There comes a moment in every startup when the brand develops its own personality and characteristics, separate from those of the founder. The next challenge is to build it into a powerhouse brand. In this podcast, you’ll hear from a brand builder and a brand whisperer.
Nathan Chan is the Founder of Foundr, the magazine that profiles entrepreneurs. Nathan started Foundr at the top by interviewing Sir Richard Branson – he then gave away that copy of the magazine to supercharge the Foundr brand. Since then he’s interviewed Arianna Huffington, Mark Cuban, Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss and he shares their insights and his own in this brand-building masterclass.
Stephen Esketzis is the marketing funnel mastermind and Founder of Digital Marketers Australia. He launched his first business straight out of high school with the Meggle App which hooked people up with their nearest bar or nightclub. Building a 10,000 strong network for the app took Stephen deep into the world of digital marketing. Today he builds marketing funnels for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.
Serpil Senelmis: How does your brand convey your business’s personality?
Interviewing Public: For me as a running a social venture, my brand is represented through authenticity, caring for the people that I’m interacting with and dealing with on a daily basis. The service that I’m putting together helps to empower students and helps to reengage elderly experienced persons. And I hope to represent that through the way I deal with all the people I speak with. And, and that to come through in that.
Interviewing Public: Well my brand and business I guess, is essentially in one. And they both convey my personality because I’m quite creative and enjoy helping other people and seeing them succeed. So as a personal development and business coach, that’s sort of what I do. I help others succeed, help them grow. And that’s a reflection of myself because I love helping others that just really makes me feel fulfilled.
Interviewing Public: The business that I work with is a tech startup, we’re pretty young. We’ve only been around for a couple Using we’re really building out our team at the moment. And it’s something that’s very front of mind for us and that we’re very conscious of and working on at the moment. I think it all starts with culture and people. And that’s definitely been our priority to start with at least yeah.
Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. Somebody asked me recently if my business was made or if it was a brand of its own that could continue without me. It’s a tough question, and I’m looking forward to getting some good advice from our two experts. As we look at building a powerhouse brand. Nathan Chan is the founder of Foundr magazine, and digital resource to self-made entrepreneurs. They got his big break after winning an interview with Sir Richard Branson.
Nathan Chan: And I knew forget it was like late at night I trackback, the head of Richard Branson’s PR. And you know, I remember telling my friend that I was living with at the time, like be quiet, because I’m gonna go pitch Richard Branson, so I run to my room. Like I just called her up. I just was like, stumbling, you know, so nervous. I gave her my pitch. And she said, right, look, please understand when we get these requests, at least 10 times a day, shoot me an email. I promise. I’ll at least get back to you. So I showed her a really good email. And then yeah, he ended up saying yes, and we did that interview.
Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear more from Nathan soon. But first, Stephen Esketzis, founder of stevenesketsis.com. Naturally, in this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis. Stephen says you really need to get inside the head of your customers if you want them to take action.
Stephen Esketzis: So my background is digital marketing. I’ve got a few different companies and one of them, we run monthly digital marketing events. So everything is all about learning how to build a sales funnel and acquire customers online. You know, lead generation, taking them through that whole process of a cold audience, someone you’ve never met before warming that lead up, turning them into a customer and sending them through your services to make as much money as you can offer them in your business. straight out of high school, I built this app to help people get into nightclubs. And that was kind of my first business idea. Believe it or not, it actually pretty well, surprisingly, but I went out one out, I was like, only get into this nightclub. I don’t know a guest list, it’d be cool if there was an app or I could just find one. So we built this app. And it worked. We’ve got like 10,000 downloads from all these different nightclub owners and patrons and things like that. And after a while, we kind of hit a glass ceiling. And then once we hit that glass ceiling, I was like, well, what do we do now this is like digital marketing when I want I don’t know anything about it. So I went into the world of Facebook advertising and Google advertising and sales funnels and boosting posts and all this kind of crazy stuff. And that’s how I ended up in digital marketing world and I ended up blocking that a lot more than the app world. So I stayed in it and became head of content marketing for a company called Click Funnels for a few years while doing a lot of consulting at the same time, and now building a lot of our marketing funnels and helping lead generation for businesses around Australia as well, so.
