Nathan's Recent LinkedIn Posts

There are six steps to the client lifecycle. Most service businesses treat five of them as a checklist: generate leads, nurture, close, onboard, fulfill. Then they start over. But step 6 is asking for referrals. It's what closes the loop and turns the whole thing into a flywheel. When a happy client sends someone your way, step 1 gets easier without any extra work. Each rotation compounds and you get better leads, warmer outreach, and faster closes. Instead of a checklist, use a flywheel.

Someone heckled the comedian Jimmy Carr on stage. They shouted how rich are you? He said: Let me put this in terms you'll understand… "I've got 100 money." I love that line because he's pointing to the absurdity of the question. How rich am I? Why does it matter? First, being rich is relative. Jimmy defines rich as: If I had any more money, I wouldn't spend my time differently. If that's true for you, then you're rich. Watch the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gFuudUAj

$6,000 invested now becomes $93,365 later. That's the difference a 5-year head start makes at $100/month, assuming a 10% return. A lot of people put off investing until they're making more money. But most don't realize waiting just five years costs you $93,000. Even $100 a month adds up. You just have to leave it alone and let it work. If you spend that $100, it's gone forever. If you invest, it compounds.

The metric you're tracking on YouTube might be working against you. For a tight, engaged community, watch your subscribers and retention. For reach, views are probably the number to focus on. You can go after both, but it takes longer. Figure out what you want to build first. The right metric becomes obvious. Grace Miller

Imagine losing $100,000/month… Mike Brown never felt more stressed in his life. $1.5M gone in 18 months. Anxiety, stress, marriage suffering. But that failure forced a perspective shift that Mike now calls one of the greatest gifts he ever received. Have you experienced something like this?

Imagine getting a trophy for experimenting. This is exactly what they do in Steven Bartlett's office. The experimenter of the week gets a trophy. It doesn't matter if the experiment itself succeeded or failed. It's about generating awareness within the team that experimentation is what's celebrated. Steven even sends encouraging messages to employees who are experimenting. The idea is to incentivize everyone to try new things. Failures will happen along the way, but in the end, the output is what's important. Watch the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/ghwxd3GX Grace Miller

Early in your career, saying yes makes sense. You're building skills, meeting people, figuring out what you're good at. Every opportunity teaches you something. But at some point the dynamic flips. Your network starts working for you, and you have more opportunities than you can take. That's when being selective is how you create leverage. Later in your career, you'll achieve more doing one thing really well than spreading your energy.

Diary of a CEO grew to 14 million subscribers in just four years. Part of the engine was Grace Miller, Flight Story's Head of Failure and Experimentation. In this episode, we break down those experiments and how to grow on YouTube. We cover: - The YouTube community posts growth hack everyone ignores - The chapters strategy that give better retention - Why focusing on output is better than obsessing over follower count Grace is in charge of running experiments across multiple podcasts. Some work, and some fail. But the growth always come from trying new things more often. Watch the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/ghwxd3GX

Awkward silence once made me $30,000. When the financial crisis hit in 2009, my freelance clients dropped off and all my work dried up. I was left with just one client—who then offered me a full-time job. There was only one problem: I was 18 years old and had no idea how to negotiate a salary. I asked friends and family, read a book on negotiation, and picked up a few tips. One was to let the employer speak first, and when they named a salary, don't immediately accept or decline—respond thoughtfully and keep negotiating. I had done my research and planned ahead. On the drive to lunch with Ken, the COO, I was thinking about what salary I wanted. $45,000 would be good. $50,000 would be amazing. Then, about midway through our lunch, Ken said, "We'd love for you to join the team at $50,000 per year. Does that work?" I wanted to shout "yes" and immediately accept. But right as Ken started talking, I had taken a bite of my bagel sandwich. Too big of a bite. I was raised with good manners, so there was no way I was going to talk with my mouth full. I just kept chewing. And chewing. And chewing. The more I silently chewed that obnoxiously dense bagel, the more Ken seemed to grow uncomfortable. Then he broke the awkward silence: "Or we could make it $60,000." I finally swallowed, smiled, and said, "$60,000 will work just fine. Let's talk about the rest of the comp package." I stayed at that company for nearly three years, so enduring that moment of awkwardness earned me nearly $30,000 more than the salary I would have happily accepted. Most people aren’t willing to ask for the full market value of their skills because they fear the discomfort of potential rejection. That would have been my reaction to the $50,000 offer, had it not been for my mother’s strict manners and that lucky bite of my sandwich.

Building a new product? Don't compete on features. When you try to match what established competitors already have, you end up a mile wide and an inch deep. Nothing works particularly well because you're spread too thin. When I built Kit, my competitors had already been building for over a decade. Rather than try to match their feature list, I found two gaps in what they offered and went as deep as I could on both. For me, that was making it easy to capture email subscribers, and making it easy to write follow-up sequences. The early versions were janky. But they were valuable. And we added polish over time. Narrow the scope so much that you can do it really well.