Will Nelson Podcast - Uploading

Welcome to today's episode of uploading and today we have the pleasure of chatting with Will Nelson, who is the founder and CEO of 64 stories. Will has been an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur in residence, an advisor to high growth companies, and he's been involved in the B two B space for a long time now. So we're really excited to have will on the show today to talk a lot about content, what it takes to build a personal brand, how entrepreneurs can stand out, and what the strategies are to build content that really sticks. So will, without any further ado, I'm going to let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and then we can jump into the convo.

Yeah, sounds good, and thanks for having me. So I've been an entrepreneur for ten plus years. I know I measured myself a little bit there, but I've been around the block a few times now. I've built a bunch of companies. A bunch have failed and a few have succeeded. I started off in ecommerce, actually building websites for people. Then I built my own, turned that into kind of like a Hellofresh style business up here in Canada out of Halifax. And that's the business that I sold a couple of years ago.

I've run marketing agencies. I was at tiny as an Eir for a little bit, built a content studio over there, and now I'm building a new agency called 64 Stories that helps B two B brands, founders, ceos and the leaders of those companies create content. So what I do is I interview those people for an hour, tease out all their insights and stories, help them craft that story, and then amplify their message on social using tools like Castmagic and others. So yeah, I'm a passionate entrepreneur. The reason that I'm starting 60 or four stories and I'm so obsessed with the creator space, whether it's on the youtuber side and more direct to consumer or the business side is that I've always been an entrepreneur that has struggled with distribution myself. I identify as a builder. I love building things. I've never been fantastic at getting attention for either my personal brand or for my businesses without having to pay for that attention through Facebook ads or more traditional media.

So that's my new obsession, is getting attention on the Internet. And so my investment for the next ten years will be around that topic.

Yeah, it's super interesting, will, because we're seeing more and more founders come out and just start tweeting more, being more active. Being active on LinkedIn previously that was seen as like this founder is distracted, they're making content, they're not focusing on their business, and slowly it's becoming more widely acceptable. I'm sure even funds would judge a founder on their diligence. If they were too active on social, that was kind of a red flag that they're not too active on the business, their product, their team and their, you know, you had a tweet from Jack Butcher that said, build this distribution, then build whatever you want. And clearly this is the reason why more and more founders are getting active. But I'm curious on your take, what has changed over time that has made founders realize the potential in building distribution through personal brand?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that the rise of social slowly but surely changed that landscape. I remember starting at radiant six, which is a company acquired by Salesforce. I forget the year it might have been 2011, let's say. And social was just becoming a thing back then, and most companies were investing in more traditional forms of media at that time. And we're just starting to invest in social. Over time, that investment in social has developed. And I think slowly but surely founders have recognized the leverage that gets.

And so it's just, Gary Vaynerchuk is a prime example of this. Starting on, I think, YouTube with wine library, and then shifting to other platforms like Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. He's always just been looking for low cost attention. And whether he was the pioneer for this or someone else was, it slowly got picked up as another way to get attention for your business in a low cost way. And I think a lot of people were burnt by platforms like Facebook a few years ago when ad rates went through the roof. And so when trust was broken, they looked for other longer term ways to promote their business. It might take longer to build a personal brand, but it's something that you can come back to. It's an asset that will keep paying you dividends long term versus having to constantly rent.

It's owning a house versus renting an apartment. You're not in control of that rent skyrocketing, but you are to some degree in control of the mortgage that you're paying.

One of my favorite concepts about when it comes to content creation is the idea of consistency and growing into and learning your voice as a creator. I know my first podcast when I started with Ramon, I didn't know what the heck I was talking about and it was really overwhelming. But you just kind of have to start. You have to put out content, and from there you can learn and you can grow and you can adapt. But I'd love will if you could talk a little bit about how do you get started? Right, like you were saying yourself, this was something that was a little bit foreign to you, but you wanted to create more content, you wanted to grow that personal brand. But maybe taking those first steps was a little bit daunting. As a creator, and especially as someone who works with other people who are going through that same thing, what's the starting point when you're creating content? Where do you go? What do you talk about? How do you start?

