How I Went From $0 To 6 figures on Instagram (67-Minute Masterclass) | Gannon Meyer | 134

Summary

The Nathan Barry Show

Episode 134: How I Went From $0 To 6 Figures on Instagram (67-Minute Masterclass) with Gannon Meer

Date: June 25, 2026
Host: Nathan Barry
Guest: Gannon Meer (Instagram automation expert)

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Episode Overview

This episode is a comprehensive masterclass on how creators can transform Instagram attention into real revenue. Nathan Barry sits down with Gannon Meer, a creator and consultant who has helped educational businesses and top-tier creators turn their followings into six-figure businesses through optimized funnels—especially leveraging Instagram stories, DMs, and ManyChat automations. Gannon shares his journey from hustling as a creator to building a sustainable, recurring revenue business and breaks down the strategies, scripts, and systems that have changed his life and the lives of his clients.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Truth Behind Instagram Followers and Revenue

• Vanity metrics vs. revenue:
  • Many creators are "infatuated with the views and the likes on the posts and the follower count. I know people who have hundreds of thousands of followers who make no money." — Gannon Meer (00:00)
  • Having a large following is not correlated with making money; the real game is turning attention into action.

2. Why Most Creators Struggle to Monetize

• Creators either chase unreliable brand deals or sell products "without knowing exactly what worked."
• Sustainable systems and repeatable frameworks are missing:
  • "Most people get lucky… they just continue riding that luck wave, then when things run out, they go for more brand deals." — Gannon Meer (02:00)
• Gannon coaches creators to:
  • Visualize what works,
  • Double down on what works,
  • Make data-driven decisions.

3. The Core Funnel: Free, Segment, Upsell (FSU Framework)

• Drawn out as a 3-part funnel:
  • Free: Lead magnets, newsletters, free valuable content
  • Segment: Ask open-ended, personalized questions to learn about your audience
  • Upsell: Make tailored recommendations/offers based on their responses
• "Everything you give away for free turns into an opportunity to ask questions to your audience… and then make a recommendation." — Gannon (07:32)
• Memorable analogy: Like a diner menu—"Too many options overwhelm people. Ask what they want first, then guide them." — Gannon (02:28)

4. Segmentation Through DMs & ManyChat Automation

• Use ManyChat to automate DM responses based on keywords or comments.
• Open-ended questions over multiple choice:
  • "If you give somebody the opportunity to tell you their life story, they will... the more data we get, the better we can go into the upsell." — Gannon (09:47)
• Leverage AI like Claude for categorizing user replies for hyper-specific follow-up.

Case Study: The Camera/LUT Example

• A video creator was selling LUT packs for multiple cameras.
• By surveying the audience via DM automation, "we realized only 8% used the Pocket 3 camera, but 43% use a Sony. When they made more Sony-focused content, sales crushed." — Gannon (14:11)

5. Crafting Story and CTA: The PSA Framework

• PSA Story Framework:
  • "Psa, if you have this problem, you're probably making this mistake. I used to make this mistake. And I got this result by changing it." (18:31)
• Explicit CTA is crucial:
  • "In order to get somebody to go through this automation, you have to tell them to do it. It sounds stupid, but people don't do it." — Gannon (18:53)
• Place the CTA early in the content for optimal retention and engagement (not buried at the end).
• 70-80% of posts/stories should have a CTA:
  • "I think you should have a CTA in all of your content... Probably like 70-80% of the time." — Gannon (33:33)
• CTA examples: "Comment 'Tube' to get the full breakdown," or “Reply with X for the free guide.”

Memorable Example:

"I spent the last 36 hours of my life reverse engineering how Nathan Barry runs his social media profile. Pay attention because this is what I would do." — Gannon (21:06)

6. Storytelling Structure That Sells & Engages

• Use the “but/therefore” narrative for tension and stakes:
  • Describe what happened, insert a relatable challenge (“but”), then resolve it (“therefore”).
• Contrast “and/and/and” stories (flat narratives) with “but/therefore” stories (engaging):
  • "The word 'but' is an opportunity to express who you are and what you've gone through." — Gannon (25:24)
• Strip the content down until “there’s nothing else left to remove.”
  • Quote: "Something is done not when there's nothing else left to add, but when there's nothing else left to remove." — Gannon quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (29:06)

7. Metrics That Matter: Views are Not Revenue

• Viral “AI/Claude” videos may get 100k+ views but rarely lead to sales.
• Niche, tactical videos (<10,000 views) close high-ticket clients and make most revenue:
  • "That video might have 8,000 views, but it's made me like 30 grand." — Gannon (47:44)
• Direct correlation: Deeper content = higher revenue per view. (See also 51:02)

8. The Private Marketing World and Subtle Selling

• Not all sales happen in public; many automated funnel steps are behind the scenes.
• "People tend to over-explain in their ManyChat automations… They just want the thing, and you can just send it to them." — Gannon (38:18)
• Private segmenting and recommendations lead to higher conversion.

9. Personal Story: Gannon’s Own Journey

• After years of hustling, failing to create recurring revenue, and living with his mother-in-law, Gannon pivoted from general coaching to leveraging his automation expertise.
• The turning point: A mentor called his product plans "dumb"—instead, “do the thing you’re already world-class at.”
• Viral “breakdown” videos of influencer businesses using ManyChat opened doors to high-value clients and real revenue.
• “What’s changed my life in the past 12 months is doing that over and over again: answering questions that have no right answer and just showing people how I think about solving problems, doing it publicly.” — Gannon (61:41)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "We are infatuated with the views and the likes on the posts and the follower count. I know people who have hundreds of thousands of followers who make no money."
  — Gannon Meer (00:00)
• "If you have an audience on Instagram but you're not making money, you're probably making this mistake. You're probably not using the PSA story framework."
  — Gannon Meer (32:52)
• "It's more than a dollar per view, by a large sum. It's probably like $3 a view."
  — Gannon explaining the ROI of micro-targeted videos (51:02)
• "Something is done not when there's nothing else left to add, but when there's nothing else left to remove."
  — (29:06)
• "Be willing to be wrong in public."
  — Gannon on why his public breakdown videos succeed (62:14)
• "The types of people who think they're going to change their life DM you privately, but they never put it out there. It just goes to spam. The ones that do it in public get results."
  — Gannon (63:38)
• "It's not because I have 192,000 followers. It's because I just went out and did the thing and most people don’t."
  — Gannon (64:53)
• "There’s very little downside: if you're right for the person you made the video about, they're a client."
  — Gannon (61:41)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00-02:04 — Why followers and likes don’t equal revenue
• 03:33-06:23 — Client types, productization, and broad vs. specific selling
• 07:01-13:20 — Drawing the funnel: Free —> Segment —> Upsell; intro to DM segmentation
• 14:07-15:18 — Camera/LUT case study; macro vs. micro segmentation
• 18:31-20:28 — PSA Story Framework and story structure with early CTA placement
• 21:06-24:44 — Example video scripting and the use of tension/but/therefore structure
• 29:06-29:39 — When is a script/video done? “Nothing left to remove” quote
• 32:47-34:14 — PSA IG story script template and using 70-80% CTA frequency
• 35:24-38:18 — Maximizing engagement by leveraging comment/DM automations; metrics that matter
• 47:44-51:02 — Why focused/niche videos outperform viral content in revenue
• 53:32-62:14 — Gannon’s personal story of transformation: From hustling to recurring revenue
• 62:14-64:53 — Willingness to be wrong in public, real-world outcomes for small audiences

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Actionable Takeaways

• Leverage Instagram DMs and stories for high-ROI, personalized funnel automation.
• Use open-ended, not multiple-choice, segmentation to deeply understand your audience.
• CTA should be in 70-80% of your content—ideally at the beginning.
• Short, personal stories with clear tension ("but/therefore") hook and convert viewers.
• Don’t confuse virality or follower count with business growth; deep over broad works best.
• For big wins, “be willing to be wrong in public”—showcase your expertise even if it means risking being corrected.
• Build systems, not luck-dependent campaigns.

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Where to Find Gannon Meer

• Instagram: @gannonmeer
• YouTube/LinkedIn: Gannon Meer (black-and-white profile photo)

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This episode is a must-listen (or read) for anyone wanting to move from content-for-attention to content-for-income.

Transcript

[Gannon Meer]

We are infatuated with the views and the likes on the posts and the follower count. I know people who have hundreds of thousands of followers who make no money.

[Nathan Barry]

How do you make money from Instagram? You already have the attention. People watch your reels and reply to your stories. But almost none of that turns into actual revenue.

[Gannon Meer]

70 to 80% of the time you should have a CTA. I have figured it out on my own because I've made 4,000 videos.

