078: Sahil Bloom – Using Flywheels to Build Longevity in the Creator Economy

“Sahil: If I’m spending 5 grand a month on video editing services that are going to chop up videos and eclipse, I should actually own a video editing business. When I’m posting a video, I can say, “Hey, I’m using this video editing service. Send a bunch of other people to this service that I own, that is charging 5 grand a month for these services.” Now, I just turn something that I was just spending cash on every single month into something that is making. Now it’s a seven-figure run rate business that’s making a bunch of cash and I own a big chunk of it by virtue of the fact that I can drive leads to it.”

[EPISODE]

[0:00:35] Nathan: I want to dive in. You have a really interesting background to life as a creator, in that you came from private equity. Is it anyone else have a private equity to creator? No, I didn’t think so. We got one. I’m curious, what was that journey as you started to see the creator world from being inside the private equity world?

[0:00:57] Sahil: Yeah. Well, first off, let me just say, thanks to everyone for coming to this. It’s fun to see a bunch of familiar faces, I feel like I’ve interacted with on Twitter sphere, or online over the last few years. Welcome everyone and thank you.

My journey was not engineered. There was no strategy behind becoming a creator. I hadn’t ever intended. Honestly, I didn’t know I’m curious whether other people felt this way, but I didn’t know that the creator economy was really a thing. COVID happened and I was stuck at home and I was working a job that I was rather miserable in, but hadn’t really thought about it. I was working a lot. I was making money and I basically thought that that was what a successful life looked like. That I would just continue to show up day in, day out and it didn’t matter that I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t know that there was really another path.

My view of what it meant to be successful was basically, you either work in banking, or consulting, or finance, or my Indian mother would say, “You become a doctor,” is the real path that you’re supposed to take. For me, it was just all of a sudden, I had time on my hands. I was stuck at home. I wasn’t traveling the three days a week that I had been doing before, and writing had always been something that I really felt a passion around.

Since I was a little kid, my mom used to write a lot, so I would be alongside for her storytelling. It was something I knew I enjoyed. That was just something that I was feeling time with. I was like, “Oh, I can pick up a new hobby, or interest,” because I’m stuck at home and I didn’t have a social life, because I couldn’t see friends, because we were all locked down. I was in the Bay Area at the time.

I started writing and it was on Twitter originally, because I just had a Twitter from back in my baseball days before that. It started to become something. People were sharing things I was doing. It was clear that there was some value that I was creating for others to where they were sharing it and they were gifting me with their attention. That was the value I was receiving in return for the value I was hopefully creating. Then maybe six months of doing that, I started to think about whether there might actually be a business model that was built around it. Because again, I hadn’t come from a background of entrepreneurship. Neither one of my parents are really entrepreneurs. I always just thought that W2 income was what you did and you needed the stable safe path. There was never a point in that first year where I thought about, “Oh, I’m going to quit my job and I’m going to go all in on this. This is the thing. This is the strategy. Here’s how I’m pursuing it.”

It’s actually funny to me today when I see people break down my strategy and talk about the ways that I pursued different things from the early days. Sometimes I often think that we apply strategy ex-post as a narrative to something that worked. It worked for me. I did something some way. But I didn’t, in the moment, think, “Oh, here’s exactly how I’m going to do it and here’s how I’m going to pursue it.” I was just trying things and following something I was enjoying along the way.

Then it became something and now I can say, “Hey, here’s how I did it and here’s what works and all of this and that.” When the reality is you’re just in the trenches and hopefully, pursuing something that you find energy around and that creates energy for you, and then in another world it becomes something.

[0:03:52] Nathan: Yeah. In that, you focused on Twitter first. I want to dive into some much more advanced things just to set the stage. What have you found has really worked for growing on Twitter? That’s been the catalyst for everything else pushing through.

[0:04:01] Sahil: Yeah. You guys all know this, but in at any point in time on any platform, there’s always something that’s the arbitrage of something that people haven’t quite done enough of yet, it’s not saturated and you can really stand out by doing it and doing it well. In the early days when I was writing on Twitter, threads didn’t exist. The first things I was writing on Twitter, I just happened to write in this thread format, because I was trying to explain something that took longer than a 140 characters at the time. They hadn’t even expanded it.

That meant that I had to comment under individual tweets. There wasn’t even the functionality there. That format started getting promoted. It became a really good growth hack, or a clear arbitrage on the platform. Like anything else and like in any market, it gets squeezed out by a lot of people coming into it. The thing that was arbitrage a few months later is all of a sudden saturated and a lot of people are doing it. In the early days, just writing in long form on Twitter was a great way to grow. Today, I think that’s a lot different. There’s a lot of people that are writing in long form. I think the growth arbitrage on Twitter is not anywhere near what it was before.

It used to be that you could just write a bunch of threads and you could grow to a 100,000 plus on Twitter just by doing it enough over six months. I don’t think you can actually do that anymore. I think the arbitrage on Twitter today is a quality arbitrage, where you can write things that are really within your niche, that are really high value. You might not grow to a 100,000 people, but you’re going to attract the 10,000 people that deeply, deeply resonate and care about the things you’re talking about.

I think, anyone that’s pursuing it now and pursuing the vanity metrics of just trying to grow to scale is going to be disappointed. The people that are icy, that are crushing it are the people that are really focusing on delivering value to the people they care about and focusing much more on the quality of the people that are being attracted to the things they’re putting out, versus just worrying about, “Oh, did this get a million views, or did it get 500,000 views, or whatever the number is.”

[0:05:57] Nathan: I think along those lines, since we met and I watched what you did on Twitter, I was like, “That sounds fun. I’ll do that, too.” We would talk and brainstorm ideas last year of growing, I don’t know what it was, from 25 or 30,000 followers, to a 100,000 over the course of the year. I was probably late to the thread wave, or some of those new growth tactics that worked. But what I found was that if I wrote things that only I could write, then that would resonate with the right people. I’d write how we build company culture at ConvertKit. You can’t read Wikipedia and write that thread. Another one that did really well is turning down the acquisition off from Spotify and what we did next, and these threads.

[0:06:40] Sahil: Compensation structure and really well. Super interesting. Yeah.

[0:06:44] Nathan: A bunch of those things that are from my journey and my story, rather than, I don’t know, say again. I feel like so many threads are written straight from Wikipedia.

