How to Build a $100,000 Personal Brand (In Just 90 Days) | 063

Summary

The Nathan Barry Show, Episode 063
How to Build a $100,000 Personal Brand (In Just 90 Days)
Featuring: Nathan Barry (host, CEO of Kit) & Darrel Vesterfelt (founder, Mount Haley Holdings & Good People Digital)
Date: February 6, 2025

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Episode Overview

Nathan Barry speaks with creator and business marketing expert Darrel Vesterfelt about actionable, high-impact tactics for building a powerful personal brand capable of generating $100K—and doing it quickly. The focus is on how founders and professionals in traditional businesses can borrow top creator strategies to accelerate growth, improve recruiting, increase conversion rates, and create lasting leverage. The episode breaks down both mindset shifts and clear, step-by-step tactics, emphasizing the concept of "creator flywheels" to create leverage and amplify results.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Opportunity & Importance of Personal Branding

• Brand ≠ Company Only: Everyone agrees company brand matters, but most founders ignore their personal brand (00:00–00:55; 03:47–05:47).
• Stigma in Silicon Valley: Some investors dismiss founders developing personal brands as vanity or distraction, but Nathan and Darrel argue the opposite: it's a massive lever, especially in founder-led marketing and early stages (02:19–03:47).
• Personal Brand Increases Conversion Rates: For hiring, sales, and recruiting, a strong personal presence boosts conversion rates dramatically (00:43, 17:39, 20:19).

"The lack of a brand is a brand itself."
— Nathan Barry (03:47)

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Founder-Led Marketing: The 0 to 1 Leverage

• Quick Wins vs. Slow Compounding: While many growth strategies take years to pay off, personal branding is one of the few where "you can get 80/20 results right away" with the right moves (08:03).
• Five Tactical Steps to Launch Your Brand (09:05–19:26):
  1. Get One Video Podcast Interview: Share your founding story and mission, even if you have to produce it yourself or hire an interviewer.
  2. Repurpose Video Content: Cut the podcast interview into clips—create a 3–4 minute “founding story” and a “why work here” video for recruiting.
  3. Solidify a Social Presence: Polish the basics of 2–3 social platforms (LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Instagram), ensure consistency, and post clips or photos showing leadership and culture.
  4. Write Foundational Essays: Publish 1–2 essays covering your unique story, a formative belief, or lessons that establish your expertise and perspective.
  5. Publish Case Studies: Just 2–3 detailed, credible case studies demonstrating your work or your company’s results.

"If you even go get on two podcast interviews, cut some of those up for clips, build out a little bit of a social presence... it’s just a night and day difference, and I would say 98% of founders still aren’t doing that."
— Nathan Barry (05:47)

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Deep Dives: Tactics, Examples, and Frameworks

Podcasting & Video Content (09:05–12:11)

• Even creating your own pseudo-interview works.
• Video is key for rapport-building—don’t settle for audio-only.

Social Audit & Profile Consistency (12:45–15:24)

• Consistency in photos and messaging is surprisingly important for trust.
• Clean up outdated information or side-project clutter on LinkedIn.

Content Strategy Foundation (15:43–19:26)

• Essays and case studies matter more than quantity: focus on quality and specificity.
• Share personal and contrarian stories (“growing up in a trailer park”) to become memorable.

Compounding Impact of Brand Content (19:53–20:18)

• Doing these 4–5 steps creates assets with a shelf-life of 4–5 years.

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Personal Brand Impact: Real-Life Stories

• Darrel’s Deal Blocked by Lack of Brand: Lost a big deal because no information existed online—fixed it overnight, never repeated the mistake (04:52).
• Relationship Building & Opportunities: Darrel’s content and track record unlocked an advisory role for Mighty Networks following an initial meeting (20:59–23:26).
• Recruiting Top Talent: Nathan credits his strong online presence and founder content with raising recruiting conversion rates by 25–50% (20:19, 29:20–31:38).
• Internal Credibility & Team Culture: Videos and internal podcasts help scale the founder’s passion and reinforce values as the team grows (34:41–37:50).

"If that's happening to you, that is a check engine light that your personal brand is not strong enough."
— Darrel Vesterfelt, on stalled sales & reference requests (23:26)

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Why Brand Leverage Keeps Paying Off—At Any Scale

• For Founders at $40M+ ARR: Personal brand continues to drive money, recruiting, top-of-mind awareness, and credibility indefinitely (25:33–28:21).
• Hiring Playbook: Use video to give potential hires full context before interviews, saving time and increasing connection (29:20–31:38).
• Internal Flywheels: Internal team podcasts and monthly video updates maintain culture and founder presence at scale (34:41–37:50).

Multiplying Impact Beyond the Founder

• Personal Branding for Team Members: Sales, marketing, and even technical staff benefit—e.g., deliverability experts hosting public podcasts build company trust with clients, making customers “fangirl” over technical team members (39:15–41:46).
• Education & Teaching Strategy: Brands that “teach everything you know” (Kit, Webflow, HubSpot) deepen customer loyalty and trust at scale (42:00–45:04).

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The “Would You Show Up For This?” Litmus Test for Content

• Raising the Bar: Most business webinars and content are “dead” because they’re boring. The test: “Would you show up for your own event?” (45:04–48:15).
• Quality Over Quantity: Content must be both valuable and compelling; consider hiring skilled presenters if needed.

"Standing out in this world, by the way, is not that hard. You just have to go a step or two above what other people are willing to do."
— Darrel Vesterfelt (47:13)

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Advanced Systems: Doing More With Less

• Batch Content Creation: Batch recording (1–2 days quarterly) can supply high-quality content for months; founders don’t need to become full-time creators to reap benefits (63:20–65:40).
• Content Flywheels: Build systems for idea capture (e.g., teamw ide Notion database for content prompts) and repurpose content to create long-tailed leverage.

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Community & In-Person Connection

• Community as a Growth Engine: Creating spaces (Slack, Discord, events, masterminds) for customers and prospects to interact leads to organic advocacy and growth—customers sell for you (57:23–62:59).
• In-Person Touchpoints: Organize city tours, masterminds, live podcasts, and meetups for maximal relationship-building and content creation.

"Community is a really important strategy that businesses could really learn from—how are we developing community between our customers?"
— Darrel Vesterfelt (58:15)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• "The lack of a brand is a brand itself." (Nathan Barry, 03:47)
• "If that's happening to you, that is a check engine light that your personal brand is not strong enough." (Darrel Vesterfelt, 23:26)
• "You just have to go a step or two above what other people are willing to do." (Darrel Vesterfelt, 47:13)
• "Would you show up for the webinar that you hosted?" (Darrel Vesterfelt, 45:38)
• "You make fans for life... especially as we've done the coaching format where people are flying out to the studio." (Nathan Barry, 56:27)
• "One piece of content can have 5, 6, 7, 10 benefits from it... it's not just a one-to-one opportunity." (Darrel Vesterfelt, 38:37)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00: Importance of personal brand begins
• 08:03: The “five things” founder should do to launch their brand
• 15:43: Importance of essays and story-driven content
• 19:53–20:18: Why these foundational steps have a 4–5 year shelf life
• 20:19–23:26: Personal brand’s impact on sales, credibility, and recruiting
• 29:20–31:38: Video strategy for recruiting top hires
• 34:41–37:50: Internal content and scaling culture
• 45:04–48:15: The “would you show up?” test for quality content
• 57:23–62:59: Community building and multi-layered in-person strategy
• 63:20–65:40: Systems and batching for scalable personal brand building

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Actionable Takeaways

1. Start building your personal brand with a single, high-quality video podcast interview.
2. Repurpose foundational content into essays, case studies, and multi-platform social profiles (with photo and messaging consistency).
3. Audit and upgrade LinkedIn and public profiles; cut “side project” clutter.
4. Batch-create content as a system, not a full-time job.
5. Invest in live and community-driven experiences to create organic advocacy.
6. Always ask: “Would I show up for (or consume) this?” Anything less, don’t ship.
7. Encourage and enable non-founders to build their own micro-brands for multi-layered trust.
8. Leverage internal content to reinforce values, mission, and culture at any scale.

