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[00:00:00]

Today's episode is sponsored in part by Mint Mobile, WorkingGenius, Rackuten, Connect Team, Found, Shopify, and Indeed. Save big on wireless with Mint Mobile. Get your new three-month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at mintmobil. Com/profiting. Unlock your team's potential and boost productivity with WorkingGenius. Get 20% off the $25 WorkingGenius assessment at workinggenius. Com with code profiting at checkout. Get cash back on every purchase with Rackuten, the smarter way to shop and save. Start all your shopping trips at rackuten. Com or get the Rackuten app to start saving today. Connect Team is a mobile phone employee management app that helps you manage non-desk employees. Open up an account at connectteam. Com and enjoy 14 days free, no credit card needed. Found gives you banking, invoicing, and bookkeeping all in one place and was created for busy entrepreneurs. Try Found for free at found. Com/profiting. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. Com/profiting. Attract interview and hire all in one place with Indeed. Get a $75-sponsored job credit at indeed. Com/profiting. Terms and conditions apply. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes.

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What's up, young and profiters? Welcome back to the show, and I've got something a little different for you today. Instead In the way of replaying one of my YAP classics, I'm sharing an interview that I did on the So Money podcast with Farnush Tarobi. Farnush is an award-winning finance expert. She's one of the top influencers in personal finance, and she invited me onto her to break down some of the secrets behind my success with the podcast and my company, YAP Media. Farnush and I talked about how I started Young and Profiting as a side hustle while working at Disney and how I grew it into one of the top business podcasts in the world. We cover all the things that matter when it comes to launching and growing a podcast, like how to build an audience from scratch, how to grow your show organically, and how to monetize your content even if you're just starting out. You guys know that I love to get into the nitty-gritty, the actionable stuff. So I also talked about the exact strategies I've used to help others grow their podcast, the same strategies that took one show from 200 downloads a month to 200,000.

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Whether you're a podcaster, entrepreneur, or just trying to build your brand, this episode can help take things to the next level. I'm so pumped for you to hear it. Let's get right into it.

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Welcome to So Money. Are you ready to talk about money?

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I am. I'm super excited to be on this show.

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I have a sense it's one of your favorite topics. Your podcast is called Young and Profiting. You love to dish about dollars and cents. But for our time together, Hala, you have so many gifts to give us, so much to teach us about drive, about building a business, about recovering from failure. I was learning a lot about you before our episode now. I love to start sometimes when guests have so much that's going on in their adult lives that's so admiring. I want to know what life was like for you growing up. Who was Hala as a young girl and what were her visions? I have some follow-up questions to that, but I'm just going to let you take that and see where you go with it, because I just love to see if there's any dots to connect there.

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Yeah, 100 %. So as a young girl, I was really, really outgoing. So one funny thing that my parents always say is that I sing before I spoke. I love to sing, and I would break out into performance as a little two, three-year-old. And then fast forward to elementary school, I was the lead in all the plays. I was always this really outgoing, bubbly, shining stars the youngest of four kids, and so had a really outgoing personality. I also had a really strong entrepreneurship spirit at a very young age. I would convince my cousins down the street to do lemonade stands, but then I would take it to the next level and we'd go to the park and make slushy stands. Then in the winter, I would sell hot chocolate. I would have my cousins and my friends make artwork, and then I would sell it to all the parents at the different PTA meetings and things like this. I was always just trying to figure out a way to make money. I would make bracelets and then sell them in the summer. I just always wanted to work. As a kid of immigrant parents, my parents were 100% Palestinian.

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My dad was a surgeon. They really cared about education, and they actually didn't want me to work. I had a job since 13 years old, and I would convince and cry and beg for my parents to take me to work. And allow me to work. I had a job since 13 years old, and I probably had about 15 jobs before I got into college.

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I can relate to that. My parents are also immigrants and prioritize studying over flipping burgers For sure. I'm curious for you, what was the motivation to work at such a young age? There's money involved, but what did the money represent to you? I grew up feeling like as long as I had money in my bank account and a license, I was invincible. Because I saw a lot of women around me who didn't have money, who were even intimidated to drive on the highway. They always insisted that their husbands take the driving seat. I thought, well, that doesn't feel like freedom to me. And this is, again, my child brain deciding what freedom means. But what did work represent for you in terms of your freedom?

