Lessons from Instagram's $660M Pay Day

When Instagram recently released its paid badge for verified users, 92% of their audience say no. And Instagram still made $660 million that day.

That's why my first takeaway is to never stop growing your audience—even if your audience gets as big as Instagram's.

If you continue growing your audience and keeping them engaged by providing value (and upleveling that value over time), you will get the yeses you need for profitable business. You'll get lots of nos, too, but imagine if even just 10% of your audience said yes? What would that number be? If you had a masterclass with 50 attendees, that's 5 yeses. That'll do, right?!

Get details on these takeaways and more when you listen to today's episode!

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi dogs. Welcome to the Ontree MD Podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, Dr. Umna. Well, hello, hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Entre MD Podcast. As always, always excited, always super pumped to be in your ears. So thank you so much for being a listener. Today I was minding my business on Instagram and I saw a post somebody made about Instagram's, you know, big payday, right? Like $660 million. And it came up, it came because, you know, they had started this verified badge that you can get on Instagram. And it's, you know, it's a subscription-based model, right? And it's $15 a month. And they had 44 million people sign up for it. Okay. So 44 million people signed up for it, $15 a month, $660 million. And that's for one month, right? That's for one month. And so I, you know, I quickly pulled out my calculator, did the math. I'm like, okay, they don't have any other people subscribe for it. And all the people that they currently have subscribed, stay subscribers, we're looking at an extra $7.9 billion in 12 months, right? So let's just call it what it is, right? Let's call it $8 billion. But that's $8 billion in revenue. And so you know that I am a student of business. I am always studying. I'm always trying to see what people are doing. I'm trying to see what they're doing behind the scenes. And so I, you know, did a post in the in the entrepreneur Facebook group. I'm like, hey guys, look what happened. You know, I there's so many lessons from this, but what do you guys get out of it? And I said I'll circle back. I am the queen of repurposing. So I was like, okay, so I'm gonna think about this. I'm gonna write out the lessons. That would I can use that as social media content. I can use that for a podcast episode. And if you're listening to the podcast, I am actually streaming this live to the Facebook group. So it's a Facebook group live happening at the same time. So I figured, hey, why not? So here we are. Okay, so 8 billion in revenue. Okay, what are my lessons from that? Well, so the first thing is relentlessly growing your audience. Relentlessly growing your growing your audience. This is something that once, especially once your business starts becoming successful, it is such a big trap where you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, we have all these referrals, we have everything in place. We don't really have to grow our audience. You kind of take your foot out off the gas and you're on autopilot. When you are successful, autopilot is a very dangerous place to be because what that means is there are opportunities that you're not going to be able to take advantage of. But even scarier than that is if something goes wrong, if anything shifts in your ecosystem or outside of your ecosystem, you are not in a position to respond to that. Right. So for instance, when someone tells me, for instance, someone in private practice tells me, oh, yeah, we build our practice over the years. We have, you know, word of mouth is strong in the community and all of that. And they're completely like comatose as far as marketing goes, as far as brand building goes. The consequence of that is it doesn't take much. It takes, you know, CVS putting a minute clinic by you, a hospital building a new location right by you, a recession, a pandemic. You're not in the game. So you're not flexible enough or agile enough to respond to it. And that's how the mighty fall, right? And so Instagram has been making money sense forever. Instagram has been doing really well. And they don't have to continue to grow, continue to do all of those kinds of things, but they have continued. And that is one of the things that gave them the opportunity to have a $660 million payday. Okay. So that's the very first thing, something I want you to think about. If you are starting out, you want to be aggressive with your audience growth. If you are established and your business is working and all of that, you want to be aggressive with your business growth. You don't take your foot off the gas. You just don't. Okay. So that's the that's the very first point that I want to throw out there. Okay. So that's number one. They they grew their audience. So their audience now is 2.35 billion with a B. Okay. They're 8 billion of the people in the planet. They have 2.35. All right. And that's monthly active users. That's not all the users. So that's number one. Number two. Number two is offering your audience value, even though they don't pay you. Right. And so sometimes there is that temptation, you know, I really only serve the people who pay me, right? Like the people who aren't paying me, they're just in my world. I don't know what's wrong with them. But I want you to think about what, you know, what not Facebook, well, Facebook owns them, but what Instagram has done over the years. If you use Instagram, I want you to think about this. You started using it, they've made it better, they've done lots of improvements, they're consistently doing updates, they bring on reels, they pay you to do reels. Now, you may say that's selfish because they're trying to compete with TikTok, but whatever, you get the value. And they're doing all these things. They give you an opportunity to build your brand for free. And you need to remember back in the day, you can only become an influencer and celebrity through TV, where you have to pay, like through your arm, and you know, you have to donate an arm and your feet, you know, to be on there. But they gave you this platform, right? You