Chris Do

Chris Do is the founder of Blind, an Emmy Award winning motion graphics studio that ran for over 20 years, generating close to $7 million per year at its peak. Working with clients like Major League Baseball, Nike, Microsoft, Google, NFL, Sony and Showtime. But in 2013, when Chris noticed consumer habits shifting, people skipping the ads that were commissioning his motion graphics, he pivoted. Up until this point, he'd also been teaching at ArtCenter and Otis College of Art and Design for around 15 years, earning $50 an hour to teach six to 12 students at a time. He left Blind and those teaching roles to start an education company, reaching tens of millions, earning significantly more than that $50 per hour he was receiving teaching in formal education. This is the story of how Chris Do became the undisputed authority.

Chapter 1 — Blind Skateboards

Liam Curley: Chris's parents fled Saigon in April 1975. The Communist Party was sweeping south and the stories of what it left behind had already reached the city. Stories of execution and torture. Life under that regime wasn't a life his parents would accept. So inside a 24 hour window, they left Vietnam by boat, beginning a journey that would end in the United States. Chris was 3 at the time. They arrive in Kansas City through a Catholic refugee resettlement programme and live across the street from their sponsor. Two years later they move to San Jose where Chris grows up between the ages of 5 and 18. He's a middle child with an older and a younger brother. Both of his parents had jobs in the tech space. Here he is speaking about his father on The Right Questions with James Victore.

Chris Do: My dad taught me a lot about logic. I watched how he as a self taught engineer, he would rebuild the Volkswagen bus and he would just take everything apart and how if anything broke, I'm like, dad is broken. And he was sit there, okay, let me look at it. He'd go through this process, you just test variables and you start with the most obvious. Is the battery dead, son? And he would test the battery and like, well, let's get a new battery. Okay. It's not that slowly. Take it apart one step at a time.

Liam Curley: His mother was a creative. She was a design drafter for IBM. But at home, in Chris's words, she was an entrepreneur. She made clothes, she painted and she drew. Chris was a shy child, unsure of himself, as was often the case for a boy matching that description. He gets into comic books, he pore over them cover to cover and he didn't have a lot of them, so he'd reread them, even study the ads. Then he'd make his own. Here he is speaking with Marc Gutman on Baby Got Back Story.

Chris Do: And I would draw and I would make my own comics. Not very good, but I would sit there and practise. And then, like many people, I discovered the book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. And it was just so mind blowing, just trying to draw like the way it was instructed in the book. And so this is what I was doing.

Liam Curley: He's also into skateboarding, which, like comic books, is also a visual passion. The graphics on the boards, the displays in the stores, the T shirts, the magazines. There's an overlap between comic book culture and skateboarding culture. But in school, academically, there wasn't a lot you could do with this design interest. In the 80s and 90s, there weren't a lot of art programmes in public schools. But every chance he got, he'd take a class that allowed him to work with his hands, like Woodchop. And then in high school, he took a commercial art class. That's his route into art school, or at least he thinks it is. When the time comes, he applies to study art and design at college. The colleges ask for a portfolio. He doesn't have one, but he collates the pieces he created in commercial art class. None of the colleges offer him a place. He was good relative to his high school, but relative to other arty kids across states trying to study art, he hadn't truly applied himself. It was closer to a hobby rather than an obsessive passion. He has no plans on what to do next. But he's still at school, finishing his senior year. Serendipitously, Chris's younger brother's wrestling coach knew that Chris drew. Chris had been doing illustrations for the school newspaper. The coach had a friend, Brad, who ran a silk screening business. Brad is looking for staff, so the coach connects him with Chris. Brad looks at Chris's portfolio, the same pieces that colleges had rejected, and offers him a part time job. It's $18 per hour, one of four times what Mr. Minimum Wage was at the time. So Chris is thinking, there's good money in island design. Maybe he doesn't need school after all. Brad teaches Chris how to do ink art. So he's inking Brad's drawings and Chris is good at it. The cogs start to turn in his mind. Why not design his own shirts? Ink them, print them through Brad's setup, keep all the profits. So he starts designing his own T shirts, inking them, printing them for $5.25, selling them for $12. What he hadn't accounted for was all the time he'd spend selling, organising production and carrying the risk. He's borrowing money from his mum to pay for supplies, but all in, he isn't actually making any money. He realises maybe he's not ready to get into business right now. He needs to get into college. So he heads to San Diego with his older brother Arthur, who had just finished a computer science degree at UC San Diego. Arthur is now preparing for grad school and invites Chris to come and live with him. The plan is attend community college, San Diego City, which offered a graphic design class. This is where he's going to make a real effort to get into art school. He'd spend the year building the portfolio, which in theory, will get him into ArtCenter in LA. Incidentally, he wants ArtCenter because Brad from the silk screening place told Chris that's the place he should go if he wanted to become a great artist and designer. It's one of the most selective design schools in the US. The first months don't go to plan. At San Diego, he gets into a toxic relationship that pulls his attention from the work. But when that relationship ends, something clicks and he becomes a different person motivated, determined and driven to do the work he needs to get into ArtCenter. This is a new version of Chris. He'd go to school in the morning, spend the whole day there, either in classes or in the library, go home, have something quick to eat and work at his drafting table on his portfolio till about 1am, then do the same the next day. Over and over for the remainder of the year. He builds a portfolio that earns him a scholarship to go to ArtCenter. You kind of go through this period. You are like a maniac, kind of obsessive designer, kind of really honing the craft. Where does that come from?

Chris Do: That's a great question. I don't know. I think there's something very competitive inside of me and that if it weren't about design, it'd be something else. And I try to explain this to other people. I think there are two kinds of competitive nature. One that's constructive, one that's destructive. The destructive one says that the zero sum game, for me to win, you must lose, and for you to win, I must lose. Or I look at it in a more constructive way where we can both win, we can both be number one in different ways and we can both be very successful. That my success doesn't come at the cost of anyone else's failure, really. It's just like it allows us both to grow. But I think in, in the real world, people do have this mindset where if we're in the same space, in the same city, competing for the same clients, if I win, therefore you must lose. And I don't believe in that at all. So there's a very strong competitive nature inside of me that says I don't want to play something if I know I cannot win. And I might not win on day one, but I will win one day.

Liam Curley: Chris takes that attitude with him to ArtCenter, where he continues to thrive as a designer. But there's another ingredient to his success too. Do you remember your first opportunity to teach?

Chris Do: Yes. That would be semester three, Typography One with Simon Johnston. It's the first time I'm given an opportunity to learn what real design is about and I'm picking it up pretty quickly. And it's in those moments that I think about a third or a quarter of the way through class, other students started coming up to me and asking me for help with their work. And so they would ask, asked me because they didn't have access to an instructor and there's no TA. And I think that was my first real professional opportunity to teach.

