How Kit (Formerly Convertkit) CEO Nathan Barry grew Kit (Formerly Convertkit) to $43.8M revenue and 49K customers in 2024.

we've i don't know gradually invested in over time and now um it pays off in a big way um and actually in a massive way i mean if you look at ahrefs i mean you're now generally ranked for almost 70 000 organic keywords you're getting 120 000 clicks organically per month i think that's unique 10.2 million backlinks there's obviously a credit to probably a bunch of hosted page products that you guys have but i mean you're killing it in seo yeah so it drives about 40 of all of our new accounts um wow it's from search one interesting if people are looking for like a a quick tip for link building that's been fascinating we didn't do it on purpose but it's worked out really well is we've been doing these creator stories where we profile creators tell their story and we've been paying for photographers to come out you know and like a local photographer to come do all the photos for the story and give it to the creator and say hey use these on your website use this because if you've ever built a website for yourself you're like realizing oh and here's where i'll put the perfect header and you realize like i don't have that i haven't hired a photographer to do that and some people love it right when we give those uh away but then what we also did is say hey we have this unsplash uh collection of creator photos if you'd like we'll release those you know if you sign off on it and you're up for it we'll release those photos um on splash as part of our convertkit you know creator collection and that has like there's millions and millions of downloads of those photos now and a bunch of people will credit convertkit but what's interesting is on all the popular sites that use them and they get used a lot we just send a quick little outreach email and say hey i saw that you used this photo um i'd love it if you uh provided a backlink back to you know if you linked back to convertkit as the the creator of this photo if not no worries it's like licensed under creative commons you know like you don't have to yeah but if you want to we love it and that has driven so many backlinks you get these photos that millions of people are using and they're just like oh yeah sure i'd love to give credit and especially when you're up front of like you don't need to at all like we're not coming and saying you have to do this like fascinating how much did you spend on photog on local photographers featuring your customers in 2020 do you have a general idea uh that's a good question we um i don't have that i'd say 500 to a thousand dollars per shoot somewhere in there and then maybe one one shoot per week um okay got it so 50 it's this this tactic could you know cost 50 to 100 000 per year yeah um exactly and you get direct return in the form of these backlinks but you also get just amazing community return i mean this helps this helps your customers in so many ways and it's free yes so this is kind of the way that i think about marketing is if there's an activity that we're going to do like we're going to release these creator stories because we want to be a brand known for um great storytelling i think all the most iconic brands are storytellers and so we're like great okay let's start telling stories and then we need to we need a process for that so there's like we need to do photos for the stories we need to do those things and you end up with a sequence of events that you do and you do this over and over again and i think that's the way that most people approach marketing or whatever task of like i have to do a b and c and i will do that a bunch of times and uh now i guess jim collins in good to great talks about flywheels and taking all of these sequences of events and turning them into a flywheel where each step logically feeds into the next and around and around you go and so we think about it in marketing of these different like these stories you know we want to produce a great story and it needs writing and photography and around that since we're producing the photography we should promote that and share it as many places as possible so that's where these unsplash collections come in because then that will get more attention for the stories and then our our search for like seo flywheels should fit into that of like oh since this asset is being created and millions of people are downloading it let's you know tie that into our link outreach and basically see how can i make these different systems that when they fit together every you know every rotation the flywheel makes the next rotation easier and i look for that everywhere of okay great if we're doing this one activity here how can it serve the rest of the business or how can it have these other buy products that are really valuable nathan is there somebody on your team that is that you've hired that is solely responsible for watching systems that other people are running documenting the system and then creating a flywheel or do you try and build it into the dna where everyone if they do something that works they have to document it and share it so you can invest in systematizing yeah i would say um there's not one person uh the person who does it the most is barrett brooks who's our ceo okay um and he's been with the team for quite a while he started working in marketing and then grew to leading marketing and then it's now this doo so he's probably the best at it but it's definitely something that we're trying to teach everyone to do and like issa adney who runs she's our her title is storyteller um she's the person who we like taught this to at a high level like in the company and she's just like okay i'm gonna take that concept and run with it and take it so much further than you thought and so she's the one that's implemented all of that and to give you an idea where it's at now um i'm working on a book called create every day and so in writing those chapters i'll get stuck on about okay i need what do i need i think a story of a creator who uh created really consistently every day you know and so i'll be like issa what do you have there and she goes to her database of all the creators that she's interviewed and says here's four of them i'm like oh perfect i dive into the stories there's already great photography there's already these quotes and everything and then i'll i'll come back a while later i'm like okay i need someone who uh really persisted for a long time and didn't get the success early you know they got it three years four years in and she's like goes to her database and she's like okay here's these four people right and so obviously we're doing the work to tell the stories to build the brand that we want but we're trying to do it in a way that serves everybody else so then when our content team is writing something about uh how to use commerce or a new like uh how to do email marketing or growing a list like they're pulling these snippets and examples from the rest of the of the content machine basically this is this is fascinating to hear um how you how you build all these on top of each other you know you've now you've now stacked a bunch of these things and one of the things that i'm curious to ask you is you clearly focus on community i mean you must at some point see yourself almost like a talent agency for creators where you're making them their own celebrity with the photos with the distribution and their then that enables them to get attention and build their own brands do you ever think about that are we gonna see a convertkit talent agency for creators i don't think we're gonna see that to quite the same extent of like us trying to get bookings and and things like that we're you're definitely gonna see it um down the road from a marketplace perspective of here are featured products to buy and you know here's the best um the best ebooks uh the best photography resources you know all of those sort of things we're driving the when does that launch when's the convertkit marketplace launch it's probably a couple years off uh okay just for like a little bit of uh i don't know i don't know if it's inside baseball or what but marketplaces are very trendy exciting thing to do and one thing we almost went from what we have today right into like and then let's do a marketplace and what we realized is when it come it comes to discovery um and getting you know using the attention the platform that we have for more creators to be discovered there's a lot that we could do of making each piece of content created in convertkit um available to be discovered on other platforms so if you think about internal discovery versus external discovery internal is like oh you just finished reading this article or because you're subscribed to james clear you should also subscribe to tim ferriss you know like that kind of thing and that's like what medium has done a lot of and um that sort of thing but what we realized is the step we need to do first is the external discovery of the little things of like oh i just subscribed to nathan's list and it pops up and says like hey you should tweet about it and we put these little moments all the way through so every time you buy a product every time you subscribe to a list um like these little viral loops happen for the creator and basically we'd be getting ahead of ourselves if we're like oh let's do it...