Nathan Barry is a designer and author who has recently become fascinated with building and launching products. In the show he discusses marketing, self-publishing, and any other topic related to building a profitable online business and living a great life!
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Look at it. I know it helps other people, so I've helped other people set it up. For me, I sort of need to feel anything I post on Twitter. I've really written right then. I don't have a backlog of content. I have no idea what my newsletters are gonna be about next week. I haven't looked at it. I write 2 newsletters a week. No clue what's gonna them. And for some people, that's really terrifying. For me, that's the only way I can do it. Some people. Right? Like, I literally I can't you could not pay me any amount of money to sit down. I'm gonna Thursday and write my newsletter for Friday. It's just I can't do it. I can't bring myself to do it. And I'm really struggling with writing my book for this exact reason. Oh, it's gonna be published in January 2025 not gonna sit down until, like, October of 2024 if it's up to me or something like that. It's not gonna work. Yeah. They don't know that. Hopefully, they're not listening. Yeah. Exactly. I'm gonna get in trouble now. But I think you need to figure out where you are on the spectrum of those two ends and and figure out what works for because what works for me or Nathan might not work for you. Me having an Excel spreadsheet of this stuff, I'm just not gonna look at it. I I have team now who's fortunate to have them here. Blake runs all of kind of operations of my general ecosystem. And he's helped me bring some level of kind of rigor to how I think about these things in a plan and an approach but it's had to really mold into how I view the world because otherwise I get overwhelmed really easily, and it just kinda makes me lock up. I kinda go into turtle mode and just wanna shrink within my shell. So Yeah. Yeah. Different methods. I'm on the other side where my spreadsheet actually tells me how many months it's been since I last posted. It's also it's it it has to fit into what you do. You have a day job running a big company as a CEO, and so you can't spend time every single day writing. And so you might need to have that system in place to make sure that you're still able to grow your creator ecosystem and have the cadence of putting things out. For me, This is what I do. The platform and brand drives everything else within my ecosystem. So Yep. I need to figure out what works. One advantage of building this library of content And whichever structure you take, if you go back and look at everything you've written and you have a way of resurfacing that, it might be things that you rewrite or whatever else, but you'll find
At this point, summits have been a thing that have come and gone for a lot of people. Like, it was a really cool thing. They're less common. And so we said, like, well, what if we tried this and we call it the traditional skills summit? We had a 101,000 people join the summit, which was huge. So, essentially, we launched our company with a 101,000 people on our mailing list. Hey. So today, I got stuck to Daryl Vesterfelt who is a long time friend and helped grow ConvertKit in our craziest growth times. He led our whole growth team and all that. So I think we grew from a 100,000 a month when he joined to 5, $600,000 a month in just over a year. And it was completely wild. So he's one of the best marketers right now. He's spent a ton of time in different industries whether it's b to b or software or course launches or all that. He's just been around a long time. And now he's fully immersed in this homesteading world. And so you get to hear about his background there. We get to talk about actually, probably the most interesting thing is how we took a summit, which is an idea that's I mean, they've been around a lot in online marketing. Probably less popular now. And he just took that that summit and and executed it at an incredible level. He had over a 100,000 registrants for the summit and basically launched a whole business off of it. So I think you'll enjoy the episode, and let's dive in. Daryl, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's good to see you. It is so good to see you. We're gonna hang out in person because you're gonna come for Craft and Commerce, to Boise and stay on the farm, which is gonna be a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to it. The I the person speaking of farms, like, years ago, well, you and I built a software company together, a little thing called ConvertKit. For anyone who doesn't know, Daryl was instrumental. We hear from what? A 100,000 to 500,000 in MRR in 12 months?