Liam Curley: Why do you think they were coming up to you?

Chris Do: Because I started to demonstrate understanding of design principles that they were still trying to figure out. And there was a. There's a pretty simple reason why I think I excelled quicker than most of my classmates. Number one, I noticed that when it wasn't their work being critiqued, they tuned out. I can tell they were looking out in the outer space. They're probably thinking about lunch, thinking about their assignment for something else, and they just weren't there. Physically, emotionally, mentally, that was a big one. And number two, when it was their critique, their opportunity to learn and soak in the information, I felt that there were a couple of things going on. An emotional resistance to hearing what needed to be said and then a reluctance to accept it. So could they hear what the teacher was saying and would they say, okay, that's a different point of view and I need to learn from that and adapt. But a lot of times I felt there was this resistance and pushback and feeling attacked so they would defend themselves. So they became very defensive in class. I was just sitting there thinking, why is this happening? I didn't notice. Week after week people would repeat the same mistake that the instructor told them not to do. And until they did it, they couldn't learn from the mistakes of others. So while they were learning on a one to one level, I was learning a one to 18, because there were 18 critiques, 17 of which were not mine, I was learning from them.

Liam Curley: You teaching or having some teaching moments in class, does that become a regular thing throughout your kind of time at college?

Chris Do: I think so. But in. In that one class in particular, it became pretty clear that I was learning something that took them a lot longer to learn. In other classes, not so much. So it wasn't a universal thing where in every class I was excelling. This one particular typography class with this type of instruction and the way it was structured really suited me well. Whereas other classes I would be the one asking for help.

Liam Curley: Chris excels through college, but in his senior year, one semester away from graduating, he takes a term off. He's burnt out. A friend who just got a job in advertising needed a partner to work with, so she asks Chris to submit his portfolio to her agency in Seattle. He puts together four pieces and they hire him. And he brings the same working rhythm that he had at ArtCenter. He asks his boss, how late can I stay at work? The boss tells him, you stay as late as you want. So as with college, sometimes he's working there till 4am until he's satisfied with each piece of work he's putting together. He's completely engrossed in the flow of design work. That work is good enough that the agency is paying him pro rata $45,000 per year. This is 1995. They're flying him back and forth between Seattle and LA and he's 22 years old, still at college. Within a couple of months, his boss offers to double his salary if Chris will join full time after graduation. Chris doesn't say yes immediately, so the boss comes back to him with an even better offer, that he can run his own design company within the agency and keep his own clients. Give me three good days a week and the rest is yours. Chris turns it down. The work doesn't truly engage him. He loves typography, but the constraints of advertising of one headline, one image, the body copy laid around it, don't give him room to do typography the way he wants to. So he heads back to LA, graduates, has a brief stint at an independent record label, which doesn't work out either, and moves into freelance. I want to pause here for a moment to reflect on everything that's happening up to now. This outcome of getting this kind of job offer at this stage of his career is incredible. And I think it comes down to what Morgan Housel calls quiet compounding. Housel refers to it in the context of money. But I think the same principle applies to craft. Quiet compounding happens day by day when somebody plays their own intrinsically motivated game, ignores external scorecards and allows their craft to mature and accumulate because they're playing the game for themselves, not for others. It's a game of mastery. So it's a consistent stretch of unremarkable days, head down, doing the work for intrinsic reasons that lead to extraordinary results in the medium and long term. A few months into freelancing, Chris's uncle reaches out to him out of the blue and says, Chris, you've always wanted to start a business and now you're done with school, but do you still want to start a business? Chris tells him absolutely. His uncle tells him, I have a business partner who develops hotels all over the world, and he's interested in partnering with somebody who wants to start a design firm. We're going to both be in Los Angeles together, so put together a business plan, come meet with us, tell us how much investment you need, what you're willing to do, and how you're going to make money. All of this is outside of Chris's experience, but he has a roommate whose father is an investment banker. So Chris calls the father, asks him what he should put in the business plan, and the investment banker father gives him the kind of rundown on what he needs to put together. So Chris has the business plan in hand. When he goes to meet his uncle and the business partner, whose name is Bob, for dinner at a hotel in LA, he hands over the business plan. Bob flicks through a couple of pages, looks at the bottom line, numbers, reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a chequebook and writes a cheque on the spot for $5,000, which was 5% of the $100,000 investment that Chris was asking for. There's no contract. He simply tells Chris this is a good faith gesture, which means we're in business together. This is around three or four months after Chris graduated, and now he's in business. As a side note, the other $95,000 never came. Bob had a problem elsewhere in his business, pulled out the deal with Chris and walked away from the $5,000. Chris continues, though, and calls the firm Blind. There's two reasons for that name. Firstly, he liked the irony of a visual communication firm calling itself Blind. Secondly, it was a nod to his skateboarding years. Vision Skateboards was the establishment brand of the 1980s polished professional. Mark Gonzalez, a street skater who was a rising generational talent, was sponsored by Vision but he broke away and launched a rival called Blind, a brand intentionally the opposite of Vision, punk and scrappy. That was the attitude Chris wanted. So Chris has no business partner or the $100,000 investment, but he doesn't need it. He's bootstrapping the company from the profits he's making from the very beginning. Here's Chris speaking with Jay Clouse on Creator Science.

Chris Do: What happened was when you excel at your craft and you show up consistently well, you get rewarded for it in my, in my own experience because my classmates who graduated before me would recommend me for jobs and that's how I got my first job in advertising. And then that job led to a full time offer and ultimately when I didn't take that, the people I worked with at the agency sent me commercial work.

Liam Curley: This points back to something I remember Ryan Hawk, an authority on leadership, said on a previous episode about opportunities. Really all opportunities, they come through people. And if you're putting out excellent work that could help other people, that again increases your opportunities of people coming to you, asking you to do something like speaking at a place or paying you a book advance to write a book or anything like that. All of Chris's opportunities are coming, as Ryan says, through people they recognise and remember the great work he does, the way that he works and the way that he interacts with people. And those interactions happen because of the quiet compounding. He's developed a skill that others recognise and value in the grand scheme of things. It didn't take that long, four or five years to have that kind of impact where he could start a business and bootstrap it straight out of college with, as far as I'm aware, no business development activity. But he is about to hit a glass ceiling because as he's about to find out, there's only so far he can go on craft alone without business skills.

Chapter 2 — Reinvention

Liam Curley: Chris has said that he had a false impression of success, that all he had to do was go out into the world, show his work and the work would speak for itself. But after those early months he struggled to get meaningful traction because he didn't have any business skills. I asked him how and why did he come to this realisation?

