From Setbacks to Superfans with Pat Flynn

In This Episode

• [02:34] – Pat Flynn reflects on his childhood dreams—from aspiring baseball player to architect—and how a layoff in 2008 led him to embrace entrepreneurship.
• [07:28] – Orion and Pat explore the genuine kindness and relatability Pat brings to both personal and professional interactions.
• [12:13] – Pat examines the trade-offs of being honest and transparent online, including the risk of public backlash.
• [15:46] – Pat outlines his book creation process, from identifying audience pain points to writing and publishing.
• [21:00] – Pat considers the role of AI in content creation and underscores the irreplaceable power of human connection in storytelling.
• [39:30] – Pat reveals his approach to managing multiple businesses, including his Pokémon YouTube channel and Smart Passive Income blog.
• [41:59] – Pat emphasizes the value of cultivating a supportive and collaborative atmosphere for remote teams.
• [42:54] – Orion invites Pat to share guidance for aspiring YouTubers launching channels in today’s landscape.
• [48:29] – Pat details his time management strategies, highlighting the importance of carving out space to think, rest, and recharge.

Jump to Links and Resources

Pat, and welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. 

Hey, my pleasure, Orion; thank you for having me.

Yeah, so you’ve been extraordinary in the marketing world. You’ve done so much. You ran so many companies. When you were a child, did you ever think this is who you’re going to become? 

No, not. I wanted to be a baseball player, a sportsperson. I was pretty athletic. And when I was really little, I was pretty much bigger than most of my friends, and then all of a sudden, in third grade, I stopped growing, and everybody else kept growing. My sports capabilities, at least relative to my competitors and teammates, started to decline, so I was just trying to excel academically. That’s really what my goal was when I was little, and I let opportunities happen. And then, I wanted to become an architect. 

As soon as I started thinking about college and what I wanted to do with my career, I realized that sports wouldn’t be a viable option. I then decided that I wanted to explore the world of architecture. I always loved to draw and build things, and everything from LEGO to Lincoln logs was a part of my childhood growing up. 

If you can define the problem better than your target customer, they will automatically assume you have the solution.” – Jay Abraham

So, it kind of made sense, and it was a career that I fell in love with. I got into it. I attended the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Architecture degree. I thought that’s what I was going to do for the rest of my life until I wasn’t able to anymore because of the recession in 2008. That’s kind of when everything fell apart, but it also allowed me to build things back up in a different way. 

Yeah, and did you find your passion for marketing?

It resulted from trying to simply survive. I mean, I’ve always known about and have always kind of understood marketing a little bit as was trying to sell stuff to people, and that’s kind of what I knew about it. However, when it came to the point of having to do it on my own after being laid off, I started to really question how to do it in a way that made me feel good. Because a lot of marketing that was taught, especially back then, was more about treating your customers like a credit card number rather than an actual human being, and I never felt good on the receiving end of that. 

So, I decided that when I became an entrepreneur, I actually started a website to help architects pass their architectural exams. That was my first foray into online business, and it blew up. It did really well, and not because I was good at marketing, but because I knew exactly what my audience was going through, having just passed that exam myself. So, in a way, that is the best marketing when you can understand who it is that you’re serving. Right?

I think it was Jay Abraham who said, “If you can define the problem better than your target customer, they will automatically assume you have the solution.” Well, I knew exactly who my customer was because I was my own customer. I think this really came to light in 2009, so I launched my business in October of 2008, and it did very well. I sold a study guide, which was just a PDF file, for $20, and it eventually turned into a six-figure business.

However, in May 2009, the United States Green Building Council, the organization that developed the questions for this exam, released its guide. And I thought I was done, for I started a question. “Why would people purchase something from me when they can literally buy the guide from the people writing the questions?” And lo and behold, that was my most profitable month, and when I started asking questions to my customers like, “Why did you buy for me? Or what was it about my stuff? And why didn’t you buy from the other people? “

People bought products because they related and felt genuinely understood, as if their exact situation was fully known.

And they said, “Because I related to you, because I felt like you knew exactly where I was, these were the kinds of answers that I was getting, and that really changed my life. It helped me realize that the more I lean into who I’m serving and actually step forward to serve them first, the more I can always get something back in return. So my mantra has always been that ever since then, your earnings are a byproduct of how well you serve your audience. I just kind of lean into that. I strive to be an example of that, and I teach it to my students as well. 

But I think it’s something more than that, because even with me, I always saw you from far away, on stage and some on videos. I was quite nervous taking on this interview that Stephan was supposed to conduct, but he’s sick. However, from the first two seconds I spoke with you, I just felt that there was some kind of kindness or generosity emanating from you. You come across as genuine and relatable, and it’s clear that you genuinely care. Do you know how you judge people in three seconds? I can judge people in two.

There’s a lot of truth to that in the first impression and the 1000 things you say before you even say a word kind of thing, and I appreciate that a lot. I’ve heard that before. I’ve tried to distill why that’s the case, and I feel like some of it’s intentional, where I know that if I come into a room loud and aggressive, then that’s I’m going to be perceived a certain way. But I mean, what was the first thing that I asked you before we got started? I said, “Tell me about who your audience is because I want to make sure I serve them best,” right?  I’m, yeah, talking about what I’m saying here. I’m walking the walk in real time. 

And it’s because, again, I come from that place of, well, I’m here for you. I mean, you were so generous in asking,” Hey, we’re going to talk about your book today. How do we set that up?” I said,” Let’s not even worry about that. That’ll come naturally. I’m here for you.” And I think that, again, just showing up in that surf first kind of attitude has always been what I’ve done. I guess that comes out both with the words that I say and maybe just kind of my tone and how I show up and body language. I don’t know. It might be even deeper than that. 

Yeah, and even with Smart Passive Income, you always share your income with everybody. That’s being so transparent. How do you think it served you? And did it take something from you?

To provide a little more context on what we’re discussing here, in October 2008, which was the first month I sold my study guide, I decided that because many people also started asking me, “How did you do that? Can you share with me how you became an entrepreneur, kind of relatively quickly? I want to do the same thing. Everybody was struggling at the time, and they wanted to find their way out and a way to survive.”

