Justin Moore (@justinmooretfam) knows a thing or two about sponsors. He’s responsible for dozens of episodes of this very podcast to be sponsored! And what he taught me, he’ll teach you.
I was VERY hesitant when I started looking at sponsors. I thought that would dilute my brand. Make me a sellout. But that’s a self-limiting belief — and Justin will give you the tools to profitably reprogram your mind to embrace alignment and value-added sponsorship relationships for whatever you do.
00:00 – Arvid (Host)
Hey, it’s Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap Founder. Today I’m talking to my friend, justin Moore, who recently published a book Sponsor Magnet where he shares his many years of insights finding, working with and growing with sponsors for content and media businesses from all kinds of industries. Now, I was always super reluctant to ask companies to sponsor the show and my newsletter because I thought I shouldn’t. There’s something wrong with this, and Justin helped me see why this was a self-limiting belief, and today he will share with you what mindset shift creators of all shapes and sizes can go for to start monetizing their work earnestly and honestly. Now here’s Justin. Justin, welcome to the show.
00:50
Just to put this on the map, over the last year, you’ve been instrumental in my securing of the biggest sponsorship for this very podcast. Yet I really just want to give you a big shout out for that. That’s just amazing. Not only did you help me with all the nitty gritty details along the way, which was most appreciated I had no idea what I was doing but you also encouraged me to be confident along the way, and that is wonderful. It’s really, really cool. Now you’ve written a book about this topic and you’re, I guess, aiming to help everybody out there who considers getting their work sponsored. Before this, you’ve been more like hands-on, and now you’ve expanded it into a book. What makes you choose that it’s now time to write?
01:30 – Justin (Guest)
Dude, this is a really hard decision, because there was a lot of fear wrapped up in this decision to actually distill everything that I know about brand partnerships into a book, because the primary engine behind my business is education, right, so I have a course and I have coaching. And so the fear was well, if I put everything I know in a book, no one’s going to hire me. I have multiple full-time employees, I have contractors, I have a whole lot of liabilities, basically, and so this was a lot of where the fear was coming from. But I just felt so pulled by my aspirations of impact, which is really just to. I feel this pull to educate the next generation of creators, and so I’ve let that North Star guide so much over the last four or five years building this business.
02:15
Every time I was ever doubtful of like, should I do this thing? Well, it feels like it’s the best fit to educate people and really help people, so I should just do it and I’ll just deal with the carnage whatever happens. And so my thesis was, like our mutual friend Jay Klaus likes to say, information wants to be free, and so what is the most accessible format for people to learn at the most accessible price point. It’s really a book. And the other reason is that, as I’ve been educating creators all around this process and business owners over the last number of years, I’ve realized that people really have different learning styles.
02:47
Right, I started teaching people in a live like kind of over Zoom. I had a cohort-based course and then I had a blog I started, you know, I have a YouTube channel, so video content, written content, I have a newsletter, and so there’s these last two buckets, which was like the book. A lot of people learn reading books, but also in-person experiences, so I’m launching an in-person event as well, and so, as I just start building out the Creator Wizard Cinematic Universe, you know, I really felt as though a book needed to happen.
03:14 – Arvid (Host)
That always blows my mind just how quickly everything just explodes in terms of all the different channels that you can and want to tap into. Right, like you said, like if YouTube you have in-person events plan. I think the book is a pretty solid anchor, and I mean this almost in a sense of the word. Like you give somebody a physical token that they can kind of feel your expertise through. I think that’s a great choice to make, just as an educator is to give somebody something where they can see okay, this person knows at least this much in terms of, you know, printed paper about this topic and anything around that embellishes that too and gives it more value and gives it more meaning.
03:54 – Justin (Guest)
You know there’s a lot of weird things that have happened. You know, because the book just launched and so there’s been a lot of weird things that have happened since then. Probably the top of the list of weirdness has just been seeing people friends that I’ve made on the internet for years holding this physical manifestation and taking a selfie with it, and just being like this dude helped me so much. Rather than being like go watch his YouTube channel or go subscribe to his newsletter, it’s just like, no, this thing, this fricking physical thing that I’m holding up right here, get this. Everything you need to know is contained in this thing. And so, you’re right, there is something special about like holding something. Also, it’s just like it’s way easier for people to recommend you. Yes, because, like you know, it’s one thing to oh yeah, go binge this guy’s YouTube channel, which feels like a lot. That feels like a lot of work, like I don’t know if I want to do that, versus like, oh, just go buy this guy’s book. Like that. That feels like an easier recommendation to make.
