Sahil Bloom’s #1 Advice to All Content Creators

0:01Alright, Marketing School listeners, this is a 20-30 minute segment of a full interview I've done with an amazing founder, entrepreneur, creative, visionary. You're going to get a ton of insights from this. And if you want to listen to the entire thing, go search for leveling up with Eric Su. That's the entire podcast that you're going to find. So you get 20 to 30 minutes here. And if you want the whole thing, you can just search for leveling up with Eric Su. And without further ado, enjoy the episode.

0:35I think you focused on Twitter first, and then you really started to compound. And so I want to dive into how that happened initially. I was working in private equity, so I had no plans. I didn't know what the creator economy was. I didn't know what an influencer was other than Kim Kardashian or whatever. COVID hit, and I had more time on my hands. I was kind of trying to figure out what to do with my spare time. I was stuck at home. I had no social life. And I'd always loved writing. Uh, and what I figured was like, I'll just, this will be like an interesting hobby. And so I started doing it on the weekends.

1:07I had 500 followers at the time. This is like May of 2020. Uh, and it was very clear to me early on that there was like some pull for the stuff I was talking about. Originally it was like finance explainers. Like I was kind of explaining finance topics in simple terms. It started like taking off a little bit and the like positive reinforcement I was getting encouraged me to do more of it. So on the weekends, I was spending a little more time on it and it was continuing to go. But I never, there was never like, oh, hey, I'm going to go become an influencer. Hey, I'm going to go become a creator and this is going to be a job, right?

1:41Like I was, I had a lucrative job. I was doing well. I was on a good track. I didn't love it, but it was good. And you're getting patted on the back for being successful. For me, at least one of the big takeaways was like, I never set out to become a creator. I was writing about things I knew and things I understood. And then as I expanded it, I was writing about things I was struggling with, like my own life, life experiences, you know, problems I was wrestling with, and things like I was really learning by actually doing them in the real world. So I was never like, hey, I read this, you know, in some book, and I've never thought about it.

2:13And let me just like share with you or like, here are 10 TED talks that'll change your life. Like, my whole thing was always, if a 22 year old kid with no life experience can do this same piece of content, I probably shouldn't share it. It should really be things that like I am uniquely qualified to share. And that made a big difference. So yeah, I mean, Twitter was the first place I wrote a ton there. My general perspective was like, let me just figure out layers of depth. So if Twitter was like the most surface level, the next layer of depth would be newsletter. So I expanded the newsletter, grew that.

2:44Next layer of depth would be book. So I signed the book deal working on that. And then expanding mediums and like expanding the surface area. So that's, you know, with all the video stuff I do now and kind of growing from there. You're spending at least 5 ,000 hours in the first year on this. Yeah, it was, I mean, countless, countless hours. Like this is no, there was no hack. I mean, people constantly, I constantly get asked like, oh, what was the hack? What was the growth hack? What was the, you know, engagement groups? Like everyone wants to point to the thing that was like the hack. The hack was that I wrote 300 ,000 words on Twitter.

3:16Like I literally just wrote an unbelievable amount. And like some of it worked, some of it was duds, some of it was great, like some of it was medium. And that was the real thing was like, I showed up every single week for long, long period of time. That was it. You just got to do the work straight up. And here's the thing, like I'll experiment with things because that's kind of my job as a marketer, right? So like on my Twitter, this guy reaches out to me, he's like, hey, we do these threads for people. It's all these other like creators. And it's like, yes, clearly, like these are people writing these stories that are super long.

3:47And so he does a couple for me. and you know yes they get two million views or whatever i'm like great it totally doesn't sound like me and like also who cares yeah i think i know this person so this if it's the kid that i think uh i actually like uh had like a issue with him because he told people he so i've always 100 percent of the time i've never had a ghost i write all my own stuff because i love writing that's my thing yeah and this kid wrote a message to one of my close friends sean puri uh saying that he did ghostwriting for me. And Sean is one of my close friends. So Sean texted me and was like, hey, does this guy write for you?

