Audience Building & Monetization Mastery with Corey Haines

Yeah. Those all ways I describe myself, but creator, I guess technically is maybe the closest thing to what I am given that it's not a software business. It's not a service. It's

And basically I was, wasn't a learning experiment trying to figure out what could we do better? What are the opportunities? So I sent out a whole bunch of emails. One of those conversations out of it was this guy who said, Hey, we're not a customer of X, Y, and Z. I would love to elaborate why, but also we're looking to hire someone like you and I love what you're doing. And can I pick your brain about your job and maybe how we can find someone like you just said, great.

Sounds like an even swap. I get to ask more questions and then he can ask me some questions. So basically I asked him my questions about parametrics, and then he asked me, Hey, so you may want to hire someone like you has. He asked me a few questions about what I was doing, and I said, cool. And where do you think we should post the job description and actually advertise it? And I said, I normally pay attention to. The remote job boards. Like we work remotely remote.

Okay. He said, well, we're not a remote company. It's actually in the office and said, okay, you could go to like angel list. Yeah, it's already there, but it's not getting that much traction. And then he was like, man, I wish there was a job board just for marketers because it's such a good niche. And I just feel like even a lot of the popular job boards appeal to and cater to like product focused roles, programmers, designers, product managers is man.

If I had some extra time, I'll just spin that up. Yeah. I had just seen. So I was an early customer of Ben tassel at microbead, before his maker cat was called my NewCo. And he had just rebranded into maker pad and launched a couple of tutorials around Webflow. And specifically one was how to create a job board of left low. So I just seen that a week or two before. And so I can have a Eureka moment, whereas I was like, oh, that's a really good idea.

I was like, Hey, what if I had built a job board? Would you be the first customer? Would that be interesting? He was like, oh yeah, totally. So the next three weekends, I carved out and nights and weekends just spent spending up the job board. I built it out, launched it. He became the first customer and launched it on prototype. And then the job board was a thing fast forward to November of this last year, I actually sold the majority stake to this guy named rich Barnett, who is the founder of.

But anyways, built it all with no code. So that was one of my sort of projects that I built. I also created two courses, so a mental models for marketing and refactoring growth. And so they're both really comprehensive big courses. I actually built both the courses each in about 30 to 45. Well, the first one, the third year, it's the second one to 45 days.

And basically the only thing that got me to kick into gear was setting a public goal on Twitter and basically saying, Hey, I want to launch this thing on December 2nd. Then I was like, all right, I'll have to have something to show for this. And I had to pull a couple of all nighters and it was a very busy month in November of 2019 when I was working on that, but made it happen. And those are both been very successful.

And then I started swipe files in March of 2020, and then essentially rolled the courses. Uh, into the swipe files brand as part of the product offering. Okay. So tell me a

And it came time to create the landing page to recruit affiliate partners. I was like what? That goes on a landing page for an affiliate program for a B2B software company or product. Like I've never done this before. I haven't seen that many examples. So I had to go and do a bunch of research, ask a bunch of people and then finally figured out like, okay, this is what goes on here. Here's like a good example to model after.

And so anyways, that was like, the thought was, I'd build up this library of these marketing examples and these tear downs. But then it also had this thought in the back of my mind, like one of the other ideas that I wanted to create was a marketing community because I had been a part of a couple of slack channels and a couple of forums, but I never really got connected. And I really felt a part of a group and really dug into a marketing community.

This, maybe this is one of those things that I have to build myself. Hold on. And, um, yeah, so

One to many, whereas a community. Yeah. You interacting, but also them interacting with each other many, too many. So, yeah, I think there's a big distinction there. So that's how I think about the difference. There is one to many, like my newsletter is not a community. It's an audience. There's 6,000 people that subscribe, but they don't have any idea who each other is or interact with each other in any way. My community though, the actual swipe files community that's built on circle.

I would say that's not my audience. Like I don't have the largest voice there. There's a lot of interaction that goes on there without me. And so it's definitely not my audience. It's a community. So like I said, yeah, it's really not. There's some very important

So at the very largest sphere and circle is a borrowed platform. So this is basically any time that you can get in front of someone else's audience. And then in the middle, we have rented platforms, which is basically like a meeting ground it's things like social media, and as things like having a byline on a publication, Being listed in some sort of directory, right? Where basically a meeting, right?

