00:06
Well, let's go ahead and kick things off.
00:09
How do you think about audience building? And and what does your audience mean to you, Sean?
00:14
Oh,
00:15
wow. Emotional question. How do I think about it? I think about it like
00:20
I don't really think about it. It's the byproduct of what I do. So
00:24
the way the way I,
00:26
approached it was after I sold my company, I said, alright.
00:30
I could do whatever I want now. So, like, hey, time to face the tough question. What do I actually wanna do? What do I actually care about in my life? Well, and and I that was where big questions, I kinda scared me. So then I I I trimmed it down. I said, alright. Well, how do I just wanna spend my days? What would be a normal
00:46
will be a great day that I could do every day. And, the thing that came to me was, like,
00:52
the thing I enjoy doing the most is just getting curious. I I'm I'm generally very curious about things. And if I have to, like, go do work and then put those on the side and hopefully get to them when I get to them, that seemed like, that was not great. But if I could just make my work that I could just be curious about these things, whether it's crypto or it's audience building or some new science tech thing or it's, you know, where the hell, you know, do peanuts grow on trees are from the ground. I I don't know. Let me go find out. Right? Like, whatever it is, I was like, I wanna be professionally curious.
01:21
Alright. Well, that's cool. The curious part's easy. How do you be professionally curious? Well, one way was, let me turn that curiosity into content. So I'll take these questions that I'm I wanna, you know, go look into. And then I just gotta package up my learnings at the end and share them with others. Alright. Cool. That'll make it more fun for me
01:38
And it'll turn into something that actually generates a bunch of income, which will let me just do this all the time. That was my thought process. So audience building and content was just a kind of a necessary means to an end or a byproduct of the main thing I wanted to do, which was just be professional and curious, be able to wake up and just dive into the thing that's most on my mind that day and have no other restrictions beyond that.
02:04
Yeah. I mean, I think that
02:06
building an audience is a lot like making money, especially in the year two thousand and twenty two, which is that you have to provide something that doesn't exist and then people will commoditize it with their attention or, you know, if you're a business and you're building you're trying to get revenue. So with the way that I build my show and the way that I consistently think about building and getting more audience is just to continue to fill niches. You started out filling one particular niche built niches and niches and niches, put an underlying philosophy that gourds that and then continue to try and build more on top of that, which just results in overall top line figure that continues to go up. Yeah. I actually don't think it's really that complicated as a concept. It's just incredibly complicated to execute,
02:47
which is why not a lot of people do it. And there's really, you know, not that many people at the very, very, very top of the game and why, you know, in the whole influencer market, all returns are exponential. Both, you know, the top point o one percent of podcasts
03:00
get just so many more downloads than even the top one percent of podcasts. Like, what I figured, when I found out what even in the top one percent. I was like, wait, like, twenty thousand downloads. I mean, how can you I was like, I don't even know how you make a living, for something like that. And then, you know, you compare that to what the top ten are. So I think that execution
03:18
is harder than every anything else in this game, probably exactly the same as business. I mean, it sounds easy to fill a niche. But actually doing that, doing on a consistent basis over years and years through changing
03:29
conditions, you know, changing market conditions for business changing information environment, for somebody who's in the content game, that's where the skill, all comes to play. Like, simple, simple, not easy. Right? It could be simple what the the answer is, but not necessarily easy.
03:44
Like, we did this,
03:45
like, get away, like, this getaway where we're gonna play basketball with a bunch of interesting people the people that came was mister Beast, the number one YouTuber in the world. So he, you know, he knows a thing or two about audience building. And it's like, if you talk to him, You're like, hey, you know,
03:59
awesome. What's the what's the what's the secret? What's the trick for getting huge on YouTube? But he's like, he's like, I just wanna make the best YouTube videos possible. Make great videos. And we're like, okay. Yeah. But, like, yeah, how'd you do it? How'd you become number one? He's like, I just try to make great videos. Every day I just wake up, and I'm like, alright, what's a great video? How do I make that? And it's, like,
04:18
simple, not easy in the sense that, like, he he didn't over complicate. Okay. Well, what makes a great video? Something they your attention, something that holds your attention, something that, you know, makes you feel something at the end, you know, laughter or, you know, feel good moment or outrage, whatever it is. You could choose.
04:33
And either you could break it down from there and add a little more detail. But, fundamentally, you're not gonna get some answer that's like, damn,
04:40
I never thought of that. Right. Wow. They had this insight. That's just not it wasn't available to me. And and now that I have this insight, now I I too can go succeed. It's like, the best the people who are the best do the simple thing just better than everybody else.
04:55
Totally. Is is make great content? Is that really kind of the
04:59
the bottom line here, if you were to say, like, what separates that top one percent the seller was mentioning from the other ninety nine percent? Is it as simple as just make great content? Or
05:10
Yes. Okay.
05:11
Well, you you went through YC. Right? Although, you you guys were were you in YC? Yeah. We did. Yes. Yeah. What what's the YC motto? Right. YC, the greatest startup accelerator in the world, Bardnon, has the greatest track record, created almost half a trillion dollars of value of the companies that went through it. What's the secret?
05:27
Make something people want is their motto.
05:31
Just try to hey. Start up. Don't get distracted by fundraising and press and all these other things that you could drive growth hacks. Are you making something people want?
05:40
Of course. Really?
