Billion Dollar Creator

Rachel: We didn't even have a name for this podcast. We had no idea what the hell we were doing.

Nathan: I've had like 15 people come up to me and say that that moment where we go and buy the domain live on the podcast is like their favorite thing ever. So put the messy process into the final material and people will appreciate you for it.

Attention is power, and creators harness it better than anyone else. But they're not using that attention to create the biggest impact possible and are vastly under monetized.

Hi, I'm Rachel Rodgers. My co-host, Nathan Barry, and I believe you can be a billion dollar creator. Sound impossible? Over the last ten years, we followed each other on our own quest to build billion dollar companies. We've studied creators and seen how entrepreneurs build traditional audiences and use them as a launching pad for a massive business. It got us thinking, if it can happen for them, it can happen for us. If it can happen for us, then why not you?

Billion Dollar Creator is a show teaching creators how to capture attention and turn it into real wealth. We will deep dive into brands, celebrities, and entrepreneurs who have done it before and show you how you can apply it to your business as an everyday creator.

Join us weekly as we learn from both the wild successes and the missed opportunities, the grand gestures and the integral mistakes. Through that, help you become an expert at building your audience on your journey as a billion dollar creator.

Nathan: Do you know who Ali Abdaal is? Are you familiar with his stuff?

Rachel: I am but only because you’ve told me about him and his podcast a couple of weeks ago. Then I think Sahil mentioned it on the New York episode that we did.

Nathan: Yep. Because they have business together and all of that. Then when we were kicking this off, I was recording with Ali at his studio in London, which was really fun. But Ali just launched this thing called LightMode, which I saw it this morning. I was like oh, this is a billion dollar creator playbook. We've got to talk about it.

Rachel: Interesting.

Nathan: Yeah, so LightMode is, he talks about it as a new business for like productivity products, which I think is interesting. It's not him going down the path of like making one product. He's got all these tools that he wants to make around productivity. The first one is this mechanical keyboard. Like he talked about how everything in the productivity world is like either gamer focused or like business-nerd focused. So gamer is like this darky aesthetic. Everything is black and a certain look and all that, right?

Rachel: Black and red, in particular.

Nathan: Yes, exactly. There's neon going on as well. It's a certain look to it. Or if you're like this is the most optimal way to type and to do everything else is productivity, it's like IBM or Microsoft aesthetic.

Rachel: Yes.

Nathan: So he has this new brand, LightMode, which I love that he owns LightMode.com. Like you can tell he is making like a real brand out of this. Their first product is this mechanical keyboard. Which I am not a keyboard nerd, but talking to people, we have people on the team at ConvertKit who are like really into mechanical keyboards and how they sound when you type and customizing them and everything else. I just thought this was super interesting because he's got this video where he's talking to it. He's just like introducing the brand in a really casual way.

But where he's going is trying to make some of the best and most beautiful, I think says beautiful like 14 times in that video, but tools for productivity and starting with a mechanical keyboard. So anyway, I was like I love it anytime a creator has a big YouTube following. So he has like four million followers on YouTube for productivity. Then he's not saying like oh, I'm just going to do a course. I'm going to do this other thing. He's like how do I build what I think is going to be an iconic brand. Like I see this, and I think oh, this brand has legs. So anyway, I thought that was super cool.

Rachel: Very interesting. I love it. I love the design of it. I like the colors. The mechanical keyboard, I guess it's like giving you the feeling of typing on a typewriter, but you're still using your laptop or desktop or whatever. Is that what that is?

Nathan: Yeah. They're supposed to be like the most ergonomic, and they have the exact right feedback on the keys. Then you can customize them. Like you can take off all the key caps and change it around.

Rachel: Wow.

Nathan: Someone’s going to skewer us who’s like no, here's everything that mechanical keyboard’s doing. Like, I don't know but I know that people think this is really cool. They get really into it.

Rachel: What's the price point? Do you know?

Nathan: Yeah, it was interesting. It's $159. So he talks about it in the video how they're going not bottom end, but not also like, I think you can spend like $1,000 on a mechanical keyboard.

Rachel: Yes.

Nathan: So they're trying to make it, he has some interesting phrasing of like it's your first one if you want to invest a little bit, or it's a good first upgrade if you're like you got one that was cheap, but now I want one that’s quality.

Rachel: Yeah, like I want a better one. I like it. I like it. So he's making it like accessible to the people, and he's thinking about the price point in terms of who's in his audience, which is exactly what he should be doing. Because you can either go for higher volume or you can go for maybe less people buy it, but it's more lux item. So that's really interesting. That'll be fun to watch. We have to have him on the podcast maybe early next year and see how it’s been going.

Nathan: Yeah. Because between this and then the YouTube studio that he's doing with Sahil Bloom called Hey Friends. He's got that and courses, right? He's making like four or $5 million a year selling his various courses. It's just, it's impressive. I'm like you can tell he's thinking about it in the billion dollar creator mindset of like okay what can I channel this into?

I think my favorite thing, I mentioned this earlier, but it's how he's building like the brand. Like I can tell this is a brand. It's not like oh, here's a mechanical keyboard that we're making. Then here's something else that we'll do next. You can tell it's like no, this is just the first product of the brand. That's more important than the individual product. So I think it really has legs.

Rachel: Yes, I think so too. I like the branding of it. I like the look of it. I like the long term plays. He could sell a lot more courses. This is Q4. It's December. He could sell a ton of courses right now at the end of the year, or he could focus on launching this new physical product. Maybe people give it as gifts to some of their entrepreneurial friends or whatever or gift to themselves. But then building that company to be the big play, which is exciting.