Wayne Lewis: With the app, can you give us a bit of an insight as to some of those hurdles that you came across? In those early days?
Stephen Esketzis: So with the mobile app, especially like I had no idea what I was doing. So if anyone’s going into marketing or starting a business, it’s pretty overwhelming. You don’t understand how to spend your money effectively. You put your money into like a Facebook ad or something like that. You just see the ad spend go up and you don’t see any results you don’t see people actually buying. So for me, the biggest hurdle was actually understanding how do I get someone to become a paying customer on my platform or for my service, before interacting with them? How do I get someone who I’ve never met before to actually give them my money? Give them me money? Have them give me money? Third time lucky. I know it’s tongue twister, but yeah, so that was the biggest hurdle And I guess to figure that out, I realized that you know, there’s two things there. So it’s sales and marketing. And I think a lot of people confuse the two because sales is face to face, closing a sale. So actually taking someone through the process of your qualified customer. Now, let me tell you something, whereas marketing is the process of warming someone all the way up to your offer. And then they’re actually already sold because they’ve seen all the messaging that leads them to your offer before you even got there. So I thought that was really fascinating because it’s a lot of a less pushy approach. Most people think sales is a lot more pushy. And I thought, you know, if I can do this at scale, then there’s a huge opportunity here for any business I want to build. It doesn’t have to be an app, it can be a website, it could be, you know, service-based company, like a removals company could be anything you want. If you understand the mechanics behind marketing, then you can go into a business and blow it up at will. So for me, that was kind of the biggest hurdle and that’s how I went about solving it is just looking around what is marketing diving deeper and deeper in and then I realized that to get that actual understanding The process is called a sales funnel. So it’s actually putting someone through the top of this funnel, teaching them about your product, warming them up, and then eventually they become a customer and then breaking that down. So that’s what I ended up going in and learning.
Wayne Lewis: So some of the clients that you’re working with today, is it your main role to understand those customers’ needs before you start working with them, or how does it work?
Stephen Esketzis: So I mean, different clients we work with have different data available to them. So some of them like of selling brand new, some of them have email lists and Instagram followings, and all that kind of thing. So if you’ve already got some sort of data available to let’s say, you’ve been in operation for a little while, or you’ve got some customers and some leads, but you don’t have a ton. You leverage what you’ve got to make the next step easier. So you can start targeting new customers. So for example, if you’ve got like an email list of past clients or past customers, send them an offer, you know, give him a free voucher or attempts and off code and say, Look, we’d love you to answer these questions. Just keep it very low barrier. Now what’s the number one challenge you’re facing right now in your Or in your swimming lessons or in whatever the product is. And actually go through those answers and structure and see where you know what people are replying one of those answers that has coming up over and over again that you can start tackling when you start targeting new customers. So they’re actually giving you all the fears and frustrations or issues. And you’re just reusing that in the content when you start advertising to them. So that’s what we’ll do with a client, we’ll find out what they’ve got available. And then we’ll go and take it away and start leveraging that when we want to start finding new clients. If you’re starting from scratch, and you don’t have anything, it’s always good to go out and either partner with someone who has a following in that space, or start running some test traffic and going face to face asking questions. You’ve got to kind of get that face to face response sometimes to really get the insight into, you know, what they’re thinking and what they’re going through.
Wayne Lewis: And what tools are you using for the capture?
