You already know it's the creative spaces show. Do you consider yourself a creator?
Yeah. Than ever before. I used to be just an engineer because that was my self perception. I come from a computer science background, although I really come from a coding background, let's be honest. Like I, I love to build things left to code. Never really considered myself a scientist as much as I liked science, obviously. And I read a lot about it as a kid and I always wanted to be like an academic. I never turned out to be one. I went to university. For computer science.
I dropped out over there because it was just too sciency and not computering enough. And then coded for multiple companies built. I guess reputation as a software engineer. And I thought always, that's what I was going to be like from my, my, the rest of my life. But then I became an entrepreneur and that kind of started dissolving the self-image of being just a software engineer. And then I started writing about it and that this solved my self image of just being an engineer and a founder.
And now I'm all of these things at the same time. And the one thing that unites all of these things is that I create. So yes, absolutely. I've been a creator and I've been a creator before, even when I didn't consider myself to be one it's just, now that I actually. That I am a creator.
It's one of these things where you don't think you're a writer until you published, but if you write everyday, you are a writer, no matter what other people say and anything beyond that is just your perception of what people are supposed to say to you when you are a writer. And if you are creating stuff, no matter what it is, then you are a creator. And I definitely consider myself. I
think that's one of the core messages of the show that too many people don't consider themselves creators don't consider themselves part of the creator economy as much as I dislike that term, because it's a new term that got branded to describe a very specific class of people. And in reality, it's a term that has to expand and that's what the investors see. That's the way it's sort of the bigger picture sees.
But if you're in it every day, writing code making apps, or if you're just putting out tweets every day, You're a creator at the end of it. Yeah, absolutely.
And there's no distinction in quality. Like if you tweet every day and you engage people and make things, think about things that they've never thought before, then you are an amazing creator. It doesn't matter if you can draw. And just in quotes here, just write treats you're impacting people's lives. That's all that matters like by creating is making an impact and it doesn't matter how you do it. It just meant that to you. You don't need to be approved to be a creator. Most people already are.
You mentioned that the, you create companies and code and books. Are we leaving anything out? That's
a good question. The thing is, all of this is connected. So maybe what I'm actually creating is connection. And that comes on many different levels, right? Obviously there's the connection between the things that I'm doing. I wrote a book about building a business, which is here to sold. And then I write a book about building an audience, which is the embedded entrepreneur. And they're connected because they both are about building a life. On in self-finance kind of path.
Then I also have a newsletter and I have a podcast and I have my Twitter presence and they all connected because the content from one goes into the other. And then there's this flywheel effect where people find me at one place and they make their way to all the other places. And all of a sudden they see. So much more. So there's this kind of connection, the semantic connection, but there's also the personal connection. And I think that's what I'm proudest off.
That I can actually create connection between people in my Twitter following so many people that I started following maybe half a year ago. They never talked to each other before and now I see them chatting. Now I see them commenting on each other's posts, highlighting each other's works, empowering each other, inviting other people into the conversation. Now that is something that I'm actually super proud. It's great to write a book.
I'm, I'm extremely happy that my books have received the kind of attention that they got, but the actual connection between people that I see every single day, because I spent way too much time on Twitter that is worth all this work for me.
And so how do you build your audience?
I'm actually doing what I'm already doing, which is I regularly write about things that I find interesting and that I want other people to think about because I'm now at a stage where I have a sizable audience, so I can set the tone of what I'm talking about. I can go and engage with people where they already are, but I can also bring in content that I want other people to consider. So I do this every week.
I have this little accountability system in a shape of a newsletter and a podcast that kind of keep me engaged every week, forcing myself to write and to record
newsletter or a podcast, which
do you like that? Honestly, it's the same thing. That's also a content reuse is a big concept for me because I read one thing a week and I put it on my blog. I read it to my podcast essentially. And I put it in yeah, a newsletter so that people who are, have different approaches to consuming content, both reading or listening, they get it in a shape that fits for them. But it's still the same content I write about one particular topic every week.
