in his hometown a bar is not gonna make a ton of money but then he used that bar as the like basically the backdrop to film him creating a stout and i he's gonna sell a stout as a new like alcoholic beverage brand and it's kind of amazing the guy gonna become a billionaire and fighting is gonna be the lowest part of his income stream as my guess which is insane i bet you i bet you mc connor conor mac mcgregor i bet you he did for well he might make a billion he might lose a i think you could nathan oh you're you're worth like did you reveal the valuation of your company we we raised it two hundred million okay so let's just i let's just i don't know what the facts are but let's just say you you own ninety percent so you're worth a hundred and eighty million dollars do you think that you can ever spend through that i would have to brad change my lifestyle i what do think is that enough yeah it's so much more than enough i think i spend like two hundred grand a year so if that gives you an idea if you take a like if you set aside the things like when i'm not buying assets that's your burn that's your your actual person it's like two grand year yeah it would it would take a lot to yeah to spend through through that so do what we let's go let's go to this ladder thing well i'd i there's a point go so what what sean was saying about like a the trend between all of these people is that that's what's in the rule number two of selling products not attention and that's the flip right so conor mcgregor is a perfect example of this because everyone's expecting people to sell attention right that's the the nascar logos plastered all over the car equivalent of that you know like great connor doing that every celebrity and so you know you expect that everyone like every influencer is going to do that and the wealthiest people are the ones who are were like great i'm i'm going to not do that i'm gonna promote my own product connor has is the extreme example of like i'm gonna do ten of these or something most people are like let me do one or two but that's where you're gonna build this real well then let's just hit the other rules real quick so rule number three drive higher customer value through recurring or repeat purchases so you'd rather have a a product that you can that has repeat purchase rate versus a one off that's the big idea there yep yeah and then that's the thing of if you just look at the most valuable brands you see that a lot of them are selling a product that someone buys many times right yeah so you know if my first million created a idea journal it's probably not gonna have super high repurchase rate because you're you know one journal will last you a long time versus if we made you know the pure money deodorant and pure money deodorant is something that you would go through every two months then that consumable is gonna be worth more than if you know so product selection is important here yep and so if you're just going back to the catch up example right right you know you're going through catch up every month every couple months you know that that's way better than something that lasts forever right billionaires catch up great okay so then last one choose a better business model so what what do you what do what are you pointing out here choose a better business model yeah so there's a couple things in this one is well i'm using the example of von har who has the food babe so she had information products business she's selling quickbooks meal plans all that and then she teamed up with a friend of mine derek hal who was also in kinda of that online business space and they wouldn't made like a health supplements company and so it's completely different they've made the switch from you know that business model into selling this product that people are buying on a recurring basis that you know the brand can be acquired but then i think the other example that's interesting i love listening to andrew wilkinson on the show and you know he did his whole thing his whole thing is using a very cash flow a positive business right in meta lab of they're doing agency work honestly it's a very profitable business but it's not valued that high in the market and so he's like okay i'm gonna take low to medium quality revenue and use it to go by really high quality revenue you know because agencies they're not as recurring they're not high multiple if you wanna sell the business so it it's like great i'm gonna go buy software companies that are start software companies you know and i'm gonna trade in you know one set of revenue for another and then you see this a lot in software where someone will launch to like you'll have two versions of the same tool one's like the wordpress plugin version where it gets it done and all of that but none of those really turn into like substantial companies and so the ones that made it car like opt in monster where they built a wordpress login it was okay make millions of dollars but like it's not valued like a software company whereas when they go and rebuild like side bulky rebuild opt in monster as a saas platform added more features you know they can charge a different pricing model all of that and and then it's really valuable right and you have to raise money at silicon silicon value valuations you get to sell the company at those multiples even though it's like fundamentally accomplishing the same less three people who i think left money on the table you named two of them i have a third actually you you find name all three okay so you talked about ram remit safety who you think you know maybe he's making ten million a year in revenue selling kinda high end courses his audience is all around personal finance and he pointed out like at the time where he had a bunch of audience and trust in personal finance and was advocating for a philosophy of like hey you know low fee index fund style investing set it and forget it you know saving a certain portion of your revenue he could have built wealth front which just got acquired for one point four billion you know yesterday or something like that which was like a robo advisor doing just that so instead of selling courses could have built a software product so left left some value potentially on the table another one is tim ferris right tim ferris has makes a ton of money on sponsorships and ended up making a ton of money through investing in the right startups because of his brand name but you know could he have done what joe rogan did with like on it supplements right like i think tim ferris is a huge trusted audience he said look i tried every supplement and here's my issues with them so i'm launching the paleo ketchup i'm launching the supplement i'm launching the the protein powder whatever whatever he could have picked you know i think is is a five hundred million dollar business given the size and trust of his audience but it seems like he didn't go that path so what do you think of of that oh the third was marie four third i think you had her in here and you i think you pointed out and yeah you you pointed out two things is she builds everything in her name instead of building like brands that can be dis associated from like her purse the product is her telling you content her selling you time and consulting or whatever else her selling you a course versus her creating a product based on her belief system and you trust her so you think this product is gonna work for you so but listen to this sean you're well you're not exactly but you're criticizing these people you're doing the exact same thing so you've got this big audience of people who like and trust you it shockingly trust you and do what you say but you're building this other thing that people are begging to know what it is like do you think that like you're you should follow your own advice here oh totally you know that's why i like this article i think it's a it's an eye opener for it pieces together a bunch of like anecdotes and philosophies and by the time you read it all the way through you're like yeah of course of of course i agree with this so i did it in a way with the fund so for example podcast podcast ad revenue i think our first year i made like seventy thousand or something like that in podcast ads it wasn't much it was like a very the the value of the audience i felt was bigger than the value of the trust in the audience was bigger than the the ad revenue and so i bet on that i was like okay well what if i raised the fund from these people who have been listening and i'm not gonna take any i'm not gonna do any pitch meetings i'm not gonna make a presentation i'm just gonna say hey if you trust me from this podcast and you wanna invest alongside me in startups ups you can and so now that fund is like an eight million dollar a year investment vehicle so if you just take the math on that right you get two percent of that and management fee okay that's not that much but then you get twenty percent of carry so twenty percent carry means you're basically getting one point six million of startup up equity that you're investing per year for free so seventy thousand and ads versus one point six million in start up equity of of which i get to pick the startups ups and i think those startups ups can you know what if that's five x in the next you know seven to ten years so that means each year i'm getting something like five million dollars a year of value out of a product created from the podcast so that's an example of doing it example of not doing it is i do a course in the reality is i do the course just because i hey i like teaching and beat i like the instant cash flow from that because i can go buy stupid chip with it so for example i'll like i wasn't i stopped teaching my course because just got busy doing another shit and then i really wanted to go like do some random n speculation i was like i feel stupid doing this with my money but if i just like i did a course for you know two weeks and then that let me go buy a board but a crypto punk and whatever else okay that sounds more fun and something i'm like i'll down to you know teach succession to do that that's it seems like you're good for in my head mentally but i would say that's not actually a good use of time and then the new thing we're building the new product is kind of in that boat right the milk road isn't called sean's crypto newsletter it specifically has a new brand name and it has like staff around it and it's a product that if it works can be big and it'll be super charge or kind of initially initially distributed by people who already follow me and like my content and then the second criticism which nathan can address which is like and maybe ram meet would say this he's like well but i like blogging and i don't know anything about starting like a a per a fintech company and what's the what's your reply to that nathan yeah i mean i think it's a great answer and like all these people who i like lightly pick on in my article they're all friends and and so that's one where like you gotta choose the business model that's right for you but answer the question of like okay can this audience that i have make me a billionaire trying to have as many examples of like if that's the outcome that you want you know or maybe it's not a billionaire right because you raise money or something else but getting on that hundreds of millions of dollars type scale then it's like okay well here's the framework that it has to happen and if you're saying like look you know these we list to people who have amazing businesses right there can complete control of their time making millions of dollars a year you know like absolutely no complaints there so this is all on the case study of like how would you do it actually one of my favorite examples i used michael hyatt as an example in this article and he replied he like he sent me an email right after it and said like hey we actually discovered the exact same thing personal brand entirely we're selling digital products we're very tied to our email us we're doing like sponsors and stuff that and we realized like oh this business is gonna you know reach them limits and so he then built out all these sub businesses they built out a journal product you know other physical products and realize okay how can we build what take what we have now and use it to leverage you know other independent brands and like kick start and launch them and so it's fascinating to like use someone as an example and haven't come back and be like you're spot on in describing our business but you're actually two years like you spot on two years ago we realized the same thing we're fixing it and now like everyone will see the result a little while from now and so yeah if if people want this path you know that's that's the way go about it how big is this how many notebooks does this guy sell i don't know that i have the numbers i'm trying to think what he what are he put in the article but it's his other products are now bigger than all the things that we know him for so in the tens of millions of dollars that's crazy alright what we saying sean i was gonna jump to the ladders of wealth but i think this is the other kind of nice framework that you have so and this is kind of like i think some people have heard of kind of stuff like this but i just wanna like lay out the fast version and then we can go into whatever's whatever's is interesting from this so you have this image of of a series of ladders and it's not like one ladder that you just go up and up it's basically like if you use if you choose this method of wealth creation your ladder can be this high but if you choose this method of wealth creation it can go one rung higher or it can go through two rung higher or four rung higher depending on which one you choose so here's here's how works so it's basically the lowest ladder the smallest ladder is you're selling time for money so that's having a job or being yeah having a job basically then there's your own service business so this might be like an agency you're charging by the project you have some clients you charge some hourly rate whether you're you know it doesn't matter if you're like making logos for some company or you're a lawyer you're actually in the same boat you have a service business with clients and you charge an hourly rate then there's product site product services which is given a give an example of a product of product yes so the example would be let's say i charge a hundred dollars an hour to redo the copywriting on your website you know and so i'm i'm doing that or i say for a thousand dollars one time you can buy it with a credit card you know i will go and rewrite your site you know or write you one whole landing page and so there's a couple really important things there one the purchase is being made without me talking to you like charging a hundred bucks an hour we're probably have a conversation and you're like we're planning that second thing is it's pre packaged so you know exactly what you're buying and then the the third thing is that the time and money are totally disconnected so if i get better and better if i hire people any of that right like i'm not having to sit there for ten hours and do it and so there's a bunch of these skills that have to learn to do the product right service an exam a simple example we i think ryan bi came on the pod long time ago and he talked about drop servicing which was a a version of this so like the the example was given is like there's these products that are like you pay thirty dollars and i'll draw a picture of you you and you give me a picture of you and i'll draw you as a simpsons character or like you can send this as a gift so somebody loves simpsons you can give me a photo of them i'll draw as simpsons character you get it so it has all the elements you talked about self serve you come in has a predefined price you just click a button and you pay you get a defined product end product out of it so we're kinda both clear on the bargain and then third you don't know how long it takes me you don't know how much it cost me i don't have to do the work myself so with a lot of these character services it's like it just gets pipe to a you know person in the philippines who's an artist they take the gig they submitted it they get seven dollars the the service keeps you know whatever twenty three dollars and and it's all done so that's like an example of a product type service and by the way isn't there it like a facebook group called product who is that there's a guy running that's pretty interesting we talked about them yeah great name green maybe or something like that so so what he does is he's got this facebook group and the is like a so niche but it's actually pretty valuable if you're in that niche so he has his facebook group called product services or something like that product businesses is and and what he was doing was he would just show an example so he'd say look this is a real estate agent and before here's how it used to work you know here's their page here's their face call them up become a client blah blah and he's like or i'm sorry that's not a good example it's i make what i design websites i can code anything you can hire me as a freelancer and then you changed it to a product i service which is you're a real estate agent you need a website for your company i make real estate agent websites come here pick one of the the six templates push go i'll give you a website and i'll charge you a fixed fee of two hundred fifty dollar a five hundred dollars to give you that website and so it's basically a way of product a a service you know what the best name that i've ever heard for that is jack butcher who's our friend and he has this course it's got it's a beautiful it's called build one sell twice so good it's such a good name i i took the course yeah what did you love it yeah i love it just because everything jack does is done so well so you know he could you know write me a birthday card and i would be like wow i love birthday cards it's like do i really love birthday cards or do i love jack butcher i think i just love jack butcher actually yeah his ability to take something and like dis steal it down to the absolute essence alright and like build one sell twice is that like it's selling products you know where you're saying okay i can make this thing a single time and and then sell it as many times as i want which everyone talks about the upside of that of like oh this is gonna be amazing right i can build this and sell it a whole bunch of times no one talks about the downside that like it's so freaking hard to do the for like to make the first one you know whereas if i'm building a one off thing like using websites for example like okay i'm supposed to build a website for sam he's paying me two thousand bucks like i build this out it's not that hard i can use my skills to do it the product version is like building a website builder you know that's incredibly hard and so you have this like trough for a long time where you're you're not gonna make money in the short term but the the like the leverage is incredible how are you now thirty one so you're thirty one as long as i've known you we've known each other since we're both like twenty three twenty four you've you've always pretty much been the same where you were pretty calm very patient i would say patient would probably be the best word to describe you and there's been a lot of times i remember in two thousand and fourteen or something like that i didn't have much money but i holler at my really rich friend and i was like man nathan is doing like a hundred grand a month like in revenue this thing's gonna be big you should try to invest and maybe i could broker a deal and you and if i did that then i met i've you you probably had a ton you've have also probably had a ton of people who were trying to buy the company for a life changing amount of money and you've probably had loads of other opportunities so my question is how have you stayed pretty calm and also incredibly patient throughout all this i if patience is something i struggle with your sean was telling you about how he launches like a new does a new drop every week and like and i i think that that's rooted in like oh but we need the numbers to go up this week and like you got and i've done this i do the same thing where i'm like but it's not growing now and i and i need to so how have you done so patient and long term focused well i think part of his personality and you're right that like patient and relentless are probably two things you can use to describe me back then and now but i think a lot of the ideas that are in some of these articles or that that i try to write about is really in building this one thing so i think about what analogy that like is strip malls versus skyscrapers let's say we're getting into real estate development and we've got a piece of land and you're trying side okay what what should we build on it and so you wanna make money quickly and so you build like you know first of the office building or something you got like a radio shack there now you're making you got a little bit of cash flow coming in you know you wanna expand you build another you know add onto to that now we've got a subway and we're we've built it out and we've got a little strip mall or a shopping center and that's like we're gonna use up our land each time we're spending horizontally you and so we're you know launching a new product the the version of this is the like the blogger podcast or someone who's like i've got my ebook my membership site my whatever other thing that i'm doing you know i keep adding and each one makes a little bit of money my approach on everything is the skyscraper model like i'm gonna do one thing and i'm gonna keep pouring everything into that and just keep going taller and taller and taller and makes the and so like convertkit is my attempt at a skyscraper and like in the billion dollar creator article it's all about people i think you are building those but skyscraper you've not you've not always done that actually i and i think that that's a good strategy but i would i would actually say it's pretty cool that you've not always done that and i'll give you an example but the reason why it's cool is because like you're flawed and you do you you definitely have your you're even though you're incredibly patient and long term thinking like maybe it's not rooted in this probably but like there are some examples for example like you've done a bunch of book launches you've launched like eight or nine things that's that have sucked you did this great twitter thread where you well no he did this twitter because it's very sucked yeah he goes here's deny things that i've created that were horrible no he he had a threat i don't know if you words suck maybe he said failed yeah flopped or something like that so this is something else right like we all wanna jump in and build the most perfect product and you can't do that because there's all of these skills that you have to learn like that's the point of this ladder wealth creation article is that like business and building wealth is the combination of like a thousand little skills and if you try to do it all at once you know like you're going to fail and so that's like in these ladders the one point that i'm trying to make is that the like you know i put marketplaces in social networks you know at the top of the hardest ladder and then just below that is saas because if you think about the number of skills that you have to know in order to do that like sam what was the first product you sold online i well there was two it was liquor so i sold alcohol on the internet and then i also created a guide on how to how to find a roommate in san francisco okay so that guide like do you remember as you were trying to figure out how to collect payments for that or like how to put together a page that would sell it like like he was at the road meetup yeah i ended up using gum road because it was so stressful i couldn't figure out i was like walt i was like i remember going to shopify i'm like well shopify let you sell pdfs how does that work so yeah remember those things right you're trying to figure out how to do okay how to collect money on the internet is something that you have to learn and now we're just like we get we could rattle off a whole bunch of ways right but someone sorry i was saying hey i wanna get into this they don't know how to collect money on the internet they don't know how to write headlines they don't know how to collect email subscribers why that even matters right all of these things and so i think the best way to do it is to learn through a bunch of these other little products right and so that was like basically what you're seeing all the way along with the ebooks and everything else is me learning all of the skills that ended up culminating and being able to build convert that's great and then the other thing is like if i say i only focus on convertkit like that's not fully true because i like to have contrast in my life i think that's something that helps and so like we we started off yeah you know ripping on some real estate stuff and the reason that i like it is because you you spend all your time sitting in front of a computer and so doing something tangible like airbnb or something in the real world is like to me is the opposite because i get to actually go see a real property i get to you know the visited in in person it's a totally different experience my friend sean blanc says if you work with your mind you should rest with your hands and that's i like that idea cool of like just doing something that's the opposite and so i think if you give yourself these little indulge of like buying a house in airbnb being it or starting like a one off paid newsletter that you run an autopilot or sean what you're doing where you're like run out and make a course and then they're you're like okay that was fun i think that can be a creative outlet that then it helps you focus on the main thing rather than saying like oh i'm gonna go create ten main things when you've been creating convertkit let's say that either you've sold the company and you still wanna i like to do interesting things or your twenty one or twenty five years old and you wanna start something what interesting opportunities or problems that need to be solved have you discovered where you're like i can't do that now but it'd be pretty cool if someone like someone could totally get into the blank and do blank yeah okay this is honest but a terrible answers your question because of the night because i also did it right is as we're were doing email marketing you know and running the newsletters for like james clare tim ferris and everyone else the thing that i wanted to do is then get into commerce of like okay we have this whole side of it right where we're sending all the emails how the connection of the fans now i wanna build the like the credit card processing and i wanna get a cut of everything that they sell and so then i realized like oh and that was always the answer actually if if someone was like if you weren't doing convertkit what would you do now i always said i'd go start a gun road competitor and then the nice thing is there's that synergy there so it's like okay went started in a government competitor called convertkit commerce it's in the same product so it's like both a realistic cancer and probably not very satisfying for you because it's totally different gum road has been around for a long time now up until recently they pretty much had never done anything to change it and no one is competing with them and but there's a downside it doesn't make that much money like i actually don't know what it makes anymore but as of a couple a few years past like he would tweet out his revenue and like it was really hard to build a business where he was making like four percent of someone's like ten dollar pdf you know what i mean there's that's why you had build a build a better business model right and so if you look at something and say how could we improve that business model the thing that i saw in that is like okay what if we had another product alongside it that we sold and right so for convertkit we make money off of your email subscription and so i now have these two things that go hand in hand and so the commerce side is really good because now like we're able to for every one of our customers right who's selling products we're able to make a little cut of that and they don't feel like they're paying us anything extra because it's just a bit of the credit card processing fee and then it also reduces our churn because anyone who's selling through convertkit commerce right there now like convertkit is paying them rather than the other way around and so we saw a radically low return so i'd argue you that like gum by itself or you know the government competitor that i wanted to start by itself you're right it's not that good of a business model but when you pair it with convertkit and make the creative a marketing platform this is turning into a sales pitch but you get the idea that i'm trying to make oh it's the like the the combination of those two things that ben makes it a fantastic business model and so you have to look at okay this is working i wanna go after this in whatever space it is and then take a step back and say okay what are the flaws in the business model what other products do i pair it with what other audience do i target it against you know any of those things that actually makes it a compelling business instead of like an an average business and do do you actually are you still hands on with convertkit or are you i know you're the ceo but do you have someone helping you run it or are you still the guy in charge no i'm way too hands on so i think that people don't tell you in startups is that like the growth that you see is a whole bunch of stacked to s curves you know of like you figure out things that work and it takes off and then it levels out and you gotta figure out the next plateau or like the next stage of growth and so i'm very hands on like we've had a few executives leave over the last year just a lot of change and so i'm like completely in it recruiting new executives working with the team who designed an expert of the product and so yeah i'm not the the like case study of what you should do for the perfect execution on you're not the four hour workweek week i i'm not the four hour workweek week do grind i mean i know you got like eighteen kids no three what do you i know i i just because as long as i as long as i remember you i think your oldest are like you had your oldest when you were young and so i always would tease like what do you have like forty kids now so you trouble so and but you you are you grinding right now or do you have is it a forty hour workweek week it's it's right now it's a lot more than a forty hour workweek week but it's interesting of trying to structure that around like kids you know of it it's a lot of like waking up early you know or like this weekend we're headed out for our team treat like meaning of a up in person so i'm leaving saturday morning so like this morning when my kids woke up early i like we went out of the house and like i spent two or three hours together you know before because i know i'm gonna work all day and and then gone all next week so yeah i don't work in crazy amount but at least like fifty to fifty five hours a week is probably what i am for so i don't know if that counts is grinding but it's definitely not not relaxing it's in the middle yeah in the middle i think of grinding and that grinding what do you think sean i think it's great i you know i think convertkit i'm a user so i and i i complaining to nathan all tell i'm like i'm paying too much for convertkit he's like and and duke complain about that and he was good and i just point out how much money you make yeah he was like but you know email like making you all this money and i'm like yeah but i just feel like emails free and like this should be free and i was like i was like can i just get this for free and he's like well you know like let me know what you think is you know he's very very patient with me and and was sort of like you know because i was like i was i'm i told ben i was like ben go find like what we should use instead of convertkit and ben kinda like search for a couple products and then he was like well you know like they're all kinda worse but there are some cheaper options you want worse but cheaper and i was like off fuck i gotta choose worse but cheaper wait what's your what's your what's your bill every month i think i pay like four hundred dollars a month maybe more don't even know that's what you're and how much money do you make a it's not above that right like it's more i those are two separate things i feel like because because the email doesn't make me that much money it's like got it through the email i build the audience and then through the audience if i launch a product or a course or whatever yeah makes a bunch of money but that's separate work i gotta go do if a separate set of cost they go into that and so we actually did we were like oh should we switch and then i kind of respected that anything wasn't just like oh whatever takes to stay you know here you go free i was like i was like okay the fact that he didn't do that tells me like he knows the value of his thing and as much as i hate that i'm you know not getting this like free discount or whatever i respect that and so i stuck with it nathan mormon no i'm not dude do you get a free mormon energy and off new hear me i mostly just hear from you sam you've never heard that for anyone else i mean you live in idaho you you you had kids at twenty one like you're you work hard your honest it seems like you don't party you got hardcore mormon energy problems do all the time yeah no you gotta you gotta with the caffeine there's sean what i gonna say is that what what's funny is some of like tim mcgraw and armed sports both have convertkit newsletters and they pay full price and they don't never give me shit about it yeah then it's the it's like the inmate influence just they're like i should get this for free you know and i'm like no so it it's a fascinating because we've had that a lot over the years right of people saying like hey what discount can you give me do you know how famous i am and kinda what's fun is getting into i separate them from internet famous and actual famous and the more we've got into the actual famous space it's the more it's been to say like yeah no man here's the value that we provide and and i think i was giving you a hard time because you had just done a thread like two weeks earlier about your paid newsletter it was making like fifty or a hundred grand a month i can't remember if i like linked you to the same thread but that's what i wanted to do in the twitter dms so how big is how how big is arnold's list oh we can't say those numbers but he's still relatively small who's whose list is bigger his his list are violence my list is not very big but his i i think it could be the same segment arnold no way that's bitch no you don't a favorite little like business model synergy completely so he was on like his fun like ways he goes around promotes his newsletter because he goes on like jimmy kim and it's talking about his email news newsletter which is is always fun yeah i go on indy hackers dude but when like a business model thing that's funny is when one convertkit customer links to another to grow their list so like when tim ferris links to arnold's list and said like hey you know go sign up for arnold's list it adam of your fourteen forty thousand prescribe and and it's just