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Final Note

This episode is a masterclass in modern personal branding for founders and operators—combining actionable frameworks, memorable stories, and a strong call to “create leverage, focus on results, and let your presence work for you for years.” Even if you’re not in the creator economy, these principles apply for anyone serious about multiplying their business impact with less effort.

Transcript

[Nathan Barry]

Everyone talks about how brand is so important and people don't put the same level of effort into personal brand. 98% of founders still aren't, aren't doing that.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And that's the exciting part where I think you can really turn on the jet fuels.

[Nathan Barry]

Daryl, you are one of the best in the world at all things creator and business marketing. Let's dive in on concepts that traditional startups should take from the creator world

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

0 to 1 at the early stage of a company. I think founder led marketing is the most effective way to have really quick results.

[Nathan Barry]

This is probably one of the only categories where we're like, you can get 80, 20 results like upfront if you do. Another thing that's made a huge difference is for hiring and recruiting.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

People don't just pick a company for feature sets. They pick the story, they pick the community, they pick the vision and the mission. And I don't think that can be

[Nathan Barry]

outsourced recruiting conversion rates, I bet it went up 25 to 50% based on personal brand.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

What are the five things that you would do with founder led marketing being really impactful?

[Nathan Barry]

I would get one podcast interview. We want to create a founding story, build out a little bit of a social presence, two or three case studies, and that will get you 90% of the way there.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Exactly right.

[Nathan Barry]

All right, Darrel, we have done a lot together over the years and one topic that keeps coming up is founder led marketing. Yeah, as in general, but more specifically, something that's come up a lot for both of us is concepts that traditional startups, you know, conventional startups should take from the creator world. So I want to dive into that today. But before we do that, give the high level of Darrell Westerfelt Holdings.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah, so the company is actually called Mount Haley Holdings. It's the company that encapsulates everything that I do. Underneath that there's an agency called Good People that takes creator strategies and implements them into startups and traditional businesses, also works with high level creators to develop monetization strategies around their audience. So intersection of these two things is startups are really good at converting people and selling, but not great at using the strategies of creators. Creators are really good at creating audience, but also don't know how to convert people. And so we serve those two, those two audiences at that agency. That's it. I've got a couple other small projects. I got a consulting firm called Boomtown where I consult startups from 1 to $10 million in revenue.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, there's all kinds of things there. But let's dive in on what traditional businesses, you know, what these startups should do to, you know, borrow from creator businesses first. I think just to talk about it, there's this stigma that it has, especially in Silicon Valley.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Where the tweet that I've seen from time to time or the comment is something like, you know, from a venture capitalist or an investor saying, you know, once one of the founders in your in your investment portfolio starts, you know, tweeting, writing blog posts, creating a personal brand, you can just go ahead and write off the investment because it's not going anywhere. And like anything, there's an element of truth to it. There's probably a little bit where that has happened.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Right.

[Nathan Barry]

Where founders have gotten distracted or something like that. But it's just, I think, a myopic view on the world.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I agree.

[Nathan Barry]

I'm curious for your take.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah, I agree. If I were an investor and I saw a founder beginning to develop a personal brand, I'd be excited. Did the exact opposite. Mostly because you and I have personal experience with founder led marketing being really impactful at the early phases of companies and even later phases of companies. That's a really powerful thing. Again, I do think there are some pitfalls that founders can fall into in this realm, but it's kind of like the concept of the tide in the harbor rises and all of the boats rise with it. The development of a personal brand can actually have a positive impact on a company.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. I think about how everyone talks about how brand is so important. No one's going to come out and argue like, brand doesn't matter or, you know, our company doesn't have a brand. It's like, well, the lack of a brand is a brand itself. And you're gonna talk about like, oh, Apple, this and Airbnb's new brand here, or this other thing. Right. Where brand is really important. And then people don't put the same level of effort into personal brand. And they think like, oh, that's vanity. And then you get into these situations where you're trying to recruit a team member and they're like, do I want to work for this person? I have no idea. There's no information. All the information I have about whether or not I want to work for this founder or this executive is what I've picked up in, you know, a handful of interviews. Right. You know, as we're talking over zoom, where they're mostly asking me questions, you know, or you get into trying to get into a sales deal and someone's like, who is this person that's emailing me, quick Google search, nothing comes back.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

I think you have a few examples of like early on of not having a brand and what that.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

But I was doing agency work for four or five years and you know, my, my kind of consulting and agency work was filled up for years and I didn't ever develop a personal website or even a website for what I was doing at all. My LinkedIn was dormant and so I was, I was working on closing a significant deal one day. It was a multi six figure deal and the person came back like I can't find you online. Like is this even real? Are you trying to scam me? Like do you even have like does who works with you? What, what case studies do you have? None of it existed. And so I remember staying up until like two in the morning and developing something, getting it out, getting a couple articles, linking a few things up that I had done elsewhere. But giving the place for somebody to believe in what I was also selling them was a huge importance. So I think it's super important for any kind of public facing role in a company. Founders is one of them. But I also think any type of salesperson or marketing person having some level of personal brand is really important in a company.

[Nathan Barry]

What I think going to 0 to 1 is actually fairly straightforward. I think we tend to think of it as I will either be the behind the scenes person who builds businesses, you know, I'm a heads down operator, you know, my work will just speak for itself, the company results or over here I'm going to go become a creator. And you know, we're 100% in on founder led marketing. This is everything that we do. And the reality is neither path is probably right. The founder led marketing could absolutely work. There are lots of people that we know who have gone all in on that and it's working really well for them. But if you're over here of, you know, not findable on the Internet or very little out there, if you even go get on two podcast interviews, right, cut some of those up for clips, build out a little bit of a social presence, make sure that your LinkedIn accurately reflects your network, go write a couple of stories, you know, here's how we got our first million in revenue, here's like what it means to serve customers, you know, here's our founding story, a few of those things, it's just a night and day difference and I would say 98% of founders still aren't, aren't doing that.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah, it's wild to me. And the stigma doesn't make sense to me. Again, if you just look at results of people who've done this well. And obviously the example of what you did at ConvertKit early days was, is the foundation for why we believe in this so much. And I think that 0 to 1 is super easy and super key and also where you can see the most amount of results really quickly. Right. Because if you're at an early stage of a company, it is so much easier for a person to understand what you're trying to offer from a person than from a brand. Right. And I think the example of our friend Encore with his new company Carry is a great example of this. Encore is telling personal stories from the founder about this brand more than the brand is telling the story of what the brand can do. And I think that's a really powerful impact. So zero to one of like just getting started no matter what phase you're at is really key. But also 0 to 1 at the early stage of a company, I think founder led marketing is the most effective way to have really quick results.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. You know what's ironic? There is so many things in life, uh, you know, we're talking flywheels or startup growth or anything, it compounds very, very slowly. And so you're like, hey, this is worth it, but you gotta do it every single day for two years before you'll even have the hint that it's worth doing. But trust me, and this is probably one of the only categories where we're like, hey, actually you can get 80, 20 results like upfront right away. If you do, it's like these five things. So maybe just to be really clear, what do you think? Like if we had to list out five things that we believe every founder should do as that baseline to get that, that first step function.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Let's reframe this a little bit. Cause I want to push this back to you because you do this so well at the beginning of Convertkit, if you were doing this over again at convertkit and convertkit was at 2000mrr and you were kind of staring at this opportunity that was in front of you, you believed in the company. What are the five things that you would do over again or do that you didn't do before starting over as fonderly marketing, that's a good framework. I think for, for this.

[Nathan Barry]

The first thing that I would do is I would get one podcast interview. It could be more, but at least one where I am telling the founding story and the mission and the vision of the company. This is why we're, you know, why we're doing it, who we serve, why I chose this problem to solve in particular, what I value that sort of thing.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

How would you go about doing that? And I want to dig in on this strategy a little bit more because I think it's important. And there's a couple nuances here. What type of podcast would you look to find? How would you find it for somebody who maybe is like, well, I don't even know how to do that. How would you find that first one?

[Nathan Barry]

I think, you know, first looking in your network. Right. Because if there's someone that can do you a favor, already thinks you're great. Even if you could almost do it on any podcast where the production quality is decent and the interviewer is decent.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Good. That's, that's a perfect framework. So I'm not having to go to find a top 50 business podcast or try to develop a relationship with somebody. We're looking for an advantage of some.

[Nathan Barry]

But here's one key thing. It has to be on video.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Do not waste any time with an audio only podcast because we're trying to build. This is a piece of content to build rapport.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

And you just, you need the video to do it.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And if you're a KIT customer, by the way, shout out to having amazing production at your fingertips with the KIT Studio and Boise. And so you could even do that.

[Nathan Barry]

Right. If you're like, I can't find anyone on, you know, to do a podcast with me. Well then think who in your life is either knows you really well or is a good interviewer and say, okay, we're gonna go to KIT Studios and here are the questions that I want you to ask me. And you can invent a podcast.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

That's great. And so, so this is like resourcefulness here is like, like if you have somebody in your network, that makes sense, great. If the production quality is high, great. You kind of check the box. If you have somebody in your network but the production quality is low, invite them to get studio with you to do the interview. If you can't find anybody, then make up a podcast episode like this at a location similar to this.

[Nathan Barry]

Or you can hire someone.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Exactly.

[Nathan Barry]

Right. There's all these podcasters who are great interviewers, but their show might not be big yet. And so you could say, hey, for my, for the about page on, on my website and my social presence, I need this content created. Can I hire you to interview me? And that's all you have to do it's amazing. You know, it's like, here I'm going to give you, you know, five pages of details about me, that sort of thing. So you can ask great questions and yeah, that's all you need.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

There's a lot of great frameworks and that. I love that. So step one is get this podcast recorded, get it done on video, have it be good quality. And that is a foundation for what, what's to come.

[Nathan Barry]

And from there we want to create a few different things. One, we want the founding story in three to four minutes and then like that's going to be really helpful and so we can cut it out of of that. And then the next thing is you're not going to build a company without a team. And so you can actually cut another version of it. That is a hiring video, why you should work for us. And on your careers page, that should go there. You know, why you should work at Kit.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Why should.

[Nathan Barry]

And that's gonna get into. It's gonna be a bit of the founding story, what it's like to work there, where you're going and you wanna give people a taste of who you are. So that all comes out of the podcast. I think the next thing is the basics of the social presence. Right. And so we're gonna pick, I would probably go three platforms because we're gonna at least set up basics there. Cause you don't know who's going to. They're like, oh, all businesses done on Instagram. What are you talking about? You know? Or they're like, I've never been on a social platform besides LinkedIn.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

So for me I would go X, LinkedIn, Instagram. Probably LinkedIn first and then the other two secondary.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I think context is important here too and it depends on the kind of company that you have. So I often think about picking the social platforms. I think two or three is the right amount. So I agree with you there. But what is the context of why people are there? Right. So for a B2B company, I don't think TikToks makes as much sense. I think LinkedIn makes more sense. I think Twitter X makes a lot of sense and I think Instagram can make a lot of sense too. If I'm a CPG brand, I don't think LinkedIn makes as much sense as TikTok does. So it's like, what's the context of the people who are there and the reason that they are there and how does that best engage in your company? So picking your platforms is really important about the context of the. The user type, the demographics that are more likely to use those platforms, and also then the reason that they're there. So I think picking those out can be really, really key. Thinking about context, too.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. I think in the business case, LinkedIn is probably the one that you have to have for sure. And then the others from there. Instagram is nice because you could have a handful of. You don't need to build out a full profile. It doesn't need to be all your vacations, but you could do, you know, post a photo and it's like, oh, I'm in New York this week meeting with, you know, these clients, you know, at your team, off site, get a photo of, you know, you all sitting around the table, like, strategic planning for 2025. A few of those photos will get enough of on Instagram.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

And then you can. You can kind of just set it and leave it. But do that audit, like, go through each profile and be like, okay, do I have the same photo on each one? Is that the photo that's tied to my Gmail? Right. You know, or whatever, when I send out an email that shows up consistency.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

This is like, such small details that are so key is like, don't have three different photos. So people are like, what's going on here? Who is this person?

[Nathan Barry]

Yes.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

It's some of those, like, really tiny branding elements that actually make a big impact.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. And then, you know, get someone else to look over your LinkedIn or whatever it is and. And go through, like, uh, I can actually think on. On my LinkedIn, there's some things that I should clean up. Do I need to include there that I interned for the state legislature in 2006. Probably not. Right. Like, I can let some of that drop to the next page or. Or clean some things up that. Or also something that people do all the time that I think is not very smart is they put on every single board that they were ever a part of or every volunteer group or that sort of thing.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

And you go into LinkedIn, you're like, I don't. What is your. Like how long you've been working on this company? What are you doing? Are you now. Now everything looks like a side project.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

And so having, you know, thinking about that focus and story. So we cleaned up the social profiles, we've posted some of the clips, you know, from the podcast, the founding story, some of those videos, and then I think the next thing that you need is one or two foundational essays.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

And these are the things, you know, if you think of a question like, what's something that you believe that other people would find controversial? Right. Or if you had to distill it down to what are the five like biggest things that have made a difference in your life and career or for you, like tell the story of why Mount Haley holdings is called that.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Right.

[Nathan Barry]

And let's get some of the arc of your, your career.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Cause we imagine the scenario, we both work in a similar industry. You want to do work with my business, you send me an email and we've passed some basic checks. The email is short, it's well written, there's some good context. You seem like a legit person. I'm going to, you know. You know. And let's say you're trying to get on a call. I'm going to do a little bit of research. So I Google that and I want to see what comes up. If you can get me down the rabbit hole, just a little bit of like what you're about, that sort of thing. Even if it's doesn't come across as like, oh, you're a full time creator. Right. But it comes across, you know, let's say I end up. This is more of a, a clickbait heading or something. But you know, if you're like five lessons learned from growing up in a trailer park to earning my first million. Right. You don't even have to write like as crisp of a headline as that. But if you could, you know, I might find myself sucked down a rabbit hole reading that. And before I know, I'm like, I like this Darrell guy. Yeah. Let's get on a call. And the conversion rate goes way higher.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I have a post like that on my, my LinkedIn profile where it has a picture of the trailer house I grew up in. And it talks about the advantages of growing up in a place like that where it's like kind of contrarian.

[Nathan Barry]

Yep.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

That single post has done that exact thing for me. Several.

[Nathan Barry]

Because if we're in startups, we're thinking about conversion rates all the time.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Right. Trial to paid cold, outbound, email to call, demo call to close, all of that. And you're just like, why would I not increase conversion rates every single place that I can.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

And brand increases conversion rates. And so doing that in these specific areas makes a huge difference.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

So these three foundational pieces, I think there's a couple other types of content here that would make a lot of sense. Case studies would make a lot of sense.