So, I was more than happy to share everything I was learning. And then I started to think, “Okay, well, if people want to learn from me, I think the best way to do that is to share everything and be fully transparent.” That included sharing how much revenue I was making and how many customers I had, and doing that every month for years, showing that the UPS wasn’t always up.

Sometimes, it was down, but being very open and transparent, not just with the numbers, but why the numbers happened. Here’s what I fell short on. Here are the mistakes I made, too, and that was very much inspired by so I was a huge Personal Finance Blog nerd. Remember when you would read blogs with an RSS feed reader, and you’d wake up in the morning, and there’d be like 40 new articles from your favorite bloggers? 

Trust is the most valuable currency online, built by sharing everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Of all the bloggers I followed, from Get Rich Slowly to The Simple Dollar, there was one in particular, mymoneyblog.com, and this person was very open about the stock trades they made. They shared exactly how much they were spending and how much they were making and also how much they were losing, and that made me trust that person that much more versus other people who were talking about retirement plans and funds and mutuals and all this kind of stuff, but weren’t showing what they were doing. They were just telling, so I loved and admired this person for doing that. 

So I think I brought a lot of that over to the entrepreneurial space because I was like, “Okay, I wasn’t selling anything at this time, but I also knew how important it was to build trust.” So I just said, “Okay, I’m just gonna fully show everything. Eventually, that became a part of my flavor of smart, passive income: wow, he’s sharing everything —the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But it’s fascinating because, over time, you were able to see the sort of upward trends and the growth and some of the every once in a while, there’d be a month where I’d have an astronomical increase in revenue. And it would be so fun to talk about how that happened. ‘“Hey, I’ve released an audiobook to accompany my architectural book. And here is where I struggled with that.” I mentioned that I had tried to record it myself. First, and then my mastermind group told me that that was silly, that I should hire a voiceover person, and how scared I was to invest $2,000 to do that, but how I was able to make that up on the first day, and all these lessons that I was learning in real time I was able to share. 

And again, I think that did so much for quickly building that trust. It became, yes, a quick little carrot that was easy to share. Like, “Oh, dude, this guy, Pat Flynn, he’s sharing his income.” Cool. That was very easy to share and very interesting and different, but it also just opened up the fact that I was just doing what I was doing. I wasn’t trying to convince anybody of anything. It’s just here I am. And here’s what’s happening now.

Over time, when it grew to six figures per month, which it did at one point, it started to work in the opposite direction. I started to disassociate myself with the level at which my audience was. It started to feel Pat’s way beyond where I’m at now. He’s doing all this advanced stuff. He’s building a team that’s like, I can’t afford a team yet. I’m a solopreneur. I’m not ready for his stuff, or he is beyond my level now, so I’m going to move on to somebody else. 

So, I started to, in a way, outgrow my audience by sharing those numbers over time. So, eventually, I had to decide to just stop doing that and instead focus on more campaign-based reporting, one of the bigger ones that I did.

Again, this was a way for me to reconnect with my audience, not by disassociating myself through the numbers, but rather by saying, “Hey, here’s a particular campaign.” For example, I wrote a book called Will It Fly. in 2015, and 2017, I revealed all the numbers behind it. Here’s how much it costs to put together. Here’s how much I made from Amazon and ebook, and here’s how I also turned that into a lead generation magnet. 

Therefore, I included a companion course within that book to capture the emails that Amazon doesn’t provide. And that was very much not just like a numbers lesson for people, but also very, very strategic and tactical for people who are authors as well copy and use as inspiration for their stuff. So I’ve still found a way to kind of provide that information, be honest, but in a different way. I mean, what got you here won’t get you there. You have to evolve with your audience as well, and I feel like I’ve been able to do that in a good way.

Is there a cost to being so honest and transparent online?

There’s always a cost for everything. The cost of being honest far outweighs the cost of whatever anybody might do to manipulate things. I recall that in 2012, I partnered with a person who eventually came out and shared that he had been lying about all his numbers. And this was a person with whom I became associated because I was working with him. We were about to come out with a product together, and then all of a sudden, he just had this guilty conscience.

Looking back, I’m grateful he did that because it could have gone deeper. It could have been worse, but I was pulled down with him at the time, even though I was honest the whole time, and he wasn’t. Because I was associated with this person, it was very much a slap in the face to everybody who had been following me.

Transparency built trust, but over time, it also created distance. I had to evolve with my audience to stay relevant.

As you continue to build trust, I think it’s not necessarily a downside, but the more that you build trust, the more conscious you have to be about all the moves that you have to make. And that’s not to say that, “Okay, you shouldn’t be honest so that you can avoid that.” Still, rather, just with the growth and the audience that you connect with and the trust that they build with you over time, you have to be sure that you still remain true over time, as the audience grows, as money comes in, I’ve seen it, not just with this person that I was working with, but other people who have become successful, who have completely changed who they are or their values have changed, and as a result, that relationship. 

Yeah, it’s very scary. In many cases, they don’t know they’re doing that. It’s just where the money and the fame have taken them. So I have purposefully put things in place to stop myself from doing that, almost like, you know, on the road, there’s these, like, they call them rumble strips, when you’re on the road, and if you’re like, falling asleep, you kind of go over to the side, and there’s these bumps on the road that kind of wake you back up.

I’ve applied those principles to my own life in various ways: through my mastermind group, my wife, and even my audience. I tell my audience, if you see me veering off course, slap me in the face so I can get back on. Please be honest with me as I go because I don’t want to fall into those traps because I’ve seen it before. 

Yeah, with great power comes great responsibility. And, it’s not that they say that money is a magnifying glass for the person that you are, and that’s true. And it’s also when people gain a lot of money and fame that they can become confused, not necessarily highlighting their bad qualities. It just can be overwhelming. And I guess it’s good that you have that support team to keep you defaulting into generosity, like on your shirt.

On my shirt. It makes sense, though, that when you’re working so hard, you often don’t get the results you want. All of a sudden, boom, you start to see some revenue come in. But more than that, you start to get other companies, other brands, other people, partnerships, potentially, who reach out to you, who tell you you’re great, who want to give you attention, who want to share revenue with you, who want to get your face in front of their brand. It can be very easy to just get wrapped in that and fall into those traps. 