04:44
And so I was very intentional in terms of the positioning of the book, the title, the subtitle. I did a lot of work in the early days structuring it, thinking like, in what conversations are people having where my book would get recommended? So let’s say you’re talking to a friend and they’re like, oh, I’m I don’t know man, I’ve been building this audience but I just don’t know how to make money from it. I’m just really struggling to pay my editor for the podcast. I just don’t know how I’m going to make this economically feasible. And so it was like okay, how can I make my book be the natural? Next answer to that I’m like oh, you should read Sponsor Magnet. And so I was pretty intentional from that standpoint.
05:15 – Arvid (Host)
I like this and I’ve browsed the table of contents for that reason, because I wanted to see how do you structure even just approaching this topic, because to some people it is perfectly clear I want to build an audience and I will monetize it through sponsorships. Those people have understood it already, but those are not necessarily your audience. Right, they partially are as well. But the people who are like should I even, is there value in this? Is this dangerous? They have a lot of questions that you kind of catch right from the start. They have a lot of questions that you kind of catch right from the start. And I think that’s where I want to start this conversation, because I come from this overlap of communities between being a creator, doing this clearly like writing I have books out as well.
05:53
I think I’ve understood the value of these kind of physical things. But also I come from the world where there’s really very little tangible and a lot of intellectual stuff, a lot of thinking, a lot of logic, a lot of analysis and not much personal connection, which a sponsorship often is. It’s between people. Even though you might have this big brand or medium-sized brand that sponsors your content, it’s still an interaction between you and their marketing team, or you and somebody on their team. It’s this human-to-human, which does not necessarily come easy to software entrepreneurs. Right, it may be a cliche, but it comes from somewhere. So if I’m more on the side of, I want to do my own thing. I’m an indie developer. I’m an indie hacker. Right, I’m independent. I don’t want anybody else to muddle my voice. What can you tell me about the opportunities that lay in these kind of partnerships, sponsorships for people like this?
06:45 – Justin (Guest)
All right. So let’s go back to just kind of first principles here, of really understanding where a lot of this comes from, a lot of this head junk, I think because I call it head junk of like this obstacle, this unwillingness to see what other possibilities might be out there. I have this framework that I talk about called the collaboration paradox, which is that whether you’re a creator or you’re an indie hacker, you’re a bootstrap developer, software founder, whatever, there’s a pretty natural tendency oftentimes to ask for feedback on our product, our podcast, this thumbnail for my YouTube channel, the onboarding process for the software program, whatever. We ask people on Discord, on Reddit, on Twitter, wherever, linkedin we feel like it’s a very normal thing to just solicit feedback to make our product better. That seems like a normal thing, right? Yeah, because who wouldn’t do that? Right?
07:39
But somehow, when it comes to the prospect of making money whether it’s you’re a creator and you’re trying to get your work sponsored or make money from the content that you’re creating or the influence that you’ve built, or you are a developer or your founder or something like that and you’re really trying to figure out a way to monetize this thing, this feels like a distasteful subject to talk about. It’s like, well, I guess I just got to figure this part out alone. I can’t ask anyone for help, or I can’t forge a partnership with anyone because, I don’t know, I’m just uncomfortable, I have imposter syndrome, I’m sheepish about this, and so my whole philosophy, and one of the reasons why I wrote the book, is to help people understand the power of partnerships, and it’s not just about the money, it’s also about helping you bring your creative or product vision to life to be able to impact more people, and the byproduct of that is more money, right, because you’re able to help people in a more profound way. And so this is my philosophy when it comes to collaborations is understanding. How can you identify a partner out there where it’s not like they’re detracting from what you’re trying to put out there, it’s actually enhancing it and actually amplifying it, not even in a linear capacity, more like a exponential capacity.