You don't own it, but you have a place there and you have rights there and you have certain control, but things are also subject to change. And then we have the owned platforms and the own platform is where you have a direct line of communication with your audience and or community. And I think what a lot of people find is when they talk about building an audience, what they really mean is building out that owned plan. Where they want to get subscribers to their newsletter.

They want to get traffic to their website. They want to build out their community. They want to build out the customer base, et cetera. The hard part of that is that it's speaking into the void when you don't have anything to start. Yes.

In places that people are already interacting. And so the first couple of things that I did was I started interacting with a lot of people on Twitter and I started just commenting, liking, dropping in people's DMS. So making connections and then following and following back, really just my first 500 to a thousand followers on Twitter were really just like these one-to-one kind of hand-in-hand. Of audience-building and it really, I wouldn't even call it audience building.

It's more like networking essentially. Cause what you're trying to do is you're trying to build friends and relationships and you're trying to just meet people in expands by going around and just meeting people. And I also was doing things like when I was at Baremetrics I would invite people to do webinars with us. And so then they get to borrow our audience, but also I get to be like the face of bare metrics. So I got to leach off of the bare metrics brand a bit.

And I don't mean that in a condescending way. I quite literally. You're doing a public facing things, but then also I would be invited to do workshops for other communities. For other workshops. I was writing guest posts, appearing on other people's podcasts, occasionally writing newsletters for them. And basically I was just showing up and adding value to others.

People's audience and other communities as well, both on Twitter, within slack channels, within a few other places, private communities as well. And that in turn started to grow the rental platform, which is my Twitter audience, where I get more and more followers there. And it wasn't until maybe about a year or two ago that I started to get a little bit more serious about Twitter. And then really it's all about content.

And you have to understand the mechanisms of how to get discovered and how to get in front of more people. But when I started getting serious about Twitter, then it's a lot about content, production and consumption. And so then I was posting a lot on Twitter. Then I was actually intentionally going out and I was appearing on other people's podcasts and workshops, writing guest posts. I was collaborating with a lot of people.

Like I said, doing the workshops with people at parametrics, making a lot of connections and friends, especially with people who already had bars, audiences. So, anyways, so to summarize, I always think about it through eventually want to get people to your own platform, right? Your newsletter, your blog, your community, your text message list or podcasts, but it's yours goes directly to people, but you have to do that.

But. Building your rental platforms showing up, going to places like Twitter and LinkedIn getting listed places. And then even to do that, you'd have to borrow other people's audiences. And that's really about how can I add value to this person? How can I make it a win-win collaboration and to get exposure to new people and that

Experience things for yourself, even though there's a huge difference between creating something for someone else versus creating for yourself, it's just a much different, more intimate, more valuable learning experience. And so I just wanted to get things out there. I think it's really a muscle to learn how to make money on the internet, to be honest. It really takes a lot of practice to understand what's valuable to people and how to build something that people that's worth paying for.

Essentially, it's not that I wanted the money necessarily, but I wanted to build something that was valuable enough for people to pay for. And I wanted to test that through charging money. So all of them definitely had monetization in mind, but that looked very differently. For, Hey marketers. I started out by just allowing people to pay what they want. So the whole thing was built with no-code tools that informed the payment system and like how you posted a job was built through Typeform.

And, um, so it basically allowed me to say, like building a question, this is like, how much do you want to pay? And then people can. $1 or a thousand dollars and whatever it was like, that was okay with me because I wanted to just see what people paid for this on. That was actually a really invaluable, because allowed me to see what the kind of like floor and the ceiling was for the pricing and how people thought about it. How long did you let that go on for through music? I think excellent.

All in the last couple of months I just changed. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So we've got a lot of data points in there. I think basically, uh, where it ended up was there was like this kind of happy medium where like at the meat and the average and the most common prices were usually between 49 and $99 per posting. But for the courses that was actually really scary. I thought about releasing them for free just as like a, but I got encouraged by a couple of people to charge since.

Yeah. We're spending so much time on it. Like I think I probably put in 50 hours for each one through like content creation. I was doing like these one take videos, but there's 40 plus videos for each one. And each video is between 15 and 45 minutes. That's a lot of time and a lot of recording. And it was also like publishing all the admin and operations stuff.