have access to all these capabilities, but you don't necessarily pay them. Do you see what I'm saying? Now, if you pay for ads, that's different, but you understand what I mean by that. And so think about what you do in your business. There are people who are in your ecosystem, they're part of your audience, they may become clients, they may never become clients, but what are you doing to offer them value? Okay, so for instance, I will use my business as an example. We have the Untrained D podcast, right? And this is a podcast, I'm not paid per se to do the podcast. There are many people who are creating unbelievable wins. I cannot tell you the kind of DMs that I get, you know, sometimes based on the podcast. And I'm doing all this value. I'm not necessarily paid for it. But again, it's what sets the stage for you to have big paydays. Okay. So think about you. I talk about having your own HQ all the time, whether it's a podcast, a blog, a YouTube channel, but you just have this place where you can serve your audience, you can give them value, right? Even if they're not, even if they're not paying you. But it will set the stage. Okay. So you're serving even in the conditions where you're not getting paid. Now, because I know my audience, I'm gonna stop and I'm gonna say this. That does not mean don't serve and make money. Okay. So you're doing this, but a business is an entity that serves people in a profitable way. Okay, so that doesn't change. That doesn't that doesn't change at all. Okay, so that's number number two. Number three, they were giving value, but they consistently up-leveled the value, right? Like, so you got one version of Instagram. I know this sounds like the second one, but it is different. Like giving value is one thing, but you can give value and step into your comfort zone where you're rinsing and repeating the same thing and doing it exactly the same thing, and you don't have goals, you're not striving to, you know, continue to wow the people that work with you and things like that. So think of your business. What can I do to consistently up the value? So, for instance, in the entree MD business school, there are people who've been in the entree MD business school from July 2020 when it started till now. Okay. So we call them the EBS masters, they call themselves the elders. Okay, but they've been in the school since it started. And they will tell you that there is almost no, like it's night and day the school they started with and the school that they have now, right? Because as a community, what we try to do, the team for the entream D business school, is we're constantly have our customers top of mind, like, what can we do to serve them better? What can we do to give them bigger results? What can we do to help them to navigate the challenges better? What can we do to open more doors of opportunity for them? Like that is constant. So in the beginning, we didn't have you know smaller group meetings, we introduced those. And we're like, what can we do to help them, you know, get results faster? We're like, oh man, if we could we could do the 90-day sprint and live 90 days at a time, which has worked phenomenally, right? Like, okay, so many of them would want to be authors. What can we do to them? We could for them, we can do a collaboration book. And it's constant, right? It's constant because once you get stale, then your people go away. The only way to stay ahead is to continue to get better. That that's the only way to do that. And so so that's the third thing. And if you look at Instagram, they've done that, they've just gotten better and better and better. And because of that, they've stayed relevant. If they didn't do that, like you see, even when TikTok came on board, they had to try and compete and all of that stuff because if you don't, you're gone. It's just the way it is. Okay. Number four, fourth lesson, is and this will be so reassuring, right? You only need a small fraction. Like if you're someone who's growing, you're growing your audience, you only need a small fraction of your audience to hit your revenue goals. Okay, so I was doing the math here, right? They have 2.35 billion active users every month. 2.35 billion. The people who signed up for the verified badge subscription, I thinky, are 44 million. And so I did the math, it's 1.87%. They had a $660 million payday based on 1.87% of their audience saying yes. And so you're growing your audience and you're gonna make offers, you're gonna invite people to join your private practice, you're gonna invite people to, you know, come coach with you, you're gonna invite people to sign up for your consulting services, you're gonna whatever it is that you do. Okay. But the truth of the matter is you're gonna get so many no's. And I cannot tell you how many entrepreneurs stop, quit, rollover, play dead because someone said no. You're gonna get so many no's, but you only need a few yeses. And so the lesson here is don't let the no stop you. Think about it. They they've been doing this promotion. Hey, verified badge, you can get it. 1.87 people said yes. And they have 660 million. Right? And so the no is part of the game, it it's it's part of entrepreneurship. It's it's like you work out and you feel the burn. They go together. It's okay. Embrace the no. And it's gonna be a lot more no's and yeses. Now, that doesn't mean for you it'll be 1.87% that you know the conversions work a little different from that. But if you are a coach, and say you did a masterclass, you could really have 10% of the room say yes. And that is a normal conversion, especially for someone starting out. That's normal, right? Some people have 30, some people have 50, but you're gonna get a lot of no's. And I want you to just embrace the no. Okay. So they had 92% of their audience say no, and they still ended up with 660 million. Now, this is the reason why we started with growing your audience. It is so critical that you do that because business is a numbers game. Okay. So it's a numbers game, and the top of the top of the funnel is your audience. Once that is not growing, it's the top of the funnel, it's the widest part of the funnel. So it just goes, you know, it just goes that way. And so if you are not growing that top number, the rest of it just can't grow, right? Like so, growing your audience