Building a $2M solo-business on LinkedIn • Justin Welsh

Speaker A: I'm telling you, nothing is easier than writing a newsletter and then looking back at the newsletter and easily inside of it, seeing five or seven pieces of content. Like, you just see them, you scroll through and you're like, oh, this paragraph is a piece of content. This sentence is a piece of content. And then you just pull it out of those things. So I recommend, like, if you're learning how to be a content creator, nothing better than having a pillar piece of content that you can use to continue to grow your audience related to the same topic.

Speaker B: Hey, bootstrappers. Welcome to Bootstrap Stories, the podcast where founders, marketers, and thoughtful leaders share the most actionable tips, um, on building a successful business. After meeting with hundreds of bootstrappers in the past years, I figured out that we all struggle to grow our businesses. But the truth is that most of us don't know where to ask for help or advice. That's why I decided to start this podcast, to give you all the keys to succeed at every stage of your business, all the tested strategies for solving your struggles and taking your business to a new level. No fluff, no bullshit, only a real talk between friends that help each other succeed today.

Speaker C: My guest for this episode is Justin Welch, also known as the king of LinkedIn. Justin, welcome to the Bootstrap stories.

Speaker A: Hey, thank you so much for having me. Uh, I appreciate it and appreciate the, uh, fun nickname, so thank you.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I've been following you for, like, a couple of years, and it's really impressive how you've grew exponentially on LinkedIn. I've also, uh, bought your course, uh, several courses, actually. And, uh, I think what you're doing is, uh, really awesome when it comes to content creation. But for people who, uh, might have been living under a rock and don't, uh, know you, would you mind introducing, uh, yourself and tell us a little bit more about what you do?

Speaker A: Sure. Uh, my name is Justin Welsh, and what I really do is I help people identify, develop, and then monetize skills they already have online. And, you know, I got started in this. My background's a little bit different than maybe other creators. Um, I spent 17 years, uh, in the sales world, mostly in, uh, SaaS technology. Um, started at the bottom working as a field salesperson, um, and then kind of worked my way up, uh, into manager, director, and then eventually as a vice president of sales for a company called Patient Pop in Los Angeles. Um, got, uh, my first swing as an executive there. Built that business from its very first dollar in revenue up to about 50,000 dol, 51 million in recurring. Took a sabbatical, came back as the chief revenue officer during COVID took it to 75 million in recurring. And then for the last really three and a half years, sort of on and off. Outside of that second stint with Patient Pop, I've been creating. Started on LinkedIn, um, back in 2019, just writing my thoughts and recently moved to Twitter and Instagram and I've been building courses and doing coaching and uh, building a private community for the last three years. And now I run anywhere from four to five different revenue streams that support my one person business.

Speaker C: That's really awesome. Can you maybe let uh, us know a bit more about uh, the revenue stream and uh, what the percentage of each?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I don't know that I can nail the exact percentage, but here's sort of it. Roughly it's roughly 75% digital courses. So I have um, two flagship courses, uh, the operating system which teaches people how to use LinkedIn to grow an audience and business and then the content operating system which is basically a primer on developing a scalable system for creating content, high quality content at scale, um, that makes between 70 to 75% of my revenue. Um, really I work towards that passive stream of courses. Uh, outside of that I do some advising for early stage SaaS companies. So that's probably 6 to 8% of my revenue. I do coaching which is probably roughly 4 or 5% of my revenue. And coaching is for creators. I have a subscription product that makes up maybe another 7 or 8% and then I have a private community which makes up roughly 3 to 4%. Um, and outside of that I have little things like sponsorships, affiliate products that makes up the remainder. But really it's mostly driven through digital courses and knowledge sharing and basically for

Speaker C: the courses, uh, it's a one shot fee, yet uh, it's still the biggest chunk of your revenue. So what kind of is your long term strategy when it comes to courses? Is it to always build new courses or update them so you can sell to your existing audience or is it more to uh, enrich your top up funnel and always get more people to discover the course?

Speaker A: Uh, it's probably a little bit of both. I think what I ultimately want to end up at, I don't really have like a five or ten year plan. I kind of like to, you know, just do things as they feel right for me. I think that makes it more interesting. But if I were to guess at what my plan is, it's probably continuing to expand top of funnel so that I can get more customers for my current courses because the feedback on my courses is exceptional. And so I want to expose those courses to more, more people. Um, so that's, that's sort of one plan. The second plan is I'd like to continue to add courses. Now I have an operating system for LinkedIn which helped me go from 0 to 233,000 followers. I've roughly, I've recently, excuse me, grown on Twitter 4,000 to 100 and almost 30,000 in about six months. I'd love to put together something small that showed people how I did that. Um, I'm also really interested in doing cohort based coaching programs. So courses are really fun and they're small and they help you do something really specific really well. But ultimately my goal is to help people build their first online business. That's what I really want to do. And I think there's probably no better way to do that than hands on with another cohort of people who have the same goals, want to reach the same outcome. And so I'm kicking around ideas for doing that effectively. It's just a matter of getting organized and making sure that I focus on what my actual audience wants next.

