How To Get Started With Building An Audience in 2022

Episode 373: In this special episode of MFM, Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) joined the Demand Curve Growth Summit with Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) of Breaking Points, to discuss how to build a loyal audience and turn them into customers, reactions to tweets, and more. ----- Links: * Demand Curve * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (01:15) - How do you think about building an audience (09:00) - Company brand building vs. personal brand building (14:50) - Reax to tweets (42:30) - Tactics to building the first 100K on Twitter ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Well, let's go ahead and kick things off. How do you think about audience building? And what does your audience mean to you, Sean?

• 0:15Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow. Emotional question. How do I think about it? I think about it like, um, I don't really think about it. It's the byproduct of what I do. So the way, the way I approached it was after I sold my company, I said, all right, I could do whatever I want now. So like, hey, time to face the tough question. What do I actually want to do? What do I actually care about in my life? Uh, what, and those were big questions that kind of scared me. So then I trimmed it down. I said, all right, well, how do I just want to spend my days? What would be a normal, uh, what would be a great day that I could do every day? And, um, the thing that came to me was like, the thing I enjoy doing the most is just getting curious. I'm generally very curious about things. And if I have to like go do work and then put those on the side and hopefully get to

• 1:00Shaan Puri?

  them when I get to them, that seemed like, uh, that was not great. But if I could just make my work, that I could just be curious about these things, whether it's crypto or it's audience building or some new science tech thing, or it's, you know, where the hell, you know, do peanuts grow on trees or from the ground? I don't know. Let me go find out, right? Like whatever it is, I was like, I want to be professionally curious. All right, well, that's cool. The curious part's easy. How do you be professionally curious? Well, one way was let me turn that curiosity into content. So I'll take these questions that I'm, I want to, you know, go look into. And then I just got to package up my learnings at the end and share them with others. All right, cool. That'll make it more fun for me and it'll turn into something that actually generates a bunch of income, which will let me just do this all the time. That was my thought process.

• 1:45Shaan Puri?

  So audience building and content was just a kind of a necessary means to an end or a byproduct of the main thing I wanted to do, which was just be professionally curious, be able to wake up and just dive into the things that's most on my mind that day and have no other restrictions beyond that.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  About that. Uh, what was that about you?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that building an audience is a lot like making money, um, especially in the year two thousand and twenty-two, which is that you have to provide something that doesn't exist and then people will commoditize it with their attention. Or, you know, if you're a business and you're building, you're trying to get revenue. So with the way that I built my show and the way that I consistently think about building and getting more audience is just to continue to fill niches. Started out filling one particular niche, built niches and niches and niches, put an underlying philosophy that girds that and then continued to try and build more on top of that, which just results in overall top line figure that continues to go up. I actually don't think it's really that complicated as a concept. It's just incredibly complicated to execute, uh, which is why not a lot of people do it.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  And there's really, you know, not that many people at the very, very, very top of the game and why, you know, in the whole influencer market, all returns are exponential, both, you know, the top point oh one percent of podcasts get just so many more downloads than even the top one percent of podcasts. Like what I figured, when I found out what was even in the top one percent, I was like, wait, like twenty thousand downloads? I mean, how can you, I was like, I don't even know how you make a living um, for something like that. And then, you know, you compare that to what the top ten are. So I think that execution is harder than every, anything else in this game, probably exactly the same as business. I mean, it sounds easy to fill a niche, uh, but actually doing that, doing a consistent basis over years and years through changing conditions, you know, changing market conditions for business,

• 3:32Speaker 02

  changing information environment, uh, for somebody who's in the content game, that's where the skill, uh, all comes into play.

• 3:37Shaan Puri?

  Like, simple, simple, not easy, right? It can be simple what the, the answer is, but not necessarily easy. Like, um, we did this, uh, like getaway, like this getaway where we were going to play basketball with a bunch of interesting people and one of the people that came was Mr. Beast, the number one YouTuber in the world. So he, you know, he knows a thing or two about audience building. And it's like, if you talk to him, you're like, hey, you know, awesome, what's the, what's the, what's the secret? What's the trick for getting huge on YouTube? And he's like, He's like, I just want to make the best YouTube videos possible. Make great videos. And we're like, okay, yeah, but like, yeah, how'd you do it? How'd you become number one? He's like, I just try to make great videos. Every day I just wake up and I'm like, all right, what's a great video? How do I make that? And it's like, simple, not easy, in the sense that like, he didn't overcomplicate.

• 4:22Shaan Puri?

  Okay, well, what makes a great video? Something that gets your attention, something that holds your attention, something that, you know, makes you feel something at the end, you know, laughter, or a feel-good moment, or outrage, whatever it is, you could choose. And you could break it down from there and add a little more detail, but fundamentally, you're not going to get some answer that's like, damn, I never thought of that.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:42Shaan Puri?

  Wow, they had this insight that's just not, it wasn't available to me. And now that I have this insight, now I too can go succeed. It's like, the best, the people who are the best do the simple thing just better than everybody else.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Totally agree.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Is make great content, is that really kind of the, the bottom line here? If you were to say like, what separates that top 1% that Sagar was mentioning from the other 99%? Is it as simple as just make great content?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Okay?

• 5:11Shaan Puri?

  Well, you went through YC, right? Although you guys, were you in YC?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  We did, yes.