05:42
You know, tell me, how do you know? What what what gives you that feeling? And then they started, like, I don't know. I just kinda sort of assumed I was. It sounds so simple that sort of assumed I was already doing that. Same thing with content or audience building. Are you making content that people want? Right? That's the that's the thing. It's not just make great content. It's make content that people want. That's what great content is. When he talked about picking niches and then figuring out how to serve that niche, that's what he's doing. Making content that people want in that category and then doing it better than than others and doing it consistently so they build a habit, etcetera, etcetera. I completely agree. Yeah. I mean, I get approached by a lot of people. Hey, will this light do it for me? Will this camera? I'm like, camera's not your problem, bro. I'm like, your content's problem. I'm like, make my eyes look good. Everything falls up than that. You know, I recently spent sixty thousand dollars on cameras, and that's after three years of doing this. But meeting four k cameras was an added benefit for my existing audience, not what I needed for a requisite to start. Like, sure, there's the baseline level of production I think a pop filter,
06:40
like a yeti, USB mic, and a basic webcam.
06:43
It has not high startup cost. And everybody's like, what about my thumbnails? What about my listen, thumbnails matter, headlines matter, all of that other stuff matters, etcetera. But what Sean is talking about, which is that All mister Beast does is he knows exactly how to rank a retention,
06:58
thumbnail, all of that, stack it all on top of each other, iterate it a million times and then come up with the quote unquote secret sauce. He has the exact same YouTube dashboard that I have that all of us have of that that you're access to. He just figured out how to read it better than anybody else. So I always say, is the content good? That's my number one concern. Is it good? Is it compelling? And that as he said. It's simple. It's not easy. You know, at a certain point, it it is strange. Like, it is really one of those, like, you know it when you see it. I can listen to somebody and be like, that's compelling. And I can listen to someone who's like, I don't know what it is, man. This needs work. Right. And and it it's tough to exactly explain what that is.
07:37
Yeah. We we listened to a a session on product led growth yesterday, and it was almost like everybody was kinda like, well, what's what's the hack? What's the tactic? What's the secret? And our speakers were very simply like, well, you need an a plus
07:50
product in order to have any sort of product led growth. And I feel like the the principle stands stands true for any form of, of audience growth as well.
07:59
Now both of you have pretty distinct,
08:01
personal brands as well as like a a business brand that you're you're both independently
08:07
growing either on accident or on purpose.
08:10
How do you think about
08:13
the sort of
08:14
brand building as a as a company as an entity versus personal brand building. Do you have any heuristics or or ways of thinking about it, soccer?
08:22
You know, the way that you kind of use your own Twitter versus, like, right,
08:26
breaking points? Yeah. That's interesting.
08:28
So from a business, obviously, it has to be whenever and, Sean, you you too. You're, like, you're in a partnership. Right? So this is inherently not something that you have total and a hundred percent free to month. So whenever I'm doing something under the BP umbrella or, you know, business or hiring. It's not necessarily just a reflection of me. It's a reflection of the ethos and the principles that we decided that we were gonna grow on. Mutually agree on together,
08:49
re you know, within that framework, everything is being branded, is being used. That's a reflection of us, of our philosophy, etcetera.
08:57
On my personal brand, to be honest, I just have a lot less
09:01
capacity for,
09:03
care. I have guys, like, if I'm interested in it, I'm just gonna explore it. I've I frankly am at a level where I can do that if I want to. And if people have owned me, I'm sick. I literally don't care. You know, instagram. You know how hard it was at the Sondra to find find tweets that I'm able to show. Yeah. I was like, I was a little scared whenever you lived, you were like, I was like, oh, man. I was earn a piss off at the audience. But, I mean, that's fine. You know, I'm used to it, in this line of work. And that's kind of what I'm what I'm getting at, which is that there the business has an orientation, which is a, make money, b perpetuate itself. For me, personally, I mean, obviously, my personal brand, I probably thought about this very, very differently. Whenever I was younger, And I was like, on the up and up. But at this level, I actually just do whatever I want to do. And so that is the, like, the only dichotomy between the two.
09:48
How do you think about it, Sean?
09:50
So what kind of answer would be interesting to you here? What what's, like, the
09:54
like, because I try to figure out what's the question behind the question? So so the question, the surface question is, like, what's the difference between your your pod brand and your personal brand? But what is the question behind that? The question behind that here, let let me start with the problem. So the problem is that audience building as a brand is hard. It's hard
10:13
to, create affinity when it's it's not,
10:16
coming from a human face.
10:19
And,
10:20
people often find at least in in the folks that I've I've chatted with.
10:26
E even personal, honestly, demand curves Twitter has has been difficult to grow,
10:31
versus like, you know, personal, like individuals as, like, Julian, for example, has a much easier time with this with his growth than than we do as a co company account. So, yeah, the question behind the question, that's a great question, Sean.
10:43
Is,
10:44
you know, how how ought to
10:47
Like, how how should startups and companies be thinking about,
10:51
audience audience building when they have,
10:54
yeah. But they haven't got, like, the personal brand. And they're No. I understand. No. I understand. Yeah. The question really is, like, what am I doing wrong here with demand curve? Hey, but but more generally speaking, like, I don't know the it's I I haven't cracked this nut. What's the difference? I've I've noticed personal brands are easier to grow, but I also I do I want my company thing to grow. Blah blah blah. I think that here here's my, like, very simple slash controversial take on this, which is I think if you're a company,
11:20
You should be using individual faces to grow. You'll go you'll go faster that way. If you're an individual trying to grow, like, a media property, you
11:29
should
11:30
put it under a brand umbrella,
11:32
mostly because you can't ever sell you.
11:35
So, like, if you wanted this to be an asset and not a job, you needed to grow its own brand. Like, you need breaking points or, like, in my case, like, I had a personal newsletter and a personal Twitter that grew really fast. I grew my personal Twitter from like, ten or twenty thousand followers to it's at three hundred thousand in, like, a year, basically, a year and a half. In a year, we got to two hundred thousand, then it just trickled up.
11:58
But, like, great. What am I gonna do with that? I'm, I don't really wanna be some, like, influencer.
12:04
And,
12:05
And great. Like, you know, I can't hand this off to anybody. It's my voice, it's my name, it's my face.