Speaker C: So your focus for the core coaching will be more mainly on just uh, like people uh, willing to start their business or do you have uh, niche down to a specific audience, for example like uh, SaaS businesses crossed 1 million ARR. Or whatever.

Speaker A: Yeah, I basically part of the reason that I don't have a tremendous amount of my income as uh, a SaaS advisor. By the way, if you asked me two years ago I would have said that was 80% of my income. Um, is I've kind of left the SaaS space. Like I don't talk a lot about SaaS. I'm not really super interested in building SaaS companies or platforms. What I'm really interested in doing is helping people who have a full time job right now identify the skills that they may not be aware that they have already because we all have knowledge blindness or really develop those skills and then learn to monetize those skills online outside of the uh, 9 to 5 workplace. That's what I want to do. So you know, a lot of that is creating digital courses, building coaching and consulting businesses, you know, building private communities. All the things that I've done to actually exit the SaaS world and get away from that, that sort of corporate nine to five. That's what I'm really passionate about and that's why I want to aim in that direction now.

Speaker C: Uh, that's really cool. And uh, right now, what is your uh, funnel like when it comes to really uh, uh, going from converting your audience towards having them as uh, either in your community, paying a recurring fee or potentially buying your course?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's pretty simple. So if you read my content, I'm really against over complications. So you're not going to see a lot of tremendously complicated funnels or anything like that because that's not generally how I buy things. So I usually design my business around the way that I like to buy and I think it works. So here's sort of how it goes today I think at the top of the creator funnel there's getting discovered. So I think you got to create noise, right? You got to go out and you got to make people aware of who you are, who you help and what you help them do. That's sort of number one. The second part is generally trust. And trust is usually developed by showing how you think at a deeper level, by pulling back the curtain on how you think and how your brain works. That's usually through a newsletter or a podcast, podcast or a YouTube channel, something where there is longer form. Content after trust is relationships. That's usually getting involved in a private community where you can really have one on one time, where you can talk in real time and the next step is monetization. So here's how I generally leverage that creator funnel to build um, really a customer base, right? I create content twice daily every day on both LinkedIn and Twitter. Always aimed at my ICP, always aimed at people who want to build a side project, build a side hustle, build something online. I don't talk about really anything outside of that. And my whole goal is to get them as a subscriber to my newsletter, which has about 30,000 subscribers. I launched it roughly four months ago. Um, I want them to read that, I want them to get value out of that and I want them to make a choice at the end of reading one of my newsletters, either they've read enough and they feel a deep enough trust where they can purchase one of my courses, which by the way are affordable. And I make them that way intentionally so they can pull that trigger impulse buy pricing or join my private community where they can deepen the relationship with me and eventually buy products which are helpful to them. So that's really as simple as my funnel is making a lot of noise, showing a deeper level of uh, how my brain works or how I think about things. To build that trust and then giving people the option to either deepen a relationship or buy something right away, that's about it.

Speaker C: Yeah. Uh, that's really cool. And I think that's exactly how I decided to purchase your course and join the community at some point. It was following your content. You brought value. And I was actually curious because, um, I've launched also a couple of courses in the past, like, uh, sell online, et cetera. And your pricing strategy, you mentioned your courses are really affordable. And what was like the reasoning behind it? Because you're selling coaching, uh, which I think is around like uh, $1,000 an hour or $800 an hour. But you also have courses that cost like a, uh, few hundred dollars. I think it was a couple of hundred dollars. Uh, so what's the strategy behind it? Uh, have you ever thought about like packaging, uh, like coaching, uh, plus courses or doing like different type of pricing or what did you have in mind when you decided your price?

Speaker A: Yeah, it starts with just an overall thought about how I want to be in the world, which is, um, I want to help as many people as possible. And you can't do that when you price people out. And there's a lot of information floating around the web around high ticket this and high ticket that, and a lot of that is survivorship bias. You see a few people doing really well with high ticket courses. If you actually peel the onion back, you'd see, uh, a hundred thousand people who have tried to sell high ticket courses with crickets. Right. So I think first of all, it's really, really difficult to do that. Second of all, it's just not my mantra. I want to help as many people as possible. Whether you have a United States dollar, whether you're living in India or Europe or South America, wherever you live, I want you to be able to hopefully afford a course that I have. That's sort of my goal, but also it's a win win. Don't get me wrong. It's great to have a lot of customers and to help people, but also the more customers I have, the more likely someone is to be saying something good about my product every day online. And so my sort of thought process around the pricing is make it really affordable, make it really easy for people to say yes and then wow them with the content. So spend 150 bucks, which is what my courses are, and I want someone to say, man, that was $150,000 worth of material and I only paid $150 for that. And for them to go on LinkedIn or go on Twitter or go on Instagram and talk about it on my behalf. And if someone's talking about my courses on my behalf, it leads to so many more sales than when I talk about it myself. And so it's great for the customer and it's, it's great for my business.

