Listen to the episode with Jeff Borschowa
The short version
- Most people who come to me are surviving, not thriving. The gift is real, the monetization is not built yet, and a lot of the block is guilt.
- With Lewis Howes we built Inner Circle at $50 a month, grew it to over 2,500 members and well over a $100,000 a month, and he showed up once a month.
- Different audiences want you in different formats. The people who pay you are often not the people who read your emails, and that is fine.
- You only need a very small percentage of people to love you. Passive fans are the actual problem.
- Every podcast episode is a fresh launch to a new audience, so it is better to launch continuously than to plan one big moment a year.
- I fired my entire team. It is me and Luna, an AI operator, running a $7,000,000 community.
The gift is not the problem, the monetization is
Almost everyone who comes to me has the same shape. Big vision, big mission, an audience that ranges from hundreds of thousands of people down to very small. They are genuinely changing lives. What they have not figured out is how to monetize the gift, and that gap is where the pain lives. They have made money and they are surviving, but they are not thriving, and they are not living the lifestyle they actually want.
When I dig into why, it is usually not a tactics problem. It is self sabotage. They feel guilty when they make money. They do not know a way to make money that is in integrity and aligned with where they want to go, so they stall. That is probably the biggest one I see.
The other half of it is fear of the load. They do not want to take on the burden of launching a pile of courses or running masterminds, because they think going full money will pull away from the impact. So we find a way in the middle and walk that line with them. What if we did this instead, at this size, with this much of your time.
Fifty dollars a month buys you the runway to become who you said you were
In 2014 I started working with Lewis Howes. At the time he was doing LinkedIn courses, helping people make a transition. He came to us and said he wanted to be a media personality, he wanted to be the next Oprah. Great. Being the next Oprah takes a lot of money. You buy the ads. You pay the travel. You write the book and build the media platform that gets the book onto the best sellers list. So I said we have to find a way to make money while we are getting there.
We built Inner Circle. Fifty dollars a month, and we grew it to over 2,500 members and well over a $100,000 a month in revenue. Lewis had to show up one time a month and that was it. The program ran because people wanted to be like Lewis, and once a month he answered their questions about growing a podcast and a personality brand. I was a guest expert and we brought in other guest experts to carry the rest. He got the cash and the financial commitment he needed to build the podcast and the YouTube channel, and now he is the media personality he said he wanted to be.
The revenue was not even the most valuable part. A paid community does several jobs at once, and most people only count the first one.
- The questions coming in tell you what to build next, because they come from people who already pay you
- Those are the people who show up at the live events and buy the next course and the next product
- It proves the value exchange. Listening to a podcast on a commute is one question, paying $50 a month is a completely different question
- Once someone has answered the money question and been happy about it, the next time you say enroll in this, they raise their hand, because there is trust
Different audiences want you in different formats
Back when I ran my agency I had a real complex about this. We were expensive, $7,500 a month US, about 90,000 a year, which is a serious investment. People would sign, and then two or three days later they would unsubscribe from my emails. I would get nervous. I figured I had one month with them and then they were gone. They stuck around for a long time.
Eventually I asked one of them what was going on. He said, look Gary, we want to pay you, we want the relationship with you, we do not care about your emails, we are not that target. That was around 2014 and it rearranged how I think about audience. There are different audiences in different modalities. Some people will only ever consume me on podcasts. Some will read every email. Some will pay me. They are not always the same person and that is okay.
There's gonna be an audience that will only show up and listen to me when I'm on podcasts and they love it.
You only need a tiny slice of the world to love you
Building a brand is moving energy and building relationships, and that is emotional. Emotions run both ways. All we need is a very, very, very small percentage of the English speaking world to love us. What we need is for the rest of the world to hate us. It sounds counterintuitive but you need both sides, because you need the dialogue and the comments to get the algorithms, and you need people passionate enough to stand up for you and ride or die with you.
The dead middle is where dreams go to die. Passive attention is worthless. My wife and I run an Instagram page about Austin called weekly ATX, about 4,000 followers, just growing it. We posted about the robotaxi event coming here, and someone replied with a vomit emoji and Elon Musk. I do not care whether you like him or hate him, what he has done is quite remarkable. I wrote back, it is okay fam, I am sure you did not get the invite to the event. That is the exchange. You are allowed to have a position and you are allowed to let people disagree loudly.
You don't want passive fans that forget your face and your name.
Every guest is a launch, so launch continuously
There is a lesson I keep coming back to from Nikita, who was head of product at X. He would write his announcements twenty or thirty minutes before they went live. Meanwhile founders plan a launch for six months. His view was that it is better to be relevant and in the moment and launch what you have than to plan for six months and flop. I agree with him. It is better to be launching continuously than to have one or two big opportunities a year and spend the rest of the year wondering what to do.
A podcast is the cleanest example of that. You have a show and a platform, and every guest has a unique audience, so every guest is a new launch. You introduce yourself to their people, they introduce themselves to yours, the two of you find out if there is anything else worth building together, and you push new content to a segment of your audience that may relate. Some of your listeners will hate me because I talked about money in the first five minutes. Fine. Some will finally hear someone talk about money and think maybe I will not be broke. That is okay too.
The same logic applies to a book. There is a real window at launch to hit sales volume and hit a list, because the list adds credibility and credibility raises your speaking fees. One of Lewis's books did not hit the best sellers list the first time out, even after all the pre work and all the podcasts. We had to go do it again, and we hit at week three. The launch date is a start, not an ending.
Bring a bottle of wine to the party
When my team pitches a show, I look at it like being invited to someone's house for dinner. You invited me, so what can I bring. What I can bring is my audience and my clipping team and the promotion. When Jeff and I recorded, neither of us knew yet if it would be fruitful, because the episode had not even come out. But I wanted my bases covered in case it was. If it was not, we part ways as friends.
The reason I care is that I want to be able to come back and say, last time we got 250,000 media impressions for you, and here is what else we did, and I have another opportunity, and I am going to bring it again. That is a different conversation than showing up empty handed and expecting applause. Some guests genuinely believe they are doing the host a favor.
Strip it all down and a host and a guest are two people. Bank accounts differ, weight differs, relationships and ages differ. Neither one is better. So let me bring my value while you bring yours, and let us build something that works for both of us.
I don't want to be like, oh my gosh, Gary's here. He's the hero and he's the star.
I fired my entire team and hired Luna
A couple of years ago my wife was doing podcast outreach for me and she hated it. It is tedious. You email people, they do not answer, not everyone is kind, and you have to follow up consistently because it takes multiple touch points. It was making her miserable and it was not good for the marriage, so I stopped and said no more podcasts for me, because I was not going to do the outreach myself. That became the first thing I built with AI, because it was a repeatable process. Find podcasts, build the graph, reach out, personalize, identify the fact that you are AI, pitch, and if it does not work, no problem.
That is Luna, and she is not a template blasting the same email at everyone. She reads every episode, looks at every guest, ingests the transcripts, works out what the host actually talks about and whether I am a fit. If I am, she starts the pitch and does not expect a yes right away. Every new episode I am on that might read as credibility, she sends over. When a host books a guest who has been on another show I was on, she maps that and says, you just had this person on, here was Gary's episode on that other show, would it make sense to bring Gary on. I have been booked on six podcasts in the last week through her.
She does far more than outreach. She shows up to my meetings, handles the follow up and the recap to the customer, and sent me a brief the morning of this recording so I knew the pitch and knew the show. She handles customer support, she is our community manager, she does all our video content, she replies to every social media comment on every platform. We built a central brain, so she knows Jeff now, with short term and long term memory, and anywhere we interact with Jeff she ties it together. I am solo, and we run a $7,000,000 community.
Jeff broke her, by the way. He replied with a scheduling link and she thanked him for booking me. She also told him plainly that she is an AI and still being trained, which is the part I insist on. It is an experiment and I am running it in public. If you spend the time teaching AI the way you would teach a human, it gets better and better and better, and it never quits on you.
I'm solo. I fired my entire team. It's just me and AI.
The time bank, and the one thing I would tell my younger self
Our people want to stop trading time for money. They have started to see that time is the most valuable asset they have other than health, and those two sit right beside each other. We know how much is in our bank accounts and we do not know how much is left in our time banks. I am in my forties, and by now most of us have had friends pass away earlier than they should have. That creates a wake up moment, especially for visionary entrepreneurs who are the face of the brand and built the whole thing themselves.
So the work is leverage. How do you use artificial intelligence, marketing and media, and your own brand to build products you own that generate income without you trading hours for it. In our community that shows up as three buckets. One is community driven and owned, for anyone who relates to not wanting to trade time for money. One is people building their own AI agency or consultancy. One is established visionary entrepreneurs doing 6 to 7 and sometimes 8 figures.
That third group is why the AI operator matters so much. When I ran the agency I could sit across from a founder and lay out the 42 things they should do with every single podcast episode. They would agree with me at the table, then get back to their desk and realize there was no way they were doing all 42. Now the operator does it for them.
Jeff asked what advice I would give my younger self. I have an 18 year old son living with me who is becoming an entrepreneur, so I think about this a lot. Get out of your own way and stick to something. I have bounced around. I have a bit of ADHD, like a lot of visionary entrepreneurs, and we go down a path, then another path, and another, until we have walked a complete circle with rays going out in every direction. Every time I accomplish something I go find a harder challenge instead of staying and becoming the master of the thing. Find something and stick to it, and run it until there is no more.
We know how much is in our bank accounts, but we don't know how much is left in our time banks.
Questions people ask about this
Why do impact driven entrepreneurs struggle to make money?
In my experience it is rarely capability. They have a big mission and an audience, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, but they have not figured out how to monetize the gift. A lot of it is self sabotage. They feel guilty when they make money and they do not know a way to earn that feels in integrity and aligned with where they want to go, so they stay in surviving instead of thriving.
How did the Lewis Howes Inner Circle membership work?
We started working together in 2014 and built Inner Circle at $50 a month. It grew to over 2,500 members and well over a $100,000 a month in revenue. Lewis showed up one time a month to answer questions about growing a podcast and a personality brand, and guest experts, including me, carried the rest. That revenue funded the ads, travel, book and platform he needed to become the media personality he wanted to be.
Do I need to build an email list first?
It can be the starting point, but it is not the only one. When I ran my agency, clients would pay us $7,500 a month and then unsubscribe from my emails two or three days later. When I finally asked why, they told me they wanted the relationship, not the newsletter. There are different audiences in different modalities. Some will only listen to podcasts, some will read the emails, some will pay you, and they are not always the same person.
What does it mean to say you only need a small percentage of people to love you?
Brand building is emotional, and emotion runs in both directions. All you need is a very, very small percentage of the English speaking world to love you, and you need the rest to hate you, because the dialogue and the comments feed the algorithms and the passionate people stand up for you. The thing to avoid is passive fans who forget your face and your name.
Why is every podcast episode its own launch?
Because every guest brings a unique audience. You introduce yourself to their people, they introduce themselves to yours, you both find out if there is more to build, and you push new content to a segment that may relate. That makes it better to launch continuously than to plan one big moment. Nikita, who was head of product at X, would write announcements twenty or thirty minutes before they went live, on the view that being relevant and in the moment beats planning for six months and flopping.
What does an AI operator actually do in your business?
Luna does podcast outreach and identifies herself as AI while she does it. She reads every episode and transcript of a show before pitching, follows up over time, and maps overlaps with other guests. She also attends my meetings, writes the recaps and briefs, handles customer support, manages the community, clips and posts video content, and replies to social comments. We built a central brain with short term and long term memory so she remembers the people we talk to. I am solo, and we run a $7,000,000 community.
Watch or listen to the whole conversation
The full episode is on The Lighthouse Sessions, hosted by Jeff Borschowa.
Written by
Gary Henderson
Founder of Gary Club
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