is number one. You never outgrow it. You never, I know I've said that before, but you never outgrow it. Okay. So embrace the no. So the fifth thing, the fifth thing is this be open and curious about new streams of income and pace yourself. Okay, I explain what I mean by this. There have been ways things have been done, and we don't realize how much we feed into that. Like, this is the way it's always been done. And so we close off our minds, forgetting that as entrepreneurs, we're creators, right? So think about, let me pull up some examples. So, say, for instance, for a private practice, you're like, the only way I can make revenue in this practice is by seeing patients. Okay. Now, this is us creating. So I just want you to think about it. Okay. We're not looking at feasibility just yet. We're thinking about it. But well, there are some people who have their private practice and they have different verticals. And the verticals could be research, it could be that I have supplements, it could be that I, you know, I have this part of it that I rent out. So I'm getting rental income from my business. It could be that you do you developed a software as a service that you use for your practice that now can be white labeled to others. You could have built a training system for your staff that you can then have other people in your specialty use, and that is a product. You can have some other tool, AI related. Like you can create, it does not have to just be seeing patients. It doesn't have to be. Okay. There are people who've created MA schools because they're like, we cannot deal with this turnover. We always want to have the team that we need. So we created this MA school, and that is a separate stream of income. So I want you to start thinking outside the box, like, what are the other revenue streams that I can create? Because I looked at the data from 2022. Instagram generated 43 billion in ad revenue. Okay. So they generated 40, 43 billion in ad revenue, but they're still like, well, oh wow, we could do this. And they did that, and potentially they have at least 8 billion in addition to that. Not half bad, right? Okay. So you want to start thinking in that way. You're a coach, you have a framework. Can you license the framework? Can you certify others in it? There's so many things that we can do. And one of the things that would help you do this is actually interacting with entrepreneurs, especially those who are not in your field. Because if you're in private practice and you see a consultant doing something, the question is, huh, I wonder how that would look if we brought it to the private practice world. If you are a coach and you see somebody in the product world and they're doing something like, huh, I wonder how I could level, I could use something like that as you know, as a coach. You want to, because sometimes people are like, for instance, the entrepreneur business school in the early days, people is like, well, why don't you just have people that are only private practice, only coaches, only speakers, only event hosts, and things like that. I'm like, no, because innovation is not always something new. Innovation sometimes is taking something from one industry and bringing it into your industry. And people are like, oh, wow, that's amazing. But it's not necessarily new. Like when we, you know, I've talked about this when we went through the pandemic because my practice, I'm so grateful, but my private practice did better in the pandemic year than the year before that, right? So we did better in 2020 than in 2019. And one of the things that helped us thrive was all the things I had learned from the online marketing world. So we leveraged email marketing, we leveraged videos, we leveraged overcoming objections, like all of those things. We just flipped it and brought it over to the private practice world. And that's what set us up to thrive, right? So just being open. Now, I then said, and pace yourself, right? Because then you might say, Oh, I have these five new verticals I want to start in my business today. And we're not gonna do that. Okay. So the thing is you want to be aware of them, you want to have a journal where you have them, you want to flesh them out, you want to try them out, you want to do some beta testing, but you want to pace yourself, right? So they could have done this from year one, they could have done this from year two. I don't know. Now, understand, I'm speculating. Like I don't work for Instagram, I don't know anybody behind the scenes of Instagram. I'm just saying, you know, based on my observation, right? They could have done this a long time ago, but they just did it now, right? For whatever reason, but you do want to pace yourself, okay? One of the things I've seen some of the most successful businesses do is they build one business, they build it to where it's self-sustaining. They take on the second business, build that up. It frees them up, they go to the third one. When you try to do three or four at the same time because you don't want to lose out on opportunities, you end up creating a, you can actually create a really big mess for yourself. And so the idea is for the most part, we have babies one at a time. Let's do this business thing one at a time and then free ourselves progressively. So I call I call it progressing, you know, like progressively firing yourself. So you get in a business, you progressively fire yourself, free yourself up, go to the next, free yourself up, go to the next. And, you know, sometimes people are like, well, but if I don't do this now, you know, I'm losing out on an opportunity. But the truth of the matter is when you're building your first business, you are actually building every other business you'll ever own, right? Because you're developing the skills, you're developing the toughness, you're developing the experience, you're developing the relationships, you're developing all of those. So you never start from ground zero, right? You start from one, you grow it up, your next one, you take it up a notch, right? And everyone, you'll be able to do it faster, quicker, better because of all the experience you have. So you're never losing anything. Okay. All right, let me give you one more. The sixth one really is this idea of playing the long game, right? Playing the long game, you