Yeah, so I'll break this into two parts. So what to talk about? I think it's just you need to get started. So talk about what you know and what you're passionate about. And forget coming up with your brand or your story out of the gate. That's something that's going to block you from starting. So just get started and then you can figure out what your superpower is or what the story is over. Time to get started. I think you need to be documenting on a regular basis ideas that are interesting to you.

So I was talking to Dave Gerhardt the other day from exit five, and he has a notion page that he just jots down ideas into on a daily basis and then circles back to those to see if he can create any piece of content from. So whenever an idea pops into his head, he's putting it down somewhere. Of course you could maybe use castmagic to do that as well. I know that you guys have a new audio feature in one of your apps. The second thing that I would do is either find someone or something to hold you accountable. The thing about a personal brand is that it's personal to you. It's not a part of your team or your company necessarily. There's no other person that's expecting you to report on how many tweets you've put out versus your sales outreach there's probably someone, whether it's an investor or your boss, that's keeping you accountable to sending x amount of emails.

You don't have that with your personal brand. So find someone, whether it's a teammate or a person, to check in with you on a weekly or daily basis to ensure that you're creating content. So step one is just to get started on anything and develop a system that allows you to do it consistently. Then once that's done, you can go back to it and see if it's any good or not and figure out how you can optimize.

It's funny you mentioned the story, like your personal story, to not starting there, because that's what a lot of people do. They'll start there because stories trigger emotion, and that resonates with people. It's authentic, it works, it performs. But what happens, and this has happened to me, it's like I start putting together my story, and then it's like, all right, but my story eventually ends. There's only so many interesting things that have happened in my story, and so I think you need a variation. Like, for me, it's funny, I'm getting a lot more active on x and what's working somehow. It's like a combination of trolling with AI images, and then it performs even better than the super serious story stuff. But what I found is I need to have sort of like, okay, one trolling tweet, maybe one story, one every week or so.

And so how do you suggest a combination to your audience of content that isn't. Because if it was just only my story, that gets old really quick and it hits a ceiling. So how do you find what each person should use to mix up their content on a daily basis?

Yeah, I think it really depends on the outcome that you're striving for. So if you are someone that's just trying to become a creator and that's your main way to monetize. There's one strategy for that. If you are a business or a founder that's trying to optimize for new leads, then there's another strategy for that. I think in general, though, on social, you should have the mindset of just giving away as much as you can for free, and then very infrequently asking for something in return. So just like going to the ATM, you need to first put money in the bank account to take money out. For business owners, I typically recommend ten to 20% for top of the funnel content, 60% to 70% for middle of the funnel content and then ten to 20 for bottom of funnel content for another approach is to have an 80 20 split between or 90 ten split between giving stuff away for free and 10% asking. So it really depends on who you are and what your outcomes are.

If I was a creator, I would think of the most viral content possible, like very top of funnel stuff, trying to break through the noise by doing stunt based content a lot of the time thick Mr. Beast or Arac or things of that nature. And I think there's a place for that in B two B. Look at what Alex Lieberman just did with the national championship football game. Him and a bunch of guys got together and played like a where's Waldo game using HubSpot's logo on their. Yeah, work backward. I would say work backwards from the outcome that you're going for and try to be original and come up with something like, truly unique will.

So for when you guys are working with other founders, right? Kind of what we were talking about is maybe it's not so natural. It's nice to think in terms of like, oh, I'm going to start putting content out here. I should go 90 ten on this. If I'm a creator, I want to create more sort of creative, viral sort of content. But again, a lot of the reasons people come to you and work with you is because they can't even take that step themselves, and they need someone to help them do that. So why don't you walk us through your creative process in terms of when you're onboarding a client, what are the first things you're trying to get from them, and how do you build a strategy for them to create content that becomes authentic to that person and becomes repeatable?

