AJ Kumar, Founder and Digital Maestro, The Limitless Company

  Welcome back friends to our podcast, unlocking your world of creativity. We travel around the world, talking to creative practitioners about how they get inspired and organize their ideas. And most of all, how they gain the confidence and the connections to launch their workout into the world. And we've got a high energy, high content guests to learn from today.

AJ Kumar is my guest from the Limitless Company. AJ, welcome to the program. Howdy ho.

How's it going? It's going great. It's going great.

Pleasure to be here. I've warmed up all morning for this interview. I was told you'd be high energy, high engagement and like I say, high content and learning because you are a guy that focuses on the content, the creator economy.

That's me. I'm ready to bring it.

There you go. What creative ideas are you're working on today? What's on your desk?

On my desk today let's see, right now I'm really focused on expanding the Limitless Company and we're hiring more talent. And I'm specifically focusing on younger talent, especially talent that's graduating colleges because a lot of colleges have just started introducing more like digital media programs and we're starting to finally see some of them come out of colleges.

So now I'm. Preparing and setting them up to come join our company and help our clients.

Yes. I'm glad you brought this up because I've often wondered about from an educational standpoint, are they driving? Are they lagging? What sort of skills and competencies are you seeing from people coming out of school right now?

I

think they're, I think they're close. I think there, there is some kind of gap between like where the real world actually is and where they are, but I think they're getting close. Like I had a conversation with a new person that we heard yesterday and I was just asking her like, what are the kind of things that they're teaching you and she's they are they're helping us understand about The customer journey and the touch points that the customers are having, not just the traditional touch points I used to have, but apps like, like Starbucks, for example.

So a touch point for a customer could be on an app in addition to on a website and other platforms. So they are starting to think in that capacity, which I think is fascinating. I wish they had that kind of program when I was younger,

Exactly. And even to have a customer journey, mentality and a mindset.

It's good. So you've labeled your company a smart content creation engine. And I love this idea of an engine that's, truly driving, powering because content creation. It takes a lot of fuel, takes a lot of mental fuel, takes a lot of time and money oftentimes to really get it out there.

What are your engine components? What do you think goes into content creation these days?

I love that. Yeah, because, content creation really is like a hamster wheel for most people. And I've been in it for over 15 years, and I originally started off with written content, and then in the past five years.

It has shifted to video content and for the Limitless company, I built it off. I built it in a way where I was able to take all the different things that go on in content creation and turn it into four core functions that our company does. The first one is talent empowerment, and that's empowering the talent to understand what they're essentially doing, strategizing with them, and empowering them on how to create content.

The second is story development. That's actually coming up with ideas that are either evergreen, that they could last for a long time, or they could be ideas that are trending based off of something that's happening now. And then the third function is physical production that's actually taking those ideas and turning them into marketable content, like a media file.

And then lastly, the fourth component is brand marketing. So that's actually getting that media out into the marketplace and getting that engagement to actually occur and analyzing that activity. And

a lot of people I talked to anyway, often confused. the story, the content with the brand. The content is not the brand.

The brand is what you're supporting with the content, right? How are you helping people align and distinguish between those things? Yeah.

So I, I see brand as a brand is like a living, breathing organism, and it's something that is positioned in people's minds. So when it comes to content, especially now, the way I like to describe it is.

People are consuming hundreds of videos a day, right? Average person's on a S on a smartphone, like two, three, four hours plus, and within that time, a lot of them are spending that time on social media. And a lot of them are watching short form vertical video content. And you got to think about it.

There's hundreds of videos that are being posted every single day. So when I'm working with clients and when I'm. Teaching people about content creation and building your brand in our modern world. I always, I talk it like akin to a photo book. You ever seen those photo books where it's like you flip it and then it's like a motion.

So that's how I view content creation, where every single day you have little pieces of content that a person is consuming. They're not really even aware cause just because they're consuming so much, but over a period of time, you're actually creating this narrative in someone's mind and they don't even realize it's happening.

It's on a subconscious level, but as a brand, as a company, you're positioning yourself, whether you're a personal brand or you're a corporate brand in their minds. As as an authority on your topic and your subject matter so that when they do, are planning to make some kind of purchase decision, they already have some kind of feeling.

