I know what your problem is. You think you have nothing and you want to start a business. Five years ago that might have been a problem and there's never been more pressure to become an entrepreneur than today.
The good news is entrepreneurship is changing. You don't need some assistant, some full-time filmmaker, an expensive office, or an expensive desk. The truth is there's a new wave of innovators that are doing entrepreneurship right. leading a business with the personal brand of its founder, using their own personality as a hero for the business's brand, transforming the ingredients needed to attract a paying community. This is the founder-led business model, and it allows you to prioritize yourself, your happiness, and your goals when building a business.
building a business. I spent the past three years testing this formula, creating systems to build my own founder-led business, FounderOS. A business built entirely around myself, my wants, my dreams, my desires, my goals, my lifestyle, everything that I want and nothing that I don't want.
And the crazy thing is, it works. I get to live my dream lifestyle while FounderOS brings in over $850,000 a month in revenue. I can work when I want, on what I want, wherever I want, with whoever I want. This is the evolution of entrepreneurship. This is the founder-led business model.
This is how to start a business from nothing, starting with yourself. Today, starting a business isn't necessarily the hardest thing. Every influencer and their sister has a product or a course or a merch line they would call a business. But starting a business and growing it while actively tending to your happiness, that's the challenge. And this is where founder freedom comes in.
Founder freedom is full control over the four W's in life. Work where you want, on what you want, with who you want, when you want. It's time, location, and financial freedom. The hype of hustle culture drove so many people into the deep end of entrepreneurship without the education or the tools to participate in this world sustainably.
Even I lost myself while building my first business, Bitmaker, which was an in-person coding school. From the outside, everything looked good, but inside, it was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. I hated running an in-person brick and mortar business. It was the worst. It took everything in my soul not to break, but I realized a ton about myself.
Looking back, it's obvious that Bitmaker wouldn't fulfill my dreams, but if it wasn't for Bitmaker, I'd never have known what I truly wanted and how to avoid what I don't want. Your entrepreneurial journey doesn't have to start with lessons learned the hard way. Embrace founder freedom and focus on the founder. You.
Give yourself clear answers around how you want to live, where you want to work, and who you want to work with, and how much you need to make. For me, I wanted to live between global business hotspots, working wherever I want, and having the freedom to travel and to be close to nature. Answer those four questions and you've defined founder freedom. You can now start building your founder-led business model, the vehicle everyone must use to thrive in this new age of entrepreneurship. Every founder-led business model starts with analysis of the founder.
That's you. That's me. That's us.
To connect your business directly with your personal needs, wants, goals, and dreams, you have to look inward. My favorite method to discover your personal niche is the Ikigai exercise. Ikigai is a concept in Japan that stands for your reason for being.
So your Ikigai consists of four different lists. But once you're done this, you can see that this area here, that's your icky guy. And so you're going to go and you're going to fill this in with what you're good at, what you can be paid for, what the world needs, and then what you love to do.
You may go and find that as you look at these four different quadrants, there are some commonalities. And what I'd encourage you to do is try to go and fill at least five things out in each of these different sections. The topics that meet in the center represent your unique niche. This changed everything for me. For my icky guy, I discovered that I love systems, growing audiences, building communities, and traveling the world and helping founders.
This is my niche. I help founders get to $5 million profit a year using the proven systems I've created over the past 15 years creating four profitable companies. If I were to simplify it down to one word, it would be systems.
But I don't just see myself making stuff only around systems. I talk about my curiosities, the things that inspire me, my travels, my interests, my strengths. I'm able to do all of this because I'm doing things that I'm passionate about. I'm passionate about traveling and meditation. Cold baths, saunas, nature, and the list goes on.
At the intersection of this diagram isn't just a business that you love, it's a business where you love the customer. And then to communicate with that customer, you need to become the niche. And to do that, you need to understand people follow people, and then they follow brands. It's important that every brand has a founder that is building their own personal brand. Having an online presence establishes you as the true expert in your area.
