Maximizing the Impact of Your Email List with Nathan Barry from Kit

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens. Imagine your kitchen. It’s more than just a place to cook. It’s where your creativity comes to life. It’s where you nourish your family, your friends, and yourself with food and conversation. Now imagine sharing that kitchen with the world. Imagine inviting people in to experience your unique flavors, your personal touch, your passion for food. At Member Kitchens, they believe that every food creator has a special kitchen to share, and their job is to help you swing the doors wide open. Their white-label meal planning platform is your virtual Kitchen. It’s fully equipped with everything you need to showcase your recipes and brand, build a loyal community, and earn a sustainable income. As one customer said, recurring revenue is life-changing. Your kitchen will integrate with tools you already use like Zapier and WordPress, and it’s fully configurable putting you in complete control of your brand and your business, all in an easy-to-use interface. Backed up with stellar one-on-one support. So if you’re ready to share your kitchen with the world, set up your own Member Kitchen, visit MemberKitchens.com today to learn more and start your free trial and use the code Food Blogger Pro for 50% off your first two months of any plan.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming back Nathan Berry from ConvertKit soon-to-be Kit to chat about all things email marketing strategy. Nathan first started ConvertKit back in 2013 and has been very intentional about growing his business and growing an email marketing platform designed specifically for creators like you. He has a great perspective on email marketing strategy, but also what it takes to grow a successful business. This podcast episode dives into the importance of optimizing your emails for the reader, consistency, and driving revenue with your emails and how that can be increasingly important with the demise of third-party cookies to use your email list to help increase your ad revenue. Nathan and Bjork talk about strategies for increasing email list signups and other tips for growing your email list.

They also discuss the magic of flywheels and how to apply that concept to your email list and growing your business, and Nathan walks through the journey of ConvertKit over the years and the decision to rebrand as Kit and what that will mean for you as creators as it becomes increasingly important to diversify your traffic sources. This is a must-listen episode and we know you’ll get a lot out of it. If you enjoy this podcast episode, we would so appreciate it if you would take the time to share the episode with your community, whether you share it on social media or perhaps with your email list, it means the world to us when you help get the word out about our podcast. Thanks so much for listening and without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Nathan, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, we’re going to talk about all things email. This is actually perfect timing because 44 minutes before we jumped on this call, an email actually came through from Raptive or ad provider and subject is Unlock new revenue streams with ConvertKit plus Raptive. Now, it’s almost like I’m doing an ad read here, which this is not an ad read. It is just organic editorial content and what Raptive says in the emails. Over the years, we’ve collaborated with many email service providers and understand how challenging it can be to find the perfect partner. However, there is one ESP email service provider that stands out for its seamless integration and ability to maximize reader engagement effortlessly. Wow, look at that. That’s kind of fun.

Nathan Barry: That’s some great copy. Thanks.

Bjork Ostrom: Perfect timing too for this conversation. So talk a little bit about that. We talk about email strategies with email, why it’s important. One of the things that we’ve found within our world of food publishers is they don’t necessarily approach it from the same mindset that somebody would if they’re really strategic with affiliate or especially if you have a product, it makes a ton of sense to have email, but I think in our world sometimes it becomes an afterthought because people are so focused on SEO and search traffic or maybe Pinterest traffic, but now you’re starting to see people talk more about email, the importance of email, talk about why that is, and just this idea of unlocking new revenue and it looks like there’s a webinar coming up on the 26th for Raptive folks that they can tune into, but maybe we can talk through some of those things here now today.

Nathan Barry: Yeah, the first thing with email is it’s the platform that you control the relationship with the audience, and so there’s so many of these. If anyone’s gone viral in any way and you didn’t capture that relationship with the reader, then you realize like, oh, I was missing out there. Or even if you had search rankings that dominated for a long time and then Google at some point decided actually we’re going to give that slot to someone else, and you’re like, hold on, my article is just as relevant as always, and they’re like, yeah, well, times have changed. And so with email you have that ability to push content to the reader and you can build up that relationship over time, and so it’s been fun to see in the food space and all across the blogging world, people really rely on email to go from a sort of a drive-by interaction of someone who might come across your content from social or from search into someone saying, oh, no, I want to stick around to get the great recipes to get the meal plan, to build that long-term relationship and say, oh, I come to you for all this content.

I think about my wife is a really big fan of Shay Elliot, the Elliot Homestead, and there’s a bunch of things that we’re cooking at home that are from Shay, and so probably 30% of all of the recipes that we cook are from Shea because we’re such a big fan of her content, her story. We also have a small homestead and her style and everything, and so you get that deep connection that you can really build and foster over email, even though it starts from distribution on a social channel or search

Bjork Ostrom: In some ways, you can view any of those interactions, whether it’s search, whether it’s social, as kind of this transactional interaction. Somebody finds you, they’re looking for a certain thing, a certain recipe, especially if it’s a not let’s say on search, it’s a non-branded search. They’re just searching chocolate chip cookies and they come across you. The goal is then to establish that relationship so then you can have that ongoing as opposed to that person coming once and leaving. It’s kind of like in the world of product, they talk about recurring revenue versus product revenue, like transactional revenue or it’s one time and the allure of recurring revenue is that you have somebody sign up once and then your goal is like, Hey, convince them to stick around as opposed to finding a new person and having them sign up. Similar in our world when it’s attention, if you can get one person to sign on in this case, sign onto your email list, then what you need to do is prove your value over time and encourage them to stick around as opposed to finding another person, encouraging them to come and find you and kind of having a one-off interaction again.

