Guerrilla

Inuence Formula Interview Series

ADAM BAKER

Interviewer: Tyler Tervooren

All right. Hey everybody. Its Tyler with the Guerilla Inuence Formula. And Im here right now
with Adam Baker of Man vs. Debt. And Adam has what I consider a tremendous community
of people who trust him a lot. Hes built a really fantasIc community around his site, and I
wanted to talk to him today about building trust with your readers and with your customers,
and with the people you interact with. And I thought Adam would be a great person to do
that with. So Adam, if you want to say hi and tell everybody about anything else you want
them to know about. And then well get started.

Cool. Well, thanks Tyler. First, hi, and rst, Im really apprecia;ve that you would include me in
this project that youre doing and have me on to interview. So like you said, I primarily blog over
at Man vs. Debt, so Im excited to be here today.

Awesome. I think we all agree now. I dont think theres any quesIon leL that building trust
and building a relaIonship with your audience is of utmost importance anymore. You
obviously do it beNer than a lot of people. Could you just kind of describe to me the top three
things? Like, the most important things for you and the most important things for your
readers, to build a really great relaIonship?

Yeah. I thinkOne important caveat. I will try to give two or three specic ;ps. But one
important, I guess, overall theme. Maybe just the rst ;p is that its not a strategy that you have
to ac;vely try. Or it shouldnt be more of likeIts not a tac;c, if that makes sense. Theres not
some system of things to do. And so its hard for some of us to be like, How do we establish
trust? You can have some tac;cs, but its really about more than that.

Its about just the type of interac;ons you want to have, and I guess, strategy that you want to
use. So its the strategy more than tac;cs. And Ill clarify that by meaning, theres not just one or
two things you do. Its just how you approach and how you care about the subject youre talking
about.

Not everyone I knowI have friends that dont like interac;ng with their readers. They dont
like, they dont want that interac;on as much as some of my other friends. And thats perfectly
OK. Its all just geRng comfortable with what you want and what you are comfortable
delivering.
But your ques;ons specically about building trust. And I am very comfortable having that
interac;on and having that back-and-forth. So what I try to do is, at all ;mes just be myself. So I
guess thats the rst ;p, if I had to give one.

AuthenIcity.

Yeah. Its really easy when you get into blogging, especially if youre in niche blogging.
Something like personal nance, which is what I started in. Its really easy to act dierent than
your actual self. And no one wants to be, Im just genuine. No ones going to come out and
say, Im fake. But everyone, in some way or another, fakes it in dierent situa;ons. And the
more transparent and the more, like you said, authen;c, that you can be with your readers, the
more I feel that they can connect with you.

Now, what this is notand its not just blogging about, Oh, my cat died, and Im just having a
really tough ;me now, and Im depressed. The key is notIts OK to have occasional posts
where youre really sort of in a bad mood. But the key is to be op;mis;c, to inspire, and to
convey whatever message that you have in an authen;c way. Its just not to show up and put a
camera on yourself, because that only works for a very, very short ;me. Its channeling your
message, whatever you want to get across to people. But making sure you do it in an authen;c
way.

So for me, thats never presen;ng myself in an, Oh my gosh, Im so rich. Heres how you can do
it. Thats cheesy. No one really wants to digest that, and the people that do are short-lived,
short-term people.

So I just presented myself as who we were. We were a couple whod just had a baby and
wanted to get rid of our debt. And it turns out, that in itself was viral, in a way. That in itself
caught on much faster than if I was like, Here I am, another nancial guru. Lets go.

So for me, establishing trust in the beginning was really focusing on who I was, being honest
with my readers about who I was. And just kind of keeping that true as things grow and change.

And so, like you said, for you, building trust means basically being super open and just leSng
people know exactly whats going on with you. And that doesnt necessarily mean that
everybody has to be like that. You can build trust and also be a liNle bit more closed-handed,
but you also have to kind of present yourself in a way that is uniquely you. You have to play to
your own strengths and make sure that people understand, this is really who I am. Cause if
you try to air everything out there and thats not who you really are, then that kind of comes
o weird too.

