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was ages ago. Number 75 on the podcast, now close to 700 episodes. Wow. Yeah. And at that time, it was how Facebook's number 30 employee quickly built four businesses and gained 40 pounds with weight training. I feel like my headlines have deteriorated over time. They become very set up pedantic and pedestrian and descriptive. That is better copies. So I need to work on that copy. Maybe you drafted that copy yourself, actually, for all I know that could have been the case.
We have a lot to talk about, but for people who don't have any context, can you give a little self intro? Great to see you first off. Yeah. Great to see you. Now we're at $8 million businesses. It was pretty amazing. I was number 30 at Facebook, number 4 at Mint.com. I was a cubicle monkey at Intel for a very brief moment, which sucked, which led me to this entrepreneurship journey. And then I've started so many different businesses that failed some work to now help run apps, zoom in.com.
No one's side online for software deals would do about $80 million a year, which is unreal. It started bootstrapped in a weekend. I couldn't believe it when I saw that. I remember day one of apps who love effectively. It's back in the day. It's been crazy. And you're a big help with it. You're super, really help with getting it going. So thank you. They're welcome. YouTube channels done pretty well in million subs. It's got a book, a million dollar weekend coming
out to help people very similar complimentary to for our work week. And we're here today. So let's do a little trip down memory lane because ages ago, 2011. So this is going back away. We've known each other a long time. I remember we first met. I want to say at a coffee shop in Mountain View, California on Castro. I remember that. And a lot has transpired since. We're going to cover quite a bit of it and get into a lot of tactics in this conversation. No, always is
able to deliver specifics, concrete, recommended actions, scripts, you name it. So we're going to get into all that juicy stuff. But you had a guest blog post on my blog in 2011. And it's easy for me to forget. It's easy for some people to forget or just not realize that the blog for me was really the connective tissue that permitted everything else, including the first book because the blog came out before the book. And what was that blog post that you put together? How to create
a million dollar business in a weekend featuring Chihuahua's. And that started this book. Yeah. That started a lot of me sharing my approach. Yeah. And that was wild. And it resonated incredibly well. Funny sidebar also. If you're curious about some of the ingredients in the cocktail that contributed to Ryan Holiday becoming the face of modern stoicism way back in the day. I think it was called stoicism 101 on the blog. Yeah. So people can take a look at Tim Dublug for that.
But let's start with a completely oblique question, which is a geographic question. So we're sitting here in Austin, Texas. And before we started recording, you said something along the lines of Barcelona is the new Austin. Can you expand on this? In our last show, which was you were talking like, Hey, you're in Austin. I'm living in San Francisco. You know, tell me about it. Yeah,
I thought about it. And now we're here living in Austin. And I do think of my life. I've been able to pick things a little early Facebook a little early, mental, early social games, little early. Group on kind of absolutely not come early, SaaS businesses early. And so even choosing Austin early and super early. When did you get to Austin 14 years ago? 14. Yeah, which people are like, what are you doing out there? I was like, I don't even know where it isn't Texas, but it's
great. And you know, for me six years ago, my buddies, Dan and Ian from Tropical MBA, they're like, come out to Barcelona for a month. And I got there and I was like, that's okay. And I was like, it's very hot here in Austin. So I was like, all right, I'll go out there. And after a few weeks, I'm really cycling. I'm into the spandex. But really the cycling out there was just, it's world class. It's where Lansar Armstrong got famous. Like it's what he made famous actually in a city called
Gerona. And so I got out there and we started training, started drinking at night, started eating. The prices are amazing. There's a beach right there. It's basically California without all the bullshit. And a lot cheaper. That's a good sales pitch. Yeah. Yeah. People are like, I'm going to go to California. I'm like, no, thank you. I do love California. It's definitely one of my homes. And so I just started going there every single summer. And now this year, I spent 143 days.
And it's just amazing. And then what's even wild is my girlfriend who I met there. And now she's pregnant, which is insane. She was saying that the life expectancy of spaniards is actually higher than Americans. I believe that. I was talking to her about this. And that's kind of interesting. It's like, well, wouldn't you want to live where people live longer? It's like, yeah. So it's you have fresh food. Everything is walkable. So you're like, going downstairs, you're like, well,
I'm going to go get a tomato. And there's a vegetable store. And then there's a meat store and a cheese store. You have community there. We're here where she comes, she lives in my house here. We live out in the West. She's like, do you see anyone ever? Do you ever talk to anyone? She's like, where is everyone? And so all these factors combined, plus the cost of living is cheaper. It's just been where now we're spending at least half a year out there.
Hmm. A lot more social fabric too, I would imagine. Right? I have an experienced parcel in a much. I've spent a little bit of time there. Great tango scene for people who may be interested. But in Madrid, where I spent a bit more time, people are out there socializing groups of friends, families. You just see more cohesion and at least it seems maybe technology has changed this. And people are more ready player one now in Spain. It's possible. It's true most places. But
less self-imposed isolation than I observe in the US normally. Less isolation, better looking people. Straight up. It's got a higher density of really gorgeous people. I want to ask in the pretty attractive town. It depends on what you're looking for. It depends. Yeah. But it's just for cycling it's world class that all the, I like men with man buns and leg tattoos. That's Austin. Okay. Okay. You're in the right place. If you're just like just everything about it has been
it's been such a blessing to be able to find that and be able to live my life there and here. You can do both. So we're gonna move on to other things. But before we do, Barcelona, let's start with a contrast. So Austin for a host of different reasons has become a nexus for a few things that I think we could have expected looking back. For five or five years ago we could have expected tech. Right. Tech was already here from a taxation perspective, etc. It made a lot of
sense. COVID accelerated all of that. So you've seen an explosion of tech. I mean within striking distance where we're sitting there is an entire skyscraper who knows how many floors 40, 50 floors that is going to be exclusively Google. And which has not yet been opened commercially speaking right there are a few retail shops at the bottom. That I think is somewhat predictable. The things I couldn't have predicted or wouldn't have predicted Austin has become the mecca of Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu in the world, not just in the United States. It is if not already certainly becoming an epicenter for comedy, stand up comedy. In many ways thanks to Jorogan and his club that he is open here. What do you think if anything you're like you know what next five to 10 years, I bet Barcelona could be hot for X. Is there anything that comes to mind? Because I always looked at Austin as this highly diversified town that was not dominated by single industry. That's part of what
appealed to me compared to say SF Bay Area right now. Hasn't quite worked out as I anticipated, but certain dominant communities and industries are becoming clear now in Austin. Any thoughts on yeah, Barcelona? I would say with Austin I'd also add content creators. There's a lot of pretty sizable YouTube podcasts that have become an awesome run holiday. Me, you. Yep. Definitely love it. People have moved out here. I would say for Barcelona, for me specifically, I can see
it being the remote working capital of the world. Yes, the hours are a little off, so maybe you'd want to go South America, but potentially just for having a metropolitan city, especially in Austin, it's hot here for months a year. Yeah, for four months. To be clear, we mean by hot, sorry, centigrade folks. I don't know how to convert this, but we're talking like one 10 to 120. It's like 30. Yeah, 38 to 40 Celsius. Your dog cannot walk outside. My dog's feet will literally
turn into omelets. Well, you're showing your floors literally burnt in your place from the sun. From the sun. Yeah, the previous one or the previous one or left the solar shades up and the entire floor was bleached by the sun. Yeah, you know, you go to Barcelona, I get a co-working spot, go to one co-work, but there's so many out there, $500 a month to get an awesome desk. You get really, really fast Wi-Fi everywhere. You can use youkio.com, UKIO.com.
It's like Airbnb, but even cheaper. Super sick apartments. Don't use it yet because I need to book my place. Good luck. Yeah, then you have like, you can go to all these amazing cities in a weekend. So you got like Poo Tradah, which is like better than Lake Tahoe, bigger mountains, not as crowded. You've got Costa Brava, which is California coast, but even better, it's like European style.
You have naked beaches. Mm-hmm. Both genders, so whatever you want. We were going to the wrong beach, depending on how you look at it for a long time, when my body says, let's go down the beach. All these varietal things that really make it a nice summer. I like the balance of having both where there's the intimacy of being here in Austin, where you can go to Uchi. Yeah, people like you
and me, and there's a lot of interesting people here. But then also when it's hot in summer, wow, now with entrepreneurship, now with remote work, Barcelona is a great second home for the rest of the year. Tactical question for people listening, and I know this exists in some European countries. Is there the equivalent of a digital nomad visa, or is it? Yeah. So I think it's more complicated. It's way more complicated than people sound. So I literally got the phone with the
immigration lawyer for US and Europe yesterday. I talked to both of them. And this ties into our entire conversation and I'll make that connection in a minute, but please continue. So you got off the phone. It's not as easy as it seems. There's basically, there's a nomad visa for Spain. And to be clear, it's taking me 18 months and I still don't have it. Wow. And I have a pretty sizable company, a pretty sizable bank account. I went to a college where you have to do,
and I've used a law firm to follow all these papers, and I'm still not there. So sometimes when you're dealing with other countries, and even in America, there's a lot of bureaucracy. That's one way to do it. That could take a lot of time. Second one is the golden visa. So you spend half a million in Spain, in Spain on a property, and then you can be able to get a visa there. The other one that we're going to be approaching the way I'm going to do it is called a parahed de Itcho. Okay.
So if you can meet someone who is actually a citizen, you don't have to actually be married. You just have to live with them and be with them. You can get your residency there. So that's what I'm doing with my girlfriend. I so that is one approach getting your green card to be able to get my green card. I'm coming through the border legally over there. But otherwise, it's a three month towards visa. I think the Duma visa, it sounds great. It's just a little 18 months and I don't know,
about 1,500 bucks or nothing. Yeah, that's a lift. I mean, in terms of energy commitment. And the reason I wanted to cover this and the reason it ties into everything is that I enjoy our conversations in part because I learn a lot about the latest and greatest of whatever you've experimented with personally and professionally. And the personal part is not a small thing, right? Because you can create a business that is a monster of your own making, a jail of your
own making. It's very easy to do. That is the default, I would say. And you can also design a business that allows you to do the type of thing that you're describing. And those are fundamentally different approaches they seldom happen by accident. So why don't we hop into the million dollar weekend? I can do one more bonus visa thing that everyone can consider. Great bonus. This is like a little secret
thing that it's actually kind of interesting. A lot of countries, if you can find your genealogy, and use 23andMe or talk to your grandparents, you can actually get your citizenship through that. So my great grandfather is from Poland. So that's been one avenue I've been considering, where you can actually find documents, which we've been able to find some. I can get Poland's citizenship, which is then part of the EU citizenship. So that is another way of getting in if I
didn't have a girlfriend. So if I forget a lot there, go look up your ancestry and see if that country will be able to give you a citizenship. Yeah. And different countries have different degrees of leniency slash acceptance, depending on how far back you go. My buddy, Dan, Andrews always says is like be mindful of marrying the passport. Because my girlfriend is Venice, Whalen, but lives in Portugal that we were in Spain. So it's just a lot of things now to get her
in America. It's been a nightmare. Get her in a super challenging. I'm like, let's ridiculously challenging. The people are trying to get across the border down south. I'm like, if that's easier, maybe we'll just do that. I'll put you on my back and carry you. Yeah. Side note, if we look at this as a whole separate conversation, if we look at the plummeting birth rates, right? We're not meeting replacement rates for population growth, which is then correlated to GDP growth and so on.
And so many industrialized countries, the one advantage the US has really is immigration, attracting talent globally. So making it easy or easier is really mission critical to the economic and national security future of the United States. 100%. It's also not as easy as people realize. Like I was talking with the lawyer to get her into America, the other visa lawyer. And you know, in 90 day fiance that show, it's like, okay, you get a fiance, boom, boom, no, it's not like that.
You have to wait a lot of time. You have to spend a lot of money. You can't leave the country. Either you if you do it in America, she can't leave for months. Yeah. If we do it in Spain, she can't come into America for years. Yeah. It's a incredibly, tricky, incredibly complicated. So let's zoom out for a second. And we're going to talk about starting. We're going to talk about the initial stages in process for building a business or
concepting a business in a very short period of time. So we are going to get to that. And we are going to have a challenge slash competition offer from Noah later that you're not going to want to miss. So stick around for that. I absolve all responsibility. Noah has has verbally committed to all the indemnities in the world for me. So this is this is Noah's thing. But I want to talk about running absumo because prior to doing the homework for this conversation,
I had no idea that it had grown so much. It was wild. Right? I mean, so 80 million a year business. That's bananas. And what I'm curious about is being the CEO of such a company. Could you give us an idea of what the company looks like first of all, just in terms of basic org chart, like how many full time employees, how you think about structuring the company. It's been interesting. And one thing, especially from $1,000,000 a weekend, which is what I've
been able to, it's the playbook I used. And it started with just me in a basement in hate asprie for 48 bucks. And that's what's crazy to them. Okay, everyone doesn't have to have a lot of money or time to be able to get to this point. And so that is kind of wild. There are playbooks for starting low cost, starting low risk, incrementally building something that can become the type of business that you're describing or larger or not depending on your priorities. Exactly. And for
me, it's being able to, that's why I left SF. I wanted to live. I'm not here just to work all day. Yeah. And that's why I'm in Barcelona. It's like I want to have a good balance of enjoying life and making money the way I want. And so I assume we're calm today. We have about 75 full time teammates. I think the word employees is just kind of archaic. And then maybe 25 full time contractors. So that's broken out about six different departments. So we have product engineering department,
sales, business development department, marketing department operations. So we go get the best deals on the planet app, sumo, negotiate and same prices. And then we have to get it on the website. So there's a team that helps to do that. Customer support team, people team, and then a finance and business intelligence team. And are those employees distributed to the have locations? I think they're
different. I guess I think they'll have locations. I think they'll be reosses. We've gone back and forth over the years, man. Like I started an abacement. I made every move to Austin. And then we got an office here. Now we're remote. And we're doing stipends for co-working spots for some of the teammates as an experiment to see if we can actually help them either get their home office set up or co-working set up. We've tried the office. It didn't seem like people actually go. We have one now.
I don't know if people go. I literally have no clue. But we've definitely downsize from about 50,000 a month. I think our office now is 3500 bucks a month. I was going to ask you about CUO frameworks that you use on an ongoing basis. So we're going to come back to that. But since you talked about downsizing, I want to give somebody who's listening something tactical right away because we want to frontload some of those scubi snacks to keep everybody listening. You are a very proactive
negotiator. And that can range from asking for a discount on coffee, which I think we should revisit. To the 35th plan, I believe that you had for COVID, I think it was maybe dropping sales goals, assuming a 5% profit margin, something like that. And I'd like to know how you negotiate things down. Like what are some of the key approaches? So let's say somebody's looking at least of a space for an office. It's not really being used. Or they're looking at their credit card
statement. And they're trying to tighten the belt because they want to take some swings and entrepreneurship, but they want to feel a margin of safety. Right? How do you approach this? What are some of the keys to that? Because this is something I know you have a lot of practice with. Can I'm not going to do a show? But I love a good deal. That's absolutely what I call this all been. No, it's Jewish to be clear. Okay, a few things of how I like to approach negotiating
and getting better prices on things. First off, this is going to be counterintuitive. But I always say I'm really bad at negotiating. That's my first line. You say that to the person you're negotiating against. Right. Every time. Got an idea here is one I am bad because what I'm interested in is like I don't really want to spend a lot of time. I want to understand what you want. And if I know that what you want and you're happy with where you get and it's within my circle, that's it.
I don't want to spend so much time action negotiating. So and I think that lowers people's defenses while we're I'm just not really good at negotiating. I want to make sure you get what you want. And then you're like, Oh, great. So number one. Second thing, no one really wants to be gilted. I have a Jewish mother. I know about guilt. Right. There's a reason Jewish chocolates called gelt. Right. It's not a coincidence. But the second thing is no one will be gilted into
being excited to work with you. And the internet is a small place. The world is a small place. Me and you how long we've been together. You started what? Your book 2007. Yeah, the book came out in 2007. Started writing to the five. So we met 2007 2008 2006. Maybe early. So it comes around. Yeah. So when people try to dick you over or people kind of grind you, you're like, Okay, I know. I'll see you again. Yeah. Right. And so for me, it's like, how do I have a positive experience where
do you want to do another deal with Noah? Do you want to do another discount with Noah? And then lastly, I think a lot of times pricing. So one, be positive. Have a good experience because you're probably going to do this again. And I say lastly, what's the actual value you're negotiating around? I think a lot of times it's like, why won't five versus 10? Why? So have clarity about why you think it's that price. Like, Hey, here's comps. Here's something that you can actually base
this on. So have something where you're like, Okay, I'm paying what we do at abscumand.com is we do a buy annual review over every single contractor and every single software subscription. We don't need software. We literally just have a list of spreadsheets. So twice a year you go through the list every single thing of your sort of recurring costs. Yeah. So our server costs and electronic costs a month. Give or take is 250,000 contractor teammate costs is somewhere around one and a
half million a month. So yeah, that up over a year. It's a lot. So every buy annual anna who leads our people team. She's amazing. Goes over that and then we basically have two columns, which is price of it. And then we have the return on investment or how valuable we think it is the company low medium high. And then they literally go through every single one and see if they can contact anything that says low. And then just get it canceled either get a canceled or get a no shit down. Anything
that's high, we still ask for discount as well. But we more or less leave those alone. Last tip I'll give for negotiating prices. And again, I recommend every new and a buy annual review personally or professionally. When you give the number, shut the hell up. I don't know if you've heard this, but this is one of my favorite. I do this all the time. I literally did two days ago. And when you say when you give the number, that's effectively what you're asking for. Yeah. So, you know,
$1.00 a weekend and you can abscumand.com and life in general, everything isn't asked. And so how I like to do it. I bought a sauna and they didn't deliver it for six months. And I was a little frustrated. So I did a charge back. People in Europe don't know about charge backs. You know this Americans are like, I'll charge you back. Your peens are like, what is what's happening here? So I charge back and they contacted me to find a charge back. That's basically you're asking
your credit card company to reverse a charge. Yes. Which everyone should do not all the time. And it happens at Epstein moment when we do our best to rectify what customer thing is wrong. But it's a really nice way of getting a company's attention because they get charged for it. They get $35 bill and they get notified like, hey, if you're a charge back, you need to solve this. And so I wouldn't do it all the time. I'm not saying I'm done right. But if someone I try to return something or they
didn't deliver for six months, I did a charge back. Now I'll talk to the negotiating court. So the owner of the company three months later after he notices it is like, hey, I got a charge back man. Like, what the hell? And I was like, on my integrity, I'm going to pay for your sauna. But let me just tell you my my my experience. We have a chat. This is literally three days ago. And he's like, all right, man, he's country. Actually, he's like, all right, man, I got you. I'm going to
hook you up a little discount there. Noah. I was like, all right, there Craig is like, I'm going to give 10%. I was like, okay, Craig. I was like, Craig, you know, let me just, I think what times in your negotiating people do like they go back and forth emotionally. And it's like get off the emotion and get to the solution. You get the result. Yeah. Get the result. Instead of being right. Instead of 100%. 100. You're like, well, Craig, you know, instead of being righteous. Exactly.
100% and so with Craig, he said 10% and I said, all right, you know, well, Craig, let me just, let me just walk through what happened. You guys charged me 13,500 for my son at which I love. It didn't come for six months. You lied to me every week. I think what's the reason they lied to me that it was coming every week. I asked every week. They're like, oh, yeah, it's coming this week for six months. Five minutes took. For those people of seeing snatch.
What is it? It's a movie reference. People who get it. It doesn't matter. It's a movie reference. So people who get it will get it. Yeah. So the last negotiating technique. And this is, you know, a million dollar a week and we can talk about how to sell better. And there's a very simple framework everyone can copy. But with Craig, I said, all right, Craig, let's do 20%. This is the power move. You say you're asked or your number and you shut up. That's it. I don't know if people are to do
this or know about this, but that is the power move. So the final let's let the silence to the world. Just be like 20% and Craig is like, all right, no, you got to deal. Let's get done. And so then we got 20% I was able to get an extra thousand bucks off the sauna. I'm happy he's happy we can move forward. So that is a lot of how I like to negotiate. And if you flash back to earlier days, smaller company, maybe it's when you're solo. Yeah. Maybe it's what you did before starting
absumo. This is not a new habit. This is the habit you've developed over a very long period of time. Yeah. And I'm looking at transcript of an interview from Mixergy. So I'll throw out. I know going into the archives and wanted to throw this out there. Just in case it's helpful to folks or for just jogging other techniques in terms of tightening the belt, which is something I did also before starting my very first company, the sports nutrition company. I went through my
credit card statement. So I like, okay, what can I cancel? What can I get rid of? So I feel like I have more of a buffer, right? My burn rate is as low as possible. Here's what we have in front of me fact check. Can't trust everything you read on the internet. But here's what we have. My most important thing is that when you're emailing someone, I think you've got to do a few things. First, tell them the exact price that you want. So you kind of alluded to that. Number two, say,
hey, I can't afford this right now. Number three, say, this is what I need for now. We can revisit in six months of the economy recovers. This is a great way to keep me as a long-term customer. That's a pretty good line, right? Any other thoughts on negotiating prices down? Yeah. What? Or out, right? Just deciding what to cut. I think the bigger concept that I reflect on for everyone out there is that you can actually ask for discounts and I don't think
people realize that. Yeah. I think that's actually the bigger, one of the bigger things, not the only biggest thing, which is I went to, you know, Ollie Abdel? I do, yeah. I don't know personally, but I've had a little bit of contact. Oh, he's awesome. He's like, beautiful person. I love this guy. And I went to hang out with him in LA two weeks ago. I go into a hotel. He's like, he's done a very good job on a whole bunch of different levels. And he's kind about it, which I really admire.
