# How to Turn a Podcast into an Empire

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUm0VOkTIBY
Duration: 1 hr
Language: English
Words: 12780
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/GUm0VOkTIBY

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[0:00] podcast is a very terrible platform to launch if you have no audience I I was fortunate that I didn't really have a big audience myself but I had spent a long enough time around a handful of people that had big audiences that had gotten to know me for the very thing I was starting a podcast for you you always have one of those friends who you know you have a favor and it's like you hold on to it forever and then finally you're like I'm launching a podcast can you help and just like tell your audience about this thing I cashed all the favors in when I launched the

[0:29] podcast dude you're you're a pro now I feel like right uh what defines Pro I mean your podcaster for podcaster creator for a living right yes my wife quit her job and she is now joining the company so it is now both of us are doing this full-time which is bananas it's really bananas because you probably don't remember the first time we met but I do if I had to guess yeah I guess for some reason I'm envisioning a room maybe it's just the Canada thing with Aaron burry in the room I mean I know Aaron burry uh like many many moons ago and I'm like was that room in

[1:14] Ireland or was it at South by or was it just in San Francisco you're not you're not wrong okay it it was in Europe it was in 2011 Lo Webb Paris ah okay I remember going to Paris let's see hold on I actually don't have a good memory but when a photo comes up I always zap back into that reality and I remember being in a warehouse party with you me you Chris Barrett if you know who that is he's a PR guy okay and you were talking I think you might have recently sold your company to Google is that possible is that around then

[1:55] um yeah I think it was 2012 but in 2011. it could have been I think we were maybe we were we hadn't started but we knew it was happening anyway as far as I'm concerned I'm this like you know it's in my head at least in like country Canadian and I meet this like you know fast-moving Silicon Valley guy who knows everyone and who's building all this stuff and who's just you know really charming and no and just like knows you know knows where everything is going and I was like I need to be in San Francisco what am I doing and in my mind now fast

[2:30] forward to 2023 you've abandoned like you were at the Pinnacle of Silicon Valley building startups raising Venture and now we're now you're doing creation stuff how does it feel yeah apologies if anyone's watching the video because I was like I was so into this moment that I didn't know if we were actually recording and I'm like distracted looking at iPhoto trying to find photos of this trip to Paris but um I was at a conference yesterday in San Francisco and it was like a VC Tech startup conference and I was like do I even belong here anymore like I know everyone here yet it feels like it's a whole

[3:05] different world now I'm like yeah so it feels kind of fun to be at the I mean I'm not at the ground floor of Creator world right like people million it seems like millions of creators have done this before but for me it feels as exciting and new as it did back in I don't know 2008 when I first learned that people build tech companies for a living and I was like I need to go do that so I don't know I'm having a lot of fun learning a whole new industry I find that most people don't treat the Creator world like a business so I meet all these

[3:36] podcasters that are like oh gross like I never really thought about it like monetization like I just thought you just you know go to a network and they put ads in I didn't know there was a better more optimal way and so uh applying the principles of like high scale Venture startup to a new business that hasn't really taken that is fun that I love yeah I think there's a lot of creators who look at it just like from an art perspective I passionate about this particular thing I'm going to create videos about it or podcasts and then there's like this new wave of creators like yourself who know a little

[4:11] bit of the art but also the science and you're kind of putting it together and making money and also kind of doing tomorrow yeah yeah the art thing's interesting because I think I meet a lot of creators who are much younger they're like you know 24 and they're grinding and they tell me oh God what's a new tactic for tick tock and I was like do you like making Tick Tock videos and they're like no but like I feel like there's such an opportunity and I'm like yeah I'm not I'm not doing any I'm not doing a thing just because like it makes a lot of money I have to want to do it

[4:44] like the bar being I don't know almost 15 years older than these people in some cases 20. it's like I have to really want to do the thing and so it forces it almost like forces the art like there are people who don't care about money and do the thing they want to do always and then there are people who start out and they're like I don't have any money and I really care and I'm really grinding and then there are people who've had enough success that they're like look if I if I didn't make money we would need to move like we do not have

[5:11] enough money to live our lifestyle for the rest of our lives uh but we have enough that we could just like focus on things we love to do and so it's allowed me to treat it a little bit like an art in a way that 10 years ago maybe I would have been chasing making Tic Tac videos but some people I know that are making tickets they don't even like doing it they're just like they feel like that's the the opportunity I like the art piece so it's been what a couple years since you started this journey two years in May so a couple months passed but yeah

[5:38] two years and could you share a little bit about like the all the hacks uh Empire like how's it going yeah so when I started I didn't know what I wanted to do and I just knew I had a full-time job I just knew that I love going really deep on all the things like you know you know me personally but for people who are listening don't it's like if someone asks a question like what's the best way like what's the best way to get auto insurance I'm like I either know the answer because I've already done it or I'm like I need to know the

[6:11] answer and I'll go spend 50 hours the next week going to learn everything you can possibly learn about auto insurance I'll call 10 Brokers I'll get a quote from every company I'll read the policy terms and then I'll come back about you guys I went back and I looked it up here is everything you need to know that's just like my personality during the pandemic I didn't get to share any of that with anyone yet I also had more time than ever to do that kind of research and so I just felt like I needed an outlet and I didn't have the dinner parties to be like hey guys did

[6:42] you hear about this new crazy thing did you you know I just accumulated four million points doing this crazy like I just didn't have a place to share all that and so I was like maybe I'll try a podcast I'd started writing blog posts and I think I wrote two uh and then I stopped and then you know I've I've been on Twitter since I got excited about tech in 2007 but I just never became like the social media person but when I was running a startup I went on a bunch of podcasts as a guest to talk about financial planning and I was like oh it

[7:10] just felt like the most natural medium for me so started as a podcast and I had a newsletter sorry yeah certain interrupt isn't starting as a podcast like the worst possible idea like yeah when people ask me like oh hey like I really want to start a podcast I'm always like um before you start a podcast you need distribution yes so the the thing about podcasting that is worse than basically almost every other platform is that there is no built-in growth mechanism uh there is no built-in easy sharing mechanism it's like if you're reading an email and you're like I have an idea of a friend that would