Summer. Yeah. For us, it was actually pretty simple, and it was cutthroat in a way. It was, like, kinda straightened my face. Obviously, COVID had, you know, caused this to have significant growth and then post COVID just like you look at on in Netflix and even YouTube viewership, it slowed down. We slowed down as well and so did our customers. So as we slowed down and we started to churn a lot of the customers we gained during COVID because it was not ideal ICP. When COVID happened, of course, it fast forwarded a lot of demand that pulled it forward. Right? But what also happened is we got a lot of brick and mortars and, like, orchestras and symphonies, which we would never get. Prior to COVID. They were not your professional creator. They were these in person ticket sales one time events. But they had to reach their audience. So they came running during COVID to sign up. The moment things opened up, they were like, we're leaving, So which made sense. And that caused the slowdown in the business. And when that happened, Okay. Now we gotta reaccelerate the business. We gotta grow the business. So we've hired all these folks to do these different things, and we've hired head of product, etcetera. We need to build product but wait a second. I've, for the last 2 years, been more disconnected from the customers than I used VIA used to take up so many sales calls and escalation calls and customer success calls, but now I'm more disconnected So where are we going? Where's our road map? What's our 3 year road map? What's our 2 year? What's our vision? All these things that was always kinda back of mind for me now needs to be implemented again, and I'm not that close to the customer. So I need to start reconnecting myself too. Because there's no doubt if you're close to the customer, you're hearing things. Every single call tells you something. Right. You know, you just read in between the line and you find patterns. You hear ten things
Much by the time I'm this many years old and when the site is, you know, you have to. Like, you kinda set these goals for yourself. And then I would hit them, and I'd be like, So I think I I think I just quit now. Like, I didn't have Right. I didn't have, like, an after plan. I just had this number, and it was so hard to get there. When I got there, I was like, now what? Like, I just did it. I don't know. Now what? So it's always make a make a plan for after people if you do actually hit your goals because that was a little bit of, like, a shock moment for me where I had to reevaluate all of my all of my goals. What's an example of one of those goals and then, like, what you ended up doing afterwards? I just moved the goal post honestly. That's that's that's what I keep doing every single time. Every goal that we pit, every benchmark that we task, we take a minute and I sit on it and I reflect back and I look at what it took to get us where we are, the things that were worth it and the things that work worth it and where we wanna go next, but I think it's good to have benchmarks. Even if you don't have the backup plan ahead of time, because when you hit them, it's it's always forced me into a period of reflection and a period of pause and saying, okay. This is where we are. This is how we got here. It's absolutely unbelievable and weird and hilarious, and I just let myself be filled with all of the gratitude of hitting that accomplishment and, you know, the team that is now that we have built that has got us to that point and the audience that has supported us through this journey and feeling the gratitude for the business really is the most, like, reinvigorating part because it's hard and it's exhausting and it's a lot of work. And to be able to stop and sit with it for a minute is really awesome before, you know, we set our sights on on the next thing. I think that's something that my wife and I realized Maybe 3 or 4 years ago that were really bad at, like, celebrating. And recognizing. Yes. Like, that that moment to pause and reflect. And so now we make sure to at least
You want to receive positive signals from your subscribers and reduce the amount of negative signals that you're receiving. So some positive signals are opening the message that you send, clicking, responding to your message. That's actually a really big one. So getting your subscribers to reply to your emails is really, really great, adding you to their safe senders list or address book. If your message did land in their spam folder, if they mark it as not spam or move it out of spam, that's a huge positive signal. So those are all the good things that you want to see from your subscribers. In this episode, I talked to Alyssa Dulin who is the head of deliverability for ConvertKit. So if you've heard around that ConvertKit has amazing deliverability, which is absolutely true. And, you know, you hear a lot of creators talking on Twitter about how when they switched to ConvertKit, their open rates went up, their engagement went up, and that's because of the hard work that Alissa does behind the scenes. So in this episode, we talk about what professional creators need to know about deliverability, how the industry actually works, the semi secret organizations that exist behind the scenes. And then we even dive into a really fun new project kind of behind the scenes of what actually announced today when we're recording it and will have been maybe out for a couple of weeks by the time this episode airs. Well, behind the scenes is the deliverability and compliance side of how this secret new project is working. So there's a ton of stuff. Alisa is seriously the best in the industry. She leads the industry podcast on this and everything else. So you've ever wondered about deliverability. This is the episode for you. Alisa, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I was just on your podcast about deliverability, which is the key industry podcast about deliverability. I hear our creators reference it all the time. And then what's the most fun is when like the rest of the people in the industry reference it. I love the fact that you're out there.
