11 Marketing Rules every Creator needs to know: Kate Tolo

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

How do you want to split it? Actually, dinner's on me.

Samir (0:02)

Okay, big money.

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

Well, I got a Venmo balance that I can spend with my Venmo Debit MasterCard, so.

Samir (0:08)

Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kinda on me, actually.

SPEAKER_1 (0:12)

Yeah, you send it, I spend it.

Samir (0:13)

Did my money get, like, reincarnated?

SPEAKER_1 (0:15)

Yeah, it's chicken shawarma. You want it back?

Samir (0:18)

I can't believe you, like, ate my Venmo.

SPEAKER_1 (0:21)

Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo Debit Card. No monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance, account required to get a card and use a balance. Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, NA.

Colin (0:30)

Today's guest is Kate Tolo. You probably don't know her name, but you definitely know her work because of this guy, Bryan Johnson. He's the guy who wants to live forever and you've probably seen some pretty wild posts from him online. Some quick context on Bryan. In 2013, he sold his payments company to PayPal for $800 million.

Then he had a lot of time on his hands. So he decided that the most interesting problem left for him to solve was death. So he started spending over $2 million a year to turn himself into a science experiment, trying to prove that he could stop aging or at least reverse it. But he was doing this privately until five years ago, Kate pitched him a crazy idea. What if the science experiment was done in public? Kate is one of the sharpest content minds we've ever had on the show. And she walks us through the 11 rules that they use to go from 2000 followers to over 10 million with the actual emails, tweets and thumbnails printed out to teach us the strategy. This episode of The Colin and Samir Show is sponsored by our friends at Shopify, which is the platform that we've been using since we started our careers online. And it's the platform that all of our creator friends use to run their businesses online. This episode is a lot about how Kate and Bryan built their supplement brand blueprint off the back of the content they're creating. And this is a really common business model today on the internet. Make content that reaches a specific audience, build a product or an e-commerce brand that creates products for that audience. And this pipeline is so built out that there's actually a natural integration on YouTube to put your products underneath your videos. But something that I noticed recently is that for our brand Press Publish, YouTube is our number one traffic source. We actually have a really low conversion rate from people who click in from YouTube.

And the way that I know that is because of Shopify sidekick. So when you log into your Shopify, you can just chat with your Shopify store to actually get more information. And so I asked the question, how could we convert more customers? And it brought to light that there's an opportunity for us to convert more people from YouTube. One of the suggestions that it made was actually to create collections specific to videos. So if somebody is watching a video on our channel and they see products in that video, they can click through and buy those products. We've been working with the Shopify team since we started The Colin & Samir Show. And one thing that I really love is their mission to create more entrepreneurs. And they do that through providing the tools, access and education for somebody like me who doesn't know that much about e-commerce to actually log in to Shopify and learn quickly the moves I can make to support our brand. So if you're somebody who creates content and has been thinking about launching a business online or just curious about launching an online business, go to shopify.com/colin and Samir. Now for our episode with Kate Tolo.

All right, Kate, welcome to the show.

Kate Tolo (3:17)

Thanks for having me, guys.

Colin (3:18)

And who are you?

Kate Tolo (3:19)

I am the person behind Bryan Johnson's brand that a lot of people don't realize. I'm his co-founder. I'm also his girlfriend. And we started this project together five years ago.

So a lot of people know of Bryan Johnson. All of that viral content work he and I have been working on together for the last five years.

Colin (3:39)

So everything from what we see on YouTube to what we see on Twitter to even like you made a Netflix documentary all about his pursuit of.

Kate Tolo (3:50)

Immortality. Immortality.

Colin (3:51)

Of not dying.