452 – Nathan Chan From FoundrMag Reveals His 12-Month Rapid Growth Plan

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Nathan Chan

Episode highlights:

00:20 – The star of the moment
01:40 – Driving a movement
03:58 – Building the Foundr name
07:25 – Brilliant branding
09:19 – Dominating Instagram
12:09 – Monetizing the magazine
18:01 – What not to ask Nathan
20:59 – It’s about where you are in the cycle
23:03 – The Richard Branson question
27:14 – Key takeaways
29:01 – What’s coming next?

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I have a special, special guest. He’s actually like the superstar of the moment. Welcome, Nathan Chan.

Nathan: Thank you so much for having me, James. And oh, you’re way too kind. I don’t know about superstar, bro.

James: Everywhere I turn I’m hearing, “Nathan Chan. Instagram.” It’s like a rhyming thing, and it’s hard not to be sort of caught up in the whole movement, because you’ve done something that I reflected upon as being difficult to do and that is about a year ago, you interviewed me for your up and coming podcast, and 2 years before that, I interviewed an Instagram superstar who was telling me all about the Instagram secrets. And at the time, I thought, this is great, if I was a fitness professional or a chef, or in an arty niche, then I could really use this. But I didn’t realize how popular it could be for real businesses.

And lately, you’ve been educating people about how it’s helped you grow your own magazine and your super brand that you have, which we’ll touch on in a minute. And it’s working for other people, like dentists, like actual normal markets where it’s created a medium that’s powerful beyond what most people would give it credit for.

Driving the Instagram movement for business people

Nathan: Yeah, it is a super powerful platform, and I think it’s still in its infancy, and people are just dying to catch up now. We’re really trying to drive that movement for entrepreneurs, startups and business owners.

James: I think you are driving the movement, because this is my acid test. I call this the GPS method, or the triangulation method. If I’m hearing about someone from three separate reference points, then there has to be something to it. And if those reference points are far apart, then that’s even more interesting to me.

So in one minute, I’m hearing about you from Dan Norris who’s in the startup, social media, young and travel-ey type mindset. On the other end of the spectrum I’ve got stalwarts of the direct response marketing clan, the copywriters like Ed Dale, talking about it, and being involved in your own product launches, and I’m thinking, well, there’s two guys I know very well, they’re kind of at other ends of the scale, and what is it that’s so universally appealing?

And then when I have a look at your videos, they’re very educational, they’re done with real intent to serve and to help, and the information actually works. We’ve even been experimenting with some of the things that you give away in your training. And just within days, we’re seeing hundreds of followers, and a great response to the community. So I think what you’ve done is you’ve made this real for the average person who’s online, and you’ve made it relevant.

Nathan: Well, thank you James, you’re far too kind. I’m just, yeah, really passionate about the platform, and you know, we get asked every single day how we’re doing, and we’re kicking some serious goals there, not just in terms of followers but also leads and sales, and in particular we’ve generated a hundred thousand-plus email subscribers from specifically Instagram in the past 12 months. And there’s a lot of buyers in there and yeah, it’s our number one source of customer acquisition right now.

James: Right, so you’ve got a six-figure email list, you are making sales, I want to touch on that a little bit later with the monetization model. I guess you’ve come to the attention of people in no small part because you get big name people onto your magazine, and your business.

Why FoundrMag.com?

So let’s just sort of decompress this a bit. First off, currently your website’s FoundrMag.com, and you run the brand Foundr, I think, is sort of the logo or the watermark that I’m seeing. I just want to say, it’s a great name, a fantastic name. Did you ever consider pitching in for Foundr.com?

Nathan: Yeah, so there’s a whole story around this, James. If we were to wind it back, we just started off as a magazine. Now, I started the magazine March 5th, 2013. So that’s the first day we launched. The first day we launched, we made $5. So we’re going to turn 3 in 2 weeks. And when I started that magazine, it was through Ed Dale’s product, so that’s where the connection there is with Ed, and you know, it’s using his system called MagCast.

And the magazine actually wasn’t even called Foundr, it was called something else, and I had to change the name 4 months in because I was sued for trademark infringement by one of the largest business magazines in the States. And what actually happened was that I had to change the name of the business, and I knew that if I removed the “e,” there wasn’t even any Founder magazine with the “e” out there, but I knew if we removed the “e,” it was kind of tech, it was kind of cool, and I would never hopefully, touch wood, ever have any kind of trademark infringement problem ever again.

And that’s kind of how I came up with the name, and at the time someone had just purchased foundr.com, but they weren’t doing anything with it, and I just went ahead, bought the trademark in the States and just ran with the brand Foundr.

And then it gets funny because about a year later, once we’d actually built a brand on top of the name Foundr, the person that owns foundr.com actually wanted to get in touch and talk all sorts of things, teaming up, partnerships and exploring all sorts of other avenues, but that never ended up happening. But yeah, I eventually had to ask him for that domain, where I’ve still got to, I might be catching up with him in a couple of months, he’s visiting.

James: Nice. Well, good luck with that because it’s the first one I typed in when I was looking for you and I think it would be a premium brand for you to have. You know, I recently asked Clay Collins about this with LeadPages, because they have leadpages.net, and it’s a fascinating thing to me as someone who’s a passionate domainer in the past. I had a legacy of a couple of thousand domains, and some really nice ones.

Nathan: Yeah, it’s crazy.

James: People often want to buy domains from me, because they can see that they can build something out of the domains that I’ve purchased. And these days, the first thing I do when I find an offer that converts, and that’s really the core thing that I teach people to focus on first, find an offer that converts, is to think really hard about the design of your business, and branding and trademarks are so important, because I’ve seen people get the rug pulled them over and over again and I’ve also been the recipient of cease and desist orders in the past, because I inadvertently registered a domain that also was the name of a cancer treatment trial product of some kind, you know, by complete accident.

Nathan: Oh, wow.

Branding and design

James: I got a phone book from some lawyer about how I’m going to be sued and all the rest of it, and I take it seriously and I think when you look at your brand, your logo, the short name, the ease of memory, it’s definitely worked in your favor, it’s just a brilliant brand.

And all of your pictures, designed so well and I was pretty shocked, actually, to find out how you were making some of those, which you reveal in your Instagram training. And my team have really taken to the tools and started producing some of those things as well. So I definitely want to throw a hat tip your way for some tips on how to create a better design, but also how shockingly simple and inexpensive it can be. In fact, it can be done for free if you’re using the right apps.

Nathan: Yeah, well, thank you. Look, some of the pieces of our content on Instagram have been shared by like all sorts of celebrities like LL Cool J, and Puff Daddy, and we have people like DJ Khaled that follow us, so yeah, thank you for the kind words, man.

I think branding’s an interesting thing, it’s something I’m really passionate about, and part of our play is we want to have our design, our branding to be kind of cool and funky and fresh. So if someone does stumble upon our work, whether it’s our website, whether it’s our magazine, whether it’s even our podcast artwork or our Instagram page, it will invoke some sort of emotion that gets people excited, because nice design gets you excited, I think, and it’s a pleasure to look at, and it sparks curiosity and you only have positive emotions that come from great design. So that’s something that we’re very passionate about and very deliberate with.

James: Yeah, I’m all for deliberate design. I’ve got a designer speaking at my live event because it’s so important. We’re using Apple devices, they’re designed not to be the most powerful, but they’re easy to use and they look nice, you want to use them, so huge tick in that box.

Was Instagram a strategic choice?

I want to talk about marketing for a second. We’ve covered Instagram, that’s been working out really, really well for you. Why did you think Instagram was going to be the brand for you?

Nathan: Well look, to be honest, James, I didn’t. I thought the exact same thing that you thought a couple of years ago when you did that interview. We’ve been on Instagram for about 14 months, and we built it from zero to I think close to 650,000 followers, it’s like one of the fastest-growing Instagram accounts, certainly brand accounts, in the world or in Australia at least, and I think I was just looking for answers, dude. We had the magazine that was doing OK, I’d left my job, I started the magazine while I was working my day job and I was really looking for a channel that we could dominate.

And I was just testing, you know, old school marketing, you just throw things at the wall and see what sticks. And I was bringing on an intern, and I had a few friends who were doing some really cool stuff in the health and well-being niche, similar kind of niche that you spoke of, you know, you think, food or fitness, they’re the kind of niches that Instagram really thrives on, or fashion.

I just had this Instagram account and I took some advice of some friends who were doing some cool stuff, they were crushing it in the food-based niche, and the health and well-being niche, and I saw our sales spike for the magazine, just overnight. We made a couple of extra hundred bucks. And that just took me down this path of just battle testing and just mastering the platform and really working how we could wield it to not only get followers, but really use it to drive ridiculous amounts of traffic, and opt-ins and sales.

And yeah, so I just stumbled across it, James, it was not strategic at all. Even the website, it was my first business, I’m just learning as we go, I didn’t know the power of design, I didn’t think that having a magazine could allow me to get in touch with people like Richard Branson, or Seth Godin, and really showcase those ambassadors everywhere you see our brand. I didn’t know that would be powerful to build trust. But just worked it out, man.

James: Right, well you’re preempting some of my next questions, actually. Your website, for starters, it’s really good. It’s definitely designed to capture emails. It’s got a heavy emphasis on grabbing email addresses. And it’s done in a not-too douch-ey way, right? It’s not smashing things into your face. But you do have an exit grabber, you’ve got a splash-type page that encourages people to opt-in. And then you’ve got a “never miss an episode” type call to action. I think it’s really well-done. I certainly showed it to my website designer, and said I think this is best practice for a publisher.

Nathan: Oh, thank you.

Before Foundr’s success

James: It’s fantastic. Let’s talk about the making money part. One thing that sticks in my mind is when we spoke, about a year ago, the magazine was hard work for you. It was not generating the kind of income numbers that you’ve been sort of known for lately. From memory, it was just sort of not quite giving you the return for the kind of effort that you put in, and I was reflecting to you that I’d tried going down the magazine path, but I couldn’t actually even find my magazine on the platform. But what you’ve just revealed is that it’s allowed you to get great guests onto your magazine, and you’ve managed to monetize a different way. Let’s talk about that for a second.

Nathan: Yeah, so I think we spoke about just over a year-and-a-half ago, and I hadn’t left my day job yet, I was kind of scraping by, I was making a few thousand dollars a month, and we hadn’t found Instagram, we hadn’t really found a channel that we were really, I guess, just really crushing. We had featured Richard Branson, we were doing really good with the app store optimization type stuff, and were coming up in search. But for most people, I’d been working on the magazine for about 10 to 11 months at that time when we spoke, and we really, for most people, most people wouldn’t stick with it. Most people would maybe have even given up. Majority have.

You know, there’s a lot of people that have started a magazine and given up, because they just didn’t see the immediate results that may have been anticipated. But for me, I had subscribers that were paying us every single month, and I just kept going with it and just kept shipping and just producing a magazine issue every single month. And then I remember I built it up and it was just replacing my income and operating costs and I left my job after about I think it was 14, 15 months.

So we were starting to get a little bit more momentum, and then you caught up, but one thing that was really, really fascinating that you shared with me was that you said, look Nathan, like the magazine looks great, but I believe that you need to put that magazine behind a membership platform. And you were so right, dude, because that’s what we did and we created a whole new membership site called Foundrs Club, and that’s in beta, but that’s doing really, really well, and we only launched it last month, but we bundled the magazine up and all these other service offerings into a membership site, and I can see that membership site growing very, very fast once we release it to the public, and it is doing quite well right now.

That was one thing you gave me, and you were so right, man, I wish I have been focusing on doing something like that earlier, but for the most part we used Instagram to build up the magazine to do, I don’t really like to talk around numbers too much, but we’re generating over 6 figures recurring a year from the magazine, and then we started to get into the online education space, and we produce a lot of content on the blog, the social, and then also our podcast, and the magazine, so I thought, we’re in no better position than anybody else to start producing, I guess, courses, and online education products, and it was something our audience was asking for, they were asking for more help and it was just a natural inclination and we’re monetizing there.

We only really, to be honest dude, have three products right now: Foundrs Club which is a recurring membership, the magazine, and this Instagram course. Now our biggest problem and struggle is we don’t have enough product, and that’s what we’re going to change this year. I anticipate we’ll have at least 6 more courses by the end of this year, and they will service all sorts of different needs that we’ve found our audience and community are looking for more help on, and these courses actually won’t be taught by me. I might teach one more, but I want to make Foundr an asset-based business, so I don’t want to make it all about me. And yeah, that’s the plan, man, that’s what I’m working on.

James: Yeah, I just want to reinforce that. It’s like you were doing the Instagram thing, and I’ve been doing the membership thing for a while. If you’re not already, I’m sure you’ll be making 6 figures a month recurring very soon because of that model. I know you’re on the right track, because you were doing what I would call “making Grange,” which is you were plowing the field, planting the vines, tending them, growing them up, maturing them, harvesting the grapes, putting them in a vat, and then bottling them and sitting on it, and then you’ve revealed this amazing product. It’s very hard for people to just come and reproduce tomorrow.

So you and I, we’re really on the same page. The early iterations of my membership had about a dozen frontend products feeding that recurring membership hub in there, and eventually I just moved most of those products inside the hub, and I use a podcast as the marketing machine or the engine, and you’re using the magazine. I would call that marketing rather than a product, because it’s getting you the good guests, it’s giving you a big reputation, and it’s increasing your conversions, but you can really monetize it with the education, and education is a multi-billion dollar market. So I’m just very blessed to be able to interview you right now before you blow up and become the next billionaire. A few years down the track, at the rate you’re hustling I have no doubt.

Nathan: (Laughs) Oh, thanks man.

The wrong things to ask Nathan

James: Let’s talk about this for a minute. What are the wrong questions that people keep asking you?

Nathan: I guess, a lot of people think creating a magazine is easy. You know, I get emailed every day now, they want to create a magazine. And I think it’s so hard, and you don’t create a magazine to make money. That’s one thing that I realized, James. If I wanted to right now, I could forget everything I was doing and just create the magazine every month, and it would be a lifestyle business. But I just couldn’t be satisfied with that.

And I think, especially when you’re creating a new brand from scratch, the best thing you can do with a magazine is use it to create influence. And that’s essentially what I realized. I didn’t know when I first started that the magazine would be such a powerful influence-building tool, but yeah, that’s what the biggest focus is for it now, and I think a lot of people, they just ask me, how do you build a successful magazine, and it’s just from sheer circumstance that I think I persisted with it, James.

Like you know, for you, you wouldn’t, if you spent 12 months of hustle, really focusing on a magazine, and you’re only making a few thousand dollars every month, that just would not be worth your time. Right? It just wouldn’t be worth your time and for most, the majority of people, that wasn’t worth their time, and I just somehow just kept persisting with it, and just not wanting to let people down because they were paid subscribers and I just kept going through it. And I kind of worked out the business model as I went on.

But I didn’t know what the business model would be, and if I still just kept producing the magazine right now, we would be nowhere near doing as well as we are now. So I think what people need to understand is if you want to build a publication, whether it’s a print or a digital publication, and that’s actually a physical or an actual magazine, not a website, but an actual magazine you can flip through the pages, you have to realize that it’s all about having a multi-faceted platform.

So have a membership site, just like you have. Have a series of digital products. Focus on building your email database. Don’t just rely on advertising. We haven’t even touched advertising yet. I’d need to hire like a biz dev sales guy to do that.

But yeah, I think that’s something that a lot of people don’t realize and they just kind of assume… I just don’t think they know how hard I’ve been hustling. I had nothing to lose, I was working in my day job man, and I was working on the magazine. I didn’t even know if it would be a multi-million dollar business or anything of the sort. I didn’t know where I could take it, but I just kept going, I just kept persisting even though we weren’t making hardly any money and just most people can’t do that, they won’t do that, and they’re just not in the same situation as me. So it’s very hard, very very hard.

James: Yeah. I just want to echo that, and that might surprise some of my listeners who know the now me. But a lot of this comes down to where you are in the life cycle. I think the really important part of this is that whatever you’re working on right now and wherever you’re putting the effort, it’s most unlikely that’s where you’re going to get the result in the short term at least and maybe in the long term.

I’ll give you an example of that. If you think about when you’re a kid and you go down to the playground, remember they had those outdoor playgrounds before they shut them down and filled them in with concrete so that no one could get sued? So there’s basically like those round and round things with the bars that you sort of push around and around. But you put all your effort going one way, but it’s coming back at you towards your back. You put all that effort out this sort of clockwise but the thing is coming back at you from where you least expect it. So all that energy is expended and you expect maybe it’s going to come from there but it never does.

My phase, it was like yours when I was in my very early 20’s. I was about to have my first kid. I needed to make income to support three people, and I went out and got a sales job. I put so much effort into that role compared to the reward that I got. I made the company millions in sales, and I got a paltry percentage of that compared to the amount of effort I put into my business now and the reward that I get. It’s off the Richter scale in terms of effective hourly rate, which is the key metric that I measure.

But I’ve got things set up now. I’ve got things in my motion. Where I was at in my cycle, doing the magazine seem like a lot of work, but I already had the good bits in the business. I already had the podcast and I already had the membership. So I think what you’ve done is you’ve kept adjusting and performing until you’ve found the little win, and then as it’s revealed itself, in this case, Instagram’s blown up.

Then you get demand for product and you’ve found a way to monetize this flywheel of yours that you’ve built up. The real benefit that you’re building the whole time is having these superpower guests. So I’m sure I’d be doing the listener a disservice if I didn’t ask, how do you get a Richard Branson on your magazine?

How to get powerful guests

Nathan: Yeah. So look, we actually wrote a blog post, which is like a 7,000 or 8,000-word blog post that actually reveals our exact steps, everything we do to interview people, like all these rockstar entrepreneurs or influential entrepreneurs that people see in our space, and if you’ve got a Foundr mag, , you can look at that blogpost there. It’s a very well-received blogpost. But for the most part James, I think a big part of it is having a magazine. I think that the first thing was getting Richard Branson. Once we got Richard Branson, that was the ultimate social proof that we could ever have for our business and our brand, having Richard Branson and getting future interviews. And then ever since that, we’ve just kind of kept building on that.

James: Oh, I understand this. The phone was what we had before the Internet. From the time I was doing telephone timber broking, and then telephone debt collections, and then in sales, a couple of decades.

Nathan: See yourself.

James: That’s why I like podcasts. I really prefer to talk for a living. It’s a great way that you can get to the point quickly. You can pick up tonality. You can decide if you’re trusting someone by what they’re saying. You can listen to their speech patterns. It’s such a powerful thing. A very similar one is to go to live events. I really am an ambassador for that. I regularly go to live events overseas and expand my network. You’ve mentioned some key points.

Can we just do a quick recap and see where we’re at?

Nathan: Yeah, let’s do it man.

Quick recap

James: So first up, Nathan is like this shooting star sensation right now. Even despite his lack of having it all mapped out in advance in a perfectionist way, which is something I see a lot with people, they’re trying to get all their ducks in a row before they proceed. Uh-uh. You just start and you grind and hustle a little bit until you find an edge and you keep doing what’s working.

Nathan found a great brand and he’s fine tuning it a bit with good domain purchases and trademarks, etc. He stepped on a hot plate like so many of us do in the beginning. So if you do find your offer that converts and you know you’re in the market for a while, go and get it locked up.

He does great marketing. He’s looking at Instagram, making it popular in the circles that I circulate in, and I want to ask you about something else relating to that in a minute, but what you really had was the moneymaking combo of high credibility, a very valuable medium, which is a magazine, and I imagine there’d be some related effect of having a podcast, or a book, or an event, but having that show in a difficult to produce format has created credibility.

Of course it gets monetized with both the subscription and of course, spin off products and/or product. I’d be interested to know Nathan, what would happen if you created those six products, and instead of selling them, if you gave them away to hundreds of thousands of people each, I wonder how many recurring memberships for Foundrs Club you’d sell if you did that because that’s where I ended up heading down that track. So that’s an interesting one.

You’ve given us a good formula for getting interviews, you’ve got a huge blogpost about it, which people can go and look up, and we’ll link to it in the shownotes, I just want to ask you, what are you doing with your next sort of step? Where do you see it? Are you doing some snapchatting? Are you thinking you might blow up YouTube? Or is this something around the corner that you’re excited about?

The next step
Nathan: Yeah. It’s a great question James. Yeah look, would you like me to run you through like my plan for the next year? How I plan to scale?

James: Yes. Let’s talk about how Nathan Chan plans to scale in the next year. Where do you go when you’re already kicking butt?

Nathan: Yeah look, we’ve got all this massive community, we know we need more products, so as soon as we’ve got all this massive launch going on that you know about, for our Instagram course, after we do that, we’re going to go to the whole list. Our list is close to 200,000 now and we’re going to go to the whole list with Foundrs Club, and then we’re going to come up with a high-converting funnel for Foundrs Club.

So we want Foundrs Club to be an upsell or a downsell wherever you are throughout the sale sequence, wherever you are. Wherever you are, you end up hearing about Foundrs Club. I think one great way to be able to sell Foundrs Club will be over webinars and doing like $1 free trials. These are things that I want to test and we’ll see how we go. But I really like webinar funnels.

One thing I want to do as well is, for example with Foundrs Club, we give away weekly action plans, weekly recipes. I want to give away those as actual lead magnets, and I know that having that webinar registration page as the thank you page that will really allow us to get people to come on to webinars and eventually educate them about the product and maybe they want to buy it. Webinars were found to convert really, really well.

I want to hire a sales guy to do all these webinars. I don’t want to be doing them. And then yeah, just keep working on product and really use email automation and webinars and hiring more people to I guess create these products, setting them up, and having that email marketing do a lot of the work for you. And then at every touch point, we have upsells and downsells. By the time we get there, just I think keep doing what we’re doing as well James. Like with the Instagram, the podcast, or the other social stuff, the content stuff, the guest blog posts, and just keep interviewing influences, getting these amazing stories, and that machine on the front end is working really well. We don’t really need to do anything new there. So that’s us in a nutshell man.

James: It’s going to work. I’m very excited for you. I’m a huge advocate of recurring memberships. I think you’re going to enjoy my podcast interview with Jarrod Robinson because he is killing it with webinars in his niche. He’s talking about it at my live event.

Nathan: Wow!

James: He’s helping me setup some webinars at the moment for my own funnel. And I 100% agree with you, best way to sell a recurring membership is as an upsell or downsell or cross-sell. It should be the central hub to all your satellite things. Best example is from the back of live events or any high ticket product. It’s always good to gift your best members a trial access and a huge proportion of them will stick around.

Nathan: Yeah yeah, that’s it man. I think it’s a lot of hard work ahead but it’s exciting times.

James: No, what I think you’re actually going to go through a transition. When we catch up in 5 years from now, I imagine you’ll be dialing in on some of the things that have been super effective for you, and you will have delegated or switched off some of the things that no longer excite you or you may be less hungry for. I think you’ll actually be doing particularly well. I’m really excited for you for the next stage of your business.

Also, I just want to restate how much gratitude I have for you, showing up today while you’re mid-launch. It’s a tremendous advantage for us to be able to have a listen to your ideas at this stage in your career. I’m glad to have spoken to you before. I’m glad some of those predictions hand out and I’m backing you as a winner in the future. So Nathan Chan from Foundr mag. Thank you for sharing with us.

Nathan: Yeah look, thank you so much for the kind words James. It’s an absolute honor to be here. I’ve been following your work for a long time. You have a tremendous amount of clout and authority in this online marketing space. It’s amazing to hear this kind of kind words from someone of your caliber bro. So thank you man.

James: All right. So let’s stay in touch and maybe we’ll do an update podcast, which is something I really like to do, is to document the journey in the future. Look out for that one, listeners.

Nathan: Awesome. Yeah dude, I’ll happily come back anytime man. Thank you so much!

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