Chris Do: Okay, there's a couple of tiers to this. Number one, I graduated at the top of my class and I know this because A, I had very high scores for my portfolio reviews for scholarship. There's only one other person who would have a better score than me. So I'm like, I'm pretty near the top here. Very confident. I have job opportunities. In fact, people offer me, in my opinion, back in the day, crazy amounts of money to go work for them, but I just couldn't do it. So armed with what I thought was a really good portfolio, I was thinking, okay, this is going to work out just fine. I had no conception about. No one in the world knows anything about you.

Liam Curley: Work is coming in through contacts, but after that initial spike is slow and unpredictable. The phone isn't ringing off the hook, and Chris is sitting there passively waiting. There's no tight positioning either. He's taking any work he can get. Identity design, print packaging, editorial, and one other strand of work, motion design.

Chris Do: And so there was a really long ride on the struggle bus of, like, how do I even get work now? Thankfully, a couple, like, really wonderful things happened that I didn't even know if I had any control or input over. Number one was a few of the students that weren't in my department collaborated with me. Kim Jacobs and Alain Breer were directors in the film department, and I did motion or title designs for their spec commercials. So when they got out and got work, they would recommend me to everybody. That was really instrumental. It's how I got my first car commercial. It was because they had just recommended me to somebody. And then those editors who I worked with also then recommended me for other gigs. So this is one of those things where you may not have a lot of relationships, but the ones that you have make them count. Never make them regret recommending you. And every new relationship is your opportunity to make new relationships from that. Number two was some of my student work. Actually, one piece that I didn't feel good about was featured on the Adobe After Effects CD ROM. So you would get the software to download and then they would have a demo reel. And there was just a handful of other students who were included in this demo reel, and that disc went out everywhere. And I just happened to be in Hollywood, in LA, where this new industry is bubbling up. And so I get calls from strangers saying, hey, we saw your work. And there are two calls, two relationships. One gentleman named Gary Briese with a company called Focus Productions. I wind up being his friend for 30 years. We do work together from time to time. And another person named Ian Dawson, he was working at Novacom. He brought me and offered me a job. I refused that job, started my company. But in appearing there for, like, less than a week or two, I met enough people that they started sending me work. So now I have a couple, like, feeder opportunities. And this is the great thing about America and the industry in which we're in at that moment in time was there was more money allocated to do this work than what it would cost me to do the work. So from the jump, I was bringing in people to help almost from, from the, from the get go, because I'm thinking, A, I don't like to work alone and B, I know if they could do 80% of the work and I could do 20% of it to get it to be the 100%, we're both going to win. And so I started growing, but the problem was it's very passive. So once we got into the realm of much bigger projects, I didn't know how to bid, I didn't know how to do the pitch calls, I didn't know how to ask smart questions. And so I was fumbling through them like our work was good enough for us to be considered, but I wasn't good enough to win the business. So I look at it to this day. It was one of, like those moments like, hey, dummy, what are you doing? I think I probably lost over a million dollars worth of new business in the first year, year and a half, just because I just didn't know how to conduct myself, didn't know how to bid at all. And so eventually I do acquire those skills. But it's on the graveyard of many lost opportunities that you crawl over.

Liam Curley: Despite all of that, the business survives and in fact grows because of something Chris didn't plan or engineer. The same thing that shows up in nearly every authority story I research. In a previous episode with Rory Sutherland, I've spoken about a concept he shared originally from Nassim Taleb, the fat tail. A fat tail means a small number of observations in a given data set will represent the bulk of statistical properties. In Rory's words, a small proportion of your activity or discoveries deliver disproportionate value relative to all other activities and discoveries combined. Here's Rory speaking on that point.

Rory Sutherland: If you play poker, if you play blackjack, what you really notice is that a small proportion of your hands in the course of an evening really disproportionately contribute to your winnings and a large number of hands. You may make a bit of money, lose a bit of money, but there are some outsized hands, which complete outliers in terms of how much you win or sometimes how much you lose. And it's vitally important, I think, to understand that's also true about real life.

Liam Curley: This happens again and again with authorities. They get lucky, they do the work. The quiet compounding that increases their chances of getting luck. But there's always a lucky break. That lucky break usually comes in two forms. Number one, an opportunity comes because you know the right person. Or number two, you're in the right place at the right time. The work is in placing yourself in as many locations, literal or metaphorical, to get lucky and building relationships on the back of the value you provide. If we get back to Chris, the motion design work represents an opportunity. He has early mover advantage and few people really specialising in the area. So I've got a quote from you which is we started a creative agency, a visual communication company, pretty generic focus. About a year in to Blind, I decide I need to focus on motion design. Where does this realisation come from that you need to focus on one thing?

Chris Do: It's pretty clear I get an opportunity to work on a main title for a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger called Eraser.

Liam Curley: Eraser was a major Warner Brothers action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger released in the summer of 1996, when Schwarzenegger was at the peak of his box office pulling power.

Chris Do: And I'm working on the storyboards as a freelancer and that board gets picked. So Kyle Cooper, he's the executive creative director at R/GA, soon to be Imaginary Forces says, okay, you do the animation and I could do animation. And I knew the idea and I could make this, but they knew I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know the things about aspect ratio in terms of like square, non square pixels, frame rates. There's a lot of technical stuff and what kind of colour space we're working in. I could make it move the way I want, but there's a lot of technical stuff you need to know. And so they had sent over one of their senior animators just to help. They had given me the work. They're going to pay me to do this job and yet they're sending someone to kind of provide assistance. And so I think at that time there were probably seven computers. I mean the processing power of those computers are nothing compared to the phone that you have in your pocket. But we're working on this. And he comes over, he's like, hey, in very friendly way. He's like, you mind if I take a look at the file? I'm like, bo, please, I don't know what I'm doing. And you look at it and he's like, oh, okay. And then he just changed the vector curves for the animation because we were doing linear animation. So it was just moving at a certain constant rate and he would ramp up and ramp out, and so the motion just looked a little bit more elegant. He goes, that's all you need to do, Chris. I'm like, okay. He goes, otherwise, you're good. And so I sat back and said, okay, hold on, hold on a second. So I'm the owner of a company, I've been paid to do this job. They sent one of their people over to kind of babysit me a little bit, and I was grateful for it. We don't know what we're doing at all because we're dabbling in too many things. Like when we got a web assignment, we don't really know what we're doing. We know design. I can design and solve most problems, but in terms of production, that was a real problem. So that's when I turned to my girlfriend, soon to be my wife, and said, hey, I think we need to shift focus. I really enjoy this motion thing and I think the way my brain works, there's going to be decades worth of learning that I won't get bored in. Whereas laying out a page with type and images, I'm already bored of this. This is becoming a little bit too easy. And so that's why I decided, you know what, we're going to go focus in on this and I need to get really good at this.

