hosted by Brian ClarkNathan Chan took a familiar route when seeking to escape the corporate world. Like many, he worked his passion project on the side while he paid the bills with a job.
His dream was Foundr Magazine, a paid digital publication that aims to get to the essence of entrepreneurship from people who have been there and done that. People like Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Steve Case, Michelle Phan, Gary Vaynerchuk, Barbara Corcoran, and Seth Godin.
Amazingly, not long after starting Foundr, Nathan’s capacity for tenacious action landed an iconic interview with Sir Richard Branson. Nathan then devised an intensive Instagram strategy combined with free content and email to grow Foundr’ subscription revenue to over six figures.
From there, Foundr has ventured into courses, physical editions, and big plans for the future. Tune in to hear specific advice from Nathan on how you can grow your own brand and business.
The Show Notes
Transcript
From Side Hustle to Digital Domination, with Nathan Chan
Nathan Chan: Hey, I’m Nathan Chan and I run a digital magazine and media company called Foundr Magazine. I’m the founder of Foundr and I started my publication with a few thousand dollars off a back of a credit card. And I’m unemployable.
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Brian Clark: Nathan Chan took a familiar route when seeking to escape the corporate world. Like many, he worked his passion project on the side while he paid the bills with a job.
His dream was Foundr Magazine, a paid digital publication that aims to get to the essence of entrepreneurship from people who have been there and done that. People like Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Steve Case, Michelle Phan, Gary Vaynerchuk, Barbara Corcoran, and Seth Godin.
Amazingly, not long after starting Foundr, Nathan’s capacity for tenacious action landed an iconic interview with Sir Richard Branson. Nathan then devised an intensive Instagram strategy combined with free content and email to grow Foundr’s subscription revenue to over six figures.
From there, Foundr has ventured into courses, physical editions, and big plans for the future. Tune in to hear specific advice from Nathan on how you can grow your own brand and business.
Nathan, so good to talk to you again. How are you, my man?
Nathan Chan: Great, thanks, Brian. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. Little sleepy, not going to lie. I might have been working till 2:00 AM and it’s 7:00 AM.
Brian Clark: That’s the life, I know. Again, Nathan’s in Australia, so he’s up early to accommodate the interview and I appreciate that greatly.
I first met Nathan in the Philippines at a conference, Chris Ducker’s. Then we met up again at Mike Stelzner’s Social Media Marketing World. And I finally was able to get him on the show. We had a few scheduling misfires, most of which were my fault. I’m glad you’re here, Nathan.
Nathan Chan: Yeah, it’s great to be here, man. Absolute honor. I’m a big fan of your work.
Brian Clark: Thank you. I’m a fan of yours too.
How Did You Get Started?
Brian Clark: I want to talk about how you got started with Foundr Magazine. Because the conventional wisdom out there, and I’m a big proponent of this, is you get started, you start small and you just build step by step.
Then when I heard your story about the first issue of Foundr Magazine and how you got Richard Branson to be on the cover, I’m like, “Wait a minute, this guy is not starting small. He’s starting big. Tell us that story, because it’s a good one.
Nathan Chan: Yeah, sure thing. With full transparency, man, we had Richard Branson for issue number eight, but I pitched within the first three months of starting. So I locked him down within the first three months of starting.
Brian Clark: That’s still early. I thought it was first, but still, that’s quite a feat for a guy of that magnitude.
Nathan Chan: Yeah, for sure.
Pretty much my back story and how it all began is I was working at a job that I absolutely utterly hated in IT support. I had to crawl under computer desks and set up computers and reset peoples’ passwords. And I was doing that for five years post finishing my degree in IT/business.
I always felt that I wanted to do something. I didn’t know what it was, I read a whole ton of books: Rich Dad Poor Dad, 4-Hour Workweek, all sorts of things, Think and Grow Rich, Man’s Search for Meaning, some really, really life-changing books. And I stumbled across the fact that there wasn’t really a publication like a magazine that I could relate to as an aspiring novice stage entrepreneur.
I also wanted to make a bit of money and hopefully get ahead of my day job. I didn’t know that I’d fall in love with the process. No experience in publishing apps, design, editorial, even the entrepreneurial space. I just approached it with a fresh set of eyes, didn’t even really know what a magazine is supposed to look like. I did a little bit of research, but very minimal, just treated it like, “This is kind of a side hobby passion project.
