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Al: I literally built my entire warehouse by watching YouTube videos about Amazon. Like that for lighting, that for podcasts, that for video. That same principle holds true. People think, they're pretty close. Most people are always pretty close. You just want to see it, want to interact with it, want to play with it, try it out.
Billion Dollar Creator is a show teaching creators how to capture attention and turn it into real wealth. We will deep dive into brands, celebrities, and entrepreneurs who have done it before and show you how you can apply it to your business as an everyday creator.
Nathan: Al, welcome to the show.
Al: Thank you. Oh, wow. Man, I love this place.
Nathan: So we're hanging out here in Scottsdale.
Al: Beautiful, windy, rainy Arizona, which we all packed for.
Nathan: Last night was a little rough. We were followed by the fire. We kicked Steve Nash away from the fire.
Al: Steve Nash was sitting next to us. I was like this is a very swanky hotel.
Nathan: It is. I'm not sure that we belong.
Al: It’s not the Hampton Inn I'm used to.
Nathan: That's right. So one thing that was fun. This is the first time that we've met. We were chatting. I was like yeah, you're in the blog post that I wrote, that I based a lot of my work around.
Al: It was very creepy stalkerish. You're like I know everything about your family. I was like what? I wrote an essay three years ago.
Nathan: I've stalked you ever since. So I want to just dive in and start with the story of Missouri Star Quilt Company because that's one of the best examples that I've seen of someone building an audience and then taking it to the point that it has, powers a whole business that has real enterprise value. We also have buying towns in common. We'll get into that.
Al: Yeah.
Nathan: There's so much good stuff. But give me the origin story of Missouri Star.
Al: Two minutes on Missouri Star. When we were kids, born and raised in California. Turns out California is pricey. There's seven kids in my family. My dad worked at like Smucker’s jam as a machinist. We were not living the highlife in California. My memory of California was concrete and asphalt. Like 40 minutes inland from the beach. We weren't cool.
So anyway, when I was like 13 years old, we moved out to Missouri, and that became our home. So we moved in this little town in the middle of nowhere. Actually, we didn't move to a town. We moved to a farmhouse that nobody lived in 40 years and fixed it up in exchange for rent because we couldn't afford it.
But I mean, for us, it was a great way to live in. A great place. Missouri was great to us. I went from concrete and asphalt to lakes and rivers and streams. You're up in farmland, Idaho. Man you know this life. It was awesome. I've always loved Missouri.
But as we watched our little town that we'd go into for groceries and stuff, Hamilton. Over the years, it just slowly died, right? I mean, the reasons to stay there, I feel like a lot of America kind of goes through this, or the world goes through this. But you have these like gatherings to cities and then these everybody disperses and wants to farm again. Then you come back and out.
We went through a full contraction back into cities and Hamilton just didn't have anything left for it. If you were a kid there, there's no reason to ever stay there. So.
Nathan: What's the population of Hamilton?
Al: 1,500.
Nathan: Okay, yeah. It’s quite small. Cowgill, where my address was growing up which is great for mail orders, three people. So a family right moves in. We're like double digit increase in the population percentage, it was a big deal. So we have this great town that like just nobody cared about, and we'd see these businesses open up. They'd live for three or four months then they die off.
Because I mean what you're doing in these small towns is the guy that works at the grocery store, makes eight bucks and goes and spends it at the gas station. That guy makes his eight bucks and goes and spends it at the grocery store. You just recycling money.
So me and my sister had been looking for a thing to do in Hamilton for a while. Then my mom, as all the kids grew up and left the house, she took up quilting by taking a class of the voc-tech down a town or two away and just loved it. Thought it was cool. Thought it was very artistic and fun. She's not a lifetime quilter. She's not the most skilled quilter in the world.
But she's funny. She was in theater, and she's a ham. I take after my mom much more than my dad. My dad is very kind and mild mannered. My mom's like, “Now I've got a story for you.” So when she took up quilting, that's sort of her flavor of quilting that she took. Everything was cool shortcuts and what could she do? How could it be fun?
So at one point, she had taken a quilt in to get a quilt made for my niece, who was a newborn at the time. I was like oh, that's cool. She's telling me about it. I was like that's great. She's like, “So I took it into the quilters.” Because in quilting, you sew all the pieces together. You have a flimsy top and then you have the batting and the backing. Put it all together. That's called quilting when you stitch it all together.
She took it into the quilters to get it quilted. She'd have it back in the year. So I was like, I can build a house faster than you can get a quilt done. What is going on? She’s like, “Everybody is just so backed up.” So me and my sister, we're like okay. Well, we'll buy you a quilt machine. You quit your job that you kind of hate. She was working at a prison school for reformed teens. I mean, when your mom's coming home with crazier stories than you, you’ve got to get her out of there.