[7:50] want this you hit like F Type three letters and hit you know command enter you know depending on what what uh email provided you have it's pretty quick on a podcast you have to like take your phone out of your pocket then you have to like go back to the episode page and then go back to the show page and then hit the share button and then click like the text message button and then type your friend's email text in and text feels very invasive and by the way both of those are still way harder than if you just post a video on YouTube and it

[8:17] seeds it out to 100 people and they love it then it's supposed to seed it to more and more and more people and that happens on lots of social platforms podcasting it's like there's no no there's nothing so yes you're right podcasting is a very terrible platform to launch if you have no audience and I I was fortunate that I didn't really have a big audience myself but I had spent a long enough time around a handful of people that had big audiences that had gotten to know me for the very thing I was starting a podcast for so when I said hey you know you always have

[8:50] one of those friends who you know you have a favor and it's like you hold on to it forever and then finally you're like I'm launching a podcast can you help and just like tell your audience about this thing I cashed all the favors in when I launched the podcast and I had a thing that I was known for in like money and financial optimization so I could go on a few other podcasts and say Hey I want to talk about this thing and I was actually you know an expert on that topic and so I think I had a little bit of an edge there and then I had this

[9:18] mailing list from you know a couple different aspects of my life I started a life updates one a travel one and I kind of let everyone know on those mailing lists hey I've got this new thing that gave me enough of a jumping off point that I could build an audience but without that you know I meet people that are like I have this podcast I'm on episode 100 I get about 50 downloads an episode and it's like you could do a hundred episodes of a podcast and still get only 50 downloads like most people that produce 100 pieces of content on any platform end up getting a bigger

[9:48] audience but podcasting so hard so what's your what's your advice for people who want to start a podcast don't have distribution and don't have you know well-known people to to plug their pod look I don't think anyone should start a podcast if you don't enjoy a podcast because for the first year podcast made no money so like yes I might have had listeners but like it was still a huge amount of work and the return was doing the podcast so I wouldn't advise anyone to start a podcast as like a business opportunity uh in general unless you have an audience so if you don't have an

[10:21] audience start it because you love it I think even with a tiny podcast I've met a ton of people who've been able to use it as a way to ask for a conversation with someone that otherwise they wouldn't be able to so if you really are a curious person and like learning from people use the podcast as a platform to have those conversations um you would be amazed at how many people will say say yes many of them will also say no but some of them will say yes and say yeah I'd love to come on your podcast so I didn't know Morgan hausel the is a writer and personal

[10:52] finance world and before the podcast had launched with no listeners I shot him a cold email and was like hey I got this podcast coming out it's about life and money and optimization will you come on he's like yes you know he didn't know that it had anything behind it so I think that for that reason it was great and a lot of people can do that and not care if there's an audience I've met plenty of people have podcasts Eric I have so many interesting conversations I've built an amazing Network I don't care if there's listeners it doesn't matter to me so know why you're doing it

[11:19] maybe it's just a creative outlet for you and it doesn't matter if anyone listens like it just is a platform for you to have a conversation in public or or just get stuff off your mind so I would say start it not for the reason of a business but if you do start it there are some things that I think give you an edge so one find a thing that you can be known for and leverage that to go on other podcasts where you're actually an expert and don't just send the email that I get 100 of every week that's like hey can I be a guest I did a thing be

[11:49] like hey I listen to your show I understand what you're looking for in a guest and I understand the kinds of topics you talk about here are a couple bullet points for what I think we could talk about that would make for a really great conversation I'm happy to do some more prep work um whenever I get those emails I'm like 50 of them convert whenever I get the email that's like I started a business like buildings you know lawn mowers and I'm like well that has nothing to do with my show like I don't even know why you sent this email I don't even reply I just archive it but

[12:18] when someone says Hey I've listened to 10 episodes of your show and I know that you like talking about optimizing areas of your life I've actually optimized this one area more than anyone here's what I know here are some of the takeaways your listeners will get those convert really well funny enough I I found that the bigger the name of the guest is completely almost inverse proportional to how well my listeners like the episode so uh it doesn't I care more about the content than you know the name of the person on the show really because that's really counterintuitive it's very counterintuitive and I think it's very unique to my show if I had a

[12:51] show that's like let's like hear all the juicy details of the lives of my guests people are more interested in the juicy details of the lives of people that they've heard of that they admire but if mine is tell me all the tactics I did an episode with a guy that I couldn't even find a lot of information about about rental car hacks people loved it and then I did an episode with Tony Hawk who I admire if you're on video you can see I'm literally assigned skateboard of Tony Hawk in my background um and it was super interesting but I wouldn't say that episode delivered as

[13:24] many tactics Tony I think maybe I could have figured this out in advance but he's one of those there are some people I could compare him to Kelly Slater and it's like some people are like very good at what they do and they are very intentional about how they do it and some people are just naturally so good at what they do and it's not because they're intentional they're just just you know otherworldly Tony is the latter it's like what's your routine he's like I skateboard and like you asked you asked Kelly said what's your routine he's like I wake up at this time I take this supplement I do

[13:55] this thing and I do take any supplements Tony and he's like yeah I gotta take like cholesterol meds because like that's what my doctor told you know like totally he's not someone who does that and that's it works I mean obviously he's like the you know everyone listening knows who he is like he's good at what he does but I wasn't able to deliver I was able to deliver a fun conversation and like I think I think it's a good listen but it wasn't the episode where you're like my life has changed after listening to this and I'm gonna do these seven things different or I now have I've gotten emails where it's

[14:24] like I listened to that episode and I made fourteen thousand dollars that was pretty cool um or like my marriage is better or my business is stronger that's what I want to deliver and so that honestly people are coming to the podcast for me they're not coming for the guest walk me through how this works so basically you you interview someone on the Pod it it becomes popular because people are sharing it with a lot of people is that what makes a popular episode a weird thing that I was talking about yesterday was that when you look at someone on social media or on YouTube and you're