[Nathan Barry]

He's done videos for clients that have done hundreds of thousands of views. $50,000 bootcamp launches and every weekly newsletter he sends generate sales on Autopilot. If you have an audience on Instagram but you're not making money, you're probably making this mistake.

[Gannon Meer]

You're probably not using the PSA story framework. Every time I do it, it has 4x outlier.

[Nathan Barry]

He breaks down his selling system into a simple three step framework and he walks through his funnel piece by piece.

[Gannon Meer]

If you go on your Instagram analytics, your insights for a post, their most recent update lists the engagement in order of how important it is for being recommended to a new audience. Comments are still ranked pretty high.

[Nathan Barry]

By the end, you'll have a funnel you can set up this week. No matter the size of your audience, your revenue per view ratio on that is probably very good.

[Gannon Meer]

It's more than a dollar review.

[Nathan Barry]

This is incredible. So Gannon, we've got a big topic today. How to make money from Instagram.

[Gannon Meer]

Yes, sir.

[Nathan Barry]

There's a lot of people that build big followings and don't make any money. Yeah, what do you say to that?

[Gannon Meer]

You know, they usually chase brand deals as the next best step and then that turns into an unreliable marketing stre income stream. So I help them sell their products. And people who do sell products, they're just like, I know I sell them, I just don't know how I sell them. And I'm like, well, we have to figure that out. So that's why they hire me.

[Nathan Barry]

So you turn the attention from Instagram into actual revenue and sales.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, and also being able to like visualize what it looks like and how to do more of what's working because people just don't know.

[Nathan Barry]

I think a lot of people even who make that leap to products are then like, I don't know, I just kind of mentioned it in a story or something else. And yeah, it made some money. And so it doesn't feel sustainable or reliable. Like how do you approach?

[Gannon Meer]

I mean, most people, I mean, I hate to say it, like they just get Lucky.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah.

[Gannon Meer]

And they just continue like riding that luck wave. And then when things run out, they just like, well, this doesn't work anymore. Let me go for more brand deals. You know, the way that we approach it is just like, how do we make everything personal? Eyes at scale. Right? So like, if I know somebody has a specific problem, I need to get that out of them, have them tell me, and then recommend a solution. Because the way that I kind of explain it is like if this is a menu at a Diner, you have 40,000 different. Like a New Jersey diner, for example. Right. Or a New York diner, you have like 40,000 different combinations of things. Let's just. I use the example of like being on a road trip. Like you're on an eight hour road trip from like Florida to like upstate New York. You stop in New York City or like somewhere in New Jersey and it's like, I'm starving and I don't know what I want. And the fact that this has 40,000 things on it is not making my taste any better. And I give the analogy of like a waiter or a waitress coming over and asking like, what can I get you? You not knowing what you want. And then the waiter asking, well, what do you like, what are you in the mood for? So instead of the waiter recommending right off the bat, like the specials on the menu, it's taking into consideration what this person likes. Because if they're like, you should get this salmon and you don't like seafood, it's just going to make you even more mad. So that's kind of the logic we're taking to this. Like, even if you have one or two products, you still have a menu and you need to get that menu item in front of the right person to help them make that decision because they don't know what to buy, they just need help. Yeah. And that's where you come in.

[Nathan Barry]

I'm excited to dive into that. Before we do that, what's. What are some examples of clients that you've had? Maybe let's do two things. Talking about clients that you've had, like. Right. And who you've served. And then maybe separately from that, you can give some examples of the types of income that you've seen creators achieve. You know, like following to income level.

[Gannon Meer]

It's crazy. And just like being able to see this behind the scenes and just seeing how like, just how these businesses operate is just so like eye opening for me. Yeah, yeah. How they typically work. You know, a lot of the clients that we work with are like info educational based, like course cohort, membership, community. They're typically doing like quarter million to like half a million in sales a year. A lot of that's brand deals. Or they want to launch a product and they see like, oh, this person made $1.2 million or $1.5 million. And like, I want to do the same thing. And it's just like, we can, we can try to get you there, but you have to understand that like when you're launching something or releasing something to your audience, the fundamental thing that you're trying to achieve is how do I get this person not to pay me money, but to trust me enough that I'm the right person to help them solve this problem? And people are just not good at that because they take this shotgun approach where it's like, I have 800,000 people in my audience. Let me just pitch the same thing to everybody and see who buys. Shout out to Brendan Dunn, by the way. Thank you, Brennan.

[Nathan Barry]

He's great at personalization and all of that. Fun fact about Brendan is when I was early on starting kit, he was my developer friend who was in the GitHub repository checking to see if the freelance developers that I hired were doing good commits.

[Gannon Meer]

Wow. Yeah. Well, that's before Everybody was on GitHub and now you have cloud code and just pushing absolute nonsense. Which is. I'm guilty of that. Which is what you're doing.

[Nathan Barry]

So going. What I'm trying to get a sense of is if I have 10,000 followers and a targeted offer, and that's really like, is this something where it's like, hey, you could be making $5,000 a month.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Or 50,000. Like, what's the scale that.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, I mean, like what we do with selling. So we use many chat, which we'll get into is like you, you have a really good opportunity, number one, to get somebody to buy into a lower ticket product right off the bat. Like, if you're thinking about selling a $2,500 course or a $10,000 service in the DMs, it's just not going to happen. Right. Like, no one's going to take out their credit card. It's like that. What was it? Kayak? Maybe they did a commercial where it's like, I'm too scared to make this decision. It's like three millennial Gen Z people are trying to make a big decision to purchase on a phone and they just won't do it. So anything really over maybe a few hundred dollars in our case, we work really well, with $47 offers, it works really well in the DMs, but anything above that, you just have to get them over to email, and then email is what sells them.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay. So what we're focused on initially is getting that attention on Instagram and then translating it into.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. And all the clients we work with, they're really good at getting attention.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah.

[Gannon Meer]

But, like, we don't solve the attention problem. But I have kind of figured it out on my own because I've made 4,000 videos, you know, so it's kind of like something has to work after you make 4,000.

[Nathan Barry]

I want to dive into that a bit later, but let's. For now, let's focus on this conversion process. So what, we've got the board up here.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

What should we be drawing?

[Gannon Meer]

So draw. Draw three boxes. Right? So draw a box up here, one down here, and just go big or small. Yeah, go, go. Go wide. And we can just, like, brainstorm these as time goes on. I couldn't have done it better myself. Look at this.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah.

[Gannon Meer]

Professional.

[Nathan Barry]

Right here.

[Gannon Meer]

That's right.

[Nathan Barry]

I'm just trying to get on your level.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. So this represents. It's like a funnel, essentially. So you have three steps of, like, what we do and what I recommend people do is your top of funnel is just like all of your free stuff. So just write free. Right. So this is your lead magnet. This is your newsletter. Yeah. Anything that you give away for free of value. Okay. Second is segment.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay.

[Gannon Meer]

So just write segment in that one. It turns into an acronym that people think, oh, does that mean what I think it means? And like. No, it means free segment. And that upsell is the last one.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay.

[Gannon Meer]

It's not. It's definitely not, you know, not what you think. It's not what you think. It's definitely nothing. It's not attention play, either. Yeah. So it goes from free segments to upsell. So everything you give away for free turns into an opportunity to ask questions to your audience. Right. So free is when somebody's on a road trip, they come into your restaurant and they're like, I know you have food. I know you can help me not starve on this road trip. And then the segment question is when the waiter or waitress comes over and asks, what do you like? What do you enjoy? Right. So there's good ways to ask questions, and then there's bad ways to ask questions. We can talk more about that, too.

[Nathan Barry]

Do you want to dive into that now or we'll come back to it?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, we'll come Back to it. So like upsell is just giving somebody an offer and I say upsell. But like upsell is usually just like a recommendation. So you can do FSR if you're not salesy. People don't like being salesy. So upsell is technically not like, hey, you bought this for 100, buy this for 200. It's just, you got this for free. Check this out as the next step. Right, so segment. When we're thinking about segmenting questions, we love open ended questions.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay.

[Gannon Meer]

So we want to get the most accurate data from our audience for a few different reasons. And we'll Talk more about ManyChat and like how this plays in. But ManyChat gives you the opportunity and for those who like are watching this and you're like, I don't know what ManyChat is. It's just if you've ever seen somebody tell you to comment on a post, comment this word. And you get this resource. They're like, how you do that? It's just money chat basically. Most cases, manychat, you can do it

[Nathan Barry]

through Facebook Business manager as well.

[Gannon Meer]

And yeah, you can do it for, you can do it for ads, you can do it for Works on Facebook, it works on Instagram. Yeah. TikTok kind of.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay.