I just finished my degree, so I went back to uni, did a masters of marketing and wanted to get a marketing job, couldn’t get a marketing job. I remember speaking to someone and they said, “It’d be really cool if you could show that you launched a project of your own. And I thought, “Okay, well maybe I should do this magazine, and kind of just fell into that.
It was always going to be a digital magazine, never thought of printing it. The app store, Google Play Store, only had recently in the past year or so allowed the capability to produce a digital magazine. That capability was out for a couple of years, but it was supposed to be a hot thing. It’s not that much to be honest, but it was a good starting point for us.
The first issue of the magazine, we didn’t even have anybody successful on the front cover. It was a stock image, because no one would get back to me. On the first day that we launched, we made $5. In the first month, we made $80. The first day we had two subscribers. At the end of the month, we had maybe 20 subscribers and a couple of bucks a month. We had 30 subscribers, did a couple of bucks a month and it was just launched on the app store and there was a subscription and it was a monthly subscription.
As time went on, because it was a monthly publication, I thought to myself, “Richard Branson, he’s quite an iconic businessperson, he’s everyone’s hero. He’s one of my heroes. He’s been on the front cover of every single business magazine. Why couldn’t he be on the front cover of Foundr?
Just with that spark of an idea that maybe, just maybe I could get him on the front cover of Foundr, I went down this path of seeing what that looked like. And how I did that was from a series of phone calls, speaking to publishers at Random House, and then trying to find the head of PR that actually landed me with the head of PR and I made a lot of phone calls.
That’s what I still do to this day if we want to get an interview with the hard-to-reach person. We don’t really send emails. We might send a few emails, but we tend to make a phone call, because that seems to be a lot more cut through than email. I think having a magazine, any publication is just a great way to build influence.
Then I pitched for a Skype interview, he said he could only do email. And then we just took that, ran with it and that’s been, still to this day, one of the best kind of PR best piece that we’ve given away for free that’s driven traction for the magazine, built credibility, authority for the brand.
Now we’re even going to start printing the magazine, in particular that issue, going to do free plus shipping funnels and all sorts of crazy stuff. We’re really milking it, man. It’s been awesome.
How Does Reading Provide Inspiration and New Ideas?
Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s like instant legitimacy with Branson willing to do that. But also, I think it’s more remarkable your perseverance and your boldness. You’re just like, “I’m just going to go for it and I’m not going to send an email and give up when no one reads it. That’s a great story.
One thing that you mentioned, I want to go a little bit back toward, which is how you talked about how you read a bunch of books and that set you on the path. I’m also a big reader. My wife always knows when I’m reading a book on a topic that’s completely in left field that I’m about to go try to do something new over the course of 20 years.
Are you still a big reader and is that where you find both inspiration and new ideas?
Nathan Chan: It’s funny you ask that. I wish I could read more books. I probably read now these days max a couple of books a year. I’m massive on audio, massive on podcasts, massive on blog posts. I do know this space pretty well, maybe not as well as you, because you’ve been doing this for a long time. But yeah, this online space I know pretty darn well. And that’s just from insane amounts of consuming audio podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts, read a lot of blog posts.
Then also a lot of inspiration now is just speaking to people as well. I’m going to conferences, meeting really smart people like yourself, but then also still doing the interviews for the magazine. Most of them for the magazine and that yields a lot of golden knowledge shared and leveling up on my part as well.
Brian Clark: Yeah, that makes sense. The online space moves pretty fast, and you usually have to go real time on it. I’ll generally read for an idea that no one else is currently focusing on, something old school that you can make new. But it makes sense. I can’t really do audio books, and even though I podcast, it’s hard for me to sit through one unless it’s playing in the background. Sometimes you miss things that way. I’m just such a reader. It’s my orientation that way.
What Are the Components of Foundr and When Did You Start It?
So tell us what Foundr encompasses at this point. What are the components of the business? Also, how many years has it been since you started?
Nathan Chan: I launched the first issue of the magazine March 2013. We just passed issue number 50 a couple of months ago. Issue number 50 had Tony Robbins on the front cover. And we’re up to issue number 53. Every single month we’ve published an issue and it’s just all consistency, which I’m sure you can testify, that is a big part of it. It’s just extremely consistent with content.