[0:06:52] Sahil: Yeah. Now from ChatGPT, right? I think my general perception with content in general is anything that can be done either through Wikipedia originally, or now through ChatGPT is barrier to entry goes to zero for creating that type of content, so it is going to be mass proliferated. The way to stand out then is to do the end of one stuff like that, where you only can talk about it, or to really share who you are and your personality that is unique. As I think about the world of AI, as more and more of our lives are consumed by interacting with robots and with technology, I personally think the pendulum swings to wanting to have real human connection and to wanting to be able to connect with people like this in real life, one-on-one, feel like you know the person that you’re actually reading their content.

For me, over the last year and a half since – really since my son was born, which was a life-changing event for me on a personal level, I’ve shared more and more about who I am as a human being and my life and values and things that I care deeply about, than I have mental models type stuff on Twitter. Maybe that was what people knew me for originally and what they were following me for. But over the last year, I shared way more stuff about my life than most people do.

Are there trade-offs to that and your personal life becomes in the public domain? Certainly. But the connection and the community that I think is built around that real human feel is really powerful. I think, the end of one type content where it’s only you that knows this type of stuff, all of you have something like that, some insight. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. Sharing who you are and what you care about, what your core values are, I think, is another really powerful way.

In terms of just straight blocking and tackling, things that are working still really well on Twitter and on LinkedIn as well, visuals are far and away outperforming what they used to. Images, video, all of that stuff, because Twitter is trying to become more of an ad platform. They’re prioritizing attention and people looking at things helps with that. I’m sharing tons more in the way of visuals on the platform, just because it’s clearly performing much better than it used to in the past. Similarly on LinkedIn. Similar general perspective.

Then the last thing I would say is being very aggressive about repurposing content that you’ve used in the past is something that everyone should be thinking about. There’s this tendency to think that you need to come up with some brilliant earth-shattering novel new idea every time you share something, and it’s putting way too much pressure on yourself. I mean, the number of times you’ve shared your compensation thread, or your Spotify thread and continue to have it get traction and reach new people and bring in new followers that are really high-quality is amazing. You can do it every few months, you can be sharing something, because it’s just reaching new people, because of the way the algorithms work.

Really doing that, capitalizing on that, figuring out the ideas that resonate for you and then putting them out in different formats across different platforms is something that I’ve been much more aggressive about and that really helps in terms of broadening the reach of the stuff you’re putting out into the world.

[0:09:39] Nathan: Yeah. An example of that is you actually showed me how to do this of creating a spreadsheet of all of the threads and individual tweets that you write that do well, and then have a cadence where you’re going to come back and revisit them. I originally thought, you should write something and post it once, maybe you can rewrite it later and post a different version of it. Learning from you and Nick Huber and others, hey, you can post the exact same thing over again. If it worked the first time, it will probably work the second time. You’ll get occasionally, people are like, have I read this before maybe? You might get one out of 50 replies of someone saying that.

[0:10:19] Sahil: Even less than that, to be honest. I probably can count on two hands the number of times I’ve had people respond saying, “I’ve read this from you in the last three –” Because it’s a stupid comment to come back with. People, they might think it, but they’re not saying it, and so you’re just, you don’t get a response from that person. That’s okay. It doesn’t matter.

If they do, frankly, it boosts it in the algorithm, because there’s a comment. It goes and reaches more people. Maybe that’s a good thing. I mean, that’s the Nick Huber approach. Say something that outrages people and that drives it up in the algorithm for him. Different strokes, I obviously don’t do that, but –

[0:10:45] Nathan: Yeah. Neither of us followed with that.

[0:10:47] Sahil: But yeah.

[0:10:48] Nathan: Yeah. What you end up with is a cadence. If you’re saying, “Hey, I’m good with reposting a thread, or a series of tweets every four months, or every six months. Well, let’s go with, even saying three months if that was the cadence. Well, if you have 12 great threads that you’ve written that are really landing well, then you could actually write that and then just keep recycling the same content in a three-month cadence. I personally like more of a six-month cadence.

[0:11:15] Sahil: You can think of it on a spectrum from inspiration-driven creators to tactical, operational-driven creators. If you think, Tim Urban is someone I really admire the way, but why writer, who really – I mean, he might publish one blog every several months, because everything he does, it’s deep, deep, spends a ton of time thinking it through. There’s no cadence how he puts out content. It’s very inspiration-driven.

The other end of the spectrum is someone like Justin Welsh, who has done really, really well with he has a system and he’s going to write one thing and then he’s going to make five tweets out of it, and then the five tweets are going to lead to a newsletter. He really has a regimented system and the ideas are the same ones that he’s saying in different ways and he’s open about that. He talks about how other creators should do that.

I’m somewhere probably closer to the former end of the spectrum, where I’ve never had the Excel spreadsheet, where I look at it. I know it helps other people, so I’ve helped other people set it up. For me, I need to feel – anything I post on Twitter, I’ve really written right then. I don’t have a backlog of content. I have no idea what my newsletters are going to be about next week. I haven’t looked at I’ll write two newsletters a week. No clue what’s going to be on them.

[0:12:15] Nathan: That’s terrifying.

[0:12:15] Sahil: For some people, that’s really terrifying. For me, that’s the only way I can do it.

[0:12:18] Nathan: Some people, right?

[0:12:19] Sahil: You could not pay me any amount of money to sit down on a Thursday and write my newsletter for the next Friday. I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m really struggling with writing my book for this exact reason. Oh, it’s going to be published in January 2025. I’m not going to sit down until October of 2024, if it’s up to me, or something like that. It’s not going to work. Yeah, they don’t know that. Hopefully, they’re not listening. Yeah, exactly. I’m going to get in trouble now.

But I think you need to figure out where you are on the spectrum of those two ends, and figure out what works for you. Because what works for me or Nathan might not work for you. Me having an Excel spreadsheet of this stuff, I’m just not going to look at it. I have team now, fortunate to have them. Air Blake runs all of operations of my general ecosystem. He’s helped me bring some level of rigor to how I think about these things in a plan and an approach, but it’s had to really mold into how I view the world, because otherwise, I get overwhelmed really easily, and it just makes me lock up. I go into turtle mode and just want to shrink within my shell.