And I go to his hotel room, like, dude, sick hotel room. Really sick hotel room. It's like, literally a corner, Santa Monica, facing the beach. Me and Isaac, the videographer, we're sharing like a tiny one bedroom, like, like cuddling on a bed, like poor people. I was like, dude, not poor people. But like, I call it small rich. That's the new poor. That's my new term, small rich. Because it means, you know, there's still a chance to get rich soon or yet. So anyways, I asked Ollie, I was like,
how much is room? And this must be like a thousand a night. He's like, you know what, mate? He's he's a London. He's like, you know what, mate? I just emailed them and said, I'm doing videos and stuff in the room. Do you think you can give me a little discount on the room? They give him the room for free. Yeah. They give him the room for free just by asking. Doesn't hurt to ask. And so I think the bigger thing is not necessarily how to grind other people. And I don't think
that's what we're encouraging at all. It's just thinking like, if you can't afford something, if you want something, how can you just ask for it? And then I think what Tim said, what you highlighted for more we're talking about is I like the phrase, whift. What's in it for them? Just think whiff. Like, how can I tell them? I'll be a long-term customer. That's what you called out,
which is great. Or like, hey, I can't afford this, but I can't afford this price. So I could do something now and thinking about how you make it in there and just like, maybe I'll leave you a review and thinking, you know, more in that instance makes them more likely to do it. So let's give an example of an optional practice. And I know we've talked about this. And for any number of reasons, I'm just in love with it. And that is the coffee discount. Because don't practice your first
round on the important stuff. That's ridiculous. That's asking for all sorts of problems. And all sorts of like self-imposed PTSD if it goes sideways. And then you're not going to do it again. Yeah. So practice on things that don't matter. Right? It's kind of like if you're going to have a really important job interview with your top pick, don't make that your first interview. 100%. I just go get a bunch of practice rounds with other companies where you don't care about the outcome.
So in this case, what is the coffee discount? Yeah, the coffee discount, it ties all into starting a business, which people are like, really? And like, yeah, it is the thing. It's you go to any time you buy coffee tea, any time you go to a store, even a restaurant, you can do it anywhere. You go up to the counter, you make your purchase, and you say, can I please have 10% off? And then they look at you really strange. And you say, well, no, a Kagan, a million dollar
a week, and I'm doing this course. I'm trying out this book. They said I should do it. And they keep looking at you weird. They go, let me talk to my manager. Okay, fine. You get 10% off. Or they come back and say no, and you get your coffee and you move on. And then I always love asking people like, what did you learn about yourself? And everyone's always like, I was scared. I had courage because I faced my fear. And I realized I can do more things. And it's not as
scary as it actually seemed. And now you can start applying that, frankly, in everything in your jobs for raises with your dating, asking someone for a date, and especially in business, which is, hey, will you come on my show? Hey, will you be my customer? Hey, will you give me feedback? Hey, can I interview you? That's all this whole life is, is asking people things? And if you ask,
guess what? You can get. I don't know when I originally said this or wrote it, but I've it resonated so much that I was like, huh, maybe I should think about this even more myself, which was this line. Can't believe I'm quoting myself for God's sake. Save me. This is what the internet does do. I haven't started quoting myself with my name signed. I haven't started doing that either. But the life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. And this ties into my
earliest beginnings prior to the four hour work week. And I don't know if I've actually talked about this publicly, but when I was giving the guest lectures and high tech entrepreneurship, at Princeton twice a year from 2003 to 13, I think. And I was invited by a professor. I didn't have any special credentials other than everyone else he invited in as a guest speaker was venture backed and traveled that route. They had some type of external financing. I was one of his students.
We kept in touch. We got along really well. Ed Show, I've had him on the podcast. And he wanted me to come back to share my experiences on the front lines because I was a recent grad. Also, I wasn't decades out. Yeah. Butch dropping. Right. So I went back. And the crux of my presentation every time. And it modified, you know, grew and it evolved. And the notes for that ended up becoming the backbone of the four hour work week as I ran all these experiments. But the opener
was effectively who here wants to be a salesperson. And no hands would go out. Nobody would raise their hand. Right. So good. Especially because this is Princeton, right. And they're like, sales, like makes my skin crawl. You know, so you have people who are maybe going into entrepreneurship, more likely investment banking or management consulting, probably. But a lot of them had aspirations to be an entrepreneur. And I said, okay, whether or not you want to be a salesperson
is irrelevant. And if you don't like that label, that's fine. But you have to become a really good deal maker. You have to become a good deal maker. And a lot of those presentations focused on the kind of stuff that we're talking about, asking for what you want, deciding how to position it, deciding how to really determine what the other person wants. Because maybe you are causing a fuss over something that is just an indicator what they actually want. And there are books that help
with this. Getting past know is one of my favorites. There are many others. And that is why we're spending some time on this. Are there other, let's just call them comfort challenges, let's say, besides the asking for a discount on a cup of coffee. And I want to make one modification to what you said, which is when you first, maybe the first time you do this will make it softball. Fine. So you can ask for the discount. And then you can mention you're doing it as an exercise
for a book or something else. But then when you've tried that once or twice, now you can't say that. Yeah. Make it more uncomfortable. Yeah. Are there other small challenges like that where people can build their tolerance to discomfort in a similar way? Yeah. And let me give you two, one you could do right now. And so this is something from the book about, and it's the only book I think that you actually make money in the first few pages. And this is something that literally
everyone could do right now. Ask one friend to invest a dollar in you right now. Let her be going on your phone, Venmo PayPal crypto, whatever it is, and just message someone on WhatsApp, whatever this and say, Hey, I got this idea for a business where I want to start a business. But I'm looking for one person to be on my board of advisors for my investor, will you Venmo me one dollar? And I did this with a guy named Jake about a month and a half ago and his hand was trembling. He's like,
and then he you want to make it harder call the person. Don't just text messages them, call them. And it's silly, right? And I think business should be fine. I don't think we should have these day jobs that we hate all day. That seems horrible. But this is a fun thing that you can do just a little dollar one tiny little dollar. And that's, but guess what? Every billion dollar company started with dollar. And so building up that practice where you just kind of asked for the dollar and then
you get it, like, Oh, shit. That's the beginning. This is going to be such a mundane, procedural stupid question. I'm going to ask anyway, if they're like, what am I getting for my dollar as an investor? What do you say exactly? So the line I like to use is I love your support as I'm starting my business and I love for you to be on my board of advisors. So I can keep you informed as I'm working on my business. And it's a way to have people that that care about you are just a part of
your journey. And I think people are surprised how much people want them to succeed. And so Jake called his brother, Jake called his other friend Tom. They're both like, who's Jake? Jake is a guy who read nine dollar. We can live at my house for 48 hours. So he read basically a prototype galley, something like that. Yeah. And so we called these two people. He said, Hey, Tom, I really love you to support me. Can you send me a dollar right now? And he was shaking. Tom sent a dollar
live. We saw it on Venmo. And Jake was like, and everyone can do that right now, especially if you're want to start a business and you want to get going or guess what? If you have a business, do it to one friend, do it to a colleague, do it to your significant other. So that's one I highly recommend. The other one that this is stuff I still do to this day. They're silly, right? And business should be fun. And guess what? You're as you called it out really well, practice on the small
stuff. So when you get to bigger stuff, it's not as big a deal. Like I'm going to people's houses and knocking on doors. That's pretty scary. Most of my videos on YouTube are me going up someone's door. I don't know them and I ask them, what do you do for living? That's a very big ask to a stranger. Imagine me knocking on your door here. You really get the hell out of here. So the other one that I'd
recommend, and this is again, these are universal. You don't need money. It doesn't matter your gender, it doesn't matter how rich or poor you are. You can practice these and build your skills up and your confidence up to be successful in business. Because as you said, sales is the basis of billionaires. A lot of billionaires were really good sales. Just footnote. Don't lose track. Yeah. I got. If you're not selling customers, you're selling people and your ideas. You're selling people and why
they should use your design specs instead of something else. You're selling them on why you deserve or at the very least, it's okay that you take a week of paid time off. Like you are persuading. You are going to be in the persuasion business. Even if you are the most anti-social of coders, at some point you have to interact with these bags of flesh called humans. Yeah. Yeah. And this is part of the game. It is the other one that's universal and I did it last week.
It was actually pretty fun. It's the compliment challenge. The compliment challenge is real it's what it sounds like. And specifically what I like to compliment people on is clothing. I've never been a good dresser. You grew up in California, no, Mervins. I grew up in Los Angeles. Yeah, but you grew up clothing. But yeah, you move to the Bay Area, like you know, Mervins, remember that store? Mervins, vaguely. No, man, it was bad. That's
only a place my mom bought us clothes from. And it was rough most of my life. As I go, I was like, I kind of want to dress well. And so the compliment challenge is anytime you see anyone with something nice that you're like, that's kind of a cool hat, cool jacket, cool shoes. So two weeks ago I was at the best Western. And as I like to call it, it's the okay Western hotel. It's definitely not the best. It's re-branded. This lady had shoes on. And then the way I like to
think about it specifically with these challenges is you have a three-second rule. For me personally, as I won't negotiate with terrorists, I will not negotiate with myself. So within three seconds, I have to make the decision to do it. Just go do it. Don't even think about it. And then by the time you do it, that was never so scary. And I still have the fear. It's not like at point you go away, just get a little bit easier over time. So this lady was sitting having breakfast
with her husband and I'm like, I'm bothering her. I'm definitely bothering. And that's actually a really misconception in big in sales. We're bothering the other people. Here's what's fascinating. And go up to her. I'm really sorry to bother you guys, but I love your shoes. She's like, thank you so much. I was like, do you mind telling me where you got them from? It's like, yeah, I got them from JC Penney's. I was like, awesome. I think my girlfriend might like this. Have a great day.
She's like, thank you so much. That was really nice of you. I was like, okay, I went back to my chair. And so that's that's one of the misconceptions and sales is that we're actually harassing or bothering people when maybe it's actually a good thing. And people need to maybe reconsider their perception of what a sale is. Quick pause. If the book title keeps coming up, we're going to have to cut it. No, no, did I say it again? You're good. We can mention it. But if there's too
much density, we'll have to thin it out a little bit. Of course. So back to the story. By the way, great feedback. Thank you. That's like a superpower. I mean, that alone is great. I don't know if you want to include that in your content. We could include it. Actually, I mean, shit, if you're okay with it. Yeah. I think this is like one of my superpowers that I've seen. We could say is not just my super or one of our values as feedback is a gift. That is also on walls at the artist formerly
known as Facebook, right? Feedback is a gift. Is that what they said in that? Yeah. Oh, wow. That's the thing. But it is. And this is fun. Okay. Yeah. If we can keep it in, that'd be great. Because when I was as an example, right, when I was early on preparing for the four hour work week, I went to media training. I'd never done real media before. And they were like, you must say
as in my book, right? In my book, mention the title. And I did it. I got really good at it. And what I would say to folks, if you're on morning television and you have 45 seconds and they're going to mispronounce your name and get your book title wrong, yes. It's a good idea to get it in. With longer format, you have the time to work with nuance. And I will tell people right now, like, I'll keep it simple. Just go buy the fucking book because because I've seen what the blog post
is done. I've spent enough time with you. I've seen you in action. We've collaborated way back in the day on the Tim Ferriss experiment, the TV show. Got to see a lot of this stuff live. Got to practice a lot of it live. So you know what you're talking about. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs. Every small business owner I know, and that includes me, is asking themselves the same question.
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Why not try it out? You can go to LinkedIn.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. So coming back to the sales, I will say, don't assume that complimenting someone or approaching someone is going to be bothersome or harass them. However, there are times when that can be the case. In the sense that I remember in Silicon Valley, man, this is part of the reason I was like, I need to take a break from this place geographically. I would be at dinners. Dinner's,
sometimes with my girlfriend, you'd be on a date, and a dude, it was always a dude. It was always a dude. Some dude in his mid 20s would come over and be like, hi, Tim, and pull up a chair and just sit down and pitch me on his startup. I remember on multiple occasions, there were times when I was not as delicate about it, but I would just be like, John, because your name, John, you didn't even mention
your name. John, let's call you John. I mean, John, it does not matter how good your pitches are. Right now, it could be the best pitch in the world. The timing is not good. I'll just share one more than I thought was amusing, which is a counterpoint, although I will say, oftentimes it's going to bother someone. It's going to be rude. It's going to be filmed the blank negative label. Is an excuse for us to avoid doing the thing that is uncomfortable. However, one counter example,
we're sitting here in Austin. I was here at South by Southwest. That is a huge festival here in Austin. Great fun. I was on an escalator. I was exhausted because I'm an introvert, which people may not realize because I have one-on-one conversations and then broadcast it to millions of people. But very introvert, I get depleted. When I go to events and I do things like book signings, I'm toast for two, three days. So I'm on the escalator and literally putting my face,
like nuzzling into my girlfriend's neck because I'm trying to hide from the world. She's above me in the escalator. A guy reaches over her shoulder and taps me on the shoulder to pitch me on his start-ups. I don't do that. I got a guy in Barcelona. I was in spandex, just to be clear. I just finished a bike ride. This guy pulls up a seat next to me and he's like, you're no a kegner. I'm like, yeah, I'm okay. He's like, dude, give me a hug. I was like, I don't know you.
And then he's like, he's like, you got to come meet my friends. I was like, dude, I'm just getting a beer. Just let me get my Australia damn and chill out, dude. And yes, I'll come talk to you and it was just a little bit too imposing. But just look, I don't want to turn this into a total kvech marathon, but I will say that for me, this is very much an Austin thing too. If you meet anyone for the first time and perhaps I've spent too much time in Japan, who knows? But if I stick out my
hand and you say, I'm a hugger, don't do that. And then they bear hug you. They bear, those are always the bear hugged. Or they do like, like, will Ferrell comedy extended hug? Don't do that, guys. Don't do that, guys. You're like, this bomb do the bow. You're just about anything is fine. Please don't don't. So imposing. Like, I'm a hugger. It's like, all right, I'm a kicker. Doesn't mean I'm gonna kick you though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Slap it. Yeah. Great. So pro tips.
Let me draw a, I'll draw one thing, especially in sales. We're talking about challenges. And by the way, all these challenges do lead up in what I think has helped me be successful. Is asking and practicing. And so for sales, I have a little framework that works super well. It's called lot. Listen, options, transition. And this is the same thing in asking. Just listen to
that person. So first off, I'm gonna listen to him. Talk to him about their problems. If you're especially if you're starting a business, you're like, let me talk to you about your shirts. What do you like about your shirts? What do you not like about your shirts? Tell me more about your shirts. And just listen, just think of you're doing a podcast interview. And you're just interviewing them and getting feedback. Okay, then you present an option to your person. It's like, hey,
oh, you like shirts? What about this shirt at this price? And they say, yeah, that actually solves my problem. Or if you can't, you don't. And then you transition them to all right, pay me. All right, let's move on to a next step. Let's put in the calendar, which I'm always a huge, like lock it in the cow. If you're trying to get sales, always in the cow. Or how do you lock it in the cow? In a case like this, like what goes into the calendar? So what I'm doing, I'll give
an example yesterday, I was talking to this woman at a company that I want to work with. And it was like, all right, well, we'd like to do something together. Cool. I'll follow up an email. And I'm like, let's just do it right now. And so my phrase is always this, I have my calendar open. How does this date work at this time? And that is such an easier decision for her to then make. And say, actually, yeah, cool. It's a placeholder. It also saves so much bandwidth over time.
100% right? Like you add that up over as a process, right? If you're constantly doing follow-up emails, yeah. And I want to make sure I can get a test. Now, 10% of your life is dealing with those follow-up emails. So let's talk about what we left, maybe 10, 15 minutes ago. Just because I like to bookmark practices at different stages, because I do find that they inform a lot. And I'm also personally curious. These conversations are ultimately always personal to me. So CEO frameworks.
Yeah. Things that you do on a daily weekly or monthly basis, you mentioned the bi-annual for lack of a better descriptor, recurring expense review, right? You mentioned that already. Yeah. What are some other things? Because you've had quite a bit of practice now. Yeah, let me show you a few. Because I think it's going to cool when you get to see it. So every single day at www.summa.com, can I say the website? Or is it my saying the two months? That's fun.
That's fun. Every single day at www.rubb.com. Beep.com. You have a little bleep it out. You can check this out. I think you can talk through it. I'm happy. Oh wow. You can share these numbers. So every single day, this is something Keith Roboi does. Okay. So this is Zoom. So every day we have a daily poll. So that's what we call it. And let's zoom out for one sec. Have one singular goal. That's what I learned from Zuckerberg.
And that's what I do at www.summa.com. And so with www.summa.com this year are one singular goal is $45 million net revenue. That's net. Gross sales is definitely around $77 to $80 million depending on how the year ends. And then every single day, there is this slack bot that posts like all of our key metrics that lead to our number one goal. And it's tied into automation. Yeah. So what are you using there? We're using Zapier and then we use Snowflake when we have a two person
business intelligence team. But anyone could do this on a spreadsheet. Just every day, you have one goal. How are you doing? Can I say this for a sec? Yeah. Yeah. I want to talk out some of the numbers. Pretty interesting. So we have data updated through. This is a pulse bot. So it's being automatically posted. You're not manually pulling this. But you could. Yeah. And you can also, by the way, if you're just starting out, just have a spreadsheet and check it every single day.
Yeah. So you have a month to date actual as compared to goal. So that's in and of itself meaningful. Right. And so you got total gross sales 4.3 million. Let's call it versus 4.4.3. 8 million total net revenue gross profit. AOV, which is average order value. Yep. And new buyers total buyers plus members. Those are subscribers. Those are our VIP customers. VIP customers. Daily sales, which is broken out, new buyers, new buyer conversion rate, new versus existing buyer gross sales
month to date. That's an interesting one. And then daily KPI report with monthly projections. So the KPI and keep performance indicator. So this is quite a bit of stuff. And I'm wondering if you had to 80, 20 this for your business right now, because I'm not sure how Keith Roboi does this or describes it. There are, I believe, examples that say why a combinator of talking about the single weekly metric, right, picking one or two weekly metrics that are tracked over time.
And you're trying to get that to compound at 10% a week or whatever the number might be. So what, what would you choose as your kind of 80, 20 priorities in that list right now for everyone out there. It could be different. We're more of an e-commerce site with our business. There's three numbers that I would just look at. Three numbers add up. So again, start with one goal. What is your goal and what's your date for that goal? So our goal is from zero January one. It's the end of the year.
How do we get 45 million net revenue? And the three goals, the three KPI's that lead to that. It's just three for us traffic. So how many people are coming to the site? How many people actually buy, which is our conversion rate, and then how much do they spend, which is our average order value? That's it. That's all I would look at. Now, that's the most simplest version of it. So if you have traffic, time so much people buy, how much they spend, that gives you your revenue numbers.
But then we have sub numbers. That's where it gets complicated. But if I had to do 80, 20 would be that. Now, what other people need to be thinking about though is what are the things that impact those three KPI's? That's how you now get way more complicated. For sure. Just for fun. If you had to pick one of those three to optimize for 2024, which would it be? With app sumo.com. Top of the funnel. So traffic, conversion, or average order volume.
Yeah. If I only could pick one thing out of all of it, I would actually pick just number of deals for our business. Number of deals. So every business has a number of products that you're offering which should help with. I imagine the conversion and traffic. And so for every business out there, what's the core input that leads to your main outputs? Let's just take a lot of different examples. So YouTube, lately, and this has been a big transformation for me is I'm sending unambitious
goals. Tell me more. You know, I think in Silicon Valley, if you're not 10x again, I learned I was with our board of month ago. Like, if you're not 10x, you know, you're failing. And I was like, okay, I've read that book. And so I got that t-shirt too, guys. I get it. 10x, everything is written by people that haven't 10x to business. And the reality, and let's say there's two parts there, but there's cores for everything. So the core for my YouTube
channel is two videos a month. That's it. That's what I found gets me to the main metrics that I need. And they're supporting metrics around it. But that's my core there. AppSuman.com. As of now, it's give or take around, I'd have to ask Sean, he runs the high level, but it's about 35 deals a month. If we can do 35 amazing software deals a month, we hit our targets more or less. And so for your business, what's the core numbers? We talked about this in the past, but what's the core
number? You can really just like everything kind of works backwards off of. And so for us, it would be deals. Okay. So we're going to talk about other frameworks. And then we're going to, at some point, we are going to come back to YouTube, because I have questions around that. Sure. Top three, bottom three. Hmm. What is that? You know, you gave me feedback early on a show, which is great. And this is awesome. That's how you improve. I don't know if people don't realize
that. Like the only way you look at yourself is with a mirror. And that's the same thing with your relationships to ask your partner today right now, hey, what am I doing? Well, or what do you want me to improve on? And we're going to come back to this. But how much money have you spent on coaches, would you say in the last five to 10 years? Myself and the team, easily over a million. Okay. Easily over a million. So we'll get into that. Coach,
that. Yeah, I like feedback. That's how I get and get better. It doesn't mean I accept all the feedback, but it means I can acknowledge all the feedback and make a decision. So T3B3, there's something it's from Travis, actually at Uber. And so the idea there in Andrew Chen was one of my best friends and advisor brought it to me, been on the show. Basically just like every quarter, it's so light. I just don't like sometimes feedback because it's like these 18 pages that I'm like,
I don't know what to do. You have 18 things that fucking do. It's so much. Just so many top three things. You're in great. We can go. What are the top three things you love that I'm doing? So I know I can continue it. And what are the bottom three things I can improve on? Three things is definitely doable. If not three, just even do one. You can do T1B1. And I just have it in my calendar. I think more things you can just have automatic in your calendar. The better. So I just
have my calendar asked team T3B3 every quarter. And so right now in your business, if you're in the junior department, if you're the leader of the company or even in relationships, whatever it is, just go ask your partner, ask someone that you trust and respect, hey, what is the top three things I'm doing? What are the bottom three and do that regularly and you will be able to keep improving. Can you give any examples of real T3B3? So on my desk, I print my now because I want to see it.
