Success is a Numbers Game Book: If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, you’ll love this conversation. Today I’m talking with someone who’s written for top publications, built affiliate programs from scratch, and approaches every campaign with strategy and intention. We’ll break down his process… what actually works… and how you can think more like a strategic affiliate marketer too.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
The Affiliate Book Launch Blueprint
How I Found Affiliates for My Book (And How You Can Too)
The Shocking Truth About My Affiliate Program
How Affiliate Managers Can Get Focused and Stay Focused
Inside the Mind of a Strategic Affiliate Marketer
Matt McWilliams: If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, you’re going to love this conversation. Today I’m talking with someone who’s written for top publications, built affiliate programs from scratch and approaches every campaign with strategy and intention. We’re going to break down his process, what actually works and how you can think more like a strategic affiliate marketer too.
Let’s get started. So today’s episode is a little different and honestly it was a whole lot of fun. I think I laughed more on this episode than I have in a long time. There’s a few parts we had to just edit out because that, well, we got a little goofy sitting down with somebody who I have known for a decade now, my friend Kyle Young. He’s, he’s a strategic marketer. He’s done affiliate marketing, he’s been, we’ve done stuff together. Brilliant connector. And now finally, finally as I make fun of him in the beginning, he’s a published author Character.
Matt McWilliams: Truth be told, if you had asked me, you know, 10 years ago when we first met, who’d be the first one to release a best selling book, I would have totally have picked Kyle. I would not have picked me because I didn’t think that. I just didn’t think that was going to be a thing and I just assumed he would have written one, you know. And so he finally did though, and his new book is called Success as a Numbers Game. It just launched and while we’re going.
To, we’re going to talk about the book a little bit.Of course, more than that, we’re talking about how he thinks about affiliate marketing. Not just from the author side, but from the affiliate side too. Kyle has worked with some major publications and he’s going to talk about, you know, how he does that actually, you know, Entrepreneur magazine, Fortune, Psychology Today, Fast Company, you know, some big ones. And this guy knows how to build relationships and he knows how to show up with value and he knows how to treat affiliate marketing like the long.
Term game that it is. We talk about, you know, why numbers really do matter in affiliate marketing and how to play the numbers game the right way. We talk about some of the stuff that he did kind of behind the scenes of his book launch to get support, how to pitch yourself to big publications, how to stand out. That’s one of my favorite things. You know, like, you can do what he’s done. You know, you can get articles in these major publications which can totally build your brand. And then eventually, when you do write a book, it sets you up to get a major publisher like he did. Even how his background in ministry helped.
Shape his marketing mindset. So you’re going to love this conversation. It’s very practical. Even though we do get a little goofy at times. It’s honest. And Cal brings just a ton of some really deep, kind of just more. So than a lot of guests.
Deep insight, right? Like kind of that goes like that extra layer, deeper, beyond. Just like, here’s the one thing you can do. So whether you’re an author, an affiliate manager, an affiliate marketer, a content creator, whatever, it is just a ton of awesome stuff in this interview with Kyle. So let’s get into it. Here’s my interview with Kyle Young. Before we do. And this is. I’m adding this post production because we caught this as we were editing the interview. Realize that the entire interview I recorded through the wrong microphone. So that’s super awesome that I don’t know how it happened. It’s the lesson there, I’m going to tell you in advance is always check your settings.
Even if you have checked them the. Last 60 times and they have been perfect every time, the 61st time will get you. And that’s what happened here was I haven’t checked my settings in over a year and they’ve always been perfect. And then this one time, they’re not. Like, you know, I don’t do a ton of interviews and then I finally do one on Zoom and my settings are off. So check your settings, as I should have. But this is such a good interview that I think you can get over the fact the audio quality is not exactly perfect. Anyway, with all that said, here’s my discussion with Kyle.
Well, Kyle, welcome, my friend. Thank you for having me. This feels like a long time coming. Dude. You finally wrote a book.
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Kyle Young: I finally wrote a book. That’s what it took. This whole time. After 10 years of friendship and working together, you’ve just been waiting on me to write a book. If I’d known, I would have written one sooner.
Matt McWilliams: I baited breath. Baited breath. So, man, I’m excited for it. I mean, you and I go way back. I know. Gosh. I mean, we’re talking like 2015. Jeff. Goins, you know, launches like this is. I only had one kid when we first met, man. So I know. I know a pretty good amount of your story. I’m going to share one quick, fun tidbit that when Kyle and I had known each other for like two years, I was looking for an email from him and realized he had emailed me like, three years before. So, like a year before he and I ever met. And I found this email and I had. I don’t know if I’d missed it or what, but I had completely ignored your email. And I remember just feeling so bad. I was like, I texted you. I was like, hey, I found that email from three years ago. I don’t think it’s relevant, but. Sorry, No, I remember that.
Kyle Young: Well, I was in my first job out of college well over a decade ago, and I had a question about affiliate marketing, and you were the man to ask. So I thought, I’m gonna. I’m gonna take a chance and I’m gonna find this guy’s email address. And I was a big admirer of the work you were doing. And so I sent an email and didn’t hear back, and that’s totally fine. But it was funny that a few years later I found myself working with this person that I’d always seen as such an expert. And now I’m on the podcast. So what a. What a journey for me.
Matt McWilliams: Full circle, you know, because you finally wrote a book, so. Which is just a side note, everybody. The best way to get a hold of me is to text me. By the way, 260-217-4619, you can text me anytime. And I do respond to those. In fact, I just responded to one about five minutes ago. I do respond to those where those don’t get lost like Cal’s emails do. So, anyway, after that fun story there, I know your story, but I’d love for you to share just a little bit about, like, what’s your background in affiliate marketing? And then I want to talk about this book. But like what? Like different campaigns have you run or been a part of, Launches, all that stuff, both as an affiliate, but also maybe on the other side that kind of shaped your thinking on probability, which is ultimately, you know, pretty good chunk of what this book’s about.
Kyle Young: Yeah, big question. Let me see if I can break this down. Well, I’ve been a business strategy consultant for roughly a decade. I come into small businesses. Typically there’s a subject matter expert who knows a lot about something and has some attention online because of it. And they’re looking for ways to monetize that attention or grow the monetization of that attention.
So the gardening columnist for the New York Times is a longtime client of mine. I have a client who’s an organizational psychologist who goes into organizations, helps them become more productive. I have a client who’s a PhD nutritionist who is a part of a well funded nonprofit that’s trying to convince Americans, the most carnivorous people on the planet, to eat more plant based foods. All kinds of different experts on lots of different subjects.
I come in, help them make more money with what they know. And what do all of them want? Well, to some extent, you know, we’re all looking for growth. And so affiliate marketing has always been a really logical extension of that. Who do I know who I can potentially introduce, potentially get to mail, refer? And so that’s certainly been a part of my career. Typically, you know this Matt. A lot of launches will have sort of an internal launch director and then an affiliate launch director.
There’s somebody running the affiliates and somebody running the internal list and making sure that the product is where it’s supposed to be, managing the technology. I’m typically the internal launch director. I’ve run probably close to 50 launches and I would say over half of those were, you know, at least a six figure launch. I’ve had a few different opportunities with organizations that I worked with for years to launch repeatedly and so got a lot of reps in and that was cool.