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Well, my parents were pretty well off. My dad was a doctor, but I wasn't spoiled at all. Because my dad basically put all my nieces and nephews overseas through college. And my parents grew up really poor. And so they never wanted to buy me clothes or really... I wanted all this fashionable clothes. I wanted cool bags. It was more about me just wanting to pay for my stuff. Most of my jobs were actually retail jobs where I'd sell clothes and get a discount so that I could wear really cool clothes and get makeup that I wanted or skincare that I wanted. It was really just to fund me wanting to spoil myself.

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And so fast forward to today, when you think about your relationship with money, how has it evolved? What is your why, I suppose, for scaling as quickly as you are, and we're going to get into with the successes and so many of the wins of your business. But what drives you now? Because I just did a bunch of episodes on the show about what is enough, and that's a very personal question and answer. And I just want to know, What is your why today as you pursue financial greatness?

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So I understand that life is limitless. I understand that things can scale really quickly if you have the right idea and the right systems. And for me, For me, I'm trying to grow my company to be like a $100 million company, right? So that's my goal, and it's really to help people in the process. I am the type of person where I always have teams around me, even when I had volunteer groups that I couldn't afford to pay. I've always had teams of 20, 30, 40, 50 people that help me with my mission. Even working for free, we can get into that. But I also really enjoy paying for people's livelihoods and having a big team and being responsible for people's salaries and seeing them grow and make more money. That really drives me as well. It's like growing my team and their potential as well really motivates me.

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Tell us about this. I see people calling it a media empire. Yeah, media. You have your own podcast, Young and Profiting, as well as cultivating and growing other podcasts via a network, your own network. You have an MBA, you have background in marketing and consulting. Tell us about the current operation that you have and tell us all about it.

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Yeah. I have multiple businesses. Number one is my podcast that I started five and a half years ago. That's a business entity in itself. We get lots of sponsorships. My personal brand gets lots of sponsorships. I punch way above my weight. I'm a really large podcast, but I make as much money as the top podcast in the world because I really understand how to monetize all my channels. I've really mastered this whole monetization of the podcast industry. That's my first business. My second business is my social agency. I'm one of the biggest influencers on LinkedIn, and I have a social media agency that's known as the number one LinkedIn marketing agency. I run a lot of influencers on that platform, like Marshall Goldsmith and Heather Monhan and Matt Higgens from Shark Tank, Cara Golden of Hintwater. So lots of CEOs, celebrities, podcasters. I run their social media, their LinkedIn, their Instagram, their YouTube, and I also do podcast production. So we were the best podcast agency of 2022 and awarded that. I have a podcast agency and a social agency. That's another part of my business. And then lastly, I have a podcast network. So a year and a half ago, I launched the Yap Media Podcast Network.

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It's the number one business and self-improvement podcast network where I grow and monetize other shows. So the same way that I get sponsorships from my podcast, I also get them for about 25 top business and self-improvement shows, and then I take a rev share of their sponsorship.

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So tell us the secrets. How are you growing podcasts to scale and making it super duper profitable. I have people all the time coming to me and saying, I think I want to start a podcast, but it's so crowded. I don't know. What's your advice to someone who's like, I want to be Hala. I want to start a really phenomenal podcast that is sustainable as well as profitable? Because a lot of people quit.

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Yeah, because podcasting is not easy, and there's really two ways to go about it. One way is you have money, and you can invest in advertising and media buying. So all the different podcast players out there, there's about 70 different podcast players that make up the industry. Spotify, Apple make up about 60% of all listening apps. And then the other 30% is like 70 different apps that you can advertise on. So you can advertise on 30% of the podcast players. So that presents a really big opportunity. You want to advertise where the podcast listeners already are instead of having to convince them from social media to listen to the podcast platform that you're soliciting, potentially Download the app, find your episode. Instead, you just advertise in the podcast player itself through banner ads, through integrating yourself in the onboarding series, and so on. So all these different podcast players have different advertising opportunities. The other way that you advertise in the podcast apps is through buying commercials on other podcasts in your niche, guesting on other podcasts in your niche, and so on. So there's lots of different tactics to advertise within the podcast players.