We’ve been going for just over four years and we’ve become much more than just a magazine. We’re doing all sorts of things, kind of in many inspirations inspired by yourself, Mindvalley, Digitalmarketer.com. There’s a website that I love called Mequoda that talks about how publishing companies that publish magazines can have a multifaceted platform which has inspired a lot of stuff.
Brian Clark: I know Mequoda. That’s interesting, because I could see how you might have been inspired by their model. That makes a lot of sense.
Nathan Chan: So, coming back, we’ve got the magazine on the front end. A lot of that content is repurposed from podcast, then we’ve got the blog, then we’ve got the social media channels on the front end. Now we’ve just got a coffee table physical book, and we’re getting into physical products now big time.
We’re working on printing the Branson issue and doing free plus shipping. But then also, printing a few of our other iconic issues that people love. Like the Seth Godin issue, probably the one with Jessica Livingston from YCombinator on the front cover as well.
Yeah, just printing iconic issues, because we’ve found a lot of success with physical products. I’ve found that that changes the relationship with somebody and they have a much deeper connection with the brand as opposed to being all digital.
The physical coffee table book was just a compilation of the best insights that we’ve gotten from the past four years of interviews (at the time it was three years). We crowdfunded on Kickstarter when we really understood that game, raised over a couple hundred grand. And we’re going to probably do another Kickstarter campaign not for version two of the book, but I’m thinking a journal of some sort.
Then we’ll do a version two of the book on Kickstarter as well. I think we’ll do much better than we did, because we learned a lot of hard lessons there.
So getting into the physical products, but then also on the backend doing courses. We’re going to be doing that at scale next year. We want to set up an office in the States eventually to one, hand over the interview, so I won’t do them anymore and to just massively go triple down on video content. We don’t really do any video content right now. We’re going to triple down on that. Then also to do courses at scale by getting influencers to teach.
Now what we’re doing is we’re just serving our audience and finding the biggest pain point that they’re experiencing and getting them to tell us through surveys what that biggest pain point is, and then whether it’s hiring, whether it’s you’re scaling, whether it’s starting a business, what kind of business, whether it’s productivity — it’s so broad. And then finding an expert to teach it, doing a Rev share type deal. Then just building a really good course, because that’s something we’re good at.
We’re good at producing really, really great content, because that’s our core business. Whether it’s a magazine, whether it’s a physical book, whether it’s an ecourse or a podcast or video or blog post. We’re good at content.
So that’s kind of the model. The backend is the courses. Eventually we’ll have enough courses to turn into a subscription, and then, in many ways inspired by yourself, one day, at least three years away, do a SaaS product.
Brian Clark: Man after my own heart. I love it. Not short on ambition whatsoever.
Nathan Chan: Yeah, I love this stuff.
How Did You Grow Your Business?
Brian Clark: Yeah, you’ve got to. Let’s go back a little more towards the beginning, because I think a lot of people will be interested. It’s great to see how much you’ve grown in four years. But let’s talk a little bit about how it happened. If I recall correctly, Instagram was a big social channel for you early on. Is that correct?
Nathan Chan: 100%. I started the magazine March 2013, left the day job. I did the magazine for around a year on the side and still worked the day job full-time.
I think that’s a critical thing that when people are getting started, you’ve got to have cash flow coming in, and you’ve got to do your business service where you just really keep just focusing on a great product and don’t go too hard on monetization. And that’s what I did for a year, man.
It took me about a year to build it up until I could leave my day job and go full-time on Foundr. And then it took me about three to six months to find my feet.
It was in November 2014 that we started on Instagram. We launched the podcast and then we launched on Instagram November 2014. That’s about two and a half years ago now and that was a game changer. It was our home run in terms of channels for customer acquisition, especially free unpaid customer acquisition.
It just blew up and we have over a million followers now on that channel. And it still to this day generates us at least 100 to 200 email subscribers a day, depending on how hard we push a lot of traffic in the tens of thousands every month.
Can You Still Start with Instagram and Succeed?
Brian Clark: That’s amazing. I am notably more of a Twitter guy, don’t really have an Instagram presence. I’m thinking about it. But I guess what everyone out here wants to know is in 2017 can you still get started with Instagram and succeed?
Nathan Chan: 100%. It might be a little more difficult, but you definitely can.