So I think that this is a great time to experiment and try things, especially like if there's a “recession” or the market is down, like that's when a lot of great companies are made. So I feel like it's a good time to try things, right? There's a lot of people who don't have much to lose. Like if your numbers are down or things are flat, it's like you might as well try something new and see what happens.

Nathan: I agree. Speaking of trying something new, we're back from a five city tour. We finished all of that. Should we recap that and just talk through? I don't know, was it worth it? Would we do it again? All of those things.

Rachel: Yes. Okay, I would definitely do it again. I would change some things, for sure. But I actually love being scrappy. I actually, we just did annual planning for my company a couple of weeks ago. One of the things I think I'm adding it literally to our company values because I'm so obsessed with it, which is being scrappy. There's something about that that really appeals to me.

So I love the idea of just starting something, doing it messy, doing it ugly, and trying it and then working out the details as we go and learning. Because the amount of information you get back so quickly, like how long would it take for us to get that much feedback about the podcast if we were just doing episodes and waiting to get new listeners. But actually going out there, bringing people together, getting real time feedback, that was extremely valuable to me.

Nathan: Yeah. So we had an advantage going in that we both already have audiences. The podcast itself does not have an audience, but we separately have audiences. So that allowed us to have at least 100 plus people show up in every city that we did. So that was really good.

I think what you said about the feedback loop I really like because I think podcasts normally have a terrible feedback loop. Like almost a non-existent one. You have to either actively solicit feedback, which I posted on Twitter yesterday. Twitter, X, I don't know? Whatever. I posted on that platform yesterday of like hey, what feedback do you have for me on the podcast? Because otherwise, you just don't naturally get it. I'm like hey, I want to solicit unsolicited feedback.

But with the tour, people would say like oh, this was really great. Or you get to talk to them real time. Or even like getting to see their heads nod along as like the guest was sharing something insightful. Someone’s like nodding along or taking notes. You're like oh, this is good. Cool. I felt like it was good, but I'm glad that I can see on your face that this is a valuable thing.

Rachel: Yeah, getting the immediate laughs, watching them take notes, just having them yell at certain parts and get like really hyped and excited. All of that was perfect to just know what's working. Sometimes too like we're talking about like complex business ideas. I worry sometimes that I don't want it to go over people's heads. I want to make sure my audience is with me always, right? Like I'm not running ahead and leaving them behind.

I could see that they were so that was really good too to see that like yes, some of this is kind of complicated to think about. People are interested in these deeper conversations and more complex conversations. So that was good information to have as well.

Nathan: Yeah. So when we last talked about the tour, I think we’d done New York and Nashville maybe, but we hadn't. So since then, we've done New Orleans, which was on the main stage at Fin Con. So that was in front of 1,000 people. That was like not our own event. That was fantastic, but it was a different experience and really cool. Then we did Austin and LA in the same week.

So I guess some of the lessons from that. One of the first ones for me is that it's a ton of logistics. I think I underestimated how much work would need to go into it because we're trying to do so many things. We're trying to do a live event, which is one set of logistics of like can everyone pay attention live and all that. We're trying to record it, which adds a whole other element into it.

Then we wanted a meet up afterwards. Then we wanted a mastermind beforehand. Like each one had its own set of needs. Like if you're optimizing just for that one thing, you would do a specific set of decisions. We're like okay so we want this and that. We said to our teams, and especially to Haley who our events producer. Like bless her, she was amazing. We just told her like okay Haley, here's what we want. Make it happen. I think it was really tough to fit all of that into the same venue and to make all that happen together.

Rachel: For sure. Shout out to Haley. She's the real MVP of this podcast tour. For sure. She held it all together. But yes, and it's different venues worked in different ways. Like some were better than others. I think, out of all of the venues, my favorite was Austin. Austin was the best one. I really enjoyed the marquee outside. That was great. Just the setup.

It was not ideal for the mastermind, but it was ideal for the podcast, the live show, and then the meetup afterwards. So I really loved that. But yes, there's a lot of data to review. I definitely have edits that I would make. Well, first of all, I would charge more for the tickets.

Nathan: Yeah. We charged $39 for anyone listening.

Rachel: I thought that was reasonable. I mean, we weren't really trying to break even or whatever. We just wanted people to come out. I think in the future, I would do maybe $95. Just make it a little bit higher so that like I want to start to have a pot that we're working from to produce the podcast. So that was interesting.

Nathan: It's not just basic scrappy.

Rachel: Exactly. Yeah, we started with scrappy and using our own funds or whatever. But now it's like scrappy plus break even, you know what I mean, would be nice.

Nathan: We probably spent five to $10,000 out of pocket, probably $10,000 out of pocket for every stop before paying for our team salaries because we'd bring in three to $7,000 in ticket sales, four to $7,000 in ticket sales, and then you can drop a ton of money beyond that.

Rachel: Yeah, exactly. Like covering drinks and all the things. Honestly, I have zero regrets. Like I just think going forward, I want to elevate the experience a little bit. So I always want more capital to work with so that we can elevate the experience.

I also am very into event choreography like I want this is happening first then this than that. So I would tighten up the choreography a little bit like who's introducing us? Where are we coming to this stage from? What happens when the podcast is over? Who steps onto the stage to take over? Right? Like I like all of that mapped out and just seamless and beautiful, you know?

