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As the CEO of Kit, Nathan Barry has a front row seat to what’s working in the most successful creator businesses.
On The Nathan Barry Show, he interviews top creators and dives into the inner workings of their businesses in his live coaching sessions.
You get unique insight into how creator businesses work and what you can do to increase results in your own business.
One of the things Nathan is passionate about is helping you create leverage.
Creator Flywheels let you create many copies of yourself so you don’t get bogged down with the little things in your business. Flywheels will help you reach a place where you can focus on revenue instead of busywork.
Tune in weekly for new episodes with ideas and tips for growing your business. You’ll hear discussions around building an audience, earning a living as a creator, and Nathan’s insights on scaling a software company to $100M.
Learn how to get more results with less effort and:
Grow faster over time.
Work less hard over time.
Make more money over time.
Ali Abdaal: [00:00:00] How in the early days, business is about serving the self, but at some point it stops becoming like once you made enough money, you're like, you guys anymore, it really does become about serving others.
Sahil Bloom: What am I or people like me spending money on on a monthly basis? And how can I turn that into something that I'm profiting from?
Nathan Barry: The ladders of wealth creation. As you work up these ladders, you build these skills. You can earn more and more along the way.
There's a few like key insights that have to change at different stages of your business. Um, one that you and I have both gone through is early on, you get all of your success by saying yes, and then later on you have to say no.
Ali Abdaal: And should we draw this out? Okay. You can do before and after.
Nathan Barry: Ooh, I
like it.
Ali Abdaal: Move fast and break things. Go slow to go fast. Yes. Yes.
Nathan Barry: Move. This is something that I'm trying to learn all the time. And so as I'm over here, I'm like, obviously we should move fast and break things. Yeah. [00:01:00] I don't know about that. What's an example of, of, uh, like this pivot that you're making your business?
Ali Abdaal: Yeah. So, uh, when it comes to creating new products, so move fast to break things, we have an idea. Let's create a YouTube course. I can just come over to my house, post it notes within three days, the landing page is up. We're collecting sales and we'll build the ship as we sell tickets for the ship. Oh shit.
We've got 350 people in this community. Let's just make it up as we go along and rush up everything with duct tape. Now it's more like, okay, we actually have a reputation. We don't want to screw things up. A lesson that I've really learned is I guess relates to this is the power of focus. And when you focus on just one thing, whereas I think in the early days, when you don't really know what's going to work, you try a bunch of different things, throw a spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
And this one is more like quadruple down on what's working, that sort of idea.
Nathan Barry: I have this, uh, thread that I did on X. Yeah. Where it goes through the, my first 10 products. And it was like product eight that actually made a bit of money. Product [00:02:00] nine that made enough money that you could like pay rent off of it.
And product 10 that became ConvertKit. I think it's the experiment versus Double Down. Nice. Yeah. Something that I talk about on the show is building strip malls versus skyscrapers. And so early on, you're testing different things. Did this work? Did this work? And all of that. And the tendency that people have is they say, okay, so if I got to 3 million in revenue or say a million in revenue with three things, then if I want to get to 2 million, I should add three more things.
And the truth is you should find one of them with it works
Ali Abdaal: and, and build this guy. Yeah. Yep. And so that's the, the do less. That's, that's, that's so true.
Rachel Rodgers: One of the things that's interesting, it doesn't actually have to be this really unique thing. Like Hampton is not that unique. It's not unique at all.
Even ConvertKit is not that unique. Right. Um, what I'm doing is not that unique either. So I think sometimes people think like in order to come up with that billion dollar idea, it has to be like some, some idea that [00:03:00] comes. down to your head from God and it's like Sometimes it's just like oh, I see a version out there Like basically my business was because I went to conferences where everybody who was speaking was a white guy and I was annoyed That there were no women and there were no people of color on the stage and I went a couple years and then I finally decided Okay, I'm gonna stop being pissed and just say Create the competitor that's better, you know, and that's that is has diversity and inclusivity at the center of it So I just created my version of it Which has you know taken off because it was a need in the marketplace.