Not to say that those are bad; they can be good. But if you don’t do your due diligence, you could connect with a company that might be in this for the wrong reasons, and you have to make sure you do your research and do your due diligence. It can be very easy to fall into those traps because we crave that success. I mean, we’re working hard online so that we can generate revenue, and once it comes in, it’s seemingly like more and more of it, the opportunities come by, but you got to be careful.

How do you come up with the ideas for your books and your viral videos?

So, the books have always come up as a result of just what my audience is asking me the most about. It’s always pressure-tested. My first book, Let Go, was written in 2013 and is a memoir of my experience getting laid off and the mental transition into entrepreneurship. And it’s called let go because I was let go for my job, but I also had to let go of who I thought it was supposed to be, right? 

Like the saying, “Let go and let God” 

Create and find out where you love to play. When you find the fun, your audience will feel it too. Share on X

Yeah. I mean, I had to, essentially, I was straddling two ladders. Even though I was building businesses, I was still going in for architecture interviews because I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I had spent all this time going to school for architecture. That’s what I’m supposed to be. But eventually, I had to let go of that to grow as an entrepreneur. 

And a lot of times we’re straddling a lot of things, and we’re like, imagine trying to climb two ladders at once. You can’t do that, or it’s very difficult at least. So that’s let go. It was just a result of people being more curious about my mental state in that transition. My next book was Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money. 

I ran a survey among my audience in 2013, and I asked them, ‘What’s your number one challenge?’ What are the biggest brick walls that you’re facing right now? This question was inspired by Ryan Levesque, author of the book “Ask,” and many questions arose: How do I know I’m going in the right direction? I don’t want to waste my time. I don’t want to waste my money, so I need to make sure this idea works first. I’m worried and fearful of taking the wrong steps.

So, I wrote this book in response to the number one struggle that people had, which is just getting started and taking those first steps. So, Will It Fly? Essentially, the tagline says it all:How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money. It’s about validating your ideas. It’s about getting to the point where you can never sell your thing before you create it so that you know it’s going to work and not doubt yourself, but use real evidence and proof that what you’re doing is the right next step. 

Additionally, the benefit of reaching a red light, not a green light, but a red light where something doesn’t work, is also beneficial to you, as you can learn and pivot around that. And that’s important, too. This idea is about taking action and letting mistakes guide your way rather than waiting for the perfect time or never taking any action at all. Super fans emerged as a result of a presentation I gave in 2015 at the New Media Expo. 

This was a presentation I did about converting your casual audience, people who find you for the first time, into raving fans. Because I had a lot of raving fans, and people were like, “How do you have people who will, like, literally buy anything you talk about no matter what it is? How do you have people who will fly over to see you if you just say you have an event?”

Like, “Can you teach me how to do that?” Right? Well, that’s part of it, but it’s a process, right? You must first provide value to them, then show them how they can be part of a community, and you need to speak their language. And this whole process has a framework that I use to build super fans. 

And it was this presentation that I continued to get hired to do. People in the audience wanted me to speak at their events. And so I spoke about this 20 to 30 times. It has become a very fine-tuned presentation that I can deliver right now if needed. And I had a friend of mine who said, “Pat, you’ve done so well with this talk.” It’s just so obvious to me. It needs to be a book. This is A. J. Bear. And I was like,” Yeah, book writing is hard. My struggles with writing. Will it fly? I don’t really want to go through that again.” He’s like, “You have the outline already. It’s your presentation. Just extrapolate that”. And I was like,” Wow, you’re actually right.”

So, I wrote this during November of 2018. This month is also known as NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writers Month, and this is a month that a lot of writers will just use as a container to crank out a book. I decided to do that myself. In November 2018, I finished on my birthday, December 6, so I didn’t complete it in November, but I had the book done by then. And, of course, it was sped up because I had already presented on this topic so often, and it was published in 2019 at one of my events. And it has done very well.

It continues to excel in the world of entrepreneurship now because more and more people are recognizing the importance of not just acquiring customers but also building fans. This idea of forming genuine human connections now leads to lifelong fans. This is how you future-proof your brand in the world of AI to build a community and cultivate super fans. 

And so this book has been taking off without any additional help from my end. It’s just percolating through the grapevine, and it’s amazing to see that it was a little bit ahead of its time as well. I was a little prophetic in recognizing the importance of the community, people, and super fans. So I’m proud of that book. 

And then this latest book, which is called Lean Learning. This is my first traditionally published book. All those other books were self-published, and even though that’s the case, one of them became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, Will It Fly. Which is pretty amazing. Pretty amazing, but this book is one ring outside of the world of entrepreneurship. This has evolved into personal development and self-help, as it’s about learning. It does answer another question that people have given me, which is, how do I know who to learn from? There’s so much information out there. I’m overwhelmed. I’m confused.

How crazy and AI. Now you mentioned AI. You’re like, “Oh, now I have to learn AI. And I have to be, be masterful at all the prompts and know exactly how to work with this fast-paced world.” Yeah. How do you deal with all that?

Yes, Lean Learning is interesting because, before information was valuable, there wasn’t a lot of it. If you had information, you would be smarter and more valuable, right? If you owned an Encyclopedia Britannica in your home, you were, by default, smarter because you had access to stuff that other people didn’t, right? But today, we all have access to the same information, and not only that, we’re now at a buffet line of information, and we’re filling our plates so high because we as humans just haven’t evolved to consume this much information that’s coming our way. 

We are bloated with information but starved for clarity. Learning less, intentionally, is the path forward.

And literally, we’re being force-fed information too. Algorithms are putting stuff in our faces that we didn’t even know we needed. So we’re, as a result of this, bloated with information. We’re lethargic, we’re confused, overwhelmed, and when we’re trying to actually get stuff done and achieve something or learn something, it’s so hard, it’s actually harder than ever, even though all the information we need is there. 

This book discusses several key principles, with a primary focus on speed running and skill acquisition. I wrote this book not only for my audience but also for my kids. My son is 15, and my daughter is 12; they are about to enter their young adulthood in a world that is increasingly hard to navigate, given the vast amount of information they have access to. 

