What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
All right, I'm here with Nathan Barry, the founder of an email marketing platform called
ConvertKit.
It's what I use to send the IndieHackers newsletter out to about 80,000 subscribers, three times
a week.
How's it going, Nathan?
It's going well.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's been a long time since you've been on the show.
I think you were, it was like May 2017 or something, you were doing $7 million a year
in revenue with ConvertKit.
Obviously things have changed to an extreme degree since then.
I think you're at something like, correct me if I'm wrong, $28 million a year in revenue
today, which is nuts.
Yeah, $27.5 million ARR.
It's definitely a grunt.
That's the magic of compound growth is that you give it four or five years and a lot happens.
It's absolutely crazy, and I bet you feel pretty different too.
One thing I think that's interesting being in your position is that most people I talk
to who are, once they hit a mil, two mil a year in revenue, they're like, all right,
I'm going to stop doing the whole transparency thing.
It's enough.
I don't really want to feed my competitors this information.
I think in your situation, the other big players in email marketing, they're not really that
transparent.
I don't know their revenue numbers.
I don't think anybody knows their revenue numbers.
Yeah, well, it makes sense to me that a lot of people stop.
I had two good friends of mine in the business space.
I think a lot of the people in the IndieHackers community would know at a conference who sat
me down and was like, hey, Nathan, this is an intervention.
The public numbers were cool, up to 50,000 MRR, 100,000, 200,000.
I don't know why, but it's time to stop.
You're giving your competitors way too much information.
We actually had two different competitors at different times, hey, thanks for that.
That's super helpful.
They were basically saying, it doesn't serve you anymore.
Stop doing it.
I think they had really good points.
From the business perspective, the whole build in public thing, which is really trendy and
popular now.
We've been doing that since the beginning.
What ends up happening is the numbers get misconstrued in some way.
They get quoted in a way that isn't accurate.
I think Buffer stopped sharing their numbers like a public barometrics page because they
changed how they were calculating MRR.
You just get into a bunch of weird things and still aren't quite as accurate.
They moved on.
Buffer is still public with their numbers, but in a different format.
You get into Transistor, WriteMessage, a ton of other companies have also been like, great,
now let's pull that back.
I think that makes sense.
I would not recommend that companies share their numbers publicly unless you're doing
it for a mission perspective.
If you're doing it for the marketing or the stats or the attention that it'll get you,
that's a short-lived reason.
For us, our mission as ConvertKit is to help creators earn a living.
That's what is on this tiny little plaque sitting behind me.
It's on everybody's desk.
It's through and through everything that we do.
It's a partially that's been building the software that we build, the training, education,
everything else.
I think of it as being able to leave.
Our public metrics are leaving breadcrumbs for every other founder who will follow us.
I think we've all done this.
We're piecing together, like, oh, this fundraising announcement, and then over here, the founder
said this.
I wonder what the growth curve was between that and like, okay, that's 37% annual growth,
maybe, roughly.
Or like, you're extrapolating things from if they said user count and revenue was this.
Actually did this with the company today.
I can just talk about it.
I actually campaign launched, they just announced a $250 million funding round today at like
a $3 billion valuation.
I was curious what revenue was, and they didn't say what it was, but a year and a half ago
or something, they said that they were at $90 million a year in revenue and X number
of users.
In the new funding announcement, they said how many users they were.
So I extrapolated out, they're basically $145 million ARR.
So you do a lot of that kind of thing with companies that drop hints of public information
at spots.
And what I wanted to do is for any founder coming along, he goes, okay, I'm at $20,000
in MRR, and I'm really struggling with churn.
What was ConvertKit's churn when they went from $20,000 to $50,000 of MRR?
And you can actually go in the dashboard and go back and find that.
Or just showing that path, I remember when I was at $5,000 in MRR for ConvertKit, I thought
getting to $50,000 would be the most incredible thing.
And if someone said, this business is going to be making $2.2 million a month in revenue,
X number of years from now, I would have been like, there's no way.
That's just not even possible.
But a few people like Chris from Wistia, Wade from Zapier, being friends and sharing some
of their growth numbers more privately, that made me think like, oh, wow, this is actually
possible.
So I want to do that for everyone else and say, basically, like, you can grow a company
to $27 million in MRR and more totally bridge traffic, and let me show you all the way along.
And that's what makes it worth it to share numbers publicly.
But if it was just for the marketing, it's not worth it.
I wonder if you feel like that comes back to you in a concrete way, like you pre-pandemic
had the craft plus commerce conference in Boise, I've been out a couple times, like
that's where you get to actually like interact with ConvertKit users and fans on the ground,
you interact with founders and people creating stuff.
And then there's like sort of internet first, and we're on Twitter, and people might like
DM you and talk to you.
But like probably the vast majority of people who look at ConvertKit metrics and compare
their metrics and like use that to educate themselves, like probably never say anything,
like this is sweet.
And they'll just use it and you'll never hear a single peep from them.
Yeah, and I think other people sharing their metrics, like specific examples would be Ruben
Gammas from BidSketch, Amy Hoy with Freckle, the time tracking tool, oh, impactful ones
for me were Sasha Grief and Jared Drysdale back in 2012 when they launched ebooks and
like shared all the metrics publicly.
That helped me so much that my mindset has always been I'm just going to pay it forward
and always share my numbers publicly.
And so again, when you make a mission driven decision like that, then it's easy.
And you don't have to get into like weighing the pros and the cons.
What happens after that?
Yeah, exactly.
And the other thing is, there's this weird thing that happens where there's a lot of
metrics public about companies that are say like zero to 25,000 MRR or like just getting
straight, right?
Someone's tweeting and they're like, oh, I just passed 3000 MRR on Twitter and everyone's
celebrating that.
And that's amazing.
And then you have like Squarespace's S1, which came out the other day, right?
You get to see on that level or Shopify or whoever else like Salesforce, you know, look
at anything you want about their metrics, you know, they're publicly traded.
And so you end up with like information down here and information all the way up here and
then just nothing.
Nothing in between.
Yep.
And so I'm like, hey, I'll be one of the companies that like shows, you know, numbers in the
middle of the journey.
That's super cool.
And it's like, it's Andy hackers is bread and butter.