So there’s certainly been a big component of that in my career. But the other side of it has been affiliate marketing through SEO and through niche websites. I’ve started a few sites in that space. The biggest and most successful was a site that reviewed elearning platforms like Masterclass, Skillshare, LinkedIn, learning all organic Traffic. And I grew that site with a partner to the point where ultimately it was the. We were the number two affiliate in the world for masterclass, which many people have probably seen. Yeah, seen advertisements.
Matt McWilliams: I didn’t know that.
Kyle Young: Yeah, that was a cool journey. We ultimately sold through a brokerage for between 3 and 400,000. And that was a fun exit. I as a consultant, you know, try to be pretty well rounded and that was just such a gap in my knowledge. What does it take to list with a broker? What is that, you know, journey of finding your multiplier, having calls with prospective buyers? So I went through it in large part just to increase my own education, sold the site. I’ve had the opportunity to sell others since and that’s also been a big part of this is affiliate income through SEO.
Matt McWilliams: Now, on a personal note, was that the broker you introduced me to?
Kyle Young: That was. So I started with a different broker. And the different broker, really, I want to be very careful. That relationship didn’t work.
Matt McWilliams: You don’t have to say the name.
Kyle Young: I worked with a very famous broker. It didn’t work great. And then I made a switch to the broker that I introduced you to. And that broker, I’m happy to say, is named Chelsea Clark. She owns a company called Niche Investor, and she found a great buyer for us, and it was a really cool thing that actually even led to a relationship. I became a part of a pretty exclusive group of online business owners through that transaction. They invited me into the group, and so it was really collaborative, and I’m very thankful for that.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Yeah. So thank you again for the intro, by the way, because of course, we, you know, I was able to. Gosh, I was able to sell one of our businesses and maybe 40 days.
Kyle Young: That’s amazing. I didn’t know the end of the story. I knew that. I knew I made the introduction. I didn’t know that it went the distance. Good for you.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. I mean, only marginally under asking price, which is, you know, again, if you know anything about selling businesses or real estate, that’s pretty. Basically, we got exactly what we expected. And. But it was a lot quicker than I expected. And so I know I had told you, like, that was a business. I was just. It was eating up my time.
Kyle Young: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: I remember my soul, and I needed to get out of it. And I was so thankful. Like, I. I would have, frankly, if it. If you could tell me, I would have sold it in half the time. I would have taken half the money, you know, but, yeah, didn’t have to. I didn’t have to. So.
Kyle Young: Shout out to Chelsea Clark, nation investor.
Matt McWilliams: She’s helped us both to put in a link. So, a little bit I want to talk about the book, but I know one of the things that set you up for, like, the reason you even have a book today, I think is twofold. Now, this is my hypothesis. Number one, obviously, your level of expertise. That’s. That’s a big part of it. But there’s a lot of people out there who are experts at stuff and can’t write a book.
I think the thing that set you up for being in this position is just your experience writing for. I mean, name a. Name a publication that people probably read on a weekly or monthly basis. You know, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, etc. Etc. I think that Al1, it, it honed your craft. I think that’s an important thing. Like I think just enough people, especially in the age of AI. Here’s the thing, I’m going to break the news to you. AI is not good enough to do more than 30% of the writing yet. Will it get there in five years? I’m sure it will. It’s not there as of this recording, but you honed your craft. That’s one and two. You built an audience. But I’m just curious, like, what’s that done for you? Maybe like, what can people learn from what you’ve done to be able to replicate the playbook of what you’ve done with just being a part of those organizations and those publications?
Kyle Young: Yeah, it’s a quirky thing about me that one of just the arguments that I make to just about anyone who has a goal is I think it’s really important to try to write for major publications. And that sounds so arbitrary, that sounds so counterintuitive. It sounds like a lot of work.
In some ways it is. But I found that nothing gives you quicker credibility than being able to say that you write for major publications in the space where you ultimately want to have some success. When I say I’m a writer for Harvard Business Review, I had a $240,000 consulting contract, which I don’t say to flex on myself, but I want you to hear this story and understand the stakes.
I was interviewing. Get some other people who were all just as qualified as I was. That was just one line was, well, I’m a writer. Actually. I remember the line when the interviewer said, here’s the truth. We’re interviewing a lot of people. You all kind of bleed together. Tell us one thing that’s different about you. And I said, I’m a writer for Harvard Business Review. I get hired for this multi six figure contract.
And I asked somebody afterwards, why’d you pick me? And she said, well, you write for hbr. You write for Forbes and Fast Company and Psychology Today and Business Insider and CNBC and the Boston Globe. And when we heard all of those things, it was, it communicated to us what I believe it can communicate for anyone, which is this person has some good ideas, they’re relatively credible, right?
There’s people respect them, they have access to an audience that’s helpful for goals like publishing or affiliate marketing. But then also they’ve been vetted to some extent. Somebody took the time to look into their background and make sure they weren’t saying crazy things online, make sure that they were a decent enough person that they were willing to lend them this platform.
And what I think is really powerful about major publications. I want to give a specific affiliate marketing application in a second. But what a lot of people fail to fully appreciate is how much staying power these brands have. I have clients who have written for the New York Times and open doors for themselves every week because they are a New York Times contributor. Here’s the twist.
Some of those people haven’t written for the New York times in over 20 years. It’s been a really long time. But that brand is as powerful today as it was then. And so when they say I’m a contributor to the New York Times, it still has an impact. It still opens doors for them. In the case of Harvard Business Review, they’re reviewing a piece for me right now in conjunction with the book that I’m releasing.
But the last article I published there was seven years ago. It still opens doors for me because these brands have found ways to be relevant, you know, throughout these different decades. I want to give a really specific affiliate marketing application, which is I found that writing for these major publications is incredibly helpful for opening doors with affiliate programs. There’s obviously affiliate programs that are more relationship driven.
Somebody’s maybe selling an information product. You reach out, you connect with them one on one. There are some that are a little bit more institutionalized, right? You’re on a network like CJ or Impact Radius or Awin and. And in those cases, one of the biggest affiliate programs I worked with with the site that reviewed elearning companies that I sold for quite a bit of money. One of the biggest programs that we ended up working with rejected us initially.
And I sent a response and said, hey, saw that we were rejected. I’m Kyle, writer for Forbes and Psychology Today, and these different places would love for you to reconsider. I. When I do that, and I’ve had to do this multiple times, I don’t just typically get an acceptance. I usually get an apology, which is crazy. I’m not asking for that at all. I’m just writing a friendly email saying, would you reconsider? And oh, Mr. Young, we’re so sorry. You know, we fired the intern over this. We didn’t read your email carefully enough. It opens so many doors online when you have the ability to demonstrate some authority in a space where sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s real and who’s just posing.
Matt McWilliams: So I want to get into. I want to get into the, you know, the whole concept of probability hacking. And I want to get into the book, but yeah, sure, let’s. Let’s talk.
Kyle Young: We can talk about affiliate marketing all you want, man. I’m good to go.
Matt McWilliams: Talk about what you just talked about because take your time again. Hbr, Forbes, Psychology Today, Fast Company, you know, New York Times, all those types of things like you said. I mean, the credibility level, it’s kind of like, you know, with. With my book, I don’t know if I told you, by the way, it launched today, the day that we’re recording this. Yay.
Kyle Young: Amazing.
Matt McWilliams: So I called it the Book on Affiliate Management, because now I can literally say I wrote the book on affiliate management. You did.
Kyle Young: You wrote the book on affiliate.
