I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
How big should your team be?
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Hey Reader, My friend Josh Kaufman has run his book business for decades without a single employee. He doesn’t even have a customer support team. Every copy of The Personal MBA and his other books sells through Amazon, Audible, or another retailer. So if a reader has a problem with their order, they just contact the store. When Josh came on my podcast, I asked him why he doesn’t add a course or a group program on top of his books. Because that could easily bring in an extra $100,000 to $500,000 a year. “More money is very often not the point,” he said. Josh explained that 25 years ago, his exact business would have needed a team of 20 people. Today, he uses automation and smart business design to free up more of his attention for the work only he can do. A lot of people assume their team size should grow with revenue, but it doesn’t have to. Revenue just determines the budget for how many people and which roles you can afford. How much of that budget you spend on people is up to you. Josh started with the life he wanted to live (complete freedom of time) and worked backward from there. This means he spends none of his budget on a team. So that’s one end of the spectrum: Josh with no employees. But plenty of creators I know chose something a little bigger. I love what Sam Vander Wielen has built with her legal templates business. She’s sold more than $10 million in digital products, and today the business brings in close to $2 million a year with essentially one full-time employee. Then there’s Callum McDonnell, who runs 7x Content, the agency that produces my podcast. He and his team of about 15 have worked with five podcasts that have ranked in the top 10 worldwide—including Diary of a CEO. I have an excellent episode with him coming out in a couple of months (it’s a masterclass on growing a podcast). Ali Abdaal started out making study videos in medical school and now has more than 20 people working on his YouTube channel and productivity apps. On the far end, there’s me, with a team of 115 at Kit. Personally, I love working with a team and wouldn’t have it any other way. Work is way more fun day to day, and I’d get lonely otherwise. A team also lets me take on projects at a radically different scale. I also learn so much faster getting feedback from every direction. When I think about scale, I often reference Naval Ravikant’s four types of leverage:
People are one of the four types of leverage, and building without a team takes one of those four completely off the table. For the goals I have at Kit, I don’t want to give that up. Josh and I chose very different paths in terms of team, but we both chose our path on purpose. If you’re trying to figure out the best fit for you, start by picturing your life three years from now. Ask yourself:
Once you figure out what you want, you’ll have a better idea of the team it takes to get there. There’s one more question I’d ask as you figure out the roles you’ll need: Which ones could you hand to AI? Josh mentioned his business would have taken 20 people to run 25 years ago. Today, in more cases than not, if you can hire and train an employee to do something, you can probably train an agent to do it too. I’d start there before committing to payroll. You have more flexibility than ever before to build the team you want. Whether that’s a team of one or a team of 100, you get to decide. PODCASTWhy Community Beats Followers (And How to Build One)Do you want to know how to get into rooms with people several levels above you? Jayson Gaignard, author of Community Made, is the reason about 50 of my favorite entrepreneur friends are in my life. When Jayson got married, there were two people at his bachelor party. So he invited eight top local entrepreneurs to dinner, which eventually became Mastermind Talks. We get into:
Watch or listen to episode » CASE STUDYHow Neville Medhora Turned Two Readers Into a $45,000 SponsorshipIf you sell newsletter sponsorships, your best leads might already be on your list. Neville Medhora used Kit’s Subscriber Signals to search his list for a company he wanted as a sponsor. He found two of its employees already reading his newsletter every week. He reached out to them directly, and roughly three weeks later he’d landed a sponsorship worth about $45,000. The case study walks through how he found them and the audience data he showed the company to close the deal. RESOURCEHow to YouTubeIf you’re a developer or technical creator who wants to grow on YouTube, this is a great playbook. How to YouTube is a free guide on a single page. It walks through how a developer video gets made, from beginning to end, covering titles, thumbnails, scripting, editing, and publishing.
“The biggest goal you should have is not to make bigger videos, but to raise your floor. You want your worst videos to be better.”
There’s a ton on this page, but it’s very digestible. Have a great week! —Nathan |
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
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