4:21I'm thinking, you know, I'm like thinking of engaging him on one of my companies or something. And I was like, what? Like, no, absolutely not. And he was like insinuating that he had written for me. And so I reached out to him and I sent him like kind of a joking message and said like, hey, my attorneys will be in touch. And he freaked out. And I was joking, but I just wanted to scare him. And he like, you know, and I basically told him like, look, you're a 20 year old kid. This is a learning lesson for you. Never do that. Like, don't use people's names that you actually haven't worked with because the world is so small.

4:52I mean, Sean literally like within minutes had texted me and I knew and then I was messaging this kid. So you have to be really careful. Like if you're trying to build your reputation as a service provider, the other thing is like, you have to ask people before you use their name in any marketing. I mean, this happened with Sean, like with Milk Road. He had that big, you know, like public spat with a guy that did his newsletter growth. Because like, you have to be careful about whose name you have to ask. Like if you're an agency operator, you have to ask and get consent from someone that you can use their name in your marketing.

5:21And like for any agency operators out there, that's just like, you have to do that full stop. But yeah, I mean, I agree. Back to your point on the ghostwriting, like it goes to my point of when you're creating a piece of content, if you are someone that is actually doing real things in the real world, you should want any piece of content you put out to be something that only you could write. It shouldn't be something that a 22 year old kid using chat gpt can write because then like who cares yeah yeah could i i mean i could go around and basically go find interesting things someone else had written that like oh they only have a thousand followers but they wrote something good and i could just repurpose it right at my own way and i have a million followers it'll get a whole lot more views than their version did but like if anyone can write then like what value is that actually creating for me in the long run it's just like it's stupid right it's like fairy dust yep it's It's also not authentic either.

6:09I mean, with all the AI stuff coming out, it's like, yeah, you have to either have original stories or experiences or you have to have original data. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of my lamentation with the creator world as it stands today, which basically when I was getting started, creator or influence, it wasn't really a thing. It wasn't like a career path, right? You could go make some money doing it short term, but it wasn't like, oh, mom, I'm going to go become a creator. This is what I'm going to do. And so when I thought about it, it was all about like real experiences and authentic things that you were doing.

6:43Like you had to go do things in the real world and then, and then you could talk about them. Um, now there's like a lot of, I haven't done the thing, but I'm going to write about it. Right. Like a business guru talking about business principles when they live in like a 500 square foot studio and they haven't made any money or had business success is weird. Like that's weird to me. Right. Cause then you're just like what you're writing about like someone else's book, basically, if you haven't actually experienced or built the thing. And similarly, like if you're a fitness influencer and trying to build a fitness creator ecosystem, but you're not fit, like, why would I listen to you on that?

7:17You know, it's like a running influencer that doesn't have stats to back up the fact that they're a good runner. It's like, it's a weird thing that is net that now exists. And so like, if I give advice to anyone that wants to be a creator, it's like, go do the thing in the real world and talk about it But along the way, like you can talk about the journey of doing it and the experience and the struggle and the like successes and the failures. That's interesting content because that's like the path that a lot of people are on. If you're talking about it like you've done it and you haven't done shit, that's like that's just inauthentic, right?

7:47It's not real. That's a grifter level. Yeah, it's not real. Yeah. Well, here's the thing too. So it's definitely creating, right? And it's plus being consistent because I don't think you've stopped tweeting since 2020, right? Right. So yeah, it's I mean, consistency is the foundation of everything. And like, this is a common trope. It's just it's true, though, like, you just have to keep showing up. And you have to not be so short term that you get discouraged when things don't work, because they're going to be just like valleys where for a long period of time, and like, I'm not talking like one or two posts, like, you might go three months where like, your open rates are really low on a newsletter, and you don't know why or like, your engagements really far down.