[14:57] like how big is Their audience you're drawn to this number that is usually their number of subscribers their number of followers something podcasters there's no public number of followers okay so the only number people share and they don't even share it publicly that often is how many downloads you get per episode or how many downloads you get a month that number is completely different from the number of people who listen to the podcast or or who subscribe to the podcast let's say that better so if you're going to compare the number of people who listen to a podcast to the number of people who you know a

[15:27] YouTuber you'd look at how many videos on or how many views on average does their video get which depending on the YouTuber and the type of video could be four percent or ten percent of their overall subscriber base I think for for my podcast if I had to guess and I don't actually know the numbers and they vary drastically on Apple it's like 50 of the subscribers on Apple listen to an episode on average and on Spotify it's like 12 percent and and those numbers are only really available for Apple Spotify and Google so for all the other platforms which is like a meaningful percentage of listens I have no idea my

[15:59] guess is I have about five times as many subscribers as I do listeners on each episode so a an episode that does well is an episode where a higher percentage of the people that subscribe to the show listen to it and an episode that does poorly is one where a lower percentage but that range by the way on like day one downloads is anywhere from like 13 to 17 000 downloads on day one uh so it's not like you know and on average it's like 15. so like a bad episode is like 10 percent worse and a good episode's like 10 or 20 percent more um it's not like YouTube where you're

[16:35] scrolling through someone's feed history and you're like wow this guy's got ten thousand ten thousand ten thousand 17 175 000 like it's a very tight band so you know the only other metric I have is how many people are still listening at the end of the episode so how many people did I lose so if I compare okay how many people people downloaded it is a proxy for like is the topic or the title interesting and how long did they make it in the episode is a proxy for like was it a good episode uh do you spend a lot of time on titles um probably like 20 minutes

[17:07] I think it's some combo of me my wife my virtual assistant and chatgpt and like between the four of us we're like we're bouncing ideas off and then it's usually my wife and I at 9 00 PM taking all the data from all those sources and then we both are like that's it but I don't like a B test the title to see which one's gonna perform better or I don't have like a data I have a data back opinion on a lot of things because I like you know using analytics I don't I don't know what on titles you look at Tim Ferriss his titles are like four lines long and

[17:40] you'll get some other shows and the titles are like eight words and you ask them why and they're like yeah I think it's just so much better the SEO of podcasting like almost nothing is indexed except your show title so you know you could argue that really long titles will help people searching for random things in the in the App Store so they're not wrong about putting that in there um Spotify will index your summary of your your description of the episode but Apple only indexes the title so if you if you want to start a podcast and you want to create a popular podcast what

[18:13] recommendations do you have for people in terms of things that they can do to you know increase their probability of success honestly I think the most important thing is to to find some way to determine if you actually have like good content because you could spend all the time in the world growing a podcast but it's going to be people aren't going to stick around it's going to be so much harder so you need to find if you have a good podcast so first off can you actually explain why your podcast is different to other people like try that you know try to see if you can convince

[18:45] people about why your podcast is different because it's late enough it's early enough in podcasting that there's room for more podcasts it's late enough that you can't just like be a success because you have one and very often I meet people and they're like my podcast is great because I'm going to interview people and they're going to share all these awesome things and I'm like okay well there are a lot of podcasts that do that what's different about your podcast like why is someone going to listen to it do you have a different perspective like do you and your do you have co-host and you do interviews in a different way

[19:10] are you only interviewing a specific person in a niche where there aren't a lot of people doing that content like what is different about it so you could but you could have a different podcast and still suck at podcasting so like you might think I'm crazy but I don't really look at my metrics for for my podcast so I look at it every three months and I just look at downloads and and which which platforms like once every three months I'm like okay am I going in the right direction I'll look at it for 10 seconds and then I'll close the tab and I don't think

[19:44] you're crazy I I'm just like I'm not here for like I I think that first of all I think I have in intuitively I could see I could sense if if the podcast is doing well because people are like tweeting episodes I'm getting messages about hey I saw you know I listened to this episode it was really dope um and I realized when I first started the podcast I was really really into the metrics and I was trying to optimize everything and it was just a lot less fun for me now I'm just kind of like I'm just gonna invite interesting people they don't have to have the biggest

[20:15] audiences in the world I'm just gonna come up with a title that I think speaks to what this thing is I'm gonna post it on Twitter or on email when I think it makes sense and I mean I lost like my co-host I lost like six or eight months ago who has almost you know more than a million follow 1.5 million Collective followers or maybe even more 2 million Collective followers so I saw like a drop in downloads and I just look every three months and it's just been steadily increasing that's great I'm I'm you know and that's all that's all I care about like am I

[20:47] missing anything should I be no I don't even care anymore about downloads for me the only thing I care about now that this is a business this is like how we pay our bills I'm like are my sponsors renewing that's the only metric I care about and like if our sponsors are not renewing that means something's not working are we not growing fast enough are the reads not good like if you treat it like a business do I care like if I had half the downloads but I just kept all the people that are so excited and are supporting our sponsors that's fine like I'm doing the podcast not to be a

[21:17] celebrity but I like doing it every week and I like and it takes time so I need it to make enough money that I don't need to go get another job because then I couldn't do it every week um so I don't think you're wrong but I think if someone listening is like I have a podcast and I wanna you know try to figure out whether people what topics people like there are ways that you could look at the analytics to try to figure out which episodes are doing better or which episodes do people listen to longer I couldn't tell you on my own show like

[21:44] which episodes people listen to longer because I haven't looked at it because it's not a huge priority for me the way I decide what I do for episodes is like what am I interested in um and like if I am interested in a new topic now I'll do an episode on that you know it's not as if people want more Finance topics and I'm not interested in the topics they want to hear from I'm like I'm really sorry that'd probably make for a fun episode but it's just not interesting to me right now and it's not gonna be good content if I'm not interested so I have no problem with you

