Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This my conversation with Nathan Barry. Lots of great stuff: specifically for building an email list.
Show Notes
Welcome to a brand new episode of Product People: this is the show that exposes you to the scrappy underworld of people creating their own products. No bullshit, no pretending: what does it take to build and launch your own thing?
This my conversation with Nathan Barry. It originally occurred on the community I run for bootstrappers called JFDI.BZ (Just Fucking Do It). JFDI members were able to ask questions live, and have access to the full (video) interview. The podcast version is abridged, but has a lot of great stuff: specifically for building an email list.
If you’d like to become a JFDI member, you can sign-up here.
Show notes
PS: want more?
Get bootstrapping goodies, and advice on how to build and launch your own thing: justinjackson.ca/newsletter
Read my latest post: Succeed with your own products in 2014
Subscribe to my free course on building your own email list.
Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Here we go.
Speaker 2:What is going on? I thought the show was canceled. Hey. It's Justin Jackson. Welcome to a brand new episode of product people.
Speaker 2:This is the show that exposes you to the scrappy underworld of people creating their own products. No bullshit. No pretending. What does it really take to build and launch your own thing? This week, I'm talking to Nathan Barry.
Speaker 2:This is a conversation we originally had in a community I run for bootstrappers and solopreneurs, people trying to build and launch their own thing called jfdi.bzed or www.jfdi.bz. And, if you were in that community, you'd be able to chat with Nathan Barry live and ask him questions. But I've taken out some of the best parts of that interview and put them in here for you. So enjoy it. If you want more information, you can check out my website, justinjackson.ca/newsletter, and I'll send you all sorts of goodies related to bootstrapping, building and launching your own products.
Speaker 2:So let's get right into the conversation with Nathan. Thanks for coming back and listening to a brand new episode of Product People. Are we live now? There we go.
Speaker 3:Hey, everybody. I'm here with Nathan Barry from Boise, Idaho. He's a world traveler, but now he's in Boise, right?
Speaker 1:Yep. That's right. Thanks for having me on, Justin.
Speaker 3:Hey, Nathan, thanks for being on. Thanks for taking the time to do this. You know, it always surprises me. This is a weird industry because we can ask people to do things and often if they've got time, they're really receptive to it. I think a lot of people don't realize that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One thing, it's actually when people ask me to do things on short notice, I'm more likely to do it. Because I know what's going on today. I know what's going on this week. But when people are like, Hey, in three weeks, let's schedule this thing.
Speaker 1:And I just don't want to do it.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Exactly. That's a good point, actually. I've had good it all depends. Like if you give people really advanced notice, some people really like that.
Speaker 3:But I'm the same way. Like it almost adds anxiety if I know, like, I've got this thing looming three weeks away. But if it's a snowy day it's a snowy day here in BC right now and it's kind of cold and, you know, there's not much going on, it feels like, oh, yeah, hang out today. I'm cold and lonely. All right.
Speaker 3:So Nathan and I are going to talk about email today. And first question, Nathan, is why is it important for people to people that want to build products, why is it important for them to build an email list?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the first thing comes down to how you're going to get attention for your products. So I I struggled for a long time to get any kind of attention for products until I learned that if you teach people things, they'll listen and they'll pay attention. So that could be anything from telling stories that are interesting to teaching marketing, you know, design tutorials, any of that. So you teach people, pay attention.
Speaker 1:The problem is if you just put that on out on blog posts, people will come across it either through, you know, Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, whatever. They'll come across it once. They'll go, oh, that was interesting. And they will forget who you are and they will never ever come back. And so early on that can be really, really frustrating because you're fighting to get 10 visitors a day, 15 visitors a day, and just knowing that those people are never ever gonna come back is really depressing.
Speaker 1:And so what you need is you need a way to contact them. You need a way to push content out to them instead of hoping that they'll remember who you are and remember to go, Oh, wonder if Nathan's published a new blog post this week? And go check it out. So, in that sense, you've got Twitter, Facebook, RSS, a bunch of different ways that you can push out content to people if they follow you on those channels. And they all work.
Speaker 1:I ran a bunch of numbers and the post is on the Convertkit blog. But I found that email converts far better than all other traffic channels combined. And for me, an email subscriber is worth about 15 times as much as a Twitter follower. That's why I use email because it makes me lots of money.