[Gannon Meer]

And then.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, and then I think people do

[Gannon Meer]

it manually on LinkedIn. People do it manually on LinkedIn. Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Which tells you that it's valuable enough of a thing to do that. Yeah, people believe it's worth it.

[Gannon Meer]

I just think these companies don't want to expose their API data for whatever reason. But I think for people who want to run businesses, it's just a no brainer. It's absolutely insane.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay, so we've got open ended questions.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. So the reason why open ended questions are great is because, you know, if you ask somebody a multiple choice question, which is like what we do typically in a Typeform. Yeah. You're only going to get four different responses.

[Nathan Barry]

So a designer, a developer or whatever.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, but it's like those are like radio dial questions that you can ask. But you can also ask questions like what do you need help with the most? And if you keep that open ended, what you can do in manychat is you can actually look at all of the responses that people gave you, export it as a CSV file, send it over to like your copywriter and be like, this is all the responses that we have from our team or from people who went through it. And we need to update the copy in our sales page, our content. But it also, if you give somebody the opportunity to tell you their life story, they will tell you their life story. But the more data we get, the better we can go into the upsell. So essentially what's happening here is like, I can draw this. Yeah, go for it. But with manychat, you have. Oh, this is a nice marker. I love this.

[Nathan Barry]

We love a good marker, efficient atom.

[Gannon Meer]

This is very small, but you have an I slash input bucket, then you have an O output bucket. So typically what happens when you create these automations in manychat is you have these input and output fields. So if I ask you what your biggest struggle is, if you say anything to do with revenue, you're going to get put into the revenue bucket. Right.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay.

[Gannon Meer]

So when you ask these questions, like as soon as you ask the question, this input jar opens up.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay.

[Gannon Meer]

And it stays open until whatever duration you set for. Usually it's 30 minutes. You can do 12 hours. But whatever you say gets put into that jar, then it gets sent over to Claude and then Claude categorizes them in that output and then you can send a conditional message based off that. Okay. So it's a little abstract for the divorce.

[Nathan Barry]

So in this, because I think most people are used to segmentation where they're just like, are you A, B and C or that? So this is a lot more advanced. You're saying actually for 30 minutes. Is that what you recommend is the.

[Gannon Meer]

A 30 minute window? So I mean, it defaults to 30 minutes. But the issue with that is like, if you. So I think of it like a train station. Right. So like the 30 minute window in Manychat says if this person does not respond within 30 minutes, the train leaves the station, it's not listening for their response anymore, the jar closes. So Meta has a 24 hour rule where if they respond after 24 hours, it's not actually part of the automation. So they can't beyond 24 hours engage in an automation anymore, which is.

[Nathan Barry]

Which prevents you from doing mass marketing. Or like Meta's worried about people using it for spam or something else.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, exactly. So I usually like, we default this to 12 hours, but if people respond before that, it just pushes them along in the automation.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay, so it's just looking for a

[Gannon Meer]

response, it's just listening. Yeah, basically until the timer goes up. But yeah, whatever they say goes into the output and then Claude interprets that input and then classifies them into an output. Yep. So we can, we can dive more on that because I know it's a

[Nathan Barry]

little so basically, yeah, what's happening is

[Gannon Meer]

it's like a sorting hat in Harry Potter.

[Nathan Barry]

This is going in and then we're just going to have that circle for Claude.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

And then that's going to go into whatever the output is that's going from there and the output is the response back.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. So like you, you already kind of know like what your outputs are. Right. You know, like if you're going to create this as a multiple choice question, you have radio dials of like A revenue, B, growth, client, acquisition, whatever it is, but you give those radio responses to Claude and then you have Claude just categorize it for them. But the benefit of doing it this way is that you'll get more accurate responses and then you can use the actual language that your customers are using and then use it for other things.

[Nathan Barry]

Because you can use this exactly as you're saying, one off to help segment that one subscriber. But then you can zoom out a level and go up to that abstract

[Gannon Meer]

level and be like, okay, yeah, 500

[Nathan Barry]

people went through this. What are they talking about?

[Gannon Meer]

I mean, we can talk about like what we did for Adrian and the camera example. Right. So like, this is like, it's camera, like cinematographer stuff.

[Nathan Barry]

So for anyone who doesn't know what's Adrian's content?

[Gannon Meer]

Adrian is a content creator who teaches other content creators how to like make cinematic videos. So he's shooting on like a $5,000 camera, but now he's shooting on his phone. So he's just helping people make things cinematic. He was a music video director, very deep in that scene. So he had this lut pack which is basically a filter that you put on a video to make it look nice and cinematic. And those luts were for different cameras. So he had one for a Sony camera, he had one for the handheld Pocket 3. And he kept making videos about the Pocket 3, probably because he thought that,

[Nathan Barry]

oh, this is what most the Everyman creators probably using.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. Cause price point wise, it's more accessible to that audience. But we went through, we asked the question. So we had like the free. Well, he would post content about it and then he would drive to a sales page. But what we did was we asked them what camera they were using and then we sent them to a sales page for that offer for that camera. So instead of going to like the menu again, right. Like 40 different things on the menu, you just go to the particular thing you want based off of what we know about you. So he kept making videos about the pocket three and we realized that only 8% of his audience was using the pocket three. So I'm like, dude, make more videos about the Sony. There's 43% of your audience right now who is using a Sony camera. The other like half is using an iPhone. So if you want to sell more Sony luts, just make more Sony videos. And he did. And it crushed.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

Okay. So it's not just like now we tag this person in kit that they use a Sony camera. It's we know that 43% of our audience uses a Sony camera. So now we can make better content decisions. So it's like macro and it's micro or.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. So that would be an example of an open end question is like, what kind of camera do you use?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

And so I can just pull it out and I can type in whatever else.

[Gannon Meer]

And yeah. And the typing like, of the experience of that is much better than just clicking like A, B, C or D. It just makes it seem more human. But people just aren't familiar with like. Okay.

[Nathan Barry]

Because ManyChat will happily let you. Oh, you choose A, B, C or D. Yeah. And you're saying don't do that.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, I mean it's easier to set it up that way. But we use cloud because we want to make it seem conversational. Like people don't know they're. They're talking to an automation. It's.

[Nathan Barry]

Is that the same across all of your clients?

[Gannon Meer]

We don't, we don't use multiple choice questions.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay. Yeah. Hmm. Okay. So we said like good versus bad.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Is that good versus bad questions or like open ended? Like, can we make a list of like, do this, not that?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. So when. Well, there's, there's things that are good about open ended questions and then there's things about that are bad about open ended questions. But there's also good ways to ask an open ended question and the bad way to open it. Ask an open ended question. Okay.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, let's dive in on that part of it.

[Gannon Meer]

All right. So yeah. So you like whenever we're asking somebody a question, we're trying to figure out like where are they trying to go? Right. So if.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. What should I write down?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. So like what are your goals in the next like 6 to 12 months? Goals and timeline. Yep, there we go. I mean it's like that's pretty much like what we're doing like as the main segmenting question.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

We can ask other.

[Nathan Barry]

So what's an example?

[Gannon Meer]

Accessory, Would you say as generically as

[Nathan Barry]

like, what, what's the if Adrian were to use a goals and timeline question, what would it be?

[Gannon Meer]

It would be like, why? Why do you want to make cinematic videos? Like is it for audience growth? Do you want to look more professional? Because you want to.

[Nathan Barry]

So. But a lot of these questions start with why.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, it's usually question.

[Nathan Barry]

Yep.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, yeah. Why is more open ended than like, what?

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

Like what do you use versus why do you use it? Yep. Or why?

[Nathan Barry]

Okay, so I'm gonna go.

[Gannon Meer]

They're like not necessarily bad, but it's not gonna help somebody make a decision.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

Ultimately. Yep. That makes sense at least for like a higher ticket offer.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

Like if you're selling a $39 lut, like what camera do you use? Of course it's gonna help me make a decision. But it's like, okay, so you might.

[Nathan Barry]

Would you ever use both? Like in this case?

[Gannon Meer]

Well, yeah, I mean we do this for like applications for what we do. So I run automations for applications in my DMs and I'm always like, you know, what platforms do you use? What's your current revenue? But like why are you trying to figure out manychat right now?

[Nathan Barry]

So then do we're going to have a flow then that starts with what camera do you use? Or you know, why are you trying to.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Do that? And then later on it's going to ask other questions.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. So you're basically like for lower ticket. I think it's fine to ask just like what types of questions. But if you're going for, you sell a service or you sell a course where somebody's gonna have to spend more than a hundred bucks, you want to get them talking and then it's like a sales call. Right. Like you're not going to just be like, what do you use? What do you use? What are you using? All right, cool. I can recommend you this. It's just. No, it's like why are you here? Why are you here? Like there's something that caused you to trigger this automation. What was it? Tell me what it was. And then as soon as we know that information, we then pitch everything else based off that.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so then let's go to the free side for a minute. Yeah.