[22:12] not looking at downloads at all but if you're trying to figure out can I get this to a place that I could quit my job you probably want to look at those metrics because it's gonna be really important I don't know man like I hear stories about like uh I hear stories about Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan basically he he does like he spends a lot of time of course thinking about the guest and a lot of focus on the guest when he's interviewing the guest but from what I understand the guy is not really looking at metrics at all he's just focusing on who's interesting to interview and then

[22:49] having really interesting conversations and I wonder if that's just the that's the best way to do it like if the guy who has the most successful podcast of all time is barely looking at metrics well I think it like what I said my caveat was if you are at your day job and you're trying to figure out if I can quit my day job to do podcasting full-time like and you have to pay bills like you might want to know if the podcast has any path to paying your bills do I think that but but what I really think you should focus on is do I

[23:21] have a good podcast because and I think the way you're gonna have a good podcast is that if you love what you're doing so The Joe Rogan strategy is absolutely what you should be doing so I wouldn't say use let the metrics dictate what you do but let the metrics dictate whether you have a business or you have a passion project um and maybe you want to quit and just go all in and hope that it works but at some point you can't go to sponsors unless to monetize your show unless you have people that are listening to it so you have to at some point look Joe Rogan

[23:53] also has the luxury of having the largest podcast so like he doesn't care if it goes up or down by 10 because he's probably making what was his deal like 100 it was like you know ridiculous amount of money so yeah if I was making that much money up I would never even look at that over who cares like it doesn't matter how much how much money do you think you can make on your podcast in as a business like I don't know but eventually or uh yeah I think when I think about the vision for what I want to build and the newsletter is an

[24:22] interesting thing to to mention because when I first started the newsletter I was writing it's kind of adjacent to the podcast but it wasn't about the same topics and then it all clicked for me when someone emailed me and was like hey I'd really love you do an episode on insurance and I was like wait I did a newsletter on insurance two weeks ago like and they're like oh I don't I don't subscribe to the newsletter I was like oh you should and they're like I don't like reading newsletters I like listening to podcasts and I was like oh my gosh I originally thought I had all

[24:46] these people and I was giving them content in different forms and then I realized some people are newsletter people and not podcast people some people like scrolling Tick Tock and don't like either of the others and so each platform there are some people like all the platforms and some people that only like one or two but I they're not fully overlapping circles so I say that uh as a preface for I don't view all the hacks as a podcast I view it as a place to disseminate information and knowledge and and all kinds of things related to upgrading your life your money and your travel and ideally in ways that you

[25:20] don't have to spend a lot of money to do so I also think that there are things that I want to build that are way bigger than the podcast so my view is there are a couple companies in the states that people join memberships of because they want to get access to Great Deals right people join AAA so that they can get car towing so they can get you know hotel and rental car discounts people join AARP when they get old because there's all these great deals and discounts all that stuff there's like not a a thing like that for our kind of gen XYZ and

[25:57] maybe it's like the Chase Sapphire preferred or the Platinum Amex but I don't know why something like that needs to be tied to your credit card company and I don't trust credit card companies to be the most Nimble and come up with the coolest deals and they usually make really like tight single off Partnerships there's a company that did this that you probably know called Founders card and they did it for entrepreneurs but there's not a consumer version and so what my wife who's who's joining full-time on all the hacks next month and I are like really excited about is how can we build this community

[26:27] where you could become a member and get access to Amazing Ben benefits that far outweigh the cost of the membership I don't want like a patreon give me ten dollars a month because you like me I want a all the hex membership give me a hundred dollars a year because you save a thousand dollars a year by being a member and it's like an obvious you know no-brainer I think that if TR if AARP has 39 million members we could have 40 million members and if 40 million members are paying you know 100 a month that's like a that's a pretty big business I think uh you know so or a

[26:58] hundred dollars a year sorry so what does that do four billion in Revenue I don't know so if if you're starting this community you're going to use your newsletter podcast's distribution I think that's the I think that's the early early version of course like I don't have another distribution Channel I think once the like right now the benefits of joining for a very specific Niche it's like we have a couple awesome deals that outweigh the price of the membership but if you're not really interested in one or two of those companies it's a support Chris or a bet on the few future or be a part of the

[27:33] community right we do calls with each other we're taking a trip to Iceland like we're doing some cool stuff but it's small the moment we have like hundreds of amazing benefits is where it's like I don't know if I care about a podcast or newsletter I just want it's like an RO good Roi for anyone so we're not we're not near there but I just I just say that when you're like how big could this be I was like I don't know could it be doing four billion dollars a year like which look it's not doing that at all it's like that is you know but it could

[27:59] it could but yeah it's multiple multiple orders of magnitude away yeah um so I just don't view it as a podcast I think the ceiling on podcasts if you look at the top podcasts and let's let's pull you know a handful of extreme uh you know number one number twos out I think the ceiling is probably somewhere around 10 to 15 million dollars a year um and I think there are going to be you know 100 shows at that level and then everything below that is probably in the not everything but like the next tier down is like in the you know one to five million kind of range which is you know

[28:40] there's probably a thousand five thousand shows maybe doing that I don't know how well does uh Dave Ramsey do that is a question I don't know the answer to but that dude has a lot of money but yeah like a lot like uh Graham Stefan is a YouTuber that interviewed him and they went a little deep on his his Finance I mean he has a products and courses and books and his you know family has their own podcast and he's built this whole media Empire that I don't even think it makes sense to talk about in the same Realm uh well I think it's similar in the

[29:16] sense of Dave Ramsey in the US is one of those one of the leading if not the leading Financial advice guy yeah right and he he does that um I think his biggest channel is the radio I think um at least he used to be on the radio a bunch and and I know that he has an like an office building yeah real estate like in cash he like it's like essentially a skyscraper it's crazy yeah I just searched Dave Ramsey or Ramsey Solutions revenue and the numbers are they range from 20 to 515.6 million so he's doing a lot but but my point there was just that I don't

[30:07] think it's not the Pod like if you have a podcast and you don't Aspire for it to be more than a podcast you're not going to be at Dave Ramsey Revenue numbers uh that ceiling I gave was like the ceiling for people like look at Tim Ferriss has a podcast has sponsors but hasn't tried to turn it into anything else like it is a podcast he has a newsletter he's not trying to make a company he's not trying to have memberships he's not trying to sell merch he's not you know he's not doing all the other stuff and I think those kinds of businesses kind of cap

[30:36] out in the podcasting world with a handful of extreme outliers at at the like you know 10 15 million range I gotta think that a Tim Ferriss is making 7 to 12 million dollars a year on his podcast yeah I think his sponsor page on his website says here's how much it costs to sponsor the podcast so you can do the math yeah here's the cost to sponsor how many sponsors in each episode how many episodes a year so I think it's in that range and I think if I'm him and I'm making call it 10 million dollars a year with pretty little costs Michael for you know and he gets to have

[31:14] interesting conversations he does it his way you were on the Pod and he made you not pee for three hours you know like to be fair he gave me the offer but we were having this crazy interesting conversation then next thing you know is three hours and I was like I have to go to the bathroom like I just I can't do it I just peed myself yeah I mean I say right now how cool would be to be running this thing and four billion along the way I might be like that's not the best use of my time like I don't I'm excited to not be

[31:43] running a company with lots of employees and lots of stuff so you know I have this great vision because I just love helping people optimize their lives and there may be a point at which helping more and more and more people do it is not worth the payoff for me but you know I spent I was surprised to hear that to be honest like coming from you know you were at wealthfront before pretty big company now uh you know raised hundreds of millions of dollars you used to work at Google big company I'm surprised that you you would even consider a role of hey I want

[32:19] to go build like a billion dollar thing but I don't know if that billion dollar thing by the way has to have tons of employees uh maybe there's a path to it with LA I don't know I mean we're talking something so crazy we're just talking yeah yeah but you know just a couple friends talking my wife was telling me the other night she was it was like late in my au pair uh is playing a road trip and she was asking me about and she just said she needs to rent her car and I was like where are you gonna rent it you know like I went

[32:48] down this rabbit hole and she was like well we're gonna do this and my friend from Italy is she's going to road trip with her friend from Italy and they're both under 25 and I was like there's underage rental fees like when you're not 25 and you got to pay extra driver fees so we went through this whole thing by the end of the night she's now a member of AAA which saved her like 250 now she's got this car rented did uh you know I made her an authorized user on one of our cards so she could use it and get the free uh rental car insurance

[33:14] coverage and get free status on Hertz so she gets to upgrade and at the end of the night my wife's like why did you spend three hours like helping her save a couple hundred bucks I was like I can't help it like I it's like it wasn't that I thought it was a good Roi it's just when people email me and they're like hey I want to try to do this thing it's like almost impossible for me to not help people like find tweaks and ways to optimize their lives and so that makes me think I will not stop at the same time I have two young kids and I

[33:44] enjoy spending time with them and I don't want to run a big company so who knows where the where the ceiling of what I do is and there are a lot of people out there who found really you know wait different ways to run companies than the traditional traditional Silicon Valley VC backed company of you're the CEO and you have crazy burnout you hire all these people and and life's insane so I don't think Founders car which is a company with you know almost 100 000 members paying hundreds of dollars a year I think they have like a couple employees if I had to be honest with myself we're probably not

[34:14] going to get to four billion dollars in Revenue like let's be you know I can have aspirations just to keep pushing me uh but you know if if we had a hundred thousand members that'd be really cool I wonder if the prom's almost like how can I have Max 10 employees but have Revenue per employee be something crazy 100 million dollars per employee yeah the struggle here is the most optimal way to put money into a retirement account in the US is like solo 401ks are amazing right you can put like you can control all the features you can have a there's a thing called the mega backdoor Roth where you can put

[34:53] basically like sixty thousand dollars into your uh retirement accounts with tax benefits but the rule of a solo 401K is you can have no employees so my in my mind I'm like how can I build a massive company with zero W-2 employees other than your spouse your spouse can be a W-2 employee but no other no other employees so I'm not gonna decide the fate of what we're building on the tax advantage of a 401k but it was a cool exercise in my mind which is like what you just said except instead of 10 it's zero right I like how you're like yeah I'm not going to decide the fate of my

[35:27] company based on this tax advantage account but I'm not not gonna do it yeah it would be on brand yeah my uh right now we have a bunch of people working on different aspects I have someone helping with sponsors I have a virtual assistant I've got production crew and they're all 10.99. so I think it's possible you know I like this new world you know it's like no it's not let's all go to the office and you know it's a bit of a different vibe but I've really enjoyed it it's fun what other companies podcasts communities do you see and you're like those guys are doing a cool job like do you look up to

[36:06] any other I love what Peter or tea is doing um he is a doctor and the thing he's doing which I don't have another business to fund my life enough to do is he flipped the model on its head and he says Hey pay to be a member of our podcast and I'm gonna go to all these Brands and I'm gonna say hey I'm not going to charge you to for me to promote you know normal traditional sponsor deal is hey Brand I will talk about you to my audience and you will pay me a rate of X dollars per thousand people that download and that rate is somewhere

[36:44] between 20 and 50 so he goes to Brands and says hey give me an amazing deal funnel all the money you would want into the discounts that you're offering my members and then he goes out and tells members on the Pod he says hey we just did this amazing partnership with uh you know eight sleep and you're gonna get a deal that's so much better than the deal you're gonna get and you hear on every other podcast because every other podcast is getting paid that's not to say they're promoting a crappy product I work with Aid sleep I love Aid sleep we have one but they are

[37:16] paying me as a sponsor he doesn't have that sponsored relationship so he has amazing deals that he offers his members uh I love that model the downside is until you have a lot of members the model doesn't work right like you lose money um and so I can't make that transition now but I see a vision like into the future where over time maybe one of our ad slots switches to me talking about the partners then two then three you know like and eventually we get there so I love his model of offering extra benefit not necessarily extra content uh I I don't love this model where it's