Stephen Esketzis: We use a few different things. So for our email list in our CRM, we use a tool called Active Campaign that does all our email management and CRM. For surveys type forms pretty good where you can do quizzes and surveys. If you’re starting something mass market from scratch, a little hack of mine is using a tool called Google consumer surveys, you can actually go through and ask some questions. And Google will put this as an ad over pieces of content on websites. And for people to access the content, they got to answer this quiz. If you’re starting like a beauty eCommerce store, you can say, Are you female and interested in beauty? And then yes or no. So anyone that hits yes will go through another five more questions. Anyone who hits no is disqualified, and then they don’t answer the questions. So you only pay for the responses that are qualified. And you can start getting some data like that. So that’s a really easy way to do data collection. And again, if you don’t have resources or an email list, Facebook groups is a really easy one. We’ll start doing that recently for ourselves. One of our brands we’re launching in the pet space. So we wanted a logo and we’re like, well, what logo do we want? What’s going to resonate with people, someone who owns a dog so we had four or five different logos, we went out we posted it to all these different groups and the one that I thought was never gonna win one. It came up again. Again, again, again, it’s a stupid little dog like lying on his back. And I was like, it looks like a dead dog. Like, there’s no way, like this thing is gonna win. And it just crushed it like they loved it. So I was like, all right, that’s what we’re gonna go with. Like, it looks ridiculous. But you don’t know sometimes like your target customer isn’t you. So it’s just about picking up that piece of information. But at the end of the day, like digital marketing, it comes down to three things. So it’s talking about having the right offer, you’ve got to have a high converting offer and offer which resonates with your audience and the irresistible offer. So that’s probably the most important part. The next is your target customer, you’ve got to make sure you’re crystal clear about who your target customer is and how you’re gonna reach them. And where they are. If you don’t know who they are, you might have the best offer. But if you’re targeting the wrong people, they’re not gonna respond. And then the third thing is the messaging your copy. So if you’re actually targeting the perfect person with the perfect offer, but your copy sucks, then they’re not going to take action. So it’s gonna be just like a dead campaign that had, you know, had legs on it, but at the end of the day, it’s not capturing it’s not gripping enough to convert. So make sure you’ve got really tight copy, hell of a really good offer. And your targeting is on point. If you get those three things, it’s a home run every time
Wayne Lewis: And how do you see the future for Australia for not just digital marketing, but businesses as a whole?
Stephen Esketzis: I think it’s thriving. Honestly, every single time I speak to someone who’s in business online, offline, brick and mortar, whatever it might be. Right now, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to start a business with contractors like upwork.com, where you can go hire anyone from any country for dollars an hour. I think the the wealth of knowledge out there on the internet is so vast that everything’s at your fingertips, there really is no excuse not to be able to start a business and just keep plugging away and grinding through it. Because there’s so many free events and so much free content. There’s so many blog articles and so many different pieces of information out there that you can go and learn from. I just think it’s gonna get bigger and bigger and more and more competitive as well. So I think you have to have your hand you know, your hand on the pulse or finger on the trigger. I can’t remember what the thing is. But basically, you’ve got to be paying attention. Because at the end of the day, if the guy next to you is running the same company or something similar, and they’re doing that, then it’s just gonna crush you. So I think we’re thriving, but you’ve also got to be an active business owner, you can’t be passive. If you’re in a startup and you want to just do the minimal work, you’re going to very quickly find out there’s a lot more to it if you’re really want to scale something quite large.
Wayne Lewis: So what are you thinking down the line?
Stephen Esketzis: For online? Yeah, I mean, I’m involved in a bunch of projects. But for me, personally, we’re working in a lot of lead generation spaces. So online lead generation for different service-based businesses. And I’ve got another company where we build media properties, so big content, websites, thinking like, you know, health.com or a lot of those were just content, content, content. So I run a couple of those websites. And we just see the potential. There’s really big a lot of companies who are, for example, the dog one that we’re starting at the moment talking about targeting pet owners and giving them information about how to be a better dog owner, and we’re bringing experts in to help them with that. We’re saying companies who like all these pet food companies and all these dog walking companies and all these supplemental products that linking to that industry are really looking to partner with these authorities. And you know, people who are providing value first rather than just the product. So I think if you can provide value in your business, no matter what it is just content in whatever form it is, whether it’s video, blog, content, podcast, whatever that medium is for your audience, that’s going to really capture their attention. And that’s how you’re going to, again, build the brand, I think providing all that content upfront. And that way, by the time they hear about you and work with you, they’re already pre-sold in their head. So I think content is just going to get more and more important.