They already have some kind of familiarity, a relationship with the brand and are more likely to choose you. Yes,

and I appreciate you. You brought up this idea of story. And of course, you can't walk down the sidewalk without tripping over somebody's idea of how to build stories and tell stories and that storytelling is all the rage.

But like you, you're in this business long enough. I even just went back to reread story wars by Jonah socks. And it's yeah. Are we in a war? I think about all the competition between these hundreds, thousands, not just per day, but per minute, probably what's being uploaded to YouTube and TikTok.

Is it a war? If I could be so bold as to use that term.

I, I would agree with that. I would agree with that because even the vision for the Limitless Company, how I view it is to win the war on attention for the betterment of humankind. I think everybody, everywhere is. is essentially having their attention taken over by something, and a lot of it happens to be negativity, right?

Growing up, I was always like, watch the news, become aware of what's happening in the world, but a new the news covers, just a small percent of just the negative stuff, because that's what, people are compelled towards, but then as you grow older, and now that there's All these different sorts of media networks and social media networks and personal media networks, you have everybody essentially competing for attention.

So it is now a time where, like story wars, it's whoever tells the best story is going to win.

Now let's turn that inside out, because even as we were talking, I caught myself using this charged language, this violence. Metaphors. And so instead of using bullet points and shotgun, methods and story wars, let's turn this inside out to something that I know you believe too.

And that's human healing brands and a human connection. So let's soften our language a bit and talk about how we can heal and support people with our stories.

Yeah, I love that. So when I say human healing brands, I'm essentially talking about how when you create content and it impacts a person in a way where they laugh, right?

Laughter is a form of healing or they learn something or they feel inspired. Like these are forms of healing because a lot of people, when they're, when they're watching content and just the concept of marketing in general is about solving people's problems. So when you're creating content, that's.

Making people laugh, making, getting people to learn something. It's helping them advance. It's helping them move forward. It's helping give them something that they could like I also use it, use this like metaphor when it comes to content creation and food consumption where it's like If you're eating junk food all the time, you get unhealthy.

And just like junk food, there's also junk content. And just like how there's nutritional food, there's nutritional content. So I like to always work with clients that are in the business of wanting to provide nutritional value for the masses.

Yes, when you publish a lot of your own content, I've been reading some of your articles on the entrepreneur magazine website platform and you mentioned some of these, watch outs, but especially this idea that content is meaningless.

I liked in one article unless the context. And some customer reader relatability is infused. How do you make sure, we can develop stories, but how do we know that these are the stories that people

want? I think a lot of that has to do with, so I've had a lot of mentors like in the software business and.

One thing I took from that is that it's an iterative process. And even when you look at top content creators, like a Mr. Beast, like the top of the top, right? The Michael Jordan of content creation, even they have similar messages where they talk about, create a hundred videos and each video that you make it so that you're a little bit better than the previous one.

So when it comes to, when it comes to. Creating stories on social and creating something that's meaningful and it resonates with people. A lot of that has to do with, I think content creation is like a self discovery process as well, as, as much as it is trying to help other people and give other people value.

Because then it puts you in this position where you're, you're trying to stay ahead. You're trying to create something that's really good before you put it out there so that. You could see pretty quickly the feedback on whether it's actually working. And that's the beauty of creating content today is that you get that instant feedback and that's part of the value that I always talk about when I'm recruiting new talent into the company is that, look, I give you the ability to work with these really cool clients that already have pretty decent sized followings.

I'm not talking about like millions of followings. I'm talking about like hundreds of thousands, but they do reach millions of people. And you get rapid feedback and for success in any endeavor. Just that rapid feedback just allows you to iterate and become better versions of whatever subject matter you're trying to be good at.

Yeah. Could I pick up on this idea of feedback? I assume you mean more than just a click of a, happy face and a thumbs up. What other kind of feedback should we be thinking about?

eVen the quality of what people are saying in your comment section, for example, in your social media feeds, the quality tends to change when the content starts to get better.

So when you're looking at social media, like social media in the customer journey is the touch point. And then within each social media channel are micro touch points, right? Whether it's like a share, a bookmark, and all of these have different weight. Like where the weight of a like isn't as substantial as the weight of a comment, or you could even think about the, like a share or a bookmark, like when you're creating content, the goal is to package it up in a way to where people are going to have conversations about it, and it's going to be something that they share, or it's going to be something that they bookmark and save for later.

And by having knowing that those are some of the important indicators makes it so that you start creating content more intentionally.

So good, because I even think about my own experience as a content creator, and for gosh sakes, I am a content creator. I got podcasts, and books, and articles, and blogs, and who knows what out there, and sometimes you do wonder.

I don't know, I sell a book or two a week and so you wonder if you're putting your voice out there. Is it about the message or the medium or timing algorithms, all these factors that you build in, but sometimes you feel like you're just putting your voice and your content out there, hoping for the best.

How can we be a little bit more strategic?

So that's a very, that's a big challenge for most people, especially when it comes to organic social media or organic content for that matter. Whereas the world of advertising it's a lot more black and white.

There's metrics that exist, like ROAS, return on ad spend, where, you put in this money, you get this out, it's very black and white. But even the world of advertising is changing drastically now, just because we're about to enter this cookie less world, or a world where tracking things is going to be a lot more difficult because people are people are prioritizing privacy a lot more, whereas before they were just more impressed by the novelty of the internet and social media and all the things that were happening, right?

So over my experience of working in organic content, written content, video content, audio content, I've developed something with one of my business mentors. He helped me co create It's something called ROAC, Return On Attention Created. And it's essentially a holistic way to look at the effectiveness of content creation.

Because oftentimes when people are creating content, you do something, you don't get an immediate benefit out of it. And then it could be disheartening. It could just lead to you not continuing. Whereas ROAC is more about looking at it from a much bigger picture. There's qualitative components.

There's quantitative components. And one of the things that happens when you're creating content for social media, especially in the beginning, you're not going to necessarily see a ton of money being created. You're probably not going to get brand deals. But what you are going to be doing pretty quickly is you're going to be creating your narrative.

You're going to be creating your story. You're going to be creating how people perceive you. Because the way people perceive you on social media, is essentially how they perceive you in real life today. It's that it's reached that level of credibility, right? Like before you've had all of these networks, ABCs, the NBCs, right?

That was the authority. That's what people believed in. But nowadays it's changed. It's different. And the visionaries that created a lot of the media companies that existed before, a lot of them are gone. A lot of these media companies today are ran by accountants. Whereas now you're starting to see the Mr.

Beast, the Logan Pauls the Neil Patels, like you start to see all these other. Visionaries creating their own media company, creating their own content, creating their own programming. So today, it's like when you're creating content, you got to start thinking about, hey, what is this narrative I want people to have?

Or what is this perception I want to create? Because you are creating that reality.

And I'm glad you brought up monetization. Somewhere along the way, this content creation has to be a moneymaker. Or at least be like you call it an engine to making some money. otHerwise it's a nice, happy.

yEah, exactly. Yeah. It's gotta, it's gotta lead to business outcomes and that's what, and that's what Roark is about. It's about tracking and understanding how it's creating your perception today and how that's leading to even something as. As getting more leverage in business negotiations, like people, it's like when you think of TV stars, you think of them bigger than they really are, right?

That's the effect. That's why everybody wanted to become a TV star. That's why everybody wanted to be on this screen. And social media and smartphones does essentially doing a similar thing in people's minds. It makes you bigger than you are. So immediately in the beginning, your negotiation power starts to increase.

And then as you do build up an audience. That's leverage. That's currency. When you want to write a book, when you're trying to produce a TV show, when you're trying to do anything today, most companies, most people are risk averse. So if you're coming in with an existing audience, it gives you more leverage.

And that's just off of doing business deals. Obviously you could also sell your own products. Obviously when you have all of these people paying attention to you, then you could start monetizing slices of time, right? Because if you have people watching a video of you every single day, then you could introduce ads or commercials within those videos, right?

So there's a lot of creativity that's possible when it comes to. Essentially creating your own network

today. That's right. I love that visualization. That analogy because we really are creating our own networks. AJ, let's first of all, get listeners. I want to remind you our guest is AJ Kumar. He's the founder of the Limitless Company content creation engine.

Listen, let's turn the page to your own creativity. I love this title that you've inherited and given yourself the digital maestro, especially as you're leading your company and working with more clients. There is a lot of maestro conductor orchestration in your

world. There is, yeah. Musicians play their instruments, I play the orchestra.

And it's I like to I'm heavier on the creative side, right? I have friends that are much more on the analytical side, the numbers side, whereas I'm heavier on the, on more of the creative side. And even when I, The way I operate my company and I work with my clients, I work with my in house talent.

I like, and my mentor helped me understand this analogy where it's like you go to the Hollywood Bowl, you have the orchestra conductor that's working with the musicians playing their instruments and then you have the star that's facing the audience. So that's similarly to how I envision what it is that I do, except.

My talent isn't necessarily using instruments in the traditional sense, they're using instruments in the sense of a smartphone, a laptop, these digital internet connected devices, and they're creating different parts, components, pieces that are all contributing to an integrated brand strategy that audiences are listening to across space and time at different locations in a way that is cohesive.

And it positions the person in their minds as, an expert in whatever it is, or the business and expert in whatever they are. And that's essentially how I run the business.

The orchestra analogy has always meant a good one for me. I really can picture that, the conductor, but also I recently toured the LA Philharmonic.

Hall and this idea of an orchestra pit, we always thought of the orchestra's down under the stage, out of sight, as you described. But the show isn't the same without that orchestra and the great acoustics and the sound that they produce. So it's the they're behind the scenes perhaps, but central to the whole operation.

Yeah, it's like there's a lot of stuff that happens behind the screen that makes what on the screen look so easy.

So good. aNd you've been working on a book, AJ. And what about your own creative process in capturing, the stories, capturing the feeling and the message that you wanted to put out in your book?

Oh like how I,

how I'm Yeah, how have you approached your own creative process?

. I think it was back in like: 2010

I did a lot of training for it. So things like, one of the tools I use now is ai. Before I used ai, I was also using things like mind maps. . Because our brain and the way we think isn't linear. Where like how you're taught in school where it's just like one after the other we like our brain is much more Multidimensional and a mind map is something that helped me Capture the different dimensions of what it is that I'm trying to convey like all these concepts and now with AI tools like Claude like chat GPT even chat GPT has this new cool plug in called whimsical diagrams, which is just such a nifty plugin where you could actually have it create mind maps for you.

So just things like that help you organize your ideas better so that you could see them in front of you. Because oftentimes, especially in the creative world, creative process, things can get so jumbled up in here and a little bit confusing. So even without super crazy artificial intelligence helping you, you could even use something like a journal.

So even if I'm blocked or something, I would just have a journal and I would write about that block. And then I find that as I write about it, it starts to open me up and get me through whatever thing was like blocking or keeping me from moving forward. Sure.

And that's where this idea of limitless must come from.

But what was the background on you choosing this for your

company name? The movie Limitless definitely played a part because I knew that was possible. I grew up I dropped out of college I got into sales and I always just had this inkling that the world was more than what it what I was shown or what it looked like to be.

a lot better today. And after: 2020

Help me and help me navigate, but I realized for the longest time people didn't see that they kept living in the outer world, right? I always say that there's three worlds. There's the inner world, right? Your thoughts, your feelings, what goes on. There's the outer world, what's happening in the world around us, the rules, the taxes, the government, the businesses.

And then there's the digital world, which is this world of Our collective minds of all internet connected devices that essentially, it's like this landscape. I think of it as like Tron. I dunno if you're familiar with Tron, but it's like Tron is what people thought. It's like amazing to think people actually thought about this stuff in the nineties before a lot of this technology existed.

But it's like realizing that there's these landscapes where anything's possible. It, it really is limitless. I

love that. Very inspiring. Thank you. AJ, as we close, talk to our listeners one to one. They might be an artist trying to get, another gallery show. They might be a singer songwriter trying to get their song on the charts.

They might be a hospitality brand trying to get more guests. These are the kind of creative people who are saying, I've got to, I know I should be creating content. But our email boxes are full of the magic bullet. Here's a calendar. Here's a strategy. How do we make sense of all this as creative people that say we need to get our stories out, but we need to, do it strategically.

And sometimes we get stuck on that. What advice or insight from your experience would you

offer us You mean as a way to cut through the noise of all the confusion of the people that are selling us stuff? Yeah. And

sometimes it's actually a it makes me more frozen sometimes. And I know people tell me that it's like, Oh my God, I got to sell out my seminar.

Oh, I want to get more speaking gigs. Oh, I need to get, like I said, my music, some bookstore, all these creative people literally around the world. Tell me this. And I'm so frozen because of all the options. I'm afraid if I do the wrong thing, either I'll waste time and money or, it might what if I do it wrong and so forth.

So we're stuck. So it's bad enough that we have, imposter syndromes and we have procrastination and we have all the other reasons we can be stuck. But now we're afraid to do the wrong thing in content creation. How do we break through

this? Yeah, that's a good, that's a really good question because I, as you're talking about it, I could totally relate to a lot of that because it does occur.

And unfortunately, there's not going to just be one answer for this. I figured. I think, like, when it comes down to the fundamentals of, When you get inundated by so many things that you got to do, it's about doing like a little thing and then getting the momentum to do a couple more things.

Because that's often what happens is oftentimes we like, we don't do stuff. And then it becomes this backlog of stuff that needs to get done. And then that backlog just becomes a lot bigger than it really is. And then you go through the motions of the weeks or whatever, where you're avoiding it and you're delaying it and you're just pushing to the side.

And it's hurtful and your regular life starts to get affected by it. Whereas when you finally go to that pile to do the thing that you were gonna do, it wasn't that bad, it wasn't that hard. So I think a lot of it has to do with Finding a little thing that you could do so that you could just do it and get that momentum because when you are productive You feel good.

You feel better about it. It's like the gym like yeah, it's a knowing or whatever But after you do it you feel good about it And then that good just becomes momentum that you could use to go to the next thing, right? and it really is that especially for creative people because I've been on the side of being not creative and just like getting things done and having my calendar like fully blocked to being totally creative and having a totally open calendar.

And I realized like both of those don't work like you do need to be able to have a little bit of each. So even as being a creative and it comes to creating content. Yeah, you gotta create content daily. Like even for me, like it's hard creating content. So I decided to go on more podcasts because then I get to meet really interesting people and have these conversations with you.

And now that's a way for me to create content faster than what was originally what I was originally trying to do. So I think a lot of it has to do with you find the thing that you got to be doing and then just chunk it down to a small thing and then do it. And then do more. And that's how the confidence gets built for you to then accomplish more.

That's terrific. We're going to take away a lot from that. We've had two great metaphors, analogies here, and I've never met a metaphor I didn't like, but it's like going to the gym. So you've reminded me that's probably a good idea. I should probably get my body moving. And the other was orchestration and we should imagine.

That we're working together with an orchestra and that sometimes we're the conductor, but sometimes we're just playing the tuba and the violin. So let's be a part of the team and contribute the best we can.

There we go. Then everything's in

harmony. Everything's in harmony. Good way to end AJ. My guest has been AJ Kumar.

He's founder and president of The Limitless Company, a whole studio system of content creators and influencers, and we've learned a lot from AJ today. AJ, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me. And what's next in your creativity? Where do you go from here? Next

is next. You'll probably see me a lot more, see me on a lot more podcasts.

I also have a book coming out called guru Inc, which is essentially about. What we're seeing across the world right now, which is everyone's trying to build a personal brand around their business. So you'll probably start to see me talk a lot more about that.

Fantastic. Can't wait. We're going to put all your links in the show notes so people can find you, follow you and keep it, keep track of your work.

Thanks so much. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks again for being on the show Ciao! and thank you listeners for coming by. And if you've been getting a lot of good insight from the creative interviews we've been doing all over the world, now's a good time to subscribe, leave us a review, give us some feedback.

We talked a little bit about the feedback loop today, so it's very helpful to hear what's meaningful to you, what you're getting out of it and other topics and people you'd like to hear from in the future. So come back again next time. I'm Mark Stinson We'll continue to unlock your world. Of creativity.