But I also just wanted to see again, if I could do it, I especially wanted to see like a pre-sale and both of those pre-sold very successfully, I think for the courses, even in live each one, pre-sold about $3,000 worth of sales. And then. When I actually launched within the first week, they reached about 10,000 and then they sold very well since then. But basically my pricing strategy was quite literally what's the minimum. I would be willing to accept if I discount it by 50%.

And so for mental models for marketing, I started with $200 and then I could discount them. 50% and still charge a hundred bucks for people to buy in the presale. And when I launched and then for refactoring growth, I decided to basically double that price. I actually charged 500 and then I would, pre-sell at two 50 and both are really valuable learning lessons. And then for swipe files, the monetization strategy wasn't as clear. I was just curious honestly, to see if people would pay for it.

And I was actually very surprised to see how many people did, but that was like when this whole newsletter craze was just taking off. And so I wanted to see if people would even just pay 99 bucks. And so that's what I started charging. And then now, since then, I've just been like sweetening the pot. Now there's the newsletter, there's the community. There's the courses which are bundled in an upgraded package with all access membership. And it's all very like work in progress still.

But, but basically the sum of the modernization strategy is like, what's the least I can afford to the take to experiment and validate that there's demand here. And I haven't gotten any further than that. To be honest, the prices have changed very slightly. Slight iterations along the way. Do you use any

Again, with the courses also being bundled under that as a one-time sale. I think it technically does. You can do the math, right? So it does about 30,000 a year. The courses do much more than that though, to be honest. And there's also been some other one-time lifetime deal stuff in between, but definitely that's the primary one.

Who's an investor and founder of a tiny capital because this concept of what he calls a launchpad business. So his advice to always the people who are just starting out is to create a business for a basically it's not anything like world changing. It's not going to be a billion dollar business. It's probably also not like a very technically complex business, but it's just something that pays your bills and allows you to go and then work on other things.

That could open up your time or financial opportunity for something world changing or bigger or more complex later on Rob walling. Also, he was the co-founder of drip. Now he's the founder of tiny seed and accelerator for bootstrap businesses. Also hosted a startups for the rest of his podcasts. He also has this idea of what he calls the stair stepper approach to entrepreneur.

So his advice is for people to start with a one product, one channel business, and it's usually they go a one-time sale as well. And so we think about something like SEO, like an affiliate blog, for example, right. I take Google's the one source of traffic. The product really is like the content you're writing blog posts. And then by the one-time sales, like I feel like commissions. And then step two is something.

That has one channel, maybe with one or two products, but maybe it's like a recurring. So maybe this is more like a membership type business, like swipe files or it's something really simple, a Shopify app. For example, it's built on another platform. A Chrome extension still has very limited distribution, but have some sort of a recurring nature to it. But it's still a very simple product and like step three is optional. Right. But another helping step is some sort of prototype.

So it's gonna be like an agency, a consultancy, some sort of done for you package where you can rinse and repeat the same kind of services. And then step four is software tech, consumer businesses. E-commerce multichannel, multiple products, very complex. So the idea is you step up to those, right? You work out to them because they're harder. They take more, they take more experience, but they're also a lot more financially rewarding and even maybe emotionally or spiritually rewarding as well.

So the idea for swipe. To be that launch pet business to be like that step two, if you will. And marketers and the courses were like that step one, swipe files with step two, I still do a lot of consulting and I've done prototype services around mentoring and coaching, and kinda like these done for you, audits and packages for a B2B, SAS startups. And so next up is SAS and software.

And that's why I'd eventually like to get to once I have the finances taken care of and some of the time freed up as well.

When in reality, I think that a lot of your success comes from who, you know, but also who knows you again with this whole practice of borrowing other people's audience. A lot of that comes through relationships and networking and who can make an intro for you. And so I think friends and just allies are super, super important on that second bit around just create a lot. But I think I did a good job of my reps and sets in with like products and products.

But not on the like content production side of things of what am I learning? Who am I, what do I know? What's my domain kind of knowledge and expertise. And the content creation part is really what helps you to build an audience, to get an unfair advantage around again, who knows you, right? And then once you have an audience, then you can figure out what to sell them or what to build for them.

How to build a business around a group of people that you love and you want to serve, but it's always a grind. And another thing happens on time. Everything takes longer than that. And so learning to enjoy the process think is a big part of it. Just to give yourself some longevity and stay sane along the way. Cause it's not. Do you