[Gannon Meer]

What about content?

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. What's the free content that gets people to actually engage and to start this funnel?

[Gannon Meer]

Yes. I mean I have this like PSA style story that I use all the time where it's like psa, if you have this problem, you're probably making this mistake. I used to make this mistake. And I got this result by changing it. Okay. But I'm not telling somebody how I changed it. In order to learn how I changed it, they have to get the free thing. Comment this word, reply with this word, Comment this word. And it goes from there.

[Nathan Barry]

Oh, cause you said reply. Because it's also.

[Gannon Meer]

It's a story. Yeah. It could be an Instagram story, It could be like a dm, it could be comment on a post. And yeah, it's typically psa. But if there's one framework that I try to teach, it's like in order to get somebody to go through this automation, you have to tell them to do it. It sounds stupid, but people don't do it. It's like, I just have this automation and then they bury it. In journalism, it's called burying the lead. Right. So your call to action is your lead in your caption. So it should be the first thing people see.

[Nathan Barry]

And as a marketer, I use the

[Gannon Meer]

correct lead there, right? Yeah, that's right.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, that's a journalism lead, not a marketer's lead.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. So like, you want to have the call to action in the first sentence of the video. And like, typically, what most people do, like, if you, if you draw a retention chart, I don't know, you probably can on this side.

[Nathan Barry]

Right?

[Gannon Meer]

So like, just draw like an X and Y axis. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, yeah, it's good. So like, as time goes on in the video, like somebody might. They start watching here. So like, just say that this is duration of the video. And then as time goes on, there's less and less people that are still on the video.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

So what people do is they're like, let me just put the call to action at the end, because I don't want to seem salesy, but I still want people to go through it. It's just like. Well, now you have 5% of your audience seeing it, right? Yeah. So what you can do is kind of like flip this so it's. This is the hook right here. Right. And then you can say, by the way, if you want to learn more about this, just comment the word X at any point in the video and I'll send you more information. And then you just continue with that tutorial.

[Nathan Barry]

So we're going to get the CTA early, You said in the first sentence.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, I mean, somewhere I usually go, like hook transition with like a short CTA and then the rest of the video.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay, so you said hook transition. Then we're going to have a cts,

[Gannon Meer]

a Smaller cta, basically. Yeah. And cta.

[Nathan Barry]

So we're going to do a cta,

[Gannon Meer]

and then you just wrote, like, meat of the content. I just write meat. Just bulk of the content and then another.

[Nathan Barry]

And this is going to be like a bigger cta. Okay, give me a script of a video. Like, what? What's one that you've done? What would the hook be?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, I mean, I do breakdowns of, like, creators and, like, how they run their business. So it's like, I spent the last, you know, 36 hours of my life reverse engineering how Nathan Barry runs his social media profile. And I learned that, you know, if you do the same thing that Nathan does, pay attention, because this is what I would do. Right. So it's like you kind of set stakes and you tell people what they're going to learn, and if they know who you're talking about, they're gonna be like, oh, okay. So, like, he runs a similar type of business that I do. Let me pay attention. And then you can say, by the way, at any point, if you're like, I want to learn this exact breakdown, because I only have three minutes to teach it. I have a full YouTube video. Comment the word tube, and I'll send it over to you. And then you go through the full thing, and then you're like, again, if you want the full tutorial, I have three minutes. I can't do this in three minutes. But comment the word tube and I'll send it over to you.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay, so that's that. That light touch on the CTA and a deeper touch on from there. What about from the storytelling side of things? Like, what makes a difference in actually retaining people through the stories that you're telling or the narrative there?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, I mean, I'm actually. I'm in the process of writing one right now for the keynote that I'm giving. Okay. So I have a partnership with a company who just released a new presentation remote. And I'm like, how do I tell the story of this being my first keynote and being nervous because I've never talked in front of this many people. But also the features of this remote, how it's going to help me prepare for this keynote? So I'm thinking about, you have to set the stakes of what's actually the problem here that we're trying to solve, and how are we going to solve it? And it's like, before, during, and after. But it's more than just what people do is they'll tell the story and be like, this happened and this happened. And this happened. And then this happened. And then this happened. So it's like, oh, I have a presentation and then I got this remote and then I presented because the remote was cool and I did a good job. And that's it. It's like, well, no, it has to be deeper than that. You need tension in, in the story that you have to talk about that will get somebody to continue wanting to watch, to see what happens. So an example of that is like, I have my first keynote. Cool. Oh, I am anxious about this. And I've never did a keynote in front of 500 people before and I don't know what I'm going to do. So it's like, I have a keynote, but I have this problem and then I want to solve this and you're going to come with me to solve this problem. So it's this happened, but this is going on and we have to get somewhere else.

[Nathan Barry]

So if we were to map it out, because I think a lot of people are going to fall into the. And, and storytelling. So if we were to contrast for

[Gannon Meer]

tutorial based, it's definitely going to be end and. But you know, you want to somehow set the stakes of these.

[Nathan Barry]

So we're like this and this and this. So what you're saying is that we're going to say like this happened, but this therefore the end.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, an example of this. And what I've tried to get good at is doing this tutorial based. Okay, so like how do I teach a tutorial but also set stakes for why somebody should watch. Okay, so an example of that is like how I structure almost all of my videos where I do breakdowns. It's like I spent 96 hours doing this and researching how they run their business. And I think there is something they can fix. And then you explain what they're currently doing well, and then you go into what they could fix. So the. But is the transition there, right?

[Nathan Barry]

Let's use an example of this, because two days ago, we got to hang out in the mountains of Idaho and you came flying with me.

[Gannon Meer]

I flew the plane.

[Nathan Barry]

You flew the flight?

[Gannon Meer]

I definitely flew the plane.

[Nathan Barry]

To be clear, we have video evidence of you flying the plane. So you, you made an Instagram video about this. Most people would say I was going to Boise and I really like airplanes. And so I thought maybe I'd reach out to Nathan. And then it worked out and I

[Gannon Meer]

got to go flying. Yeah, that's it. It's like, okay, well, thanks for sharing. I'm gonna get them to yourself.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, exactly.

[Gannon Meer]

It's cool.

[Nathan Barry]

But, like, it's like, I'm happy for you. Or the response you get is like, that's cool. Yeah, good job.

[Gannon Meer]

I think your video does not follow that form.

[Nathan Barry]

No.

[Gannon Meer]

So, like, I actually think I could have done a better job with the video. The reason why I like the word but is because I think, like, this might sound woo, woo, but it's an opportunity to, like, express who you are and, like, what you've gone through. Right. So, like, for the presentation, the keynote, it's like, I'm about to give a keynote, but I have anxiety. Like, I. I'm not comfortable on stage. We're going to see what happens. And then it's like, for the video that we did on the plane, it's like, I'm about to go to Idaho, but I don't want to just go to Idaho. I have an opportunity to do something with the CEO of a company who owns a plane. So let's see if we can get on the plane. And like, that's kind of setting the stakes. But it's also.

[Nathan Barry]

And then you build up to, like, is it going to work? You know, like, you're like, oh, he. He liked my post. He followed me.

[Gannon Meer]

He liked my post. He followed me. His team reached out and then, like, he picked me up at the hotel and he started wheeling the plane. I'm like, okay, this is happening. This is not fake. No, this is real. But yeah, when you use but it's just an opportunity to share with people what's happening and how you're thinking, yeah, there's ways to do it that are not as deep and personal, that you don't have to go crazy with telling people about your personal life, but it's just an example of showing how you think. So the tutorial example is I studied this person's funnel, but based on my work with clients, I think it could actually be a little bit better. So let me show you what's working and show you what I would change and why I would change it. And then you just do that.

[Nathan Barry]

Something that stood out to me in your video is the way that you made it, like, so much of a personal story. And it wasn't just one, but it was like, yeah, because the payoff was, oh, you're actually going flying.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

But then you had the later of like, but it's actually bumpy. We're flying over.

[Gannon Meer]

Bumpy flying the plane.

[Nathan Barry]

I love the line where you're like, my man. I said, I want to fly in your plane.

[Gannon Meer]

Are you sure?

[Nathan Barry]

Now fly your plane. You did great. Everyone's wondering.

[Gannon Meer]

Thank you for watching again.

[Nathan Barry]

It's a great pilot.

[Gannon Meer]

On Way Back, you know, it was a little bit better, but. Yeah. All right.

[Nathan Barry]

You're weaving that all the way through.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

If we take that video, that video is exactly 60 seconds long.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Why is it 60 seconds long?