So it actually it's like The same business that so many people have, but just the, the one unique insider, the one unique perspective is what helps it to take off. So you don't have to come up with the most amazing idea. You can just see what's out there and see like, how could I do that a little bit better?
Or just come up with an offer like in Ali's case, right? He's a productivity expert. So like, he just needs to come up with either a software or planner or something. And when he does, [00:04:00] That's going to take off too.
Nathan Barry: If you've ever had that friend who was like, Hey, I'm going to build the next Uber for this or the next Facebook for that.
And you've been like, I don't think that's going to work, but I can't really tell you why. The reason is the ladders of wealth creation, but the way that I've broken it down is really these four different ladders and the skills that you learn along the way. And so those are, uh, time for money, your own services, business product as services, business products.
And then selling products. They probably have skills from the very bottom ladder, right? Time for money. They're good at showing up consistently and you know, maybe they have skills in an industry and they're trying to tackle a problem that is all the way at the very top of the most difficult ladder, right?
Of taking on a marketplace or a social network. What's really important to understand as a creator is that there's a series of skills that you have [00:05:00] to learn. As you go. And if you want to skip way ahead, let's say that you want to go from having a full time job at a company to taking on, you know, launching, um, a software company, there's a huge amount of skills that you have to learn along the way.
And you can choose to learn them all in one giant jump across ladders, or you can work your way up over time. And so in this, right, if you were to work on your own. You learn how to show up consistently. You, you know, do a good job, but as you go into your own services business, you're going to have to do things like know how to build clients, how to close clients face to face, right?
How to, maybe as we move up the ladder, you need to hire your first employees. How do you do that? These are all things that in hindsight are easy, but when you're doing it for the first time, they're very daunting. I remember the first time that I filed paperwork with the secretary of state in order to form a limited liability company to even [00:06:00] be like, how do you even do this?
And there, I don't know what it is in Canada, but in the U S like you have to have a registered agent. And that sounded so official. I see a few head nods. Like, how do you even do that? It just means an address that they can send notices. But As you work up these ladders and you build these skills, then you can earn more and more along the way.
So you're talking about the CEOs becoming a creator, well, not just within their company, but, but far beyond that.
Matt Schnuck: Yes. Because people are far more interested in following people, not brands. Correct. Which then means the leader has to Show up, show up as a person, as
Nathan Barry: a person. And that is a brand. Yeah.
Matt Schnuck: So, so one of my theories is a modern CEO, or they could also have an audience co founder or somebody on the senior team.
Right. It's got to have 10 percent of their time spending and creating.
Nathan Barry: An example of that would be the company Ahrefs, which is a SEO company. [00:07:00] Um, I'm trying to remember the founder and CEO's name. I think Dimitri maybe very, very technical, brilliant guy, brilliant coder, but the kind of person that, you know, goes and builds a product that indexes the entire internet just because it's fun, you know, and then maybe like rewrites it a few years later, just for the heck of it.
Tim, who's the CMO of Ahrefs is the face of everything, not the original founder. But to your point there needs to be someone that everyone's like, ah, that's the guy, you know Tim has built a very effective personal brand. Another example would be Cameron Harreld from 1 800 GOT JUNK I just had him on the podcast a couple episodes ago.
COO and he's the one, you know He built this massive personal brand that he used to help grow the company substantially. So there's there's definitely examples of Of people doing it. I've seen a lot of creators and running ConvertKit I've had a front row seat to You need to be careful. You need to be careful.
And there's a standard [00:08:00] playbook that works really, really well for monetizing audiences. And you do not follow that playbook at all. Right? And I think most people, they see what you're doing and they're like, oh, okay. Yeah. So he makes his money through sponsorships. It's like, yes, there there's revenue driven from sponsorships that you reinvest in audience growth, but then there's this whole other side that most people don't know of these agency businesses.