Like the stuff that works the best for us on our forum is people posting success stories
and doing AMAs and usually sharing their revenue numbers because it gives everybody kind of
the chance to see.
And it's like you said, it's like a lot of people on the bottom, not very many people
in the middle and a lot of people at the top.
And at the bottom, I think people just don't care because they're like, well, it's not
that much.
Who cares?
And then the middle is kind of like, well, I don't want to like publicly tell everybody
that I'm rich.
You know, I don't want to get like raw grown.
I don't want people to like, you know, ask all these questions and like, you know, send
me all these weird offers.
And at the top, it's kind of like, oh, we're going public or, you know, we're super mission
driven or something, something else that's different.
And it's driving people at the, at the low end, it's like, that's just barely covering
your salary or something.
And so that's great.
At the high end, everyone knows like you're not, as the founder, you're not taking that
money home.
Yeah.
So it's divorced from you personally.
Yeah.
Like it's this big company with hundreds or thousands of employees.
But in that middle stage, like if you were to say like, oh, we're making $8 million a
year, people are like, wow, you are making $8 million.
No, the company isn't like, and we're spending it all to like build the product and, and
everything and pay salaries.
But people have a hard time separating that.
And so I think that's, that's part of the challenge.
I've been looking at like what you've been up to as an individual.
First of all, you seem like super mellowed out.
I've never seen you as mellow as you are right now.
You feel like you are just like high on life.
Everything's golden.
You got enough of care in the world.
But on the flip side, you seem like a supercharged Nathan, like online, like you've sort of rebooted
your podcast in a big way.
I think you've done more episodes this year than almost every other year combined.
So it's the, the Nathan Berry show or the art of newsletters.
It's kind of got two names.
Yeah.
It's got a season of the Nathan Berry show.
Oh, okay.
That's how it works.
Cause I didn't, I didn't want to fragment the audience.
I still had the feed.
I wanted to get going.
And I didn't know if I want to talk about newsletters forever.
And so I was like, I want to talk about newsletters for the next year for sure.
And so like, let me play with that of, it's like art of newsletters on the Nathan Berry
show.
Well, newsletters are obviously back in like a pretty big way.
So it's a good time to get into newsletters.
On top of that, like your blog is beautiful, sort of encapsulates like everything that
you're doing, not only blog posts, but also your podcast, your books and your products
and stuff.
And you've got like a weekly newsletter that you're sending out that I'm subscribed to.
That's super helpful too.
And like all of this stuff is like, like if that was literally all you did, that would
be a lot of work.
It's a lot of work maintaining a podcast.
It's a lot of work doing a newsletter, but then you also run this like 27 and a half
million dollar a year, uh, SaaS company, which is crazy.
So I don't know, you're super chill on the outside, but like what you're doing behind
the scenes is like crazy supercharged.
There's definitely a lot going on.
I actually had to swear off new projects, um, for the rest of the year because, uh,
it was getting a little bit out of hand.
Um, uh, someone on my team, her name's Elizabeth.
She's my executive assistant, uh, for the last four years now.
She was like, dude, you gotta, you gotta chill out.
Stop doing me things.
Cause the other thing I do have other things like we have a whole farm that you know, of
where I live and we expanded that.
So it's now nine acres.
And, and then we also own now 14 Airbnbs as a, as a business.
And not to make this more ridiculous, but I just started a new business running a local
newsletter for Boise, the city that I live.
Jeez, dude.
Didn't you like buy a town or something too?
I feel like I remember watching a YouTube video where you're like, it's starting a new
town from scratch.
I'm just an investor, uh, in a town in a ghost town called Cerro Gordo, uh, in the, uh, like
kind of near Mammoth, uh, in California, like in the between mountain, 18 different things.
And they're all very different and they're all very hard.
Every one of those seems pretty hard.
Well, the trick is to partner, to either hire great people or partner with people on everyone.
So I convert it.
I feel a lot more chill about, because now we've built out like an executive team.
And so they're the ones pushing me rather than me pushing them.
And then on like the Airbnbs or other things or like the Airbnbs I have partners on and
that's been fun to have like a real world, like take internet money and put it into something
tangible.
And then also just to have a tangible product to set, to sell like an in-person experience
rather than a digital one.
And I see you crowdsourcing help with, uh, Airbnb on Twitter.
Like you had some questions the other day, like what's the best possible experience you
can get, uh, replies.
I was like, yeah, I replied.
I was like a Chromecast and the TV so I can easily play music and something.
And there's a bunch of other good suggestions.
Yeah.
It's the same thing.
Like I'm obsessed with user experience and product.
And so I want to do the same thing in real life.
So that's the Airbnbs.
You got the ghost town, you got the newsletter for Boise, and then you got like your own personal
newsletter, which I think is probably the most like relevant side project to what you
do at ConvertKit since obviously ConvertKit like powers everybody else to have the newsletters.
What's the thing behind like starting a newsletter back up actually do have like a Courtland
Island newsletter that nobody knows about that I never send any emails out to you.
But like I really wrestled with it last year.
Like, should I start this back up?
Like, what's the benefit?
It seems like a great way to own your audience.
Yeah, I definitely wanted to be producing content myself again, like ConvertKit was
producing all this content, but I felt really detached from it.
And there's some things that as an individual, you can just do better than like a company
can.
Like, for example, let's say I wanted to get on, I don't know, CBS or the Today Show or
or something, right?
Like do national TV as a way to promote ConvertKit.
There's not like a good path to do that.
But like as ConvertKit, but as an individual, if you were to write a book, and then go on
book tour, and the book was really like creator economy, you know, like, any of this stuff
we're talking about, like, that's a very normal path, you know, you're like, oh, here's James
Clear, author of Atomic Habits, who is on, you know, on his press tour, and like, let's
have him on TV.
So there's interesting things where sometimes you have way more leverage as a company.
Because you've got the team, the brand, everything else, like, you know, it has hundreds of thousands
of users and all that.
And then other cases where you have more leverage as an individual.
And so I started to look for that balance.
And basically, what I found is in restoring the newsletter, I can piggyback a bit off
of the company.
And then also, I can build connections with people.
And that's restarting the podcast, you know, was really building connections with people
having a lot of conversations in this space, and using that to feed a lot of content at
ConvertKit.
