Brewing Awesome Online Content with Aditi Rajvanshi

Aditi Rajvanshi: If there is one goal that we globally need to just get behind is high quality, free public education.

Chris Hill: Welcome to We Built This Brand, the podcast where we talk to the creators and collaborators behind brands and provide you with practical insights that you can use in growing your own business. Now, today I'm talking with Aditi Rajvanshi, the head of strategy at Portal-A, an award winning social content company. She's had quite the career journey, working with YouTube in India and eventually making it here to the United States. On top of working with Portal-A, she runs a freelance digital video consulting business named Brewing Awesome, which has worked with brands like Sesame Street.

This episode was a wide ranging conversation, and to be quite honest, it's one of my favorites who I've done all year. So, without further ado, here's my interview with Aditi Rajvanshi.

Chris Hill: Today, I'm joined by Aditi Rajvanshi, and we're excited to be talking to her about her time at Portal-A and some of the awesome things that she has done, not only there, but with YouTube and helping content creators get their start, grow their online brand presences, and. Everything that she's done. So I'm really excited to talk to you today.

Thank you for coming on the show.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Thank you for having me, Chris. And you nailed that. I appreciate the opportunity. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Chris Hill: Absolutely.

So I always like to start by just getting to learn a little bit more about you and your background. So I did some digging, looked on LinkedIn and noticed that you, it looks like you got your start actually originally in India.

So we'd love to talk about your origin story. How did you get, how'd you get to the United States? What, what's been your journey?

Aditi Rajvanshi: I love a good origin story. So let's go back to the lore of me. Well, I'm born and brought up in India. My lovely parents and my sibling make my core family. While I was studying in India and I did my college out of there, I started exploring what are the different directions I want to do is sort of go in and by any stretch of the imagination, this space that I currently am in wasn't on my radar back then.

So part of sort of, I guess, the story is that it's a story of serendipity. It's a story of sort of serendipitous things falling. In, in place in some ways and the opportunities I've had, I mean, I've been, I've been grateful for the opportunities that I've had. So I started off with, like I said, born and brought up in India, studied there.

My family's there. I met my partner and husband there. And it's been a journey of sort of figuring out what are the different ways in which I can exist in this, in this. pretty global world today where I can live in New York and still feel really closely connected to my family in India, in other parts of the world.

When I was in college, I was studying literature. As a literature student, you sort of start thinking about building perspective. It's part of the ask as a literature student to bring critical thinking, to bring analytical thinking, to bring a way of seeing our world through your own lens, and to be able to articulate that.

And that, in many ways, continues to be a core foundation for who I am today. Who I hope to be in the future. When I wrapped up college at that point, I was trying to figure out what comes next, and almost out of nowhere, Google happened. Google was my first job out of college. And as you can imagine, I was completely wide eyed and wondrous about everything that Google brought as an opportunity and without even necessarily thinking much about it.

So. When I sort of started off at Google at that point in time, unlike a lot of the other people that I was working with, it wasn't my dream job. It wasn't the dream company that I wanted to be at. It was sort of this thing that I experimentally landed in and wanted to give it a shot. And I think in some ways, because that's where I started, I came from a place of curiosity about what are the different things that are happening at Google and through my eight years at Google and YouTube, one of the things that remained true was this ability to do a variety of roles across a variety of teams and being really able to sort of go behind the scenes on how some of the worlds work.

Biggest products are built and marketed and brought to life, how brands like YouTube are born and built. And that is another sort of like fundamental cornerstone in how I think about longevity, how I think about what it takes to build a brand in this world. My work at Google and YouTube is also the wild, wild west era of YouTube.

So this is sort of the time when we were still discussing cat videos and all the memes of the world and a trip to the dentist and Charlie at the zoo. Like this is very much OG YouTube territory and sort of really figuring out what this platform is going to be because I was coming from the Google ads world into YouTube.

I think I was able to think a little bit about the business perspective, think a little bit more about. What brands and advertisers would see when they see a platform like YouTube and also be able to think about what users would get when they get into YouTube. So it was an interesting way of getting into this world of the creator economy that I have since inhabited for many, many years and now call home.

My journey through Google and YouTube was powerful. It is my learning ground. It's where I, I think of that as my alma mater in every which way, the place where I learned, and I still continue to sort of look back at that time very fondly and very gratefully for the opportunities that I got. One of the reasons why I think I have this fundamental belief in the creator economy today is that I saw the work ethic that creators brought to the table at YouTube.

From the word go, there was, we weren't necessarily talking about building businesses, but we were absolutely talking about people with an entrepreneurial spirit, really bringing that energy to the table and really sort of thinking about, "Hey, how would I turn what is my passion project into something long term?"

And because that was such a big part of the conversation to have that conversation day in and day out with hundreds and thousands of creators over my six years at YouTube specifically really shaped my worldview around creators. So when I think about creators, I almost never use the word influencers.

And when I use the word influencers, I almost never mean creators. And I think that's a distinction that is sort of foundational to me. It's something that I learned in that moment, in that experience, and it continues to sort of think about how I think about those two, those two words and I, how I think about those two brands.

Yeah. And from there, I think I'd hit a point at Google and YouTube I had hit my ceiling within the roles that I was in. It was this feeling of knowing that I, when I started at YouTube, we were a startup, but by the time I left YouTube, we were a giant business. Which was running like a giant machine, and once you hit that point, you know that you have to sort of take a few calls for yourself, figure out whether this is the most gratifying sort of journey for you anymore. And I knew in my truth that it wasn't any more of that for me. And that's how I started exploring what I do next. And in many ways, that's the genesis for Brewing Awesome, which is my personal brand. Brewing Awesome is a digital video consulting business I started with that core sort of idea in mind that there are always going to be hundreds and thousands of creators, especially small to medium creators and small to medium brands, that will not get the support, the guidance, the advice, the, the handholding that top creators and brands do by any of the platforms that exist.

And that became sort of my priority and focus area to work with small to medium businesses, small to medium creators who are trying to figure out how to navigate this world of digital video. And that's where Brewing Awesome happened. Um, I've been very fortunate to work with the likes of Sesame Workshop, DotDash Meredith, hundreds and thousands of creators through that work.

And that's what got me to Port L. A., where I currently am. And I run the strategy team at. So it's a long story. It's an origin story getting you all the way up to here. Happy to go back into any of those phases.