What you're doing, well, you're probably going to continue, but what you can improve is cool. So the team gave me feedback that I'm they want more autonomy that I'm too much up in their ass. And then I'm like, yeah, and this is the funny. But I was like, I'm not a micro manager. I'm like, dude, everyone who says that is. Okay. It's kind of like if, uh, yeah, if you see on a dating app, anyone who says no drama, you're like, oh, you love drama. Huge red flag. Huge red flag.
So they wanted more autonomy. And then ask for example, like what's an example or what's a moment, give me a solution that we make sure that as it comes to it. So for instance, with absuma.com, I love going through our credit card bill. You know, our credit card bills, sometimes like in November because black Friday, it's about a million dollars, almost a million dollars. And normally, it can vary between three and five minutes on customer acquisition, like pay ad acquisition,
Facebook, our Amazon bill, 50k a month, a lot of different ads. Just so I understand, Amazon bill, you're talking about AWS. AWS. So I was going through every transaction and be like a nine dollar transaction. I would love if your Amazon bill was just shit, your employees were buying as guests. AWS. You know, there's, well, as you get bigger, you also have checks and balances. Someone actually tried to scam us for 30k for weeks, which is super impressive. But I was going through these credit
card bills and we talk about coaches. We have a CFO coach for the VP of finance. She's the CFO, she was the CFO of Mailchimp. Pretty good job. You know, I'm pretty good company. And we're in a meeting and she's like, no, you know, we talk about autonomy, we talk about trust. Do you think going through the credit card transactions and messaging people about a $10 purchase is really autonomy? And not trusting your VP of finance, Kevin, who can do this. And I was like, good point,
a stop looking credit card bills. So that was one of them. The other B3 from this quarter was around longer term vision. I'm much more of a tactician and I like getting action, I like getting movement. And the team was like, you need to chill out and think longer for us and come back with some type of longer plan. And so the last six months of the year, it was really thinking about what do we want to do in the next three years? Because I've been so focused in business in generally about one
year segments. So we spent so much time. And now we have like a 2026 vision. I think this is also very common. It's not true for everyone, but very common for people who have done a lot of bootstrabbing. Yeah. More so than people who've raised a bunch of money. Yeah. We're a board understandably wants to know what the hell you're long term. Yeah. What you're long term plans are because they want to realize their equity. Yeah. And that was the feedback I got from the team.
They're like, get out of the day to day. Let us do it. We got it. And just start moving the process forward. So it was thinking about like talking to customers, talking to partners, thinking about ourselves, like, what do we like doing? What do we grade at? And where can we be in three years? And then bringing that back to the team incorporating and getting them buy in. That was something I got feedback in the past. Like, hey, you're just making decisions without us.
So yeah, by the end of the year, I think in November, now we have a three year vision and base camps towards that vision. Base camps project measure. Not necessarily base camp.com. But base camp specifically, what are milestones? So our destination is to be able to just distribute software tools for entrepreneurs. That's what we love doing. I love promoting things. And so how do we be the number one place to distribute software tools? Not just deals,
but software tools. And then what are the different key milestones numerically, as well as from what we want to do in the business within these separate years to be able to get there in 2026. So that was feedback directly from the team that they told me. And then we do this for everyone in the company, the top three, bottom three. How do people track that? Where? How do people keep it present? Right? Because it is one thing. Having just come off of an offsite myself.
And I actually think we did a good job with this because we sort of assigned ownership next steps and then did working sessions during the offsite. Like, okay, let's actually get these things in motion. Because it's great to have a bunch of meals, have some wine, walk around, talk about big ideas. Oh, we're so excited. Let's take a team photo next to the paper on the wall and then went right back to status quo. How do people keep these top three, bottom three,
present, or maybe a better way to where it is? How do they keep themselves accountable? A few things that work for us. So one is scorecards. Everyone gets a scorecard. If you're an absolute, you get a scorecard. And so I can show you an example of it. I focus on the leadership scorecard. So I have a company scorecard. What are our top three things we're trying to do in Q1? And Sean, let's see, he's our head of revenue. Alonus, he's our COO. They each have a scorecard.
We're just one of your top three things based on what we're trying to do in Q1. Okay, this would be for Q1. Yeah. And so that isn't helpful way where maybe it's something they want to improve or maybe it's just something that they need to work on. Or it's just an outcome that we want. And then we agree on what those are. They propose it. I review it and then we decide it. Got it. It doesn't mean necessarily like, hey, it's going to be one of their B3s. But that for me is like the three
things that they want to get better at or they want to accomplish. The other thing I would say, it's not like you guys had a planning session and all this stuff. We had it told you we have a three-year vision. And then we have all this stuff. But on Monday, I was with one of my coaches, Dan Putt from reboot. And I was talking to Dan. I was like, I don't know if we're on the same page what we're doing because I'm not really clear. He's like, well, if you're not clear, they're definitely
not clear. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. It comes from the top. How are you leading by example? If I'm not clear, what we're going to go necessarily in the next quarter, like, does everyone else know? So we had a meeting that I saw that day. And I was like, everyone needs to bring the top scorecard projects. We need a line on them, make sure they're tied to the main thing and have a one-pager around it. Had to mean next day, everyone brought their stuff. And then we have
one pager that ties all this together. And so now being very, very clear, like, what's our number goals? What's our key projects? And by the way, this is something that's counterintuitive in businesses is like, if there's not fighting, you're not really getting the best ideas. I want more people saying no. Like the best people at Facebook when I was there were always saying no to mark. And I was always like, yeah, Mark, that's pretty good idea. That's very, very well got fired.
But over time, I've realized that challenging respectfully is very healthy. And so you ask about feedback and all that. It's ask for feedback really. Be clear on what success is. That's what a scorecard is. It's like, here is success for me with our work. And then you can be able to measure against that in a very clear amount of time. Okay, we are going to come back to saying no pretty quickly because big part of enabling yourself to say yes to the things that matter is being
able and equipped to say no. Yeah. So I do want to come back to that. Other frameworks that you would like to mention? The other one I do that just changed everything for me in the past two years, especially as a CEO, was a weekly review. And so I only have three questions. And really noticing what you actually do a lot of people like, I have all these frameworks and then you ask them like a year later, like, yeah, I don't use again. So maybe they've evolved it, but really it's not sticking.
And so this one that sticks with me. And I could show you it comes up on my phone. So every week, I get a slack bought. Here it is. You can see. So it says complete your Friday weekly review. So today's Friday is where we're chatting. You can click on it. And there's three questions. And the three questions are very, very simple. It's how is a week one through five and why? And this is you could do whether your CEO or whether you're a junior person. And so we track it. We track the
ratings every week. One is sucked. Five is fantastic. Yeah. So this week was a five this week crushed. And that's thinking about, okay, well, what made this week a five? What happened this week? I got a hang out with you. We had lack of clarity on Monday on Tuesday. We dialed in our Q1 planning. And everyone was like super hyped on that. I finished executive compensation, which was challenging about how much people get paid. So this week was a five and then explaining line
adding all those different things. And it's not always like, I just bold point out. And I just need to write stories. Number two thing, especially as my leadership style, I noticed I was very inconsistent. Yeah. Where you consistent. Yeah. So my number two question is, was I consistent this week one through five? Basically because I'd go into a meeting and I would just start fucking ripping on people. Like I was in me with Mitchell and Olman and I'm just like
shitting all over them. I'm like, your ideas are sucky. And I wasn't come with solutions. That week was a three. That was not a good idea because if as a leader, you want consistent experience for the people you work with. And you're being consistent based on feedback you've received from the team and your top three bottom three. Is that sort of a little bit? It's also how this is more my own subjective opinion. Got it. This is how you feel. Yeah. I found this really,
really helpful. And then the last question is what am I top three for next week? So it makes me be very more focused about, okay, I have a singular goal. We have Q1 priorities. Now I can break these down to smaller levels and say like, okay, this upcoming week, what are the three things you want to work on? Then with my executive assistant and our chief of staff, we can help realign my schedule. Like, is that actually what I'm working on next week or is it a bunch of other things?
One tool we stop using because I cost money. So we stop paid for it. But there is a tool that does this T3B3 and then follows up and you can have all of it. But I was like, I think we can do it in Google Forms for cheaper is lattice lattice lattice HQ.com. It's Sam Altman's brother. Jack got it. But it was like 15,000 a year. And I was like, I think Google Forms for free a year. I'm going to do pretty equivalent and just it's a little more work on the team shout out Charlotte
and Anna and Angelina for helping facilitate it. But yeah, that actually will do your tracking. And then you could double check how you are against it versus honestly, Google Spreadsheets is comparable. Q on top and singular goal. Do you want to talk about other of these? A lot of it when you're trying to go anywhere in your business is like, where do you want to be by the end of the year? So right now for anyone who's watching this, it's coming on January, where do you want to be
December 31st, 2024? And just pick a destination with the time most people don't do either. They're like, you've influenced so many people on health. Like, I just want to be healthier. What does that mean? Yeah. Be healthier. So be more clear on your goal and your destination. That's something that Zuckerberg I've talked to you about it where he brought me into room. He's like, I want to get a billion people. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah. And this is when we had 10 million. Yeah. That's a
big one. That was amazing. It was exciting. And so have a very clear singular goal that you want to accomplish. But maybe it's like a thousand subscribers. And my goals lately are much more unambitious because I want to focus on goals I can sustain. Could you give an example of what that looks like? So with apps and we're calm in the past, if we didn't 2X a year, I'm like, oh, it failed. And you'll hear this. You'll say, like, shoot for the stars. And if you're
not at the moon, you're good. But also that means I'm running really fast. You burn out because you're working really hard and you're not getting where you want to go. And so now with apps, you are general growth ranges 5 to 10% a year. And so this year for 2024, I believe it'll be around 7%. And the reason that is is because if I can do 7% over a year after a year after a year,
after a year, they end up the warm buffet of Vepsule. Exactly. And the other thing that I've noticed through these unambitious goals, and I'll give more examples, is that it creates more freedom for taking 10X experiments. So we're doing a lot more content this year, but sometimes this comes out. We're going to be trying doing like an alternative to product time and some of these other options. But if we're so focused on having to grow revenue and do all these things,
you don't really have oxygen to experiment in a way that feels confident. So same thing with my YouTube channel, I'm going from 1 million to 1.25 million this year. You know, like 25%, but, you know, we've been going 50%. And that's because I would say we've had less aggressive goals. And so thinking about that for everyone out there, I do think Silicon Valley and what they're telling you, oh, you got a 10X, that's because these investors don't care if people fail. I would add to that.
Yeah. This is super important. I'm glad you're bringing it up because I do like how some of these outrageous questions break your mental models or your assumptions about what you can't do. Right. So how could you achieve your 10-year goals in the next six months? Love that. Great. That's an excellent thought exercise. But if you're applying to yourself as a bootstrapped entrepreneur, 10X or bust. And if let's just say, well-being or happiness is
reality minus expectations. Yes. You can paint yourself into a precarious corner and you can paint your team and employees into a very precarious corner. In the venture backed power law distribution of startups and venture capital, there are a few things you got to realize. The first is that investors are banking on that kind of power law return it within tech. So they're looking at huge possible multiples. Right. So they can make a thousand X on something that breaks out. This
happens. And that pays for all the losses. Other invisible, I would say invisible to the public factors include the incentives you may not see in the headlines. For instance, if a founder is able to take money off the table with large rounds of financing, they're already in the black. And then for the company outcome to have a huge impact on their quality of life, they're willing and able to make enormous outsized bets with ridiculous ambitions because guess what? It's not
in the news, but they already have 20 million in the bank. They're good. And this is why I think what you're saying is really important. The consistency matters. And I want to tie this because everything is related to everything in some respects. And I want to talk about YouTube briefly. We're are going to talk a lot about building, but guys, these are the ingredients that allow you to build an experiment consistently. You need to develop certain attributes and frameworks.
We can talk about KPIs and goals and what we want to achieve. There's a survivorship bias and entrepreneurship where you tend to hear about the success stories. 100%. One of the things you have done on YouTube, I'm not sure if this is going to be fertile ground for harvest. So we'll see. But you've asked a lot of millionaires, billionaires versions of was it worth it? What do you regret?
It's are there any takeaways from that that were either non-obvious or that have really stuck for you because it's easy to find every year some version of the article that is like so and so talked to people on their deathbed and they all said, I wish I had spent more time with my family and less time in the office. It's like, okay, fine. Right. Don't neglect your health. Fine.
I get it. Like these are all kind of predictable things you would expect. And no one on their deathbed, if they would don't want to be considered like a miserly cunt is going to say, my family sucks. I really wish I'd spent more time in the office. They're just not going to say that is their legacy. That's what I'm going. So has anything really stuck with you from those conversations or lines of questioning? Was it worth it if there were any regrets? Things
it would have done differently. For context, for the listeners, interview John Paul de Giorgio, founder of Patron Tequila, Paul Mitchell Haircare, Paul Orphalia, founder of Kinkos sold that for 2.4 billion. John Paul sold Patron for 3.5 billion. Founder Qualcomm, 100 billion dollar company. There's a few things that have stood out from chatting with them. One, none of them became billionaires within 20 years. Not one. Not paper money worth coming up and down super quickly or crypto
billionaires where it can go away. Took a long time. Long, long time. Number two, they all got rich. People know these things just like you said, deathbed and people know to spend more time with their family, but they don't do it. This is another one. They all got rich in one way. Just one thing. John Paul de Giorgio, just Paul Mitchell Haircare, then he able to do it again, which is we can talk about that. There's something there. Kinkos, just copiers. Larry Jineski,
just basements. Michael Hudner just ships. But all of us were like, no, I'm going to diversify. But then you think about all these people. It's like, they just did one thing. Two other things I would comment from billionaires to three. They're all entrepreneurs. They weren't W2 employees. They hired W2 people. The richest people on earth, they hired W2 people. And so it's realizing like, oh, maybe the sound partnership is there's some upside to that. The one that you commented on,
another highlight there. And this is from John Paul de Giorgio, which I thought was super powerful. And this is when you start noticing with billionaires, they're actually all really good at sales. And that is the skill you're like, oh, it's asking. How can I practice it? And John Paul de Giorgio, I don't have hair. You don't have hair. He was like, give me your hand. I'm going to put on lotion. And he like rubbed it on my hair. He's like, how's that feel? I was like, it feels actually
pretty good. He's like, how your hands feel? I'm like, they feel good. I literally went home and bought Paul Mitchell hair care. I went home and bought it. And he was just like, what I like to do is find the best product that exists and make sure it's a product people reorder. I'm like, oh, that's smart. And then I'm really good at selling. And I was like, that's really interesting. So there's something about selling. I would say that stood out for me. And then last year, I think I would say 50,
50 seemed like they could be happier. I just don't know if they all seem as happy as I would have imagined. I'm like, do your billion. You can literally do anything you want all day forever. And I think like John Paul de Giorgio, for me, stood out where he was just very kind. He was kind with me. He was kind of the staff. He was kind like, he sold Patron and he sent a
$50 million check that day. And he felt like he had a good balance. Like, I would say the Austin balance of like, I'm not trying to be a Silicon Valley workaholic, but I'm trying to work, make a lot of money and have a great life. And I admired that. Yeah. He gives me that impression. I've had him on the podcast. And what that proves to me is that it's possible. Yes. There are a lot of prick billionaires. A lot. But you don't have to be a prick.
It's not a free requisite. You don't have to be Gordon Gecko. Yeah. You don't have to. But I would add to that is that there are many different ways to be good at sales. When I first graduated from school and when I first moved to Silicon Valley and I was selling fiber channels, storage area networks. And I was the lowest paid sales guy, which I learned because of spreadsheet got emailed to the wrong place. And one of my buddies was like, bro, you're going to love this.
He showed me the annual salaries. And I was like, you know, barely above the receptionist, which I was actually okay with because it was commissioned based, but didn't love the fact that I hadn't negotiated harder on the front end. But at the time, I was pretty desperate because I had gone without a job for a while. My parents were like, so you can stay here as long as you want. But what's going on? The point I want to make is I had a desk and a chair in an emergency exit.
It was like shoehorned into a fire exit, totally not up to code. But I took a lot of opposite approaches from other sales guys who had come in from bigger companies like EMC. And there were some great sales people from EMC as an example that a really good training culture, really good hiring practice, generally competitive athletes or former competitive athletes. But the approach I took was two things. I'll just mention this briefly because it might alleviate some of the allergic
reaction that people have to this word sales. The first is that I looked at the biggest block in the vein of the task that hinders your task is your task. And what I realized I couldn't get the dealmakers on the phone. I couldn't get the CEOs and CTOs who would have to greenline a seven-figure investment on the phone because there were so many gatekeepers. So I just did the opposite of what I saw around me, which was instead of making calls during 9-5, I just made calls before
an after 9-5. And guess what? Those people who are working dogs, men and women who have really gotten to the top still tend to work a lot by and large. And so they would pick up the phone. The second was I studied the tech inside and out to the extent that when we got to the point of closing a sale and sometimes they'd get handed off to accounting in the accounting department or the VP of Finance would ask them, who's your sales guy? And they would say, I don't know who my sales
guy is. And then eventually they'd be like, oh wait, is Tim my sales guy? Because I came in with not quite the knowledge of an engineer, but I spent all my time with the engineers. So I technical conversations. I'd be like, oh, well, let me guess. You probably have this solar system and this and this and this and this and this and this. You might have problems with this. And you can approach it in a technical way as one example with certain products. It doesn't have to be
Glengaric Glendros. So I just want to mention that. The following I'm curious for you, and this is what I've been thinking a lot about is how can immigrants are so successful. And specifically, I think one they have you can control their attitude and I think they have good attitudes about like I got to figure this out. And the second thing is effort. There's no limit on effort. There's only a limit on time. So I was really curious because especially with for our work, I just remember
your effort was in scene. And so I wanted to know, and this is sales, right? Sales is like, all right, well, I'm going to put in effort to see if I can help this person if I believe I can. So I wanted to hear more, I was curious to hear more about like what effort you put in because I just remember the time was like, who is this guy and how hard it man? He's working hard into the book itself. Like the the right to launch the launch the launch. Yeah. Let's see where to begin. So if I think
back to launch of that first book, I still approach my launches very similarly. Believe it or not. As the tools have changed and the technology and the platforms have changed, the general principles that I used, I still use to this day, for instance, for every launch book or otherwise, I have looked at the landscape and interviewed people. So for the book, for instance, I interviewed and you can interview people who might seem at a reach, keeping in mind, I had no platform, no nothing at
the time. I remember. But I just had to reach out and ask. And if you get somebody on a good day, and you know, maybe you take your hat off, put it in your hand and do a little begging, best writing authors were very forthcoming with their time. So in the number of instances, I was able to interview best writing authors. What I mean by that is real pros masters and prolific non-fiction writers who had very, very high quality output on their writing process.
So I did that prior to writing the book. Then seeing that the end was near, and this was all on a schedule, although I faced a lot of hiccups and a lot of challenges along the way. So it wasn't a straight line. But when I knew that my book was probably going to be delivered, was scheduled to be delivered in, let's just say, three months, I started interviewing best selling authors, which are not always the same as best writing authors. And the questions revolved around their most
recent launches. And specifically, the vehicles or formats or people who seem to be diminishing an impact and those that seem to be ascending an impact. And those that were ascending an impact, I assumed rightly at the time. And this has been true almost every time would be uncrowded. So for instance, for the four hour work week, it became clear even then that television and radio seemed to be television, especially television seemed to be diminishing in its impact on sales.
Nonetheless, the dominant playbook included tons and tons and tons of say morning TV. But almost every best selling author I spoke to said, by and large, not worth the effort. They said, however, there are a few other things that have been impressive and notable. Number one is that certain radio programs like MPR and so on move a lot of books. This is again 2000, let's just call it six prior to the publication in 2007. And then towards the end of 2006.
And I actually remember this because we're recording this at the end of December. And I remember sitting at my parents kitchen table after Christmas and sitting down to really put together a plan for the first book. And another pattern that it emerged as people said, you know, I'm not really a tech person, but there are these things called blogs. And for whatever reason, these single author blogs move a lot of books and not a single person I recall and publishing gave a shit about
blogs. So what I decided to do, I also had a very self-imposed and also practically limited budget for the launch. So for me, it was like five to ten grand. I can't remember at a huge white board and decided to make my target blogs. And there are many conversations that went into this. But decided to put my effort into blogs. What's the most crowded channel? So I'm not asking it just about the formats, but also the means of reaching bloggers. What's going to be most crowded?
Blog comments? Email? These are the most crowded. So I took my budget and allocated it to in-person travel to events where in the hallways and at after parties and so on, I could have drinks around or with bloggers. And I spent all my time in the lounges, I spent all my time in the waiting areas. And that is where I committed my investment of time and money. Who knows if that was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, maybe I just got lucky, but it worked incredibly well.
Now I'll just give one more recommendation. And actually people can find a talk I gave ages ago, it's South by Southwest, which is called How to Build Your Network in Record Time or some click-bady sounding headline. But it does deliver, it explains a lot of this and also how I use South by Southwest. Similarly for the book, because South by was where the book really broke out. But there was a bunch leading up to it. So this is going a little long, but it might be helpful for folks.
Rule number one, be nice to everyone. And this isn't some feel good, snow white, you know, hummingbirds landing on your hands kind of things. This is the right thing to do, but it's also the most practical thing to do. And I'll give a real example. I went to Blog World Expo or something. And I'm hanging around, didn't go to any sessions in this particular case. A lot of folks had pointed out Robert Skolbel as a power broker, hugely influential, which he certainly was. And
super speak guy as well. And at that time, I didn't know contact with him. He was the hottest girl at the prom, right? Everybody wanted to talk to him. And I didn't really know how to navigate the event, but I knew there would be people who were familiar with it. So I went to a lounge. And I think it was a Seagate lounge or something like that way back in the day. And there was a woman checking people in and kind of handling the inbound traffic. And I just struck up a conversation.
