In this episode, Chris Powers sits down with Chris Koerner, a serial entrepreneur and host of The Koerner Office - one of the fastest-growing business podcasts in the world. Koerner has gone all-in on media: 1.4M on Instagram, a 270k newsletter, and a YouTube channel he grew to 600k subscribers in a year. They get into how he cracked short-form, why he thinks attention is the only moat left once AI makes any business easy to build, and the filters he uses to decide what&#x27;s actually worth starting. Then they go somewhere completely different - they talk in great detail about his experience as a missionary for the LDS Church. Koerner spent two years in Hungary, knocked on roughly 25,000 doors as a self-described introvert, and discusses the skills it taught him that made him a better businessman. Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (01:08) From Mobile Home Parks Tweeter to Business Media Juggernaut (09:38) Why Audio Builds More Loyal Followers Than Anything Else (12:21) Facebook&#x27;s Hidden Creator Payouts — and Getting Shut Down Overnight (17:11) The Two-Pizza Company: Building a Lean Content Machine (23:36) From Impulse to Publication: How Content Moves Through the Factory (28:13) The YouTube Split That Unlocked the Algorithm (33:52) The Real Mission: Inspiring Strangers to Start a Business (37:37) Why People Don&#x27;t Act Until They Hit Rock Bottom (40:03) Selling Religion Door to Door: The LDS Mission in Hungary (50:01) 25,000 Doors, 11 Baptisms: What Mass Rejection Really Teaches (56:53) Homecoming: The Most Depressing Day of His (1:06:53) Violence and Death in the Missionary Life Find our sponsors: Collateral Partners - https://collateral.com/fort Relay Human Cloud - https://www.relayhumancloud.com/powers/ Chris on Social Media: X: https://x.com/fortworthchris Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepowerspodcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrispowersjr/ Visit our website: https://www.powerspod.com/ Leave a review on Apple: https://bit.ly/45crFD0 Leave a review on Spotify: https://bit.ly/3Krl9jO

How He Built a 2.5M-Follower Media Machine with Chris Koerner (#420)

POWERS

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** POWERS

## Participants

- **Chris Powers** (None)
- **Chris Koerner** (The Koerner Office)

## Transcript

You were rejected 24,989 times. I couldn't do anything about it. They shut me down. That income was cut off overnight. I thought, okay, how could I turn this lemon into lemonade? How could I play a David and Goliath story? And so I ran home and I sat down on my computer, then I sent an email and I had made a hundred grand by the end of the month in net profit. Just do a little more and you can influence how much money you make. You're going to a country you've never been and you are going to sell religion. And I

praying that they wouldn't need to. Does anybody ever like get violent? A couple of times. Does anybody ever die? It's crazy. Cause it's, I mean, again, I don't use TikTok or anything else, but it seems to be the biggest social network with the most, uh, the highest concentration of the world's most like elite people on it. Whose attention is the most valuable. Yeah. Like one of Bill Ackman's

hours on Twitter or something is worth a gajillion hours of some random on TikTok. Yeah, that's true. I don't know, man. It's an interesting time. It is. Well, maybe we even just start there. I think we met because of social media. Yeah. But we met Twitter and for a long time you were just kind of on it, but not really taking it seriously. And then like what, two years ago

you took it, started taking it really seriously. And now you have one of the largest business podcasts, but kind of business media, business media businesses on the topic of business in the country. What was the shift? What happened? Man, I, I mean, I started tweeting four or five years ago about real estate. Yeah. Cause everyone like there was, you know, strip mall guy, you self storage guy. And

I'm like, I'm doing mobile home parks. There's no mobile home park guy. So I started from zero there. And then I got to like 50,000 followers and then like every other white male in America, I'm like, I should start a podcast, you know, but I knew going into it, how hard they were to grow. There's no discoverability. And so I'm like, okay, Chris, like set your expectations. Let's do a 10 episode test to see if a, you like this B it's growing because you can't really bring a 50,000 Twitter

followers anywhere else. You can't really bring people across platforms. It doesn't work like that. So I didn't really expect those 50,000 people to convert more than 1% and they didn't. So I launched my podcast and the original thesis was to be like a Dave Ramsey, but for business owners, call in show. Cause I, I do well there cause I've had so much like broad experience. I can answer stuff on the fly. So I did that and it was fun, but it wasn't really the concept that people wanted

because these questions and answers only applied to a small percentage of people. It wasn't broad enough. So I did 10 episodes. It was growing, but I pivoted the format to, um, to e...

How He Built a 2.5M-Follower Media Machine with Chris Koerner (#420)

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

How He Built a 2.5M-Follower Media Machine with Chris Koerner (#420)

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.