Chris Hill: We're going to look at it all. I think it's really cool. You know, that you were able to make it to, to get into YouTube, like at a time where I think you were like one of the early partner managers there.

So that's a unique experience. And I'm sure you brought that business side to the table when you're managing those relationships.

It also looked like, you know, you're over India at that time, which to me is a really new perspective. Like I, as an, as an American is based in the U.S, like, I know what was trending and in America at the time you were in those roles, but in India, I'm sure it was like, it probably felt like a different company or at least different content that was being created.

So I'm really curious to know, like, what, what are the differences that you've seen between the two sides? Like, what may you not know about like India's media creation versus America's?

Aditi Rajvanshi: Oh my God, that's such a good question. And I'm glad we're going to go back to that. So India and the U.S. have had completely opposite creator economy trajectories.

Today, we're at a point where it sort of feels more global, where the idea of what it means to be a creator is more global in general, more well known, but that was not the case 10 years ago at all. When we first started exploring launching The YouTube Partner Program in India back in 2010, this was a novel idea.

We didn't know who would be our creator class. We didn't know who we were looking at for monetization, right? Like the point of the YouTube Partner Program was that it allowed for creators and sort of content based companies, media companies to build YouTube audiences, to build YouTube as a revenue stream.

That was the core idea of the YouTube Partner Program. It had already launched in the U.S., and the U.S. story started with creators like you and I sitting in our houses right now and figuring out how we were going to do this. People recording from their bedrooms, the quintessential YouTube vlog era.

That's what the YouTube U.S. story was. In India, when we started looking at it, we knew that we first needed to bring content to this platform for users to follow. So we didn't have the sort of the leeway or the runway to actually start from a place of let it organically sort of get to a place where creators come up to the platform and sort of find their way in.

We were operating on this core idea that to get Indian audiences to even build a class of Indian creators, we first need to show that that entire group of people that there is content on this platform, there's value to be delivered by YouTube. So the first set of partnership deals that we cracked and the first set of sort of partnerships that we pursued were all traditional media partnerships.

We worked with movie houses, cricket, of course, is India is the largest cricketing nation of the world. We are a cricket obsessed country. I always say this, that think about how a lot of the people in the US Feel about baseball. That is how, and then maybe like 10x it, that's how we feel about cricket.

It's a little nutty out there. I'll be honest. And I'm a cricket fan. So I feel like I can say that. And that's sort of the place where we started. We started off by actually bringing in the cricketing board of India, bringing in some of the top movie houses, the largest music channel in the world.

T Series were one of the first set of partnerships that I had the chance to work on. So in, like I said, it's a completely opposite sort of like origin story and evolution where we started with traditional media houses in India and then built the creator class slowly and gradually. I literally can put myself back in the first session, the first rooms that I was in, and I kind of am getting goosebumps just thinking about it because it was so incredible the first time we thought we were going to bring in individual creators into a room.

There were 33 people who showed up in a small room in Mumbai, and we did our first conversation around what it meant to be a creator. And the examples that I used in that deck still like stay with me. It's Vlogbrothers, Hank and John Green, old school stuff. It's Grace Helbig, Philly D, Epic Rap Battles.

Chris, if you haven't watched anything from Epic Rap Battles, cannot recommend that enough. I'm going to send that to you. But it is old school YouTube, the part that I still love so deeply. And I distinctly remember that conversation because it was an afternoon spent with these 30 odd people talking about the power of the platform and talking about the power of community, really, of, of this being a place to circumvent the traditional, you need to go somehow open doors that are hard to open route.

And it was such a inspiring moment to just be in that room, to even run that conversation. And then not just that, like run many such conversations until we had rooms filled with hundreds and hundreds of creators and new potential creators. I'm excited to figure this game out. So the U.S. story, in contrast, and it was sort of happening in parallel at that time, was this, the U.S. market started with core creators sort of happening organically, figuring out the form, building communities, like, we all remember that era. And then from there, Big media houses like the Warner Brothers of the world and the Sonys of the world were like, oh, there is something here. Disney suddenly woke up one morning and said, I actually think we should be on YouTube.

So the story was so different. And I always think it's an interesting sort of way to think about where those markets were. Today, of course, if you look at The top 100 channels in India and the top 100 channels in the U.S. It is actually a pretty good split between what we would have traditionally called individual creators and more sort of like media houses.

It's actually a pretty good split. And I think that's where the evening out of who's a media company today. Has happened. Like, nobody can argue that Mr. Beast is not a media company today. Or no one can argue that Mythical Entertainment, run by, started by Rhett and Link, is not a media company today. There are as much media companies as the Disneys of the world, and I think there is something really powerful about where we currently are in that world.

Chris Hill: That is really fascinating because I remember the early days of YouTube and always thinking about YouTube as a place where you went for dumb videos of people getting hurt, or I don't know, what sticks out in my head right now is a penguin like falling into water, you know, things like that. The other penguin like patting it on the back and throwing it in and just silly things like that is what I remember YouTube for.

And then the early days of the vloggers. I don't know if, oh gosh, what was that one girl who did like It turned out to be all fake and staged?

Aditi Rajvanshi: Lonely Girl!

Chris Hill: That's it, yes. And like the, the, the effect that that had on people thinking, "Oh, it wasn't real." And then as someone into that early content, then seeing the brands come on, it felt like they were invading our space, you know, the advertising got in here.

They're invading our space. Same thing happened with Facebook and social media, you know, in the 2010s and such. But yeah, to hear it came from a different perspective in India is really interesting. I think it makes, in my mind, it makes sense without, admittedly an uneducated background, but like I could see how like the brands would have to do more to bring it in there because that maybe that startup culture that's in America that makes people want to go out and get the latest app or the latest thing wasn't really there.

The iPhone wasn't as popular there. Smartphones, I don't know when they got adopted in India, but I'm sure that YouTube's been on the iPhone since pretty much its inception. So. It's a much different dynamic and I could see how that would take people warming up to it in a different way. The way you see a lot of brand takeovers or not takeovers, but a lot of brands get into things like, you know, say podcasting or other things where like, well, we're going to invest in podcasting now, which we'll get into a little bit later.

But because that brings us full circle back to YouTube, but, but that's, That's really cool.

So you, you made it to the U.S., you started Brewing Awesome. That must have been quite the adventure doing that on your own versus having a company backing you up to do it. How did you, how did you get started? And what would you say was your, what I call the moment of validation with that start that business of like, "Okay, this is real.

People are like, I'm impacting people. They're growing and I've got a business I can, you know, continue to grow with."

Aditi Rajvanshi: I feel I was listening to an earlier episode of your podcast with Mal Alder, yeah, and Mal said something that just stayed with me that afternoon when I heard it, that entrepreneurship is one of the most rewarding, but also one of the most isolating things to pursue. And you know how it is when you're sort of like listening to a podcast. Sometimes you tune out what you're listening to a little bit because you're trying to do something else. The cool listening experience. And then, and I realized that it was that, that comment that brought me back into the conversation suddenly and I was, was paying attention in a different way.

And it really resonated. It was a moment where I was like, I related that a lot because starting off Brewing Awesome was an isolating experience for me. And I distinctly remember the first two years of simply just doing the work without necessarily seeing the results or necessarily seeing the results that I'd hoped for.

And, and mind you, the results that I'd hoped for were not anything completely out of the world of possibility. I would say that they were likely outcomes, but there is a combination of timing of what opportunities come your way and how you pursue them, and I'm really grateful that I continued.

I'm really grateful that through that two year period, every time I had the opportunity to take on a more Like a safer road. I didn't necessarily choose that. There were moments in the, in that initial window where I wasn't sure if I was going to even figure out what I'm worth and what I should be paid for my time.

There were real conversations that my husband and I had during that window of you're going to have to hold the fort down while I figure out how this startup goes and where we go with it, and I'm forever thankful for the choice I made in my partner, not just for that reason, but for a lot. And I think the, the moment of validation was, was not necessarily a single moment, but it was definitely a period of over six months where consistently work sort of started coming my way.

That was the kind of work that I wanted to pursue. It was also around the same time that I got my first client come back to me and say, I want to extend the retainer, or I want to actually get you on a retainer to begin with outside of a short term project, something that I knew very early on with doing awesome was that I wasn't going to do the whole hourly gig or turn this into only doing short term consulting work. I know having worked with creators and having worked in the space of audience development for as long as I have, that there is really nothing to be done over two weeks. So unless someone is willing to invest two to three months, And actually like put a roadmap and say, okay, this is, this is what I'm looking at.

I understand that audience building, community building is not going to happen overnight. I understand that it takes time and effort and resources, and someone shows that commitment, I knew that I wasn't going to work with them, and I think that ultimately benefited my trajectory through Growing Awesome.

And even now with my work at Portal-A, where I see the same mentality sort of come through, I have never been one of flash in the pan advertising or flash in the pan moments of doing something massive today and then not having any follow through. That's never been my approach and I think it has served me well.

And sort of in many ways that became the moment of validation, like you said, was not, was slow, was not necessarily a single moment, but it was definitely something that happened over the six month period where I knew that there was finally proof in the pudding, like I was doing something, I was building something that had legs. And starting sort of 2019, going all the way through to 2022, those were incredibly fulfilling, Brewing Awesome years for me.

I worked with Sesame for almost the entirety of that window. And-

Chris Hill: By the way, that's really cool. I have two young kids, so I just love, and growing up with Sesame Street, I just, yeah.

Aditi Rajvanshi: There's such a good group of people. I mean, I've, I've seen how underfunded they are for the amount of work that they do globally and the amount of good work that they're doing.

I got a chance to work with their teams across India, across Asia Pacific, and actually got to see a lot about their Middle East operations. For example, the work that they've been doing through the refugee crisis, the work that they've been doing across the globe, actually, on the refugee crisis.

It's, it's phenomenal. Incredible work done by some really, really kind and generous human beings, and I always throughout my window and I still believe in their mission so much. We need to fund public education to be as high caliber as possible. Like if there is one goal that we globally need to just get behind is high quality, free public education.

Chris Hill: I agree with that on so many levels. So many levels. My wife's a public educator. I mean, so she's, she's already there and I can definitely. Say, you know, like seeing what, what Sesame has taught my kids and how they have learned from the content that's been created, even the books and the things that we read as kids.

Like my son had, we have a Sesame Street book from the 90s that has like all these twiddlebugs on it at the end of the book, and they go to 100. For a while, my son was obsessed with, because he could read numbers, reading all the way to a hundred. He'd be like, "Daddy, let me read this one." I'd just sit there as he would read to a hundred, but that's, that's like a small example of what they do and how they impact people.

And yeah, that's really cool that you get those opportunities. It's always really rewarding when you're an entrepreneur to do things like that. That feels like to me, a lot of validation when you have that moment of like, "Oh my gosh, what I'm doing is having an impact on people." That to me is when I feel the most validated.

So that's, that's really cool that you've had those opportunities.

Where, where did the name, by the way, where did the name Brewing Awesome come from?

Aditi Rajvanshi: I swear, I wish that we had timed this and I had my coffee mug sitting next to me right now, because that's where the name comes from. It was over a weekend of ideation.

There were giant post its everywhere on a wall with like names being thrown. And I think brewing the idea of my obsession with coffee was one whole category of names, and that's where it came from. So, I mean, talk about brand building. We, we, I really attached my personal brand to the name.

Chris Hill: That is awesome.

Yeah. I'm a big coffee fan myself. So definitely, definitely love that. I was curious cause like I, my origin story is around craft beer podcast. We were, we got won some awards for it and things like that. And we pretty much documented our local craft beer scene coming up. So when I see brewing, I think craft beer, and I was hoping you would have a craft beer connection, but coffee's just as good. Coffee's just as good.

Aditi Rajvanshi: I've never refused a good pint. So if you're offering me beer, we're absolutely jamming on that. But like, this is amazing. I love that. That's what got you into podcasting is like that. The first time you thought about podcasting?

Chris Hill: Oh, no. I thought about podcasting way back in 2006, 2005, right? When it was first starting, a friend of mine was getting into podcasting and she said, "Hey, there's this guy I follow on this podcast called Letter to America. And it's this podcast of an ex-patriot living in Ireland," and she wanted me to check it out and listen to it, and I got obsessed with it. I loved it. Going back to the Lonely Girl thing, like I was actually kind of pre-, I don't know if that was around that time or if that was a little after. I'll have to look back at the timing, but they did this episode they called the Giants Causeway where they went to visit the Giants Causeway and at the end of the episode they, they wrapped it.