like our cut just goes you know it's just one customer just refer to the other but now anyway it's a dude you gotta write a blog post like the best way to grow your list partnership like a list of like interesting people to park their way i have a vp of growth opening do you wanna come come the morning crew actually as we discussed last so yeah last episode morning brew offered me a job too then yeah it's actually like great power move is to just offer staff writer jobs or staff jobs to ceos of other companies just to like flex on them dude hey you know i heard things are tough just so you know where we're always there's always a home for you here it's really so let's just send the ceo of mailchimp like the like a month into starting the hustle i like we written blog post whatever and we're were i was trying to hire writers and i saw this awesome article and i and i don't remember where it was but the author was nellie bowls i think her name is b o w l b o w l s and now she's like a really famous new york times person and i think like even when i found her she was at actually at the new york times but like i just done a one off piece for this small magazine and i emailed her i'm like you are so good would you love to interview for her position at my company like we're looking for bloggers and she was like that's cute but no thanks and i will never forget that she told me that's cute i have got i have i have held this grudge against her for years because she said it's cute for years you could just imagine like the little pat on the head and the hair ta that went with like cute you know like it's technically up at night like so i mean i was like i've am i gonna get revenge and i don't have a good way but that was like eight years like already gotta stark before bed every night he says a list of the names of the people he needs to like get revenge on it's like nellie balls i i definitely have you know like with they say like i got like a bunch of champagne bottles with people's names on it and whenever i get back at on crack that champ i don't bottle open to drink it like yeah i've want some people's heads on my desk that's for sure we have buddy you get on that list not much turns out not much yeah just don't call me cute just be like you know comment on one of his instagram you know videos and just be like awesome awesome for a beginner just move on you've like you're still at it awesome we we have a buddy who is like the nicest guy in the world like you know we'll give you the shirt off his back and nice to everybody kind strangers kinda animals kinda to everybody and you go into his house and on his fridge he's got this like clip art picture of a i have a brand name of a another company's logo with a target and like kind of like a red target like a sniper and he's got three on on his fridge and i remember going over like what's this about and he's like oh yeah he's kinda like you know those are my those are my competitors i just every day when i come to the kitchen i just wanna think about you know just sort of killing them basically i was like whoa the a dark side to the to mister nice guy here do you have one of those nathan think and i bet anything they think does not have anything like what we're talking about he's got you are so wrong i bet you that he he will i don't know if he'll admit it i bet you he hates mailchimp oh see i have weird feelings about mailchimp because i have so much respect for them and like dude you have respect them like the guy who killed john lennon has respect for him it's called a love knife you love so much wanna kill him like what it is it's like the guy who like killed the pope that's what you're gonna do so you have to separate the business like the business from the people so i think that's true like one time i was that conference and ben chestnut was speaking and so i emailed him and was like hey man will you i don't know even know why he said yes but it's just like like big fan of what you've done like all in all fairness were a competitor trying to take as much business from you as you can but would you be up for sitting down and talking and he said like yeah i have a flight at this time so i'm checking out the hotels like meet me in the hotel lobby you know and we'll chat for thirty minutes be the wrong hotel love it great gotta remove bench chestnuts mats sent me this wild yeah is like that your flight hotel he never had a flight but no like he sat down with me and told me a all about how they launched their free plan and all this stuff and then the they were ink magazines company of the year this is the ink magazine like the inc five thousand event and so the editor in chief from ink magazine comes up what we're talking he's like hey ben great talk all of that and he ben goes hey do you know nathan he's trying to kill my company and like as he introduced me to the editor in chief of ink magazine and anyway so after time what it look like if you just like assaulted him right there so like sam's screwed what if you reservation now he's still like i'm feel like killing nellie balls with the love knife or whatever for the record delhi i'm not i'm not gonna do anything is say was this the same person that you had the interview the famous interview with at the new york time times or the new yorker or whatever it was and like the interview did not go well it did not go with her or no that was aaron griffin and she like came to interview me and i don't even know why but she was fishing for stuff and she's like so like what are you doing in the weekends like listen to joe ro that's what she said to me i'm like what i'm like no like he doesn't even like that's monday to friday he doesn't even have a i'm like unnecessarily be talking about yeah and and and she was like well like because you're like a tech bro and i'm like first of all most of new york times revenue is digital you're a tech company so you tell me what are your tech friends do and it's so anyway yeah i think did you storm out or or how did that end something something i i just like i don't know what to say i'm out of here yeah i i it it didn't it didn't end well that's so good those interviews i've only ever had one of those i remember who was with but where you're like okay i i i think we're done where you could just tell that they're like looking for some angle and all the questions are weird and why would anyone hate you because you're kinda perfect it's good that you bring that up like well like it's like well i it's a lot like true so i'm not sure what the problem is yeah it's like i like to i've got there's a lot of like like it's like showers it his clip of biden in the other day when he called the the journalist was like on the way out did you see this clip a stupid name it you guys like you know he was in what you think about inflation and biden just like in that moment it was just like lost it he was just like yeah great stupid subtle bitch okay that's how i imagine nathan like breaking character in like one of these interviews so okay sam i have a question on this then like do you think that being so nice in all of this and and like everyone likes me it holds back my growth