08:53
Because you know like one thing I talk about a lot is like people think about traditional sponsorships as like they pay me to do an ad read on my podcast, right, like that’s a brand deal or a sponsorship. But what would it look like? Tons of my students and clients have done these really creative partnerships, where they are doing a webinar in partnership with the brand, because of you know, arvid, who you represent to the indie hacker community that this brand comes to you and says, hey, we’d love to back a dump truck full of money onto your driveway If you were to do a webinar with us or a hey, arvid, can we fly you out to this conference to speak on this panel on our behalf or with our marketing person or something. And so a lot of times it’s like what you represent to your community, that is a really, really valuable thing.
09:34 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I think that’s the fear that I hear in a lot of like novel creators or people who go into becoming a creator, having a brand. It’s like, oh, my brand would get diluted with their things instead of seeing it as a growth for the brand, like something that invites more people to look at you through the lens of somebody else. I think that’s just really really hard to figure out because you don’t know what it’s going to look like, particularly when you’re starting out right, you only see all these ads that somebody else has on that newsletter or all these ad reads that are on some YouTube channel and you’re like, ah, this feels weird. Yet there is a good partner out there for you.
10:11 – Justin (Guest)
It’s probably just not the first one that comes knocking 100%, and let me give you another creative example that’ll stretch people’s brains.
10:18
So I am right now in the middle of a negotiation with one of the largest creator-focused conferences in my industry and I’m like 95% of way along the lines that this is probably going to happen where, basically, they have agreed to include a copy of my book in every person’s swag bag that’s going to the conference, and they have thousands of attendees.
10:40
And so think about it from both perspectives here, right, as a conference, they have an incentive to provide value to their attendees. They want people they paid hundreds thousands of dollars to come to this conference. They want these people to feel like wow, like this was a worthwhile investment, I want to come back for another year, this is a great thing. And so they have an incentive to just like in this swag bag, make people open this and be like, wow, this is awesome, like this is so super valuable that I’m getting this thing right, and so the conference is getting a lot of value, and I’m getting a ton of value because I’m getting in front of a bunch of my ideal audience or customers, right, and so designing a lot of people. Again, don’t think of that as a sponsorship, but it absolutely is, regardless of whether whether exactly what the money changing hands looks like, because I’m absolutely negotiating a sponsorship as part of this. But a lot of people just have this very, very fixed view of what a partnership is like and I think that you’re missing the boat.
11:32 – Arvid (Host)
How do you do this? How, as a single individual person, do you negotiate with a massive player like a conference Because to me, that’s where the imposter syndrome kicks in all the time Like this big brand, they have all these hundreds of people working for them. And here’s little old me trying to put my book, like please, sir, please, would you like my book please? How do you get there? Like mentally?
11:54 – Justin (Guest)
I think for me, part of it is like first of all, I completely acknowledge and I want to hear you and empathize with anyone who feels like you as well, well, who’s listening or watching, because I was you. I was you like 10, 15 years ago when we started on our presence on the internet and I sent tons. I had so much imposter syndrome. I did a few pitches early on and got rejected and then it was like the long, dark night of the soul, with the violin playing in the background and I was feeling like crap, like I’m an idiot, I suck, people hate me background, and I was feeling like crap, like I’m an idiot, I suck, people hate me. And so I was very much there. But basically what happened, dude, is that I built this muscle, I built this skin, this armor over many years of just sending out lots and lots of pitches and emails and realizing that when a brand says no to you or a company says no to a collaboration, it’s not really no, it’s not yet, it’s just not the right time. They’re not running a campaign that would be a good fit for you, they don’t have the marketing budget. So it’s not that you suck, it’s that it’s just not the right timing, and so my perspective is like if the brand says no, I’m no worse off than I was five seconds ago. It’s literally the same outcome. I wouldn’t have gotten that. But if they say yes, wow, there’s a huge amount of upside there, and so I just get so excited about the prospect of a yes that I’m willing to withstand the rejection. Do you ever say no to brands? Oh, all the time. Yeah, 100%. Because I talk about this framework in my book, sponsor Magnet that is called.
13:22
Basically, you have to engineer your sponsorships to be a win-win-win. There’s three wins. Most people think about the first two. It’s like I’m going to win because I’m getting paid. Sweet, right. The brand is going to win, obviously, because they get to access your audience, your customer base, whatever it is. But a lot of people don’t think about that last win, which is your audience or your customers. Better be winning If there’s some sort of partnership that’s occurring and there’s not a discount code, a promo code. They’re not being exposed to a brand or a product that they’ve never heard about. And so if you’re negotiating a sponsorship or a partnership and there’s no win present for those people, you have to engineer one. And if the brand is not or the company is not willing to do that, you have to walk away.