Speaker C: Uh, that's, uh, love the, love the mindset. And, um, you, you were really focused on, on LinkedIn at first. And as you mentioned, you, you started like, uh, posting on Twitter and now more recently maybe like Instagram a bit more. What's, like, the idea behind it? Because usually, uh, someone would tell you, okay, once you've narrowed down your audience on the platform and you're getting a lot of traction, just focus on that and go all in. However, you're deciding to do something else, which is kind of testing a new platform. Why is that exactly?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, by the way, it's really good advice when people say nail one platform. That is generally advice that I give. Um, I think what people don't see is I spent three years on only LinkedIn and just writing on there every day until I feel as though. And by the way, maybe this isn't true, but I feel as though I understand the nuances of the platform. I've mastered most of building, um, a large audience and getting a lot of engagement. And once I did that, I wanted an opportunity to go expose my knowledge and content to people who might not consume on LinkedIn. And so Twitter was a natural next step because I like to write, uh, versus being on video or doing audio. So I took a lot of what I've written on LinkedIn and challenged myself to say, can I get this down to 280 characters? Can I make this informative and punchy and interesting in much, many fewer characters? And so I was able to do that. And so it exposed me to this whole new audience. And now I'm doing the same thing on Instagram. So not only is it a new audience, it's also further social proof. So if someone comes on LinkedIn, says, oh, this guy's got 230,000 followers, and then goes over to Twitter and you got a few hundred, the confidence level goes down. Versus this person has 230,000 followers on LinkedIn, they come over to Twitter, have got 130,000 followers, something is consistent about this person's content that makes people want to follow them all over the place. So I believe that social proof long term will have a positive impact on my business.

Speaker C: Yeah, I a hundred percent agree And I think like you can also drive uh, a lot of traffic from like a social platform to another. Because if people enjoy like following you on LinkedIn, they'll probably enjoy following you also like uh, on Twitter or Instagram, ah, down the line. And so far like uh, can, can you share like, uh, like kind of the, the revenue you've made or like yearly revenue or these type of numbers?

Speaker A: Yes, um, right now. So I think last year my business did maybe 740 or 750, um, mostly on courses and some advising. This year it's pacing about 1.4. Um, so it's almost a double. I think the year before that it did maybe 550. And so it's growing really quickly. Interestingly enough, um, with the market down and gas prices up and the summer hitting and all these things happening, that is having an impact. I won't lie. People are definitely spending less money on info products. Um, but that's okay. Part of my holistic strategy is not to make as much money as possible. It is to make good money that I want to make money. Don't get me wrong, don't let me tell you otherwise. But um, I want to make a certain amount of money. I'd rather work less. I'm doing this as a lifestyle business and my goal is to spend as much time with my wife Jennifer as I can and my dogs and traveling and doing all those things. Um, so yeah, like the fact that revenue goes down when something like this happens is not great, but it's also not the end of the world. And I've set my business up to function that way.

Speaker C: Now that's, that's really cool. And uh, what's like the, the long term plan? Have you planned like to hire people to start working with you or do you already work with contractors? Like what's kind of the structure of the business?

Speaker A: Yeah, I have no employees. Uh, I have a virtual assistant who I hired through a firm called Zirtral. So she gives me 24 hours of work a month, um, through Zirtual. So she's a contract assistant and she handles emails and receipts and invoices and random questions about how people log into my website and things like that. But I'm a one person show. I mean my wife supports the hell out of my business and um, she does things like um, write some emails for the community and things like that. But, but to the extent that I have employees, I don't have any of those. I also don't plan to have any. Um, I built this business for time, freedom to be able to do what I want to make good money. But also I don't really want to manage anyone. I had a team of 150 people at my last business and I love helping people grow and thrive. But right now I'm on a break from at least managing folks.

Speaker C: Okay, that's really cool. Uh, and on your coaching side, uh, who do you usually coach?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. I have three coaching packages. One for audience growth. So like how to grow on social media, one for business growth, which is mostly like how do I build a better service business where I'm trading time for money, like a consulting or coaching business. And the last one is how do I grow a digital product? Um, 80%. 70 to 80% is all about audience growth. Most people struggle on the top of funnel, the getting discovered part. The other 15% is generally on the digital product side. Very few on the business side like service business coaching and consulting. So I'm really striking that from the record and saying, all right, I'm not going to do that anymore. But the core focus is how do I get traction on social media? And not just how do I get traction, but how do I get traction with my ideal customer? And a lot of folks want to build courses and want to build businesses, but they have no traction. And, uh, you gotta have it. It's a prerequisite for being really good at selling digital courses or building a business online. You gotta have that attention. And I spend most of my time coaching and educating people on how to do that.

Speaker C: And you mentioned, because, uh, you talk a lot about audience building and helping people on building their audience. And I think you're obviously the perfect example of someone who started on LinkedIn and grew, uh, his audience to, to more than 200k followers. So what kind of was the first step of building your audience and how much time were you actually spending on the platform to grow your audience?