Nathan: Right.
Al: So we got her home and gave her, bought her this quilt machine. We mortgaged my sister's house. When I say we, she mortgaged her house, bought the machine. It's like a $40,000 machine. It was a big buy, but we were very confident. All my market research was in that one call of it takes you a year? Okay, we'll do this.
So we buy this quilt machine. She starts quilting. We needed to do a couple quilts a week. I was going to make an extra grand a month, so was my sister, and we were all going to be happy. Then.
Nathan: How old were you at the time?
Al: I was 26. I was working as a, I was in with Symantec Corporation doing tech stuff and having a great time. So then I'd started this company for my mom. I lose my job. When you lose your job, you're like I am an entrepreneur now. I'm fully committed. We're going to do this.
So I had this little quilt that company that was not doing anything that I gave my full undivided attention to. I always loved the stuff Woot.com and Steep & Cheap and all those deal sites back in the day. I mean, they hooked me so hard as a broke 20 year old. But nobody had built any experiences for the 40 to 70 year old female demo, which was my mom.
I was like dude, she's up at midnight way more than I am. She's restless, can't sleep, insomnia, going pee, and all that. She would love to open up a computer and look for deals at midnight. Because my experience with it was well, it's 11:00. I'm just going to wait around until midnight and see what Woot puts up, right? I loved it that much. It was just a fun way of interacting with the Internet.
So we built this quilters daily deal site, started buying products put on there, and nothing really happened. But then that first year, we did about 100 grand in sales between a quilt shop that mom was in every day and this website that I was working on online. Then the next year, we did about a million in sales, and then 4 million, and then 8 million. Just really found some great appetite for it.
But our secret sauce was my mom, who’s this great character and personality. YouTube was only a year or two old at the time. I think YouTube started in 2006. We came.
Nathan: It got acquired by Google in 2006. That's when it was super, super early. That's when it really started to.
Al: We started in 2008. So through I mean, I don't know why we all cared about, but it came on the scene fast and it was big. So I started filming my mom and putting quilting tutorials up on YouTube. Then my genius idea was oh, we'll email these out in our newsletter.
Because we were very protective of the messaging, and it was an email that you got that made your life better. It was not about promos. It was about making you happier that day. We'd get a 60/70% open rate on this with hundreds of thousands of users. It was something that you were happy to forward to your friends. Have you seen this? Oh, let's do this one. So every week, there's a new idea around quilting. This community just really embraced us and made it great.
So today we're over 100 million in annual rev. We're 400 employees. It's a big deal. But we're still it's very family owned, authentic. You can come to town, give us a big hug, and come shop at our 15 quilt shops. We bought the entire town and built this great destination moment. Which, honestly, it's very altruistic, but it's also the best marketing fodder you've ever seen. Right?
We talked to our customers about here's what we're building today. Here's what we're fixing up in the man's land. We did this thing, and this one got this new fabric display that we put together. Oh, we're in here building this. We literally, our customers came and helped us build the shelves for one of our second stores.
Nathan: They want to be a part of it.
Al: Well, yeah. The town is almost another character that you follow along with. You have mom and my sisters and myself to a smaller degree or a lesser degree. Then you have this town that's doing a thing. You have the business doing the thing. It’s just such a beautiful move for building great content. Yeah.
Nathan: That’s the story.
Al: In one minute or less, that is a story the quilt company.
Nathan: Nailed it. So one that I love about it is all these people talking about building audiences. They're pointing at usually to digital products, right? So if somebody wanted to build an audience in quilting, video first, I think most people would assume that would result in a one to $3 million year business if done well.
Al: Sure.
Nathan: Because you'd be selling patterns, courses, tutorials, that sort of thing. Then have affiliate deals to a Joanne Fabrics or someone else in the space. You're over here, and you're like the ceiling on this audience is $100 million in annual revenue. What's different of how you're thinking about it?
Al: What's funny, man. There's, if I could be a one man show making one to 3 million, I'm probably doing better than I'm doing with a 400 man show making $100 million.
Nathan: The take home is pretty different.
Al: So would not knock that at all. But we've always looked at the stool that we're successful on is content, commerce, and community. Right? You look at it there's some cool, I look at these great YouTube channels that I just can't get over. There's one guy that does dioramas. He's got a million subs. He's just building dioramas. I'm like this is amazing. You go to his store, and he's got a little bit of merch, right? But he's great at content, sucks a commerce.