Imagine what it’s going to be like for young kids now, just like us adults with our mature cognitive abilities, as we get lost in social media, FOMO, and all that. So, how do young kids handle that? It’s hard.

Exactly. This book, we hope, serves as a starting point for the world in the realms of education, learning, and overall success. One of the principles I discuss in a larger concept is the idea of gathering just-in-time information versus just-in-case information, which many of us consume just in case. However, there is so much out there. 

A lot of that is inspirational, but I call them junk sparks. They’re inspirational, but they’re pulling us away from the commitments that we’ve already had. And I think we’ve all felt this. We want to go here. We want to go there, the bright light syndrome or shiny object syndrome. However, I learned this from my mentor. Only allow yourself to consume and learn about things that are relevant to the next thing that’s on your plate. 

And I think that, because we’re in this world now where there is plentiful information, we have to trust the idea that if we just learn about the next step. I mean, we still want to know where we want to go, right? We still need a North Star and a why, but in terms of the learning and the consumption that we do, having it be related to the next step in that process, knowing that on the next step after you will find resources, those resources are available, so let them be available when you need them. But for now, focus on this. This is what will help us move forward. 

Case in point: my first book, which I wrote, was a study guide for architecture. I didn’t know how to format a book or sell it. I had never done that before. I didn’t feel like I needed all this. I was like, “Okay, maybe I should go to business school to do this.” Right? I fell into that trap that we all do, which is that I need to learn all the things before I take that first action. But today, because all that information exists, we don’t need to do that. I just needed to, number one, open up Microsoft Word, write the thing and learn how to do that. And that’s all I needed to do. 

And guess what? After I finished that, and it was just like one giant essay-looking thing, I was like,” Okay, now I need to learn how to format this. Okay, how do I do that? Let me go find the experts in that field. Let me watch the videos from experts in that field, and then I’ll do that.” “Okay, cool. I’ve now formatted it. How do I sell this? Where do I go? Okay, let me find the people who’ve done that right,” even to the point where I was at the point in the process of building a sales page, I was like, “Okay, what is the easiest way to do this?” Well, there was a book called Moonlighting on the Internet, which has hundreds of pages and many different ways that you can make money online. 

But in the back. Regarding the book, there was a Mad Lib-style sales page generator, and since it’s a physical book, I had to copy it. It wasn’t online yet, but essentially, I could simply take my product and insert it into a Mad Libs-style plug-and-play sales page.

That’s what made my sales page, and it ended up generating hundreds of thousands of dollars because I found it when I needed it, versus getting overwhelmed and confused by the entire process. And what’s cool about this is, with those people that you connect with, I call them champions, your mentors, or peers, colleagues, like it was a friend of mine who said, “yeah, go check out this book.” 

At the end of this book, I recall the sales page feature, which is cool. I just went right there. I didn’t need to even explore very much because I had people I trusted who pointed me in the right direction, people who had gone down these paths before to tell me what to do. It’s a counterintuitive way of learning. I mean, the tagline of this book is how to achieve more by learning less. 

The key idea here is to take action, and you will learn more by doing so. You will have a guide to help you because resources are available when you need them. There are also other principles, such as how entrepreneurs and marketers tend to overcomplicate things. We think that things have to be more difficult than they actually are. 

Here’s a question Tim Ferriss, a friend of mine, asked me. He’s a significant inspiration behind this book, but he was also a major inspiration for me when I first started reading his book, The The 4-Hour Workweek, and it’s this question I call the Keystone question. “ITWEWILL” is the acronym; if this were easy, what would it look like? And I use that question to filter everything that I do now,

Wow, that’s very deep. That’s even spiritual, like that goes everywhere in your life, parenting, 

100%if this was easy, what would it look like? Let’s go do that, versus all the complicated stuff, and just the way our brains are wired to try to feel like we have to fill in all those gaps with everything, like, if this were easy, what would it look like? For example, I recently invented something with my videographer. It’s called the SwitchPod. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but we have a physical product. We’ve never invented a physical product before, but this is a tripod. You can put your camera on top, and then when you just open it, it can turn into a tripod. The arms kind of fold into each other. 

 Can you put an iPhone on it? 

You can put an iPhone or a DSLR. You can put 100 pounds of stuff on it. It’s made out of metal. But of course, we’d never built anything like that before. We didn’t know how to manufacture anything. We didn’t know how to sell a physical product. We didn’t have it on and didn’t have an audience for this. But if this were easy, what would it look like? “Well, we would have a prototype.” “Okay. Well, if it were easy to make a prototype, what would it look like?” Well, we would just cut it out of cardboard.” That’s easy. I can do that right now. 

So that’s exactly what we did. We just cut it out of cardboard and then literally went to events that had YouTubers and said,” “Hey, if you had a tripod that kind of did this, like, hold it. How would you feel? Like would that be easy for you? What do you think about this?” We just collected feedback. “Oh, it needs to be taller. It needs to be. It has to do this. It has to hold a lot of heavyweights because the other ones are flimsy.” “Okay, cool. Like thank you for giving us this information. Cool. Okay, from here, how do we make a working one? If this were easy, what would it look like? Let’s ask around. Let’s ask some people who’ve done this before.” “Oh, yeah. 3D printing. Of course. I didn’t even think of that. Cool.” 

We 3D printed a version and then actually brought it back to these events. And people who started to now see it and started to want to get behind it, and they’re like, “Oh, Pat. This is cool. When it comes out, let me know. I’ll promote it to my audience.” “Wow. We didn’t even have to ask because we let them shape what it became. So they got to actually follow along in the journey, too. So, the marketing was happening as it was unfolding. 

So again, we launched on Kickstarter in February of 2019; we had never launched anything on Kickstarter before. If this were easy, what would it look like? Well, if it were easy, we wouldn’t have a million different pledge levels. We would just have, like, one or two. And let’s go to somebody who’s done it before. 

So, we attended an event called Craft and Commerce, where the keynote speakers were individuals who had recently sold a physical product on Kickstarter. We made sure to ask them out to dinner or coffee and ask them questions. “What did you learn? What are the mistakes that you made?” Cool, we don’t have to do the research. Somebody’s already done this process. We launched the SwitchPod on Kickstarter in February 2019. 

It looks cool. I want it.

Thank you. I’d be happy to send you one. And we had generated, in 60 days, $415,000 and were able to. It’s now a product that’s basically automated, in the most sense, by sales on Amazon and our website, and now it’s just generating revenue for us. And again, we had never done that before. Never done that before, but we found, and I’ve learned through the Lean Learning process, that I’ve finally been able to distill the step-by-step framework to kind of incrementally make quick advances on things. That’s amazing.

You will learn more by doing than consuming. Action is the best teacher.

You really are leading with the audience in mind. That’s a big point, but you do; you know you have the status, and you have the audience. What if somebody doesn’t have that? How do they go about asking around or surveying people if they’re just beginning?

Again, I didn’t have an audience for the video stuff before because I wasn’t known for that. I just put myself in a room where those people would care no matter who I was, right? There was a good example of this. It relates to the switchboard, too. I interviewed a friend of mine. His name is Glenn Alsop, and he is on my podcast, the Smart Passive Income Podcast. He is a very smart kid, very young, and I asked him, “Hey, how would you like it if you were coming out with a product like I am right now?” The same question, “How would you get the attention of people who are influencers who could help amplify your product. Like, how would you do that if you had zero audience?” 

If I came to you and I said,” I know somebody who’s a friend with Casey Neistat,” who was the top vlogger in the world, right, very popular YouTuber, and if somebody randomly came up to me and said, “Hey, Pat, I know somebody who knows Casey Neistat, I might be able to get him to maybe share the SwitchPod with him, or something like that if you’d like.” At that point, I don’t care who you are; you’re my best friend because you’ve related that to something that is of utmost importance to me right now. And that’s how you do it. 

You figure out what is most important to the person who has that audience. And it doesn’t matter who you are. You don’t even need an audience if you understand what they might need help with and you have any value of any kind; a value doesn’t just mean an audience. Some of the most valuable people in my life have zero audience, right? But it’s what matters to this person right now, and what their goals are, what they’re doing. 

Storytelling is going to be the most powerful skill that you could ever have.

I did the same thing. I built a relationship with somebody at Apple. He’s no longer there, but I know someone who worked at Apple Podcasts because I knew he had a son who was a Star Wars fan.  So I just sent a really cool leather-bound Star Wars notebook. And he was like, “What do you need? Pat, I got you,” and I was able to get my podcast. This was back before there were even, like, 100,000 podcasts. So it was, like, really early days.

I was pretty early on in the podcasting world back in 2010. Still, I was able to build a relationship through that, right because he was going to Disneyland, they were just opening some new Star Wars stuff, and I was able to make that connection and just offer a little bit of extra attention and effort that often is the answer, both for building audiences and for making partnerships and key connections, is just a little bit of time and attention go a very, very long way. And just like, as Gary Vaynerchuk says, “just give an ‘F’” right? Just caring a little bit goes a long way today. And I think people notice that now, both audiences and large individuals.

Do you think AI will compete with others? Because you were talking about what was different, I have the human connection and the community. How do you see the future of that?

I mean, it’s already competing. Some people are trying to find ways to simply push a button and write a book, and while information will be shared, the human connection will never be replaced. And the way to combat that as a creator, amongst these tools that are seemingly automating a lot of the creation, is to tell better stories. 

Storytelling is going to be the most powerful skill that you could ever have; when you can connect on an emotional level, you can make people laugh, cry, sing, get upset, get angry, and get behind you on something. When you can make that real connection, then there’s no competition with AI, right? And this is why building Superfans is important, too. Calling back to my other book, because you make those connections, you make people feel like they’re a part of something.

AI makes us feel so disconnected, even though it provides us with all the information. Again, information is now plentiful. We’re all on the same playing field now; as far as info is concerned, it’s now how that information is wrapped and how you bring yourself into that. I spoke at Craft + Commerce, formerly known as ConvertKits, an event, and shared a quote that resonated with the attendees. This is a quote from my friend Jadah Sellner, and I remember just the audience like, this is what it is, “There are no unique messages, only unique messengers.” I love that.

The way I demonstrated this on stage was by sharing a clip of a rapper reciting the words from the book, Llama Llama Red Pajama.I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that.

Yeah, yes, I have.

But he read it, and he wrapped it, and you could just tell, even though it was the same words that are in that book that we’ve all read, you knew it was ludicrous because of the way he delivered it, and that’s a musician doing in his style, but we all have styles that we could offer as marketers as well, right? So mine and you called out, in the beginning, was that very authentic, transparent serve first, and I think that that’s something everybody should absorb, but putting more of you into your work is going to again allow for those connections to happen. 

How can you step into your most unique style?

You need to create and find out where you love to play. And that’s really what it is. I’m finding that my best content comes when I’m able to play and have fun. When you find the fun and enjoy the work you’re creating, your audience is more likely to enjoy consuming the work you create. It’s been by far the most satisfying thing. I mean, a lot of people who are watching or listening to this. Now, might also know that I have a Pokémon YouTube channel that I started in 2021.

Yeah, you get, like, what, 300 million views or something crazy like that. 

We have just crossed 1.5 million subscribers. This is about four years on this channel, where, again, I’m a 40-year-old man playing with cardboard that has cartoons on it, but I’m creating stories, and they’re not even stories, just about Pokémon.

Pokémon is the medium by which I’m telling these stories, but we get comments from people who are like, ‘I don’t even know what this guy’s talking about,’ but I cannot stop watching his videos. 

Because we tell stories, we’re doing challenges. We’re meeting people and finding things that are rare and hard to find, and there’s like a human component to that at the root level. And I’m having so much fun, and that’s a reason why. For example, a couple of weeks ago, we released our latest video. It has already garnered 2 million views in just two weeks.

How long does it take you to produce a video, and what’s the process like when thinking about it?

 

Yeah. So, it starts with the title first. I think this is a really important strategy; if you’re creating content that is long form, the short form is different because, in short form, you don’t even need to see the title, but it’s the hook in the beginning, right? I also have a short-form channel that’s performed exceptionally well, garnering over a billion views on YouTube in under a year. It’s a separate channel; it’s incredible. But again, I learned my way into how to create shorts. In the first 30 days, I was getting zero views.

But again, by continually showing up and counting uploads, not likes, that’s how you win, counting uploads, committing to the process and the incremental improvements that you can make, atomic habits, and I talk about that in my book Lean Learning as well. You will eventually find your voice, you’ll find your way, you’ll find what your audience likes, and you can use data from these platforms to, again, move your way into successful stuff. 

So, to go back to the long-form videos, start with the title first because if it’s a title worth clicking on, then it’s a video worth filming. If I don’t have a clickable title, then even the best video in the world won’t be effective. Nobody’s going to watch it because you have to have a title, thumbnail combo packaging around you. Come up with that. Initially, you have a seed idea. 

Superfans aren’t acquired; they’re earned through genuine connection, consistency, and community.

For example, in my Pokémon channel, I had an idea to teach people how to package and ship their Pokémon cards, right? That’s the seed idea. But if I came up with a video on how to package and ship your Pokémon cards. Not a lot of people would necessarily click on that unless they were in the process. Well, first of all, they have to have Pokémon cards to want to ship, and then they have to want to ship at that moment. And even then, it’s like, maybe people already feel like they know how to do that, like they don’t need that video, so it’s not going to be seen by a lot of people. 

But that’s the seed idea, using that seed idea to then come up with 20 to 30 different options, whether that’s on the fly or this is where I love AI. I love AI as a collaboration partner, a brainstorming partner; I can put that seed idea into ChatGPT and say, “Hey, this is my seed idea. How can I take this idea and expand it into something more far-reaching? How do I cast a wider net here or make it more interesting to a wider audience.” So, we came up with the idea after looking at a whole bunch: which shipping service damages my cards the most?

Oh, that’s great.

Now, it opens up a question of whether you were into shipping or not; we want to find out. And on the thumbnail, of course, there is a box with a huge dent on it, followed by the UPS logo, USPS, and FedEx, and then the story. Now, yes, I can still teach you how to properly ship your Pokémon cards. I still teach that in this video, but we also have some other questions that people need to stick around to get the answers to, as we also draw inspiration from other channels. 

In the same video, around that time, a person had a viral video where he sent an AirTag to North Korea so he could track what happened when it arrived. And that was very interesting. So I said, “Hmm, I’m inspired by that. Can we place an AirTag in each of these packages for USPS, UPS, and FedEx and then track them along the way? That’ll be a good way to kind of show people or another thing that people can see, which one gets there first.” So, from the title, it evolved into a more interesting and completely different video, which has almost a million views. Even though it’s a utility video, it’s still also, in a way, entertaining; even if you don’t even care about Pokémon or shipping anything, you still want to know the answer to that. 

When you find the fun and enjoy the work you’re creating, your audience is more likely to enjoy consuming it.

How do you manage all those websites, the books, the ideas, the companies? How do you do all that?

One thing at a time? That’s for sure, a lot of people see all these things, and they’re like, wow, like, I have to also have a book and courses in a community and YouTube channel and shorts and, no, it’s all done in sequence. My blog started in 2009, and the podcast started in 2010. It was only after I reached a point where I could understand the platform and begin to automate some of it, whether through tools or teams, that I could reclaim time to put it into something else. 

Because if I didn’t do that, if I just added on to it, I mean, I only have so much energy in hours during the day, but I’m able to use that energy in hours to create something, to build in a way that then I can find either support with team or tools to then now remove me from that process to move on to something else. I do have a team on the Smart Passive Income side of things who are amazing, taking care of the community and ensuring people get the results they want. 

And our results inside of SPI are incredible, the best in the industry. I would fight for that. And with the Pokémon stuff, I have a producer and an editor, so they’re helping me with those components so that I can just get into the script writing and storytelling more, and I can just do more of what I want. It was my good buddy Chris Ducker who said, “Do what you do what you do best and delegate the rest.” It took me a long time to learn Orion, because I was someone who, when I started out, wanted as much control over everything as possible. I had once given up control to my architecture firm, which then let me go. I felt betrayed, even though it wasn’t their fault; it was the economy. 

So I said, “If I fail, I want it to be my fault,” so I’m going to do everything. And that was not the right way to go about it because I reached a point in 2012 where I was close to burning out, as I was wearing all the hats. And it wasn’t until Chris Ducker, a good friend of mine, really saw where I was heading, down a path that he had gone down, before he kind of really told me the truth about what was going to happen unless I hired people and got some help along the way. 

And how big is your team?

On the Pat Flynn/SPI side of things, it’s eight full-time people with whom I’ve been working for a long time, offering full benefits and everything else. I’m incredibly proud of the team we’ve built and the environment we’ve created. And then, on the Pokémon side of things, which is a completely different team and business. There are just three of us, an additional editor, so it’s not very many at all. Is this a physical or virtual team? These are all virtual teams where everybody is working remotely. 

How do you create an environment in a virtual team? You say I’m very proud of the environment we created. What does that mean?

That means we give people agency to own the part of the business that they are responsible for. So rather than us going in and micromanaging, we say, “Hey, here’s what you’re responsible for, and we believe in you so much that we’re going to let you run with this and this like you’re going to own this.” And so when we win, we’re going to celebrate with you, but also, if it starts to fall short, we’ll know that it’s on you as well, and that creates an environment of ownership, and it feels like people are part of the business, and not just like cogs and a machine that I built. 

Do what you do best and delegate the rest. – Chris Ducker

That is what has led to this incredible environment that we’ve had. Yes, we do meet in person once, sometimes twice a year, and that’s important. That’s a good recharge for us because it’s important. But we also have meetings, and we’ve, at one point, had too many meetings, so we’ve reduced that because meetings remove you from the work that you’re supposed to do. Many things can be solved without a meeting, but that’s essentially how we operate, and we give people the ownership and agency to do what they do best.

You are truly fascinating, and there is so much to learn from you. It’s incredible. Thank you. I’d like to return to the YouTube channel. If somebody wants to open a YouTube channel today, what would you advise them?

I would advise you not to do it right away but rather to get involved in a community first. That’s what I did with the Pokémon stuff. Before I said, “I’m going to create a YouTube channel,” I got involved. Because when you get involved, you get involved, you get invested in who it is that you’re going to be serving, right? Which is, again, to my point, the most important thing. 

So, in the Pokémon space, for example, I became a consumer. I became a moderator for certain channels. I got to know some of these people, and I got to talk to other people in this space to learn about them. Because I didn’t grow up with Pokémon, it wasn’t something I was familiar with. However, it was something my kids introduced me to in 2020 during the pandemic, and then we started playing together. And then they outgrew it, and I’m still here, but getting involved, getting to know who the people are. So, I call this in my book: Will It Fly. Creating your market map:

Where are the places that these people go? So that’s the first P.

The second P, are the people who are the people who have already been here, who have earned the trust, who people look up to in the space, the authorities, the influencers, if you want to call them that, who are those people? 

Then the final P is the product. What are the things that they’re paying for? What are the prices of those things? Right? When you just create a market map like that, you already start to see, just like a real map, the lay of the land, where people are and kind of what their specialties are. 

For example, in the Pokémon space, I learned that many creators had their specialties, right? There were people like SM Pratt, for example. You don’t need to know who that is, but what you need to know is he is an old-school collector who has just such historical knowledge about the markets and about Pokémon cards that, like, I can never compete with, that he kind of owns that. 

Then, some people are into the more expensive trophy cards, exclusive, rare cards that are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they specialize in that. They know about those things. They know how to acquire them. They have some of them. I can’t compete with that. There are people like pokey rev who just have massive collections, huge.  Here, there would be no way for me to compete with that, such as sharing my collection.

But what could I bring to the table? Well, nobody was telling a story or actually creating challenges around the world of Pokémon and actually going out there in real life and connecting with the community. Everybody was filming from their own homes, or, as in, Pratt says his grandma’s basement, which I don’t believe is his grandma’s basement, but that’s just what he calls it.

There are no unique messages, only unique messengers. Share on X

And I decided, “Okay, I’m going unto the wild and actually interacting with people and capturing these stories.” And that’s kind of what led to a lot of the bigger videos that we’ve created today, where you see me interacting with people and doing trades and like helping kids out and helping vendors and whatnot in these storylines. 

So, if you’re just getting started, get involved first, and then when you have the itch to create, just do it. Don’t worry about being perfect. And the more reps you can get, the better. Quantity is important early on so you can learn what works and what doesn’t. A lot of people say, “Oh, quality is more important than quality.” Don’t sacrifice value, but quantity is more important upfront.

You can have a bad camera; as long as you have good audio, you can still tell a great story. It’s all about the story, story, story. I think the most important thing, or just at least, is to know what you’re showing up for and what you want to try to hypothesize that you could become known for, and then just try those things. 

You may or may not like that, but it only takes taking action to learn whether or not it’s something you should persist on or pivot on. There’s a whole chapter in the book Lean Learning, Persistent or Pivot that gives you some frameworks about how to think about those things and how they may or may not still align after you start. So just take action and understand that you have to cringe before they binge what I like to say.

I like that because it does seem like YouTube is becoming more professional, with cinematography, editing, and everything else becoming more high-level, at least I think so. 

Yes. However, you may have heard of stories like those of Leon the Lobster. It’s this guy named Brady Brandwood who went to a grocery store with his iPhone, bought a grocery store lobster, and then raised it as a pet. That was seven years ago. That video has 23 million views, and it was filmed on his iPhone, making it a non-professionally produced piece. But you know what? It was an intriguing story, a question that now we have to know about. And then now there’s Leon the Lobster merch. Leon, unfortunately, just recently passed away, and it was like a memorial for him. The lobster.

It takes experimentation. That was not Brady’s first video. If you go to his channel and look at his history, there are videos about all kinds of things, but once he landed on the lobster and that video took off, he continued to tell that story and share how Leon would molt and the food he was eating and how he was doing, etc. And it took him years. I think it was MKBHD. When I interviewed him, he was the world’s most well-known YouTube tech reviewer. Marques Brownlee, MKBHD told me that his first 100 videos were for less than 100 subscribers, and now he has around 20 million subscribers. 

If you go back into Mr. Beast‘s archive, you’ll see that he has hundreds of videos that were just random in the beginning, but they were all learning experiences, and they were for nobody. There were no subscribers back then until he found his voice and found his way. And now, of course, he’s just huge. But he kept going. That’s the other thing. He kept going with it. 

Yes, Pat, how do you manage your time? And how do you find time to think.

I give myself space and time to think that’s really important. I think literally putting those things in my calendar, like meditation or just like blocks of time just to decompress, oftentimes on walks or when I’m working out, is when a lot of those good ideas come out. I can just think and be. I also give myself space on a more monthly level, getting into nature, fishing, and just escaping technology. That’s become huge for me, especially fishing, which allows me to get out there and not look at email or think about comments or anything like that. So that’s really key.

I treat time. I try to honor the time that I tell myself I’m going to do stuff.  I am very, very big on discipline. When it comes to what you put in your calendar, there’s a chapter in the book about time blocking, and we have probably all heard of time blocking before, right? I’m going to put a two-hour block of time in my calendar, a literal block, in Google Calendar to do this thing. That’s great, but I think of time blocking as more of a verb in the sense that it’s not a block of time; it’s you are literally blocking out everything else, other than this thing you’ve committed to, right?

You have to be cringeworthy before they binge. Share on X

Like you’re creating a shield around these moments in the day where nothing else can come in except for that thing that you are going to hopefully hyper-focus on or get into a flow state with, and that’s how I treat time.  It’s precious. And so, there are many things again out there that are trying to pull us away from deep learning, deep understanding, and deep focus. We have to be careful and protect that time. Creating a barrier around it is key.

How do you create a quantum leap? You mentioned that in your book. 

So, a quantum leap is in the section of the book about accelerated learning. How can you quickly gain more new skills faster? There are several ways to do that. A quantum leap is almost like something that feels like a leap of faith to be able to give yourself more space and time to do something. 

So, the example I use in the book is my good friend Nathan Barry, who founded ConvertKit, which later became Kit. At the time he launched ConvertKit, he was also managing a book business, a design agency, and several other ventures. And eventually, in order to make it work, he had to take that leap of faith and get rid of those profitable ventures to do what he really wanted to do, which was to focus on this software. And now it’s a company that’s making, like, a million dollars a day or something like that. It’s amazing because he took that quantum leap. 

Now, it doesn’t always have to feel like a huge escape from something. There are other ways to achieve significant moments of success, and one of those ways is what I like to call the power 10. So, I used to row in college. I was on the Cal Lightweight Rowing team. And if you have ever been on one of those boats, or have ever seen them, that’s like those longer boats with like eight people on them, and the like tiny person at the front who’s yelling commands, the way that you speed up your boat is not by just saying, “Go faster. Go. Come on, guys, faster, faster.” You create a contained moment of time to go all out for 10 strokes. That’s what’s called a power 10. 

So the person, the coxswain in the front of the boat, will say, “Okay, guys, we’re gonna do a power 10 in three, stroke two, stroke one, stroke go.” And for the next 10 strokes, you just give it everything you have.  You somehow, even though you’re already going hard, you somehow muster up and find extra energy to put into it for just 10 strokes. And it’s possible because it has an end. It’s 10 strokes; you can do 10 strokes more at full power, and you’ll see the boat just like a fly during that time. 

So finding ways to bring power tends into our own life, and it might mean, if you’re a podcaster, for example, and you’ve been going weekly every week for the last year, and you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to do a power 10 for my podcast.” For the week of May, I will release one episode per day for the entire week. I’m going to put a little extra energy and focus into my podcast just for that week. A week alone ‘is a contained amount of space, so you’re able to do this, but it creates additional energy. It creates more momentum, literally, and you’ll find that you know what I mean. 

So it’s like a lot of times we coast through, and we start to build these machines for our business and marketing, and we have automation, and that’s great.  Sometimes you just need to go, ‘Okay, where can we insert a heightened moment?’ It’s like a hackathon, right? Think about coders and when they do hackathons, right? People are coding all the time, but when you say, “Hey, we’re going to do a 24-hour hackathon where we’re going to come up with a new product I use in 24 hours and literally get no sleep.” Cool, you put in that extra energy and effort, and there’s like that time frame, a start date and an end date, and so many beautiful, amazing things have come out as a result of just a contained period of heightened momentum and pressure. 

And so that’s just an example of one way that you can accelerate your learning into something.  And imagine a YouTuber like a kid who’s like, “Okay, I’m trying to learn how to play piano. And guess what? I’m gonna live stream myself playing piano for 10 hours straight tomorrow.” And that creates what I like to call a voluntary force function, which means you’ve said this deadly. Set this deadline, knowing that now you have a specific time when people expect you to show up, which is a great action step in itself. It involves putting something on the calendar and then showing up with heightened stake and pressure. 

But number two, it’s like you’re going to be there for 10 hours, and people are going to be watching, and if that’s your own version of a hackathon for piano. You’re just going to sit there and really do it, and then it ends, and you’ll probably be that much further ahead than if you had dedicated one hour a day for 10 days. Not doing that too often is key, too, right? If you were rowing on a boat and you were, like, doing a power 1000, I mean, you’re gonna, you’re gonna burn out, right? So it’s this, again, short bursts.

Makes  a lot of sense. It’s great because most of the time, people try to finish projects, and they don’t even like it psychologically just to do this tense track. That’s amazing. So thank you so much. If you’d like to share a final thought with the audience, please do. Where can people find you? Get your book and all that. 

Thank you so much, Orion, and thank you to Stephan. I hope he gets better soon. I’m sure he will be by the time this episode goes out. So I appreciate it. Leanlearningbook.com is where you can go pre-order the book. If you’re one of the first pre-orders, there are some bonuses there as well. Again, leanlearningbook.com. The Deep Pocket Monster is the Pokémon channel. I know a lot of people, when I talk about that, are very curious about that. So, Deep Pocket monster, and really just Pat Flynn on all social media channels as well.

So again, I appreciate your time. And just a quick word for everybody out there before I leave: it’s like the mistakes are important, right? You have to take action and understand that we are no longer living in a world where failure means you don’t get to pass the grade. It means you just haven’t found the way yet. And there are plenty of resources out there. We are available to help you find your way through anything, connect with people, and fail fast. That’s what I like to say.

Yes, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Appreciate you. 

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Practice just-in-time learning instead of just-in-case consumption. Only allow myself to consume and learn about things that are relevant to the next thing that’s on my plate, knowing that those resources are available when I need them.

Apply the keystone question to simplify complex challenges. Ask myself, “If this were easy, what would it look like?” 

Get involved in communities before creating content. When I get involved, I become invested in the people I’m going to serve. This helps me understand my audience deeply before creating.

Start with the title first when creating long-form content. If it’s a title worth clicking on, then it’s a video worth filming.

Build super fans through storytelling and human connection. When I can connect on an emotional level, then there’s no competition with AI.

Create my market map with three P’s: Places my audience gathers, People they trust as authorities, and Products they purchase. This framework reveals the competitive landscape and opportunities in any industry.

Transform time blocking from scheduling to protection by creating shields around focused work. Instead of just marking calendar time, actively block out all distractions and interruptions during committed work periods.

Create quantum leaps through voluntary force functions, which means I’ve set a deadline that I know people are expecting me to show up for.

Create momentum with Power 10s – contained bursts of intense effort with clear start and end dates. Like rowing’s “power 10” strokes, commit to short periods of heightened activity (daily content for one week, 10-hour work sprints) to break through plateaus.

Connect with Pat Flynn for learning and community building. Visit leanlearningbook.com to pre-order his latest book with bonuses for early supporters. Follow his Deep Pocket Monster channel for storytelling examples.

About Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn is an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster who turned a 2008 layoff from his dream job as an architect into a launchpad for building multiple successful online businesses. Known for his transparent approach and focus on service-first entrepreneurship, Pat created the popular Smart Passive Income blog and podcast, which has helped millions of aspiring entrepreneurs around the world. He also co-founded SwitchPod, a physical product for content creators, and actively advises companies and supports global charities. Pat’s mission is to inspire others by sharing honest lessons, building meaningful projects, and prioritizing purpose over profit.