Liam Curley: This is a similar scenario I covered in a previous episode on Marty Neumeier. Though Marty had focused on a vertical being tech companies in Silicon Valley, he hadn't specialised in a horizontal. He was offering a range of design work in the same way Chris was. Brochures, identities, posters. And as a result, he was struggling to win the most lucrative work. From Marty's perspective, big clients gravitated towards agencies with big reputations, which he didn't have at the time. He had only two ways to compete with them. Build the firm to a point where he'd done enough great work with great companies that the work sells itself, which would take years, maybe decades. Or hone in on one particular task within the remit of his target clients, one that's important to get right and obsess over mastering the delivery of that one task. That's the decision Chris makes here with Motion Design. So that sounds like a huge opportunity, right? Working on the Eraser, how did that opportunity land? How did I come in?

Chris Do: How did I get that opportunity? I have a story for this. So one of my very good friends, her name is Kimberly Ju and she's very attractive lady. She kind of looks like Winnie from The Wonder Years, but just as a woman. And she had graduated before me. And I remember when I got to school, we were chatting one time and she was telling me, she was telling me like, she's dating this guy who designed the main titles to Seven. And I had just seen that in the movie theatre. David Fincher film, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman. And I was blown away by the main titles. And I was thinking, there's no way you're dating that guy. This is Hollywood, this is LA. People will say anything to get into your pants. There's just no way. I just don't believe it. But she's a super cool lady. So she goes, you know what? I think you guys would really get along. So I humour and take a meeting. So I bring my portfolio, I drive out to Hollywood from downtown LA, and I arrive at this place and I go inside and it's a pretty cool Hollywood looking place. But I'm like, okay, I don't know. And I haven't met Kyle, but I keep getting told it'll be a few more minutes. An hour and a half later, I'm still sitting in the lobby and thinking to myself, I'm out. And you know what? The timing was uncanny. Because right when I was thinking, I gotta go, somebody would come down the spiral staircase and say, hey, he's almost done. He apologised, he's really sorry. This meeting will not end. Just enough for me to sit back down. I was like, okay. So finally the moment comes and she ushers me upstairs into the conference room. Ginormous conference room, by the way. As I'm walking past the spiral staircase upwards and we walking down the hallway, I could see movie posters. I'm like, oh, I might be in the right place, I'm not sure. And then I, I hit the landing and there's this giant movie projector. Like a relic, it was bigger than a refrigerator. So I'm like, I think I might be in the right place. And there's this long conference room table. It's kind of like a scene from Hudsucker Proxy where there was like a power figure and there was me and I had to walk all the way across so I can sit next to him. And he says to me something like, Kim says, you're very talented. So I start taking out my pieces and I lay it on the table. And these are beautifully laminated with a velvet backing. It's very professionally done. And he's just rifling through the boards with his fingers. One, two, three. He stops, he puts it back in. Very nice work. Thanks for coming by. I have to run. I'm so sorry. And I was sitting there thinking to myself, what did I just do? I waited for an hour and a half so that somebody can finger walk through my portfolio and make about a third of the way through. I was like, this sucks. He is the guy. Because I can tell now there's so much attitude. You know, I was thinking these directors, the Hollywood stereotype is completely true. So I get back in my car and I drive and I think I had a cell phone then I don't remember, but I remember getting a call from my friend Kim. I wasn't even back to the studio yet. She'd called me and she goes, Chris, Kyle really likes your work. And he says it about nobody. I was like, oh, sure enough, a day, day and a half later he called me for a movie title for Celtic Pride with Dan Aykroyd and one of the Wayans brothers, I believe. So that's how we got started working with him. And there was a powerful lesson there, one I want to share with people, is that we think it's important for someone to look at all of her work when they know exactly how much work they need to see. And I tell people you only need three good pieces and if you can put together three really good pieces that show some diversity in your thinking, your, your design, that's all it takes. I know in three pieces. Later on when I'm hiring people, I look at a demo reel and sometimes it's a couple of minutes long. Within the first 30 seconds, I know you're going to be good or not. And I torture myself thinking maybe they just don't know how to edit and it'll get really good from 30 seconds on, it never does. So the lesson is don't go past the sale. So when somebody says yes, shut up and be quiet. If I had insisted in that moment when he's like three pieces in is like, hey, you know what? I waited downstairs for an hour and a half. So you're gonna watch or look at all these pieces, man. Cause it's that good. Could you imagine if I did that? He'd give me the one finger salute, you know? Yeah, the middle finger salute.

Liam Curley: From here, Chris grows Blind. Over the next almost 20 years, he works with the types of clients I mentioned earlier in the episode. Nike, Microsoft, NFL, Showtime. He grows to a team of around 16 people and a rotating cast of around 60 freelancers working in a 9,000 square foot studio. Revenue typically fluctuates from $4 million in poorer years to $7 million in great ones. They even win an Emmy in art direction for animation in a music video they work on. But tech markets evolve, consumer habits evolve. And in 2013, Chris notices a shift.