The thing in the newsletter is I have, like, these long form essays that I love to write,
like, a few of the big ones are like Ladders of Wealth Creation, The Billion Dollar Creator,
where I'll put like months into writing them, getting friends to read it and everything
else.
And I would have this thing where I would publish nothing at all, and then like drop
one of those and then nothing at all.
And so I wanted a way to bridge that gap.
And I knew I couldn't write one of those every week, like, there was just no way that was
happening.
And so like the curated, like, this is what I'm up to, this is what I find interesting
newsletter was a way to say, hey, every Tuesday I'll show up in your inbox, I've got useful
stuff for you.
And maybe, you know, once a month or something, that's going to be an essay.
And once a quarter, one of those essays will be something that's like a flagship piece
of content.
But one thing that's been weird is if you let your site go dormant, turns out all your
traffic goes away.
So, you know, like, surprise.
And so I built the email list, I think 28,000 people.
And then since I've restarted it, it's just gradually shrunk down to, I guess just like
25,000, 26,000, because, you know, every time I send, I lose 80 people, but I'm only getting
like eight new signups a day because the traffic isn't there anymore.
And I haven't yet rebuilt that.
So, you know, it's a whole new project.
The curse of the newsletter send, where like the churn really happens when you send an
email.
So like you want to send an email to engage people, but like the lowest churn newsletter
is one where you just have a sign up form on your site and then you never send any email.
List just keeps growing and growing and no one ever unsubscribes because, you know, you
never send an email.
Magic.
This whole idea of like, what's the best way to get the word out, a podcast, a blog,
being an author, writing a book, you know, going on talk shows, it's super interesting.
I was talking to my brother about this today because let's take books, for example.
Books are like the most sort of legitimate way to communicate an idea, right?
It's like the most professional way.
If you tell people you've written a book, they sort of like, you know, they get starry
eyed and like, oh, this guy's legitimate.
But most books that I've read, like I read like sapiens years ago, I can tell you like
one idea I got from sapiens and maybe like four or five facts.
I'm like homo sapiens is 150,000 years old and also, you know, like shared fictions are
a good way to keep, you know, large disparate groups of people together.
But that book was like hundreds and hundreds of pages long.
Whereas last week I have another podcast, I'm starting up with my buddy Julian.
We had Tim Urban on and another guy named Jason Silva and we were talking about identity
and stories and Tim was like, yeah, there's this Paul Graham essay about like your identity
and I was immediately like, keep your identity small.
He's like, that's the one and we both recognize the exact same essay, the exact same idea
and that essay is like, I don't know, like 800 words, took like, you know, a tenth, you
know, a hundredth as long to write that essay as it does to write a book and yet it like
communicated like the same force of the idea and so I like the blog approach on the newsletter
approach really like these 600, 800 word essays where you can really have an impact but it's
not going to take you like six months to write it.
Though I would challenge that sometimes those short essays take the longest to write where
you're really putting a lot of thought into it because there's an idea that you're wrestling
with.
And I think this is one that I want to write about is what is the most impactful place
for your, I was going to say you're writing, we'll run with that.
Maybe it's your effort overall, but if I'm trying to spread an idea, how should I best
package it?
Where should I put it?
Right?
Because I could sit down and write a thousand words and is that best placed on Twitter in
like a super polished essay in like a whole combination of various random blog posts in
a book and something that I think a lot of indie creators in particular struggle with
is like, where should I apply my effort?
And there's very different leverage in each in each place.
And so one thing that I realized for me is like my effort, I believe should go into a
book because I think that that will be a step function in the type of audience that I can
reach all that.
So like the next blog post is not the most useful thing I should publish the book.
But that's the idea behind that, not the idea behind the book, the idea behind where should
you put your effort, your writing, your creativity for the most leverage, I think is a really
interesting concept.
And I have a bunch of different notes on it, but it's not ready for an essay yet.
Like it's going to bounce around my head for another four or five months.
And then I'll write down like the 800 word essay, hopefully that people will reference,
you know, for a long time to come.
I like that bounce around phase too, because you could have a lot of conversations with
other people who are thinking about the same thing and you have these insights and they
put ideas inside your head and you're reading other essays.
And then eventually, you know, you sit down to write and like things sort of clicking,
but it's because of all these conversations and all this time that it spends marinating,
etc.
And so you're right, those things like don't really write themselves.
Having those friends who you can riff on ideas with are really important.
The ladders of wealth creation post, I probably wrote it over the course of a year.
But it was really three different conversations with James Clear, where we were talking about
an idea and I wrote notes and then later I like built on it and sent it to him and he's
like, that's good.
That's interesting.
I'll think about it.
And then when we get together, like we had, we're going to be in person again in a couple
of weeks and so he's like, we'll chat about it then, you know, and then like on a drive
from the airport, he was like, okay, here's my thoughts on it now.
And then, you know, and then he edited it down later at the end.
He was like, this is amazing, but also I cut out all this crap.
Like what do you even, you know, what are you doing with that?
It doesn't add to the point.
And so having someone like that, you know, we do it with James or like Barrett, who's
our COO at ConvertKit, like really riffing on these ideas and letting it build for a
long time.
And that's a pretty, I mean, that blog post got super mega shared.
I feel like everybody read it and it's long, like it's put in word counter.
It's like, there's another program essay that I really like called How You Know.
And it talks about like the benefit of reading, you know, even if you forget, even if you
forget things, it's still good to read because it kind of changes things that you don't even
realize are changing about your mindset.
And that blog post is like 600 words and the ladders of wealth creation is like 6,000 words.
It's like, uh, it's like 10 Paul Graham essays all in one.
Yeah.
And I struggled with that of how, how should you share the information?
Yeah.
So I love what Eric Jorgensen did with the almanac of Naval Robicon because he did with
all this information that was out there and put it in this format that we as a society,
like value and find easy to consume.
And so it'd be amazing if someone did that with Paul Graham, where he's got all of these
800 word essays and put it into a consumable format.
And so it's not just on this website that was designed in 1997.
Never updated, you know, but like put it in that format and it can be this whole collection
of essays similar to how like Jason and David from base camp, right?
Or Derek Sivers writes like, you know, it could be this short little book, but like,
I would love that.