And we were talking about this when you and I did another event together of turning cost centers into profit centers, like following the Amazon model. And so why don't you give people a behind the scenes look on the agencies that you run and then how you use your audience to grow those.
Sahil Bloom: Yeah. So as I was starting to build the business, I quit my private equity job.
I was going to go all in on doing this thing that I was working on and the platform that had been built. This is like. Mid 2021. Basically, what I decided was that I didn't want to make money in the way that I thought most creators were making money at the time, which was like courses, products, [00:09:00] sponsorships, ads, etc.
And so the first sort of venture into that was looking at What am I or people like me spending money on on a monthly basis and how can I turn that from something I'm spending money on into something that I'm profiting from because I know that if I'm spending money on these things, there's a whole hell of a lot of other people that are spending money on this exact same thing to one of the first examples of that was like video editing services.
I was spending five grand a month for people to edit clips for me and to turn them into short form video clips and I was sending referrals to this like random agency that was doing it for me and they were paying me. 250 or something for every referral. I sent for clients that were then, you know, paying them five grand a month on an ongoing basis for long periods of time.
And I was like, well, shit, this doesn't make much sense. for me to do this anymore. And so I told the guy, I was like, hey, do you want to partner? And he was like, well, I don't know what you mean, whatever. And I was like, all right, see you. And I had a friend who I had been musing on ideas with for a while, who had just come off two successful agency businesses.
He had built eight figures and exited. He [00:10:00] was looking for like his big thing that he was going to do next. And so we came up with this idea of building effectively a creator led holding company where we build and scale started with services businesses, but it'll be much bigger than that eventually that have sort of a creator that sits on top.
That is the distribution engine. So rather than having to spend money on Facebook ads or Instagram ads to scale these businesses, you use the creator for distribution and we offer services that all of these people need. So video editing was one of the first ones. We did a short form clip agency business with Cody Sanchez and Sam Parr as the creator partners for it.
Basically they are, you know, involved and then our business runs and operates the entire thing in the back end and they are a partner in it. So it's like
Rachel Rodgers: influencer marketing, but like. More intense. Like one influencer. Yeah. Partner with one person
Sahil Bloom: who has like a very real resonance with that and market that you need them to.
So Ali Abdaal, we partnered with for a YouTube production business recently that we launched and he has a [00:11:00] massive audience of people that want to make YouTube videos like him. So when he goes and says, Hey, if you want to make YouTube videos like me, but you don't have the time to do it. I have this agency business that will work with you and make these videos that are beautiful like mine.
A lot of people sign up and we bring in 2 million monthly revenue of leads in the first day from him launching it. And the whole game then becomes like, how do you go actually service that and have the backend systems to do it? Which is what my partner is really good at.
Nathan Barry: What's something that you've, you know, either helped a client with or, you know, a friend who's another creator. Or something maybe that they've ended up delegating after following this process that. I don't know. They thought they never could.
Simon Severino: Yeah. All the time. So, um, they say, ah, Simon, yeah, I want to delegate, uh, editing, uh, my YouTube videos, but every time I do that, the quality is miserable.
I keep firing them. I keep having this back on my lap. And so I say, okay, what about if we try, tell me [00:12:00] if I'm your editor. Tell me exactly what the best video looks like. And they told me this for five minutes and I was just recording it. And I gave it back to them, transcribed and cleaned up. And I said, this is the process.
Give them this process. They gave the process to the editor and well, it worked. There is only this little boring piece that myself included. We try to skip it, the boring part of writing down the process. And I agree with you all guys. Yes, this is boring as hell. That's not why we are entrepreneurs to do boring stuff, but once you have to do it only once, then you write it down, you can tell it to the camera and let's have it, have your assistant transcribe it and then hand it over the quality that comes back will be higher.
And now you don't take it back on your desk.
Nathan Barry: Yeah, I like it. I mean, I do that all the time. Of saying, Hey, this is what it should actually look like. Here's how to write [00:13:00] in my voice. Here's how to like the way I like things edited, all of those things. And it's usually recording a loom video and then walking people through it.
