Misfit Entrepreneur October 2023 - 373: Cracking the Twitter Code, How Dakota Robertson Went from a Crack Addict’s Child and College Dropout to 7-Figures

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Dave Lukas Chats with Dakota Robertson

373: Cracking the Twitter Code, How Dakota Robertson Went from a Crack Addict’s Child and College Dropout to 7-Figures

This week’s Misfit Entrepreneur is Dakota Robertson. Dakota’s parents were crack addicts, he grew up in a motorhome, and dropped out of college – but in less than a year, he grew his social media agency to over $50,000 per month and has kept his trajectory to where his businesses, Growth Ghost, has now done millions in revenue and he has an online audience of over half a million. His secret? Learning the art of Ghostwriting and turning it into a business.

Dakota has cracked the code on how to grow intentional audiences on social media that engage and grow businesses and their revenue. I asked him to share his best, actional strategies and secrets that you can put to work in your life and business to level up.

www.dakotarobertson.net/

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Show Notes

Dakota grew up with just his mom for first few years of my life. His dad left because Dakota’s mom gave him an ultimatum to smoke crack or raise your sons. Crack won. Dakota took on a lot of shy and, and not ideal traits as a as a boy. That prompted him to feel a really insecure and doubt myself in a lot of ways. He eventually found working out and started building his confidence. He then got into the self-help book world reading things like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Think and grow rich, and basically shifted his mindset to what was possible. It lit a fire under him to go out and find a way to work for himself living life on his terms.

He experimented with a ton of stuff like Amazon, FBA blogging, flipping mugs on eBay and a number of other things, but eventually stumbled across Twitter and fell into the misfit crowd of a bunch of young entrepreneurs just talking about online business and philosophy. He fell in love and eventually got indoctrinated in the Twitter world and was learning more on Twitter than he was in college at the time. So he dropped out, went all in on Twitter. He had no idea how he was going to make it work. He started from zero followers and got mentors to help him along the way and grew his social media following. He then started growing other people's social media following for them since he had that skill and started stacking sales, marketing, all this other stuff into his skill set, scaling his agency from there.

What was the aha moment for you where things finally clicked? What did you learn in that moment?

He wasn’t consistent with all the other things he did. He didn’t stick with it.
He did with Twitter, but he also really enjoyed it and enjoyed writing so it didn’t feel like work.
It was also the feedback loop watching his footprint grow and start to impact people.
But they key was going all in and sticking with it.

Why Twitter? Because there's a lot of different social media platforms, obviously. So why did Twitter make the most sense? And how was that able to help you create this business and succeed the way you have?

As an introvert, it was a place he could feel comfortable spending time.
He was already using Twitter for following topics.
Low barrier to entry. Easy to do. And you don’t need high production value.

Tell us how you are able to garner that attention and put together these threads that get this massive following, and then grow accounts, and thus, revenue?

It all start with the idea. If the idea isn’t there, no one will care.
You have to become very good at spotting ideas that gain attention.
It also begins with understanding your audience and crafting content around it.
You can go on chat GPT and “Say my target audience it..” “List out the top 50 pain points that this audience has.” You can then tell it to “Inverse this into How To statements” That will give you the best topics to write about and headlines.
You can look at other popular accounts in the niche and emulate them and get ideas from their content putting out your own version.

The What, Why, How framework…

Example: 5 Ways to Sleep Better
What is tip #1
Why is that a tip
How can it be applied
This ticks all boxes quickly for people.

Do you find list type threads work best?

Dakota does a mix.
He has his GAP framework.
G stands for growth content. And that's content that you kind of leverage other people's brand awareness.
A is authority content which is how to and showing your knowledge. This raises your authority in the domain.
P is personal content and that is anything that builds a connection with your audience. So that is your personal worldviews, opinions, stories, experiences, etc. And that's more of the storytelling format. How I went from X to Y, how I went from a pain point to a desire, you know, any transformation, that's the core of all storytelling is how you're at the pain point. Now at this desired situation, what are the lessons you learned

So do you find that the P is probably the hardest part for people?

100% if you're boring, you're not relevant.
Stating your convictions or opinions, people respect that.

Let's say somebody's watching this or listening to this and they're sitting there and they're going, I I've got a Twitter account. I'm not doing a ton with it, right? I've got some followers and stuff. What would you tell them? Like, what's the best way to get on the path to start growing that, like, today? What would you tell them to do over the next week?

The #1 thing is to become an interesting person.
Pick a skill that you have interest in, even if you aren’t that good at it. And that other people are interested in.
Learn that skill and teach what you are learning.
It all starts with earning people’s trust up front.

Once somebody has built a following, how do they go about generating revenue and scaling that from there? What should they be thinking about? What are some of the things you've seen that best generate revenue?

It's will range depending on what skill you learn and what you're offering to the market.
The best route would be to offer a done for you service where you're trading your time for money. That's going to give you a really good understanding of the skill on a deeper level where you're actually applying it, you're learning the nuance of that.
Read $100 million offers by Alex Hermosy, because that will give you a really deep understanding of how to craft an offer.
Ask your audience what will be valuable.
You can also look at what others are offering in your space.
The next product after you have done well and put the time is offer a “done with you program.” Coaching.
Then you can create a course from the experience.
Done for you, Done with you, Do it yourself…

What are some of the best ways to sell and scale?

Windowed launch that expires to create urgency and action.
Leading up to the launch with content.
Make it easy to buy. No brainer.

You were talking about chat GTP before for content. How can people stay fresh with content and good ideas?

To put out a lot of content, you need to consume a lot of content.
Consume content from creators and just noticing the different formats they use. Take the content and apply your own format.
Have a notebook you keep with you for writing down ideas,

How long did you go before your first client?

He started in Sept 2020.
He hired his mentor in summer 2021 paying out 75% of his saving.
That got him in gear.
He launched the Ghostwriting business in Nov 2021 and got his first client.
The first client he landed was a software he was using that wasn’t working properly. They hired him for $3k per month.
He was at 11k a month within 28 days

At the 34 min mark, we talking about how Dakota is progressing in his business and growing it.

What tools do you employ? What systems are you putting in place that have helped you continue to grow as this business and helped you to find leverage and maybe even save a lot of time in how you do this?

The simplest approach, you know, where it's least amount
Dakota hosts his coaching program on Heartbeat and uses zoom.
He just hired his first VA and is putting processes in place.

What is something that you wish you knew sooner as an entrepreneur?

“I wish I knew the importance of systems and processes, because I'm naturally more creative. So I'm just like, oh, yeah, let's just create some content here to do the marketing, all that. Oh, operations systems, screw that stuff. But as I'm getting older and more experienced, although I got a long way to go, I'm just learning how important the systems and the logic side of things, how important of a role it plays in the creativity. Because that is what frees up you to be more creative, you know, to focus on the marketing or the content creation aspect stuff, which I do love. And it's also going to be what allows you to delegate the stuff you don't want to do if you have systems in place, it's you make it repeatable and easy to follow for other people. And boom, just have them do it. And that's what that's what I'm getting to right now. So I'm excited.”

Best Quote

Do more uncomfortable stuff. If you want to be in the top 1% of everything, it's kind of logical. You got to do what 99% of people aren't doing.

Do more uncomfortable stuff. If you want to be in the top 1% of everything, it's kind of logical. You got to do what 99% of people aren't doing. So being okay with, with putting yourself out there, especially at the beginning.

Get mentors and don't be afraid to ask for help.

Be more vulnerable. Show that you're human, you're not perfect.

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