Show Them the Way

Happy Sunday!

What a week! I flew to Nashville to pressure wash a house, went on a 50 mile bike ride, recorded 4 podcasts, worked a ton, saw Taking Back Sunday with my son and ate some delicious food.

My episode with the Walt Disney of youth baseball went live. (Apple or Spotify) and that was a ton of fun. I’m obsessed with the fact that he treats every baseball concession item like the nightly special at a 5 star NYC restaurant. In rural Texas! Just crazy. I’m driving out there in a couple weeks to film a “behind the scenes” of the business.

What are we waiting for!? I’ve got my office buddies bringing their families over in a few hours for some CK-made BBQ, and I haven’t even started the fire yet!

I want to plant more business ideas in your head today. And before you click out of this email, please read these 3 bold sentences:

The ideas I’m discussing today all revolve around how and why you should partner with people that have existing, under-monetized audiences, to put gasoline on the growth of your product or service.

This email is NOT about “how to become a creator” or how to build an audience email. 99% of people don’t care about that (and they shouldn’t), so I’m not writing about that.

But 99% of you DO want to start or grow a business. Right? This email will make your quest to do that much more achievable.

I noticed several things at once this week, which was my signal that I had to write the newsletter about the idea/topic.

Observation #1:

As my son and I were waiting for Taking Back Sunday to come out on stage, something interesting happened.

All of the sudden, we heard the voice of the lead singer, Adam Lazzara come over the loudspeaker, and say something along the lines of,

“Hey everyone! We’ll be out shortly. While you’re waiting, please pull out your phones, open your browser and type in set.live. If you enter your email you’ll be automatically entered to win a shirt and a personalized video from me! See you soon.”

Hmm…I thought. I’ve been to around 130 different shows and concerts like this, and I’ve never once experienced this. It was an ad! My mind started racing with thoughts like…

This is brilliant. There’s a 3,000-person captive audience here. Why aren’t more companies partnering with bands to do this?

How else could this be done? What other types of products or services could be sold?

Who is set.live and how much did they pay for this? (I still don’t know either of those things)

There’s 80 dates on this tour, so 300 - 500,000 different people will be hearing this message!

What other types of performers could do this?

Was it a little annoying to hear this ad? Yeah, because everyone thought he was speaking because they were about to come out. It felt like a slight bait and switch. But then minutes later they actually did come out, and we forgot all about any annoyances.

Observation #2:

I was scrolling Tiktok and saw an unusual video from a funny creator I’ve been following for years. This was the video. I’ll save you 3 minutes, this is what he was saying

• I’m broke

• Please help me

• Would appreciate a Venmo because I can’t pay rent.

He has 2.3m followers! It blows my mind that someone with that many eyeballs can’t make a dime off it it. I don’t think he was lying, either.

Usually he just puts out silly, funny videos. So this was definitely a break of character.

Observation #3:

Do you follow the Nature is Metal IG account? 6.2m people watching videos of animals attacking other animals.

IT’S AWESOME!

And how do they monetize? Stupid T-Shirts! Talking about lowest and worst use of an audience.

Do dentists learn how to be good business owners in dental school? NOPE. What does that mean? There’s a billion dollar industry that revolves around helping dentists be better at business.

Marketing, accounting, HR, etc.

Creators get popular because they’re great at creating. The chance that they also happen to be great at business is about 5%, which is why you have guys like Logan Paul and Mr. Beast. For the other 95% of creators out there, they’re waiting on you to slide into their DMs.

They’re lost and need your direction, whether they know it or not. They’re kept from the truth because they know not where to find it.

They don’t need someone with a Harvard MBA or amazing track record. They need someone with a business brain. What’s a business brain? Here’s my definition that I wrote a while back but never published:

People always ask me "How can I think of a good business idea?"

My response? You can't. It doesn't work like that. You're asking the wrong question entirely.

If you're asking that question it's because you don't have a business mind. Develop a business mind & the ideas will flow.

How to develop a business mind?

Start reading books about entrepreneurship.

You know your uncle that owns a flooring company? Sit down and talk to him for a few hours.

Sell some stuff around the house on FB Marketplace.

Spend hours on SMB Twitter, listen to SMB podcasts.

Do business things for a long period of time and 1 of 2 things will happen.

1. You don't like it. Cool, that's great. Stop worry about business ideas and get back to work. Your life actually just got a lot less stressful. This is good.

2. You love everything about business and you can't turn off the idea machine that your brain just became.

At this point the right question to ask is

"How do I pick the right idea?"

Now THAT is the golden question.

Not should I start this business, but which business should I start?

And the answer to that is a longer tweet for another day. But it took me over a decade to learn how to ask myself that question.

Taylor Swift doesn't sit around and brainstorm song ideas. They come to her freely as she lives life, because music is her entire life and always has been.

The greater share of your brain that you allocate to business, the more business ideas you will get.

Ok, so let’s lead with the assumption that almost everyone reading this either has a business brain or has the desire to develop one.

That means you’re the perfect fit to partner with a creator.

And by “creator” I mean anyone that is deliberately trying to build an audience on any platform via any method.

Maybe it’s comedy, or sewing, or cooking or music. It doesn’t matter. Audience = attention and attention = eyeballs and eyeballs = $$$.

It can even be in business! Because many business creators out there don’t know how to actually sell things, or they don’t know what to sell or what to promote.

When I saw that Tiktok video of the guy asking for money I did 2 things:

1. I sent him money on Venmo.

2. I attached a note to that money offering to help him monetize.

Teach a man to fish, right?

What’s my idea for him? I don’t even know yet! Maybe I can hire him to work for me on the RV park side of things. He could start looking at RV park deals with me and talks about what he’s learning in videos to attract investor interest.

He never responded. White whales usually don’t.

Other Ideas:

Nature is Metal could partner with tour guide services that offer:

• Swimming with sharks

• Scuba diving

• African Safaris

And send business their way for a 20% cut of the profit. That could be thousands of bucks! You’ve gotta sell and ship a TON of t-shirts to make a thousand bucks in profit.

The offer HAS to be in line with the persona of the audience.

You can’t sell SEO agency services to dudes that just wanna watch a bear and a croc fighting. «— BTW that might be the first time that sentence has ever been used.

What about the Taking Back Sunday example?

Imagine how many people are

• Public speakers

• Comics

• Musicians

Well, ChatGPT estimates that there are this many people that regularly perform to large audiences.

We’ll call it 2,000.

Have you ever even heard of Taking Back Sunday? Probably not. That goes to show how much opportunity there is.

Here’s the lead guitarist on IG. Only 23k followers. I bet you he’d respond if you bugged him enough!

What’s the pitch?

“You guys need a podcast, and I’ll manage it all for you. It only takes ~100 daily new podcast subscribers to rank in the top 50 of Apple’s Podcast charts in any given category. You play to 30x more people than that every single night. I launch the podcast for you, and you just ask everyone in the audience to pull out their phones and subscribe on the spot.

You’ll be a top 5 music podcast your first week, which = X downloads which = Y revenue. That’s more than you made on your last album! And all you have to do is hit record and talk about anything you want. I’ll manage the ad sales, editing, publishing, etc, and take a 30% cut. You don’t have to do anything.”

They already have an agent for other stuff. You’re their podcast agent.

Conclusion

There’s 3 ideas for you today of how you can partner with creators to make money. (Nik and I spoke about this topic on my podcast yesterday in more detail, but it won’t be live for a week or two.)

You don’t need to be a big shot or a billionaire. You just need to exude confidence and have a business brain.

How to reach these creators? Read my white whale newsletters here.

Happy Sunday! I gotta go throw a log on the fire.

Top Tweets of the Past Week

1. My Favorite Inventor

2. Walt Disney of Youth Baseball

3. New Trend

4. The Business of Summer Camps

5. An MBA from Twitter

As always, thanks for reading! Please share with a friend.

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com