Obviously I also write a couple of books every night. But the main thing is every week, there's one kind of anywhere between 1,004 thousand words, kind of article or essay or whatever I can come up with. And that's the main story of the week and everything else revolves around that. That's how I built my audience when it comes to content. And then obviously I engage with people as much. I tried to join conversations. I try to empower people when they have something, have a question.
I try to reach out and get other people involved. I retweet quote, tweet, respond, give my opinion. I try to give advice where it's fitting and I try to be as present in their communication as possible. So that's how I build an audience, but it's mostly the things I like to do anyway, help people and write about stuff that I can. Has it
changed along the way? Did you start out growing differently?
Yeah. And in the beginning I talk more about things that people were already talking about. So one of the concepts that I described in the book as audience audition, go to where people already hang out audiences of other people and look at what they're talking about, what topics do they come. Talk about what is going on in their community and how can I add my valuable content or add my opinion in some valuable form to that conversation.
I did that more in the beginning and that the first initial, a couple of blog posts that I wrote for the boots are found at, which is my blog were sourced from those communities. And then I just got my opinion in there. Cause I had just built and sold a company with my partner, Danielle, we just had all this knowledge and I had an opinion. I had a perspective, right? So let's just put it into a shape that most accessible to people where they will already having that conversations.
That was my initial approach. And over time I reduced this, disbalance more to a 50 50, where I talk about what's going on in the community half the time. And the other half is just me pushing out my thoughts, hoping that some people will be inspired or at least thinking about the content that I put up. Because that's all I really want for everything that I write. I want one only one person to have a thought about it that helps them just want to help one person. And that's enough. I
think that lines up perfectly with the idea of like 1% better every day. Just making that one little action. How do you go about
monetizing now? I have two info products. That's really all I have. I still do consulting whenever there's something interesting going on, but you know what, since we sold our business, all I wanted to do is build a life that is completely on my own terms. Like financial security and empty schedule. It's the best thing I can. And they don't want to badmouth our conversation here today. But when I wake up and there's nothing on my calendar, now, those are the best dates,
exact same way. Every day.
No, honestly, consulting is fine too, but it's like, somebody else depends on you and you need to be there and all that. I don't want that. I want a life that is completely under my own control in all regards like financial and scheduling wise content wise. That's my dream. That's my goal is to do whatever I want to do. So I monetize that in a way that allows for that, which is through passive income through info-products.
Sell themselves when I sleep, but I have two books out CEO to sold the first book I ever wrote. And now the embedded entrepreneur, which I launched last Wednesday here on Twitter and just today on product hunt. But I launched that because I first off, I want to help people because the book is a consolidated version of all the advice that I've been giving over the last couple of years. So it, it comes in an easier to consume shape than going through all my tweets. It's just not as enjoyable.
So that's why there's a book out there and yeah, they are info-products and I did that consciously. I created info products for people to buy because honestly, most of the content that's in the books is halfway available either in my blog or in what I tweet about. It's just another shape of what I'm already offering for free. But it's a way for people to give back to me.
And if I found anything to be efficient in this kind of audience, building community, building space, it's the concept of expectable reciprocation. The idea that if you give and give and give, and some point people are unable not to give back. It's just the human condition. We have to feel like we are in an equal. Balanced situation in a relationship. And if you're out there, something for free to people every single day and they benefit from it, they cannot help giving you something back.
And that's how I do it. That's what I really enjoy because honestly, writing a book is a lot of fun for a person that APA until a couple of years ago probably would have called myself an introvert. But now that I've found my community of people who are like me and understand.
Somewhere more in the middle of the spectrum for people who love to work on something in isolation, and then get some feedback, loops, get feedback from their prospect audience, prospective readers and build something really cool with them. And for them that's the best way I can imagine creating. Because I get to say what I want to say, then people tell me, no, I don't understand this. Say it better than I make it better. And then they say, okay, this is cool.
And then they buy it, like, how could this not be more enjoyable, right. Or how could this ever be more enjoyable? So that's why I'm going for info products. The fact that I don't have to actively sell them, I don't have to do sales calls, but I can do marketing. I can present the contents to the market and they decide if they buy it or not is just the icing on the cake and judging from my launches just last weekend.