Chris Do: I started Blind in 1995, when the term motion design was not yet invented, and there was a real space for innovation in using desktop tools, desktop video tools, to do work that was done by boxes that literally cost a million dollars. We were working on our Macs to do this, and I remember render times were like over an hour a frame. So if you think about a commercial video, it's 24 or 30 frames per second. It would take 24 hours to render one second of animation. And we're not talking about complicated stuff either. Like a motion blur took that long. So I had to daisy chain several computers together. I share that with you because I felt like every five years for Blind to be relevant and competitive, we had to reinvent ourselves. So in the very beginning, I would take on any kind of work, and then soon it's like, okay, now there's a market for animated end tags. So three second buttons that happen at the end of a commercial to let you know who's brought to you by. Then we started doing animated titles, and then by the end of this arc and journey, we're doing full live action production with no visual effects or animation at all. And so every five years, you have to reinvent yourself. That's about the lifespan of most creative companies that are doing something with technology tools. Right? So I've become really good at seeing where the puck is going. So if all of a sudden the puck is moving towards visual effects, we would reorient a company to bring in visual effects artists and build a bigger team and be able to solve these kinds of problems. But then a conversation I had with my business coach, Kier McLaren, was about like, I wonder how many of your young people still watch TV? He was just asking that question, and I took it literally. So I went and asked all these young people, from the interns to the young designers, and do you. Do you watch TV? They're like, no. Where do you get your entertainment from? Streaming? YouTube, the premium subscriptions. The streaming services weren't there at that point in time, but they would rent the Netflix disc if they wanted to watch a movie, but they weren't tuning into cable television or broadcast television. And so I kind of knew the end was near. I don't know how long it's going to last, but if we, myself included, don't watch the things that we make and produce. That whole industry is going to be gone. And you can see it. It's like little dominoes falling. And if you're paying attention, you can hear them. You would hear about big agencies laying off people, clients firing their agencies. We're talking about the Madison Avenue, the, the ones that do a billion dollars worth of billings a year. The giants are starting to fall and they're splintering and they're breaking up. And what had happened too was people recruited the, what is it, the media buyer from the agencies and brought them in house. And so they're decoupling the media buying component of it, which really was where the profit centres were for ad agencies. They would give away, in my opinion, the creative so they can buy the media because there's so much money in media. For example, I'd heard this stat back when advertising was still very prevalent, that American Express sends half a billion dollars in media buy a year. So if the agency was pulling 10% of the half a billion, they would be making 50 million just on media buy alone. And that's a profit centre, right. No wonder they would give away the commercials and the production. And we were bottom of food chain there. I could see it moving that direction. There were more competition. The expectations of all the vendors that worked in this space were getting bigger. So they're asking you to do more for less and to compete against more people. And the trend line of fewer people watching commercial television meant that we're dinosaurs and there's a finite amount of time. And I would ring the alarm bells to my team and my executive producer and my sales reps. Some of them could listen to me. Some of them like, you're an alarmist, you're panicking. I'm like, I'm not panicking. I'm telling you it's not going to be here. So this period, for about a couple of years, I was looking for alternatives, explainer videos, industrial videos, something that didn't command the same amount of money. But it was good, steady work that we can do. And I tried several things. It wasn't until then that I saw there's a future in making content. Yeah. And that became the answer to the problem.

Chapter 3 — The Futur

Liam Curley: I mentioned in Chapter 1 that in semester three, ArtCenter Typography One, Chris is asked to teach while he's still a student. He chooses not to pursue a teaching career at the point of graduating. But five years later, five years after founding Blind, he gets a call from ArtCenter. How come they call you?

Chris Do: They call me because there's another instructor who is a classmate of mine who was teaching this class and could not teach it anymore because work was just too much for her. So she's like, hey Chris, are you interested? If you are, I will let the school know. Also because I was, I guess, a guest crit art instructor for one of her classes. And she goes, you could do this better than me. So when she couldn't do it anymore, she thought of me and then put me in that role.

Liam Curley: What was the class?

Chris Do: I think it was the main title, Design. So designing Motion Design for broadcasts and feature films.

Liam Curley: How often are you teaching when that starts?

Chris Do: Back then I was teaching once a week. I was for about three hours and it was three semesters a year, so it's year round.

Liam Curley: How long at that rate were you teaching for after that point?

Chris Do: On and off for about 15 years, maybe more. And I say on and off because sometimes I needed to take summers off and I didn't want to teach then. And sometimes I taught two classes at two different schools. So one at Otis and one at ArtCenter.

Liam Curley: That's Otis College of Art and Design.

Chris Do: Yeah, they're kind of cross town rivals to a degree.

Liam Curley: Was ArtCenter the first? Because you were at ArtCenter, was that the first teaching gig?

Chris Do: If memory serves me correctly, ArtCenter was the first and I had done a lecture at Otis and the students were, hey, we heard a rumour you're teaching at ArtCenter. Would you consider teaching here? I said, why? Have I been asked? I was asked right after that. And so yeah, I signed up.

Liam Curley: Then the students, Otis, how did they find out about that?

Chris Do: I think because we're not that far apart. One is by the ocean and one's inland, one's in Pasadena, one's by the airport. Students talk, they hear. And in the early days I had a bit of a reputation as a really tough teacher. I'm not sure if I ever shook that assumption. I am a tough teacher, but I'm not a nasty teacher. And there's a difference between the two. And so I think word circulated or I might have mentioned something about when my students did this and they're like, well, what's, what do you mean? Where are you teaching? And so it got out there, as he says.

Liam Curley: Chris taught for 15 years at the two colleges. He loved teaching. Here he is speaking with Hao Tran on Vietnam Innovators.

Chris Do: I love teaching so much. It's part of my core identity, probably deeper than graphic design. And the schools do a really good job of curating and selecting the most passionate, talented students who can afford it, who have allowed the line to be there. And I loved working with them. At ArtCenter, the student to teacher ratio is very, very low, right? So it's one teacher to like 12 students. So sometimes my classes had six students in it and it was an elective, so everybody chose to be there. You weren't required to take this class. And I love working with them. I love pushing people to the edge.

Liam Curley: But while he loves teaching, over the years he becomes disillusioned with the institutions.

Chris Do: So I'm at ArtCenter and I'm in these faculty meetings. I remember the very last faculty meeting that I had there because at a certain point I wasn't feeling great about teaching. Now teaching is great for your soul, it's great for your feeling of contribution, gives you purpose and meaning in your life and it feels really good. But the pay is terrible, relatively speaking. And I do recall because I still have some of the cheque stubs that I was paid, say 50 bucks an hour, maybe 55 bucks an hour. And I was paying freelancers more than I was getting paid. So as a boss of a company, I was paying people who are contractors working for me more than the school was paying me. That didn't sit well in my stomach. But I kept telling myself, oh, it's not for the money, it's for the teaching. But I started thinking about how exploitive the business model is of teaching. So they like to hire professional people like us, who hourly rates are very high relative to what they're paying and they would just wouldn't meet us there. And what bothered me even more was like I asked or I applied for a title change because my official title was adjunct assistant instructor. And usually if you have a master's degree or a PhD in your field, they would give you a better title. If you're a full time employee, they would give you a better title. And supposedly based on merit, they would give you better title. So I'm like, what gives, guys? I am literally out there in, I think one of 15 companies in the world who can do what we're doing at that time. Of course it changes later. What does it take for me to even get a title change? Can I even be called a professor? I have to be an adjunct assistant instructor. That is like, call me the intern. That's fine. I guess it's kind of like the same for me. So there's hierarchy, there's politics. And I think later on maybe I figure it out. That if you give you a different title, they have to pay you more, which stinks. So it's like, okay, now you don't give me, I guess, legitimacy by giving me a real title. I've been teaching for a long time. I'm very good at teaching and I'm an accomplished professional. And so all these things were just rubbing me the wrong way. And so it becomes very clear in two moments. One is my wife, who's a designer who I went to school with. She is retired at this point, so I had invited her sometimes to come to class because I had so much joy doing it. I wanted her to see me in my element. And she would participate with the other students and she would ask questions and she would push back. So they loved having her there because it's the only person who could talk back to me. And I can't say nothing. I mean, if I want to keep my marriage, I can't say too much, right? And there was one drive home, and I always look forward to hearing her feedback. She's a very critical person and in a way that's constructive for me. And she goes, hey, you ever get tired of doing the same thing? I took offence to that question because I'm like, it's never the same. I adjust everything to how the students are responding. She's like, I don't mean that, but just the structure of this is the same. And you're teaching basically 10 to 12 students every semester. And she says something like, I think you could do more. I was kind of pissed off when she said that. I was like, I am giving my heart and soul into this thing and this is where I find joy. And it feels like you're taking that away from me. But what she said was totally true. It just. I couldn't hear from it from her. And you know how oftentimes the person closest to you tells you what you need to know and hear and you just can't hear it? What she was saying was, don't you think the classroom could be much bigger than this? And she was right.

