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Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Lessons - The Four Key Mantras for Creator Success | Nathan Barry - Built a $40M+ SaaS for Creators
00:10:30
In this "Lessons" episode, Nathan Barry, founder and CEO of ConvertKit, shares the four key mantras that fueled his journey from author to software entrepreneur. He explains how teaching everything builds credibility and drives continuous learning, why creating every day and working in public not only sharpens your skills but also forges deep connections, and how defaulting to generosity unlocks lasting success by transforming every challenge into an opportunity to grow.
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Transcript12 lines
- [00:00]
A
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- [01:48]
B
Yes, it was actually really soon. There's so many things I look back on. I'm like amused by my thought process at the time. So I had a few things going on and so 9-20-12 I published my first book to an audience of 800 people on a Mailchimp email list. Like 12-15-2012 I published my second book and that is to a list of more than double the size. Actually probably three or four thousand people. That book goes on to sell $50,000 worth in the first month. And then January 1st I start working on a ConvertKit. So in a 90 day period I published two books and started a software company.
- [02:39]
A
Just laughing because you never stop. You never stop.
- [02:42]
B
Yeah, let's have it. Sufferable to be around. I don't know. But I so at that time I was teaching a lot about software design and I had this idea, I could see myself moving fully from being a practitioner into teaching. And I had this idea that, you know what, if I stop designing myself, then I'm going to be one of these people who only teaches. They lose time, touch and credibility in the industry. And so I should have another project that is software designed so that I can keep learning, keep my skills sharp, and have more to teach about. And so When I started ConvertKit, I did it with something that I called the Web App Challenge, where I said, I'm going to build a software company from zero to $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue within six months with only $5,000 of my own money contributed to this. Everything else has to be customer funded and I'm going to live vlog the entire thing. And so that gave me a lot more to write about. I actually published another book in the middle of this, which is kind of wild. But that's the thing. When you have this muzzle going of like the sheer amount of content I was learning so fast, I was just teaching absolutely everything that I.
- [04:02]
A
That I knew, by the way, just a. Just total as total aside. Writing that much, did it help with your clarity? Because I find this, it helps my clarity of thought when I write in everything that I do. And when I don't write, I actually feel like a little bit more sluggish, a little bit more foggy. I don't know if you felt that too, but I'm curious.
- [04:21]
B
The first thing that people often bring up, people who aren't writers, when we talk about the amount that I wrote during that time period, they go, don't you run out of things to say? And so long as you are consuming content and doing research and all that as well, I find that the more that I write, the more I learn and, you know, the more that I have to say. And so, yeah, it was just so prolific actively doing things at the time as well that I could just even write about what I was doing, you know. And that was the thing with building a software company. There was every single week there were things to write about. How do you name the company, how do you hire developers, how do you write copy for the homepage? And that's really where I like cemented these core values or these mantras that I have, which are, there's now four of them. But the first is teach everything you know. Second is create every day. Third is work in public, and then the fourth is default generosity. And. And like all this is around like constantly creating, constantly learning and sharing. And if you do those things Consistently I you cannot lose A huge shout.
- [05:31]
A
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- [07:26]
B
Yeah, so the first one of Teach Everything youg Know really was a hard earned lesson for me because I got started in web design and all of that and I just didn't understand the difference between the expertise that I had and the expertise of those who were public and out there and famous. And it wasn't until I realized that it's not that people teach because they're experts. It's actually the inverse. We perceive them as experts because they teach. And so I was thinking like, oh, I can't write blog posts on this. I can't, you know Like, I'm not an expert and so I can't teach any of this. But then it was that I realized it actually was the first time I was trying to install Ruby on Rails on my computer, the programming framework, and I read an article written by an expert and it didn't make any sense. It felt like it made sense to them and they'd like skipped past some key stuff. And then I found an article written by an absolute beginner who had read the first article, suffered through it, learned all of the missing points that a beginner, you know, actually encountered, and they wrote theirs. And I was like, ah, here's someone who's two steps ahead of me. And they wrote something that was far more useful to me. And so then I always had that mindset of, okay, I'm just gonna, I'm not gonna teach from like an ivory cower up the top and like, here's how things work. I'm gonna say, hey, here's what I just learned. I hope it's helpful, like as a breadcrumb for you as you follow in, in my footsteps. And that changed the game. Like that immediately gave me thousands of things to write about because it's like, oh, well, from the place of a non expert, I know a lot. The second one of Create Every Day really came back to that lesson of writing every day and actually finishing the book of like, you can't have these false starts. You can't tie effort to motivation. And it's just like, show up. I don't know which famous author this is a quote from, but it's something like, you know, I only write when I'm inspired, but conveniently I get inspired every morning at 9am sharp. And it's just like, I am a professional. I do this. You mentioned Seth Godin and he has this essay called A Manifesto for Small Teams Doing Important Work. And it's one of the things, it's like 100 words long, 200 words long, it's very short and it's just so good. But it's basically like you. The gist is you are a professional.
- [10:03]
A
Act like it.
- [10:05]
B
And yeah, that was each for me, the third one at work in public is really just separating this idea of what I'm doing and what I'm teaching and just saying, look, I can just talk about what I'm doing. I don't even have to be teaching. I can just say, here's a problem that I'm running into, but I don't have to have the answer, or here's a milestone that we hit. Here's what we're celebrating, here's what we're challenged with. And that in itself is interesting, engaging content. I remember a time working on ConvertKit where I was struggling with a copy for the sales page. And I just talked about it in one of my blog posts. I'm struggling with how to write this. And then Amy Hoy, this amazing copywriter and business leader in the bootstrap software world, who I'd met, and we talked. I think we'd met once at a conference, but she just messaged me and said, hey, I'll help you. And we got on a Skype call and we rewrote all of the copy. And then instead of saying, like, here's the final version, I did that. But then I published a whole blog post about everything I learned, like, the transcripts of some of our conversations. And that was one of the most popular things I'd written because they wanted to see, like, how a great copywriter works behind the scenes. And then. So that's work in public. The final one is default to generosity. When people sell content online, they have this. This question that comes up a lot of what should I sell and what should I give away? And a lot of times people will say, like, okay, I'm going to give away 20% for free and I'm going to sell 80% of it, right? Because I give away too much that people won't buy what I'm selling, and all of that. The problem when you go that route is that you just never provide that much value for free. So you never grow that big of an audience, so you never end up having that much reach. And so there's not much revenue from it. And I'd like to invert it. Not 80, 20 of give. It started with the 80, 20 of give 80% away for free, hold 20% back. I think now I'm probably more like 95. 5 of default generosity, giveaway just about everything, and then just hold back a little bit, charge a fair price for that, and then there's plenty of money to be made in those areas. So those are the four mantras, and they've guided so much that I've done as a creator.
- [12:39]
A
Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.
- [12:56]
B
Ra.