It gives you a packed pipeline of clients that you can tap into at any moment. And it makes you even more in demand, allowing you to charge more, drive more customers, and build a massive empire. There are two routes forward with your niche.
Both work, but there's one that I really love. First, you can own your niche. This is when you... pick a subject and then go all in on it.
You own a word in the customer's mind. You're the productivity guy or the habits guy or the stoicism guy. On the positive side, this builds a highly targeted audience fast.
You become the go-to expert and the trigger when people hear that, they come to you and people want the solution that you provide. The downside is that you can end up stuck in a single niche and you get a little pigeonholed. So the alternative to then owning niche is just to be. the niche.
Think about it. You're the only one who has access to your own unique insights, curiosities, mistakes, achievements, lessons, tools, and tactics. There's no one else who knows as much about you as you. This shift alone was a dramatic change and helped me then grow an audience of over 3 million people around myself and then feed all of my businesses, which are now doing over $13 million a year in revenue.
With this approach, You want to discuss a handful of related topics regularly, but those topics are more focused on your personal brand than on a single company topic. You're trying to make people feel connected to you because, again, you are the niche. The downside of a person-first brand is it becomes challenging to monetize if you don't also have a bunch of businesses around you and a clear problem you're looking to solve for your audience.
And you risk people coming to you more for entertainment than to charge. That's why I recommend starting somewhere between these two areas, right? You're both going to become the niche while also owning a word in the mind of your customers.
Then look at the edges of where your interests are and see where it overlaps with your ideal audience members'problems and desires. Then you can create a brand around solutions that address those problems, but overlap with who you are. You'll have a unique niche and a personal moat around everything that you do. But to embrace your niche, you need to embrace content. And this is where the system of building your own personal media company comes into play.
There's still too much of this creator approach to content, whereby you must master all of the elements of content yourself. If you're an entrepreneur, your superpower is assembling a team, making decisions, and then executing a clear vision. How are you going to do that while you're making tons of YouTube videos from A to Z, building a newsletter, your audience on X and LinkedIn all by yourself?
If you're starting out, you likely will have to do a lot of it yourself. But once you've landed on your niche, two to three formats you want to pursue, you are ready to leverage your cash flows to hire some creative weapons dedicated to scaling your brand and your message. And here's the real numbers behind a successful personal media company.
Let's just say, for example, you have $12K to dedicate to your own personal brand. The $12K investment can be broken down into a couple of options. Option one is you hire a weapon of a writer as a... contractor for around 7k and then have them handle all the social content on your newsletter.
Then also hire a newsletter writer to handle a newsletter one time a week at around 3 to 5k per month. Option two is you hire a full stack writer as a contractor that can handle all of your social content and your weekly newsletter. This person is going to work likely part-time solely on your content and this will probably cost around 8 to 10k per month.
If you go with option two, you will have a full stack writer to publish. 14x posts per week, 7 long-form LinkedIn posts per week, and one high-quality newsletter per week. You'll need to ensure that you bring on this writer that has loads of experience writing on the platforms that you're looking to grow on, which is likely X and LinkedIn.
The strength of this strategy is that it can help you build leverage. You're getting help now with writing the content so you can go and spend time on bigger things in your business. You are also able to focus your energy on ideation and then helping with execution. The downside is that you still got to be pretty involved in your content strategy. You need to come up with ideas, edit content, and ensure tight alignment between your content and brand guidelines.
With 2 to 3k more of your business's revenue dedicated to your personal media company, you can increase the salary of the writer to then come up with the ideas that you'll execute on inside of your content strategy while still employing a social manager to post all that content. That way you can get off the content hamster wheel entirely. This is where you move from just the creator to the CEO, back into your zone of genius.
You now have four out of the five ingredients of the founder-led business model. You understand founder freedom. You identified your reason for being your icky guy. And you are dedicated to either becoming or owning your niche.