Speaker A: If I Zoom back to 2019, when I first started M, maybe it was late 2018. I don't always remember exactly, but, um, what I started to do was I would wake up in the morning and try and think of something to say. And that was. That was it. That was the whole, you know, strategy, right? Um, I. Probably not the right word, but that was the strategy and I struggled because that's really hard to do. It's really hard to do that every morning and stay consistent. But in the beginning, what you really need to do is create noise and look for signal, right? So it's like get out there and get comfortable putting your thoughts into the universe. If you can do that, you're doing what almost any business does, which is almost creating a product. And I really truly believe that the things you write online are products. They're products that people are consuming. They might be free, it might be free for the customer to read your content online. But the great part about free products like that, which is the content is you get feedback from potential users. And so I would just write a lot and watch and see what resonated. And as things resonated more and other things resonated less, I started really honing in on that signal. And so early in my career I was m mostly writing about SaaS sales because that was my background and my goal was to land consulting and advising clients for my business. And so I started just by talking about SaaS in general and then I moved to early stage SaaS, then early stage SMB SaaS and then early stage SMB SaaS in the healthcare vertical. Because that's where really my big background was, that's where my expertise was and that's what was resonating with my potential customers. Once I honed in on that feedback that I heard from potential customers, I started landing consulting and advising clients left and right. So that was the beginning of how I wrote. As I've transitioned out of SaaS and more into the creator space, now that it's a full time job, I've built really robust systems. So I have a nine step system that I leverage every Monday to create a newsletter. 10 pieces of LinkedIn content, 10 pieces of Twitter content, 10 Instagram stories, one Twitter thread, a selling post and a post newsletter post. And so I do it all in one day based on a variety of systems that I have in place now.

Speaker C: That's really impressive. And uh, how exactly like uh, how does the system kind of uh, look like to create so much content in uh, in such little time?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll kind of, I'll kind of walk you through it. So the first step for me is idea capture. So it's all about just what, what are the possible things that I can write about. My Saturday newsletter is really practical and tactical. You're going to learn how to grow your audience or business every Saturday in less than four minutes. So my newsletter is all how tos. It's never observational, it's never nebulous, it's just here's how to do something. And so I start by every Monday doing some idea capture. And by the way, idea capture happens throughout the week using my Notion app. I'll just if I think of something, I toss it into the app and I have this ever long running document essentially of ideas. Once I have an idea or a significant number of ideas, I select one on Monday morning and I start doing research. And research just comes through finding tweets, quotes, books, articles, things that support what I'm saying. I can talk about how I do things, but it's great when you can also shine the light on somebody on Twitter or somebody on LinkedIn. That's how you build relationships. So I love incorporating research as step two. Step three for me is really putting the idea in the research into a short, less than 4 minute newsletter. And I have a template for writing my newsletter that I use every week. And so you know what you're going to get from me? I'm going to present a problem, I'm going to tell you why most people don't solve it, and then I'm going to show you how to solve it. That is my template every week. And that's really step three. Step four is short, it's editing. I ask myself four questions and I push my newsletter through the lens of those four questions to make sure that I have a very well edited newsletter. Step five is my pre newsletter call to action. So on Friday I'm going to call everyone to action to say, hey, if you don't subscribe you're going to miss tomorrow's issue. So I write that post out that goes to both LinkedIn and Twitter on Friday. Step six is uh, the post newsletter call to action. So the newsletter comes out on Saturday and then every Sunday I do a post newsletter call to action which is hey, this is what you missed yesterday and here's why you shouldn't miss it again. So again, trying to accrue or acquire those subscribers on a Sunday. Step seven is I take that newsletter and I push it through a different lens. I push it through the lens of additional content. So I'll reread the newsletter, look at the idea and say number one, what are observations that I have? Number two, what's a commonly held belief about something that I wrote about that is wrong? A contrarian. Take number three, what are some tools or books or newsletters or tweets about this? So I create a listicle. Number four, like why does this happen very often I'll create a tear down or an analysis. Number five, like how will this change in the future? So I create a present versus future piece of content. And then number six, what's a story that I can tell about my life that's related to this, uh, particular topic. And that story is generally put into five parts. Paying attention, Agitation, intrigue, positive future, and solution. So by the time I'm done going through that, I have six pieces of LinkedIn content, six Twitter content, and sometimes I'll write two of each, so I usually end up with 10. Once I'm done with that, I go back up, I take the newsletter, I turn it into a Twitter thread copy paste, separate it, get it into 280 character increments, and store it into hype fury for 12 weeks out. And then step nine is I push it through a publishing system so I have each piece of content that I just talked about gets distributed into the future so that I can call people back to the newsletter at any time, which builds that trust I talked about earlier and creates that funnel for buying one of my courses. That's the nine steps.

Speaker C: Wow, that's uh, that's really awesome. And I love how organized you are. You mentioned that you, uh, were, um, at some point once you wrote the newsletter, you ask yourself four questions regarding the newsletter itself. Like what are usually like, uh, the question you ask yourself to know whether or not the content was great.

