Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Adam Schafer: The #1 Organic Sales Strategy Entrepreneurs Overlook on Social Media | Part 2 | E339
Mon, 24 Feb 2025
When Adam Schafer launched Mind Pump, the fitness space on social media was flooded with fake success and viral fame. But he chose loyalty over hype by helping a few people deeply, replying to every DM, and turning down quick brand deals to protect his audience's trust. That approach built Mind Pump into a multi-million-dollar business, with brands now lining up to work with them. In this episode, Adam shares his top social media marketing tips for entrepreneurs and content creators, why organic sales win, and how putting your audience first drives lasting business growth. In this episode, Hala and Adam will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:00) The Power of Authentic Marketing (02:12) Building Loyalty on Social Media (05:29) Why Organic Sales Beat Paid Ads (08:49) Scaling by Listening to Customers (11:54) Email vs. Social Media Marketing (15:39) Tailoring Content for Every Platform (19:14) Surviving YouTube’s Tough Audience (21:20) Online Growth Strategies for Entrepreneurs (25:03) Why Mind Pump Refused Sponsors at First (28:13) Building Trust and Value in Advertising (32:11) Protecting Your Brand in Online Marketing (35:18) Boosting Productivity with Fitness Adam Schafer is the co-founder of Mind Pump Media, a multi-million-dollar fitness brand and podcast. Growing up with childhood trauma, including the loss of his biological father to suicide, Adam developed resilience and leadership early on. Starting with a lawn-mowing business and later working as a fitness trainer, he co-founded Mind Pump, growing it into one of the top fitness podcasts and companies from the ground up. Sponsored By: Shopify - youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - rocketmoney.com/profiting Indeed - indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - robinhood.com/gold Factor - factormeals.com/profiting50off Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Resources Mentioned: Mind Pump’s Website: mindpumpmedia.com/free-resources Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, SEO, E-commerce, LinkedIn, Instagram, Digital Marketing, Storytelling, Communication, Video Marketing, Social Proof, Marketing Trends, Influencers, Influencer Marketing, Marketing Tips, Digital Trends, Content Marketing, Marketing Podcast.
Chapter 1: What is the importance of authentic marketing on social media?
I love the content in this episode. It's so interesting. If you're a creator entrepreneur, which so many of us are right now, we all need to have some sort of way to connect with our audience online. You are not going to want to miss this episode. Without further delay, here's my incredible conversation with Adam Schafer. Adam, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
So I want to talk about marketing and your marketing message, because I know that one of the ways that you differentiate in the fitness industry is by telling the truth, at least how you started. So talk to us about how intentional you are about your marketing messaging and how you think about the way that you communicate with your audience and the things that you tell them.
I think that we were so intentional about it that I think it was nine years ago when I bought the trademark, stay authentic for our clothing line. What we saw when we got in this space was how fake a lot of it was. It's gotten better, but it still is. I'm sure you know how many people are fake successful, fake fit, fake. It's just so much of that. And we quickly saw it right away.
And we're like, man, This may be working for these people right now, but eventually they're going to be found out. Eventually the customer will get smarter. And eventually the messaging will be about authenticity, about being yourself. And that will be the only way to win.
So much that we decided to go out and trademark Stay Authentic because we believe that that wasn't a buzz term when we trademarked that almost 10 years ago. It was, we believe that that was the direction that, and you hear that now everywhere. Anybody who's successful like yourself in here that communicate things that are important, I've heard you say it on your show multiple times too.
Authenticity is so, so important to the brand. That's what we led with. We really did that from the very beginning and it was a slower game because it's not as sexy. It's not as cool. It's not as trendy. It doesn't go viral, but it's authentic. It's real. And I think that there's a big mistake in the social media game that people make that, again, we were lucky that we did brick and mortar first.
And I use the analogy of if I had just started my brick and mortar gym and I turned the lights on, it's day one, and five potential customers walked in, how would I treat them? And how would I be? What would I be like? And what would I do? Oh, man. First five people paid attention to my business. I'm over there greeting them and talking to them and excited. I mean, I found out all about that.