And you have the first steps of a highly scalable personal media company to power your brand through content. And now you have to sell it. And to sell it, you first need to target the right audience.
Most founders use some spray and pay method and that never works. You wanna move with surgeon-like precision. Focus on quality over quantity.
Find the right people and then draw them in. There are 8.1 billion people on the planet and you can't help them all. Narrow down your audience to a specific type of person.
If you're teaching health and fitness, narrow it down. Health and fitness for film industry professionals. Health and fitness for working moms.
Health and fitness for recovering athletes in the first six months following an accident. The more specific you can be there, the more compelling your online presence will be for the right person. Second, go after a topic people are already passionate about.
Fashion heads don't need to be convinced. to go and get the newest pair of sneakers. Apple enthusiasts follow every single keynote and product drop. You don't want to have to persuade people that they need your offer.
Find that passion, then direct it towards a specific version of what you're creating. Criteria three for your ideal audience member is who can buy. At the end of the day, you have to be realistic about whether or not your audience can actually afford to purchase what you're selling.
About six years ago, I had the idea for something called Trail AI. It was an AI that would essentially help real estate agents and financial services folks with synthesizing all the data and reports that they have and then getting those to their clients. I'd get on calls with these folks and I'd get green lights. They were excited.
The only issue was that they weren't really the buyer. They didn't have the money or the ability to pay. I quickly realized that I was building something for the wrong audience. And this was much more of a large corporate play.
Every business owner has experienced this. An audience that's passionate. but has no money. So pick an audience that's ready to spend money either to solve their problems or to get deeper into what they love. An audience full of people who are in love with what you're talking about is the goal.
That audience is a tinderbox of revenue that you need to ignite with the perfect social funnel. The perfect social funnel consists of a newsletter, strategically placed CTAs, killer lead magnets, and an irresistible offer. Create your newsletter on ConvertKit. It's the best platform for founders. When I discovered ConvertKit, it blew everything I tried beforehand out of the water.
It is hands down the best place for your newsletter on the internet. You'll want to create a focused landing page that really sells what your newsletter is and is an incredible resource for your ideal audience member. Here's an example of what my signup page looks like.
All right, so this is my signup page here. Anyone that goes and signs up on founderwest.com slash newsletter, this will drive you to my ConvertKit newsletter. And so the key components of this page, as you can see, there is no ability to scroll on this page. So all you can do is enter your email. From there, there's a bold headline, right?
The only newsletter you need to grow your personal brand. And then from there, a little bit more information on why you should join, including a valuable lead magnet to get you 50 systems to generate 1 million per month. And then we have overwhelming social proof here from a group of absolute legends. So that's my signup page 101. Now go make yours. Your focus signup page is important for converting traffic since you'll be sharing it across all of your social channels.
I call this process my call to action system. You want to go on a massive campaign to add that link to as many places as possible across your social media presence. Here are 20 places I incorporate my call to actions across Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, YouTube, and my podcast.
You're going to want to put in your Instagram bio. Instagram stories, LinkedIn about section, LinkedIn bio, LinkedIn featured section, LinkedIn cover photo, LinkedIn carousel ending, your ex bio, ex cover photo, ex end of a tweet, ex end of a thread, TikTok bio, your TikTok video CTA, YouTube bio, YouTube description, YouTube about section, YouTube cover photo, and a YouTube 15 second commercial with a CTA, as well as in your podcast descriptions. If you want to get my CTA system and learn how to implement all 20 of these call to actions across all the six platforms, then go to the description of this video right below the like button, which you should press anyways while you're down there. This is the guide I wish I was given when I wanted to grow my email list as fast as possible. If you really want to increase newsletter conversions, I recommend lead magnets.