And so yeah, test your ideas and essays and then later package them and put them into
a book.
So is that your plan for a book?
If you're going to write a book, it sounds like you're sort of set on a book, like to
write little essays and then test out which ones are good and compile them into a book.
Or do you want to just like sit down, start to finish huge book?
I'm kind of, kind of doing both at the same time and we'll see which path works better.
But I like short books, you know, I like the ones that take a few hours to read.
And so that lends itself well to a shorter essay isn't it?
Yeah.
Same thing.
One of my favorite books is The Mom Test.
And like I did a podcast with Rob Fitz, the author of The Mom Test, and like you could
listen to the podcast or in the exact same amount of time that you could read the entire
book.
So it's kind of like no reason for the podcast to even exist.
And that's why I'm like a super bullish on like these short essays or these really short
books where you just get the idea across and the idea like really sticks.
It was a great book.
I've talked about it on the podcast a little bit, but Sam Parr turned me on to it.
He's a huge fan of it.
And I know he's on your podcast recently.
It's called Made to Stick.
And it's literally, have you read this?
I haven't read it.
It's on my list.
Great.
So I can't recommend it enough.
It's literally just an analysis of like what makes ideas stick.
And a big part of it is story.
Like there's I think six principles and the sixth one is story.
The other ones are, you know, simplicity, credibility, concreteness is a really good
one.
It's about sort of abstract ideas, it's really hard for people to remember that.
But if you put like really specific examples, you know, you're talking about like an apple
or a fox trying to catch like a skunk or something like people just for some reason our brains
are wired to remember it.
Like I remember your story when you were like, God had to be like, when you're writing authorities
was like 2013.
Yeah.
I remember looking at your newsletter and I was like, ah, Nathan's so inspiring, but
like everything he does seems exhausting.
Like that's what stuck with me.
I was like, it seems so exhausting having this newsletter.
It seems like he's like running so fast.
Like I just want to like code an app, you know, my pajamas and like press a button.
So I was like, okay, like this patio 11 guy resonates with me a little bit more, but like
I remembered your story because of like the exhausting part of it.
Yeah.
Cause I was writing a thousand words a day every day.
Yeah.
And like, I did not want that for myself.
You had a tweet recently, uh, and I want to talk about convert kicks.
We're talking all about newsletters and writing.
We were, it was very interesting.
It came from a blog post, I think on the Harvard business review that said there's really only
four types of value propositions that companies can have.
Uh, so like best quality, this is like Louisville, Sledder, you know, the best bats or something
like that are the best phones from like Apple, uh, then you got your best bang for your buck.
So that's the cheap stuff.
IKEA Chipotle, Toyota, number two is luxury and aspiration, you know, like the Rolexes,
you know, the goods that people aspire to have to kind of show off their status.
And then number four is a must have, like you just kind of have to have this.
So that's Stripe or, you know, some sort of server tool you install and you set it and
forget it, like, uh, arguably it's like it's convert kit, you know, like I kind of have
to have to have to have something to send my emails with, but then you have a ton of
competitors who might be like, okay, we're like, we're the best in class with a luxurious,
you know, emo marketing tour.
We're actually the best quality.
How do you think about convert kit fitting into that framework?
Well, I tweeted it because I was sitting with that question myself and I wanted to see how
other people were, were handling it.
And of course everyone took the tweet as like, Oh, let me point out all the other types of
things that there are, you know?
And I was like, well, just go read the HBR article where they talk about how like, great,
but it, those all kind of boil down to the other four.
But my favorite reply, two different friends, Brian Delcke and Sean Blanc, both replied
and they were like, all four of these described Chipotle Chipotle is an aspirational product,
best in class, best value, highest quality, you know, like everything.
I was like, all right, I can agree with that.
So I was thinking about convert kids value proposition and it's hard to be all of those
unless you Chipotle.
And so it's like, which one are you trying to be?
I think you want to be a must have, but honestly, like if convert kit didn't exist today, indie
hackers would run fine on MailChimp or something else that gets into the question of like, how
disappointed would you be if this product didn't exist, which is sort of like the product
market fit question.
And I think in such a competitive space, like email marketing, it's really hard to be the
must have.
And I put Stripe down on the list of one that I would put as a must have, because I just
think that no one else has come close to competing with that.
And it's kind of funny, right?
As all these platforms are launching payments and like she do payments on Substack or Clubhouse
or ConvertKit or TikTok or wherever else.
And Stripe's like, I don't care.
Like you are a fight.
We'll just take a cut of everything.
Yeah.
You're the boats, we're the ocean.
It's cool.
Yeah, exactly.
And so I think anyway, I think the must have is really hard to do in this space.
And where I ended up is I want to be best quality.
That's where we want to position ourselves with some of this aspirational element to
it.
Like one thing that actually Barrett or COO wrote down in his notes is your favorite
creator's favorite marketing tool.
So like it's sort of the best quality aligned with this aspirational side of things of like,
and I think Apple does that really well, right?
You look at all of their marketing and it's the producers and the artists and the musicians
and all of that that they're featuring in their marketing.
And so you're sort of like, oh, I use this so that I can be like Phineas, the music producer
or whoever else, right?
So that's where I ended up in that.
And that drives pricing decisions, right?
Like should ConvertKit have a $9 plan or a $15 plan instead of starting at $29.
And I think it's like, well, if you're going to be best quality, you don't have to compete
at the very bottom end of the price.
So I don't have concrete answers, but I have a whole lot of notes about which would be
best.
You said something that was really interesting.
It resonates with how I think about indie hackers, which is that you want ConvertKit
to be your favorite creator's email marketing tool, which is like the bread and butter of
indie hackers, a sort of aspirational, inspirational, like share stories.
And I've seen like, you've done a lot of stuff around sharing stories.
Like previously, like before hearing you say that I'm like, why is ConvertKit sharing all
these stories?
I don't understand their content marketing strategy, but you've got like books featuring
creators and you've got like your conference where creators get on stage and talk about
their stories.
You sent Esa out to interview me, I think a year or two ago before the pandemic.
And you guys hired like a professional photographer, you did a whole interview with me that like
wasn't really about ConvertKit.
Like I think I barely mentioned that I did ConvertKit and I was just like, yeah, people
like Portland, they'll read a story.
