Taylin Simmonds is the co-founder of Ghostlii. A content marketing agency that specializes in helping founders grow personal brands and generate leads through Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Since Ghostlii’s inception in Q3 of 2022, they’ve accumulated more than $500,000 in product sales for founders.
We are on track to cross the $1M mark by Q3 of 2023.
For more information on Ghostlii, visit ghostlii.com
We sat down to chat with Taylin about his entrepreneurial journey, and here’s what we learned.
Q. Tell us more about your journey – how did you get started? What inspired you?
Taylin: I’m almost 30, so there’s a lot to say, but I’ll try to sum it up. In my early 20s, I went to college and became a ghost music producer for an independent record label. That was a crazy chapter in my life, and most of it was awesome, except for the part where I was a starving artist who couldn’t afford food one time and had to survive on lemons for three days. However, the experience showed me that I needed to understand business to make it as an artist.
When I got tired of the hectic, hedonic lifestyle of a music producer, I became a full-time college teacher for 7 seven years. Eventually, I wanted to have more freedom and a higher earning potential, so I started a ghostwriting agency on Twitter, which expanded to LinkedIn and Instagram. Now, I’m getting into productization and brand building. That’s the super condensed version of how I got started.
Q. You were a ghost producer, and now you’re in ghostwriting, so why continue as a “ghost”? What do you like about that?
Taylin: When I was ghost-producing, I was in my early 20s, and I didn’t have much confidence, so I didn’t want to be the star of the show. It was easier to be locked away in a studio, produce stuff, and have someone else be the star.
I got into ghostwriting because of sheer luck. I wanted to start an online business so I could have more time and location freedom. Dakota Robertson offered to teach me after chatting for a few months on Twitter, and I ran with it.
I’ve only been ghostwriting for a year, and in that short time, I’ve written for a few people in Forbes 30 Under 30 and CEOs who have exited for 10+ million. In my opinion, ghostwriting is the quickest way to access a high-value network. You just have to provide value to them, which usually comes in the form of profits or influence.
Q. What’s the craziest deal you’ve landed as a ghostwriter?
Taylin: So, the average ghostwriting price, if you’re good, starts at around $3,000 per month or 50 cents per follower. Once you get better at it, you can get clients for 6 to 8K per month, which tends to be the standard.
The craziest deal I’ve landed was 50K upfront, and the goal was 100,000 followers. Of course, my work depends on the client’s goals, so the goal is not always getting clients to X amount of followers. Sometimes, they want to gain more status, expand their network, increase their influence, obtain X amount of leads, etc.
Q. Is there anything you can share about your strategy?
Taylin: I ask myself who the target audience is and what the client’s unique angle or perspective is. Now that AI is disrupting everything, personal branding is more important than ever. So, I’m always thinking about the pain points of the target audience and how I can provide a solution.
Say that they want to do more outreach, but they’re struggling with their current strategy. Well, I provide a guide and explain how they can implement it in their businesses. The bottom line is that I focus on putting a personal touch on it so it feels unique. The more stories clients can give me, the better quality brand I can craft.
When talking about packaging, I invented a framework I call the “slip and stick.” It plays off of Joseph Sugarman’s famous copywriting concept about the slippery slope, where the first sentence hooks your attention, and every sentence after that takes you further down the hill.
My framework consists of ‘slipping’ the reader into the writing to then provide compelling content that slides their eyes down the page until the idea finally ‘sticks’ in their mind with a really good sentence they can’t forget. For example, Harry Potter’s “Swish and Flick” is something you can hear in your head. That’s a sticky idea.
Q. Do you have a process to help you identify how to leverage stories?
Taylin: This guy named Kieran Drew once said on Twitter: the less relevant the story is to your audience, the quicker it has to be. I think that’s a good rule to follow. You have to focus on what’s relevant for the audience.
I’m always asking myself, how can I make this person’s story give hope to others? If you can do that, that will make your business storytelling a lot more effective. People don’t just want to hear about the wins; they want to know how someone went from point A to point B through the valley of despair and how they survived. They won’t hope that a desired transformation is true for them.
Q. What do the next few years look like for you at a personal and business level?
Taylin: On a personal level, I’m moving to Panama, and I want to start building a family. When I was a kid, my dad worked out of town a lot. He sacrificed spending more time with us to give me and my brother an amazing life full of opportunities.
I didn’t understand it then, but now that I’m older, I’m so grateful. Naturally, I want to give my future children a good life while being present. All my decisions are aligned with that goal, and I won’t sacrifice my freedom.
On a business level, I want to move away from agency work and lean more into productization because I think it takes less time to scale and can make a greater impact. I want to take everything I’ve learned and use it to create products and communities to help other people transform their lives.
In the long term, I want to move my brand towards short-form storytelling on social media and turn life lessons into compelling fictional packages. But I’m taking it one step at a time. Ultimately, I want to help create real change through my fictional storytelling and sticky messages. That’s my purpose for the next 3 to 5 years.
Q. What does productization look like to you?
Taylin: The thing that moves me away from the agency model is that, at some point, the risk-to-money ratio starts to tilt. There comes a point where you have to bring on more people who are qualified and invest in all these other things to keep it running and continue growing. The amount of risk just isn’t worth it for my goals.
As for productization, I think it’s realizing that code can be replicated an infinite amount of times. If you’re able to launch a cohort, you can make a decent amount of money. I know people who have cohorts focused on educating people on what they did to build successful agencies, and they’ve made 400 grand in a day.
It takes time to build up to that, but if you get there, you could make a year’s worth of income and have all this free time to do other things you’re passionate about. You don’t even have to launch a cohort; you can just turn what you know into a product. The bottom line is that you can make more money teaching than doing.
That’s why, in the short term, I want to distill everything I know into writing lessons and go from there to teach people how to write. The problem is that people who don’t have experience are out there teaching, so it gives us all a bad rap. But when you have the track record to back up what you’re teaching, people will know they can trust you, so reputation matters a lot.
Q. What’s a one-sentence piece of advice you would give to someone who wants to become an entrepreneur?
Taylin: I would say that life can change faster than you expect. One door leads to another, and another, and another. The next thing you know, you’re making last year’s income in a day.
Everything I’ve accomplished would have seemed astronomically impossible a year ago. So, it doesn’t matter where you are today; you’re one opportunity away from life-altering change. Remember that and just keep going.
MBA vs. MFA as a Startup Founder(Opens in a new browser tab)
If you want to keep up with Taylin and his journey, follow him on Twitter @taylinsimmonds.