So, a long story short, I helped my girlfriend launch a physical product business. You can go check it out if you go to Healthish.com. It’s a physical product, it’s a time marked drink bottle. And I helped her launch that business. Literally, it’s been out for six weeks. That business will turn over two and a half grand in the first month and it’s all come from Instagram.
What’s the Best Approach to Getting a Following?
Brian Clark: That’s fantastic. What are your tips from a visual, motivational, whatever? And I do want to talk about email, because that’s another big component. And I love to hear that you’re turning that Instagram audience into email subscriptions, but we’ll get to that.
What’s in your current opinion the best approach to getting that initial following in the first place? Obviously, value, things that people like. But what do you think that looks like for a business? Again, it depends on the business first of all, right?
Nathan Chan: Yeah, 100%. I was just about to ask, are we going to go for Copyblogger bloggers? Are we going to go for physical product, ecommerce? Are we going to go for SaaS founders? What are we talking?
Brian Clark: It’s interesting, because the Instagram account I’m playing with right now is for my side project Further, which is in the personal growth area. It’s a newsletter. When you said, “Translate Instagram to email subscribers, you got my attention. So let’s talk about something like that.
Nathan Chan: Yeah. For personal development, you look at who are thought leaders in personal development? Do they have a following on Instagram? You look at personal development blogs.
Actually, it’s funny you mention that. I don’t really know that many personal development blogs doing well, except my friend that runs Addicted2success.com. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that blog. It’s quite popular.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I know a few newsletters that have pretty big audiences. I don’t know about the blogs anymore. They seem to have shifted to email pretty heavily and that’s where I’m at too. It just seems like, for example, every time I put out an issue of Further, it’s got a nice image with a quote that reflects the thematic content of the lead story of the email. Those usually do quite well.
It’s interesting when I switched my graphics at the very beginning from stock photos to that “approach, my retweets went through the roof, like up to 50 times higher. It was amazing. To me, that’s one component of an Instagram strategy, although to me, it’s kind of overdone with the quotes.
Nathan Chan: Yeah, that’s what I was just about to get to. The quote game is, I agree, overdone these days. When I was doing it, I looked at Success Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, and I saw they had an element of it. I was like, “Yeah, that’s strong for us. But you have to find a way to differentiate your account as well.
For us, we post now a lot of photos of entrepreneurs — doesn’t get as much engagement, but it’s got a really good story. Then also, we’re using our Instagram stories in a very, very big way to do animated motion graphics to get people to blog posts and all sorts of interesting things.
Then also, we’re posting about magazine covers and people we interview and all sorts of things. But we do post predominantly a lot of quotes. Now that’s been interesting because people want us to produce posters now as well, physical processes. That’s something a lot of people are asking for as well at the moment. But coming back to it, I think, yeah, the quote game is kind of overdone.
The Importance of Collaboration and Content
Brian Clark: I think it can still be a component, but I’m already looking at some other stuff. Like you, I’m thinking about physical products. That’s such a good opportunity to show people interacting with those physical products. Like you said, even if it’s not a profit center, it’s a brand builder for sure. Anyway, it’s cool because we’re thinking along the same lines.
You’re right, it’s just like with other content — it’s got to be remarkable in some sense while still connecting with people at the right level.
Nathan Chan: Yeah, 100%. I think the biggest takeaway I’d want people to have with Instagram is, still to this day, it is all about collaboration. I’m not sure what it was like in the early days of Copyblogger, guest posting on certain places and linking strategies and stuff like that.
Brian Clark: Let me tell you about that. That’s interesting, because that’s a big change. Number one, blogs used to link to each other just freely, conversation, all of that great stuff. Number two, no one did guest posting.
Copyblogger, if not the first major blog, it was an early one that started accepting guest posts. You know why? Because one time I wanted to go on a vacation and I hadn’t had one in a year, so I asked some regular people that hung out in the comments if they wanted to contribute and people loved it, so I kept it going. That’s how Copyblogger became more like a magazine and less like a blog.
Anyway, just a little flashback to the past, because it was a very different time before Twitter. Facebook was still in dorm rooms. There was no LinkedIn, certainly no Instagram. It’s been a lot of change in the last 11 years.
