The Future Belongs to Creators

We’ve all made mistakes. They’re going to happen to everyone. However, it’s how you learn and adapt from those mistakes that can transform your business and creative endeavors. 

In this episode, we’re discussing some of our biggest mistakes and what we learned from them. You can make this a regular part of your creative process by doing retrospectives or “retros” after each project. No matter what you call it, it’s important to look back and learn from the past. 

Mistakes We’ve Made

• Not knowing the audience. It’s important to know what your audience wants and what they can/will pay for. 
• Not growing a list. Even if you write great content that drives traffic, if you’re not capturing that audience on a list then you won’t see any long-term benefits from that traffic. 
• Focusing on money over content. When you get traction, it’s easy to focus on how to monetize, but that can be short-sighted. Instead, continue to create content and build your audience and let the selling come more organically.
• Trying to build motivation. Consistency and having a system is more important than relying on motivation to accomplish your goals. 
• Not having a clear vision for money. If you’re going to raise money, it’s important to understand how you plan to leverage it before you get it. 
• Trying too many things at once. You will always have more success if you focus on one thing at a time and give it the attention it deserves.
• Thinking there’s an end point. Having a body of work that shows your growth as a creator is valuable for your future self.

Links

• How I Made $19,000 on the App Store While Learning to Code by Nathan Barry
• Don’t Throw Away Your Competitive Advantage by Nathan Barry

Creator of the Day

• Michael Sykes

Resource of the Day

• I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons by Kevin Hart and Neil Strauss

Thought of the Day

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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It’s another Q&A Friday, where we answer your questions about business and what it means to be a creator.

In today’s episode, we answer questions about our employee wellness program, refining our company values, pivoting to a new niche, and more!

Today’s Questions

• What is a wellness program? What does ConvertKit’s look like?
• You’re refining your company values? What does that process look like?
•  If you're pivoting to a new niche, what would you do to refine your content strategy and define your potential products?
• How is ConvertKit Commerce doing? Is it still in beta or has it been released to everyone?
• What are the questions you wish creators would ask you? 

Links

• Patcasso Creator Session
• What’s your system for establishing principles? by Nathan Barry
• Silicon Florist

Creator of the Day

• Dr. Montserrat Andreys DC, MS

Resource of the Day

• Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires by Shomari Wills

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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Is it better to be under contract and get paid up front? Or to be independent and own all the long-term value you’ve accrued?

That’s the question we’re addressing today. We discuss what it means to be an independent creator and spend some time illustrating what we can learn about the future of our work from prominent creators such as Joe Rogan, Michelle Obama, and Joe Budden. 

Most of us will probably never reach these levels of fame, but it’s a good conversation to have because of the important implications for creators moving forward. 

Main Takeaways

• Unlike many other career paths, the options are endless for independent creators. 
• Keeping your personal or professional brand in mind when signing a contract is critically important because that will drive how you impact the marketplace. 
• A key question to ask yourself when deciding which path to choose is, “Do you want money now or more money later through more work?”
• It’s hard to “make it” regardless of who you are, so there’s minimal risk going independent and retaining everything that you create. 

Links

• Joe Rogan Got Ripped Off By Spotify

Creators of the Day

• Srini Rao Creator Story
• Stratechery

Resources of the Day

• Descript
• Audio Social Networking (Like Clubhouse)
  
  

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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It’s another Q&A Friday! Make sure you join us live every Friday and/or submit your questions ahead of time so we can give the best possible answers to your questions.  

In today’s episode, we answer questions about reviving your old email list, preparing for speaking engagements, becoming the face of a company, and more!

Main Takeaways

• How do you reboot a stagnant email list? Is it better to re-engage somehow or blow it up and start from scratch?
• Both of you do speaking engagements. How do you prepare for your talks? How have you grown because of speaking?
• ​Do you have any examples of a creator being acquired/hired by a larger company to become the face of the company (from a social media and content marketing angle)?

Links

• The Billion Dollar Blog by Nathan Barry
• Substack
• Medium
• Google Trends
• Quora
  
  

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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Scaling is something everyone should consider when starting a business. It’s important to understand how and why you will grow in the future and what it might look like when you “make it.” This type of visualization and planning helps you work backward and figure out where you need to start. 

Today’s episode is based on Nathan’s article, The Billion Dollar Blog. We dive a little bit deeper into the four basic principles of scaling that Nathan introduces.

Main Takeaways

• Making money is a skill that you need to practice. 
• Your audience is a critical launching pad for your business and will continue to matter even as you grow. At some point you will need to make the switch from audience to brand, but only you will know when that time is.
• The Four Principles
  • Build more than a personal brand. 
  • Sell products, not attention. 
  • Drive higher customer value through recurring or repeat purchases. 
  • Choose a better business model. 

Links

• Wellness Mama
• Kylie Jenner
• The Billion Dollar Blog by Nathan Barry
• The Ladders Of Wealth Creation by Nathan Barry
• How to Get Good at Making Money

Resources of the Day

• Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts by Ryan Holiday
• Our third decade of climate action: Realizing a carbon-free future
• Project Wren
  
  

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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It’s a great Friday here at ConvertKit. It’s a little smokey in Portland, but other than that we’re all looking forward to the weekend! We’ve got another great Q&A episode for you today, in which we answer questions about promoting courses and products to a small audience, why we reject job applicants, buildings a meaningful business, and more!

Today’s Questions

• I have a small 165 person email list and 850 subscribers on YouTube. I’m about to launch my first online video course, how would you go about promoting, pricing and pre-launching it?  
• Why don’t you promote The Future Belongs to Creators to your newsletter list?
• What are the most unexpected/unusual reasons you’ve had to reject job applicants?
• If I decide to monetize my personal brand via content, will that change how I use my personal brand for freelance / consulting work?
• Should I keep two similar blogs or go down to one? 
• ​What one piece of literature has had a dramatic impact on how you think about commerce and/or building a meaningful business?

Links

• Are You Making the Most Common Pricing Mistake?
• Nerd Fitness
• The Lessons Of History by Will and Ariel Durant

Creators of the Day

• Trevor Noah: Afraid Of The Dark
• Will and Ariel Durant

Resources of the Day

• I Was a U.S. Diplomat. Customs and Border Protection Only Cared That I Was Black
• Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices about Giving Back by William MacAskill 
• The Responsible Company: What We've Learned From Patagonia's First 40 Years by Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley 
• Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard
• Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business: The Story of Clif Bar Inc. by Gary Erickson and Lois Lorentzen 
• Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia 
• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
  
  

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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It’s another Q&A Friday! This week, we answer questions about taking vacations, finding time to create, avoiding procrastination, crossing $2M in MRR, and more!

Today’s Questions

• How do you take a good vacation as a creator? 
• ​Do you block off time on your calendar to create (like you do with calls) or do you just fit it in wherever you can find time?
• ​Do you ever find yourself procrastinating? If so, when? If not, how do you avoid it?
• How did it feel to cross the $2M MRR mark?
• ​When it comes to the idea of "people like us do things like this," what does that look like for ConvertKit? Who are "people like us" for you?
• How does your company use mathematics? Do you do any modelling or statistics?
• ​In a perfect world where finding time to do this work is not an issue, how would you integrate your personal websites with this podcast?
  • Would having a “podcast” menu item on your site not jive with your vision for your site / this podcast?

Links

• Nathan’s Website
• Barrett’s Site

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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With Barrett on vacation, Nathan is going solo to discuss a topic that is important to being a creator, especially in our digital-first era: What should you give away and what should you sell? 

It can be scary to give things away for free, but it’s probably the best decision you can make when it comes to growing your business and fanbase. But how do you when you’re giving away too much? How do you figure out the right balance? And how can giving away your content actually help you monetize it?

In this episode, Nathan talks about those questions, and offers some tips and strategies to help you figure out what will work for you.  

Main Takeaways

• By giving away more for free, you can reach more people. Go all-in on free, and then grow your audience, and then move toward paid. 
• Giving away content can establish you as an authority in your field and make your future products more desirable based on the consumption of your free content. 
• Even if you give a lot of content away, there’s always more to sell in a paid version. The more content you create (free or not) the more ideas you’ll discover more. 
• Clarity and brevity are selling points. If you can cut through the noise and get straight to the point, you should monetize that information. 
• Switch media types. If you have been focusing solely on writing, do a workshop or video. In addition to being interesting and challenging, the novelty can lead to sales. 

Links

• Fs.blog
• The Productivity Manifesto
• COVID Death Stats

Creator of the Day

• ZdoggMD

Resource of the Day

• The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker

Thought of the Day

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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In today’s Q&A Nathan is joined by special guest Sean McCabe. Sean is a writer, podcaster, course creator, and business owner (among many other things).

Nathan and Sean answer questions about writing email sequences, customer discovery calls, creating great brand content, how to repurpose your content for other platforms, and more!

Today’s Questions

• Any tips for the first time writing a sequence or automation setup for a webinar?
• ​I have an idea for the audience I want to serve and I want to have some customer discovery calls. How would you approach this? Cold emails? FB groups?
• Out of the companies you follow, which are the types of content you like most? What frequency do you like? What information do you wish you received more of from your favorite brands?
• What's the most important aspect of video repurposing? Quality of content? Length?

Links

• Sean Wes
• Burn Notice
• Inside Marketing Design
• Sean McCabe on Twitter

Creators of the Day

• Jason Anderson
• The Generalist

Resources of the Day

• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel
• SaveTime.Blog

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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Building and operating a business can quickly get complex. In order for your business to run smoothly, there are thousands of choices and decisions that must be made each day. And when you have questions, it’s great to seek advice from those going through the same thing with their businesses.

Today, we answer questions about open rates and statistics for broadcast channels, building online communities, intellectual property, and more. 

Today’s Questions

• How accurate are the open rates, click rates, and statistics for broadcast in ConvertKit?
• What is your take on building an online community? Is this a strategy worth pursuing?
• How do you distinguish when high standards serve your broader mission and when they don’t?
• What precautions does your company have in place so that an employed software developer doesn’t steal the complete source code in ConvertKit?
• Have you done customer or speaker gifts at ConvertKit? How does that work?
• A couple of weeks ago, Nathan asked about feature requests for ConvertKit on Twitter. Can you talk more about this? What’s the goal? Is it documented? And how do you share updates?

Links

• Sean Ogle
• ConvertKit
• Next Please
• Campaign Zero

Creator of the Day

• Steven Pressfield
• Samuel Sinyangwe

Resource of the Day

• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

Start building your audience for free

With ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.

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