I was like, I bet you're meeting everybody. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm working on my first book. I'm kind of lost here. And we just talked like all that was true. We talked and we talked and we talked and I was explaining them here. I laid out my whole plan. And I was like, well, really my best option is to focus on the blogs because the publisher owns a bunch of different territory. This is not their first rodeo, but it's my first rodeo. So this is kind of key. There
are a bunch of things that I assumed were off limits for me. I don't understand radio. The publisher's going to handle radio. I don't understand television, publisher or other publishers are going to handle that. So the one area I felt where I could play and potentially leverage things was blogs. So I'm explaining all of this. Well, guess what? That woman who was checking people in turned out to be Robert Skolz's wife. And she was like, Oh, you should meet Robert. And then that led to meeting
Robert. I'm pretty sure I gave him sent him a galley. And I made it absolutely zero expectations. So first of all, I was like, if it would be of interest, I can send you a galley after I describe the book for certain facets of it. I said, what I can do also because you're not going to probably have time to read the whole book. I'll just put in a couple of post-its for like the four or five pages that I think you'll find most interesting, most tactical. And he's like, right, send it off.
That turned into blog post he put up about what I'm reading, something like that went nuts. I don't recall the exact timing that was before or after South by Southwest and South by Southwest was in March. Talk about sales, right? I pitched myself to Hugh Forrest at the time who I believe was director of programming just for South by Southwest interactive, not music, not film. At the time, it was like the red headed stepchild. Nobody gave a shit about interactive or tech. It was just
nerdville. It was small. That was also the year that Twitter launched publicly at South by. You could see all the tweets in the world on one big screen TV where they were scrolling through in real time. And Hugh to this day, I feel a debt of gratitude. So part of the reason I come back to South by every year is because I feel like it's just comically the right thing to do. And Hugh is now running pretty much the whole show, I believe at this point. But I got a last minute cancellation
in like the cafeteria, like the Adobe sponsored cafeteria. Somebody backed out. I took a last minute spot. I gave a presentation for our work week. I was able to print up flyers beforehand, which I did a very last minute. And I am blanking on his name. I feel really badly about this. But it was the developer behind Firefox. I think so. I crossed. Yes. He had very graciously given me a quote for the four hour work week. He read a galley. And I can't remember how that came together. I
owe him a debt of gratitude as well. But I printed up flyers with that quote with a couple of other quotes based on galley's and encouraged people to attend this cafeteria. You put a flyers for the event. I handed them out. Like I had people hand them out. I put them up all over Austin. Got printed them out. I'm sure it kinkos. And I practiced in my friends garage. So I was crashing on a friend's couch. And I remember practicing in his garage with his Chihuahua. As you mentioned,
Chihuahua's he had three Chihuahas. And clearly the Chihuahua's did not understand the content of my talk. But I used them as the gauge of whether I was engaging or not. If they started wandering around, then I had to change my mode. I had to be more tone-erotic. And I prepped, I prepped, I prepared my ass off for this thing. Like it was my first and last opportunity to nail it. And got up on stage. I had this entire presentation with all the visuals. Of course, what happens?
Laptop dies. And so I had to improv and just do voice only, which I think ended up being a very good thing. And made auto responders available. I gave people this was key. And this is something you do very well. I gave people real time challenges. I was like, here's something you can try today. You're going to be going to do a lot of sessions at South Buy. You're going to take a lot of notes. Here's what I suggest. Everybody gets busy. Things get lost. Here are a few things you can
try today. Here are a few things you can try in the next week related to auto responders. Send me feedback. Let me know how it went. Go on my blog. Let me know. I will give you also feedback, like constructive advice. And it just went ballistic. It went ballistic. And that set the conditions such that I could execute on other things. But, less people think this was this home run international phenomenon from the get go. That's not
what happened. It did hit the extended best seller list in its first week. But keep in mind, the publisher only printed 10,000 copies. Nobody expected it to do anything. And with those copies, sold the vast majority of them. But that was not enough to hit the real print best seller list. For advice how to, especially, which was hyper competitive at that time. It hit the extended list.
So people in the business knew that it was on the list, but not in the print edition. It took an additional five or six months from doing the math correctly to get to number one on the New York Times for the monthly business list. And then it just stayed there for years. But to answer your question in terms of effort, effort isn't enough. Effort is not enough. You need a means of focusing that effort. So for me, I used this what's uncrowded, what's overvalued, what's undervalued.
That's how I found podcasts for the four hour chef. That's how I found other things for the earlier books. And that's how the four hour chef sold whatever 100,000 plus copies in its first week. Most because I jumped on these new things called podcasts. That is also the impetus behind me then starting my own podcast in 2014. But you're right. I put a lot into it because first and foremost, and now I'm getting on my soapbox again, but I really, really, really, really put everything
into that book. Like I did not leave anything behind. I put it all on the playing field. And based on early feedback and based on also the many feedback forms, many questions I had asked, many revisions I had made for years, or shopping in classes. I knew this stuff worked. I knew it worked. I knew in other words, right, talking about absumo and your metrics. I knew it converted. I just needed top of the funnel. And that led me to the blog. So very similar approach that I
would take today with most things. Wow. You seemed a lot happier when you were counting that story. Like I was noticing like earlier in the show, you're kind of like, I don't know if you felt frustrated or I don't know how you're feeling. You seemed excited and like proud. So tempting. And often the case, right, when you're in the weeds and you're just like running through this jungle with a machete, trying to make shit happen and it's hard and things are going wrong. And you think about that as
the thing you have to do to get to the other thing. But then you get to the other thing, meaning like you reach some escape velocity with your business success. And then you're like, okay, this is the thing I thought that I was getting through other things for. And I'm happy with where I am. But I'm making trains run on time. And that's cool, right? Like I'm like a Swiss operator on some type of transport platform. And I'm tweaking things. I'm pulling levers. I have other people doing a lot
of the grout work. But those early chapters, when I look back, that's where so much of the juices, like so much of the excitement for me. Yeah. Right? We were like, fuck, my computer broke. Right? Got to fix it. Got to figure it out. I can't fix it. I'm flying. Fuck. You know? All right, flyers. Like I do. Flyers. Okay. Like I'm going to give out flyers. Like flyers. Okay. Like I don't have anybody who's around because my friend has to work. Like I don't know. I'll give the talk to the
dogs. Like, all right. Like, yeah, you get a chance. This is true later too. But if you really get a chance to prove how resourceful and creative you can be because you don't have a huge bank account to play with. You don't have tons of employees to delegate to things that oftentimes they shouldn't do in the first place. Right? Yeah. And for me, that is the real heart and soul of entrepreneurship. And the fun of it is making something from nothing because you are resourceful.
Right? You look at set of tools or complete lack of tools and you see something different. You see a little gap and you're able to pursue that and manifest something in the world that otherwise doesn't exist. And the later stages are amazing. And there are people who are so good at the later stages. I not convinced that I'm one of them. Okay. But the early chapters where at the time are like, you know, it's going to be great. One at some point I have X one at some
point. When I cross my number, which is a moving goal post, right? You cross like a million and then you cross this and you cross this and it keeps moving. That when I think back to those early chapters, I get excited. It's like I remember how unknown it all was to. Right? And how fun some of the unknowns were. They're definitely hard times. They're all sorts of difficult chapters that I'm sure I've blocked out for my memory. But I wasn't frustrated earlier at all.
I think it's just the juice of thinking back to those very nascent stages. That's my guess. Yeah. Well, it's also I try to remind myself that a lot of my nostalgia is a liar. Oh, totally. Oh, starting up, CMO, I would drink most of the days, which we were doing. I was just like drinking with Neville, the fucking around, getting some deals. And then you remember like,
oh, I felt lonely. I felt really insecure. I thought. And for sure. And I guess I'm wondering, is that something you're exploring now to like what is that creation or thing that you can bite into? Yeah. That was something I was wondering for you in that, you know, I've obviously known you a long time. I remember it's funny when I'm doing this whole book thing, which I'm not talking about what the book's called. No, no, no, no, no, no one knows. Don't even look it up.
And I think about you because I think that guy fucking worked hard. I remember you working hard. And it made me wonder where you're at today because I see you not chasing. I think in my older age, we're both in our early 40s, I think I was chasing a lot. I want to get famous or I want to get money. And then I was like, I wonder not what you're chasing anymore, but like what
you're enjoying or what you're not after the right word and not what's next. But I'm noticing, oh, Tim's not really going aggressive on YouTube and chasing what other people are doing. And so I was, yeah, and it's not just YouTube, but it made me, I was like, I wonder how he's if I do anything. Yeah, totally. I think to your point of nostalgia being a liar oftentimes, right, where we have this rose colored picture of the past. If I look at the chapters around, say,
the beginning of the four, our work week for our body, et cetera, I was very hungry. I was moving very quickly and certainly using processes and automation and so on. But there was a lot of uncertainty. And I would say that as I have prioritized mental health and just overall well-being, which includes physical, but at the time I was in physical prime condition. I mean, I was in very good shape. I was still competitive in sports. I would say that looking back, a lot of those
adventures were formative. And I enjoyed them, but I in retrospect should have enjoyed them more for what they were, which like these seminal moments. And I think part of what you're reading in me in terms of less chasing is that I feel like and I suspect many people feel like you know, the dog that catches the car or the gray-hound that catches the mechanical rabbit. And you're like, this is what I was chasing. That's good.
Fuck. That's funny. Like it's kind of like tragic comic, but which is not to diminish money. It's not to diminish financial success. It's I think easy for us to have these conversations because there's a degree of security and stability and comfort. So it's not to diminish any of that because I know what it feels like to be like, fuck, I'm not sure what I'm going to do about healthcare next month. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about this next month. I know what that
can feel like and it's not a good feeling. Eating from jack in the box. I remember eating so many meals from jack in the box on shoreline across the stream. On my shitty apartment with my terrible roommate who just ditched and like almost got all my stuff yanked because there are all these eviction notices like I remember those days. I don't want to return to those days, but having caught the thing that I was chasing, I've realized that none of these targets or panesies. They're kind
of placeholders to keep you motivated. And I've also, if you look at patterns in my life, I tend to do things. If I'm going to do something well, seems to be in the five to ten year range. Books started been investing predominantly. I focused on from 2008 to 2015 and then I published this blog post on taking a long startup vacation and stopped that categorically. I stopped doing it completely for a period of time because the game got saturated. It got more complicated, much more competitive,
much riskier from a terms perspective. So I stopped. And then you have podcasting. I'm coming up on 10 years next April. And it's a good time to pause and reflect. And I feel like podcasting also. And I will have questions for you about YouTube because I go back and forth on my thoughts on YouTube. But when I see best practices emerge or converge, maybe is a better way to put it with
a lot of the algorithm driven growth slash lack of growth that we see. I really want to step back and see if I am in a position where I'm uniquely differentiator have some type of competitive advantage. Not because I care about competition per se, but it's like, am I in a red ocean that used to be a blue ocean or am I developing practices that are going to lead me to a point of not just uniformity with others. But like, are we all running towards a cliff like a bunch of lemmings?
In the sense that, for instance, email, I'm going all over the place I realized, but like, no, good. This is great. With like email blog, especially if you're open source, like I'm based on WordPress, you effectively own your audience. You don't own your audience. You have a direct relationship with your audience. Your audience is portable. If you're on a platform that includes almost any platform, there's some technical workarounds for these things, but you are renting your
audience. And so I've seen multimillion dollar Facebook pages back in the day when that was a huge thing. Get turned off. Just like PG&E might turn off your power during a rolling blackout in California. It's like one day you're on and you have employees and a big business the next day you are turned off. And I've seen that over and over again. I've seen, for instance, organic reach get throttled. Now you have to pay. I think it's foolish to assume that can't happen to whatever
platforms you're using today. And as we've seen a number of precipitating events, COVID, for instance, the writer's strike, another example, drive people to what they realized can be a profitable model in the form of podcasting YouTube. As the mimicry of TikTok has engendered a drive to video in short form video, I feel like I have fewer and fewer differentiators and advantages. And the human basis of recommendation has been replaced by in large part kind of top down corporate
directives and algo modifications. So I feel like I'm in a transitional period right now, potentially where I'm taking my foot off the gas. So I'm not sure the car is going in a direction where I want to take it to 120 on the auto button. So that's where I am. And I'm also not in a rush because maybe it's just fatigue, frankly. I mean, I started the podcast 10 years ago. And there are people with incredible longevity and not very many, but like Rogan as an example. I mean,
the guy's a machine and he's very good at what he does. 10 years is also a long time for me. All right, that's a long time to do to do one thing consistently. I'm going to continue doing the podcast. But from a growth perspective, I feel like YouTube is probably one of the more appealing avenues for growth currently. But offsetting that is a desire to increasingly be less publicly visually recognized because there are compromises that have made related to that.
There are safety issues, there are privacy issues. There's lots of weird stuff that happens. I'm not sure I want to actually I'm quite sure I do not want to make my face more recognizable. On the counter argument side, I never done all of the questions. Dude, by the way, this is fire. Okay, because this is fire going on. I want to know. On the counter argument side, and this is both a reason not to do YouTube, but also a reason maybe
I'm over evaluating the risks. I've talked to some folks. I don't want to name them, but very well-known iconic writers, photographers, creators who did one thing very, very well. One thing, which also makes me question sort of the Jack of All trades approach that I think is in some respects
a norm now, where you're present and growing on many, many different formats. But putting that aside for a second, the half-life of fame, I think, is going to drop precipitously as algorithm chasing becomes more and more dominant and more and more determinate of what is surfaced. In the sense that there will, I would be shocked if there's ever again someone as dominant as say
Oprah was for effectively, let's just call it, Hunas. A third to a half of all the women in the United States, one person, one show, the sort of long tail of personalization, I think has largely removed that possibility. And if you even think about like the personal half-life, which I think we can extract like studying the micro to study the macro, because the macro can seem super intimidating
and abstract and ungraspable. If you just think about your personal experience, and I've talked to friends about this 10 years ago, if you got sent some crazy video from friends, like that video would stick around for a while, right? It might be the video that sticks around for like a week. Oh my god, you see that crazy video of the thing? How many of those do you get per day now? Right? Something that would win the gold medal of the meme Olympics. Crushes all the stupid
things that you would have looked at 10 years ago, infinitely more attention-grabbing. And the half-life is what? 30 seconds? 60 seconds. So I think fame as a phenomenon in most cases online will have a very, very short half-life. And that worries me a bit from a psychological adaptive perspective, because I think that has supreme implications for this sort of dopamine hit, rat stepping on a cocaine pedal, aspect of content creation. If what you do is less and less
persistent, meaning it has less and less durability, what game are you signing up for? And what is winning that game look like? These are really critical questions. We're all playing games right now. Beyond food, shelter, a handful of things at the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we're all playing games. What games are you playing? And just as important, what does winning that game or
those games look like? And is that the life you want? So looking at how things are developing, and maybe this is a very fancy way of rationalizing just being older and morph-ticked, I don't know. But I find where things are trending super, super worrisome. So if I could be long a number of things, I'd be like, okay, mental health therapeutics, dialysis, which seems pretty dystopian, I'm going, that would be very long those things. I think we haven't even seen a glimpse of
some of the mental health challenges that are on the horizon. So probably a long answer to a very short question, but that informs, I think, a certain, it's not just calmness, although there's a lot that goes into that on my side compared to my earlier self, but a not wanting to rush into committing at high speed in certain directions that are very appealing right now at face value. I'm like, you know what? If you have, here we go, I'm going to show the fuck up in a second.
But it's like, here's the thing, if I think about the authors I respect the most, if I think about the filmmakers, I most aspire to be like, or admire the most, they're not playing a volume game, right? Like Miyazaki who just put out, I think it's the boy in the hair and the Japanese name is, like, how do you live? It's a totally different name, but they put out great work that is uniquely their own. You watch that movie and if you've seen other Studio Ghibli Miyazaki movies, you're like,
that is the signature that could not be anyone other than Miyazaki. You see like a Daniel Deleuist film. There's so many examples of this. These people have unique capabilities, they've harnessed,
they don't need to rush, right? So if I find myself feeling compelled to rush, either it's a false signal I should ignore, or I'm about to do something that a lot of other people could do, and that for me is a cue to really chill the fuck out and be like, wait, wait a second, let me go back, let me read Blue Ocean Strategy, let me go back, let me read 80-20 principle, let me go back and read any number of things, I mean I do like reading.
Let me go back and watch these following documentaries about people who really took an unorthodox path, and then let me sit down and ask, why do I feel like I am compelled to rush? So there you have it. That was fucking fired. Thanks. This has been on my mind non-stop for the
last couple of months. I think people confuse inaction with patience. Tell me more. What I heard, and I'm curious how you approach it, is that instead of rushing really quickly, you're understanding yourself and thinking patiently, what is my right play for me to move? And I think in the past, and maybe you can revisit it, let's go rush and find things and maybe
settle happen, but now you're like, you're observing. You sound calm, you sound you're thinking about what's happening, where my advantage is, what's going on, and where is a place that you frankly want to play, and instead of rushing into, let's say, YouTube world, which does feel like a lot of people are rushing into these kind of things, really thinking about what your play is. I love that. I guess the question I was curious about. What's your approach
for thinking about what's underserved? Because what you said, I thought it was fucking powerful. It's like you can put effort, but in the wrong thing. When you did your book, you're like, oh, blogging is it, and then your second book, podcasting is it, how are you approaching thinking about getting to, like even now, you're like, all right, I like podcasts, I'm doing podcasts. Yeah, I love doing podcasts. I love doing podcasts. It's going to get a lot harder as a business.
It is already, I'm very fortunate in the sense that, and this was not accidental, right, like this podcast and the audience for this podcast, this podcast is intended to be long form, thoughtful, dense, and incredibly practical, tactical. And I'll mention it because you've been very good at receiving feedback, but million dollar a weekend, we are going to get to it and talk about very
practical steps. All of this is practical, though. If you look at it through the lens of making decisions, this has been positioned as high ultra premium as far as podcasts go, advertisers audience, right, and we've done all the polling and so on. So it's like, if you want to reach Ted, this is the podcast, right, if you want to hit millions or at least let's just say thousands of very, very well-known creators with one podcast, like this is the podcast. So the premium positioning
means that like for the next year, we're basically already sold out with advertising, right? So I'm in a very good position, but I think overall it is, this is true on YouTube too, but and it released everything I just said, it is going to get and is getting harder to differentiate, right? Like back when I had like Jamie Foxx and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the podcast, that was insane. Blue people's minds, right? Like that was just not something that really happened. And
now that you have incredibly talented people, comedians, entertainers, writers, right? That's why I mentioned the writer strike earlier, who for a period of time did not have the option of doing what they normally do and they dip their toe into podcasting, they dip their toe into YouTube and they're like, wow, actually I'm really good at this. And I can get paid. Interesting. There are
exceptional, exceptionally skilled people producing things for podcasts in YouTube. What I'm saying is the bar for quality has gone up dramatically in all of these areas, but the possibility for originality I would say has diminished as a result of the sheer volume of entrance. So in terms of thinking about like what's unserved, I would say that I'm looking for a Venn diagram because asking if you ask any of the questions I'm asking myself in isolation, which I've done in the past,
you can lead yourself to bad decisions. So if you ask yourself, what can I uniquely do? And that's your question and you use that to determine what you do. You can end up doing things that you dislike that are draining that don't have any type of market fit whatsoever. So that's not enough, right? Although for me, that is necessary. Like what am I uniquely suited to do? Because that will give me not only an immediate, say, first mover or early mover advantage, it gives me endurance.
So being uniquely suited to something doesn't mean that you are the only person that can do it. Maybe you just love it more, right? Like with me in language learning is an example. Now that's not a business. I mean, it did lead to me being one of the first investors until it lingoes that worked out, but I have infinite endurance for that in a way that most people don't. That's a huge advantage, even though other people could technically do it. So there's what am I uniquely suited for? What do I
find easy that other people find hard? Then there's what is underserved. But if you approach that by itself, you can make some really bad decisions. And I've done that in the past. Like what do people need? Now I'm not the boss of myself. I've turned my audience into the boss of me. This is also how people get shaped in horrifying ways by social media or their audiences on YouTube, right? Your most extreme behaviors get reinforced. So you repeat those, you exaggerate them and your stage
presence, your social media presence becomes you. This is really important. You have to be careful about the masks you wear because you will become those masks. And I've seen that I'm sure you've met people like it's terrifying. You will be shaped by your audience and by these creative decisions. So not just asking what is the unmet need, but a question I might ask is like what experiments can I run
that I think will meet the needs intended by say the podcast in a different way? And also, I mean, another question that I ask is like instead of like what is the new new thing? Like what is something old that is being neglected? It doesn't have to be new, by the way, right? So for instance, that led me to start five bullet Friday in the newsletter ages ago. Because people are like emails dead.
Nobody's going to use email anymore emails dead. You hear that every year. And that was particularly true when I launched five bullet Friday because social media, Snapchat, oh, young kids are never going to use email. And I was like, well, it's true until they get a job. And then guess what? They're going to use email. So in that particular case, I wasn't looking for the new new thing. I was looking
for something old that was kind of neglected. And I wanted to also own my audience. So that led to the millions of people for the newsletter. So those are some of the questions that I ask. I think I've learned for me personally, I make better decisions when it's a bit of a vent diagram. If I go after any one of those, which could include profit, by the way, that's one that gets people. Boy, oh,
boy, I've succumbed to that too. Right. If you're like, what has the most leverage for revenue, profit, et cetera, that can lead you in directions that end up compromising well-being, end up compromising long-term growth, end up compromising filmmaking, blank personal and professional and organizationally speaking. So damn, no, that was fine. I mean, someone said to me recently that like, don't trade your nine to five for a 24 seven. And it's like the cool part about entrepreneurship is
that you can create a life you want. Whether you want to live in Austin, you want to live in Spain, you want to live wherever Tokyo. But it's then, are you actually living the life you want? I think that the two comments say one common one question. I love that you said experiments. I mean, you that was kind of super early for you and how you developed a lot of your stuff. And I think for a lot of people, it's like, oh, well, I got to make this big decision. It's like, well, how can
you test it right now? How can you just really keep? How can you test and see if that's actually the case? So I love that you said that the other thing I was curious, once last time you read for our work week, you know, you were talking about books you read that you come back to us. I was like, I wonder, you know, sometimes we come back to our own things. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I was looking at four hour week, a couple of weeks ago, actually. Yeah. And because my books I make, I mean,
they reflect things that I am doing and have done, but they also act as references for me. Yeah. Like I go back to the four hour chef all the time for various things. Like for our body, I go back to it all the time for various things. And for our work week in this particular case, because I'm thinking about virtual assistants, which have really upleveled in the last handful of years with technology and also different companies and types of training. I've been thinking again about virtual
assistants. And so I wanted to revisit like scripts, principles, etc. Because I've shifted from VA's to in person full time work chart type stuff. And I'm experimenting again. I have a full time VA, also on the payroll now. And I wanted to revisit some of what worked in the past because very often the things that worked then are still going to work. And the principles of the principles for a reason.
The tactics, the tools, the platforms, the hardware devices, those all change. But in terms of human communication, clarity, lack of clarity, the words are still words. So I wanted to revisit some of that. So as an example, I mean, I've been thinking about going back to text. I've been thinking about going back to blog posts. It's so antiquated. It's so out of fashion. And it's so high labor too.
I mean, because that is something where I do not feel comfortable delegating. If I'm putting my name to something, I want to be the one who has put those words on paper or on a screen in this case. But I've thought about it. I've thought about it quite a bit. We'll say I mean, that's a heavy lift.
It is a heavy lift. But that's also something I want to be aware of or cognizant of. And that is am I doing this because it fits into the Venn diagram or am I doing it because it requires less work because requiring less work does not automatically mean elegant combination of things that leads to my goals, right? And if you don't have those KPIs like you mentioned, watch out for vanity metrics too. Like, okay, this matters. Why does that matter? Because it leads to this. Okay,
why does that matter? Why does it because of this? Okay, because of this. Ultimately, it's going to come down to, all right, you want this amount of money. Okay, why do you want them money? Because I want to trade it for this experience or this possession. Okay, why do you want those because you want this feeling? Okay, well, let's keep that in mind. You want to sleep all at night? Don't do all this other shit that is going to cause you anxiety. And let's come back to kind of highlight what they
have. Yeah. Of course. So two parts. One, I want to shout out for people looking for VAs. This side I use is hiremymom.com. Really? Yeah. Okay. All right, amazing. So hiremymom.com. I'm not affiliate, no cuts, no nothing. They can sponsor my podcast or Tim's podcast. But you basically it's moms who want to spend time with their kids that are super elite moms. And they just don't want to work full time though. Yeah. And so you can basically get these super impressive parents
at pretty affordable prices. So I hired someone recently was the executive assistant for the Dallas Stars, the hockey team. Oh, wow. Okay. Right. She has two kids. She wants to stay at home. She did quit last week. Tell you real she quit. But it's like you're finding that level caliber at I'll say she's not working. She was three books in a hour. Yeah, which is insane. Yeah. Yeah. For someone who's
a really impressive one, she quit. She is an executive assistant. And then she thought I was asking to do some assistant level work. So I asked her to schedule some appointments. I asked her to make some purchases. And she's like, I just want to do the business work. And so I really admire and respect when people know what they want. I was a little frustrated because like you quit all of a sudden abruptly. Send me a voluntary termination letter. I've never received one of those
ever. But she's professional. Yeah. But you go back to it. And that's part of business. I think a lot of people do once. And then they like you go, you know, it doesn't work. It's like, yeah, that's part of business. It's like, okay, I'm going to go and find another one and improve my process to understand. Yeah. Hey, in the hiring process, you're going to have to purchase something from a store. Is that going to bother you? Okay. Doesn't okay. We can move you forward. My
recommendation there. Yeah. Especially if you're considering a full-time hire. Test them for a few months and have them do that stuff because people know how to interview. And a lot of people will say absolutely no task too small, no problem. And that's horseshit. In the same way that they say they're going to buy whatever you're offering, ask them to pay you. Yeah. Then you know it's real. So if you can try before you buy, especially on the EAV API general, make them do some of the
grout work, not grout work, but just smaller things. And by the way, like anyone who's got real chops, right? It's kind of like jump all disarray, like putting lotion on your hands, right? Like that guy has done every job. He's done every job. And this isn't always going to work, but it's you want someone with that same type of ethos. Yeah. We will. I mean, that's how we hire every almost every person absent who is a contractor to start. Yeah. And it's like, hey, we're going to
and even with my YouTube channel, I'm going to pay you to do your trial video. Great. You can see if you like me. Maybe you hate me. Maybe I don't like you. Maybe we'll do like a child that buddy, or at least getting paid. So there's not really as much downside for both of us. Yeah. The other thing I thought was really cool is looking back on our old lives that you said, looking back in your old work. I used to live in this really 800 square foot shitty house. And I went back
at it. And then I also looked back at my photos every month that I do a month review. I look back on my photos. And it's nice to look where we've been and where we are. So you know, everyone I do a month review, you can literally just scroll up in your phone, go to your photos, scroll up really far. And almost every time you're pretty proud of where you are now. So it's times we're frustrated. I went back to that old house and I felt, wow, man, I'm so proud of where I am now. But I didn't really
always notice that I do. But going back there and help that for sure. Yeah. Totally. Especially if you're used to looking ahead, right? Yes. Forward. Yes. And you've developed a certain set of habits and attributes being in six year, always being in the fast lane. It is a practice to augment that with other abilities. 100%. This is why a lot of people self-destruct when they quote unquote, retire. If they're trying to go from like, auto bond to park, it's like, well,
hold on. I wish get used to some other gears. Let's see what happens. So let's talk about tests. Let's talk about experiments. Let's talk about small steps. Million dollar weekend. Number one, what is the, well, here, let's do this up to the surprisingly simple way to launch a seven-figure business in 48 hours. So for people who find this tantalizing, I guess number one, why should they believe it? Let's start there. Like, why the fuck should they listen? Because they're going to come
across a lot of promises, a lot of click back on YouTube. And then they click on and they're like, oh, come on. So why should they believe it? Maybe there's a case study or two or example you could share. And then if somebody wants to test drive something from this podcast, other things they can do. I've come up with simple rule because what's crazy on YouTube and podcasts now, you can make whatever title up you want. There's people saying, oh, we're at 100 million. Like, really? You can
just write that. And so don't trust any author that has gotten rich from their, any business author, I would say that's gotten rich from their book or their course. I think that's a pretty straightforward approach. Like if that's how they got rich teaching, how they got rich, like double check, two day art, maybe look for someone else that's maybe I worked for Zuckerberg, help start mint.com, or kickflip.com, help start camba.com. So somebody who has a very well-grim mustache,
the my Latina girlfriend loves the most. I don't normally like it, but she's like, you got to keep that. I was like, yes, baby. See, see. And you know, running up suma.com. And so you can, I'm not getting rich on the book. And I think that's a very simple test to think about who you want to listen to, specifically in business. Yep. And secondly, can you see their businesses? A lot of times I'm like, oh, I've got these businesses. You'll never see it though. Why not? Because you can't
know about it. Why not? Yeah. Never get to the answer. That's probably a way you don't ever have on your shows. Now, in terms of the surprisingly simple way in that, I'll just give you a case study of Jake. So Jake lives up North Texas. He's got three kids. He's got a day job. And he said dreams, just like a lot of people have had. And he's had it for two years. I was like, Jake, how do we change
you in 40 hours? Because everyone has a weekend. And now I'm about to have a family. And I'm realizing, like, family, YouTube book, prioritizing my partner and our kid, it's hard to have time to start to set us up. It's hard to have time to like get going. And the reality though is we do all have weekends. We have 50, see you with them. So we can't do something in a week. And even if it's really small
action, and by the way, it doesn't have to be a million in a weekend. It's through every weekend. You can pound it over some time. It can get there. Now, the things that people can do in a weekend right now, this is the thing with books. I think your book is phenomenal. If everyone gets two books, it's yours for a work week and knowing how we can. Your book has such a great recipe. Such a great recipe. But what I noticed when I've worked through my course, which I'm going to
call it, I've worked through a course. 10,000 people have gone through it. YouTube channel millions of people. You can give them the recipes, but they still may not do something. And I was kind of like, what the fuck is going on? Right? Like, you have a big dream. You have a dream, like, hey, I want to work here. I want to make a thousand bucks a month. I want grocery money. I want whatever it is. But then you haven't done nothing for two years, like, Jay. And the reality is that most people are
afraid of starting. They're not ready. They feel they're not ready. They're actually already. There's a lot of rich people who are really ordinary. They think people think it's all like, oh, no, group and Silicon Valley and Tim did these things. Like, no, there's a lot of really normal people that are rich, but they all got started. And we got started over. And like, how many times do you bring quick in? You've done all these things, opening the kimono. Yeah, you've done a lot of
things. And so how do we overcome the fear of starting? Then you could do that right now. That's why I asked people when we did it earlier, do the dollar challenge. Just get a dollar right now. Just go get going right now. And we surveyed just like you did with your book. And the number one takeaway from the book by far was now not how. And I was like, what do you mean? Now, now, they're like, yeah, no, you always just do right now. And like, what do you mean? Just right fucking now.
What's the smallest action you can take that will get you momentum? So you want to be a content creator? Post a video right now with your phone. My first YouTube video was with my phone. Just shirtless in my little house. Even with a shirtless shirtless. Yeah. Yeah, it's not impressive. It wasn't like shirtless. It was just like sweaty. Just got off a bike in my spandex. I actually just watched the video a few weeks ago because I was like, this true. And I was like,
wow, really? It's on the channel. And now my videos are, you know, give or take around $30,000 to make per video. Wow. From all the salary. Oh my god. But that was a shirtless thing with an iPhone 10 that everyone can do right now. They're going to be my most popular YouTube video of all time. And we're sitting here with like pretty nice video set up. Yeah. Got a basically a studio. The whole nine yards. My most popular YouTube video of all time is me in my kitchen. Somebody
was like, God knows what kind of old phone, the resolution's terrible. De-shelling, hard-boiled eggs without peeling. That is my most successful YouTube video of all time. A bit sad about that. Yeah. I wish Africa was in other things. But yeah. Yeah, dude. I mean, one of your favorite videos in my mind is microwaving eggs. Yeah. We talked about last. I love microwaves. I love microwaving my eggs.
Sometimes I use a stove. My girlfriend's like, let's use a stove, baby. All right. See? So what can we do right now? Let me give you a great example as well. I'm a big pinballer. So I have two pinball machines at home. And this morning, literally, I was watching how to make a pinball machine. By God's will. It's the number one rated pinball machine in the world. Sick. That's what I have at home. And you know, when most people think I want to start a pinball business. What do they think? Holy
fuck. I got to bend this machine. I've got to go figure out software. I've got to do, I got to probably get a website. Maybe on Shopify. Shout out to Shopify. They sponsor your podcasts. Yeah. Which is a you'll eventually need maybe I need a lawyer because I've got a patent idea. And then that's six months, 12 months, two years of nothing. Now, what's crazy? Stern pinball, the number one maker of pinball machines. They put out this video behind the scenes of a
gazillion. They literally took like a board and then bent some metal and just kind of through the ball. You could do that right now. You could do that in one day and go to people literally on your phone in person. Hey, we're working on this pinball machine. Let me just let me show you to you right now and see what you think. And you could get people to purchase your pinball machine before you spent six months, six years doing nothing. Same thing with the cyber truck, six years. And barely
it's getting delivered. And so there's things that people can start realizing. Let me actually see if people really want this and find out right away. So that that's really around surprisingly simple. It's like there's business models. There's all these things you can do. It's like, well, finally, I have a weekend. I don't have a lot of time. How do I break it down to the essence of
the simplest form? And so in terms of the book, where I think a lot of the breakters happen is, how do I get going right now like with the pinball machine or with Jake, Jake had a dream to do golf trips. He wants to do golf trips, like super bougie high end and you golf. I have golf. I wouldn't say I golf. Yeah, I don't golf. I like disc golf. Yeah, you know, disc golf. Yeah, yeah, like I'm a cyclist, but he wants to do golf trips. And so he's been thinking about it. It's when these people,
I'm sure you've noticed something they'll like talk to you about it dinner. They're like, oh man, I hate my job. But I'd like to try this. And so it's like, all right, we have 40 hours, Jake. How do we actually do right now to see if other people want golf trips? Because that's what you think is a problem. Now, I think the best problems in business are your own. Yeah, I agree. Like your show really, I mean, you think about it, you getting to talk to people you want.
That's what it is. Yeah, that's a problem you have about learning different areas of business, science, health, fitness. And then you publish it and make a lot of money doing that. Like, how cool is that the best job ever? Dude, it's a sweet work. It's super sweet. So in terms of the book, it's one, how do we just get going? Fucking right now, right now. And then giving people more momentum stories, actions like dollar challenge, now, not how freedom number, which is understanding,
what is the number you need to quit your job? For me, it was 3000. Do you have a number? Oh, yeah. Yeah, slightly different moniker, but same idea like target monthly income, which was not just the replacement. It was a bit more part of this exercise called dreamlining, but yeah, yeah, exactly. But very similar idea, totally more like figure out the basic math. Because maybe you need less, very often you need less than you think you need. I live in Barcelona, I think our apartment is a
thousand dollars. It's not huge to be clear, but it's like you can live actually a lot cooler life than you think for a lot more affordable than you realize. Yeah. So part one is around that. And then we can get into the recipe. And I think, you know, for a work recipe is fire. You know, I shout out you in the book and honor how you approach it as one way. But even before that, it's how do you understand the upside of asking and how do you become an asking machine? How do you build an asking
muscle? Yeah. So what did Jake do? So Jake, I mean, first off, we did the coffee challenge. So we drove over to Taco Deli. And I was like, all right, Jake, let's go ask for 10% off. He's like, ah, he just done sales before it's like, it's easy. It's always easy until you do it. And then guess what? It's not as hard as he thinks. And that's really true for a lot of life. We're afraid of things. And you know, this every almost every time we face the hard thing, it's never as hard
as it that like, like, I wasca for me. Part of it, I was so afraid and thank you for giving me time and coaching me around it before I went in. But a lot of I wasca was just like facing something hard more than all the other stuff. It was just like, it's so chow for me. It felt so challenging and being able to overcome it. Standing with the coffee challenges, go do it today. Commit to do it right now for yourself. So Jake did it. Bam. Just to be clear, I wouldn't do the take I wasca
today as a translation of that. No, no, no, I would say the coffee challenge. Coffee challenge. Coffee challenge. Then Jake did the dollar challenge. Just get a dollar. And he was so nervous. But then he was like, well, I haven't done shit in two years. And literally in like six hours, he already had a lot of momentum. Now, once you kind of get practice on those different things, really the book breaks down in two parts, which is how do you build and find something that people
aren't excited to give you money for? Now that you're better at starting and asking, all right, let me start swinging. So it's thinking about, okay, how do I come up with ideas? How do I see if there's a million dollar in money I can make on it? Check out a one minute business model. And then the third part grow. It is like finding social media for customers, email to actually, as you were saying, sell them and communicate with them. And then the growth machine, which is the playbook I
use at mint.com and up zoom.com YouTube. The book, it's the same marketing playbook I use over and over. And then these are all things by the way. People were like, well, I want it more complicated. And I need it. It's like it's 48 hours. And then you know this, like by having these limitations, bringing out a lot more creativity, bringing out a lot more resourcefulness. Yeah. I mean, I would go so far as to say, like, this is going to be a broad statement. But like the best creativity
comes from constraints. You need constraints. Those sound bad. They sound like wrist strains. Like you're strapped into, you know, electro shock therapy or something, but you need constraints. And weekend is a constraint less than $100 is a constraint. Two hours is a constraint. These are all four hour work week. Four hour work. Like these, right? Which is a constraint. It's a constraint. And how is it an advantage? I think most people think I don't have money. It's like, that's a great
thing. Okay. What do you do now that you don't have money? Okay. How can you make it happen? And then you realize like, oh, maybe there's something here for just like a pinball machine, which is crazy. Like, no, you need to build it. No, take a piece of wood, then some metal, see if you can get a three, I generally say three people in the weekend. You can get three customers to me. That's validation, meaning that this is something you can invest in. That's it. You can do that
in 40 hours. And I think people give themselves so much time and so many excuses. That's why the book starts with frequently made excuses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, frequently made excuses. Yeah, to be able to get them past that so they can get going on their journey. Yeah, totally. And there's so many examples of low stakes, low costs, say prototype, I'll just mention one guy, people can look him up, Stephen Key, fascinating guy. And he has licensed tons of toys to huge
manufacturers. And so his game is licensing, right? He's not actually in the venturing business. He's not in the manufacturing and the distribution business. He comes up with ideas. It's like, this is a great game and he sells it to Hasbro or whoever might be in these huge companies. He uses construction paper, some glue, Scotch tape, he'll prototype it, take some photos of how it might work and then off to the races he goes. And he just does that over and over and over and over.
And there's a lot of examples of this like Airbnb, how 60 billion, 100 billion dollar company? That literally started a weekend. They posted to some design conference like, hey, we have a couch. Does anyone want it? There wasn't some fancy website. There was no market in recent funding. There was none of it. And now that's a hundred billion dollar business. So the thing that we talked about a long time ago is that you only need to get lucky once. But to get lucky, you have to be doing things
consistently every single weekend. Eventually get to that point. And I think people miss out on that. So once Jake had a little bit of movement. So Taco Deli, etc. What happens then? For someone like a Jake doesn't need to be Jake, but like for someone like a Jake. Let's let's break down. I think the more concrete tactical I know that that's what we both appreciate. So now it's like, okay, well, what do I sell? Well, and so again, there's a lot of different ways. I'll just give you one.
Literally just make a list of your day. Do breakfast lunch dinner and try to write everything that sucked. So for you right now, you've already told me one, finding a VA. Yeah, yeah. Opportunity. Jake, his different ones. He has kids. So toys. He found it really annoying to that his kids get older. Not to find toys. He's like, oh, shit. I need to get rid of these toys and get new ones. Maybe there's a toy rental business. Oh, it's kind of cool. I mean, look at Cheg
for textbooks, right? Huge business. Cheg for toys. Doesn't exist. So someone does that. Sorry, Jake. He didn't have to do that. But it was going through different problems that he was excited to solve for himself. He had a coffee problem. And what he stumbled upon is that he went on a golf trip with guys a year ago and he was like, I really love that. I want more of that in my life. I want to have something look forward to on the calendar. I didn't want him to do that business.
I wanted to do the toy rental. So one additional approach I'll throw in there. Because it's actually how he started breaking quick in the first business, sports nutrition, etc. Which is where I cut my teeth for all the things I followed. But I, as part of my calculus, I went through all my credit card statements. And at the time I was making, I don't know, like base salaries, like 40 grand a year in the Bay area during like one
of the peak rushes. It was it was partially explains why I was eating Jag in the box. But like with California taxes and like rents, it was like gone before you know it. So I went through my credit card statements and I looked at what I spent a lot of money on. Like what did I spend a lot of money on disproportionate to my income. And that's how I landed on sports nutrition. In part,
I also had some knowledge around it and the ability to find people involved with that. But another approach I've heard from several different entrepreneurs who ended up building huge businesses is they looked at where they were cobbling together solutions. Like where are they paying for multiple things or using multiple things to mugiver some half-ass solution to a problem that they have opportunity, right? Yeah. Another one I've liked. And to be clear, you can have that and then
still there's no business there. So we did that. We tried to compete with Clavio and e-commerce and we were cobbling together. So they don't know what they do. They're Mailchimp or ConvertKit, but just for e-commerce. I see. And so we cobbled together a solution and we're like, oh, we could sell this to people. And then when we tried to sell it, no one wanted to buy it. Yeah. And that's what we get to later in the book. And so I think the other comment I would
actually highlight that it's great. You called it out is what's on your to-do list that you're just avoiding doing? That is actually a really interesting business. So for you, your to-do list is to find an EA. What else is on your to-do list that's maybe been there over two weeks? Yeah, yeah. That's a good one. That's a good one. Let me think about that for a second. Yeah, what is? I can tell you what I'm mind. Yeah, let's do one here. I need a house manager. Yeah. I need someone to just
handle property stuff. My painting fell. My grass died because I put my car over it. I didn't get watered. I have a cold plunge. That needs to get refilled. And I have my girlfriend who's pregnant. So I'm taking care of her and practicing here. I don't have time to even find the house manager. Yeah. So there's one. So in the case of, and if better example exists that we want to run with, but let's, since we've introduced Jake, we get off the V.A. one, but Jake's thing was, I want to
do golf. Let's stick with that. Next up, is it a million dollars of money that you can make in that? So how big is the market over what period of time a year or what period of time? I'm a little bit more just looking at the market. I'm honestly looking at a timeframe on that. It's just like, are there people now today that at least a million dollars? Like I would literally, which is crazy, is absolutely success. I would say it's significantly because the market just grew. We chose a great
market. Yeah. When I started up, there's 10 software products. Now there's at least 10,000 software products, if not more. And so we chose the right market. So with Jake, he was basically, there's two ways you can do it. One, just look at Google Trends, which is super basic. Most people know this. Like, this Google Trends is a flat. The client is a growing and look at relatively. In terms of search terms, right? Yeah. Go to trends.google.com and just double check it. And this is,
again, this is almost identical to the blog post we had. It's just been evolved on your blog and conversely blog for our workweek.com. And then the second part is, all right, is there a million people or not even a million people? How many people and how much they spend on this? Same thing with Chihuahua's. How many people have Chihuahua's? How much they spend on Chihuahua's? So for Jake, it's how many people are golfing? How much they spend on golf? And can you get any other data
points? But that's probably the most straightforward way. Because again, we only do it in a weekend. To see, is there at least a million dollars in their golf is a billion dollar industry? Multiple billions of dollars. So you can look at the clubs, you can look at things, but the simplest way to do it, go on Facebook, do an ad. How many people are searching golf? And then you can Google how much do people spend on golf for your? Okay, is there at least a million
dollars in there I can make it? I would imagine at this point too, I'm just throwing this out there, but that some of these tools like Chachy PT or Bard could also be incredibly 100% 100%. How much much money do people spend on golf a year? How big is the market on golf? You could put that in right now. And again, people are like, well, I need to do more research. It's like, no, we really just want to understand like generally because we only have a weekend. Otherwise, that's the thing
that like two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, ten weeks, nothing's happened. So next up, how do we actually understand what the business model looks like? Again, not I went to Berkeley, went to Princeton, like there's all these complicated discounted cash flows you've done a lot more investing than I have. I just want to know, can I make a million dollars in the business? So the real simplest business
model, one minute revenue cost expense divided by a million. And I have a bunch of templates on the website, but really again, I'm trying to understand, is this realistic? Trying to sell a business at that, let's say a golf trip, that's what he was excited about, $5,000. It's like $3,000 to do it 2000. Can I sell this many golf trips and how long will that take me? Help him adjust the business model like when I did Sumo jerky. And even when I've done absumo, I had to do the same change.
