be more like Taylor Swift, do things that don't scale

Summary

Taylor Swift’s tour is projected to clear a billion dollars. you don’t have to like the music. you do have to look at what she actually does to build a fan base that powerful.

1. she signs autographs until every single person at the show has one. she sends fans personal gifts. she remembers birthdays. she pays attention. that’s the whole strategy, played for two decades straight.

2. when I started, every time someone signed up for my email list, I replied by hand. by name. asking what they needed. some thought I was a bot. some replied. all of them got real engagement, and I learned exactly who my audience was.

3. at Garage Gym Athlete, every new free trial got a fifteen-minute onboarding call with me. I did over a thousand of them before I had to stop. then we shifted to a custom welcome video for every new signup, recorded by name. takes a minute. nobody else was doing it.

4. none of this scales. that’s the point. early on, founders worry too much about what big businesses do. big businesses didn’t start as big businesses. they started by doing the unscalable thing for as long as they could.

5. you’ll know when to stop. when the volume genuinely outpaces what you can do, you delegate or you automate. until then, give 100%. take the extra call. write the longer email. record the video. that’s the whole game in the early years.

if that sounds like too much work, try harder.

Transcript

the billion-dollar tour

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Welcome to the Better Human Business Podcast. This is Jerred Moon, and today I’m going to suggest that we all be a little bit more like Taylor Swift. So I’m reading a quick excerpt from fortune.com, Taylor Swift is bringing in ticket sales of more than $13 million a night on the road, putting her on a trajectory to deliver the highest grossing tour in music history.

And it looks like she’s going to maybe cap out over a billion dollars. A billion dollars, I feel like sometimes we don’t really understand the word billion with how much it gets thrown around. When you’re talking about massive economy, like US gave X billion dollars to Ukraine, all this other stuff.

Billions is insane. And for Taylor Swift to be bringing in a billion dollars on a tour is insanity. It’s quite impressive. Whether you like Taylor Swift or not doesn’t really matter. Whether you love her songs, hate her songs, or never heard of her, which is highly unlikely, we can all learn something from Taylor Swift.

One thing that you should know about Taylor Swift, and I’m not some closet hardcore Taylor Swift fan, I just did a little research before this podcast. She is crazy about her fans, just absolutely crazy about her fans and how much she pays attention to them. And you could Google this and look at all the instances and stories of her sending fans one-off gifts and presents and doing stuff for their birthdays.

what taylor swift actually does

And even early on when she was gaining a lot of popularity, she would stay at her concerts and sign autographs until every single person got an autograph, until every single person was there and met her. It would take her hours and hours and hours to do. And that’s how she built this crazy fan base that will follow her for the rest of her life and always make her successful because of how much she cares about her fans.

Again, I’m not getting into her music or whether or not she’s the greatest artist of all time. That’s not even the debate. It’s like making the New York Times bestseller list. Has nothing to do with whether or not you are a good quality author, all it has to do is with how many you sold. So you’ve got to be doing something right.

And Taylor Swift is doing something right. And what’s that she is doing right is how much she pays attention to her fans. And so I want to give you a quick example of how I’ve done this over the years. And to be honest, what I’m recording today is just as much for me as it is for anyone else listening.

So when I first started, I knew I wanted to get more email subscribers because I knew if I had email subscribers, I could communicate with people, send them my articles, eventually sell things, all those kind of things. I didn’t get a lot of email subscribers when I first started. And so what I would do is anytime I got an email subscriber, I would actually manually reply to them or email them.

By name. Hey, I noticed that you signed up for my newsletter. I appreciate it. What kind of things are you looking for? How can I help you? And a lot of people think that these were automated messages. And some people would reply, some people wouldn’t. And so that was one thing I did. And it gave me a lot of insight into getting to learn who my target audience was and who I was writing for and what I was doing.

manually emailing every new subscriber

And then once I started Garage Gym Athlete, every time someone would sign up for a free trial, I just had 15-minute slots on my calendar to where you could book a quick on-board call I put in quotes, just a quick call with me. It wasn’t like ongoing coaching or anything like that. It was just a quick 15-minute call with any person who signed up.

And I did this over a thousand of these calls. After a thousand athletes, I just couldn’t keep up with the volume. And realistically, when you start to manage a team and everything else, I couldn’t keep up with it anymore. But I did a lot of these calls. A lot of people took me up on this and did a call.

We did a 15-minute call. I’d quickly get to know who they were, what they were looking for, how we could best deliver on the promises that we had at Garage Gym Athlete. And I did, like I said, over a thousand of these 15-minute calls before I stopped. And I’ve even done welcome videos to people coming into Garage Gym Athlete to tailor them individually.

So we even did this, it was just a few years ago, where someone would come in, they’d start a trial. I didn’t have time to do the 15-minute call thing anymore. But what I would do is shoot every single person who started a new trial, I would shoot them a video. It’d be a quick video, it wouldn’t be very long, typically less than a minute.

And it would just, it would specifically mention them by name. It was a new video for every single person, it wasn’t this like reused video. So if the person’s name was John, I’d be like, hey John, just saw you signed up for Garage Gym Athlete. Welcome, super glad to have you. If there was any other personal information I could pick out from them, I would try to throw that in there.

1,000 fifteen-minute onboarding calls

Just so they know that I wasn’t reusing some video or using AI to alter my voice and say their name. People would think that’s what you’re doing these days, but back when I was doing it, there wasn’t none of that technology, you were just doing it. And this really helped me grow the business in a significant way, but it’s not scalable.

But I will say, I think that a lot of entrepreneurs worry too much about what won’t scale, even when you’re early on. So when you’re early on, you might be thinking, I can’t realistically email every single person who becomes an email subscriber or whatever, because that’s not what big businesses do.

Big businesses didn’t start as big businesses, they started as small businesses exactly like you. And so it might be a good idea to take a page out of Taylor Swift’s book and just go all in on your fan base, your customers, the people who are eventually going to be paying your bills, go all in on them.

Give them 100% the longer email, take the extra phone call, do all the things. Again, it does not scale, but you’ll know when you’re at a point in your business to where you’re like, I can’t realistically do these things anymore, it’s not smart for me to be doing them anymore. But if you feel like you’re not there yet, this could be the deciding factor about whether or not you’re going to scale or make it to the next level.

That next level of personal touch. I was doing it in an online business where that’s basically unheard of. So people were so relieved and so refreshed to get on a call with the founder, they just thought it was awesome. And I wish I could still do some of that stuff. And I want to look for ways in which I can continue to do those kind of things in the different online businesses that I run right now, because I do miss some of that stuff.

do things that don’t scale

Getting direct customer feedback and working with people, doing the calls, responding to the emails, doing the videos, like all that stuff is fun. And you get to know people and they get to know you and they really become a part of your community. What I want to urge you to do today is focus on some things that don’t scale.

Do you think Taylor Swift was thinking about signing every single one of these autographs and doing all these like special things for fans thinking, you know what, I might as well not do this at all because I can’t do it for all 100 million of my fans. No, she focuses on who she can focus on when she has the time and she’s been doing it for a long time and now she has one of the greatest fan bases we may ever see.

And so I think that we can take a little bit out of just one small page, maybe a paragraph out of her book, pay a little bit more attention to not only our customers, but the people who are somewhat interested in what we’re doing. Pay that extra bit of attention to them and just see what it does for your business.

It might sound like a lot of work and if it sounds like too much work for you, maybe try harder.