Speaker 3:What? If you had to guess how much money your email list has made you, what what would it be?
Speaker 1:I I would attribute the large I would attribute most of my revenue in the last year to email.
Speaker 3:So what are we talking about? A $100?
Speaker 1:About 280,000.
Speaker 3:Wow. That is really amazing if you think about it that, just some guy from Boise, Idaho could build a list and actually have people respond. I think that's one thing that people sometimes that's one of the blocks that they have is they'll say, well, why would anyone care? Why do people care about your list?
Speaker 1:Because hopefully it's providing value. So it's if you teach people things, they'll they'll listen. And, you know, there will be quite a few people that unsubscribe that don't get value out of it and that's fine. But now, I've got a bit over 12,000 people that find what I'm writing interesting enough that they want to pay attention. Hopefully through some of my writing online tiered pricing and using email and that kind of thing, I've helped make some people some money.
Speaker 1:And so if you can give advice that people can use to make more money, they will happily listen to more and more. The people who have read my book Authority, I put out some case studies on it like a month and a half ago. I can go in and look at the open rates from those people who I know have made money off of authority and they read everything because they've used that knowledge to release books that have made $3.05 and $10,000. So, yeah, just try to deliver value and people will pay attention.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the other thing about email is that people can reply. So can you tell people about that? Because I think some people don't realize that when you have a list and you're sending stuff out, it's not just one direction, right? Like what kind of stuff comes back when you send out an email?
Speaker 1:So it always depends on what you have at the conclusion of the email. You know, but I've had things like, when I'm working on a new product, I'll ask, what are you struggling with in this area? What frustrates you? What do you not understand about product launches? And then I'll get some really great things back.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to think of some other examples. My friend Brendan Dunn has the best one and that's where in his onboarding sequence, there's an email that says, it's something like it ends with, what's your biggest pain in your freelancing business? And then he categorizes all those responses and then he knows like, okay, I can create a product or I can write a book or a blog post that answers these things because I see certain pains coming up over and over again.
Speaker 3:So,
Speaker 1:the downside of doing that as your list gets bigger is you can get a lot of replies. And it can be a little daunting, especially because I'm not the best at my personal email.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And getting back to people and that kind of thing. And so, I sent out one email. I don't remember what it was. Where I asked, you know, hit reply if you've encountered this too or something like that. And it was just before I left on a trip and I got something like 80 or 90 responses and I felt bad because there's still a lot of them that I still haven't replied back to.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's really fun to be able to talk to people and a few other things that I love about email is you can filter down and just see Hey, I'm headed to the city. Who's going to be there? And you can just send out an email and be like, I'm putting on an event in London. Who wants to show up? There's just a lot of great things that you can do with email that the connection just isn't the same on Twitter and Facebook and other platforms.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you and I have built a list very differently. I built a list. I started building a list before I had a product or anything. And you've done it a different way.
Speaker 3:You started with a product, right? Could you kind of walk us through that? Why did you do that? And what was kind of the result of doing that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So depending on the goal of your list, my goal was to make money. And so I started with a product and really, I don't want to make it sound too much like I knew what I was doing because I was really just figuring out all this stuff as I went along. But I think it's really hard when you have no online presence, no credibility at all to start out and say like, pay attention to me. I have something interesting to say.
Speaker 1:Or and and then to get people right away to sign up for a list. I have a hard time doing that. But in my case, I was starting to work on a book. And so I said, I'm writing a book about designing iPhone applications. Sign up here.
Speaker 1:And in that, I think people actually had something to rally around. Know? They're like, oh, I wanna read that book. Yes, I'll sign up. Or this guy must know what he's talking about with design because he's writing a book on the topic.
Speaker 1:So there's some instant credibility, some actual reason to sign up other than follow the random projects I'm working on. And then there's also intention there where I said sign up to hear more about this book. There is an implied so that you can buy it. And so when you follow that product first approach, you are going to make, I should say, your dollars per subscriber are going to be quite a bit higher. Rather than if you give away a whole bunch of stuff, then you'll get a bunch of people who are expecting more free content.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And just as a kind of to contrast that to some So other I just interviewed Jacob Lonowski. He's the guy behind goodui.org. And he has I was super surprised because he has over 24,000 subscribers on that list.
