The Importance of Writing and Internal Storytelling in Building a Successful Team

Adam Spencer: I'm Adam Spencer and this is Earning Ears, the show that helps you earn your audience's attention. In this episode, I speak with Michael Batko, CEO at Startmate. 

Michael Batko: People put way too much emphasis on making something perfect and having this massive barrier of releasing good content. For me it's actually quite different, like the analogy itself is the one of a tap of water that you just haven't used in years.

And you almost need to open it up and just let all of the waste water out, maybe for hours and hours until you actually get to the clear water.

Adam Spencer: In his time at StarMate, Michael has worked with more than 100 startup founders who have gone through their Accelerator program, giving him an incredible vantage point on Australia's startup ecosystem. He's also founder of PuddlePod, a productivity community that delivers a five week productivity and AI course, as well as a content creator.

Michael documents his insights and learnings on his Substack Batco OS. In our conversation, we talk about Michael's belief that writing is a key skill for leveling up as a knowledge worker. The importance of feedback and learning from failure and his top productivity tips for content creators.

Welcome to Earning Ears, Michael. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. What's been earning your ears lately? 

Michael Batko: I have um, a group of content creators around me actually. We've got a bit of a WhatsApp chat going and they are all excellent. So I could actually give all of them as a shout out.

Tom Elder, who's, um, writing strategy breakdowns. He's incredible. Alex Brogan, who's writing faster than normal. Emily Casey, writing all about health tech, Casey Flint, all about AI, Yanneth with his startup podcast, Jessie Wu with all of her posts and writing as well as super inspirational. And there's a couple of others as well, too many to mention here, but there's some awesome people out there writing great content.

Adam Spencer: You just named all the top players in the startup kind of ecosystem. Wow. That's incredible. Um, yeah, I especially love strategy breakdowns with Tom. 

Michael Batko: Yeah, he's doing such a great job, even went full time now. I know. To dedicate 100 

Adam Spencer: percent of his time on it. Yeah, I recently listened to a podcast that he was on.

Um, the Sparkloop, there's a company called Sparkloop and he did it, he did their podcast. I really enjoyed listening to that. Um, so, and all of these people you mentioned, it's incredible the amount of quality output and quantity output they, they produce. Um, you know, when we look at Tom though, he's now a full time content producer.

What strikes me so much with you is that you are CEO of StartMate and you are just doing so much. You are just putting out so much, so much different content and, um, I really am in awe of that, and I'm hoping to, in this interview, distill some of that wisdom from you on how you manage your time so well.

And you already are known, it's just how productive you are. Um, Batco OS, I think, is your sub stack. And it's just, I want to figure out how that operating system works. Yeah, we can definitely dive into that. Question one, as you're in your role as CEO of Startmate, um, before we get into all the different content that you produce, how, how do you think about storytelling and especially internal storytelling?

What kind of value do you place on that? Having seen the team grow from around about six, when you took over as CEO. When was that, by the way? Was that about six months after we did the interview for Welcome To Day One back in 2018? Something like that? 

Michael Batko: Yeah, so when I started six years ago at StartNet, it was literally just, um, two or three of us.

And, um, and now we've got a team of 20. 

Adam Spencer: So, so yeah, you've seen the team grow massively. Tell me about the internal storytelling, like how steering the ship. 

Michael Batko: Yeah, for sure. My favorite insight actually was from a, how do you CEO series that I wrote, um, uh, about a year ago. So I wanted to upgrade myself as a CEO and I interviewed 15.

Of my favorite CEOs who I highly respect and ask them all of my burning questions in particular. How do they manage communication? How do they keep the team aligned? And it was just some incredible insights from, um, Duncan from Adrolo, Kate Morris at Adobeauty from, um, Didier from, um, from culture, et cetera.

And one of the recurring themes, which I just like resonated so strongly with me was. That communication essentially breaks after like 5 people, 10 people, 20 people. You just can't maintain that many relationships. You can't repeat yourself that often. You will be misinterpreted. So every single one of them, as soon as the company scaled to 20, 50, 100 plus people stressed the importance of writing and that communication style itself is just so powerful because it.

forces you as a CEO to distill your thoughts into the core insights and the ability to then distribute them across the whole team. It's, um, so they all remember it, it lives on for a long, long time and you just can't be essentially misinterpreted. Um, so actually the importance of writing was one, which I love.