A lot of times they're good at one or two, right? Great at content, beautiful community. They don't understand the commerce piece. Or they can be great at content and the commerce piece, but then it's the guys that have a big audience and shove a bunch of merch down their throat. They're missing that community piece that really build it out into this full-fledged enterprise. So, I mean, you see it really quick as you look at different creators. You're like oh they're so good at these things, and they're missing that one.
Nathan: They’ve got one or two legs of the stool. All three together is where you get that amplification.
Al: Honestly, it worked in our world because it's my mom who's great at the content. It's me who's great at the commerce stuff, and my sister that's really good at the community. She built the town that essentially is Comicon every day for quilters, right.
So I don't think it works without a couple different personalities in the mix that you trust and lean into. Because any one of those is easily a full time job for you to try and figure out and stay on trends and figure. What's the algorithm doing today is something you need to be paying attention to.
So I mean, for us, as we had all three legs to that stool, the ceiling’s unlimited. We haven't even seen where this thing can go yet. But if you don't have that then your ceiling for being a great, like you said, being a great creator, that's building some affiliates and partnerships a couple million year. Not to knock that. You don't need a 400 person business to do that, but your ceiling is known.
If you're great at commerce, there's a lot of websites out there with no content face with nothing, right. We know their ceiling too. But you put the stew together. You get something.
Nathan: You get something different. Then there's an impact in the community. Just hanging out with you in the last couple of days, you can tell that the impact that you had in Hamilton is very important to you.
Al: Well, it's funny man because I want to be a heartless capitalist so bad. I just don't have it in me. Well, because you and I, we both did Reboot, right?
Nathan: Yep.
Al: I found Reboot because I was the CEO of this company at the time. Me and my cofounders, which is my sister and my best buddy, Dave, we all got to the spot where the company's doing 50/60 million a year. I'm like I don't know what I'm doing in here. I was a bad manager. I was very micro-managey. You kind of learn how to be a leader by watching terrible movies on A&E. I mean, you're just piecing it together the best you can.
So I found Reboot, which is business coaching and therapy for CEOs and stuff. Came out of that and was like all right, let's try and transition out of this and become healthy again. The challenge I found in there was I've got a town that I've told trust me. I'm going to build it for you. I got a family that I've told trust me. I'm going to build it for you. I've got an industry that we're disrupting that I'm saying hey, guys, I'm a good player here, right? I'm not here to pirate anything. I'm not a vampire. I'm going to.
Nathan: We're going to build up the entire industry.
Al: Because there's a bunch of guys. I mean knitting.com that if you go look, there's a controversy around it because they're like, “Oh, these dumb ladies. We've got it all figured out. We're going to strip mine this whole thing. We're going to sell it on Amazon. They don't even know what's coming.” Everybody's like eff these guys. Screw them.
Our personality is very much like dude, everything we're doing. We're not gouging prices. We're trying to build this great world around us. So with all of that weight on my shoulders man, stepping back from the company was this terrifying thing. Now I'm chairman of the board. Honestly, I'm a better CEO without the day to day duties that I thought a CEO had to do, but just focusing on big ideas and stuff.
But we've got a great CEO in there now but I've transitioned out of that, out of the day to day, and I'm working on bigger stuff, but I still wear that weight of we can't just sell this to some crappy PE firm. Man, I'm building parks and fixing schools in my county. I need to kind of stay here. I've made 400 jobs.
If somebody else came in and bought that, they'd be like, “Well, first thing, it’s dumb to be in Hamilton. Let's cut that and move the warehouse out of here.” So, yeah. All that stuff. It's funny community is meaningful from an audience standpoint. It's also very meaningful from the employees in the company standpoint as well as in our personal world, right? It all mixes together, man. You don't get to live in a silo.
Nathan: Yeah. I think the way that you've done it in the town, it's obviously had a huge impact. So do I understand correctly that you own all of the commercial real estate in Hamilton?
Al: Well, most. 27 buildings in a 1,500 person town. You round that up pretty quick.
Nathan: Yeah. Just about all the way there. But something that I've heard you talk about in the past is that every business should have a town. It's effectively a set for everything that you're doing. Then I mean, you've made literally the Disneyland of quilting.
Al: Dude, everybody I talk. Look, I'm an angel investor. I hang out with a bunch of startup folks. When you're a hammer, everything's a nail. I see the value of a town, a destination that you're building your amusement park in everywhere. If you're a baking company, I should be able to go somewhere in America. There should be a cheese making capital of the world in Wisconsin. There should be the rally car town that we all go to in southern Colorado for a guy's trip for a week, and we just race rally cars.
Nathan: Then we follow it on YouTube the rest of the year.