as a entrepreneur and you know internet so wanna be internet celebrity no because a like you're happy and it's working i think that's like the goal and b you actually have dropped it a couple times so you don't have to talk about this if you don't want to but basically you didn't like what saw hill like gum road yeah did and you called them out and it was pretty it was pretty vicious and i knew that do you know this sean what did he call about for dude he just like publicly kinda bitch slap style and like for what it was crazy point so so i was around sam was talking about i around government from the very beginning i think i was the first independent or at one point they told him i was the first independent seller across ten thousand dollars in sales on government so like from the very very beginning and anyway so friends with tons of people there and like spent a lot of time at their office and all of that and a huge friend of silos but at one point he like got burnt out on the company they had to offer to to buy the company he didn't take it he laid everyone off instead like it it wound down and and like ultimately failed but the thing is with a platform like that they don't like fail and disappear they just like fail in coast and still like the software still works and all that and then he came back and told this totally different story of like here's how i you know like vc is evil and i'm running the company like in this totally new way here's how i run it in five hours a week with like two contractors and that was frustrating but i didn't say anything but then when they went and raised new money and didn't give any they they got all the vcs to write off their equity they got all of the team members to be like hey to failed the company like give up your equity and all that as part of it and they wouldn't raise a bunch of new money and didn't go back and give the original team members like that pissed me off because it was like i know exactly who built the software you know like because i sat next to them as we we're talking about it you know they're off in san francisco like i know that they don't have any equity and i know that you didn't take care of them and now you're like telling this new story and everything so alright yeah i guess sam i do make some enemies on to do and and when you said that i was like well i was i don't know saw hill he seems like a nice guy from my limited interactions with them but i was like well if nathan saying that it's probably true yeah and you know you could separate off your spread the person from like the decision i've made a bunch of bad decisions but i don't think i'm a bad guy and you made a lot since yeah and so you know i i would separate the two like because he you know probably a nice guy i i don't know him super well either but but you're right like you know the the way he kind of got twitter famous in a way was to come out and tell this story of like the kind of like it was like a fail story that worked it was like we were the hot thing we raised money we had all these expectations people bet on us it didn't work and so now we're in this new mode and i've seen the light and it was sort of like you know i got baptized and now i believe that this business should be done this other way okay fair enough and some people really like that they thought i was very transparent all that good stuff but it was weird that like you know a year or two later like i'm raising new money at a hundred million dollar just like can wait you're back on the that train like weren't you kinda saying like you know all the things that were wrong with that model and like free yeah champion the the the freedom that you were getting and the the choose your own destiny and getting off the rat race like maybe i read it wrong maybe i was just skimming and i missed the point but like that did seem strange to me and then like you're saying nathan like it's kinda weird to kind of to do that whole thing in public when the whole bunch of people bet on you lost money on you and and are not participating in the like you know future and so that would leave a bad taste in people's mouth i think so you know i think it's fair points you know and i'm sure i'm sure he's got his side of the story about why it's not bad and why it's not bad and all those things so you know fair enough but he's not here so i'm just gonna say my side and seems like that'll be the final word i mean tons of credit to to sell hill afterwards because he like he owned up to parts of it and we had a conversation about it and he actually then when he launched his book he actually included convertkit in a story in it which i was was really surprised so as far as people who don't hold the grudge i think si is one of them not sam he's not sam i think he's not i i old grudges in fact i actually manufacture grudges so like this just one guy i always called my rival and i'm sure from his perspective he's either like who is this or he's like wait why are were we rivals we we got a lot we got a and in my this is like somebody i met in when i was in college and the guys got like a super ultra rich dad like billionaire dad and i always used to joke like if i ever played basketball there usually wasn't like another indian guy like playing basketball so if there ever was like the running joke and my group of friends in college was well sean we know who you're guarding like you have to guard him and you would need to win your match up here like your honor is on the line basically like we need to know who's the better indian and basketball player on the court right now it was just like this running joke and so that got extended once we i started a business with my college friends they were like well seems like this guy is like you know your rival and i and i played into it and we kinda made it a thing where the guy would be like you know hanging out with richard branson on island and we were like just try to create a chip on our shoulder underdog stories like you know i'd be sleeping on my air mattress that i was planning to return to target to like save money because our business wasn't doing any good and if you saw this other guy like you know sipping pin cola with richard branson it just felt like oh those are the halves and where the have knots and so i was like manufacturing these little feud or like i remember we did a we when we bought be back we were gonna re relaunch it and i gave the scoop to this girl who was like really nice journalist to me she was somebody had matt she seemed really nice and i was like hey you do you want the the story like i'll give you the story about like what we're gonna do and how it all played out she's like yeah great so we she comes over i do the interview it's like literally you know we're playing patty cake it's all good article comes out the next day and the headline is like just some vicious it's like remember be yeah that you know that flop is backing again i know it was just like it was like oh my feels disgusting exactly marie lunches as he told me that he told me playing with his sad breath and i was like what you know like yeah in my head that's what it said like it