[37:55] like we're gonna do two pods a week and one's paid and one's free I'm like I personally I'm like I want to put all the content out there for free and I want to find ways to offer products and services and other stuff to members uh and the idea of them getting better deals is even more interesting so I had a cool episode with David Chang the the chef uh of a restaurant in New York called Momofuku and a bunch of others when we got connected I found out he is I don't know what the right word is like a part owner in a company called any day

[38:24] which makes microwave cookware and during the pandemic he was like got obsessed with cooking at home and is kind of more of a home studio cook now and loves cooking the microwave and with this company they create a whole line of cookware and they were like hey we want to give a deal to your audience and they're like we could do an affiliate deal and I was like great we'll do an affiliate deal for everyone you get 15 off but for members you get 20 off and I don't want the affiliate rep you're like so that's like a slow way to transition into it is like as a member you get a

[38:52] better deal than everyone else and there are some people that are like wait a second add extra five percent is going to save me the cost of membership so I'll just join and hopefully before the year of their membership might expire we've launched a bunch of other things and they're like wow I keep saving more money this is so cool I think what you're touching upon is this shift towards like member only community experiences which I think is where things are going it's like how do I drive as much value as possible for this member experience just like benefit benefit benefit benefit benefit benefit benefit benefit benefit benefit benefit

[39:21] benefit so that like 10 bucks 20 bucks you know 50 a month makes it worth it I was I saw on Twitter today Andrew Wilkinson the founder of tiny Capital has like a Twitter subscription and it's like I don't know 40 or something 30 or 40 dollars a month took a lot of money I think for a Twitter subscription you know for premium content for a really busy guy um who might not you know be tweeting in this private only area that much but then I started reading you know he's gonna like pick someone random from his audience every month and have a 30 minute conversation and record the audio

[39:58] and post it and there's like just like 10 different benefits where once you're reading like benefit seven and eight you're kind of like all right like swipe my credit card and then when you first said that I was like I hate this idea of like all this gated content but then I realized he's kind of just hacking the platform he's like the platform is supposed to be sign up so that people pay for premium content he's like sign up you might get these audio conversations as premium content but he's he's adding more to it and that's where I think it's interesting and he's gamifying it too right he's saying like

[40:29] there's almost like a slot machine nature to it which is you could be one of the one in 500 people this month who has that conversation with me on zoom and the reality is that's probably 90 of the reason why people are joining they're they're playing in the casino of Andrew Wilkinson basically I did this so I used to work at wealthfront and the wealthfront cash account right now has I think it's a 4.55 apy in the US but if you refer someone to the cash account they give you a boost of half a percent up to 5.05 so I was like what I want a

[41:08] boost so I was like this is a great product I believe in it I put my money in it so I talked about it and you can only get four referrals and each referral I think is worth long works for three months so I share I told everyone I was like look you can get this boost here's my referral link and I got four and I was like crap I don't want any more I can't get any more every person that uses my link is gonna just be a total they'll get the half a percent and no no benefit to me so I pinged all of

[41:30] our members and I said hey if any member has a wealthfront account and they want a boost go to this little air table form and put it in and I still haven't found a site I can't believe bitly doesn't do this but I found this like nimble links If someone knows a better one let me know but Nimble links works for now and you go in and you type all these referral codes you get to choose whether it's random or like equally distributed so I chose the redirect evenly and now anytime someone goes to this URL that I can say here all the hacks.com WF Cash

[41:58] wealthfront Cash WF cash you'll just randomly get a referral link from one of our members and so I've had our members reach out to me and be like I'm now earning 50 more and this is my down payment let's say they're saving you know 200 000 uh for a down payment for a house they're gonna earn extra thousand dollars a year insane they paid 99 for an annual membership to all the hacks and they're gonna make a thousand dollars a year from four referrals and so we're now and now I'm like what are all the other brands out there that have interesting referral programs credit cards are an interesting one there are

[42:30] some cards where the referral deal is way better than the deal you get anywhere else so let's collect all these uh there's a window where Amex Platinum had 150 000 Point referral deal so I went to members and I said send me all your Amex Platinum referral link tanks in the pot I was like hey there's this awesome deal to get 150 000 Amex points with a platinum referral click this link and now it's all my members are getting all the bonus points from these things so I'm like giving them a distribution channel to earn uh or get perks or get referral stuff like they would have no

[42:59] platform to do that I don't have those referral links like when I log into my MX account my referral for the Platinum is like 50 000 points so nobody wants to use my referral link uh and so that's like a cool thing so I I push creators to think of unique ways that are on brand with them to come up with you know products or services or experiences that are really you know tied into their stuff that they could offer to people and I think people are thriving for that I'll give one more example that's crazy so I and this is two example of two things one I started my podcast it was

[43:33] an interview show and it was just me interviewing people about areas of their life to optimize and it was great I loved it and then a few things happened I was like gosh sometimes I couldn't find a guest that I thought could match the level of depth I've gone on something so when we bought a fractional home we bought like an eighth of a vacation home from a company called Picasso I was like I wonder what all the different ways there are to buy a vacation home I was like I wanted to talk to someone who's researched time shares you know vacation clubs the inspirado pass everything I couldn't

[44:03] find a single person that had done more research than me and I was like crap I can't do this episode and I was like What if I just do the episode no guess because I've already done all the research so I did that episode and I was like I should do this more so then I started doing solo episodes and then I was going on a trip to London and I was like I haven't been to London since and I have this maybe embarrassing but I have this memory of walking around London with a disc man with Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill and I thought I was so cool uh whatever age I

[44:31] was and I was like I don't know anything about London clearly because that's that was my last experience as a child so I found someone online this woman Jess Dante who has a channel Called Love in London and it's she's like she makes travel guides you can download them you can buy them she's like makes all this content I was like do you want to record an episode about London and like everything someone needs to know about planning a trip to London she's like that'd be fun so I did that so then I met this guy who I had on the Pod talking about travel because he is like