14:02 – Arvid (Host)
That’s been my perspective too, like on the last couple brand sponsorships that I had for this podcast. I know who’s listening, right? I know because these people talk to me on Twitter and they talk to me through my newsletter and all of that, so I know what goals they have. So I really really want to make sure that whatever I put on this show as a sponsor, as somebody that I can stand behind, is also going to be beneficial to them. And that’s been why I had such problems finding the right sponsor for the longest time for this show, why it wasn’t monetized for the longest time, because I really really wanted to find this alignment. And that is hard, because before you start the sponsorship or before you start the run actually producing the content, producing the reads and all that, you don’t really know how it’s going to feel like and what it’s going to look like. Do you have a tip for this, like how you can feel this out?
14:49 – Justin (Guest)
So the very best way to feel it out is to not guess or make things up. It’s to ask your audience which is what the feel that you got interacting with people on X and over your newsletter and things like that. There’s a lot of people out there who just guess Actually. And over your newsletter and things like that, there’s a lot of people out there who just guess Actually. The worst criteria that most people use is like well, I use this product and therefore this is a good fit, because, by extension, my audience should love it if I love it, right, and that’s a bad criteria to use to evaluate prospective partners. And that because, first of all, of course it’s. That is basically table stakes. Like, of course that is basically table stakes. Like, of course you have to love it. Duh, right, you shouldn’t promote anything that you don’t love. But the more important question is is this something that is going to help solve a problem for my audience or my customers? And so this basically, if you don’t know the answer to that question, you have to ask them.
15:37
You have to do what I call a psychographic survey. It’s very simple. It’s very simple. It’s basically like hey, I am planning out my content strategy or my product roadmap or whatever, for the next year, and I want to learn more about you. I want to learn more about what types of jobs do you have, are you married? Do you have kids? What types of problems do you have? What’s keeping you up at night? What brands and products and other tools are you using and loving right now? So you start getting this colorful texture of what’s going on in the lives of the people who are following you, or your customers, and that gives you such a deeper perspective of not only what your feature roadmap or your product roadmap should look like, but the types of partners that you could potentially collaborate with.
16:22
Because if you get this survey back, and wow, I didn’t realize that 35% of my customers are SMBs they’re small, medium-sized businesses. Or maybe I didn’t realize that 35% of my customers have a brick and mortar location I thought it was all internet entrepreneurs. Wow, that’s interesting. I should go out there and either build feature sets for them or in my software, or I should go out and partner with a I don’t know bookkeeping tool or something to help them with their inventory management whatever, right. And so I think this whole idea about learning about them, asking them. Questions is scary, I know, but it can give you a lot more comfort to know that if I partner with this brand and I tell them about this product, it’s not a scary thing anymore. It’s like I know that they have this problem, so it’s going to help them.
17:02 – Arvid (Host)
That makes perfect sense because you also now have leverage right. You have negotiation material with the brand, because you can say hey, out of all these thousands of people that are already in my audience and that I have just now shown I have a direct communication channel with through the survey, 25% of them use this tool. That is just like yours. You might want to just tell them about yours as well, because there’s a pretty high chance that opens up a data pool, like you have information that you didn’t have before.
17:29
I like this because I would never have thought about this. That’s the thing like surveys and stuff they always scare me as a receiver of them. I just don’t want to give up my personal information, so I completely ignore the fact that other people are not like me in that regard, and they will gladly tell me about themselves because they know it will benefit both of us, like the win-win-win you were talking about. That’s great. That’s a great idea. At what size audience do you think this starts working? Well, it’s probably not the best for somebody who’s just starting to build an audience 100% false dude.
18:02 – Justin (Guest)
No, no man. You can even have these conversations in real life, in person. The sample size doesn’t need to be massive for you to get valuable information from this, or maybe it’s even something as simple as tweeting or putting on I don’t know. If you have an Instagram or YouTube. You can put on your community tab or Instagram stories, just some polls or something like that. And, yes, the data, the sample size, is not going to be gigantic early on, but it may give you some. You may be able to start connecting a few dots early on and being like wow, I didn’t realize, people are following me for X, y, z. I’m going to start thinking about this.