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That's one way. And basically, if you have money, a company like mine, I'm one of the biggest experts in terms of growing shows. I can put together a plan and exactly know if you're like, I want to get to 100K downloads a month, I can say, Okay, here's your three-month plan. This is how much you're going to spend, probably around $10,000 a month, and I'll get you to 100,000 consistent downloads per month with real subscribers and so on. That's one way. If you have money, you can just pay to play. This is like anything out there right now. You can just pay to play. If you don't have money, it's going to be a longer game. Typically, you want to have at least one platform where you have an audience. You need to pull an audience from somewhere. You're not going to just put up a show and people are going to magically find it. That's not how it is. It's not 2016 anymore. There's lots of competition. Having a social media presence and then really focusing on closing the loop. This is what a lot of people miss. They put up microcontent videos, they put up social posts, and they promote a podcast episode.

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They have a link in their bio or link in the caption, whatever it is, and they really are expecting people to click the link, find their episode. Maybe if you're smart, you might do a chartable smart link to your direct episode, but most podcasters, they're not even that tech savvy to do that. So they're really expecting a lot. They're creating a lot of friction. You need to close the loop, and that means one on one combat in the DM. So you put up a post. Anybody who likes and comments is raising their hand and saying, Hey, I'm potentially interested in this podcast episode. You then need to DM them a link to the direct episode. Hey, I noticed that you engage on this post. I I love for you to listen to my podcast. Here's the link. Then you follow up. Hey, did you get a chance to subscribe? And you do that all day, and you promote, and you bring people from social to your podcast. Now, that's a much longer game, but that's how you do it for free.

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I may or may not have been taking notes, I'm saying. I actually noticed that I liked someone's post the other day on Instagram. It was a story, and I immediately got a DM from them, and I was like, Wow, this person is quick. They're really scouting all their Their engagement. I was like, No, it's an automatic DM. It was really well done. It was smart.

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Yeah, you can use like, ManyChat or there's lots of different softwares where you can automate this. But I always recommend that having a VA that does it manually, where you have scripts and it's super personal. I think that always does better.

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Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Yeah, fam, I'm not a finance person. I'm a make money person. I love to innovate, create, and sell. I don't like to do the boring finance stuff. I hate thinking about bookkeeping, expensing, invoicing, tax planning and organization. I hate it. So I've offloaded all those responsibility to my business partner, who's basically our COO and our CFO, Jason. And Jason is doing an awesome job.

[00:14:21]

However, I basically handed a mess over to him, and he's been having to toggle from app to app to app to get it all done.

[00:14:29]

And he was looking for streamlined solution to handle everything in one place. And we found that with Found. Yes, it's called Found, which is very fitting. Found is a banking and bookkeeping app that is especially made for solopreneurs and entrepreneurs. It's made for us. You can do everything from invoicing to bookkeeping to tax planning. One of my favorite features on Found is that it will actually automatically estimate the taxes that you owe and then set aside money for that. Similarly, you can create virtual cards different things like travel or marketing, and then set spending limits on them. Found is super cost-effective. First of all, it's everything in one app, and there's no hidden fees or minimum balances. There is no paperwork to sign, there's no credit checks. It's a breeze to sign up. If you want to try Found for free, you can go to found. Com/profiting. That's F-O-U-N-D. Com/profiting. Again, if you want to try Found for free, go to found. Com/profiting. Found is a financial technology technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Piedremont Bank member FDIC. Found's core features are free. They also offer an optional paid product, Found plus.

[00:15:40]

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[00:16:53]

And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed. Com. Com/profiting. Just go to indeed. Com/profiting right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed. Com/profiting. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Young in profiters, you know me, I love a great deal just as much as the next person. But I'm not going to cut coupons or collect loyalty cards just to save a few bucks. It has to be easy. No hoops, no BS. So when mintMobil me it was easy to get wireless for $15 a month with the purchase of a three-month plan? I didn't believe them. But it turns out it really is that easy to get wireless for $15 a month. And mintMobil has made it simple for me to switch. Everything was online. It was easy to purchase, easy to activate, and easy to save money. The longest part of the process was the time I spent on hold on the phone waiting to break up with my old provider. Want to get started? Just go to mintMobil mintmobil. Com/profiting. There you'll see that right now, all three-month plans are just $15 a month, including the Unlimited plan.

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[00:19:06]

Now, I was listening to you in an interview of yours. You've talked about this on your podcast and other shows about how COVID was a real game changer for you in terms of just... I think for all of us, it was a time for at minimum reflection. Like, what am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? What is the meaning of everything that I'm doing? I know that you went through a lot of personal hurdles and challenges, grieving during that time. And I would love to the extent that you're willing to share, what was the impact of that? It was like 2021, I think, was really, you called it the hardest and the best year of your life.

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Yeah, It was 2020. So actually in March of 2020, that's when the pandemic really hit at least New Jersey. And all my family is in New Jersey, and my family was one of the first to get hit by the pandemic. So this was when nobody knew about it. It was really scary. If you had COVID, it was like you had the plague. Nobody talked to you for months and things like this. So my mom, my dad, and my brother was visiting them all got COVID. And my aunt and uncle down the street also got COVID. And so my family's doctors, so they got it all really fast because they were in the hospitals and stuff like this. And so they caught it really fast. I ended up going home. I was living with my boyfriend at the time in Oakland. And my sister basically called me up and she was like, Hala, this was in lockdown, like the first week of lockdown. When I was working at Disney at the time, I was working from home. She's like, Hala, mom and dad have COVID. You've got like 30 minutes. Let me know if you want me to pick you up.

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I'm going to go take care of mom and dad. And I was like, Well, of course, I'm going to go take care of mom and dad. So she picked me up. I didn't have a car at the time. And I get to the house and everyone is extremely sick. So this is like the first wave of COVID where it was just really tough. My brother is super fit, pretty young, and he was really, really sick. So it was very scary. Me and my sister were staying in the basement. We were wearing hazmat suits. For a week, I was just really covered up. And we were basically not eating all day in the basement, having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before we went to sleep, sleeping with dirty old comforters on the couch because nobody was prepared. And we just We didn't want to sleep upstairs because we thought it was really contaminated. We didn't know what to do. So then my dad got very, very sick. And we were trying to get an oxygen machine for him. Everybody's a doctor, so we were just trying to help him because we knew if he went to the hospital, it would be really bad because the hospitals were really overwhelmed at the time.

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We knew that he wasn't going to get attention. He actually said, Hey, if you send me to the hospital, you guys aren't going to see me again. And that was the truth. So there was nothing we could do. He was basically dying. And so we called the ambulance at one point, and he got wheeled away to the hospital. And at that point, I was working from home. I ended up staying in Washington, New Jersey for three months because I basically couldn't go back to Brooklyn. I got COVID myself. My dad was in the hospital at this time for about a month and a half. I remember watching him on Zoom. I would have him on my Zoom and be working at the same time. He was pretty much unconscious. They traped him right away. He looked really uncomfortable. It was really mortifying to see him suffering that whole time. And the worst part is that we weren't allowed to visit him because at that time there was no visitors allowed. And even the nurses barely went in his room and he could barely see. And I feel like all he could do is hear. So I used to just sing to him all day and just try to soothe him.

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So it was a really difficult time, but I was also really bored because none of my friends wanted to see me. I couldn't see my boyfriend. I was working on my podcast, which was business as usual. I had 20 volunteers at the time that worked for me for free. So I was doing my regular thing, working on my podcast, working on Disney. And at some point, every time I used to end a podcast, Last episode, my podcast was already a top 10 how to podcast. That was my category at the time. I had big authors. My podcast was big, and I was already a LinkedIn influencer, but I was just doing it on the side. I wasn't making money yet. This was about two years into it. And the guests that would come on my show, they always end and be like, Hala, I know that you're really big on LinkedIn, and it's super impressive. Can you do this for me? Or they would say, Hala, you grew this incredible podcast. Could you produce a podcast for me? I'd love to do this. And these were all really wealthy, accomplished people. And I'd always be like, No, I'm sorry.

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I've got this great job at Disney. I can't help you. I've got a volunteer team. They just work for free. It's just a hobby. This is just a passion project. And I would always push them off until one day a lady, Heather Monahan, who still my client, this was three years ago, she basically was stalking me on LinkedIn. And every video, she'd be like, Holla, I need you to do this. Hala, get it together. Run my social media. I told her, I was like, Heather, I can't run it for you because I don't have the team. I don't have a company, but I'll teach you because I was bored. I also wanted her as my mentor because she's really successful. On the weekends, I started scheduling Saturday calls with her, and I was taking her through my Slack channel, taking her through my templates, taking her through my video editing. Because I'm like a marketing Jack of all trades. I can audio edit, video edit, copyright. I'm like a marketing guru, in my opinion. Not to tell my own horn, but I'm really good. I was like, trying to teach her everything. That's how I had a volunteer team because I used to teach to them so they would just work for free for me because I would just teach them how to do things.