But let’s say in that case of something going viral, let’s say you have something on Instagram and the algorithm picks it up. What are you seeing in terms of strategy around people encouraging somebody to sign up for an email list or to capture some of that attention in an ongoing way when you do have something that goes viral, how do you do that? Well,

Nathan Barry: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is having a lead magnet of some kind where you’re saying, here is some package to offering that you’re going to want to download and saying, then you put it on landing page and put in your email address and I’ll send it to you. An example of that is there’s a creator on Instagram, I think he goes by the lifestyle diet and he’s got about a million followers. He’s a Kit customer and he talks a lot about macro based eating, so how to hit your protein macros and all of that, and he’s grown a huge portion of his list with this protein heavy ice creams to make in your ninja creamy, right? It’s very specific, but he’s like, here’s 20 recipes, and he can talk about that a lot on Instagram in different ways, and so probably one in five of his reels, maybe one in 10 actively promotes that, but he’s mentioning it in stories, he is mentioning it in other things, and he’s found that because it feels so specific and actionable, a lot of people are really downloading that and that drives so much. The other thing that I love is taking that similar content and putting it in an email sequence, so you are actually sending that out timed to that subscriber, and that way you’re training them that, Hey, it’s not that you give me an email out and then you give me your email address and then over here I give you something else.

It’s the value that you came for is in the emails, and so it gets you continually reading

Nathan Barry: You could do it, yeah, go ahead. You could do it two different ways. You could put all the content in the email or you could have the email drive back to the site and then you’ll get more ad revenue or other. That makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: This is really specific, but what are you seeing as the best way to include that call to action? Let’s say you do have a lead magnet. Is it like mentioning it, mention the URL? I’ve even thought about in different instances, is there any way that you could do a QR code, which I don’t really know if there’s a great way to do that. Most people are viewing on their phone,

Nathan Barry: On their phones, you can’t,

Bjork Ostrom: But I think there’s something there or there will be eventually. A lot of people will say, comment protein smoothie to get the link to this download. Do you have any thoughts on

Nathan Barry: That? The main ways would be in either dropping the link directly or putting the link in your Instagram stories. If we’re talking about Instagram in particular, that’s common. People will say, Hey, check out the link in bio. The reason that the comment to get this thing is so popular is that Instagram is viewing that as an engagement, as a boost, like an engagement signal, and so when you have a whole bunch of people commenting protein smoothie or whatever, then that is not only creating a one-to-one interaction between you and the creator, right? It pulls it into your dms, but then also it’s got that signal to the Instagram algorithm like, oh, this is worth paying attention to that. It

Bjork Ostrom: Always to me felt a little bit like, it’s like it bends the system a little bit way, a little bit towards like hack and I always a little bit hesitant towards any type of hack. I know it’s getting into a different space. We’re now talking about social media, but you have any thoughts on that? Even just from a marketing perspective? We’ve tried it with Pinch of Yum a little bit. We’ve experimented with it and I’m trying to figure out there’s something there. It works. I don’t know if it’s dms, if it’s comments, what the best approach to it is, but I’d be curious from your perspective, what thoughts you have on that. Even the marketing thing that is working that might not work for a long period of time. It feels like it might fall into that category, but maybe not.

Nathan Barry: Well, so the way that I think about it, the algorithms change all the time, and if we think about it from a hub and spoke perspective, so the hub of our content is, or the hub of our relationship with our audience is going to be the email list. That’s the thing that you can segment off of. You can build a long-term relationship and you’re not subject to any algorithm. Now, email does not have a distribution method. Emails themselves don’t go viral. If they do go viral, it’s usually because, I don’t know, some bad news story happened like Apple and Samsung were colluding and there’s a

Bjork Ostrom: Bunch of articles that are written about it. Yeah,

Nathan Barry: It’s never good if email goes viral, whereas on social, a post can go viral, all this distribution, so you really want to have your hub of email and then a few spokes that you focus on in your business that are how you’re going to get distribution search, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, et cetera, and you don’t want to focus on every spoke. You’ll delete your efforts, but if you have a few, what I like about the comment to get this thing is even if that dies out, you’re not reliant on that as your method because in each case you were getting people’s email addresses, it’s a means to get them back to your email addresses. So if that flavor of the week stops working next week or next year, it doesn’t matter. We built that long-term relationship, whereas if we were saying like, oh, we’re going to build an audience on this new platform that then dies off in some way,

That’s a different thing. The other thing is if you can do it in a way that gets personal connection, if someone comments to get access to something, why not start a conversation with them from there? Sure. A lot of people do it with ManyChat and then have a bot conversation, but I know more creators. There’s one, her name’s Bonnie Christine, and she makes all this great content around surface pattern design, so how to design fabrics and all of that. And for a lot of her programs, she just has conversations with her audience directly in Instagram DMs, and she’s actually sold a lot of courses and coaching and things like that directly in Instagram DMs. So I like it because it starts a conversation. Now at the same time, I do sometimes think it is weird when people are commenting, I understand the hack feel to it, but one other thing, the ways that you can get engagement without it feeling like a hack. I saw there’s one that I see different creators post fairly often, and that’s like, I think Jenna Kutcher posted it most recently, and that was if you are a woman under 35 years old, post a question, and if you’re a woman over 35 years old, reply in the thread and post an answer

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, that’s so cool.