18:37
Let me give you a quick example. When I started out creating content on the internet, my YouTube channel banner said the business of being a creator. That was what I was going to talk about, like, not just sponsorship. I was going to talk about affiliate marketing and digital products and merchandise and whatever all all these things, cause I love talking about all these things and I thought that’s what I was going to do. And the growth for you know, the first six months basically was really weak, it was lame, it was actually I got a sound effect for that one.
19:03 – Arvid (Host)
It was like oh man, it was it was just it was.
19:07 – Justin (Guest)
It was not impressive at all. And so one a follower DM me six months a year into the journey, something like that, and said hey, justin, why are you talking about anything other than sponsorships? Like that clearly seems to be your wheelhouse. You should like stop talking about all those other things. And I was like that’s a good idea. And so it was like, honestly, it was like this insight from my audience that changed everything for me.
19:31 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, feedback is always great. Feedback from the people that you’re doing this for is likely the most valuable kind of commodity you can have as a brand, as a creator. There’s also feedback from the other side and I’ve been through this too like from the brand itself. If you, if you have a sponsorship with people and they come back at you with feedback. Do you have an example of communication challenges there? Because I know that a lot of people fear interacting with brands because they think that might be too restrictive or they might not even know what they want. Like, how can we prevent that from happening? What could potentially happen there?
20:11 – Justin (Guest)
So I think a lot of it is a mindset shift realizing, instead of fearing, that process where you either will get annoyed that they are dumb and they don’t know what they’re doing, or you get annoyed that you create something and then they give you feedback on it and they’re like, hey, this sucks, you need to change it. I understand that fear, but you have to shift from an annoyance to, in my opinion, one of joy. It’s that you know what. Actually, educating brands or partners about best practices and about what works in my industry or in this ecosystem, this niche, is a fun thing. I actually really enjoy this because not only does it allow me to serve them in a way that is very value add, but it also allows you to continue to hone your own expertise, because if it means that you have to go out there yourself and educate yourself around the best practices, what’s working on the best platforms, what’s working with the best onboarding processes, whatever, that allows you to further establish and entrench yourself as the expert in your space. And so this is the perspective that I have when it comes to education and collaboration is that there’s lots and lots of times, dude, where I will do a lot to educate a prospective partner and we’re not able to ultimately forge a deal.
21:22
But I don’t get pissed about it. I’m not like, oh, screw them. I just wasted two Zoom calls and I sent them a bunch of looms and I made a proposal and they just fell apart and screw them. Now I’m a hater of them. This is what a lot of people, this is what happens to a lot of people, and for me it’s just like. No, it always comes back around, even though I did all this work. Either they’re going to move to a different job in six months and remember that I was so generous with my time and they’re going to hire me over there, or they’re going to tell a friend hey, you should work with Justin, because he’s great, he knows a lot about this stuff. And so, again, I don’t know whether people listening or watching believe in karma, but I absolutely do, and so I do think that there’s value in just like being really magnanimous about this stuff.
22:00 – Arvid (Host)
I believe in that too. It’s the whole thing Like even writing a book to me is leaving traces right, leaving traces of your ambition, leaving traces of your expertise, just with all the other people that may eventually come back to you, which is why writing is such a great way, like producing a book, something tangible that people can just keep in their field of vision, in their bookshelf, right, and then that one moment they have this idea and they see your book, they pull you out, they see your name and then they send you a message that stuff can happen next week, can happen two years from now you never know, but it can happen and you make it possible for it to potentially happen by just being positive and optimistic about this. Same with these negotiations. I had the same thing. People come back to me with stuff. It’s like great, now we both know more, and Now we both know more.
22:41
And even if it doesn’t work, you’re right, they might jump ship or they might just remember you for the next campaign, that’s all. It is right. Like you said, it might not work today, but it will work in the future. I really like this. Generally. This to me feels like the opportunity surface idea. You create this big surface where opportunities may land and you just have to be there when they hit, and then you have to take them right. It may land and you just have to be there when they hit and then you have to take them right. It’s this preparation meets capacity and capability, kind of thing.