[0:13:18] Nathan: Yeah, different methods. I’m on the other side where my spreadsheet actually tells me how many months it’s been since I last posted it.

[0:13:26] Sahil: It has to fit into what you do. You have a day job running a big company as a CEO, and so you can’t spend time every single day writing. You might need to have that system in place to make sure that you’re still able to grow your creator ecosystem and have the cadence of putting things out. For me, this is what I do. The platform and brand drives everything else within my ecosystem. I need to figure out what works.

[0:13:48] Nathan: One advantage of building this library of content and whichever structure you take, if you go back to and look at everything you’ve written and you have a way of resurfacing that, it might be things that you rewrite, or whatever else, but you’ll find that something that you wrote once when it was interesting, or inspirational for you might become timely later. People might have cared about five out of 10 about your content. Then later when you originally post it and then if you share it later, they might care 10 out of 10, because of something else happening in the world.

An example, I have a thread that I wrote about Ryan Reynolds and why I think he’s the greatest marketer alive today. I think that’s the hook on the thread. That did really well. Got a bunch of attention. Most importantly, it got Ryan Reynolds to follow me on Twitter, which is probably my greatest accomplishment of the last year. But I think I posted that twice, maybe six months apart. Got a ton of views each time. People loved it. Then when T-Mobile purchased Mint Mobile, I shared the thread again but changed the hook and talked about T-Mobile just bought Mint Mobile for whatever that was, 1.2 billion. By the way, someone replied and was like, “Yeah, but Ryan only owned 30% of that.” I was like –

[0:14:55] Sahil: Yeah. Loser. Yeah, what a loser.

[0:14:59] Nathan: Poor guy. We’ll take up our collection afterwards, so you can buy another sports team.

[0:15:04] Sahil: Yeah. Hopefully, he’ll be all right.

[0:15:07] Nathan: But it got double the views and impressions, because when I released it timely, versus when I released it when it was interesting to me. The lesson is not write something and sit on it until it’s timely. It’s publish it when you find it interesting and when you want to write it. Then if something comes up that’s timely, then repost it and republish it and you look.

[0:15:27] Sahil: Yeah. There’s also, the broader component of this is being proud to share the things that you’ve written, created in whatever context. I think it’s just a shame when amazing content gets shouted into a void and doesn’t reach people. If that happens, people have a tendency to say, “Oh, it wasn’t good.” But if you’re proud of what you created, you should be willing to continue to promote it. Because if you’re not willing to, then why would anyone else be willing to?

If you put out something that doesn’t get any traction, just by definition, that means no one really saw it. You can go put it out again very shortly. If something really just doesn’t perform a month later, you can be excited to go put it out again and figure out, maybe the hook was a little bit off and you need to make it a little more catchy in some way, or connect it to a current event in some way. But there’s plenty of rationale behind just being a little bit more shameless. The line between shameless and just pride and the work that you’ve created is a thin one. You need to dance on that razor’s edge.

[0:16:21] Nathan: I like that. As you’re producing all of this content, freakishly close to when you’re sending it out to your audience.

[0:16:26] Sahil: Freakishly. Thanks.

[0:16:27] Nathan: You’re welcome. Scarily, out of the way. You’ve had to build some pretty determined habits to put out that level of content on that cadence. I’m just thinking about your personal life. Your son’s a year old and you’re super involved so with him and with your family. What are the habits and systems that you put in place to be able to create in that way?

[0:16:50] Sahil: I think that you need to figure out your own energy cadence around creating. I’ll talk about it during my talk this afternoon. But one of the things I always think is we all have a very different circadian rhythm and a very different time when our creative energy is flowing, in the way that is required for you to create at your highest level. I used to think I could write in the evening, because that was when it fit into my day and my life. What I realized was I actually was my sharpest, most creative version of myself at 5 in the morning. That’s just me being a weird morning person. I like waking up early, but I was doing a bunch of emailing at 5 in the morning, rather than spending that time on the one creative thing that actually mattered, that was really high leverage.

Figuring out for me when my creative energy actually was flowing and then mapping that to when I was actually creating on a daily basis was really, really important. That to me is just a matter of mapping out your life of what is the actual, real important thing that you’re doing on a daily basis from a creative standpoint.

Writing for me is that number one most important thing, whether it’s my newsletter, whether it’s my book that I should be working on, or writing for Twitter, or whatever other platform, I need that to be in the morning, because that’s when I actually have creative energy flowing. In the afternoon, I’m basically useless after 2.30. My energy goes to zero. I need six Dunkin Donuts, cold brews in order to do anything. If I email, or if I have to get on a Zoom call in the afternoon, that’s okay. I don’t mind going and doing that, or doing whatever the lower value task is. But mapping my energy to when I’m creating has been really, really impactful for me.

[0:18:21] Nathan: Yeah. I like it. I’ve seen it play out just in the volume of content that you create.

[0:18:25] Sahil: The one thing I would encourage everyone to do is I have this thing I created. I called it an energy calendar. Basically, it’s looking at the activities that are on your calendar during the course of a week that create energy, versus drain energy from your life. The way I did it originally was I just at the end of a day, I color coded my calendar and I thought about, okay, that thing that was on my calendar, did it create energy for me? I mark it green. Was it neutral? I marked it yellow. Or, was it draining energy for me? I marked it red.

At the end of a week by doing that every day, you get a really good perspective on the type of activities that were creating a ton of energy for you and your life, the type of activities that were draining a ton of energy for you and then the things that were okay. When you establish that awareness of what it is that’s hurting, versus helping your energy, you can then slowly start to reposition your life over the course of a period of time towards more green on your calendar.

You can’t ever hope to eliminate all of the red necessarily, because we all have things we have to do, probably, but you can do things to try to make red look more yellow. For me, red was Zoom calls and phone calls, sitting at my desk. But yellow was a walking call. If I could walk outside. I started turning all of those Zoom calls into, hey, let’s actually just do a phone call, I’m going to walk. I’ll be much more focused on you. Because when I’m on a Zoom call, I’m trying to multitask on my computer. But if I’m on the phone talking to someone on a walk, I’m laser-focused on that one thing. I switched a lot of it. All of a sudden, a bunch of red on my calendar became yellow, and that helps a lot.