was like as yeah if you like spinach eat some of the stuff that came at a sean's teeth still probably there i thought so back have you know not no love knife just straight knife and i remember just being like so i never had the interview where i walked away i had the opposite where i felt completely but and i text her i was like y what the fuck because actually the article was fine just the headline was completely brutal it was just making fun of us and saying like get a load of this fucking sc and and she's like sorry like the editor writes to the headlines that he just thought that that's what would get more clicks like i don't have any saying that and i was like oh so fuck you in your profession it was like you know where i landed on that i think that was my only feud actually by the one where i called what's her name the jake paul of journalism was probably the other one taylor the runs yeah like i think that i actually think it's great fuel i mean like i joked to my wife i'm like i'm fueled on like carbonated water and like grudges like i think grudges i think are like the greatest fuel ever i because of that like the whole thing about being like a chip on your shoulder like all what it you wanna like grudges is like my macro rage my macro yeah i'm just like yeah like i gotta make sure i get my rage in that day otherwise i just don't feel like myself it's like alright goal i just love firing people so anyway i think it's good i think rate is great that's the key takeaway from this episode people same you don't need like a lawyer and we go manufacturers somebody some day i do like and i well it's sean when when we first met ben levy or i met them the first time you were like well you know sam's a little challenging give them the heads take your personal if he kinda fires off yeah our goal is actually a great great analogy because there's no there's no what's it called like there's no hate behind the words right like i'm i'm yelling but i love you and like it says nothing to do with how i how much i like you or i'm good i think you are i'm just yelling because i'm yelling and so i tried to give him the heads up but you were so zen this was post post exit sam is a completely different guy he's you know you're not already gold anymore we'll come back in due time dude nathan thanks for coming on happy happy you're you're able to make it i i bailed on you last week sorry and i'm happy that we made it work this time yeah thanks for having it's always fun yep you wanna where people you're just like what yeah yeah okay so if people wanna follow me online i'm i'm currently trying to grow my twitter audience so you should go following there i'm trying to see if i can go from i'm at fifty thousand a i need is hundred thousand so at nathan barry and barry ba a r usually usually i tried you should tell them the name of the of the thing you know i only want the most dedicated fans who like really no i'm kidding thanks for the advice sean to your ladder turn shove out in your ladder you know what we didn't discuss him and i don't we don't have time now but one time sean nathan renamed the company convertkit to something else and he didn't realize it but it meant like something like it was disrespectful to hindu hindi hindi with the plural yeah either first and it was disrespectful them and he made this huge name change and they changed the company back to convertkit after like twenty four hours wait what was it what was what was that okay what i i'm i speak with about but what mean service but in sea culture it means oh like like self service and like the highest form of worst yeah and so it it's a whole thing like i'm doing a i'm doing a service for you i don't i don't find that offensive that's not offensive yeah there were a lot of people who did find it offensive and so you technical if we talking about mistakes turns out i'm not as easily i the owning i got trouble so didn't find it offensive and i actually we had a lot of people who were like that's like thought that it was awesome or something like that but yeah everyone who was from the seat culture they were like sorry it yeah it had a much different meaning there so anyway that was a five hundred thousand dollar mistake but i owned up to it so that's the whole thing for another way that the the the convertkit good name the other thing like seven or whatever you said not of my name like so i think hindu maybe a new worship no like that doesn't seem like the right name for an email yeah versus great name but such a good name well so maybe it was a five hundred thousand dollar mistake that will turn out to be a multimillion million dollar win do you still do you still have the domain because we should just launch like a prayer surface or like you know like a a phil thing for india under that night i have some indian startups ups that might want that name i do have the domain there's actually two startups ups one that went through y comb and one other that have asked for it at one point but i paid three hundred and forty thousand dollars for the domain so i'm i'm kinda hanging on to is a four letter four letters i do even how spell that word how you spell that word s e right yeah but it sounds like a bottle one i something that you're gonna like send emails from so i think smart move my i got trouble this morning because i wrote yeah sorry in in the mill road edition that went out this morning one of the things we covered was like oh the fed the fed had this meeting about interest rates and how that's affecting like the markets and and i was like basically i put a picture up of the committee that meets the fed open market committee and it's basically like a bunch of old white people yeah and i was like you know and today you know i had a bunch of different openers that i scrapped one was like here's a picture from a nursing home i visited recently oh wait no that's not right that's the fed open market committee and i scrapped that and i said something else and then i was like you know at today's elderly white people book committee and i like i had a strike through and i was no at that fed open market committee world old mcdonald's at like seven am and people got mad it's like a seas sandy and yeah people were like you know the skin color has nothing to do with i was like yeah of course it's a joke and it has everything to do with my joke and like just the picture is funny and like wait i thought we can make fun of the fed with no repercussions like that the there's like certain things that are really safe to punch at and the fed seems like one of the safest you know the fed you know the the the senate like who's who's defending their own i don't understand who are you is your mom on this is your grandma on this panel to some people got mad at i was like you you should go ahead and add unsubscribe because my filter is a lot looser than that dude nate to thank you this is awesome yeah thanks for having me we'll have to do it again sometime and we'll hang out in austin where you get this new property we'll come in and do a workout on the you know on the ranch you you to come on let's go let's get challenging up grudge this year alright