Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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 power of authentic marketing on social media?
We talk about his rags to riches story and the way that he didn't let himself be a victim, even though he grew up with so much adversity. He was able to push himself and become the incredible entrepreneur that he is today. In part two of this episode, we're really focused on the Mind Pump business. Now, Adam is really the business guy in Mind Pump.
And although they talk a lot about fitness advice, he's actually one of the most accomplished and knowledgeable entrepreneurs that I've ever come across. And we talk about everything in this episode, their marketing message, how they work together as partners. We talk about how they approach social media versus podcasts versus email. We even talk about sponsorships.
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 Schaefer. 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.
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Chapter 2: Why do organic sales outperform paid ads?
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?
Why are they looking for so much, so many eyeballs? They want to go viral and have a million people paying attention to them, but then they don't even respond to the one comment or they don't DM and talk to the people. So I think the strategy that people were doing early on to get famous and get attention was a terrible strategy for a long-term business.
And there was kind of this, what's the term I'm looking for, where they get there, it's a false perception of what reality is for them. Meaning, they had a million followers. And if you've got a million eyeballs on you, I guess you could start a t-shirt line.
And by default, you can make a few hundred thousand dollars initially, just because you got a million eyeballs, but that's not a really successful business. Like it's just because you have that many. And by default, one half a percent of them bought something from them. It's like, that's not, and we weren't looking for that. And we knew that, and we didn't want to get into that game. We were like,
I don't want to try and compete with all these people doing that. Let's go help five people. Let's go change five lives. And this is, again, something that we were taught in building a trainer business was I realized how powerful. Now, granted, it's great to get leads. It's great to get all these potential customers looking at you or coming into your gym or things like that.
But nothing was more powerful than changing that one life. I changed that one life. And that lady, 20 years later, is still talking about me. And I still get people that find me from her 20 years ago because I changed her life. Like, holy, the ROI on that is crazy. How many people has she turned on to me and what I do because I put so much in it?
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Chapter 3: How does authenticity drive business growth?
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 thousand 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 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. Like 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,
Those five people that I help for free on that Instagram post or that YouTube clip or that podcast episode, those five potential leads, oh my God, those people are so much more valuable than the thousand people I just added on Instagram because I paid for some post to go, you know, to be pushed out there to a bunch. And I just don't think a lot of people realize that.
I don't think they think that the game is volume. And it's like, no. And in fact, I actually think that that sometimes can convolute what you're doing really well, because you might be getting all this attention. And so you get this idea like, oh, we're doing really good. But it's like, you're not even attracting your true customers. You're just getting eyeballs and random people.
And that just causes more headaches and confusion. People that are, you might be doing the right things in your business because you're so focused on attention. You're getting steered in these wrong directions because you have a bunch of random looky-loos who don't even know who you are. Oh, that sucks. Or I don't like that. Or why don't you do more of this?
And then you start, we had to be careful of this. I remember early on, like not allowing that noise to steer our mission. Like we know what the goal is. We know what the mission is. Like, of course, there's gonna be some haters or some people who don't know us that are gonna hop in there and just gonna make some comment about us. Like you can't let that, deter your mission.
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Chapter 4: Why is building a loyal audience more valuable than going viral?
They didn't get to where they are by being an asshole to everyone, right? They actually want to help people and you can see that in all their content and everything that they do. So I feel like it's so smart that you were like, let's just focus on five people. So you were able to sort of niche down who the perfect client would be for you. And then you listen to them. What do they want?
What do they want from you? How can I add more value, grow the LTV, the lifetime value of this customer? So they buy a course and then maybe they do something more expensive and then they tell their friends. And it's this like flywheel effect that you've basically created with your audience. So I think that's just so super cool. My question for you is you've got this podcast. You've got social.
You guys have an incredible email list. I heard you say that your podcast and email subscribers are way more valuable than your social followers.
Oh, by far. We could shut off. We tested this back when Sal got kicked off. So this was about two years ago. It was right in the thick of the COVID stuff that was going on. And Sal sometimes can say stuff politically. And at that time, that was a very dangerous thing to do on social media. He has the I don't give a shit attitude. And so do all of us who were like, go for it.
Say what you want to say. Do what you want to do. And he was removed. So he was kicked off of Facebook and Instagram multiple times. And we had our best revenue run at that time. We didn't feel an ounce of that. He had the biggest Instagram page. He had the most engagement. So he had the most powerful Instagram out of all of us at that time.
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 listen 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.
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Chapter 5: How can entrepreneurs effectively use email marketing?
Like if I want to ruin my day and be upset, all I got to do is go to the latest YouTube video and just read comments because rarely ever are those comments even close to what the comments we get. So it is true. You have to learn the mediums and how people use them and understand what the game you're kind of playing with those people. And so, and you can't let it bother you.