When we did absumo, I did bundles. Remember? I do. Yeah, because your productivity model, you help put it on the map. We did these bundles and it was like, dude, I'm doing fucking two months of work, selling for 50 bucks. I made $5. And your Chen came and he's like a math genius and he's one of my best friends. He's like, let's just do this quick model. And that's what we've replicated. Stop doing bundles. Just do one and do one a week. Help us the margin. I went from $5 margin to $25 margin.
Can you say that one more time? Yeah. So let me back up. So when you're doing these quick models, and again, I don't want people to spend a lot of time. People like it's so simple. I'm like, that's the point. Have a one minute. By the way, not to interrupt, but like the vast majority of incredibly profitable, elegant businesses are simple. Yeah. Right. At their very core, they're simple. Beautifully said. At their core. Like Google, at its core. I know there's a lot of
complexity that goes into delivering it, but as a business model. Very straightforward. Uber, at its core. Very straightforward. Airbnb at its core. Very straightforward. And patron. I mean, like at their cores, these businesses are Geico even, right? Like very simple. And one thing I want to take a step back on is entrepreneurship is awesome. It can create a great life. And that doesn't mean you have to be a millionaire. That could be even grocery money. And I don't think people
realize they can change their life and have that option. Like I was fired. You've been fired? Yeah. For my first job fired, ice cream shop to long story. I have to like try to get fired there. Well, I was actually kind of funny. I mean, my first job is the way this guy was doing stuff, the big boss. I was like 14. I don't even know if it was legal. But I was working at this ice cream shop and I was the cleaner. So I was cleaning the machines and doing this, that's the other
thing. And the way that I was taught to do it made absolutely no fucking sense. So I came up with my own system for cleaning. And I did it in like one tenth the time. The mistake I made was I stayed at work for the rest of the time. And I read black belt magazine. And I took the broom handle off of like one of the mobs. And I practiced karate moves. It was just something in the parking lot. And the boss understandably didn't find that terribly inspiring. So he was like, I don't care if
you're already cleaned it, clean it again. And I was like, what is clean? And that was early proof that I'm effectively unemployable. So yeah, I got fired. I would agree. I'm sure maybe I got fired from other stuff, but I definitely got fired from the first show. I was trying to wish I could see that dude. I wish you could have some cameras that I could see you with your broodsticks. There's a good chance I had a Rat Taylor Amolit too. There's a very high likelihood that I had a
Rat Taylor Amolit at the time. My point of going back and what we'll stick with the Jake example is that I was fired. And that was one of the most traumatic moments of my life. And then I was like, I'm never fucking again going to be dependent on someone. Yeah, ever fucking. And so I at that moment was very clear. Like I need to get to my own level. It's taken 30 years to. It's taken therapy to work. I mean, therapy's been an amazing thing. Oh, I get it. I'm laughing because also
I get it. Yeah. But that was a realization that like one person determined my fate. Yeah, I never wanted that again. Yeah. And so it doesn't mean you have to quit. Like it's crazy to have assumed. We have a lot of people with really interesting side hustle. Amy does flowers. She's like she has her customer support. Nick has her growth. He has a teeth whitening clinic. I think it's amazing. Yeah. Old men and his wife have a facial clinic. I don't know. It's kind
of cool. But at least they have the option. They seem to like their jobs at AppSumo, but they have the option that they can do that. And that's why I do think people should consider no matter what they're doing. To an adjusting time to kind of get to these places. Like I didn't get my first sell at AppSumo. It was 12 bucks. Yesterday was 200,000. But that did me getting going. Be able to
get to this point. And I'll throw this in there too that much like despite everything that I've said and the frickin Ted talk that I gave earlier about all the things I'm thinking about. Despite all of that, I still think everybody should start a podcast because you will learn a lot about yourself and your own thinking. You will need to get better communicating. And there's a lot
to be taken from that. Even if you stop it after five episodes. So I still believe that for improving your ability to communicate identifying verbal ticks, cleaning up your thinking by going through that process makes it worth starting podcast. Similarly, I think everybody should start a business. Does not mean everybody should be a lifelong entrepreneur. There are upsides to 95. The ability to just like turn off your work, go home, like throw on the TV or watch some YouTube and like
have a couple beers with your friends or family. Like there are arguments to be made that that in the right circumstances. I'll tell you like Monday we have a lawsuit because someone doesn't like something two people are upset about their salary. That was Monday. Yeah, right, right. I'm just saying like they're trade off. I was at this rock climbing gym not too long ago last week. Actually, here in Austin, a lot of good rock climbing gyms. There's a new one Mesa Rim that is much taller
in terms of their top-roping areas than anything else I've seen here. In any case, I was there and I saw this woman climbing and she had a shirt on that said no solutions only trade offs. And I looked at it and I said, okay, maybe that doesn't make sense. Maybe it's like a Japanese billboard who knows. It seems like English, but it's not quite like it's grammatical. They're English words, but wait a
second. Like, bear is the best friend. Wait a second. What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. But I sat with it and I was like, you know what? That's actually a very healthy way to look at a lot of decisions. It's like there is no one best. Like there are always trade offs. So coming back to Jake, Jake and business model. How did you tackle this? And it can be Jake. It can be other examples,
but to the extent that you can give real world examples. All right, so let me give you two examples. One Jake and one, you know, very clear as well with that psoomo. So Jake's issue with Andrew Chen when he came in and modified it. So that was one example. The other example, and I'll show you that there's dials, you know, kind of like remits with your finance dials. There's revenue dials in your business. And so with Jake, he was like, I'm going to do 10% profit. I was like, okay, hold on.
Let's look at a woman at model and see what you can actually make and how you can make a million dollars doing this. So we put it into the woman at model and again, it's very simple. You don't have a lot of time revenue costs profit. So let's be specific Jake. I was like, Jake, how much can people pay? And again, let's just try to see what we can put together as an offer that will bring to people. How much you pay on your golf trip before? I spent 2000. What do you think is reasonable
for 48 hour amazing experience for people to go golfing? 4000. Great. 4000. Now what are the costs that go with that? Do you have to play for travel? No, make them pay for travel. Okay, hotel, golf, whiskey, cigars, food. Great. How much is that? Just real quick. 2000 bucks. So your old model was like, you took a percentage, but now we just do a one minute model. It looks like you're make like two to three thousand dollars. Let's just call it 2500 per each golf trip.
They're by the by a thousand. That's not that many sales. That seems actually very doable to create a million dollar business just having golf trips. So just by understanding that, it's like, okay, cool. We have an idea we like, we see that there's a million dollars because a lot of times you're going to work really hard in the wrong direction or in a market that's really small. And you actually understand that this is a business model relatively that can work. Now we talked about revenue dials.
Let's just say the average order value, like people are going to pay 1000. Holy shit, that's never going to get there. That's a thousand people during app to seller. Is it a thousand people? That's a lot of people. So if we can five x that, maybe we make it more expensive. Can we get people to buy it twice? Is there another types of products? And I've written down the revenue dials in the book and there's free on the website as well that you can be like, how can I change this model so
that it's easier to get to the million dollars? So people can find some of these resources for free at million dollar weekend.com. Totally. And now with that, it was like, oh, okay, cool. It's $2,500. I don't have to sell that many people to get to a million dollar business. Now let me see if I can get even just three customers today. And I will tell you at this point of the day, Jake was really frustrated because we had no sales. You know, we finished this model and it's like,
shit, man, like, I don't know, like I don't know if this is going to work. And I think that one of the most powerful things you can do is go for a walk. And that's all we did. It was like, Jake, for two years, you've thought about this idea. For two years, you've wondered what if and you want to be an example to your kids. And in 24 hours so far, you have an idea, you have a business model around it. And now we can actually find out if we can make a real business out of this. And I think
that's just kind of amazing for all of us. Like, how can we change our lives in a very quick amount of time and give yourself a fucking break if it's not immediately a million dollars. Like go for a walk, get a good night's sleep, go look at old photos to realize how far we've come. So the next morning, woke up and what we did within, I don't know, an hour as he put together without a Google doc, pictures of a golf trip, golf course, food, cigars. I don't know if you'll do golfing, clothing,
polo shirts, and then a price, four thousand bucks, five thousand bucks. And I was like, all right, cool. Let's just call people. So there's three different validation methods to see if people want to have a business. And number one is pre-selling. This is one of the most popular advice. See if people will purchase. Yeah. So you haven't offered. He literally put together a Google doc because I do think it's nice when you sell something that you can get people like, oh, wow, I can visualize.
I can see it. Same thing that Elon's done with Cybertruck Model 3. Those are six years and 10 years before he actually delivered. And he pre-sold thousands, tens of thousands, a hundred and thousands of them. So it's a very effective model. Same thing with airplanes hotels. They all pre-sale to see if someone wants it. Department building. So we're looking around here, like the vast majority of these were sold before construction was finished, certainly. But it was often before
construction started, a hundred percent. And when you're doing businesses, find a problem you're excited about. As you said with your stuff, like if you only do that and make sure that no one else wants it, you don't really have a business. You just have a hobby. So Jake has that. The other thing I think is a super common mistake for new entrepreneurs is like, well, I want to do AI. I'm like, okay, have you done anything? Yes. So funny. I was going to bring up this exam.
Oh, people. I love AI. I'm like, have you used chat-gapete? Not really. Have you coded anything? No, not at all. Who saw? What do you do? What's your day job? I mean sales. Okay. What do you sell? I sell solar. Okay. Maybe it's easier for us to sort of business selling. And you can sell AI. And do something within your zone of influence and your zone of expertise versus so far outside of it. People make it way more complicated on themselves, especially new entrepreneurs. Like what are problems
you like? What are groups or zones of influence you have? Doesn't mean you can't, but just make it so much harder. And so, Jake, he plays a lot of golf. He has a lot of golf friends. So the pre-sell method makes me also knows how to find those people. He knows what websites he goes to. He knows which celebrities he follows. He knows where to go fishing. Yeah. I don't. What's a golf course? Many has more credibility in selling it too. If he's like, this is the trip that I have
always wanted to design for myself. There's a lot of weight behind that when you're talking to someone. Yeah. It was cool. It was cool to see him excited to create a business around that. And there's some some mistakes that he ended up making that others can avoid that I'll cover. But through that, it was like, all right, Jake, you have a doc. You got a model. Let's contact these people. Let's just call him right now. You already practiced it. Remember in the beginning,
we talked about starting. You got started. Let's start asking. And he called his brother. And people like, no, my brother, like, it's too easy. It should be easy. Make it fun. Like, feel, no, it's got to be hard. I got to make it challenging myself. Like, why? Why do you want to make it harder yourself? What's the advantage in that? Because that avoids you actually facing reality. So he called his brother and his brother's like, and again, we talked about the listen option
transition. Hey, man, I need feedback. I'm doing this process. I'm trying to start a business in a weekend. Do you remember the golf trip? I was like, yeah, how did you like it? I liked it. Is there anything you missed on it? Would you want to do it again? Do you have another one scheduled? Oh, you don't. Oh, so you're listening to see if you what problems they have. Then he provide an option. Hey, I've got a golf trip. It's going to be in April. It's going to be to this place.
It's going to be $5,000. And it sounds like something you'd be excited to do. Transition. Do you want to give me $100 right now as a deposit that's totally refundable for this trip? And then shut the fuck up. This is a brother sent about $100 right away. Okay, brother, fine. Easy. J cool. So if you golf with, let's make a dream 10 list of everyone you've ever golfed with. Just 10. Super easy. This is inspired by chat homes. So I got to give him a shout out ultimate sales machine when my
favorite books all time. And he has a dream 100. I'm like, 100 is a lot. Let's just do 10. You don't like got a weekend. So then let's just go through your list. Who else please golf with you? Who else have you gone on a trip with? I went on a guy named John calls up John and actually we recorded the calls. He's like, yeah, fuck you, John. I'm like, this how you talk to your friends? But they're friends. And then he calls John. He's like, yeah, man, can I just get your feedback?
Because again, when you're selling, don't have to make this big, scary thing. Talk to someone. Hey, I love to get your feedback. This is what I'm working on. Is that something you're interested in? You are? Okay. Cool. Do you want to give a deposit to commit that you're actually serious about doing it? Because a promise of a deposit is a rejection. A promise is a rejection. Hey, yeah, yeah, I'll do it. Just when you get closer, that's a reject. That's actually a no. You know,
this you've sold a lot. You've done a lot of this. And so getting them to actually tell you the truth with their wallet. And for me, a lot of times with rejection, it's, do I actually want to do this business? Do I actually want to make this thing possible? And so it's a test if you want something. That's it. And so when you're getting rejected, be like, as I'm doing this book and as I'm doing other things, even with asking people for all my YouTube videos, do I really want this? I'm like,
fuck yes, I do. Do you want the thing that is being rejected? Am I proud of what I'm doing? Like, is this the thing I actually believe I want to do? And that rejection is just a test for yourself. And everyone can pass. It's up to them to choose. And yeah, those are also like those early rejections are valuable because if your commitment starts to waver, you're still in the
honeymoon phase. You are going to have hard challenges. You are going to have hiccups later. And if it's not going to work, like if you are going to waver or you might fold, it's better do it in a sense. Super quick. Early. Then later. And you're really, for me, getting rejected is an opportunity to learn. And this is what I do in sales. I'll do it all the time. To this day, I'll just say, I just want to learn. And I frame it. That's my first phrase. Second phrase is, you didn't
want this. Just tell me why not. I want to learn. People will reply. And they'll tell you. Really? Yeah. They just do it. I don't think people are like, no, I want to tell this person why not. And a lot of times after they say why they didn't do something, you can answer that question and sell them again. So Jake called John. He makes fun of this guy so forth. And then, hey, man, I have an idea of this golf trip. I love your feedback. What do you think about it?
Dude, that sounds awesome. Yeah, it's an April. Do you want to do a deposit? And then they're deposit. And then he ended up getting, I believe, five deposits within 48 hours for 500 bucks. And then he also had a partnership with another guy that he went on a trip with. And now three weeks later, he's like securing the location. He's getting the $5,000 or whatever the end of price is going to be along the way. Now, there's some interesting things around this. So one,
and this is the mistakes that people make, you have to deliver what you just promised. So focus on that. You just promised like, hey, give me a deposit. And let me take you on an amazing golf experience. So over deliver on what you just promised. Common mistake that Jake was making. He came back to me and checked in on him. He's like, dude, I'm these people are buying it. It's exciting. I'm going to get eight people. Here's the model. It looks great. One guy talked to me about
an app. So I'm going to start an app. Oh boy. Oh boy. And I was like, squirrel. Yeah, squirrels. That's a good move. I love squirrels. Until the times I put squirrels, my favorite apple. And so that very easy to get distracted. Very easy to get distracted. And this is the best businesses with the ones that work. And so I'm like, Jake, you just sold five people. Another mistake that very, very common. You know, I don't know about these trips because I don't think I want to go
on them in a few years. I was like, dude, you have to go on one. Yeah. Guess what? You know how much work I do at Absimo day to day zero? I don't do any work. And that's not as like a flex. Oh, don't do any work. No, I hire the people that do the work. And they're excited. And the frankly, they're better than me at the work. You don't have to go on a trip. Maybe for a podcast, if you're the signature host and it's called a Tim Fair show, you probably need to be doing it. Unless they
AI your voice. But for these golf trips, don't be so worried about making a million when you have made one. Just deliver the product. And guess what? Then do it again. And then again, and then again. And so that was another common observation. I was surprised. And I've seen it by others. How's it going to scale? You haven't gotten a dollar. Don't worry about it. Yeah. And let's deliver the experience, which now he's getting it going in April. He's getting these
people to pay. And then it's like, Hey, just after they pay in April, you know what you do? You just do it again. And then again, and then again. And then the rest of the book is now, how does he get it beyond that? So it can be beyond his network and his zone of influence. Also, just to emphasize a few things that you've said and also just add a couple of comments, right? The whole scaling thing. Look, I invest in businesses at scale. But I think that what a lot of entrepreneurs tend to do,
especially if they're fantasizing about doing something big. Like if it's not huge, it's a failure, if it's not 10x, it's a failure of something. It's like paradigm shifting. Most businesses that help their owners to craft unique lives that are incredibly rewarding are completely invisible to you. The businesses that you see on magazine covers or in these tweet threads and so on, ex threads. Whatever the cool kids are going at these days are outliers and trying to
just model those crazy outliers is like deciding for New Year's. You want to get into shape. So you watch the Super Bowl and you're like, okay. So I'm watching how Tom Brady moves. And if I can't be Tom Brady, then it's not exercise. And you're like, well, hold on a fucking second. It's not the right way to look at it. Chances are also you're not Tom Brady, right? So maybe before you're like, it's not worth me learning to swim unless I can be Michael Phelps.
You're like, well, look at his ankles. Can your ankles do that? No, like I don't think so. Are you shaped like that? No, you're not. So just reminding folks, like you do not need to mimic the top 1% of 1% of 1% of outliers who probably are mutants on a bunch of levels in order to have a business that fulfills the dreams you have associated with being an entrepreneur. I just want to say that because it's so common. It's really common. And what you've been saying also echoes
something that Seth Godin has said on the podcast, which is no paraphrasing here. But effectively, like do the smallest thing possible. It's like people hide behind the big because when they have this thing, I want to do an AI app that does this and this and this, which isn't to say those things can't exist. But when they've got this huge idea, I want to help 5 billion people, whatever the thing might be. You can hide behind that and never get started. It's easy to hide behind the big
thing. But if it's call 5 of your friends, you can't hide behind that. I mean, business really is 3W's what I looked at. It's what's a problem you're solving that people care about. Who are those people and where are they? That's it. What's the problem that people care about? So for Jake, it's a golf trip. For apps who want to comment, software deals a good price. For Tim Ferriss, it was learning like very Tim Ferriss, very tactical, practical things in different areas of your life.
Where do people listen to that? Where are they? And it has been awesome to see someone like Jake who's had that dream be able to make that change. There are other validation methods. I'll just share it because I think people want to see other ones. So one is presale. So whether it's a pinball machine, which we talked about, whether it's even app suma.com, I was able to get this going within a weekend as well. The same exact method. It wasn't presale. I was able to close it all in 48 hours.
So just to share another story of that, I noticed through all of my work that I like deals. I like marketing and I think the software thing is going to be big. How do I do this very quickly to find out to something people actually want? And that's the reason you have weekend because you have 52 chances to change it. If it doesn't work one, guess what? You have another one and another one. And at least understand a process. You're so good at this. You're so good at thinking about that.
So how do you experiment? And so with apps who want to say, I think there's something with these three things. I'm going to try to do a weekend. I called emailed Imjer, this college kid, said, hey, I want to do software deals. I'll pay $7 for everyone I sell. For him, he's like, I'll get free money. That's cool. So cold email. It was just, and it was funny. I had to find the college good to cold email because I went to Imjer.com. Oh, sorry. No, no, not a right now. I was some like
name from Azerbaijan. Okay. Imjer.com. So I knew that the problem with software deals like good prices. I knew that I'm a redder and I was like, well, that's where the customers are. And then that's who the customers are and where they are. And I was like, they want Imjer. That was the most popular product at the time. That was all over it. So basically cold emailed Allen, just Allen at Imjer.com. It was like, hey, I want to promote you. $7 for deal. You get free money.
It's no cost to you. And then I was like, well, I can get this posted on Reddit. And I even cold emailed the founders of Reddit and was able to get them to give me free ads. Yeah. How did you do that? So you're asking. I know why would they give you free ads? I don't really know, actually. That's bullshit. No, no, no. What was the pitch, though? The pitch was just too full. One, I said I knew someone they knew. So I worked with Chris Smoke when I started
previous companies. He knew Chris slow. So when you're sending an email, it's really strong subject line or any messages like referred by blah. At least you're going to get open or reply. Said, hey, I'm working on it. I don't bullshit that because you'll get fact checked. I just got someone fact checked with me like Jordan Hartton or Jordan Harman's. Yeah. He's a good buddy. He fact checked someone who messaged him like, hey, no, okay, he's working with you.