Speaker A: Generally some pretty simple ones. Like the most simple ones are, have I added appropriate visuals, things that are eye catching, that support what I'm saying? Number two, have I added relevant links? So if I'm sharing somebody else's work or a tweet thread or something somebody else has said, I always want to give them credit. I always want to make sure I'm linking to those things, including linking to my own content, you know, internal links on my website, so on and so forth. The sort of ones I ask myself to make sure I'm on target is, are my sentences concise? Is my grammar correct? Is each sentence really easy to understand? Do I stick to the main topic? Do I reduce sort of going on these really long boring tangents, and then ultimately do I deliver what's promised in the headline? So if I say I'm going to teach you how to do something when I read through the newsletter, can I 100% confidently say that I did that? And so those are the pretty simple questions that I push through editing.

Speaker C: Now that's, that's awesome. And um, at some point, you know, you were mentioning that, uh, you, you have this on multiple platform and it's basically like one topic per week that you're going to kind of like split under different angles. Is it really like uh, something that you're going to push through only one week or do you sometimes like mix up between different weeks, different, uh, topics? Not sure if it was clear.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was clear. Um, I mix it up, so I think it's boring to say. On Monday through Friday I'm going to talk about one topic and then the newsletter is going to be that topic on Saturday. So generally I'll produce the newsletter on a Saturday. Um, and again I'll produce 10 pieces of content off of that newsletter and I'll stagger those over the next 10 weeks. And the really cool thing is, uh, because I've already created a newsletter and because the newsletter is really tactical and practical, they're almost like free guides. And so if you look over the next 10 weeks, there is one piece of content at least once per week over 10 weeks that will be related to a previous newsletter issue that I've written at some point. Because of that, when I write on LinkedIn or Twitter, I can say at the end of each piece of content if this particular topic is interesting to you. I've written a longer form guide to this. Find it in the comments, check out this link, find it in my profile. And that brings people to my website, which is now I have a captive audience. The likelihood they do something else is really high. Subscribe to my newsletter, gain trust in my expertise, buy a course book, a coaching call, any number of actions that I generally can't get them to do when we're just playing on social media or in the email inbox. And so my intention is to constantly expose my content in knowledge. But inside of, you know, the captivity

Speaker C: of my website, that's um, that's impressive. Like the way you, you have been like structuring all of that. And I've got two questions, one about your newsletter and the call to action, which I will ask a little bit later. But the first one is you've mentioned that um, obviously like uh, every content creator to get ideas. Sometimes you're going to like, uh, I don't know, be on social media. Someone's going to post about something or you're going to do a research phase how you're going to be able to basically gather ideas from a lot of interesting people and make it your own to write your own post. You also mentioned that, um, you try to give credit as much as possible to things or quotes or um, things you will take from other creators. What is kind of the balance between. Okay, this content has been inspiring me. Yes. But I mean I'm creating my own so I don't have to kind of credit them. Uh, two. Okay, I really need to quote that person because it's is very close to what they were saying, basically.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I, I don't know that there's a whole lot of new ideas in the world. Right. Like. Right. So. So generally what I try and do and the way that I think about it is I try and create ideas based on what's happening to me. So like, for example, I had somebody ask me the other day, how did you make your first dollar online? And I thought, well, shit, that's a great newsletter topic. Like, that's an awesome newsletter topic. Not how I made mine, but like, how might I do it if I were starting today? And so I like wrote down that topic in notion. I was like, how to make your first dollar online. That will come out this Saturday. Um, and I can write about my process or how I might think about it, but there's so many other people who inside of that process have said something much smarter than I could say it or much better than I could say it. So as I'm writing out my process. So for example, let's say I was talking about step one. You got to figure out what skills you have that you've identified and developed. Well, I can tell you how I might go about doing that, but I'm also going to go out into Twitter, into Google and start searching for, is there someone else who's explained this 10 times better than I could possibly explain it? And so I'm going to make a note of that as I'm doing my research. And so, uh, ultimately I'll write a newsletter that's my opinions and what I would do, but I'll back up my opinions and say, well, you know, here's Austin Belsack or Dan Ko or Dickie Bush or Nicholas Cole, and here's how they think about it. So if you're looking for a different thought process or a little bit of a deeper rabbit hole through this Twitter thread, check out this piece of writing. Because to me that that's part of building relationships. And often the people that I choose are either A, really brilliant or B, people that I want to foster relationships with. And so shining a light on their content, I think is one way to do that.

Speaker C: That's um, that's really smart. And I think like, uh, as you said, like, you're also creating relationship with others. And obviously like, I think something in uh, that you've done really well is once you start becoming like, uh, let's like a content Creator with a large audience. Partnering with other people who have also, like, large audience is just a great way to grow. Like, is this something you've extensively done? Because I've seen you do like a, uh, webinar with, uh, Dickie or Nicholas Cole, et cetera. Is it like a strategy you have in place or you just go with the flow? Meaning, like, uh, you know what I love? Uh, this guy is creating, uh, awesome content. I'm just going to start sharing, uh, a bit more his content to my newsletter. Show some love. And down the line, uh, if it goes to, uh, I don't know, a potential partnership or whatever, I'm down for it. What's your reasoning behind it?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's pretty interesting. For about the first two and a half years of my journey online, um, it was not a part of my strategy. So I was just writing and engaging, writing and engaging, writing and engaging. And every once in a while.