• 5:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, what's the YC motto, right? YC, the greatest startup accelerator in the world, bar none, has a greatest track record, created almost half a trillion dollars of value of the companies that went through it. What's the secret? Make something people want, is their motto. Just try to, hey, startup, don't get distracted by fundraising and press and all these other things that you could try to, growth hacks. Are you making something people want? Of course, really? You know, tell me, how do you know? What gives you that feeling? And then there's sort of like, I don't know, I just sort of assumed I was. It sounds so simple that I just sort of assumed I was already doing that. Same thing with content or audience building. Are you making content that people want? Right, that's the, that's the thing. It's not just make great content, it's make content that people want. That's what great content is.

• 5:59Shaan Puri?

  When he talked about picking niches and then figuring out how to serve that niche, that's what he's doing, is making content that people want in that category, and then doing it better than, than others, and doing it consistently so they build a habit, et cetera, et cetera.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  I completely agree. Yeah, I mean, I get approached by a lot of people, hey, Will this light do it for me? Will this camera? I'm like, camera's not your problem, bro. I'm like, your content's the problem. I'm like, make content good. Everything follows up in that. You know, I recently spent $60,000 on cameras and that's after three years of doing this. But needing 4K cameras was an added benefit for my existing audience, not what I needed for a requisite to start. Like, sure, there's the baseline level of production, I think, a pop filter, like a Yeti, USB mic, and a basic webcam. That is not a high startup cost. And everybody's like, what about my thumbnails? What about my... Listen, thumbnails matter, headlines matter, all that other stuff matters, etc.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  But what Sean is talking about, which is that all Mr. Beast does is he knows exactly how to rank a retention, thumbnail, all of that, stack it all on top of each other, iterate it a million times, and then come up with the quote-unquote "secret sauce." He has the exact same YouTube dashboard that I have, that all of us have, that you have access to. He just figured out how to read it better than anybody else. So I always say, is the content good? That's my number one concern. Is it good? Is it compelling? And that, as he said, it's simple, it's not easy. And at a certain point, it is strange, like, it is really one of those, like, you know it when you see it. I can listen to something and be like, that's compelling. And I can listen to something and just like, I don't know what it is, man, this needs work. And it's tough to exactly explain what that is.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, we listened to a session on product-led growth yesterday, and it was almost like everybody was kind of like, well, what's the hack? What's the tactic? What's the secret? And our speakers were very simply like, well, you need an A-plus product in order to have any sort of product-led growth. And I feel like the principle stands true for any form of audience growth as well. Now, both of you have pretty distinct personal brands, as well as like a business brand that you're both independently growing, either on accident or on purpose. How do you think about the sort of... Brand building as a company, as an entity versus personal brand building. Do you have any heuristics or ways of thinking about it, Saagar?

• 8:22Speaker 00

  You know, the way that you kind of use your own Twitter versus like breaking points?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's interesting. So from a business, obviously it has to be whenever and John, you too, you're like, you're in a partnership, right? So this is inherently not something that you have total and 100% freedom on. So whenever I'm doing something under the VP umbrella or you know, business or hiring, it's not necessarily just a reflection of me. It's a reflection of the ethos and the principles that we decided that we were going to grow on, mutually agree on together, you know, within that framework, everything is being branded, is being used. That's a reflection of us, of our philosophy, et cetera. On my personal brand, to be honest, I just have a lot less capacity for caring. Like if I'm interested in it, I'm just going to explore it. I frankly, I'm at a level where I can do that if I want to. And if people have only I'm just like, I literally don't care.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  You know, either Instagram.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  You know how hard it was, Saagar, to find tweets that I'm able to show?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was like, I was a little scared whenever you were like, I was like, oh, man. I was like, we're going to piss off half the audience. But I mean, that's fine, you know, I'm used to it in this line of work. And that's kind of what I'm, what I'm getting at, which is that there, the business has an orientation, which is A, make money, B, perpetuate itself. For me personally, I mean, obviously my personal brand, I probably thought about this very, very differently. Whenever I was younger and I was like on the up and up, but at this level, I actually just do whatever I want to do. And so that is the, the only dichotomy between the two.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  How do you think about it, Sean?

• 9:50Shaan Puri?

  So what kind of answer would be interesting to you here? What's like the, like, uh, cause I'm trying to figure out what's the question behind the question? So, so the question, the surface question is like, what's the difference between your, your pod brand and your personal brand? But what is the question behind that?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  The question behind that, here, let me start with the problem. So the problem is that audience building as a brand is hard. It's hard to create affinity when it's not coming from a human face. And people often find, at least in the folks that I've chatted with, even personally, honestly, DemandCurve's Twitter has been difficult to grow versus like, you know, like individuals as like Julian, for example, has much easier time with his with his growth than we do as a company account. So, yeah, the question behind the question, that's a great question, Sean, is, you know, how ought to, like, how should startups and companies be thinking

• 10:50Speaker 00

  about audience building when they have, yeah, but they have got like the personal brand in their...

• 10:57Shaan Puri?

  Now I understand, now I understand.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:58Shaan Puri?

  The question really is like, what am I doing wrong here with DemandCurve? Yeah, but more generally speaking, like, I don't know the, it's, I haven't cracked this nut. What's the difference? I've noticed personal brands are easier to grow, but I also, I want my company thing to grow, blah, blah, blah. I think that, here's my like very simple slash controversial take on this, which is, I think if you're a company, you should be using individual faces to grow. You'll go faster that way. If you're an individual trying to grow like a media property, you should put it under a brand umbrella, mostly because you can't ever sell you. So like, if you wanted this to be an asset and not a job, you need it to grow its own brand, like you need breaking points.

• 11:41Shaan Puri?

  Or like in my case, like, I had a personal newsletter and a personal Twitter that grew really fast. I grew my personal Twitter from like 10,000 or 20,000 followers to, it's at 300,000 in like a year, basically. A year and a half, in a year we got to 200,000 and then it just trickled up.