Yeah, great question. So, first things first, we try to figure out what their number one outcome is. So a lot of the time it's new business. They might tell me that they want to be like Sahil Bloom or Alex Ramosi, or any of these big b two B creator names. But then they quickly realize that they need the investment in my agency to start to pay for itself sooner than later. So the real outcome is new business. If they can justify the $5,000 monthly spend really quickly, then they're happy. And that gives them much more longevity to create a ton of content.

So first things first, is the outcome. Secondly, what do they know really well? What can they talk about at length that will kind of never run dry? And if there's not something they can talk about, what's a topic that we can create a ton of content around. Kerry Vaynerchuk did this with wine and wine library. There's an endless amount of wine that he could review. So what's a topic that we could cover on a high volume basis? Something like founder stories or company origin stories, things of this nature. Now that topic has to align to the outcome, so you seem to constantly toggle those two things. An exciting idea that also can drive business in terms of the creative approach. Oftentimes I'm just looking at what's working.

So I have a full time analyst that will go to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and start to mine the top performing content in a given month to get a sense of what hooks are performing, what style of content's performing, what types of edits. If there's any new trending style or idea that's working really well, we'll go to really big companies. So let's say I'm working with the CEO of a SaaS business. I'll look at Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, a bunch of big companies and sort by the posts that are most popular and not steal those ideas, but at least get inspiration from the top performing content on each of those channels and in each of those brands pages to then inform the content ideas that will apply to one of our clients and inform the questions that we're asking them. Just to go back to what I said earlier, a lot of the content that we create stems from a long form interview like this where I'll come prepared with 50 questions or 50 prompts of some kind. For example, one prompt might be, tell me, guess this startup within 60 seconds and I'll give the person a few clues. So that's just like one type of idea to play with, but it's often informed by what has been working on the channel that's most applicable to that client and we'll go from there.

When you mentioned justifying the expense of growing a personal brand, investing in content, there usually is a ramp up period, right? Like if you start, it'll take three months, just like SEO. But in this case, it's more you as a founder, understanding your tone, your voice, you getting to know their story better, the engagement slowly ramping up, engagement compounds as your audience grows. And so how do you best recommend for people to look at the ROI of their content investment or to not look at it? At which point then should you start even considering and calculating the ROI of it?

It's a great question and I think the SEO comparison is a fair one. It probably takes, realistically, three plus, maybe six plus months to start to see an ROI. And so you're losing money or you're investing money into something without seeing a return for a little while, and that can sting. The clients that are best suited for what I'm doing are clients that already know the ROI. So, for example, I'm working with the CEO of an agency who does a lot of public speaking, and he knows that the more content he puts out, the more speaking gigs he will get and the more leads that will be generated for his business. But for someone that doesn't know that ROI calculation or doesn't have that already set and doesn't have their story figured out, it is a bit of a leap of faith, just like entrepreneurship is. So you have to know that you're at least going to commit three months before you're starting to see a return and expecting that you're going to blow up on YouTube when you first start out or your business is going to succeed within the first 30 days as a new founder or any quick win or silver bullet hope is just unrealistic. And this is kind of another one of those scenarios where you have to put the time in, you have to invest in something before it starts to pay a dividend.

Yeah. And will, one of the favorite piece of advices that I've gotten and that we've had going through our podcast when we first got it set up, is like as a creator, when you're just getting started or even if you're scaling, it needs to be something that really aligns with your interests and what you're doing. Because if you're doing it to make some money as a sponsor or you have some other ulterior motive, a lot of times it's difficult and it's tough to stick through it with the discipline and consistency you need to keep going. So a lot of times, and this is something Ramon and I talk about, when we're creating content, it's content that we're creating because we like creating it. And then when you get someone reaching out and say, hey, I heard your piece of content, this was so awesome, and here's some value that I want to give you. It's like the best feeling in the world and opportunities pop up that you could have never have planned for. But I just think starting from a place of aligning your content with your Persona is so, so important. Because if you're like, I'm creating content about x, but I don't really care about X, and I'm like over here.

And this is what I spend my time doing on Y. You're going to be at ods with yourself the entire time.