Matt McWilliams: Original name was the Affiliate Management Bible. And that actually in everything that I did, like, you know, you know, asking Grok and Asking GPT and Asking Claude, like, what would be the better title? Every one of them said the Affiliate Management Bible or the Affiliate Manager’s Bible, you know, because a lot of people, like, as far as, like, search results, but from a branding standpoint, I felt like. I kind of felt strongly about the book on Affiliate Management because it’s just a. Again, it literally says on my site now, we wrote the book on affiliate management. Well, our CEO Matt did, you know.
Kyle Young: Sure. And so I’m going to jump in and say, I think there’s a nice SEO play there too, because what are people going to search for if they ever want to book on that topic? Books on Affiliate Management. And you now have a title that’s so similar to that. I think it could give you a leg up.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that was a. That was a side benefit that I definitely think will help. And. And so the same kind of thing, like, just the branding behind doing, you know, doing those types of things like you did. What’s the. Specifically, in 2025, I’d imagine it’s changed a little bit now I’m curious, like, what’s the process for that? You know, you have somebody who’s. Let’s say they’re, you know, they’re a decent writer. Yeah. Maybe not perfect, but they’re good. You know, they got good ideas. Okay, you know what?
Matt McWilliams: I’m gonna.
Matt McWilliams: I’m gonna ask this. I’m gonna ask a weird kind of a way.
Kyle Young: Please.
Matt McWilliams: So. And I’ve written for some publications, but frankly, they came to me. So I. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know that I’m interested. I don’t even know if I Want to do it personally? Don’t know. We’ll have to about setting that later. But let’s say I wanted to write for Fast Company. Yeah, hbr, whatever. What, what’s that process look like? How does somebody go about doing that? Sure.
Kyle Young: So I’ll give you kind of the.
Matt McWilliams: DIY way thing from my friend Kyle, who I could just text and ask how to do it and he would tell me, but now he gets to tell in front of all you.
Kyle Young: You know, I feel like half of all podcasts are people who want free consulting and I’m honored to be a part of it. So I think that there’s kind of a DIY way and then I think that there is a maybe a more expensive way that can potentially accelerate your success. So the DIY way is the gatekeeper at a publication like say, Fast Company is called an editor.
Now, Fast Company has many editors, and these are people who ultimately commission pieces for publication. Now, commissioning in some context means they pay you. There are sites that pay several hundred dollars, even for short articles. There are others that do not pay you. And interestingly, something I want you to understand is a lot of times it’s kind of the opposite of what you would think.
It’s a little counterintuitive. The more prestigious sites often do not pay you because they don’t need to pay you. The less prestigious sites are sometimes more excited to write you a decent check for an article. I don’t believe Fast Company did pay me when I wrote for them. So what you do is you find an editor at that publication. You can do that. I mean, you could go on LinkedIn and search editor at Fast Company.
You could do that in goog. You could go on Twitter and just look for people who have that in their bio description. Sometimes you can find it on the website itself. Go to a tool like Rocket Reach is one that I use a lot. Put in the person’s name. Yeah, Rocket Reach is amazing. It was so helpful for getting blurbs for my book. I’m finding email addresses for some of the most famous people in the world. And that’s not for a second to say that they all endorsed me, but some of them did. You know, Seth Godin blurred my book. That was incredible. And Rocket Reach is really helpful for.
Matt McWilliams: Ultimately how you find emails for affiliates, because people.
Kyle Young: So yeah, Rocket Reach, big, big fan of that. So go on Rocket Reach, try to find an email address for that person and then you’re going to send them an email. And I know that sounds just so inglorious. But that’s what you do. You send them an email, and the email is a pitch for an article you would like to write for that site. And you’re going to try to make the case for why they should give you the opportunity to do this.
So that’s going to take a little bit of credibility from you. In my case, having written for other websites, I can call that out, but maybe you don’t have that. But you would come at them and say, hey, I’m Kyle. I know that you have a lot of readers who are entrepreneurs. And right now, a lot of entrepreneurs are wanting to understand what is the role of AI in entrepreneurship.
And so I was hoping to write an article that would be about seven ways entrepreneurs can use AI to accomplish more when they have a small team. Why am I the perfect person to write this? Well, I’m the founder of five businesses that I exited from. All of them relied heavily on AI. All of them were mostly automated. And I want to share some of those experience with your experiences with your readers. Would you be interested in something like that?
Can I send over a full draft? And so that is a way to do that. Now you get told no a lot. Especially now. A lot of big publications have to lay people off. And the people who used to be staff writers are now freelancers. So sometimes you’re competing against people who have really good credentials, really good connections. But I think my writing resume is proof that it’s still totally possible to break into these publications, if you’re willing to get told.
Know some. I wrote an article one time. It was about a man who was really about a young. A young boy. His dad comes back from war. And when his dad gets back, the kid’s sleeping in his bedroom. And he was so excited to have his dad home again. But at night, he started to hear screams coming from his dad’s bedroom, like he was having a nightmare. And as time went on, these nightmares get worse and worse and worse. And he ends up losing his wife. He loses his job, he loses his house.
And his son watches this horrible deterioration in his life because of ptsd. And this is a true story. His son, ultimately, when he got a little bit older, goes to college and became a computer programmer. And he invented a smartwatch app. And what the app would do is it would track biometrics to identify when his dad was starting to have a nightmare. And it would vibrate just enough to pull him out of the dream. Not enough to wake him up, but enough to pull him out of the dream. And it Helped his dad get his life back.
And what was interesting about that is this young man didn’t know how to solve the issue of ptsd, but he found a way to still address a problem even though it wasn’t a true solution. So I used that story to write an article about how to handle a problem you can’t solve. I sent it to hbr. They said, this is way too emotional for us. Like, cool article, too emotional. We’re not interested. I sent it to the Wall Street Journal. I don’t think even heard back from the Wall Street Journal. I sent it to several different publications.
I ultimately sent it to Psychology Today. And oh my gosh, I mean, it was like Christmas morning for them. Like a story about a person overcoming PTSD with real world applications for our decision making. That was so on brand for them. They loved it. They gave me a column with that gives me the ability to write on Psychology Today whenever I want. So a big part of this process is you’re going to send things multiple places. You’re going to get told no a lot. But some people will tell you, tell you yes, it’s a numbers game and you just keep trying.
I had an article recently that cnn, I thought it was going to be with cnn, they said no, Wall Street Journal. I thought it was going to be with Wall Street Journal. They said no. It ended up on Forbes. So you just need to be a little bit open to that. It gets easier over time as your writing resume improves. So I said that was kind of the DIY version, the accelerated version, if you want, is you can hire a publicist. And sometimes publicists will have relationships with editors of these publications that can kind of move you to the front of the line, help your pitches get a little bit more attention.
They can also coach you. I hired a PR firm for my book just to save me time and to hopefully form relationships that I didn’t already have. And it was certainly easier. They have brought some new publications, which is great, but also some of the ones I’ve written for before. It was much easier to get back into them when you had, you know, somebody on your team who already had a lot of those existing relationships. The challenge is you’ll build a relationship with an editor and then they’ll switch jobs. And now you’re a past contributor to that website, but you don’t know anyone there anymore. It’s nice to have somebody in your team whose full time job is to keep those connections warm.
Matt McWilliams: I mean, you just described how to grow an affiliate program. It’s a numbers game.
Kyle Young: 100% it is, people.
Matt McWilliams: And if you want the accelerated version, you. You hire an agency like ours. I mean.
Kyle Young: Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Matt McWilliams: You know, you can absolutely do it yourself. I tell. I think I’ve mentioned this before, you know, listeners. I. I tell 96, 97 of the potential clients that we talk to. I talk them out of working with us. I. Nope. At least for the next year, you’re better off doing it yourself. And here’s why. Like, you’re going to build it to a certain point, and you’re going to do that for a fraction of the cost of hiring us. And then we can come in and throw gasoline on the fire, but you’re going to build the fire. You know, and by telling, like, be prepared to hear no 95 out of 100 times, it sounds like you’re saying the same thing with this. So there’s no magic formula. I mean, it’s just dogged persistence, being willing to say no. And, you know, having that good. That story, by the way, I’m gonna have to look that up on Psychology Today. That sounds absolutely amazing. Like, as you’re telling that story, I’m just, like, so drawn in.
Kyle Young: So I thought it was good. I was a little frustrated. You’re going to be a little frustrated by the people who tell you no, but you just keep pitching it, pitching it, and you’ll find the right home.
Matt McWilliams: And I don’t mean this in, like, a cosmic way or anything like that, but you ended up with a. Like, you set your sights at hbr, and the reality is, like, the audience for Psychology Today is probably not necessarily bigger. I don’t know what the size is. Probably about the same size, if I had to guess, but so much more geared to that. So, like, the fact. No, no, no. Actually ended up producing the better result. And a lot of times that’s, you know, that’s the case with stuff like this.
Kyle Young: Yeah. It’s really helpful to have a diversified writing resume, because different sites will resonate with different audiences. Last night, I mean, I had no.
Matt McWilliams: Idea you were published by Psychology Today until I read, like, the thing.
Kyle Young: Sure.
Matt McWilliams: That, you know, that you sent me, like, that your PR agency put together, and I. I meant to even ask you about that, and I just forgot, like, what it’s. How does my friend Kyle.
Kyle Young: Sure. Yeah. I’m not a psychologist.
Matt McWilliams: Everybody in Psychology Today has, like, a PhD behind their name, and I don’t.
Kyle Young: That is the story of my entire career. It’s me and a bunch of people with with much better credentials than I have. But I’ll tell you the nice thing about having a diverse writing resume is, like I said, different outlets resonate with different people. A lot of times when I list the places I’ve written for, I say the Boston Globe last, just because chronologically it happened a lot later in the journey.
Last night, 8pm I was on a radio show in Boston, a radio show that is broadcasting out of Boston. And they have me on. They say, hey, we got Kyle Young here. He’s a writer for Harvard Business Review in the Boston Globe, because those were two local publications to them that resonated more with that audience. So there’s a lot of benefit. And it’s nice to maybe if you have 10 articles on Forbes, cool. I would say that’s more impressive than having one article on Forbes. But in terms of your ability to demonstrate your authority, sometimes it’s Nice to have one article on 10 different sites and, you know, go wide instead of deep.
Matt McWilliams: I love that, man. That is so freaking cool. All right, let’s talk about the abrupt transition. No segue. Like, no editing.
Kyle Young: Let me build in a segue. Let me build in a segue.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Kyle Young: A couple of times here we’ve talked about how success is a numbers game, how you have an opportunity to write for major publications if you’re willing to try several times, maybe get told no. Matt just mentioned that affiliate marketing is in many ways a numbers game. And I think that’s absolutely true. Kyle Austin Young, friend of Matt McWilliams, is the author of a book called Success is a Numbers Game, published with an imprint of Penguin Random House. Subtitle Achieve bigger goals by changing the odds. And next up, Matt is going to ask some questions about the book.
Matt McWilliams: Oh, that was brilliant.
Kyle Young: If you just want to leave, Matt, I’ll interview myself.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, you know, I got things to do, man. Good. You want to just send me the. Send me the recording.
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Kyle Young: Yeah, I’ll send you the recording. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Matt McWilliams: You know, I mean, with AI now, you could probably interview yourself and then just make my, you know, the questions sound like I’m asking them.
Kyle Young: I’m generally pretty pro AI, but I hate that because, honestly, one of the most fun parts of writing the book was reading the audiobook. It was so cool to go into the studio, do something so different. I was working with a music producer who was in the studio when Green Day recorded American Idiot. As just a tech, you know, plugging in chords, so many great stories. I had so much fun recording the audiobook. And I had another author tell me recently, I can’t wait till I can read our books for us and sound like us. And I thought, oh, those were three of the best days of my year.
Matt McWilliams: So this is. So I mentioned, you know, we’re in the same boat. So one of our clients is. He has a book coming out next year. I’ll tell everybody more about it soon. But he has a book coming out. He’s. He’s in Nashville, actually, by the way.
Kyle Young: Yeah, me too.
Matt McWilliams: Pretty close Ish to you. So he’s a guy, if you’ve ever been to, like a Dirk Spentley show, a Brad Paisley show, a Garth Brooks show, Taylor Swift show, like any of them. He’s the guy that does the live video that’s playing.
Kyle Young: Oh, nice. Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Matt McWilliams: Music videos, all kinds of stuff. And the guy’s amazing and he has an amazing story. We don’t need to get into that. But. So I am actually going to record my audiobook here in the next few weeks. And I’m going to be doing it from his tour bus, not while it’s moving, but because his podcast studio and his recording this again, this guy’s like, got the most high end of stuff. Like, my podcast studio is rough. It’s like $1,000.
Kyle Young: Oh, totally.
Matt McWilliams: Studio is in the six figures.
Kyle Young: Same boat man on his tour bus.
Matt McWilliams: So we’re just going to sit there, me and a bucket full of, you know, Hall’s cough drops and some throat coat tea and record the, you know, the audiobook.
Kyle Young: Very cool.
Matt McWilliams: And, you know, they’ll be like. And that’s the thing is, like, you can’t do this with AI. And again, we’re going down the traffic trail. But you started it, so.
Kyle Young: Oh, I. This is going exactly how I expected it.
Matt McWilliams: The audiobook, it should be a little bit different than the regular book. There should be something in there. And there’s like a story I can tell. And so there’s a story I tell in the book about. Because, you know, what’s it called? The tin roof in Franklin.
Kyle Young: The ten roof one in Nashville as well, I think. So.
Matt McWilliams: It’s one of the 4812 music bars in the Nashville area.
Kyle Young: Okay, sure.
Matt McWilliams: Anyway, it’s in Cool Springs, you know, right off G Boulevard.
Kyle Young: Yeah, I know exactly what that is.
Matt McWilliams: So anyway, tin roof, I don’t know. This is like 16. This 17, 18 years ago, actually. And where I had my. I had my little Windows phone, if you remember the windows phones back before the iPhone came out.
Kyle Young: Sure.
Matt McWilliams: And we’re in the tin roof and we’re there with a potential affiliate. This affiliate is considering giving us 10% of his traffic, which usually like a 40% growth in our company.
Kyle Young: Yeah, it’s huge.
Matt McWilliams: But so anyway, we’re talking to him. This guy’s, you know, he’s a big wig. We’re, we’re really excited for him to be there. We’ve wind and dined him for the past 24 hours. And he sees this guy at the bar and he’s like, oh my gosh. He goes, that’s. And you know, at the time I didn’t catch what he, what name he said, but he said, that’s so and so. He’s the lead guitarist for, for Rascal Flats. Turns out the guy’s name is Joe Don Rooney. All right, so I’m like, shoot, I don’t know what to do here. Like, he’s like really excited. I’m like, it’s Nashville. Yesterday I saw Carrie Underwood and Naomi Judd in a Walmart. You know, like, you run into people all the time. And Lance Armstrong were sitting next to us at Jay Alexander’s. Like, this is a nothing burger. Whoop dee doo, the lead guitars.