Nathan Chan: Yeah, with Instagram, it’s all about collaboration, man. That’s probably the biggest thing. It’s getting other influencers or Instagram accounts that have a similar type audience to what you’re going after, a similar type of customer avatar and essentially doing partnerships and/or paying and/or doing a mutually beneficial exchange in value to get them to share your content, share your photo, share your image, whether it’s once, whether it’s multiple times. If you do that enough, that’s how you can grow an Instagram page.
Video is quite big as well. You look at what Gary V does. He’s done a lot of shout outs. They’re called shout outs. He’s done a lot of shout outs across all sorts of accounts and all sorts of things. But now he’s just relentless on video and I think video is a big thing for Instagram as well, but it doesn’t have to be. One thing I can tell you is it’s content at scale as well. It’s consistent great content at scale.
I don’t know how many posts you guys do, but I’m sure you couldn’t do one a week like with Copyblogger. It’s probably at least one a day, the same with Instagram now. We post five to seven times a day, where I’ve found the more content you produce, because the feed moves so fast as long as it’s quality content.
It’s a combination of quality awesome content that differentiates yourself in the marketplace, especially if you want to play the quote game. It’s getting as many people to share your content as physically possible. It’s getting those big accounts to like your content as well. It’s a concept called “power liking, and then it’s doing that over a long period of time.
You can definitely build a fast growth Instagram account, and mixing in a combination of meme videos or videos that are relevant and/or kind of valuable to your audience. Then yeah, that’s kind of still quite an extremely powerful formula.
Then in 2017, you can build an email list. You can definitely build a fast growth Instagram account. When it comes to building an email list, what we’re doing still to this day is using Instagram stories. You’re getting people to swipe up, giving lead magnets.
We’ve got so many different lead magnets and funnel entry points to different funnels that we’ll rotate 15 to 20 different lead magnets a week with opportunities. And because Instagram moves so fast, and because we’re constantly rotating them, people don’t even differentiate or see the same ones that often.
So that’s how you build your email list. It’s actually asking people or letting people know, “Hey, we’ve got this free ebook. Hey, we’ve got this free guide, check this out, check this out, check this out. The ebooks are golden, like we could charge for them. They’re that good. The design, the content, it’s amazing.
Brian Clark: That’s interesting. So, the pay-to-play thing on Instagram, I of course am aware of that. And that 10 years ago in the blogging space would’ve gotten you burned at the stake. It’s just so amazing how things have changed. It used to be very kumbaya and anti-commercial. We’ve almost gone too far the other direction.
How Do You Produce the Premium Lead Magnet Content?
Brian Clark: Let me ask you a question, because I like your email acquisition strategy and your lead magnets from Instagram and whatnot. That seems to be really smart, considering the following you have there. How are you getting all that premium lead magnet content produced? Is it in-house? Is it freelancers? What’s your workflow on that?
Nathan Chan: Yeah, great question. One thing we’re doing is building out the team in Melbourne big time. Actually, I learned some hard lessons around doing a hybrid, so now we’re going all in Melbourne and then very, very minimal, as minimal as possible, remote.
For design, we do have a couple of great freelance designers that we use, same with the magazine. A couple of great freelancers on it still to this day, and we just treat these ebooks as magazines. We’re very, very good at producing a great magazine. We’re really good at doing content like that, like a book or a magazine – we’re really good.
I just treat the ebooks like a magazine. Not necessarily with page count or a masthead. But they have a front cover obviously, and they have really, really good content in there. And we’ve got good copy editors and writers that can pull this content together.
Then it just goes through our process of treating it like a magazine. So that’s kind of our workflow.
It starts with the writer, then goes to the copy editor. Most of the time goes through me, not always, just checking it over, making sure we’re on the right page before we send it to design. Then treating it like a magazine.
Then I see the last version around the design standpoint. That’s probably my superpower these days, Brian. I’m good at branding, audience building, marketing and just design kind of stuff — not doing it, but visual and understanding that. Then, yeah, then it’s out into the ethos.
Brian Clark: Loving it. Nathan, thanks so much for joining us this early morning from Melbourne. I think anyone who’s listening to this had to get at least one if not five actionable tips. Thanks again, man.
Nathan Chan: Oh, you’re welcome, man. Thank you so much for having me. Absolute pleasure.
Brian Clark: All right, Everyone, you heard the man. It’s only been four years. He’s well on the way to a digital empire. But even if it takes a little longer, just stay the course. Do the things that are good for the audience, get them on an email list and most importantly, keep going.