Wayne Lewis: Content is king.
Stephen Esketzis: Content is king.
Wayne Lewis: Guys, can we have a round of applause for Stephen Esketzis.
Serpil Senelmis: So the key to successful digital marketing is a three-step process. Number one, have an irresistible offer, two, be clear on your target customer. And finally, make sure that the copy in your message is exceptional. After all, it will decide whether your customers take action or not. Thanks for all that Stephen. Next, we’ll meet a man who went from struggling to get a job to having tremendous influence and learning to think big.
Ad Guy: Masters Series is presented by WeTeachMe. Is it too early to think about Christmas? Why not learn to make gifts such as soap, robots, or Christmas wreaths? Get the jump on the festive season at weteachme.com. This podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. You can give your brand a voice and personality with a podcast that really speaks to your customers. Let your brand talk with writtenandrecorded.com. And now back to the podcast.
Serpil Senelmis: Thanks Ad Guy, Nathan Chan. didn’t have much of a work history behind it before he took a leap of faith and started Foundr magazine, in this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis. Nathan says the growth of your company is a reflection of you as a founder, and how much time you’re investing in learning and networking.
Wayne Lewis: I’m an avid listener of your podcast.
Nathan Chan: Right, thanks mate.
Wayne Lewis: The first line that you always open up with is how did you get your job? So that same question, if you don’t mind, how did you get your job?
Nathan Chan: So I just kind of fell into it. It’s funny. I’ve been doing this for five years now. And I look at all these people that want to start a business and they have all these crazy wild dreams of raising capital and building the big businesses. And for me, I started Foundr because no one would give me a job. My first professional job was in IT support at an accounting firm, and then I moved across and started working at a travel company called intrepid travel. And I did a master’s in marketing. And still no one would hire me to do marketing. So I saw there was an opportunity to disrupt the publishing space creating a digital magazine. And at the time, I was interested and curious around entrepreneurship and business. And I thought, what better way than to create this magazine around business and everything that I wanted to learn and read because I saw there was a gap in the marketplace to produce content around entrepreneurship and business for more kind of early stage founders and aspiring founders. And I just started on the side. I remember actually taking that magazine, like the first edition on the iPad, taking it to job interviews, and still no one would hire me. After a couple of months, it was pretty clear to me what I wanted to do and how it’s gonna grow this thing. And yeah, the rest is kind of history.
Wayne Lewis: How did you get some of the early wins on the board?
Nathan Chan: You know, starting a magazine is a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that I didn’t know it at the time. But a magazine has a tremendous amount of authority when you talk about like building up media properties. Having a magazine is tremendous for influence. And I just kind of stumbled across that. And if you want to start a magazine today, like you know, a lot of people would say, you were stupid, saying back then a lot of people told me I was stupid, but I was really naive, right? And you know, I didn’t have any money either, so I kind of had to be super resourceful. So to answer your question, I worked out very quickly that having a magazine is amazing for getting cut through and actually getting in the door and getting in front of people. And the first early wind was I got an interview with Sir Richard Branson, and that was for issue number eight, but I pitched him for issue number four but when I was four months in. I’ll never forget I was you know, Still at my day job, and I was at a share house with one of my mates in McLeod. And I never forget it was like late at night I trackback, the head of Richard Branson’s PR and you know, I remember telling my friend that I was living with at the time, like be quiet, because I’m going to go pitch Richard Branson, so I run to my room. Like I just called her up. I just was like stumbling and I was so nervous. I gave her my pitch. And she said, like, Look, please understand, we get these requests at least 10 times a day, shoot me an email, I promise I’ll at least get back to you. So I showed her a really good email. And then yeah, he ended up saying yes, and we did that interview and that that was a really big win because I took that interview. And I gave it away for free. I gave that particular magazine edition away for free. And that was something that I learned that you when you’re building any kind of brand or building an audience. If you want to build that audience, you want to lead with something that’s really good that you could easily charge for. But if you give it away for free and put it out there, you can do a few things. One, you can provide value up front and you can build your audience but two, with that magazine, having Richard Branson on the front cover of a brand that nobody’s ever heard of. It’s tremendously powerful for building influence. That was definitely a big win. Another big win was, I just was lucky that I stumbled across the business model of selling recurring subscriptions. And that just kept building and it was just building, building, building, building. You know, a lot of people, when they start a business, they don’t think, okay, I’m just gonna sell subscription that was really powerful, and still is today. I’m very, very passionate about recurring revenue
Wayne Lewis: From the podcast, I’ve noticed that you’re looking for that advice from some of those founders about how to scale and how to build teams?