Yeah, exactly. One of the big reasons that I create content is because I live in Halifax. I'm not in Miami. So Halifax has a population of 500,000. I don't know what the population of Miami is, but I know that Florida has the same population of all of Canada. So I imagine there's a lot of people there. A lot of the value for me has been in the dms. I meet a tremendous amount of founders and investors and just interesting people through my Twitter dms and through LinkedIn.

So while there's not a monetary return right there, I know that that relationship is worth something at a later point. So when it comes down to justifying the $5,000 cost, that's a different story. But there's clear value in investing in your content creation. Ideally, when you're just starting out, you're reducing your cost and maybe not hiring an agency like mine. And that's where casmagic or similar apps come into play.

Yeah, and a lot of people say, well, I just don't have the time to create the content, et cetera, but you have to make the time. Even if you're using an agency, it's going to take time. You even should be studying the analytics, et cetera. Even if you're outsourcing content creation, undertaking the entire operation is a lot of work, and that does require a huge lift of time. So what advice do you have for founders who are thinking, okay, I've been creating content. I've been getting some progress. I want to make my first hire. How should someone assess what their first hire should be for content? Or should it just be all in agency like you guys do? Where is that gap? Sort of trying to think through what mistakes should people not make when deciding to take their first leap into taking their content more seriously?

Yeah. So as a first step, put 1ft in the water, don't dive in. Maybe hire a low cost contractor that's part time to help amplify some of your content. This means that you, as the founder, need to do a lot more of the work, from the editing to the inputs. But there are lots of ways to do that in a kind of, like, low lift way. If you're walking to the gym, driving to go get groceries, or you're making breakfast, those are times that I think you should just be recording content, like turn on your voice notes or whatever, something to talk to, just to document iOS app. There you go. I didn't know how to best plug.

It, but I'm sorry to interrupt, but you mentioned get somebody as a contractor to help you amplify. What did you mean by amplify?

So take the inputs that you're giving your voice notes or whatever app you're using to log those insights and then chop that up into written content or video content if you're recording that, and then actually post it to the various social channels that you want to get on. So I know that castmagic does a lot of that work for you, but I still think that there's someone that needs to orchestrate some of these things to get it out into the world and then repost that engage in the comments, et cetera, just almost like a va for your social content. So I would start by trying to document when you have downtime or while you're in between tasks or while you're doing something mundane, and then find the different build a tech stack that works for you and then find someone to assist to duct tape all that together.

So there's a lot of people who also come to you. Like Ramon was saying that maybe they're making some sort of mistakes. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see creators who are trying to handle this stuff themselves make that you guys, when you start working with them, were like, okay, we got to get this figured out. What are the most common mistakes that a creator who's maybe they know they want to get into? Content, they've been putting out content, they've been doing it. Maybe not super disciplined, but they're on their way to a content creator and you come in and you're kind of like, okay, I see exactly where you guys are messing up. Here's what we need to fix. What are some of those most common mistakes?

Yeah, I would say that their content allocation is off. So they might only be focusing on top of funnel content, telling their story, but not talking about their business. So they're not getting that ROI that they're hoping for. They're probably not investing enough hours into it or are giving up too quickly. I think a lot of people have expectations that they're going to go from zero to 100,000 on Twitter within a short period of time and don't get that and get discouraged. A lot of the big accounts that are on X or LinkedIn have been at it for quite some time, so it's a lot of just sick tuitiveness. But there aren't any major red flags that people have when they come to us, it's really just a matter of getting the story right and sticking to it.

You mentioned oftentimes people aren't putting enough time into it. How much time is enough time?

Well, if you're smart about it, you don't need to put as much time as I may have made it seem to be. So if you spend an hour or two per week, that's plenty of content for the week. But you need to set up the system to be recording content for an hour. And that's where I think a lot of it gets lost. So for us recording this, it's taken a few attempts to book this recording. We tried to do it last year, and now we're kicked into the new year. There's natural barriers to host a podcast, so you need to be constantly dming people if you want to be on podcast or have conversation with people for you to record. Yeah, I think the short answer is a few hours a week, but it.

