How to Build a $100,000 Personal Brand (In Just 90 Days) | 063

[00:00:00] Nathan Barry: Everyone talks about how brand is so important and people don’t put the same level of effort into personal brand. 98 percent of founders still aren’t doing that. And that’s the exciting part where I think you can really turn on the jet fuels. Darrell, you are one of the best in the world at all things creator and business marketing.

[00:00:15] Nathan Barry: Let’s dive in on concepts that traditional startups should take from the creator world.

[00:00:19] Darrell Vesterfelt: Zero to one at the early stage of a company, I think founder led marketing is the most effective way to have really quick results.

[00:00:26] Nathan Barry: This is probably one of the only categories. We’re like, you can get 80, 20 results like upfront.

[00:00:32] Nathan Barry: If you do another thing that’s made a huge difference is for hiring and recruiting.

[00:00:36] Darrell Vesterfelt: People don’t just pick a company for feature sets. They pick the story, they pick the community, they pick the vision and the mission. And I don’t think that can be outsourced.

[00:00:44] Nathan Barry: Recruiting conversion rates. I bet it went up 25 to 50%.

[00:00:49] Nathan Barry: Based on personal brand. What are the five things that you would do with founder led marketing being really impactful? I would get one podcast interview. We want to create a founding story, build out a little bit of a social presence. Two or three case studies. And that will get you 90 percent of the way there.

[00:01:06] Nathan Barry: Exactly right.

[00:01:11] Nathan Barry: All right, Darrell. We have done a lot together over the years and one topic that keeps coming up is founder led marketing as in general, but more specifically something that’s come up a lot for both of us is concepts that traditional. Startups, you know, conventional startups should take from the creator world.

[00:01:31] Nathan Barry: So I want to dive into that today. but before we do that, give the high level of Darrell Vesterfelt Holdings.

[00:01:37] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. So the company is actually called Mount Haley Holdings. it’s the company that encapsulates everything that I do underneath that there’s an agency called good people, that takes creator strategies and implements them into startups and traditional businesses.

[00:01:53] Darrell Vesterfelt: also works with high level creators to develop monetization strategies around their audience. so the, the intersection of these two things is Startups are really good at converting people and selling, but not great at using the the strategies of creators Creators are really good at creating audience, but also don’t know how to convert people And so we serve those two those two audiences at that agency.

[00:02:12] Darrell Vesterfelt: That’s it. I’ve got a couple other small projects I got a consulting firm called boomtown where I consult startups from one to ten million dollars in revenue You

[00:02:19] Nathan Barry: Yeah, there’s all kinds of things there, but let’s dive in on the, what traditional businesses, you know, what these startups should do to, you know, borrow from creator businesses first.

[00:02:29] Nathan Barry: I think just to talk about it, there’s this stigma that it has, especially in Silicon Valley where the tweet that I’ve seen from time to time, or the comment is something like, you know, from a venture capitalist or an investor saying. You know, once one of the founders in your, the, in your investment portfolio starts, you know, tweeting, writing blog posts, creating a personal brand, you can just go ahead and write off the investment because it’s not going anywhere.

[00:02:58] Nathan Barry: And like anything, there’s an element of truth to it. There’s probably a little bit where that has happened, right? Where founders have gotten distracted or something like that. But it’s just, I think a myopic view on the world. I agree. I’m curious for your take.

[00:03:13] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. I agree. If I were an investor and I saw a founder beginning to develop a personal brand, I’d be excited.

[00:03:19] Darrell Vesterfelt: but the exact opposite, mostly because you and I have personal experience with, Founder led marketing being really impactful at the early phases of companies and even later phases of companies. That’s a really powerful thing again I do think there are some pitfalls that founders can fall into in this realm, but it’s kind of like the concept of the tide in the harbor rises and all the Boats rise with it.

[00:03:43] Darrell Vesterfelt: the, the development of a personal brand can actually have a positive impact on a company.

[00:03:47] Nathan Barry: Yeah. I think about how everyone talks about how brand is so important. Yeah. No one’s going to come out and argue like, ah, brand doesn’t matter. Or, you know, our company doesn’t have a brand. It’s like, well, the lack of a brand is a brand itself.

[00:04:00] Nathan Barry: And you’re going to talk about like, Oh, Apple, this and Airbnb is new brand here. This other thing, right? Where brand is really important. And. And people don’t put the same level of effort into personal brand. And they think like, Oh, that’s vanity. And then you get into these situations where you’re trying to recruit a team member.

[00:04:20] Nathan Barry: And they’re like, do I want to work for this person? I have no idea. There’s no information. All the information I have about whether or not I want to work for this founder or this executive is what I’ve picked up in, you know, a handful of interviews. Right. Well, you know, as we’re talking over zoom where they’re mostly asking me questions, you know, or you get into trying to get into a sales deal and someone’s like, who is this person that’s emailing me?

[00:04:43] Nathan Barry: Quick Google search. Nothing comes back. Yep. I think you have a few examples of like early on of not having a brand and, and what that, I

[00:04:53] Darrell Vesterfelt: was doing agency work for four or five years and, you know, my, my kind of consulting and agency work was filled up for years and I didn’t ever develop a personal website or even a website for what I was doing at all.

[00:05:06] Darrell Vesterfelt: My LinkedIn was dormant. And so I was, I was working on closing a significant deal one day. It was a multi six figure deal. And the person came back, like, I can’t find you online. Like, is this even real? Are you trying to scam me? Like, do you even have like, does who works with you? What, what case studies do you have?

[00:05:22] Darrell Vesterfelt: None of it existed. And so I remember staying up until like two in the morning and developing something, getting it out, getting a couple articles, linking a few things up that I had done and elsewhere, but giving the, place for somebody to believe in what I was also selling them, it was a huge importance.

[00:05:36] Darrell Vesterfelt: So I think it’s super important for any kind of public facing role in a company. Founders is one of them, but I also think any type of salesperson or marketing person having some level of personal brand is really important in a company.

[00:05:47] Nathan Barry: Well, I think going to zero to one is actually fairly straightforward.

[00:05:51] Nathan Barry: I think we tend to think of it as I will either be the behind the scenes person who builds businesses. I, you know, I’m a heads down operator. You know, my work will just speak for itself. The company results or over here, I’m going to go become a creator. And, you know, we’re a hundred percent in on founder led marketing.

[00:06:12] Nathan Barry: This is everything that we do. And the reality is Neither path is probably right. The founder led marketing could absolutely work. There are lots of people that we know who have gone all in on that and it’s working really well for them. But if you’re over here, you know, not findable on the internet or very little out there.

[00:06:32] Nathan Barry: If you even go get on two podcast interviews, right? Cut some of those up for clips, build out a little bit of a social presence. make sure that your LinkedIn accurately reflects your network. go write a couple of stories, you know, here’s how we got our first million in revenue. Here’s like what it means to serve customers.

[00:06:54] Nathan Barry: You know, here’s our founding story. A few of those things, it’s just a night and day difference. And I would say 98 percent of founders still aren’t doing that.

[00:07:03] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. It’s wild to me. And, and the stigma doesn’t make sense to me. again, if you just look at results of people who’ve done this well, and obviously the example of what you did at ConvertKit early days was, is the foundation for why we believe in this so much.

[00:07:20] Darrell Vesterfelt: and I think that zero to one is, is super easy and super key. And also where you can see, The most amount of results really quickly, right? Because if you’re at an early stage of a company, it is so much easier for a person to understand what you’re trying to offer from a person than from a brand, right?

[00:07:38] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I think the example of our friend Encore with his new company, Kerry, is a great example of this. Encore is telling, Personal stories from the founder about this brand, more than the brand is telling the story of what the brand can do. And I think that’s a really powerful impact. So zero to one of like just getting started, no matter what phase you’re at is really key, but also zero to one at the early stage of a company.

[00:07:59] Darrell Vesterfelt: I think founder led marketing is the most effective way to have really quick results.

[00:08:03] Nathan Barry: You know, it’s ironic. There’s so many things in life. you know, we’re talking flywheels or startup growth or anything. It compounds very, very slowly. And so you’re like, Hey, This is worth it, but you got to do it every single day for two years before you’ll even have the hint that it’s worth doing.