12:10
So it's a job. Now I need to maintain this thing. And it's cool because, like, I just don't get, like, I'm, like, sorry. I just don't care. So I'll go six weeks without tweeting because I'm not trying to maintain some schedule. This is not a business of mine. But when I created the milk road, it's intentionally not called Sean's crypto newsletter, which actually would have been easier at the start to get subscribers for because people already had bought into the Sean franchise. So going for, oh, Sean is gonna talk about crypto and do crypto analysis and crypto opinions. Great. I wanna know about that. But instead, I called it the milk road because I thought one day, I'd like to not be the guy riding this thing. One day, I'd like to not be the person maybe even owning this thing. I'd like to sell this someday.
12:48
I want this to be an independent asset. And so for that, again, me as an independent, me, like, content creator, I created a brand umbrella for those reasons. But let's say it was my startup, I would be saying, hey, I'm Sean, the growth guy from Bebo.
13:02
And I wanna talk about growth over here, not the Bebo account doing it because it's gonna get less play,
13:08
because people would rather follow people than, than companies. And so you gotta use You bake that trade off when you're already a company,
13:16
then use the fact that people would rather follow people. If you're an individual,
13:21
you take a little hit by putting it under a brand umbrella, but you get this big benefit of it's not tied to your name and face forever that way. So it's a strategic bet. That's my my opinion on this. Yeah.
13:32
Well, that's super helpful. And it kinda points to the problem that we originally had a demand curve where so much of our brand equity was tied up in Julian's brand equity.
13:41
And so, you know, being able to build that up under a new brand has certainly been something that,
13:47
you know, we've done over the last last couple of years. So that's super helpful.
13:51
Okay. We, yeah, let's go ahead and and, start to repeat that tweet segment,
13:56
here. Let's
13:58
we're we're gonna experiment
14:00
with screen sharing for the first time.
14:04
See how this goes.
14:06
And, yeah, both of y'all the the idea here is for both of y'all to just re react to the tweet. What were you thinking when you tweeted it out? Why do you think it took off? Why did it work?
14:16
And, yeah, any other context that you think we would find interesting
14:21
I wonder what percentage of these. I'm just gonna be like, I have no idea what I was thinking.
14:26
I don't know. You've got that stupid.
14:28
These these are bangers only. So hopefully, hopefully you remember.
14:33
Sean,
14:33
you you did this hot take about everybody being wrong about the metaverse. Obviously, it was a very hot topic at the time when he did this. What can you what can you tell us about this?
14:43
Well, I'll tell you kind of like okay. I'll tell you my point in a second, but, like, I guess that's a little less interesting even than just the,
14:52
what made this work? So this thing reached, I think, I don't know the exact stats. I think it's like sort of, like, some between ten and twenty million people in the US, but then it also was it got shared, like, crazy on Instagram. And it could share it in China, like, some big Chinese, like, social media influencers were posting it, I guess. So he got, like, millions of views there. Logan Paul was talking about on his podcast. Mark Zuckerberg referenced this in a Lex Freeman interview. So, like, really far. And I was like, why did this go so far? And I think it was because it basically had three things.
15:18
Number one, it was timely. So this was right when Facebook had rebranded to Meta. People were talking about the metaverse. And I think everybody had this, like,
15:27
six sense that it's still the sort of, like, you know, sneaking suspicion that everybody's bullshitting about this.
15:33
But, like, nobody knew it was all smart people and big names that were were saying how the meta versus the future, but nobody was saying what the hell the metaverse is or why it's the future. And so, like, I think everybody kinda smell bullshit, but didn't know how to call it.
15:45
So it was timely. I was calling bullshit, which is generally is, like, something people are gonna wanna click into and read. And then last thing was I think I backed it up. I think I had a good point that could get you to
15:56
agree with my my my conspiracy theory, if, so to speak, was not so far fetched. And and basically what all I was saying was, like, when people hear the word Metiverse, they think about this, like, virtual reality shit, like, I'm living in some thing. I'm a avatar now.
16:09
And I said, actually, I think it's more like this concept called the singularity, which is an an artificial intelligence, which is like this moment in time, this tipping point, where computers, you know, have reached a superintelligence, and they're so vastly smarter than than than humans, and they they are so smart. They just program themselves to become it's like runaway intelligence. Program themselves to become smarter. And so,
16:30
I thought, oh, the metaverse is kinda like that. It's basically this tipping point where,
16:35
Well, a lot of my friends are online now. I I think I have this experience. Maybe you guys do. Look at this, like, experience we're having now. A lot of my work is now digital.
16:45
My social identity, like, my profiles, my followers are all digital.
16:49
You know, my if you buy NFTs, cool. So my art is now digital. More and more things, more import more things that are important to you are now, like, they live on the internet. And so at some point, all of your digital stuff matters to you more and you spend more time and energy and focus there than you do in your physical. That doesn't mean you'll never go eat or walk or exercise or anything like that. That's not what it it just means, like, sort of there's a tipping point where before rewind twenty years,
17:15
it it didn't matter. Like, you know, I had a computer room in my house.
17:19
That was, like, you know, there was a computer room and everything else was non computer.
17:23
And now, like, you know,
17:24
the computers attached to my body, basically, Right? So it's like you've seen this transition already. It's just gonna continue. And so, hey, don't think it's this crazy virtual world. It's just this tipping point where at some point we've been creeping towards it, creeping towards At some point, we're just gonna value our digital stuff more than we do. Our physical in the sense that we're gonna spend more time and energy and effort and money on on the internet than we do offline.
17:46
That was the idea. So that's that's my explain this tweet.
17:51
Super helpful, man.
17:53
It it was surprising to me, during your podcast with Hudson Manage
17:57
that he was he he was genuinely triggered by the suite.
18:01
It it affected him, like, an identity level.
