The Andrew Kirby File (notes from our meet up)

Jan '23 in Other

I flew to LA to meet up with Andrew on January 5th and 6th.

We spent ~8 hours together split between both days and talked about a bunch of topics (content, community, money, life, travel).

He got to try Chipotle for the first time and Chick-fil-A haha. I consider this a win.

Sadly, we didn’t record our conversations. But!

I did write down some chicken scratch notes that I think could be fun to share 😀

So let me get right into it. Feel free to skip around based on the underlined topic.

CULTURE TALK (Andrews team)

Build a culture where we can all just send LOOMS to each other
Default for the company = over communicate
We want to replicate the GaryVee model where we are recording and gathering content from our conversations
Told me that in an ideal world, I need to get to a 3 hour work day per day so then I can focus the rest of my time on strategy, research, and letting my mind breathe.

This got us talking about the public Gumroad Wiki. And how each person on the team carries their weight, gets tasks done, and without many meetings.

I didn’t share this with Andrew at the time but I thought about creating a public wiki of what it's like at KirbyX.

Why: the type of people we want to attract would love to see what a high performing business runs like.

CONTENT OPERATING TALK

We need a system that helps us create high quality content at a prolific rate.

There’s no need to create a system from scratch. Who do we like that’s doing interesting things? Let’s build a system using their foundation.

So we created a rough Content Operating System that revolves around 1 long form piece of content per week. Then that long form is redistributed into short form content (video, tweets, threads).

Inspired heavily by THIS COURSE made by Justin Welsh.

For context, Justin Welsh creates his long form piece of content within 45 minutes. And then bases all his tweets and threads off of that long form piece of content.

He does not work 12 hours per day and grind away on the creator treadmill.

Our goal with content strategy = work extremely efficiently to have time during the day to strategize and get creative.

Version 0.1 of our strategy:

Sunday - select idea

Monday and Tuesday - research

Wednesday and Thursday - writing the video

Friday and Saturday - short form content

Sunday - day off

On top of this we are still writing daily tweets and turning the highest performers into short-form content.

When a short piece of content performs well, we can go into more detail in future recording days.

We talked about having a daily call or a weekly recording to probe what’s on Andrews mind.

“A Mining Call”

What's on your mind?
What threads stuck out to you?
What have you seen that got your attention/worked?

While I was there, we were creating our first ever recording day so we talked in depth about the type of content that would make this type of day most efficient for Andrew.

Recording Day Objective: To prompt Andrew to say things that I believe would make good content

He then will batch create as many high quality videos as possible in the shortest amount of time.

CONTENT DISCUSSION

Talked about “serious beginners” and how we want to build a really valuable audience.

A serious beginner = someone who when told what steps to take, will take them, and share their lessons. There’s leverage in unlocking massive change in a serious beginner that applies to everything we teach.

A big part of the business revolves around helping existing business owners scale their business via content creation. Andrew likes making this kind of content, and we 100% want to create content for them as well.

The Synthesizer Community can dictate the type of content we make 🧠

We want to attract a certain type of person into this community. Community helps creators get off the creation treadmill.

So how do we do this?

We can create posts in the community that target the Great Online Game. Turn those posts into a long form YT video. And turn that long form YT video into tweets, shorts, threads.

If we can figure this out, then everything we want will come true.

One bit I noticed with Andrew the next day.

Andrew was talking about Twitter and how “different is better than better”.

Example: He found a Twitter profile with 30 followers. But they had great pictures and an interesting profile pic so he DMed them.

There’s a lesson there in reaching out fast, syncing up with people who are doing cool things, and learning how to do what they do.

We talked about the future of work and how in the future, any one who thinks clearly will be rich.

The clearest thinkers will become the richest people.

The greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head.

CONTENT IDEAS

Writing out Andrews tweets from time to time. Some of his highest performing tweets have an image/video added. What if the scroll stopper was his handwriting? There’s a ton of visual twitter accounts. This could add a freshness to the account.
Main YT channel will be broader in topic while we run our current experiments: productivity, stoicism.
Synthesizer Podcast channel would be more niche and related to business and the Great Online Game.
Ideally we create such a high quality backlog of content so that Andrew CAN take off a full month without stressing.
Create tutorials that teach people how to do what we do. There’s a huge gap in the market where creators are talking about theories, abstract concepts, and not giving step by step guides.
Can we select great ideas and how can we templatize what we create to be consistent?

Or what if we just ignored the algorithms completely?

Created content for this community first. Because most people create externally and try to bring their viewers into their own platform.

If we create here, impact as many of you as possible, you’ll naturally want to invite more people into the group and so on.

An interesting bit to further this point. Andrew would reduce his YT subscriber base to 10k people if that meant each one of those 10k people were exactly the types of people that love what he’s creating.

We are headed to Bali this year to make amazing content with a fresh presentation.

This tweet by Zach talks about changing up your presentation. Because nobody wants talking head clips or more podcast clips. Interesting point.

When in Bali, we expect to take tons of beautiful pictures of Andrew working in different spaces.

The idea was that his Instagram could be filled with him working in beautiful spaces worldwide. Like these 3 pics (attached at end of post).

The internet receives a signal with the content we make that he’s playing the Great Online Game, quite solid at it, and learning as he goes.

We went into a rabbit hole of how everything should be different, let’s be weird.

Let’s lean into financial freedom in his videos. How he makes money in different variations to not bore any of you :)

We talked about the Content Specialist opportunity and how it really is a win/win/win.

Gym Launch (Alex Hormozi) was successful because they disclosed how much $$ ON AVERAGE their members made. Where courses become scams is when they advertise their top students making above average income but their regular students don’t make their money back.

The Content Specialist gig is a guaranteed way to earn and learn.

Work with someone under an apprenticeship model. Which is an alternative to making content if you need money up front.

How Andrew would make money

You only need 3 people to make $$ (3-5k). He wouldn't start by building an audience, he’d build a business.

He’d pick Twitter and figure out what he loves based on the tweets/profiles he likes the most
Follow 10 people that you love + comment under their tweet with value or insights
Post infrequently (3x/week) and comment under big accounts so when they go to your account, all of your posts are high quality
Become well known within your niche

I definitely missed a bunch of topics and did NOT go in crazy depth here. Let me know if you need something explained in more detail. Hopefully, I remember haha.

Cheers!

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