I'm making those five people my best friends because I got all the time in the world. I got no customers. These are the only five potential customers I have. And so it's wild to me because that's like rules of business. Like any good business person 20, 30 years ago would say, of course, of course you would do that. Well, then why do so many people treat it differently on social media?
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Chapter 2: Why do organic sales outperform paid ads?
Is this business acceptable? And we were a multi-million dollar business before Instagram even hit 50,000 followers. And so I tell this to people all the time. You do not need hundreds of thousands, definitely not millions of people looking at you on Instagram or YouTube or whatever. You don't. What you need to do is go find your thousand loyal customers.
And I forget what book that is or who wrote that. It's a great read.
Seth Godin.
Yes. Thank you. Your thousand tribe or whatever. Right. So once you, and so that was, it was like, we're on this mission. Let's go find a thousand people that we can. And I think that's such a, it's such a good number because I really did think I felt right around a thousand loyal customers. It was like the business was rocking and rolling.
I mean, it was just, cause at that time, once you reach that point where you've changed a thousand, you've got a thousand people out there marketing and advertising for you. And let's say, obviously, not all 1,000 people are out there walking with signs saying, listen to my input. Of course not. But there's enough of them at all times always doing that.
They are constantly talking to a family or a friend. And that lead is so much more valuable than any paid lead you could ever potentially get in this game. And I've spent tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars now in all the different ways that we can – advertise on Google and Facebook and Instagram. And we've always ran these campaigns.
And then at the end of the day, we come back to organic traffic because those customers are so much better than the lead that I paid all this money to get them to convert right away who don't have a relationship with me, don't know who I am, but because they got hit with this ad or whatever, they converted. Those actually end up being the worst customers. They're the most difficult to deal with.
A lot of times, if you have any sort of refunds or cancels, it's coming from those people. They complain the most. They are the hardest customer and it costs me so much to get them.
Versus if I put out a good piece of content with the intent of helping somebody for free and giving them something super valuable that I learned over my decades of training clients, if I can impact them with one piece of content that goes out and helps like five people,
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Chapter 3: How can entrepreneurs build loyalty on social media?
And he was completely removed off of it for six months, eight months, something like that. And we continued to scale during that entire time. And so it really made us realize that these assets are good and are powerful and a tool, but they're not necessary for us because we had a very strong foundation from the podcast, from the email list, from building these customers.
This whole conversation you and I have been having, if you truly change the lives of a thousand people like that, they'll follow you, they'll find you. They will. You could shut down all platforms. And I believe that from us right now. We could turn everything off, go to some other random platform no one's ever heard of, and maybe not everybody, but a good portion of people, they will find us.
I mean, we just did the Spotify raps that come out and like that just came out. I love when those come out because it gives me, I get to peer into some more insight that I don't get to see. And I love data numbers like that. And for 40,000, over 40,000 people, We were the number one thing they listened to all year on Spotify. And that's just Spotify. And that's one of our smallest platforms.
We are significantly bigger on iTunes and about the same in the podcast on YouTube. And so to think that 40,000 people for an entire year listened to Mind Pump more than anything else in their ears is crazy to think that.
and i confidently believe that so at least 40 000 of those people would find us no matter where we're at and 40 000 people listen to me every single day is more than enough people to build a livelihood for all of us here right so social i think is is a great tool to have and a compliment another way to connect with your audience another way to tell your story kind of like a little bit of a business card too like so it has its place and it's valuable
but we don't place a lot of value on a single thing. And this was again, intentful, right? Like we always agreed that we wanted to own our audience. Like we didn't want to, because I had never heard horror stories of people that I knew that were making really big money on Facebook or Snapchat.
And then all of a sudden the algorithm changed and they were losing tens of thousands of dollars like overnight. And we knew that early on. So we were always like, listen, we have to find ways to connect to our people on so many different platforms and build a relationship so well that it didn't matter if these platforms got weird or shut down or like that. We wanted control.
And so we were mindful of that early. And so we built it. Although I will admit that I was naive and for the first two years did not build an email list. I say this is the biggest regret or mistake that MindPump ever made. And I'm responsible for this. I actually thought, and this was a learning curve for me, I thought that social media replaced email marketing.