All depends on you and how you craft your content. I think there's definitely a point where, hey, if you're spending an hour to craft a tweet, then maybe you don't need to spend an hour to craft a tweet. What's interesting that's happened to me, it's almost like there is the concept creation process and then the tweet writing process. First, I sort of wrap up, what is the concept? I want to tweet that's sort of like the draft, but I really just capture the overall thought and concept, and then drafting the actual tweet is I do it another day. So one day is like concepts and all that. And so I think that tends to work really well for me. But I want some golden nuggets for the audience, will. So can you share with us some tips on how to prompt or how to prompt yourself or get inspiration for coming up with concepts and tweets? Like, let's say you hit the writer's block, essentially.

How can you prompt yourself to come up with some good ideas?

Yeah, so one hack that I've been using is just like downloading a bunch of pre existing podcasts. So let's say Tim Ferriss is aligned to the content that I want to create. I might take down a bunch of his content, put into cast magic, and then ask for the questions that were in those episodes. So really, I'm just stealing or getting inspiration from content that I know has performed well in the past or has been thought of by an expert podcaster. So I'm taking away a lot of the heavy lifting, the heavy creative lifting off my plate by just going to an expert. And back to what I said earlier, I think rather than putting a bunch of pressure on yourself to come up with ideas on the spot, always be documenting ideas while you're on the go. Similar to what Dave Gerhardt does, he has a document in notion set up just for this. So whenever there's something that comes to his mind, he knows that it goes there.

And then when it comes to that creative session, whether it's an hour or 3 hours, there might be a bank of 50 prompts or 50 ideas for him to lean on.

Yeah, I mean, the quality of the content you consume also determines a lot of the quality of the content that you put out. It's almost like you are what you eat, but the content version of that.

Yeah, that's right. I like that.

Yeah. Ramon, the other thing I was going to say is kind of like we were talking about sometimes it's hard to capture content when you put yourself down and you're like, now I have to come up with content. So will, I just love that concept of just trying to document as much as you can. I think that's one thing I'm trying to be better at in 2024 is when I have an idea for content, to write it down and make sure it doesn't just get lost because life happens. A million things are popping up. So whether that's in the form of a voice note, sort of capture with castmagic, or whether the form of it's just like jotting down the idea that I can revisit later, or even if it's seeing, like you said, another creator's piece of content that you want to expand on or give your take on, you can just kind of build that swipe library for yourself. And then when it comes time, like Ramon said, you want to block out time for your creative output, and then you can distill that into a one to two hour writing session to come up with all your stuff and schedule it.

Yeah, but I agree with all of that. As you were speaking, a couple of ideas came to mind. So I go for a lot of walks, hour long walks, and for whatever reason, when I'm out on those walks in nature, a lot of ideas come to me. And so I'll document those ideas. Then I go to a gym that has a sauna and a steam, and for whatever reason, when I come out of the steam, my mind is clear and I come up with tons of ideas in that moment. And then lastly, probably the worst time of day, I'm really fired up and creative just before bedtime. And so as a way to fall asleep, I jot down ideas as I'm falling asleep. So these are just like some times that I'm more creative than others.

I'm sure others are similar to that or have their own times where their mind is clear. Just take advantage of those times to jot down content ideas and then you can circle back to them later and decide if they're good thoughts or bad thoughts, or just leave them as is.

Well, I love that idea in terms of tying your content creation and ideation process to a specific job or activity or time in the day that you know you're best at, right? So like you were saying, you know when it's time to go on a walk through nature, that you can also double up and use that for creating content. And the more times you do it now, you don't even have to think. You're like, oh, I'm going out. I'm capturing content. And for everyone who's listening, everyone's creative workflows are a little bit different. Like you were saying, I'm like, you will right before bed. That's when my brain is going. I'm like texting Ramon all my ideas right before I fall asleep.