[Nathan Barry]

So.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And don't you can get super technical And I think that's actually okay because it's attracting the right type of people to you. But just tell the story, like show, don't tell, don't tell me your company can do this. Show me that when you did it, when you did it, how you did it, and as much detail as possible in a believable sense. Right. And I think the type of case studies that you share here are super key too. So that can be another foundational essay type here where it's like, hey, watch how X person got this type of result from my company is super key for that foundational content too.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. And I think if we can get to two or three case studies, you get diminishing returns past that because what we're trying to do is demonstrate expertise and you know, is 10 better than 2 or 3? If they're all great, sure. But you know, there's really, really diminishing returns there. And exactly what you're saying of the level of detail, the specifics, you know, I've hired a lot of designers and agencies over the years and when they're like, here's the site that we started with, here's the process that we went through, you know, here's where we ended up with the final result. It just gives so much confidence that you can deliver on that.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Is there anything else? So we basically have those four things of, of the podcast, the videos that come from that social, the essay and the case studies.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

The foundational content.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, yeah, I'm, I think that's kind of, that will get you 90% of the way there.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

That's, that's a really good start. Like, that's the foundation, I think, for everything else. That content done well, which if you're a founder of a company, you have some level of standard that you should actually just achieve yourself, sets you up for what could be an entire amazing content strategy to build beyond that. And that's, that's a little bit of the exciting part where I think you can really turn on the jet fuels.

[Nathan Barry]

But one, one key thing is if we think of the spectrum, again, from no online presence or very, very little to like full time creator, and you're like, I don't want to go that route. That's fine. If you do just those four or five things that we talked about, like you get a huge amount of value and that will work for you for years, that, that probably has a shelf life of four to five years.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Agreed.

[Nathan Barry]

Like, especially if you do it in a studio or something like that, then you know, like, yes. If you had. If you're like, oh, I did that years ago on Skype and it's like, all right, so that's probably, you know, your story start again, you know, time to do a refresh on it. But yeah, there's so many things. Okay, so that's basically the 0 to 1.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

Now let's talk more about how personal brand plays into some of these interactions. I've got some stories. I'm curious if any stories come to mind for you of times where you like your personal brand in any way, or a client's personal brand has unlocked some deal or opportunity that they wouldn't have had otherwise.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah, for sure. I recently met Gina, who's the founder of Mighty Networks.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. Who also takes this approach very, very

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

well, very, very seriously. And I think it was like we met and she's like, who is this guy? And I think she did some digging around coffee. We were standing like, who's this guy? We did a little bit of looking up and it blossomed into an amazing friendship. Gina and I now have an amazing friendship. And I'm now an advisor for Mighty Networks. And that relationship, I believe, had something to do with being able to display the track record of work that I've been able to do through my personal brand. And by the way, I'm not creating content in the same level that you were at that time. So it is that stuff. It's like a couple posts on LinkedIn. It's making sure that the results of the things that I had were, were displayed on those profiles. It was easy to find things about me that I think worked well.

[Nathan Barry]

Like one of those, one of those examples is Gina has hired you to do, to run summits for Mighty and to bring, you know, more of this creator style marketing into the software platform. And one of those things, I don't know if this is the buying path that she took, but it could very likely be. You know, you two meet, have a good conversation. She's good at follow up. She's a very thoughtful founder. So, you know, she's going to keep track of everyone she met and then go look them up and say, hey, what opportunities are there here? Who should I build deeper relationship with? All of that, uh, she finds good stuff about you. And then later on, like, oh, we talked about summits. Should I hire Darrell to do a summit? Maybe, maybe not. Well, one of the things that she would look up and find is the hour long podcast episode that you and I did where we're diving into all the strategies of how we got, you know, 100,000 people or more on a summit and how it did all of this. Right. And she's going to show up to a sales call with you being like, yeah, I'm pretty confident.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

It actually didn't even take a sales call. Like, it was literally like a one line email that I sent to her and she was like, I'm in. And I sent her the details and it was closed. So it made the, in my opinion, it made the buying process like the credibility that I gained because of these things. Again, I don't know her exact buying pattern. It'd be interesting to ask her someday. But these things spoke for themselves. Right. She didn't need to ask. This is one of my least favorite things that happens inside of sales. And this is maybe how you know your personal brand isn't as strong as it could be. Someone's like, hey, can you send me three or four references of your work? And it's like, that is such a stall in the sales process that I hate. And if that's happening to you, that is a check engine light that your personal brand is not strong enough.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Because people should know that you're credible this quickly or before they even show up for the call based on the content that you put out in the world. Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

It's the intersection between personal brand and company brand.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

Right. Because that means that I tried to find the. Well, here's exactly what happens. I, I like, you know, let's say we meet. I'm trying to hire you to do something. We're talking through it. I'm like, okay, I think this is gonna be great. I go back to my team and my team doesn't know anything about your credibility or all of that. They didn't have the great coffee meeting, you know, the drinks that at the conference or whatever else. And so they're like, is this the right person to hire? I actually know this other company that I've heard does a good job, and I found this case study of them doing a good job. So let's look up Darrell's company and compare. And there. There's not a good comparison there. And so, like, I think we should check some references before we pull the trigger on this. And so that bas. That question basically means I tried to look up your personal brand so that I can make a case either for myself or to someone else on my team, and I couldn't do it. And so can you help me out?

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Exactly. Right.

[Nathan Barry]

And so in this case. Right. You would link to some Case studies of someone's done. Or you would say, hey, here's a podcast episode where I broke, you know, in and out, full hour. We break it down. Now, in this case, like, Gina and I are friends, so we don't know if she ever watched that podcast episode or. Or whatnot, but if she did, she's like, okay, now here's someone that I respect interviewing this person. I'm thinking of hiring as the expert. And it's like, in the trust transfer, there is significant.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I agree.

[Nathan Barry]

And if I was selling, like, you know, educational marketing or. Or doing summits, I would be linking to that podcast episode in the signature line of my emails.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

Because it's just that, like, the number of times that people are going to click through that and it's like, make it easy to find the content that drives all this credibility.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Exactly. So I have a question for you, Nathan. Obviously, this was really good for you. And, and you've talked about how founder led marketing was really impactful for the first early days of ConvertKit. Now Kit. But Kit's now at $40 million plus of ARR.

[Nathan Barry]

Yep.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And you're obviously still investing in personal brand. Why are you doing that at 40 million ARR? Like, why are you still investing? Yeah, why do you still do it? And I know that you have a team of people that. That's their primary focus is the personal brand of Nathan, the founder.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Why are you still doing it? And what are the pitfalls that a founder at your stage could have, focusing on personal brand versus, you know, traditional brand.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. First reason why still doing makes a lot of money. Like, you could throw in things, like, I love it. I get to meet great people. All of these things are absolutely true. But it drives business results. So a couple examples. There's some things that come natural to me, like, you know, the conversations on podcasts. I love that. Writing the newsletter. But then there's other ones, you know, not the person that's like, consistently posting on Instagram and. And staying on top of that sort of thing. And I remember there was a creator that I was trying to close as a customer for Kit, and we had some conversations back and forth, and I was like, I don't. How do I stay top of mind without being like, I don't know what value I have to deliver to them? And I was posting some Instagram stories about the conference I was at in la, and this person that I wasn't didn't even feel like I was friends with yet. You know, they replied to my stories and Was like, oh, it's great to see you, blah, blah, blah. And I was thinking like, oh, as a salesperson, you're like, how do I deliver value and how do I stay top of mind without being pushy? And my random posts about what I, you know, the trip I was on or what I got up to on the farm on Instagram were doing that because that person, after the meeting, had followed me. And so that was like, one simple example.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I have an old school, old school story of this old mentor of mine was an old school marketer, like, pre Internet days. And he said, I used to just send out a hard piece of mail every single month, like, regardless of if there was really anything important to say or not. Because at the worst case scenario, my logo would go across their desk directly into the trash can.

[Nathan Barry]

And that's. Yeah, that's the worst case scenario.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

That's the worst case scenario. The best case scenario is they open it, they read it, I become top of mind. But at least I am in their mind as they're putting that in the trash can. Right? And I think that's very similar here to like, hey, I'm posting a thing on Instagram. It's like, oh, yeah, Nathan. Like, oh, yeah, he does this thing. We're staying top of mind for people. And I think it's a huge strategy that's really, really important for a founder to do. Like, we were actually in Atlanta a couple weeks ago, and we're like, whatever happened to that person? Like, we haven't heard from them in three or four years. Are they still doing something? Are they still here? And I think that's exactly right. It's like, you can very easily fall out of touch with somebody. They forget about what you're doing if you're just not even posting anything regularly. So that makes a lot of sense.