Exactly. Chris Gumbo says this really well. A major mentor of mine, and I know a mentor of
yours as well. He said in a post, or told me once when I was geRng started, that you have to
pick your transparency line. So decide where your comfort level is, and give 100% of that. So
there are some areas that he doesnt talk about, of his life, but he talks very in;mately about
the areas he does.

You know, I dont talk about my extended family outsideI talk about my core family because
Milligan and Courtney are a big part of what I do. I dont o\en talk about my extended family.
So I dont talk about my parents, I dont talk about a lot of that kind of stu. I dont talk about
my sex life. I dont talk about a lot of dierent stu. Its just like, why would I post about some of
that stu? Its just not congruent with who I am.

On the other hand, Im willing to share my nances, Im willing to share how much money I
make. Im willing to share stories about my daughter. Some people arent willing to talk about
their kids. And again, like you said, Im comfortable up to a certain point, so I just try to do that
really well. If youre comfortable at less, thats perfectly OK, but you need to do that really well
and behave a back-and-forth, have a conversa;on on that level. You said it well yourself.

And that was actually going to be my next quesIon, wasbecause you pracIce whats being
called now radical transparency. But thats contained a liNle bit, and I was going to ask you
whats o and whats onwhats OK and whats o limits. And you went into that. And it
sounds like, be as super open as possible about the things youre willing to be open about.

Sure.

And dont drag in other stu.

Yeah, exactly.

Keep it relevant, it sounds like. If you run a personal nance blog, then nobody cares about
how your cat puked on the oor last night or something. They care about your nances.

Heres a perfect example. I talk a lot about Courtneys and my discussions, or certainly
Courtneys and my high moments. But I dont talk about any of our ghts. Obviously, weve
been married three and a half years. Weve obviously had our share of ghts, and weve known
each other for over a decade. But theres just nowhy would I share marital spats that are
trivial anyway most ;mes on a blog, you know?

And so some;mes people cri;cize you. Its like, Youre only sharing one side of the story. Its
like, No. Why would Iits not Adam Baker Exposed. Its not even a documentary. Again, Im
in control of the lter. So I present my message as best as I can through where Im comfortable.
And when you do that as a blogger, you a^ract the right audience. And when you a^ract the
right audience, theres that trust between you and the audience. And I think thats a really cool
thing about the medium were in.

So we talked about how important authenIcity is. And thats a word that everybody says,
like, Be authenIc. Be yourself.
The buzzword.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. But its legiImate. So how do you know when youre being authenIc?
I know I have some of these feelings, like I sort of think about what Im about to do. Does that
t in with what Ive done before and what I want to do in the future? Like, where does that t
on this realm of who I understand myself to be? Do you have any way to gure out whats
authenIc to you? Do you ever get this feeling like, Im not being quite who I want to be right
now and I need to change things up right now?

Sure. This is going to sound weird, but other people help me with that. You know? And it sounds
weird that other people tell you what youre authen;c about. I try the best I can, but I have all
sorts of things. I have weird random ideas, like, Oh my gosh, I want to go do this. Or, Oh my
gosh, I want to talk about this. And I have a close group of mentors and friends who are like,
Well, I mean, if you want to do that, you should, but I dont think you should overlap Man vs.
Debt with something else. That may not be the best idea, kind of thing. And Im on this wild
goose chase, but they kind of rein me in.

And Courtney, certainly, for people that are married, have that sort of rela;onship too. One
person tends to have this sort of wild idea, and some;mes we go with it, and some;mes we
rein them in. And again, I think if its this raw, theres a camera on me, I just do whatever I want
all the ;me, I dont think a lot of people want to watch that. I dont think a lot of people want to
read that, if its just random.

So two ways. By having a close group of friends that you can get feedback o of. Heres a cool
idea. Oh yeah, thats you, man. Do it. And the other one is just having a clear message,
because when you have a clear message that youre trying to convey, everything you can say,
Does that really t with that?

Like if I just wanted to talk about inves;ng in single stocks, I might just say, Wow, this is kind of
cool. I want to try it. It just might be this crazy idea. And I might write a blog post about it, but
its not congruent with really my message. And I formed this message over years and years, and
so Im not going to change my message with one idea.

