so today I want to talk to you about the hidden growth lever of top creators 98265 that is the number of minutes I estimate that I've spent studying how creators build their audiences in the last year and a half I've written deep Dives on over 60 people including Cody Sanchez Lenny ritky SEL Bloom Dan Ry all kinds of amazing creators and when people find out what I do their first reaction is this and the second one is what's the secret right they all want to know how do I grow my newsletter so in the next
20 minutes I'm going to try and share the top three things that I see most commonly with top creators and how they grow so those three things the first one is keep doing the thing right consistency Focus it's a very good advice we all need to keep doing the same things year and year after year uh to be able to do this the second one is make good things right create great content um it's great advice like if you don't have good content the next 18 minutes or so are going to be pointless but the
third one is the one that people Skip and it's what I call the hidden growth lever it's also the thing that I skipped when I built my first business so back in 2017 I walked out of my day job on May 31st and I posted this picture on Instagram and it was terrifying but I was helping creators um with Facebook and Instagram ads and I was like I'm going to do this on my own let's let's go and in 2017 the rest of that year I made $42,000 and I was pumped because that was almost
my salary at my day job in half of a year then in 2018 I made $117,000 and I was like this is awesome and I was doing it all myself right getting clients doing all the client work everything so I got to take home all that money the next year in 2019 $212,000 and I was like business is easy like what are people like I don't understand how you fail at this it's like I just don't get it and then 2020 happened and we all were sitting at home wondering what we could do and uplevel
our skills and all kinds of things and thankfully the online course creator space was booming and that was exactly the people I was helping with Facebook ads so in 2020 I made $452,000 and it felt like this to be honest with you again how do you fail this is crazy but it quickly turned into this and it was because I was doing everything so slowly but also very fast my business went downhill and I was essentially back to where I started right and now know how people failed and it's because I skipped this one critical
piece of the puzzle this hidden growth lever that I keep mentioning so after my business crashed and burned I found this guy named Mario and Mario runs a newsletter called the generalist and he had written this post called the generalist turns one he was essentially reviewing his first 12 months writing the newsletter and I was like okay and I was reading it and I got to this part and I saw the chart and I was like okay subscript sponsorships that's cool and then I saw it $38,000 this guy made with his newsletter in one year
in his first year and I had to know how he did it and I just like went down the rabbit hole I did tons of research and I was like I want to figure out how this guy grew his newsletter like I just don't understand so I started finding all the things he did right so he added this to the bottom of his emails to get people to reply apparently was good for deliverability I was like okay cool and then I saw he wrote 30 Twitter threads in 30 days I was like all right I'm
going to make this giant list of growth hacks so I added those two to it and then I found Cody Sanchez and I was like okay she's doing a ton of guest podcasting right so all those little microphones are heard doing a guest podcast I was like wow okay add it to the list then I found Tory Dunlap and she made a quiz and 778 th000 people took that quiz and I was like okay Create a quiz add it to the list found this guy named Ali he had been trying to grow his newsletter and
he built in public so he shared everything and two of the most common ones that he used were cross promotions referral program and I was like great add it to the list I do actually have this list that I created it's called the growth lovers Library you can get it here I'll have this in the bottom corner for the next couple slides so don't rush or anything so at this point I'm like all right I think I got the playbook for audience growth right so you pick an audience right everyone tells you pick a niche
find somebody that you want to help and who you want to serve okay solve their problem with awesome content kind of goes without saying you know that second thing I told you was create good stuff promote it right these growth hacks drive them to your website get them to sign up and repeat right consistency Focus do this over and over again but it felt a little flat like something was missing from this Playbook that I had right and then I found Lenny and I was doing research for this deep dive on Lenny ritky and he
has a huge newsletter and so I was going down I was on page like 12 of Google trying to find out how he grew his newsletter and I found this article called typ house and it was on this website called 2m and it says a play on the Tik Tock craze the newsletter industry has its own brand of collaborative house in it great ideas have been ideated concepted executed I was like okay and then I saw who was in it and I was like all right Lenny and then I saw all of these people I'm
like wait Alex liberman of morning Bru in this group and Dan runy pachy McCormack I was like these are huge names and some of them I had written deep Dives about before and I completely missed this and I was like huh interesting makes total sense now right that hidden growth lever other people relationships communities masterminds peer groups friends I was missing all of these in my first business kind of I'll get to that but when I tell people that relationships are critical for growth their first reaction is usually like well yeah you know like come
on duh but there's two parts to this right there's the relationship and then there's the ask and when things fell apart I did not ask for help I was in community I was in masterminds but what I did was essentially join get my dopamine hit from joining something that was going to change my life and then I'd lurk I wouldn't ask questions I would just look at what other people were doing to grow their business and I was like okay cool but what I should have been doing was all of this sharing your work helping
other people commenting asking questions and so we often think of these asks as a one-way transaction right you think you know can I pick your brain can I take you out for coffee like what should I do what do you think I should do next and it feels very icky but an but an ask is not a one-way transaction these can lead to things like guest posts and masterminds collaborations and building community and one of my favorite examples of this is from Dicky Bush um and Dicky bush had been writing on Twitter for about nine
months and it got to November of 20 and he had barely made much progress like if you were spending 9 months on this like a lot of people would have given up at this point getting to 1,800 followers but instead he asked his followers he said who would want to be part of a group where every person writes 30 screenshot essays for 30 days right and he got great response like for having that small amount of followers like he got a really good response and so he didn't want people just to like join and like
not actually do the work so he was like okay PayPal me 50 bucks and if you write every day I'll send the money back cuz he didn't want to like actually take people's money um and after that first one he had so much fun that he wanted to do it again but he wanted to learn from these people like what worked what didn't and so he asked them again and he ended up doing 50 one-on-one phone calls with the people that had done this challenge with him and now we know this as ship 30 for30