[Nathan Barry]

One example of this that our mutual friend Jay Papasan shared a few episodes ago that I just want to highlight in case someone hasn't listened to that episode, is he sends a monthly friends newsletter. And I'm like, okay, what is this thing? And he's basically like, people I meet in person. And I'll ask, hey, do you want to be added to, you know, my friend's newsletter? And then he will just send out once a month. Here's what he's up to. Here's what he found interesting. Here's the books that he read and, you know, like, hit, hit, reply and tell me what's up in your life.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah, that's so smart.

[Nathan Barry]

And it's Just like this really thoughtful way to stay top of mind. And he's like in the.00001% of people who he spends 40 minutes a month to do this activity.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

It's crazy how, how easy it is just to stay top of mind with people. Those things are actually really important. And you can do this with a personal brand versus like having to do the like sitting on your phone and texting 65 individual people all the time

[Nathan Barry]

or whatever it is be really time consuming. So going back to why build the brand? Another thing that's made a huge difference is for hiring and recruiting. Yeah, there's a lot of people. We'll give you an example. So I've been last year or early beginning of this year I was recruiting a VP of product. And so I spent a ton of time in like Silicon Valley tech companies, you know, looking for people who have done this product led growth at meaningful scale. Right. We're trying to go from 40 to 100 million. So these are people that have done it at Square, Uber, Dropbox, Stripe, you know, all of these companies. And I would get on calls with them. So the recruiting company would introduce people. Right? We hired a top recruiting company for this and I would get on calls and people would have already done a lot of research and they would have already listened to me on podcast interviews and I had some incredible leads and then ended up hiring this woman, Katie, who used to lead all of product for Square's E commerce division, which is like, you know, the one of the biggest parts of the company. And she joined the company and so much of it is because she fell in love with our mission and our product and how, you know, how I lead the team and all of that. And she could do it from all the content that I put out there. And so I believe that my recruiting conversion rates, you know, we're thinking about as a funnel, right? So from awareness to basic interest to a call to multiple calls on from there I bet it went up 25 to 50% based on personal brand compared to if that didn't exist. And actually one other tactic in here that I think anyone doing recruiting should steal this immediately is record a video that's like 15 to 20 minutes long. That's all the context about the state of the company, the role, all of that. Let's say I'm trying to recruit a COO or a VP of product, some high level role. I'm bringing them in to solve problems. And so just record that video as if you're recording it to one person. Just don't say a name at the beginning though. I just learned that Loom now has a merge fields option that will AI

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

for living in the future.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. So anyway, so if you do say the name in there, just upload it to Lube and they'll take care of it. But basically it's saying like, you know, hey, I'm really excited to talk to you about the role we've got. You know, a lot of interesting things, but I want to dive in on, let's say the company, what our biggest problems are, all of that, and just kind of give you the, the 20 minutes that we'd start our call on, but give it to you in advance. You have time to think about it and dive in and do that. And then I would have, I would either send it to them or the recruiter would send it to them before our calls. And it got people thinking so much over and over again. People were like, I've never seen this done before in a role. And again, one of these things like true worst case scenario is it saves each of us like 20 minutes live because they watched on 1.5 speed while they were doing the dishes or on a walk or whatever. I didn't have to say over 15 calls the same thing over and over again. But then what I think is really magical is it got into a bunch of the problems of the business and then they had 24 to 72 hours between receiving this, think about how to solve it and all that. And then you could tell the people who came in and they're like, have you tried this? What's going on here? And had great follow ups versus the people who were like, yeah, I watched the video that was helpful. And we were starting early on and I could be like, okay, nevermind, I don't, I don't want you here.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Another thing this reminds me of is how important it is for the internal team to understand the passion of why this company was started, the mission and the vision and the core values of the company. And I think this is something that I've seen a lot like the slow death of companies happens when the rest of the organization forgets why we're doing this and they forget why. Responding to a pissed off customer and the support queue is important to what we're trying to accomplish from a high level. And I think you guys have some internal content that goes out to the team too, that is from you and from other members of the team that I think is also wildly important here. And that isn't just important in Internal team. But this can be repurposed for external too. Like we talked about this on the episode that you did with me on my podcast is people don't just pick a company for feature sets. They pick the story, they pick the community, they pick the vision and the mission and those kind of things as well. And this is an underwriting reason that I think founder led marketing is really important, is like, why are we doing this still? Why are we different? Why? If I. If I'm looking at a list of all of the reasons to pick a company and they look the same, why this one versus that one? And I think that's a really underrated thing, is keeping the, like, the DNA of the company alive, both internally to recruiting and then externally as well, is a hugely important part of brand. And I don't think that can be outsourced. I don't think, like a director of marketing can do it in the same way as a founder can. And that's a wildly important thing. And I think you do a really good job of that with internal content, recruiting content and external content.

[Nathan Barry]

Well, let's talk about internal content. I think there's two things that everyone should do. One is run an internal podcast. So the one that we do at KIT is we have a team stories podcast. And so it's just team members interviewing each other about their life. And that's it.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

That's amazing.

[Nathan Barry]

50 or 60 episodes on there, and I can go out on a run and see the latest episode, plug it in, listen to it and go. I can see I can take over managing a new team. Right. If I come in as a new design director.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Right.

[Nathan Barry]

I'm like, okay, who's reporting to me? I can go listen to each of their, like, life stories on the podcast, get a sense of their personality, what they care about, why, like, how they came to work at kit, each of those things at scale and do it on my own time. The other thing is getting into a habit of at least once a month, if not more often, sending out a video to the team, talking about literally anything that's on your mind. Because what happens is, like, when you and I were working together, you know, we grew the team from, I don't know, what, 7 to 30, 35, somewhere in there.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

That's wild.

[Nathan Barry]

We were like, very closely involved in everything. Right.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I talked to you almost every day.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. And I probably talked to many, like, like, even I talked to your direct reports pretty often where, you know.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

We just didn't have the scale and the layers and that Sort of thing that comes as you get to, like, you know, 80, 90, and then forget even 200, 500 team members. And so people will lose that personal touch unless you bring it back in. And so what we do at KIT is every week, one of the execs puts out a loom video and just says, it's either, hey, here's how we're responding to this thing in the market. That was the one that we did this last week where Katie, or VP of product and I jumped on. We, like, outlined our notes at a high level, spent 12 minutes talking through it, what we wanted to say to the team, what we wanted to communicate, and fired that off. Um, some will be just company updates, a deep dive into our marketing strategy, all that. But that, like, steady cadence and having that leverage. Because then the other thing is a new team member comes. They probably met. You know, you might have covered this in all team meetings the last year or whatever. They miss that. But if the recordings are there, you know, of these videos of the. The team meetings, they can go back and catch up on that. Or if someone's saying, hey, what are we? What's our stance on AI and this thing, someone can say, oh, just watch that video on it. We covered it. And there's like, real leverage there.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I love that. So what I'm. What I'm picking up from this is circling all the way back around. It was. The question was, why are you still doing this at 40 million ARR. And that what I'm getting from this is like, it has multiple impact points. Oh, impact externally that can drive growth. And you said, you said the line. Because it just makes a lot of money. That's great. Also in recruiting and also internally.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And. And this is what I want people to take away from this is I also know, because I know people on your team, they watch your podcast, and now they're seeing that the integrity of the founder exists when they're in small meetings with him, in large meetings, at retreats, when he's talking on stages, when he's doing podcast episodes. It's like, this is true. This is real. This is who we are. And I continually get to see the ethos of my founder talking about why we do what we do on podcast episode and podcast episode and podcast interview and on this stage. And I think that's a hugely important thing that has impact in one thing. So the reason we love this so much is one piece of content can have 5, 6, 7, 10 benefits from it. And it's not just a one to one opportunity.

