Nat Eliason is the founder of Growth Machine, a successful SEO and content marketing agency. Nat also teaches the popular Roam course, Effortless Output.Nat earned his B.A. in Philosophy from Carnegie Mellon University, and has worked for companies such as Zapier, and Sumo Group. Nat co-hosts the Made You Think podcast with Neil Soni.Nat also writes a weekly newsletter called Monday Medley. Each Monday Medley has ten articles, videos, discussions, pieces of research, or other interesting finds from around the Internet, spanning a broad range of topics.In this episode Nat discusses the evolution of his newsletter. He shares his strategies on developing online courses. He also explains how to find product-market fit before launching a course or product.Highlights of the conversation include:
How Nat made $300,000 from his online course
What separates a mediocre newsletter from a great newsletter
The differences between running a newsletter and teaching a course
How Nat balances work, family, and leisure
Links & Resources
Shane Parrish
Farnham Street Sunday Brain Food newsletter
Tim Ferriss
Five Bullet Friday
Azeem Azhar
Exponential View
airr
Building a Second Brain
Tiago Forte
Wes Bos
Derek Sivers
Nat Eliason’s Links
Effortless Output with Roam
Nat’s Twitter
Nat’s website
The Monday Medley
Made You Think podcast
Episode TranscriptNat: [00:00:00]Build up little channels. There’s a lot to be said for having one thing that drives 10 grand a month. But if you’ve got 20 little things that drive $500 a month, that’s cool too. In some ways it’s a little more resilient because if one fails, you’ve only lost 5% of your revenue versus if the $10,000 a month thing fails, you’ve lost all of your revenue.Nathan: [00:00:26]In this episode, I talked to Nat Eliason. We talk about a bunch of different things ranging from his newsletter, the course that he’s running, you know, earning a crazy amount of money from the course, his thoughts on paid newsletters versus courses. Really just how he approaches life. It’s kind of a meandering episode as we go through those details.I love the way that he’s not trying to grow and optimize everything. And then also the way that he’s taking internet money and bringing it into like tangible, real world life experiences, connection with friends, things like that. So it’s a great episode. I hope you enjoy it. And, actually before we dive in, I’d love for two things.One, if you’re listening to the podcast and you just clicked through from random clips or things like that, and you haven’t subscribed, go ahead and subscribe in iTunes, Spotify, and, you know, wherever you listen to podcasts, really appreciate that. And then the other thing is, I realized I’ve never actually asked for reviews and it turns out reviews help, you know, with rankings and more people to discover the show.So I would love it if you would go on iTunes in particular. Is iTunes a thing? Apple podcasts, I guess you go on Apple podcasts in particular and subscribe and then write a review or just a rating. That’ll help more people discover the show. So thanks for doing that. And let’s dive into the interview.Alright, Nat, thanks for joining me.Nat: [00:01:40]Yeah. Thanks for having me, excited to be here.Nathan: [00:01:41]Why don’t you just kick things off by talking a little bit about the newsletter that you have, and I’m actually curious, you know, how long ago you started.Nat: [00:01:51]Yes. So my name is Nat. Hi, in the world of newsletters, I started my newsletter, which is called the Monday Medley or often just the Medley in may of 2015, no 2016.Nathan: [00:02:08]Either way it’s been awhile.Nat: [00:02:10]Yeah, it must be only 2016, cause I’m coming up on five years next week. I think it’s next Monday is the five-year anniversary.So, I’ve been sending it out every single Monday for five years straight, which is kind of absurd. I actually, I have no idea how I haven’t messed one up in that time, but here we are.Nathan: [00:02:34]At 200, what