Al: Yeah. Well, that content is immediately a face. Because the thing that everybody, especially in AI age and stuff man, everybody's suspicious that they're being taken advantage of. I don't want to buy stuff from an faceless, nameless warehouse in the middle of El Paso. I want to buy from somebody.
So a lot of these creators come on, and they give the veneer of authenticity, right? They say hey, I'm here. Now buy from this thing that I'm not connected to or affiliated. As you build a town, that trust just goes so much deeper. Because if I want to go and shop your products, I'm going to go to your town. I'm going to see what you're making.
I'll travel a bunch. I was in Morocco a year or two ago. I remember walking through, and your first couple stands, you're like this stuff is amazing. Then by your fifth or sixth little shop, you're like oh, it’s all the exact same guy.
Nathan: Same stuff distributed. Yeah.
Al: If I could see a guy cutting a leather belt by hand in the back, I immediately trust him, and I want to buy from him. Because all I'm looking for is something authentic to that experience. If you're in quilting, you just don't want to be tricked into buying a Walmart thing, right? You want the real good stuff. Any hobby, any craft, that's exactly what you're looking for. You just want to trust, and you want to get the real thing. That's why creators are so unique because they give that. A town just goes a little deeper, and surprisingly affordable to do.
Nathan: Yeah, what does it actually cost to?
Al: Well, you think about it. So we have one little town next to ours that me and my sister are trying to restore, right? It's called Kingston. There's eight buildings on the main drag. It's completely rundown. It's been vacant for years. I drive past it back to my house every day. One day I called her. I was like I want a dang chicken restaurant and a stop, a place to get some ice cream with the kids. Need a little general store. We've got to do something about this. So we bought the whole lot of buildings. I mean, they're abandoned. Nobody's in them.
Nathan: It's going to cost a lot to fix them up.
Al: 50 grand is what we bought them for. We'll put in about $2 million at the point that you go and fix that up, which $2 million is about 10 grand a month as a mortgage, right? If you get some financing on it. So you’ve got to cover 10 grand a month in rents. In a town that has nothing, that's kind of tough. But we'll do some mixed real estate, do a little residential up top and some commercial down below.
But that town now gets to have an identity. Because I own a quilting company, it'll probably extend into crochet and knitting or embroidery town or watercolorville. We'll give it something in that same space. So as people drive to come and see us there. We get 100 and some thousand people a year come to our tiny town.
Nathan: You have over 100,000 people a year coming to visit Hamilton.
Al: For a barometer, I don't have the source for this. But in my head, the number for Magnolia, which is the Trip and Joanna Gaines, is 30,000 people a week.
Nathan: We're talking about 100,000 being a huge number.
Al: Yeah.
Nathan: You're like try doing that every three weeks.
Al: That's right. So I'm looking at it saying man, I think I can double or triple that if we have creativity land, and people coming for that. But they'll come to town and then I give them a few other things. Seven miles this way is another one. Seven miles that way is another one. You go check it out.
Nathan: Yeah. It's like buy your ticket to Disneyland. But we've got California Adventure right across the plaza.
Al: Dude, the Barnum and Bailey Circus. The three rings means something because you can't get it all in one trip, right? That's why they did this so that you'd have to come back and buy a ticket for the second day. We're in the same boat where like we've got to stay interesting. You can't just come to town and then never be like oh yeah, I did that.
Nathan: Checked it off. That’s it.
Al: No, it's changing. New stuff, shutting that store down, moving this one over here, and doing the whole thing. For us, you look at it in sort of those numbers. A finance $2 million, $10,000 a month. There's a lot of brands spend way more than that on meta ads.
Nathan: Oh yeah.
Al: You're going to get so much more fodder out of the build and the experience that you're putting together in there. The fact that people can come and visit that. 10 grand a month is very reasonable for a lot of those.
Nathan: People want to follow that journey. You're talking about someone saying oh, what changed? What's different from last time? But then it also gives you all of this content ongoing. So I think of what you're doing, Chip and Joanna are a great example of building a town.
Brent Underwood is doing this with Cerro Gordo, which is the ghost town. I'm an investor in. But watching that, I go visit there, and there's probably 100 to 150 people on each Saturday and Sunday that come up. I mean, it's in the absolute middle of nowhere.
Al: Well you know what's funny, man as soon as you get poking around, it's not an original idea. Apparently Freeport, Maine is L.L.Beanville. All right. So our parents dreamt of going to Freeport, Maine. I didn't know this until my mom's like, “Oh, we've got to stop there.” We go check it out. They've got the whole downtown. It's 20 stores, and it's all L.L.Bean. You walk around them, and they return shop where you can go and get the discount stuff. You go to the jacket place and the boots place.