[Nathan Barry]

Right. One thing I want to talk about, because you brought up the team, I believe this is something that you should do at any level in any organization. It's especially important if you have a customer, you know, or sales facing role. So we'll start there. But all of this applies in that circumstance. So, like, I think about people on my team who have personal brands as well. Right. Charlie, our creative director, has built, you know, an amazing personal brand. But then even we have sales team members. I think about Helen on our team who is really early in building her personal brand. Like she just two weeks ago gave her first conference talk.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Amazing, right?

[Nathan Barry]

And so there are these things that come from that where you know she's going to have it when she sends. Just like a founder sends an outbound email to try to get a response, she's doing that in a sales role. And that creator is going to be like, should I respond? Should I not? Who is this person? They're going to look her up and be, oh, you know, I'm going to look at her X account, her Instagram and see, oh, she knows what she's talking about when it comes to creator growth. Oh, here's the, you know, here's her on stage in front of hundreds of creators, teaching them, hey, here's what works to grow your business. I should probably get on a call with her and learn. Just last night, as we're having dinner with another podcast guest, Karina, she was talking about the first time that she met Alyssa on our team who hosts the Deliverability Defined podcast, which is now the industry leading podcast on deliverability. And she made it because she's like, look, this is my expertise, this is what I love talking about.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And the phrase that she said was, I was fangirling over Alyssa when I met her and it's like amazing to me. I was just sitting back and watching, like, that's such an impactful statement. I was fangirling over the deliverability expert at Convertkit, because Alyssa has a podcast that's amazing. That's the kind of response that you want from a customer is even what would normally be like a behind the scenes, really technical role, maybe would never even talk to customers or only to a few customers. And all of a sudden she has this public brand that is impacting in such a way that a client was fangirling in her own words, over a list. It was amazing. Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

And now I'm gonna have to clip this out, that little section and send it to Alyssa so that, you know, she's able to hear that. But then even, like, as Alyssa has taken on a bigger role inside of Kit and now leads all of our, like, our creative growth team. So then her co host on the podcast, Melissa, is filling more and more of the deliverability roles, taking on so much more of this. And sometimes when that happens, you could have like a credibility mismatch in some way where someone's like, oh, no, I want to. It's like founder to first sales hire. Right. You could have some of those things where it's like, no, I want to talk to the founder, not this new person or something else. But because of the way that Alyssa and Melissa did the podcast together, so much credibility, you know, like, Melissa has all the expertise and now she has the credibility to match it. And so people are like, oh, great. Yeah, I listened to that podcast episode and, you know, like, we watched the exact same thing happen with Melissa because they're so deliberate about how they treat brand.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

In the most obscure niche, you know, but it's true.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

It can work almost anywhere.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah. So I want to go back to a few other tactics that people should focus on.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

You know, if we, if we're applying this in, in other areas. And one, a huge one is education teaching. Just as we say at Kit, teach everything, you know.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

And we know from sales that, like, education based sales works really well of just saying, hey, here's what we've done for other clients. Here's what works in the industry. Here's what we do for you. It's not like, oh, hire us, like, and then we'll show you what's behind the, behind the curtain. It's like, no, no, no, we'll show you right now, like, there's no secrets. And then when you take that out in public, it works so, so well. So I think about companies like webflow and Framer and others that have really doubled down on education.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And we found this to be true. I mean, you and I have done all kinds of education in public. We found this to be true. And I think the value of this is twofold is one is we're building our credibility. Right. We're also depositing into the account, the trust account of the person.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

If the first experience that somebody has with our brand is that they learn something, whether they sign up for our service or our product or not, they might not be in a buying behavior now, but they might be six months, 12 months down the road. And we put a value deposit in that account before we've even asked for a withdrawal. And I think that is wildly important is like having the right balance of, hey, like you sign up for most traditional companies, if you sign up for their email list, you're gonna get a hundred emails asking you to buy in the next 30 days. It's an insane way to live. Like a better way is, hey, can I offer you value? Whether or not you do anything for me, I wanna give you value that will pay dividends in return. Maybe right now, for sure, definitely later. And then you start building this snowball effect. Shout out to our friend Mo. But you build a snowball effect of just giving to people. And over time, over 5, 10, 15 years, it's impossible for that not to be a positive return for you.

[Nathan Barry]

I don't know if this analogy works, but I'm going to try it anyway. I'm thinking about the deposit that you're talking about in these, like the, the personal trust accounts that people have. Usually when you do that, I don't know, let's say I have a hundred dollars, you know, I've got ten, ten dollar bills. And then I can decide, like that represents my time. And I can decide, okay, I'm going to keep depositing $10, $10, $10, okay, I should probably spread this out a little bit so maybe I can get to a good amount of trust with three or four people before I use up my a hundred dollars worth of time. What is interesting about the, the leverage that comes from personal brand is that you're making it once and it's like you have that infinite money supply. You're like, okay, I put a hundred dollars worth in to create trust and I like gave out $10 to, you know, a hundred people. And I still have the same, the same resource in the beginning. And so it's pretty wild because you get just this amount of leverage in trust building that you don't have otherwise.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

One thing that I hear often in this space is that like live teaching is dead. Webinars are dead, large summits are dead. I hear all the time. I could pull up LinkedIn posts, people basically saying it's dead. And I was actually with a company in Atlanta not long ago and they're saying, you know, we've tried doing these webinars and they just don't work. And I have a really strong opinion about this. Yeah. And I think that content that's not compelling is dead, period.

[Nathan Barry]

And I think the bar is higher.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

The bar is way higher. But the really easy framework for this, and this is the question I asked the lady I was having this conversation, would you show up for the webinar that you hosted? And she was like, it clicked. She was like, no. And I'm like, great, so then why are you putting effort into something that you wouldn't even personally show up for? And so what I've continued to find, as I've continued to push into using live teaching as a strategy for growth is the bar is higher. But the good news is about this is you can have this framework of like, what is compelling that even I would show up for. Right. Or have conversations with your customers. Like, what is the problem that you have now and what would you show up for and make it compelling? This is why I love doing these summits now. And uh, there are subtle ways that I can even make these summits more compelling. Is, you know, hey, would it be easier for our team to do a one day summit? Yep, it would be easier. Does it seem more valuable to do a five day summit? It sure does. Hey, we could, could we just record this and then just play the recording of it? We sure could. But you know what's more valuable is for that person to be live and that person to be able to answer questions live.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Okay, great. What's the standard that I'm going to jump over for? Like, would I even show up for this? Is this a compelling topic to even talk about? Is the way that I'm energetically showing up here, compelling way of communicating? These are just simple things that I feel like sometimes we get in our head of like, well, I've just got to do a webinar and I wouldn't even show up with this. So why are we even doing the effort for it? It's like, let's do the things that are just a level above. Like standing out in this world, by the way, is not that hard. You just have to go like a step or two above what other people are willing to do.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And I think this is key is like, yeah, I think live trainings and webinars and summits are dead if you're not thinking about how it's actually compelling for your people. And by the way, I'm gonna give a very strong opinion here. You don't have to get on there and sell. I don't actually think that is an important part of this process. I would almost rather somebody just fills the value tank in a session like that than even is worried about a pitch. I've told clients before, if you're worried about the pitch, we won't even do it at all. Like the whole point of this is going to be to put your credibility out, to add value to the. To the person who's going to watch this. And so it's like, I can relieve myself from this anxiety I have about having to sell live too. And so I think just value, value, value, value. How do I make this the most compelling? How do I make this the most valuable? And that is my hot take on this is that the ones that are dead, like, that is your check engine light of like, this isn't working because it's boring. It's not compelling. I wouldn't even show up for it. It's not moving the needle for me.

