How to Earn Millions by charging $0

0:00Imagine you've built a massive audience. We're talking millions of subscribers and sold out speaking tours. You've even written multiple bestselling books and then you decide to do something absolutely crazy. You give it all away for free. But here's the twist. You tell your audience they can pay for it if they want to. No pressure, just an invitation to support if they can. Sounds crazy, right? But for one guy, this strategy is actually working. In this video, we're diving deep into Sam Harris's pay-if-you-want business model. We'll break down how it works, crunch the numbers, and break down the consumer psychology behind it all.

0:41But here's the million-dollar question, literally. Is this just a marketing gimmick or potentially the best business model for creators in the world? This is Sam Harris. You're not currently on our subscriber feed. You'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. So if you're not familiar with Sam Harris, he is, well, he describes himself as a moral philosopher. That maybe doesn't mean so much to you. He's a pretty well-known author, meditation guy. So he has an app called Waking Up. He has a sub stack where he's got like another subscription, like subscriber-based thing going on.

1:23He has a podcast called Making Sense. the thing that I love about him so much is his bravery. He says things that are absolutely shock and yet at the same time as promised with his statement of making sense he has a big fan base of people like me that really admire and respect his work and follow his work around the internet. So and also you know if you know anything about me I'm you know around a company called Heights we're into the brain space and he's a neuroscientist so you know I'm slightly biased on the fact that that I like that he works on the brain as well. Okay, Chris, how familiar are you with Sam Harris as well?

1:58Are you fanboy, sycophant like me? No, not like you. Right. I mean, I know who Sam Harris is, but I certainly wouldn't have called myself a fanboy, no. More surface level. Not deep enough. For whatever reason, just hasn't stuck. We're running a media company, right? And so how Secret Leaders makes ads as a podcast company, as a YouTube company now, how we make money rather is we sell ads, right? and that's the de facto normal way that people in our space tend to make it. There's not that many models out there, right? There's that and there's a sort of subscriber model with Patreon as well. This sort of freemium idea.

2:38There's limited ways to make money if you're a content creator. But here's the thing about Sam Harris that I think is super interesting. He literally gives all of his content away for free and tells people like me that you can pay if you want and here's the fucking nuts thing, I do it. You pay? I pay. But you don't have to? I don't have to. Why do you pay? I don't pay for all of his content, in fairness. I don't pay for his sub stack. I pay for his podcast,$100 a year. And I pay for his waking up app, which is like maybe 100 quid a year or something. Or maybe it's around the same. So you're giving this guy like£180 a year?

3:12Yeah. And because here's the thing. He does, maybe the episodes are an hour and a half. They're around really fascinating and deep topics with very smart people. and he does about the first 30, 40 minutes free. And then you've got to pay if you want to hear the rest. But what he does is he says, if you want to hear the rest of this episode, head to samharris.org and pay to subscribe. But if you can't afford it or you don't want to, just send us an email, no questions asked, and you can have it for free. We'll give you a free subscription. He does that on every episode? Every episode. Wow. And every piece of content is literally, if you want to hear the rest or if you want this content, pay or email us and say you can't and you get it for free anyway unpack that as a content creator who makes money from content like what i mean my my initial two things i thought if someone like you who is you know frankly incredibly successful is not paying for all of his stuff then for i was like shit i mean you know i feel for this guy and then i was suddenly like hmm you know my cynical hat on my marketing hat on thinking to myself is that not just the best gimmick in the history of gimmicks ever because you kind of get both things he's got his affluent consumers being like i feel good that i'm paying for everyone else and then you've got your consumers who don't have much money getting it for free and then presumably when they get money they'll feel they want to pay it and pay it forward i ask very clever the thing that's been quite debated with this is you know from cynical people whether this is all just a gimmick right is it just a marketing ploy firstly it's unique right so he he invented this model pretty much in in media and content and so it becomes a talking point so it becomes something that people are talking about have you heard of sam harris which is good for his brand right and then at the same time you've got this kind of idea that he probably right has cultivated an audience of highly intellectual people like the top top top one percent of like smart people will listen to him and a bunch of other people at least the audience think that of themselves yeah correct absolutely bang on also probably a lot of content creators So here's the really interesting world of digital and content creation, right?

5:18Is content creators understand that making money online from content is hard and they struggle with those problems? The question is, do they understand those struggles enough that when a model like this presents itself, they become paying customers? Because I would argue not. I actually have a fundamental belief that most people are hypocrites, right? They want everyone to do it for them. But then when they're asked to shell out for someone else, they're like, hey, buddy, fuck you. And to top that off, there's a weird psychology thing that happens. And so I used to run, so this is more comparative to waking up, right?

5:46Waking up is an app. Apps are nightmares. Like you've always, there's a never, it's a never ending game. You can set up a website and if you're on a platform, you can just leave it. If you're an app, there's always a problem. So there's a never ending game once you start. So waking up will have full-time developers or an outsource team or something on it, ongoing costs for sure. He can't get around that. So the question becomes when you have a digital product, people do not value it properly. That's just how it is. So how do you really work out the funnel? like how do you actually get people to give you money if you're sam harris if you give so much away well i think firstly it's like why didn't why do we not value it and i think that we don't value it because of basically like 20 years of companies being completely free and monetizing our attention yeah we're the product facebook instagram etc etc who provide us a service for free which feels completely free and feels really good and all the rest of it but they're selling our attention to brands.

6:38And so what Sam Harris is obviously trying to do is trying to not do ads. He doesn't do ads. He was actually on Joe Rogan. I don't know if we can pull that clip up. That's the clip. That's the clip I've seen. But with a podcast, people make calculations that they would never make when they're just figuring out whether they want to buy something. People say, well, how much does a podcast cost to produce? If I knew what you were spending the money on and what it costs you to do this podcast, well, then I would support you. Right. But they're never saying how much does it cost to write a book? And if I knew what you were going to spend the money on once I bought this book, then I would know whether or not I wanted to buy it.

7:10You either want the book or you don't. This is such a great point, by the way. That is such a good point. This is such a great point. So can I just say as someone who ran a digital company, so I ran a company called Gravel. In Gravel, the main reason that company failed, millions of people every single month were using that product and getting real value and shopping through it and using it all the time. But we were so unable to capture value because people wouldn't pay for the service. It wasn't valuable enough to them because it was digital. On the flip side, the first ever bottle of heights I ever sold, right?

7:39You put a price on it and someone goes, okay. And people will say that's too expensive or that's not expensive enough or whatever the thing is, but no one goes that should be free. Because how could it be? Because how could it be? But how could other products be as well? But there's a complete difference. No one has ever, no rational person expects that book to be free. But I think it comes back to what he said. and I think it's like two decades or more VC money pumped into businesses that harness our attention as their ultimate product and so the Facebooks, Instagrams etc they have cultivated in us our belief that something must be free whereas I think that he's right I think as time goes on the higher quality digital products will become much more gated you know the rise of substack etc and why not because again you know i i create content you create content if you're doing it full time forget about just the time it takes because to create great content that millions of people love it takes time but on top of that the investment in building a studio in cameras in team in editing and production in marketing like you're running a full-on business I just think people are so predisposed to want information for free, which makes digital products much harder.

8:54It's quite hard as well. So, you know, Netflix, let's just round up some numbers here. Netflix is like, what, 10 quid a month or whatever, right? Maybe 12 or whatever. But the point being, it's about 10 or a month. So psychologically, how could you pay more for Sam Harris's content than you pay for all of Netflix? And then let's go a different model. you're paying 20 quid a month for open ai to have access to premium ai content so how do you then start to value other digital content when that is 20 quid a month yeah the baseline is that that's insane right and so yeah do i think that's worth double what netflix is to me yeah can i honestly genuinely say that anything should ever be priced higher than the chat gbt pro that's actually probably where like depth and fandom goes because you need to really like obsess over a crate or whatever to think that anything can be worth more than basically the world's greatest knowledge base utility that currently exists the age i am now i'm paying for that i'm feeling good about paying for that but i'm feeling good about paying for that because i'm paying for my younger self to have access to material i didn't have access to because i want unique and interesting and differing you know countering viewpoints in the world i don't just want netflix i don't just want chat gbt you know i want individualism and i think he's serving it to us okay so let's talk about how much money do you reckon actually he makes in 2017 so also you know this is a long time ago so let's just assume it's doubled so you've done some good research he gets he gets one million listeners per episode he's getting one million episode in 2017 yeah well i did not know that A waking up subscription costs$120 a year.

10:38Making sense subscription costs$100 a year. So yeah, I was about right. 100 quid,$100. Substack costs is about$100 a year. And then I found this net worth tool. You know, these celebrity net worth things are such rubbish. I searched for you, by the way. You weren't even on it. It said Sam Harris is worth$12 million. No. If you have a million listens. but a million listeners you're giving away for free and you're not monetizing or advertising so the interesting question is how many people are paying yeah anything on that no let's say that the 12 million was true so of a million subscribers not many you're going to say for example he's got three three things that he monetizes all at roughly a hundred dollars let's call it i for example subscribe to two out of three of them i reckon most people who subscribe probably subscribe to one out of three of them i literally run a subscription business as well so with three products actually so it's a good good comparison i can tell you most most people buy a bundle but he doesn't have a bundle so the second most common thing is um your personal one subscription yeah right so i will just assume using the same subscription logic that most people only subscribe to one of his one of his things so the aov the average order value is a hundred dollars yeah so a million subscribers in 2017 but whatever what percentage are gonna subscribe to him i reckon a lot of people pay for at least one product well so here's the thing if we use that maths of one percent of his audience estimated at a million listeners pay for his content and pay for one of the things he ends up with a million dollars a year yeah so he's got books and he's got other things as well but that's a million dollars a year and the estimated net worth thing is at 12 million dollars right does that sound right for sam harris and his global fame and you're like no way no way but if you then go back down you realize it's hard to make money like it's hard to scale money it's not that simple to suddenly be worth and he doesn't do ads although although although sitting here now again thinking about those numbers yeah i just feel like a lot more people are paying but just to be clear 12 percent of his audience would have to be subscribers well that's 12 million a year not 12 million net worth that's also very true if you make it 12 million a year he's crushing it that's also very true so what do you think you need to make per year in theory to have a 12 million dollar net worth your net worth is calculated by your assets and your cash and so well he lives on a cloud obviously yeah i don't know is this a good model like as in is this good culturally so let's talk about internet toxicity you talked earlier about uh facebook and instagram and blah blah and monetizing our attention and we all know this right we've all seen social dilemma and we're all present at brexit and then all of the cambridge analytica stuff like it's a nightmare so here comes someone with the exact opposite model What do we think?

13:28Is that like, is that moving society in the right way? Or is it like overly pious and somewhat sneaky? You can deliver very little value and charge people quite a lot. I think younger people who are highly aspirational and not fully educated yet can end up wasting an extraordinary amount of money paying for education that fundamentally shouldn't be charged for. whereas I think you know if the baseline is here Harris is delivering content that is a step up and so I don't know where I draw the line but I do know as a business owner that running a paid for product rather than an attention-based product allows you to go deeper with the audience and you're less beholden to the brand sitting on your shoulder and saying hey you know jump and I wish more people would understand that building a proper digital experience costs an extraordinary amount of money.