Me and Jordan messages me. Of course. Yeah. I was like, no, I'm not. Yeah. It was a little bit more than that. Basically, I said, hey, I'd love to just treat you to lunch and share more what I'm working on. And so I took him to the pork store cafe and hate. And I just shared what I was working on and said, I'm doing this idea for software deals. I want to focus on Reddit. I'm a huge redder. I've been redder since 2006. It's with Imger. I'd love to see if you can
give me free ads. There wasn't a bigger ask than that. Again, we come back full circle. It's because I like asking, I'm practicing asking. Everyone can ask. He's like, sure. Crazy part of that story fast forward about six months. I asked him again. And he's like $10,000. But I highly appreciate Chris and Reddit for giving me that free. They were just getting their ad platform out. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That was a good chance for them to showcase something or have a case study
that it worked. Well, so I launched it. I was like, if I can do 200 sales, this is obviously a little bit bigger than what I'm encouraging others. If I can get 200 sales within a very short time, this is it. And let me just break down the website. I paid $48 to a guy named Mohammed who I can still recommend to people to help me put a PayPal button on app zoom on.com. And I spent $12 on
app zoom on a com, which I know I should have maybe done even not the website. But that PayPal button, people when I post on Reddit, hey, I've got a deal on Imger Pro instead of $24, it's 12. And I gave out $7 immediately. That first $12 sales the best. Yeah. That was so sweet. And I remember and this is the thing people were like, well, how do I scale? I emailed the codes for every 200 person. You know what my back end was Gmail. I got the PayPal notification. And then I
sent him an email saying, thank you so much. Here's your code for Imger Pro. What other deals do you want me to get? And that is what's led now to like a 100% team. And we have all these crazy products. We've launched so many different things from apps. And we have, I think a 20, 25 person engineering team. It started with literally manual Gmail codes. And so the concept there is just how so fucking basic. I didn't let all these other things get in the way. Yeah. And also that super
primitive back. And so you're talking about highly manual, but high touch with the customer. Yes. Yes. It gives you a lot of really valuable input. And even though we've been talking about the word scale is kind of a four letter word. And one of the very first episodes of Masters of Scale that Readhoff mended, he interviewed Brian Chesky of Airbnb. And it's a great episode. And one of the key tenants in the beginning for Airbnb was do things that don't scale. And those
things tend to be highly manual, helping people take photographs of their places. And what they learned then led to a lot of what we've seen. I mean, you didn't think about yourself. I hope I recall correctly. I thought you super responded to everyone super early on. I recall you in the comments on your blog. Oh, in the comments when I was building that community for sure. And this is highly responsive in the blog comments. You were. I remember that. It stuck out to me. And that's exactly
if people are like, well, how do I like have high touch? And how do I do things at scale? That is literally it. So for me on YouTube, I still reply to my comments. Not every single one now because there's a lot. But I reply to them. And guess what? When you get that message that someone actually connected with you. And this is great, especially if you're at one, two, three, four, five customers.
So early on, I don't know if I've talked about this at all. When I had decided that bloggers were the path, at least that was the hypothesis worth testing for launching the four hour work week. I went to a bunch of their blogs and I left comments. And my comments were like blog posts unto themselves. I mean, they were. They took forever, right? But I put a ton of energy in and I would do that in some cases, like two or three times on a given blog where the authors were active in the
comments. And they noticed that. And people bloggers in this case, in many cases directly reached out to me to thank me for the comments. And that laid the foundation. It was like super targeted, very much sniper shot. It was not me trying 100,000 different things. But you also in the beginning need to throw a lot against the wall. You don't know what you're good at. You don't know what works. So you try a lot and going back, it's fun taking the trip down memory lane for
brainquagon way back in the day, the sports nutrition company. And I see sports nutrition because turns out Americans did not want to be smarter at all. So selling something for improving cognition at that point didn't work at all. But I got reports back. This is when very high touch from athletes, especially NCAA athletes who bought it for studying. They're like, yeah, I don't really care about studying though, but it improved my time off the blocks for my track event. It helped
me with this, how me with that. And being the idiot that I was, I ignored that for ages. I was like, no, this is brainquagon, right in my own head. So I kept pounding my head against brick wall. Didn't work in a venture. I was like, well, wait a second. They're using this for sports. The only reason I spent so much money on my supplementation as a percentage of my income is because I cared about sports performance really. And then pivoted. And that's when the whole
thing took off. But that's not the takeaway that I was going to share what I was going to share is at the very earliest stages. I had a website up, which a coworker at work at TruSan had put together for next to nothing, right? Because we were always scheming. And we were always just like going out to lunch and bullshit and we were friends. So I paid him, but I couldn't pay him much. And he was like, it's fine. And he put together a website for me. I had not manufactured
anything. I had done quite a bit of basic math to figure out if the economics would work. Nothing fancy though. It's like, how much do I think I could manufacture this for? What are some of the basic costs of sourcing? Landed on a retail price. And at this point, nothing has been made. Nothing has been manufactured. There's no product to ship. And I just went to coworkers who were friends. And it wasn't exactly gilting, but these people at that point didn't really need
this necessarily. Like it could be a benefit. But I was like, Hey, I want to try this out. Like, would you be willing to just pay for one of these so that I can try to do a first manufacturing run? And they're like, Yeah, sure. Why not? 50 bucks or something at the time. And that gave me just the bare minimum of capital to start having conversations. And then I had to negotiate everything. Right? Because I would go to these contract manufacturers and they're like, well, our minimum
order size is this. And in my head, I'm like, impossible. That's never going to work. And then they're like, and our minimum term of commitment is this. I'm like, yep, also impossible. So I had to sell the vision. And at that time, I was able to, because I'd learn through cold calling off hours, get a hold of the president of this manufacturer, got him on the phone at one
point. And I was just like, I know at some point somebody gave you a break. I'm not asking for anything other than, can I drive to you at any time and just tell you about my vision for this business? And if we are able to find a way to work together, which I would like to, I promise you that I will work with you exclusively as a manufacturer as we grow the business went down. And I think he was maybe just amused more than anything else. He's like, okay, sure. Like after all was
said and done. And then I used him for years. Right? And that's how the deal got done. But it all hinged on in the very beginning, the pre sales. And also, I was buying, I mean, negotiating at that time. You want to talk about a real pain in the ass magazine advertisements. Feedback loop is really slow. After you have put out the cash for the advertising, you might not know what you're selling for months. It could take a really, really long time. And so what I did
when I started getting more ambitious, because I started with small ads, of course. And then once I got to kind of full page ads, I would go to say distributors. And I would say I would love to feature you exclusively in this particular ad. But for that to work, I would just need you to pre-order X amount of inventory. So they buy X amount of inventory. Let's say that's $10,000. And I would also say like it's $10,000. But the rate card for this full page is like 40 grand. And maybe like, okay,
well, seems reasonable, especially since we're going to make a profit on the product. Then I would buy the ad space as a remnant. So I would negotiate last minute. I would get that for like five grand. So what has happened? If I had them pre-order, let's say 10K, I paid five. I'm already in the black, no matter what the outcome of the advertisement. And this is the kind of stuff most entrepreneurs
are going to have to do on some level, something like that. Two things I want to highlight from your story. When it's beautiful, you seem to have a knack for finding underserved opportunities. And that's where the opportunity is. Like if it's a market, there's no opportunity because people know about it. Like you finding remnant inventory. I think there's something with that sumo we've had a lot of times where like when the news feed came out, years ago on Facebook, no one was really
advertising. We're like, oh, this is huge. No one else is doing it. Let's go hard on that. And there's something interesting in business and finding what others aren't noticing. Just you had to specifically for me, I'm interested in like kind of the marketing part. I think the other thing that that was interesting about what you do is you put a little bit more extra effort in just the sprinkle of the hot sauce. That's what you do, right? So one thing and just to highlight
further, there's out there to copy, copy it like successfully scrumps. When you wrote a blog, post comment on other blogs, you didn't just write, hey, cool story. Thanks. Tibo, right? You wrote like actual in-depth things that made people want to reach out to you. Like many, many, many hours of a single comment. Like 17 revisions kind of thing. And the same thing goes for when you wanted to do the manufacturing. You didn't just say like, call the guy and be like, I'll show up to your door.
Tell me where you're at. And I'll be there. That's a little bit more. It's not a lot. And it's not exclusive to him. That's available worldwide. Just put in a little bit more. Take that little bit of chance on what a cool story. If it doesn't work out, at least you have this crazy story that you can talk about. Exactly. And another little tweak because it's not like the story I think that's appealing for a lot of people to hear, which is not what we're saying is I did 100x more than the
next guy. That's not what I did. I did like 10% more with some degree of focus. The details matter and keep in mind, I'm copying people too. Right. I had a three ring binder, which I treated as my swipe file whenever I bought something. And at that time, magazines were a big deal. That's changed,
of course. But like print advertising and stuff was the game that I was interested in. Any time I was about to buy something or I bought something or I flipped through magazine and my attention stopped for a period of time and I had I would take out the ad and I put it in a three ring binder and I would study the ad to be like, why? Why did this affect me? And then I'll copy it. And to give an example, just to a fine tune, right? How many emails have you received or someone's like, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah. I'd love to pick your brand of me for coffee. How about next Tuesday at 2pm? Right? And you're like, that's pretty presumptuous. Maybe that works. Right? But it's a little forceful. And in the same way that if someone's like, I'm a hugger and they invade your space and you back up, don't cause that instinctive, defensive response in somebody reads your emails. So even in the very beginning, and I still do this because believe it or not, I get rejected. It still happens,
right? But in the case of say the manufacturer, there was no presumption. It was like, I really appreciate taking the time. This might not be of any interest. It gives very light. I wasn't like, I know what you need. This business is going to be 20x. We're going to scale and you can be our exclusive provider. No, I was like, this may not be of interest, but I think there's a chance it is because I've studied your website. I've looked at this, looked at your customers. I've identified
this, this, and this. And would love to meet everything I just said. And if that doesn't work for you, I totally understand. Now, what does that say? Because there's sort of a subtext to this. What that says is, if this guy meets up with me, I'm not going to browbeat the shit out of him. I'm not going to follow up 20 times after he said, no. So he's like, the risk of me meeting with this guy is low because he had a light touch in the beginning. Now, there's a time to be forceful.
Right. There are times to be more forceful. But I do find that that the carrot works better than than the stick or better way to put it is just like a gentle touch works much more often than a heavy touch. This was also true with the bloggers. If a bunch of bloggers or people I thought might be bloggers, we're having drinks at like an after party at South by. I would wander up and I would just say, oh, hey, guys, I know you don't know me. Is it okay if I just join you guys about myself? And they
be like, oh, okay, sure. And then I'd ask questions and ask questions. Eventually somebody be like, what's your story? Like who are you again? And I would say, oh, I'm here because the only thing I can really control with my first book, I'm really nervous about it is looking at digital stuff because the publisher is doing everything else. And then I'd stop. I wouldn't give them a full pitch. If it ended up being the right audience or if they had any interest, they'd be like, well, what's
your fucking book about? And then they're like, well, it's about funny. Yeah. Well, you know, it's a group of like six to eight people. Chances are at least one person, even if they're just being polite, we'll be like, well, it's a story. What's the book? And then I would just pay attention to who was interested, right? Who was opting in? Yeah. Right. And then at some point, not in front of the group, by the way, but like I like buy drinks for folks. Like I let me buy you guys around a drink
so I feel like I'm crashing your party. And then if somebody really expressed interest, I would say, you know, zero pressure. I know you, I'm sure you got a lot going on. But if you're interested, I could send you an early copy of the book. You're not going to want to read the whole thing. It'll take too long. But I could just highlight 10 pages that you might be able to use immediately because that's templates for this thing that you just mentioned. They're like, cool. And I'll be like,
yeah, I'm not expecting to promote it. I'm not expecting anything. I just want to expose people to this stuff. And you have to mean it, right? That you can't then follow up 100 times me a prick about it. But you said you didn't expect it. Yeah. Yeah. And that worked. It really worked. And that approach, that light approach has worked over and over and over again. I mean, it took me two or three years to get Jamie Foxland podcast as a long time. And then it was at the
time, you know, podcast of the year. It took time. Cool. I think though two comments. I'm curious, one comment and a question as well. If you start with the light asked, you can do a big ask. So let me give you an example. When I knock on doors from some of the YouTube videos where I just go to literally the nicest houses I see and just knock on their door. If I go to your door and say, what do you do for living? Like you're going to close my door, close it in my face. Instead,
now what I do, knock on door. I love your house. They're like, really? Yeah. I just, you know, we're doing a documentary on the neighborhood and I just love your house. Can you tell me about it? Oh, yeah. Actually, that is so crazy. Yeah. I thought this I always drive by and I was always fascinated. But what'd you do for living to be able to get a house? It's so great. It's definitely a difference. The same ask, just done it a little differently. That does take
practice and through time and persistence, you do get better at it. One thing coming back, when the last time you were rejected, you were saying you got rejected from something. I'm curious to that last time. And what do you tell yourself? It depends on the type of rejection. And rejecting comes in all sorts of forms, right? It could be silence. It could be light,
like polite decline or it could be something stronger. This relates back to my pausing around a lot of next steps for myself where I'm like, if you're rushing, it's probably because you have a scary, scary, scary perspective on something. And if you are, as I always tried to, and this comes back to the question you asked that I didn't really answer directly, if you're looking to find something that is rarely seen or recognized or to meet an unmet need, you have some time. So I think those
opportunities are everywhere. So my feeling is if I get rejected, and I'm sure there are examples, I can't think of them offhand, but they're a lot of efficiency. The guest doesn't want to be on the podcast for the too busy or whatever. Fine. They're going to be 20 other people who will be as good if not better possibly. If there's an opportunity and the door closes because who knows? There's an investment and blah, blah, blah, blah for XYZ. Different reasons.
I want to make the deal happen, but they can't make an happen or I get rejected as a strong word, right? But for whatever reason, I can't be part of that deal. My assumption is they're plenty deals. Like there are plenty of fat pitches out there. That is based on experience. I would say, generally, I tilt pretty pessimistic. I have a dim view of human nature, very hobby. I'm not this bright-eyed bushy tilt bunny that just hops around seeing gold everywhere and the best
in people at all moments. That's not me, but I was just based on my lived experience. There are opportunities, fucking everywhere. There's so many million and multi-million dollar opportunities out there. They're everywhere. For that reason, when I get turned down, that's within the entrepreneurial context. It's like, you know, that's fine. Maybe I got saved for myself on this one. That's happened tons of times. I don't get into a deal and it's a
disaster. I'm mitigated disaster. I'm like, wow, okay. Glad life saved me from that. That's something you're optimistic. That's a little optimism. Here's what I would say. It's in this particular case, it is a very specific form of informed optimism. I'm not default optimistic. I look for hedging against worst-case scenarios and so on. I mean, you have some of that too, right, with cutting costs and looking at these things. But in this particular case,
I've just seen so many examples of successes where you would never predict a success. Starbucks gets turned down by everyone. They're like another coffee company, two-crowded. No way. There are so many examples. When I started my podcast, I was told it was two-crowded. In 2014, very smart people, I'm not going to name, but they said, you could do it, but I feel like that ship is already
sailed. 2014. And I think I also have learned to have a less extreme response to what we might consider rejection because number one, if you're going to be a good resource allocator, if you are easily offended or get easily spun out, you're going to be exhausted a lot of the time. I also frame so much in the form of experiments. They're not pass-fail. This is feedback.
And so I do so many things as two-week experiments, one-month experiments, three-month experiments that applies to my podcast, that applies to everything in the business world that I do, that applies to my style of investing. I'm going to experiment with blah, blah, blah. Then I get my face ripped off. I'm like, okay, good feedback. Maybe I'm not so good at X, Y, and Z. Maybe I should stick to my bread and butter. Well, that was worth an experiment. I kept my downside.
So I learned. Great. Good feedback. For all those reasons, I would say that I'm less reactive than I used to be, but the truth is that you told the story of Jake. There are so many opportunities out there. And I'll just say from meeting, let's just call it unmet needs, or finding niche opportunities that other people don't see. There are a couple of resources I'll mention, and I return with these things all the time. These are things that I reread. And I'm probably going to reread all
of these again. These are just almost like mantras. I'm trying to train myself to recognize and think of these things. One would be Blue Ocean Strategy. I mentioned it before. Excellent book. Excellent, excellent book. How can you be a category of one? Another one. I've mentioned a million times. And I mentioned a million times because I'll read it a million times. One thousand true fans by Kevin Kelly. And then within the 22 immutable laws of marketing, there's one chapter
called the Law of Category. And it gives old examples that said, don't get the for the internet, because it was written in like 97 or something. Get the old version. And I think I may have even excerpted it for either tools of titan's or tribe mentors, but it's called the Law of Category. And they talk about, for instance, the invention of light beer or being the first light beer of X. And the first low cost airline. I mean, these are things that came out of nowhere. And how can you
create a category of one where you're not trying to be the best? You have decided and positioned yourself to be the only, whatever that is. And I think of there are so many examples. And part of how I assess playing fields also is I'm like, how hard is it right now to create a category of one. And I look at, for instance, some of the early innings and podcasting and you had people who broke all the rules and became mega successes. Hardcore history, for instance, with Dan Carlin.
My favorite podcast is still to this day. His episodes, I think they come out, or they historically like once every six to nine months, maybe six to 12 months, one episode. And they're four to five hours long. They're effectively audiobooks on history. No one would have predicted or prescribed that as a successful format. Nobody. Zero. And yet it developed this enormous call audience and has allowed him to do a million things. Now that would be a lot harder. Why? Because it's
less human driven and more algorithm driven. So I'm like, huh, okay, maybe it's time for me to choose an easier game. I don't like hard games. I mean, sometimes I like to push it if I'm doing some board game or maybe trying to ski like right within the bounds of my capabilities. But in terms of big life games, I'm not looking to suffer. I'm not looking to crawl on my knees. I'm broken glass
for a hundred miles to make some really complicated business model work. I'm like, no, I want until I find something that seems simple until I find something where I'm like, hmm, maybe this doesn't need to be the hardest thing in the world. I keep looking. All of my best investments have been kind of obvious and low risk. All of my best investments. And when I've deviated from that. So the same criteria that I use for entrepreneurship, for content, the same criteria I should use in
investing, at least early stage stuff, all the same stuff. Are there other people who come to mind who either worked off of the blog post or that you've interacted with personally who read early versions of the book outside of Jake where you're like, you know, this is a good example of another person who's put it into practice. One thing I wanted to comment on, I got rejected yesterday. It was like a mutual friend of ours. He's like, yeah, come on the show to the
thing. Yesterday's like, no, don't come on the show. I don't like you. He didn't like that I made a comment about him. He did his face. Yeah, well, I did do his face. And then he, but he's been promising for two years. And so I think younger Noah, 20 year-old Noah would have guilted him. Be like, what the fuck, dude? Do you like said you would do this thing? But what you said is actually something I work in therapy a lot, which is instead of emotion and
react, pause and respond. And I tell myself that, no, pause, which I love that you're saying. I'm like, we're going the same therapy. Off, off Michael, talk about it. Oh my God. What a small world. But the pause and respond was like, okay, and you're not going to guilt anyone really into doing something they're excited to do. And I said, hey, thank you for being honest with me. I appreciated that. And I'm sure that's not what he was expecting me to say to him. But I appreciated
it. And I was like, yeah, that must have been hard for him to send. Said, it sounds like there's a little miscommunication. We're probably going to have an experience in the future. And we might work together in the future. Let's go for a walk. And he's like, sounds great. Let's do it after the holidays. And that's definitely a matured experience for me. And so the rejections keep happening. Remember how we can choose to respond to them and approach them can change.
There are, with most things, there are always more opportunities. It's easier for me in the business side to see this. Right? So for instance, you know, I got out of a very long, for me, a relationship, I mean, a five plus year relationship about a year ago. So in just say the dating world, which has changed a lot in six years and is very bizarre and a whole lot of levels for the same reason that content creators and creation have become very different. I mean, a lot of the same factors
are at play, gamification, volume, paradox of choice, I mean, all sorts of things. So gamification of FOMO, right? I mean, there's a lot that goes into the similarities. But on the business side, just because I've spent so much time looking at that. And I've had so much feedback from people who have read the first book. And I've seen so many hundreds of businesses. I'm like, guys, there are opportunities everywhere, everywhere. You also have to believe you're commenting on dating.
I was struggling with dating in Austin. And then I struggled in LA, and I struggled in New York. I was trying all these places. You also have to understand that you have to believe it exists. Yeah. You really do have to believe it. I found that it was easier to believe it exists in Barcelona by, you know, one optimistically. And then working on it and be like, Holy shit, could there really be someone out there? It's like, yes, there is. That is optimism. And it's something to learn.
One of my favorite books this year is Learned Optimism. Okay. And it's a Seligman. It might be. I don't know exactly. But the idea is that you can actually learn it and practice it. Did you read Learned Optimism? Oh, I do a lot of homework. I do a lot of research. Oh, yeah. I love that book. And so it was believing that my friend said to me once, my best buddies, JR, I was like, there's going to be a woman you'll meet who's all of us combined in one. And I was like, that's Bullshit.