Nathan: How interesting.
Al: I'm like oh, yeah. You guys are killing it. But a lot of these mail order brands that start in these small towns, they sort of do that. Right? It's cool. It's experiential. It's things that people would aspire to. It's Disney Land because you just want to go and see it. But you take that and put that over a brand or a creator, and what does it look like? Would your people go see it? Dude, I wish there was a Nintendoville, and we'd go hang out, play all the, a whole shop dedicated to Super Mario or something. Right? I would go see it. I would just want to see it.
Nathan: Then you to have the museum aspect where you're learning about behind the scenes.
Al: You could jump on a Goomba and battle King Koopa. I would just go do it. I’d take my kids, and we’d do the whole thing and put it in Yucaipa, California in the middle of nowhere. Like all right, I'll go there.
Nathan: Yeah, what do you think about, let's say ConvertKit as a company, right? We could obviously spend 10 grand a month on that real estate or something. How important do you think it is building something out that out in a larger city, right? Chip and Joanna in Waco. So they've got a big population there and within a two or three hour drive.
Al: Honestly, man, before Chip and Joanna, Waco was David Koresh’s town, right. Nobody cared about Waco.
Nathan: From a brand, it was not.
Al: I couldn't build Missouri Star in Chicago or New York. It just wouldn't have worked. But you go 30 or 40 minutes out there, and it gets an excuse to exist. So if you were going to do it, right, don't do it in Boise. Drive 30 minutes somewhere and go. You’ve got a lot of desert out there.
Nathan: There's plenty of desert. No shortage.
Al: But when you go marry it up to Rexburg or something where you’ve got plenty of working populace. A lot of college kids looking for jobs. All of a sudden, you've got an identity that lives in this town that you're growing it out. It's like oh, dude. ConvertKit, you’ve got to go see what they're doing.
Nathan: The whole creator experience.
Al: It’s four city blocks of you go make your content there. They'll let you use the podcast space for free. It's fun. Yours is an interesting one because it's not an obvious jump in there. But if you guys sat in a room put on a whiteboard, if we had a town, we’re about creators. We’re about amplifying their message, helping them succeed. What would you put in four city blocks?
It's like dude, that's interesting. Maybe we're getting, the goal is that you have some serendipity, and 20 of these creators are there all the time. You're collabing without even trying. You're just building these ways to facilitate that. Whether it's doing activities or sitting and doing podcasts or writing content together. There's a constant TV show docu-series that’s being shot through there. People will go and slip into it and see themselves. There's a ton of stuff that you can start to pull out and say if you're a creator, what would the coolest experience look like?
Nathan: Right. You have this whole range. Creator is such a giant umbrella that there'd be the perfect woodshop where all of the DIY woodworking creators are at.
Al: Yeah. You have a bunch of authors. So it's like all right, what cool experiences? Nobody's built the author experience.
Nathan: There would be a bookstore that has every book from the all ConvertKit creators.
Al: It’s funny man because I love, have you ever been through the color factory?
Nathan: I haven't, no.
Al: What is the museum of ice cream and stuff. They're just these big sort of Instagrammable moments. If there was an author I followed that I could go and sort of go through the mini-experience of five rooms dedicated to James Clear or something. You're like he changed my life. It was transformative. It was magical. I just had to come here and see it. Look, I'm here with the giant thing. It's all the stuff that now has meaning to you.
From a community standpoint yeah, both the creator community and the fans of those creators, and there's plenty there to be excited about. It's funny because I didn't know ConvertKit from Adam, right? Because ConvertKit mainly is messaged to people that are not me, right? You're looking for more people with a newsletter that are growing that.
But I guarantee you if there's a town that was building experiences around authors or building experiences that makes it onto NPR, that makes it onto NBC Nightly News, I see that. All of a sudden I have a relationship with your brand where before I didn't, right?
Nathan: Yeah, the amount of earned media that you can get from it. I mean that's what we see with the ghost town where it's just non-stop. Every story if you put it in the ghost town becomes more interesting. People follow, they're hanging on every word that Brent puts out. Because they're like, “Oh, did you finish that? Did you get windows in the hotel yet? No. Okay.”
Al: Did you see the guy on TikTok that was building the eel pit?
Nathan: No, what is this?
Al: There's this guy on TikTok that had in his basement, he had just a basement. He sealed it off and filled it with water. He's like, “I'm building an eel pit.” So dude, he was in my feed. He owned my feed for a while. You just watch him, and he's like normalizing the water. He drop some fish in there. He goes to catch them. He gives them all names then he finally dropped some eels in there.