According to HubSpot, companies see a 50% increase in leads when they use a lead magnet compared to companies that don't. A lead magnet is a hyper useful piece of content that's gated behind an email signup. It could be an in-depth PDF download, multi-part video series, webinar workshop, workshop recording, an email mini course, specialized insight quiz, ebook, white paper, checklists, free systems, playbooks, or even a free trial.
You can prove your authority by solving a piece of the problem for the customer for free and then the rest of the solution is an easy purchase away. My belief is that the more generous you are, the more everything grows around you. You know, it can be scary. Creating something that truly is amazing and then giving it all away for free? Sounds nuts.
But I think having an abundance mindset always wins. Reciprocity is one of the strongest forces in humanity. You give and then you get. So for me, I always challenge myself to give away what I know.
You're now ready to connect your passion to profit by pitching your audience on an irresistible offer. so they can become your monetized audience. This is your most valuable audience.
And this is the part I love because you're already creating a system that automatically is creating trust between you and your audience. And finally, what should you actually provide in your offer? Well, now that you have an audience, they're probably already telling you what they want from you.
I like to listen to what my audience regular ask for in my YouTube comments, email responses, and in-person live events. And I just observe the topics that resonate with my audience. And if people are passionate about a certain topic, well, they're probably willing to pay for related products or services around that thing. If that's the case, all you have to do is then package it up into a compelling format that works for you. Here are five tiers of offers I recommend.
Low ticket offers are great because they're a low barrier to entry. You can get people into your ecosystem with very minimal friction. For example, you can expand a low ticket course into then a high ticket course upsell. Or you can take part of a higher ticket course and then create the lower ticket course from that. Paid communities are amazing as well and they're a great form of recurring revenue.
You're bringing people together to learn and have fun. You get paid to talk about things that you love while making meaningful connections amongst an amazing group of people. The community can also be an incredible internal referral source and you have a pre-sold audience that you can then upsell other products or services to. Service-based businesses and consulting are the lowest barrier to entry with great margins if you're doing it right.
Consulting in particular is one of the easiest businesses to get traction with and what I recommend every successful founder starts with if they don't know where to begin. Finally, let's dive into masterminds. These are ultra high ticket products where you do group coaching, experiences, and education over a longer period of time with a consistent group of high performers. Often the point of a mastermind is personal connections. to an exclusive crowd.
The price point is the barrier to entry and the math of getting to six figures once you have a compelling offer is simpler than it appears. For example, consider 20 people buying a $5,000 course or 50 people paying $2,000 for consulting or just over 500 people buying your low ticket $197 course. All of these are routes to $100k.
If you mix and match, you can get there even faster. Once you have your irresistible offer, it's time to share it and convert your rented and owed audience to monetized. First, create a sales page for the offer using similar principles to your focus signup page for your newsletter, right?
You're going to have a bold headline, hero images, social proof to make it so irresistible people can't say no. Then incorporate that link into your profitable profile, create an email sequence that automatically launches after they download a lead magnet, and then launch it to your entire list for the first time. when your offer debuts. Then continue to feature it as a main or recurring CTA in your newsletter.
I've created businesses where sales are generated directly from the sales page, but in my experience, the higher ticket your product is, the more likely you're gonna wanna actually sell the customer directly. When I was just getting started with Bitmaker, we priced the program at about $1,000. We'd go on to increase the price of things to around $5,000, but I remember the joy on my team's face when we saw that first $1,000 come in for the first person that would join our technology school and learn to code.
I don't know if I could sell anything else that would bring me as much joy as that first sale I got. I think the hardest money that you're ever going to make is the first time you get to 20k per month. You have no idea what you're doing.
I know because I've been there and I can tell you this, you're going to get through it. You will need a sales system in place but I'll let you get started with your business and then I'm going to give you that in another video. This channel is about building businesses, not prisons. Freeing us, the founders, to do what we want in life.
If you want to do the same and haven't already watched my full series on building your audience from zero to 100,000 followers, you can click this video here to start learning. Thanks for watching and good luck on your founder journey. I wish you all the success possible.