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And she was like, Hala, I just had a call with Vaina Media. She's like, I can give them my budget or I can give you my budget. I'm more impressed with your stuff. I want to be your first client. And this was COVID. And again, my dad was dying in the hospital. I was bored. And I was like, okay, let's do it. And so she ended up paying me $700 a month, very little. And I started taking over her LinkedIn. I crushed it. Then I took over her podcast and her Instagram, and I started taking over all her stuff. Now, the next month, I had a billionaire, Jason Waller, CEO of Power Home Solar at the time, was the fastest growing private company in the world. He invited me to his podcast. And at the end of it, he was like, can Can you do my social media, my podcast? And at this time I was like, Yeah, I could definitely do that for you. And so I put together a proposal. I had no website, I had no logo. All I had was my team and a Slack channel that I just started paying because Heather was paying us barely anything.

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And I put together a proposal. And at first I had three services, and I priced them $3,000 each. Linkedin was $3,000 a month, Instagram, $3,000 a month, podcast production, $3,000 a month. I thought, Hey, $9,000 $1,000 a month would be great. I talked to Timothy Tan, who's now my business partner, and I sent him the numbers. He's like, Kala, this guy's a billionaire. Let's charge 10K each service.

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I was like, Okay, So I pitched him.

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I put together this awesome PowerPoint. Again, I had no website, no logo, really no incorporated company yet. And at the end of it, he's like, Boom, let's do it. I had my first real client, $30,000 a month retainer. And then it just skyrocket. I got the CEO of Hintwater. I got the CEO of When I Hint, I got junk. And I started running all these big CEO social media.

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Giving Vanner Media a run for its money. I love that story.

[00:26:43]

They call me the young Gary Vee, all all the time.

[00:26:46]

Oh, my gosh. That's incredible. Now, you're making $30,000 a month off one billionaire. Was there a part of you that was like, I better not screw this up? I think I would be really nervous to take... Although for him, it's a drop in the bucket. I crushed for him.

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I crushed for him because I had built it. Here's the thing. I already was doing it for myself. I had no idea. I literally had already built a company. I had 20 people working for me already. I had all the systems in place. I had done it from... I was crushing on LinkedIn. I was crushing my podcast. I understood media buying. I took him from a podcast that was getting 200 downloads a month to like, 200 And then I started making him so much money. So I was paying for myself within six months. And I blew him up on Instagram, and I blew a bump on LinkedIn, and I got him huge celebrity guests. He was so happy with the results. He actually went through some PR issues. So he's not my client right now, but he was my client for two and a half years and very happy. So when you can produce the results, then I just realized, wow, I'm really the best in the business. So I'm keeping my rates like this. And within six months, I was still working at Disney. I had 30 employees around the world. Now I had my first US employees I was paying.

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I had a creative team in the Philippines. I had my Ops team in India, and I had built this global team. A lot of them were the volunteers, and I started paying them. Six months into it, I was already making almost $200,000 a month from all my clients in my business. And then I finally quit my job at Disney because I was like, Okay, this is not a fluke. I'm crapping it. I want to go all in. And that's when things took off when I finally quit my job.

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Working from home probably helped, I'm going to guess, right? Because you'd read these Wall Street Journal articles, people help putting down two, three jobs at a time, full-time jobs. And you literally had It sounds like more than just two full-time jobs because it sounds like a lot of work. I had three.

[00:28:50]

It was a podcast. But here's the thing. I had created a company that was working for me while I was at work. I had already built that. So for two years, I was basically working at HP and then Disney, and I had a team that would work for free for me while I was at work. And I would just train them, and they were just aligned to the mission and wanted to be a part of YAP. So then once I started my side hustle, it's like, I still have this team that was working for me while I was working my job. They were just working on other clients, not just me anymore.

[00:29:22]

So now you've mentioned already a few times these 20 people that work for you for free. And I had a question here just about for those of us who want to bootstrap and get up and running, and we don't have a lot of resources or money, what's your advice? But I'm curious about how you convince 20 people to work for you for free.