Nathan Chan: Yeah, yeah, yes. So you build a very, very big company, or something of true worth and value and significance through having a great team. There’s no other way about it, you can’t do it off your own bat, I think you can build a business maybe to a million bucks or a couple of million by pushing it, max by yourself. But once you want to get past that, you really need to develop a keen eye and skillset for identifying talent, recruiting talent, fostering talent, and really allowing people to do their best work at your company and really fostering that team. So that’s definitely something that is a common thing that a lot of people don’t think about the accomplishments. Now founder is not a reflection of just my work. It’s a reflection of our team’s work. And we have an incredible team, which is, that’s how you can scale is through hiring tremendously talented people. And it’s really tough. When it comes to hiring great people. You want people that I think super hungry, you want to create an organization, an environment where they can do their best work. Getting paid is one thing, but being able to fall in love with the work is another thing, one thing that I’ve found really powerful to attract great talent to want to join founders of vision. I say this not sparingly, but I truly believe that the work that we’re doing at Foundr, our content, everything we put out, we have the potential to create the next Elon Musk to like shape the future of our generation. Because all these young kids, when they go to learn, they want to learn about entrepreneurship. And they, you know, type in Google, they’re finding an article from Foundr, they’re listening to a podcast, they’re watching one of our videos or doing one of our courses. And you know, to be a part of that, that’s pretty exciting. That’s all you need focus on when you scaling and building your team.
Wayne Lewis: Nathan, you’re super passionate about building a powerhouse brand. And can you just share a little bit about how you went about turning your brand into a powerhouse brand?
Nathan Chan: Yeah, I am particularly passionate about building brands from scratch, especially if you got no money. You know, there’s three key components that I believe are the key elements and ingredients for building any brand, especially online. The first one is having a great product, you look at all the companies that are winning, and that have great brands, they tend to be the ones with the most superior products. Like if you want to win in business, you have to work towards having the most superior product in the marketplace. And that kind of goes without saying, but for some people, they try and cut corners there, so that’s number one. So for us at Foundr, it’s our content, anything that you see us put out, whether it’s a podcast, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a blog post, whether it’s one of our courses, whether it’s one of our magazines, a book you name, it, anything we put out, is a very, very strong product and it’s good. The second key component is and this is a form of unique selling proposition in of itself to differentiate yourself is great design. So I’m very, very passionate about, about having great design in whatever you put out there. So if you look at all the top startups one thing that is very, very common, they all have tremendous design. Like it just goes without saying. And the cool thing is with design, because of technology nowadays, you can actually get incredible design at extremely low cost. Like you don’t have to go to these ridiculously expensive agencies locally. You can go to a website like behance.com or dribble.com, you can find an amazing designer from Eastern Europe. Obviously, you can take advantage of the economy and pay somebody a really cost affordable right here in Australia or US or whatever, and find somebody in Eastern Europe and you can get incredible design work. And I think that is so important. So if you look at anything we put out there from Foundr, the design is impeccable, it’s really, really strong. And when it comes to great design, the things that I think about is it has to be cool, it has to be funky, it has to be fresh, and anything that we put out there, we want people to to see it, if they’re glancing and they’ll take a second look, it’s got to be really cool. And that’s something that can be achieved when you starting from scratch with not much money, obviously a great product, you’ve got to build a great product. And then the third one is having ambassadors for your brand. Now, it doesn’t actually have to be kind of, you know, you’ve got a deal with them, but you need to be able to align yourself with them in some way, shape or form. So we don’t have any official ambassadors per se for Foundr, but we treat the people that are the rock stars of our industry in the entrepreneurship and business space. We get them on the front covers of our magazine, and some of them we have testimonials from and we put everywhere all over our website. Like if you go to the homepage of foundr.com, you’ll see a testimonial from Gary Vaynerchuk, Daymond John, Marie Forleo are all very well-known people in the industry in the space that people were just like, wow, these guys must be legit. You see the Foundr covers, we use those to show these people was almost ambassadors for the brand. So if you can really elevate your credibility and authority, that’s how you start to really cultivate and develop an amazing brand. That’s really all it is in those three simple key steps. And this all can be achieved even when you’re just starting