✈️ What the Best Creators Have in Common

Attracting Audiences, Making Your Own Luck, Building a Strong Network

Author

Yong-Soo Chung
August 23, 2023

First-time traveler? Welcome aboard, Jetsetter! 👋🏼

Before we take-off, there’s one thing you should do:

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Welcome to First Class Founders, your favorite destination to learn proven strategies to build your successful business.

Jetsetters, have you ever wondered what sets successful founders and creators apart from the rest? Yeah, I wondered that too.

So, I put in a ton of work to dissect what I believe to be the top 7 common traits of successful creators. I gathered insights from past guests of the podcast and from my own experiences of building my business from $0 to $20 million in 8 years.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • 🏆 The Power of Deliberate Practice

  • 🧠 Mastering the Entrepreneurial Mindset

  • 💻 Importance of a Robust Distribution Strategy

  • 📈 How to Attract and Engage Your Ideal Audience

Here are a few juicy excerpts from today’s episode to get you flowing:

The Benefit of Deliberate Practice: "Simple practice does help you get better, but deliberate practice is where the true results reveal themselves." — Yong-Soo Chung (06:46)

The Importance of Content Distribution: "Create momentum within one platform before expanding onto others. This will make it easier to snowball your audience onto other platforms later. Think about distributing your content through both depth and width. When you're ready to expand, you'll be prepared to boost your distribution even further." — Yong-Soo Chung (22:12)

I guarantee you'll find yourself reaching for a notepad, jotting down insights until your pen runs dry. Yes, you heard that right!

If you want to succeed, you’ll want to make sure you’re doing everything I talk about on this episode.

Let’s get down to business!

📢 Presented By: Swell AI

Jetsetters, I’m super excited to announce Swell AI as our presenting sponsor for First Class Founders!

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✈️ First Time Listener? Here’s What You Missed…

🏷 Lost & Found

Did you miss these? Each week, I round up all sorts of interesting things I found on the internet that you missed. Enjoy!

📝 Yong-Soo’s Weekly Journal

Each week, I reflect on lessons learned growing my newsletter & podcast — the good, the ugly, and everything in-between in raw, unfiltered, free-form writing.

3 Hidden Benefits of Becoming a Creator

I launched my podcast in November to no audience. Zilch.

On one hand, it was devastating…

No one cared.

On the other hand, it was liberating…

No one cared.

Funny how that works.

This paradox is something I still think about often.

This week, I put together my thoughts and wrote about it.

Here are 3 hidden benefits of becoming a creator…

  1. It’s a self-reflective journey.

Building an audience is an internal journey. It’s like looking at yourself in the mirror and reflecting on your past. And if you are self-conscious, it can be brutal.

Publishing content online in public is strangely therapeutic. You get over your fears. You let your guards down for your audience.

But in reality, you let your guards down for yourself. The whole experience is meditative. You get to know yourself better than you ever have. And that’s a good thing.

And this process is what makes the journey your reward, not the destination.

I’ve been a creator for about a year now.

Yes, I started from zero.

Yes, I had to get through the “suck” when I was terrible.

Yes, it was painfully slow at the start.

And in many ways, I’m still struggling through it all.

I listen to my earlier podcast episodes and cringe…

But that’s all part of my journey to discover myself.

To allow myself to publish things that I know isn’t perfect.

  1. It documents your entire life.

Publishing content is like a public journal. You’re literally journaling your life’s experiences in real-time.

Can you imagine going back to your writing 5, 10, 20 years later?

Or better yet… can you imagine your audience being able to find your writing from 20 years ago with a single Google search?

That’s where we’re headed, my friends.

A real-time, searchable journal of your entire life that anybody in the world can discover with a simple search.

Does this sound a bit scary to you?

If so, read the Benefit #1 I stated above. 😁

The good news is that your content will compound and more of your work will be seen over time.

  1. It builds lifelong fans.

Your life will change. You won’t be known as “the guy for X” forever. Guess what?

Your audience will follow you because of you.

You’ve banked so much goodwill over the years that they’re curious how you evolve over time.

Khe Hy and I talked about this in my podcast episode. Your “niche” will end up becoming you if you play your cards right.

Think about that for a second.

You will literally build a lifelong audience for you to raise money, launch a product, get feedback, hire operators, etc.

This is incredibly powerful.

So, don’t miss this opportunity.

Your chance is now.

🎛 Metrics Dashboard

I'm building First Class Founders in public. Each week, I share my numbers exclusively through subscribers of this newsletter only.

Newsletter:

  • Subscribers: 7,901

  • Open Rate: 43.6%

  • Click Rate: 4.2%

👍🏻 Recommendation: Thinking of starting a newsletter? I use and recommend Beehiiv with powerful features like boosts, recommendations, segmentations, automations, and detailed subscriber metrics.

Podcast:

  • 90-Day Downloads: 7,691

  • 30-Day Downloads: 2,739

  • 7-Day Downloads: 674

👍🏻 Recommendation: Best hosting platform for your podcast? I use and recommend Buzzsprout. Get $20 when you sign-up using this link.

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💬 Final Word

Looking for some candid feedback on my newsletter.

Please hit reply and let me know what you thought of this week’s newsletter!

I read and reply to every single email.

Thank you and see you next week!

Yong-Soo Chung — Serial Entrepreneur, Podcaster

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