[00:08:20] Nathan Barry: But trust me, and this is probably one of the only categories where we’re like, Hey, actually you can get 80, 20 results like upfront right away. If you do like these five things. So maybe just to be really clear, What do you think, like, if we had to list out five things that we believe every founder should do as that baseline to get that, that first step function?

[00:08:43] Darrell Vesterfelt: Let’s reframe this a little bit because I want to push this back to you because you did so well at the beginning of ConvertKit. If you were doing this over again at ConvertKit and ConvertKit was at 2, 000 MRR and you were kind of staring at this opportunity that was in front of you, you believed in the company, what are the five things that you would do over again?

[00:08:59] Darrell Vesterfelt: Over again, or do that you didn’t do before starting over as founder. That’s a good framework, I think, for, for this.

[00:09:05] Nathan Barry: The first thing that I would do is I would get one podcast interview. It could be more, but at least one where I am telling the founding story and the mission and the vision of the company.

[00:09:17] Nathan Barry: This is why we’re, you know, why we’re doing it, who we serve, why I chose this problem to solve in particular, what I value That sort of thing.

[00:09:27] Darrell Vesterfelt: How would you go about doing that? And I want to dig in on this strategy a little bit more because I think it’s important. And there’s a couple of nuances here. what type of podcast would you look to find?

[00:09:36] Darrell Vesterfelt: How would you find it for somebody who maybe is like, well, I don’t even know how to do that. How would you find that first one?

[00:09:42] Nathan Barry: I think, you know, first looking in your network, right? Because if there’s someone that can do you a favor already thinks you’re great, even if, You could almost do it on any podcast where the production quality is decent and the interviewer is Decent good.

[00:10:00] Darrell Vesterfelt: That’s a perfect framework. So I’m not having to go to find a top 50 business podcast No, try to develop a relationship with somebody. We’re looking for an advantage of something.

[00:10:08] Nathan Barry: Here’s one key thing. It has to be on video

[00:10:10] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yep

[00:10:11] Nathan Barry: Do not waste any time with an audio only podcast because we’re trying to build this is a piece of content to build rapport

[00:10:18] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah and you just you need the video to do it and if you’re a kit customer by the way shout out to having amazing production at Your fingertips with the kit studio.

[00:10:26] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah, I see and so

[00:10:27] Nathan Barry: you could even do that, right? If you’re like, I can’t find anyone on You know to do a podcast with me. Well, then think Who in your life is either knows you really well, or is a good interviewer and say, okay, we’re going to go to kit studios. And here are the questions that I want you to ask me.

[00:10:46] Darrell Vesterfelt: Mm-hmm .

[00:10:47] Nathan Barry: And you can invent a podcast.

[00:10:49] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yep. Right? That’s great. And so, so this is like resourcefulness here is like, like if you have somebody in your network that makes sense, great. If the production quality is high, great. You kind of check the box. If you have somebody in your network but the production quality is low, invite them to get studio with you to do the interview.

[00:11:03] Darrell Vesterfelt: Right. If you can’t find anybody, then make up a podcast episode like this at a location similar to this.

[00:11:09] Nathan Barry: Or you can hire someone.

[00:11:10] Darrell Vesterfelt: Exactly. Right.

[00:11:10] Nathan Barry: There’s all these podcasters who are, are great interviewers. But their show might not be big yet. And so you could say, Hey, for my, for the about page on my website and my social presence, I need this content created.

[00:11:23] Nathan Barry: Can I hire you to interview me? And that’s all you have to do. It’s amazing. You know, it’s like, I’m going to give you, you know, five pages of details about me. That sort of thing. So you can ask great questions and

[00:11:35] Darrell Vesterfelt: yeah, that’s all you need. There’s a lot of great frameworks in that. I love that. So step one is get this podcast recorded, get it done on video, have it be good quality.

[00:11:43] Darrell Vesterfelt: And that is a foundation for what what’s to come.

[00:11:45] Nathan Barry: And from there, we want to create a few different things. One, we want the founding story in three to four minutes. And then Like that’s going to be really helpful. And so we can cut it out of, of that. And then the next thing is you’re not gonna build a company without a team.

[00:12:02] Nathan Barry: And so you can actually cut another version of it. That is a hiring video, why you should work for us. And on your careers page that should together, you know, why you should work at kit. And that’s going to get into, it’s going to be a bit of the founding story, what it’s like to work there, where you’re going.

[00:12:19] Nathan Barry: And you want to give people a taste of, of who you are. So that all comes out of the podcast. I think the next thing is the basics of the social presence. Right. And so we’re going to pick, I would probably go three platforms because we’re going to at least set up basics there. Cause you don’t know who’s going to, they’re like, Oh, all business is done on Instagram.

[00:12:41] Nathan Barry: What are you talking about? You know, or they’re like, I’ve never been on a social platform besides LinkedIn. So for me, I would go, X LinkedIn. Instagram probably LinkedIn first. And then the other two secondary,

[00:12:54] Darrell Vesterfelt: I think context is important here too. And it depends on the kind of company that you have.

[00:12:57] Darrell Vesterfelt: So I often think about picking the social platforms. I think two or three is the right amount. So I agree with you there, but what is the context of why people are there? Right. So for a B2B company, I don’t think tick tocks makes as much sense. I think LinkedIn makes more sense. I think Twitter X makes a lot of sense.

[00:13:15] Darrell Vesterfelt: and I think Instagram can make a lot of sense too. If I’m a CPG brand. I don’t think LinkedIn makes as much sense as Tick Tock does, right? So it’s like, what’s the context of the people who are there and the reason that they are there and how does that best engage in your company? So picking your platforms is really important about the context of the user type.

[00:13:35] Darrell Vesterfelt: The demographics that are more likely to use those platforms and also then the reason that they’re there So I think picking those out can be really really key thinking about context to

[00:13:44] Nathan Barry: yeah I think in the business case LinkedIn is probably the one that you have to have for sure and then the others from their Instagram is nice because you could have a handful of you don’t need to build out a full profile It doesn’t need to be all your vacations But you could do, you know, post a photo and it’s like, Oh, I’m in New York this week meeting with, you know, these clients, you know, at your team offsite, get a photo of, you know, you, you all sitting around the table, like strategic planning for 2025, a few of those photos will get enough of a, on a Instagram.

[00:14:20] Nathan Barry: Yep. and then you can, you can kind of just set it and leave it, but do that audit, like go through each profile and be like, okay, do I have the same photo on each one? Yep. Is that the photo that’s tied to my Gmail, right? When, you know, or whatever, when I sent out an email that shows up what consistency,

[00:14:35] Darrell Vesterfelt: this is like such small details that are so key is like, don’t have three different photos.

[00:14:39] Darrell Vesterfelt: So people are like, what’s going on here? Who is this person? It’s, it’s some of those like really tiny branding elements that actually make a big impact.

[00:14:46] Nathan Barry: Yeah. And then, you know, get someone else to look over your LinkedIn or whatever it is and, and go through, like, I can actually think on, on my LinkedIn, there’s some things that I should clean up.

[00:14:54] Nathan Barry: Do I need to include there that I interned for the state legislature in 2006? Probably not. Right. Like I can let some of that drop to the next page or, or clean some things up. Or also some of the people do all the time that I think is, not very smart is they put on every single board that they were ever a part of, or every volunteer group or that sort of thing.

[00:15:15] Nathan Barry: Yeah. You go into LinkedIn, you’re like, I don’t, what is your, like, how long have you been working on this company? What are you doing? Are you. Now, now everything looks like a side project. Yeah. And so having, you know, thinking about that focus and story, so we cleaned up the social profiles, we’ve posted some of the clips, you know, from the, the podcast, the founding story, some of those videos.

[00:15:37] Nathan Barry: And then I think the next thing that you need is one or two foundational essays. Yep. And these are the things, you know, if you think of a question, like what’s something that you believe that. Other people would find controversial, right? Or, if you had to distill it down to what are the five, like biggest things that have made a difference in your life and career or for you, like tell the story of why, Mount Haley Holdings is called that, right?

[00:16:08] Nathan Barry: And let’s get some of the arc of your, your career. Yeah. Cause we imagine the scenario. We both work in a similar industry. You want to do work with my business. You send me an email. And we’ve passed some basic checks. The email is short. It’s well written. There’s some good context. You seem like a legit person.

[00:16:30] Nathan Barry: I’m going to, you know, you know, and let’s say you’re trying to get on a call. I’m going to do a little bit of research. So I Google that and I want to see what comes up. If you can get me down the rabbit hole just a little bit of like what you’re about, that sort of thing. Even if it’s. It doesn’t come across as like, Oh, you’re a full time creator, right?

[00:16:51] Nathan Barry: But it comes across, you know, let’s say I end up, this is more of a clickbait heading or something. But you know, if you’re like five lessons learned from growing up in a trailer park to earning my first million, right? You don’t even have to write like. as crisp of a headline as that. But if you could, you know, I might find myself stuck down a rabbit hole reading that before I know I’m like, I like this Darrell guy.

[00:17:16] Nathan Barry: Yeah. Let’s get on a call. And the conversion rate goes way higher.

[00:17:19] Darrell Vesterfelt: I have a post like that on my, my LinkedIn profile, where it has a picture of the trailer house I grew up in. And it talks about the advantages

[00:17:27] Darrell Vesterfelt: of

[00:17:28] Darrell Vesterfelt: growing up in a place like that, where it’s like kind of contrarian. That single post has done that exact thing for me several, several times.

[00:17:35] Nathan Barry: So, cause it. If we’re in startups, we’re thinking about conversion rates all the time. Right? Trial the paid, cold outbound email to call, demo call to close all of that. And you’re just like, why would I not increase conversion rates every single place that I can? Yeah. And brand increases conversion rates.

[00:17:56] Nathan Barry: And so doing that in these specific areas makes a huge difference.

[00:17:58] Darrell Vesterfelt: So these three foundational pieces, I think there’s a couple other types of content here that would make a lot of sense. Case studies would make a lot of sense. So, and, and don’t, you can get super technical and I think that’s actually okay because it’s attracting the right type of people to you, but just tell the story, like show, don’t tell, don’t tell me your company can do this.

[00:18:16] Darrell Vesterfelt: Show me that when you did it, when you did it, how you did it. And as much detail as possible. In a believable sense, right? And I think the type of case studies that you share here are super key too. So that can be another foundational essay type here where it’s like, Hey, watch how X person got this type of result from my company is, is super key for that foundational content too.

[00:18:38] Nathan Barry: Yeah. And I think if we can get to two or three case studies, you get diminishing returns. Past that, because what we’re trying to do is demonstrate expertise and, you know, is 10 better than two or three? If they’re all great. Sure. But you know, there’s really, really diminishing returns there and exactly what you’re saying of the level of detail, the specifics, you know, I’ve hired a lot of, designers and agencies over the years.

[00:19:04] Nathan Barry: And when they’re like, here’s the site that we started with, here’s the process that we went through, you know, here’s where we ended up with the final results. It just gives so much confidence that, you can deliver on that. Yeah. Is there anything else? So we would basically have those four things of, of the podcast, the videos that come from that social, the essay and the case studies, the foundational content.

[00:19:27] Nathan Barry: Yeah. Yeah. I’m, I think that’s kind of, yeah. That will get you 90 percent of the way there.

[00:19:33] Darrell Vesterfelt: That’s, that’s a really good start. Like that’s the foundation, I think for everything else, that content done well, which if you’re a founder of a company, you have some level of standard that you should actually just achieve yourself sets you up for what could be an entire amazing content strategy to build beyond that.

[00:19:49] Darrell Vesterfelt: And that’s, that’s a little bit of, the exciting part where I think you can really turn on the jet fuels.

[00:19:53] Nathan Barry: But one, one key thing. Is if we think of the spectrum again, from no online presence or very, very little to like full time creator. And you’re like, I don’t want to go that route. That’s fine. If you do just those four or five things that we talked about, like you get a huge amount of value and that will work for you for years like that, that probably has a shelf life of four to five years.

[00:20:18] Nathan Barry: Agreed. Like especially if you do it in a studio or something like that, then, you know, Like, yes, if you had, if you’re like, Oh, I did that years ago on Skype and it’s like, all right, so that’s probably, you know, your stories are old, you know, time to do a refresh on it. but yeah, there’s so many things.

[00:20:36] Nathan Barry: Okay. So that’s basically the zero to one. Yep. Now let’s talk more about how personal brand plays into some of these interactions. I’ve got some stories. I’m curious if any stories come to mind for you of. where you, like your personal brand in any way, or a client’s personal brand has unlocked some deal or opportunity that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

[00:20:59] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah, for sure. I recently met Gina, who’s the founder of Mighty Networks. Yeah. Who also takes this approach very, very well. Very, very seriously. And I think, it was like we met. And she’s like, who is this guy? And I think she did some digging coffee. Who’s this guy? We did a little bit of looking up and it, it, it blossomed into an amazing friendship, Gina and I have an amazing friendship and I’m now an advisor for mighty networks and that relationship I believe had something to do with.

[00:21:26] Darrell Vesterfelt: Being able to display the track record of work that I’ve been able to do through my personal brand. And by the way, I’m not creating content in the same level that you were at that time. so it’s, it is that stuff. It’s like a couple of posts on LinkedIn. It’s making sure that the results of the things that I had were, were displayed on those profiles.

[00:21:43] Darrell Vesterfelt: It was easy to find things about me that I think worked well.

[00:21:46] Nathan Barry: One of those, one of those examples is Gina has hired you to do. to run summits for mighty and to bring, you know, more of this creator style marketing into, the software platform. And one of those things, I don’t know if this is the buying path that she took, but it could very likely be, you know, you to me have a good conversation.

[00:22:07] Nathan Barry: She’s good at follow up. She’s very thoughtful founder. So, you know, she’s going to keep track of everyone she met and then go look them up and say, Hey, what opportunities are here? Who should I build deeper relationship with all of that? she finds good stuff about you. And then later on, like, Oh, we talked about summits.

[00:22:23] Nathan Barry: Should I hire Darrell to do a summit? Maybe, maybe not. Well, one of the things that she would look up and find is the hour long podcast episode that you and I did where we’re diving into all the strategies of how we got, you know, a hundred thousand people or more on a summit and how it did all of this.

[00:22:38] Nathan Barry: Right. And. She’s going to show up to a sales call with you being like, yeah, I’m pretty confident.

[00:22:45] Darrell Vesterfelt: It actually didn’t even take a sales call. Like it was literally like a one line email that I sent to her. And she was like, I’m in and I sent her the details and it was closed. So it made the, in my opinion, it made the buying process, like the credibility that I gained because of these things.

[00:23:00] Darrell Vesterfelt: Again, I don’t know her exact buying pattern. It’d be interesting to ask her someday, but these things spoke for themselves, right? She didn’t need to ask. This is one of my least favorite things that happens inside of sales. And this is maybe how, you know, your personal brand isn’t as strong as it could be.

[00:23:13] Darrell Vesterfelt: So it was like, Hey, can you send me three or four references of your work? And it’s like, that is such a stall in the sales process that I hate. And if that’s happening to you, that is a check engine light that your personal brand is not strong enough, right? Because people should know that you’re credible this quickly or before they even show up for the call based on the content that you put out in the world.

[00:23:33] Nathan Barry: Yeah. And it’s the intersection between personal brand and company brand, right? Because that means that I tried to find the, well, here’s exactly what happens. I, I like. You know, let’s say we meet, I’m trying to hire you to do something. We’re talking through it and like, okay, I think this is going to be great.

[00:23:48] Nathan Barry: I go back to my team and my team doesn’t know anything about your credibility or all of that. They didn’t have the great coffee meeting, you know, the drinks at the conference or whatever else. And so they’re like, is this the right person to hire? I actually know this other company that I’ve heard does a good job and I found this case study of them doing a good job.

[00:24:05] Nathan Barry: So let’s look up Darrell’s company and compare and there there’s not a good comparison there. And so like, I think we should check some references before we pull the trigger on this. And so that base, that question basically means I tried to look up your personal brand so that I can make a case either for myself or to someone else on my team.

[00:24:23] Nathan Barry: And I couldn’t do it. And so can you help me out? Right. And so in this case, right, you would link to some case studies of some it’s done, or you would say, Hey, here’s a podcast episode where I broke, you know, in and out full hour, we break it down. And Now, in this case, like Gina and I are friends, so we don’t know if she ever watched that podcast episode or whatnot, but if she did, she’s like, okay, now here’s someone that I respect interviewing this person I’m thinking of hiring as the expert and it’s like in the trust transfer there is significant.

[00:24:55] Darrell Vesterfelt: I agree.

[00:24:56] Nathan Barry: And if I was selling, like, you know, educational marketing or, or doing summits, I would be linking to that podcast episode. the signature line of my emails. Yeah. Because it’s just that like the number of times that people are going to click through that. And it’s like, make it easy to find the content that drives all this credibility.

[00:25:16] Darrell Vesterfelt: Exactly. So I have a question for you, Nathan. obviously this was really good for you. And, and, you’ve talked about how founder led marketing was really impactful for the first early days of. Convert kit now kit, but kit’s not 40 million plus of ARR. And you’re obviously still investing in personal brand.

[00:25:37] Darrell Vesterfelt: why are you doing that at 40 million ARR? Like, why, why are you still investing? Yeah. Why do you still do it? And I know that you have a team of people that that’s their primary focus is the personal brand of Nathan, the founder.

[00:25:48] Nathan Barry: Right.

[00:25:48] Darrell Vesterfelt: why are you still doing it? And what are the pitfalls that a founder at your stage could have focusing on personal brand versus, you know, traditional brand?

[00:25:57] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah.

[00:25:58] Nathan Barry: Yeah. The first reason why I still doing it, it makes a lot of money. Like you could throw in things like, I love it. I get to meet great people. All of these things are absolutely true, but it drives business results. So a couple of examples, there’s some things that come natural to me, like, you know, conversations on podcasts.

[00:26:17] Nathan Barry: I love that, writing the newsletter, but then there’s other ones, you know, not the person that’s, like consistently posting on Instagram and staying on top of that sort of thing. And I remember there was a creator that I was trying to, close as a customer for kit. And we had some conversations back and forth and I was like, I don’t, how do I stay top of mind without being like, I don’t know what value I have delivered to them.

[00:26:43] Nathan Barry: And I was posting some Instagram stories about the conference I was at in LA and this person that I wasn’t, didn’t even feel like I was friends with yet. You know, they replied to my stories and was like, Oh, it’s great to see you, blah, blah, blah. And I was thinking like, Oh, as a salesperson, you’re like, how do I deliver value?

[00:27:02] Nathan Barry: And how do I stay top of mind without being pushy? And my random posts about what I, you know, the trip I was on or what I got up to on the farm on Instagram, we’re doing that because that person after the meeting had followed me. And. So that was like one simple example.

[00:27:19] Darrell Vesterfelt: I have an old school, old school story of this.

[00:27:23] Darrell Vesterfelt: old mentor of mine was an old school marketer, the pre internet days. And he said, I used to just send out a hard piece of mail in every single month. Like regardless of if there was really anything important to say or not because at the worst case scenario My logo would go across their desk directly into the trash can and that’s yeah, that’s the worst case scenario That’s the worst case scenario.

[00:27:46] Darrell Vesterfelt: The best case scenario is they open it. They read it I become top of mind, but at least I am in their mind as they’re putting that in the trash can right? And I think that’s very similar here to like hey, I’m posting a thing on Instagram. It’s like oh, yeah, Nathan like Oh, yeah. Like he does this thing. Oh, we’re staying top of mind for people.

[00:28:01] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I think that’s a huge strategy that’s really, really important for a founder to do. Like, we were actually in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago and we’re like, Hey, whatever happened to that person? Like we haven’t heard from them in three or four years. Are they still doing something? Are they still here?

[00:28:13] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I think that’s exactly right. It’s like, you can very easily fall out of touch with somebody. They forget about what you’re doing if you’re just not even posting anything regularly. So that makes a lot of sense.

[00:28:21] Nathan Barry: One example of this that, our mutual friend, Jay Papasan shared a few episodes ago, that I just want to highlight in case someone hasn’t listened to that episode.

[00:28:29] Nathan Barry: He sends a monthly friend’s newsletter and I’m like, okay, what is this thing? And he’s basically like people I meet in person and I’ll ask, Hey, do you want to be added to, you know, my friend’s newsletter? And then he will just send out once a month. Here’s what he’s up to. Here’s what he found interesting.

[00:28:47] Nathan Barry: Here’s the books that he read. And you know, like hit, hit reply and tell me what’s up in your life. Yeah. That’s so smart. And it’s just like this really thoughtful way to stay top of mind and it, he’s like in the 0. 0001 percent of people who do this because he spends 40 minutes a month to do this activity.

[00:29:07] Darrell Vesterfelt: It’s crazy how, how easy it is to stay top of mind with people. Those things are actually really important and you can do this with a. Personal brand versus like having to do the, like sitting on your phone and texting 65 individual people all the time or whatever it is.

[00:29:21] Nathan Barry: So going back to why build the brand, another thing that’s made a huge difference is for hiring and recruiting.

[00:29:29] Nathan Barry: There’s a lot of people. We’ll give the example. so I’ve been last year or early beginning of this year is recruiting a VP of product. And so I spent a ton of time in like Silicon Valley tech companies you know, looking for people who have done this product led growth at meaningful scale, right? We’re trying to go from 40 to 100 million.

[00:29:48] Nathan Barry: So these are people that have done it at, Square, Uber, Dropbox, Stripe, you know, all of these companies and I would get on calls with them. So the recruiting company, would introduce people, right? We hired a top recruiting company for this. Now we get on calls and people would have already done a lot of research and they would have already listened to me on podcast interviews.

[00:30:11] Nathan Barry: And I had some incredible leads and then ended up, hiring this woman, Katie, who used to lead all of product for squares e commerce division, which is like, you know, one of the biggest parts of the company. and she joined the company. And so much of it is because. She fell in love with our mission and our product and how, you know, how I lead the team and all of that.

[00:30:35] Nathan Barry: And she could do it from all the content that I put out there. And so I believe that my recruiting conversion rates, you know, we’re thinking about as a funnel, right? So from awareness to a basic interest to a call to multiple calls on from there, I bet it went up 25 to 50%. Based on personal brand compared to if that didn’t exist.

[00:31:03] Nathan Barry: And actually one other tactic in here that I think anyone doing recruiting should steal this immediately. is record a video that’s like 15 to 20 minutes long. That’s all the context about the state of the company, the role, all of that. Let’s say I’m trying to recruit a COO or a VP of product, some high level role.

[00:31:25] Nathan Barry: I’m bringing them in to solve problems. And so just record that video as if you’re recording it to one person. Just don’t say a name at the beginning. Though I just learned that loom now has a merge fields option that will AI fill in in the future. So anyway, so if you do say the name in there, just upload it to loom and they’ll take care of it.

[00:31:46] Nathan Barry: But basically it’s saying like, you know, I’m really excited to talk to you about the role. We’ve got, you know, a lot of interesting things, but I want to dive in on the state of the company, what our biggest problems are, all of that. And just kind of give you the, the 20 minutes that we’d start our call on.

[00:32:03] Nathan Barry: But give it to you in advance. You have time to think about it and dive in and do that. And then I would have, I would either send it to them or the recruiter would send it to them before our calls. And it got people thinking so much, over and over again, people were like, I’ve never seen this done before in a role.

[00:32:20] Nathan Barry: And again, one of these things like true worst case scenario is it saves each of us. like 20 minutes live because they watched on 1. 5 speed while they were doing the dishes or on a walk or whatever. I didn’t have to say, you know, over 15 calls, the same thing over and over again. But then what I think is really magical is it got into a bunch of the problems of the business.

[00:32:42] Nathan Barry: And then they had 24 to 72 hours between receiving this, think about how to solve it and all of that. And then you could tell the people who came in and they’re like, Have you tried this? What’s going on here? And had great follow ups versus the people who were like, yeah, I watched the video. That was helpful.

[00:32:58] Nathan Barry: And we were starting early on. And I can be like, okay, nevermind. I don’t, I don’t want you here.

[00:33:02] Darrell Vesterfelt: Another thing this reminds me of is how important it is for the internal team. To understand the passion of why this company was started, the mission and the vision and the core values of the company. And I think this is something that I’ve seen a lot, like the slow death of companies happens when the rest of the organization forgets why we’re doing this.

[00:33:23] Darrell Vesterfelt: And they forget why responding to a pissed off customer and the support queue is important. To what we’re trying to accomplish from a high level and I think you guys have some internal content that goes out to the team, too That is from you and from other members of the team But I think it’s also wildly important here and that isn’t just important in internal team but this can be repurposed for external to like, we talked about this on the episode that you did with me on my podcast is, is people don’t just pick a company for feature sets.

[00:33:56] Darrell Vesterfelt: They pick the story, they pick the community, they pick the vision and the mission and those kinds of things as well. And this is an underrated reason that I think founder led marketing is really important is like, why are we doing this still? Why are we different? Why? If I, if I’m looking at a list of all of the reasons to pick a company.

[00:34:15] Darrell Vesterfelt: And they look the same. Why this one versus that one. And I think that’s a really underrated thing is keeping the, like the DNA of the company alive, both. Internally to recruiting and then externally as well is a hugely important part of brand. And I don’t think that can be outsourced. I don’t think like a director of marketing can do it in the same way as a founder can.

[00:34:36] Darrell Vesterfelt: And that’s a wildly important thing. And I think you do a really good job of that with internal content, recruiting content and external content.

[00:34:41] Nathan Barry: Let’s talk about internal content.

[00:34:42] Nathan Barry: I think there’s two things that everyone

[00:34:44] Nathan Barry: should do. One is run an internal podcast. So the one that we do at kit is we have a team stories podcast.

[00:34:52] Nathan Barry: And so it’s just team members interviewing each other about their life. And that’s it. That’s amazing. 50 or 60 episodes on there and I can go out on a run and see the latest episode, plug it in, listen to it and go. I can see, I can take over managing a new team, right? If I come in as the new design director, right?

[00:35:12] Nathan Barry: And I’m like, okay, who’s reporting to me? I can go listen to each of their. Like life stories on the podcast, get a sense of their personality, what they care about, why, like how they came to work at kit, each of those things at scale and do it on my own time. The other thing is getting into a habit of at least once a month, if not more often sending out a video to the team, talking about literally anything that’s on your mind.

[00:35:41] Nathan Barry: Because what happens is like when you and I were working together. You know, we grew the team from, I don’t know, what, seven to 30, 35, somewhere in there. It’s wild. We were like very closely involved in everything. Right.

[00:35:57] Darrell Vesterfelt: I talked to you almost every day.

[00:35:58] Nathan Barry: Yeah. And I probably talked to many, like, like even I talked to your direct reports pretty often where, you know, we just didn’t have, the scale and the layers and, and that sort of thing, that comes as you get to like, you know, 80, 90, and then forget even 200, 500, team members.

[00:36:20] Nathan Barry: And so people will lose that personal touch unless you bring it back in. And so what we do at kit is every week, one of the execs puts out a loom video. and just says, it’s either, Hey, here’s how we’re responding to this thing in the market. That was the one that we did this last week where Katie or VP of product and I, jumped on.

[00:36:42] Nathan Barry: We like outlined our notes at a high level, spent 12 minutes talking through it of what we wanted to say to the team, what we wanted to communicate and, and fired that off. some will be just company updates. A deep dive into our marketing strategy, all of that, but that like steady cadence and having that leverage.

[00:37:02] Nathan Barry: Cause then the other thing is a new team member comes, they probably met, you know, you might have covered this in all team meetings the last year or whatever they missed that. But if the recordings are there, you know, of these videos of the, the team meetings, they can go back and catch up on that. Or if someone’s saying, Hey, what are we, what’s our stance on AI and this thing?

[00:37:22] Nathan Barry: Someone can say, Oh, just watch that video on it. We covered it. And there’s like

[00:37:26] Darrell Vesterfelt: real leverage there. I love that. So what I’m, what I’m picking up from this is, circling all the way back around. It was, the question was, why are you still doing this at 40 million ARR? And that what I’m getting from this is like, it has multiple impact points.

[00:37:40] Darrell Vesterfelt: Oh, it has impact externally, that can drive growth. And you said, you said the line, cause it just makes a lot of money. That’s great. Also in recruiting and also internally. Yeah. And, and this is what I want. People that take away from this is, I also know because I know people on your team, they watch your

[00:37:59] Darrell Vesterfelt: podcast

[00:37:59] Darrell Vesterfelt: and now they’re seeing that the integrity of the founder exists when they’re in small meetings with him in large meetings at retreats, when he’s talking on stages, when he’s doing podcast episodes, it’s like, this is true, this is real, this is who we are.

[00:38:14] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I continually get to see the ethos of my founder talking about why we do what we do. On podcast episode and podcast episode and podcast interview and on this stage. And I think that’s a hugely important thing that has impact in one thing. So the reason we love this so much is one piece of content can have five, six, seven, 10 benefits from it.

[00:38:34] Darrell Vesterfelt: And it’s not just a one to one opportunity. Right.

[00:38:37] Nathan Barry: One thing I want to talk about, cause you brought up the team. I believe this is something that you should do at any level in any organization. It’s especially important if you have a customer, you know, or sales facing role. so we’ll start there, but all of this applies in that circumstance.

[00:38:56] Nathan Barry: So like, I think about, people on my team who have, personal brands as well, right? Charlie, our creative director has built, you know, an amazing personal brand. but then even we have sales team members, I think about Helen on our team who, is really early in building her personal brand. Like she just, two weeks ago, gave her first conference talk.

[00:39:15] Nathan Barry: Amazing. Right. And so there are these things that come from that where, you know, she’s going to have it when she sends, just like a founder sends an outbound email to try to get a response. She’s doing that in a sales role. And that creator is going to be like, eh, should I respond? Should I not? Who is this person?

[00:39:34] Nathan Barry: They’re going to look her up and be, Oh, you know, I’m going to look at her ex account, her Instagram and see. Oh, she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to creator growth. Oh, here’s the, you know, here’s her on stage in front of hundreds of creators teaching them, Hey, here’s what works to grow your business.

[00:39:50] Nathan Barry: I should probably get on a call with her and learn just last night as we’re having dinner with another podcast guest, Karina. she was talking about the first time that she met Alyssa on our team who hosts the deliverability defined podcast, which is now the industry leading podcast on deliverability.

[00:40:07] Nathan Barry: And she made it because she’s like, look. This is my expertise. This is what I love talking about.

[00:40:11] Darrell Vesterfelt: And the phrase that she said was, I was fangirling over Alyssa when I met her. And it’s like amazing to me. I was just sitting back and watching. Like, that’s such an impactful statement. I was fangirling over the deliverability expert at ConvertKit because Alyssa has a podcast.

[00:40:26] Darrell Vesterfelt: That’s amazing. That’s the kind of response that you want from a customer is even what would normally be like a behind the scenes, really technical role. maybe it would never even talk to customers or only to a few customers. And all of a sudden she has this. Public brand that is impacting in such a way that a client was fangirling in her own words.

[00:40:45] Darrell Vesterfelt: It was amazing.

[00:40:46] Nathan Barry: Yeah. And, now I’m gonna have to clip this out, that little section and send it to Alyssa. You know, she, she’s able to hear that. but then even like as Alyssa has taken on a bigger role inside of kit and now leads all of our, like our creative growth team. so then her cohost on the podcast, Melissa, is filling more and more of the deliverability rules, taking on so much more of this.

[00:41:09] Nathan Barry: And sometimes when that happens, you could have like a credibility mismatch in some way where someone’s like, Oh no, I want it’s like founder to first sales hire, right? You could have some of those things where it’s like, no, I want to talk to the founder, not this new person or, or something else. But because of the way that Alyssa and Melissa did the podcast together, so much credibility, you know, like Melissa has all the expertise.

[00:41:34] Nathan Barry: And now she has the credibility to match it. And so people are like, Oh, great. Yeah. I listened to that podcast episode and you know, like we, we watched the exact same thing happen with Melissa because they’re so deliberate about how they treat brand in the most obscure niche. You know, it’s true. It works there.

[00:41:51] Nathan Barry: It can work almost anywhere. Yeah. So I want to go back to a few other tactics that people should. focus on, you know, if we, if we’re applying this and in other areas and one, a huge one is education teaching. You just, as we say, hit kit, teach everything you know. And we know from sales that like education based sales works really well of just saying, Hey, here’s what we’ve done for other clients.

[00:42:19] Nathan Barry: Here’s what works in the industry. Here’s what we do for you. It’s not like, Oh, hire us like, and then we’ll show you what’s behind the, behind the curtain. It’s like, no, no, no. We’ll show you right now. Like, There’s no secrets. And then when you take that out in public, it works so, so well. So I think about companies like Webflow and Framer and others that have really doubled down on education.

[00:42:42] Darrell Vesterfelt: And we’ve found this to be true. I mean, you and I have done all kinds of education in public. you thought we found this to be true. And I think the value of this is twofold is, is one is we’re building our credibility, right? We’re also depositing. Into the account, the trust account of the person, right?

[00:42:59] Darrell Vesterfelt: If the first experience that somebody has with our brand is that they learn something, whether they sign up for our service or our product or not. They might not be in a buying behavior now, but they might be six months, 12 months down the road. And we put a value deposit in that account before we even asked for a withdraw.

[00:43:16] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I think that is wildly important is like having the right balance of, Hey, like you sign up for most traditional companies. If you sign up for their email list, you’re going to get a hundred emails asking you to buy in the next 30 days. It’s an insane way to live. Like, A better way is, Hey, can I offer you value?

[00:43:33] Darrell Vesterfelt: Whether or not you do anything for me, I want to give you value that will pay dividends in return. Maybe right now for sure. Definitely later. And then you start building this like snowball effect. shout out to our friend Mo, but you build a snowball effect of like just giving to people and over time, over five, 10, 15 years, it’s impossible for that not to be a positive return for you.

[00:43:57] Nathan Barry: I don’t know if this analogy works, but I’m going to try it anyway. I’m thinking about the deposit that you’re talking about in these, like the, the personal trust accounts that people have. Usually when you do that, I don’t know, let’s say I have a hundred dollars, you know, I’ve got 10, 10 bills and then I can decide like that represents my time and I can decide, okay, I’m going to keep depositing 10, 10, 10.

[00:44:22] Nathan Barry: Okay. I should probably spread this out a little bit. Maybe I can. Get to a good amount of trust with three or four people before I use up my hundred dollars worth of time what is interesting about the The leverage that comes from personal brand is That you’re making it once and it’s like you have that infinite money supply.

[00:44:44] Nathan Barry: You’re like, okay, I put a hundred dollars worth in to create trust and I like gave out ten dollars to you know, a hundred people. And I still have the same, the same resource in the beginning. And so it’s pretty wild because you get just this amount of leverage of, interest building that You

[00:45:03] Nathan Barry: don’t

[00:45:04] Nathan Barry: have otherwise.

[00:45:04] Darrell Vesterfelt: One thing that I hear often in this space is, that like live teaching is dead. Webinars are dead. large summits are dead. I hear all the time. I, I could like pull up LinkedIn posts. People basically saying that’s dead. and I was actually with a company in Atlanta not long ago and they’re saying, you know, we’ve tried, we’ve tried doing these webinars.

[00:45:26] Darrell Vesterfelt: They just don’t work. And I have a really strong opinion about this. Yeah. And I think that, content that’s not compelling is dead period.

[00:45:36] Nathan Barry: And I think the bar

[00:45:37] Nathan Barry: is,

[00:45:38] Nathan Barry: is higher.

[00:45:38] Darrell Vesterfelt: The bar is way higher, but the, the, the really easy framework for this. And this is the question I asked the lady I was having this conversation.

[00:45:45] Darrell Vesterfelt: Would you show up for the webinar that you hosted? And she was like, Oh, it clicked. She was like, no. And I’m like, great. So then why are you putting effort into something that you wouldn’t even personally show up for? And so what I’ve continued to find as I’ve continued to push into using live teaching as a strategy for growth is the bar is higher, but the good news is about this is you can have this framework of like, what is compelling that even I would show up for or have conversations with your customers.

[00:46:13] Darrell Vesterfelt: Like, what is the problem that you have now and what would you show up for and make it compelling? This is why I love doing these summits now. there are subtle ways that I can even make these summits more compelling is, you know, Hey, would it be easier for our team to do a one day summit? Yep. It would be easier.

[00:46:29] Darrell Vesterfelt: Is it seem more valuable to do a five day summit? It sure does. Hey, we could, can we just record this and then just play the recording of it? We sure could. But you know, what’s more valuable is for that person to be live and that person to be able to answer questions live. Right. Okay, great. What’s the standard that I’m going to jump over for like, would I even show up for this?

[00:46:48] Darrell Vesterfelt: Is this a compelling topic to even talk about is the way that I’m. Energetically showing up here compelling way of communicating. These are just simple things that I feel like sometimes we get in our head of like, well, I’ve just got to do a webinar and. I wouldn’t even show up with this. So why are we even doing the effort for it?

[00:47:02] Darrell Vesterfelt: It’s like, let’s do the things that are just a level above, like standing out in this world, by the way, is not that hard. You just have to go like a step or two above what other people are willing to do.

[00:47:13] Nathan Barry: Right.

[00:47:13] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I think this is key. It’s like, yeah, I think live trainings and webinars and summits are dead.

[00:47:18] Darrell Vesterfelt: If you’re not thinking about how it’s actually compelling for your, for your people and, and like, By the way, I’m going to, I’m going to give like a very strong opinion here. You don’t have to get on there and sell. I don’t actually think that is an important part of this process. I would almost rather somebody just.

[00:47:37] Darrell Vesterfelt: fills the value tank in a session like that, then even is worried about a pitch. I’ve told clients before, if you’re worried about the pitch, we won’t even do it at all. Like the whole point of this is going to be to put your credibility out to add value to the, to the, person is going to watch this. And so it’s like, I can relieve myself from this anxiety I have about having to sell live too.

[00:47:58] Darrell Vesterfelt: And so I think just value, value, value, value. How do I make this the most compelling? How do I make this the most valuable? And that is my hot take on this is that the ones that are dead, like that is your check engine light of like, this isn’t working because it’s, it’s boring. It’s not compelling. I wouldn’t even show up for it.

[00:48:14] Darrell Vesterfelt: It’s not moving the needle for me.

[00:48:15] Nathan Barry: I think that line, even as you said it, it like cuts a little bit of like, would you show up to that? And there’s a version of it of like, are you proud of, of that? Something that I tell my team is before they send something to me for review, I want them to answer the question.

[00:48:33] Nathan Barry: Am I proud of this? If the answer is no, don’t put it in front of me, like get it to the point, unless you’re doing it like, Hey, I have this standard for taste and the thing that I’ve made doesn’t meet that yet. And I’ve tried these three things to try to close the gap and it’s not there yet. And I need a second perspective.

[00:48:51] Nathan Barry: Like that’s a totally different situation. That’s a, that’s, I would love that conversation.

[00:48:54] Darrell Vesterfelt: That framing gives me a different frame of mind to even show up to that conversation.

[00:48:58] Nathan Barry: Yeah. Cause then we’re like on the same side of the table trying to figure out how to make this great. But I love that question of what I show up to this because I would say 95 percent of business content, like If the average business that makes 20 million a year, listen to this podcast episode and said, we need to teach.

[00:49:20] Nathan Barry: I would say 95 percent of them would end up with a result that is something that we wouldn’t show up to. It’d be the most generic white paper in audio form because most presentations suck. Most training sucks. So as you’re, I think it’s important to dive into actually, how do we make good education and If you don’t come from that creator world, right, you’re not trained in crisp writing, delivery of content, all of that.

[00:49:46] Nathan Barry: And you deal with this, right? Because you’re building a summit for clients and Yeah. How, how are you navigating this?

[00:49:55] Darrell Vesterfelt: I think this has to be like, one of the keys I think is, is important is I want the founder or somebody who’s connected to the vision of the company to be in the room. Right. Because I don’t want them to be like, I, they need to be excited about it.

[00:50:10] Darrell Vesterfelt: And their excitement level is a barometer to me of whether or not we’re, you know, Representing the company at a way that is worthwhile or not.

[00:50:18] Nathan Barry: Right.

[00:50:19] Darrell Vesterfelt: and so this is like the way that I even asked that question is that woman knew in two seconds that the content that they were doing was not right. And so it’s like, we’ve just gotta be, we just gotta be that much dialed in internally to us and to the team.

[00:50:30] Darrell Vesterfelt: Like I can’t go into a company that I’m not a part of in the same way and be like, Is this compelling in the same way? I don’t have the context that founders and key members of the team have. And so that’s, first of all, it’s like, let’s just meet our own standard of what’s exciting and compelling. second is, I would much rather, I don’t think the founder needs to be the one delivering this.

[00:50:53] Darrell Vesterfelt: I think that it has to be exciting and compelling and there has to be somebody good at it. To deliver this content. So, I think it’s as much important about what you’re teaching as how you’re teaching it. So if I’m, if I’m sitting down and it’s the most valuable content in the world, but I can’t even pay attention to it.

[00:51:12] Darrell Vesterfelt: I start checking my phone. So what is like, how is the compelling nature of it? It’s very easy to hire somebody who can do this for you. Who’s very good at delivering content. It’s very easy to use, like, influencers to teach this content for you, like these are very common practices of having somebody who’s really good at delivering this content.

[00:51:31] Nathan Barry: You would hire an emcee for your conference. A hundred percent. Why would you not hire? You know, someone for

[00:51:38] Darrell Vesterfelt: somebody that comes to mind for this for me was Tim page at Leadpages early days, right? Tim wasn’t an executive of the company, right? But he’s a very skilled teacher My friend Ryan at HubSpot Very skilled teachers that create content on behalf of the brand where it’s not just the content is good It’s the content But also the delivery is really good.

[00:51:56] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I think that’s a piece where people miss all of the time. so those are the two things in my mind that are really important is, the third is format. So what is the easiest way that somebody can engage in that format? I see people make this mistake all the time is they serve themselves as a company first.

[00:52:13] Darrell Vesterfelt: So they make it really hard. Hey, we’re going to stream this inside of our app. It’s like, why? Like, Oh, cause that serves you first.

[00:52:20] Nathan Barry: Right. We’re trying to, someone’s trying to drive monthly active users. And so they’re like, Oh, we’ll get logins.

[00:52:25] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. And so it’s like, yeah, that makes sense. If the, if the frame of mind or the objective is let’s serve us first.

[00:52:31] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I think that the reframe is like, what’s the easiest for the person who’s going to engage in this content to engage in content. So I think format is also really important. What’s the easiest way for somebody to get there? What’s the most, like, can they get it on their phone? Can they get it on this tablet?

[00:52:44] Darrell Vesterfelt: Can they get it on the desktop? And it’s easy to engage in the content that way. So I think it’s. It’s the content, it’s the delivery, and then it’s also the format. I think those are really important things to keep in mind.

[00:52:56] Nathan Barry: Yeah, that makes sense. Are there other companies that you’re thinking of that do education really, really well?

[00:53:01] Darrell Vesterfelt: I think HubSpot does it really well. HubSpot, I mean, HubSpot’s like a gold standard in a lot of ways, and they, they’re, they’re spending millions of dollars acquiring content, like the podcast network is a great example of that. so I think that’s one that I really look up to. What about you? What, what companies come to mind there?

[00:53:17] Nathan Barry: I mean, in that, in that vein, right, the HubSpot bought the hustle, which means they own my first million as a podcast, and the hustle is a brand. And so from there, watching Sam Parr, you know, he obviously. comes to this world of being a writer, building a large newsletter, but watching him use his personal brand to build Hampton, you know, which is his new like entrepreneur, you know, founder network.

[00:53:40] Nathan Barry: And you just think of he’s at like tens of millions of dollars of free advertising, free advertising. And it’s way more effective because of the credibility that comes with it. And in some ways, you know, Sam or Gina or Encore, some of these people that we’re talking about, Like on one hand, they’re outliers because these are people who are very good at what they do.

[00:54:02] Nathan Barry: But like they got there by starting pretty simple and being like, I don’t know, I’m going to start right. I’m going to be consistent. Like they became outliers over a long period of time. But I don’t think that there’s something that they have that is untouchable for others.

[00:54:17] Darrell Vesterfelt: I sat down with Gina. I was like, cause Gina released a podcast that’s done very well in the last little bit and it’s hit the top 50 business podcasts or even beyond.

[00:54:24] Darrell Vesterfelt: It was in the top 10 business podcasts at one point. And I said, all right, tell me the secret of how you’ve grown your podcast, Gina. And the reality was it wasn’t a secret. It was like just really good, compelling content. And you like in those moments you’re like, Oh, okay. But the reality is, is like, there’s no shortcuts for her.

[00:54:41] Darrell Vesterfelt: There was no, like. Secret playbook that she knows that other people can’t know. It’s like she has spent a lot of time thinking about the most compelling content. And she even told me that they did a bunch of episodes and ended up deleting them and going again because it didn’t meet the standard of like what I even listened to this.

[00:54:57] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I think her podcast, the first season of her podcast is so brilliant because it gives her point of view of why mighty is different from everybody else. And she did such a good job with it. So, there’s no secrets here.

[00:55:10] Nathan Barry: Cause there’s something in that. You need to equip your customers to be able to deliver your brand message for you.

[00:55:17] Nathan Barry: Correct, right? So someone’s asking, should I use Kajabi or circle or mighty or something else? And they’re not asking you that that does happen. But 90 percent of the time that that question is asked, someone from each of those companies is not in the room, correct? It’s two potential customers talking to each other.

[00:55:35] Nathan Barry: And so if one of them has listened to Gina’s podcast, then they’re going to be able to do in Gina’s words, thinking it’s their own. Be able to explain to their friend. Here’s why mighty is different.

[00:55:45] Darrell Vesterfelt: Here’s a perfect example of this. Gina talks about transitions in a way that a lot of people talk about niche or problems that you solve.

[00:55:52] Darrell Vesterfelt: And I have after you told

[00:55:53] Nathan Barry: me yesterday,

[00:55:54] Darrell Vesterfelt: 20 years of speaking about this a certain way, I’ve changed the way I talked about it because Gina’s point of view is so strong. I’m like, this is amazing. But Gina put her point of view out in the world in a way where you’re right now, her customers are talking about transitions.

[00:56:07] Darrell Vesterfelt: Because they know about this content inside of her, her content. It’s, it’s amazing to me and to call it out, Nathan, like this podcast is great. It’s one of my favorites. It’s not as big as my first million, not even close. That’s okay. Yeah, it’s still worth it. It’s still having outsized impact for the amount of effort that you’re putting into it, even though it’s not getting 10 million views or whatever, because

[00:56:27] Nathan Barry: the thing is, I’m very clear about who my target market is.

[00:56:30] Nathan Barry: I want to speak to professional creators and people at this, you know, you know, at a certain level. And so the number of times that I talked to someone and maybe there’s an issue in our product or, someone else has a compelling offer is giving away, giving away for free. The number of times that people come back and say like, Oh, I learned, you know, how to take my business from a quarter million to half a million a year from this podcast, you know, like we make fans for life.

[00:56:58] Nathan Barry: And then especially as we’ve done the coaching form format where people are You know, flying out to the studio coaching on their business and they’re just like, I

[00:57:06] Darrell Vesterfelt: love this so much. Yep. So you don’t have to have a Sam par size podcast or a Gina size podcast to make this worth it. Yeah.

[00:57:14] Nathan Barry: We’re talking right now.

[00:57:15] Nathan Barry: We’re, you know, 5, 000 downloads an episode is what this podcast gets. Which on one hand is a lot on the other hand in the grand scheme of things, it’s very, very small and still worth it.

[00:57:24] Darrell Vesterfelt: There’s one more, I know that we were, we were one more topic I want to talk about as far as creator strategies that I think impact business in a positive way.

[00:57:30] Darrell Vesterfelt: That’s community. and I think developing community is an incredible way to continue to engage in, with your customers and with potential customers. and I think this is, this is one that we don’t have to spend a lot of time on this, but I know that building a community is an important part of what you do.

[00:57:49] Darrell Vesterfelt: Kit. and, I think this is an important strategy that, that, businesses can take from creators. Creators are building communities around all kinds of niche topics. Right. and I’ve seen a couple of, of, of people doing really cool communities. One example of a small company that is, it’s really impactful for them is my friends that cast magic and, and they have built a community called uploading, which is about how to use AI.

[00:58:14] Darrell Vesterfelt: To generate content for your business and for your team in a way. And so this community is like, it’s a really compelling topic. People have lots of questions about it. They host. Podcasts that are public, but then for the people who are part of the community, they get like private trainings and they get to do Q and A’s with the podcast guests afterwards.

[00:58:32] Darrell Vesterfelt: And so they’re building a community of people who are, some are customers, some are not customers, and they’re building in a community format that is positively impacting their businesses. One of their best growth levers is just creating content in the context of a community, but the value of community is that the customers and.

[00:58:52] Darrell Vesterfelt: Potential customers are interacting together. And so you’ve got people selling, it’s like third party advocacy is like customer X is now telling potential customer why, why this tool is great. And you’re not having to do any of it. And there’s a momentum that happens inside of community. So community is a really important strategy that I think businesses could really learn from is how are we developing community between our customers?

[00:59:14] Darrell Vesterfelt: That’s a great non customers. And then the intersection of the, both of those as well. Yeah, I think that’s

[00:59:18] Nathan Barry: huge. Yeah. Finding ways to get in person, like some of the, you’ll hear a lot in like conventional software growth, for example, like Jason Lemkin, who’s built a bunch of great companies and you know, had exits and now talks a lot about building sales teams and scaling software companies.

[00:59:33] Nathan Barry: He’s always talking about like, get in person with your customers. Like. plan a tour, go around, you know, a five city tour, get in person, do those things, go to the events because it just makes such a huge difference.

[00:59:44] Darrell Vesterfelt: And you did this with the, Oh, first of all, we’ve done this, we’ll go to conferences all the time.

[00:59:49] Darrell Vesterfelt: Even when we barely had two nickels strove together, it was important for us to get in person. you’ve done this with, craft and commerce. Conference, which I know you don’t make a lot of money from, but it’s an investment in the community. And by the way, like it’s people’s favorite event in the whole year.

[01:00:06] Darrell Vesterfelt: I know people who it’s like, it’s like a pilgrimage or like a family reunion. you also do this with your podcast tour where you took the podcast on the road. And again, I know that was an investment into getting in person with people. so there’s lots of ways to be developing

[01:00:19] Nathan Barry: hosting masterminds, hosting dinners, all those things.

[01:00:22] Nathan Barry: There’s a playbook that we’ve done. That we did last fall that we’ll do again soon, where we said, okay, we want to show up in a city and in the most efficient way possible, touch all the right people. And so what we did is, would plan in advance and try to get five or six in person meetings. And so this is with top sales prospects, top customers where you want to have that one on one time.

[01:00:52] Nathan Barry: And then the next thing from there is. To host a mastermind. And so this would be a half day event. We do this deep dive into flywheels, how to build flywheels in your business. Right? So we’re teaching our methodology that really differentiates us from any competitor. There’s no one else is talking about this unless they’re copying us.

[01:01:11] Nathan Barry: and then that would get 15 to 25. of like the high level customers or prospects in the room. This great thing is when you got, say 15 customers who are killing it and you let them invite their friends who might not be customers or you’re inviting prospects and you’re delivering a ton of value. And then I would just overhear these conversations where someone’s like, Oh, I’m on active campaign.

[01:01:34] Nathan Barry: Should I switch to kit? And there’s like four people who are like, yes, absolutely. Here’s why. Here’s how I did it and all that. I don’t need to sell in that situation. I’ve got 15 people who are my best customers who sell for me. And then the next level up from there is we would do the live podcast where then to that we could invite, you know, a hundred to 200 people and we create content live on stage.

[01:01:56] Nathan Barry: We’re recording it. It goes out on the web. It generates a huge amount of credibility because it’s like, Oh, not only are you recording a podcast, but you’re doing it in person on stage in front of hundreds of people. Okay. This must be worth listening to. And then finally, at the end of that, we’d have a meetup and all of those, you know, a hundred to 200 people get to meet each other.

[01:02:15] Nathan Barry: We get to talk to them. And these days were absolutely wild. And they’re grind. They were, they were a total grind, but so worth it. And for me, like, well, you and I both have have kids. And so, you know, and all of these other obligations, it sounds like, look. if I’m going to do this, I’m going to make the most efficient use of my time.

[01:02:38] Nathan Barry: And so I’d be in a city for 36 hours and would knock out all of those things. Oh, the other thing is I would go in person on other people’s podcasts. Yes. So two days in Austin, I think I recorded seven podcasts, said five in person meetings, taught a mastermind, had 150 people out to a live event and the live podcast.

[01:02:56] Nathan Barry: And it’s just, it’s just, You can systematize that and knock it out.

[01:03:00] Darrell Vesterfelt: And so I think community is a huge deal and I think it’s a really underrated strategy that again, a lot of this stuff is like investments that have outsized returns longterm, but they also have immediate impact too. So, I think, I think those are the three real strategies that traditional startups can learn from creators that I think are going to have really outsized impacts on their business.

[01:03:20] Nathan Barry: One quick thing that I think I want to end on is just talking about systems and how you could. do this in a way that doesn’t take all of your time. And so, you know, not all, all consuming. So the first thing is batch recording content. Like, let’s say you decided, that you want to go zero to one. If you did probably an hour of prep work for four or five days, then you could spend this dedicated chunk of time where you’re like, Hey, I’m going to go to a studio for one day and knock out a huge amount of content or two days.

[01:03:54] Nathan Barry: And so you can really batch record that second, you could get into a system where you’re collecting ideas over time. You know, you have this, page or database and notion where every time you’re thinking about like, Oh, that’d be a good example for content where that should be a case study. It just gets dumped there.

[01:04:11] Nathan Barry: And then periodically you do the, the batch creation. And then I think the, the next thing is, then this is one that we haven’t done yet, a kit that I really want to do is to bring in the team on all of that. All right. So something that we’re planning to do is to, to ask team, like, Hey, who are five or six people or eight people on the team that want to do this level, like the zero to one personal brand building related to kit and bring them here into the studio.

[01:04:40] Nathan Barry: Let’s spend two days and let’s record all this content. So like we could say, Hey, what let’s crowdsource within our team, all of the best advice we give to creators. You know, what does create every day mean to us? Why is that important? You know, if you were going from zero to a hundred subscribers, how would you do it?

[01:04:58] Nathan Barry: Like just all of these types of things, what are the biggest mistakes that you see creators making? Right? We can build a shared database of, of all of that and then sit down and interview each other and that will turn into all these reels and clips. And then when you go to Helen on our sales team, you go to her Instagram, then it will be her talking about.

[01:05:20] Nathan Barry: this is what it looks like to, you know, here’s what I’ve learned helping all of these creators grow to a hundred thousand subscribers. Here’s behind the scenes, you know, all of that. And there’s a huge trust transfer and you could do that. Twice a year. Like we’re not talking a fundamental switch and like, okay, now this has to take over 10 hours of

[01:05:38] Darrell Vesterfelt: a week every single week.

[01:05:40] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. I mean, this is what you and I have been doing the last two days is I’ve recorded a batch for my content. We’ve recorded for my show. I’m now recording for your show. And it’s really like a 24 hour window where we’re trying to get a bunch of content done. Yeah. And so I think if you could invest one day per quarter, developing this stuff out for your company, it doesn’t like become this thing that has to be all consuming all the time.

[01:06:02] Darrell Vesterfelt: and then shout out to the flywheels concept here is like, you’ve got some really good content flywheels that people should pay attention to of how you can be capturing these ideas, how, your CS team or your sales team could be putting in ideas for you. So when you sit down, it’s easy to knock out.

[01:06:18] Darrell Vesterfelt: piece of content a single day. I think it’s a huge, a huge benefit.

[01:06:22] Nathan Barry: Darrell, we can obviously talk about this for a very long time. You are one of the best in the world at all things, creator and business marketing, and particularly going from, you know, zero to 10 million. And. We actually have two other episodes that if someone is just tuning in for the first time, they should check out.

[01:06:40] Nathan Barry: So about a year ago, you came on and we talked about summits and how to launch and scale those. And then we just recently did an episode where you gave a whole breakdown. on my launch and tactics and strategy and we got into positioning and all of that. So lots of great Darrell content. If people want to check it out beyond that, if people want to follow you, connect with you, what should they do?

[01:07:00] Nathan Barry: Where should they check out? Good people. All of that.

[01:07:03] Darrell Vesterfelt: Yeah. So first of all, Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Send me a dm, just Darrell Fel on LinkedIn. I’m the only one in the world so it’s easy to find me. the agency that does this kind of work for companies is called Good People Digital Buy Good people.com is the URL.

[01:07:18] Darrell Vesterfelt: So you can check that out there and reach out to us either place and we’d love to talk to you. Sounds good. Thank you for coming on. Thanks man.

[01:07:23] Nathan Barry: If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe, and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I’d love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also, just who else you think we should have on the show.

[01:07:37] Nathan Barry: Thank you so much for listening.