The other one, um, that my personal learning as a CEO, as well as the company grows, it is actually that importance of inspiring your team on. One direction, like we have such a highly autonomous team. People make decisions every single day, 15 of them. And, um, and I don't have any input necessarily on it because what is important for me to do is actually set that direction itself.

So I put a lot of emphasis on creating the right strategy, actually pinpointing us, where do we want to be in one year, one year's time, three years time, five years time. And once we have that, and it is crystal clear, and it takes a long, long time to get there, then, everything else actually follows. So, um, so the importance there of creating that story and crafting that narrative, but also making it really nice and tangible, really guides the team.

And it helps, honestly, it helps everybody. Helps the team, helps me. Um, so it's just so much smoother. Outside 

Adam Spencer: of using content as a, as a tool that, that loops on and can't be misinterpreted to help drive the team. You seem to just love content in general. It's just, that's what my, my perspective is looking from the outside in.

Why? What about, where does this love of content come from for you? 

Michael Batko: Honestly, it comes from a love of learning. That's what it is. Like, I am a self first learning enthusiast. And when. I learn, I love creating a system around it to then not only just bottle it up for myself, but also then share it with the world.

Cause I know that if I share it, it will attract those types of people back to me. And so many more ideas get triggered and I learn even more. So by sharing it, I actually get bombarded by people replying to it, giving me interesting ideas, concepts, questions, and so on. And the love of learning is really the one which drives me to create that content because.

For me it's um, every single time I learn something, I have a short term memory so I will forget it. So one of my systems and habits is I will write it down. My, one of my favourite quotes is the one of your brain is for having ideas, not for storing ideas. So I always write it down, I always summarise it for myself.

And the next thing is because I summarise it, I then share it with everybody else. And if I share it with everybody else, then actually interesting people approach me again. And it just like triggers more learning and more experiences and attracts the right people. So it really comes from like a, almost like a selfish perspective, actually, of attracting awesome people back to me.

Adam Spencer: You, I sense such positivity coming from you, Michael, and I did back in 2018, that mindset. That positive outlook, I think that really helps you and I think it helps, you know, I think you find a lot of successful people with that kind of mindset as well. Question is, have you identified any habits or personality traits that predispose people to being successful in content?

Michael Batko: Oh, interesting. Um, make me, I'll first address the positive outlook points, which I actually love. Like for me. The reason why I am an optimist and an eternal optimist is because what's the point of being sad? If you're right, great, congrats to you, like, you are now the authority for predicting the apocalypse.

And everything's bad, like, you are sad, the world is bad, and nobody's actually better off. But if you're wrong, the world is actually a great place, but you've been sad all along. So it's just like, it's almost like flipping a coin and saying, heads, you win, and tails, I lose, like, you will always lose. So it's like, that's why I'm always an internal optimist.

Um, I always think the world will be better. One of my favorite quotes is, today is the worst you'll ever be. Cause again, like on that kind of, um, learning trajectory itself and always wanting to be, get better. Um, on the positive outlook, um, and the content related side of things, like, um, that's an interesting dynamic.

from what actually hits the media and the news. What people love reading is actually hardships and vulnerability or like controversial stuff. And personally, I actually hate the controversial stuff. Like I'm not a person who loves writing anything controversial like that. I actually don't get much energy from it.

I think, um, It's, it's just not my style. What I love writing about is more kind of like, again, like from a learning perspective, inspirational stories that actually get people to think in new directions and expand their mindsets rather than more the kind of click baity of like, I don't know. Yeah. The world is a terrible place and if this is what happened, 

Adam Spencer: uh.

Yeah, I agree. I absolutely agree. So many things you've done. I want to get into the productivity side of things. CEO of Startmate, book summaries, Puddle Pod, CEO series, Executive Coach series, Start, Striders, which although not necessarily content, it definitely is related and it definitely is community building.

Um, and something, I think, something about on LinkedIn, a video series, you wanted to post a video every day. I love all this. I love this. I love all these little projects. How do you keep track of it all? How do you do it all? 

Michael Batko: I was reflecting on this one a little bit because I, you are right. I do a fair few things.