At the end of the week, you actually don’t feel completely killed and drained when your calendar was mostly green and yellow. That’s another thing that I just think people should do. It’s a very easy activity and it helps a lot.

[0:20:01] Nathan: Nice. I used you as a poster boy for flywheels a lot. Thanks for being a great example –

[0:20:07] Sahil: Appreciate that.

[0:20:07] Nathan: – that I can just talk about regularly. I’m curious, how you think about that flywheel. There’s obviously the side that I talk about of how it fits into the ConvertKit’s ecosystem and all that. But is the flywheel that runs and drives your newsletter growth something that you consciously think about? Or what tweaks did you have to make to get that level of growth that we’re talking about?

[0:20:29] Sahil: Yeah, I think only recently have I come to understand the way that it all flows.

[0:20:33] Nathan: You’re welcome.

[0:20:35] Sahil: Yeah. Honestly, again, to the point of a lot of these strategies being exposed narratives, that something started working and then we say, “Oh, yeah. That’s a flywheel.” Then we’re like, okay, let’s go build one of those. I think other people can learn from that. But it was only by screwing it up on the way and falling into it that it got figured out.

[0:20:50] Nathan: It’s very recent.

[0:20:50] Sahil: Within the last six months probably. My newsletter flywheel is really just part of a broader flywheel around my ecosystem that I think about. I tend to think more on a macro scale. It’s just the way my mind works. You’ve been helpful in helping me think about what the micro scale flywheel looks like, around just the newsletter and how to drive that, but it’s only recent.

[0:21:10] Nathan: Yeah, so let’s go to that macro scale, because I think it’s a lot of your background coming into this world from private equity and business and all of that, gets you thinking on a different level. One thing that I want is so many other creators to think on the level that you do of, I guess, in this billion-dollar creator idea of asking the question, if you have an audience, that means you have someone’s attention. What is the highest value place you can direct that attention?

We’re all experimenting with this. We might not talk about it that way, but we’re experimenting with that in small ways, where we’re saying, “Okay, is it ads? Is it an eBook? Should I sell a course? Should I whatever else?” I’m really curious how you think about that question at the macro level of what’s the grand scale of what you’re building and how do you think about driving attention?

[0:21:58] Sahil: Yeah. I came from a business background. I came from the private equity world, where we were investing in businesses that were, I don’t know, a 100 to 300, 500 million of revenue, real-scale businesses that we were investing in. Coming with that perspective, the number one thing that I was most nervous about and wary of as I was starting to build my new ecosystem was the longevity of it and sustainability, and realizing that no creator really creates forever. I looked and looked at all the case studies of the different people, and there’s growth curves to it. People have their period of crazy growth and then they have some level of stagnation, and then some of them have a second growth wave.

Tim Ferris had his book wave, then he was quiet, and then he had the podcast and he’s managed to continue doing it. But they’re unicorns, right? I mean, crazy one in a million type thing. Most creators, you have your curve and you need to figure out what’s next. In a normal career path, there’s a normal arc to it. You show up every single day as a W2 employee, you get your 2% pay raise every year. You know that if you just keep doing reasonably good work, you’re going to have a job for the next 20, 30 years. That doesn’t really exist as a solopreneur. You have to actually go out do it and build something that’s durable and sustainable.

I came in really thinking about that from the get-go of, what can I be building that’s not necessarily on the surface that people see, that is going to outlast me creating? If I want to not write for a year, or if no one cares what I have to say anymore out of the blue, for whatever reason, do I actually have something that exists that has value, either equity, or real cash that’s just coming into me that isn’t attached to me just having to create on a daily basis?

I understand the business models that a lot of creators have built around ads, or courses, or products, all these different things. I think they’re fantastic. But I wanted to have that, plus build something that I felt wasn’t attached to me being on a treadmill of creating every day. I came in with that perspective and really was trying to all on the way, have those businesses being built in the background alongside things I was doing from a platform and brand perspective. That’s really how I pursued it. I don’t talk about that publicly really at all.

Nick Huber, who you mentioned earlier has been very public about the businesses that he co-owns and that he’s driving people to. He talks about how much money he’s making on them, doing all these things. I’ve never really wanted the attention of talking about money that I’m making, or things that I’m doing. I personally just don’t feel comfortable sharing details financially in the way that other people do. That’s prevented me from doing that, so it’s been more under the surface.

The vast majority of people have no idea of the business ecosystem that I’ve created alongside it. But I think there is something interesting there that we can talk about in this room, a strategy that I think people can put in place to build something that outlasts them having to create new content on a daily, or weekly, monthly basis.

[0:24:42] Nathan: Yeah, I want to go to that. Maybe before we do, who’s a creator that comes to mind? It could be, maybe at our level, or someone even much more famous who has this interesting – building substantial equity in something that either inspires you, or you think about, “Oh, that is a unique model and it’s getting me to think about this differently.”

[0:24:59] Sahil: I think, Nick was definitely a version of that for me. I disagree with a lot of the things that he says publicly and a lot of the way that he approaches it and the abrasiveness with which he approaches things, but there’s something under the surface there that’s really interesting in the business and how he’s thinking about looking at the value chain of the real estate world that he was operating and creating in, and thinking about where in that value chain he could create businesses and partner with people to build businesses and benefit and profit from that.

I think there are some investors that have used it really well around building holding companies, [Inaudible 0:25:30] and Xavier Helgesen. Small lure followings to Nick, more or like 50,000 to a 100,000 followers on Twitter and not big newsletters, but they’ve been really deliberate about how to leverage a high value following for driving deal flow and for being able to create access to the things that they’re investing in. They have a holding company that allows them to compound value over a really long period of time.

Then on the big, big scale, I think what Kim Kardashian is doing with the private equity fund is one of the most interesting things. It got dunked on a lot. People were going crazy over it, but I think that’s one of the smartest ways that she could possibly make money.

[0:26:06] Nathan: Yeah. Using that attention to point it to something that a business that you can really grow and have.

[0:26:12] Sahil: Yeah. Private equity funds have been claiming that they create value for the companies that they invest in for the last 30, 40 years. It’s been 99% bullshit. Excuse my language. I worked in private equity. The value we created was we would send a bunch of consultants to go create process and bounce around and say smart things and then not do anything, and then we’d pop out and hope that it worked. Cross your fingers, hope you don’t run out of cash before you pay off the debt.