But you're watching this whole thing happen. I'm like dude, if this guy would let me come see this, I would drive to Alabama or wherever this dude is set up because I've watched 100 videos on this thing. It's so cool to me. I want to go and meet Flashy the eel. I just want to go see it. It's sort of ho-dunky and not flashy or anything, but I was into it.
Nathan: Yeah.
Al: I was super curious about it because there's part of me that's maybe I'll build a eel pit in my yard now, but I've got to see yours. I've got to see how you do it. He did all the work of creating all that content. The audience, everybody followed me, but he was never selling anything to what you were saying.
When you think of an eel pit, what are you going to sell? You could do some merch, but really unless you want to get into selling fish over the internet, there's not a lot you can do. But the experience is definitely worth coming out and going through, right? I’ll pay 20 bucks to go through the eel pit and feed the eels and stuff. People asked.
Nathan: Yeah. So now if you think about scaling that the community further. As you go, what's it going to take, say, to go from 100,000 visitors a year to 200,000 or 300,000?
Al: Well, it's funny, man. Because in my world, in quilting, there's like 10 million quilters out there. Right? A lot of them, a lot of them aren't online. Because you buy fabric, you touch it and feel it. So when I think about where I go from here, the town is an element of it. But the big question mark in my mind is how do I find another 8 million customers? It's probably figuring out some other experience that goes built around them.
Or probably more meaningful than that is supporting the experiences that already happen. Quilters get together and do stuff. So it's like if I'm thinking outside of my box, man how do I become a big supporter of that? We've got an example nexus of Joanne's or Michaels which are these.
Nathan: Big craft stores.
Al: Just crappy stores that have not earned the right to exist in 2024. You can see that in their market share and their stock price and stuff. But for Joanne's, that’s two and a half billion in revenue. They're a big company that a lot of people get their fabric from them. They're very transactional, but it's like dude, what could Joanne's be if Joanne's had the community and the content brain that we've got? What does that look like?
I mean I don't have it solved yet, but that's one of the big curiosities that I live in. Even Amazon when they did the bookstores and stuff and the go stores, honestly I was way more excited than most, even though they've kind of flopped a little bit. They pulled back and done stuff. I'm like this is the first time at the Amazon wasn't just the nameless, faceless warehouse. I was like this is interesting. I wonder where this goes.
Nathan: Yeah, you're watching a bunch of direct to consumer brands, like the Warby Parker's and others that have started to open up. Well, not started. They've been doing it for 10 years now. But the retail spaces all around?
Al: Yeah. Which, again, I mean those guys are great at commerce, right? They're doing great with commerce. What if you married amazing content in there? What if you married amazing community in there? Those shops that are opening up meant something to the community rather than just being an eyeglass shop that’s screwing over the local optometrist, right?
Because if they open up in my town, they don't love them. They open up in New York and Philadelphia, they're beloved because it's a fun brand. It's the DTC stuff. I'll mail order through there, totally makes sense. But they haven't solved the other two pieces of the stool. You can make a lot of money being a commerce brand. Again, not knocking. Just go all in on that.
But I love the idea of these brands that sort of have this holistic round. I read an article a couple of years ago about how Hilton was trying to call itself a media brand, or Marriott or something, right? One of these big hotel hospitality things.
Their thinking was, “No, we're trying to inspire people to travel. We're going to rethink ourselves into this content space that supports it with our infrastructure.” I was like that's awesome. That's cool. I hope you can figure something out. Because if not you guys, there's some upstart brand that's going to do amazing.
Airbnb is probably the closest to something that where they say, “We've got an infrastructure here. Now dream of where you could go and look at all these experiences and the trips and all this stuff that you could take.” It's like that's good model. I like that. That resonates with me as a crew returned as a consumer a lot more than any other hospitality stick that I've seen yet.
Nathan: I'm just thinking about the local expansion. Instead of most people say okay, you're bringing commerce to each one of these cities, right? Say okay, we're going to open up 10 Missouri Star Quilt Company locations over the next three years. Most people look at that and say great commerce. What you're saying is now, I'm only going to do that when if I plant a flag in a new location, I can have equal parts commerce, community, and content.
Al: Yeah, I sort of see it as I don't think I could be a Walmart or a Joanne's right, but I could be a Six Flags. There's a great destination within three hours of everybody in America, and you're picking out 16, not 200. It’s like oh yeah, you’ve got to go to the MSQC, the Missouri Star down in Santa Fe because they did this thing. Something like that starts to be interesting to me where just opening up a bunch of stores, being the pure retail play gets real boring real fast.
Nathan: So who's an example that does that?
Al: Like the Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shop or something.
Nathan: Yeah, Scheels.