Nathan: Yeah. Well, I mean, thinking about I think most venues we were pulling together who's going to do the introductions like half an hour before.

Rachel: Ten minute was before. I mean, you know.

Nathan: That was one, I feel like Robert in New York really set the bar. Now, he's like a professional performer. Like he's world class at what he does. So I would hate to be compared to him in any way. But just the way that he was going to people and saying like before the show, you all have to subscribe right now. Then afterwards, the way that he's like somewhere between requiring, guilting, cajoling, whatever getting people to like. But he's like you just listened to a whole episode of the show live. So like write a review. He did a really fun way.

I think he said like we did this and other tour stops as well. Where it's like hey if you want to drink, instead of drink tickets, it was like go to the bartender and show me that you have rated or reviewed the show. Actually, in Austin, I went to go get a drink after the show. The bartender is like so have you rated or reviewed the show? I'm on it. I'm on the show. She's like cool. I'm happy for you. Have you rated or reviewed the show? So I had to pull up Spotify and show that yes, I had given five stars to my own podcast.

Rachel: Listen, it's a good point. Why not, right? Why not? You’ve got to at least vote for yourself.

Nathan: I was kind of proud of her that she had pushed that hard for everyone to.

Rachel: I'm impressed as well. I also thought the masterminds were great as well. We did a mastermind for about four hours each time with like a handful of invited folks, anywhere from like 15 to 25 I feel like we had in the room, and those were great. I feel like between the podcast conversations and then also the mastermind, I was like taking pages of notes and had my own insights about my business to go home and apply after every tour stop.

So even from that perspective, it's almost like this mini mastermind. Not just the mastermind part, but also the podcast conversation and just insights that I'm getting listening to our guests or you or even hearing myself give advice that I need to go home and take. You know? Yes, exactly.

Nathan: You should do this. By you, I guess, oh shoot, I mean me. Okay.

Rachel: Yes, I guess it applies to me too. How annoying.

Nathan: Yeah, we both really like the annual planning session. Or like the not even annual planning, the three to five year planning session that Tim Grahl led at our Nashville mastermind. We both took a ton of notes.

Rachel: That was one of my absolute favorites. The notes that I took from that is actually what I presented as my vision for my annual planning that I did for my company. Because in that process, he's like we're talking about like 10x-ing your company. What does it look like to 10x it, and I just reverse engineer 10x-ing it. So by the end of that exercise, I had my 10x plan. So I'm like okay, great. Well, now I'm prepared for annual planning. Wonderful.

Nathan: Listen everyone, our mastermind is so good that even as we teach and lead it, we're the ones who get the most out of it.

Rachel: Literally. That was interesting. At the LA stop, someone came up to me and said, “I would have paid thousands of dollars for this. Like this was so incredibly valuable for me.” So yeah, maybe next year.

Nathan: Yeah, you're like come over and tell Nathan this because I was the one who’s like no, let’s not charge for it. Right? Because you and I are both in the position that our businesses make a good amount of money. We don't need this to make money in itself. Right?

So you were saying we should charge for this because this is really good. I was like no, like we charge for other things. Let's just pour this back into our community and all that. So what was interesting then when you pulled her over, and she was like, she basically reinvented her whole business in that four hour session and had like clear actionable plans of how to do it and had met 15 or 20 other creators. I like watched her getting everyone else's contact info and all of that.

So, that was a good reminder of like okay yeah, we could legitimately charge $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 for this, and people probably show up more professionally and get more out of it and all that. But you know what? Say what you were going to say and then I want to dive into what I realized my resistance was.

Rachel: Yes. Oh, I can't wait to hear that. I heard actually on your podcast Laura Roeder say value for value. So we're providing value so we get value in exchange. That just makes it an even exchange, which makes sense. But even beyond that, otherwise, it's almost like the opportunity can be wasted on people if they don't recognize the value of the moment, right.

So even being on your phone. When you have all these dope creators, you're sitting next to somebody who just sold their company for eight figures. You're sitting next to somebody else who has millions of followers on YouTube, and somebody else who is just building a dope agency. You have so much opportunity here, and you're on your phone.

Like when you've paid money, when you've paid 5k for the experience, you're not going to be on your phone. You're going to be fully focused. You're going to think about how you want to prepare for the moment before you get there.

Even for us. If we sell it and have people pay for, we can also have a survey going out saying okay, what's the status of your business? What's going on for you? We can customize and tailor the content to fit the people who are coming. We know that people are going to show up. They're not going to cancel last minute. Then we could also elevate the experience, which you know I always want to elevate the experience. I think those are all really good reasons to charge for the mastermind.

Nathan: Yeah, what was interesting to me is realizing about halfway through, or I guess it was after you had the conversation with the attendee who was saying we should definitely charge. I don't know if it was later that night or the next day or what, but we were chatting about. I guess it wouldn’t have been the next day because you flew home at like midnight that night.

Rachel: Oh my gosh. Worst fight that I've taken in literally years. That was the, I won't even tell you why it was terrible, but it was.

Nathan: Yeah. It was just that moment you had this long line of people talking to you. It's like 10:00 at night at the meetup. You’ve talked to basically everyone there, but you still have like eight more people that want to talk to you. I'm in the middle of a conversation. I realize like wait, Rachel needs to be at the airport right now. Like go Rachel. This is great, but you need to go.

Rachel: Yes. Thank God, yes. You got me out of there. You were like you have to be responsible and leave right now.

