▶️ MATT NAVARRA, GeekOut Creator    

Lia Haberman: What’s your primary social platform?

Matt Navarra: Until now it's been Twitter and that's how I became known in terms of what I do and where I leak loads of stuff and where I've got the biggest audience, 150,000. However, I'm massively recalibrating because I realize that Twitter is probably in a lot of trouble. So, I already had the newsletter and had other things like the Facebook Group. But I’m trying to diversify further. 

LH: Where else are you looking to connect and communicate with your community?

MN: I saw that they launched WhatsApp Communities… I don’t have the time to do all the engagement pieces in a community. But people that follow me [say], ‘Matt, I just want you to be a source of news.’

And so a broadcast channel that is not algorithmically sorted and fits in with their existing workflow or existing messaging behaviors and sits there in that very personal space is, for me, really powerful. And it's proven to be the case.

LH: How does this channel help you?

MN: The reason why this appealed to me was because it wasn't a huge lift and I don't think that devalues the service. I think it just shows that actually there's something that I wasn’t being efficient and effective at making money from. And it's something that people value and will pay for. But I hadn't found a way of making money from doing it. 

People use my Twitter account as a go-to resource, but I can't monetize it. Twitter's s**t, it doesn't have any tools to do that, and I couldn't really do it in on Facebook because the algorithm kind of b***ers it up because people don't see stuff. And so when these broadcast channels came out, I was like, ‘This is f**king great.’

LH: Are you monetizing this channel — what does that look like?

MN: The interesting thing is that when people started to join in… Forget the newsletter, forget my Twitter, forget anything else. People said, ‘This is the best thing you've done. This is the most useful thing. This is the thing that I would pay money for.’ 

And I was like, ‘Oh, I've been looking for something where I can charge a monthly fee. Maybe this is the thing.’ So I surveyed the community using a Google form and about 60 to 70 percent of people said they would pay something. The majority said they would pay $5 to $7 and a few more would pay $7 to $10.

So I’ve got a tool that manages it. When people pay, this tool lets them in the community and if they don’t pay or stop paying, the tool removes them from the community without me having to manage it. It’s great, the tool is Nas.io. 

LH: What’s the percentage breakdown between time spent on social and this other channel?

MN: It's hard to make a judgment because everything bleeds into one. My job is sitting here most of the day in front of my screen, and I'll have client calls for consultancy and I'll have a few other bits unrelated to this. 

But my constant is checking the RSS feeds. ‘Oh, there's a new story about Facebook. I'll share that.’ And I'm doing that all day long. And 70 to 80 percent of my working day is just doing that. 

And so this is still doing that and it's just an extra click away, an extra 10 seconds away. So, once it's up and running, on a day to day basis it's probably going to be an extra 10 to 20 percent at most.

LH: What’s your BEST tip for other creators considering this?

MN: Find what people value. What is it that people want to have a steady stream of… your tips or your ideas. Maybe it’s an aspect of what you're already doing. 

Creators would lose nothing from saying, ‘I'm going to stick it in my calendar and several times a week I'm going to drop a few useful things in here and I'm going to engage with the community on a few bits and pieces.’ 

That's a low-effort strategy for most creatives that they can experiment with and see what the appetite is. And it doesn't have to be WhatsApp Communities, you know, Instagrams Channels does it perfectly well.

*Lightly edited for length and clarity