If the market was good and the company was good, it worked out. Great, you made a lot of money, because you levered up a business. If it didn’t, oh, well, we did well on the other ones. It’s fine. With a model what she’s put in place with this new fund, she can drive seriously changed outcomes for a consumer business, assuming it’s the right type of business that they go and invest in, people will go buy the product that she gets excited about.

I mean, they, the Kardashians for all their flaws, have massive influence in getting people do consume things. If they buy a consumer business, the amount of value that she can create for that business overnight, it’s messy coming to the Miami MLS team. The amount of value that is created in a franchise by one person is enormous. I can’t think of a better business model for creating value out of that attention than having a billion-dollar private equity fund, where you can put a bunch of equity to work that isn’t yours, and you make 25% of the upside on the profit. It’s the best business model in the world, and you’re taking 2% fees on it along the way.

Being able to do that, I will be shocked if more seriously influential celebrities aren’t doing that in the coming years. For everyone, that is the macro-macro scale. None of us – I shouldn’t say none of us. There’s probably a high, high likelihood that none of us will ever have the level of attention that a Kardashian has. I don’t want it. I hope none of you guys do. It’s a weird life to live. But that model can be distilled down to a micro level that a lot of people actually can go and execute on. It’s not inconceivable that anyone in this room could go and raise a couple million dollars to go and acquire a niche business that’s within your category of things you’re doing and really build a cool compounding vehicle around the space that you’re operating in.

If you’re working in the cooking space and in high-end chefs, restaurants, that is a very real model where you could drive a differentiated outcome because of the attention that you have in that space. There’s a lot of really interesting things, I think, that can happen on a micro scale, taking that same model and pulling it down.

[0:28:26] Nathan: Yeah. I like that. It drives towards owning equity in something, right? You brought up [inaudible 0:28:30] as an example. I think you turned the offer from Saudi Arabia was over a billion dollars?

[0:28:36] Sahil: Yeah.

[0:28:37] Nathan: Right? You turned that down in order to get equity and rev share and the ability to own an MLS team.

[0:28:45] Sahil: And not have to live in Saudi Arabia.

[0:28:46] Nathan: That, too.

[0:28:48] Sahil: That’s worth a lot.

[0:28:54] Nathan: Think about that in your own business, when you’re trading attention for cash versus when you’re trading attention for equity. There’s a time and a place for each. You could live a really difficult life if you too early on, you only pursued equity, because equity is not going to buy the groceries. At least not now. Equity will buy the groceries 10 years from now.

[0:29:14] Sahil: Yeah. Although equity in a business that cash flows from day one might buy the groceries, just more specifically around the ecosystem that I’ve focused on. I have a venture fund that invests in early-stage startups. Small venture fund. Those are all 10-plus year bets. Companies that are money losing today, that you’re predicting, or going to build a huge ecosystem around them, amazing founder, is building big, big solutions. There’s no cash in that type of stuff. You’re hoping for a billion-dollar-plus exit.

The other end of the spectrum of business types are these cash flow from day one agencies, services, these businesses that just create value from day one. A lot of the businesses you guys run and have built are in that mold; coaching businesses, whatever it might be around the agency model. You can go build businesses like that that are going to make you cash and real cash flow from day one. For me, I’ve thought about, I have reach of say, two million people across these different platforms.

There are a lot of things that I was doing on a daily basis, or monthly basis that I was spending money on. Video editing services. Design services. Newsletter growth services. People building my newsletter on the backend, all of the ops around it. I was spending cash on that every single month. I just looked at it from an Amazon model of Amazon turned all of their cost centers into profit centers. How can I do that exact same thing?

Well, if I’m spending 5 grand a month on video editing services that are going to chop up videos and eclipse, I should actually own a video editing business. So, when I’m posting a video, I can say, “Hey, I’m using this video editing service.” Send a bunch of other people to this service that I own that is charging 5 grand a month for these services, and now I just turned something that I was just spending cash on every single month into something that is making, now it’s a seven-figure run rate business that’s making a bunch of cash. I own a big chunk of it, by virtue of the fact that I can drive leads to it.

I don’t have to run it. You partner with a great operator, someone that’s actually going to run it, that’s going to own 50-plus percent, really have it be their thing, but I can just drive leads to that business and be along for the ride. That’s cash and it’s also equity, if you have a more diversified platform there. That’s really how I pursued it was just looking at things that I had really clear product audience fit around. I think that’s the really important piece is for me to go and promote, I don’t know, a cooking business. Yeah, I don’t talk about cooking really. I don’t have any background in the restaurant industry, or anything. It would be weird. No one would really connect with it.

But for me to post a post of beautiful visual versions of a thread that I’ve written and then say, “Hey, this is the company that’s actually doing all these visuals for me,” that’s a very clear audience product fit and connection there that drives a bunch of new eyeballs to something a business that I own a piece of. That’s really how I’ve pursued that on the backend.

[0:31:50] Nathan: Yeah. Are you open to running through a couple of those agencies and share?

[0:31:53] Sahil: Yeah.

[0:31:53] Nathan: Because there’s more than – I think that implies there’s two. There’s actually –

[0:31:57] Sahil: Probably like 10 or 12 today, somewhere in that range. Yeah.

[0:32:00] Nathan: Yeah, what are some of the examples of what those agencies do?

[0:32:02] Sahil: Yeah. The video editing and the design service ones are two new ones that have both –

[0:32:07] Nathan: Had blown up in the past month.

[0:32:08] Sahil: Yeah, in 45 days since we launched them. It’s pushing a 3-million-dollar revenue run right now across those. It’s reached real scale and cash, 50% even – 50% margins cash flowing from day one out of them. We invested zero dollars to start the businesses. Scaling capacity. You have to time the services and how you’re actually bringing on capacity to do it and make sure that it’s really managed well by a great operator on the backend, but there’s real money in doing these businesses that you can scale. Finding those for your niche and finding a great operator is the challenging part. But once you do that, there’s a really amazing business that you can actually put together.