Now, my message does naturally change over ;me, and thats perfectly ne. But those wild
ideas that you kind of have, those reality checks, your message kind of helps keep those in
check. Or at least it does if you have a clear one. Ive come to nd as Ive developed a clear one
over ;me. But the more clear your message, the easier it is to keep that in check.

Gotcha, yeah. You pay really, really close aNenIon to what youre trying to tell people and
then it makes it easierIt makes it a lot easier, I think, to see what ts with that and what
doesnt.
Sure. Its like a lter, you know. How does thisHow can I convey my message through this, or
does this t my message? And you kind of check it, checks and balances.

Even though it doesEven though you said it sounds kind of weird, that sounds like a good
idea to me. Asking some close friends for help with that kind of stu. Because honestly were
not always the best judge of ourselves.

Were the worst judge of ourselves most of the ;me. Were extremely biased.

Exactly, exactly. Back to radical transparency a liNle bit. Have you ever run into a situaIon
where you felt like it backred on you? Has it ever gone wrong? Has anything negaIve ever
come from it?

You know, there are certain implica;ons of having family life in public. Like having my daughters
pictures on the site. Some people arent willing to do it, because they feel like other people, like
weird, crazy people, can see it. And thats certainly an issue. But I am not a celebrity by any
means, you know what I mean? Even if I have an audience, its a ;ny, ;ny spec of the world. And
there are lots of families that do have that on huge, huge scales and s;ll manage to live healthy
lives.

And so for us, again, were not on there on a daily scale. But if I feel like Ive put a picture up of
my daughter, thats not a big deal to me. Would that ever backre? Who knows? I cant judge
the future. I can only try to make posi;ve decisions now. So that some;mes I think about. Other
than that, I think that its beenI cant say that its never been nega;ve, but I think its been so
overwhelmingly posi;ve that I just

Overrides it.

I cant even think of a nega;ve. Some;mes its a lot of work, and when you try new things and
youre transparent with your income. And if you dont make the money, or you do make a lot of
money. Ive had months where I havent made a lot of money and Ive just not wanted to share
it. Because I was like, I dont want people to know I made $500 this month.

And I have a couple months coming up where Im going to make a lot of money and it just
happens to be because of the swing of things, because of the swing of being an entrepreneur,
that Im kind of like, Now Im a li^le unsure of whether I want to share. You know what I
mean? Cause what will people think now that I had a couple good months.

I guess, again, it comes back to the message. Ive realized that it doesnt ma^er. Im going to put
it out there, and whats the worst that could happen? Like 5% of my audience revolts because,
Oh my gosh, he made a li^le bit of money last month? Or the other 5% says, Oh, he made
$500? Why am I following this guy? I dont really care because I dont want those kind of
people. And I think that thats a big transi;on from growing an audience in an early part.
What youre doing here is trying to help people with grassroots. Early on, just every person
ma^ers, and thats really powerful. But you have to get the right people in your audience, and
you realize, I guess, as you get bigger, some of my mentors tell me, as your audience starts to
grow, you cant please everyone. And its actually be^er to be really genuine and a^ract the
right people. The people that dont care if you do certain things, or the people that want you to
promote something every two months instead of complaining if you promote something every
couple months.

You dene your audience, and thats the best thing about the Internet. You put your message
out there, and whether its 100 or 100 million, you get to kind of dene what your audience is
all about. Because you dene that by the type of content you put out. And so Im learning to do
more of that in an a^empt to nd people that I meshed with be^er and that trust me be^er
and that we get each other more. And thats just a be^er overall rela;onship. I can help them
more, they can help me more, and its all good.

Yeah, yeah. And like you said, no maNer how hard you try, even me, at a much smaller scale
sIll than you

Not by much.

No maNer how hard you try to aNract the right people, youre sIll going to end up with a
small minority of people who you cant please. And if you spend all your energy trying to
focus on them and trying to make them happy, youre going to piss o 95% of the rest of your
audience.

And the unfortunate part is, theyre the loudest usually.

Theyre the loudest ones. Theyre the ones you hear from, so you want to help them out
because theyre the ones shouIng the loudest. But theyre the ones you have to kind of
ignore the most.