Liam Curley: So Chris loves teaching, but the institution is getting him down. Plus, his wife has opened his eyes to the fact that maybe he can do something bigger. For context, the conversation that Chris is having with his wife here, it's happening around the same time that he's trying to pivot with Blind. Remember, he foresees that the market for motion design in ads will collapse at some point. And he's trialling different offerings, explainer videos, industrial videos, but nothing's sticking. Now another significant fat tailed event is about to occur. He reconnects with an old classmate, Jose Caballer.

Chris Do: So Jose and I, we went very different paths. Both equally competent and good at what we did. I went down the motion design path, so I worked in commercials and music videos. He went down the web and digital side. And he's an extrovert. I'm an introvert. He's an extreme extrovert. I guess I'm not extreme introvert, but we're at the polar ends of the spectrum in terms of personality types. And so he had been working with a guy named Jason Calacanis, I think is his name. He's quite famous.

Liam Curley: Tech entrepreneur Jason Calacanis is an angel investor in Silicon Valley, early backer of Uber, Robinhood and Calm, current co host of the All In podcast, which has more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube.

Chris Do: And they had a show called This Week In and they would do things on YouTube, so This Week in Web Design, and he was the host, so he was used to doing this. And then eventually he started his own YouTube channel called The Skool, spelled S K O O L, no relation to the other school that's out there now.

Liam Curley: Jose had a product he was selling, a framework he called Core. It was a set of exercises designer could run with a client's team to get them aligned on three things. Their brand, their customer, and their business objectives.

Chris Do: The way I found out about it was I had, I needed his help. I took on a web design client and he said, look, you don't need to pay me. I, I will just do it for you and hopefully it'll work out for your clients. And I just ask that we have permission to film this thing because that's what I need. And I ask my clients, is it okay if we film this for this purpose? And they're totally fine.

Liam Curley: They film it because Jose wants to use the footage on YouTube. He's already running a channel. The plan is to make content around the problems Core solves and let the content do the selling. It's 2014, and few professional service firms are using YouTube to market their business.

Chris Do: So we set up cameras and we do the session. And the session went great. And this is where I get to see Jose in his own zone of genius. And I was thinking, this is pretty cool. I want to learn how to do this and I could do this, I know I can do this. And I want to start changing things right away, but it's a very powerful thing.

Liam Curley: After filming, Jose persuades Chris to go into business with him that they could build The Skool together. Remember, Chris had already spoken to members of the team that he felt the motion design market would collapse at some point. He'd been trialling different models that could replace that work and education would be the area he'd go all in on. The idea is Chris will pull himself out of Blind while he builds The Skool with Jose. Blind continues to generate revenue to fund the pivot. And when The Skool is ready, everyone who wants to will move over from Blind to The Skool. Here he is speaking on The Futur.

Chris Do: And I'm starting to get lots of questions from people because people feel the absence of my leadership and being involved in new business pitches and they're trying to pull me back in. And my directive to the team was, please, I'm trying to build another company so that all of us have a good life raft or safety net here, so that we can escape this one.

Liam Curley: Not everyone is on board. Some people leave, but others believe in a vision and stay. And the idea is publish videos on YouTube, then point back to and sell digital products. The production is high quality. They have a studio, HD cameras, crew lighting, professional editors, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear. And this is all before the high production podcasts you now see from the likes of Diary of a CEO, all supplied by Blind. In the first year of operating, 2014, The Skool pulled in $15,000 in revenue. In 2015, it's $42,000, 300% growth. But that's less than Chris pays his lowest paid employee at Blind. In 2016, $144,000. Again, we're seeing signs of growth, but not the growth Chris and Jose are looking for. The problem, Chris figures, is they're creating content to sell a course. So my understanding that I've heard you say was when you started with Jose, you were creating content to sell a course.

Chris Do: Yes.

Liam Curley: And so no one watches the content and then for no one buys the course.

Chris Do: Right.

Liam Curley: So what I'd love to know is what was the content like then and can you contrast it with what it eventually would be 12 months down the line?

Chris Do: What was like then was Jose was, I think, ahead of his time. I think he was a real pioneer and innovator because a lot of the things I see people doing today he did when there was no blueprint for it. Now everybody's doing a cookie cutter version of something like this. He understood the power of content marketing. So he goes, we have a product and no one knows about the product or us, and no one cares. We have to give him a reason to care. So what he would do is construct conversations and dialogue around the problems in which the product solves. Right. So you agitate the problem, you talk about it and you hint at things. But we never really got deep into, like, showing people this is how we do it. And then there would probably be a little soft CTA about where we're getting this thing from. And if you're more interested, check us out. And I think back then, I don't think a lot of professional people were looking at YouTube as a way to learn and upskill. I think it was a lot of people are looking for an escape from work or life or studies or something like that. And watching the videos and we could tell, meaning if you were tuning in, you could tell, like, yeah, they're talking about a product that they won't tell us all about it and they're going to want us to buy something. And so that's not exactly hot content, that's not fire content. And so we sold a few things, we got a few views, but it wasn't great.

Liam Curley: So something obviously changes because you change. What changes? Do you just chance upon something or.