You got a lot of really good photos on there.
Actually a quick aside, like you had a professional photographer come out, take a bunch of photos
of me, you put them in like an Unsplash album or something.
And like I have literally every single week I get like five people are like, why is your
photo on this random website selling speakers?
Like every SaaS startup, just like Google's like Unsplash black guy on computer, black
guy on podcasts or something, something's going on like that.
And I'm like, photos all over the web.
But that photo of you on Unsplash is insanely popular.
Well, I hope it's insane.
You had a super sweet studio setup, right?
And like sort of the moody lighting going on and everything else.
And yeah, I was just on another, I was on Teachable's website actually.
And it was just so funny.
Like there was a photo of you.
Yeah.
On their features page.
I get that all the time.
Oracle sent out like a PDF of like our year of interview or something and then my landlord
sent it to me.
He's like, is this you?
Is this my apartment?
I'm like, yeah.
I don't know.
It ended up there.
So it's a good growth hack.
If you want to be an internet model, get a bunch of professional photos taken of you.
I guess do some SEO hacks on Unsplash, figure out what people are searching for and then
just make an album of yourself and you'll end up on a thousand random websites.
But some of those have been downloaded like two or three million times, which is crazy.
The same reason you're doing with indie hackers, right?
That's the content that people resonate with and there's a couple of worlds, right?
There's sort of the creator marketing, you know, become a successful creator world.
And then there's like the internet marketing in the sleazy way, which is the get rich quick,
everything else.
And we, we want to like our mission is to help creators earn a living, which may not
be that different from like a click funnels or someone who's like, yeah, we're here to
help you earn a living.
And so how do you differ?
How do you accomplish the same goal?
Not in a get rich quick, one weird trick to make money on the internet.
You're one funnel away from, and they're basically promising that as you make money in this way,
it'll solve like all of your, all of your problems.
And I'm like, I think you're one funnel away from like a more effective marketing funnel,
but I don't think that you're one funnel away from like self actualization or a better
marriage or, you know, whatever else.
And so we really struggled with how do we, the whole goal is to help you earn a living,
help you use our software, you know, to earn a living as a creator and not have it come
across as like all of this sleazy, you know, basically get rich quick and actually legitimately
like what you and I are trying to teach people of you can build a real business, earn a living.
There's a system and process to it.
And we found that storytelling is the best way to do that.
And so we're deliberately featuring a broad range of creators from, you know, photographers
to fashion designers, to podcasters, to fitness professionals and everyone else of like, this
is how they did it.
In the, I am a creator book, which is the one that you're in, it starts off with the
story of a lawyer turned food blogger.
And actually the fun thing is she read our first book called I am a blogger that one
of her friends gave her.
And that was the thing.
Like she read that book and then immediately quit her job.
And then so that's why we had to feature her in the second one.
Doesn't that feel crazy that people are like quitting their jobs because you like put out
a book and someone's like, I'm going to change my entire life because you know, I heard podcast
episode.
I really like this is a side project that I made both wildly inspiring and absolutely
terrifying simultaneously.
So it's basically, we think storytelling is the best way to accomplish that.
And so we're just trying to do it as much as possible.
There's this idea, you know, in Joseph Campbell's hero's journey of talking about the different
roles, the hero, the guide, and all of these brands try to make themselves the hero of
the story.
And it's like, actually the most effective marketing is when you make yourself the guide.
And so you're trying to do it through the product and you're trying to do it through
stories and examples and all of that.
So we just go absolutely all in on that.
And now we have a full-time in-house filmmaker and you said telling stories and we hire photographers
and all of us.
It's crazy how fast stories spread.
It's like, it's what people want to share.
It's like people resonate with, with ND hackers, we sort of stumbled onto this completely by
accident because I was just doing interviews and I wasn't conceptualizing the interviews
as a story at the beginning.
I was just sort of asking random questions and then like the ones that resonated the
most were the ones where the questions were like kind of chronological and people were
like, well, I want to hear the story, et cetera.
And now it's like the bread and butter of ND hackers are kind of like these AMAs were
like, Hey, come do an AMA on ND hackers.
And like, you know, people are like, what should I write?
I'm like, Oh, just tell your story.
And like, then that person is kind of the hero of their own story.
But as like a reader, you don't care about ND hackers and like, you kind of care about
this person because you're projecting yourself into their shoes.
You're like, wow, like what, you know, what she did is so amazing.
Like how do I do that?
And then because it's an AMA, it's like, you can just ask her how she did it or you can
read her story, or you can share a story because it's just so much more memorable to consume
a story than it is to consume like a PowerPoint presentation.
You know, that's like, that's not how humans were like wired to, to like remember and share
information.
You know, like something happens in your tribe.
Like you tell a story like, Hey, did you hear about like Jonas?
He like stole a pencil from Marie and then he goes, I went down and you remember that
and everybody spreads it, but you're not like, you know, let me make a PowerPoint presentation
of these 10 bullet points.
Nobody remembers that.
It doesn't get spread.
It doesn't get shared.
Even on Twitter, a lot of my friends who are doing really big on Twitter, just doing these
huge threads where they're just tell a story and break it into like 15 tweets.
And like, when you're scrolling through, like, you know, a lot of bite-sized, you pull up
point tweets and you see like a real cool story, you're going to get into that and you're
going to share it.
So it makes so much sense.
It's like, that's the content that people really want.
It resonates and it's just incredibly inspirational.
I'm realizing that I haven't, I've written a lot about converted story, like as we've
gone along, but I have written like one post that tells the whole arc and then jumps off
to all the random content.
So I'm going to actually go and do that because just because that is interesting to have one
place of like zero to where we're at now and highlight that.
Who knows?
Maybe we'll do that.
It's supposed to end up writing probably again and again, because like if you wrote, you
know, all of converted story five years ago, we'll now be missing five years of information
and your perspective will be different.
And I bet you the way you write about the early days today will be so different than
you saw the early days at the time.
And that doesn't mean like your perspective now is inaccurate.
I mean, it'll be a little bit less accurate, but it'll be, uh, it'll be just more clear
context.
You'll see much more about like how the world was changing, where you were in sort of the
landscape and the ecosystem where at the time it's probably harder to place yourself.