[Nathan Barry]

I think that line, even as you said it, it like, cuts a little bit of like, would you show up to that? And there's a version of it of like, are you proud of. Of that? Something that I tell my team is, before they send something to me for review, I want them to answer the question, am I proud of this? If the answer is no, don't put it in front of me. Like, get to the point unless you're doing. Of like, hey, I have this standard for taste, and the thing that I've made doesn't meet that yet. And I've tried these three things to try to close the gap, and it's not there yet. And I need a second perspective. Like, that's a totally different situation. That's a. That's. I would love that conversation.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And that framing gives me a different frame of mind to even show up to that conversation.

[Nathan Barry]

So, yeah, because then we're like on the same side of the table trying to figure out how do we make this great. But I love that question of, would I show up to this? Because I would say 95% of business content. Like, if the average business that makes $20 million a year listen to this podcast episode and said, we need to teach, I would say 95% of them would end up with a result that is something that we wouldn't show up to. It'd be the most generic white paper in audio form. Because most presentations suck. Most training sucks. So as you're. I think it's important to dive into actually, how do we make good education if you don't come from that creator world, Right. You're not trained in crisp writing, delivery of content, all of that. And you deal with this, right, because you're building a summit for clients. And yeah. How. How are you navigating this?

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I think this has to be like, one of the keys I think is. Is important is I want the founder or somebody who's connected to the vision of the company to be in the room, Right. Because I don't want them to be like, they need to be excited about it. And their excitement level is a barometer to me of whether or not we're representing the company at a way that is worthwhile or not.

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And so this is like, the way that I even asked that question is that woman knew in two seconds that the content they were doing was not right. And so it's like, we've just got to be. We just got to be that much dialed in internally to us and to the team. Like, I can't go into a company that I'm not a part of in the same way and be like, is this compelling? In the same way? I don't have the context that founders and key members of the team have. And so that's. First of all is like, let's just meet our own standard of what's exciting and compelling. Second is I would much rather. I don't think the founder needs to be the one delivering this. I think that it has to be exciting and compelling, and there has to be somebody good to deliver this content. So I think it's as much important about what you're teaching as how you're teaching it. So if I'm. If I'm sitting down and it's the most valuable content in the world, but I can't even pay attention to it, I start checking my phone. So what is, like, how is the compelling nature of it? It's very easy to hire somebody who can do this for you, who's very good at delivering content. It's very easy to use, like, influencers to teach this content for you. Like, these are very common practices of having somebody who's really good at delivering this content.

[Nathan Barry]

You would hire an emcee for your conference.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

100% you would.

[Nathan Barry]

Why would you not hire, you know,

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

someone for somebody that comes to mind for this, for me was Tim Page at leadpages early days, right. Tim wasn't an executive of the company, but he was a very skilled teacher. My friend Ryan at HubSpot, very skilled teachers that create content on behalf of the brand, where it's not just the content is good, but also the delivery is really good. And I think that's a piece where people miss all of the time. So those are the two things in my mind that are really important is the third is format. So what is the easiest way that somebody can engage in that format? I see people make this mistake all the time is they serve themselves as a company first, so they make it really hard. Hey, we're going to stream this inside of our app. It's like, why? Like, oh, because that serves you first, right.

[Nathan Barry]

We're trying to. Someone's trying to drive monthly active users, and so they're like, oh, we'll get logins.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah. And so it's like, yeah, that makes sense. If the. If the frame of mind or the objective is let's serve us first. And I think that the reframe is like, what's the easiest for the person who's going to engage with this content, to engage in content. So I think format is also really important. What's the easiest way for somebody to get there? What's the most. Like, can they get it on their phone? Can they get it on this tablet? Can they get it on their desktop? And it's easy to engage in the content that way. So I think it's the content, it's the delivery, and then it's also the format. I think those are really important things to keep in mind.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, that makes sense. Are there other companies that you're thinking of that do education really, really Well?

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I think HubSpot does it really well. Oh, yeah, HubSpot. I mean, HubSpot's like a gold standard in a lot of ways, and they. They're spending millions of dollars acquiring content. Like, the podcast network is a great example of that. Uh, so I think that's one that I really look up to. What about you? What. What companies come to mind there?

[Nathan Barry]

I mean, in that. In that vein. Right. The HubSpot bought the Hustle, which means they own my first million as a podcast and the Hustle as a brand. And so from there, watching Sam Parr, you know, he obviously comes to this world of being a writer, building a large newsletter, but watching him use his personal brand to build Hampton.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah.

[Nathan Barry]

You know, which is his new, like, entrepreneur, you know, founder, network. And you just think of he's at, like, tens of millions of dollars of free advertising.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Free advertising.

[Nathan Barry]

And that's way more effective because of the credibility that comes with it. And in some ways, you know, Sam or Gina or Encore. Some of these people that we're talking about, like, on one hand, they're outliers, because these are people who are very good at what they do. But, like, they got there by starting pretty simple and being like, I. I don't know, I'm gonna start writing, I'm gonna be consistent. Like, they. They became outliers over a long period of time. But I don't think that there's something that they have that is untouchable for others.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I sat down with Gina. I was like, because Gina released a podcast that's done very well in the last little bit, and it's hit the top 50 business podcasts or even beyond. It was in the top 10 business podcasts at one point. And I said, all right, tell me the secret of how you've grown your podcast, Gina. And the reality was, it wasn't a secret. It was, like, just really good, compelling content. And, like, in those moments, you're like, oh, okay. But the reality is, like, there's no shortcuts for her. There was no, like, secret playbook that she knows that other people can't know. It's like, she has spent a lot of time thinking about the most compelling content. And she even told me that they did a bunch of episodes and ended up deleting them and going again because it didn't meet the standard of, like, would I even listen to this?

[Nathan Barry]

Right.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And I think her podcast, the first season of her podcast, is so brilliant because it gives her point of view of why Mighty is different from everybody else, and she did such a good job with it. So there's no secrets here, because something

[Nathan Barry]

in that you need to equip your customers to be able to deliver your brand message for you.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Correct? Right.

[Nathan Barry]

So someone's asking, should I use Kajabi or Circle or Mighty or something else? And they're not asking you that that does happen. But 90% of the time that that question is asked, someone from each of those companies is not in the room.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Correct.

[Nathan Barry]

It's two potential customers talking to each other. And so if one of them has listened to Gina's podcast, then they're going to be able to, in Gina's words, thinking it's their own, be able to explain to their friend, here's why Mighty is different.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Here's a perfect example of this. Gina talks about transitions in a way that a lot of people talk about niche or problems that you solve. And I have, after you told me it yesterday, 20 years of speaking about this a certain way. I've changed the way I talked about it because Gina's point of view is so strong. I'm like, this is amazing. But Gina put her point of view out in the world in a way where you're right now her customers are talking about transitions because they know about this content inside of her content. It's amazing to me. And to call it out, Nathan, like, this Podcast is great. It's one of my favorites. It's not as big as my first million. Not even close. That's okay. Yeah, it's still worth it. It's still having outsized impact for the amount of effort that you're putting into it, even though it's not getting 10 million views or whatever.