Chris Do: We're doing this and I'm, I'm like the neophyte. I'm not used to being on camera, not speaking in real time, coherent ways. And Jose is like, you just give him a mic or anything, he'll just talk for hours. And so we're both not ideally suited for this kind of content. Number one, you need to learn to say things and be coherent and make persuasive arguments over things. And for Jose, he just needed to be more edited and kind of boxed in because no one wants to see somebody just rambling on, connecting random ideas. Okay. And we would try different kinds of formats and it was all right. But I was starting to feel pretty good about this content. Like, I feel like we're doing something new and fun. And so I would have my wife listen to it. And I said, hey, honey, did you, did you check out the latest episode? She goes, the one about this and that, I'm like, yeah. She goes, it's unwatchable. And she just walks away. I was devastated. I was like, my wife is telling me my content is unwatchable. The person, the mother of my children, you know, Mrs. Do here is like, doesn't love me enough to watch the content. I'm like, babe, what do you mean it's unwatchable? You guys are rambling on. It looks like you're not even prepared and I can't follow you guys and you know what? She's spitting truth again. And this time it didn't hurt me, but I was like, darn it, she's right. So I went to Jose and I said, hey, Jose, I want to try something new. What if we just made content to teach people? No CTA, no deception. Why don't we talk about brand identity design? I'm passionate about that. And I had just finished this project using the Core framework, and I just want to show everything. And I think he was a little reluctant and as many people are. And I think the idea was, if you show people everything, what will they buy? They can reverse engineer all of this. And it's completely true, by the way. Smart people can look at something, read the title of the book, the chapter headings, and reverse engineer the whole thing. But thankfully we don't sell to super smart, capable people who can reverse engineer everything. They want a plan, step by step, guides. They want reassurances, going to work. They want all of that. So I told him, look, I'm going to go prepare a keynote. You prepare a keynote, let's talk about this subject. And I remember working pretty late into the night, it's probably 11 o'clock at this point, and I get a message from him. He's like, hey, how's your keynote coming? I'm like, it's coming. And he's like, can you send me your keynote? I was like, Jose, are you going to do the work? Or we're both supposed to work on this and you're messaging me pretty late means you're trying or you just gave up or I don't know what the deal is. So I'm like, yeah, it's not done, but here's my keynote. He goes, cool. And so I keep working. I think I work to 4 in the morning, I go to bed and we meet up at the studio. And I'm like, hey, how's your presentation? He goes, it's okay. And I look at him like, bruh, I gave you my template, I showed you what I was doing. You just needed to do a little bit of work. And it didn't look like he did much at all. Right? It's like the classmate that you do a group project with and you are totally disappointed because the other person doesn't hold up their end. But it doesn't matter. I do my part, I'm ready to go. And we produced this video and I think people started to sense something during the live and afterwards, which was one person didn't do the work. So they're always jumping in on the other person's thing. Like I have an argument, I know how to teach, I'm setting it up, I'm building and building. And then every once in a while he would interrupt and say something, trying to be funny or just interject himself because his. I think his deck wasn't ready. I think I don't know what was going on. But that video, despite the bumpy start that we had, outperformed all of our other videos by a wide margin, exponentially outperforming. Now, back then, if we got like 50 to 100 views per video the first day, I was like, this is pretty cool. A hundred people tuned in to watch this video. That's bigger than the classes I teach in. But this video is getting 4, 5, 600 views and it just kept growing and growing. So then I knew something was up. I had a hypothesis. Number one, don't gatekeep anything. Tell them if you're gonna tell them otherwise, don't show up and put in the work necessary. So probably I'm guesstimating that was 10 hours worth of work for one YouTube video just in terms of preparation. And then we did the video and then just show up and do that and there's no CTA. Don't try and pitch people anything, just do it and then get off the air. And that video taught me a lot about how I need to show up in the future. And it's been a guiding principle moving forward.

Liam Curley: Not long after this revelation, Chris and Jose split. They have creative differences in the way that they want to move forward, largely driven by the fact that Chris has the creative freedom to try this new way of making videos that aren't directly designed to sell products. The thinking that money can and will come later. Blind is paying Chris. But Jose doesn't have a Blind. He needs to earn money today.

Chris Do: So when we split up, it is not an easy split up and luckily we're friends and we remain friends. But I definitely didn't want to be attached to any of the legacy because Jose has his own brand and personality. One of the final sticking points was he had asked me, he said, Chris, can you continue using the school brand name? I will give you a perpetual licence to use it forever for free. And I thought about it a lot and one of the challenges I had, I'm telling a lot here. So we're just talking in the spirit of transparency. Jose has made a lot of promises, a lot of deals with a lot of people and I was afraid some of those promises and deals will come back to bite me in the butt. And I didn't want. I wanted a clean start. I would have preferred to keep the name because there was momentum. People got to know us. And I thought it was a good name. I just needed clean, legal, like, it's a brand new company. So if he had made a promise to a sponsor that we were gonna do X, Y and Z, they're not gonna come after me. So we were struggling with the name. And here's the irony is, during that moment, there were a lot of emotions and tension between the two of us. And we had a community that was really kind of torn apart because mom and dad were getting divorced in public. And there were Team Jose and Team Chris, but there was this other team, team, like, keep it together. You're better together. And this is one of those things where people need to understand you don't own your brand. It's kind of weird. Your customers and your audience owns the brand. They tell you what you're going to do. Very difficult time. So I'm sitting here thinking, okay, I gotta come up with a name. I have a book somewhere, a couple hundred names, mostly garbage. I'd literally drive down the street and call it Red Oak. That's what we're gonna call it. And I would just. Whatever we saw, Sharp corner, let's call it that. And I just wrote down everything. No editing, no judgement. Just kept writing and writing and writing. And I would just come home and pitch 15 names to my wife. And she's like, nope, not it. Like, okay. And so we're in this Facebook group together, Jose and I, and he was kind of. It was like a proxy war where he was saying things directed towards me without using my name. And he's a very good writer, so he keeps writing and writing. And this is one thing, he writes this weird manifesto. He says, in the future, designers will be invited to the seat of the table where decisions are made. In the future, designers will move beyond aesthetics and. Da, da. And he just kept writing this over and over again. I was like, that's it. He's literally writing about us right now. And I don't think I was trying to be funny or cruel, but I'm like, he's talking about this great place called the Futur. We're going to call our company The Futur. And that's where it's born. And I just tried it out, like, welcome to The Futur Conference. You're listening to The Futur. Thank you for watching. You are not defined by your past. The future is what you make it. So I was like, this can work, it sounds good. I can say it in a bunch of things and I know I can build an ecosystem around this. And that's how The Futur was born.

Liam Curley: So now Chris is rebranded to The Futur and he has no business partner, so he can go entirely in this new direction that he wants to.

Chris Do: So somewhere in between Jose and I creating this company and then us dissolving, it was this idea that I just wanted to teach. And now that we're breaking up, I'm going to go back to teaching. So this is the stuff I would teach at ArtCenter, but I just want to do it on my own.

Liam Curley: If you remember earlier in the episode, Chris's true passion at college was typography. That's the first class he taught. He has an idea to sell a typography course online. He asks some of the students and interns he taught before how much would they pay for a course from him on typography.