23:09 – Justin (Guest)
You know, dharmesh, you know CTO of HubSpot, talked about this quote that Steve Jobs had and he kind of has crystallized this frame of thinking is just to be a dot connector, right, like. It’s very rare that you can look into the future and think that, okay, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this and it’s going to lead to the outcome that I want to. But it’s oftentimes very easy to look backwards and say, oh well, because I did this and because I had that failure and because I had that success, all of these experiences crystallized into me being successful or me getting the outcome that I wanted, and so I’m very much a fan. He calls it like be a dot connector or a dot collector, because just get these experience sets, like even if this thing doesn’t work out, and you just collect all these things and then ultimately, one day you like very risky to just go out on a limb and experiment a little bit.
24:05 – Arvid (Host)
You’re just going to highlight somebody’s product, an established product in an established market. That feels to me. Most sponsorships that work out look like this. So it’s, I think, worth the risk. Like that’s the German in me I’m always thinking about the potential massive downside of things, because that’s how I’ve been kind of culturally educated and that makes it hard to be super optimistic and super open to these opportunities, because you never know what might happen. Like Germans are so focused on liability. Like one of the questions that is in my mind right now is like, do I need insurance for this? Yeah, that is literally what I’m thinking about. But let’s maybe go there. Like what is the potential risk and how can you mitigate this? Because you are again a small player, particularly when you’re starting out fighting, negotiating for your own rights with these bigger, probably more legally capable, more just like legally structured entities, how do you protect yourself?
25:03 – Justin (Guest)
Okay. So first I’m going to challenge you on one thing and then I’m going to answer your question. The first thing that I’m going to challenge you on is this idea that a negotiation is like David and Goliath. It’s like a confrontation that you have to, like put on a suit of armor to go into the octagon to battle these brands. And, in reality, a much better visual for what a negotiation should feel like is you’re both in a conference room at an office building, okay, and instead of you sitting on opposite sides of the conference table like this, you know, looking staring at each other’s eyes, you basically squeak your office to your swivel chair around the side of the conference tables and you’re. But now you’re both on the same side and you’re both looking at a whiteboard. You’re like, okay, the brand says here’s where I’m at point A, here’s where we’re trying to get point B, and you’re both working on this problem, this challenge, together to figure out how to accomplish that. That’s what a negotiation and a partnership should feel like, and if you’re, it’s a real thing for sure. So I do have, like professional liability insurance for sure. That’s something that I believe anyone who is, you know, working with partners in a meaningful way on an ongoing basis, absolutely should protect yourself in that way, and I do think it’s like very important to like have contracts, have agreements that outline. You know they bring a heightened level of accountability and expectation to the relationship when you collaborate with someone, so you spell out exactly what the terms are going to be, what are the deliverables, what is the brand allowed to do and not allowed to do, and so a lot of it comes down to just educating yourself around what’s fair and what’s right, and, honestly, when I started, I just hired our family lawyer. Dude, this is so funny. I hired our family lawyer 15 years ago to make me a contract template. I was like, hey, we’re like starting to do these like things, and, and she was like used to doing like wills and estate stuff, and like she’s like what are you doing on the internet? This is so weird, and so what she did with, basically, though, was like she made us this boilerplate template, where it was like the first like eight pages were just like standard, like we never, we didn’t change anything, and the only thing that we changed was like the last page, which was like the statement of work. It was like this, this, this, we’re gonna do all these things, and so we felt protected, like at least in the event that someone you know tried to come after us. But again, dude, I’ve done over 550 sponsorships with my wife, we made over $5 million doing it and we’ve never had any sort of legal trouble at all. So I just think it’s like blown up to a point where people are fearful for no reasons.
27:33
But there is one other aspect to this which I think is important and is kind of another aspect here is that, like reputational risk is a real thing too, because you may have seen, you know, there have been massive companies that have blown up whether it was FTX or other scandals, where there were people who were promoting those brands, who got embroiled in controversy as well, because these were like finance YouTubers or something where all the people were like how dare you promote this brand?
28:00
That was like a Ponzi scheme or a scam or whatever. And I hear that that’s hard because, like you look, if you’re like a finance YouTuber, let’s say you look at like a company like FTX and like they have Tom Brady investing and the top venture capital firms and all that who seem to have lended all their money and credibility to it. How is a little old YouTuber going to like do the due diligence, to like understand whether this is like a legitimate company to like audit their books? No, it’s not feasible. And so, of course, like my policy, there is like just honesty. Like you just have to like be honest, like you have to do your own due diligence as much as you can do research, read reviews, try it yourself, this type of thing. But, at the end of the day, no business partnership is without 100% of risk.