Speaker C: Sorry to interrupt. One quick question. Uh, when you say engaging, you mean replying to the comments people write to you or engaging on other people's posts?

Speaker A: A little bit of both.

Speaker C: But mostly, mostly your comments.

Speaker A: Mostly I'm head down, heads down on creating and then engaging with the people who engage with me. And then I go out and I would engage with other folks whose content I really enjoyed. But co creating or support was not a real big part of my strategy. And I was able to grow to 150 or 180,000 followers that way. And then I moved to Twitter. And as I started to get some traction, and by the way, again, this was all solo. 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, 70,000. And as soon as I eclipsed 75, 80,000, something really interesting started happening, which was a lot of folks started reaching out to me and saying, hey, I see you killing it on Twitter. How do you write on LinkedIn? What's that all about? We've never been over there. Tell us a little bit more about it. And I was like, sure, why don't you tell me a little bit more about Twitter? You have 200,000 followers. Could you share what's working for you? And that started to lead to some really deep relationships. The first one I can think of is one you mentioned. Dickie, uh, Bush and Nicholas Cole. The ship. 30 for 30 guys. And we just started creating a relationship. So now we're doing what any. I wouldn't call us business partners. We're not in the traditional sense. But what any partners might do, which is when I can help them on LinkedIn, I'll give them A piece of guidance. When they can help me on Twitter, they'll give me a piece of guidance. And that relationship has happened with folks like Dickie and Nicholas, Sahil Bloom, Blake Burge, Nick Huber, and it's turned into, really, a group of brilliant people that I get to chat with every once in a while to learn more about being a creator.

Speaker C: Now that's. That's really awesome. And I think it was, uh, it was actually interesting because I noticed it because Dicky, uh, was really focused on Twitter and he was, like, killing it. And, uh, I think it's only a couple of months ago that he started investing really, like, uh, on. On LinkedIn. And when he started, he had, like, uh, I don't know, just not even a thousand followers. I think, like, uh, I think now it has, uh, grown a lot. But, uh, it's really cool to see that you can, uh, help each other out like this.

Speaker A: For sure. Yeah. And I highly recommend. I've talked about this forever. The one thing that you don't want to do is get involved in a pod. You don't want to pay money to have a bunch of people who are unrelated to your business give you engagement because they feel obligated to do so. Does it work? Maybe. I don't know. Um, what you really want to do is build relationships with people, like, then get them to support you. Right. And the way you get them to support you is by supporting them.

Speaker C: Yeah, like, yeah, no, I.

Speaker A: Not too much different than networking offline. Sorry for interrupting.

Speaker C: No, no, all good. But I 100% agree with you. And, uh, to be honest, like, uh, I was, uh, the founder of Lempod before actually, like, selling it. So it was, uh, for me, like, it's just, uh. I created a monster.

Speaker A: Yes, sorry, I forgot about that.

Speaker C: But to be honest, uh, my vision of the LinkedIn game, I think three, uh, years ago, when, uh, we created it, was very different. And I 100% agree with you. It's like, if you want to be in the game for the long run, you shouldn't look for quick hacks, quick engagement pods, quick things. It will never work out. Of course. It can work out in the short term. First month, second month, uh, you get vanity metrics. But then after that, what do you have left? Uh, true relationship takes time. And I think, uh, the way you're doing it and the way, uh, you've built your audience, uh, is really impressive. And I want to go back to this part of your funnel when on, um, uh, Friday, you have this call to Action to actually have people join your newsletter, then the same on Sunday for people who might have missed it to talk about the issue from Saturday. And I'm actually like, uh, curious because you mentioned your newsletter. You started it, uh, like six, uh, months ago or something. Four or five months ago.

Speaker A: Four to six. I can't actually remember, to be honest.

Speaker C: Do you regret starting it like, uh, so late versus from when you actually started to create content online?

Speaker A: For sure.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: Yeah. For sure. Yeah, Yeah. I just crossed, I think I just crossed 30,000 subscribers today, or it might end up being tonight or tomorrow. But thank you so much. But, you know, I could have had a hundred thousand subscribers or more by now. And, um, so, you know, I didn't do it. So the best thing you can do it when you didn't do it back in the day is to do it as soon as you now. Right, that's right. And I, I decided to make that choice. And um, you know, I had tried in the past and I had not been very good at staying consistent. And it's because I just didn't have a system. And so once I had a system, it became game over. It was, it was so much, so much easier.