Chris Do: And they were saying astronomical numbers. And there's a reason why, because it was costing them something like $18,000 a semester and they weren't taught this after eight semesters of school. So they were saying ridiculously high numbers. So I'm like, okay, you know what? I charge fifteen hundred dollars. This seems pretty cheap relative to fifteen thousand. I could do that. So I make an announcement on Facebook or something. I think that's the only platform I was on back then saying, hey, I'm starting a typography course Enrol. I'm sitting here thinking, I'm going to fill this room up. It's going to be amazing. I'll have 30 to 50 students and something like four students enrol. This is terrible. I don't know what to do. I'm not showing up for four students. This doesn't feel good to me. And of course I go home to tell my wife, can you believe it? And she goes, can you believe it? What are you thinking? Nobody knows. Except for your classmates, the students at ArtCenter and Otis. Nobody knows you even know how to do anything with type. And the reason being is the last 10, 15 years I'd been a motion designer director. And there aren't a lot of opportunities to showcase typography because it's on screen. First standard definition and then high definition. But you can't put a lot of detail type on the screen. First of all, no one can read it. No one wants to read it. We're not used to this. So she was saying, you need to rebuild your identity and let people know what you're good at. So of course I cancelled the class, refund everybody their money. And some of them were really disappointed. Like, I still want to take the class with you. I'm like, I know, I'm so sorry. Thank you for believing in me. Something else will come. So I go and start thinking. If at in six months, I want to launch a typography course, a workshop, I need to backfill the content with a lot of typography so that people know that I know what I'm talking about. So thus begins all our typography crit videos where I would live, design with people, or they would send it posters and I would just work on them. And that started to build this, I guess what they call it, thought leadership around typography. And so people would tune in. It's like, hey, this guy. I mean, some people would argue with me, I don't know what I'm doing. But that's the Internet for you. And so cool. Now I'm ready to launch a course. So I launched the course. And the course I think is $69 originally. And if you buy it pre launch, I think it's $49. I'm like, this is ridiculously low. And I even told people I'm going to teach this in public and livestream the whole thing week after week, you could just watch it for free, but after 24 hours, I'm going to take the video down. Now, back then, I know even then you could just rip the content and download it to your hard drive. I knew that was a possibility, but people didn't. And when we went to launch it, it was $100,000 launch. And I was like, wow, we can do something. This is cool. This is amazing, actually. And over its lifetime, the course has made us over a million dollars in revenue. That was literally the first feature product.

Liam Curley: I'm assuming that you've gone past the 10,000 subscriber mark. You've got. You've got people watching and listening you and following you as you're building that material, right?

Chris Do: Yeah, but it's not much more than 10,000 because it took us years. I think I have a post somewhere. It's like celebrating 20,000 subscribers. And I would say, like it took two years or three years to get to 20,000 subs. So small following, relatively speaking, from there.

Liam Curley: Using that model of building huge value first on a topic consistently for a sustained period of time, then launching products, The Futur grows, their following grows. For one, as you heard there, when Chris launches the first product, they have a little over 10,000 subscribers. That was in 2017. As I record this, The Futur has 2.79 million subscribers on YouTube, 528,000 followers on Instagram, 258,000 followers on Facebook, 141,000 followers on TikTok and 100,000 followers on LinkedIn. Chris personally has 620,000 followers on LinkedIn. So the value and entertainment, because I'd argue good thought leadership today is entertaining to its intended audience. All of that leads to the millions of followers the brand has. Then after delivering that value, they follow up with relevant products and courses that deliver something on top of the free content. Though as Chris says, they don't play the game of holding a little back, the free content has value in its own right. When Jose and Chris split in 2016, revenue was $144,000. In 2017, the year Chris rebrands to The Futur, they gross $536,000. In 2018, they gross $1.78 million. And that's the point when he and his team decide it's time to go all in on this intellectual property they're building. From there on, they no longer accept new client work through Blind and in 2019 they gross $3.1 million. That revenue was coming mostly from a combination of digital and community products. Throughout his career, Chris has consistently demonstrated the courage to take these micro pivots into different adjacents. If he doesn't recognise the opportunity, emotion, then online education and follow up that recognition with action, he doesn't encounter the following success he experiences. He's even pivoting now. As I record this episode.

Chris Do: If there's a sliding scale, it's really shifted and who knows where it's going. In the early days, most of the revenue was made from products, courses, self study, self paced courses. Somewhere along the way we introduced group coaching. This became the Futur Pro Group. It was actually an extension of The Skool. The Skool had something called the Pro Group and I just called it the Futur Pro Group. And we move all those members across. Initially was free, then became 25 bucks a month and now it's $500 a month. Why it's a shifting scale is because fewer and fewer people want to take courses anymore. So we've seen them fall off a cliff and we're not alone. There's lots of people who are smarter, better at it than us and who are told us it's fallen off a cliff. My buddy Ryan Deiss said something like in one month they saw an 80% drop in course sales. So they retired all their courses. They're done.

Liam Curley: Ryan Deiss, featured in a previous episode of Undisputed Authority. What Chris is referring to here is Ryan's business DigitalMarketer, which I believe was the biggest marketing education platform in the world. And Ryan pulled all products because the market's no longer there for online courses.

Chris Do: So we've seen sales of digital products and courses plummet with where we seem to be making money now. Still, in the group coaching programme, I have a couple hundred people in two different programmes that are paying 500 bucks a month. I do brand deals, I do public speaking, so the brand deals can bring in anywhere between 40 to 50k, upwards of $200,000 per brand deal. And there's affiliate marketing, so we make some money there. So it used to be pretty concentrated with like one bucket. Now it's like a lot of little buckets catching the rainwater. And I do public speaking. Usually when somebody books me, it's 30 to 40k per speaking gig. So that's starting to make a dent.

Liam Curley: Chris is a legitimate authority in the field of design and growing a creative business. He's masterful at producing and delivering content that's simultaneously rich and accessible. He's got a vast body of work, hard earned through years of quiet compounding day by day persistence and obsession in improving his craft, mostly in private, for intrinsic motivations that lead to extrinsic recognition and rewards. He combines that quiet compounding with the courage to pivot when he notices a shift in the market, even when everyone around him thinks he's too early. That is how Chris Do became the undisputed authority.

Liam Curley: Thank you for listening. This podcast was produced by Jamie Slevin, edited by Magnus Kramers and researched, written and narrated by me, Liam Curley. I help experts develop the positioning frameworks and insights that differentiate them from everyone else in their field. And I've created a free email series called the 10 Patterns of Disruptive Wisdom. In my research of undisputed authorities, these are the consistent behavioural patterns I noticed among those who rise to the top. To get the email series, head to liamcurley.co.uk. Link is in the description.