Um, I am also very, very social active and the way I actually approach it is, um, we all try to make habits happen. We all try to go to the gym more often, go for a run. We all fail with diets, with meditation, et cetera. It's like the classics. But if you really, truly mean something, the way I don't just create a habit that I'd like to achieve, but I literally create one that I can't escape.

So what I mean by that is I create an actual system around it, which holds me accountable that there's no way for me not to even do it. Just to give you a couple of examples, like. I do a lot of reflections, for example. So, um, I write a weekly email to my three best friends to summarize my, my week. And I love sharing that and they share it with me.

So we'd have this accountability group where we do it. I write a weekly email to my entire Startmate team. Hey, Those are my priorities for next week. And this is how I did last week. That stacks, actually. It stacks to my monthly updates. I write a good, bad and ugly for Startmade. Every single month that I share with a thousand people via email or blog, what worked at Startmade, what didn't work at Startmade.

I share a monthly update with my family and friends over email. Like, hey, this is what my month was like. And again, I can just use those weekly updates. Then I do an annual summary again for Startmade and for myself personally. But it actually really nicely Holds me accountable on a weekly basis and in stacks monthly and annually.

That's just one example. Startup Striders is a running community that you mentioned, which is super interesting as well. I started it only with six people and I literally was just like, I need to get up at 6am on a Saturday to go running, or I'm just going to fail my running goals essentially. And I was like, all right, cool.

Who wants to go running with me? I created this group. I knew they're going to be waiting there for me and every single Saturday I've now got people waiting for me to show up to go for a run and I've been going for a year now I've got 800 members over 12 cities but I was like this thing where like I made it almost impossible for me not to go because I know people are going to be waiting there for me.

The third story that I can actually give you because you mentioned Puddlepot. Puddlepot is my side hustle which is a productivity community and I started it three years ago now and The beginnings actually of PuddlePod were that so many people were asking me for productivity talks and tips and tricks.

So I actually decided, all right, could this actually be an interesting thing? I write up and create content around. So I again got, um, put it down on Twitter. Hey, who would like to learn from me about productivity? 15 of my friends actually said, all right, cool. I'll sign up for it. Like, um, let's give it a go.

And I was like, all right, cool. You are my first guinea pigs of 15 people. And you're going to hold me accountable every single by Sunday night. Then I'm going to write up eight pieces of massive content each week. And I literally was there dreading it on the weekend. I'll just be hating myself being like, Oh my God, like 15 of my friends are waiting for me to actually release something by Sunday night.

But the beauty was eight weeks later, I literally had created this entire incredible, almost like course of content about productivity that now has actually become a full company with 400 people having gone through it with hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue and like. That's actually, I make a habit, but I don't make it a nice to have.

I make it like a absolutely has to happen. And I can't even escape it. 

Adam Spencer: How important is it? Because I love that. It's almost like a building in public, you know, everyone. Keeping you accountable, although this isn't necessary in public, sometimes your stuff's in public, sometimes you're just doing these kind of weekly summaries or weekly recaps to your friends, but how important do you think is it to find that right group of people, like, because What happens if you don't do that?

What happens if you don't do that weekly summary? Is there, are there any bad? Like do people kind of ring you and say, what the hell? 

Michael Batko: Um, that's a great question. Um, there's a couple of cool things, um, in this question. The first one is kind of the importance of the group and kind of what happens. So the importance of the group, I mean, I actually think it's the saddest thing in the world if you Don't find those people because among my favorite quotes is you are the average of the five people you spend most time with.

Yeah, I love that. And I want to surround myself with people who are more ambitious than myself, who actually drive me to become better. I want to find those exceptional people who are better than myself. And I want to actually. Almost like emulate them or learn from them and push each other further. So I love creating small groups of people.

Like I mentioned the content creator group that I've got. I've got my elephants group or my friendship group who I write, um, updates to. And my, how do you CEO series was actually designed for me to meet lots of CEOs. Cause I wanted to create a group of CEOs around me, et cetera. So that's the first question.

Like it is so important. I mean, this is the reason why we created Startmate. It's like surround yourself with ambitious founders who drive further and you don't revert back to the average. The average of a founder actually fails as stats actually show you. You need to surround yourself with the most ambitious.

And finally, your second piece, um, question was like, what happens to people that are like, Oh my God, like you didn't, you didn't really update on a Sunday. And, um, there's two interesting parts in here, like the first one is, um, yes, it happens because we set the expectation of like, we will do this for each other.

We will support each other, but we also will tell each other, Hey, this is not good enough. And if you set the expectation, you, um, you can push yourself further there. The second part is, um, that for me, I've got this personal, almost like desire or really strong force in myself to. If I say I'm going to do something, I will always deliver on it.

And I always wanted to be, um, something that people know me for my brand or reputation, because I choose to be reliable. And I know that people, uh, people should always know that I will live up to my word. And that's just, I don't know, like when I tell my friends, I'm going to do something, they know I will.

Adam Spencer: So you build this system around you, this, this thing so you can't not do the thing, you can't not do the habit. But having that accountability email and that accountability group around you is one of, one part of the system. Are there other parts of the system to allow you to do all of these things that you're doing?

Michael Batko: In terms of content writing itself, I would say the other part of my system, which is really important is, um, is not relying on my brain as sad as it sounds. As I was like actually putting everything into notes and tasks and reminders and lists. I am a huge believer in that. Um, again, back to the concept of your brain is for having ideas, not for storing them.

And then that's the first part of like actually capturing all of the ideas that I have it. I've got an entire Asana board, which probably has like a hundred tasks on there, which are all content ideas. And there's just way too much of writing I want to do. So the next kind of part that I do then is whenever I do have a free minute, I'm just on my phone walking to the bus or something like that.

I do open it up and I then go into some of those ideas and then just flesh them out. It's like, whatever comes to mind, I don't, I pick one up for like 10 seconds, 30 seconds, take a couple of notes, go on to the next one, et cetera. Yep. And then writer's block is a real thing. Like you then, you just can't, I am not the kind of person who can sit down at the desk and be like, all right, now I'm going to smash out 90 minutes of writing.

I agree. I'm very different to that. Well, I didn't. Sometimes I just get inspired, I've got a bit of time and I then look at that Asana board or I just get this idea. I'm like, all right, now I really care about this topic. And then I open it up. I've got all of those notes ready to go. And then I just like with the burst of energy, kind of just go into it and write it up.

And it's not necessarily a structured approach as such of what I release next. But it's very much like I, I like working in my zone of energy rather than kind of like a zone of, um, of structured writing where I just get blocked very, very quickly. Well, it seems to be working. So well, another maybe concept that I can give you about a way on this one, cause it's quite interesting.

But an analogy that I absolutely loved is the one of, um, writing to me at least is people put way too much emphasis on making something perfect and, and having this massive barrier of releasing good content. Um for me, it's actually quite different or like the analogy itself is the one of a tap of water that you just haven't used In years and you almost need to open it up and just let all of the waste water out Maybe for hours and hours until you actually get to the clear water So similar to me as well, like with ideas and writing, I almost need to get all of that art writing out.

There's lots of bad writing in there, lots of bad ideas in there, but every now and again you then actually get to the good idea and that's actually almost what you want to then polish up. So it's, don't be afraid of releasing bad content. Nobody cares at the end of the day. I love that. That's 

Adam Spencer: a little insight into this, the Batco operating system.

And you briefly mentioned then, like, there's not a real structured approach to what you release when or next, but how do you evaluate all the different ideas that perhaps you have for projects that you want to work on? How do you pick the ones that are most important? Is it really, is it really tied back to what do I 

Michael Batko: want to learn?

Um, yes, often actually. Yeah. So when I go about something, It's actually like learning and development is such an interesting one where like, we all want to do it and we all have those massive intention. Like, I didn't want to learn this. I've got those free development areas. Hopefully you do that with your manager or at work, but we all know, like life gets busy, you've got your priorities, but they fall down to the wayside and you just get distracted.

And the way I approach it is similar to what I said before, is like, rather than just a nice to have habit, I literally make something that I can't escape. So. The best example here is actually the last, um, the, how do you CEO series was a good one, but in my next kind of, um, my next kind of learning and development part was I wanted to really become a great manager and a great coach.

And I know it is going to be something that it's going to be very, very important to me in the future. And instead of just doing courses or doing a bunch of reading, I again, took it up on myself to, to create a system that I just can't escape. And the day was essentially, I'm going to interview six incredible executive coaches.