Speaker C: And the thing is, like, uh. Because my first thought, you know, when you started your newsletter, like, uh, like a few months back was just like, I was wondering if in your strategy it was more like, to grow your audience to like, a certain level and then bring people like, uh, to your newsletter or if. So I'm going to rephrase this question. If you had to give an advice to, let's say someone with, uh, just starting on LinkedIn, uh, starting getting maybe like a little bit of traction and if they want to, like, when would be the right time to kind of like get started with a newsletter?

Speaker A: I think anytime.

Speaker C: Anytime.

Speaker A: I, uh, think. I mean, to the extent that it doesn't keep you from continuing to grow your audience. And that's why I think about having an interlocked and interrelated system. That's why I believe if you're going to, you need a piece of pillar content, like Gary Vaynerchuk always says. And me, since I don't do a podcast and I don't do YouTube, um, my pillar is the newsletter. And I'm telling you, nothing is easier than writing a newsletter and then looking back at the newsletter and easily inside of it, seeing five or seven pieces of content. Like, you just see them, you scroll through and you're like, oh, this paragraph is a piece of content. This sentence is A piece of content and then you just pull it out of those things. And so I recommend, like, if you're learning how to be a content creator, nothing better than having a pillar piece of content that you can use to continue to grow your audience related to the same topic.

Speaker C: That's, that's really cool. And you know, like, uh, we were discussing a little bit earlier, um, right now you have like, very clear niche and icp and you talk to me a little bit more about, like, uh, you know, when, uh, you work, like talking about SaaS, then focusing on SaaS for SMBs and SaaS, SMBs in the health tech industry, et cetera. How would you go or explain to people how exactly to find their niche and the type of content they should write about?

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't necessarily know that you find your niche, and I try and write about this often, but it's hard to find your niche. I sort of feel like your niche finds you sort of. Um, you have to be aware of what skills you have and you have to start developing and using those skills. So, for example, I'll walk you through how my niche found me. Um, I had a skill, and the skill was building essentially SaaS companies in the healthcare space. I did that for 11 years, um, and very well. And so I started writing about that. I didn't have the skill of writing, but I grew it over time. Writing about that thing ended up being a second skill. So as I started writing, what happened was my M. LinkedIn audience grew and I started studying how to grow that more so I could get more customers. That turned into a third skill. So now I knew how to build healthcare technology companies. I knew how to write and I knew how to grow on LinkedIn. And when I looked at my DMs on LinkedIn, the most common questions weren't how do you grow a healthcare company? They were, how are you growing so fast on LinkedIn? And so I was like, let's pivot. So I pivoted out of healthcare and SaaS and I started talking about how to grow on LinkedIn and I became a LinkedIn guy, right? I didn't want to be that and I don't want to be that. So I kept writing, kept writing, and I made sales of my courses and showed people how I did that. And over time I started doing things like building a community, building a coaching program. And suddenly the questions started shifting away from LinkedIn and they started shifting to, well, how are you building your business? How are you building so many revenue streams? How do you Think about which revenue streams to build. And that became a fourth skill. The fourth skill became building this one person business. So I pivoted again. And then you won't hear me talk much about LinkedIn anymore. I talk about it in the context of building a one person business, but all I did was listen to my audience, look at the questions they were asking me, and also what was I, like, interested in. I think whatever you're doing at the moment is generally most interesting to you. So as you talk about that, other, some folks will follow you, other people will say, hey, this topic is no longer interesting to me. And that's okay, that's fine.

Speaker C: And you were mentioning that, uh, whenever you were creating content, you spend time like, uh, engaging on people's comment. Is that something you still do? And because, I mean, your posts are getting like thousands of likes and sometimes thousands of comments. So how do you keep up? And what's your strategy about comments and answering all comments?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, for about the first 45 minutes of each morning, I engage with almost every single person who writes on my stuff. That is a differentiator, in my opinion. I don't know how smart it is because it's time consuming and it burns me out sometimes. And I could probably, you know, spend that time building a new product without much of a hit. But like, I don't know, I like the idea of building relationships with my audience. Um, Outside of those 45 minutes, I generally have three to five people on LinkedIn whose notifications I have turned on, and I have 20 people on Twitter whose notifications I have turned on. Plus I use a tool called blackmagic that allows me to know, um, when they've posted on Twitter and if I have missed it. And like, for 15 minutes once a day, I jump on Twitter and LinkedIn and I just rock through all those people. I add some value to their piece of content and that does a few things. It fosters the relationship even deeper and it also exposes me to a new audience who may not know who I am. And so again, it's a win, win. Um, I'm not Mother Teresa. I don't do everything just on the behalf of others. I try and do things that benefit others, but also benefit myself. And so that I found to be one of them.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's definitely a win, win. And do you engage because you were mentioning, okay, you have like maybe uh, 20 people that you want notification turned on on Twitter. So do you engage on all of their tweets or sometimes, you know, some tweets are like, very difficult to engage with. You, like, can just agree or whatever.