Speaker 3:And I was just blown away. I said, I've never met anyone that's built a list that fast. But the one thing he's had a hard time doing is to actually sell products to that list. So he's tried a few things. And I think, to your point of intentionality, that is true.
Speaker 3:You can have a list of 24,000, but if your goal is to make money, then you might not convert as well off that list.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's all a matter of what you're trying to do because there's a lot of places where really high numbers of subscribers are really helpful. So if you want to go write a traditionally published book, if you want to go pursue advertising or sponsorships or something like that, then you want really high numbers.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 1:if you're trying to build a great little business that makes somewhere in the 6 figures a year, then you want subscribers who are used to paying for things. So, anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. And so my experience was a little bit different. I did actually have a launch list for this book I was going to write called Build and Launch. And what was helpful for me is as soon as I had people sign up, even, you know, it was 10 people and then 20 and then 30, is I could talk to those people right away.
Speaker 3:And eventually, I figured out that the direction I was going might be more risky, as in people might not buy the book in a year when it was done. Right. As opposed to so what I decided to do instead was after hearing like these patterns emerge from these conversations I was having, I decided to release amplification, which is all about, getting a lot of traction on your blog, building an audience, that kind of thing. And I was able to finish that book a lot quicker and then, you know, launch that. And I think I just hit $3,500 or something on that.
Speaker 3:And so that was like a nice like first product. I think a lot of people are like looking to do their first product, and there's always that fear of like, who am I going to launch to? And you know, if you do have a list, even if it's small, like that $3,500 was you know less than a thousand subscribers at that time. You can respond to kind of what they're saying and then you know, offer a product that kind of fits with the signals they're giving you.
Speaker 1:Right. So I think that's really important that as we're trying things out, you know, most of us have no clue what's going to work as far as anything we are doing online. So, we are trying stuff out, you want to get things out there quickly. That's why you can really build a small product over the course of thirty to sixty days. Get that out there.
Speaker 1:I tend to encourage higher priced products, but I also like to use Sasha Greif as an example where he put out a his ebook step by step UI design. And it took him, like, a week or two to put that together, and he sold it for $3 and $6. He's since doubled the price. And it made him a good amount of money. But it was a great first product.
Speaker 1:And so I think, whatever tutorial you could put out there, maybe a short video tutorial for $5 that tells people how to do some really specific thing that's useful, I think that'd be great. This was actually from the episode of Product People where you interviewed Jason Fried. He talks about how important it is to get those first dollars from complete strangers. And I think that's a great principle because something changes in your head when you realize, Wow, a complete stranger on the internet just paid me money.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And you know what? I had so much anxiety leading up to that launch of amplification. You're just thinking like, Oh, like it could be absolute garbage, like people might hate this. But one thing that gave me confidence is that I had this list, I was able to certain people, especially like those really engaged folks that were emailing me back, I was able to drip out like chapters and stuff to them and get their feedback.
Speaker 3:And then I actually had someone to launch to, right? And so I just actually I haven't promoted it really except for on Twitter a little bit, but I haven't really promoted it besides my list, you know? And to do your first product that way, yeah, it definitely when you overcome that jump of, okay, I've put something up on the internet and someone's paid me for it, it feels well first of all it feels amazing. Even if you only sell a few copies, there's something about like, I built this thing and I sold a few copies and I did that. And you know, and now I've got these relationships.
Speaker 1:And you learn something new every time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the other thing I've been able to do, because I still feel like an amateur in this, is I've been able to like I added so again, based on the emails I was getting, a lot of people were interested in Hacker News. And so I added a Hacker News guide to the product and was able to email my list again and have a bunch more people buy it again and increase the price. So you can grow with your audience too.
Speaker 1:Yep. Well, it's a great thing. You've got these people who care enough that they haven't unsubscribed. So they're saying, Keep telling me about what you're working on. Keep providing value to me.
Speaker 1:They don't go away. It's great.
Speaker 3:Let's keep going. Think it seems like the two important ingredients are number one, have a blog, and number two, have a mailing list. But it's obviously not just as easy as having those two ingredients. Once you set up a blog and you set up a mailing list, what would you do next? What would be your next steps?
Speaker 1:Are we talking to launch a product?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Let's take it from that perspective.