I thought that that was what we were seeing happening. I couldn't have been further from the truth. What I have realized over all these years of doing this now is that they're different. They're different monsters and every medium is that way too.
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Chapter 4: Why is it essential to tailor content for each platform?
Such good advice. Last question on business. I know that there's a lot of creator entrepreneurs out there right now. This is the world that we live in. So a lot of entrepreneurs also have a large following, which means that they're probably getting brands approaching them for sponsorships.
So would love to understand if you guys are taking sponsorships and how you go about thinking about the brand partnerships that you go with.
I love that we got here because one of the things I'm most proud of that we did was I think we really disrupted the advertising space on podcasts. So 10 years ago when we came in this, this is relatively new. No big brands are advertising on podcasts yet. Very few people realize what a powerful medium it is. So the companies are pretty sparse.
Although in the fitness space, there was a lot of like supplement companies and a lot of these companies were there. They were figuring this out early on. And what was really good was that we were so protective of the brand and our branding and our voice that we didn't want to convolute it with other brands and other people's voice and direction and vision.
So we agreed that we may never take advertising. So we said that early on. We said, you know what? We can build a successful business and we don't need to take on advertising sponsorship money from any. And it obviously, when we hit new and we were getting out there, we were getting approached right away. And of course there's a temptation when you're making no money.
And someone says, I'll give you a thousand dollars to do a commercial on your show every day or what like that. Would you take it like, oh wow, a thousand bucks. We're making no money. That's money. Like let's do it. It's reoccurring. But we agreed, no way. Like this is not. And we did that for several years. So we were getting actually kind of bombarded. by a lot of companies.
I mean, it's not like Nike was coming up to us and these brands and we'd be like, I mean, if that would have happened, I'm sure we would have been over the moon, but that ain't happening. If you're just building your business and you're just getting started, those huge companies are not going after the small entrepreneur that's getting their first thousand listeners.
What you're getting is a lot of other startup companies, a lot of other supplement companies, small brands that know that they could probably offer you a couple hundred bucks Because to you, that's a lot of money because you're just getting started.
And so it's appealing and it's great for them because if they can spend a couple hundred bucks to get a thousand or a few thousand people to hear about their brand, it's great ROI for them. So it is very selfish on their end. It's a completely motivated by that. It's a numbers game. Plus at that time, so I was here before people realized how powerful podcasting was.
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Chapter 5: How can email marketing be more valuable than social media?
What is one actionable thing my young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?
To become more profitable, here's what I'm going to lean into, because it didn't hit me until I was 26, and that was the pursuit of daily growth. I didn't come from a big family of reading, and I didn't think of that as something that would return on my investment, but holy crap. crap is that? And I know that Alex Ramosi, right? Says this a lot too.
Talks about like, I love the way he talks about when someone asks him how to invest $10,000 when they would, you know, how do I do this? I'm 20 years old. I have $10,000. And he's like, reinvest in yourself, go grow your skillsets, in the marketplace because nothing is going to give you a greater return on your investment than improving who you are.
Get better, get growing, and hold yourself accountable to that on a daily, on a daily, like go ask yourself at the end of every day, what did I learn today? How did I get better at my craft? How did I become a better person? What did I read and learn?
And if you're stringing days together where you don't have an answer to that, that's your first thing you go do right now is don't let a day go by that you're not growing and learning and improving yourself because that shit starts to compound.
And when you look back five years later, and boy, will you be so much more valuable in the marketplace five years later of doing that every single day than if you just kind of haphazardly go about it.
It's so true. And what is your secret to profiting in life? This can go beyond business, beyond finance, can go beyond what we even talked about today.
So the single best piece of advice that was ever given to me changed my life. I'll tell you the short version of it. I had just finished crushing goal at my gym, 110% of goal. The boss came in. I was proud of myself. I was excited. I thought he was coming in to tell me how great I was. And he came in and he picked me apart. Told me all the things I was doing wrong and this and that.
And it just broke my heart inside. But that's not who I am. What do I do? Work harder. So I was in the back just working on all these things, getting my paperwork worked, being better at all the things that he said. And later on, who became a best friend of mine, who was the manager at that time, comes back and he sees me on the desk working on stuff. He goes, what the F are you doing?
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