It doesn’t have to be enormous. I say that, I think that’s on a big scale. You can do something like that and build this multi-million revenue business quickly. But on a niche level, if you go get, if it’s high-ticket services type stuff and you have a few clients at a few thousand dollars a month, there’s a real business to be made very, very quickly that’s driving cash flow into your ecosystem that you can then reinvest in other things. I reinvest a lot of the cash flow from these businesses into growing my platform, because the platform then drives it all in that big macro flywheel that I’m talking about.

You and I are working on one together now. You were doing a – basically, we productized the backend of my newsletter growth operation. The team and everything that was doing all of my newsletter growth operations, we productized that playbook. Now, it’s a done-for-you model around that. Nathan and I had been working on that together for a while. We partnered with a great operator who’s running that business.

[0:33:34] Nathan: That’s Shane.

[0:33:35] Sahil: Yeah, who’s sitting in the room, actually. That business will scale very quickly, because there’s a model. It’s very clear that I’m able to talk about it very credibly, because I actually use this exact team and the exact playbook and it has worked. There’s a case study built into it. There’s something really interesting to just be done for all of you and for you to all think about and wrestle with the idea around how can you create something like that within your ecosystem.

[0:33:58] Nathan: Yeah, and I think the product audience fit is really, really important. I’d love to open up to the group and take questions. We are going to pass the mic around and just to capture on the video for the podcast. Who’s got a question that they want to ask? We’ve got there and here.

[0:34:11] Sahil: Are you tossing mics, or are we going?

[0:34:13] Nathan: I think that we’ve learned that tossing microphones can be deadly.

[0:34:16] Sahil: Good to know.

[0:34:18] Nathan: I’m impressed that microphone did not break the LED wall.

[0:34:21] Sahil: What happened? When was that?

[0:34:23] Nathan: In the talk.

[0:34:23] Sahil: Oh.

[0:34:24] Nathan: The catch box, it came apart.

[0:34:25] Sahil: Oh, jeez.

[0:34:28] Nathan: Yeah. Was it a little bit of war zone feel? Okay.

[0:34:34] Male 1: Yeah. The question is from the other side, the non-creator. If someone wanted to partner with a creator, what’s the approach to, if you created your own product, or if you want to create a product together, what would you recommend for that type of person?

[0:34:48] Sahil: Yeah. For anyone that didn’t hear your question, is around the other end, on the operator side, or on the builder side, you’ve built something you want to figure out distribution around it. The reason this is an interesting model for a builder, obviously, is when you’re just thinking about acquiring customers, you were the person that has built the product and now you have to figure out distribution. If you can find someone that actually has that distribution and it allows you to hack the entire model. You’re not having to buy Facebook ads and do all these things when you have someone that owns it.

I think the biggest thing is to make the list of the people that actually have real product audience fit around the thing that you’re putting out into the world. I think the worst thing you can do is partner with someone too quickly that actually doesn’t have any resonance around the topic area. I had someone approach me about doing an SEO agency business. They had built it and it was doing $50,000 a month of revenue, and they wanted to give me equity to help them push it out.

I honestly just had to have an honest conversation. I don’t know what SEO stands for. I was like, “I can talk about this and we might bring in some people, just because there are people out there that care about it, but I have zero credibility to talk about this, and you should find someone that does. Someone that really, really knows it.” It might have a much smaller audience and reach way fewer people than me, but those people are going to care about what they have to say about SEO. I think that that is probably the most important thing is figure out who is talking about those things, and in that little ecosystem. They don’t have to be enormous creators. Open up a dialogue with those people.

I don’t think the information is well distributed enough about the equity side that all creators are going to get it immediately. If you go to them and say, “Hey, interested in partnering.” I think most of them will default to thinking of it as a cash retainer collaboration type deal, because that’s the default model with these things. Brands have been paying Instagram influencers to post things on their feeds for forever. Having that conversation of how you want to actually approach it, if you do want to give up equity, or if you don’t is probably an important one to have upfront as well.

[0:36:38] Male 1: Yeah. I love it.

[0:36:39] Nathan: Who else? You’re right there.

[0:36:43] Rachel: My name is Rachel from moneyhackingmama.com. I’ve got to get that in the podcast.

[0:36:47] Sahil: Perfect. That’s good. Good plug. Good plug.

[0:36:48] Nathan: Just talk a little louder, because we don’t have a mic for this room.

[0:36:51] Rachel: Okay. You mentioned that it’s hard to find, to create these opportunities and these agencies, but you’ve done it. Can you tell us more of how are people coming to you? Are they pitching you? Or are you coming up with ideas and finding people and then how do you find those operators?

[0:37:03] Sahil: Yeah, it’s a great question. I have been fortunate in that, because of my business background, I had a lot of people that I were in my network that I knew were really high-quality operators. They weren’t building this exact thing, but I knew that they were very, very capable of building something within the space. When they came up for air and were ready for what their next thing was, this most recent, the video stuff and the design services, that was a guy who I’d been friends with for a while, that had built an eight-figure agency and sold it and was taking six months to figure out what was next. I was able to get together with him and pitch him on, “Hey, I think there’s this interesting concept, or idea. Is it something that you’d be excited to do?” It worked out.

Without that, I think the thing is you need to just put yourself out there into the ecosystem of people that might be builders. I think it’s frankly, being in rooms like this, being around other people that are talking about these things, interested in these things is the only way to get lucky with connecting with someone that might be the right collaborator and partner on it. I don’t think there’s some perfect method of the approach to do it. I do think looking at your value chain and figuring out what you spend money on, or what people like you spend money on and how you can actually flip those things into profit centers is a very easy way to think about it, that will give you some ideas at least from the get go.

Because that was how I thought about it was like, what am I spending money on? There’s a lot of people that are spending money on those things than I am. I’m not the only one in the world. Everyone wants a high-quality version of that. How can I use that then to create a value chain?

[0:38:37] Nathan: I think the Amazon model is really interesting, of the exactly what they did with AWS, of the cost center to profit center. Another thing in that it’s really important is as a creator, it’ll be tempting that, “Oh, I’m starting this business and then I’m going to be the CEO of that.” You are already the CEO of your creator business, and I would not recommend pulling an Elon Musk and trying to be the CEO of multiple people. Thankfully, you’re not Elon Musk in many ways, but very few people can pull that off and I wouldn’t try.