[44:58] this really well-known travel blogger he's written lots of guidebooks and we did another one on Iceland now I want to go to Iceland but I didn't have a trip planned and at the end of that episode I was like God I want to go to Iceland so bad like and this guy knows he's been to every restaurant every Hotel every uh guest house every Fjord head he spent six months and saw everything he wrote like four lonely planets for Iceland and at by the end of the episode I was like I want to go on the trip you just told us to all go on and he and he was like

[45:25] why don't we just go on it and then we were like what if we just invite people to go on it so now in March next year we're going to Iceland this guy Brandon who knows everything about Iceland is hosting the trip all the best guides and tour companies he's met in his you know years of going to Iceland almost a decade are going to be leading the experiences and everything so we're going to take in all the hacks members trip to isil that like I would never have thought of that it kind of organically came up over time but that's the kind of cool stuff that I want to

[45:53] build in a membership that is different than what I think the average patreon is doing what it does is it builds like those people who are going to go on those that Iceland trip are going to be loyal to you for the for the rest of their lives whether you're whether you're trying to do it or not um you know be it the person who's getting a thousand dollars a year for for doing very little like they're they're gonna see a new all the hacks episode and pop up and they're just gonna be like yeah of course I'm listening to this that's my boy right like it's about reverse engineering

[46:28] That's my boy that's my girl whatever right I think it's really easy to follow other creators and just like kind of copy what they're doing and be like oh this person's doing a subscription I should do a subscription this person's doing a paid substack I should do a paid sub stack but it's really hard to be like how do I just cram as much value as possible to people and just like follow your curiosity to what you think that they're gonna want and just kind of test test get their feedback iterate yeah get feedback is a big thing we did a survey and I was like how do I make sure

[46:58] podcast listeners fill out a survey right it's very it's a lot to get a podcast listener to do anything they're like maybe they're on a run so I'm like I create this URL all the hacks.com survey and then I said okay here's what I'm gonna do my audience Loves Travel points miles so I was like I'm gonna personally transfer 10 000 Capital One points to anyone who takes to someone who takes the survey and then I also cashed in some points for two United uh tickets anywhere in North America Caribbean Hawaii and I was like I'm gonna pick someone that fills out the survey and they're gonna get two free

[47:31] tickets on United someone else is gonna get some Capital One points I reached out to some sponsors Fiori's like we're gonna give a hundred dollar gift card to someone now all of a sudden there's like tangible things you could win from taking a short survey and I didn't ask people what do you want me to do I was like what are you passionate about what are you excited about like what do you know questions to try to really get it get at it and that was kind of what inspired some of this people like I love traveling I love unique experiences and I was like ooh people want to travel and

[47:58] get unique experiences yeah I could interview you someone and talk about how they set it up or if we just gave it to them and so I could see a world where I don't know 2025 there might be 10 all the hack strips I might not go on all of them but you could be 100 certain that the person leading each one of those is gonna be so dialed in to create the most unique experience get the best deal like and make it just a once in a lifetime trip to that place and I think listeners gave me some of these ideas but you've got to get that

[48:27] feedback whether you're on Twitter whether on email the platform doesn't matter but if you can find out what really gets the people in your audience going and you can build products and services around that and not be afraid to test things out I yesterday so I may I'm a nerd people have haven't picked that up if you're not listening uh and I like credit card points so I made this crazy spreadsheet where I put like 50 credit cards in what they earn in all the categories and I put how much money I spend in every category and as you checked the credit cards it would go in

[48:57] and say which one has the best earning for each category how many points will I earn and it tells you at the end based on the one to 15 credit cards you picked how many points per dollar am I earning you know it's like if you have the AmEx gold now your grocery is getting four points per dollar uh and I was like talked about it so I was like can you share that with me and I was like I don't know it took me a lot of time so I put online I created a convertkit like product page and I said pay whatever you want a dollar like any if any I spent

[49:24] enough time on this that if you don't think it's worth a dollar fine like don't don't buy it we have like 100 people buy us buy like a Google sheet you know like so uh and if you remember I was like just log in and I put a link right here in the member dashboard so like by the way I love that model by the way the pay which you want model it's the I call it the the Radiohead In Rainbows model I'm guessing that's like an album they sold for whatever you wanted to pay it must have been in like 2004 like the peak of

[49:51] pirating music Radiohead was like go to this website download this album for free but download it from us and if you like the album how about you pay something and they did an analysis at the end what the average person paid the average person paid like seven or eight dollars and when you look at that versus you know what they were selling the album what they would have sold the album for which I think was like 9.99 like they actually made more money because they got more distribution free distribution it didn't go through some Network and go through it so they were stoked I love that yeah the only thing that I think is

[50:30] crazy is that one person I I was looking through we had all these sales the person who paid the most paid 100 but the membership is ninety nine dollars so I emailed them and I was like you could have gotten this for free if you became a member so like let's just get you into membership like yeah but that's such a smart it's actually I don't know who that was but that's actually such a smart way to get on your radar like if you want to get on some busy person's radar and they have like uh pay what you want thing pay as much as you can yeah

[50:58] I've heard of people that did this for maybe it was huberman lab or uh maybe it was the founders podcast but they were like we have this Pro tier where you could pay anything and someone just like it was like are it's ten dollars a month or 100 a year and someone just paid ten thousand dollars I think it was huberman lab because they fund research and so it was like a little bit of a non-profit-y kind of angle and it was just like had they put a premium tier of 500 they would have never seen you know what it could have been uh and this person was like I'm

[51:32] gonna pay ten thousand dollars that's what I wish I can do on Twitter subscriptions on Twitter subscriptions you have to set the amount you want to get paid big Miss Elon Musk yeah like big big Miss stripe actually has a way to do pay is what you want but not on a recurring basis that's right I mean stripe has a way to do it they just don't have a UI like they have these cool payment links but they can't do pay what you want on a recurring basis and I'm sure someone could teach me how to I mean literally it would be probably a very simple line of code but you just