Um, I'm going to record it. I'm going to write it up by writing it up. Actually, I, this is like the second piece of learning is like listening is number one and writing it up as number two and then sharing it and actually getting feedback from people is number three is like, you've got three hits on your learning journey.

And by the time you get to number three, you really have. Kind of condense that learning in your brain and inserted it in. That is like a really structured way of going about learning and development that I love. Um, the other part of what am I going to write about is, um, it is a little bit about just capturing all my ideas on a board itself and then whatever energy burst I get on the day or whatever topic is kind of relevant at a time, I can actually just pick up on any kind of topic or conversation.

I do have the advantage of being a CEO at Startmade where I just work with hundreds of startups, like every single year. I've got thousands of fellows around me. There's like so much information. There's so many stories that I can tell. It's, um, it's a bit overwhelming, I have to say, because I don't even know what to write about anymore, because there's just almost too much to cover.

There's too many narratives I could. Um, spin, so maybe back to your question as well, like, what do I then write about? Cause my challenge is almost, there's a bit too much going on. I didn't actually have to ask myself the question only two months ago, like, what do I want to be known for almost? Um, so then I actually, um, created those topics for myself and I'm going to open it up right now on Asana.

And I was like, all right, there's actually five areas that I really want people to know me for. And it's essentially the idea of. Um, founders, um, should only focus on customers. And that idea is just so cool to me and every founder should hear it a billion times. And I'm, I never will be sick of talking about what will happen off the back of it.

Hopefully it will attract awesome founders to Startmate and to me. The second concept is the one of, um, micro VC funds. Startmate is a micro VC fund. We raise small amounts of money, but we can return them 10 times over and be, have incredible fund returns. And again, that's an incredible story I want to tell.

And attracting Um, and then the third one is actually, I love talking about talent and people looking for jobs and how to do it well in a startup environment. Again, like with the idea that it will attract the most incredible talent to start that into our fellowships and the final one is actually productivity.

That's just something that's near and dear to me, and I just love writing about it and I love sharing tips and tricks. And that again is both actually just, just attracting the right people back to me again. So you see the common thread is almost like. What do I want to be known for in order to attract the right people who I care about them to me, so I can learn from them, but also create those groups of people who are awesome.

Adam Spencer: Looking from the outside in, it almost seems like everything you touch turns into a success. As a head of operations, I think when I met you, not too long at Startmate. You're now the CEO, Puddle Pod, the Startup Striders, like it just, it all seems to go well, but I'm assuming that everything doesn't all go smoothly for you.

I'm assuming that some things don't. Don't work out as you wanted to. How do you deal with those setbacks? And any advice you have for people out, because content is a long game usually, and it takes a long time to build an audience, so you do need to have resilience. A. How do you deal with setbacks? And B.

Do you have any resilience advice for content creators out there that are just banging their head against the wall maybe trying to build an audience? 

Michael Batko: A hundred percent. Um, I mean, conceptually speaking, um, setbacks. I, I mean, the first one is I always just see them as learnings. It's, we encourage experimentation at start.

We are a startup ourselves. I'd be hypocritical if we weren't doing it. If we, I tell our startups all the time, experiment, learn, talk to customers, pivot. I love that mindset. We do it at Startmate. I do it at Paddlepod. I do it myself. And I don't care if something fails. I, the cardinal sin though, is if you don't learn something from that failure.

Um, as long as you do that and the next experiment is better and, um, and you adjust it, et cetera. Amazing. That's all I care about. We never blame the person. We always focus on what actually happened here. Let's unpack it. Let's learn from it. So if content creators themselves, like, I think the biggest piece of advice is very much the one of, don't try to release something perfect.

It's actually often imperfect in being vulnerable and the mistakes themselves, which are worth sharing. I'm a huge proponent of the 80 20 rule of how can you get 80 percent of the value with 20 percent of the effort rather than going the extra 80 percent to 100 percent polish, but it actually takes you 80 percent of the time.

And so I'm definitely a massive, um, proponent of, and this is by the way, also where the name Startmate comes from. It literally is just start mate, it's like, just give it a go and try it out. What's the worst thing that can happen is one of my favorite questions. And honestly, in, especially in content creation space, the worst thing that can happen is nobody reads it.

So then nobody actually saw it anyway. And then just release the next thing. 