[Gannon Meer]

I don't think it needs more than that. I think it's like, you know, what is. What is the way that I want to come across with my audience and, like, what do I want to share? And I think the video is more about how I'm willing to just put myself out there to do side quests than it is of just like, hey, let me message the CEO and get on a plane.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

It's like, no, this is what happens when you just put things out in the universe and just see what happens. So it's more about that than it is about, like, Gannon was on a plane in the middle of Idaho.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

It's like, we don't know. Yeah. So, like, 60 seconds. The way that I kind of, like, think about videos is like, if I write this and I read it in my head, like, 15 times, it's always, what can I remove? What can I remove? What can I remove? And if the video still makes sense, I remove it. But if I'm like, I can remove this sentence and the video is still good, it's gone. But if it's there and I'm like, this doesn't really contribute to, like, whatever plot is in my head. Like, if I was telling this at a dinner table, like, somebody would be like, yeah, you probably don't need to mention that. They would never say that. But it's like, what contributes to the emotion and what's happening in this video. And if it doesn't contribute to anything, then just get rid of it. It's like giving yourself a rubric. But if you do it 4,000 times, it's going to make sense eventually. But that's just how my brain works at this point.

[Nathan Barry]

So then how do you know when a video is done or a script is done?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, it's when there's nothing else. This is like a quote. I wish I put this in my senior year high school quote. But it's like, something is done not when there's nothing else left to add, but when there's nothing else left to remove.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

I forget that's an artist quote. I forget.

[Nathan Barry]

Antoine D. San Exupri.

[Gannon Meer]

Probably. Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

However you say his name.

[Gannon Meer]

Sure.

[Nathan Barry]

I give him credit yeah, but then that's such an important thing, because when I make Instagram content, this is why yours works and mine doesn't, is I just, like, rattle something off. Like, that's pretty good. Post it.

[Gannon Meer]

You know, I mean, it works for some people, but I think, like, it's the people who have done, like, the actual scripting so many times, or they just consume so much, where they just know kind of like, what's the format that I need to follow here? And I feel like I can pick up a camera and just yap, like, which is like the most popular format of videos right now. But I'll still have to cut things out, right? So, like, I'm not trying to fulfill a 60 second video. I'm just trying to cut things down to where it makes sense. And it just so happens that it is 60 seconds.

[Nathan Barry]

Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so what else? If we're talking about the free side or attention or all of that, is there anything else that we haven't covered that that's important?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, I mean, it's. It's really like. I think the big thing on the free side is that your stories are going to get the most engaged people. Like, if you think you don't mean

[Nathan Barry]

storytelling, you mean your actual Instagram stories. Yeah.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. So, like, if there's anything that somebody's going to do today, it's take a selfie, delete all of your Instagram stories right now, or archive them, post that selfie, put psa. If you have this problem, you're probably making this mistake. If you want to solve it, I solved it this way. And if you want to know how to do it, we'll go through.

[Nathan Barry]

We're diving into this.

[Gannon Meer]

What marker am I using?

[Nathan Barry]

So we're doing an Instagram story this vertical.

[Gannon Meer]

And you can draw like a self portrait here. And it's a Nathan selfie. There we go. There it is. Oh, look at that.

[Nathan Barry]

Got style.

[Gannon Meer]

And so we're just going psa, big psa, on top. And it's like, if you have X problem, if you're currently dealing with this, you're probably making this mistake. So it's like, if you're not making money on Instagram or you're not making money through your Instagram story, you're probably not following the PSA format. And people are like, what's the PSA format? Right.

[Nathan Barry]

And are you saying.

[Gannon Meer]

No, it's just the video. So like. Or it's a. It's a picture. So it's just like this sentence would Go here. Right? So like, if you're making this mistake or if you have this problem, making this mistake. And then the next sentence, which if you want to write out, you can, would be, I got this result by following a new format. Like, this would be like, I solved it by doing this.

[Nathan Barry]

And so then we're going.

[Gannon Meer]

So we're just like, I would say credibility too. Like, I solved this problem by doing. By changing this. Yeah. And like result incredibility. Plus, like, what was the method behind doing it without also. Yeah, like vague. Like very vague method.

[Nathan Barry]

There we go. And we're going vague. The result said in a way that gives you credibility. The method stayed in a way that's.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, that's vague. Yeah, yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

And then reply.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, just like call to action. It's like, I stopped by doing this if you want to learn how to do it. And then that is about the same size as the psa. So you're just like CTA right here. I usually do like a different color, like yellow background, black text, whatever it needs to be. But.

[Nathan Barry]

And the CTA is just, if you

[Gannon Meer]

want to learn how to do it, reply, reply tube. If you want the full tutorial. If somebody who has like, I mean, it's going to be different for everybody, but this typically for me, reaches like 15 to 20% of my followers or it'll get 50. Well, it might not all be my followers because some people will send it to other people, but it'll be like roughly a 20% margin of like, what my follower count is. So be like 30,000 views on this.

[Nathan Barry]

If you have an audience on Instagram, but you're not making money, you're probably making this mistake.

[Gannon Meer]

You're probably not using the PSA story framework. Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, I used it to make X result.

[Gannon Meer]

It got 30,000 views and made me $1500 in 24 hours. Yeah. If you want to learn what I'm talking about, just reply with this and I'll send it over to you. That's a lead magnet. And then you collect, name and email. You send them to whatever page you have the tutorial on. It could be like a loom video, tele video, whatever it is. And then you follow up 20 minutes later.

[Nathan Barry]

The free side. This could be reels, this could be stories.

[Gannon Meer]

Carousel post. Carousel posts.

[Nathan Barry]

How many times? Like in all of your content, how many times would you weave in one of these things?

[Gannon Meer]

A lot. Okay, can say it like, I can do it often, I think, because people just have come to know me for being like that. Automation. Manychat. Guy. So, like, it's not gonna, like, turn anybody off. If I had to give somebody a number, probably like 70 to 80% of the time. I think you, you should have a CTA in all of your content. Obviously, some of my videos are like, more personal, so I'm not gonna be like, hey, I just proposed to my girlfriend, you know, comment wedding. If you want us, like, see how we're planning our wedding, like, we just don't do that.

[Nathan Barry]

So something else I want to talk about is the. There's this idea on a lot of platforms that if you send traffic off platform or if you do something that is like, selfish to benefit you.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Then the platform will penalize you. But if I look at anyone's profile and let's say, I don't know, there's a nice little their face up here, and then, I don't know, they've got 10k subs for followers. Right. If we have a grid of posts and one of them, you know, I'm scrolling through it and you know, it's like 2000, 3000, 2000, whatever. And then this one right here has 50,000 views. Yeah. There's like a 90% chance that this has a comment to DM Automation.

[Gannon Meer]

100%. Yeah, it's actually 100%. They do. Yeah. So, like, if you go on your Instagram, like, analytics your insights for a post, it'll actually. I think their most recent update lists the engagement in order of, like, how important it is for being recommended to a new audience. Okay. So it'll show like, saves, sends comments, likes, and I don't know, I think that might be it. I think there's like four or five of them, but, like, comments are still ranked pretty high. So, like, when you have a manychat Automation turned on, it counts as a comment. And then when you reply back to their comment with a manychat Automation, it doubles the amount of comments on the post.

[Nathan Barry]

Wild that.

[Gannon Meer]

That works. So like, like, people have said, like, it doesn't really have any effect on the content. But, like, why is it that every time I do it, it has like a 4x outlier? Like, the data just tells me that whoever is saying that that doesn't make sense is just incorrect.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, I mean, like, I am a amateur student from a distance, and I'm like, this stands out ridiculously.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay, so if we were to like, pull up my content right now, what you can see is I, instead of 70 to 80% of content having a CTA, I'm probably 3 to 5%, 35%. And so you probably think I'm insane, right?

[Gannon Meer]

Like, what would your CTA be? I mean we can do like a masterclass, like, like roast of Nathan's content right now.

[Nathan Barry]

I mean there's a bunch of things that I could do. I don't have a lot of lead magnets and that kind of thing.

[Gannon Meer]

So like, for your book, like what do you.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, do a CTA for the book. So the book is the Ladders of wealth. Comes out December 8th, pre order. Okay. So we could do a sample chapter. Yeah, I have a free email course on how to grow your audience that I'm working on. Putting together any content I do about flywheels. I have like a library of 10 flywheels. Yeah, those are kind of things that exist today.

[Gannon Meer]

So the goal is to eventually get somebody to pre order or buy the book when it comes out, right?

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, that'd be great.

[Gannon Meer]

So who in your audience, like, what are the groups of people in your audience who are best served from this book? Like entrepreneurs or like early career?