14:21So begs the question, do you think this would be a good model for secret leaders at some point? I think what's very interesting about what Sam Harris has done is he has created kind of the best of both worlds. You are able to listen to half of it, half an episode, get a lot of value. Presumably the way the conversation is weighted, I'm just riffing here, but presumably most of the meat is at the end of the conversation. and so if we were to do it you would still be able to give away a lot of value and then your core subscriber base is paying for the production and i wonder if you you know by doing harris's model are you not able to do ads you don't have to do it like he does it i mean there's a lot of people that do that right as in to get ad free content just subscribe per year what do you think the pros and cons of a model like sam harris most of the time i've been sitting here thinking I'm not struggling to come up with pros I am struggling quite a lot to come up with cons actually but the pros is like much deeper connection with your audience you can create content specifically for them and people are voting with their time and their money and you don't have to sensationalize everything which you do with the rest of your content exactly like I don't have everything doesn't have to be like expertly hooked I don't have to go for the volume game and all the rest of it and so I feel like that's a huge pro you would say there was a con if he wasn't doing the free access you would say that gating content from people and restricting them from that content is a con but he is kind of getting around the con maybe that's what he did yeah maybe he sat down he said what are the pros and the cons of sam harris what are chris and dan gonna tell me are my pros and cons let me handle that objection yeah exactly exactly i mean he's he's kind of giving you the best of both bars yeah and he says in that episode or in that clip that we listened to that he's raising his prices.

16:09Yeah. And he's comfortable doing that and giving it away for free, which makes me think that a much greater proportion of the audience are paying than we could ever imagine. You could argue this is downside in any model, but particularly that one, you don't know how much money you're going to make next year. And you could make one mistake that your audience don't vibe with and have tens of thousands of cancelers. You're never going to get back. But isn't that like the truest sense of creating value for your audience? If your audience all unsubscribe, you either know your content is bad or you know that you're making content for a deeper more select audience yeah that maybe you increase the price for you're much more in control of your destiny when people are paying a subscription for sure i feel like yeah as a business model of course it's way stronger way stronger the more i think about that so question is are we going to adopt this model or let's find out after a message from our sponsors hi i'm chris from secret leaders Hey, I'm Dan from Secret Leaders.

17:04As you know, Dan and I are aiming to build the most entertaining business show on the planet. The most important thing to us is that you subscribe to the channel. This gives us the opportunity to create the best content that we possibly can. Please keep sending in your feedback and your thoughts and your ideas. Like, let us know who you want us to interview. Let us know which business models you want us to explore. We want to create the best content possible for you. so you subscribing and you giving us your feedback is the most important thing and if you don't subscribe we don't fucking care about your feedback so that too is that true that is true that's a secret leader's promise okay in all seriousness welcome back from our you know little ad break uh the question great sponsor amazing i love those guys yeah um i'm i'm reminded of the the core part of the question here okay sam harris fanboy but let's be honest he already had a big audience when he decided to take the risk in fairness he took the risk but he switched over to a different model and we're in a different situation right we're building an audience from scratch we're begging people to subscribe to us on youtube pretty much but i guess the main question is are we going to flip to that business model and i don't think we can yet right i think the key is you know you and i have been building businesses of of varying degrees for 10 to 15 years and we will keep keep improving and investing in this show to try and make it the best show in the world and if we do this for a decade like we've done our other businesses like can you only imagine how great the content will get how much more nuanced the business model will get and hopefully we get to share that with our audience along the way yeah and build in public yeah that'd be cool i mean like very happy to sort of break down the different things we're exploring but a good example for the audience is if we were to make a far more researched element of the show and going really deep on a business or on a sector, we would have to hire a researcher to do that.

18:57You can see the costs leveling up enormously. And that might then say, is a part of the show paid for? Or do we have to get a better agreement with our sponsors? And so that's the sort of decisions we'll be making on a month to month basis. Well, on that note, I'm Dan. And I'm Chris. Want to see us out, buddy? Thank you for listening to Secret Leaders. What a fucking pro. God, I wish I used to say that. It's amazing how you just did it with such it's just sass are we out? are we in?