Kyle Young: I’m so glad you know what a nothing burger is, Matt. I thought only my wife knew that and now me. Because whenever I use it thinking I’m gonna be cool, like the young kids, they always just kind of of raise an eyebrow at me, like, what are you talking about?
Matt McWilliams: Say that. So six, seven.
Kyle Young: So I, I went trick or treating the other day and there was someone dressed up. One of them had a six in their back, one of them at a seven. And the kids are all going, oh, it’s six seven. I have. I to this day have no clue what that means. I asked them to explain it to me. They gave an explanation. I still have no clue.
Matt McWilliams: Here’s the short version. It means it’s. It means it’s really mid.
Kyle Young: Oh, okay. I know what mid means. That’s good. Yeah, I’m hanging in there.
Matt McWilliams: It’s a 6 7. You know, like iPhone 13. That’s 6 7, you know.
Kyle Young: Okay, good to know.
Matt McWilliams: It’s not 17, you know, so I’m.
Kyle Young: Probably not going to use it, but I’m glad that I understand it.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I use it only because there’s a long story. I don’t have time for now. So anyway, we see Joe Dunrooney. I’m googling on my Windows phone, you know, on dial up Internet. Basically lead you Know who’s members of the band Rascal Flats and like looking at their pictures and like, oh, it’s that guy. So I’m like, okay, I got his name. I go left. Come here with me. I bring Lev over and I go, joe Don, let me introduce you to Lev. And like, this has happened to him every day of his life. Joe Don Rooney goes, lev, it is great to meet you. And he’s like, where are you from? 30 seconds. He’s like, let’s take a picture. Dude was on cloud nine. I. I like walk away. I look back at him and he just goes like that kind of to.
Kyle Young: Me, you know, what a wingman.
Matt McWilliams: And I mean like, dude, that could have gone sideways.
Kyle Young: Sure.
Matt McWilliams: Right.
Kyle Young: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: So like, there are elements to that story. That’s because of book about affiliate manager. I couldn’t turn that into like a seven page, you know, story that I would love to tell more about that story in the audiobook. And that’s what audiobook should be. So that’s my thing about audiobook. Okay, let’s talk about this book though.
Kyle Young: Okay.
Matt McWilliams: Why. Why Success is a numbers game. Like, why did you even write it?
Kyle Young: Sure. So ultimately, this is my attempt to teach something that’s been really important to my consulting career for the last 10 years. Ultimately, my clients are the people who come to me with a goal. They have something they want to accomplish, and they’re concerned that they’re not going to accomplish it. They’re concerned that their odds of success aren’t good enough.
And so my job has always been, how do I make those odds better? While acknowledging that I can’t guarantee that they’re going to get the outcome they want. It’s ultimately going to be me trying to give them a better chance of success. Me trying to take them from somebody who could succeed to someone who, who should succeed. Excuse me. And I do something called I create a success diagram.
A success diagram is where I list out everything that has to go right in order for you to get the outcome you want. And then for each thing that has to go right, I write down the things that could go wrong instead. So I’m going to give a really simple example of that. Let’s say that you’re training to run a marathon. You’ve got 90 days, not a lot of time. So you hire a running coach.
And she says, I can get you there in time, but you’re going to have to do three things. I need you to eat, sleep and train the way that I tell you to. And if you follow These plans exactly. You’re going to be ready on race day. If you don’t, I can’t get you where you need to be in three months time. So in this scenario, there’s three things that have to go right. You got to eat, sleep, and train.
What I encourage people to do is then try to estimate how likely they think it is that each of those prerequisites is going to happen. So let’s use really simple round numbers. Let’s just say 70% across the board. We feel pretty good about it. We think there’s a 70% chance we’ll eat the way we’re supposed to. A 70% chance we’ll sleep the way we’re supposed to. A 70% chance we’ll train the way we’re supposed to.
Now this is where most people make a big mistake. Most human beings, when they’re trying to understand their odds of success, fall into a trap called averaging. We instinctively put some thought into what is it going to take for us to accomplish a goal. Do I feel like I have what it takes to pull this off? The problem is, then we fall for the trap of averaging.
If the individual steps look likely to happen, we assume that our goal as a whole is likely to happen. That’s not mathematically sound. In reality, we have to multiply those individual odds together to find our overall outlook. And if we do that, in the case of a marathon, even though there’s only three things that have to go right, and even though we think we have a 70% chance of getting every single one of them, or getting each of them rather, the ultimate odds of our success are 34%.
This is an expected failure. We do not think that this is going to work. And a lot of people are pursuing goals with bad odds because they don’t understand that. And so that’s the beginning of the framework is helping people get a sense of their actual odds of success. And then the second part is taking them through a five step framework for ultimately improving their odds. And again, that comes down to ultimately, let’s list out the potential bad outcomes that could happen instead of what you want.
If you have to train a certain way for 90 days, what are the bad outcomes that could happen instead of that? Well, maybe it’s raining on a day when you need to train and you’re not able to train because of the weather. What can we do in response to that? What can we do in preparation for that? You might need a gym membership for a little while. Maybe you lose motivation. A month and a Half in. Maybe we need a running partner, somebody who can hold you accountable. Maybe you fall prey to an injury.
We can’t completely eliminate that risk, but there might be certain stretches or certain things we could do to try to reduce the risk of an injury. So ultimately, my job is to try to help people improve their odds of success step by step. Design plans that are as optimized as they can be. And I found that that’s a system that can be applied to a wide variety of goals, certainly including online sales in a lot of ways. You know, you and I both know that selling is overcoming objections.
If you can cancel out all of a person’s objections to not do something, then they’ll probably do it. So the goal is to cancel as many of those as you can. And I see what I call probability hacking is basically trying to sell life on the future. You want those alternate futures. Those alternate outcomes are sort of life’s objections to what you want to happen. You want to run a marathon. But. Yeah, but what if it. What if I want it to rain that day? Or what if I want, you know, for you to lose your motivation? There’s an injury. Whatever the case may be, as we make these bad outcomes less likely to happen, we can change our odds, change our goals, and ultimately change our lives.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, let’s talk about practical terms.
Kyle Young: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: A success diagram. So you mentioned earlier, you’re. You’ve been the internal guy. So you know Colin I met. Because he was the internal guy for Jeff. For Jeff Goins back in about 2015 with TRI. Was it Tribe riders?
Kyle Young: I think that’s right.
Matt McWilliams: Look, I can’t even remember. It feels like a lifetime ago, by the way.
Kyle Young: Yeah, I. I. Very long time ago.
Matt McWilliams: Gosh, it’s. It’s kind of like hitting me now.
Kyle Young: Like how I feel like I’ve lived several lives since then.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, I had a lot. I had, like, no gray hair. I’m over 40%. You know, my probability is that 50% of my hair will be gray by the end of next year. So.
Kyle Young: Might happen.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: Ten years ago, he was the internal manager for the launch. I was the affiliate manager. I was focused on that. And then we. We spent a lot of time kind of in that middle area talking about. Because, you know, affiliates affect everything and everything affects affiliates. So from a practical standpoint, if you’re coming in as, you know, an affiliate, you’re creating a success diagram for a launch, you’re coming in maybe as an affiliate manager. Take us through kind of what that process looks like.