Thats a big thing. Just ignoring nega;ve comments, dele;ng stupid emails that are non-
construc;ve. Support people that construc;vely give you feedback. Thank them.

Absolutely.

But non-construc;ve, dont even respond. Thats seriously what I do. Like, I just delete. Most of
the ;me, I just delete. I dont want it in my life. I didnt start that way. I started where I worried
about it and I spent an hour wri;ng an email rebu^al to this person. And I was like, There went
an hour of crea;ve energy that I couldve shared with thousands of people, that I spent trying
to ght one person, that I dont owe. That is never going to like me anymore, because of
something that I did thats horribly wrong. Never going to benet; Im not going to change them
in any way. I just spent an hour wasted.
And nally a\er doing 100 hours of that, it clicked with me that it just wasnt necessary. Theres
no rule that you have to care about every single audience member. Because if theyre nega;ve,
then theyre not one of your, like we said, trueor not one of your real audience. Then just say,
You know what, OK. Or, thanks and thats it. Some;mes I send emails out that are just like
Thanks and thats it. And some;mes I just delete it and dont respond. And I just think thats a
great ;p for someone, if they ask me. Because that really wouldve saved me a ton of ;me and
energy geRng started.

Yeah, everyone listen to that. And the reason I was smiling so big there is because I
remembered. Right when I was starIng out, I can go back in my Gmail and theres this email
history of 40 emails of me back and forth with this guy that was just, he was an asshole. And I
wasnt really, really bothered by it, because he was kind of amboyant, over the top, like a
really big jerk. So it wasnt like really stabbing me in the chest. It was just kind of like, oh,
youre just being a jerk. But I went back and forth with him for like a week and a half or
something.

And Ive got this thread of emails 40 messages deep, and when I look at it, I just go, I
couldve spent ten hours, a cumulaIve ten hours. What could I have produced in 10 hours?
And look where it went, and look what I wasted it on. I think about that now, yeah.

It is. It really is. I have the same things, probably even more. But it comes down to condence, I
think. You have to have condence in yourselves. Because if youre not condent, then you want
to argue with that person all day. And as I built condence, I understood that thats just not the
right thing.

And so Im condent in my message. Im condent in what I do. That doesnt mean Im arrogant
or stubborn to that point. But Im just condent, and if that persons being unconstruc;ve, I can
see that. I can be condent in myself and just let them leave without it triggering a response.
Does that work every ;me? No, obviously.

Obviously I s;ll occasionallyOccasionally you can get me to push the right bu^ons and get me
to respond in a nega;ve way. But I really try not to.

Live and let live.

Yeah.

You ever get Ired or burned out? You ever feel like giving up? Find yourself in a dip? How do
you get through that?

Yeah, for sure. I almost quit the blog a\er releasing my rst product.

Wow, OK.
I sort of released Un-Automate Your Finances. I dont know if weve ever talked about this, but
its very public. You can go through my archives and see, just what happened. I released Un-
Automate Your Finances, which took a year and it was like my thesis statement on nances. That
was a really big part, its obviously where my blog started, you can tell that by the name.

And I got it out. It sold, made me a couple thousand dollars, which I had never made that much
from my blog before. I obviously wasnt going to re;re o of that. I had this big awesome
business plan that I wanted to execute. But I just got stuck in a ditch, because I wasnt sure what
I wanted to do, and I wasnt sure where I wanted to go with my blog.

And I knew I didnt want to talk about personal nance all the ;me anymore. Like, I was sick of
it. So that doesnt mean I dont want to revisit it, doesnt mean I dont want to ;e it in to what I
do. But I just knew that wri;ng about credit cards was not what I wanted to do. I knew that I
wanted to write a product called Sell Your Crap, but I didnt really want to do the research.

I didnt want to dig in and do all theit was hard work. I had to go page-by-page through eBay
and Craigslist and gure out walk-throughs. I just didnt want to do the work. If you gave me
something, I could probably sell it pre^y well on Craigslist. I didnt want to structure it to
present it to somebody else. So that kind of got stuck.

I thought about star;ng a blog about entrepreneurship, just quiRng Man vs. Debt. I thought
about selling Man vs. Debt. I applied to work at Starbucks. I thought aboutI wouldnt join the
military, but I just thought about ideas like that. It was probably four months. This wasnt for a
weekend.