Nathan Barry: It doesn’t feel like a hack at all, right? Because there’s great, there’s probably a thousand comments of great extra.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels like strategic content.

Nathan Barry: But Instagram, all they see is like, wow, this Reel got a thousand comments. We should probably show it to more people.

Nathan Barry: And so that’s the high quality version.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Nathan Barry: Of comments, breed engagement.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Love that. So going back to this email, Raptive sends this out, what is happening there? Why is it important from an advertiser perspective? Obviously Raptive is invested in this. I know you have a partnership with Mediavine as well. Most of the people in our space who are using ads or probably using one of those two ad partners, why is email important other than just sending traffic? And the lead up to this is for a long time it was like first-party identifier, third-party cookies are going away. This is really important for us to get information about who your users are, and there’s an integration built-in now with ConvertKit in order to do this, a button click that allows people, you can talk about how that works, but is that still important now that the third party cookies thing has gotten punted once again down the line? And if so, why is it important?

Nathan Barry: So as you look at some of the browser wars that are happening, Apple and Google, and they’re going around taking different focuses on privacy, apple takes this very strong privacy-first approach, which on one hand is very, very noble and I appreciate, on the other hand, they’re selling a huge amount of their own advertising. So you have to keep in mind that it’s very self-serving for Apple

Bjork Ostrom: Because they have that information, they, they’re not brokering it, but they’re still transacting. Is that within their own ad network? What does that look like? Yes. Okay. On Safari.

Nathan Barry: On Safari, but very heavily on mobile.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh sure, so they…

Nathan Barry: Have their ad network. Yeah, mobile apps, they run huge amounts, but for them it’s first party data, and so they’re like, oh, see, it’s safe with us, but they’re saying that third party data is this, that is bad in some way. So what’s happening is for various reasons, those cookies data is shared a lot less than it used to be. Even with third party cookies, as you said, that’s being punted, but you’re still seeing this, that the number of visitors to your site who are seeing those Raptive or Mediavine ads, they’re getting much less targeted ads.

Nathan Barry: Often Raptive or Mediavine doesn’t know who that person is. They came in in their Safari browser and the cookies aren’t held. They aren’t stored for the same length of the time that they were before. So basically Raptive and Mediavine want to serve the most relevant ad they can because it’s the most likely to get clicked on, it’s going to drive the most revenue for their advertiser. And so personalization’s very important. So what’s interesting is that as a food creator with an email list, you have that data of who the subscriber is. And so every time you link out to your own content, you can pass through who the subscriber is, rapid Mediavine will be like, oh, that’s who it is. And then they will display relevant ads for that person. And then even if the browser clears the cookies or something goes away, you can get these re-engagement points that happen over and over again.

You can identify the users, serve relevant ads and earn more money. So what ended up happening probably over the last year is that rapid media bind were saying, Hey, as a content creator, you should be coding in these identifiers into your emails that you send out so that every click passes through who it was that clicked, and then your website can know and you can earn more from it. And then the spring Raptive came to us and said, Hey, why don’t you build this in to ConvertKit as a core feature? Even though it was making creators a lot more money, they would do it for a while or they’d have their virtual assistant do it for a while and then it would eventually drop off

Nathan Barry: There’s just so much work. And so now what we just announced is that it’s a core feature, so now you turn it on inside your account once and then without doing anything else, you forever have your email list and your visitors to your website in sync so that Raptive can target much more relevant ads and it’s a better experience for the visitor and run much more as the publisher.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And true for a Mediavine as well.

Nathan Barry: Yeah, true for Mediavine too.

Bjork Ostrom: So let me see if I can, one of the prompts I’ve been using a lot on ChatGPT is explain this to me. I’m a fifth grader. I’m going to try and explain it back to you as if you are a fifth grader and you can tell me if your opinion would be that a fifth grader would understand it, maybe not a fifth grader, maybe like a junior in high school who’s smart? Sounds good. So previously we had this thing called third-party cookies. Third-party cookies allowed people to get tracked across the web. We can all imagine the scenario where we look at a new basketball or a backpack or some type of product on Amazon or any other site, and then we go to our favorite food blog and then we see an ad for that. That’s because there was a cookie that went into our browser and some advertiser set it up in a way that it would track us across the web.

People would pay more money for that. Brands companies would pay more money for that because that would allow them to have more targeted ads. So that was really valuable. It was an effective way to run ads, but people were concerned about privacy. And so browsers and companies that have browsers start to respond to that Safari with Apple being an early one, and when they start to disable the ability for cookies to track people, suddenly the ads become less effective. And Google Chrome was going to do this for a long time. They still probably will at some point, but they’re having issues I think with European Union, and so they’ve delayed that for now. But one of the ways that you can get back to having ads that are more targeted is by using your email list strategically and using that in a way where when somebody clicks on a link, it has to be the click.

That is the thing that is going to allow people to track. Somebody has to click on the link, but once that happens, now they have that information and they can bring targeted ads towards that user. Previously you had a hard coded, in our case, we asked our developer, he worked on it, he integrated it, but now there’s this one click button. You can turn that on and you’ll have the ability to have that kind of closer look or better information about who that person is within your email list as long as they click over and then go to your site, meaning you’ll earn more from that. Do you know number one, accurate? Does that feel like a

Nathan Barry: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. That is accurate. You think the average junior in high school could understand that conceptually?

Nathan Barry: So as long as the junior in high school is, it’s this world of marketing. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. If they know, if they have complete understanding of this arena that we’re talking about, if they just want to play Fortnite, then no. Yeah. Okay, fair. So my follow-up question is do you know if it’s still valuable outside of the context of Google not having third party cookies go away anymore? Are you still earning more from those clicks that are coming through when you have this enabled?

Nathan Barry: Yeah, the data from Raptive is even today that it’s, the earnings are about 40% more. So it’s substantial. To give you an idea of how important it is for, so Raptive only makes money as the creator makes money. It’s very much that rev share model. So the incentives are very aligned, both Raptive and Mediavine, the same thing. They pay their internal employees to go and set this up for creators manually go into the creator site and do it all for them, even though it’s a huge amount of work because it increases earnings by that much.

Bjork Ostrom: They’re dedicating resources time to

Nathan Barry: This because they’re having their

Bjork Ostrom: Account managers return.

Nathan Barry: Yeah. First they’re saying, Hey, you should set this up, and the credit are like, yeah, yeah, I’ll do it. And then they’re like, okay, well give us access to your account and we will do it for you

Nathan Barry: It’s that valuable,

Bjork Ostrom: Which probably doesn’t have to happen now because it’s just a button. Previously there was this process involved and now there’s not. So it also sounds like it’s important then to get the click. So to go back to what you were saying before, as you think about as a creator sending out an email, do you include all the content, do you not? Obviously there’s a lot of considerations that go into that, but one of them, if you’re trying to maximize ad revenue probably would be around encouraging people to click to get to your site. So that first party identify information would be included in that interaction with the customer. Is that accurate?

Nathan Barry: So the most important thing is optimize for the reader experience, make it a good experience for them. Second, yeah. The second is consistency with whatever they’re expecting. So if you set this expectation from the beginning, Hey, I put all of the content in the email, that’s where all the value is. And then all at once you started only linking to your site and the emails became super short, that would be weird. Now, if you had the expectation before that you’re just linking to your site and maybe there’s a quick story or something, that wouldn’t be a weird transition. So I would just think about that consistency. And then third, you should be thinking about what drives revenue, and you’ll absolutely see higher revenue on your site if your banner ads and others are displayed in a way that can be targeted to that user. And I just continue to reiterate, it’s a much better experience for the reader to get targeted ads. There are times where you get an ad and you’re like, whoa, that’s very targeted. And it might be a little off-putting,

Nathan Barry: Nine times out of 10 you’re just like, yeah, these are ads for things that I care about instead of being completely different and totally not relevant.

Bjork Ostrom: In our case, it’d be like some really specific frog terrarium that we’ve been researching because our daughter’s really into frogs right now. Have you been looking at frog terrariums every morning and are you pulling your hair out? Now? All of my ads, you don’t know what frog terrarium to get for a bioactive enclosure. But yeah, generally speaking, and people might say, obviously there are people on the other side who’d say, I’d rather have more privacy than targeted ads. But from an experiential standpoint, if you see stuff that’s a better fit versus not, it’s going to be a better experience. So that makes sense. The

Nathan Barry: Other thing, not that we need to make this whole episode about why ads should be targeted versus not, but if you think about it from a reader’s perspective, I’m consuming content from a publisher, whether it’s an individual food blog or a major publication, and in order for that publisher to invest a lot into high-quality content, it costs money, whether it’s my time as the content creator or the team of editors working on it or whatever else. And so as a reader, I want the highest quality content, which means I want them to earn a substantial amount of money, which means them offering targeted ads means they earn more money, which means they can invest more in content and provide me with a better quality product as the reader, even though I’m not paying anything. Do

Bjork Ostrom: I think about it now? You want the best for the people that you care about who are making your life easier. Obviously there’s always going to be those people who are like, I can’t believe you put an ad on here. And it’s like, this is literally free content. You’re paying nothing for it. But generally speaking, people want the best for their creator. And especially if it means seeing an ad that’s more targeted versus less targeted, it feels like a very small, right. I think it’s a better experience all around.

Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Raptive. You may have heard of Raptive, formerly AdThrive as an ad provider for over 4,000 of the world’s top digital content creators. Pinch of Yum included, but they’re not just an ad provider. They’re a strategic partner that helps creators build their businesses with the resources they need to grow and monetize their audiences. They offer customized industry-leading solutions like an engagement suite called SlickStream resources on email, strategy assistance, HR guidance, and more. So creators can focus on what they want, be focusing on creating great content. If your blog has at least a hundred thousand monthly page views, a hundred percent original content, and the majority of traffic from the us, Canada, the UK, Australia, or New Zealand, you can apply to become a tive creator by going to Raptive.com and clicking the Apply Now button. And even if you’re not quite at the point of being able to apply to Raptive, they can support you in your traffic growing goals through an 11-week email series. Head to foodbloggerpro.com/raptive to get access to this free series. Everything Raptive does is in support of creators like you, whether you’re just starting out or bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site each week. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

All of this is within the context of how do we think strategically as business owners to increase the value of our business? And some of us look at it as cash flow, right? Like, hey, we want to get to the point where we’re making just as much from our site, our following our email list as we are with our W2 job, kind of this break-even point. But also what we’re doing is we’re thinking about how do we create a valuable business? That’s something that you’ve done. You’ve talked about this, I think publicly, but ConvertKit has raised multiple, it’s not raised rounds. I dunno how you’d describe it, but it’s kind of a unique form of allowing people to buy in to ConvertKit soon-to-be Kit. Do you refer to it as Kit at this point?

Nathan Barry: At this point, let’s see, we’re three and a half weeks from when we officially rebrands. Yeah, I’m pretty much it solidly in the

Bjork Ostrom: Kit. Okay, I’ll call it Kit. Yeah. Okay, I’ll convert over. We have a really good friend who we grew up with, and he always went by Joe, and then he moved to LA and he’s like, I go by Joey now. And Lindsay and I are literally the last friends that still call him Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey. So I’ll do my best to transition over, but I just am nostalgic for those things. So Kit and Kit is a valuable company, and one of the things that we talk about on this podcast a lot is we’re not just building cash flow, but we’re also building things that are valuable in the world. And part of that is thinking strategically about like, okay, how do we increase revenue here? Okay, we can earn 40% more from traffic that we get from email if we’re switching literally just by checking a checkbox. And so the first question is, is the number that you’ve raised most recently at with Kit is that public information, not

Nathan Barry: Public? So what we’ve done, we’re public and transparent with all of the Kit revenue numbers. So we’re at 42 million in annual working revenue. Then what we’ve done is done these secondary rounds. So not we’ve raised capital from VCs, but basically enabled team members who have equity and want to sell and partnered them up with friends of the company who are founders, angel investors, a lot of content creators. So a lot of our customers have come in and basically just had a marketplace where they could buy shares from each other. So we’ve done this twice now. We did it in 2021 actually after we had an offer, Spotify offered to buy the company for 200 million, and we turned that down and then team members were like, okay, cool, but how do I sell some of my shares? So we did that in 2021. I think it was about 6 million of shares that transacted, and then again in 23 where I think it was 9 million that people bought from each other. So it’s kind of interesting of a publicly traded company, but only these little windows every couple of years,

Bjork Ostrom: And it allows people to be liquid who maybe have equity and have some of that ownership. Do you talk about what the value of the company was at those times?

Nathan Barry: Yeah, we did 200 million in 2021 and then 320 million in 2023.

Bjork Ostrom: So my point within all of this is I also remember when then ConvertKit now Kit was starting and you’re talking about your journey and it was like a thousand dollars in monthly revenue and then 2000 and then 5,000. And we talk about this idea of people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. And I feel like Kit is a really good example of that where you have created something that is along with an incredible team worth $300 million. And for anybody listening to the podcast, you might not be wanting to create a $300 million company, but through the intentional effort of multiple small things over a long period of time, there’s the potential to build a really valuable thing in the world. And I feel like it’s important for people to hear that because I think sometimes we maybe have some artificial cap on what it is that we can do.

And I feel like Kit is a great example, having seen it from the outside of that happening. And it feels like a lot of that probably comes from, there’s a hundred different variables in that equation, but one of them is, I would assume and want you to validate this, it’s showing up every day and finding opportunities to grow, to build, to create more revenue, to create a better company to work for. And it feels like this idea of flywheels, which I know you’ve talked about before, probably fits into that mindset of building a really valuable company over a long period of time. So can you speak to what that’s been like for you through the years and how flywheels have fit into that?

Nathan Barry: Yeah, so first is everyone listening are content creators in some way, and to get to where you are, it probably took consistent execution over a long period of time where you had very little traction. At first, maybe you’re talking to 10 people and then later 50 and a thousand, and then at some point you get to the level where you’re like, wait a second, my list grew by more today or this month than it did the first year that I was working on this. And so I think the trait that has served me really well is that idea of creating every day and showing up consistently for a long period of time. So I’m 11 years into this company now, 11 and a half. So it’s been quite a long time going, and it’s really just been those steady compounding gains rather than, oh, this happened and then we took off, and then that happened and it went exponential from there. So yeah, I would say the first thing is figure out how to stay consistent on it for a long period of time, what you’re talking

Bjork Ostrom: About. What has that been like for you to put a pin in the second thing you’re going to say, how have you found that you’re able to do that?

