Meet the CEO making creators like MKBHD easy money | #33

Transcription

Daniel: Welcome to Connection Accepted. I'm so excited today. We've got a great guest on. We've got Will Bauman from Fourthwall. Will, thanks for joining us. Matt: Yeah, it's great to be on. Thanks for having me, guys. Daniel: Awesome. So Will, for people who don't know who you are or what Fourthwall even does, do you mind just giving a quick background on where you're from, who you are, what you guys are working on? Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Will Bauman, co-founder, CEO at Fourthwall. I grew up in Tampa, Florida, moved out to New York for about 10 years and then moved out to LA about five years ago when I started at Fourthwall. Very simple. The way I used to scream from Fourthwall is like merch for YouTubers, right? We do a ton more than that, but that's where we started. I would say for our business model in our space, there's like two major players in the industry. There's Shopify, who's like enormous and wildly successful. Matt: I'm sure both of y'all have heard of. And Shopify is really built for people who want to run e-commerce brands full-time. But there's this whole other segment of people who have some creative passion that really isn't running an e-commerce company as a full-time job, which is like every YouTuber, but increasingly it's every podcaster like y'all. Hopefully soon. It's every Twitch streamer. It's every musician. Taylor Swift isn't personally running her merchandise and apparel and online beauty brands, right? Like somebody else does that. It's every startup and nonprofit, coffee shop, elementary school. So we're really targeting folks like that who want to launch fashion brands without actually worrying about supply chain or customer support or sales tax or logistics or any of that stuff. That's what we all do. Tech platforms that enables you to launch a premium brand within 5-10 minutes and we'll take care of like all the logistical details. So it's more of an atoms company meets bits company, but yeah, I've been doing that for about a little over five years and or six years at this point. And yeah, going great. Daniel: Can you give the audience some examples too of creators you've worked with and what you helped them do? Matt: Yeah, exactly. So a couple of creators off the cuff, MKBHD. We power his MKBHD.com. So if you go to his site now, you can check it out. It's his homepage, sort of link in bio. He also sells lots of his merchandise. Matt: Everyone else from Cleo Abram, Coffeezilla, in the podcast space, we power The Acquired podcast, guys in the business world, Sanagato Studios, or the Basement Yard podcast. We power like, I think, 10% of the top hundred podcasts on Fourthwall. Let's see who else in the business world. We do Y Combinator, the whole Smithsonian Institute, New York Magazine, Anyway, it's like all across the board in terms of that. But a lot of people you would know were totally white-labeled platforms, so chances are we power a lot of shows you're familiar with, but may not see off the cuff. Daniel: That's so impressive. There are so many brands that both Matt and I are familiar with. How do you first start? So I guess let's just go even further back. How did you come up with the idea of a fourth wall and what kind of led you to that place? Matt: So initially, I was just a big fan of creators. I watched YouTube a bunch, and one of my co-founders, Walker, he had previously started a company called Teespring, if y'all are familiar with that. And we were chatting about like the creator space and how, like, there wasn't really a standard business model that worked and many of these folks are amazing artists, marketers, but not necessarily like always comfortable running in the business side. And that kind of sucked that there wasn't like an easy way for them to grow and make money and do that in like a way that made sense for their audience and their brand. Daniel: And so we kind of started Fourthwall of like monetization for creators and seeing if we were able to figure out something in that space. And we decided to start on physical products. We thought that was the hardest segment in the area to solve. And it was sort of the biggest unlock in terms of like where we wanted to begin with. So we built supply chain networks around that, custom storefront generators. But like day one, it was really like raise some money, hire some engineers and like start building this thing. And it really took us about a year and a half to get to like our quote unquote MVP point because like I didn't realize this starting, like building an e-commerce platform sucks. It's really hard. Like I'm sure every business is really hard and like I totally empathize with that. But like, man, it was like a lot to like doing simple things of like inventory management. Like, you know, don't always think about this, but if you oversell inventory, that's a big issue, right? Like if you, there's someone can only do a hundred items and you have a bug and you sell 10,000 items, not good. So building in their e-com platform was tough. We basically put that foundation in over a year and a half and then we really started go-to-market trying to get new customers along the way. And I'm sure like anything, you know, it's like getting... Your first hundred views, thousand views, thousand listeners is like, it's a slog. You have to, like, sell everybody one by one. Daniel: So it was like DMing everyone we knew, cold emailing everybody we knew, getting on, you know, if somebody replied five minutes, we'd be on a call just being like, let us pitch you this thing and then just like making it happen. The plat, you know, early on, we did a drop for, um, Linkin Park, uh, the band. And so I remember their team was in our platform. You couldn't even drag and drop the products into the right order, like the 50 products. And you couldn't move the right ones to the top. You'd have to literally like save each item so it would go to the bottom of the list. It was like an updated at thing. So our team would be in there if they wanted to make one edit, save 50 straight things to just like reorder the list perfectly. But you know, that's early on, right? And you just kind of make the platform slowly, iteratively better. We're like huge believers of like 1% better every day. Like every day we ship new stuff. We're like laser focused on making things better. No bugs, like everything's perfect and polished. And I think that ethos is really important because we're a white label platform, right? When Mark has for MKVHC.com, if you buy a product there, it's not obvious that Fourthwall is doing it. You won't see our branding anywhere. It's all his. And so if we fuck up, that's like visually his fault, right? So it's really critical we don't have any bugs. Daniel: It's really critical that the platform is polished because like that imbues trust for these individuals when they're selling through us that like when things are actually manufactured, that there's no misprints, there's no defects, there's no like stitch that's on the wrong side or that this one has a stain on it or the million, you know, other things that can go wrong in supply chain logistics stuff just works. And so like, we're really, really focused on like excellence from platform, you know, start to finish. Matt: Yeah, I love that, Will, you bring up the idea of quality being so important because of the nature of the product that you guys are selling and the, you know, the customer base, right? As a creator myself, I can totally empathize with, you know, someone like Marquez, for example, wanting to make sure that whoever he partners up with is, is going to do a very, very good job because