[Nathan Barry]

Anyone? Any, any entrepreneur that could be early, probably earlier, mid stage, late stage, they're going to be like, honestly, the late stage love, they love frameworks, they love all of that.

[Gannon Meer]

So entrepreneurs, you can also like just pull your audience with your newsletter and just be like, where are you at in your career? Or like, for me it's like, I want to understand how you built kit, maybe some of your past mistakes with your previous companies and how I can not make those mistakes moving forward. But it's helpful for you to know why am I interested in this book? So if you talk about it in your content and you're like, hey, I'm releasing it on December 8th if you want a free chapter of it. Because now they have context of what the book's about. Now you know, how am I going to eventually get this person to pre order it? Like, what is the information that I need from this person in order to pitch it properly? And it might just be like, what are your career goals? Like, do you want to be an entrepreneur? Do you want to like, you know,

[Nathan Barry]

but you can even go fully open ended. You could just say, what are your. Yeah, what are your money related goals? Like why do you want to start a business?

[Gannon Meer]

Like it's.

[Nathan Barry]

And some of you, like, I don't. It's like, okay, fine, but then you

[Gannon Meer]

can just like liquid code and be like, you mentioned that you didn't want to start a business, but you're here for my book. So like, what makes you want to man, like how you doing? Um, but that's like, that's basically what we do. So like you know, you even if your pre order link is not open yet, you can still start building like that pre order wait list.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

And then just get whatever information you need from your audience of like maybe it's that why question. And then you put that into a custom field in kit and then you just start every email off with that same line. So like if this, if subscriber customer field equals or is like you know, entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur, whatever it would be, it's how do we start the email off with that and then pitch them in the rest of the email the same way that everybody else gets that same email. Right. So I think it's just about like you have to understand that people have more context than you realize after watching a video and they've taken the action to request even more information. So people tend to over explain in their manychat automations. They're like, I can't wait for you to see my tutorial, I'm going to cover xyz. I'm like, they know that you don't have to say it again so they just want the thing and you can just send it to them. They can register. So what I would do if I were you is I would add them to like a form and kit and then five minutes later ask them like what they're looking forward to most about the book, like what are they trying to solve in their life right now that they think the book will help with. And then you take that information, add them to like what I call a phantom form. So it's a form that doesn't exist anywhere like on a website. Yeah. So we just use that to transfer data over and update their contact. Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

So let's go with another example. Let's say because my other world besides writing books is I run kit.

[Gannon Meer]

That's right.

[Nathan Barry]

You know, and I would like to get lots of creators to set up their emails on Kit. You've done a lot of content about Kit, you work with a lot of Kit customers, you bring us lots of customers. Right.

[Gannon Meer]

Thank you.

[Nathan Barry]

What? You know, if I was putting out content directly to promote Kit, you know, and that's the sale that we're trying to make is to get a creator to sign up either for a free or paid. Paid account.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

What's the flow that you would put together like, type of like things we emphasize on the free and then kind of the segmenting that we would do

[Gannon Meer]

I think you're in a unique position because, like, you have the power to leverage the CEO thing, but you also don't want to step on, like, other people's toes and be like, why is the CEO of a company, like, telling me that what I'm doing is wrong? So you have to be.

[Nathan Barry]

There's a line to walk.

[Gannon Meer]

Careful with that. I would do more like case studies, I think, but also kind of show your way of thinking. Like, if you were brought in to consult with this creator on how they should run a kit, show them how they would do it. And what's going to happen is people like that creator who might follow them, you're kind of leveraging their audience. But they might have people in their audience who are interested in, like, what they do and might have a similar business. Be like, oh, shit. Like, Kit might be the thing that I want to try. That's what works for me.

[Nathan Barry]

Yep.

[Gannon Meer]

I think it's less about. I feel like the game you're playing on the content side right now is more like, you know, documenting and, like, trying to connect more with the audience, which is. Which is good. But I don't know if it's going to create, like, incentivize people to start, like, maybe signing up for Kit.

[Nathan Barry]

Right. There's one thing that we care about is. And that's making money.

[Gannon Meer]

That's right.

[Nathan Barry]

From Instagram. And so that's something they would change. So what I hear you saying is you're noticing my content is about connection, about relevance, like, all of those things. And you're like, great, happy for you. Glad it's working.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

But if you want leads and you

[Gannon Meer]

want revenue, why do people use kit? Because for me, it's like, I think it's the best UI UX experience. It's simple. It does exactly what I needed to do. And it has an integration with manychat and it checks all the boxes for, like, what I need, but somebody else might be like, well, it has the creator network and that's where I want to get those recommendations from, or it allows me to sell products. It has liquid code, which is one of my checkboxes too. Right. So there's a balance between what do I do in my content that's going to help me connect with my audience. So for me, it's like, I was on your plane. Nothing to do with ManyChat.

[Nathan Barry]

That was very much a connection post.

[Gannon Meer]

I don't care how many likes it gets. Like, if it makes somebody. Like, I can post things on the Internet and it'll eventually get me to a point where, like, you realize you can just do things.

[Nathan Barry]

He's like, turns out you can just.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, I tagged him in the caption. But, like, for me, it's like 20% of that is connecting with an audience. And then 80% is like, what do I have to do in order to actually get people to pull the trigger? And the 80%, like, if I had, like, you know, if these were all small boxes on this, like, maybe there's like, I don't know, 3,000 boxes on here. Like, 2,400 of them are like, this is sales content. Like, I want people to hire me.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

And the rest is like, how can I get people to understand that I'm a human being? Like, what's my first pin post on my Instagram profile?

[Nathan Barry]

What is it? What are you doing?

[Gannon Meer]

Maybe you don't study my Instagram content.

[Nathan Barry]

I haven't seen it.

[Gannon Meer]

It's the start here one, right? So, like, they understand who I a person. So, like, it's not just like, hey, I have this service, you should buy it. It's like, I built this thing. And here's why I built it, because I have this background experience with, like, coming from small neighborhood, low income, you know, parents got foreclosed on. It's like, I started this business because all of that happened.

[Nathan Barry]

I mean, I should probably make one

[Gannon Meer]

of those posts 100%. Right? It's part of your book. It's part of sleep part of your book. So it's that. And then the second pin post is me proposing to my girlfriend. And then I don't have a third pin post because I'm like, those things are more important than the business, I feel like, obviously. But I can't tell you how many people have, like, just saved the start here post. And even, like, the picture of my fiance. I'm like, this is weird.

[Nathan Barry]

Why?

[Gannon Meer]

There's so many people saving it, but

[Nathan Barry]

they're actually probably trying to remember you as a person.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah. And like, there's so many comments in the start here. And that was not my intention with doing it, but it has just, like, helped people connect with me at a deeper level. Because, like, at any point, 50 new people can pop up in, like, this automation space. But why would somebody come to me?

[Nathan Barry]

Right?

[Gannon Meer]

Right. So that's the message I'm trying to get across. And you can do that with a 70, 30, 80, 20 split.

[Nathan Barry]

Now you have 190,000 followers. So if we look at this, that

[Gannon Meer]

number is kind of crazy to say.

[Nathan Barry]

Look, if we look at this grid. You know, that was your profile and we underlined the follower count, right? There's a lot of. Yeah, but you don't care about followers. Like, that is not a metric that truly matters.

[Gannon Meer]

I talked about this. My friend Tom Noski posted about it, and then I saw Jay post about it. He was like, jay Kloss? Yeah, Jay Claus. So he's like, more and more creators are becoming unpaid spokespeople for AI tools. And I'm like, why? Because the content just absolutely crushes. And then I made a series, which I'm still doing because I think it's just fun to make. But I made a series for Claude called cloudomations. Just like, what can I automate with Claude in terms of marketing? I mean, those videos do, like, at least 100,000 views. Every single one. I had one post get me, like, 20,000 new followers after just months of stagnation on my page. And I'm like, I want to do more of this. This is exhilarating. I wake up and I'm like, oh, my God, I have 5,000 new followers from last night. And I'm just like, I'm paying somebody to edit these videos. Those videos are not making me money right now. They might in the future. Like, I've had, you know, businesses reach out and companies reach out, being like, hey, can we do a sponsorship for, like, our new integration with Claude or something? Like, we have a new mcp. And I'm like, sure. But, yeah, I mean, you've done a. That's not what moves. It's not what moves the needle for the business. Right? It's attracting the wrong people. And then Tom made a post about it. He's like, my business, my content right now has never been worse. Performing worse. He's got, like, 460,000 followers or something. And he gets, like, you know, a good chunk of like, maybe, like, 10k views a video. But compared to his old stuff, he's just not living up to, like, the content that he was posting. But he's like, my business has never been doing better. Like, we are infatuated with the views and the likes on a post and the follower count. And I know people who have hundreds of thousands of followers who make no money. So I don't want to be like,

[Nathan Barry]

this idea, right, that views. Now I'm like, how do you spell views? V, I, E. W. Yeah, V, I, E. Did I just get that wrong? Views equals revenue. Yeah, revenue.

