Lessons - The Four Key Mantras for Creator Success | Nathan Barry - Built a $40M+ SaaS for Creators

In this lessons episode, discover the formantras that fueled a creator's journey from author to software entrepreneur. Learn why teaching everything builds credibility and drives continuous learning, explore how daily creation and working in public sharpened skills and foster connection, and understand how defaulting degenerosity unlocks lasting success. So after you put these publishes two books, obviously hundreds of blog posts, at what point does the idea of convert kit and now kit come into play? Yes, it was actually really soon. There's so many things I look back on like amused by my thought process at the time. So I had a few things going on. And so September 12th, I published my first book to an audience of 800 people on a Mailchimp email list. Like December 15th, 2012, I published my second book. And that is to a list of more than double the size. I should probably three or four thousand people. That book goes on to sell $50,000 worth in the first month. And then January 1st, I start working on a convert kit. So in a 90 day period, I published two books and started a software company. Just laughing because you never stopped. You never stopped. Yeah, I let's divide itself or we'll be around. I don't know. So at that time, I was teaching a lot about software design. And I had this idea, I could see myself moving away from being a practitioner into teaching. And I had this idea that, you know what, if I stopped designing myself, then I'm going to be one of these people who only teaches, they lose touch and credibility in the industry. And so I should have another project that is soft resigned so that I can keep learning, keep my skills sharp and have more to teach about. And so when I started convert kit, I did it with something that I called the web app challenge where I said, I'm going to build a software company from zero to $5,000 in the year for revenue within six months, with only $5,000 of my own money contributed to this. Everything else has to be customer funded. And I'm going to live vlog the entire thing. And so that gave me a lot more to write about. I actually published another book in the middle of this, which is kind of wild. But that's the thing, when you have this muscle going of like the sheer amount of content, I was learning so fast, I was just teaching absolutely everything that I knew. By the way, just a total is total aside, writing that much, did it help with your clarity, because I find this helps my clarity of thought when I write in everything that I do and when I don't write, I actually feel like a little bit more sluggish, a little bit more foggy. I don't know if you felt that too, but I'm curious. Well, the first thing that people often bring up, people who aren't writers, we're going to talk about the amount that I wrote during that time period, they go, don't you run out of things to say. And so long as you are consuming content and doing research and all that as well, I find that the more that I write, the more I learn the more that I have to say. And so, yeah, it was just so prolific actively doing things at the time as well. That I could just see them write about what I was doing, you know, and that was the thing with building a software company. There was every single week, there were things to write about. How do you name the company? How do you hire developers? How do you write copy for the homepage? And that's really where I like cemented these core values or these mantras that I have, which are, there's now four of them. But the first is teach everything you know, second is create every day, there it is work in public, and the fourth is default generosity. And like all this is around like constantly creating, constantly learning and sharing. And if you do those things consistently, you cannot lose. I don't want to move off of convert just yet, but because you brought it up and I was going to bring those, I thought there was three things that I didn't realize you added a four. So those those four mantras, maybe just two, three sentences on each one for a creator that's listening to this or an entrepreneur that wants to be a creator. How do they adopt those four mantras as they go out and they create content, they document their journey, they vlog, they mean, they tweet, they write, they would do whatever. Yeah, so the first one of teacher everything you know really was a harder and less than for me, because I got started in web design and all that. And I just didn't understand the difference between the expertise that I had and the expertise of those who were public and out there and famous. And it wasn't until I realized that it's not that people teach because their experts, it's actually the inverse. We perceived them as experts because they teach. And so I was thinking like, oh, I can't write blog posts on this. I can't, you know, I got by not an expert. And so I can't teach any of this. But then it was that I realized it actually was the first time I was trying to install Ruby on rails on my computer, the programming framework. And I read an article written by an expert and it didn't make any sense. It felt like it made sense to them and they'd like skip past some key stuff. And then I found an article written by an absolute beginner who had read the first article, suffered through it, learned all of the missing points that a beginner, you know, actually encountered and they wrote theirs and I was like, ah, they hear someone who's two steps ahead of me and they wrote something that was far more useful to me. And so then I always had that mindset of, okay, I'm just going to, I'm not going to teach from like an ivory cower up at the top. And like, here's how things work. I'm going to say, hey, here's what I just learned. I hope it's helpful, like as a breadcrumb for you as you follow in my footsteps. And that changed the, like that immediately gave me thousands of things to write about because it's like, oh, well, from the plays of a non expert, I knew a lot. Um, the second one of create every day really came back to that lesson of writing every day and actually finished the book of like, you can't have these false starts. You can't tie effort to motivation and it's just like show up. Uh, I don't know which famous author this is a quote from, but it's something like, you know, I'll be right when I'm inspired, but can be into that. Get inspired every morning at 9 a.m. sharp. And it's just like, I am a professional. I do this. You mentioned Seth Godin and he has this essay called a manifesto for small teams doing important work. And it's one of saying it's like a hundred words long, two hundred words long. It's very short. Uh, and it's just so good, but it's basically like you, the gist is you are a professional act like it. And yeah, that was each for me. The third one of work in public is really just separating this idea of, you know, what I'm doing and what I'm teaching. And, and just saying like, look, I can just talk about what I do. I don't even have to be teaching. I can just say, here's a problem that I'm running into, but I don't have to have the answer. Well, here's a milestone that we hit. Here's what we're celebrating. Here's what we're challenged with. And that in itself is interesting, engaging content. I remember a time working in Converkit where I was struggling with a copy for those sales page. And I just talked about it in one of my blog posts on a struggle with how to write this. And then Amy Hoi, this amazing copywriter and business leader in the BitChap software world. Who I'd met and we talked. I think we'd met once at a conference. But she just message me and said, hey, I'll help you. And we got on the Skype call and we rewrote all of the copy. And then instead of saying, like, here's the final version, I did that. But then I published a whole blog post about everything I learned to like the transcripts and some of our conversations. And that was one of those popular things I'd been because they wanted to see like how a great copywriter burst behind the scenes. And then so that's working public. The final one is default to generosity. When people sell content online, they have this. This question that comes up a lot of, what should I sell and what should I give away? And a lot of times people will say like, okay, I'm going to give away 20% for free. And I'm going to sell 80% of it, right? Because I give away too much that people won't buy when I'm selling and all of that. The problem when you go that route is that you just never provide that much value for free. So you never grow that big of an audience. So you never end up having that much reach. And so there's not much revenue from it. And I like to invert it, not 80, 20 of give it. It started with the 80, 20 of give 80% away from free, old 20% back. I think now I'm probably more like 95, 5 of defaults generosity. Give away just about everything. And then just hold back a little bit. Charge a fair price for that. And then there's plenty of money to be made in those areas. So those are the four mantras. And they've guided so much that I've done as a creator. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.