at the end of the day, reputationally it's his face. Even if, you know, the platform breaks down, it has nothing to do with what he was doing. So I really like that you guys are super focused on that quality aspect. And I'm assuming like in the early days too, obviously, as you were iterating and improving on the platform, that was top of mind as well. Daniel: Yeah, for sure. I mean, quality is like critical throughout the board for us and just, you know, there's like I think fundamentally, it's just like, it's an oversight on a lot of platforms. Matt: I think we, we've never really tried to do like the true MVP where everything is like half broken. Like we really focused on like a quality end-to-end experience. And, you know, I'm sure a lot of people say that, but like the upside for us is like retention stats are spectacular. We have over 100% dollar retention, which means if a cohort of users started month one a year ago by month 12, they're selling more than when they started on the platform. And I think that really speaks to like the quality curve of just like, we're obsessive on the details, fast reply times, you know, things are always right. Things do go wrong, but we take care of it, right? It's just sort of a no questions asked policy. We will, we'll own it. If something goes wrong, if there's a manufacturing defect or whatever, we'll handle it. We'll correct it. We'll ship new things out to your customers that are like right. And so that's been really good for us from like a retention standpoint. Daniel: It's honestly unreal and so impressive how you're doing it. I mean, I'll I'll follow you on, on X and I'll see all your replies, anything that says Fourthwall related, you're always at the bottom. And I remember talking to you earlier about what you did on Reddit to grow and recline in the early days. Can you tell us that story? Matt: Yeah, for sure. So we have a ton of little like growth things. I'm sure like every, every company does. So for us on Reddit, um, we use Reddit as sort of like a growth marketing form. Matt: So again, we're white label product, which means nobody knows we exist. So we have to like be inserted into every conversation. What we would do is we first scraped and identified all the subreddits that were mentioning any of our competitors. This is pretty straightforward, but if you go on Google and do site, reddit.com and search, uh, one of your competitors' names, it'll list like the top subreddits that they're mentioned in. So we found all those subreddits. There were only like 10 of them. It's not like super exhaustive. Then for each one of those, we, we set a monitor. There's a tool called Billy buzz that we use for this, but we basically actively monitor each of those subreddits. And for every post that comes through, we use a ChatGPT filter or a simple AI prompt that will try to infer basically, is this a high intent question where the answer should be us? Or part two, is it a question that someone's like comparing to one of our competitors? And if one of those hits true with like 99% confidence and the, you know, the prompt stuff for all of that, that will then post in the Slack channel. It'll tag me or a virtual assistant who writes stuff for my team. And then, you know, we'll send a post from my account that'll say, Hey, so Will, I'm one of the co-founders of Fourthwall, you know, share some information that is both opinionated, authoritative, but not like sketchy in a sense. Matt: Like we're not trying to like AstroTurf the subreddits on like, you know, our accounts, but effectively from me and, you know, with a genuine... Reply for that. And those on Reddit, the faster you reply, the faster you get upvoted, faster you get upvoted, the more people comment and ask questions on that. And that became an early like growth strategy for us to just like help discovery. So did you set up that entire automation process internally yourself? Or like, how did you get... Because it's fascinating. I think that's super cool that you're able to do that. Daniel: Internally. Internally. I mean, it's like, I wish... You know, maybe there's like, eventually that could be its own company for us. It was just like, you know, a company that monitors Reddit to Zapier hook or Zapier hook, however you pronounce them to OpenAI prompt to Slack alert to human that goes and executes on that. But yeah, it's pretty easy. It just takes like an hour to set up. But yeah, we have like hundreds of little things like that. Another anecdotal one is like Trustpilot, for example. We really try to like push Trustpilot reviews because again, like white label platform, nobody knows who exists. If you do discover us, the first thing you're going to search is Forespall reviews or Forespall reviews Reddit, and you want to make sure that like that is presented in a way that does well and resonates. Daniel: So anytime somebody replies to our customer support team or creator support team with like an inquiry or, hey, this happened or that happened, we will take that information. We'll run that through a GPT prompt that basically tries to infer like, A, is this problem solved? And B, was this solved with like, you know, what was the sentiment? Is it like extremely positive or like meh? You know, when you read through the whole thread and if it's extremely positive, we'll follow up with like just a simple request of like, you know, hey, if you have a moment, would you mind leaving us a review on Trustpilot? And so, you know, sending that out to try to like encourage people at the right time in their journey to leave a review about our platform. And so that drives, you know, if you go to our Trustpilot today, you'll see a steady drip of reviews that are just a function of that. Matt: Do you do anything like this on LinkedIn too, or is that hard? Daniel: So LinkedIn, yes, but right now LinkedIn is mostly me running manually. Yeah. So this is something I do at some point plan to hire a ghostwriter because I kind of know the content arm that I want to do it. But right now I'm doing it. I'm busy, so I don't post as frequently as I should. Daniel: But to me, the meta on LinkedIn, and you'll probably know better from like the LinkedIn side, so maybe at the end of this, I'll ask you some questions to gauge, but like, I find LinkedIn is mostly around the hook, basically getting people to click to expand the post. So you have 20 words to like hook people so they click the three dots and be like, keep reading or read more is the starting point. And then I have a network of people that I'll just, whenever I do make a post, I'll be like, yo, could you comment, reply, like, repost. I like the little light bulb, I think is the most valuable of those I've heard. I'm not 100% sure if that's still the case, but like getting the little light bulb insightful emojis or any of the ones on LinkedIn, if you like long press that, like go kind of to the side charts of that. The basic like is the easiest, lowest friction point versus the long press is slightly higher in tint. So basically, you know, I text you guys and be like, yo, I just posted something. Can you all comment like whatever? And that's good for sort of the LinkedIn self. Right now that's just me and texting some of my folks, but I'd like to systematize that. So that'll be early next year. Matt: So that's huge. I want to dig in on that. And also like for your context, I run a ghostwriting agency. Daniel: So this is a very relevant topic that we can talk about, but so you mentioned like the time thing being sort of like the main barrier, but it seems like you've clearly seen that there is value in posting on LinkedIn. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like what kind of value have you maybe already seen, whether it's through like DMs from people or customers, investors, other creators? Matt: Yeah. So I would say our primary target user base is like YouTubers, podcasters, musicians, things like that. Those folks generally don't spend their time on LinkedIn with one exception is that I think LinkedIn is like the easiest social network to ramp up on today because it's very, it's like so cringed, right? Like, and so it's like the competition is very weak. So there's a number of creators who've gone there just to be like, this is so easy. And just like, you know, they have good polished content and like rip through the charts. But who actually spends a lot of time on LinkedIn is the managers, the agents, the larger entities that sort of are the business behind the talent in a lot of ways. And we often partner with them as well. And so that has been a really good and valuable growth channel for us is targeting those individuals. And that is largely a function of like trying to create content that engages with LinkedIn. Matt: So for us, that often looks like creating our own posts, but also giving replies to other posts who are like adjacent networks because your comments, if you're fast to comment there, you will get exposure to their whole network. So like Daniel, when you comment on any of my posts, my audience is going to see you and therefore get, you know, discovery about you as an individual writer. And that's going to drive followers back your way. So that's sort of how we've approached LinkedIn. Daniel: But, you know, selfishly, like probably once a week from these posts, I got a new inbound deal and that's like for one post. I think like whenever we really turn this into an engine, it'll be like dramatically higher. And I know folks who are getting one to two inbound leads a day, often with like, you know, 20,000 plus ACVs. Like, it's super valuable. First of all, completely agree with you. And I think a lot of founders, more founders, are definitely starting to realize just how big of a gold mine LinkedIn is. It's not like any other social media platform. Matt: It's hard to find anything comparable to it, quite honestly. And obviously, you have the decision makers, the people who control the budgets, active on the platform. I think there's some statistics like 90, 95% of all Fortune 500 CEOs are on the platform actively. And you know, when I previously was at my employer, Google, I worked with a lot of B2B marketers. Matt: In every strategy conversation where, you know, we were thinking about, okay, how can we most effectively market B2B products, LinkedIn was some component of it. And I think like the point you make about, you know, you make one post a week and maybe a lead or two comes through that. When you're talking about ACVs that are like 10, 20, 50K, like that could be a massive impact on the business. And so the ROI is there. I think more and more people are just taking time to become aware of it and then actually like take advantage of that. Daniel: Yeah. And it's something that like, again, for us, the managers and agents, these are like the WBEs, the CAAs, these often rep many of the largest, you know, musicians, podcasts, YouTubers, et cetera, in the world. And they spend time on LinkedIn. They're, you know, discovering, you know, they're either recruiting or talent acquisition or learning from other folks in their space who are doing unique and interesting things. Just existing and being present, it's like a steady drip of reminders that your company exists. Like the reality is like, nobody cares about your company in the world, right? Like you have to make people care, right? Like nobody's gonna come to you just because you threw up a website that just sits online, like, ever, right? Like, you have to constantly drive marketing eyeballs in order. Daniel: And you can either build that through distribution and building your own audience, which is like a slow process, right? It takes years of building audience. Or you can pay ads. And so that's the other thing we've seen as another effective LinkedIn channel is like anytime a post starts to pop off, especially if it's a collab post with a partner company, like, throwing some ad budget behind that will accelerate that so your reach can go from maybe 10,000 organic to a hundred thousand with like a little bit of paid spend behind it just to get iterative stuff. But for us, like at the top tier, many of the agent, you know, type deals are really high value ACVs. And so for us, just being that steady drip of content there, like the unit economics makes sense. It works. And I think that's like doubly true in like, you know, quote-unquote traditional B2B space where it's like a, you know, multimillion dollar ARR deal, where you're like licensing that up front. Matt: When you're doing these ads, are you doing them from the fourth wall company page, your page, or how are you thinking about ads on LinkedIn? Daniel: Yeah, a hundred percent from my page. So LinkedIn, I don't know if they officially do this, but like company accounts on LinkedIn get crushed. It's like banished to the shadow realm. Like if you're not posting on an individual account, you're in a world of hurt. And so we would only do it from an individual account, usually mine. Daniel: So I'll like on Twitter, we'll basically from the company's account and then I'll quote tweet it or reply or something like that as well. A bunch of people from the team. That's pretty effective there. On LinkedIn, you need to do the same post from personal accounts. Like company accounts just, it's not like a zero, you shouldn't, like not do it, but it just doesn't get anywhere near the traction that's relevant. So they'll all come from my post. Once I post, I will then message our internal Slack and text a few people like, hey, post is here. Can you please engage? Which usually looks like some combination of likes, comments, reposts, just to build out that initial network. And all the, again, I'm not sure if LinkedIn like captures that or has some penalty, but in general, there's like an initial velocity for posts that like tracks. So if you're kind of starting that curve and you get a lot more engagement early on, it matters, right? Like in terms of that versus if you post and there's no engagement for five hours, LinkedIn just kind of assumes like not that compelling versus like ton of early engagement. So immediately text my groups and especially like tangential networks, I think are really important. So like, it's better off in the sense that I post and I get your network to engage or your network to engage just as like my same circle all the time. Daniel: And then if one of those overperforms relative to the mean and like we're doing a collab post or with a partner company, we'll often throw some paid budget behind that. The process you described, it's exactly what Jason Cohen said, the same thing about only doing thought leader ads on his organic posts that do well and that posting on a company page, you might as well not post it at all. Matt: Yeah, exactly. It's just like again, we've tried both. I don't know if it's specifically penalized, but like. It goes nowhere. But on the flip side, like, you know, there's a famous, or not a famous saying, people follow people, not brands. Like if you look at Instagram's top hundred, I think Nike is the only brand there. And otherwise it's the Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashians, Cristiano Ronaldo's, like they're all humans, except for Nike. So it's just not something that people do in terms of like following the company. Daniel: You know, I, I think of it like, sorry, last thing is uh like athletes. I don't know if you're all sports guys, but there's a reason after all these games, they make these, you know, the players like stand in front of a mic after they've just, like, played their hearts out for three hours and answer stupid questions from the press, right? Because people follow people. They want to learn from like the humans that are behind it, as opposed to just the team. You want to, you want to like those players. You want to empathize with them. Daniel: You want to feel their pain or celebrate their wins. So. Yeah, I love that you're bringing that human aspect. I feel like on LinkedIn, especially, you know, it's a more buttoned up platform in general. I'm curious if, because I also want to talk about like what type of content you sort of observed has performed better in terms of engagement or reach. Something that we've definitely been noticing from other guests that we've spoken to, and also just personally posting on our own LinkedIn accounts is authenticity seems to do very well in terms of engagement on LinkedIn. Right. I think like that's probably, my hypothesis is one, obviously authenticity works across any social media platform, but two, especially on LinkedIn, where, you know, in the past, you probably wouldn't see any content outside of like, I'm happy to announce that in my next role. But I feel like, especially as like more and more of the users are from the younger generation there, you're seeing a lot more content that's sort of shifting in the direction of being a little bit more raw authentic. And obviously, you know, personal preference up to people like what level of, I think authenticity they want to portray in LinkedIn on social media. Daniel: But I'm curious from your point of view, from stuff that you've seen or content that you've posted yourself, what have you noticed has really like resonated the most with the audience? Matt: Yeah, I think things are, I think it's authenticity, authenticity, and then some sort of unique insight, right? Which is probably true of all platforms. Like, you know, people are like, oh, you got to promote it. Like, and that's a meaningful thing to that person in their life, but it's just, that's sort of the traditional drip feed versus, you know, something that's more like a real hook, like, you know, like with all grew more than 50% month over month for the, you know, last X months. Here's how we did it, you know, like, that's the sort of thing that's like a unique insight to our company that I think is the most compelling on a platform like LinkedIn, like LinkedIn, because you need that initial hook to get people to click to expand to see the rest of the post. The other like little tidbits I see a lot of selfies performing well or photo dumps on LinkedIn. Like I haven't found video comments to be especially performant overall. I know LinkedIn is pushing that and trying to encourage that, but like just going to an event and posting a photo dump from that event, like is very effective. I've seen in terms of that. And then some personal anecdote or insight, um, LinkedIn is a little more celebratory. I think Twitter is a little more raw in terms of like sharing failure. Daniel: I find LinkedIn is a little less like sharing the hard parts of business building. It's a little more like, here's the wins and people like to celebrate the wins there and the algorithm pushes that. It's a little like friendlier place, whereas Twitter is more just everyone dunking on everybody else. So, uh, yeah, so, but I would say it's like unique insights that generally, and I think that's true of all social, but LinkedIn especially. It's like unique insights that you have discovered from running your particular business or podcast or content creation or whatever your creative endeavor is. Like, that's the stuff that, you know, performs, I find a little bit outside because it's something you wouldn't learn otherwise. Matt: A hundred percent. I mean, the thing that you said about unique insights based on whatever it is that, you know, you're doing at your business or in your case, working with creators, I'm sure you have a lot of very interesting, insightful insights on creator behavior, what they care about, things like that, that other people are probably very curious about or could get a lot of value from. And, you know, we've done interviews recently with Ara Karazian, who's the one of the economists at Ramp, and he uses their proprietary spend data to create these really interesting insights and analyses. Matt: And people like Peter Walker, who's the head of insights at Carta using their unique perspective on fundraising, startup equity, things like that to create really relevant and actionable, valuable content on LinkedIn. Um, And so I totally resonate with what you're saying there around how you founders and even like employees at businesses have an opportunity to take the learnings that are specific to their industry or their product or their customer base and really almost synthesize it and package it up in a way that is beneficial to their ideal audience. Daniel: Yeah, agreed. And I think, you know, even just earlier on this podcast, right, I've mentioned two things, like this Reddit thing and the Trustpilot thing. Like, those are two good LinkedIn posts. They're not specifically unique to my industry, but they're something that are just like, maybe companies are doing, maybe they're not, but it's something, if you're not doing it, like, oh, maybe you should apply that, right? Others hiring on Upwork. For us in the creator space, it's like, creators don't really reply to emails. Like, I don't know how many times y'all have reached out, but like, it's not super common. And most people don't reply to emails to begin with, but it's LinkedIn and Twitter DMs are like a lot of our outbound motion. I mean, to be clear, we send like 50 to 100,000 emails a week, every week to kind of, you know, hit those channels as well from a creator side. Daniel: But like, the high touch, it's heavy on Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, like trying to meet people where they are. And in traditional B2B world, it's LinkedIn DMs, right? Like that's the most common outreach funnel. And, you know, in traditional business for us, it's hitting somebody up on Instagram. You know, yeah, found this interesting. You want to do a drop on FourthWall, right? And seeing if that opens a conversation. And there's distinct tactics around that, like trying to buy aged Instagram accounts from Hellyback's followers or that follower so you're less likely to show up in the spam filters, trying to make reach from a U.S. IP via XYZ proxy. Like, all these things are little tactical details that you kind of build up in your go to market funnel as you sort of reach out. But email works for every channel. It's just at the high-end creators don't respond to their email, mostly. And it's how do you find a way to contact them on Discord, Twitter, Instagram? Almost certainly not LinkedIn for our segment, but for most groups, LinkedIn DMs work exceedingly well. You are so incredibly dialed. Do you have any, like, I mean, LinkedIn still closes me some deals. Do you have a LinkedIn DM strategy right now? Like, one Instagram or not as complex. Matt: Not as complex. We use LinkedIn more for brand marketing. So just post of here's what we're up to. It's just like a steady drip of, you know, we're alive. We're in business. We're growing super quickly. Matt: We're the biggest player in our space by a good margin. Like, let us, you know, like, remember us when you need a deal for like, you know, six months from now. And part of that is like intentional. Like, the amount of times that y'all might want to do a merch drop or launch a fashion line for this podcast is like at best once a year, right? And so like, our time to actually capture you in a high intent moment is maybe once a year. It's very valuable. Once we get you, we'll have you and you'll work with us forever because we're a good product and we're good service. But that onboarding ramp is infrequent. So a lot of our LinkedIn strategy is just around like the steady drip of, you know, us being there and being present. The other campaigns are more to directly meet the creators where they're at. So for the managers, it's more like, or agents rather, it's like, we're present. We're here. We're growing quickly. Like when your client reaches out to you and asks you, who's the best partner for us for this, keep FourthWall in mind and mention them. For the creators themselves, it's a different strategy because the managers and agents serve to kind of protect creators from like the flood of stuff and deals coming in and trying to like filter. So we find it more effective to go straight to the creators on the other channels. That's exactly what Peter Walker does with Carba. Like he, because he's now a hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn. Daniel: When we were interviewing him, he's fresh talking about how his job isn't to, you know, have a click-through rate and get a certain amount. It's so to reach potential founders. So when they're ready to start a business, the first people they think of is Carba. Matt: Exactly. And it's just, you know, some businesses are very sticky, very high ACV, but they're like low intent, right? When you need it, you want to be the first one they're thinking about, but it's not like, you know, an everyday initiative. And so a lot of LinkedIn for us is brand marketing. And I think that fits for any sort of like infrequent but high intent action. Daniel: One of the key things that I'm sure you know with content is to have a repeatable format. And I think with LinkedIn, it's really hard to figure out a repeatable format. Like, like these are on YouTube doing a podcast show or, you know, you have tech reviews. Can you talk about any sort of repeatable format for you on LinkedIn? Matt: Not as much as I would like is the short answer to that. The longer answer is in the span of us building the business, I probably have like a myriad of conversations with our team every single day, many of which are like pretty unique and insightful and that I may not like pull out of my own workflow. Matt: And so what I think the best repeatable flow for myself would be is just like sit down for 15 minutes at the end of the week with someone of just like run through your Slack DMs and figure out what were the five most interesting conversations you had this week that are somewhat insightful and turn those into posts, right? And so I think there can be a steady drip from that because you discover a lot. just in the span of whatever your normal day-to-day business habit are that, or whatever your habits are for that particular day that you may not share with the world, right? It's very natural to just problem solved onto the next problem, problem solved onto the next problem, problem solved onto the next problem. Like so much of building is just like firefighting in a unified direction. And so trying to like sit down at the end of the week or have, for me, probably an interviewer who can like sit down with me and be like, Hey, let's glean out, let's go through your Slack DMs or messages and figure out like, what are the channels that were unique and exciting so that you can turn those into posts. Daniel: I love that you bring this up because a lot of what I do is also just like interviewing founders and a lot of times it's like, they may think that there's not that much content available from the week, but it's really an exercise of unpeeling the layers of the onion. And you know, we'll start high level if like, okay, so how did the week go? And then they'll tell me like X, Y, Z things. Daniel: But really like asking those second and third order questions to really get to the bottom. Okay, so how were you, how are you feeling? Why did you make that decision? What was the rationale behind it? And then what does that mean in terms of like how you make decisions? Oh, maybe that's a post about how you, how you make decisions as a founder or, you know, we try to follow a framework to give you a general structure that maybe you can test out if you, if you'd like, is like growth content, which is more top of funnel authority building, which is more, you could say, top to mid funnel. And then the personal content, which is more to humanize you and probably will get a lot of impressions, but may not be as conversion focused. And so, you know, an example of a growth content growth question you could ask yourself is like, is there something interesting that I read in the creator economy that really resonated with what we're doing at fourth wall that could turn into a post. Give your own unique spin on it. Authority building content. You know, maybe there's a conversation that you had with someone on your sales team this week. And there's a common sales objection that you've been seeing has been coming up over and over. Maybe you want to address that in a post. Hey, like this is, this is the most common thing that I hear from creators that are thinking about launching their own, you know, merch. Daniel: Like how do we do this? And then you talk about what you're doing at fourth wall to specifically address that. And then on the personal side, of course, everyone has a lot of stories around why they're doing what they're doing. So there's no, there's an endless supply of, of content there. Matt: I fully agree. And it's, I think a lot of it is just, like you said, unpeeling the onion, right? Like anyone who's making, like putting some work into whatever their craft is, whether it's marketing, whether it's YouTube, whether it's podcasting, whether it's consulting, like whatever your work or primary sort of like focus in a given week is, there's so much content around that. You may not be able to share all of that for, you know, privacy reasons or personal reasons or whatever, but everyone has so much content in their lives, right? Daniel: The difference is, do you want to share that with the world? And many folks don't. And I think that's very like understandable. It's like scary and often stocks to put yourself out there and like, what is by default almost certainly super cringe, right? Like LinkedIn is made for super cringe and that sort of content. But if you can kind of get through that barrier of just starting, it's unbelievably valuable just in terms of connections. I also haven't even spoken to recruiting, right? There's like huge top of funnel, like fourth walls actively recruiting, right? We're like always looking to like everyone, like hire the best people, but like, okay, sure. Matt: But how do you find the best people? How do you want them to like come to work with you as opposed to like some other company? Well, you have to like teach them about like, why what you're doing is why it matters, right? Like fourth walls helping like millions of artists succeed in launching their brands, monetizing make ends meet. Like that's powerful to a lot of people. So how do we share that story in a way that gets someone who resonates with that mission to want to work with us, to join our team. And that's another like major value prop of LinkedIn is it just frankly makes recruiting dramatically simpler than if you're just like, all right, let's hire our 15th agency to go try to find like the best growth person in the world, right? Of just who's gonna, you know, send a bunch of cold DMs and like maybe, but like, you know, you, you kind of have to at that journey as well. Daniel: I love this. And I think what stands out and helps you guys to succeed so much is that mission. And I'm curious because I think we've seen a trend recently of that mission moving more towards a not monetary, but something numerical, like on a mission to help 5 million creators launch their own store or you're like John Hu has this billion dollar business. Have you thought about tweaking that mission to something more numerical that more people can join on? I know it's like a slight tweak, but I don't... I think the numerical is more internal for us as a company. Daniel: And I think the mission is like bigger and like, I think it's bigger. Like I think the two best examples of missions in the call it the last 40, 50 years. Years are like Bill Gates' Microsoft computer on every desk and Elon with the, you know, go to Mars, right? Like they're big grand missions that aren't necessarily numerical, but you know, whether you empathize with those two individuals or not, those are two missions that clearly like resonate with people who are in those respective industries and want to chase. I think the numerical goal is like a really internal motivator, but I don't love it as the mission because I don't want to achieve our, like our mission is a never-ending goal. It's like to empower and empower and empower. And like, so I really want to set that sort of like, you know, Google's mission is to index the world's knowledge, right? Like that's an ongoing mission as opposed to like index a million posts or whatever, right? Like there's a different scale to that that I think is like compelling for us. So honest answer is probably not to have a numerical tie-in. But internally, we set that mission of like, all right, like now we're at 350,000 sellers, like how do we get to a million? Like, what's the path there? How do we do that, you know, like current pace. Maybe we hit it this time frame. Daniel: How do we compress that? How do we do it twice as fast or four times as fast? Like how do we, you know, strive to hit that mission faster and better than we thought possible. I want to shift gears a little bit back to LinkedIn specifically. Will, you've been on LinkedIn for some time now. Is there anything that you'd want to change about the platform as it is today? Matt: Hmm, probably. I would like, I've mentioned LinkedIn's cringe. I would love to get like less cringe, but I think that's sort of like, you know, folks like ourselves who are posting there more regularly and adjusting the format. But it really is gamified to be like, you know, one sentence, quick hook, then like a multi-part step down as you expand it, which is kind of okay. I think the other thing is I would personally like to get less DMs all the time and like cold inbound. Like some of that's very valuable, but a lot of it is like, like the connection system is kind of cumbersome where everyone does is a connection as opposed to a follow. And so it's a little harder to like navigate between those two segments. But I think as a platform, it's pretty solid. I don't have any major gripes about it. I like it as a service. I may not have like the deeper nuanced understanding as someone who posts a couple times a week, but isn't like ghostwriting or in it every day to know like the deeper platform nuances. But it, it feels a little more gameable right now. Matt: Are you someone who has zero connection requests right now? Do you go through them all? Or I don't know about that. Daniel: No, I, I go through all of them, but I, I don't like, I don't ignore them. So I have probably like, I don't know, a thousand plus in there, but like I, I'll accept the ones that like I'm usually if I have like a large degree of mutuals or they write an interesting hook in their connection request. So I think one of the biggest unused growth levers on LinkedIn right now is actually your personal title. Because I think like you were saying a little bit earlier is that no one knows what fourth wall is. Matt: In saying, I think it's a little bit different when you're like commenting on Reddit under support tickets. But if you're trying to grow an audience on LinkedIn and you see co-founder and CEO of fourth wall, most people aren't going to know what fourth wall is. But if you say I'm the business behind MKHD or like I make merch for creators or some spicy take about the creator economy, that might make people more likely to accept your connection request or, or when you comment on Matt's post, let me be more willing to click on your profile and then see what fourth wall is. Daniel: That's smart. I'm going to make that change right after. Do you have any spicy takes that you think you can put in there or what are you thinking of changing it to now? Matt: Um, I will, I'll have to see the character limit for it, but probably it's, I think like 63. Daniel: Okay, I'll probably drop. Matt: I'll have to see, but it would probably something like 350,000 stores, nine figure GMV, you know, it's something creative, you know, something in that that like just shows, you know, the, the reach. So I love it. When I changed mine to LinkedIn as the next TikTok, I've gotten so many more DMs because of it. And like everyone's like, What are you saying? And then it's like, it's like, this is exactly what I wanted. I'm gonna, I'm gonna like test a few variations of that as soon as I get back, so. Daniel: Oh, hi. Will, on the topic of getting lots of DMs, a lot of them being not very good, uh, has there ever been a DM that you've received on LinkedIn where you're like, Oh, I, that was really thoughtful. That was really creative, or I want to respond to that because it's different. Matt: Yes. There's a few. I would say they do one of two things. They either know very concisely what they're offering or they kind of tug at like heartstrings. And so to, to, or at least one example on the heartstrings one, I forget exactly how it was framed, but someone was like, Hey, I'm, you know, high school kid, like trying to figure out what you did. Like some. somebody took a chance on you when you were my age, like, open to a quick call. Matt: Like, something like that, like, I think is a good hook for a young person to just, like, you know, chase after or something like that that isn't just like, hey, like, a lot of these things are like career advice or just blasé stuff that they don't have, like, an actual intent behind it of I'm trying to learn X or get Y out of this. I think you should really come in with a specific ask, is one. From like a business standpoint, it is pretty rare. A lot of them are just like, you know, SDRs, BDRs, AEs trying to just, like, you know, hey, I'm selling a new customer support tool. And it's like, I'm not interested because they haven't, you know, it's just like at scale, they haven't done the research, even if it's an AI-enabled one. It's just, it's pretty vanilla. And I get it. We do this on our, on as well for email. It's just, vanilla works. It's a numbers game. It's a volume. Like, it's all, you know, part of it. But the ones that really hook are, are usually like a little more personal address, like not necessarily recent posts, but like, saw your interview on X. You know, you mentioned you had this specific problem or, you know, Reddit thing, like, we can do better. Here's my tool, like, open to, you know, can I email you or something like that, that warms the conversation or like, can I send you a video? I love receiving those in terms of like a video intro because it showcases, like, you did the manual work. And like, the truth is, like, I'm sure your schedules are similar. Daniel: Like, you look at my schedule at this point. Like, we have no standing meetings and very few in fourth law. I cancel all that. And so we can just do all ad hoc customer meetings, you know, problem-solving meetings, like really focused things. My calendar is like crushed every single day. Like, the last thing I want to do at the end of my busy day is get on like a 15-minute call with someone to hear a pitch on a product that I don't want. You know, like, it's like, that's the truth. And so that's what you're competing against if you're one of these things. So like, sending a Loom video. Hey, three-minute pitch. Here's the thing. Here's where the platform is. Like, open to chatting more. Like, that's a grind to do that. But at least for me, it works. Matt: We've been talking a lot about how voice memos. You can now send voice memos on LinkedIn DMs. Have you gotten any? Daniel: I haven't got, I will not listen to a voice memo. Matt: Really? Daniel: Yeah. No, no, no. Because it's more, it's higher friction for me. Now I have to, like, put in my Loom video. But a Loom video, I think, is like much more like, that is higher friction overall. But it feels like it's a higher intent production thing that they, like, really put in the time on it versus like, even on a, like, when someone texts me a voice memo, like, I realize this is like a generational thing, but it like shifts the work. It's easier for you to record a voice memo, but it's like quicker for me to write, read, you know, 20 words of text. Matt: So I don't want to listen to it, basically. But a Loom video, it's like so much knowledge density in like a one-minute thing. So that makes sense. Daniel: I think the reason voice memos have been working so well for men and I, even like just getting guests, is because of the novelty. And I think almost like the way Snapchat, you know, like, you don't know what the message is going to be, and you get that with a voice memo. But I do totally agree that the effort is on the person receiving it to listen. Matt: Right, right, right. So I could, like, I could see the novelty part working and listen, I'm like, it may just be a generational thing. I just don't like to get voice memos. So like that's, that's just fine. But I could see why it works. I just can speak personally. Like, if I get one of those, that's a next. We'll try Loom videos. Daniel: Yeah, we'll try that next. Matt: I think you hit on a really important point, right? Which is for anyone who's trying to do outreach to people who are probably getting high volume inbound, whether it's a founder or a creator, what have you, demonstrating like a little bit of higher effort, either through, you know, the Loom video or even like a voice note or a more personalized message because it took them an extra second to even just think through how am I going to craft this slightly differently, is super, super important, especially if like in today's day and age with so much outbound that is probably being automated at scale there, the volume has never been higher than it ever has been. Daniel: So I think if anything, do you think that it's harder or easier to stand out because of the additional volume of outbound? I think it's harder to stand out, but it's also conversely like easier. Like the standard pitch is like re, will or quick call or one of, like any of those are like Insta spam, right? Like, like, I don't want to get on a call with you for 15 minutes to hear your pitch. Like if you can't concisely present your pitch and why this is going to be valuable for me in like two sentences, I'm done, right? Like, and so that's your job for like busy people. And I realize that's hard. I'm not trying to like convey that as like an easy problem. But your job is to like, like the last thing in the world I want to do is get on a phone call with a stranger. Like, really? Like, it's just. Daniel: I need to know that you're like serious or have, or like going to bring something super interesting and unique or just are like early in your career. And you You have some unique take that you want to learn about X. That to me is compelling. And so those are the things that tend to get me. So I think maybe this perhaps a cop out answer, but there's so much like low-quality stuff out there that I think it's easier to stand out. But the flip side is because there's so much low-quality stuff out there, it's easy to get like flooded in the noise. So like, you know, in between your super high value, like the reason people go to low-value stuff is if you send me a high-value thing, if I don't catch it and get hit by four more low-quality things, then I check it a day later. Like, I'm probably, it's just, ah, check all, mark as read onto the next, right? So like the reason people go to low-quality stuff is because the high-quality hit rate is only like maybe 2x the hit rate over low-quality overall. Like realistically, like if you really, like, we've done this in our cold outbound volume stuff. If you just do generic copy, maybe call it a 3% reply rate. And if you do highly tuned copy that's like very personalized for a cohort, like if we email all creators is the same versus like Minecraft gamers being different than tech YouTubers being different than like music podcasts. Like if you really break it out like that, you maybe get to a 6% reply rate. Daniel: So the reason people default to low-quality is like it's a 2x improvement, but like, you know, 6% is still your emailing 100 people to get six replies. Like it's not like great. You know, it's not like you go from 3% to like 50% if you really make it high quality. And I think the ultimate 100% rate is through making your own content and then getting it to come to you. Matt: Exactly. It's really like, you need an inbound funnel, right? That's back to full circle of like, why do we create our content? It's just, it's so people come to you and so you don't have to like, filter through the noise. People see you on the feed. See, interesting. It's exciting. Are there any other... Daniel: We did touch on this earlier, like any other LinkedIn kind of hacks you're trying right now, experimenting, or? Matt: I would say there's no particular hacks that we're experimenting with right now. The ones we mostly spend our time on are posts. You need to have a hook. I'm sure this is kind of obvious, but maybe for your audience, but just in case not, like, you need your hook above the see more or like little expansion, right? Just like simply like, that's the most important signal to the algorithm is like, do people click to open that? Then the moment or within short time of making a post, you want to do that usually 8 to 9 Eastern time, is what I've seen be the highest effect. You want to share that with your peers, your co-worker, and ask them to like, LinkedIn takes likes, comments, replies for all of them. Matt: You want to cross reply on other people's posts. So like I would reply on Daniel's repost. He would reply on mine that you're kind of co-boosting each other's things. But just asking for that. I've heard the light bulb icon versus like vanilla like versus light bulb like tends to be the highest value. But those are kind of like the more tactical things. And the meta may have changed across all of that. That's maybe like four to six months dated knowledge. So like all those may not be fully applicable, but like, I think Mr. Beast has said that like, the algorithm is just the audience, right? Like, you know, at the end of it, like the goal of whatever algorithm is just to give people what they engage with. And so these are all little hacks and tweaks, but like at the end of it, if your content is not interesting or personal or exciting or informative, people are just going to scroll to the next one. And that's like the worst thing that can happen is, you know, it's just somebody scrolls down and keeps looking to like the next post. That's what hurts you in the algorithm. Daniel: Yeah, I think you hit on a really important point about what it takes to go viral or have a high-performing post. It's almost like the 80-20 of it is just create good content. But there's obviously all these other things like little optimizations, like min-maxing that we can do with each platform or with, you know, the algorithm. But at the end of the day, the algorithm, Mr. Matt: That's interesting. So, you mean like letting them have a say in the content that gets created or maybe like some sort of interactive poll where they decide on what the next project is or something like that? I think there's definitely potential there. It makes the audience feel like they have a stake in the content, like almost a part of a community, right? Daniel: Exactly, and it could definitely deepen the engagement. But on the flip side, there's the risk of diluting the brand if it becomes purely what the audience wants. Sometimes the vision needs to come from the creator themselves to maintain authenticity. Matt: Yeah, definitely a balancing act, but it sounds fun. Do you have other ideas on this list that you wanted to run by me? Daniel: Uh, yeah, there's a few. Let me see... Okay, what about doing live feedback sessions where we review content live with the audience? Matt: And I haven't totally thought this through, but like some sort of like I think superfans might want like some control over their creator and I think control might be like a, you know, dramatic word, but like have you thought about something like that where like giving fans output on something a creator does? Okay idea. Probably like there there's some good elements to this, but at the end of it, like, you want the artist to make the art, right? Like, and I think it becomes decision by committee, which isn't great, you know? So I, I think it's, it's a fun thing for creators to expose if it's like they're debating between three shows. We have Viva La Dirt League, they run their premium memberships, fully white-labeled through fourth wall. They will do it like, Hey, we're thinking of these three shows to launch as our next sketch show. We're excited about all three. We'll let the fans, the paying fans vote one vote a person to see what that. So it can be a good idea, but you still want to make sure the artist creates the art at the end of that. Daniel: This is, I realize also not a good idea or a bad idea, but I'm just genuinely curious, what are your thoughts on like the logistics on embroidery versus screen printing for t-shirts and stuff? Matt: Well, embroidery is, there are different styles, of course, and there are different things. Like one call out for embroidery is like, even on the thing you're wearing right now, it's probably like a little patch inside. Daniel: So embroidery tends to be like, it's a little patch. So like embroidery on t-shirts, especially lightweight fabric has like a little patch on the inside. So like the thread can stick and stay tight. That can be a little uncomfortable on a t-shirt. So embroidery tends to work better on like hats or heavier garments, like more streetwear, heavyweight type stuff than opposed to like a light form-fitting t-shirt. You can do like super high-end premium embroidery that like offsets that, but it just like, it can be a little more uncomfortable to wear for like larger embroideries. So because of that, prints tend to be best on lighter shirts. Embroidery tends to scale up as like a small little patch or, you know, logo or sleeve thing. Um, Matt, do you have any ideas? Matt: Yeah, I have an interesting idea. What are your thoughts on crowdsource, almost like a GoFundMe, but for creators where, or less of like funding the creator to do something for free, but like fans can invest fractionally in creators. Uh, so if a creator has a really thriving business, but like they want to inject more cash into it, really supercharge the growth and they don't mind sort of like allocating a certain percentage of equity to some of their audience who would be the big supporters. What do you think of the, the concept of almost like giving fans the chance to invest in a MKBHD? I think I skew to bad idea. Matt: Not that I think it's like a totally bad idea, but a lot of creator businesses are like all over the place of artists chasing, you know, whatever, like fun business endeavor it is. And I don't know if it's like, I think it could be either penalistic to the creator who like gets into some crazy like 50% rev share where they're like a hundred K subs and then blows up to Mr. Beast's status and then like doesn't know how to get rid of like a bunch of like boutique micro investors or people invest in someone who's like Mr. Beast status, who's like, doesn't structure the business in a way that will give like reasonable returns. So I think it's like, I like the concept, but I think the devil's in the details and I think the details will make it like not work super well. And the reason why I asked you about that question is I was approached maybe like six months ago by an unnamed startup that was attempting to do something like that. And I didn't end up like entertaining it, but it was, it was interesting to me, the concept of it, but I can see why logistically it would be a nightmare. I think it's better if it's like a more of like a traditional debt instrument. Daniel: Like if you took a hundred K from them and you had to pay back, call it 125 or 150 over X timeframe, I mean, there can still be a negative ramification, but I think the equity aspect is harder when it's like an in, like the business of creation is mostly an individual person, right? And so it's like, you're basically, you know, capitalizing a person's like time, which is, you know, it doesn't really, I don't know, there's not a lot of businesses or traditional art that has like gone that way, so. Matt: My next idea is a creator starter pack. And I'm a little biased. I know you do most like B2C, but like if there could be a wrap for this mic and you know, with like a sticker on it, like some of the others, um, what do you think about that idea? Uh, speak to our wheelhouse. Daniel: Love it. We'll do this. So let's say like a wrap around this microphone or stickers or something like that. Like the reality for creators is source that and figure out the supply chains. Like a one-off is one thing, but even to sell these to their audience, it's just a lot of work and time, whereas they should, maybe not should, but maybe would rather spend that time making the perfect thumbnail, editing the first 30 seconds of the video so that it's super crisp. There's no, you know, like the cuts are fast and all that and not like, you know, which 20 manufacturers should I call to source this thing? Like, that's what we're trying to do so you can just trust that, like, like, we're obsessive on quality. Daniel: We want nothing but the best. And so we will make sure that everything is perfect so that you can focus on the other spots of your business that you enjoy. Matt: That's awesome. Matt, do you have any more ideas? Daniel: Um, not at the moment. Those are good though. Matt: Cool. Well, was there anything we, did we touch on you wanted to mention? Daniel: No, I think that was good. I'm excited to hear about your ghostwriting agency, Matt. I think would be super compelling. And I enjoyed this. This is fun. This is like a cool little back and forth. Matt: I can just riff on random stuff if it's compelling. But yeah, I really enjoyed this. So thanks for coming on. Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate it. Thanks, fellas.