know, when you come into business, sometimes you're like, man, you know, I need to hit my first six figures in three months and all those kind of things. And it doesn't quite work out that way. Then you get bent out of shape and all of that. It's a long game. Like, what is your mission? Who are you there to help? What problem do you have? What problem do they have? What solution do you bring them? And you're committed. Now, that doesn't mean there are opportunities to pivot, there are opportunities to shift and all of that. But overall, there's this commitment to the long game. Like I'm here to get this done. It is an approach of, you know, I'm here to serve, I'm here to shift an industry, I'm here to help people as opposed to I'm here to make a buck, right? If making a buck is a motivation, it's such a bad motivation. It's not enough to keep you in the game, right? Because there are real challenges there. So it's just this concept of playing the long game. Because someone's like, what, 660 million? You know, my business sucks because I can't do that. I'm not saying anybody's thinking that, but they've been around since 2010. They've been pushing, they've been doing all kinds of crazy things since 2010. And so this payday was, you know, 13 days, 13 years in the making, like, you know, when you when you think about it. So is that commitment to the long game? I'm in here to make this work. I'm in here to to do my part, make this a possibility, make it a reality for me. That's kind of the attitude that you want to have with that. You know, sometimes, you know, people are like, well, you know, I've been doing this for a year, um, you know, and and I didn't cross the seven-figure mark. I'm like, come on. You know what I mean? Like, come on. This takes a minute, but you can do it, but you wanna you wanna play the long game. Okay. All right. So, you know, what I would love for everyone to do, I I think this is one to maybe grab a group of friends and you guys just sit and go over this again and then just decide how does this apply for my business at my stage, right? So maybe you're no longer paying attention to growing your audience, or maybe you're just in resistance. Like, I don't want to put myself out there, you shouldn't take all that. So maybe you just want to get out of resistance, right? Like it's the top of your funnel. It's the top of your sometimes. People say, Oh, like I'm posting on social media, nobody's following me. And I'm like, okay, so how about growing your audience? What are you doing for that? Whose podcast have you been a guest on? Who, what joint venture, IG Live, have you done on somebody else's platform? What event hosted by someone else have you spoken at? When was the last time you were a networking event? And they're like, oh, you know, yeah, I haven't done any of those. That's the top of the funnel. Like nothing works till that works. That that's that's the top, right? And so maybe that's what you're gonna be thinking about. Maybe you've been ignoring your audience. You know, you have a Facebook group or you have a podcast or you have a YouTube channel, you're not really serving your people. Maybe you want to start serving them, right? You want to start serving them because, you know, you don't know. And people are like, no, I know this is the way my business is gonna be. The truth of the matter is you don't know. Instagram didn't start as a photo app. Like you should read the history. It didn't start as a photo app. It started as this place where you can check in, like you go somewhere, you check in, this is where I am. And they noticed that people were really only using it for the photos. And it was what, Blur? I think that was the name in the beginning. And then they changed the name to Instagram and made it a photo app. Like, you don't know what your business is ultimately gonna be. You don't know how many businesses you're going to go on and own. You don't, you really don't know. And so, with the people that you do have and the version that you do have, you want to serve because it may open the door for something completely different down the line. You don't know. That's the beauty of entrepreneurship, right? So, whatever it is, you want to, you want to take some thought, you want to make some decisions, you want to apply it to your business. Because you know, in entrepreneur D, we don't do learnitis, we don't just learn, we learn to do. So now you know this. Now we've had this very stimulating, one-sided conversation. Um, you know, you want to think about what you're going to do, you're gonna do differently. Okay. But let me tell you, I'm really excited for, you know, I know this is interesting times for physicians, but I'm really excited about it because it's giving us the opportunity to evolve. And so, man, I would, I would love to see what we do with our businesses in the short term and in the long term, like 13 years from now, what would we have done? What kind of paydays would we be creating? What kind of impact would we have in the world? And it all starts from starting. It all starts from, you know, where we are, whether we are starting a business or whether we're at 10 million in revenue. It's like, what is that next phase? It's embracing it and getting it and getting it done. But I'm looking forward to maybe doing a podcast episode about your business one of these days to say these are the lessons I learned from your payday or some big impact you're having in the healthcare space, or some disruption that you did, or some innovative thing you're doing with your practice. I I would love nothing more than to celebrate that. So this is what I have for you today. And so as always, remember Entre MD is more than a podcast, it's a movement, it's a movement of change sweeping through the physician community. So share this episode with a doc in your life. They will love you forever. And I will see you on the next episode of the Entre MD Podcast. Hey, if you love listening to the EntreMD podcast, I want to invite you to join EntreMD On Demand. It is my signature subscription program that gives you access to a library of business courses designed to help you do one thing as a physician entrepreneur, and that is to thrive. Just head out to entreamd.com forward slash on demand, and I'd love to have you join us. See you on the inside.