My team actually now has a document that my, um, Kara, my head of content made. She's gotten very good at writing in my voice, you know, as I'm writing, uh, video scripts and course training and even like social media content. Right. For this podcast episode, you know, we're going to come out with a whole bunch of clips.
I'm not going to be the one writing those individual clips or like the captions on it or that sort of thing. And so Kara went and made not just a, a guide to writing in my voice, but then also like a whole bunch of do this, not that examples. And so, you know, over time as the team, as a social media team went to create a post, she then rewrites it, but then she put it in the dock of saying like, cool, here's a firsthand example of like, you might want to do this, but here's the Nathan version of it actually.
And so now when we're onboarding a new writer, you know, or a new team member. There's so much information for them to go through, like training and very practical [00:14:00] examples and like, it just removes those bottlenecks
Jackie Aina: one day. I was like, in my car and I got this email and it was the same email. Like it was an offer for something. I don't remember what it was. And then immediately after I read this email, there was a voice in the back of my head that was like, what makes you think you deserve this? And I was just like, Where'd that come from?
Whoa. That was, it scared the crap out of me because it was almost like a foreign voice and I was like, who the hell was that? And I immediately, immediately had to like talk myself down from that. So I've definitely experienced things like some versions of imposter syndrome, especially for those of us that have come from like marginalized communities, impoverished backgrounds.
When you're the one person who makes it and you can't, Hand carry everybody with you that comes with an insane amount of pressure. Yes And so some of that, you know, that's a whole different conversation used to
Sam Parr: do these [00:15:00] events We had this thing called hustle come we did for four or five years and I remember I used to I had a lie That I would tell people I would say you're speaking at three, but you've got to come at noon for the mic check Just like this event, there is no mic check.
Microchecks at conferences, they work. But we had a green room and it was just my, my opportunity to hang out with these amazing people. And so I would get to hang out with like the founders of Grammarly or back then when we thought WeWork was awesome, the founders of WeWork, I said, like, Casper and Away Travel and like all these like multi billion dollar companies.
I got to hang out with them. And what I noticed was that they would be maybe 10 or 100 times more successful than I am. They would freak out still. For example, Sam Yegan. He's the guy who started OkCupid. He was the CEO of, um, I think Match. And now the company that owns Match. I forget. It's a public I. It starts with an I.
I A C. Yeah, I A C. And he was pacing back and forth in the, in the green room. [00:16:00] And I was like, Hey man, do you need something? Can I get you some water? Um, and he was like, snapped at me and he was like, just leave me alone. And I was like, Hey, look, Sam, like I'm, I can help you. I, you seem really nervous. And he was like, I'm sorry.
I'm just nervous to speak in front of these people. And I was like, have like 20, 000 or 10, 000 or something employees. And, and it gave me so much confidence that the people that I admire that were like ballers, they were freaking out all the time. And I remember like I hung out with this, I remember when I hung out with this other company and they had just raised a, a, a, in the New York Times and they were like, this woman was like the it girl.
She was like so cool and successful, whatever. And she was telling me that she didn't fire this one person for the past 12 months, even though this person was imperfect for the role because she was just afraid of the conflict. And I was like, wow, really? Like I admire you so much and yet you're, and so it was almost as if.
I had bad eyesight and I finally was putting on eyeglasses and could like see like I was like, oh, this is awesome Like I could be like really uncertain [00:17:00] and not brave about certain things, but as long as I do it anyway, I'll be okay So that gave me so much confidence Because there was very few people that I met that were like 10 times smarter than me There were a few that does exist But like for example the founder of Grammarly when I would hang out with this guy was like, oh We just don't have the same amount of horsepower I, there's no, nothing in this world, there's no, nothing I can do that I can keep up with you.
But there was many others where I'm like, we're in the same ballpark.
Rachel Rodgers: Yes.
Nathan Barry: If you enjoyed this episode, go to the YouTube channel, just search Billion Dollar Creator. And go ahead and subscribe. Make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also who else we should have on the show.