[0:39:07] Sahil: Yeah. It’s an awareness of what you like doing and what you’re actually good at, and then what you don’t like doing and what you’re bad at. I know, I’m not, and this has taken me a long time to realize it and to be self-aware enough to talk about it. I’m not great at managing people. For me, I have zero desire to say that I will manage a team of 15 people, that I have a lot of creator friends who, I think in the early days of the creator movement, it was a flex to say that you had a big team, because it was, I left the corporate world, now I have this big team. Look, I’m credible. You felt proud to say that.

Now, I think the movement is actually being really lean and nimble and not feeling like you have too many people to manage and a whole big organization is an amazing way to approach it. For me, I know I’m not great at managing people. I have zero desire to spend time managing people. I really want to spend time on creative things that I enjoy and get a ton of energy out of. Building it the way that you want, and that means partnering with people that are going to manage people and that really are great at that, that’s where they spike and light up is important. Finding people who are great at the things that you’re terrible at, you’re great at the things they’re terrible at is the best potential model that you can hope for.

[0:40:11] Nathan: I love it.

[0:40:13] Logan: Hi, I’m logan. I work in the dating and relationship space. I’d love to hear you talk about failure and related to failure, how you run your experimentation process. I’m sure you’re constantly running experiments. How do you know when it just hasn’t been long enough and you have to keep growing, or when, “Hey, this one didn’t work and I’m going to pivot and do something else”?

[0:40:30] Sahil: I failed a lot as an athlete, enough that I became very comfortable with it. I was a baseball player prior to my work. Just by nature of the sport, you have to get really comfortable with failure and failure on a pretty public stage.

[0:40:44] Nathan: You have it in your twitter bio.

[0:40:45] Sahil: I still have that in my Twitter bio.

[0:40:47] Nathan: Say what your Twitter bio says.

[0:40:47] Sahil: Yeah. I gave up a grand slam on ESPN in 2012. My whole family there and all family and friends and watching at home and stuff. It’s still one of the lowlights of my life. Now, I can laugh about it, but it was pretty bad at the moment. I mean, I think because of that failure is something that I’m not particularly scared of and able to recognize quickly and move on. I would say, giving some – it’s a silly heuristic, but six months is generally how I think about timelines of thinking about things. I tend to, I review my own life on a quarterly basis, where I’m looking at, okay, what am I spending my time on? Am I spending time on the right things? Wat really matters in my world right now?

I do that quarterly, but usually, if you can’t really make a decision about whether something worked or not in that three-month period. You need to adjust course at the quarterly mark. Then if that adjustment really didn’t fix the thing of what you were trying to fix, then after six months, you can make a go, no-go decision. I’ve jumped into a few things that I think had bad product audience fit and didn’t really make a ton of sense. I’m involved with one right now that I would say, it’s probably a month or two away from me saying, “Okay, I’m probably not the right person for this. The business doesn’t really work. The operator is just thinking on a different plane than how we’re thinking about it.” Being able to just walk away from things like that is an important – I think it’s just an important trait and skill set.

Going in with the right communication with the operator around what the goal is, what you’re actually trying to build is really, really important. There’s that one. I think he is really trying to build a lifestyle business that makes X dollars. For me, that won’t be impactful. Spending any time on it, if that’s what it’s going to be doesn’t make sense for me. It might make sense for someone else and they should probably work with that other person then in that case. Just being really eyes wide open with the people about what the goal is and what the anti-goal is. What would make this a disaster for both of us?

When we were starting our agency together, we had a discussion with our CEO. What are our goals for this and what are our anti-goals? What do we want to make sure we avoid along the way here? For both of us, we have full-time things that we’re working on in building. Our anti-goal is spending more than X hours a week on this. Makes it a total, total failure. If we’re building a model that requires us to spend that much time on it, it’s not going to work and we already know that, so we can avoid it from the get-go. I think that that helps also at the outset is having that discussion.

[0:43:05] Nathan: I love it. Let’s do a few more from the side of the room. Who over here has one?

[0:43:08] Sahil: Balance out the sides.

[0:43:09] Nathan: Yeah, exactly.

[0:43:10] Male 2: This is a ridiculous question, but 10 years from now, what do you think the creator ecosystem looks like?

[0:43:15] Sahil: I’m terrible at protecting the future. The way I think about it as a company is if I have the north star of helping creators in our living and I just continue to follow that north star, then the exact way that that plays out – I’m not married to one implementation of that, or, oh, this feature, or this way we do business. It’s really just continually checking in what what’s working and be relentless on that. I think that allows me to build a business that is long-term sustainable, without having to have us a really clear idea, “Oh, I know exactly what 10 years from now this is going to look like.”

I think a lot of trends are going to continue. I think audience sizes are going to continue to grow like crazy, as I was saying in my talk. I just see even global population growth and then the population’s coming online, that’s absolutely huge. We’re still in this really small ecosystem compared to even just current online populations.

I like general mental model for this is commerce follows attention. 50 years ago, attention was highly centralized. The biggest conglomerates owned all of the airwaves. They had every single ad space they owned. It was P&G. The handful of big companies owned all of the attention in the airspace, so they had all of the commerce that followed it. Increasingly, attention is becoming decentralized and it’s owned by people like all of us in the room, who are building these little micro communities and micro attention centers that are built and spread out all over the world. Commerce is now following that. I think it’s way behind. It’s lagging, actually.

You’re on the very early part of an S*curve of commerce decentralizing to all of these tiny little attention centers that are being created around the world. I think that will continue to happen. I don’t see a reason why that would stop, because I don’t see the big attention-grabbing conglomerates being able to try to re-centralize all of this. Maybe they start trying to acquire a bunch of creators to try to bring that back within the fold, but the reality is all of these platforms, the social platforms, all the things that exist exist to allow people to create those tiny little attention centers around themselves. All of the software that’s being created stands an example of this. All the stuff that exists out there is allowing people to create these little attention centers around the world. Commerce will then follow that.

I think 10 years out, I would just continue to see a trend towards that, of being able to build your attention center around whatever it is that you want to build it around, and then have a commerce apparatus that’s built around that. If that’s businesses and things we’re talking about, or if it’s products, or if it’s a newsletter business, ads, whatever it might be, I think that that – the capacity to do that will continue to accelerate.

