Zain Khan

You don't need a big audience to make a lot of money online. You're just scared. That's what @Nicolascole77 & @dickiebush explain in their MASTERCLASS on how to build digital products Here's how to create your first digital product (without the risk of failing): 🧵

I closed millions in sales before building a sales team. Then I hired people and realized I'd never documented what I was doing on calls. Took months to rebuild that into a repeatable process. Write down what works before you try to scale it.

Content is how people find you and decide to trust you before they ever get on a call. Everything after that is the actual business. Most creators optimize the first part for years and never build the second.

In the world of Andromeda and AI, the creative is everything. Ads that used to fatigue in 90 days now fatigue in 14. We had to 3x our creative output just to maintain the account. We also 2xed our agency partners so they could produce more and compete against each other. Meta's Andromeda algorithm now reads, watches, and visually matches every ad. If your variants are too similar, it counts them all as one. 15 variants that look alike perform like a single ad. More creative. More variety. That's the only way to scale an ad account right now.

Quick hiring tip for senior talent: Build a list of people already doing the job well somewhere else. Reach out and ask if they know anyone great for the role. Never ask if they're looking. People are never looking. Ask who they'd recommend instead. It's a Trojan horse. About 40% of the time they come back with "Well, I might actually be interested myself." Now you're in the game without putting them on the defensive. We've poached some serious killers using this strat.

Most agency owners underpay on base and offer no upside. Or they overpay on base and wonder why nobody acts like an owner. The answer is always in the structure.

Harsh truth: Top talent isn't applying to your job listing. They're well paid, well recognized, and have no reason to move. The only way you get them is by finding the thing they're unfulfilled about. Everyone has one.

The room gets a lot smaller when you only want to work with people you actually respect.

Running a team of 20+ taught me that most management problems are incentive problems in disguise. People aren't lazy. They just don't get anything more for doing more or better work. So they do enough to avoid getting fired and nothing beyond that. Align the incentives and watch the behavior change.

We rebuilt our creative process and both agency partners we work with immediately adopted it. That's how you know something works. You don't have to sell it. People just start doing it.

Most people want the audience before they've done anything worth following. Do the work first.

Had dinner with a friend who runs an agency. He has real scale problems. Kept telling me he couldn't get more out of his team. Turns out he just refuses to put money on the table. Built out a revenue pool with him, quarterly bonuses tied to core numbers. His people are going to perform differently now. Money changes behavior when it's real and it's visible.

Most operator content is either too surface level to be useful or too company-specific to be shareable. The sweet spot is the playbook. "Here's a problem I've solved 5 times. Here's the playbook." That content builds real trust with real operators.

Spoke with a marketing agency owner who had a scaling problem he couldn't crack. His team was doing okay work. Not great work. And he couldn't figure out how to get them to perform better without standing over them. I asked him how his comp was structured. There wasn't one. Flat salaries with no real performance upside. That was the problem. When people's income doesn't move with the business, neither does their effort. The incentive isn't there. I advised him on 4 changes: 1/ Set up a revenue pool. A percentage of top-line revenue above a baseline gets set aside every quarter. That pool belongs to the team, not as a gift, but as a contract. 2/ Define 3 core numbers for the quarter. 3 numbers that actually move the business. Tie the pool distribution to those. 3/ Build a hurdle. The pool only activates above a minimum performance threshold. This protects your P&L in a down month and keeps the incentive meaningful. 4/ Review it publicly every month. The team should know exactly where they stand against the numbers. Visibility is accountability. Most service business owners underpay on base and offer no upside. Or they overpay on base and wonder why nobody acts like an owner. Real upside, tied to real numbers, with a real floor. That's how you change behavior.

My growth guy came to me feeling like he was doing worse than ever. He was actually doing better. I just hadn't kept his feedback loop tight. When someone on your team feels like they're stagnating, ask yourself when you last gave them a clear milestone and showed them how their work connects to outcomes. Usually that's the whole problem.

We set up a bonus comp structure that worked great when the business was up. When the business dipped, it absolutely destroyed our P&L. Had to tear it down and build a hurdle into it. Which is, frankly, how all comp structures should be built.

People treat every negotiation like a chess match. They obsess over positioning, leverage, who blinks first. But the bigger issue is ego. When one side lets their ego in the room, the deal is over. Business is person-to-person. Acting like a normal, nice human being will close more deals for you than any FBI negotiating tactic.

We went from 15% to 25% call-to-close on a brand new offer in a few weeks. The offer was brand new. Our partners had a tiny list. We had to firefight on leads from day one. 1st move: went through every contact they had ever worked with. Text message lists, past conversations, anyone who'd ever expressed interest. 2nd move: every time someone ended a sales call with an objection, we didn't just follow up with an email. We had the partner send a personal voice note. Immediate and human. Then we sent an FAQ email to the whole list based on the top objections we were hearing. Call to close went from 15% to 25%. There was no hack here. Just obsessive iteration on every point of friction in the funnel.

Vibe coding is genuinely useful if you're willing to take the 0 to 1 yourself and then bring in a dev to take it to 10. We've cut dev costs by probably 2/3 doing it that way.

My friend was about to blow up a business deal. He'd been trying to close an acquisition for a while now and it had stalled out. The other guy had gone quiet and he was done waiting. He showed me the email he was about to send. It was basically an ultimatum. Either we make this work or we don't. Final offer, take it or leave it. I grabbed his phone, told him to play the recipient, and began reading the email out loud. He started laughing 20 seconds in. "I'd post this on social media," he said. "Look at this jackass who thinks he can buy my business." So we started over. Wrote a three-sentence text instead. Congratulated the guy on what he had going on, said he still thought there was a deal worth exploring, and proposed a 5-minute call. No pressure either way. Got a response within the hour. They're having a call next week. The deal went from completely dead to back on the table in one afternoon. People treat every negotiation like a chess match. They obsess over positioning, leverage, who blinks first. But the bigger issue is ego. When one side lets their ego in the room, the deal is over. Business is person-to-person. Acting like a normal, nice human being will close more deals for you than any FBI negotiating tactic.

The best closer I ever hired wasn't looking for a job. Wasn't unhappy. Wasn't going anywhere. We just found the one thing his current situation couldn't give him and built a path to it. He was on a call with us the next day.