Tai Lopez doesn't have the best reputation — while going on his podcast would be great exposure, isn't the reason people in your community love you your authenticity? Wouldn't appearing with him undercut that? What business does he have selling automation info products when it's mostly surface-level stuff you already give away for free?
For context: Tai Lopez and his team reached out to me multiple times inviting me onto his podcast. I found some value in his early social media marketing agency courses back when I was just starting out, so I was weighing whether to do it — but I noticed his views-per-episode seemed low for a channel with 3 million subscribers, which gave me pause. I haven't actually talked to him myself, so I'm going only off secondhand impressions, and I don't want to judge him too harshly on that basis — whatever you think of his products, the guy ran one of the most viral marketing campaigns ever and is clearly a sharp businessperson. Really I was just weighing it from an ROI angle: is it worth flying out to his studio (I think Florida) for the exposure? That's genuinely what I was thinking through out loud, and Brendan's comment was giving me his take on it.
personal brandpodcast appearancesreputationbusiness decisions
Yeah, I like to think so as well. I deliver a ridiculous amount of value—whether it’s $60, $70, or whatever the current price is, sometimes around $3,000 depending on when you watch this. To make a long story short, I don’t actually recommend posting on YouTube for a while; most people see creators like me posting and assume that’s how you make money, so they feel they need to post and showcase their systems. I can only do that because I’ve already had success selling this through cold outreach and built a business model aside from YouTube. Only once I had the cash flow to justify spending time on YouTube did I start making videos consistently. Before you start making videos about a money‑making topic, get to the point where you’ve achieved more than 99% of people at that thing. If you’re a standout 1% with some accomplishment or social proof, people will be far more likely to listen to you. There are literally a million‑plus people waving light poles online talking about stuff they don’t really understand. When you can demonstrate real results—say, making $42,000 a month—and show how you did it, you cut through that noise much more easily. The key is to do it without bragging; come across as genuine, not ungrounded. Based on our interactions in Maker School, you’re not that kind of guy—you’re good. For me, it’s more about reputation than follower count; I care about the strength and quality of each follower, not just the number. I’m not missing out on money by focusing on goodwill; in fact, I’m accumulating more goodwill than pretty much anyone in the industry by doing this. Thanks for the advice—you totally get how to play the game.
If you're using Facebook for this, it's essentially game over--Facebook DMs are extremely difficult, limited to about 10 messages per day per account, and you'll quickly end up in message requests. By contrast, a cold email account lets you send 25-30 emails daily and costs only $2-$4 per month, whereas a Facebook account runs around $50 per month due to verification overhead. Therefore, you need an intermediate step to obtain their email addresses, then conduct cold email outreach. Calling is also effective, especially for towing businesses that are often on the road; you can't reliably email auto shops, so walking in or calling works. This approach isn't perfect, but it's workable. Regarding my own situation: I've realized I need to set up ads. Yesterday I hung out with Jackie Chu in Vancouver, who's now ranking for businessman and is a brilliant guy--I plan to send him a message. I also met Tom Wang, who's really cool, and Tony, founder of Bessie. Their advice was to run retargeting ads from Maker School; they said not doing so would be idiotic. I agree and will implement that, with help from my team and the school. My strategy is to list the problems my community faces, pick five or ten, and record a video addressing each. The videos will reiterate that Maker School is 100% free if you don't land your first client within 90 days, with a full refund. We also have $20,000 in discounts; most people use about 10%, giving roughly $2,000 off, which means a new member gets an immediate 10x ROI in the first month before even getting a client--so there's no reason not to join. I'll track video completion percentages to gather more data. My offer is strong and the product quality is high, so I'll put it in front of as many people as possible. I'm also excited that a friend is onboarding people for Claro, and I'll meet school guys later today for a coffee-shop flyover activity and other fun. Overall, I'm amped up about everything happening, and I believe ads could unlock insane growth if executed well. As for my channel stats: my main YouTube channel currently shows 471,066 subscribers, which is abysmal growth; other metrics indicate decent growth elsewhere--my paid offer has 7,234 sales, my Maker School rank is still two, and we're making good money, though subscriber growth isn't what I expected because I'm not creating viral head-type videos. I'll keep growing at a steady clip and hope to reach 500k subscribers by year-end.
Sure thing. I'm pitching a profitable AI agency cold email campaign that I can walk through in about 40 minutes. I have videos of me selling inside Maker School if you want to see them. I've tried posting those sales videos on this channel before, but I got veiled legal threats from people on sales calls telling me to take them down. It's weird, but funny story: I had dinner with a buddy who posts full sales calls live, and we talked about outreach. I do mostly outbound, so the clients I talk to don't know about my YouTube channel. If they did know about it, I'd be clear: if you want to move forward, I can give you a discount on XYZ service, assuming you're okay with me posting the call, and I'd censor all sensitive info. That would actually give you extra clout, authority, and visibility. Would you be game? Yeah, I think we could do that. So stay tuned for more of that.
First things first, you can't be camera shy in a world where your success depends on you being confident enough to show you in conjunction with your brand. People won't see that as shyness — they'll see that as a lack of conviction or a lack of belief. If you really believe in your brand, you will stand behind it 100%, and that includes putting your face on it. So it's not really a question of being shy or comfortable or whatever; it's a question of 'do I really fucking believe in what it is that I'm doing?' And if so, of course I'm going to put my face behind it — that's how you show the rest of the world your belief. So reframe that. The second thing is reach. There are many different ways to do it, but you don't actually need social reach in order to build a startup for your cleaning business. It depends on what your startup is, obviously, and the ticket value, but you can actually just reach out to people one-on-one, like I usually talk about on my channel. A lot of big high-ticket SaaS companies do this sort of thing, and that's how they actually grow. So if your SaaS or startup or whatever it is makes somewhere more than, I don't know, like $3,000 lifetime value, it actually makes sense for you to do this sort of outreach. And then your apps on the App Store are going to be 50/50 — probably not going to be that high-ticket, but just worth considering. And then if you did want to build social reach, the best way to do so right now is just to pre-commit 90 days to a platform and a format. A platform might be YouTube, a format might be talking-head AI automation tutorials such as I do. And then just rip and do one video or one piece of content a day every day for 90 days. If you feel like you can do more than one — because maybe it's a text thing or some sort of audio thing — then do two a day for 90 days. Don't assess yourself before that period; only assess yourself after that period. If after the 90-day period you think you made a positive return on investment for all the time, energy, and money that you've spent, then ramp it up and go all in. Otherwise, just move to another approach, take what you learned from the previous one, and rinse and repeat.