Adam Spencer: I love that. Related to that is feedback in all of your projects since as start mate and the founders, is it, is it a conscious thing to build in feedback loops into all the work that you do and. And yeah, what value do you place on that?

Michael Batko: Massive, massive. It literally is one of our core values at Startmate. And it's so easy to say that, but it's actually so much harder to live up to it. Um, and I, like, as you can tell, I'm a huge learning enthusiast. I love feedback. Feedback, a lot of people say it's a gift. Honestly, feedback is really hard to hear and you actually need to get used to it and encourage it and build up the resilience to feedback as well, to really receive it.

So we have lots of systems built in to actually make it the norm at Startmate. Just to give you a couple of examples, um, in all of our programs, we have religiously. At halfway through the program and at the end of the program, we collect feedback, we summarize it, we then share it back to everybody who gave us feedback.

We tell them exactly what are we going to change, what are we going to double down on, and we do that religiously across every single, we run 10 programs twice a year with like over 2000 people. Like, we, um, that is just a common practice. We literally postmortem at the end of it of what are we going to change for the next program and we share that as well.

That's just one mechanism at the program stage in the team as well. It's equally as important to actually practice what I preach. Um, we, as part of our one on one template, cause, um, managers, um, catch up with their manager once a week. And we literally have it in there, um, of what could I have done 10 percent better.

And what did you like? And even the question, what did it, could I have done 10 percent better? It's a great question to not be like, Hey, there's this huge thing that really annoys me, but actually making it smaller and getting people comfortable of sharing this more improvements. Cause once people realize, Hey, you are receptive to the small changes, then they're way more likely to give you like the massive piece of feedback of like, Hey, you actually suck it as a manager.

And that is. It's great. Like at least you actually build up that confidence and that understanding between the manager and manager. But then we also have, um, uh, six monthly culture and three sixties where everybody gets feedback on each other. And, um, and then we also have engagement surveys on culture and for start date itself, every three months and wellbeing service, et cetera.

Like feedback is literally like the lifeblood of everything we do. And finally. Um, we actually, every time somebody gives us any feedback on Start Mate, whether positive or negative on social media or on Slack channels, or even at drinks, we actually have literally a customer, um, feedback Slack channel where we just post a little snapshots or, um, quotes or, um, screenshots and where we just share it with the whole team just to constantly keep that lifeblood of the organization of feedback going.

One of 

Adam Spencer: the five things you want to be remembered for, because you love talking about productivity. Do you have a couple of productivity tips through the lens of like four content creators, content marketers? 

Michael Batko: Yeah, two probably. Like the first one is, um, find your niche. It's like, it's so Like, I think a big common pitfall is that people try to write something which will resonate with everyone.

And if you, if your target market is everyone, your target market is nobody. It's like, you can never appeal to everyone. Um, so actually find the people who love your content, don't just like it. Um, so find your niche. So this is from a productivity perspective, but also just from a focus perspective. The second one is find your, your channel itself, like based on that audience and based on the interest, what is actually your preferred channel itself?

Cause channels are actually all quite different, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, like they actually all have their own audiences or own demographics, what people are interested in, the way virality works on them as well. So actually you want to make it audience and channel specific and then write up the.

Write up specifically, um, the content for it on their channel. 

Adam Spencer: Around your content, is there anything that you, um, look for, things that you track against? Yeah, what do you look for to say, this has been successful, this hasn't been successful, this is where I can improve, what are you looking for? 

Michael Batko: Yeah, yeah, um, honestly a lot of stuff, a lot of times there's actually, I get so much value of just writing it up and getting it out there because Talking condenses things like it makes, it gives them energy.

Whereas writing distills them into like this clear kind of like idea at the end. So I actually get a lot of my value already just by writing it up. But back to your question of, um, what value or how do I almost measure, measure success or what value do I see? Two of my favorite things, uh, One is when people reach out to me off the back of a blog post, um, or a piece of content I wrote, and they exchange interesting ideas, or they are already deep in that space, because I love connecting with those people.

Because clearly, like, that topic was important enough for me to write it up, and that person actually was important enough for them to actually hit me up directly. So I love people reaching out, just even to say, Hey, thanks so much for writing this up. I loved it. Like, even just that, it was like, it's already golden, makes my day.

Um, so like actually bringing again, like attracting right people around me is goal number one. Um, and the bonus goal almost, or like the, the piece of, um, feedback that I then that there's almost like the ultimate measure of success is when people years later meet me or see me and then really literally refer back to a piece of writing I did years prior and like, Hey, this really resonated with me.

Or they even use a quote out of a blog post, for example, one of quote, which now you can see everywhere. Is increasing the surface area for luck to strike. It's so interesting because people like it actually, it's just something I wrote up a couple of years ago and I'm sure like there's lots of people around the world who actually wrote up about it, but now people literally like almost like associate me with it because I talk about it so much and so often.

Adam Spencer: I used to use that quote the other day to my partner. I have one more question and you know what it is. Saran, all the founders that you. That you help, that you surround yourself with, learnings that you've drawn out from them that has helped you with, maybe you can pass on to the listeners here, help them with the content creation or community building.

But before I ask that question, um, is there anything that I haven't asked you in this interview that you would really like to talk about? 

Michael Batko: I could talk about, um, one other aspect actually, um, that I would love to cover, which, um, is about why is writing important? It's actually an interesting question, which, um, which I didn't actually quite, um, answer there as well.

And it's, I love the concept that, um, Duncan, the founder of Adrollos shared with me in the How Do You CEO series. And it's the idea that we are all knowledge workers. All of us sitting on our laptops every single day are actually, what we do is we don't produce anything physical often. We're actually producing knowledge itself in some shape or form.

So it's almost like the question of like, how do you become a great knowledge worker? How do I actually become better? And his thesis, which I so subscribe to, is actually through, well, coming up with an idea and thinking, talking about it with somebody else to expand your mindset, and then actually writing it down to distill the idea to actually become clear on what it is.

And then sharing it and getting feedback and then repeating it all the way from the beginning again, because you want to actually keep getting better and better and better at that knowledge creation itself. And it's that loop actually where writing is the key element, which most people are missing, and then getting feedback on that writing itself that I absolutely love.

So that's why is writing important is actually it distills it, gets you feedback, and then you can start the thinking process again to become the best knowledge worker possible. Last question. 

Adam Spencer: All the founders that you have in your life, around you, that you've helped, what are some of the biggest takeaways for you that you've learned from all of them that you would like to pass on to people to help them with their content creation, with their community building?

Michael Batko: Um, So for context, um, I have been at StartMental for six years. We back about 20 to 30 founders every year. And so I've probably worked with like 120, 250 founders now. And we also have a pre accelerator with hundreds of founders in their year as well. So I've seen. I've worked with a fair share of people who are starting businesses and getting them going.

And the common thread around all of our founders, in particular the ones who then actually follow through and make it work as well, is customer obsession. Of somebody who cares about that customer so much and about the problem that Nothing will stop them to solve that problem. And they don't have an ego about the product.

The product will keep changing and it will keep adapting, but they actually know their customer inside out, love learning from them, love talking to them and doubling down on the problem. So for content creators, what that really means is know your niche and your audience inside out, understand who they are, create content that resonates with them.

And you don't actually want to go too wide and too broad. Sorry, one follow up question on that one. 

Adam Spencer: How do you recommend people Other than the obvious answer, which is talk to them, talk to your audience, um, how do you figure out who they are? How do you get a deeper understanding of who they are as, as people and what they care about?

Michael Batko: Yeah, yeah, great one. Um, I think one, um, almost like very practical tip I would, um, I would have is one of my favorite features on Substack, Substack is where I write. is I can literally have a look at click, open rate, and then also click through rate, but also how often somebody has opened up my, um, my post.

So it's actually pretty amazing because you do have a cohort of like 20 or 30 people who have opened it dozens of times. Like they literally open up the email 30 or 50 times. I'm just like, Oh my God, like I haven't even read this article that often. So like, that's actually a pretty good indication of.

Who is it that finds so much value in your content that they open it 50 times? And that's the kind of people who you can hit up being like, Hey, what was your favorite 10 percent of the blog posts? And what was the worst 10 percent of the blog posts? And that's just a great question to ask as well.

Adam Spencer: There's that 10 percent question again. Yeah. Great. Unfortunately, it's harder to do that with a podcast, but all the more reason to have a newsletter attached to your podcast. Yep. Awesome. Thank you, Michael. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for coming on Earning Ears. It's been amazing to catch up with you again.

Thanks so 

Michael Batko: much.