[Gannon Meer]

I can't spell anymore.

[Nathan Barry]

And so what you're saying, like, what you're noticing over and over again is

[Gannon Meer]

like not even close.

[Nathan Barry]

It's not.

[Gannon Meer]

Not even close.

[Nathan Barry]

And so we, you know, we see people where views are way up and revenue is down and we see the universe where views are way down and revenue.

[Gannon Meer]

I feel like, you know, for most people when they have high views and they go broad, that's when the brand deals start getting big.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah.

[Gannon Meer]

And I think they feel like they maybe deserve bigger brand deals because they have a bigger audience. You've talked to Justin. That's just not the case. It's not how this works. What can you deliver for the brand? Yeah, exactly.

[Nathan Barry]

Or you might get the first one. But if the follow ups.

[Gannon Meer]

But like for me it's like I'm willing to go deeper with an audience than I am to go like cast a wide net and just see who out of these people is potentially a good fit. Especially when we charge so much money for our setups. It's like the person like somebody wanting to learn how to set up a Claude skill is not going to spend ten grand with me to build their many chat automations. Right. But somebody who is like, oh, There's a new ManyChat pricing update and this person knows what they're talking about. Or they did this for this other creator and that video might have 8,000 views, but it's made me like 30 grand.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

So it's like there's a trade off here and I think everybody's chasing views and they think by chasing views it leads to revenue and it's never the case.

[Nathan Barry]

So what's what leads to revenue? Is it relevance? Like what is the thing that has the most direct tie to revenue?

[Gannon Meer]

I think it's just like how deep you go on a topic and how you share how you think about solving problems. Like if you can prove that you have solved a problem that somebody has and you tell them exactly how you did it. I'd say at least in the service based business, those people don't want to pay to learn, they want to pay for somebody to do it for them. So that's what works for us. I'll make a video about this is what I would do if I were this person who's running ManyChat. And then that video might you see 180,000 views, 500,000 views. 5 million views on a video. Oh, those videos probably crushed. He's probably living lavish right now. I'm like, I made no money from that. Then it's the video with 3,000 views where it's like that paid for My wedding. So it's like I'm trying to go deeper, share how I solve problems and show up in front of the right audience. And then hopefully, typically what happens is that person will message me or interact with the post or somebody like that person will interact with the post.

[Nathan Barry]

Okay, so this is the example of like being very, very upfront about what you offer, the value you provide. I feel like a lot of creators, like, they don't want to be salesy, so they're like, and so I'm going to hide the value that I provide to the world and all this.

[Gannon Meer]

I like that you bring this up because, like, what's happening here, it's like, it's all in private. Like, Samir calls this like your private marketing world for your audience. So, like, what Colin and Samir do with like creator support, everything happens privately. So you don't know that they actually sell anything until you see it in a creator support video or you go through a lead magnet and you're like, oh, wow, there's like so many different things that I can do here. But they're never like, hey, you should buy, you know, it's this $799 brand deal blueprint.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

Because it's just like, you know, they don't want to come off as salesy. But I actually think it's smart because nobody's just going to buy that from like, you know, maybe they have poll, so like, they probably will get well.

[Nathan Barry]

As a random aside, I met up with Samir when I was in Dubai. We were talking about him switching over to Kit and all of that. And he's like, yeah, like, I'd love to do that, which is awesome. And then he's like, let me connect with the team to make that happen. They connect to the team and it's you.

[Gannon Meer]

I'm the team. And I was like, oh, awesome team. Like Cheyenne, who runs a lot of the, like, basically the full funnel. Like, she's brilliant, she's awesome. I take very little credit for like, what all the email stuff. Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

But it's fun to see, like, you're behind the scenes for a lot of these creators. Yeah. And so what you're doing is you're putting out a video where you're saying, here is how I would break down. Like, I studied this in detail.

[Gannon Meer]

Right.

[Nathan Barry]

We've got the stakes. We've got. But here's what I noticed. There should do better. I'm watching that video and then either I'm like, oh, I'm like a con. And Samir or someone else. Or I am them.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

And so that results directly in clients, is that right?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, they've been a client since I posted that video. The video has like 7,000 views. It's crazy.

[Nathan Barry]

That's a lot of revenue on a. Like, your revenue per view ratio on that is probably very good.

[Gannon Meer]

It's more than a dollar of you, like by a large sum. Yeah, it's probably like $3 of you.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, yeah.

[Gannon Meer]

So, like, I mean, for me, like, I don't know if this is like, helpful for people, but like, when I'm up in front of a whiteboard just like by myself, breaking these things down, just like my alter ego, it's like I turn into a different person, like, from what I'm outside, like, and I can't do it in front of anybody else. Like, even my fiance. I'm like, if you're going to be home when I'm recording a video, you need outside on the balcony listening to your book, because I don't want you to hear this. But the thing about those videos, it's like it all starts the same way. I started the Alex Hormozy video with like, Alex Hormozi just texted me and it's an automated message from his book launch. But I realized he has 3 million followers and doesn't use Manychat. Therefore, I'm going to spend the next 96 hours of my life building him a strategy. That's it. It's like Colin and Samir are some of the biggest creators in the creator economy, but they're not running ManyChat. Here's what I would do if I were running their manychat automations. And then I just break down, like, what products they sell, how they sell it, and then like how manychat plugs into it. And those videos do really well. One of them got like 800,000 views.

[Nathan Barry]

So I mean, that's the thing, right? We're talking about. These videos have a very small number of views and result in a lot of revenue for your agency. But then also sometimes they do a ton of views and get you a bunch of followers as well.

[Gannon Meer]

It's, it's like the amount of like the people who I've like met on calls from just videos that I posted. Like near, who wrote Beyond Belief. Yeah, he saw me from like the video that I did for this woman Emily on the Brain. He's like, you know, I'm releasing this book and it's not woo woo. Like, I feel like you can help me, you know, with this Wait list and, like, promoting the book launch. I'm like, I've been reading your content for years. Why am I on a call with you right now? This is so weird. Who else? Like, Nick DiGiovanni's team? Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Nick's a Kit customer as well.

[Gannon Meer]

What is happening? I'm just, like, posting these videos. Like, three minutes of me talking in front of a whiteboard, and it's just,

[Nathan Barry]

like, as a quick aside, I feel like Kit has gotten a lot of very impressive customers over the years. My kids are like, yeah, whatever, whatever. Wait, you have Chef Nick as a customer? And that's the one that gets me street cred.

[Gannon Meer]

He's doing the FIFA World cup stuff right now. It's awesome.

[Nathan Barry]

This is incredible. I'm going to change a bunch of things about what I'm doing, and I love seeing all the behind the scenes and everything else. So thank you for the masterclass.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, of course.

[Nathan Barry]

There's one more thing I want to ask you.

[Gannon Meer]

Sure.

[Nathan Barry]

But it's probably a conversation. We should sit down for.

[Gannon Meer]

Sure. Sounds good.

[Nathan Barry]

You have completely transformed your life in the last 12 months. And I want to know, first, contrast. What was life like before? What is it like now? And let's dive into, like, what did you do?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, I mean, I've been. I've been full time as a creator since January 2024. And I, like, did the whole hustle thing where I'm like, if I can create and teach something, I'm going to turn it into a product and just sell it and see who buys it. And that did okay. It got to a point where I was like, I'm proposing to my girlfriend. We live with her mom. We've been here for seven years. I am full time working for myself. She's a nurse. At some point, we're going to get the ball rolling and move out and figure out how we're going to start our lives. And that required me to really think seriously about how this is not just every month. We start from zero. How do we create a recurring revenue stream? And I had this idea of creating an Instagram community coaching membership.

[Nathan Barry]

That's a pretty typical creator product, of course.