Speaker 1:So I wouldn't focus too much on the blog, actually. I would probably try to put, know, maybe two, three, four really, really good posts. Let's say you're launching a book. So put up three really, really good posts, your expertise on that topic. And at the bottom of each one, you know, at the top and bottom of each one, talk about the book you're writing.
Speaker 1:And then at the bottom have, you know, link to the landing page as well as a spot to sign up right then. But then, you know, you definitely want to put a ton of effort into getting those posts shared, you know, everywhere and you're the master of that. But then after that, I would turn to other people's audiences. It's really, really hard to build an audience completely from scratch and to just write new posts and to watch it get read by 20 people. And then to write another post and watch it get read by 40 people.
Speaker 1:You know, it's really really slow to do that. And so I I would turn to other sites that have really big audiences and write guest posts. And don't just write a guest post and have your author bio at the bottom and say like, nathanberryblogsnathanberry.com, go, you know because nobody ever clicks that. I wrote a guest post for ProBlogger, which is a pretty popular blog. And I think I had like a 100 people click through.
Speaker 1:Not even a 100 email subscribers, like a 100 clicks total from that blog post. And you contrast that with a a post I wrote for Smashing Magazine titled How to Launch Anything. And it was this really long 4,000 word post on product launches. And then at the end of it, it said, you obviously care a lot since you read through this entire post. I don't want your education on product launches to end here.
Speaker 1:So I wrote this free email course called Mastering Product Launches. Go sign up here. It's a really, really strong call to action and the Smashing Magazine editors left it because it's linking to a free resource. It's quite valuable. It's this logical next step at the end of the article.
Speaker 1:From that Smashing Magazine post alone, I have picked up almost a thousand email subscribers. Wow. Just going to that mastering product launches course. So I would say, whatever your topic is, I would create an email course on how to do x, how to launch products, whatever it is. And then every time you guest post, have a really strong call to action back to that free resource.
Speaker 1:Also, throughout it you can talk about the product you have coming out and that kind of thing. That's just been the way for me that guest posting works really, really well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think that's one thing I have not crossed is I get so focused on just building my own thing and driving traffic to my own site. And that's something I'd like to start working on more, guest posting. And I think one obstacle people have is they'll say, Well, I don't have anything to send them to. Right?
Speaker 3:And so it's creating that initial course, that email course. Can you talk to us about that? Like, how do you choose a topic? And then how do you actually Walk us through the process of how to create a good email course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So on choosing a topic, I guess it all depends on your long term goals, what you're trying to teach. So that could be anything. But just have it really really focused on the audience you want to build. I always try to think of things in terms of audiences rather than products.
Speaker 1:This is a slight tangent, for quite a while there was this idea around the web that or especially in the micropreneur circles where it was go build one product in some tiny little niche over here. Get it you know, $400 a month. Take what you learned, go to this other niche here and build a product that makes a thousand a month. And then and keep doing that and before you know it, you've got, like, enough money coming in to replace your job. I I did something similar and I don't recommend that.
Speaker 1:And the reason is because when you end up with these different silos, the work you put into one does not benefit another.
Speaker 3:So you advocate choosing one audience and this is actually like whenever I talk to people about your system, we're all kind of jealous of this system you've got with nathanbury.com slash your thing, right? And everyone like that's the one place you go for Nathan Barry stuff and you've got this one audience. Although, maybe you could talk a little about this because you started with designers.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Now I'm sure you've got a bunch of people on your list that are not designers like authors, writers, other content people. You tell us about how that's kind of like evolved over time and how you're still able to kind of focus stuff with your list? Do you segment your list? What do you do there?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So my interests have changed over time. And so that's part of the reason that I'm really glad that I blog on nathanberry.com and not howtodesignawebapp.com. So that's one reason that I recommend blogging or whatever you're doing under your own name or something that's not super specific because you will your interest will change. There are other benefits too like just getting everybody to link back for all my books to link back to nathanbury.com/webapps or /authority.
Speaker 1:It kind of helps SEO. And so the domain ranks pretty well for a lot of things.
Speaker 3:Were you worried about that? Is probably a good example. That's a pretty big departure from your traditional audience. Were you worried? Oh no, this is a new group.