And they were like, all right, we're done. And you could tell they were in a studio. They were never out there, and it just messed with my head. And I was like, wait, has this been the whole show? I don't know. I really didn't. And so, but they, yeah, the, the guy who ran it was a BBC producer and all that.

And so in 2006 he moved back to the United States, and I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was in Nashville. And he was like, "I still want to continue the show. I'm looking for things to do." So as a college student, I pitched him on, "Hey, come down here. And this is what we'll do as a podcast." And he, he loved it.

And so he did it. And so in 2006, I was a guest on a podcast and he had just a handheld recorder and we ran around Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I was at the time. And we went around all these places and did this whole podcast episode, and I was just like, this is amazing. And that's where I got hooked.

I was like, "you can just, it's just this little recorder. You can do this?" And so I learned from that. And then over time, as I had opportunities to implement it into my career or life, I did until finally I got to the point where there was an opportunity for me and one of my buddies to start a craft beer podcast and it just kind of grew from there.

But yeah, that's, that's my. A little bit of an origin story with that.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Oh, wow. This is really cool. I feel like I have follow up questions for you, but I don't know if I should go there.

Chris Hill: I mean, I mean, we, we definitely, we definitely can and we can cut it out later. No,

Aditi Rajvanshi: I mean, I'd love to keep it if you don't mind.

Chris Hill: Oh no, fine. Yeah, feel free.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Oh, okay. So 2005, 2006 sounds like, like, like that's the first era of podcasting before we had sort of like that lull happened and then the massive explosion that we, I think we're continuing to see, right? Were you thinking of this sort of like as a side hustle, as a creative exploration?

Where were you at in 2005, 2006?

Chris Hill: Oh gosh, I just thought it was a cool thing. I was, I was more of a participant and a listener. I was studying marketing at the time in college. I dual majored marketing and entrepreneurship. So like, it was definitely up my alley and we didn't know where social media marketing would go.

Like we didn't even know if it would be a thing for us. Facebook had just started in 2004. I had an iPod. That's how I was able to listen to podcasts, right? And so like all those things kind of added up until I think I was actually using like iPod or something like that back in the day to actually get them onto my iPod before that was a thing.

And then Apple integrated it and it was like, Oh wow, I can just subscribe here. This is awesome. But yeah, I was mostly a consumer early on in the early days and then just got to be a guest really early. And Yeah, just as I guess my OG cred, if you will.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Oh, I love that. Do you still run the craft beer podcast?

Chris Hill: Both of us had children, so we, it's, it's a little hard to get out these days and do the show the way we want to. We did record a couple episodes last year that never went out just because of timing and a bunch of internal logistics with my business. That's the problem when you turn your passion into a business is it becomes work and you got to pay the bills.

So I had to, had to go with that, but yeah, we, we still have it up. People can still go listen to our Humble Beer Podcast, wherever great podcasts are distributed. But yeah, that's the early days, early days. Yeah. That's, that's before I knew everything I was doing, but it was a lot of fun.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Do you see yourself bringing a lot of that to your podcast, to this podcast as well?

Like do you have any warnings and your stuff from there?

Chris Hill: Yeah, for sure. For sure. Learning, learning how to interview, learning to do all that. I mean, that's where Humble Beer was really helpful for me and starting where I'm at is it helped me learn how to interview people, set up gear, produce, record, edit, do all that.

And that part of that, that's something I don't think I'll ever, ever lose. And this keeps me fresh, if you will. So I love doing this podcast and being able to interview folks. So it's a lot of fun.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Hey, yeah, I love that. Uh, yeah.

Chris Hill: All right, so back to it.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Where are we heading next?

Chris Hill: So you mentioned flash in the pan versus dedication.

I would like to take a minute and talk about that because I do think with content, that is one thing that you see, especially with brands, businesses, they see something new and shiny and they want to go do it and they follow it because it's a trend. They don't understand that there's a dedicated pathway to it.

Tying in my podcast experience. Like we've seen that over the five years we've been in business producing for clients, the ones that are actually engaged and dedicated are the ones that stick with it. And they can be great longterm customers, but there's always those folks out there that want it to go viral or get big really fast and without celebrity, that's really hard to do.

So what do you see as like the key determining factor of knowing that someone's a flash in a pan versus dedicated to the project?

Aditi Rajvanshi: I often think about Red Bull as an example of a brand that has They've got wings. They've been around. One of the sort of the biggest YouTube and brand activations, like in the early years of brands sort of doing something was the YouTube Red Bull Space Jump.

It happened in 2012, if I'm not wrong, it could have been earlier, which would be pretty wild if it was. And one of the things that I remember from that moment, and I think it's sort of like has stayed with me over the years, is this idea that there is a difference between "flash in the pan" and "tent pole," or "flash in the pen" versus doing something that is going to give you a massive sort of bump in visibility. Massive sort of bump in mindshare in the moment. And the distinction to me is what happens after, or the core determining factor for me is when someone is talking about an isolated moment that they're looking to create, but have no. Interest in or no idea of what it takes to build into that moment. And then what it will take to follow up from that moment. Anytime I've worked with a brand, whether it's Brewing Awesome or even now with Portal-A, one of the things that we're always talking to brands about is long term relationships.

Whether you're working with creators, whether you're working with, uh, with us as makers at Portal-A, we always talk about, here's the value that you get by working with us long term versus doing something that'll be done today and be out in the world and be forgotten before it could even make a blip.

The economy that we're in is and Attention Economy. And if all you're looking to do is to grab someone's attention, then you have played into the algorithm. You've not necessarily done something to outlast the algorithm, and that's the perspective that I think more and more brands and people who are in our shoes, who are in the creative space, but can think brands, can think business, should be talking about.

Chris Hill: I love that. Yeah. The outlasting, the algorithm, I think is a key point. And that's what we've seen with our creators too. It's like the folks, the folks that are there because they're dedicated to a topic and a subject, they might hit viral because they have something that's relevant to the moment, but they're not attention seeking as much as they are just consistently creating the right thing day in, day out. I love that. That's awesome. Cool.

So tell me, tell me about getting to Portal-A. So we've done, we've talked about Brewing Awesome, talked about your background. Now you're at Portal-A. What, tell me what Portal-A is.

Aditi Rajvanshi: We are a creative company. We are a company that makes world class content in every space that we do.

Our goal is to make breakthrough content, and by breakthrough, we mean content that breaks through the noise, the clutter, the busy spaces that we're operating in as people who operate in the space of content. Portal-A started 13 years ago, so they've been around the block. They have seen the creator economy evolution.

They have seen the content marketing evolution. They have I've seen how brands have gone from being disbelievers or of being completely sort of, you know, dismissive of the value that creators and influencers bring to the table to a place where they think of creators as partners on the table. So Portal-A has been not, not a bystander too, but very much instrumental to this evolution, very much part of driving this evolution and driving innovation in this space.

Something that drew me to the Portal-A team early on was knowing that this is the team that takes a ton of pride in the work that we do. My journey into Portal-A started with. Brewing Awesome. I was brought in as a consultant on a project that Portal-A was doing with Google and the one of the founders of Portal-A is Zach Bloom.

There are three founders by the way, Zach Bloom, Kai Hassan and Nate, and between Kai, Zach and Nate, I think they figured out two things early on that I, I still think are true to their success and recipes for their longevity. One, they figured out that every one of them is a maker, that every one of them is a creator in their own right, and that every person who walks into the doors at Portal-A is a creative.

I think that core fundamental belief that we all are makers and that spirit of making stuff together has been maybe one of the core reasons for their longevity, one of the core reasons for figuring out how to do this long term. And the other thing is that they either intentionally, or otherwise, figured out that entrepreneurship can be a really lonely journey.

So we should do it with people we like and friends, and that's how I feel. That's their superpower in many ways that they started off together. Three childhood friends building the company of their dreams together, it is the kind of story that you'd like to read. And it is the vibe that continues in the company even today. It's sort of very much a community where it's very much a space where you feel like you can build relationships and build friendships.

We are not a family. We are not. We do not do the family cult conversation. We're none of those. We're very much a community, and we're proud of the space that we've built together. And sort of like that, that's my story into starting at Portal-A. When I met Zach and he brought me into this role, he said, it's a four to six week consulting project.

Here's the detail, blah, blah, blah. And I think the second week he pinged me and said, I was at a conference in Austin and he pings and says, "do you have five minutes for a quick, quick call?" And I was like, sure. I thought that when you're in a, in a freelance consulting business space, you always assume a quick call is not, not good news necessarily.

So my brain thought, "oh, okay, maybe I could take on another project soon." And instead he said, "we haven't really run a full fledged strategy department in a long, long time. We haven't really had one before. Would you be willing to come and start and run our strategy function?" And at that point, my immediate sort of thinking was, okay, hold on a sec.

Are we moving too fast? Like it was like a bit of a, is it too soon to sort of call that? But over the next couple of weeks, we spoke a lot, and I knew having started working with this team that I really, really enjoyed working with them and really enjoyed just being on a team. Again, it had been many years since I had been working sort of independently.

And I often brought in other freelancers and contract workers with me that we'd sort of like make like a small interim team around, but it's completely different when you work in a space surrounded by people who have a shared philosophy, who believe in a shared mission, and I'd really been missing that is the part that I realized pretty early on in that, in that stint.

And then it was just a, it was just a function of figuring out what the right starting moment could look like, what the roles and responsibilities could look like, but it felt like a really natural fit for my skillset and for what the needs of the company were.

Chris Hill: Yeah. Any business that is in the business of creating content, eventually you get to this point where it's like, we're not going to grow if we don't have something strategic behind what we're doing because clients aren't going to understand the value for what we do.

And they're not going to think about it in terms of strategic objectives or things we're going to reach. So, I think that that's really cool that they realized they needed that and brought you on. I mean, you, from this very brief conversation, I'm sure you're a great asset for them. So that's really, that's really cool.

So Portal-A. You, you're there, you're doing strategy. What's your approach to doing strategy for your clients? I mean, obviously you probably can't give away the secret sauce, but how do you approach consultation? What are the things you think about?

Aditi Rajvanshi: I want to clarify one piece that I think strategy and creative have always been sort of core to how Portal-A has approached their work, even before I was at the company.

And I think that is one of the reasons that they knew that they needed a full-fledged strategy function. That they needed to sort of like really develop and build into that skill set even more, into that strength even more. So, that was part of what they were doing already. They were, they knew from the get-go that they wanted creative and strategy to sort of sit close even within the company as they think about those two functions and, and be able to inform each other. For creative to take strategies, viewpoint on building an approach for strategy to consider what the creative opportunity and possibilities are when recommending that approach.

And that sort of symbiotic relationship between creative and strategy is something that I have, and my creative partner, Lex Halaby, we have been working on building and really developing that creative partnership, that partnership that says we are sort of going hand-in-hand and working towards this outcome of making breakthrough content.

Something that we say a lot is we make content, not ads. It is core to how we think about every single project, every single consultation. So one of our litmus tests when we even start reviewing a brief or start reviewing a new client ask is, are they asking us to make content or are they interested in making ads?

Because one we do, one we don't. And. Sometimes we've been successful in navigating a conversation where we may have started with ads as the priority, but have figured out with the client that actually let us do what we do best, which is to make award winning, high quality content that resonates with audiences, and it will deliver the value that you need more than sometimes the more hardworking ad content does.

We've been successful in that conversation. We've been successful in, sort of, moving the conversation over to the side that we believe in, and at times we're not. So one of our first sort of litmus tests, like I said, is to figure out, we make content, not ads. Is this an opportunity that allows us to do what we do best?

And then we think about, is this an opportunity that we can turn into something that'll make, make breakthrough content with, that we can make something with that, one, we are really, really proud of, but two, truly resonates with the target audience. Once we sort of go through those two moments, then it's all about answering the what, the why, the how, the when, the who, all of those questions.

To me, that's what the role of strategy is, to really answer those questions. That's who, that's who a strategist is. I don't think a strategist is the person who just does the data analysis or just does the, can I understand numbers? Well, yes, you should understand numbers. Well, if you're in the flow, but I would say a lot of people should understand numbers and I would say a lot of people should be able to think strategically.

So I don't think those two skill sets are not complementary with each other. So my, the way I think about any new brief, or I think about a new sort of project kickoff, is really answering those fundamental questions, and once we've answered those questions, thinking about what success looks like. Can we internally at Portal-A and then with the client really define what success looks like?

And that to me is one of the meatiest conversations to have up top, because in that moment is where you really start getting down to brass tacks. You really start getting down to here's what's truly important. We may have said X, Y, and Z in the brief, but when it actually comes down to it, here's what really matters to us as a brand today.

And that's the moment where so often we have a chance to change minds, to sort of help a brand think about, I understand that here are your goals for this month and this quarter, but here is what we could do that would help you set up something for the next six months, twelve months, several years. And one of the reasons why we consistently work with brands on long form content is this.

YouTube is a space where we operate out of a place of core expertise and a lot of love for making long-form storytelling driven content. And so every time we have the opportunity to work with a brand and say, "Hey, we can tell your brand story in a way that is entertainment, that is fun and games, but it's also impactful and meaningful and can really take your brand story forward."

I mean, what is branding, but storytelling that that's what you're doing. What else is branding, but to tell your story in a way that you want to tell it. And to us, that's the opportunity with long form. And that's one of the reasons why some of our longest running clients that we've been working with for years, Google and YouTube are some of our longest running clients.

Target is. Lenovo is. For all of them, we have consistently made long-form, storytelling driven, serialized content that we are very proud of and continues to have real fandoms around, like continues to build real IP around for these brands that we work with.

Chris Hill: It's good that you're, you have that dedication.

You have those people that are those brands that are dedicated to creating that long form content.

So I guess I'm, I'm really curious to know this, like it's probably real nitty gritty, but like you said, you don't do ads. So when you're producing this content, does any of what you do turn into something that would be part of a paid ad series or campaign?

Or is it primarily, You just, that's, that's just part of the secret sauce I would imagine to push things out. But your main focus is on just creating that content.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Yeah, I mean, uh, that's a great question. And when we say we make content, not ads, we're not thinking necessarily about distribution channels alone, right?

The way to, the way, to sort of think about this, and maybe that'll help as a distinction is that the core content that we're making is not just going to be doing one thing, which is to tell you, go check out this product at this price point and sort of deliver just that. And here's like a, uh, 20 percent discount code.

We're not in the business of that messaging. We are talking about making content that inherently has value for the viewer, that intrinsically either delivers entertainment or education or inspiration, some value to the viewer by itself that is not tied to a particular product or a particular brand offering.

That's our core when we think about content, that there is intrinsic value for the viewer. Whether you go ahead and take action after watching that video is a secondary piece of the puzzle. So that's our core. The first sort of like way to think about content, not ads. And the other thing is we have separated distribution strategies, promotion strategies from how we think about content in some ways.

We first sort of figure out, okay, There are many ways to get to the goals that we're looking at. That doesn't necessarily mean that we need to compromise on the core content that we're making. We will, we believe that we can make really, really smart content that can then get distributed through organic and paid channels that can then live inside of a newsletter or an owned and operated website that can live across all of those spaces.

But that content itself will offer value to the viewer. And I think that distinction sort of is a really freeing distinction for us because it allows us to explore creative for creative's sake before we have to sort of think about any of the other parameters, and that also makes our distribution strategies really well rounded because what we can do is, once we figure out, here's the objective,

here's the story that we're looking to tell, here's the kind of creators that we're going to work with, here's how we think we're going to actually produce this piece of content. Now that we have all of this information in place, what are the best ways to get this in front of the people that need to see it?

Whether that is through social promotion, whether that is through collab, sort of reel with a creator's Instagram, or whether that is through, Boosting it on IG, both of those opportunities are on the table. And I don't think that it is about one versus the other. In fact, in most of our distribution strategies, we try and do a complementary system where we sort of think about, here's the value that organic viewership will bring.

And here's the value that paid viewership will bring. And ultimately, it goes down to something that I said earlier, which is around defining success, right? What does success look like? If success is scale to a brand, then we need to think about how, how will we deliver scale through organic channels alone?

And then how will we deliver scale through organic plus paid channels? But if a brand's outcome or the brand's goals are what success looks like to them is around engagement, around really high retention metrics. Then we know that organic is the way to go, and we're not going to be proposing paid in that distribution strategy.

So it really is a function of starting off from defining that what success looks like and then really taking that into all the different sort of avenues from production to distribution to creative to talent selection. So that when we're, when we are thinking about all of those decisions that we're making, it's tying back to that goal.

Chris Hill: So let's talk a little more meta now.

What is, what is top of mind for the content creation industry right now? What are you, what are you thinking about as you look towards the end of the year, into 2025, what are those things?

Aditi Rajvanshi: I mean, I'm coming fresh off of VidCon, which is the annual digital video creator conference that happens in Anaheim every year, been happening for 13 years.

I think I may have been to about 10 of those. So been to, uh, yeah, I'm a, I'm a frequent VidCon attendee. One of the things that I always look forward to with VidCon, it happens every year in June. One of the things that I often look forward to is sort of this "eyes on the future" conversation, really thinking about what the next year with the next set of trends are and what's fun for someone who's been in the space for a while like me to evaluate in that moment is how so much is changing constantly because we're in where the clear economy is a space of change and constant evolution and yet so much remains the same.

We are still talking Lonely Girl, like we're 15 years in and we're so we literally just connected on that. And I think it's a, it's an interesting reminder of how much is changing and how rapidly the space is evolving but also how there are core fundamental truths that continue to be relevant and will continue to be relevant.

One of the conversations as you can imagine this year was around the perils and possibilities with AI, and that is top of mind for a lot of people in the space. Not as much for me, and not as much for Portal-A. We are a human first company. No, it's just, it's, it's a strange time to be, you know, saying how you're thinking about your creative process, but I think we're at a, we're at an inflection point on this around businesses that, that.

So basically companies are in the business of content solutions. I think there's an interesting moment that we're in there. There's a lot of conversation happening around scaling content making, around how do you simplify different elements of making content today. How do you work with a lot of creators?

How do you translate and dub content at scale? And for a lot of those conversations, AI is a huge piece of the puzzle. Trying to figure out how we could do translations better with AI. How we can do data analysis better with AI. How we can do trend analysis better with AI. How can we do projections for performance better with AI.

So there is a huge sort of space that, that has opened up, that has, that has sort of really become a high growth area within the creator ecosystem, which is around this space of figuring out how AI solutions can help support the process of making content. I think the second parallel sort of like stream that that's big right now is over the last three to four years, short form content has become the thing that all the hype is built around.

It is, if a brand is not on TikTok, then is the brand even relevant today? If a brand is not doing X, Y, and Z on IG Reels, then does that even count? And it is an interesting moment that we're in where I finally feel like there is a little bit more of a balanced approach that I heard a lot more marketers talk about this year at VidCon.

And we at Portal-A are seeing that happen across all our projects where we're realizing that it is no longer a function of, or in fact, it has never really been a function of operating on one or the other or operating only to sort of like chase the hype of a particular platform. It has always been, and it's very clear, the writing is very clear on the wall, that it is about diversifying how and where you meet your audiences.

And that is going to be key to longevity, to thinking about your dependence on a single platform or a single distribution approach for a creator or for a brand is simply not something that can, that, that can build a foundation for long, long term success. And that vision is so interesting, right? Like that, that's the one that you're like, you almost feel is, So intuitive, like it feels really obvious and yet we're having this conversation because when a platform like TikTok happens, which completely takes up all attention and all mind share, it is hard to talk about a more balanced approach to that platform, or it is hard to talk about how do you balance it out with everything else that's part of your audience engagement, audience development, um, strategy.

Now, I think we're finally seeing that hype settle down. Some of this is of course, coming from the fear of a TikTok ban, the fear of a potential bad scenario, but I think it's also because brands have realized that there is no, and creators have realized this by the way, before brands did, that there is no substitute for long form content when it comes to community building.

What you are doing with a podcast is long form content, and that's how your community is being built. Imagine a world where all you did were 30 second snippets, like that, right?

Chris Hill: You see my eyes getting wide. I'm like, no, I, yeah, no.

Aditi Rajvanshi: And I hear you. And, and I, and I think creators who've done both, who've done sort of the short form game only so far are beginning to figure out how to do long form and creators of long form over years and years have dabbled in short form and I figured out what the value is and where we are right now is a really good spot because we know whether you're thinking as a creator, as a brand, there's room for both in your audience building strategies and your community building strategies.

And they both play distinct roles that are not necessarily replaceable by the other. And I think that is a really important conversation that we're in, that we're having. And the third one that I would I'd point out is sort of this idea of owning your audiences. It's again, something that we've seen through the, the website era, the blog era, the, the whole, the whole sort of like ownership era, and then platform happened.

And we basically, both on the brand side and the creator side, we've sort of like, just given up on the idea of owning your own audience. It's all sort of platform dependent until the point that whether through the newsletter boom or through some of the podcast stuff that happened, or even through more recently creators figuring out that they could build alternative spaces that are more owned and curated by them, even if it is built on a platform like Discord or a platform like Patreon, there is This impetus to figure out how we can build closer, deeper, long term relationships within our community that'll actually be with your core audience, your super fans, your primaries.

They are, this is the audience that's willing to pay for the content that they're getting. This is the audience that's willing to sort of engage with you in a way that's far deeper, and that, to me, is a really exciting opportunity because it sort of opens up the door to say the platforms are all doing a great job of helping you reach a wider audience.

And then you do sort of this parallel stream of owning and building your superfans, your core communities, and that in tandem, then is a strategy for the long term.

Chris Hill: You literally just described something we have at HumblePod called the Listener Life Cycle.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Okay.

Chris Hill: So thank you for that validation, again.

It's always, it's always great to hear when people like align with what we've been producing and creating and trying to preach to our audience for a while. But yeah, it's, it's very much that exact same thing. And I think that's the battle we're fighting is like, you can't rely on one network. TikTok might follow fall tomorrow.

X could break up because of Elon Musk's poor management of the service. Like anything could happen, and you'd be out an audience. The thing I try to point people to right now as a baseline, it's like, get email addresses, find a way to have that community and communicate. Because even in podcasting, like there have been some horror stories from Spotify where people are on Spotify for Podcasters.

They put out their show and then Spotify's algorithm targets them for an illogical reason and deletes their entire show off the platform. And you just can't rely on content to be everything. You have to have an audience. You have to have those super fans. And they're also the ones that are going to help you grow the fastest too.

I mean, social media is social. Word of mouth still matters. And especially for social content, you want to create those moments where people can engage with it, and by engaging that core audience first, I think that's where that's where you grow the best. And that's what we try to push our customers towards.

So. Thank you for, for confirming, essentially.

Aditi Rajvanshi: I'm happy to. I mean, and you, you experience this on the daily, like you are having these conversations, you're in, you're in these rooms where you're sort of trying to balance out platform dependence with audience ownership. And, and it is a balance. I don't, I don't think there is a one size fits all approach for every creator or every brand out there.

But I think as long as every creator and brand is having that conversation. I feel we we're, we're landing at a place that feels more sustainable, more, more than anything else, honestly.

Chris Hill: Absolutely. Well, Addy, it's been awesome having this conversation. I wish we could talk for another hour. I may have you back for a part two at some point.

This has been really fun.

I always ask one question when we're wrapping up. I'm actually going to break this into two this time. I did not tell you we were going to do two, but I think you'll understand why here in a second. I always ask, you know, at the end of the conversation, since this is a branding podcast, what brand do you admire the most right now?

Aditi Rajvanshi: There's a few different brands, honestly, that come to mind. I have been incredibly sort of just surprised by what Duolingo has managed to do over the last few years. It is a pretty rare scenario for a brand to build a human tone and not [be cringe. It is not an easy balance between to strike the right humor tone, to strike the right brand tone and still be sort of relatable and part of the conversation and not someone that's trying to insert themselves in the conversation.

So to me, Duolingo has done a really good job in many ways of building a social brand around them that feels like it can occupy social spaces authentically, natively to those spaces without coming off with the whole, "we are a brand" approach of things, which is often the way I think a lot of brands approach social branding and social media in general.

So to me, Duolingo is one that comes to mind. I'm also a huge fan of When We All Vote, Michelle Obama's voting registration drive organization. I think the, They do so much good sort of ground level work. Like they're really doing actual work of bringing communities together, of bringing people to register, to vote, to canvas, to do the door-to-door.

It's the hard work. It's the, it's not the, it's not just the glamorous work. It's the hard work. And I think they've done a really good job of building a brand that sort of like does that kind of ground level work and sort of like goes up from there versus just thinking about the credibility and the, and the celebrity that someone like having a founder like Michelle Obama would bring to you.

Um, so I think they've done a good job of, of sort of building a brand outside of that.

Chris Hill: Okay. Yeah, those are, I mean, Duolingo. Oh my gosh. They're, they're hilarious. Like they're, they do a really good job of like being very self-aware and knowing how to push boundaries and do weird things. And they show up in places you would never expect them.

I saw them, there's this Instagram channel, my wife and I follow. My kids love it. They called meetquack, and it's these animated ducks and Duolingo showed up. The character showed up and it was part of a sponsored ad deal that was also sponsoring some video game. And I was like, I don't know how this came together, but it's beautiful.

It's amazing. It was just a really clever brand tie in that they did with these characters living their, these little duckies living their lives together as a couple, and it's amazing.

Aditi Rajvanshi: It sounds like a perfect partnership, right? Like it doesn't even sound like weird or, or in any which way inauthentic.

That sounds like a great partnership for Duolingo.

Chris Hill: Yeah. Yeah. The, the duck brought in the Duolingo owl to the house and he was learning Japanese and the, and the girlfriend is sitting over here dreaming about how they're going to go to Japan and tour Japan and all that and they end up going to an anime convention instead.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Okay. I need to check this out. This sounds adorable.

Chris Hill: It is super adorable and our kids love it, which is a big reason why, why it comes up so often.

So anyways, um, so second, second follow up here is just, we talked about brands, but since we've talked so much about YouTube today, I want to know what channel or what creator do you most admire right now?

Aditi Rajvanshi: Well, there is only one right answer, and that answer is Hank Green. And the reason is, well, Hank is a multi-talented, multi-hyphenate, you know, all of that, but the part that, that I cannot, cannot sort of just get over when it comes to someone like Hank is he's been making content for 10 plus years at this time, maybe close to 15 years at this point.

And he's one of the most prolific creators I have ever come across who consistently makes incredibly high quality stuff, and everything that you watch with Hank in it, you see their persona come through. You see who they are and their core values shine. That they are funny and goofy and weird and weirdly obsessed with science happens in every single piece of content that you're going to see them in.

And then you're also going to see how deeply they think about the problems that are in front of us and how to make this world suck less for people and how to think about doing good with their platform. They In, in so many ways, Hank Green and, um, his brother, John, uh, again, also a huge fan, but like if I had to pick one, I'd say Hank.

Hank is also really interesting because he's one of those few creators from the OG YouTube group in my opinion, who really managed to figure out how to make every new platform work. Their ability to experiment on TikTok, their ability to figure out how to build an audience on Twitter. I refuse to call it X.

It's one of those weird hills to die on. But like, here we are.

Chris Hill: I'm with you most of the time. I actually don't know why I said X earlier. I was like, why did you say that? You always call it Twitter. But anyways,

Aditi Rajvanshi: uh, Chris, it's, uh, it's, you know, it's the, it's the branding brain . It's coming Twitter.

Chris Hill: It's a terrible brand. You wouldn't talk about a case study in the worst branding decision of all time. Anyways, sorry.

Aditi Rajvanshi: No, there's going to be a course around how not to brand and X is going to be like the, the poster child of that course. So I, I completely agree with you, but yeah, I mean the power with, I think the reason I'm completely in awe of what Hank's managed to do is they've managed to build a community on every platform they go, and it's very, very hard to build a community on TikTok. It's very hard to build a community on X that is not, or Twitter, that is not fully toxic. And they've managed to do an exceptional job.

And I think it's because of who they are and the audience that they attract and then how they nurture that community to actually be warriors for good. Like they've managed to, the community that Hank and John run is called Nerdfighteria, and I am a proud Nerdfighter, and just, it's sort of like, is, it's a, it's a confluence of all the things that I aspire to be in my personal life.

So yeah, Hank. Hank is the answer, Chris.

Chris Hill: He is a really cool creator. I've seen his work all over the place. I've admittedly haven't probably paid as much attention to him, but I definitely see him come up on my feeds, come up in my content, probably says something about me that he keeps coming up and showing up.

So I should probably look into it more, but that's, that's a, that's definitely a good answer.

Well, Aditi, thank you so much. This has been a great conversation today. As I said, I've loved it. Can't wait to hopefully have you back on at some point, but for today, where can people connect with you? Where can they find out more about Portal-A?

Aditi Rajvanshi: You should check out Portal-A on Portal-A's website. Maybe I can send you the link and then it'll be in the show notes. And for me, I am on LinkedIn. I am on IG. I am on email, old school, stuff like that. I've said this before, I'm still, I've been on LinkedIn for maybe 15 years now, and I'm still trying to figure out how to make that platform work for me.

So if you have any hot tips for me on LinkedIn, I'm here. I am listening, but yeah, I'm happy to connect with people on LinkedIn. Talk. Some of, some good friends have been found there. So yeah, that's where I'm found. You should also check out Portal-A on IG. Our IG has been interesting and we're trying to sort of get a little bit more into the game of making fun stuff on there.

Chris Hill: Nice. I noticed, side note, Colin, Samir commented. Name dropped Portal-A. I'm a big Colin and Samir fan, so that was, that was a cool thing as I was looking through your socials. We'll definitely have all that in the show notes.

Aditi Rajvanshi: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was actually a really fun reference. It's from the interview that Colin and Samir did with the Try Guys.

The Try Guys actually said that when they were thinking about sort of like, re-evaluating what "Try Guys 2" looks like. What their next iteration looks like. They wanted to do something similar to what Portal-A has done, which is to be sort of like a core content company and sort of like being able to work with brands, being able to work with creators, but not as mediators, as innovators in the space.

And yeah, it's a. It's exactly who we are as a company.

Chris Hill: Awesome. Well, Addy, thank you so much for coming on.

Aditi Rajvanshi: You, it was lovely talking, Chris. Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to the next time.

Chris Hill: Thanks for checking out this episode of We Built This Brand. Don't forget to like, follow, and subscribe on your player of choice.

You can also keep up with the podcast on our website at webuiltthisbrand.com. If you liked this episode, please give this podcast a five star review and make sure to tell all your friends about it so we can continue to build this brand.