Kyle Young: Sure. If I’m taking. Yeah. So again, there’s always going to be some thought that goes into this. You can’t always do what I call a predictive hack. I can’t always figure out everything that’s going to have to go right. And because of that I can’t always give a reliable estimate in those situations. I just do an easy hack if there’s something I know has to go right. What are the bad outcomes that could keep me from getting what I want?
So some bad outcomes that we see a lot in the affiliate space are people agree to do something, they agree to promote, but then there’s a conflict on their calendar and they’re not able to actually take action or something happens to get in the way of their schedule. So especially with heavy hitting affiliates, people with a big audience, one way that we often hack that is you try to get them on a call, you try to get them swipe copies scheduled in their email provider well in advance, you know, maybe a week, even two weeks in advance.
So that if they go into labor, if they, you know, have to go on vacation or take a kid to the hospital, if they realize that they double booked themselves. Now it is automated that this email is going to go out and it puts you in a position to hopefully be successful. So that would be one example. But yeah, ultimately you’re trying to find a way to make it as unlikely as possible that something keeps them from doing what they need to do. And as unlikely as possible that someone who receives an email from an affiliate, ends up on the sales page, ultimately says no.
Those objections are all a potential bad outcome. You know, a bad outcome might be somebody doesn’t buy the product because they think it’s too expensive. How can we address that in the copy? Somebody doesn’t buy the product because they’re worried it’s a scam, they’re worried it won’t work for them. They’re worried they have a really specific, unique set of circumstances that’s going to take them out of the running for this transformation. All of these are potential bad outcomes that we have the opportunity to reduce the risk of. Sometimes we kind of call the system systematically de risking your goals by being creative, being intentional, seeing what the risks are. A lot of people tell you when you’re pursuing a big goal to think positive. I tell people the opposite. I say think negative. I think that you need to be mindful of what could go wrong in your goals because that’s where you have the opportunity to change your odds of success.
Matt McWilliams: Now is part of that almost like, not reverse psychology, but part of it. Like, if you think through all the negatives and still want to do it, like you’re starting a new business, you’re doing something, and you think through all the PBOs, you know, the potentially bad outcomes, and you think through all the negative possibilities and yet you still want to do it, that it’s like that person’s going to succeed. Like, is that. Is that. Is that a psychological thing? In part. Do you think?
Kyle Young: I think there is a psychological component. I think that one of the reasons so many people overestimate their odds of success, some of it is they don’t understand the math. They fall for the trap of averaging. But some of it is they don’t really. They’re not thorough enough in considering the things that could go wrong. When you think about the fact that all possible outcomes have to add up to 100% in terms of their likelihood, all of a sudden you realize that you can’t have a 70% chance of success and a 50% chance of failure.
That doesn’t work. Everything’s going to have to fit into that 100%. And it’s remarkable when you see some people stop and consider all the things that could happen, and you say, how likely do you think this is to happen? And they tell you, how about this? How about this? And then you add it up and they’re at like, 450% per probability. It’s like, well, okay, so we’re. We’re too confident that some of these things are going to work out the way we want them to. In reality, they’re all sharing 100 percentage points, and when that happens, it tends to be something that makes it more realistic for people.
I totally think that taking an honest look at the PBOs is something that’s going to be a gut check to help you decide which goals to pursue from a probability standpoint, from a motivation standpoint. But again, the nice thing about this is I’m not encouraging people to think of what could go wrong to try to talk them out of their goals. I’m encouraging them to think about what could go wrong. Because in most cases, I find that with a little creativity, with a little intentionality, and this is kind of the backbone of my consulting career, we can do things to make those bad outcomes less likely to happen.
I understand probability similar to the way that people have, like, traditionally understood matter. We’ve all heard the phrase that matter can’t be created or destroyed, it can just be transferred and rearranged. And that’s true in probability, too. The odds that you want are hiding in your potential bad outcomes. If you make those less likely to happen, you can steal those odds, bring them over to your side of that.
Matt McWilliams: Okay, so piggybacking on that, there’s. I want to get your thoughts on something that, as I was reading through the book, I. I know what you’re saying, but at the same time, I could see somebody else reading it. Feel like there’s some tension between kind of two opposing views.
Kyle Young: Sure.
Matt McWilliams: And I’d love to get your thoughts on that. So in the book, you quote, know, Thomas Edison said, have a great idea, have a lot of them. I think Seth Godin has paraphrased that as well. The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of bad ideas. And one of the quotes, you know, it’s exactly from the book said every successful person I’ve studied shared one trait. They created more attempts than most people ever would. And then you talk about, like, Beethoven, you know, thousand or whatever, you know, pieces of music.
Kyle Young: 700.
Matt McWilliams: Okay. Seven. Yeah. Mozar was a billion. You know, probably. No, it was like 600. I think that’s exactly right.
Kyle Young: 600.
Matt McWilliams: Well, it’s because I just read it yesterday.
Kyle Young: Okay, fair enough.
Matt McWilliams: You know, and you talk about these like, you just talk about like one of the exact quotes was like, I’m going to butcher this. But they. They didn’t beat the odds. They just had.
Kyle Young: They played them. Yeah, sometimes you don’t have to beat the odds. Sometimes you can just play them. If nine out of 10 businesses fail, then we expect one out of 10 businesses to succeed. And there’s some.
Matt McWilliams: You mentioned that 450 earlier. You know, the 400, that adds up to 450%. I think in theory you can do that, though. If you have, you know, 20 opportunities, 50 opportunities, then there is a 100% chance or approaching that 100% chance that one of them will succeed, even if only. Even if individually they only have a 10% chance or something like that. So I want to contrast that with the idea of. In the book, you talk about decision fatigue and that being a problem. And like, so they kind of like.
Matt McWilliams: I think I get it.
Matt McWilliams: But I’d love for you to talk about we need choices, we need options, we need, you know, the best way to have a lot of good ideas is to have a lot of bad ideas, but also, like the decision fatigue and how those two things kind of don’t contradict each other. Does that make sense?
Kyle Young: Yeah, I don’t really put as much stock in this idea of, like, decision fatigue option overwhelm as some people do. That’s me personally. You know, you mentioned the story of Thomas Edison. What I find is that it’s not hard to identify the best option if you have a clear standard to measure your options against. So let’s talk about his story. He’s in a race with these other inventors to try to create the first practical incandescent lamp.
And what that came down to was finding a filament that could burn hot enough to glow, to create light without catching on fire and burning your house down, or snuffing out quickly and ultimately not providing, you know, any lasting benefit. So what did he do? Why did he beat all of these other inventors who were also trying to find a practical filament for the incandescent lamp? Well, the experimented with, I think it’s 6,000 different plant materials.
And he ultimately finds that carbonized bamboo incandescence the longest without burning out and without catching on fire. So the fact that he had 6,000 different options to choose from wasn’t overwhelming. It was just a question of which one was most likely or not most likely. Which one proved the most useful in the context of the goal that he was pursuing. So I find that when you don’t have something that obvious, a success diagram can be that plumb line for you.
And so what I mean by that is if you have a list of everything that has to go right in order for you to accomplish a goal, or at least everything that you know of and everything that might go wrong corresponding with those different things that need to happen, it becomes a lot easier to weigh your options because you now have the opportunity to imagine a hypothetical future where you have one asset instead of the other, where you hire candidate A instead of candidate biological. How does candidate A impact these potential bad outcomes? Do they make them less likely? Do they make them more likely? Does having this person on the team introduce new potential bad outcomes? You now have an ability to apply the different things that you’re considering to a hypothetical future. And when you do that, I find that you can pretty easily rule out bad ideas and hone in on the good ones.
Matt McWilliams: Man, I wish I’d had this. I won’t mention the name of the company, but a company that I became involved. It’s the company I was talking about earlier that a year after buying, I was selling for less than I purchased it for. Yeah, I wish I had this framework then, because I think, you know, it made sense. Like Subjectively, it made sense more. And I, if I looked at those PBOs and I looked at, okay, like those, those component pieces and said, okay, what are the chances that it’s going to do A, 80%, what are the chances it’s going to do B, 60%, what are the chances it’s Going to do C 60%. I looked at that and maybe I didn’t average it, but I went, well, worst case is there’s a 60% chance.
Kyle Young: It succeeds is exactly right. Yeah.
Matt McWilliams: No, I mean, what’s 80 time? That’s 64 times 60. That’s a sub 50% chance.
Kyle Young: Oh, definitely sub 50. Yeah. 100. Your odds will never be higher than the odds of your most improbable prerequisite step. So if you have a goal where there’s 10 things need to go right, 99% chance that nine of them are going to happen, 2% chance that the last one’s going to happen, your odds are guaranteed.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah.
Kyle Young: Lower than 2%. And that’s why it’s so important to really take into account what is everything that has to go right. Because if there’s even one true prerequisite that’s unlikely to happen, your odds are terrible.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Now you tell me.
Kyle Young: Now, I’m not saying that to discourage people. Sure. When you know that you have an opportunity to try to one, design a different plan where that’s maybe not a prerequisite. Let’s say that you’re in a situation where you need someone’s approval or you need someone’s buy in, or you’re trying to email this really respected affiliate manager, hoping that he’ll email you back and instead he ignores you for three years and you have to write a book to come on the podcast.
If you find yourself in a situation like that, you might be able to design a plan that was about you, Matt. I don’t feel you realize that that was about you. Maybe you can design a plan where you don’t need that same prerequisite anymore. Maybe you can design a plan where there’s a different path to get the same thing that you want. Maybe you have an opportunity to probability hack.
Why is that a 2% chance of success? Well, it means that the sum of, of all of the bad outcomes have a 98% chance of happening. What are those potential bad outcomes? Can we make them less likely? Can we change our odds by being intentional? And ultimately, sometimes if you can’t get to numbers that you’re excited about, maybe we need to choose a different goal. Maybe not forever but maybe right now we need to go rack up some other advantages, collect some assets that are going to make it easier for us to accomplish this later. You think about like an under leveled character in a video game that can’t beat the final boss. Do you, do you go complete some side quests, you get better gear, you level up, you try again.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, that’s so true. So, okay, so they’ve gotten themselves into that situation. Let’s say that they’re, they’re reading the book and, or they’re going through, you know, they’re going through it, right? They’re in that situation or they realize now and the, the odds weren’t as good as, as I thought. And there’s a, a quote in the book that really I thought was, you know, it’s not revolutionary, but it really stood out to me. So quitting isn’t failure, it’s awful. Often probability, hacking in disguise. Tell me what you’re in that you’re in it. And now you’re setting up these, you know, these PBOs. You’re setting up the, you know, creating that, you know, that framework, right? Creating the. Oh my gosh, I just had a brain fart. The success diagram. Gosh, could not think of the term. That’s right. You know, you’re setting that up. How do we know when to just, you know what, let’s just pull the plug, let’s quit From a number standpoint.
Kyle Young: Well, you know that to some extent when you have numbers that you aren’t excited about and you are just truly out of ideas for any way to make them better. Now again, this all comes down to some extent to the amount of investment that it’s going to take. In some cases, you know, you, you took the risk of introducing yourself to this Rascal Flat singer because if he said no, it wasn’t the end of the world. Right? Were your odds great? I don’t know, maybe they were terrible. But if he’d said, hey, I’m here with my family, you know, give us some privacy please. Your life goes on.
Not a big deal. If it was a different situation where it was like you were paying, you know, $40,000 for an intro to this Rascal Flats person to then see how it would go, you’re obviously going to want to take that differently. But I think that when we stop to consider what actually has to go right for us to get what we want, when we have a single document that tells us what might go wrong, first of all, we have the ability to collaborate with other people. We can brainstorm. We can look for ways to act collaboratively and try to ultimately change our outcome and our outlook.
But we also then have the opportunity to look at things and at times say, I don’t like these odds. I don’t think I want to do this right now. You know, I’m fortunate now to be publishing this book with an imprint of Penguin Random House. I remember leaving my great grandfather’s funeral. I was 11 years old. We were driving from the church to the cemetery, and I have no idea why, but this is how I remember it. My mother said, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I told her I wanted to be a writer. That was a goal that I’ve had for over 20, almost 25 years, right?
Something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. But it was very obvious, you know, even 10 years ago, that that wasn’t in reach for me at the time. So instead I picked some other goals that I was also excited about. I decided I was going to become a writer for Harvard Business Review in Forbes. I decided that I was going to become a consultant who met the kind of people who could maybe be useful to my publishing goals. You know, became a acquainted with literary agents and editors, became acquainted with people like you, Matt, who have an audience that might, you know, be generous enough to have me on the podcast and give me a chance to talk about my book.
So I accomplished all these other goals, and then that brought these bigger goals within reach. So I’m not a big fan of the idea that you didn’t necessarily quit on your goals. I think sometimes you need to pause them. I think also there are times, even in the context of failure, where you can repurpose the beginning of a goal for a different ending. I think about the story of a group of friends that tried to start a dating website in the early 2000s. They had this state of the art technology that allowed. Allowed you to upload a video to the Internet where you could introduce yourself to people who might want to go on a date with you. At the time, that was incredible, the thought that you could upload videos to the Internet.
And so the next step was they had to get people to start using it. And typically when you’re trying to market a heterosexual dating app, you have to go find women. If you can find the women, you can usually get them in pretty easily. And this group of friends who used to work, I believe, at PayPal, were very unsuccessful in ultimately finding anybody who wanted to use this platform for the purpose of Getting a date. And so they decided that they needed to quit.
But they didn’t throw the entire goal away. They didn’t throw away everything that they’d already accomplished. They repurposed it toward a new ending. And ultimately they said, why don’t we take this video upload technology, which is world class, state of the art disruptive, and let people put any videos they want on the Internet. And so they rebranded the website, they later sold it for one and a half billion dollars because the website that they ultimately founded was YouTube. So just because something isn’t going the way you wanted it to, doesn’t mean that you haven’t collected assets that have changed your odds at other goals that might still be really lucrative.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah, there’s so many stories like that, I think of Slack. Were they like a video game company or something?
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Kyle Young: They absolutely were. They were a video game company and there was a tool that was used either in the development of the game or as part of the game. And that is the company that survived.
Matt McWilliams: As I understand it, they had like a little bit of money left over from investors. They decided the video game stuff was going to fail and they were like, well, you know, we have $50,000 or, you know, 1 million or whatever left over. What do we do? Like, well, we have this tool we created. It’s like, yeah, I mean, at that point they. I don’t know if they made a Hail Mary diagram or not, but they essentially, you know, reassessed it and went, okay, video game company, you know, like odds of make, you know, recouping any of the investors money. And it was like 0% with the video game company. It was like, it’s 0% if we just give them the million dollars or however much money they had. But it was like some percent if we do this Slack thing and, well, here we are today. I don’t even know what it’s worth now, but I imagine there’s a B involved somewhere.