And I know Ramon, for example, the time not to talk to him is right before lunch because he's hungry and that's his not creative time. So everyone has their own times and places where they work or match their creative flow. And I think what you just said is understanding when those times are and what those activities are that you can tie to your ideation process is super important because then you can ground it in something. And, you know, if you're going on four walks a week, you don't have to block off time on your calendar for it. Those are times you're going to be gathering content.

Yeah. Two more things that I'll say now the ideas are flowing now. I find when I'm having conversations like this that I've set up over riverside, good ideas will come to me. Hopefully in this recording, there might be one or two nuggets that I've shared that will be valuable to people. But by putting myself in this arena on a regular basis, by having conversations like these, I'm creating tons of assets. So we'll have short form video that comes out of this. We'll have long form video, we'll have tweetable clips. Maybe there'll be a thread who knows.

But this hour long investment should lead to a bunch of micro content for us all to share. So imagine yourself recording one or two of these per week. All of a sudden, your content output goes through the roof. Secondly, I've only tried this a few times now, but there's an app called flow Club. It's just group Zoom meetings where you attend them with maybe five to eight other people. I forget the number. And you set your intention for the two hour session, or 1 hour session, or three hour session. You report on what you want the outcome to be at the beginning, you work for that period of time, and then you report back to everyone at the end.

So I've been using those as content sessions to come up with ideas for myself and for clients. Just dedicated time where I'm focused on one thing, and I found that, let's say it's a two hour session. In the first 20 or 30 minutes, I'm struggling to get into that creative flow, and I'm almost feeling anxious that I'm not coming up with ideas at the clip that I was hoping for. But once I, at that point, after the half hour of just scrambling and jotting down ideas, I started getting that flow state. And so I think you have to allocate enough time to get into that flow state, and you have to make it a practice, whether it's daily or weekly. For me, the flow club was a weekly thing, and I found it to be quite helpful, so I think it's worth checking out.

Yeah, that's really cool. And as we kind of wrap up here, will, the last question I had about content creation was, you spend a lot of time studying some of these other big, like, if you could just share some of your favorite creators. I know you had mentioned some know hormosi and Vaynerchuk and some of, but, like, what specifically do those guys do that you love? And as you think about building your own content strategy for yourself, for your clients, et cetera, who are your favorite creators and what are the parts of their processes that you want to bring into your own process?

Yeah, that's interesting. So I don't know that Gary is one of my favorite creators, although I do look up to him. What I find fascinating about him is just how much he's able to create. So he's documenting pretty much every aspect of his life, and he's even going live now. So he's built this incredible content engine that allows him to have a ton of input into the production systems, from live streaming to Daily V, to him just picking up his phone in the street and talking. So I admire him for documenting as much as he does now. I don't know how genuine all of that is. I don't know Gary on a personal level, but I admire his system.

Greg Geisenberg is someone that I really look up to. I think he's someone that's able to create a high volume of really insightful content. Every time I see something on LinkedIn that he's written, I'm like, oh, my God, that's brilliant. It's a really great framework to apply your career to, or whatever the framework is. Who else? I have to go to my DMS people that I'm trying to connect with. That's where a lot of this happens. I'm interested in pat walls from starter story. Right now, he's not blowing up on YouTube, but he's gone from zero to 100,000 followers pretty quickly.

And he's covering the stories of entrepreneurs that are making money on the Internet, and he's telling pretty cool stories about those people opening with a compelling hook and then jumping to the podcast recording versus just doing kind of like a dialogue based podcast. But, yeah, Greg Eisenberg's the one that stands.

No, Greg. Greg's content's great. I know Ramon was catching up with him yesterday, and he's someone that we think his content and his frameworks are really spot on. So, will, as we wrap up here, where can our audience connect with you? Why don't you shout out your socials? Where can we find you?

Yeah. Thanks. So it's Mr. Will Nelson on Twitter. From there, you can find everything else that I'm doing. The company that I'm launching soon, 64 stories. It's all private right now. That will be announced on my Twitter at Mr.

Will Nelson. So go follow me there.

Sweet. Well, thanks so much for coming on uploading. We had a great time.

Thank you.