28:44 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, it’s hard to do this due diligence with, I guess, the smaller brands in particular, because the big ones I guess there are even YouTube videos about these sponsorships at this point. Right, like Established Titles is one of these places. And what was the recent thing Like the coupon honey? Right, there are news about these big sponsors. If there’s anything scammy or sketchy about them and you can find this, it’s just. It’s harder with products that are novel too. It’s just. It’s harder with products that are novel too, like I’ve had a lot of new companies come to me with like hey, we’re launching this product and it’s going to revolutionize X, which always starts the alarm bells in my mental background process. But sometimes they’re great and sometimes you dig a little and you see, maybe not right.
29:30
Eudelogist is still something that I always do and it’s easier with the brands that I already have a pre-existing relationship with. Obviously, that is due diligence kind of as a long-term process. You associate with brands that you like and over time you learn are they for real or are they not, and they most often are. But I think that’s very important and I want to give you another shout out, because the whole contractual part of sponsorships you helped me a lot with, with my own. And the one thing I really liked about what you presented to me, what you helped me with, because I had that, probably more than anything else, made this sponsorship that I had recently approachable, because I knew what I was going for, what the terms were, what the expectations were, and the sponsor knew that too. They had their own lawyers look into it and add a comma here and do these little things, but it was so clear that there was barely anything to even think about. That, I think, made it less scary to me. So thank you for that, really appreciate it.
30:41 – Justin (Guest)
Yeah, I’m glad to hear that man that is. I mean, look, whatever you need to do to feel as though this is an exciting opportunity, I’m all for. Like you’re right, everyone has different you know fears and sensitivities. And so the fact that you feel like, okay, I’m all for, you’re right, everyone has different fears and sensitivities. And so the fact that you feel like, okay, I’ve got this contract, I’m protected. Even if things go south, I’ll still be able to maintain this relationship and we’re not going to hate each other.
31:05 – Arvid (Host)
I think these are all really really important things, and I’m thrilled to hear that it’s funny because most of what we’ve been talking about it all boils down to just mindset, to just embracing this as a good thing, not seeing it as something transactional, not seeing it as a threat, but embracing a sponsorship, as like a mutually beneficial walk together. And I love this visual that you have with the conference room. It’s always like you take the other party’s hand and you have a little walk right. It’s like you go somewhere together and you kind of amplify each other in this. I like this. It’s a very, very inclusive, very embracing mindset.
31:44 – Justin (Guest)
Yeah, one other kind of framework I think will be really helpful for people to understand is, just like I have this thing that I talk about called audience first offers, so I call it your PSA, your products, your sponsors and your alliances. So, when it comes to the psychographic research that we talked about at the beginning, about learning about your audience, a lot of us are probably very comfortable with creating things, creating products that we sell directly to our customers or our audience right, and that feels like a good solution. However, when we do that survey and we learn about our audience or our audience right, and that feels like a good solution. However, when we do that survey and we learn about our audience or our customers, there’s probably going to be some things that they say that we’re never going to create a product for, or we’re never going to add that feature, or we’re just we’re not going to be able to help someone with that because that’s not our specialty or it’s just not something that we ever want to go down. And so what would it look like Again, if we think our job is to, like, solve our customers or our audience’s problems, what would it look like to go out there and pitch a sponsor to help them solve that aspect of their life that they’re having issues with?
32:42
Similarly, alliances Do you have a friend who’s a coach or an educator or a consultant who could help them with that thing to solve this problem in their life? A lot of people fear that because they say, well, if I send them to someone else my friend’s software, saas or whatever and they sign up for that person’s stuff, they’re not going to have money to buy my SaaS, or they’re not going to have money to buy my thing, my digital product or course or whatever. And that’s a scarcity mindset view. I believe there’s infinite money in this universe and if you have this mindset of service and helping people and now their life or their business is so much better now because they solved that one problem that you don’t, you can’t help them with. Now they’re going to think more favorably of you and they’re going to say, oh, now I’m going to sign up for Arvid’s thing, or now I’m going to join his program or whatever, buy his book, because I feel like I’m finally in a place where I can do that.