Speaker 1:So before every product launch, I think it's not going to work. So the first for launching the App Design Handbook, was like, I have no idea if people will buy this book. Know, sure enough people did. And then for designing web apps, was like, okay, that was successful once, but can I really repeat this success? Okay, yes, can.
Speaker 1:And then for authority, was like, okay, I've written about design successfully, but this is an entirely new topic. Now I'm talking about writing and marketing. Will people buy that? And yeah, people did care about it. So my approach has just been to talk about what interests me with the hope that it interests other people too.
Speaker 1:Within my email list, I segment things like I keep track of how you join my list. And I've got so right now, I've got about 12,000 people and maybe 6,000 six or 7,000 have expressed some sort of interest in a design product, whether that's a free eBook I put out, a free video course, something like that, or they bought one of my design books. And then another, I'd say six or 7,000 are interested in have expressed interest in a marketing product. So whether it's mastering product launches, they bought authority, something on conversion rate optimization, something like that. So I can look and there's a decent overlap, but it it's not not complete overlap.
Speaker 1:So I'd say half the time I send to my whole list and half the time I be like, you know what? This is just for the designers or this is just
Speaker 3:for the
Speaker 1:marketers. But I would not recommend having two different audiences like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. But if Unless you're interested in it.
Speaker 1:Right. And and I am interested in both. And so I would just say, build it around what you care about and then as your interests change, hopefully a lot of people will change with you. Because I have a lot of people on my list who are designers or developers who care about design and then they go, I want to make products too. I want to learn about how to launch products, how to write, how to sell, how to price.
Speaker 1:So there are a lot of people that have made that transition with me.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's actually a good point. Like if you start with something technical and you're just you know, how to design a web app, there is like everyone that does that could learn something about product launches or could learn something about marketing. So you have a lot of opportunity in front of you there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's so much to talk about and I just wouldn't want to be stuck talking about something maybe that I care about now but three years down the road I have no interest in. And so I want everything I do to be able to adapt with me.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So some of the GFDI members here are wondering, do you use like, what software do you use to keep track of people that have you know, bought products, potential customers? Are you doing that all in your you you have your own app called ConvertKit. Are you doing it all in ConvertKit?
Speaker 1:I have kind of a weird hybrid of things going on. So everyone new joining my list comes in through ConvertKit because it's really good at delivering those, you know, that free PDF when you sign up or giving you access to a course or something like that. All my sales happen through Gumroad and then my main list actually lives in Mailchimp at the moment. And the reason it's still in Mailchimp is because Mailchimp has all that data on who's expressed interest in what. And so now, every few weeks, I go do a whole bunch of exports from ConvertKit and a bunch of imports into into Mailchimp.
Speaker 1:And then, they have their, like, update existing list checkbox. And so then it'll if someone new signs up to mastering product launches and they already signed up for something design related before, then Mailchimp will keep track of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there's a few different places that this stuff lives right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I could move to an Infusionsoft or somebody really complicated like that. There's just so many things that I hate about those tools, like bad user experience and that sort of thing. So it's still a work in progress. Really, what what I'm moving to over time is some really great integrations between Gumroad and ConvertKit, Where when they talk to each other, then you'll have the best checkout process on the web combined with a really great email tool.
Speaker 1:And that's my long term vision. It just takes a lot of time.
Speaker 2:So what you had there was the first part of of time my conversation with Nathan. If you're a JFDI member, you can get the full thing at jfdi.bzed/jfdilive, and it also has video too. It's, about an hour long, and he goes into answering a lot of questions, getting into the nitty gritty, and also actually, some really honest moments where he talks about some of his struggles as a product entrepreneur. Well worth it. And if you're not a member, you can sign up at jfdi.vzed.
Speaker 2:That stands for justfuckingdoit.vzed. You can follow Nathan online at nathanbarry.com or on Twitter at Nathan Barry or check out his new SaaS app, convertkit.com. And I'm Justin Jackson. You can follow me, justinjackson.ca. That's my website.
Speaker 2:On Twitter at m I Justin. And, where else? Buildandlaunch.net, jfdi.vzed. I've got too many domains. If you wanna subscribe to my newsletter, I I have regular email conversations with people on that list.
Speaker 2:Go to www.justinjackson.ca/newsletter. Thanks again for listening. Have a good 02/2014.