Nathan Barry: It’s a good question. Part of it’s just personality of I can focus and keep working on it for a very long time. Having those steady wins and having the team when you’re really clear on what you’re doing. So it wasn’t ever like, oh, let’s just chase revenue. Our mission as a company is we exist to help creators earn a living. And so we get those steady wins and stories and all those examples of like, oh, we implemented this functionality or we onboarded this customer and then they were able to create this outcome. So I think from a flywheel perspective, there’s a really nice virtuous cycle of just being encouraged every day by the wins that we get to hear. One role that we have that I think we added when we were maybe 40 team members, we’re 90 now, but people were like, wait a second, you have that. How does this company of your size have a dedicated storyteller? What even is the storyteller?

And that’s Issa on our team who her entire job is interviewing our creators and telling their story and then bringing that into two places back to our team to say, Hey, here’s what we need to improve in the product. Here’s what we need to do, but then also here’s the impact that we’re having, and then broadly to use in our marketing outward facing of here’s the impact that we’re having. More people should sign up as customers. And so I think that’s had the effect of constantly seeing those wins. And so I guess you’d think about where do you get your hits of dopamine…

Nathan Barry: Keep things going there. And so I’ve set up a feedback loop or a flywheel where I get a lot of hits of dopamine on a regular basis from hearing a creator say, I was doing this before and then I implemented this Kit feature and now I have this outcome. Thank you so much. It’s like, great, let’s keep chasing those customer wins and then the company growth will take care of itself.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we talk about it within the context of defining the game that you’re playing and the metrics within that game. And there’s all different sorts of income. There’s relational income, there’s kind of story income, there’s outcome income, there’s income, income, revenue, income, all of these different types of income that we can have within the work that we do. And it depends on who you are and where you get that, like you said, that dopamine hit, but it really requires you to be clear on what the game is that you’re playing. And you saying that that story is a great example. For some people, they might be really revenue driven, they might be really outcome driven. They might want to sell a company for a bunch of money, which is great, but for a lot of people, it’s not that you still need that revenue. Simon Sinek says it’s the fuel to make the car go, but it’s not the destination necessarily. So I love that. I think that’s great. It’s finding what that is for you. It’s like the stories, it’s the outcomes, it’s the success that creators see. That’s the fuel that keeps you going. So for anybody out there to figure out what that is for you, what is the thing that’s going to be able to keep you going every day? You were saying a second part. Do you remember what that was?

Nathan Barry: Yeah. Well, getting into flywheels as a concept, this is something that I’ve used a lot before. I knew how to articulate it, and then now that I know how to articulate it, what a flywheel is and really how to define it, I’ve talked about it a lot more, especially the last year. A flywheel is really just this virtuous cycle that the more something happens, the better it gets. I have three laws of a flywheel. The first is that you put each step in your process one after another, so they flow smoothly from one to the next, and then it comes around and closes that loop. So the last step connects into the first step. The second is that each flywheel or it gets easier with each rotation, and the third is that it produces more with each rotation. So a really simple example that I think any creator could relate to is what are you going to publish to your newsletter or to your blog post this week? How do you get enough ideas?

And so a very simple flywheel is just, here’s one around content ideas. And what you do is as you have content on your blog and then people are subscribing to that for some reason you’re saying, Hey, subscribe my newsletter to get more content like this. Then in that email sequence, you have a question. So you say maybe it’s email three. After someone signs up, it goes out automatically just says, Hey, what’s your biggest struggle related to my background with teaching software design? So learning how to design iPhone applications in the food space. It could be something much more specific. What’s your biggest struggle related to cooking this type of dish? Or as you’ve been cooking through our recipes or anything like that, hit reply and let me know. And so then you get this steady feed of people saying, oh, I’m frustrated by this. I didn’t understand that. Just replying into your inbox. You capture all those responses and then every week when it comes time when you realize like, oh, I don’t have anything to send tomorrow at 10:00 AM my newsletters supposed to go out, you just go through those responses and say, oh, what are people struggling with?

Oh, Nathan’s struggling with this thing. I can answer that. And you write something just to that one person, then make it slightly generic so it works for everybody, and that’s the content that you send out. And so what ends up happening is the more people who join your list, the more ideas you get for content. So that gives you more that you can write about, which gets you more content out there, which will then result in more people who join your list. So it hits all three laws of every step flows smoothly, like the loop closes over time, it gets easier because you’re going to have this process refined and then it generates more and more results because responses from 10 people versus responses from a thousand will give you more reach and higher quality options to choose from.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. It feels like one version of that. Maybe we could workshop this as an example, and why I like this so much is it feels like it’s maybe adjacent to or kind of Venn diagram overlap of, we talked a lot about this idea of tiny bit, a tiny bit better every day forever. And I think one of the ways that you can get a tiny bit better is not just checking something off of your list, but aiming to check something off of your list that is going to be in place and make your life or your business better over a long period of time. So processes, systems, maybe Flywheels then is also within that world. And to zoom back to the conversation we were having before about hey, adding a call to action on social media, my guess is for the example that you gave about the creator who talks about working with macros, he’s created this lead magnet and by him then introducing the call to action in his social media around this lead magnet, there is now something always collecting or capturing some of the value that exists with the content he’s publishing that he would’ve missed out on in a massive way if he hadn’t done that and was just churning out content to grow followers and that will pay dividends over time.

So would something like that apply within or work within the flywheel context?

Nathan Barry: Yeah, it absolutely would. And I feel like a lot of what I’m trying to convince people to do is to go from the wide range of things you could do and instead find a few things that work and just do them over and over again. I think a lot of the magic of flywheels is to get you to just stay focused and consistent. The 1% better idea,

Nathan Barry: Just every rotation we improve a little bit and you realize like, oh, if I use this call to action, if I make this other tweak, then it will keep getting better. An example of this is early on when growing ConvertKit, I guess two years in, I had very little traction and the thing that I decided to try was direct sales. I said, okay, I’m going to directly outreach to professional bloggers and try to understand their pain points with email and convince them to sign up for ConvertKit.

And so I didn’t know to call it a flywheel then, but I effectively made a flywheel, which was like identify new leads. So go into a niche and okay, professional paleo recipe bloggers like, all right, let’s list all of them out. And then I would send an outreach to them. So either a social media DM or usually an email asking, Hey, I noticed you’re using MailChimp. Do you have any frustrations with MailChimp? The reason I ask is I made this tool for content creators. Here’s what it does, super short email, try to get them on a call. Then from the call I’d follow up, we’d offer to do their whole migration for them for free. And then at the end, for everyone who got through it, I’d get a testimonial and ask, Hey, do you know of any other creators? What found is those first five were ridiculously hard to get because I didn’t have any social proof, I didn’t have. People would be like, cool, who else uses the platform? And I’d be like, well,

Nathan Barry: I do. Yeah, right, you’d be the first. But over time I noticed that it would get easier and easier because the social proof would get better. My sales pitch would get better. I take the money that we made, invest it in the product that would get better. And so I ended up taking the company from 2000 a month in revenue to a hundred thousand a month in one year pretty much just without Flywheel because they just did that same thing over and over and over again. And that got to the point where we had really a lot of traction,

Nathan Barry: It was focusing in on something that worked and repeating it. Whereas the mistake that I’ve made, I don’t know a hundred times and then I watch so many creators make is they say, I figured out something that worked and now I’m going to figure out the next thing that works and keep this running and now figure out the next thing that works. And then before it, things one and two stopped working and they’re like, why isn’t the business growing? It should, and you moved away from what was working.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s like if you’re drilling and you find oil, you just keep drilling. You don’t pick up and go somewhere else. But I think it’s so easy, shiny object, even just like we get bored. But we had that conversation with our team recently where we were kind of like, oh, we tried this marketing thing and it didn’t work. It was something within emailing our list about this is for clarity, our software tool. And what I said coming out of it was like, oh, it’s just reps. We haven’t gotten enough reps with it and we need reps and we need to stick with it. We need to figure out what’s wrong and make it better because it will work eventually. It’s just a matter of continuing to figure out how to make it work. And there was a spark there. It was working a little bit, but it’s not realistic to expect everything to turn into a raging fire within the first week.

That takes years a lot of times. Last thing I want to talk about, we’ve touched on a little bit, but ConvertKit will soon be Kit that my guess is not just a rebrand, but also something that encapsulates more of what the future of Kit will be. So we’ve talked about strategy, we’ve talked about some of the growth that Kit has had through the years. What does it look like moving forward? The landscape is changing, things look different, and you’re expanding the Kit Universe to include more than email because creators need more than email or you can just offer more than that. So talk a little bit about what that looks like moving forward.

Nathan Barry: Yeah, we got kind of lucky that the name of the company as we shortened it includes the word Kit

And that really drives so much of the direction of where we’re going because what we found is that there were all these all-in-one tools to serve creators over time and none of them really work. They check a whole bunch of feature boxes, basically they go like a mile wide and an inch deep. So it says it has all these features, but then you go to use it and you’re like, yeah, but it doesn’t actually solve the business need. And so we’ve always stayed away from that all in one model, do the things that we do really well and integrate with everyone else. But then people were also, a lot of our customers love that. And then they’d also say, but we want the All-in-one. And I sat with this problem for a long time, for years of how do you have both the depth of the depth and user experience of a focused product and the deeply integrated nature of an all-in-one?

And then I realized that this problem has actually been solved plenty of times before, just not in the creator space, but WordPress and Shopify, which are both tools that either creators use or they’re adjacent. They solved it with this app store model of have a very deep focus product that’s very good at what it does at its core and then have a thriving ecosystem of everyone else building on top of it. So that’s the pivot that we’ve made with Kit and someone was giving us a hard time on, I think it’s probably Instagram dms the other day where they’re like, if you’re going to drop one part of your word or you should have dropped Kit and just been convert.com, it’s like, no, no, the Kit is actually the key part of it because what we want is because what

Bjork Ostrom: You’re doing is acquiring a Kit that is going to help you as a creator.

Nathan Barry: Yeah, exactly. And so you can come in and say, Hey, I’m migrating a Kit when I have 10,000 email subscribers and I’ve got traction. It’s an established business, but it’s just me. And then over time is that 10,000 grows to 50,000 or a hundred thousand and it goes from just you to an assistant to a full-time team member to a few team members, and you’re trying out different things. You need a full Kit more than one platform could provide it for you. And so that’s the model that we’re going to is you can install these apps. One example is we’ve had a lot of people asking us for CRM functionality for sales tracking. Think of people who run agencies or coaches where you might talk one to many to a few thousand people on your email list, but then you actually need to track individual leads for someone who wants to sign up for your coaching program. And that’s sort of these two different worlds that have never worked well together. And so we had this pitch, people are like Build a CRM where I can have Trello style move leads across log notes and build that as a core part of Kit. And we’re just like, I don’t think we’d ever do. That’s a big product

Footprint increase. I don’t know that we’ll ever be the best in the business of that. And instead we found a developer who wanted to build that. We built all the APIs so that they could build it and then launched it as Kit board, which is its own standalone app on top of Kit. So it’s a seamless experience, but it extends the functionality. And so we’ve seen all kinds of AI tools, like a testimonial management tool. There’s a bunch of things coming calendar booking that you’d want as core functionality, but now you just browse the app store and install. So it’s still early, but that’s the model that we’re going to.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. And it makes a lot of sense. You think about the engine that will be Kit and all of the different ways that creators need to or want to use that list and how different it is the you gave, if you have a coach, maybe it’s more like one-to-one type interactions they have. There’s a thousand different ways that you’d use it, but you don’t want to build a thousand different features into your platform. And then somebody comes in and like you said, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep, but to partner with creators, kind of this app store idea, Apple’s done it, Shopify’s dominant WordPress with plugins. Everybody who listens to this very familiar with you set up a food blog, it’s going to look different even though WordPress is powering it because of all of these kind of aftermarket arts that you’re installing that augment or shape how it’s used.

So very exciting that transition will have happened by the time this podcast comes out. So people can check out Kit.com if people want to sign up, if they want to become a subscriber. Can you talk about the best way for people to do that? I know for lists that are a little bit bigger, at least at a certain period of time, you’re doing those transitions. And then also do a little shout out for the studio. Anybody who’s seeing the visual for this, it’s like you’re in this incredible beautiful studio and I know those that’s available for creators as well. So give a little plug for all things Kit.

Nathan Barry: Yeah, we’re doing a lot of fun things. So first we changed our free plan. It used to be a thousand subscribers for free. We made it 10,000 subscribers for free because we’re just like, I think in this world of prices are going up everywhere.

And people were saying like, oh, with this rebrand of Kit, that domain was probably expensive. A rebrand is expenses, now comes the price increase. And so we’re like, actually we’re going to do the opposite where we’re going to go and say our free plan is now 10,000 subscribers. We’re just trying to make it as wide open of an ecosystem as possible. Also because that’s necessary. All the designers and developers building email templates and ops, they need a huge ecosystem. So I guess we want that flywheel of more creators to serve, which means more developers will see an opportunity there which make a better product, bring more creators to serve. So yeah, if you go to Kit.com, you can sign up free plans now, 10,000 subscribers. What else is in there? I guess you mentioned the studio. This is another thing that I’ve wanted to do actually since 2018 is when I first pitched the team on it, but I was thinking about high quality content and how hard it is to produce and setting up your home studio and dialing it in.

And there’s just so much to know. So what we ended up doing is the summer we launched Kit Studios, the first location is in Boise, so that’s where I’m recording from right now. But it’s five studios set up for super high-End podcast and video recording. So I’m talking to you now looking through a teleprompter with a dslr. It’s beautiful, it’s inspiring, and it’s just available for free for Kit customers to come in and book the space and record whatever they want. So there’s five studios here in Boise. And then we’re looking at expanding to future cities. We’ve got to learn a few more things, but hopefully over the next year or two we’ll expand to New York, Austin, la. There’s a campaign from Minneapolis.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, I’ll join it. We’ll pick it from Minneapolis in front of the Boise headquarters.

Nathan Barry: Yeah, exactly. But it’s fun to take the resources that we like, the scale we’ve gotten the company to and just figure out, okay, how can we pour this back into creators? And I don’t think anyone expected us to launch professional quality video studios, but I mean, it’s just when you see what people create in the space, I see it now popping up on my Instagram and Twitter feeds all the time, and I’m just like, I love it. I’m through to play a part.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s beautiful migrations. Is that something that’s still happening for creators of a certain size?

Nathan Barry: So if you have at least 5,000 subscribers and you’re coming over on a paid plan, then we’ll migrate you totally for free. And then my last question

Bjork Ostrom: Was Kit.com expensive?

Nathan Barry: It was expensive. I am transparent with everything. And that is the one thing that I was

Bjork Ostrom: Trying to buy on their side. Did they ask not to

Nathan Barry: On their side? And I was like, I got the contract. And it said, you can’t disclose anything. And I was like, yeah, well, I remove that. And they were like, we had this whole back and forth and the broker was like if you want this deal to happen, you cannot remove the NDA. I was like,

Bjork Ostrom: I won’t push for that. But just broadly speaking, my guess is that it was expensive. Yeah, obviously a valuable company and the reason is because you guys do really good work and we’ve seen that through the decade that you’ve built Kit. Excited for the next decade to come and more conversations on the podcast as well. So Nathan, thanks so much for coming on.

Nathan Barry: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Episodes, ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance and that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.