33:26 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, being a person to connect other people like it’s a reputational gain for all three parties involved, right? I always see this like when I talk to creators and they’re like, ah, I, I want to like keep my audience to myself. Like, hey, invite that expert you know, invite that other person that connect people with them, allow them to connect, and you will be forever in the middle of that relationship. That is an extremely valuable place to be in right to be the mediator 100. One last question do I have to be in right To be the mediator 100%? One last question Do I have to be as handsome as you to build a successful sponsorship business?
33:58 – Justin (Guest)
Well, just asking, you know, first of all, that’s very kind of you to say and so unexpected, like that compliment just came out of left field.
34:07
Just for those listening, I joked with Arvid before we hit record. I was like so in the intro, are you going to talk about my awesome hair or anything about my appearance? No, absolutely not. You could be Quasimodo and get a sponsorship. You do not. It has nothing to do with the way you look. Look at the end of the day, dude, they don’t care the brands or partners. They don’t care about you. They care about accessing a pool of prospective customers. That’s why they’re hiring you, and so it has nothing to do with the way you look. It has nothing to do with really how many followers you have at all. It has to do with is the composition of your audience, your customers, an attractive pool of prospective customers for them.
34:44 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I love that and that’s also one of the reasons I think, like, particularly in trying to find sponsors for my content, I had a deeper look at my audience. Who am I actually talking to? Like, what are the metrics? Like, what are the engagement metrics, what’s the demographics and that kind of stuff. It gives you this opportunity to understand the people that you’re talking to better, even just in wanting to be able to report who you are talking to to somebody who has a budget for this. So that’s really cool. Okay, that’s good to know. Like, for a lot of people who rather hide out in our dungeon basements, I think the value that you bring is in the relationships that you have, right, the potential for connection that you give to a potential sponsor. Okay, potential for connection. Where do people go to connect with you to find out more about you, to learn about you and to follow you on your writing journey, on your book journey, on your consulting, on the real life events that you’re going to do? Man, like, where do you want people to go?
35:35 – Justin (Guest)
Yeah. So sponsormagnetcom is where you can go to grab the book and you know, if you do pick it up, you’ll get kind of entered into my universe. And I am launching this in-person event in San Antonio, texas, in March and I’m really excited for it, man, because it’s an anti-conference actually there’s no panels. An anti-conference actually there’s no panels, there’s no keynotes, there’s no workshops. Basically, I’m turning my eight-step sponsorship wheel framework, which I talk about in the book, into eight games that attendees will play to actually master the concept. So it’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s called Sponsored Games and I’m pretty terrified because I’m putting out a lot of money to make this event happen, but I really want it to exist. I think it needs to.
36:17 – Arvid (Host)
That sounds amazing. I love this because that also is just, it’s an experiment, right? It’s like you’re trying something, and I think that alone is worth going. That’s really cool man. That’s a great idea. Okay, I highly recommend reading the book. I highly recommend just working with you. That is my personal experience has been over the moon. I really, really thank you for inviting me into your universe today and for sharing what you know with the listeners and viewers of this show. Thank you so much, justin. It’s always just a really fun time talking to you.
36:41 – Justin (Guest)
Dude, of course, and I just want to say as a final bookend to this conversation, you’ve really inspired me in your journey, especially with writing over the last couple of years, just seeing the business that you’ve built and I got so inspired by. I also read, write useful books by Rob Fitzpatrick and I’m in his community, and so I very much was inspired by your model of like writing a useful book and that’s that. That was the playbook I use for this, and so I thank you for kind of being a trailblazer, uh, in this whole space man.
37:08 – Arvid (Host)
Really appreciate it. Thanks so much, and that’s it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Bootser Founder. You can find me on Twitter at Abitkal A-R-B-A-D-K-A-H-L. If you want to support me in this show, please share podscanfm with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands, businesses and names on podcasts out there. We have charts. Now Topics are coming. We have collections lists. There’s a lot of good stuff in PodScan. Check it out. Podscan is a near real-time podcast database with a really, really good API. So my customers tell me. So please share the word with those who need to stay on top of the podcast ecosystem. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye-bye.
