How to Create a Network of Likeminded People | Chase Dimond & Cardinal Mason

Hey, what's up, Chase Diamond fans? Welcome back to another episode of The Diamond Download, where me, Cardinal Mason, and Chase over here at Chase Diamond talk about what's relevant and happening and useful in our little community. We got three good topics that I actually gave Chase some notice on for the first time. Yeah, they're good. You normally just hit me with them, but I actually saw them and they're really interesting. They're really top of mind and really relevant. Before we get into it, how's the day? How you doing? Day is hectic. You know, bringing on new team members. I hired a salesperson and he's a killer. He looks just like me, which makes it really easy. If someone doesn't know me that well, then you can just say he's Mason and I think the close rate is going to go up. So that's good. Other than that, I'm in West Palm right now. I'm just kind of getting some fresh air away from Miami, just hanging out for a little bit. What about you? Yeah, happy birthday. I'm curious to see. Let's check in in maybe about a month and see how the closer does. I know you what your close rate is on probably about 50 to 70 sales. Go so far. So as you hire that person curious to see if the quality of the clothes is the same or not, but on online things are good. I should just got a slack notification. We're a channel for the agency on Slack where contracts go out and contract sign and in one of the deals that I brought in. We've actually been working on this deal since December. It's with a public company. I can't say too much more, but we just signed with them and they just wrote us like a six-figure check up front for like the six-month term. And it's crazy. Like for them, it's probably like peanuts and pennies and a drop in the bucket, but for us to get like a six-figure check up front before we've even done the work is like insane. So I'm in a pretty good mood today. Nice dude. I mean that's rent. That's rent for the structured HQ. That's awesome dude. Congrats. Yeah, sick. Let's do it. All right. So first topic building with partners. So obviously like you have like 28 partners and structured a lot of partners. I've had business, but we've been business partners. I'm curious like well now you kind of build everything. So like anything you do, you know is mostly just done just by you. Do you want to go over like the pros and cons of like building a business with partners? Yeah, dude. This is a really interesting time. We went for us both. I've got a lot of different feelings about this. I think when you're first starting out and kind of when I was on the come up when you're on the come up working partners is amazing. I think it's great. You share the risk you share the work you share the upside. It's awesome. So I definitely wouldn't change any partnerships. I had in the past, but now I've gotten to a point fortunately where you know, a lot of things I want to do don't require other people or if they do it could be something like an assistant or VA or maybe someone that I pay in dollars not in equity or points. So right now I'm trying to do as many things as possible by myself that being said like I think the word partner means a couple different things to me one is like a business partner where we actually own an LLC or an entity together or other partnerships that I'm trying to do more of or things where it's like hey, my company is good at this your company's good that let's transact in a specific one-time thing. For example, I just did an event with my friend Shaq. I did between you know myself Chase Diamond and his business geek out. We did a partnership on a specific event. So there's a finite start end date and I like that too. So I like to build businesses at this point now primarily by myself or in partnerships where it's very specific on like a project or transaction versus hey, I want to own 50 you want to own 50. That's kind of like where my head's at right now. We can kind of take a step back. What are your what are your thoughts on this what your pros and cons? So I did one of those corny videos on TikTok. It was like 24 lessons in 24 years or whatever because like on Twitter it's played out but on Twitter or on TikTok, it's like brand new everyone loves it. And so one of the ones that I had was if you're starting a business, you've never had a business before. I don't think you should do it with a partner. I think it actually makes sense for you to learn these lessons by yourself. And yes pay for help if you need it like pay people with like you said dollars instead of points and make like I want to say like your first couple hundred grand by yourself and then start, you know building with partners because obviously like you and I have been pretty lucky like we like all the partners you've had and you know partners I've had and stuff like are good people and you can kind of trust him but a lot of people get I was watching an Alex Ramosi video about like how he got screwed over by his partner. Like I don't know. I don't want to go into the whole story but people can watch it or they've already seen it probably and like you would be shocked at how terrible things can go like you're trusting someone with half of your money that can go very South very quickly. And I think like you need to spend a couple of years and make a couple hundred grand in the trenches by yourself before before you can really understand what a good business partner looks like, you know what I mean? Like you have to have a sort of complimentary skills supplementary skills where it's like for example, like we have been on copy MBA. He's not a 50-50 partner, but he is you know, he does have points almost basically and you know, he like we work really well together because I master organic and big ideas and Ben is really good at paid and then filling in the holes on those big ideas because sometimes I'm like a bull in a china shop and I don't really know what to look for but Ben has done this a couple of times with different info businesses and knows where to like tighten things up. So I think like we're kind of like yin and yang like that and you and I have you know, similar, you know compliment skills too. So what do you think of that? Yeah, it's interesting. I think for me starting out like I work for people like for a couple years after college like two years after college. I want to go work for people. So I kind of learn a little bit about business and operations as being an employee and then I kind of start off on my own and had different partnerships. Yes, it's interesting. I've had some, I've gotten really bad or I've gotten really screwed over. So I think the learnings that I've had from those is like to your point. So maybe either you do it by yourself, you learn the kind of the ropes, you learn the mistakes, you learn what you're good at and then you understand like what a partnership could look like in the future. I think my biggest mistake was just saying yes, you know really quickly when you get excited about ideas, someone approaches you with something you say. Yes, you kind of happen to be in a conversation with someone you tell them about an idea you have and then before you know it, you guys are business partners, even though that wasn't your intention. You're kind of like in too deep. You're like, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. How did we get here? Right? So it's just really interesting to think about like the context you're in who you're talking to and really the pump the brakes before you sign the LLC and before you sign away a third, a half, a quarter of your business or that might be. So I think step one is like come up with the idea to come up with like the plan of like, how does this get done? Who's going to implement it? Is it cash heavy? Is it resource and heavy and how can you do more with less? Like how can you do as much of it as possible and maybe farm them out because if you build a good business, you're going to you're going to want to own as much of it as possible. So it's interesting and kind of going back to Ben and other people. I think there are great partnerships where you pay people really well, really heavily on like a performance basis, right? Maybe they don't own necessarily equity in the business, but they're highly incentivized to you know, eat what they kill per se because they're going to have a lot of upside above and beyond just you know, a paycheck or a project based thing. Yeah, a hundred percent. I think like it's a really good place when you can get to a point where you can pay really good people with money instead because like every business sort of needs some firepower at the beginning and you need that in the form of you know, capital or human labor. Like in the next couple months, like I'm going to like we're going to have to bring on like a really really good operator so we can keep scaling what we're doing. Yeah, and like luckily we're going to have money in the bank that we can just use to you know, pay them a good salary and maybe give them a couple points but we're not going to give up like 75% of the company just to have some you know, five-star a player come and just be incentivized to join the team. Yeah, and like in startups where they have like vesting schedules and class and all this stuff and I've never really understood why but it's that way like you allow yourself to enter a relationship with someone. They're incentivized. They've got upside but they really have to prove themselves and earn it for a lot of times when I'm in deals or you're in deals equity is typically given. It's not earned right where I like the opportunity for people to have equity and points but they have to earn it and that happens over one years, two years, four years and after there's a lot of history of working together a couple other like interesting thoughts and points. I think like one thing that I found so I've been trying to hire people like work with me like on the personal brand side and what not obviously you do some work with me and what not even amazing. It's really hard to find like great employees for like the personal brand stuff and it's way easier to find partners and again the word partner means different things, you know in the case of partnering with you, you write the entire Alex in my inbox series, right? So that's a great partnership where we both are just working together and coming together by value. For me to get that same quality of me just paying someone that's like a random writer. It's going to be hard. It's not impossible. It's going to be hard. I think that's actually one of the challenges like on the flip side of it. I want to own as much as I can in the businesses that I'm now starting but it's really hard to find people that can just sprint and be super autonomous and kind of at a comparable level if they're not your partner because typically people that are partners won't go to work for someone and people that are working for someone don't go become partners like and again, there's obviously a lot of in-between since instances and scenarios where that isn't true but in the most part like it's hard to find good people like for me to hire people to do my social media. I want all the people that I can't hire. I want the Masons. I want the Oxford Moses. I want the people that are already doing it for themselves, but they're typically not going to do it for someone else. So that was kind of interesting and I think the last thing I'd say is like I've been getting this asked to speak a lot of events and podcasts and early night career. I said yes every single one probably too many where I was doing like one or two a week and then I just got burnt out but it was a great way for me to build the name and kind of get my reps and start to leverage other people's platforms and now like I try to say no to everything because I want to own the content. I want to own the distribution like instead of me going to do someone else's podcast. I might as well do this podcast with you where we control the narrative we control the topics. I don't want to do another email marketing video, right about five things I've talked about on the last 20 podcasts. Yeah, dude, everyone already knows how to do an abandoned car flow. I don't think you need to explain that anymore. I mean I would say though like for you to really grow as a personal brand. It does require you, you know, moving into other people's audiences like love them or hate them. I know everyone hates them but that's what tape did. I'm using him on purpose because he's just a phenomenal case study of how to get a personal brand to grow and just be so massively viral like no one really knew who he was. I mean he was kind of in our quarter on Twitter like you probably probably saw your tweets a handful of times probably same for me but like it wasn't until he started doing podcasts with other big people where like, you know people really start to figure out who he was in different niches and stuff like that. And I think that's one of the most valuable things you can do as a personal brand, but it also doesn't require you to partner with anybody. I mean like there's still an exchange of value without having to even pay them money. You know what I mean? Like I'm sure people would pay you to have you on their podcast and I mean your hourly rate is pretty pretty valuable. So yeah, I think I think that's good for that. We think yeah, great to the next one. All right. So how to create a network of like-minded people. So I mean the one of the best things about you at this point now is you're extremely well-connected you've even you connected me to a handful of people that have turned into really good clients and whatever else like I think that's been super valuable. How do you get into these rooms? How do you meet people? How do you network? How do you find friends that are on you know sort of the same path as you because like I get this question a lot where people are like do I come in? I'm in Ohio, you know, I mean like no one in Ohio at least in my little small town thinks about business. Like how do I find people like you and chase or whatever, right? Yeah, it's interesting a couple thoughts. I have is like you know now kind of with where I'm at when I think about this like that the best way to get access to the people you want typically requires some kind of money. It doesn't even have to be big bucks with some kind of money. So anytime I wanted to learn something or learn learn from someone or meet someone you know you buy their courses you pay them to do consulting you attend the events that they host you join their group. So I think that like it requires not always but in some degrees it either requires a lot of money or sorry some money or a lot of time, right? And I think there's a fraction of the two were like for me actually just at 200,000 on LinkedIn yesterday. I went from 27,000 to 200,000 on LinkedIn in nine months. And how did I do that? I paid people that were already doing it to teach me. I paid them to get that knowledge and that was an investment into myself. So I think like when you invest in yourself, when you buy the right courses, when you pay to be at the right events, when you pay for the masterminds, when you pay for these online groups, when you pay to do these things, it shows that you're really serious. And anytime, for example, that someone gives me money, I always take it 10 times more serious. I take free stuff obviously super serious and it's really important to me. But anytime someone gives me a cent, a dollar, you know, whatever it might be, I really am invested. So I just started this like LinkedIn thing last week and people were like, hey, what's, what is this? Are you getting advice? You can do this, that, that, the other or is it just growth? I'm like, I'm primarily growth, but like, you know, you have access to me and my cell phone number and people are just asking me questions and I'm giving them advice, right? So for me, like it took just being really kind, being really helpful and then a little bit of money, paying people and they, you're kind of surprised like pay someone $500 for an hour, $1,000 an hour, follow up. You let them know the progress you got and you kind of build this relationship where then money in the future isn't the way that you transact. You kind of build a friendship from it. What are your thoughts? Um, I think, yeah, in terms of building like business relationships, I think that, yeah, it usually starts with some sort of dollar amount. I mean, like I, I kind of got lucky cause like you were paying me before I was on your team. Um, and so that's kind of how we connected, I guess, but in terms of like how I've met at least my friends that are like my homies, like my circle, not really like business connections, but I mean, I met them all from social media. I think obviously like you need to be doing something important. So at the time when I met all these people, like I had a small Twitter, I think like a couple thousand followers and like they knew I was writing for some cool brands cause I was posting about it and I was like, you know, building in public. Um, Ron Shaw obviously does this really well. Um, right from, um, yeah. Like he, like if you're building in public and you're posting about what you're doing and people are interested in it, they're going to reach out to you or at least when you reach out to them, you already have a full portfolio of what you're doing. Um, but like obviously to turn those into real friends, like you have to have some sort of personality. There's plenty of people that I know, at least in Miami, we're doing cool things, but like, you know, maybe they're not the type of person you want to be around. So like, but if you're, if you're successful in something, whether it's, it doesn't even have to be business. It could be like, maybe you're really good at, you know, growing social media accounts or like you're really good at sports or like you're, you're like something where you kind of like give yourself a little bit of status and you're a cool person. Like you can be friends with the whole world. Yeah. A couple of things to kind of add to that. Um, you know, when I was thinking about how I first got started, one of my friends, like basically forced me to write an angel check in a company. Um, this was like five or six years ago where, you know, investing like $10,000 or whatever it was like, that was a big deal. That was a lot of money for me to write personally. Like I didn't have all that much money, but just by writing a check, like to this company, I became like friendly with the founders. And then they had really good angel investors as well in the round that I could then be like, Hey, Mason, want to let you know that I'm also an investor in this company. And you kind of can build relationships through, through that. I think the other thing too, is like when I started playing golf, there's being able to like reach out to people and be like, Hey, you know, I'm, I'm getting into golf. It's not that you golf to, you know, I'm into these things. So I think having like common interest, I think to your point too, like just being interesting and engaging on social with people over time and people that are kind of in similar levels to you, right? Like if you have a thousand followers, don't engage with people that are interested in have 500 to maybe thousand followers or maybe 10,000 followers. Right. And as it's interesting, as your following grows and as your connection grows, access to the people that you get changes, like for example, when I was first going on LinkedIn, like the golden standard was this guy named Justin Welsh, right? I think he's got like 400,000, maybe 500,000 followers. I saw that this year he's going to do like 200 something million impressions on LinkedIn alone or something wild, but maybe that was all the social. And this, this year I'll probably do a hundred million. And now you and I are buddies. I've had him on my podcast. We text because he was good. And I was kind of engaging with him and building as it got to a level where we were closer and following size. It's crazy. Like those metrics, while people say their vanity, they actually matter. Like the people I've got to connect as my following has grown, has been crazy. I've had some of my favorite like authors and kind of, you know, business people reach out to me because they're like, oh, I love your content. So I think to your point, like just being engaging and interesting and active on social you find this group and this clique of like-minded people. And in that sense, you didn't have to transact any money. You just had to spend a lot of time being interesting and cool and talking about it. Exactly. And do like on the vanity metrics thing, people will say that people will be like, oh, like big deal, like 100 million impressions on LinkedIn, like, you know, whatever. But like people have to understand that that is a meritocracy. Like that's not an accident. You are saying things that people are actually resonating with and people want to hear more from you. And you have 200,000 followers because it's a lot of people that aren't, you know, those are like real people that are clicking follow on your page because something you said made them fire dopamine into their ears or something like that. You know what I mean? So, I mean, vanity metric or not, it's a real number and like you can do the same thing. All you have to do is be a little bit interesting. Yeah, with AI, with the internet, with how much information is out there. I literally believe that anyone is willing to put in the work can make it happen. Dude, it took me 11 or 12 years on LinkedIn to go from zero to 27,000 followers. And then when I finally was just like, dude, I'm sick of being sucky at LinkedIn. Like I really think that there's opportunity here. Like I just suck at it. I went out of my way. I worked really, really hard. I've become obsessed every single day since August, August 2nd, I think it was. I posted a minimum of three times per day on LinkedIn, seven days a week, you know, the entirety of almost a year every single day engaging with people. I'm obsessed, like, but it's a lot of work, but it's so worth it. So I think if you become obsessed, if you figure out how to reverse engineer what other people are doing, figure out how to pay them or pay for their stuff or whatever it might be, anyone could do it. Like basically you're almost 400,000 on TikTok, right? Like if someone wanted to learn, it's like, how do you learn? It's like, follow what Mason's doing, go back to its early stuff, maybe reach out to Mason and say, hey, I'd love to pay you for a consulting call. Do you do that? Maybe you don't do that, right? I don't do much consulting. So most of the time I say no now, but it's worth a shot. If they can't find you, maybe they can find someone else, right? Someone is going to take their money to teach them and hopefully who they're paying is the right person. 100%. Yeah. I mean, I won't teach you TikTok, but I can teach you copywriting. Anyway, last one. Klaviyo versus Senlane. So the reason this is top of mind right now is because obviously we both know Jimmy from Senlane. Klaviyo is kind of like too cool for school these days and they're turning into like, they must be like working on something because they're becoming just, I don't know, man. Like it's just not the same product. Like there was one of your newsletters that I would work on and I would go inside Klaviyo and I would like play within like set it up and everything and Klaviyo's editor changed and it just looks terrible now and it's really hard to navigate and like I was trying to send an email yesterday, but like it kept saying error or something and then I had a friend call me this morning and say, hey, I'm thinking about switching all my clients over to Senlane because this other guy said they're doing the same thing. What's going on, bro? What's going on with Klaviyo? Yeah, I've been trying to keep my mouth shut on this for a while. I've been huge fans of the Senlane team, huge fans of the Klaviyo team. I've been a Klaviyo user for probably about five or six years. We're actually their number two agency partner on all of Klaviyo. They have thousands of partners, maybe even potentially tens of thousands of partners at this point. I've been probably the biggest Klaviyo fanboy for a long time. I know who it is. I don't want to give him too much credits. It's one of our agency competitors. They're big. They've been acquired. Does it start with M and end in U6? No, no, no. It's not them. It's I'll tell you about it after. I'll tell you who they are after, but they're they are beating us by a bit. I heard but we're we're number two. So I didn't want to talk about it. But I saw Jimmy who's become a buddy of mine and I might potentially start advising Senlane soon. I saw him share on social media some of the things that Klaviyo was saying about him to brands trying to keep them on Klaviyo. And once they just started saying that stuff, I'm like, yeah, they're not really playing like a fair fight. They were literally saying, oh, you can switch to Senlane, but they're not gonna be able to help you like we can at Klaviyo. We have 1,500 employees. They only have 60 employees. Sure. They tout that they do customer service, but they only have 60 employees. We have 1,500. Oh, they say that they can do this, but their editor is not great. So just the fact that like you see this 800 pound gorilla in the space picking on the small guy that is actually doing a great job. That kind of upset me. So look, I think they're both great platforms. They really are. I think Klaviyo is gearing to go public. So I think that's probably why there's a lot of misses. I don't love their new product stuff. I was literally on a chat with their people yesterday. I think I was complaining about this. I was running an A.V. test for my newsletter. I couldn't see any data. I messaged them saying, guys, I don't see any data. They're like, oh, well, you can't see the data for six hours because you ran an A.V. test. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, unless the product changed, this is not supposed to happen. So like, excuse me, sir, this is how an A.V. test works. I'm like, either the product now sucks or something's happening. And sure enough, do you know who I am? No, no, not even. Diamond, bro. Of course you know how an A.V. test works. That's ridiculous, bro. Yeah. Anyway, I didn't say that, but I was just very polite. And then the lady emailed me like two or three hours later saying, by the way, you were right. I should have escalated this. There is a glitch going on in the system where analytics aren't working. I ran an A.V. test. I couldn't see what was winning. I can't even see what's happening. You know, I've got sponsors that are asking me how many clicks they drove. I can't even see, you know, more than 24 hours later now what's happening. So I think, again, Klaviyo is great. A lot of our clients use it. I think the tide is shifting where people want to go to companies and platforms where they feel like they frankly care. And Jimmy, who's the founder and CEO of Sendlane, he's become a buddy. You know, he's been trying to get me to come to Sendlane for a few years. And I kept saying, I'm loyal to Klaviyo. And my mind has really changed over the past couple of months