[00:29:43]

I didn't convince them. They asked me, which is so funny. My story, I feel like, is just so different from everyone else's. It is. I was growing my profile on LinkedIn, and I became a LinkedIn influencer almost before I became a huge podcaster, but I was the top podcaster on LinkedIn for for a while. I still am. My fans used to reach out to me in the LinkedIn DMs, and they'd say, Hala, your show transformed my life. I'm obsessed with YAP. I want to help. How can I help? How can I help? It was very obvious at the time that I was doing this for free, that it was a passion project, and I was pouring every single ounce of me in it. Like I said, I didn't talk about this on the show yet, but before this podcast, I used to work at a radio station. I interned for free for three years. I also had a blog, so I knew how to blog, create websites, create great copy that converts, connect with people. I hacked Twitter. I used to be a Twitter influencer. Then I became a LinkedIn influencer. I had many different online radio shows.

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I was very experienced. Even though this was my first podcast, I had all the things to become the number one podcaster in terms of my experience and my skills. So this was very obvious to my fans. They wanted to learn from me. I had one guy that was from Estonia, I remember. And he helped me with my website. So I teach him how to build websites, teach him how to update the website, and that was his job. Then I had one guy from Atlanta, Parth, who was really into the show. He wanted to learn video editing, so I taught him how to video edit, and then he was responsible to do all my microcontent. Then I had other people that would help me with research. That's what they wanted to learn. Then I had a guy, Hisham, who's still on my team. He wanted to help with guest bookings, so he helped me with all the guest bookings. I would help him create email campaigns and taught him that. So I would just teach everybody the little things that you have to do, and then everybody was responsible. And some of these people now have grown into team leaders that are managing 30 people and so on.

[00:31:39]

So that was the first phase. It was like fans that wanted to be volunteers. And I was just smart enough to put them in a Slack channel, create a community. We'd have quarterly calls, but everybody just worked like 2 hours a day because there was just one podcast and they weren't getting paid.

[00:31:55]

It's like an apprenticeship. You were running a school.

[00:31:57]

Yeah, exactly. And really, It's like once they felt like they learned enough, some people would leave, some people would stay. And then once we got paid, I started paying everyone. Then once I got paid, I couldn't not pay anyone. But when nobody was making money, it was fine. Actually, it was easier to motivate people when there was no money involved because it was just we were all aligned towards this mission.

[00:32:19]

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[00:37:26]

I'd love to pick your brain in terms of where do you see the next The next platform, the next... So you've conquered LinkedIn and podcasting and social media. What is next? You can talk maybe about AI or whatever. I just feel like you have such an ear to the ground, and you're so much at the forefront of trends, where should we be investing right now our time as creators, I should say?

[00:37:52]

Yeah, this is a great question. So I believe in terms of podcasting, podcasting is no longer audio-only. Even advertisers are no longer thinking about it as audio only. It is cross-channel. So people are listening to podcasts on audio, on YouTube, on live streams. I'm really into trying to build my livestream presence because that's also where a lot of conversions happens because There's two-way communication. You can actually communicate with your audience. Live streams, in my opinion, is the forefront of podcasting. So LinkedIn Live, IG Live, YouTube Live, and whatever other platforms, TikTok Live that enable it. That's a big one. Ai in my space, I think that AI is obviously going to take over everything. For example, with my podcast and my network, one of the things I'm thinking about is how can we basically have AI create our audio commercials? Because a lot of my time is recording intros, outros, audio commercials. You've got to refresh these commercials every month. My idea is let's put all of our content in an AI engine and then have it like somebody else speak it and they can replicate it in your voice, like how people are creating like, Drake songs.

[00:39:04]

Because there's so much Drake content, you can do the same thing. Even like, photoshoots, you can put in. If I have a photoshoot, I can plug in all the photos from that photoshoot and then ask it to generate more photos in the same outfits, in the same scenery, but just more photos. So it's like everything's just going to scale and there's going to be more competition with content and more noise because everyone's going to be able to 10X all their content from their existing content. And everybody who has a lot of content is at the advantage, because right now I can plug in all the videos that I have from the app and essentially recreate interviews without me even being present because I already have the content. I already have the pictures. I already have the audio. So anybody who's starting from scratch and doesn't have that content is going to be behind. And everybody who already has that content is going to be able to start using it to replicate themselves.

[00:39:59]

I tell you, after this, we're going to talk. Yeah, it's overwhelming, though, to hear about it. You have such a drive. This is very you. I don't know if this isn't everybody. How do you stay focused, I guess? I mean, you have obviously team, and you have many people working on many different things. You're not, hopefully, so scattered. But how do you stay focused in a world where there is just so much distraction So many shiny objects? I just signed up for threads, obviously, when it first launched, and I've given up on it already.

[00:40:37]

It's dead, right?

[00:40:40]

Okay. It's not just me.

[00:40:41]

It talks about it on my podcast for two weeks, and I was like, I wish I never brought it I was like, you know.

[00:40:47]

But you never know. I was bearish on, I'm no longer, but I was bearish on Instagram. The first two years or three years of Instagram, I was a private account because I was like, What do I I'm not going to share photos for. Well, yeah, you were wrong on that one.

[00:41:05]

I think it's going to be really hard for new social media platforms to break out, but it's possible. I mean, look at TikTok, it's relatively new. It's crushing it. But because it's not an American company, it might away, and all this time and energy that people spend on it might be for nothing. So you got to be careful about what platforms you spend time on for sure. But what was your question exactly?

[00:41:26]

How do you decide where to invest your time? When you're looking at... What's the calculus? Okay, I think that this channel is where I'm going to go because I see these data points.

[00:41:40]

Yeah. Well, I am slow to adopt new channels. I definitely experiment But in terms of putting a lot of resources or investment, I'm slow to adopt new channels. So for example, like threads, it's like I'm on it, but I'm not doubling down on it. I'm offering it as a service, but I'm weary, and I'm still doing the things that work. I know I can get ROI from podcasts. I know LinkedIn is going to be the platform that I want to invest most of my time on. I'm not just jumping on every new shiny object because I do realize that if you want to be successful, you need to leverage on certain platforms. So it's like, I'd rather be the number one person on LinkedIn and just maintain that not then be popular on Instagram, popular on threads, popular on TikTok. No, let me be the number one person on LinkedIn so that I can leverage that and grow the other platforms. For me, it's more important to get a lot of leverage. For example, I invest a lot my podcast and a lot in my LinkedIn, and now YouTube, and that's what I'm focusing on.

[00:42:35]

In terms of my business, everything works together. So my podcast is part of my network, the same sales that I get from my podcast, I'm able I get from my network, my agency clients. Also, everything is like one ecosystem. A lot of my podcasters are my agency clients. A lot of my agency clients launch podcasts. I have a LinkedIn master class, and it's all the training that I give my team for LinkedIn in. As I learn new things, I update the class. It's like there's nothing that's outside of the ecosystem. The other thing is that I know which parts of the business that I'm scaling. My agency is a boutique agency. Agencies are talent-heavy. The amount of sense on the dollar that we make on the agency is a lot less of the network. My main focus is my network, growing the impressions, growing the sales. Me as a CEO, because that's the newest part of our business, that's like 80% of my attention. All the other stuff I've been having for three years. So I've trained really great people to help me, and then I just show up for strategy calls and things like that.

[00:43:36]

So it's like I manage my time really strategically. And my team is really on point. We have daily huddles, we have quarterly planning, all of our big objectives are outlined. It's just really planned. There's nothing in the quarter that I'm doing that's not in our plan unless something like threads comes out and we've got to add that. But we really typically state It's a good plan.

[00:44:01]

All right. Well, last question, and this is softball. And because you've talked a lot about work and business and entrepreneur culture and strategies and operations, what does Hala do for a fun that is unplanned, that You take the wealth that you've created to do something for you. If you had a free Saturday, or if right now someone said, clear your schedule, go do something fun, what would it be?

[00:44:26]

So I love getting facials. I love I love getting massages. I love walking around New York City with my boyfriend and trying new restaurants. I love to work out. Those are the things that I really enjoy doing, just spending time with loved ones sitting at the pool, going on vacation. I love to dance. I actually have a lot of fun for a long time. You do have a lot of fun. Yeah. But now I have a lot of fun. My life is very fun.

[00:44:54]

Well, you're a fun. You're a fun guest. I so appreciate connecting with you. By the way, I live in New Jersey. I did live Brooklyn. Would love to bump into you and share, I don't know, a stroll or something. But it's important to get out. I know. I feel like make me time. It's got to be intentional.

[00:45:12]

100 %.

[00:45:13]

Hala Taha, thank you so much. And come back anytime. I can't wait to be on your show.

[00:45:18]

Yeah. So much fun.