You really have to be okay with like, that's just the nature of the beast is I'm communicating this to people that aren't necessarily the people that I've put a lot of work into building value with. These are people that literally just randomly found me today, have no idea who I am. They don't know my character. They don't know where I come from. They don't know any of that stuff.
And they're just going to say shit to say shit. So you got to be careful if you let those things get to you.
Totally. So as we're talking about all this, and you're saying, you know, we got to figure out how we sound like on Instagram versus email versus YouTube versus podcasts. As an entrepreneur nowadays, you really got to be online. Like, you really can't do it, especially if you're an online entrepreneur, right? You've got to have some sort of personal brand, some sort of presence.
We're also running companies. If somebody is overwhelmed, where do they start? What advice do you have for them?
Great question. And I love to answer this question because I do think that it can be overwhelming at first. Like, oh my God, everyone's telling me, Gary Vee has a good saying too, of like looking at it like real estate assets and you just want to start, you want to acquire all these things and allow it to organically grow over time and
But it could still be daunting of where do I start, what do I do? The advice that I give is most people, hopefully, especially if you're in entrepreneurship, know this about yourself enough to know that what you like doing the most, meaning like... So I can't put three sentences together. Grammatically, I just am the worst of all of us. So I do not touch copy. I do not write emails.
I would be the worst for that. So... I would be a horrible person to write our emails. I would be a horrible person to write our 5,000 word documents that we give out for free. And if I was doing this all by myself, that's not the first place I would go to. And eventually what I'd probably do is build the other businesses up and then hire somebody who has that skillset better than me.
So I tell people to lean into what you like doing best or what you know that you do best. And so you might not know what you do best yet, but probably that's going to be where you like. So if you do really well with talking for an hour and a half and you have a lot to say and you have a lot of experience on that, I think podcasting is really good.
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges of tailoring content for different platforms?
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 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 an end. 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 that we'd be like, I mean, if that would have happened, I'm sure we would have been over the moon, but then I 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 to 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.
And I've been here after the companies were really taking advantage of a lot of the podcasting. And I actually, luckily I had enough of business acumen to recognize that right away. Wait a second. You're going to pay me just based off of listens the same. So let me get this straight. You have three guys, have a marketing sales background. We pride ourselves on being really good at that.
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Chapter 7: How does Mind Pump handle YouTube's tough audience?
What is one piece of fitness advice that you could give to entrepreneurs specifically?
I think in general, and this goes for entrepreneurs and just people in general when it comes to working out and fitness, is that we overcomplicate it because there's so much noise in what's the best exercise program? What's the best diet? What's the best this? And it's like, honestly, if you lift weights two hours to three hours tops a week, that's it. Strength train.
focus on the big lifts, squat, deadlift, bench, overhead press, that by itself, and approach working out like a skill, not a punishment. You don't go into your workout trying to get a crazy sweat. You're not trying to chase being super sore. Go in, practice those movements, get good at them, get strong and slowly do that. Just, and consistency matters more than anything else.
That's the first thing related to like what to do exercise wise. Don't overcomplicate it. Focus on those things. Exercise is not a form of punishment. The biggest mistake people make is over applying intensity and volume. It takes very little to elicit that change and to get the body adapting to want to build muscle and then feed it properly with making sure you hit your protein intake.
That's the simple advice. Why you want to do this as an entrepreneur. And I'm reminded of this every time I fall off the wagon or I'm on an off streak of, say, 30 days where I might not have lifted or something like that because I'm busy.
And I tell myself this same excuse, like, oh my God, I'm so busy, I can't get to my working workout, or oh, I don't have time at this time, I've got all this going, this and that. It is wild how much more time you get when you work out.
You are a, you're a better husband, you're a better wife, you're a better business partner, you're a better entrepreneur, you have more energy, you have more stamina, you sleep better, you're sharper, you have more cognitive, I mean, you are just better than
When you are a healthier version of yourself, so if you really care about being very successful in entrepreneurship, which the skill sets are, speed, stamina, your acumen, your cognitive function, these things all matter when you want to be successful. The healthier, stronger version of you is better on all those attributes, all of them. They all come up. And you even get more time in the day.
I know that sounds weird. Like, wait, how does that make sense? You're telling me that I work out for an hour and I get more? Yes, because it's wild what happens. And why that is is because every minute of your day is slightly more productive than it would be if you're not working out.
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Chapter 8: Where should overwhelmed entrepreneurs start with online branding?
To become more profitable, here's what I'm going to lean into. And that, 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 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. How do I do this? I'm 20 years old. I have $10,000. And he's like, reinvest in yourself. Go grow your skill sets. 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?
He swipes everything on the table. And I looked at him, boss came in. He told me I'm not doing this. He says, Adam, listen, you're in the position that you're in at this young of an age for a reason. Stop focusing on the things that you're not good at. Focus on what you're good at and be fucking great. And that just hit me like a ton of bricks.
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