8:25And like the people that you know, aren't going to make it are the people that you then see posting like the algorithms changed and it's so bad and like they need to change it back. Elon Musk ruining Twitter and the really great people. Like I just, I had lunch with Mark Manson, the subtle art of not giving a fuck. Amazing guy. He's been around for 20 years, right? Like he's writing Facebook blogs back in the day. He's created all these things and his whole thing is like, yeah, the algorithms change. Like that's part of the game. That's why it's hard to be here for 20 years. you just have to figure it out.

8:55Like you're sitting around complaining about it and like getting down during those valleys versus like figuring out, okay, what works? Like how do I operate at the intersection of what I like and what's working in the algorithm today, rather than just sitting around being like, oh, the things change. This is crap. Elon Musk change it back. Got it. And then just to get a little more granular here, the threads. So you're doing three per week initially. You're working a full-time job. These have to be taking you a couple hours per thread? Yeah, early on. I mean, each one was taking me at least four hours because I was doing a lot of research to make sure they were really good.

9:27I was like refining them a lot. I hadn't built the muscle yet, so it wasn't easy. It wasn't coming quickly. And I think you were like, you didn't have any followers, right? And I think you tweeted something and then I think it was Chamath or something that shared it. So how did the growth look in the first year? I started at about 500 followers. I posted my first thread. Nothing happened for the first few hours. I I commented it underneath something that Chamath posted. And this is before Chamath was like Chamath. He wasn't super famous yet. He had a decent following, but he wasn't enormous. It was before all the SPAC boom and stuff.

9:58I commented it underneath something that was related that he had said. He then shared my thing and said, this is good. That sort of spiked me to like 2 ,000 followers maybe. And that was kind of the start. I think by the end, that was May of 2020. By the end of 2020, I was probably at about 70, 75 ,000 followers on Twitter. That was my only platform though. I didn't have anything else. And then by the time I quit my job, which was May of 2021, I was probably at about 175 ,000. What was your initial cadence on Twitter? Because I think my understanding is you are usually writing off the cuff. I think you're like, screw the content calendar.

10:35Yeah, I can't do the content calendar. I, yeah, I just, I'm not like, I'm terrible at doing things in advance. I just can't do it. Like I won't be able to motivate myself. And so, and I have to work from inspiration. It's like something I'm actually excited to write about. So I, you know, originally I was probably writing about like two threads a week and I was working a full-time job. So it was sort of like, that was all I could do. I don't think I ever really went more than that. And I just stuck to it. I never missed a week. Even still, like, you know, I launched my newsletter May of 2021. I've sent two newsletters every single week since then.

11:08No Christmas off, no, you know, holidays off, no birthday off, like just have done it the entire way through. And that's kind of how I'm wired. Like when I get into something, I'm going to do this for 10 years. Like I'm just going to do it. And that's the minimum amount of time that I'm committing to doing this. And it's either going to work after 10 years or it's not, but I'm not doing it for like three months and figure it, you know, and then just being like, ah, you know, didn't work. I want to learn and I want to get better at it and improve. So taking that long-term view was very important to me from the outset.

11:39Got it. Now in the morning when you're, when you're, because again, I don't think you have a content calendar right now. So one, where are you drawing the inspiration from and how, what's like your content block in the morning, if you even have one? Yeah. Um, every morning from five to seven 30 is when I create, it's the only time of day that I'm creative. It's before my son and wife wake up, uh, get out of the cold plunge, which I do every morning religiously when I'm at home at least. And, um, basically go sit down at my desk and that's when I am feel creative and that's when I can create. That's been a lot of book writing, some newsletter writing, and then it's, you know, for the for the social platforms.

12:15What do I draw inspiration from? It's my own life. It's like literally, things I'm reading things I'm, you know, interested in problems I'm struggling with questions I'm asking myself, those kind of things. And that makes it authentic for me where I feel like I can do it for a long period of time. And it means that it's unique. Like it's it's not again, it's like, it's not something that anyone can do because I might read a concept, think it's really interesting. But for me to write about it, then I need to place my own perspective and lens and like how I wrestled with it personally to be able to go share it.

12:49And that's the part that like you can't replicate that because that's me. That's my own unique view on it. Okay. So I know like with Alex Ramosi, the way he does it on Twitter, he's really giving advice to his younger self. And I can see how tough he's being on his younger self, right? For you, is it just like your drawing from experiences, but there's also like, hey, like you should do this. I try to avoid you should do this type stuff. The main reason I so I do some of that where I feel like it's advice to my younger self. And I explicitly say like, this is the things I wish I knew when I was 22.

13:20You know, that I feel like I've kind of learned at this point in my life about these different areas. Usually I try to avoid it. And the reason is my answers to these questions are going to be different than yours are going to be different than our friends are At any stage of your life, the problems and the questions I'm asking are universal. But the answers are entirely driven by your circumstances, your perspectives, the things you want, like what season of your life you're in. And so my goal with all of it is to help you ask slightly better questions, to help you wrestle with them slightly better, but not to give you the answer to it, because I actually don't know the answer for you.

13:56Pre-show, you mentioned that you're bearish on the creator economy. So let's start there. I think it's what I said, which is like, there's a lot of people that have gotten into this because they think that it's a lucrative career track, but they haven't actually done anything yet in the real world and like creating real experiences. And that I am really bearish on. I don't think you can do that for a long period of time. I think you can probably do that for a short period of time. You can like hack your way to a decent size audience. Like if I were to start from zero on Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever.

14:28And you told me like, hey, you have to make if it was today, so like October, and you told me like, hey, you have to make a million dollars in 2024. So next year, so I have like, sort of three months to like build it. And then like, I have to make a million dollars next year. I think I could probably do that. But then I think it would fall off a cliff in 2025. Like, I think I could for maybe like maybe a year, two years, three years, like hack your way where you could like convince people you're legit for a short period of time, do some like course or something, you know, at brand deals on Instagram, whatever.

15:00Like, I think I could hack my way to doing that, but that's not a lasting viable career. Like if you want to have a career doing this, you're talking 30 plus years, right? Like 20, 30, 40 years. There's no precedent for that in the creator economy. The best precedent that exists is people like tim ferris or mark manson who have like been doing this for 20 years um and that's really freaking hard to do like you ask them they've probably seen so many people come and go during the different phases of their life in these spaces um and so my my firm perspective is that if you are going to do this you need to like really approach it differently and there needs to be a longer term view and vision and a lot of that has to be grounded in things you're actually doing or building in the real world like the accounts on twitter that i think are most interesting are the ones that are like in some niche space and then just like talking about it publicly like car dealership guy uh is this like you know he's a friend of mine in real life but like he's doing those things in the real world and then he's talking about them he's built a big audience talking about this like weird niche thing of like auto dealerships and uh you know like used car financing and all these things um that is super cool and he's going to build an enormous empire around these different things.

16:09Because now he has a huge audience of people interested in car dealerships. Like the potential to launch businesses around that is enormous. And businesses that have real enterprise value, that have durable cashflow streams, totally different from like hand to mouth brand deals of like so-and-so is going to pay you five grand to do an Instagram reel. And that's just a very, very different thing. I keep going back to the Warren Buffett quote here where it's like, if you're not going to hold this stock for 10 years, don't even hold it for 10 seconds. And it applies for everything. That's a great quote.

16:37I've never heard that one actually. That's fantastic. I'm pretty sure it was him that said it. Okay. So this is where it's like, you have this creator led agency where you guys will cut up clips, right? I think it was called Viral Cuts, correct? I tried it for a little bit. I think my take on this one is I think most of them are going to go out of business. And my reason - I think so too, by the way. I just don't think ours is going to go out of business. Well, I think, okay, so for you, for example, like, you know, you've been in PE, like you jumping around like I think there's a good strategic brain and like you don't want to tarnish your name right so I think yours is going to be fine yeah I think the other ones because they're going to have like an influx of customers and there's going to be a big operational issue and they can't the churn's going to go through the roof I mean when you think about so so what you're referring to is like a broader holding company called assembly um partnered with a good friend of mine who's built and sold to eight figure agencies in the past um he's a laser focused operator right I'm not I have the network and the connections and the partnerships and the strategy.

17:33So we have a lot of complementarity in our skill sets, which is great. But the view from us was you can basically leverage creators as distribution when there's product audience fit. So the best example, you reference Viral Cuts, which is with Cody Sanchez and Sam Parr. They do a lot of clips. Cody in particular has built an enormous audience off of doing clips. What we've learned, by the way, is you're actually not a good customer. The best customer is a business that is looking to like do tons of video clips and ads versus creators who tend to be like, just like shorter term customers in general, because if it's like working or not working, and you know, the price point not for you, because you have businesses, but like the price point is significant.

18:18It's 5000 to$10 ,000 a month, a business can easily invest that in doing more direct response ads and doing more brand ads and all those things. And so the vast majority of that business, which is now, you know, multi seven figure run rate business is, uh, is going to be beat a bit, you know, it's real, it's businesses on the other end. The best example of this is, uh, like, Hey Friends with, with Ali Abdaal, our shared friend, um, where Ali had this amazing course, the part-time YouTuber Academy that he had built, uh, incredible audience around, you know, helping YouTubers build their YouTube presence.

18:50Well, like for me, I could take that course, but I don't want to go edit YouTube videos. I don't have time for that. I'm not good at that. It's not my skill set. I want someone to just do it for me and I'm happy to pay. And there's tons of people and businesses that are like that where they want the Ali editing, you know, quality and style and all of the like strategy and thumbnails and all of those things, but they don't want to actually do it. And so for Ali to launch this like premium offering that actually does it for you makes a ton of sense. And there's a ton of leads to your point. Now, the real devil is in the details of how you actually service with quality those leads.

19:23that is going to be the thing that makes most of these businesses go belly up. I tweeted this today that like services businesses sound great because you make cash from day one. The reality is building like a tiny little services business is quite easy. Like if you have five clients for a YouTube business like that, charging 10 grand a month, if it's just you that runs that you're making 50 grand a month, you feel rich. That's a great little business. Taking that business to where it's doing 500K a month is miserable and extraordinarily difficult and requires like a very specific set of skills.

19:55I mean, now with these video based businesses, we have like 100 employees and you're having to manage all of these different editors and you need PMs and you need a GM at different business units. That's like, all of a sudden you're talking about like you need a culture and you need, you know, HR policies and you need company offsites. Like that's a real business at that point. And so that's why I agree with you that I think most of these like, you know, sort of fly by night creator led agencies that are getting started or creator led services businesses that are getting started are going to have a really tough time because they don't have the actual business background or the business partner that is actually going to understand how to like navigate the inevitable enormous challenges that come with these businesses.

20:36Got it. That's a good point. And so I guess the question would be with the, are you the hold co here? Are you involved with all these agencies? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So the hold co basically is like the shared services layer that builds and launches all of these different services businesses. It's not always going to be just services businesses. The idea is like, I think, I mean, this is my finance background, but I call it a bond with a call option. So like the services businesses are a cash flowing bond. They are cash flow from day one. You know, they're generating a ton of cash today, like 50 % net margins across the whole thing.

21:09And you can then take and invest the cash flow from that bond into like call option upside bets. And when I say upside, I mean like real enterprise value, because we know this, like services businesses don't typically trade at a great premium. Like you can't really, they don't have a ton of enterprise value. They don't trade at a great multiple. But a CPG business or an app business or a software business will trade at a great multiple. And so those are your like call option upside bets that require some upfront investment of capital. And you can do the whole thing in a really nice way if you're like taking the cashflow from the services stuff and funding the bigger upside bets.

21:41If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours, animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code. It was easy to use, and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click, so your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly.

22:17And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together. No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's Framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply.

22:48When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind-the-scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally, from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style. Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify has got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos.