Likes Ain't Cash (And I'll Prove It To You)

So last week I was having a chat with a sales person in the DMs.

I was asking him some questions around his experience on LinkedIn—seeing how lead generation was going for him (to see if I might be able to help).

And what he said honestly floored me…

“Matt, I do think you can add value and help me generate leads, but I need to get to 5,000 followers first before I can sell.”

What. The. Absolute. ****!

This dude:

• Was a previous salesperson with years of experience.
• Has probably closed many deals without using “content.”
• But still got caught up in the LinkedIn bubble rhetoric.

The idea that you need to:

• Create content for 6 months.
• Engage for 2 hours a day.
• Grow to over 5,000 followers before you are “allowed” to start charging people money.

**** me. (Sorry for the swearing, but this really upsets me.)

He legitimately believed he couldn’t sell without followers…

So I’m going to tell you two stories to hopefully convince at least one person out there that → you don’t “need” followers to make $.

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Story 1 (The not-so-happy one)

I worked with a creator who has 130,000 followers now (had around 80,000 when I was working with them). They came to me because they were making $0 on LinkedIn, even though:

• They were in a hyper-growing niche.
• Had a crazily engaged audience.
• Were legit riding the AI wave.

But they couldn’t sell a single thing… (Because audience growth does not equal business skills.)

We started working together, and he began running Sell By Chat. And, legit, 10 days in, he messaged me saying it was all too hard and he wanted to leave our program and not keep paying.

I was like, “Huh?” → he’d only been doing it for 10 days…

He ended up leaving the program and is still riding the dopamine and audience growth wave, barely making what he wants to.

Why do I think this happened?

A few reasons, but in all honesty, I think he realized how hard it was going to be (he had no sales experience) and was just massively addicted to the dopamine.

So there’s a 130,000 follower account out there that’s literally burning money because they don’t have the business skills to monetize and were not willing to give up the dopamine hit making them feel on top of the world.

(Which honestly all creators need to deal with. I remember DMing Lara Acosta when I was growing, asking her if she felt the same thing, to which she responded, “hahaha the dopamine is crazy, right?”)

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Story 2 (The happy one, I promise)

I started working with this client when they had 1,300 followers (yes, you read that correctly—1,300 lol).

And when we first started, they were struggling to get leads for four months straight.

You see… four months prior, they had closed a decent-sized deal from LinkedIn, so they knew the platform worked for their niche. But for some reason, they couldn’t figure out how to make it work again.

We chatted for around a week going back and forth, and they mentioned how they were near the end of their savings and they wanted this to work. So, I decided that I’d cut him a deal because he was so determined, but I made him promise to me that he would:

• Come to all the live sessions.
• Make sure he did the program work.
• Ask me as many questions as he could.

And he did just that → even attending meetings at 2 am his time.

Fast forward 2.5 months, and he told me he closed $15k in the past 2 weeks, and that he’s now booking 4-7 qualified (this matters) meetings a week with his ideal potential clients.

All that, and he is still ONLY at 2,800 followers…

He literally has 2.1% of the audience size of the first creator but makes at least 20x the income. Because people, likes DO NOT EQUAL cash.

Yes, they do have a correlation, but they are not absolute causation. That would be the number of chats with your ICP you are having per day → the true metric you should be looking at.

So if you’d like to work with someone who won’t tell you to “first build 5k followers” before you can make money, then I might be able to help you.

Reply “Creator System” and let’s have a chat.

Otherwise, I hope you have an awesome Thursday (I live in the future here in Australia lol).

And remember → you deserve to make $ at any follower count.

Cheers,
Matt

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PS - Prefer to listen? Check out the podcast 🙂 CLICK ON THE PICTURE TO LISTEN

PSS - You won’t believe it, but as I was proofreading this email, I received this message. The LinkedIn rhetoric makes me sick. You deserve inbounds whatever your follower count. Honestly.