[52:00] like type a number in and it generates a new thing but I'm not there yet Chachi petite could probably write it for me I think pay what you want is is the new bad to cart because in our world in the Creator world because when you build all this Goodwill with communities you're gonna get a bunch of whales spend a lot of money yeah the thing that I want to figure out I don't know no one I haven't seen anyone you gave me this example with Radiohead and maybe maybe it'll just work so maybe I'll test this next but what I wanted was get it for

[52:33] free and then pay what you want after because I want it's hard when you're giving someone something that they don't know what the experience is like to get them to even know what it would be worth you're like what is this spreadsheet Worth to me I don't know so the way I did it was I made a loom video and I walked through it all and I was like here's exactly how it works but what I wanted was like it's almost like a tip at a restaurant it's like off your card and and like we know you're committed to pay something and then a day later we

[53:01] say like do you wanna you know what do you want to pay or or it's like what do you you know from one to five stars would you rate this and like five stars is this amount of money four stars is this amount of money I like that I've seen some that say like the average people pay this like on average people pay this right but I just think there's there's not a good easy way to do the payment after the fact that's right it's almost like pay a dollar and then I'm gonna hit you up and ask you if you want to pay more later uh because I really

[53:31] only want you to pay me tickets you can't say pay a dollar it has to be you have to remove all the friction you have to yeah yeah and and you just have to trust that people I'll try it try it I got I got so many different spreadsheets and notion boards that I that I've like researched something on uh someone you're sitting on a gold mine dude you're literally sitting on a gold mine so we'll see stay tuned for round two of all of these updates so before we bounce I asked you a lot of questions do you have one question for me one one how uh

[54:07] so I want to get your take on something that I'm dealing with which is I have this podcast there's a lot of great content I've decided that each time I do a podcast on a topic I'm going to translate that to a newsletter version of it and I feel like newsletter and podcast I have down and I am awful at you like creating any value for anyone on let's call it just for the scope of this since I only get one question you know social I feel like you understand that world like what should I be doing should I just ignore it and focus on the

[54:42] platforms that are feel natural or am I totally missing out on things I think my instinct is I hate repurposing like I don't think people want to watch a clip of a podcast as much as they want to watch something that's natively made for that platform but at the same time that's just like 10x the work so am I crazy for not clipping my show and putting it on social am I more crazy if I pay someone to do that because I always see these tweets about how profitable all like the same people are like hey use my clipping Agency for five thousand dollars a month it's amazing

[55:15] are the same people that are like I love running this clipping agency that's a 90 margin business so on the clipping agency bit by the way we looked at buying some of the bigger clip clip agencies and what we learned was their churn is so so high okay and their turn is so high because people don't see results like their cell is hey take this podcast like you're Chris you're already doing a podcast we'll just clip it up you'll have to do no work we're gonna put some Alex hermosi style like captions on it and you're you know you'll be at a hundred thousand YouTube subscribers in six

[55:49] months you try it and it doesn't work and and I've been guilty of this too like I've tried it and it doesn't work my take on short clips is specifically with podcasts but it extends to other areas too is the era of repurposing Clips is basically over unless you have a crazy huge guess like a Tim Ferriss not worth it on if I were you like if you you know you look at me like I I get I don't know 10 to 50 million tweet Impressions every single month and it's not even that that's all a lot of Impressions it is but the important part is I could use I could

[56:29] share links like I I haven't checked but I probably I probably send 50 to 100 000 visits per month at least to different things that I am trying to promote via my podcast my email newsletter products that I want to sell and like to me I look at your Twitter and it's like I I can't I I honestly can't believe given that you're like who you are and what you've done and they've built social products in the past like that you you you have such a graveyard and you have so much content that you can all you have to do is figure out how to put it in two lines or one-line

[57:09] bangers or long form threads now it literally like you probably you probably if I were you what I would do is I would find a writing partner maybe it's your wife maybe someone else just get them to ask you questions and go through a bunch of old newsletters and interviews and just try to how can I write these ideas in one line and just try to have like a thousand of them and just have a thousand one-liners and then what I would do is I'd probably take 20 of them or or a third of them and create images specifically for those one-line bangers to explain the points

[57:49] better and also because the Twitter algorithm favors images right now but like like infographicy kind of images not like a random stock photo no infographically like images that actually are cool and interesting to look at that also help support and explain the idea that you're trying to get across and if you did that like look at you know people who who's done that in the past like people like Jack butcher I don't know if you know who that is you know his his whole thing is visualize value here's a community called visualize value and he would do these black and white images daily on Twitter and Instagram or almost daily

[58:24] and like during the pandemic went from like zero to 200 000 followers like pretty consistently and it was just because you took complex ideas he boiled it down to a simple concept and used an image to explain it and that's exactly what you can be doing with all the hacks in your personal brand I love it it's funny because I know a guy named Brian feraldi who does this in investing and I love his content and I'm like he's great I was chatting with him on Twitter today he's awesome and you could easily yeah okay that that's that's what you should be doing um there's a higher likelihood that that

[58:58] person that's excited to help with a project like this listens to your show than mine so if that's you reach out to me Chris at Chris hutchins.com Chris is at all the hacks.com hit him up also good idea on the on the podcast survey if you're listening to this just DM me on Twitter what what you hate about this podcast and what you like about it and what and what would be a cool experience to do with you what am I missing what if someone's not on Twitter you got to give them more ways to get in front of you maybe your audience is all on Twitter I think my

[59:28] audience is like very much not on Twitter or you could uh comment on the YouTube on YouTube I read all the comments comment on this video um where can people find all the hacks and your whole empire that you're building all the hacks search it here search it online go to all the hacks.com fortunately I think that the name is a double-edged sword people love it it's exciting and brands are like I don't know if I want to be around that brand but uh for now that's a brand it's easy to find love it thanks Chris all right thanks for having me

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