it's like an online writing wrting course and they've the screenshots a little old but they've helped over 10,000 people start writing online and like that's a huge impact from this one ask he met his business partner Nicholas Cole in that first cohort and now this is a multi-million dollar business from a tweet essentially and his growth just went up after that but asking doesn't have to be about building a huge Community like not everyone wants to do that so there's this other example from Sahel Bloom that I like called the 100K Club so similar to
Dicky sahill had been writing on Twitter um he was having a little bit more success at this point he was at around 33,000 followers but he wanted to get to 100K like that was his goal right and so a lot of people might just have kept doing the same things like I got here why do I have to keep you know trying new things doing something different but instead he made an ask and he got six other people who were on Twitter obviously some of these names are huge now but at the time they had
10 to 30,000 followers each so they jumped in a WhatsApp group essentially a glorified group text message and they called it the 100K club and they would share back ideas and like get feedback on each other's work every time that they posted and one of the quotes I like from sahill he says when you start out on any of these platforms you need a community of like-minded people who are at a similar stage trying to grow and so so after this is when sahill exploded his growth and now he's at over a million followers and
every single person in that group now has at least 250,000 followers now this might seem a little like far-fetched for a lot of us that's huge numbers like I don't want to ever get there but the concept is interesting and this one's really fun so this is Maya voer and I actually found this not tooo long ago a couple days ago um Maya has a background in go to market strategy for a product and she I had been doing a deep dive on akos Gupta who's like a big product growth guy and I saw this
post and it was like essentially a collaboration of sub on substack so I saw her name I clicked on her name um akos has over 115,000 followers or subscribers at this point and I click on her name and I see this post at the bottom I was like interesting it's like 88 minutes long to read that post it's 20,000 plus words that she spent time to be able to post on his website like on his substack and I was like okay interesting but then you look she only has 3,000 subscribers like it's not like she
has a huge audience but she has something else to give she has this knowledge and this experience from her work and then I scrolled down and she had done it two weeks before with another newsletter and I was like oh okay this is her strategy she's just guest posting on other people's substacks and this other guy has 27,000 followers I was like oh interesting and so I just love these examples because it's you know it's so simple and it's like why don't we ask if it's this easy just to like get these results and be
able to collaborate with these people it's so hard to ask so I wanted to figure out why and I came up with these three things now now I will be transparent the source of this is the internet so take it with a grain of salt but I think it checks out so the first reason we don't ask is awkwardness I don't want to be a burden like why am I putting extra work on this person right the second one is vulnerability shouldn't I have all the answers already and this is the one that I really
struggled with the third one assumptions they're so busy they don't have time like why are they going to help me and all it would have taken was a few asks and it could have saved my first business and probably my sanity because I burned out so hard but I could have just asked a question like is anybody experiencing this you know go to my Mastermind people or the communities I was in that I wasn't posting in how are you doing XY or Z is this what burnout feels like but I was just too scared to
ask like I was just sitting there watching this fire melt my business and I was too scared we all have blind spots and so that's why I think building these relationships is so important helping having people tell you like hey I see that you're doing this one thing you might want to you know course correct a little bit but what if there were ways that we could eliminate those three reasons that we don't ask and I want to show you one good example of this so this is a guy named Chris and Chris wanted to
start a podcast but the problem was that he knew almost nothing about podcasting and so he had an idea he was like I'm going to go out to all of these big podcasters and kind of crowdsource information and just like ask them what they're doing how did you start it do you have any tips like what should I do so he went to them and he asked but first he listened to all the interviews they did about podcasting to make sure he wasn't going to you know repeat any questions they'd already answered so we could
ask those deep questions and he got all this knowledge like tons of gold nuggets quite literally some of the top podcasters in the space and now he has a top 10 business podcast he's been on the Ali abdall show he's been on Erica Colberg Goldberg's podcast and even the Tim Ferris show and so you might look at this and think like oh everything turned out great for Chris right we can all do that we just crowdsource information but I'm going to guess you're probably thinking something like this I'd never have the confidence to do that
or I don't have the right connections like why would they help little old me but Chris got creative and he probably felt a little weird for asking a bunch of people just for to give him something when he couldn't give anything back and so he took all that advice and he h this is so good I don't know if I want to share this all right he turned it into a loom video he recorded all of the things that learned from them and he put it into essentially a master class on podcasting as a loom
video right so then he sold the master class to thousands of people and made a bunch of money right not quite he took that loom video and he gave it back to everyone that helped him so he turned around and took this ask and turned it into a huge give and he essentially gave more value back than he got from each of those people and so if you're thinking about I feel a little cringey asking for help like is there a way you can take that ask and turn it into something much more impactful for
that person and so now I have to imagine that all of those people are ready and willing to help Chris again if he ever needs it and I guarantee he'll W make way more money from that Goodwill that he's built up with those podcasters and so not only does asking remove those three barriers but those asks can really deepen your relationships and even if you met someone like just once if you had done something like that they're going to be like oh yeah that's a loom guy like he's cool right so if Dicky had given
up Not only would 10,000 people that he's helped start writing online not be writing as effectively or if at all but like if sahill hadn't started that group and if Maya didn't reach out to her network and if Chris didn't curate that information can you imagine like it's just a small action you're taking but it can have such a big impact and so instead of having these surface level relationships with people you can build a more sustainable business and deepen your impact and the journey will not be as lonely and you won't have to watch
your business melt as you're sitting there so what's the secret to growing an audience I think it's building relationships and so as you're here today and tomorrow I urge you to go out there and meet people but remember to ask thank you