Yeah. I remember a point in Ime where it was really slow on the blog.

Yeah. I posted once a month for four months, basically. And I just had no idea what I was doing.
And a couple people were behind the scenes. I was talking to them and how did I snap out of it?
A lot of it was need. I needed to make money. I didnt need to make money. I needed to know
what was going to be my career choice. Or my business, or my entrepreneurship path.

I didnt need thousands and thousands of dollars. I just needed to know

Thats legiImate. You eventually run out of money, and you have to make some more to keep
doing what you want to do.

And it was making a li^le bit, but it wasnt full-;me income. So Man vs. Debt would be $500,
$1,500, $2,000, $500. And it wasnt enough to fully support my family. And I was ;red of
working a year for free, working six more months, full-;me basically, for now part-;me income.
And I just didnt have the right mo;va;on.

And then I just nally decidedActually two of my mentors called me on the exact same day,
out of the blue, on my cell phone, and were like, Hey, whats going on with you? And that
really just sort of helped snap me out of it. I just decided, I have to get Sell Your Crap out and
done. And I just buried myself for like two months in researching, planning Sell Your Crap.

And then a\er I released it, it actually didnt do as well as I wanted it to. But my path was very
clear. I knew it was what I wanted to do, even though it kind of failed in the beginning. It
actually has wildly succeeded now, but in the beginning it failed. But it really showed me the
path that I wanted to do. And I really started making some mental changes in my business and
all that cornerstone fun stu.

I dont know how to get out of a burnout because I dont handle it one. So my favorite person
on this is Danielle Laporte, who I love and respect. And she has a big thing about burnout not
being a dirty word. Like burnout is a part of the process. We just say, even your ques;on, which
Ive asked 100 ;mes to people. Havent you burnt out? Its like a nega;ve connota;on. But shes
like, its just natural. It just happens all the ;me.

Its just a part of a phase. Accept it and come back stronger. Know when youre burning out and
just go do something freakish and weird and then come back faster, rather than trying to ght
and ght and ght, and bury yourself. And her carefree aRtude about it sort of helped me not
fall into it again. I havent yet, and Im really excited about where things are going the next few
months and where my business is going. I dont feel a shred of burnout right now, but a year
from now, who knows? I dont know.

Yeah, its cyclical. So it happens to everybody. You have to understand that its happening to
you and take measures to either go do something else for a liNle while or nd something new
to do that will refresh the experience, I suppose.

Sure, sure, sure.

Which, by the way, Sell Your Crap is a good product. Its awesome. Im using it right now to
sell some stu on eBay.

Thank you.

Lets see. Is it ever hard to tell the truth, when youre doing your radical transparency. Like
someImes, like you saidYou touched on this a liNle bit earlier, but I want to go a liNle bit
deeper. When the truth isnt what you want it to be, puSng that out there and being OK with
that, how do you deal with telling the full truth when its not what you wanted?

Yeah. I think that its not ever been that hard for me because its how Ive always started the
blog. Now, if I had started the blog a dierent way and now I was trying to change things, then it
may be harder because I have a certain persona to live up to. But my persona is actually that of
transparency. So a lot of people view me and appreciate a lot of the transparency that we have
in dierent ways.
Whether its just sharing things we owned when we were traveling. We kept a detailed list of
everything we owned. Or whether its sharing nanceswhen we were traveling, we actually
shared our daily expenses. Now I just do a monthly income and expense report for Man vs.
Debt. So I s;ll share it, its just in a dierent way.

And the only reason we dont share our personal income is just because its actually labor-
intensive and hard to do. Its not because we dont want to share it. Actually, I think sharing our
income would be posi;ve. I mean, sharing our personal spending would be posi;ve because
then we would be more conscious and I would be more careful. But if thatswe mainly dont
keep the daily spending up to date because its labor-intensive to log it in to the site, and to
keep that fresh.

The same reason why we fell behind when tracking our stu when we came back. Its not that
we have more stu. We do have more stu, but thats not the reason why we wouldnt track it.
The reason why we didnt is just it was really hard to keep up with. That was just easier to keep
up with when we were traveling. But Im perfectly ne sharing my income now.