out. The thing you just have to remember is you have to be prepared to spend that little bit extra in investing the time in creating a great brand at the start. So I’ll never forget when I was trying to design the first edition of the magazine, and it was ridiculous. I found the first designer and I got him to design up the whole magazine edition. And it costs 200 bucks. And I was just like, oh, that’s a bit of money and I dropped the 200 bucks. You know how much money and then I found these other designer who was just 100 times better then the first designer we worked with, and I was just about to launch the magazine. And I found the second designer, incredible guy, and I spoke to him and and I showed him what we had. And I said, yeah, how much is it gonna cost for you to design our magazine every month and, and he’s like, it’s gonna cost you about 600 bucks and I was just like man, there is no way in hell, I can afford to pay that or pay that. And I’ll never forget, this is like one of the best lessons that I learned about branding. He said to me, Nathan, I know it might seem like a lot of money to you is probably out of your budget. But if you can invest in design, early on when you’re starting your business or building your startup, at the early stages or at the very start, you might not see it and you might not feel it right now. But it pays its weight in gold over time. And you really see those benefits in In the long run.
Wayne Lewis: Did you go with that guy, with the second?
Nathan Chan: Of course man, I went to his wedding. He’s our art director now, like he still does every single magazine edition. He’s done like most of the stuff we put out there. So, yeah, it’s a, it’s a good one.
Wayne Lewis: You talked a lot about learning for the people that have been there and done that before. And that’s helped you also grow the brand. Can you shed a little bit light on that for us, please?
Nathan Chan: One thing that I’m pretty obsessed about is obviously growing Foundr. And we have a tremendously large vision for what I believe Foundr can be. And to get there that requires taking things to the next level and scaling. So one thing that I found from my experience that helps me get there is just by the quality of advice that comes to me and that I get and that I soak up. I’ve been very, very lucky along the way to get really, really good advice from where I am now. All the way up back when I started. I’ve always been very passionate person, if I get obsessed with something, so if I meet somebody that I can help them and they can help me, I somehow tend to get a lot from that, that interaction. So where I’m going with this is, I think one of the biggest hacks there is when it comes to and I don’t like to say this, like, you know, building a successful business is finding somebody that’s done what you want to do. And just finding out all the things that are ahead from them and just learning from them. Everything that you want to do right now is probably been done by somebody else before. Now you can get that advice from really three different ways. One, you can pay for it, which is something that I’m more than happy to do and I continually double down on paying for advice, whether that’s paying for your mentors paying for coaching, jumping on something like a service like clarity.fm. And if you want to find a lead generation expert, you can find so many on there, and you can pay them $10 a minute, you speak to them for half an hour $300. And you can know, the best stuff for that person knows from generating millions of leads in the past couple of years for their company. So that’s the first thing you have to be prepared to respect that person’s time if they are going to give it to you. And if they want to be paid, pay them. Make that investment in yourself. The more that you level up and invest in your knowledge and mindset and spend that time the faster you can grow your company. The growth of your company is a reflection of you as a founder and how much you know and how much you’re learning. I know that sounds kind of basic and obvious, but if you really step outside of that, if you just keep investing in double downing on investing in yourself, then, of course, you’re stacking the deck in your favor to be able to grow your company. The second thing is really to network and meet people, I always try and serve first and ask later, I think that’s really incredible when you’re looking to meet people, and you perhaps want to connect with somebody, put yourself out there. And then the third thing that you want to be doing around getting great advice is joining groups. And there’s plenty of them out there and just having that accountability from really smart people or people at the same level, the journey that you’re at, or maybe even a little, you know, it just, it’s really, really powerful. And just that accountability when you’ve got that cadence of catching up with that group once a month and being able to say, Hey, this is what’s happening now. Imagine being able to go to that group and say, yeah, I’ve done have done nothing, you know, like having that and just being inspired by others and having that cadence of catching up with that group is tremendously powerful. So they’re the three things when I think that I’m always focused on when it comes to having quality advice and always being fed that quality advice and getting people to always test my assumptions. In my strategies and looking forward on tweaking the business model, adding this line of product or turning this cost center into a profit center or whatever it is.