Al: Yeah. Bass Pro Shops you'll drive to. You want to go see and that, and they build a huge experience around.
Nathan: Right. When we go to Cabela's, I'll take my two older boys. We're going to go pick something up. My nine year old will be like, “Okay, this is the knife that I want to get.” My 12 year old’s like, “I'm going to go look at the aquarium and go over and see if the turtles are still in there.”
Al: Well, what's funny man is you'll hit that. Then eventually, you'll be like wait, we're going to go by Sidney, Nebraska? All right, we're stopping because I want to see the original Cabela's because there it is. We're just going to go. There's a relationship to that brand that's built by these outposts that they put and eventually will get you to the mothership. But then also when you order online, you know who it is, right?
Nathan: So I feel Cabela’s that's someone that I know best in Boise. I feel they're 90% commerce, maybe 10% experience. What would you change about it in order to get it to that 50/50 maybe?
Al: Well, so I'll just simplify and say what if Cabela's was one big store? I wanted to build the experience around it more. I would try and make it a thing where you'd come and hang out for a week or two and feel engaged all the time. So, I'm a gun owner, but I don't know what I'm doing. I got one in case of raccoon comes and gets my chickens but what am I doing? I would love to go and take, hey, you're going to come for three days. We're going to go through, we've got the woods course. We got this course.
I want to get into hunting. I went hunting with some buddies for the first time this last year, and I was like oh, I get it. I've never cared about it my whole life. Then you go out to 4:00 a.m. and sit while the forest wakes up around you. I was like this is cool. This is cool. But I don't know what I'm doing.
Nathan: You could show up and learn all those things.
Al: But dude, if I could fly to Cabela's with my kid. Because I can't teach my kids how to hunt. I wish I could, but I don't have that skill. If we could go and learn it together and then try it on our farm and do that, 100% I go do some of that stuff. Or go there, and I want to get into fishing. They're like awesome. We have this great simulator you can go take 100 poles into and try all the casting rods and see what you think. We have some fun games where you're riding in a boat and rocking back and forth and don't fall in.
But there's stuff you could easily do around that that'd be super interesting and really fun. Us guys that right now we're sitting in Scottsdale, it's like whatever, but let's go to Sidney, Nebraska. We're going to freaking spend a week. It's going to be awesome. We're going to eight to four is Cabela's, and then we go hang out for dinner. Right? 100% we’d do it.
Nathan: Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. Going back to the ConvertKit’s town.
Al: Yeah.
Nathan: There are all these events that happen, right? A mastermind, mini conferences, where creators are getting together. We're doing things like sitting in a hotel room with all of our gear set up to film a podcast, but if a mastermind is like hey, we're going to go do our mastermind in ConvertKit’s town, in Creatorville, then it makes sense. You can have all the experiences, but then all the studios are already there. You can tour it. A lot of people would. It’s in a place that maybe has great nature. So you can get out and do those things.
Al: Well, it’s funny, man, because I think a lot of the aspiration is I just want to, if I've got a little podcast that does a thousand listens a week or a month or something, right? I kind of want, and I can go and record in a big studio. That feels cool. You're going to make it a reasonable thing for me to go and do. I'm just going to go. Yeah, when we're there, let's go record in the studio. We're going to pretend to be professionals at this where we could never justify that expense on our own. But now we have something to sort of aspire to, and you've helped create.
Nathan: The thing with pretending to be a professional at something, especially as a creator, is it often leads to another step towards becoming a professional at it. Because you're like oh, so that's the lights you use. Okay. You learn those things. You're like wait, I could buy this gear. I could.
Al: That's a great point, man. Because yeah. A lot of times you just want to go see how it's done. Somebody that's willing to engage with questions, doesn't ever think you're a competitor. Right? Awesome, awesome. You'd come into a space that. You just see it. You can take that home.
Dude, I literally built my entire warehouse by watching YouTube videos about Amazon. I went to a friends and family day. I had a buddy that worked in the San Antonio, Amazon warehouse. I was like can you sneak me in? I've just got to look around. I'm like oh, they pick their orders this, which is just normal warehouse logistics stuff but I didn't know.
Then I went and copied it down and drew my little warehouse blueprint and went and got this whole thing built. Put millions of dollars in, but I wasn't willing to pay a contractor, a consultant to come and tell me the right thing. I was like I'll figure this out. I can figure this out. That's exactly what I did.
That for lighting, that for podcasts, that for video. That same principle holds true. People think, they're pretty close. Most people are always pretty close. You just want to see it, want to interact with it, want to play with it, try it out.
Nathan: I'm realizing, maybe this is taking it too far, but I'm realizing you could bring in other brands adjacent in the creator space. So there could be Wistia could be the sponsors of the All About video.