You probably weren't as confident.
You probably had more doubts, et cetera.
So I'd love to see you do that.
That's my favorite thing about writing year in review posts is that you get to lock in
your own like mindset and worldview at that exact moment in time and then read it again
later and be like, Oh, that's what I saw was possible.
That's what I saw as my biggest struggles.
You know, that's what we accomplished that year.
And you basically, it's the only way effectively, you know, that you get to, to capture exactly
what you think and that worldview from that moment.
And then when you look at it five years later, you're like, Oh, that's funny that that was
what I was trying to do with, you know, and it helps see the growth because otherwise
you just feel like you're in this constant struggle and it doesn't get any better.
But if you have that documentation, either through the stories or you're in review posts
or interviews, you look back on, you're like, Oh, okay, I have grown a lot.
Like one example is a year ago, we hit the pandemic and every company leader was trying
to figure out like, what does this mean?
How do we lead through this?
Like maybe churn is really high, but new revenue is coming in and how do we take care of the
team and everything else?
And I think like three years ago, four years ago, that would have been way more than I
could handle.
I probably would have figured out how, but a year ago, we'd been through a lot already
of challenges in the company, whether it's a PR crisis or, you know, server outages
or anything else.
Right.
And so it was just like, it was challenging, but it was at the level that I felt I could
rise to the challenge.
And so it's interesting to reflect on the things that you encounter today and you're
like, Oh, past me would have really struggled with this currently.
It's like right at the edge, but I can take care of it.
You've been through a lot.
I remember being at the, I think I spoke at your conference where you unveiled like the
new name of ConvertKit and it was like Seva and I was like, this turns out to be like
a holy word in this religion that really doesn't want you appropriating it for your company.
You know, like that's a crisis that you survived.
That wasn't easy.
I imagine.
Cause like you put, I mean, it was like a really big, probably expensive unveiling and
like a lot of rebranding, a lot of marketing and you go through stuff like that and you're
like, you know, you look around and like, you're not dead and you're like, Oh, okay.
Well, the world keeps moving, you know, like I can survive, you know, bigger and harder
things.
Yeah.
That was a about $500,000.
Right.
Went into that one.
I mean, it's still a huge amount of money, but then it was especially a huge amount of
money.
That's why I think it's so important in like sharing numbers and work in public and any
of that that you, you got to share the ups and the downs, probably one of the more painful
articles I've ever published is titled there and back again.
And it's about ConvertKit's name change.
And I sat on that one for a long time, like I actually just published it two and a half
years after the name change.
You know, and part of it was like, you know what, it's now passed out.
Like I don't, I don't need to bring any of this up, but then I've also thought with like,
okay, now do work in public for a reason.
We don't just share the highlights.
We got to share the struggles and lessons along the way.
And so that was a more difficult but important post to write, at least to be authentic and
consistent.
I remember being like the very beginning of indie hackers and my server went down for
a day and I was like, Oh no, my problems are the worst problems anyone's ever experienced
in life.
What am I going to do with myself?
I was at the top of Hacker News at the time.
No one could load the website.
And I was like, this is over.
Like it's like, I'm going to have to pack my bags and like, do what, like go get a job,
get a job or something.
Like nothing happened.
Everyone forgot about it the next day and it was fine.
But the challenges of being a founder, you know, and I guess ConvertKit has grown.
You've sort of, you're still like the face of the company.
You know, I think ConvertKit, I think Nathan Barry, but I see your tweets and I see your
posts and you're sort of like, Oh, the best thing I've ever done is like no longer be
product lead or like, you know, the ConvertKit is easy to run.
I can do these side projects because I have other people I trust running stuff.
And so you're sort of like stepping away from the day to day responsibilities and like
delegating to, I assume people who are insanely talented and who you trust.
There comes a point, and this is both wonderful and challenging as a founder, where the effort
that you put in doesn't have that big of an impact.
It used to be that if I sent five more sales emails or like push for an extra couple hours
in, I guess, Photoshop at the time, pre Figma, um, you know, designing an interface to helping
get this, this feature out, like that would meaningfully move the company forward.
And now I'm sort of in this, this place and it takes a little bit of getting used to of
like, look, if you work on ConvertKit for an extra two hours today or an extra 15 hours
this week, it is the tiniest drop in the bucket compared to the hours that 65 other people
plus another 50 contractors, you know, are putting into building and growing the company.
And so on one hand, there's like this, you know, a bit of an existential crisis of like,
I don't matter anymore, you know, or, um, like this individual effort doesn't make this
big difference.
And so that can be good for a step back of like, look, I don't need to grind it out at
this computer to have the biggest impact.
You know, that's where you hear a lot of people talk about like, Oh, as a CEO, I started going
on long walks and that was actually the most like time to think and have space is so good.
But then the flip side is that anything that you do on strategy, long-term thinking, setting
the direction, like if you're wrong, you end up being wrong by a lot because you just had
like hundreds or thousands of hours of people's time go into pursuing the wrong thing.
But if you're right, then like you get incredible leverage on that.
And so it's this weird world between like, you don't matter.
The individual effort that you put in no longer matters.
It mattered a lot in the early days, doesn't matter now.
And also then in the other sense, like it matters more than it ever has.
And like, don't screw it up because there's everything that you do has all this weight
behind it.
Yeah.
It's like a multiplier on everything you do.
It's basically like your labor no longer matters, but your decisions matter a hundred X, a thousand
X more than they ever had, which is a lot of stress because like what even, how do you
even describe a decision?
What goes into a decision?
It's just like ephemeral thing where you're like, well, I think I have pretty good knowledge
and I think I've checked my sources and talked to friends and like you, for example, just
acquired a company called fan bridge.
Yeah.
No idea how much the acquisition was for, but I see it was expensive.
This is a big company and they're, I think they do like newsletter distribution for the
music industry.
Yeah, exactly.
So their email marketing for musicians been around since 2006.
That's like, that's a big decision.
You know, and now a lot of people that convert kit and a lot of people at fan bridge are
working based on this huge decision that you made.
And like, I have no idea of like what even went into that decision or what your goals
are.
But like that's probably a lot of pressure.