Right now I'm in the middle of it, where 428 people have uploaded this into the number one spot on product. Then I'm still going to try and stay up for as long as possible to just to be able to answer the questions that people ask me. And those are those few moments in between. And maybe that's an interesting thing to talk about.
Like info products are products that are essentially completed at some point, unlike software, where you build a SAS and then you build new features and then some customer needs a new feature or a new integration as possible. And you need to constantly update yourself. Obviously SAS mechanics when it comes to monetization are much more interesting because that the marginal cost of SAS is mostly zero. So you can add a new customers, creates a lot of revenue, which is great.
And there's no recurring revenue in info-products unless you have some sort of community subscription course mix, which I don't. I only sell the books and that's pretty much. And I think that's fair because I don't want to milk this. I just want people to fairly compensate me for my time and effort that I put into this and then learn and build their own business is really what I'm going for.
But yeah, unlike as it's finished, books are done and all I can do now is have these little moments, like what we're doing today, where I can actually engage with people, can reach out to people, tell them about what I did and then have them look at it. And I enjoy that. I enjoy that whole process of reaching out and talking to people a lot. So there's like today, our funding.
Yeah. I really liked that idea of finding and developing that sort of lifestyle and that work that keeps you motivated because I can just hear how excited you are to talk about this sort of stuff and to get into it and go do more of it. And I think if you can't get that excited about something, you're never going to make it. What's your north star metric for success. It's
hard to answer because I try to stay away from putting numbers as a metric, which is hilarious to say, because that's really all that metrics are because anything you measure you'll optimize for, and then you over optimize for it. And it kind of distorted the thing that you wanted to do. But the amount of times that I feel good about an interaction, that would probably be it. That's something you could mostly quantify in a day.
That is important to me because when people read my stuff and he tells me. I read your book. It had helped me with this. Those messages are the best kind of comments you could give me. So I guess, yeah, that would be my metric, the amount of reviews and feedback that I get on how much of an impact I had on somebody's professional or personal journey, whatever it is, that would be something that I would like to measure more. And we'd like to optimize more for it because obviously it's a win-win.
So that will be my answer here.
So Arvin, what's your current goal as a
creator? Well, to educate people when I'm asleep, that is one of the biggest goals. The idea is to help and educate as much as I can at scale. And that's where an info product that is recommended by people to their peers works best. So that that's where I'm going with. All I'm doing right now in a second book us out, trying to get.
Ranking on Amazon, get people talking about it, get people, actually reading it and implement it in their business lives, which is like I said, the most important thing to me. I don't care how much I make on every sale. What I'd want is that you make more on something that you learned from the book, and then just continue building on this. Working on my third book. So I'm currently in the still a bit secret outlining and theme finding stage.
So I won't really talk much about the specific topics, but definitely working on another one to empower as many people as I can. Okay. Whatever they want to do.
If you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? And when would it be? Oh, wow. That
is a really cool question. I would try to tweet back to me the day I joined. Which is like somewhere in 2009. And I was just really tell myself to try providing value in every single interaction, like trying to help people and empower people every single time you start typing something because adding value to interact. Is generating this whole flywheel effect. People are interested in you because you give them something meaningful that they didn't think of before they look at you.
They start following you. They start being interested in what you're doing, and that's the whole building public thing in a way, because people start rooting for you. They want to see you succeed. So they will help you case in point is the product launch it today. And even the product hunt launch ended a year ago, which is on the, I think the 30th of June last year in 2020. When I orange Sierra to sold, I had 4,000, some followers back then on Twitter, which is already substantial.
And they helped me get to, I think it was number two product of today because I had been giving them stuff value every single time I talked to them. And I only understood that in 2019, at the end of the year, when I started really using Twitter, not just as a place to lurk on, but also a place to engage and interact with people. So that would be my message.
I would probably give it an a, in a more succinct way than say, provide value every time you engage with somebody, but that would be the most tweetable. So I guess that would be it. Um,