Speaker A: And uh, yeah, I never, I never force it. If something's, if something's irrelevant to me, I don't commented on it at all. Um, I kind of click through using Blackmagic and find the. I've got 20 people and first of all, 50% of them won't have written anything that day, so maybe it takes them down to 10%. And of that 10%, there's generally three or four that are really relevant for me and I'll spend a great deal amount of time writing something I hope that is smart and thoughtful versus I'll never just write Agree. You'll never see me doing that unless people are saying things to me on LinkedIn that just warrant that very shallow comment. But, uh, for the most part, I'm trying to add value on each engagement.

Speaker C: No, that's really cool. Time, uh, is flying. So I want to kind of, uh, wrap up the episode with a, uh, few questions. What's, um, your favorite, uh, book or podcast you like to listen to?

Speaker A: Uh, my favorite book is I've Got a Few. I mean, I love Atomic Habits by James Clear, but that's a very common answer. A book I really enjoy is a book called Factfulness by Hans Rosling. And essentially the takeaway is in this world today, it feels like everything is falling apart. Political strife, wars, climate change, Covid. It feels like the world is getting worse. Objectively, it is getting better from a data perspective on the things that are most important. It's getting better in Hans Rosling. He's deceased now, but he lays out a very compelling argument for why the world is getting better. So I love that. I don't listen to very many podcasts, and I think people find that to be surprising. But the only time I have a chance to listen to things is when I'm driving or working out. And I generally prefer music. Uh, so I. So, like, maybe every once in a while I'll catch a Tim Ferriss something or, um, you know, I'll listen if one of my friends has been on a podcast as a guest. Um, and in a very vain way, I'll listen to myself to make sure I didn't say anything stupid. Um, so I do that every once in a while just to say, like, did everything that I say makes sense. Um, but yeah, that's generally how I think about it.

Speaker C: Really good. And, uh, who's your favorite, uh, content creator at the moment?

Speaker A: Harry Mack.

Speaker C: Okay, can you explain why?

Speaker A: Yeah, Harry Mack is A freestyle rapper on YouTube.

Speaker C: I love him.

Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah. I love Harry Mack. And um, the reason why is, number one, I like hip hop. I love hip hop. Number two, and the biggest reason is I just feel as though across every medium in the world, he is operating at the highest level. And I very much am in awe of the way that he operates. And if I could be the type of creator in my particular niche or medium, the way that he is in his, uh, that would be really amazing. So I take a lot of motivation from watching him excel in his craft.

Speaker C: It's really, really impressive how we can, uh, improvise with some random words and just rap about it and look at the environment and create awesome, ah, things, uh, is incredible.

Speaker A: I love it. I listen to it every day.

Speaker C: Where do you watch it? Is it TikTok or, uh, Instagram or YouTube?

Speaker A: YouTube. I know this sounds funny, but I'm like, I'm in my 40s, which is not old by any means, but like, I don't understand TikTok or um, I don't really know how to like watch something on Instagram all that well. So I just go to YouTube.

Speaker C: Okay. I love YouTube too. I still listen to music on YouTube, which everyone made fun of, but I still like it.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker C: And, um, what's the favorite thing you do to kind of like regain energy during, uh, tough times?

Speaker A: Yeah, a couple things. I generally, when it's not the summer in Nashville, which is where I live right now, um, my wife and I will go to go on a five or six mile walk each morning when the weather's nice. And that's a really great time to be off technology, talking with each other, you know, deepening our relationship. But also like, it's when great ideas pop up. So that's, that's one thing I love to do. Um, um, when it's summer and hot, I go to the YMCA and I swim, I lift, I use the elliptical machine. I try and do things that generate a lot of effort early in the mornings that the rest of the day seems pretty easy. Um, and then lastly, we travel a lot. So I think we're chatting before the podcast started, but we travel Europe often. We travel, um, uh, Central America very frequently. We were in Mexico very, very often. And so we love to travel and eat good food and drink good wine and we've got no kids, so that's sort of our, our escape, I guess.

Speaker C: Enjoying life, trying. Yeah, that's really cool. Um, to, uh, kind of like round uh, up this episode where, to be honest, you've brought us some value, uh, bombs and tons of really awesome insights. Where can people learn more from you and follow you and subscribe, uh, to your newsletter?

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: My website is Justin Welsh. That's W E L S H M Justin Welsh, me. And they can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called the Saturday Solopreneur. And every Saturday morning you will get one actionable tip for growing your audience and business that you can always read in less than four minutes, guaranteed.

Speaker C: And I can vouch for it. It's really good.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker C: I read it on Sunday, to be honest, but, uh, it arrives on Saturday.

Speaker A: I appreciate it. I appreciate that, man.

Speaker C: Well, Justin, thanks a lot for, uh, being awesome and, uh, have an amazing day.

Speaker A: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the Bootstrap Stories, the only podcast where bootstrap entrepreneurs share their journey in all transparency. If you enjoyed this episode, don't hesitate to leave us a review. And in case you want to see the interview, all episodes are live on the YouTube channel. Check out the link in the description and hit subscribe if you haven't already. Have an amazing day and make sure to also join us in our amazing Bootstrap community, where we all helped each other to become successful and grow a profitable business. Take care and talk to you soon.