I mean, that was an interesting one being our first acquisition, you always have these
ideas of like, Oh, acquisitions would be a great way to grow, to grow, or maybe they'll
be terrible or, you know, who knows what, right?
You just don't know.
And until you've done it, uh, and so part of the reason that we did the acquisition
was our, like expanding into the music space.
And I think you've probably seen a lot of that with convert over, over the last year
in particular of like launching creator sessions and doing all these live, like at home concerts
with musicians.
And, and basically as we went in the early days from convert kits for professional bloggers
to now all of creators and now pushing that limited even more with musicians like Matt
Carney and Tim McGraw and Amanda Palmer and others, um, then it was like, okay, musicians
is a market that we can go after.
Like, how can we accelerate that?
And then also how can we consolidate the market?
You know, it was interesting to play like in the music industry, the most popular email
marketing tools for musicians.
Number one is Mailchimp.
Number two is Salesforce marketing cloud, which is kind of weird.
And then number three is fan bridge and number four is convert kit.
And so we looked at that and said like, Oh, we can actually like, I can't buy Mailchimp
or, or Salesforce, but like I can buy this player and like, you know, double the number
of positions on convert kit or more than double by quite a bit.
Um, yeah, that's, that's like really big moves.
And I think about like what we were talking about earlier, the fact that there's these
different channels that you can put the word out on.
Right?
Like that's a big decision you have to make.
Like where am I going to, not only what am I going to produce, but like, where am I going
to produce it?
And for you, it's kind of like, okay, not only like, you know, what decisions am I going
to make it convert kit, but also like what companies, what companies am I going to buy?
You know, what industries am I going to enter?
Like it's music.
Even the right industry, you know, is an email marketing, uh, sort of newsletter company,
the right entrance.
Like, I think my very first, yeah, my very first podcast guest was this guy, Jason Grishkoff,
who ran like an ND music discovery blog.
And apparently there's like thousands of these blogs where people like subscribe to the blogs
to discover music.
It's just this huge force that I didn't know about and like, Oh, this is why everybody
knows like new music.
And I don't be like, you know, you could have started there, you know, there's like so many
different avenues.
And I wonder like how much of this is like your passion for music, you know, out of all
the different arts, out of all the different things that are, there's like a huge agricultural
industry in the newsletter space, you know, there's like, like every industry is kind
of in the newsletter space.
Why, why music?
At an executive meeting, I guess it was like 18 months ago now, we're all sitting in a
room, you know, doing our planning, we're just talking about where we want to go next.
And someone asked the question of like, what types of creators would we be most proud to
have as customers for can work it.
And everyone gave examples of musicians.
And so then it was like, great, you know, we get to pursue whatever industry we want.
You know, we did the dude due diligence to make sure that it was a space that we thought
we could enter and win and like that it made sense.
But then also in the like your favorite creators, favorite marketing tool, like in that angle,
a lot of people, their favorite creators and musician, you know, you think about some of
the best writers are, you know, a lot of hip hop artists who are putting out like incredible
rap music or whatever else, right.
And so there's also sort of this leap from the internet subculture that like Convert
It is well known in up to like actual culture.
Right.
And one thing that we said is we want to be powering the creators who are actually like
driving culture.
And so music was a great place to go for that.
It strikes me as a little bit ironic that we're talking so much about like these creator
stories and the power of story and then this episode is like, not at all story ask.
It's just randomly me talking to you like we're having a normal conversation, which
is honestly like my favorite thing nowadays, even though it's not as motivational as stories.
But there's one thing I want to talk about before I let you go, which is just this whole
creator economy thing that's exploded.
Like it wasn't even a term a year and a half ago, like no one was saying creator economy.
Maybe they were, but it wasn't like, you know, wasn't like a mainstream brand name VCs investing
in the creator economy.
So today it's like, that's literally all I hear about all the time.
Creator economy, this create economy that everybody's got a newsletter.
Everybody seems to be making money.
And it's super exciting because I think people are able to generate revenue and like create
a business for themselves and like find financial independence online without having to be a
software engineer, you know, they can write a really good newsletter and put it on convert
kit and like start charging subscribers.
Like that's not a thing you could do two or three years ago.
What's your take on the creator economy?
Like, is this here to stay?
And how do you look at kind of the competition in particular, because Twitter, for example,
is a huge distribution channel.
You know, a lot of people get discovered on Twitter and they're just like, they just straight
up bought review a newsletter company and they're just like, we're just going to pick
this directly into Twitter, which I imagine is probably pretty scary for like the gum roads
and maybe the convert kits out there.
Or it's like, Oh, well, uh, we don't have, you know, a billion people on a platform who
can use it every day.
Like Twitter does.
There's a favorite.
I'm sure I should dig up the graphic because I can picture it in my head, but that someone
did of like the popularity of email newsletters over time, you know, and it like peaks and
keeps going up and it's up a lot.
And then they like transposed in there, like email is dead headlines from like the New
York times and wall street journal, like 2014, just like all the way along of like, it's
totally dead.
Everyone said it as it like 10 X's in, you know, in popularity, you know, so everyone
has always said like emails dead social is an expect thing and we've been fairly quietly,
you know, as a self-funded company, just building the space and they're like, okay, but we're
seeing people build bigger and bigger newsletters.
No, we think this is a good thing.
And so it's been interesting to be doing that all the way along and then now have like this
spotlight come shine a shot on us.
I don't know.
I had like the eye of sorrow on, you know, as like, and you're like, Oh, guess I have
the ring.
And so on one hand, it's super exciting because people would be like, you're starting a newsletter
before and now they're like, Oh yeah, you have a newsletter, I have a newsletter.
Oh, this is great.
And I love it because there's so many people now that would never have done that before
and now can do exactly what you and I did of like build something say to like the hundred
thousand dollars a year in revenue, like to add, to have a creator business that you've
built up to that level is a pretty amazing life for yourself.
And I think that's so approachable now.
People's got a little bit of a different take on it, you know, as far as how to charge what
the value proposition is, right?
Is there like in sub-stacks case, you know, a paid newsletter is the way to earn a living
as a creator.