[0:45:54] Nathan: Yeah, that’s good. You had a question? I think we have time for one more after that. Think of your question, the final one that we’re going to –

[0:46:01] Male 3: Bobbing as well here. Appreciate your time. Interesting you asked that question, because I was going to ask, do we see aggregators coming in and trying to pull back and do that? But you already answered that. My second question would be this. What’s something that an early stage, new creator business idea needs to concentrate on if they’re looking to build, I’ve heard Nathan use this term a lot of, an enterprise style business? Because you have so many things going on, right? I would imagine when you first left the PE world that you can say, “I want to have these 15 things going.” There was a point somewhere where it started to add up.

[0:46:33] Sahil: I think it has to be credible connected attention and community first, for all of this stuff to work. I don’t think any of it worked. Their growth hacking, we’ve all seen it, right? If you are building something for the next 10, 15, 20 years, you’ve all been frustrated by it, too, where you see someone growing super-fast by doing whatever the ChatGPT thread is, AI, whatever. It was web3 before, it was Chrome extensions before that, whatever the thing was that people grew really fast with, that will continue to exist, but it will be very, very difficult to build a credible, durable long-term commerce center around that, because the attention is fake in a lot of ways. It’s not a real connection that you have with your audience.

I think that the community, the real human connection that you build with people has to be at the center of how you think if you’re getting started. I mean, if I were to start from scratch today, that’s what I would be focused on. It wouldn’t be trying to grow anywhere near the scale that my stuff has grown to. It would be really focusing on, how do I create true connection on a scale of a thousand? I think, the Kevin Kelly thousand true fans thing holds up entirely today, and I think it will continue to over the 10 years ahead. Because again, all of the baseline stuff will become commoditized and that human connection is going to be what actually stands out.

[0:47:49] Nathan: I agree. Okay, final question. Jay, all the way at the back.

[0:47:54] Sahil: Making them work for it.

[0:47:56] Nathan: That’s right.

[0:47:58] Jay: Thank you for sharing so much, Sahil. This has been awesome.

[0:48:00] Sahil: Nice to meet you.

[0:48:01] Jay: Maybe you touched on this, I got in a little late, so hopefully not. But I think for a lot of us, it’s really impressive the output that we see from you. To hear you talk about things, hey, “There are 10 to 12 businesses that I’ve helped launch.” I’d love to hear a rough breakdown of the proportion of time and attention you’re putting into different parts of your business.

[0:48:21] Sahil: Yeah. My actual day, just tactically, I have a grandpa schedule. I go to bed at 8.30 and I wake up at 4.30. I used to be like, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” hustle culture bro when I was in finance, and then I realized I was actually going to die and my health was suffering, and it was no longer worth it. Fortunately, I have a one-year-old who actually sleeps, he probably goes to bed at 7 and wakes up at 6. It actually works with our life. But I go to bed early. I wake up super early.

For me, my creative energy, I mentioned this earlier, flows early in the morning. From 5 to 7.30, I have my deep focus writing period. That’s either newsletter. Mondays, I write both of my newsletters. Then the rest of the week, it should be book, but it tends to be like book, or whatever other creative work that I’m really excited about focusing on. My whole goal is that if the whole day goes to shit after that first block, because of things with my son, or family stuff, or whatever it is that’s going on that I still feel like the day was a win if I really focused during that period. That’s my non-negotiable. I have to have really sat down and done that.

I would say, 20% of the time the day does go to shit. There’s just stuff that happens, and I still feel okay about that. I got my stuff done. But what I try to do is I try to have another block of a few hours in the afternoon, basically, after lunch, when I sit down and have my business focused deep work session, which is really focused on anything that’s going on with any of the businesses that I need to think about, weigh in on, etc., or things associated with my fund, or other stuff that’s going on within my business ecosystem, or any miscellaneous content creation. It’s an open deep work session.

I don’t spend a ton of time emailing anymore. I’m very, very bad at email. I probably have PTSD from my email time, the amount of time I had to spend on it during my finance days. I batched all of my calls and meetings on to a single day of the week, so I don’t do calls or meetings other than on Thursdays. That has helped a ton. It took a little while to pattern people into that and make sure that I could do it, but it has been massively helpful, because the random 2.30 call on an afternoon that ruins your entire day of creative work really was impacting me in a big way. When the book started coming to the fold, I knew I needed to focus on that. I forced myself to really have it be concentrated on Thursdays. That’s really what my week looks like.

On the surface, when I tell people that, they’re like, “Wow, you don’t work very much.” I think that’s true in a sense, but I feel drained by the end of a week, because of how on I have to be with all of the social facing stuff and the people facing things that I do. I find that to be probably the biggest struggle in my life is there’s constantly people that want something, better responding to things, commenting. I really try to engage with people in good faith on all of that stuff, but it really drains me, because my natural bias is to be more introverted.

For me, I feel like I have to be in character a bit. While I don’t feel like I work a lot in the traditional sense of sitting down and doing emails, or doing whatever work looks like, I feel I’m really on almost 24/7 around, even on weekends. Finding ways to actually turn off and make sure I’m present with my family is really what I’m currently trying to make sure I do wrestle with and really focus on. Yeah.

[0:51:26] Jay: I love it.

[0:51:26] Nathan: Well, there’s so much that I’ve learned from you over the years. I’m excited for you.

[0:51:30] Sahil: Likewise.

[0:51:32] Nathan: Yeah.

[0:51:33] Sahil: From you. Not from myself. Sorry. I’ve learned from myself a lot as well.

[0:51:37] Nathan: I first heard that as like, what? I was like, “Okay, I got to list that.”

[0:51:40] Sahil: No, no, no. Yeah, no, no, no. Likewise.

[0:51:43] Nathan: I’m just excited for, I mean, you’re going to share at the closing keynote today, and I share a bunch more. But yeah, thank you for building in public and sharing all of this and then giving everyone in the room a little peek behind the curtain of the actual, the macro flywheel of what’s going on.

[0:51:57] Sahil: Yeah. I’d love to hear from everyone as well, so all my DMs, my email address, everything’s all out and open. If there are any questions, or anything, definitely reach out. I’d love to chat more.

[0:52:06] Nathan: Sounds good.

[0:52:06] Sahil: Thank you.

[0:52:07] Nathan: All right. Thank you.

[END]