18:04
Yeah. He called me. He was like, hey, can I call you? I don't know the guy, by the way. I didn't know him before this. He's like,
18:11
he he had followed me from one other tweet that went viral about clubhouse. And he then he call he called me and he's like,
18:16
Bro, I, like, I do stand up comedy and real crowds with real people. That energy that is my home. That is my craft. That is my favorite feeling in the world.
18:26
And, like,
18:27
god, I don't want this, like, you know, metaverse bullshit. Like, you know,
18:32
and, yeah, talk me through it. And I was, like, I don't know what to tell you about. I I think it's going in that direction. I don't think, you know, I remember
18:39
I remember people being like, I I love waking up, getting the newspaper, bringing it in from my front lawn, and the feel of the newspaper. Right? And, like,
18:48
it's true. You you probably did like that thing. But guess what you liked more was, like, instant real time news constantly flooding into your brain. Turns out that that was more addictive.
18:58
That, like, you know, being able to get news from all these different sources rather than just your local provider, that turned out to be really important. Being able to access it on the go on your phone turned out, that wasn't really important. And so, yeah, you like the feel of it, but there's all these other benefits that, like, ended up crushing that.
19:13
So that was,
19:14
that's what happened after after this tweet. You you contextualized it well. We talked about kind of the benefit of accountability.
19:19
It's a book double edged sword here. We're, you know,
19:23
get the upside and the risk,
19:25
involved in that. Super interesting. Saga,
19:29
Yes. Like I, like I said, challenging to find suites I can share with everybody here.
19:33
But I would love to hear from our
19:39
yeah. Actually, I think your most viral was two days ago.
19:42
I I I just saw that. Yeah. Very cool. What's up there? Yeah. Talk to us about why why did this this tweet work?
19:49
What what is this speaking to? And, like, why do you think this resonated?
19:52
Yeah. I'm actually it's interesting. I kind of pivoted to becoming the gas guy politically.
19:57
This really is really this is purely a function of what I talked about earlier, which is that I If you were to ask me why I think my show is successful, is I think because I cover things in a way that most people feel are not being covered by existing sources of information. That's very basic. Like, Visa statement, that's why I think it does well. I've always noticed that coverage of gas is skewed in a particularly partisan way. So one of the things that I like to do is just highlight basic
20:22
texturize
20:23
them, make that every American has to put into their car on average a couple of times or at the very least, like, once a week, a couple of times a month. So, what did I do there? I said the average American net x amount of money after taxes at five dollars a gallon. That means they're spending approximately ten percent of their take home pay on gas. When you include food and housing, it gives you a picture of how bad things are. That's not a political statement. That's just like a statement about where things are. That got shared. As what I was saying, I mean, people screenshotted it. It was shared on Instagram both ways. It's like, why the, you know, oil companies need to stop profiteering. Here's why Biden needs to start drilling. I mean, you can put it any particular way you want. I mean, in general, my most viral content actually auto just speaks to, more putting out, like, facts and then contextualizing
21:08
them in a way where people feel like they can be used to something that is very meaningful to their life. I'll give you another example. One of my most viral posts recently has been, about mortgages. And it really was just a basic,
21:21
take about, like, hey, in twenty twenty one, you could buy X House price house for this monthly payment. Mortgage's price has now gone up. So now you get less house. Once again, like, you can read that whichever way you want. Like, you can be like, congratulations to your own pal or you can say, screw you, your own pal. Like, you could put it, any particular way. So I think, to pick you back on what Sean is saying. I think timeliness is everything.
21:45
Everything. So timeliness is, you know, timeliness is number one. It has to be timely.
21:51
Number two, it has to be the most viral stuff, I believe, has to be able to resonate with somebody and not tell them how to think, just give them the ability to then form something.
22:01
And then three, I think it's also concise, which is why Twitter is very, very helpful.
22:06
Yeah. That that's great, by the way. This,
22:09
It's like you handed them like a hammer. And you're like, don't beat up whoever you wanna beat up with this information. Exactly. And this could be used on any anybody,
22:17
you know, just Bingo. Use it to serve your agenda, which is, like, kind of the, like, I don't know, cynical take on content creation, which is like, You will blow up faster if you sort of gas up an audience around something that they already have a bias or or belief system of and you feed that. This happens For example, like, it doesn't even have to be political.
22:36
With crypto, this happens all the time, which is like, oh, just be anti the dollar, anti fed anti Warren Buffett, anti whoever, and you just keep feeding information that, like, riles up this Zealous
22:47
crowd that already believes that all they're looking for is, like, they're not looking for real information. They're looking for information that just fits their worldview
22:55
only. And I I don't mean that to pick on them because pretty much everybody does this. And so, you know, everybody's looking for information that feeds their worldview. So one useful way of thinking about it is what worldview do I like and respect and maybe share? What world view do I understand? And then that's the world view that I can serve by producing
23:12
good packaged nuggets because I know what will hit with that audience. And then I I'm I'm focused on that versus just,
23:19
generically producing content and then not really thinking about the worldview that it's gonna go live in.
23:27
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23:30
See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. Hubspot.
23:40
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23:42
A bunch of ways.
23:43
What's the what's the tweet that went viral two days ago? Oh, that was about doctor Fauci. We don't have to get into that one.
23:51
What are we here to do, actually?
23:54
I mean, I'll I'll go into it. I don't care. Sure.
23:58
Well, they'll not to derail your,
24:00
not to be familiar with our question.