Al: Dude, Wistia and Blackmagic should sponsor.
Nathan: Right. They're teaching like oh, here's the switcher. Here's the gear that you use.
Al: What equipment do we want to be in there that's aspirational for new creators. You want them to see in touch the good stuff so they know what they can reach for, right? Otherwise I'm almost never getting off my iPhone because it's pretty good. But you let me see that, see how it goes, see what the switch looks like.
Nathan: Also if you had a good live studio that can have an audience of say 50 or 80 people, then if you're bringing people through, someone's like well who's recording tonight? I can sit in on that.
Al: I'm telling you, every company if you sit down and say what would that experience? You go as deep, right? It pisses me off that I can't go to a Kansas City Chiefs experience, or all these pro sports teams. You drive all the way there, you go there, and you have the game, and that's all they'll give me. I'm like dude. I would give you 10 times more money. I would do all the things.
Nathan: Let me stay for three or four days.
Al: If you just cared about your people a little bit and let that brand grow. I mean anything we put on the whiteboard, we can come up with that experience around. It's a great hack because once you've done the work to imagine your brand or your experience in a physical world, that translates to digital way easier, right? Way, way easier.
Where a lot of times it gets muddy trying to imagine the digital experience without the crutch of oh, well, our physical brand is this. So the digital version of that looks like. That's way easier than going the other way around, I think.
Nathan: Yeah.
Al: Because our whole brain changed once we started having them print up signage and create well, all right, are we 15 store? What are we? We kind of have to think through how do we connect as a brand? How do we support each other? How do we message that? Then that came into our online world really easily.
Nathan: Are there any missteps that you made?
Al: Not one.
Nathan: But as you go and build this out where you're like, “Okay, this ended up being a waste of six months.” Or.
Al: Yeah, I mean, I mean, if I could do it again, I would, well because I started restaurants that I tried to run myself.
Nathan: Okay.
Al: Like three restaurants that we tried to run. I also thought, we tried to partner with like we had a gal that always dreamt of starting a bakery. In my mind, entrepreneurship is very simple because I can do it. So I think everybody would be great at being an entrepreneur. Then she got in there and did not love bakery life.
Nathan: Right. Being up at 3:30 in the morning.
Al: It wasn't her cup of tea. Three months later, after I'd paid to build it out, I was like I will give you your dream. She's like, “I'm going back to the job. This is sucks.” I was like okay. I would have just done that definitely. Hired somebody to set that up, hired somebody that knew about restaurants to do that.
Probably a lot of it is just finding good partners and consultants to help. The warehouse, I 1,000% should have hired a guy to be like that's a 10 foot room with a toilet, my man. You don't need that for a bathroom. I'm like oh, okay.
Nathan: Right. I think you should have still gone in deep, fell in love with the process, studied it, and then hired the expert as well.
Al: Because it's not as much as it is my head. A guy to look at my warehouse plans and call some of that crap would have been three grand, five grand, or something, right. Most of the time you have buddies that know somebody that can help you out with that stuff. So I would have done a lot more of that, been much more inclusive.
Because the instinct as a creator, I think, is to be an isolationist. It's you against the world. Everybody else is the bad guy because they think you're a dummy. They think you can't do it, or they're out to get you, whatever narrative you build up in your head. So you go into this closed world and say I'm going to do, and I'm going to show them.
The truth is, man, most people are rooting for you. They're happy to help you, happy to give you a few words. I think that narrative is changing a little bit as people promote cold emailing and stuff. It would have never occurred to me to cold email somebody and ask them if for advice or if I was doing something right. I literally, I was sure everybody thought I was a joke. I had to prove them all wrong. That ego is a mean voice in your head.
So yeah, I mean, that's what I would do different. I'd be much more hey how do you do it? Now, dude, it is so easy for me to go this is cool. What are you doing here? How do you do this podcast? What software do you use?
Nathan: Ask all the questions.
Al: Yeah. You're stoked to talk about it. You're happy to share. You're no worse off if I'm successful in my thing, but I didn't understand that until I was 40 years old.
Nathan: It's very much a positive sum game.
Al: Yeah.
Nathan: I love it. It's a good place to wrap up before we dive back into our mastermind and hanging out in cold Scottsdale.
Al: We’ll see you on part two.
Nathan: Sounds good. Thanks for coming on.
Al: Yeah, man.
Rachel: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Billion Dollar Creator. If you enjoyed this episode, please and subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave us a review. We read every single one. If there is a company you want us to profile on Billion Dollar Creator, send us a message on social media and we will consider it. Thank you and we will see you next time.