• 11:58Shaan Puri?

  But like, great, what am I gonna do with that? I'm, I don't really wanna be some influencer. And, and great, like, you know, I can't hand this off to anybody. It's my voice, it's my name, it's my face. So it's a job. Now I need to maintain this thing. And it's cool, cuz like, I just don't get like, I'm like, sorry, I just don't care. So I'll go six weeks without tweeting cuz I'm not trying to maintain some schedule. It's not a business of mine. But when I created the Milk Road, it's intentionally not called Sean's Crypto Newsletter, which actually would have been easier at the start to get subscribers for because people already had bought into the Sean franchise. So going for, oh, Sean's gonna talk about crypto and do crypto analysis and crypto opinions? Great, I wanna know about that. But instead, I called it the Milk Road cuz I thought, one day, I'd like to not be the guy writing this thing.

• 12:43Shaan Puri?

  One day, I'd like to not be the person maybe even owning this thing. I'd like to sell this someday. I want this to be an independent asset. And so for that, again, me as an independent media content creator, I created a brand umbrella for those reasons. But let's say it was my startup, I would be saying, hey, I'm Sean, the growth guy from Bebo, and I'm gonna talk about growth over here, not the Bebo account doing it because it's gonna get less play, because people would rather follow people than, than companies. And so you gotta use, you make that trade off. When you're already a company, then use the fact that people would rather follow people. If you're an individual, you take a little hit by putting it under a brand umbrella, but you get this big benefit of it's not tied to your name and face forever that way. So it's a strategic bet.

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  That's my, my opinion on this.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, that's super helpful. And it kinda points to the problem that we originally had at DemandCurve, where so much of our brand equity was tied up in Julian's brand equity. And so, you know, being able to build that up under a new brand has certainly been something that, you know, we've done over the last, last couple of years. That's super helpful. Okay, we, yeah, let's go ahead and start the repeat that tweet segment here. Let's, we're gonna experiment with screen sharing for the first time.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  See how this goes. And yeah, both of y'all, the idea here is for both of y'all to just react to the tweet. What were you thinking when you tweeted it out? Why do you think it took off? Why did it work? And yeah, any other context that you think we would find interesting?

• 14:21Shaan Puri?

  I wonder what percentage of these, I'm just gonna be like, I have no idea what I was thinking. I don't believe that, that's stupid.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  These are bangers only, so hopefully you remember. Sean, you did this hot take about everybody being wrong about the metaverse. Obviously, it was a very hot topic at the time when you did this. What can you, what can you tell us about this?

• 14:43Shaan Puri?

  Um, well, I'll tell you kind of like, okay, I'll tell you my point in a second, but like, I guess that's a little less interesting even than just what made this work. So this thing reached, I think, I don't know the exact stats. I think it's like, sort of like, somewhere between 10 and 20 million people in the US. But then it also was, it got shared like crazy on Instagram and it got shared in China, like some big Chinese, like, social media influencers were posting it, I guess. So it got like millions of views there. Logan Paul was talking about it on his podcast. Mark Zuckerberg referenced this in a Lex Freeman interview. So it like went really far and I was like, why did this go so far? And I think it was because it basically had three things. Number one, it was timely. So this was right when Facebook had rebranded to Meta. People were talking about the metaverse.

• 15:25Shaan Puri?

  And I think everybody had this like sixth sense of this sort of like, you know, sneaking suspicion that everybody's bullshitting about this. But like, nobody knew, it was all smart people and big names that were saying how the metaverse is the future. But nobody was saying what the hell the metaverse is or why it's the future. And so like, I think everybody kind of smelled bullshit, but didn't know how to call it. So it was timely. I was calling bullshit, which generally is like something people are going to want to click into and read. And the last thing was, I think I backed it up. I think I had a good point that could get you to agree with my, my conspiracy theory, if so to speak, was not so far fetched. And basically, all I was saying was like, when people hear the word metaverse, they think about this like virtual reality shit, like, oh, I'm living in something, I'm an avatar now.

• 16:09Shaan Puri?

  And I said, actually, I think it's more like this concept called the singularity, which is an artificial intelligence, which is like this moment in time, this tipping point where computers, you know, have reached a super intelligence and they're so vastly smarter than, than, than humans and they, they are so smart, they just program themselves to become, it's like runaway intelligence. They program themselves to become smarter. And so I thought, oh, the metaverse is kind of like that. It's basically this tipping point where, well, a lot of my friends are online now. I think I have this experience, many of you guys do, look at this like experience we're having now. A lot of my work is now digital.

• 16:45Shaan Puri?

  My social identity, like my profiles, my followers are all digital. You know, my, if I buy NFTs, cool, so my art is now digital. More and more things, more and more things that are important to you are now like, they live on the internet. And so at some point, all of your digital stuff matters to you more and you spend more time and energy and focus there than you do in your physical. That doesn't mean you'll never go eat or walk or exercise or anything like that. That's not what it means, but it just means like sort of there's a tipping point where before rewind 20 years. It didn't matter, you know, I had a computer room in my house. That was like, you know, there was a computer room and everything else was non-computer. And now like, you know, the computer is attached to my body, basically, right? So it's like, you've seen this transition already, it's just going to continue.

• 17:29Shaan Puri?

  And so, hey, don't think it's this crazy virtual world. It's just this tipping point where at some point, we've been creeping towards it, creeping towards it. At some point, we're just going to value our digital stuff more than we do our physical in the sense that we're going to spend more time and energy and effort and money on, on the internet than we do offline. That was the idea. So that's, that's my explain this tweet.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Super helpful, man. It was surprising to me during your podcast with Hasan Minhaj that he was, he was genuinely triggered by this tweet. It affected him at like an identity level.

• 18:05Shaan Puri?

  He called me, he was like, hey, can I call you? I don't know the guy, by the way, I didn't know him before this. He's like, he had followed me from one other tweet that went viral about Clubhouse and he, then he called me and he was like, "Bro, like I do stand-up comedy in real crowds with real people, that energy, that is my home. That is my craft, that is my favorite feeling in the world." And like, "God, I don't want this like, you know, metaverse bullshit." Like, you know, talk me through it. And I was like, "I don't know what to tell you, man." Like, I think it's going in that direction. I don't think, you know, I remember. I remember people being like, I love waking up, getting the newspaper, bringing it in from my front lawn and the feel of the newspaper, right? And like, it's true, you probably did like that

• 18:50Shaan Puri?

  thing. But guess what you liked more was like instant, real time news constantly flooding into your brain. Turns out that that was more addictive. That like, you know, being able to get news from all these different sources rather than just your local provider, that turned out to be really important. Being able to access it on the go on your phone turned out that wasn't really important. And so, yeah, you like the feel of it, but there's all these other benefits that like ended up crushing that. So that was a, that's what happened after this tweet.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  You contextualized it well. You talked about kind of the benefit of accountability. It's a double edged sword here. We're, you know, the upside and the risk involved in that. Super interesting. Sager, yes, like I said, challenging to find tweets I can share with everybody here.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  It's not even close to my most viral.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, I think your most viral was two days ago. I just saw that. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, talk to us about why did this tweet work? What is this speaking to? And like, why do you think this resonated?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm actually, it's interesting. I kind of pivoted to becoming the gas guy politically. This really is really just purely a function of what I talked about earlier, which is that if you were to ask me why I think my show is successful, is I think because I cover things in a way that most people feel are not being covered by existing sources of information. That's very basic, like thesis statement. That's why I think it does well. I've always noticed that coverage of gas is skewed in a particularly partisan way. So one of the things that I like to do is just highlight basic textualize them. I think that every American has to put into their car on average, a couple of times, or at the very least, like once a week, a couple of times a month. So what did I do there? I said, the average American nets X amount of money after taxes at

• 20:36Speaker 02

  $5 a gallon. That means they're spending approximately 10% of their take home pay on gas. And when you include food and housing, it gives you a picture of how bad things are. That's not a political statement. That's just like a statement about where things are. That got shared, as Trump was saying, I mean, people screenshotted it, it was shared on Instagram, both ways. It's like, why do, you know, oil companies need to stop profiteering? Here's why Biden needs to start drilling. I mean, you can put it any... Particular way you want, I mean, in general, my most viral content actually, although just speaks to uh more putting out like facts and then contextualizing them in a way where people feel like they can be used to something that is very meaningful to their life. I'll give you another example. Uh one of my most viral posts recently has been uh about mortgages and

• 21:19Speaker 02

  it really was just a basic uh take about like, hey, in 2021, you could buy X house, price house for this monthly payment. Mortgage's price has now gone up, so now you get less house. Once again, like you can read that whichever way you want. Like you can be like, congratulations Jerome Powell. It's like, screw you Jerome Powell. Like you could put it uh any particular way. So I think uh to I piggyback on what Sean is saying, I think timeliness is everything, uh everything. So timeliness is, you know, timeliness is number one, it has to be timely. Uh number two, it has to be, the most viral stuff, I believe, uh has to be able to resonate with somebody and not tell them how to think, just give them the ability to then form something.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  And then three, uh I think it's also concise, which is why Twitter is very, very helpful.

• 22:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that that's great. By the way, this um it's like you handed them like a hammer and you're like, don't beat up whoever you want to beat up with this information.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 22:15Shaan Puri?

  Uh this can be used on any anybody, you know, just

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Bingo.

• 22:18Shaan Puri?

  Use it to serve your agenda, which is like kind of the like, I don't know, cynical take on content creation, which is like, you will blow up faster if you sort of gas up an audience around something that they already have a bias or or belief system of, and you feed that. This happens, for example, uh like it it doesn't even have to be political. With crypto, this happens all the time, which is like, oh, just be anti the dollar, anti Fed, anti Warren Buffett, anti whoever, and you just keep feeding information that like riles up this zealous crowd that already believes and all they're looking for is like, they're not looking for real information. They're looking for information that just fits their worldview only. And I I don't mean that to pick on them because pretty much everybody does this. And so, you know, everybody's looking for information that feeds their worldview.

• 23:01Shaan Puri?

  So one useful way of thinking about it is, what worldview do I like and respect and maybe share? What worldview do I understand? And then that's the worldview that I can serve by producing good packaged nuggets because I know what will hit with that audience. And then I I'm focused on that versus just uh generically producing content and then not really thinking about the worldview that it's going to go live in.

• 23:27Shaan Puri?

  Our software is the worst.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better.

• 23:42Shaan Puri?

  By the way, what's the tweet that went viral two days ago?

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Oh, that was about Dr. Fauci. We don't have to get into that one.

• 23:51Shaan Puri?

  What are we here to do?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  I mean, I'll go into it. I don't care. Sure. Well, Bill, not to derail your entire conversation. For those who are not familiar with something called the lab-leak theory, the theory is that coronavirus leaked from a lab. And so the underlying facts and circumstances around this are pretty interesting. The tweet that I did was, again, actually speaks directly to what you just talked about, Sean, which is that if you're unfamiliar with the characters who are involved, there's one particular guy who served as the so-called cutout of funding from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His name was Dr. Peter Daszak. He's been intimately involved in the cover-up of any facts

• 24:38Speaker 02

  or evidence around the lab-leak theory. This was all old news at this point, basically two years ago, that we've known all of this information. Well, Dr. Fauci, on his waning days as the head of NIAID, actually just granted a $600,000 grant to the same individual for the same type of research, which possibly led to the escape of coronavirus from the Wuhan lab. That was it. There you go. It's right in front of you. Fauci in his waning days. As you said, like, here's information. Why do I think it went viral? I mean, that's not difficult because nobody else was reporting it and millions and millions and millions of people are interested. That's literally just a screenshot from a government website.

• 25:18Shaan Puri?

  By the way, you said something like, you know, I know a lot of people care about, you said like, I know that the gas issue is something a lot of people care about that they don't feel is being adequately covered. How do you know that? You're reading YouTube comments to get this information? You're talking to people? How are you figuring out both what my niche is interested in and then where there's a lack of service on that topic? Is it because you're not seeing it? And so you're like, oh, I am a customer. That's how I know? Or you have some feedback loop? How do you do it?

• 25:49Speaker 02

  At this point, it's art and a science. So I have a general intuition of like, hmm, this is not being covered. Also, the reason why I got into gas was because I could see that my segments on inflation were going astronaut, like dramatically high. Really what it is, is I did a monologue months and months and months ago. Uh, just, it was very basic. I was like, hey, we are going to have an energy price crisis. This was actually before the entire Russian invasion of Ukraine because we were still having problems in our gas supply. And I was really obsessed like why these specific market conditions. And it just went mega viral. I got all these emails from these people being like, hey, man, like, thank you so much. Like, nobody talks about this, like heating oil in Vermont and like what contracts look like for these things.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  And, you know, for me and my family, I only make $50,000 a year. So when I have to lock in at X price, like it really, really hurts. And I was like, hmm, well, that's interesting. And so then again, you know, you throw a couple of test segments and you like do some segments on it. Each one either consistently performs or does more so than normal. I'm like, okay, well, clearly people care a lot about this. And so what I do then is like, kind of use my insider ability as a guy who worked in the Washington press corps more to like, cover it in a professional manner. And I think that was the way that I could discover it. But I also have a general sense of, you know, I work in this media, I work in media, I live in DC. I know what the people in power are talking about and obsessed with.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  And my general orientation had been to bet against whatever that is and cover anything else. And in general, that serves me very well. So there you go.

• 27:21Shaan Puri?

  That's cool. I like that.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  One thing that Sagar shared, maybe when I, when we get into more tactics later, he can cover this. But one of the things that worked for him early on was, uh, I think you had said like, um, just posting transcripts of like, what different people would say. So if Trump would say something, all you would do is just snip the transcript and just sweep that out and let people to have whatever take they wanted on it.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I can share that. So my first 50,000 followers, I was, I was really obsessed with Twitter, like obsessed, uh, which is not a good thing. Uh, I should say, when I was younger. And I was like, I want to get more Twitter. I, I remember, Michael, I was like, I want 50,000 followers. I, I had like 4,000. Uh, at the time, I had a job as a White House correspondent. I'm like, okay, well, how can I take advantage of this? So all I did was I just got really proficient at using live transcription services, which literally watched cable television and then spit out rough transcripts, copy and pasting it, taking out the caps, editing it for clarity, and just trying to be one of the first people to be like, Trump said X. Or the Secretary of State said Y. And as you said, Odile, you're just pumping information

• 28:27Speaker 02

  uh, out into the world. This is why also, you know, I think I probably have a timely bias because I work in the news business. Like for us, timeliness is everything. If you're two hours late, like you might as well be dead, you know, you're a zombie. And so for, for us, like microseconds, especially in the, you know, in the so-called like information distribution game, you're competing against the Associated Press, against Reuters, and, uh, you know, like major multimillion dollar professional organizations. It really just turned out to be getting pretty good at tweeting out transcripts. So I think my first 50,000 followers all just came from people who were following me in order to find out like what was going on that day in politics. And since that was literally my job, I was both doing my job well and I was building an audience. So it's an easy way.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  There's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of ways that people in this audience can apply that. I mean, you're all in your own niche. You all have, uh, the, the influencers and the leaders in there, in those niches going out and doing, uh, appearances. Um, there's ways of adapting this strategy, not just in the news and timeliness context, but even in the, uh, in tech. Um.

• 29:30Shaan Puri?

  I have a quick story of timeliness.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, go for it.

• 29:34Shaan Puri?

  Exemplifies it. So I created, uh, so there was this big news event that happened in crypto where this token called Luna crashed. And it had been one of the high flyers, and then it goes to zero, kind of like overnight. And I had a position in Luna, so I ended up losing what was like a million dollars in that crash. And I also had kind of like an interesting take because you need to have a take on, you know, everybody knows what happened. What they want to know is, you know, either why it happened or what it means. And so I had a good take and I decided, okay, the way I'm going to do the, and two things happened. Hey, I was a little bit busy that week. I was like on vacation and stuff like that. Came back, all right, a couple of days go by. And then I was like, okay, what do I do? Either I'm just going to post this as like,

• 30:17Shaan Puri?

  you know, a couple tweets, a thread, or what if I made like a video on this? And so I go on YouTube, I end up creating this like, almost like a, like the John Oliver show, what's it, Last Week Tonight? I go and I create this like, I'm like, I do this rant. I rant about Luna. I rant about why, why it blew, why it got big, and then why it crushed, why it got devastated. And it was, had jokes spliced in. I hired this editor, the editor's amazing. We're working on this, we're iterating on it, we're making great content. And we put it out. Now, two and a half weeks have gone by as we put it out. You could see this if you go to YouTube, Luna, John, or something like that. And the, the video has like, I

• 30:57Shaan Puri?

  don't know, 17,000 views or so, 20,000 views maybe at this point. But it never went viral. And like, so, you know, I consider that sort of like a flop of a piece of content, especially one that I tried really hard on. And the funny thing is, like, I kind of knew this, that like, like, the smarter thing would have been if I literally had opened up my phone, typed out a thing in the notes app, screenshotted it, and just posted it. Immediately when it happened, it would have been less great, because it was not, the jokes weren't as good, there was no video production, there was no nothing. But it would have been on time. And on time matters way more than great. And when it comes to this type of reactionary, what does everybody care about right now? Because a lot of time, three weeks have gone

• 31:39Shaan Puri?

  by, just nobody cared about it anymore. The world had moved on, there was two other crises to worry about. And so that was an expensive, time-wise lesson of how much effort I put into something that did not go viral compared to shit that did go viral, because I did it, you know, good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Totally agree. Good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time. That is the quote and heck of a some art here that you got going on, Sean. I love it. Okay, cool. Let's rapid fire through one more each. Let's see, so Sean, we have your clubhouse one, but I feel like it's pretty close to the metaverse one as to why that work.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Do you want to talk about this Elon one? Or do you want to talk about this learning one?

• 32:29Shaan Puri?

  I'll do both real quick. The Elon one is actually like Sagar was saying. I, I, one of the threads that went viral was not no original insight. Elon was on Clubhouse, Elon like popped onto Clubhouse when Clubhouse was hot. And, you know, just a guest appearance by Elon Musk is not something you get very often. And also Clubhouse was like overloaded. It was like invite only and it was overloaded. So I just go for those who are locked out of the Elon thing. Here's what he's saying. And I just live typed and transcribed everything interesting he was saying in a thread in real time. And I was the only guy doing it. And like, you know, on one hand, I felt a little silly. I was like, oh, man, I've become like a professional note taker on a fucking beta app of Clubhouse. Like, geez, what does my career come to?

• 33:12Shaan Puri?

  And then also I was like, oh, wow, that's just like 7,000 likes already. Okay, nevermind, shut up, like, go. And so, you know, I just like, just did it. But it was like, it talks about that same thing, which is like, some people think they need to have this like really great insight or amazing, you know, perspective or whatever. And sometimes you're just providing a service better than others. You're just clipping good content and you're posting it and you're doing that consistently. And people will follow you for that. You can build a huge audience as simply a curator or remixer of content. You don't even need to be an original content creator. I would say in most cases, you do not need to be. So that's kind of what this one was, which was I just pull, this was separately. I just pulled out, you know, this, this great quote, you know, by Elon. And, you know, this is another one where it fits people's worldview. My, my audience is mostly entrepreneurs.

• 33:57Shaan Puri?

  Entrepreneurs love to have this chip on the shoulder, this badge of pride about like how hard it is to be an entrepreneur, which I find pretty stupid in general, but I can play to it. And so I played to it here, which is like Elon was like, you know, if you need words of encouragement for doing a startup, don't do a startup. Oh, yeah, like, you know, that's right. We are the special breed and like, we don't need this, you know, motivational, you know, speeches, whatever. So I knew that this would play. And so, you know, just threw out there and sure enough it hits. The other one that you shared was.

• 34:29Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah, this was meant to trigger people. So everybody thinks that, everybody thinks that things like education and healthcare are like highly nuanced topics. And I find it also that really funny and stupid. Like, I think that nuance is something that smart people love to hide behind because it's so easy to just say, ah, well, you know, it depends. And like, you know, it's not so simple. It's not so easy. It's not so cut and dry. It's not so black and white. It's not so binary. They love to like, do this, this nuanced thing. And so I knew I could trigger everybody if I just said, here, I could fix education in like, a tweet. And it's like, oh, classic tech bro thinks he could fix education in a stupid tweet. And so, you know,

• 35:10Shaan Puri?

  I know how to like, you know, just bait the animals with like, here you go. Right. And it's something I do believe, which is that most people, when they want to learn something, they start by trying to learn it. They go read about it. They watch about it. They, they go attend seminars and workshops or take courses about it. And they'd be better off just going and trying to do the damn thing. And then when they get stuck, they should go look up how to get unstuck. Like, I do believe that that's true. But if I had just said that, it would have gotten a tenth of the likes. By adding, there, I fixed education, I was able to trigger a bunch of people. And so, you know, that was, you know, these are the Jedi mind tricks of the, of the great creators.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  I mean, I really hear that you relate to Twitter as a game. Like, it's not like a thing where you have to tell like, what you believe exactly the way you believe it. You're, there's a bit of a game that you're playing. Is that how you would relate to it?

• 36:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, don't take it too seriously. Like, I don't take anything too seriously, but definitely not going to be Twitter. I barely take parenting and like, you know, things like that seriously. I try to be playful and silly and lighthearted with those two. So I'm definitely not going to take Twitter too seriously. And the other thing is, I, I'm lucky that Twitter is not where I, I'm not, Twitter's not my, my, my real job. You know, like, I've basically been successful outside of content creation. So I had the security that I can just kind of F around with content creation and do what I think is interesting. Because I'm not doing this in order to become successful. So I don't have to. So I didn't have this mental block of like, I need to play things a certain way. Sagar was talking about this too.

• 36:47Shaan Puri?

  Like, once you get to a certain size, whether you did it outside of content or even through content, you can start playing much looser because the other day, your life's short. Just do whatever you want to do. Say what you want to say. It's a lot more rewarding and fun and interesting that way. And so you could do that. You know, you could buy yourself that right. But most people sort of have this mental block where they're like afraid and they take everything so seriously. And then it becomes an unpleasant experience for them. I think, well, I think a lot of people don't enjoy social media, because they don't treat it like a game. You enjoy games. You don't enjoy things that are ultra serious. And so, you know, I think that's where most people get it wrong.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  I thought, yeah. Having that block of like, oh, I need to get it right, I think, is the kind of the internal conversation that keeps people from even even taking that action in the first place. Sagar, let's see, we have this on student debt or this on CNN Plus? Which one would you like to chat about?

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Oh, that I like that one. That's a good one. Narratively, I always enjoy that. So that one was, yeah, so just for those who may have been watching, the failure of CNN Plus and lapsing Obama's wife are related. So why is this tweet successful? You take two viral events that are being discussed, you pair them together, and then you put a thesis statement on why exactly it supports a broader meta-narrative. Shitty establishment content previously force-fed to us in cable monopoly era simply cannot compete in the free market streaming. The revolution has just begun. So revolution has just begun. Punchy feeds the thesis, you know, most of the people who follow me, and in general, anybody below age like 50 doesn't like cable monopoly and cable news. So obviously, huge

• 38:30Speaker 02

  market there. You know, biology actually said, biology, Trina Bachman once said something to me, is always bet on charts. It's just you've got to find the right chart to bet on. And so I always say that the right chart for me is trust in the mainstream media, which is 13%. That means my market size is 87% of the United States. So I only have even more. To grow and if you include the globe on that it's even better.

• 38:51Shaan Puri?

  Like man, so I feel sorry for CNN serving this niche 13% of the audience. Poor guy, if they need some help, I got you.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  It's about flipping things on its head and it's like, no, no, no, it's like you're the one who is only serving the need. So putting these two things together, the Obama and Spotify contract, CNN, like two legacy established political, uh, both brands kind of in their own right, everybody knows, but yet not a lot of people are consuming and then putting them together and saying and trying to describe a market condition that is arising that can tell us about why these two things have failed that goes against the way that people who actually work in professional media explanation are able to tell you. I mean, to date, I have not seen a, a, a dispassionate view, maybe out of one or two

• 39:40Speaker 02

  people, I can count on one hand, Sarah Fisher over at Axios, I think she's awesome. Uh, there's like, uh, Dylan Byers over at Puck News, I think he's a straight shooter too. Those two are pretty much the only ones I've seen with like an actual rundown of like why these things don't work, uh, compared to the amount of money that are being invested in them. The Obama Spotify contract is the same one. It's like, you know, they paid the former president of the United States millions of dollars and it just didn't do that well when he was paired with one of the biggest rock stars on earth. That's, that's kind of insane. I mean, you have somebody who hundreds of millions of people, uh, knew that, know his name, billions of people probably know his name. Uh, you have somebody who received like 10 hundreds of millions of votes collectively

• 40:22Speaker 02

  over two elections and yet he can't even crack the top 10 on podcasts. Like, how does that, how does a former MMA cage fighter beat this person? Like, how, how's that possible? And so that's a very interesting story. Now, nobody wants to tell that story because, you know, when you work in the quote unquote powers that be, you're going to offend the wrong people. And so it, again, that's just a niche that opens up for me to come in and to fill that. So I think that's why that it took off. It was, it's not, not even a difficult one really to explain.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  No, that's, I like that. Take two viral events, stitch it together with a thesis statement, and then cater to that 87% of the audience who doesn't trust in the mainstream media. Very clever. Cool. Well, let's go through some rapid-fire questions, tactical questions, and some questions from the audience over the next five to seven minutes, and then we'll call it a day. Sagar, talk to us, you know, you mentioned the strategy that you did early on, kind of just taking scripts of what other more influential people are saying. Like, what were really the inflection points or tactics that took you from that first zero to 100K? Let's say Twitter.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Okay, so zero to, Twitter is actually not that hard, which is that most of the people follow only a few amount of accounts. So get those few amount of accounts in order to follow you and get them to retweet you, and that's basically the secret to growth. I don't think it's that complicated. So what does that mean? It's like, well, find that niche, the 0.01%, what do they need in their feed that they're not getting? Provide that service. For me, I was the first guy in order to tweet the transcript, which means that they were all following me, which means they're all retweeting me and exposing me to their millions of followers, which means that some people would then follow me. So for me, it was, I would say around 10K is a big, is a big jump. For some reason, in people's minds, it's like when you cross 10,000, that is a point where you're going to get exponentially more new numbers of followers. What I've discovered across all my platforms, the more

• 42:15Speaker 02

  followers you have, the easier it is to get followers, which is so frustrating. Whenever you're starting out, you're like, when you're, oh man, 5,000, at that point, if I had 5,000 followers on Instagram, which, you know, once upon a time was the case, if I got 50, I was like, oh my God, I lose 50 a day to now, actually more, probably more like 100. And yet I'll net out, you know, at a thousand a week or something like that. And it's simply because of like the churn, the burn, the way that your algorithmic treatment is offered. So I think 10 is a big inflection point. I think 50 is an even bigger inflection point. That's where things really begin to go vertical. And, you know, this is probably the same startups, which is just getting that, you know, first initial customers and then compounding that to a sustainable-ish business is like the

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Really most difficult requires the most amount of thought because at the end of the day, that's where that's where you're filling the niche. That's where you're discovering the niche. That's where you're playing around. That's, that's, that's really the time too of the most experimentation. Uh, where you have really, really high stakes. So I would say it's there. And then also on the other end where, you know, after I reached 300 K, actually after I reached 200 K on Twitter, I was like, I just don't care anymore. I was like, if it goes up, it goes up. I could care less, you know, my business is almost entirely dependent on YouTube and I frankly, I care more about Instagram um than I do about Twitter. I think I have much higher quality engagement. Um, just from what I've seen, my ability to sell either my subscription tickets, uh, any of those things are there. So then it just became a complete game after that. And I just genuinely did whatever I wanted. So those are kind of the interesting inflection points.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I like the idea of uh finding, look, uh, there's a few accounts that everybody follows, like it's almost account-based marketing at that point where it's getting in touch and making an impression with those nodes, those sort of super nodes uh in your, in your industry. Uh, Sean, do you have any, uh, anything to add?

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  Uh, that's smart. I wish I had done that. Um, yeah, didn't have that insight, but I learned something great today. Um, yeah, mine was sort of like, uh, this, actually it was the same, but I did it in a much slower, stupider way, which was the first kind of 25 people mattered a lot. And so it's not the number, it's who those 25 are. For me, I built those relationships in person. So like, um, you know, Ryan Hoover had a popular Twitter and I had known Ryan in person, you know, for, you know, seven, eight years at that point. And so once I started getting active and started saying interesting things, he was happy to kind of like share. I'd never asked him to. He just, he followed me already. He thought some things I said was interesting and he would share it with his audience. And um, and

• 44:44Shaan Puri?

  then that happened with like 25 important people in tech that were already well-known, but I had built in-person relationship with them, built in-person credibility with them. And so it's kind of the same idea actually, but just a very slow version of what he just talked about. Um, and I didn't think about it like creating content that, that serves them, um, that they would want to share with their audience. I just thought like, it just, it just accidentally happened. So it's, you know, sort of along the way. Um, the main things that I would say is like, you know, Figure out your, you know, the domain you're trying to build your authority in. So, you know, get really tight on that, the tighter, the better, but it's very tempting to be broad. And I've made this mistake many times of just like being like, well, it's that, but it's also these other things that I like.

• 45:28Shaan Puri?

  And there's also this and it's also that. And actually you'd be better off just starting off, uh, starting off there. Then there's basically like some tactical things like, you know, for example, uh, there's this theory called the red pill theory, I guess. Uh, I think in politics, it has a different definition, but I heard it when I talked to the guy. There's two guys who do Wait But Why? And so there's like Tim, who's like the writer, the famous guy. And then this is his friend, Andrew, who childhood friend who helps him run his businesses. And Andrew, I talked to Andrew and Andrew was like, yeah, um, you need to have your red pill, which is like, you need to have the truth that you can say that people, that wasn't like, um, it's not the thing everybody's saying.

• 46:10Shaan Puri?

  But when you hear it, people like some, so some of the people will nod their head vigorously, right? So what is the, and so other people call this your spiky point of view. It's like, you know, what is your, what's your thing, right? Like, you know, maybe your thing was like, that inflation is a way bigger problem and the government is playing this down. Boom. That's your red pill and you could do, you could base your whole brand off that for a period of time. And then you have to eventually swap out and create a second red pill, which is like, you need to be giving people. And by the way, red pill comes from like the matrix where it's like, do you want? If you take the blue pill, you go back into the matrix and you just live like a sheep again. And you just don't question anything or do you want the truth? And that's the thing, you're trying to give people the truth in a way that they're not, that they haven't been told. And then you can become known for that. And so I think that's important.

• 46:53Shaan Puri?

  That's a very useful tool. I think some other tools are speaking from the I. Um, I, I, I've found great success in this, which is a lot of people in, um, the more successful that they get, they'll just keep saying you like a fortune cookie, like, oh, you, you gotta do this, you gotta do that. You know, when you feel this way, you gotta try doing this. And it's like, it's much more powerful when you're like, you know, uh, I was feeling this way or I was going through this. I had this experience and it made me think. This, but what I need to do differently is I need to do this. It's a much more, I think in general it's good for personal accountability to speak from the eye. But secondly, I think it plays really well to content because it's different than what everybody else is doing.

• 47:35Shaan Puri?

  So same thing, personal stories and speaking from the eye, I think works. But like the high level things is, you know, you could be either a generous expert sharing your knowledge and expertise, or you could be a curious novice. And a curious novice is somebody who's just going through, like you're saying, you're just typing out the transcripts. You're just finding interesting clips and sharing it. You're remixing, packaging, curating and presenting, you know, stuff as a beginner's point of view, rather than saying, I know everything. So you've got to know what areas are you an expert in and what areas are you going to be a curious novice? And then use both in your content. And the last is just, I don't know, don't quit and go viral like that. That's ultimately like, if you want to win, don't quit and like find ways to go viral or you won't grow. So if you're just, you're only going to remember two things on the strategy is like, don't quit and go viral.

• 48:20Shaan Puri?

  I would say is the takeaway.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  I could talk to both of y'all for another hour. This is awesome. Yeah, just the nuggets at the end, nonstop. I think we're going to create an illustration of this to capture a lot of those things. So stay tuned for that. Yeah, thank you both so much for spending your time with us today. This was a ton of fun.