24:03
For those who are not familiar with something called the lab leak theory,
24:08
The theory is is that coronavirus
24:10
leaked from a lab. And so the,
24:13
underlying facts and circumstances around this are pretty interesting. The tweet that I did was, again, you know, actually speaks directly to what you just talked about, Sean, which is that if you're unfamiliar with the characters who are involved, there's one particular guy who served as the cutout,
24:29
as so called cutout of funding from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Biology, His name was Doctor. Peter Dazack. He's been intimately involved kind of in the cover up of any facts or evidence around the lab week theory. This was all old news at this point, basically, two years ago that we've known all of this information. Well, you know, doctor Fauci on his waning days,
24:49
as the head of NIAID,
24:51
actually just granted a six hundred thousand dollar grant to the same individual for the same type of research, which possibly led to the the escape of coronavirus from the Wuhan land. That was it. There you go. It's right in front of you.
25:04
Vauci is waning days.
25:07
As you said, like, information. Why do I think it went viral? I mean, that's not difficult because nobody else was reporting it, and millions and millions and millions of people are interested. That's literally just a screenshot from a government website. Like, that's it. By the way, so you,
25:21
you said something like you know, I know a lot of people care about, until, like, I know that the gas issues and, like, a lot of people about that. They don't feel as being adequately covered How do you know that? You're reading YouTube comments to get this information. You're talking to people. We're how are you figuring out both
25:38
what my niche is interested in and then where they where there's a lack of service on that topic? Is it because you're not seeing it? And so you're like, oh, I I am customer, that's how I know, or you do you have some feedback loop? How do you do it? At this point, it's art and science. So I have a general intuition of, like, this is not being caught Also, the reason why I got into gas was because I could see that my segments on inflation were going astronaut, like, traumatic hot. Really, what it is is I did a monologue months and months and months ago. Just it was very basic. I was like, hey, we are gonna have an energy price crisis. This was actually before the entire Russian invasion of Ukraine because we were still having problems in our gas supply. And I was really obsessed, like, why these specific market conditions And it just went mega viral. And I got all these emails from these people being like, hey, man. Like, thank you so much. Like, nobody talks about.
26:25
This, like, heating oil in Vermont and, like, public contracts
26:29
look like, for these things. And, you know, for me and my family, I only make fifty thousand dollars a year. So what to lock in at x price. Like, it really, really hurts. And I was like, well, that's interesting. And so then again, you know, you throw a couple of test segments and you're like, do some segments on it. Each one either consistently performs or does more so than normal. I'm like, okay. Well, clearly, people care a lot about this. And so what I do then is, like, kind of use my insider
26:54
ability as a guy who works in the Washington press corps more to, like, cover it in a professional manner. And I think that was the way that I could discover it. But I also have a general sense of, you know, I work in this media, I work in media I live in DC. I know what the people in power are talking about and obsessed with, and my general orientation has been to bet against whatever that is and cover anything else. And in general,
27:18
that serves me very well. So there you go. That's cool. I like that.
27:24
One thing that Sogra shared, maybe when I when we get into more tactics later, he can cover this. But one of the things that worked for him early on was, I think you had said, like,
27:33
just posting transcripts of, like, what different people would say. So if trump would say something, all you would do is just sniff the transcript and just sweep that out and let people have whatever take they wanted on it. Mhmm.
27:44
Yeah. I mean, I can share that. So my first fifty thousand followers, I was I was really obsessed with Twitter, like obsessed,
27:50
which is not a good thing. I should say, when I was younger. And I was like, I wanna get more to where I I remember my goal. I was like, I want fifty thousand followers. I I had like four thousand.
27:59
At the time. I had a job. I was a White House correspondent. I'm like, okay. Well, how can I take advantage of this? So all I did was I just got really proficient at using live transcription
28:09
services, which literally watched cable television and then spit out rough transcripts
28:14
copy and pasting it, taking out the caps, editing it for clarity, and just trying to be one of the first people to be like, Trump said x
28:22
or the secretary of state said, why? And as you said, Avil, you're just pumping information,
28:28
out into the world. This is why also, you know, I think I probably have a timely bias because I work in the news business. Like, for us, timeliness is everything. If you're two hours late, like, you might as well be dead, you know, you're a zombie. And so for for us, like, it's microsecond.
28:41
Especially in, you know, in the so called, like, information distribution game, you're competing against the associated press against warriors and, you know, like, major multi million dollar professional organizations. It really just turned out to be getting pretty good at tweeting out transcripts. So I think my first fifty thousand followers all just came from people who were following me in order to find out, like, what was going on that day in politics. And since that was literally my job, I was both doing my job well, and I was building an audience.
29:10
So there's a lot of
29:13
yeah. There's a lot of ways that people in this audience can apply that. I mean, you're all in your own niche You all have, the the influencers and the leaders in their in those niches going out and doing appearances.
29:23
There's ways of adapting this strategy, not just in the muse and timeliness context, but even in the,
29:28
in tech.
29:30
I I have a quick question about timeliness.
29:33
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good work. Exemplifies it. So
29:36
I created,
29:37
or so there was this big news event that happened in crypto where this token called Luna crashed. And it had been one of the high flyers, and then it goes to zero kind of like overnight.
29:47
And I had a position in Luna, so I ended up losing, it was, like, a million dollars in that crash.
29:52
And, I also had kind of like a an interesting take because you need to have a take on,
29:58
you know, everybody knows what happened. What they wanna know is, you know, either why it happened or it means.
30:03
And,
30:04
and so I had a good take. And I decided, okay, the way I'm gonna do the and and two things happened. Hey. I was a little bit busy that week. I was like, on vacation, stuff like that. Came back. Alright. Couple days go by. And then I was like, okay. What do I do? Either I'm just gonna post this as like, you know,
30:19
it's, you know, a couple tweaks, a thread. Or what if I made, like, a video on this? And so I go on YouTube. I end up creating this, like, almost like, the, like, the John Oliver show was last week tonight. I go and I create this, like, I'm, like, I do this rant. I I rants about Luna. I rants about why why blue white got big, and the white crush, white got devastated, and they was had jokes spliced in, I hired this editor. The editor is amazing. We're working on this. We're iterating on it. We're making great content.
30:47
And we put it out.
30:48
Now two and a half weeks have gone by as we put it out. You could see this if you go to YouTube, Luna, John, or something like that. And the the video has, like, I don't know, seventeen thousand views or so.
31:00
Twenty thousand views maybe at this point. But it never it never went viral. And, like, so, you know, I consider that sort of, like, a flop of a piece of content, especially one that I tried really hard on. And the funny thing is, like, I kinda knew this that, like, like, The smarter thing would have been if I literally had opened up my phone, typed out a thing in the notes app screenshot of it and just posted it immediately when it happened, it would have been less great because it was not the jokes weren't as good. The there was no video production. There was no nothing, but it would have been on time. And on time matters way more than great. And it when it comes to this type of reactionary,
31:36
what does everybody care about right now? Because on time, three weeks have gone by, just nobody cared about it anymore. The world would move on. There's two other crises to worry about. And so, that was a le an expensive
31:47
of time wise lesson of,
31:49
much effort I put into something that did not go viral compared to shit that did go viral because I did it, you know, good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time. Totally agree.
32:00
Good enough that the right time is better than great at the wrong time. That is the, the quote, and, heck of a
32:08
some art here that you got going on, Sean. I love it.
32:11
Okay. Cool. Let's wrap it fire through one more each.
32:16
Let's see. So Sean, we have your clubhouse one, but I feel like it's pretty close to the metaverse one as to why that work.
32:23
Do you wanna talk about,
32:25
this Elon one, or do you wanna talk about,
32:27
this learning one?
32:29
Yeah. I'll do both real quick. Elon won is actually, like, soccer was saying. I,
32:33
I I one of the threads that went viral was not at no original insight. Elon was on Clubhouse. Elon, like, popped onto Clubhouse when Clubhouse hot.
32:41
And, you know, just a guest appearance by Elon Musk is not something you get very often.
32:45
And also clubhouse was, like, overload. It was, like, invite only and was overloaded. So I just go for those who are locked out of the Elon thing.
32:53
Here's what he's saying. And I just live typed and transcribed everything interesting he was saying in a thread in real time, and I was the only guy doing it. And, like, you know, on one hand, I feel a little silly. I was like, oh, man, I've become, like, a professional note taker on a fucking beta app of club clubhouse, like, jeez, what does my career come to? And then also I was like, oh, wow. This is, like, seven thousand likes already? Okay. Never mind. Let's shut up. Like, go. And so, you know, I just, like, just did it, but it was, like, it it it talks about that same thing, which is, like, some people think they need to have this, like,
33:24
really great insight or amazing, you know, perspective or whatever. And sometimes you're just providing a service better than others. You're just clipping good content and you're posting it and you're doing that consistently, and people will follow you for that. You can build a huge audience as simply a curator
33:37
or remixer
33:39
of content. You don't even need to be an original content creator. I would say, in most cases, you do not need to be. So that's kind of what this one was, which was I just pull this was separately. I just pulled out,
33:48
you know, this this great quote,
33:50
you know, by Elon and and, you know, this is another one where it fits people's worldview. My my audience is mostly entrepreneurs,
33:57
entrepreneurs
33:58
love to have this chip on the shoulder, this badge of pride about, like, how hard it is to be an entrepreneur, which I find pretty stupid in general, but I can play to it. And so I played to it here, which is, like, Elon was, like, you know, if you need words of encouragement for doing a startup, don't do a startup. Oh, yeah. Like, you know, That's right. We are the special breed, and, like, we don't need this, you know, motivational,
34:18
you know, speeches, whatever. So I knew that this would play. And so, you know, just throughout there and and sure enough it gets.
34:25
The other one that you shared was
34:29
Oh, yeah. This was meant to trigger people. So everybody thinks that everybody thinks that things like education and health care are, like, highly nuanced topics
34:37
And I find also that really funny and stupid, like,
34:41
I I think that nuance is something that smart people love to hide behind because it's so easy to just say, oh, well, You know, it depends. And, like, you know, it's it's not so simple. It's not so easy. Yeah. It's not so cut dry. It's not so black and white. It's not so binary. They love to, like, do this, this nuance thing. And so I knew I could trigger everybody if I just said, here, I I could fix education.
35:03
In, like, a tweet. And it's like, oh, classic tech bro. Things he could fix education in a stupid tweet. And so, you know, I know how to, like, you know, just bait the animals,
35:13
with, like, here you go. Right. And it's something I do believe, which is that most people, when they wanna learn something, they start by trying to learn They go read about it. They watch about it. They they go attend seminars and workshops or take courses about it. And they'd be better off just going and trying to do the damn thing. And then when they get stuck, they should go look up how to get unstuck. Like, I do believe that that's true. But if I had just said that, it would have gotten a tenth of the likes by by adding there. I fixed education. I was able to trigger a bunch of people. And so, you know, that was, you know, These are the Jedi mind tricks of the of the great configurators.
35:49
I mean, I really hear that you relate to Twitter as a game. Like, it's not, like,
35:53
thing where you have to tell, like, what you believe exactly the way you believe it.
35:58
You're you're the there's there's a bit of a game that you're playing. Is that how you would relate to it? Yeah. Don't take it too seriously. Like,
36:05
I don't take anything too seriously, but definitely not gonna be Twitter of the things I take too. I I barely take parenting
36:12
and, like, you know, things like that seriously. I try to be playful and silly and lighthearted with those too. So I'm definitely not gonna take Twitter too seriously.
36:21
And the other thing is I,
36:22
I'm lucky that Twitter is not where I, like, I'm not
36:27
Twitter's not my my my real job. You know, like, I I've basically been successful outside of content creation. So I have the security that I can just kind of f around with contact creation and do what I think is interesting because I'm not doing this in order to become successful. So I don't have to I didn't have this mental block of, like, I need to play things a certain way. Soccer was talking about this too. Like, once you get to a certain size, whether you did it outside of content or even through content, you can start playing much looser because at the end of the day, your life's short. Just do whatever you wanna do. Say what you wanna say. It's a lot more rewarding and fun and interesting that way. And so,
37:04
you could do that. You know, you you could buy yourself that right.
37:08
Most people have sort of have this mental block where they're, like, afraid,
37:12
and they take everything so seriously. And then it becomes an unpleasant experience for them. I think I think a lot of people don't don't enjoy social media, because they don't treat it like a game. You enjoy games. You don't enjoy things that are ultra serious. And so,
37:25
know, I think that's where most people get it wrong.
37:28
I thought. Yeah.
37:30
Having that that block of, like, oh, I need to get it right. I think is the kind of the internal conversation that that keeps people from even even taking that action in the first place. Software,
37:39
let's see. We have this on student debts or this on CNN plus. Which one would you like to chat about?
37:48
Oh, that I like that one. That's a good one. Narratively that I always enjoy that. So,
37:53
that one was, yeah, so just for those who may not be watching, the failure of CNN Plus and lapsing Obama's wife
38:00
are related. So why is this tweet successful? You take two viral events that are being discussed, you pair them together, and then you put a thesis statement on why exactly it supports a broader meta narrative. Jenny is dialed when content previously force fed to us in cable monopoly era simply cannot compete in the free market streaming the revolution has just begun. So revolution has just begun punchy beats the, thesis, you know, most of the people who follow me. And I think general, anybody below age, like, fifty doesn't like cable monopoly and cable news. So obviously a huge,
38:30
market there. You know, biology actually said, biology screen of option one says something to me. Is always bet on charts. It's just you gotta find the right chart to bet on. And so I always say that, the right chart for me is trusting the mainstream media, which is thirteen percent. That means my market size is eighty seven percent of the United States. So I only have even more to grow. And if you would glow on that. It's even better. They're like, man. So I feel sorry for CNNs serving this niche thirteen percent of the audience. Poor guy. If they need some help, I got you. It's about flipping things on its head. And it's like, no. No. No. No. It's like, you're the one who is the only serving the need. So putting these two things together, the Obama and Spotify contract you C and M, like two legacy established, political,
39:12
both brands kind of in their own right. Everybody knows but yet not enough. A lot of people are consuming and then putting them together and saying, and trying to describe a market condition that is arising, that can tell us about why these two things have failed that goes against the way that people who actually work in professional media explanation,
39:33
are able to tell you. I mean, to date, I have not seen a a a a
39:38
dispassionate view maybe out of one or two people, I can count on one hand. Sarah Fisher over at Axios. I mean, she's awesome.
39:45
There's like, Dylan Byers over at puck News. I think he's a straight shooter too. Those two are pretty much the only ones I've seen with, like, an actual rundown of, like, why these things don't work compared to the amount of money that are being invested in them. The Obama Spotify contract is the same one. It's like, you know, they paid the former president of the United States, millions of dollars, and it just didn't do that well. When he was paired with one of the biggest rocks here on earth. That's that's kind of insane. I mean, you have somebody who hundreds of millions of people, knew that know he's not billions of people, probably knows name,
40:16
you have somebody
40:18
who received, like, ten hundreds of millions of votes collectively over two elections
40:23
and yet he can't even crack the top ten on podcasts. Like, how does that how does the former MMA cage fighter beat this person? Like, how how is that possible? And so that's a very interesting story. Now nobody wants to tell that story because, you know, when you're working the quote unquote powers of b, you're gonna offend the wrong people. And so if, again, that's a niche that opens up for me
40:43
to come in and to build that. So I think that's why that it took off. It was it's not a not even a difficult one really to explain.
40:51
No. That's that's I like that. Take two viral events, get it together with a thesis statement,
40:56
and then cater it to that, eighty seven percent of the audience, who got trust in the mainstream media, very clever.
41:03
Cool. Well, let's go through, some rapid fire questions, tactical questions, and some, questions from the audience over the next five to seven minutes, and then we'll call it a day.
41:14
Soccer, talk to us, you know, you you mentioned the the strategy that you did early on.
41:19
Kinda just taking scripts of what other more influential people are saying.
41:23
Like, what will really be inflection
41:26
points or, tactics that took you from from that first zero to a hundred k, let's say Twitter.
41:32
Okay. So zero to Twitter is actually not that hard, which that most of the people follow only a few amount of accounts. So get those few amount of accounts in order to follow you and get them to retweet you, and that's basically the secret to growth. I don't think it's that complicated. So what does that mean? It's like, well, find the that niche, the point o one percent. What do they need in their feed that they're not getting? Provide that service. For me, I was the first guy in order to tweet the transcript, which means that they were all following me, which means that they're all retweeting me and exposing me to their millions of followers, which means that some people would then follow me. So for me, it was, I would say around ten k is a big is a big jump. For some reason, in people's minds, like, when you cross ten thousand,
42:08
that is a point where you're gonna get exponentially
42:11
more new numbers of followers. What I've discovered across all my platforms The more followers you have, the easier it is to get followers, which is so frustrating whenever you're starting out, you're like, when you're, oh, man, five thousand that at that point, if I have five thousand followers on Instagram, which, you know, once upon a time was the case, I got fifty. I was like, oh my god. I lose fifty a day, to now.
42:31
Actually, more. Probably more like a hundred. And yet I'll net out, you know, at a thousand a week or something like that. And It's simply because of like the churn, the burn, the way that your algorithmic
42:42
treatment,
42:42
is offered. So I think ten is a big inflection point. I think fifty is an even bigger inflection point. That's where things really begin to go vertical. And, you know, this is probably the same startups, which is just getting that, you know,
42:54
first initial customers and then compounding that to a sustainable ish business is, like, the really most difficult it requires the most amount of thought because at the end of the day, that's where that's where you're filling the niche. That's where you're discovering the niche. That's where you're, playing around. That's that's that's really the time too of the most experimentation.
43:13
Where you have really, really high stakes. So I would say it's there and then also on the other end where, you know, after I reached three hundred k. Actually, after I reached two hundred k on Twitter, I was like, I just don't care anymore. Was like, if it goes up, it goes up, I could care less, you know, my business is almost entirely dependent on YouTube, and I frankly care more about Instagram.
43:29
Then I do about Twitter. I think I have much higher quality engagement,
43:33
just from what I've seen, my ability to sell either my subscription, tickets,
43:37
any of those things are there. So then it just became a complete game after that. I just genuinely
43:42
did whatever I wanted. So those are kind of the interesting inflection points.
43:46
Well, yeah, I I like the idea of, finding look, there's a few accounts that everybody follows. Like, it's almost account based marketing at that point where it's getting in in touch and making an impression with those nodes, those sort of super nodes in your in your industry.
44:00
Sean, do you have any, anything to add?
44:03
That's smart. I wish I had done that.
44:06
It didn't have that insight, but I learned something great today.
44:10
Yeah. Mine was sort of, like, this actually, it was the same, but I did it in a much slower, stupider way, which was
44:17
the first kind of twenty five
44:19
people mattered a lot. And so it's not the number. It's who those twenty five are. For me, I built those relationships in person.
44:26
So, like,
44:27
you know, Ryan Hoover had a popular Twitter, and I had known Ryan in person, you know, for, you know, seven, eight years at that point. And so once I started getting active and started interesting things. He was happy to kind of, like, share. I never asked him to. He just he followed me already. He thought some things I said was interesting, and he would share it with his audience.
44:43
And, and then that happened with, like, twenty five important people in tech that were already well known, but I had built in person relationship with them, built in person credibility with them, And so it's kind of the same idea, actually, but just a very slow version of of what you just talked about. And I didn't think about it, like, creating content that that serves them,
45:02
that they would wanna share with their audience. I just thought, like,
45:05
it just it just accidentally happens, so it's, you know, sort of along the way.
45:10
The main things that I would say is, like, you know,
45:13
figure out your, you know, the the domain you're trying to build your authority in. So, you know, get really tight on that, the tighter, the better, but it's very tempting to be broad.
45:23
And I've made this mistake many times. I just like being like, well, it's that, but it's also these other things that I like. And it's also this, and it's also that. And, actually, you'd be better off just starting off,
45:33
starting off there.
45:35
Then there's basically, like, some tactical things, like, you know, for example, there's this theory called the red pill theory, I guess. I think in politics has a different definition, but I heard it when I talked to the guy,
45:47
there's two guys who who do Wake Bud Why? And so there's, like, Tim, who's, like, the writer, the famous guy, and then This is his friend, Andrew, who a childhood friend who helps him run his businesses.
45:56
And Andrew, I talked to Andrew and Andrew was like, yeah. You need to have your red pill, which is, like, you need to have the truth that you can say that
46:06
people that wasn't, like,
46:08
It's not the thing everybody's saying, but when you hear it, people, like, some said to say one of the people will nod their head vigorously. Right? So What is the and other people call this your spiky point of view? It's like, you know, what is your what's your thing? Right? Like, you know, maybe your thing was, like, that inflation is a way bigger problem, and the government is playing this down. Boom. That's your red pill. And you can do you can base your whole brand off that for a period of time. And then you have to eventually swap out and create a second red pill, which is, like, you need to be giving people. And by the way, red pill comes from, like, the matrix, which is, like, do you want If you take the blue pill, you go back into the matrix, you just live like a sheep again, then you just don't question anything, or do you want the truth? And that that's the thing. You're trying to give people the truth in a way that they're not that they haven't been told. And then you can become known for that. And so I think that's important. That's a very useful tool. I think some other tools are
46:56
speaking from the eye,
46:58
I I I found great success in this, which is
47:01
a lot of people in,
47:04
the more successful that they get, they'll just keep saying you, like, a fortune cookie. Like, oh, you you gotta do this. You gotta do that. You know, when you feel this way, you gotta try doing this. And it's, like, it's much more powerful when you're, like, you know,
47:18
I was feeling this way or I was going through this. I had this experience, and it made me think this, but what I need to do differently is I need to do this. It's a much more I think in general, it's good for personal accountability to speak from the eye, but secondly, I think it plays really well content because it's different than what everybody else is doing. So same thing. Personal stories,
47:37
and speaking from the eye, I think works. But, like, the high level things is, you know, you could be either a generous expert sharing your knowledge and expertise, or you could be a curious novice. And a curious novice is somebody who's Just going through, like you're saying, you're just typing out the transcripts. You're just finding interesting clips and sharing it. You're remixing, packaging, curating, and presenting, you know, stuff as a beginner's point of view rather than saying, I know everything.
48:00
So you gotta know what areas are you an expert in and what areas are you gonna be a curious novice and then use both in your content.
48:07
And the last is just, I don't know, don't quit and go viral. Like, that that's ultimately, like, if you wanna win, Don't quit and, like, find ways to go viral or you won't grow. So,
48:16
if you just you're only gonna remember two things on the strategies, like, don't quit and go viral, I would say.
48:21
The the takeaway.
48:25
I could talk to both y'all for another hour. This is awesome.
48:28
Yeah, just
48:30
the the nuggets at the end nonstop. I I think we're gonna create an illustration of this, to capture a lot of those things. So stay tuned for that.
48:39
Yeah. Thank thank you both so much for spending your time with us today. This is a ton of fun.
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