And I do go through hiccups, like we talked about earlier. But my sugges;on is, start. Start out a
certain way, or start changing soon, because the longer you wait and the longer you live in a
persona, then the harder is it going to be to share the truth and that kind of things.

But for me, honestly, its really not too dicult. And again, I dont share any of the things that I
would nd uncomfortable. That goes back to the rst thing that we talked about.

Gotcha. Because I did remember reading, when you did launch Sell Your Crap, and you had
that big long post aboutI cant remember what it was Itled. It was like, How to Suck at a
Product Launch or something. And I thought, for myself, if I had wriNen thatI really, really
admired that post. It drew me even closer to you. But I thought, at the same Ime, Wow, that
mustve been really hard to write. But for you it just sounds like thats natural to be that
open and honest about that.

I would say that the post itself was a li^le bit challenging to write. But the decision to write that
post was never challenging.

I see.

So as soon as I knew the launch failed, lets say at this point. And when all the crap thats in that
post was happening, I wasnt thinking about, Oh, Im going to have to write this. But
a\erwards, a\er I had some ;me to breathe, I was like, Im going to have to nd a way to share
this, and to put a posi;ve spin on it.

Yeah.
Thats what I went into thinking. And not to put a posi;ve spin on it because I cared what
people thought about the product, or I cared what people thought about me. The proof of the
product is in the product. And I rmly believe that, and thats why I have less than .0001%.
Everyone does online that guarantees, its just very low, the people that produce real, genuine
products.

I knew that that would rest on itself. And I knew there were ways I could con;nue the sales
down the road. I knew there were ways I could make money in dierent ways. What I was, I
guess, most nervous about, is coming across as what we talked about very rst in this interview,
as a depressed person. Look at me, my product launch failed. Everyone feel sorry for me. I
didnt want that to be the case.

So my only challenge was, how do I share the story part of it, and then how do I make it
inspiring so that it li\s up people and it helps people. So thats when I chose to do the lessons. I
thought, I shared the story, and then I did ve things I did wrong and ve things I did right. And I
thought, this is a way for people to see both sides, and then Ill just tell the story. Because the
story itself is just freaky, so it just wrote itself. All I did was be honest. Thats the 100% honest
story.

So that wasnt hard. It was actually one of the easiest posts Ive ever wri^en. And its the most
popular post Ive ever wri^en in terms of connec;on, because every word of it is true. Its just
real life, what happened. But I also did take the ;me to ;e in the lessons. And Im not too;ng
my own horn, because once again, it wasnt a strategy of, How can I make a really popular
post? It was, How can I spin this so that its just not all woe is me? And it turned out to be a
popular post.

And I even sort of was hoping it would sneak under the radar, like you said. Like, OK, whatever,
next. I wanted to share it, but I didnt want it to be really this huge publicity thing. And it ended
up being that, but in a really good way. So it was just one of those lucky wins in the course of my
blog. And everyone has a few, posts that really connect with people and things. So those are
fun.

Well, I think that might be one of the biggest lessons that I just got out of this whole
interview. Is, when youre being honest, when youre being transparent, when something
negaIve or something less than perfect happens, you cant just be honest about it. You have
to be honest and present it in a way that will actually help people, inspire people, be useful to
people.

Because if youre just like, Oh yeah, I sucked at this, woe is me, thats not going to connect
with people at all. And theyre not going to sIck around, theyre not going to support you. Or
if they do support you, its going to be like, Oh man, when can I get away from this guy?

Exactly.
So its like, always nd a way to make it useful for other people.

Yep, yep. Exactly.

Cool man. Hey, Adam, I really appreciate you doing this call with us today. I think the stu
youre sharing is really, really important for listeners and stu. And Ill be linking up to all your
resources and stu in the resource secIon of the guide. So I just wanted to say thanks again
for doing this with me today. And I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of really good
informaIon out of it.

Well, like I said, Im excited to be a part of your project. Im a big fan of yours. Im excited to see
where you go. So thanks for having me on and doing the interview.

All right. Take care, Adam.