[Nathan Barry]

Because the thing is, I'm very clear about who my target market is. I want to speak to professional creators and people at this, you know, at a certain level. And so the number of times that I talk to someone and maybe there's an issue in our product or someone else has a compelling offer is giving away, giving away for free. The number of times that people come back and say, like, oh, I learned, you know, how to take my business from a quarter million to half a million a year from this podcast. You know, like, you make fans for life. And then especially as we've done the coaching format where people are, you know, flying out to the studio coaching on their business, and they're just like, I love this so much.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah. So you don't have to have a Sam Par size podcast or a Gina size podcast to make this worth it.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, we're talking right now. We're, you know, 5,000 downloads an episode is what this podcast gets, which on one hand is a lot. On the other hand, in the grand scheme of things, it's very, very small.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep. And still worth it. There's one more. I know that we were. One more topic I want to talk about as far as creator strategies that I think impact business in a positive way. That's community. And I think developing community is an incredible way to continue to engage with your customers and with potential customers. And I think this is one that we don't have to spend a lot of time on this. But I know that building a community is an important part of what you do at Kit, and I think this is an important strategy that businesses can take from creators. Creators are building communities around all kinds of niche topics. And I've seen a couple of of people doing really cool communities. One example of a small company that is really impactful for them is my friends at castmagic, and they have built a community called uploading, which is about how to use AI to generate content for your business and for your team in a way. And so this community is like, it's a really compelling topic. People have lots of questions about it. They host podcasts that are public, but then for the people who are part of the community, they get private trainings and they get to do Q&As with the podcast guests afterwards. And so they're building a community of people who are some are customers, some are not customers. And they're building in a community format that is positively impacting their business. It's one of their best growth levers is just creating content in the context of a community. But the value of community is that the customers and potential customers are interacting together. And so you've got people selling. It's like third party advocacy. It's like customer X is now telling potential customer Y why this tool is great and you're not having to do any of it. And there's a momentum that happens inside of community. So community is a really important strategy that I think businesses could really learn from is how are we developing community between our customers? That's a great non customers. And then the intersection of the both of those as well.

[Nathan Barry]

Yeah, I think that's huge. And finding ways to get in person, like something that you'll hear a lot in, like conventional software growth. For example, like Jason Lemkin, who's built a bunch of great companies and you know, had exits and now talks a lot about building sales teams and scaling software companies. He's always talking about like, get in person with your customers. Like plan a tour, go around, you know, a five city tour, get in person, do those things, go to the events. Because it just makes such a huge difference.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And you did this with the. Oh, first of all, we've done this. We go to conferences all the time. Even when we barely had two nickels to rub together, it was important for us to get in person. You've done this with Craft and Commerce conference, which I know you don't make a lot of money from, but it's an investment in the community. And by the way, like it's people's favorite event in the whole year. I know people who it's like, it's like a pilgrimage or like a family reunion. You also did this with your podcast tour where you took the podcast on the road. And again, I know that was an investment into getting in person with people. So there's lots of ways to be

[Nathan Barry]

developing, hosting masterminds, hosting dinners, all those things. There's a playbook that we've done that we did last fall that we'll do again soon, where we said, okay, we want to show up in a city and in the most efficient way possible, touch all the right people.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yep.

[Nathan Barry]

And so what we did is would plan in advance and try to get five or six in person. Meetings. And so this is with top sales prospects, top customers, where you want to have that one on one time. And then the next thing from there is to host a mastermind. And so this would be a half day event. We do this deep dive into flywheels, how to build flywheels in your business. Right. So we're teaching our methodology that really differentiates us from any competitor because no one else is talking about this unless they're copying us. And then that would get 15 to 25 of like the high level customers or prospects in the room. This great thing is when you got say 15 customers who are killing it and you let them invite their friends who might not be customers, or you're inviting prospects and you're delivering a ton of value. And then I would just overhear these conversations where someone's like, oh, I'm on activecampaign. Should I switch to kit? And there's like four people who are like, yes, absolutely, here's why, here's how I did it and all that. I don't need to sell in that situation. I've got 15 people who are my best customers who sell for me. And then the next level up from there is we would do the live podcast, where then to that we could invite, you know, a hundred to two hundred people and we create content live on stage. We're recording it, it goes out on the web. It generates a huge amount of credibility because it's like, oh, not only are you recording a podcast, but you're doing it in person on stage, in front of hundreds of people. Okay, this must be worth listening to. And then finally at the end of that, we'd have a meetup and all of Those, you know, 100 to 200 people get to meet each other, we get to talk to them. And these days were absolutely wild.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

And they're grind.

[Nathan Barry]

They were, they were a total grind, but so worth it. And for me, like, well, you and I both have, have kids. And so, you know, and all these other obligations, I was like, look, I'm. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to make the most efficient use of my time. And so I'd be in a City for 36 hours and would knock out all of those things. Oh, the other thing is I would go in person on other people's podcasts.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yes.

[Nathan Barry]

So two days in Austin, I think I recorded seven podcasts, had five in person meetings, taught a mastermind, had 150 people out to a live event and a live podcast. And it's just like you can systematize that and knock it out.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah. And so I think community is a huge deal and I think it's a really underrated strategy that again, a lot of this stuff is like investments that have outsized returns long term, but they also have immediate impact too. So I think, I think those are the three real strategies that traditional startups can learn from creators that I think are going to have really outsized impacts on their business.

[Nathan Barry]

One quick thing that I think I want to end on is just talking about systems and how you could do this in a way that doesn't take all of your time. And so, you know, not all, all consuming. So the first thing is badge recording content. Like let's say you decided that you want to go 0 to 1. If you did probably an hour of prep work for four or five days, then you could spend this dedicated chunk of time where you're like, hey, I'm gonna go to a studio for one day and knock out a huge amount of content or two days. And so you could really batch record that. Second, you could get into a system where you're collecting ideas over time. You know, you have this page or database and notion where every time you're thinking about like, oh, that'd be a good example for content where that should be a case study, it just gets dumped there. And then periodically you do the batch creation and then I think the next thing is, then this is one that we haven't done yet at Kit that I really want to do is to bring in the team on all of that. Right? So something that we're planning to do is to, to ask team like, hey, who are five or six people or eight people on the team that want to do this level, like the zero to one personal brand building related to Kit and bring them here into the studio. Let's spend two days and let's record all this content. So like we could say, hey, what, let's crowdsource within our team all of the best advice we give to creators. You know, what does create every day mean to us? Why is that important? You know, if you were going from zero to a hundred subscribers, how would you do it? Like just all of these types of things. What are the biggest mistakes that you see creators making? Right? We can build a shared database of, of all of that and then sit down and interview each other and that will turn into all these reels and clips. And then when you go to Helen on our sales team, you go to her Instagram, then it will be her talking about this is what it looks like to, you know, here's what I've learned helping all these creators grow to a hundred thousand subscribers. Here's behind the scenes, you know, all that and there's a huge trust transfer and you could do that twice a year. Like, we're not talking a fundamental switch. And like, okay, now this has to take over 10 hours of a week, every single week. Yeah.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

I mean, this is what you and I have been doing the last two days is I've recorded a batch for my content, we've recorded for my show, I'm now recording for your show. And it's really like a 24 hour window where we're trying to get a bunch of content done. And so I think if you could invest one day per quarter developing this stuff out for your company, it doesn't like become this thing that has to be all consuming all the time. And then shout out to the Flywheels concept here is like, you've got some really good content flywheels that people should pay attention to of how you can be capturing these ideas, how your CS team or your sales team could be putting in ideas for you. So when you sit down, it's easy to knock out five to 10 pieces of content in a single day. I think it's a huge, a huge benefit.

[Nathan Barry]

Darrell, we can obviously talk about this for a very long time. You are one of the best in the world at all things creator and business marketing and particularly going from, you know, zero to 10 million. And we actually have two other episodes that if someone is just tuning in for the first time, they should check out. So about a year ago you came on and we talked about summits and how to launch and scale those. And then we just recently did an episode where you gave a whole breakdown on my launch and tactics and strategy and we got into positioning and all of that. So lots of great Darrel content if people want to check it out. Beyond that, if people want to follow you, connect with you, what should they do? Where should they check out? Good people, all of that.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Yeah. So first of all, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Send me a DM. Just Darrel Vesterfeldt on LinkedIn. I'm the only one in the world, so it's easy to find me. The agency that does this kind of work for companies is called good people digital bygoodpeople.com is the URL. So you can check that out there and reach out to us either place and we'd love to talk to you.

[Nathan Barry]

Sounds good. Thank you for coming on.

[Darrel Vesterfeldt]

Thanks man.

[Nathan Barry]

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.