[Gannon Meer]

Of course. So I text my friend Nana, who is hosting an event in New York. This is August of last year, and her husband is on Instagram. His name's Mark Brazil. He has the open residency podcast, and he started a company like Gary Vee invested in it. So I'm like, super smart business guy. I'm like, I need to ask this guy questions of like, what I should do? So I text Nana, I'm like, hey, I see you're hosting this event. And Mark is going, can I go to the event? And she's like, well, it's a female only event. So I'm like, I can't go. And she's like, no, I'd love to have you here so you can ask questions to Mark at the roundtable. And I'm like, perfect. I get to finally meet Mark after knowing you for years. And I'm like, I'm going to just put together this idea of what I have. So I'm like, mark, here's the context. I am just engaged. I need to figure out how to make recurring revenue. Here's 14 paragraphs of ideas. And I went last at the roundtable, I didn't make it four sentences in. And I mentioned like, I want to start this Instagram membership. I know how I'm going to price it. I know how I'm going to where to host it. And he's like, you're an idiot. You're so dumb. I'm like, what do you mean? I thought this was a good idea. So the context of that is that five or six months prior to that, I had a conversation with Nana Friday night on Zoom, two hours. And when your wife is on Zoom with somebody for two hours on a Friday night, of course you're going to know what's going on. So he knew what I built for Nana. So she was running Automations on manychat and wanted to grow her kit newsletter. So we built out this like, spiderweb of Automations and it crushed. And he obviously knew that because he's like, why are you talking to this guy on Zoom? Not a friend. Yeah. And he's like, you know, you, you should just do that. And I had no idea what that meant because I had never charged anybody for that. And I didn't know how to make like, automations in manychat, like, quote, unquote, sexy. It's like, up to that point, I had been storytelling and the videos were crushed and I was doing all right brand deals. I grow my account up to that point to like 120,000 followers. And I'm like, there has to be somewhere I can make this work. I don't know if I'm going to talk about moneychat. And I left that event and I was like, well, I guess I'm going to be at my mother in law's house for the next seven years. And this idea popped in my head and I'M like, wait a second. What if I just, you know, talked about what I would do if I ran somebody's manychat? Like, this is what I did for Nana for two hours on Zoom. But I'm like, I have to condense this for three minutes to three minutes. And my fiance is at a My Chemical romance concert at MetLife Stadium. I'm driving home on the New Jersey Turnpike at 11:30 at night, and I text her. I'm like, I have this idea for a video. I'm not going to sleep until the video's on Instagram. I get home at 12. The video is Alex Hermosi texts me,

[Nathan Barry]

which is a great hook. And then it's an even better because it has credibility to it. And then it has the but that you're talking about where it's me. Like, but he didn't. Right. And so you're like, wait, who's. You're cool enough. You came across my feed. You're cool enough that Alex is texting. Oh, he's not texting you, but you

[Gannon Meer]

want to stick around to be like, what is this guy talking about? Why is he in front of a giant white. The digital whiteboard, talking about, like, this funnel? So that video was three minutes on the dot, and it was, like five before I cut it. And I'm like, what do I cut to get this out to 3 minutes? And it was 12:30 when I posted it, so I didn't do any edits besides just, like, throwing captions on and making it okay.

[Nathan Barry]

Wow.

[Gannon Meer]

It's also very hard to put a horizontal screen in a vertical layout. And I posted that video at 12:30. My fiance got home, and I actually beat her to bed, which is good because that never happens when I'm recording video pretty quickly. It was very quick. And I. I woke up the next morning, the video had 34,000 views. And I was like, this is like, maybe Mark was right. Maybe I am an idiot. Maybe I should just continue talking about this. And then I posted a. A video for Ali Abdaal that did 35, 36,000 views. I did Caleb Rouston, who was on Alex and Rosie's team. That video did, like, 160,000 views. I did M on the Brain that got, like, 800,000 views. I did Colin Samir that did, like, 8,000 views. But they commented on the post. I was like, all right, something's going on here. And I realized that the way that I kind of talk about this is, like, the first question that I was asked when I applied for my first big boy job at this digital marketing company was like the everyday engineer question. Like, how many ping pong balls or can fit in a bus? How many golf balls are there in Florida? And I'm like, I actually. Why are you asking me this question? What do you mean? I was fortunate enough to have somebody who worked at the company ask me that question as a test interview. And I was like, she asked me how many slices of pizza are consumed in the US Every year? And I'm like, what do you mean? I don't know.

[Nathan Barry]

What were they trying to do?

[Gannon Meer]

I'm just a boy. I don't know, actually. But I got to an answer in 30 seconds. Seconds.

[Nathan Barry]

And they just wanted to see how you think.

[Gannon Meer]

They wanted to see how you think.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Gannon Meer]

But I actually think it's a little bit deeper than that. It's like, for what I do now, the answer to that question is there's no right or wrong answer unless it's the ping pong. You could do math to get to that answer. But for how many slices of pizza are you? Nobody knows. So why are we asking these questions? And I realized that it's one, those companies want to see how you think, but if you take it a step further, they want to see how willing you are to be wrong in public, because there's no right answer to that question. And I realized that's what I was doing with the videos that I was making. I was like, oh, people can see how I think there's no right or wrong answer. You can get to the answer a million different ways, but people want to learn more about your experience and how you think about solving these problems and watch you do it live and show people how, I guess, courageous you are to actually be willing to be wrong in public. And the more I did that, the more I realized this is why people get hired for big jobs. They arrive at wrong answers very quickly, or they're not scared to show that they could potentially be wrong. And when you do videos like that, there's a good chance you're gonna be wrong. Sometimes you don't have the full context of somebody's business, but you can put it in a sequence that makes sense for other people watching. And in the event that you're right for the person you made the video about, they're a client. They're a client. So there's very little downside. But what's changed my life significantly in the past 12 months is just doing that over and over again, answering questions that have no right answer. And Just showing people how I think about solving problems, but doing it publicly. And it's kind of like when you see something that you want or you have this thing for you, it might be a new plane, you have this idea for a new plane that you want. You might go to an airport and you're looking out for that plane model that you want, you start seeing it everywhere. It's like, I haven't seen this. Why am I now seeing it everywhere? Because you started doing it yourself or you started thinking about it. And as I started posting more and more of those videos, I saw other people doing it. When I tell people this story, they're like, of course you have 192,000 followers. Of course it works for you.

[Nathan Barry]

Right?

[Gannon Meer]

And I'm like, mark called me an idiot. I'm about to call you an idiot, because I can give you five people right now who have less than 10,000 followers who are doing unbelievable things because they did the same thing, because they're

[Nathan Barry]

willing to be wrong in public.

[Gannon Meer]

Willing to be wrong in public, yes. This one woman, Ceci, she made a carousel of what she would do for if Chess.com hired her for a merch

[Nathan Barry]

that's not getting the attention of a random creator who's definitely on Instagram. That's a big brand.

[Gannon Meer]

Post it. Notes commented, Lego commented. Chess.com commented, she had less than 10,000 followers. And I'm like, this is amazing. I followed her. I DMed her, and I was like, can I put this in a keynote? Because I saw them comment. She's like, yeah, of course. And then a few weeks later, she messages me. She's like, by the way, I wanted to follow up. I'm doing the thing with Chess.com I'm

[Nathan Barry]

like, because they said, yes, please, we'll take it.

[Gannon Meer]

That. And then I had somebody. I was teaching a manychat bootcamp maybe eight months ago, and I was at the beginning of stages of launching this agency, and I made an aside comment to my students, and I was like, I hate running an agency. I just hate doing this work and also trying to manage this side of my life and also trying to move out and just getting engaged and trying to manage all this. And one of the students, who was probably weeks five of six, who was far ahead in his homework, absolutely crushing it, he's like, hey, you made this comment three weeks ago. I spent the last three weeks trying to put together what I would do if I ran this agency for you. He's been a partner at the company ever since he posted the video because he steps up and says he's like some of the things that I might not necessarily agree with in his proposal, but he was willing to do that. Publicly or not, he was willing to be wrong. And those people, the types of people who think they're going to be able to change their life by doing this, are the ones who just secretly DM you, telling you that they can solve your problems, but they never do. It just goes to spam. So if there's one thing I encourage anybody to do is just be willing to put yourself out there. It's how I ended up on your plane.

[Nathan Barry]

Right?

[Gannon Meer]

Right.

[Nathan Barry]

I mean, who posts bucket list things?

[Gannon Meer]

It's very strange. And that'll take you to places where you like, never would have imagined. It's true for me and it's true for people who don't have. I have a small following compared to everybody else. You can spend all day comparing yourself to other people, but it's not because I have 192,000 followers. It's because I just went out and did the thing and most people don't. And, you know, you compare my life to where it was 12 months ago. It's. It's very different.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah.

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

That's amazing. What a note to end on.

[Gannon Meer]

That's right.

[Nathan Barry]

Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for teaching me.

[Gannon Meer]

Of course.

[Nathan Barry]

The masterclass. If you want to go follow you on the Internet. Where should they go?

[Gannon Meer]

Yeah, it's my first name. Last name, Gannon Meer on Instagram. It's my first name, last name, no period. On YouTube and then LinkedIn. You probably don't know many Ganons, so just search my name and you'll find me somewhere. It's just a black and white photo, so I like it.

[Nathan Barry]

Thanks so much for coming.

[Gannon Meer]

I appreciate it, man.

[Nathan Barry]

Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.