Nathan: Then even then someone was like okay, but one more photo. I was like all right and then get out here. So the realization that I had is a lot of my resistance to charging for the mastermind meant that I would need to show up differently and deliver at a different level. Because I was able to have a bit of a cop out. Like I know my content is good. I can show up and teach it off of the fly, and no one's paying for it. Right? This is all free.

So their expectations are here. I can make sure that I exceed the expectations with not that much work or preparation. But as we're teaching like the flywheels content, what I found myself wanting is like worksheets and like a workbook and other content to go with it and printouts and well designed and produced material.

Like my slides were good. But the experience delivered, maybe the end result for many people was worth many thousands of dollars. But the experience was not worth that much of how it was packaged. That was fine with me because they didn't pay for it.

So immediately if you came and said hey, this is $3,000 per person. They're paying almost $1,000 an hour to be here or $500 an hour or whatever. Then I’d go oh, shit. I have to level up my game in a huge way. That was my resistance is that I didn’t feel like I had time to do that, even though I absolutely want to. When I realized that I was like well yeah, I want this to be world class content. So we me charge for it so I forced myself to show up with the level of preparation, material, and handouts, and details so I know you're going to get that much value from it.

Rachel: Exactly. Here's what I would argue. I would argue all of the work, all of the preparation has already been done in building ConvertKit. Right? Like all of the learning that you've had, all of the experiences of building your business. Same for me.

So it's like it's 10 plus years of entrepreneurial experience and results and success that you're bringing to the table that I think is more valuable to them than your preparation. I think the time itself and the insights that you just naturally already have in your brain are worth that, worth charging for already.

Also too like even just like the workbooks and all that can be outsourced because the content is really created already, pretty much. It's just about downloading it and putting it into, like you said, just a little bit of prep, and even some of the spaces. Like there was one room where it was all windows, which seems like a great idea. Natural light. Beautiful. But then someone's sitting in direct sun while trying to learn. Exactly.

Nathan: Welcome to Los Angeles, Venice Beach. Please roast in this spot of sunlight. Yeah.

Rachel: Yes. Yes. So, so yeah, I think that there's so much opportunity too. I feel like basically, we had a meeting on our flight from Austin to LA. I feel like what we've done is maybe potentially by accident. We went to start a podcast, and we've accidentally started another business.

Nathan: Which is the last thing that you or I need right now, but yes, we did.

Rachel: It's absolutely hilarious, but it makes perfect sense. Because I'm like oh, clearly we need to create a billion dollar creator playbook because we're taking in all this information. We're gathering all these examples. Then there's like this criteria, and then we're even refining the criteria. So we're like clearly there needs to be that playbook.

Then I'm like well, if we're going to do masterminds, let's do a mastermind where we walk everybody through that billion dollar creator playbook in a step by step process to like find the billion dollar creator opportunities within their current company. So yeah, I think it just needs to happen.

Nathan: Well on that note, the day after we did the LA tour stop, I went down to Long Beach to Tiago Forte’s studio. So he has the course and building a second brand. Just amazing content. He's built his business to a few million dollars a year in revenue.

He said hey, why don't we, instead of doing like a regular interview where you came on, I interview you, all that. Why don't we do it as a live coaching session? He's like here's where I'm at in my business. Here's where I'm trying to get to the next level. You do a teardown and give me feedback. I'll share all of my numbers and all that, and we'll record it.

So I showed up at his production studio. He had a whiteboard there. We like wrote out the numbers mapped out his business and walked through the billion dollar creator methodology.

Rachel: Love it.

Nathan: It was fascinating how quickly we came to the problem that he doesn't have recurring revenue in his business.

Rachel: Wow.

Nathan: He had the other tenants. He was selling a product rather than attention. He’d built much more than a personal brand. He did not have recurring revenue. When I walked him through this, I was just like oh, like this is it.

Rachel: This is the problem.

Nathan: We dove into fixing that. We copied over some playbooks from you know what you've done at Hello Seven, what the executive coaches have done at Reboot, like in their business model. So like showing him kind of borrowing from a few of these different models. He's now got a really clear plan to scale from two million to ten million a year in revenue. We decided like hey, at that point, we'll revisit the 10 million to 100 million.

But it just made me realize how much the training and material matters to like really break down. Because then to hammer it home, I was in the Uber back up to Venice. My friend Darrell, who he introduced us to Robert at the Nashville tour stop. But he texted me. He's like hey, what material are you going to create? What educational content are you going to create on Billion Dollar Creator?

Then I'm still like I probably nothing. I don't know. I have a full time job. But just realizing like we can create this material to really take people through it in a detailed way. So we've got to do more of that. I think what it's got to come down to is like workshopping it live on the podcast and then having our team members who can package it up and turn it into the concrete material, like these are the steps that you should go through.

Rachel: Yes, exactly, exactly. I think it'll be awesome. I'm excited for more of the coaching on the podcast. We did that with Paula Pant in New Orleans. People really responded to that. She got so much value from it, but then the audience came up to us after, and they were like that was absolutely amazing.

For people to just see like you have a $2 million business or you have a $200,000 business. The opportunity to create a much bigger business is right there. You just have to see it and step into it. Sometimes it's hard to see when you're in it and getting outside of it. Also just learning how to think bigger. Like it's all the value of coaching and education. So I'm excited that we've challenged people to think bigger. I'm also excited that some people hate us for it. It's great. That makes me happy.