Kyle Young: There very well might be a B involved. You asked me, how do you know when it’s time to quit? One thing that I find that can be helpful, that makes it less discouraging and also brings a lot of clarity, is take stock of the assets you have. You know, maybe you have a great chat interface tool like Slack did, maybe you have a great video uploading tool like the founders of YouTube did. Take stock of your assets and then just make a list of other goals that would be interesting to potentially try to accomplish and make your decision in the context of those opportunities.
It’s hard to turn away from one thing when you don’t know where you’re going to go next. Sometimes that uncertainty is part of life, but it’s easier to make a decision that you’re excited about when you have a list of things. Here’s other goals that I could be investing my time in, maybe leveraging some of the same assets that I’ve already developed, you know, in pursuit of the goal that I have right now. That typically makes it easier to, again, create a diagram that gives you a sense of how the future might go and make a decision that you think is going to be aligned with what you want.
Matt McWilliams: Love it, man. Well, Kyle, this has been awesome, dude. Thank you so much. Last question. Where the heck can people get the book?
Kyle Young: Matt, let me. Let me offer something. You can edit this out if you don’t want. If you want to. Excuse me. We’ve talked a lot about writing for major publications. I didn’t know that we were necessarily going to do that, but can I offer something to your audience for free?
Matt McWilliams: Absolutely, man.
Kyle Young: Okay. I have a class called Authority Generator, how to write for major Publications. That is a $500 class that I created several years ago. I have made over $50,000 selling it. I tell you that to say this is not one of those bonuses where somebody creates something and says it’s worth $2 million and they’ve never sold a copy in their lives. I’ve sold many, many copies of this course. My students have had incredible results.
I have people who have gone on to write for Conde Nast, and then they get offered press clearances to go, you know, stay at different resorts at a discount. I’ve had people who have created incredible opportunities for themselves when it comes to publishing, attracting new consulting clients. This is a class that I normally sell for $500, and I really mean this. If you want to buy two hardcover copies of the book and send me an email with your receipt, just forward the receipt to me. I will give you the $500 class.
And this is something I’ve. I haven’t offered it hardly at all on podcasts. I’ve done it in a few private events. And it’s been something that I’m doing because, again, this is a goal I had when I was 11 years old. This is something I’ve been chasing for 25 years. And I’m. I’m willing to do just about anything to make this book as successful as it can be and to honor my relationship with the publisher. I’m very thankful that they gave me the opportunity to write a book, to make this dream a reality, to share what I’ve learned from a decade of consulting. So if you’d like to do that, you can buy the book, Amazon, Barnes and Noble Bookshop, directly on the Penguin Random House website. Buy two hardcover copies. Send me the receipt. You can email that to, I think supporthoritygenerator.com authority generatormail.com I think they both go to the same place. And I will respond. Give me, you know, a few hours. I’m launching a book. Everything’s crazy, but I will respond with a login for that $500 course.
Matt McWilliams: That’s amazing. And yeah, so, yeah, earlier we, you know, Kyle gave the five minute version of how to do it.
Kyle Young: This is the, this is the much more in depth. This is where I give you email swipe templates like, this is the email that you need to start with if you want to make this work. Here’s how to go into Rocket Reach and find somebody’s email address. Here’s how to ultimately communicate that you have authority in this space. Here’s how to figure out where the gaps in a site’s content are. I teach you something called the mock up method that I won’t share here, but I think it can have a huge impact on how much an editor really thinks about taking you seriously. It’ll be helpful.
Matt McWilliams: Amazing. Thank you, man. That’s awesome, guys. Grab two copies. So one for you and one for somebody that you know needs.
Kyle Young: Easiest book in the world to give away. This is a book for people with goals. I dare you to find someone who does not have any goals.
Matt McWilliams: A book for people with goals. I like that. So get it in the hands of people. This is a great way to do that, guys. I mean, basically for, you know, for 40 bucks, you’re getting a $500 course that’s going to make you a lot more than $500 because that’s how Kyle got this book was being an authority by being on these sites like we talked about earlier. It was the reason why he was able to get the contract, the major, major publisher for this book. So if you’re kind of in that boat where you’re, I don’t know, you’ve been treading water for a while, not sure how to build authority, build an audience.
This is a great way to do it and you’re essentially getting it for the cost of two books. So go grab two books. Send your, send your, your receipt to that email he mentioned. I’ll put that in the show notes and I’ll confirm that email just to be 100% sure with you guys. And when this airs, guys, the book is live, so this is not a pre order. When this airs, the book will have gone live the morning that this airs or the week before, I’m not sure. So it is available. Go grab two copies now. Now. Kyle, thank you so much, man. This has been amazing.
Kyle Young: Thank you for having me. If I could just say one last sentence. If anybody has a question, if I can be useful to you in any way, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Kyle Austin Young. That’s been one of the most unexpected and fun parts of this podcasting journey has been the people who show up in my LinkedIn and say, I had a question about that and it’s been a lot of fun to have those conversations. So please find me if you need me. I’d be happy to help.
Matt McWilliams: Man. I love, I love Kyle’s perspective there. It’s not often that you get to hear from someone who’s been both the affiliate and the person running the launch and Kyle just gets it. Kyle and I, we could, this easily could have been a 10 hour interview, you know, because we could just keep talking. He’s always strategic and thoughtful. It’s all about relationships, all about follow through, all about, you know, the action steps that you can take. And so if this episode got your wheels turning, and I hope it did, then here are a few things you can do next.
Number one, grab Kyle’s book, Success is a numbers game. He talked about that offer guys do not pass up on. I’m going to tell you right now, that’s the playbook right there. So whether you’re an affiliate, you’re an author, you just want to get better at outreach connection. This one is worth reading. You’ll find a link in the show notes and then make sure to reach out to him like he said, with that, the receipt and get that bonus. It’s so good. The second thing is I want you to think about your own numbers game. You know, who do you need to reconnect with? What follow ups have you let slide? What pitches have you not sent because you were waiting for the quote, unquote, perfect time? Take Kyle’s advice, play the long game, keep taking action. And the third thing is I want you to, I want you to let me know what landed for you. Right?
Shoot me a DM. You can tag me on social. Text me at 260-217-4619. I’d love to hear your biggest takeaway. From today’s episode. Finally, if you haven’t yet subscribed, you haven’t given us a rating and review. Could you take 30 seconds on that rating and review? I rarely ask about that, but it really helps so much in getting these episodes in the hands of more marketers and entrepreneurs, folks who want to grow. Their business the right way.
And we’re hearing so much good stuff about the show that I just want to ask you. Take 30 seconds, leave a thoughtful and honest rating and review if you think it’s a four star, not a five star, give me four stars. That’s fine. Hopefully you’re not like listening a lot if you think it three stars or below. I don’t know. I only listen to five star podcasts personally. Like ones that I think are five, five, five stars. You know, ones that I would give six if I could give six to. That’s just me personally. So hopefully that’s this podcast for you. So leave a rating and review if you have 30 seconds and make sure if you haven’t yet hit subscribe because you don’t want to miss the next episode. I’ll see you then. Sam.
See you soon.