and we're starting to dip our toes into what they're doing. And it's really cool. What are your thoughts? Yeah. So I have like a, I told this story on Twitter about Sendlane. Yeah, Jimmy is the man. So the story is like, so I've been using Sendlane for, I mean, I think everyone kind of knows at this point, I do Adam's newsletter, Adam Robinson from retention.com. I think he's talked about that. So I think I'm safe to say that. So I write his newsletter and I'm like, all he does is approve it, right? He reads it, approves it. And then I upload it into Sendlane. And there was one email that I was trying to do a minute ago that just wasn't, like there was an error going on and like, no matter what I did in the copy, like I changed around and I thought it was fine, but like it just wouldn't save and I couldn't publish it. And so he's in my Slack. We have like a shared Slack within my Cardinal Slack. And so I messaged him. I was like, Jimmy, like, I don't know what's going on, but this is the error I'm getting. And I figured he was, I was going to like, can you get one of your guys or team members to like take a look at this? And he was like, give me one sec. Jimmy goes into the account, does his own troubleshooting, comes back literally six minutes later and is like, all right, cool, I fixed it. It was an issue with like, I was using an example of like something you should say in copy and I was using like a first name tag, but it wasn't right. So it was just messing with the, I don't know what happened, but like he literally rolled up his sleeves and went in there by himself, like as a CEO, founder, CEO, and like did that for me, who he doesn't even know me. Well, now we're friends, but I think that's amazing. Like, I don't know who the, I don't even know who the CEO of Klaviyo is. Yeah, I've never spoke to any execs that never reached out to me, not that they have to, but like Jimmy, I think is setting a great example of like a founder led company that is active. Dude, he'll drive down every couple months to meet with me and hang out and hang out with me and Nick and whatnot. So I've been really impressed by what they're building, hoping and planning on joining in as advisor. And I'm really rooting for the underdog, like people that are trying to do things different and trying to be active. And you see him on Twitter, like he gives great advice and he's in it. So again, that was a non-sponsored segment. The only potential bias is that we really like Jimmy and he's saved my butt a couple of times when I've had issues with Klaviyo. I remember actually, um, last, uh, I think it was last October maybe I was supposed to send an email out to my list and I use Klaviyo for my personal list. I was supposed to send an email out about one of these events that I have, like, Hey, just reminder, last chance to buy tickets, dude, it would just not work. Emails weren't sending. There was a massive issue. No one from Klaviyo would respond. I sent like probably a dozen emails blowing Klaviyo up, like help, help, help. And I, Jimmy ended up opening an account for me on Sendlane for free and helped me out, took care of it and let me keep that account. So if I ever needed anything, I could, and I probably had to use that account like half a dozen times in the last six months because every month something seems to happen. So he went out of his way to help me as to gave me a free account and just was really kind. And he's even helped me within Klaviyo fix things without telling me to switch over. So no, that was awesome. Well, dude, I love, I love the topic. Very top of mind. I think a lot of good stuff to come from it for sure. Yeah. Last thing I want to say on that is like this is Paul Graham quote that I love. I believe it's Paul Graham. Do things that don't scale. Yep. That. Yeah, I think, I think as a scrappy founder, that's one of the things you have to focus on. I think that, I mean, obviously this is about Jimmy, but this is just in general. I think a good kind of place to leave it is like, you know, do things that don't scale. I think that's great advice. Like what can you do that can change, you know, one person's day or experience with your product or maybe their life that like, obviously you can't replicate across, you know, 10,000 accounts, but you look for them and they will be the preacher of the good word and make sure that everyone knows that you're doing a good job. Yeah, dude. I think boils down to exactly what you said, like going on your way to be helpful. Like it really makes an impact. It doesn't matter how large or how small someone is or how large or how small the task is. Like, I think it comes back to the, like, what's your motivation. It's obvious who's playing the long game, the people that are willing to constantly put out good content, constantly willing to be helpful. Dude. I mean, every single Thursday you do a free training for people or people for an hour plus gonna learn from you about copywriting. Sure. People could pay you. A lot of people do, but most people attend for free and you're just invested in making the world a better place. And obviously selfishly you get gain and benefit too. So I think that's really been my mantra as well as like, give away the farm and people will find ways to return the favor 100% like it's gonna happen. Absolutely. Great. We nailed this one. Great episode. All right. So find him on TikTok and Twitter at Cardinal Mason. I'm Econ, Chase Diamond, Noah A. and Diamond. So thank you guys. See ya.