Wayne Lewis: I’d love to hear this passion. You’re very passionate about social as well. And Gary V was somebody who you looked up to for the advice on obviously growing through social?
Nathan Chan: Yeah, so I’ve learned a lot from Gary, from chatting with him and catching up with him. And when you want to build a brand, one thing he taught me is you need to conquer all the channels. You can’t just conquer one. If you’re starting from scratch, you need to just focus on one channel. There’s too many channels you can only focus on one at a time. So for Foundr, we started with Instagram, we absolutely destroyed that channel. How did I work out how to master that channel. It’s a simple simple concept. This is how I master every single social channel you guys watch what we’re going to do with our YouTube channel will get that to 100,000 subscribers in six months or less. So the concept of growth hacking any social channel is a concept of modeling, which comes from Tony Robbins like success leaves clues. So you look at all the channels in your space. Let’s say we want to master Instagram and let’s say we run a physical product. We have a physical product-based business. You want to study the top 10 to 20 Instagram channels that are absolutely killing it on Instagram that sell physical products and they have a tremendous brand. You want to study them really intently? Like what kind of content are they posting? How often are they posting, how often they posting on their stories, how often they doing their calls to action, who the influences they are working with all these different things, that’s the first thing you want to do. The second thing you want to do, is you want to buy every single course out there from people that are legit practitioners. These are people that have done it with their own business, they don’t say they’re an expert, and they’re a guru because they say they are, they’ve actually built legitimate businesses themselves. mastering that particular channel, that’s the second thing you want to do, and you want to soak up as much as you can. And then the last thing you want to do is just be super consistent, high-quality content times consistency equals influence. So if you just do it relentlessly, like you pump out like we have for the past three years, if we just pumped out great content on our Instagram channel and said, like almost 1.5 million followers in three years, if we just did that, we might not be 1.5, we’d least be in the hundreds of thousands. So that’s what you really need to do those top three things. And then you move on to the next one. You just go one at a time and just be really, really relentless on just mastering that one channel. And that’s all I’ve really done when it comes to social. We did it first with Instagram, then we did it with podcasts. Then we did it with Facebook. Now we’re going to do it with YouTube. And we’re focusing on blogging. We haven’t mastered that yet, but that’s exactly what we’re doing with YouTube. No short-cuts.
Wayne Lewis: Awesome answer. So thank you very much guys. Can we have a round of applause for Nathan Chan of Foundr magazine?
Serpil Senelmis: So one of the key takeaways from Nathan was a high-quality content times consistency equals influence. There are no shortcuts. Thanks, Nathan. And thank you, Stephen, as well. Next time on Masters Series, women run the world. It’s a shame that women face more challenges than men in almost every aspect of life. But it’s a reality. We’ve already heard from some sensational female founders in this series of massive series, and we’ll celebrate two more next time. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded, and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.
About Masters Series by WeTeachMe
Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.
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