Nathan: We’ve definitely had a few more. There have been a few more think pieces that have come out about why, I don't know what's wrong with society right now. But you know what? I'm okay with being what's wrong with society.

Rachel: I'm okay with it as well because I think we're encouraging people to see the full value of what they're creating, and get paid what based on that value that they're creating. I think we're helping good people earn more money so they can do good things with that additional money. Like just like we have a lot of wealthy people, some of them make decisions that are bad for society or for our climate or whatever. We need good people who have money who can make good decisions about for our society, climate, etc.

So I'm excited to be helping creators get more money in their hands. I'm okay with taking some heat as part of it. I actually find it entertaining and fun. Also too I feel like we're here for the ambitious people, for the people who are like I know I'm meant for more. I know I can do more. I know I can create more value for people. I'm missing a piece. I just need to put that piece in place so that I can feel like I can get to where I'm trying to go. So we're filling that need. I think that's amazing.

Nathan: Yep, I like it. Okay, a couple other quick takeaways for me. I don't think I realized how hard recording a podcast in front of a live audience, how hard that actually is and how not showing up and sitting down and talking and whatever else, but the AV side of it. Like it's serving a bunch of different needs.

Then even little things where we’re like oh, we're filming all of it. So we want a camera to be able to show who's asking the question. Make sure the audio is good from the Q&A. That's really hard to do. No AV team that we hired had a clue what they were doing as far as the combination of this.

They were like okay, cool. So you want a mic. So do this. We’re like well, no. We actually want three mics simultaneously. Well, four, with the audience mic. Then we want to record all of that into one system and goi in from here.

So this is another time that that Haley and people that she pulled together like figured it out, and we ended up just building. Like partway through the podcast tour, we built our own kit that we just traveled with. We’re wheeling these Pelican cases.

Like when we went to a Codie Sanchez’s office to record the episode with her. First of all, we're like keep texting to push our flight back because we're like we're not going to, this has taken too long. But to be able to roll in with basically full studio setup. That came from trial and error and realizing that like okay, the hotel AV team or whoever you bring in doesn't know how to do any of this. We basically have to learn it ourselves and make our own playbook.

Rachel: Yep, exactly. The podcast has sounded great. So the fact that we've successfully pulled it off and why, when I say we, I mean you and your team because I had nothing to do with it. If it was dependent on me, it would be a disaster.

Nathan: Tom, who's our head of social media, he knows audio and video really well. He came to the Austin event, and he leveled up something out there. Or like Alyssa, who's our head of all things creator growth and has a podcast herself. Her husband runs a recording studio in Nashville. So his name is Thomas, and we were like, Haley was making calls and be like Thomas, okay, how do I do this one thing?

Rachel: Yes.

Nathan: It was good.

Rachel: You rely on the community. This is why networking is so important so you have people to call when you hit a snag.

Nathan: Yes. So I think overall, on the tour would 100% do it again. Were there any other things that you would change or do differently? Or did we hit all of them?

Rachel: Schedule. I would change the schedule, which you know because I complained about it the whole time.

Nathan: You don't want to just do meetings all morning, teach a mastermind all afternoon, and then roll in to a live podcast followed by four more hours of networking. What's wrong with an 18 hour day, Rachel? What's the problem?

Rachel: I'm like surely there's a better way. I clearly am very pampered at this point, and also too just the travel like traveling and jumping time zones. Then sometimes I was traveling in the morning of and then going right into we met for an hour to like game plan then we were right into the mastermind for four hours then you have like five minutes to change and like put on lipstick, if you're me. Then you are in front of an audience. So there's just like one thing after another.

So schedule wise, my preference would be that day one is all about the podcast, and we just focus only on the podcast. Maybe even have a little happy hour beforehand. I want people drinking before they listen to me talk. They'll laugh at my jokes more, you know what I mean? Then afterwards having more networking, I think could be great.

Then I would do the mastermind the next morning and then have like a sort of, I don't know, ten to one or ten to mastermind the next day. So that day one could we could just be hyper focused on the podcast. Then day two, we have this amazing mastermind after being inspired by the podcast conversation. That would be my infrastructure.

Nathan: Right. I think we could get more we get further in the mastermind if we weren't introducing some of the concepts. Like we know that everyone there had listened to the episode the night before. For me, there's a tension between like the best experience when we're there, both for us and for attendees. Like attendees, we're going to take care of that. I put that first. I think I'm still more in the like sacrifice my life to minimize. I'm like trying to minimize the time away from home, which I know you are too.

Rachel: Yes.

Nathan: Then at least these last, like for a few of these tour stops, I was just absolutely packing in everything I could. I think that week, the Austin LA week, I think I recorded like seven or eight podcast interviews. Three were Billion Dollar Creator, and then the rest were going on other shows. Just like constant meetings.

Rachel: You got a lot done.

Nathan: Yeah, I got a ton done. So I think there's that balance of like is this going to wear me out and make it less enjoyable as I do all this? Or is this like no, this is what I'm signing up for. Like I've got three kids at home. So I'm going to try to be totally focused on family and growing the company when I'm at home and then totally switch into like network community mode for five days then sleep on the plane on the way home.

Rachel: Well also too like at some point, you have to get the rest in, right? So when you come home from that trip, did you still feel like you needed a day or two to rest? Or did you feel like you were right into family mode and energized for family mode?

Nathan: I felt like I needed rest, and I definitely did the like pretend I have more energy than I do. 8:30 rolled around, and it was like all right, and everybody's off to bed and everyone includes me.

Rachel: I've definitely done that where I wore myself out on a business trip and then got home and pretended I had all the energy in the world for my children when I just really needed a nap so bad.

Nathan: But I think consciously realizing that you need to do that because you're like what's the experience that I want my kids to have? They have the experience that not only is mom or dad gone, but then when they come back, they're out of energy, which is an authentic experience. You're like okay, no actually what we're going to do is I'm going to show up and give you a ton of energy.

Then you know what? We're not going to like be like oh, I'm exhausted so I guess we'll watch a movie. We're going to be like we're doing family movie night. It’s like the same thing but a very different tone.

Rachel: Yeah, exactly. You've got to sell it.

Nathan: I mean, they'll be thrilled regardless, but like the experience of like wow I come back, and I feel really, or dad comes back and I feel really special and prioritized even though I'm annoyed at the time you spent gone or whatever. Then realizing like the kids will go to bed relatively early, and you can go to bed then too.

Rachel: I think there's a happy medium there where there's like doing the work, building in some rest for yourself, and then having energy for your family as well. Is it worth it to, like, for example, what I did. I got on a flight Immediately following the happy hour. I was exhausted. I took a red eye. It was a terrible red eye for a myriad of reasons. Then I got home, I was absolutely exhausted, but I powered through the evening and then fell asleep. Like I got home the next afternoon. Because going from LA to Puerto Rico, it's a far trip. Like it was going to suck no matter what I did.

But anyway, was that worth it or would have been better for me to get some sleep, fly home Friday, power through all day Friday. I would have missed Friday night and then been fresh for Saturday and rested. I don't know. It's a tension that I think every creator entrepreneur who’s a parent can relate to. I think depending on the trip, we make different decisions.

But it also, there's also a tension between doing the thing and then selling the thing or marketing the thing, right? Like putting the effort into creating the product or delivering the best product possible, but then you are also marketing the product because you were recording podcasts, other podcasts where you're promoting. Part of that is promoting the Billion Dollar Creator Podcast while you're on other podcasts.

So it's like do we just prioritize doing the thing and that's it, and then go home and rest and be with our families? Or do we do the thing, market, sacrifice sleep. There's different times for different things. This is a new baby. Like it's a new project. So it's going to require more effort. That's what I said at the beginning. Because there was one point where Nathan texted me and was like should we just cancel this whole tour? Why are we doing this? Our families are going to be annoyed.

Nathan: I did send that text.

Rachel: I'm like you're correct. Our families are going to be annoyed. We are going to be even annoyed at some point. But with a new thing, to get it off the ground, it's just like a flywheel. It takes more effort in the beginning, but then it starts to just spin. So I think this was that extra effort. There was huge wins as part of it. There was some downside, but I feel like there was more upside than downside for this tour.

Nathan: Yeah.

Rachel: I think there's ways to optimize and get it better. I think it's just sometimes we're going to put a ton of effort in and go really hard and exhaust ourselves. Sometimes we're going to be like yeah, I'm going to sleep and then I'm going to take my ass home.

Nathan: One thing that I would do differently, as you mentioned, a flywheel, I realized where our flywheel was broken is around creating the video content as we went.

Rachel: Yes.

Nathan: We got it dialed in to capture all the footage, and your team did a good job of creating some reels. When we had Suneera on in Nashville, she had a great reel after the event. I realized I didn't put any infrastructure in behind the scenes with a video team to like quickly turn around video content that would build the hype for future events. So I didn't post a single reel or a YouTube video or any of that. That's something even as we're recording this, we just got our video team up and running to launch the video version of the podcast.

So like if anyone's listening, very soon if you go to billiondollarcreator.com, there'll be a link to the YouTube channel and where you can follow and subscribe there. But that's something that we were so busy doing all of this that we missed that, which is really like a third to half of the podcast is the clips and the video side.

So ideally, we would have done that sooner. Because what we did, right, and all this will roll out over time. So it's totally fine. Like we didn't lose it, other than maybe a little bit of momentum. But we ultimately created what will be an incredible amount of great video content then we were missing the video step in the production flywheel. That’s when we’re like okay, big lesson learned.

Rachel: Yeah, we both have like decent sized teams. So we were both like okay, there's no one person that's perfect for taking this over. So we just kept adding more people. So we had a Slack channel at one point with like 35 people at it, and nobody knows who's doing what, who's actually in charge. So that's the part of being scrappy is like you just start and you just get it done. It's sloppy and messy. Then you realize where all the mess is.

One of the things Haley did was create like a step by step process for the podcast. So we launched it ugly. So y'all in episode three got to listen to us. Like we didn't even have a name for this podcast. We had no idea what the hell we were doing.

Nathan: I've had like 15 people come up to me and say that that moment where we go and buy the domain live on the podcast is like their favorite thing ever. So put the messy process into the final material, and people will appreciate you for it.

Rachel: Yes, exactly, because it's real. It's showing like this is actually what it looks like. It's messy, but it's also been super fun and very rewarding just hearing, we've gotten emailed feedback, reading some of the reviews. So that's been awesome. But yes, it is, it was a bit of a hot mess. We already have plenty of things to do. We chose the busiest quarter of the year to choose to do it. We nailed it, Nathan.

Nathan: Entrepreneurs are not always the best at planning. So, we’ll just roll with that stereotype.

Rachel: But you know what we do have? We have vision, and we get it done, you know? So, there's that.

Nathan: So yeah, we did five tour stops. That went well. We're on a break for a little while Ross and Rachel style. No, just kidding. The next tour stop is at ROI, which is your conference in Puerto Rico. What are the dates on that? I'm going but tell me the dates.

Rachel: January 17 through the 19. I'm really excited. So our guest for the Billion Dollar Creator Podcast will be Jackie Aina. She's a huge YouTuber, massive YouTube following, and is running the Billion Dollar Creator playbook with her own products. So I'm excited to talk to her about her content that she creates. I mean, it might as well be a TV show. Like it's so high quality.

But yeah, I'm really excited to interview her. So that'll be the episode in January. You should join us. If you go to helloseven.co/roi, you can still get tickets for that for the next week or two. Then we're also going to Craft and Commerce next year where we're going to do an episode at your event in Boise in June. So I'm excited for that too.

Nathan: Yeah, that will be June 5 to 8. So. I think we'll get some other tour stops in there. We'll see how the rest of the year fills out and then probably do a few more stops and get some more masterminds and all that.

Rachel: We discussed four. I think that we should really make that our max. We'll see what happens y’all. Of course, it'll wind up being ten or something ridiculous.

Nathan: You know, the other thing that I appreciated from Haley is like her focus on pinning us down on things. She was kept as one of us like hey, what about this, or what about that. Then when she had us together on the flight from Austin to LA, she was like, “All right, I have a doc. You have said this. You have said that. We're going to reconcile all of this in the three hours before this plane touches down.”

Rachel: Yes.

Nathan: It was really good.

Rachel: It was really good. One of the things that we talked about doing that y'all can look forward to is creating an opt in, like creating a download, like some cool content from the podcast related to the Billion Dollar Creator process that you can download. So that's something that's on our to do list. Then potentially planning some more masterminds for next year as well.

Nathan: So that'll be good.

Rachel: If there's something else you want us to do, let us know. We also want to do a little bit of coaching of some entrepreneurs.

Nathan: Live on the show.

Rachel: Yes, exactly. So we probably should create like some kind of survey or form for people to apply for that. We'll get around to it.

Nathan: We'll make one, and we'll put it on billiondollarcreator.com where you can apply. We’ll have some threshold. I don’t know. You’ve got to be already making 250,000 a year or already have a sizable audience. Then we’ll brainstorm how to take that to the 10 million and beyond 100 million level.

Rachel: Yes, I'm excited about that. That's going to be fun.

Nathan: Clearly, the survey already exists, billiondollarcreator.com. We have, what, four days before this episode drops. So no problem. It'll happen.

Rachel: We'll get right on that.

Nathan: All right. Speaking of the episode, let's wrap up by talking about two different creators that we both have been intrigued by. I'll go first and talk about Mark Rober. He is, how old is he? He's probably 40. Somewhere in there. So he is like a scientist and engineer. He worked at NASA for years on some big projects, like the Mars Rover and stuff like that. Then he ended up working at Apple for a few years. Now he's full time on his own thing.

He's built a YouTube channel about like science and physics and all these fun things to 28 million subscribers. So he is massive.

Rachel: Wow.

Nathan: His projects, he'll have things like, so first, my kids absolutely love his content. Like my four year old is like Dad, can we watch a Mark Rober video? I'm like sure, why not?

Rachel: I'm especially interested now that it works for kids. Yeah, I'm definitely going to listen and watch.

Nathan: It’s very much kid focused content, which is interesting to me. Like that has a massive audience. We're all over here. Like we're going to teach business on the internet and like the audience is very small. You think like food bloggers, they serve a much bigger audience. Like people who want to cook is way bigger than like niche internet business.

Then from there when you're like teaching science to children in a fun, entertaining way, like massive audience, and turns out 28 million subscribers. So he'll do these crazy projects. Like one of my favorites is he made a dartboard that has motion capture on it, and all the physics. So if you throw a dart, it will automatically move to catch the dart exactly in the center.

Rachel: That's wild. I'm obsessed.

Nathan: Then he like walks through like not step by step of how to build it because it's crazy complicated, but like why certain things work and he introduces computer vision and all these things. Then he adds another element to it where it has like facial recognition. So if he throws a dartboard at the dart, it's perfect. But then like he goes on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, and Jimmy Kimmel throws a dart and it like deliberately moves out of the way. So Mark can't miss, and Jimmy Kimmel can't even get on dartboard.

So he does these projects and the channel grows. I was watching an interview with him. He talks about how early on 90%, well, early on. Maybe up through I think 2020, so probably the first five, six years of the channel, 90% of the revenue was from sponsorships. Then 10% was from YouTube ads, like the algorithm driven ads.

Then as the views got huge, that switched, where 60% was from YouTube ads, and I didn't realize how big that could be. Then 40% was from sponsorships. But what I thought was really interesting is he used to always have a range of sponsors, like I don't know if he ever had like the VPNs or Squarespace or some of these brands that you've seen on a lot of podcasts or channels.

But he had one in particular that was a monthly like science box. Like it would send you, here's a science experiment. Yeah, or something that you can do. He would sponsor it, or like they sponsored. He would talk about it. He was probably getting paid a lot of money for those because I'm sure he sold a lot of units.

I have no idea what happened behind the scenes, but somewhere in there, it went from this monthly subscription box sponsoring his channel to now they're gone. He has this amazing product called CrunchLabs where they do their own monthly subscription box. Like the quality is way better. You can tell this is someone who's deeply passionate about it. The content is integrated very closely.

Like he'll make this giant Nerf gun or like Nerf gun style thing and then have another version that like, and by the way, this is what you'll get in the monthly subscription box, the smaller version.

Rachel: Yes.

Nathan: Then of course, instead of it being a random sciencey thing like he's actually teaching the physics concepts behind why this works in videos that accompany it. So a few things I love about this. One, I feel like a billion dollar creator concept is be your own sponsor.

Rachel: Yeah.

Nathan: He did that. He came in and said the sponsor is making more money off of this. They're spending obviously, and the quality isn't as good as I would like. So why don't I increase margins and increase quality? Like hell yes.

Rachel: Yes.

Nathan: Then the next thing is, this is a recurring revenue business, which one of our core principles is you’ve got to have recurring revenue. So at $300 a year, he's got this recurring business. Then the last thing about it that I love is he's able to do these deep integrations. Like I've seen people kind of launch something, and it just doesn't really fit. Like you can tell when they're like oh, I should have some of that have equity. So I guess I'll bolt this on.

Rachel: Yes.

Nathan: It usually doesn't end up working. So in this one, you can tell like it's so natural for him to talk pretty constantly about his boxes, and it doesn't feel like he's selling because it's such a perfect fit. So I think this is going to be huge business. I couldn't find any numbers. Like not a single thing has been released that I could find about like they're making 10 million a year or 50 million a year in revenue, but if it's not already tens of millions to 50 million a year plus, I think it will be really soon.

Rachel: Yeah, no, I love that. I think $300 a year is such a reasonable price. I would 100% pay that for my kids to have it. Then I have three kids, so I'd pay $900 a year for all three of them to be able to participate. But I love the tack on. You know what that, funnily enough, makes me think of? I feel like that be your own sponsor is essentially what the model is that we're thinking of with charging for the Billion Dollar Creator Mastermind day.

Nathan: Yeah, that's true.

Rachel: Because then that mastermind day can sponsor like the video team that we have, the audio team that we have, all of the travel, the venues for the live events. It makes sense. I think creators have been doing that on some small scale like who do their own podcast, and then they advertise their own products on the podcast. That's one example of it. But yeah, this is very interesting. I'm sure he's going to be printing money if he's not already. I mean, he's been on Jimmy Kimmel. Sounds good.

Nathan: Yeah. He's definitely printing money. I just think it's going to go like all the way into a household name even further. There's one other thing that I saw him doing that was like such an interesting flywheel is he's built out CrunchLabs, which is both the company and a physical office space. Where it has all the things that anyone would think is super cool of like hidden entrances and sciencey stuff and everything else, a go kart track.

What he does, is with these Crunch boxes they go out every month, he chooses I think two or three, and he puts like a Willy Wonka style golden ticket in them. If you get that, then you get to come visit the headquarters. He'll make content about that, which then wants people to do it even more. So you're getting these things where it's like dad buy me this because I might be able to get the golden ticket to come see it. So it's just an interesting flywheel of how this like feeds itself more. Then he gets content people enjoying the product more and on from there.

Rachel: Yeah, it feels like a closing the loop step by saying I'm going to create content with the kids who are enjoying these physical products, right? They get to come to my headquarters and experience this. Then that feeds more people wanting to buy the box, wanting to get a golden ticket, wanting to watch the videos. So it seems like it's a loop closer, that golden ticket piece.

That's really interesting. I have been thinking about that. I really want to find more billion dollar creator examples with physical locations. Because just a little preview of what we decided in annual planning, we are going to create the first Hello Seven physical location. That's all I'm going to say. Not going to say more about it yet, but I'm very excited about moving in that direction and having physical locations be part of our model. So I'm interested to see other examples of billion dollar creators that are using a physical location of some kind as part of their flywheel or their model.

Nathan: I like it. I'm curious to hear more about the physical location. I may or may not have also started looking at physical spaces after I came back from touring so many people’s beautiful podcast studios and all of that. Like we went and met with the Dear Media team, and their office in LA, or not in LA, in Austin, is the one we went to. They just have this insane podcast set up and office. I was like someday I'd like to have this. Then I realized like wait, I can have this today.

Rachel: Yes, exactly. Today is some day. Yes, exactly. I have been thinking about having a clubhouse for a very long time. So I'm like you know what? It's time to make it happen. Let's go do it. So yeah, so we're working on executing that sometime in 2024, but we've already begun the process. Having podcast studio space is part of the vision as well because I agree with you. I'm like why am I in my half office half den right now instead of a fabulous studio? So yeah, time to level up in all ways.

Nathan: I like it. You've had Sheila Johnson on the list for a little while. I'm curious what you've seen from researching her and takeaways from the billion dollar creator space from an actual billionaire.

Rachel: Yes, from an actual billionaire who has actually a physical space. So Sheila Johnson is, you know what? Let's not do this. You know why? Because I just realized at the time.

Nathan: Actually, that's all the time that we have because you and I both looked at the clock and realized we have other things we need to jump to our day to day businesses. So I think what would be good is we'll kick off another episode talking about Sheila Johnson, who is a billionaire that we can learn from directly. Billion dollar creator lessons from an actual billionaire. We'll do that in the next episode.

Rachel: Yes, can't wait.

Nathan: All right. Sounds good. Thanks for listening everyone. We'll see you soon.

Rachel: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Billion Dollar Creator. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe, share it with your friends and leave us a review. We read every single one. If there is a company you want us to profile on Billion Dollar Creator, send us a message on social media and we will consider it. Thank you and we will see you next time.