And in our case, we take like, like Hunter walk had this article, the multi-skew creator,
and that's very much sums up the way I convert its approach and what we have talked about
in the books and everything else of you can earn a living in the way that matches your
hairstyle, like that might be a course, it might be a paid newsletter, it might be sponsorships,
you know, whatever else, like there's a whole range of options might be a hodgepodge stuck
into Jay Klaus and he's got like, he had his own sort of like accelerator he was running
with like, you know, 10 or 20 people he was mentoring and he also had like contract work
he was doing and like a newsletter and like a podcast with ads and it's like, yeah, when
you're trying to get to that first like 100k and revenues, like you can replace your job,
like you might have to stitch it together sort of like this Frankenstein monster as a
creator that quite frankly is hard to do if you're only on sub stack because that's it
the people got to subscribe to your newsletter, you can't really sell anything else. I don't
even know if they allow you to do ads.
You technically could but they're like, editorially against it. But there are plenty of people
who do who, you know, do sponsored posts on sub stock and stuff. So like Twitter buying
review was really interesting, because it was just more validation in the space. I could
end up being totally wrong on this. But I don't think that review will end up being
a wildly successful newsletter tool or competitor in the same way that we don't have anyone
switching from ConvertKit to sub stack. I don't think we're going to have people switching
from ConvertKit to review. My hope is that it will grow the you know, the pool a lot
more the pond will get bigger. Like we have a lot of people who would have never thought
about starting a newsletter. And then they start a sub stack. And then they get to 10,000
subscribers. And they're like, this is amazing. Now I need all these features. And they graduate
from sub stack over to ConvertKit. And it's like, you know what, I will take that all
day long.
Yeah, it's pretty nice to be the bull that catches all the water dripping out of the
leaky bucket of sub stack and review because they're just increasing the top of the funnel
and you're there to catch it and actually help people build bigger, better businesses.
The other fascinating thing is like 10,000 subscribers or say even 100,000 subscribers
is a really big sub stack. Like one of the biggest if you get that to 100,000 subscribers.
What's fascinating is that's actually a relatively like that's a mid sized newsletter. Like the
biggest newsletters on ConvertKit are well over a million subscribers. You know, the
Tim Ferriss's, Gretchen Rubens, James Clears, the world, they're all huge. We just don't
do as probably as good of a job marketing it because we sit behind the scenes. Like
I think of it as sub stack is to Amazon as ConvertKit is to Shopify of like sub stack
is taking a much bigger cut. They're like front and center in the brand. You know that
you're buying from sub stack. Whereas like if I'm buying from a creator on Shopify, you
know, for their e-commerce store, I like as an person who pays attention to user experience.
I'm like, I can tell this is Shopify, you know, like almost everyone doesn't know. And
that's the approach that we're taking up. Like the creator should be front and center.
You should have like the highest kind of revenue. You know, I had a ConvertKit payments are
3.5%. Whereas on sub stack, they're 12.9%. So say to differently and almost in a way,
sub stack is like telling a story where they are the hero. And in a way, it's super flashy,
because everyone says that was sub stack, sub stack, sub stack, but you go to any sort
of particular sub stack landing page or newsletter, and they all kind of look the same. It's very
hard to differentiate, you know, it's not really creative focused and convert kits the
opposite. You're the guide, you're in the background. You're Yoda, you know, you die
in the second or third movie or something. But like, you know, Luke goes on and ends
up having like, you know, a great legends told about him. And then that seems to be
the good place to be, you know, I'm gonna guess that you're generating a hell of a lot
more revenue than sub stack is and you will for probably time immemorial. The last question
I'd like to ask on these on these on these shows is basically, you know, if you search
through your story and like what you've learned, what do you think any hackers out there need
to hear? What's something that they can take away from your learnings and your experiences
and it doesn't need to be the most important thing.
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that it takes a long time. And so when you look at
compound growth of any kind, you have to give it enough years for it to compound. And in
the early days of what I was doing, I was like trying something and then jumping to
the next and like that kind of worked. And so I'd learn a lesson and roll it into the
next thing. And that was great. But if you look at the most successful companies, usually
someone has been grinding away at it forever. Like in our space, I think about MailChimp.
They started working on MailChimp in 2001. You know, they're 800 million a year in revenue
or something like that. They haven't said numbers publicly recently, but you know, 800
or 900 million is where I would like trend them to be. But the kind of the funny thing
is ConvertKit is eight years old. And if you were to overlay MailChimp's revenue graph
starting at year zero founding with ConvertKit at year zero founding, ConvertKit is significant
and larger revenue wise than MailChimp was eight years in. But the thing that most founders
end up doing is that they end up selling early, moving on to the next project, giving up too
soon or anything else where they're like, oh, look at this compound growth that they're
getting. And it's like having $1,000 in your stock account. And it's like, yeah, it's compounding,
but it's not compounding yet. Like give it another decade and then it'll really compound.
And so I think about a competitor that we had in the early days called Drip. We were
founded like at exactly the same time. For a lot of reasons, he made the decision to
sell Drip. And I think that was absolutely the right decision for him and his family
and everything else. But like ConvertKit is going to be a wildly larger company because,
you know, we didn't sell relatively early. We stuck with it for a long, long time. And
it's, and now we're getting the compound growth on that. So I guess the thing that I would
say to indie hackers is like, it takes way longer than you think. And it's worth it if
you keep going.
I love it. It reminds me of the beginning of the pandemic, where everyone was talking
about exponential growth and people weren't afraid because like, look at the numbers are
so small, they're not much higher than they were last week. It's like, yeah, when you're
getting compounding growth in a small number, it's pretty, it's pretty small at first, but
it ramps up very quickly. And if the same thing applies, you know, across the board,
indie hackers, I think should use your advice and they're like, yeah, things might not be
crazy in the early days, but like, if you stick with it over a long and a period of
time, you can get to a pretty life changing outcome. So can you let people know where
they can go to learn about the million and one side projects are working on and also
what's going on with ConvertKit?
Yeah, let's see. Well, you should go subscribe to the podcast. I just searched Nathan Berry
show in, you know, iTunes, Spotify, et cetera. And you can subscribe to my newsletter at
Nathan berry.com. And that's where I write about everything and like link off to the
random, random things that I'm doing. And then I'm most active on Twitter, just at Nathan
Berry, various B A R R Y. And DMS are open. Email is open. Just get in touch any way you
want.
All right. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks.