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Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode goes more into the world of business, content creation, and some of those topics that you guys said you were interested in hearing more about. And I’m here with a friend of mine, Nathan Barry, who is the founder of ConvertKit. He is an investor, an author. He has a podcast called The Billion Dollar Content Creator and a lot more. And I always find my conversations with him so fascinating. And in this short episode, we talk about the concept of something called flywheels and how these can be helpful in business, in your personal life, and what that concept means. And he provides some really beautiful examples of this, as well as steps for if you have any kind of business, or especially if you want to become a business owner, content creator, how to use this metaphor and this idea to simplify that process and to have a bigger impact over time. So let’s join and learn from Nathan Barry. Nathan, welcome back.
Nathan: Thanks for having me on.
Katie: Well, I’m really excited to chat with you today. We had a great conversation in our first interview years ago, which I will link to in the show notes. But the audience has been wanting to hear more about business and finance and wealth. And this is an area I’m really excited to dive deep in with you today. And to start off, I would love to understand, and for anyone who’s not familiar, define the idea of something you talk about a decent amount, which is flywheels. So for anybody who hasn’t heard that term, can you explain what it is?
Nathan: Yeah, I think it’s one of those terms that even if you’ve heard it, you probably don’t actually know what it is. There’s a number of times I’ve talked to people and they’re like, I’ve used that word and I don’t think I know what it is. So I first learned about flywheels back in, I was in Lesotho, which is a country inside of South Africa, in 2008. And, we were drilling a well at an orphanage there and what we found is that electricity was not super common. And so in order to pump water from this well, we needed a way to do it that didn’t require a lot of effort and didn’t require electricity. And so you’d normally think of like a hand pump, like I grew up going camping a lot and you think of a long handle that sticks out and you’re pumping up and down in order to get water. And that might work for camping or if you have it on your farm or something like that. But that’s not what you want like 100 kids at an orphanage to rely on for their source of water.
And so what we installed instead was actually a flywheel. And that’s this large metal wheel that sits up on top of the pump. And instead of this like linear up and down motion of a traditional, you know, pump with a handle, it has a circular motion. And this is really important because basically what happens is the wheel is really hard to get going at first. But then as you really lean in and turn it, it starts to build momentum and it gets easier and easier with each rotation. And it actually produces more with each rotation. And so when we use this on the, on this pump at the orphanage, at first it took two of us, both my friend Luke and I had to like really lean into it and start pumping and get it going. And then as it built momentum, he was able to step away and I could do it by myself. And then I could do it with one hand and then I can get it going faster and faster from there. And we just got this steady stream of water.
And what’s really cool about it is that it’s a method of disconnecting effort and impact. It’s a method of getting leverage. And so this is one of those things that, you know, you’re like, wait, we’re talking about online business, what does any of this have to do with actually running a business? And I think the flywheel is an interesting metaphor because just like it works in real life physics, you can actually get it to work in business as well, you know, or any of your processes. And so that’s something that I’ve been helping a lot of like more intermediate to advanced creators with is how do they build, you know, flywheels in their business so they can stay consistent and get results for a long period of time and not have this like, oh, if I wanted to double the results of my business, I’d have to double the effort because that may be true in some cases, but with flywheels, it’s not the case at all.
Katie: Yeah, I think this is such a fascinating concept. And admittedly, one I learned sort of later in the game when it came to business. And I’ve shared before how I had this tendency to not just manage everything, but want to do everything myself. And I had to untangle that. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs go through that phase. But I think the flywheel concept was really helpful for me. And I think you explain it in a better way than I’ve heard almost anyone else explain it. And especially when you talk about disconnecting the effort from the impact, I love that you use the word impact. And not just results or ROI. Because for Wellness Mama, I’ve always been focused on the impact and helping moms. And I very much believe that income follows outcome. And that when you help people, you achieve better results. Could you share some examples of flywheels in business for people to be able to kind of understand this concept?
Nathan: Yeah, let me give a very specific example because I think, what I found is that when people talk about flywheels in business, they talk about them at the highest level, right? Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great, talks about how all of these great companies have a flywheel. And it’s something like Amazon’s flywheel where, you know, they really push to, they really have low prices so that they can have, or let’s see, let me reverse that. They try to run the most operationally efficient organization they can so that they can have low prices so they can improve their systems and sell more, you know, the low products sell more or low prices sell more products. And then from there, they’re able to use that scale to drive down prices further. And that is a flywheel in that it, you know, basically, the lower the prices they have, the more sales they make, the more scale they can get, and the further they can lower prices.
But that’s like at the highest level. And what I really wanted to do is give creators in particular examples of flywheels at, you know, the most micro-detailed level. And my favorite example of this is for content creators who are creating a newsletter. It could be anything, but especially a newsletter on a weekly basis. And that is something like, well, I guess the challenge that you have with it is sending an email every Monday morning, every Tuesday, whenever it is, and realizing like that often the more you write, you’re working through all of your ideas for content and you’re running out of things. And when I teach this workshop in person, I always ask like, okay, you know, show of hands. Who struggles, you know, the day before, two days before the news that are supposed to go out with actually having an idea and writing it on time. And usually half the room at least raises their hand. And so it’s like, okay, what if you could have a flywheel that the more subscribers you got, the more ideas you had to write and give you a steady, you know, an endless stream of content ideas. And everyone’s like, that sounds amazing.
And so the way that this works is when someone subscribes to your list, then you send them a series of automated emails. What I like to do is I send out kind of my greatest hits. You know, these are, one’s going to be my story. And then the next two might be some of my best essays that I’ve ever written. Kind of the thing that like all the rest of my work stands on. In order to understand my writing, you should read these essays. And then email four, email five, somewhere in there I send a really simple, like kind of plain text email. And what I do with that is I just say, hey, thanks so much for subscribing. I hope you’ve been enjoying the content. One quick question: What’s your biggest frustration with and then fill in the blank. You know, learning, in my case, I was teaching how to design iPhone apps. So I said, what’s your biggest frustration with learning how to design iPhone apps? You could say, hey, what’s your biggest frustration or biggest struggle with raising kids right now, with meal prep, with any of these things? You just say, hit reply and let me know. And what happens is then you get to categorize all these replies that they come in. It might be as simple as a label in Gmail so that every reply to that email goes into one spot. You can read them all at once. Or you could be using Zapier to an Airtable, something more sophisticated. But it can start in a simple way.
And then from there, what we do is every time I go to write an email, I’m not sitting down at my computer from scratch and saying, oh man, what should I write about this week? I’m going through my categorized responses and saying, oh, Amy had this struggle. I think I can answer that. You know, or Joe had this one. Let me write an answer or an essay just for that person and then make it more general. And then to close the loop in the flywheel, you know, that newsletter goes out and we’re going to promote it, you know, both to the email list and then also on social. That’s going to result in more subscribers. So if we go through the list or if we go through the flywheel, we have new subscribers coming in. That turns into welcome, or that turns into frustrations being shared back with us. And then from there, it’s going to categorizing the responses up to writing content to feed the responses, which then gets us more subscribers. And so this really turns into, you know, a flywheel where it’s a circular motion that closes the loop. And the more effort or like, basically, the more results we get, the more results we get, which is pretty fantastic. And we can get into the laws of flywheels and all that, but that’s a very simple example that everyone should implement.
Katie: And the thing I love about that example in particular is because you’re asking their biggest frustration, you’re giving them a space to share that. And they’re going to, like you said, tell you their obvious pain point. But also when you respond, you’re getting to write as if you were speaking to a singular person, which I know over the years really changes the tone and how you’re able to connect with people, even if that message goes to many people. And I experienced this with Wellness Mama, especially early on. I would read every single comment on blog posts. And I knew those first several hundred commenters, at least by name. And it was like there was a relationship building.
And a term often used in entrepreneurship is the idea of having an avatar, which is sort of the person you’re writing or speaking or helping and having a clear understanding of who that person is, even if it’s an avatar you create in your head that represents your audience. I found that was extremely helpful because I wasn’t trying to write to the entire internet. I was trying to write to these people who I felt like I knew at a visceral level, to the mom of three kids with tight finances, who was maybe had a kid with a health issue and she was trying to help her whole family get healthier. It allowed me to speak to her in a much more personal way than if I was just trying to write broadly to the entire internet. And so I’m curious if you have any examples of the avatar perspective in business. I know you’re involved with many and how that can be beneficial as well.
Nathan: Well, yeah, I think the single biggest thing you can do or the single most important writing tip is to write to an individual. And like, I remember one of the books that I wrote was about designing web applications. And I wrote it very specifically to my brother-in-law who was early in his design career and was looking to pursue that. And anytime that I’d get stuck and I’m trying to write the intro and I’m trying to figure out any of this, I would just actually write Philip, comma, enter, enter, and then write it to him as if I would just talk to him. And that’s so much easier because we, we as writers, tip into this weird format where we all of a sudden go, oh, I, I know how to write an email to Katie, but this is to a thousand people, or this is to a hundred thousand people. How could I possibly write to them? And it’s like, actually you do it the same way. And so what I love about this is it puts that exactly as you’re saying, it puts that, that individual and their problems and the words that they use front and center.
That’s another thing in this. Like we talked later about the byproducts of flywheels, but one byproduct of this flywheel is that you get to see the language constantly that people use to describe their frustrations and their struggles. And if you can use that and have like, oh, let’s say 10 people describe the frustrations with meal prep. You can see the words and the scenarios they use. And if you were to come out with a book or a course or content on that topic, then you could have that labeled away and you could see, okay, what am I going to title this? Well, what’s my blog post subject line going to be? Well, look at how they you know, how your audience actually describes their own struggles. And that will give you so much material to craft your language, whether it’s, you know, just for attention or driving for sales.
Katie: And I think even for someone who’s very early stage or maybe even wanting to start a business, that, that concept is so important as you’re thinking of what kind of business you’re going to create. And as you’re thinking of long-term, what a flywheel was going to look like, you can center on that. Who is your avatar and what problem are you solving for that specific person? And that helps you to really refine your message. And I firmly believe that all of us have knowledge or expertise or wisdom in a particular area and that that can benefit many other people. So even for those thinking maybe like, I don’t know what business I would even start. I feel like if you can reframe that question into who could I help with this knowledge that I have that maybe someone else doesn’t, that’s a great starting point.
I’m also curious if you’ve ever applied the concept of flywheels in day-to-day personal life and not just business. Because one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that often business principles can apply in how we manage our time and our home life as well. And I’ve talked about this some, but I realized years ago, I was really stressed in my life. But the stress wasn’t coming from business. And it got to the point where I even almost considered stopping Wellness Mama because I realized I couldn’t manage all these things and I wasn’t going to let my family be the thing that fell through the cracks. And what I realized instead was that actually, if I started running my home life, like I ran a business, at least with the level of organization and having key results and targets I was working toward and getting the whole family on board toward that common mission, it actually simplified the stress of home life, not because I was necessarily doing less. But because I had built structure that reduced my mental stress around it. So I know that’s probably a question you haven’t gotten before, but I’m curious if you’ve seen this flywheel concept apply in other areas of life as well.
Nathan: Yeah, I haven’t spent as much time on this, but what immediately comes to mind is health and fitness. And so if we go to the three laws of flywheels, as I’ve defined them, first is that each step goes smoothly from one into the next, right? So that is we’re having a circular motion instead of a linear set of tasks. The second is that it gets easier with each rotation. And the third is that you produce more with each rotation.
And so what I think about is my own health and fitness journey, where when you’re trying to make progress, it’s really hard at first. Every little habit that you’re trying to tweak is, you know, you’re trying to cut out the last meal of the day, you know, and I don’t mean dinner. I mean, the meal that I eat at like 9 pm before I start to wind down for bed, you know, like you’re trying to change all of these things. But at first, it’s really, really hard. And you start with these small tweaks. But then things get easier over time as you stack these habits on top of each other. And you really make these tweaks that work for you. And you say like, okay, like one thing that worked really well for me was eliminating breakfast. I was able, you know, by doing intermittent fasting, I was able to, without much effort, like reduce my calorie consumption. And so you make these tweaks and the rotation of the flywheel is actually on a daily basis, you know, maybe on a weekly basis as you have, you know, your exercise habits. But, you know, I find myself early on dreading the gym, dreading, you know, eating well and things like that. And then over time, you’re like, oh, actually, I’m excited for this. I’m excited to, you know, like to wait another day. I’m like, I wish that I could do these two workouts back to back, but I know I actually have to wait two days, you know, to give my body time to rest before I do that other one. And so I think it applies to those same principles. And you could absolutely do it in all areas of your life. Now I’m like, okay, how am I going to apply this to homeschooling? Because you absolutely could.
Katie: Yeah, I know homeschooling is another commonality that you and I share. And we talked about that in our first episode, which I’ll make sure is linked. But I love that. I think you’re right. Health and wellness habits can have that flywheel effect and also make use of compounding, which is another business principle that’s very valuable is like anything that’s going to increase the benefits of the effort over time is also really helpful. And so whether that’s lifting weights, whether that’s developing habits around your eating window, whether it’s better sleep habits, all of those things allow you to consistently iterate and improve more. So I love that you applied it there. And if you think of any ideas for homeschooling and applying it, I would love to have a follow-up conversation about that.
Nathan: Sounds good. We’ll have to text about that as we share some tips.
Katie: Absolutely. And you also mentioned earlier about the byproducts of flywheels. And I would love to delve into that a little bit and hear from you what you see both in a business perspective and just in general as byproducts of flywheels.
Nathan: Yeah. So I’m an avid woodworker. I’ve got a shop in my garage and I’m always making stuff. And one thing that, you know, there’s things I deliberately make, you know, cutting boards. My son and I, he’s nine and we just built a, he has this little cubby in his room that had a door on it. You know, it’s like where the roof line comes down and it’s this awkward space. And we just built a hidden, like a bookcase that opens up as the hidden door in all of this. And so there’s cool things that we make, but one of the byproducts that comes out of that is sawdust, right? We make a lot of sawdust and we throw it away. And that’s on a small scale. So that’s fine. But if you look at sawmills, they have this interesting thing of like they’re taking trees and turning it into lumber that we all use for projects and houses and everything. And they’re producing huge amounts of sawdust. And that’s just a byproduct. And it’s actually pretty irritating for them because they’re like, you gotta dispose of it. If you don’t dispose of it, it’ll catch on fire. Like it’s not good to breathe. Like it is not a good byproduct. But what Samuels learned, you know, well, I don’t know, 50 years ago or more, is that if you take all of this obnoxious sawdust and you mix it with glue and compress it down, you can make something called medium-density fiberboard, which is actually what pretty much all cabinets are built out of these days. It’s what we built that bookshelf, you know, that swings open for the hidden little hidden room in my son’s room. It’s all out of what was a waste product that was a natural byproduct of everything else.
And so I really like to look at the byproducts of flywheels. Because there’s always something there, right? Like one byproduct, you know, we talked about in our content creation flywheel is the language and the copy that we should use in our sales pages and our subject lines and all of that. Another example is at ConvertKit, we love to tell stories. Our whole thing is that we want creators to be the heroes of our brand. And so we want to tell their stories. And we’ve got a whole process of how we identify creators, interview them, do a written story about how, a bunch of them we do a written story on. We also go and make a film about. And then we ask them, who should we reach as another creator? Whose story should we tell? They always give us ideas. And that closes the loop, right? We can now complete it again with another creator.
But what we realized is there were byproducts everywhere in this flywheel. Not only did it give us, you know, one to two great stories to tell every month. But we’d send photographers for each story. And then that gave us this library of all of these great photos of creators in their home offices, studios, you know, living their life. And we ask those creators, hey, are you okay with releasing some of these that everybody could use in their content. And a bunch of them said, yes, absolutely. These photos you can release. And so we have a library on Unsplash that has 40 million views of our photos. So many creators write to us and say like, hey, thank you so much for making these photos available for use in my blog posts. You know, I just put out this ebook that uses one of these photos. And that’d be a weird project if we set out to say, hey, let’s go and you know, hire photographers, send them all over the country, you know, for these creators to make a photo library, like that would be odd. But we ended up, you know, the byproduct turned into something amazing.
Another example is Issa, who’s our storyteller. She creates, you know, she does these written stories. And we thought, what if we could make a podcast? But a podcast is a whole bunch of work. You know. And so we were thinking about, do we actually want to do that? And Issa realized that she could go and batch record a bunch of these stories. She could just read the essay that she wrote and record that as a podcast. And so that’s another byproduct because people say, hey, I’d rather, you know, you read it to me while I do the dishes instead of me having to read it myself and focus on it.
And then the final byproduct, well, actually there’s like five more. But one of the things is that, if you think about flywheels, they operate next to each other. Basically, we have this storytelling flywheel that every month puts out a story about a creator. It’s really high-quality and we’re really proud of it. Well, every two years, we take that collection of stories that stacked up and we run another process to turn all of that into a beautiful coffee table book that we can get in the hands of creators. I have all these stories of people saying like, hey, I became a creator because I was over at my cousin’s house and I picked up this I Am A Creator book on a coffee table and I started reading it and I got sucked in, you know, about this amazing story, you know, this lawyer turned food blogger. And now I’m hooked on all this and like I ended up becoming a creator because of it. And that’s actually just a byproduct of our storytelling flywheel. It’s not, hey, let’s set out and go, you know, do this huge undertaking of writing a book. So there’s all kinds of magic that comes when you run these flywheels and, you know, keep them running and improving them for multiple years.
Katie: I love those examples. And I’ll say I’m the beneficiary of your woodworking hobby because I still have the cutting board that you made me years ago in my kitchen. And another thing that lines up with that is I actually am building out an in-person wellness space in the area where I live that will have all the wellness modalities. But part of building that, I wanted to source things locally from small businesses as much as possible. So last week, I got to visit for the first time a sawmill where I live and to see that process firsthand. And it was so fascinating. So I love that you used that as an example. And I know there’s a million more ways we could go with this conversation.
But for anybody who’s interested in the concept, I know you’ve written about this as well and talked about it on other podcasts. And I’ll link to those so they can keep learning more. But for someone who’s new to the game and maybe is wanting to make that jump into being a creator, sounds like your books are a great resource for that as well. But do you have any tips for thinking big picture about a flywheel at the initial stages of business so that you can hopefully develop a sustainable one over time from that very early phase? Because I know I missed that window and had to put it in place later on. So any tips for beginners?
Nathan: Yeah, I think the first thing is to know that a flywheel is not that different. Often a small tweak from a process that you might already be doing. So for example, a lot of us sit down to work and we do what I call a scattered process. And that’s where we’re jumping around and working on whatever seemed most interesting in that moment. Or whatever email we got or text message that said, hey, you got to work on this. Or we were scrolling Instagram and we’re like, oh, that’s a great reel. I guess I should make reels today. You know, you’re jumping around to all of this. So that’s the amateur version.
I’d say the more sophisticated, maybe professional version is when you actually have processes and standard operating procedures and you say, okay, here’s the schedule that I put out content. Here, every time I publish a blog post, here are the checklist that I go through, right? Here’s my process for my subject lines. And that’s really, you know, much more effective. That is then taking that linear, you know, standard operating procedure and turn it like closing the loop, turning it into a flywheel. And figuring out how do I do it so that the more I do this thing, the more results it gives me?
And so I would say the beginner version is start to define what are the activities that you’re going to do. Let me back up. I’d say the beginner version is to think about your goal. Let’s say our goal in this case is to build a newsletter to 1000 subscribers. So now, instead of jumping at it from a scattered perspective of wherever you feel motivated on a given day, think about what activities do I need to do every week? I need to write. I need to promote a newsletter. I need to package it up. I need ways to get subscribers. I need to meet other creators and actually list those out and then try to see what processes could I document around that? How do I? I was going to say, how do I be as robotic as possible? But yes, that is actually what I mean. How do I define the constraints so that I can be as creative within those constraints as possible? And if you do that, then you’ll start to see where the flywheels can develop. So really focus on linear processes first, especially as a beginner. And then as you get those established, look for how could I close the loop? How could I make it so that more of this thing continues to snowball and get me even more results?
Katie: I love it. And we didn’t even get to delve into the world of ConvertKit today, but I’ll say for anybody listening, if you’ve ever gotten an email from me, it was through your software ConvertKit that you founded. So I’ll make sure that’s linked as well if you guys want to use it as a tool in your own businesses, it’s been really helpful for me and in line with everything we’ve talked about, if you want to see an example of that newsletter, you can sign up for that at wellnessmama.com. And I know you guys have one as well. I’ll make sure those are both linked, but Nathan, thank you so much for the time. It’s always such a fun conversation with you. And I love that we got to actually go into the business and flywheel side today. This has been really fun. And I hope everyone has learned as much as I have.
Nathan: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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