And it took me a few years in therapy and relationship coach and being alone to be like, maybe there could be. And being patient that that existed and then finding it being and be like, wow, it really does exist. And it does still take work, but it's like that was out there. Yeah. Same with business and all these things. Like, believing you can have these things. So who's another example? Yeah, there's a guy Pat. Pat is someone I, you know, he is in customer support in
Poland in Poland. All right. Yeah. He does a customer support job. Probably makes like 25,000 a year give or take. I don't know. It's maybe that high, especially in Poland. And he's dreamed of being an entrepreneur and he loves YouTube. Love's YouTube loves it. And so he's like, I'm studying YouTube obsessively. Maybe I can help local people with their YouTube channels. And so he, and it's not necessarily the pre-sell method, but close to it, it was just started contacting people
that he knew within YouTube and said, let me run your channel for you. And now I think he's close about $10,000 a month in Poland, which is basically, he's a billionaire. But the idea there, just taking a step back, what are the elements people can learn from? Where are you spending your free time? And he's obsessed with YouTube. He's just like, I love the channels. I love the thumbnails. I love the title. I love the content. How do I make that my career not being in a customer support
role? And then if I understand it, maybe you can go work for free. It sounds like you have experiences around that. We're like, let me do a great comment. That's a free work, frankly. A great comments free work that gets attention. So as he reached out to people and started helping people, now he's actually got retainers on clients who are he running their YouTube channels. And so I don't know if he's quit his job doing that. I'm not sure exactly, but that was another
example of him feeling good about starting, feeling good about asking people. And now he's got a $10,000 a month business helping people through YouTube channels. I want to triple underscore the free work piece because there's a lot of righteous indignation online about this. Crops up a lot with like spec work on behalf of artists and things like that. It's like, I'll never work for free. Like people are being exploited. Buh-buh-buh. And there are cases where that's true. Everything I
have done has been built up free work. If I look at all of my biggest wins, I can't think of a single exception in the sense that first job out of college. Why did I get that? Because a guest speaker who was the CEO, young guy came in, talked to our class. I wrote my entire term paper on that business because I wanted to do a free competitive analysis and show how valuable I could be to the business.
I wrote my entire term paper on that free work. If I look at for our work week, had that come about, guest lectures twice a year, tons of prep, took it super seriously. Got feedback, everything to iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate. Nuri got paid a dollar, right? I spent my own money on travel, buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh, all free. If I look at my investments in the startup world, I, in the beginning, would do anything I could, like, co-invest with someone to get
a tiny amount of money into the company. And I mean, just a few thousand dollars. And then I would proceed to do like a hundred thousand dollars of work in terms of being like the most valuable, low-cost person on their entire capital. I wanted them to be like, wow, okay, this guy owns nothing of the company. And he's materially impacted the value of this company, including the value of my own shares as a founder. And then what happens is I get those people who are like,
Tim's fucking awesome. And they are willing to do what? They're willing to say that to other founders. And then it builds, and it builds, and it builds. And people have gotten, I mean, this is not going to work right now, folks. So it's be aware. I'm in the process of streamlining everything. But as one example, I Charlie Hone, it worked with me for years. He did that by sending me
basically the equivalent of like the term paper that I did for my first shot, right? He would hear me or rather not hear me because the podcast didn't exist, but he read my blog posts. And he got a pretty good idea of the things that would be helpful to me. And he just did them. He just went out and put in like tens of hours, maybe more into these various projects. And he'd be like, just want to send this to you. I thought it'd be helpful. And that's it. And eventually,
after two or three of those, I'm like, okay, this is actually very helpful. This guy's very proactive, very detailed oriented. Let's have a conversation. So there's just to say, sometimes the best bargain that you have is doing something for free, especially if they have time. Everyone has the time. I mean, I can give a few other examples to kind of just keeping encouraging that. I got my job at Mint because I spend a week for free putting together a marketing plan. There you go.
Because he said, no to me, and I said, let me just at least present you a plan. So I spent more or less at least 40 hours. If not more working on a plan, brought a term and said, if you like this plan, I'll execute it. You can pay me this amount for three months. And if I do well and you like without it is, then you can give me equity and $100,000, which I got three months later. Yeah. That was because I spent a whole week for free working on it. I mean, same thing with a lot of the
best people I've hired within the company today, Jay Yang. He's 17 years old. He still has to get a permission slip to work with us. He lives at home with his parents. Shout out, Jay. I love this guy. But he put together, I think a 30 point Google slide presentation showing me everything that sucks with my social media and my email. Now he's making good money working, living at his parents. So this guy's going to be a beast. He's phenomenal. Right. Same thing with Jeremy,
he's a producer of our channel. He worked on my Instagram thing for free two weeks, Dylan, who's our new producer, put together a website. It's like, I want to work with noakagan.com. I almost always ask that question. How much hours did you put in this free work? And they're like, a lot. It's almost always a lot. And that's a little risk, right? But at the same time, one, you have something cool you can show to you learn. And three, the opportunity for the ask is pretty high.
And the downside is you spend a little bit of time learning. That's a great call out. It goes on and on to another year talking about it. It's certainly a podcast of no business model for ages. I mean, I don't think I'd any sponsors until I'd have to go back and look, but Episode 30, 40, 50, I can't remember. And rewinding the clock, though, you mentioned something in passing that most folks are not going to recognize. And that was opening the Camano OTK.
So this event that I put together. And when I did this event, I was curious. I always try to go, and I'm not saying this is the right move. I just like the mathematics and the lack of crowding in high end. I always like to go high end if I can. It provides a margin of safety that I think is, there are many reasons for it, but it provides a margin of safety that's very appealing from an economic perspective. Right? The better your profit margins, the more room you have for making
mistakes. And then I work backwards. So in this case, what I did was I was like, okay, can I remember exactly what I started? But I was like, well, like, could I make whatever the number, 5 million bucks or whatever was from one event? I can't remember. I'm making that number. The math isn't going to actually compute, but I work backwards. I was like, okay, if I'm going to do that, I'd go into some high end events that I'd paid for. And I was like, well, looks like I'm
going to have to charge a lot. So it's going to have to be, let's just say minimum 10 grand. And then the sooner people purchase the less expensive it is, it's going to escalate. So it's going to go from 10, and then like the next week, it's 12.5, and then the next week, it's 15,000. And it was effectively, as one would expect with the name, sharing everything that I'd done with my first few bucks. At this point, I guess it was my first two bucks. And it was, it seems very quaint at the
time because of how constrained it was. Now it would be like a million and one different tools, or at least that would be expected, but content marketing at the time, which was it's more like a buy-ath on instead of like a quadruple de-cathlon, which it is now. There's so many different options. And I put together a blog post, which is the equivalent of like a sales page or an email, a million different forms this could take. And then there was an application process, which was
legitimate. That wasn't bullshit. I wanted to make sure the composition was impeccable. I wanted the room to be not just diverse from an experiential perspective. I wanted a lot of people from different industries, different strengths, different weaknesses, different networks. I also wanted people who were fucking cool and low maintenance. I just did not want assholes. And one of the ways I vetted for
that, I didn't want anyone going into debt to go to this event. I didn't want anyone jeopardizing their finances. I didn't want anyone taking out a second mortgage. I didn't want anyone, pop up up up up. I didn't want to be responsible for anyone else's bad financial decisions if they were betting the farm on this. So I asked people to provide in their Google form application. I was like, would you be willing to provide proof that you have, say at least $100,000 in savings.
If you're going to spend 15 grand on an event. And one guy replied and he was like, I don't think you need to be my financial nanny. But if you want to come onto the tarmac and look at my private jet, too, you're welcome to do that. And I was like, thank you for just qualifying yourself. You know, like, don't need that guy at the event. No, thank you. And this is going somewhere. So I pre-sold the event with a blog post and a Google form. That was it. Might have been woof at the time.
And then then I was able to decide, by the way, at that point, do I really want to do this? I can still back out. I haven't taken any money. People have committed it and like they're in. So I thought about it. And then I was like, all right, now how do I work backwards from this cost? And ensure this was going to be, I think, a three day event. If I remember correctly, like, how can I ensure that I have the peace of mind of knowing I've delivered that value in the
first few hours of the first day? And I was like, okay, how would I do that? Right? This is a question. I didn't have an answer at the time. I was like, well, I'll do something I've never done. I'm going to share my actual book proposals and marketing proposals. And I'll redact a few things. But like, otherwise, like as soon as we get there, that's one of the first things I'll do. I'll be like, here
you go. Keys to the castle. Boom. Like you just made your money back. This is worth what you paid. The second thing I did, this is not relevant to the, well, it's going to get to the point. So I was talking about buying. Sometimes you have to buy your first customers or your first, like, proof of concept. Like if you want marquee clients, sometimes you have to like take a loss on that in time or money to make it happen. I really firmly believe that for a lot of things. Just like
Reddit wanted to prove its ad system worked. They want a case study. So what do they do? They give you free advertising. Brilliant. That's a good trade. So in a way, they bought their first case study. I'll share one more thing just because people who run events might find this helpful or even just like small groups masterminds. There were bios for every person at the event. And people had a bound book basically with everyone's short bios. And we took, I want to say probably two hours or
roughly 100 people. And everybody in the room stood up. And they got to do a brag, a give, and then an ask. So they get up because people especially at higher end events are like, well, you know, I've run a tech thing. And go, I have an app. And it's like, oh, that guy's like founder of Instagram. Come on. Like, give us a little bit more color. And that's not a real example. None of the founders of Instagram were there. But sometimes you end up in these scenarios where
people for a lot of good reasons or not for bad reasons are being excessively humble. And then you really just don't have an idea of what the hell people are doing. And so as I get up and like, give a real brag, like detailed brag. Don't make it 20 minutes, right? This is give like one to two minutes, like real brag, then give something you're really good at or something you have access to where you feel your world class like, where can you help people? Give a give. There's one give.
And then ask like something you really need help with or want help with could be anything. And everyone who's listening for every person, if they have a give you need, take a note. If they have an ask that you can help with, write it down. And that alone, I think, made the event hugely successful to this day. I'd have to go back and check. But I mean, literally this was who knows, I don't know, 2012 or something. For at least five years, maybe still to this date, there was a
Facebook group for those attendees that was active every week. And people still talk about it now. Coming back to the original point, I'm talking so much in this. But it's more like a conversation than a podcast at this point. I spent so much fucking money on that event to over-deliver. Vinted out a castle had like flamenco dancers, classical musicians. And plus, by the way, if you do an event in Napa, you're dealing with basically the cartel, not like Mafia cartel. But coincidentally,
everybody's going to charge $8 for a cup of coffee. You're not going to be able to negotiate anything is my point. So this event ended up being so incredibly expensive, basically made nothing. But was a huge home run for people. I felt really good about it. I learned a ton. Was an incredible investment of time. And so one could argue that was that was a waste of time. But I developed relationships with 100 people who I hand picked. I had speakers at the event
and a lot of questions that informed the whole thing. And if I ever wanted to do another event, I would guess I would have at least 90% of those people who would immediately book a second, like OTK2, done. No problem. So if I ever fell in hard times, quit the podcast business, I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to do like one of any year. I know that that will work because I can pull different levers. I've talked to people who went to that event and they're like,
that was the best event ever went to. And I was a little jealous and go, I don't know if I'd stop a blog post. But a few comments that's like, it's really interesting. You're like, you didn't build a website, you sent out an email, which everyone could do that right now if you want to start a business. You get a free cell. Yeah. Have a form. I like that idea of like, how do you survey people? And then you could filter who do you want to sell to and see if they're raising their hand to be
customers and you could sell them something. I love that. Something you said literally years ago, it was in Denver. Remember the, what was the conference we were both at? Some were in Denver's, 303 conference. It was the two brothers, born team bros. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You said it on conference. I never forgot about this because you said, I either do the most expensive or free. Yep. And I love that because I'm always about the best price and the low end.
That's my thing. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, give me the best deal. And so, have sumo is about great deals. And then you as well, like, you want to do postcasts, partnership? It's going to be 50, 60, whatever, 40. It's going to be the most expensive and you're going to get a very high quality delivery. And then how do you work backwards for that? You don't have to figure it out in advance, right? I decided like, okay, part of the marketing positioning
is how premium this podcast is. It is incredibly expensive. I mean, we're going to get into the weeds here, but talking about like the 10%, what's the extra 10% that you can do? Like, in the case of me pitching the name, texture, whatever. So one thing that I've done with a lot of my sponsors, not everybody because not everybody needs this, but what are the levers in a podcast? Well, let's just say the basic you cannot model for most podcasts. Not all is sponsorship. People
are buying ads. Why are they buying ads? Because they want to sell products. What are some of the metrics that matter to someone trying to sell products? Let's assume for simplicity sake that we're talking about direct response. Let's say we're talking about app sumo. You're going to be tracking the numbers that you just mentioned, traffic, conversion, average order size. Now, let's say app sumo came to Tim Ferriss show and decided we want a sponsor. Hypothetically, let's say number one
I have to try the product. So I test every single product within reason. There's some enterprise stuff in which case I'll do a bunch of polling and determine how my audience feels. Like, 1 to 10, no 7 allowed. How strong would you recommend this to a friend? Do it off hours for the people who work at the company. Don't see it and can't spam it. Anyway, there are ways to do it if you don't test, but I generally test stuff. Let's say I test apps. You know, I'm like, great fucking product.
What is the additional 10%? The additional 10% I will look at the website and I'll say, how well does this convert? Because what is a nightmare scenario for me? Because one could say efficient, one could say lazy, one could say they're similar. If someone has a great product and I put time into a great read and I put it in front of my audience and then their website doesn't convert and they blame it on me. That's way too much brain damage, way too much wasted effort. Now I have
churn. They're like, well, your podcast didn't work and they leave and then I have to find another podcast sponsor. I might send my team to that sponsor, record a loom and say, would love to have you as a sponsor, but we'd like you to make these following changes to the website. At least to a unique landing page to improve conversion. We'd like you to improve in the following seven ways in the same way that that's 17 year old sent you a video, which is like, here's how these things
suck. I wouldn't word it that way, but I'd say we want you to convert as strongly as possible. We know our audience really well. This is how they're going to read your website. Here's what the flow looks like. These are two places where they're probably going to abandon the cart, fix, fix, fix. Doesn't take that long because we've done it a million times and then guess what? Then I have a sponsor last like a year, two years, three years and they spend millions of dollars instead of spending
a lot on the upfront and then churning. It sounds like a lot, but it's actually not that much effort if you have the right team. So let's hop back into the weeds of entrepreneurship. That sounds bad. On to the front lines, validation. What are some other means of validating your idea to try to ensure that you're not deluding yourself anymore than is helpful? I've done it the other way where I've spent six months, I built a site, betrk.com, spent six months, $100,000 on engineers.
And then I spent $10,000 flying to Vegas talking to a lawyer as a sports betting site. First of off, I don't gamble. Not a group is this for me to even start, launched it. No one came. I could have easily found that on a weekend instead of spending six months. And then this is the thing I'm like trying to tell people I've done it the other way. Maybe you need to go through the other way to find that truth for yourself, but there's another door. So two other ways that you can validate
business ideas that I really like. I would say the one that you really made famous ads, 90 page. The only thing that won, I don't like spending money. I don't have to. Ads cost money. And then you have to figure out the ad in 90 page, but it is a way like kettle and fire, you know, adjustments company. That's how it got started. I look at it. Bone broth ads. He found that there was super cheap term. How do 90 page people could buy and he's like, this is working. Now it's
a hundred million dollar business. Yeah. So he followed your method. Yep. The other method I would say is marketplaces. So where are people already spending money that they're raising their hand? So Etsy, Craigslist, Facebook, Amazon. And how can you put even a fake or real product ideally and see if anyone's going to buy it? So let's say you want to do like a digital equipment,
like microphones, cameras, whatever lighting business is a rental. You can go put that online right now on Craigslist in your local area or whatever site is local and see does anyone actually message you about it? And if they do, cool. Go get the product or figure out now you have a business or if they don't, okay, try something else out. So those are the other two ways outside of I would say the pre-selling validation method to seeing if you have actual customers who want what
you're doing. And the constraint of spending as little as possible will generally, this is very broad strokes, but in my experience and certainly the experience of a lot of people who are building businesses not mimicking the 1% of the 1% of the 1% right like the I can't get fit until I'm tom Brady, which is generally not a great approach, but the people who are building real businesses, businesses that produce a lot of cash very often test incredibly and expensively. If you look at
the origins of CrossFit, that's the case. I remember the very early super early days of CrossFit. So it's not a let's put 30 million dollars in and see what happens. It was prototype, iterate, prototype, iterate, small group, second location, considering business models, etc. I mean,
this is true in so many, so many, so many different places. Any other means of validation that you want to mention or an example of someone who used any one of those that comes to mind me, you're already mentioned Kettle and Fire, but yeah, I mean another way you could think of what's kind of silly is Facebook. I mean, Zuck copy, he didn't even invent it. This website and that wasn't his first business. He actually created a face thing that got banned by Harvard side to start again.
And he created Wirehog. No, I know these ones, but I don't know anything about that. Yeah, Wirehog was a Napster competitor. Okay, that didn't really do much, but again, one thing in the beginning of the book is how do you get going? And he at least got going in his third day, which was Facebook, or it's that Facebook.com. Believe he built it in a weekend, if not three days, it might give her take. And just by him, he sent an email, built a really quick sent email and then it went viral
instantly. Wasn't even his idea. He copied the Winkelvoss. Yeah. And there's just a lot of these ideas you're like, you start realizing it. Most of the biggest businesses didn't start big, like, okay, Google, two dudes at Stanford for a research project. That's interesting. Zach in a college dorm, Bill Gates in Albuquerque, shout out Albuquerque, working for someone
else, creating software. And it was by doing these things where you had validation very quickly and had success that people wanted it, led them then to continue it for extended periods of time. And that's possible. I think here's what happens though, Tim. If I may. People, this is the fucking problem, and everyone's like, my business is different. It's the unique one. I'm like, you're the unique one? Really? It's you. Okay, do it. Just go try it your way.
And then let's try maybe on now. I'll turn it away after six months with no results. So, corollary. Do the easy thing first. If you want to, okay, you really want to, you really want to do the hard way. Okay, fine. Like what you really want to do is like build the flashy website and like do the thing and hire a bunch of influencers and have girls and bikinis prancing around with your energy drink, whatever. Okay, fine. Maybe you could start though with a blog post. Maybe
you could start with an email. Maybe you could start with something that's very cheap, very fast, fast, fast, fast constraints. Are you hiding behind something big? Are you talking about the sexy photo shoot and the Super Bowl ad that you're never fucking going to do, not because you couldn't do it, but because you're hiding behind the big thing and you're not trying the small thing.
And what is the easy thing that you can do first? Do that. And this comes up all the time in my business when I'm talking with employees, for instance, who have already embraced this by this point of it. I'm like, we can do the hard thing. We can do the expensive thing. I'm not a burst to it. But what is something fast or something cheap that we can do first because of it works, then that is a game changer. And then we have these backup plans. I'll give you another example.
How can you keep your life incredibly simple? Well, in the case of podcasting in the beginning, I realized if I end up with tons of accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoices, net payment terms, etc. That will insert a lot of complexity into my life. So from the very beginning, I did something that a lot of folks that would never work, which was you prepay for all your ads. There's no you book and then you run it and then you pay us 30 days later and then that drags
out because it's a holidays or maybe you don't reply to email and then we're chasing you. There's none of that. You pay up front. That's it. And that is an example of let's try the easy thing first or the simple thing, the beneficial thing. If people say no, we can always go to that third eight because everyone does that. But let's try the unorthodox thing first in the sake of simplicity
and everyone's in a while it works. And that ended up being a key determinant, I think, of my ability to build and scale and most importantly sustain this for 10 years. My dad would always joke it's better to be chased for the money than you chase them. Better to be on that end. That's definitely how the AppSumo model has worked out. The idea with AppSumo just maybe a few more examples to give people like oh shit, I can really get going. We say now, not how. That's definitely from the book.
And so examples of this is the teams like we definitely need the engineers to build this first. Definitely. I'm like really? All right, let me give you two examples. So one of them was we wanted as part of our VIP memberships, we wanted to give out credits. So kind of like your event, how do we make so many $100 for our membership and no brainer? Well, we give you $100. So they're like, well, we need to build it. Right. We did the model fine. But let's go build it. I'm
like, no, no, no. What's the fastest way you can find out today? Let's email people who are not customers or people who canceled, give them free credit, tell them to buy your membership and if they buy their membership, they have free credit. They did it was a 17% conversion rate. Now we're
building that kind of stuff into the business. Great. You did it. And if it didn't work, you can ask those people why not or you can dress something else instead of us spending a week, two weeks, four weeks, a month, two months now product management designing it, all these other things. There's another example recently where we want to offer a new feature for this VIP membership the same thing. They're like, well, we need the engineers to build SSO single sign on so that you
can make it easy to log in. Again, have you asked a customer just go ask the customers to pay us for it. If they want this feature, see if they'll prepare for it. And if they do, great. We'll build it. If not, we're not going to build it. And that is something that you can keep doing whether you're 80 million or 100 million or a $1 business. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. A lot of the time just now, in terms of now, not how, right? We think oftentimes, and there's a place for this, but you know,
ready, aim, fire, sometimes it's ready fire aim. There's a fire. Right? Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire. All right. So we're going to take a hard left turn here because you mentioned before we started, you mentioned Hanukkah gifts. And a question I often ask is best purchases for under $50 under $100. What has made some impact because the goal is to give people listening some things that might be
helpful or interesting that are going to break the bank, right? What you got? All right. So Hanukkah or the Jewish Santa, aka Noah Kagan's here, the Raghuhanika, Holiday, Yalda, Kwanza, all the gifts, depending on whatever people want. And so these are my favorite things. I think almost every single thing here is under $40. Great. That I've brought for you. And by the way, you could totally give it back. You don't give it to you. And you're like, fuck, I really don't want this. Feel free to
be like, yeah, you're nay on it too. Okay. First off, this is my... I wasn't able to get the Amazon Basics one because it sold out, but this is a, I think, $14, $15 tiny travel backpack. And so I always leave one in my main suitcase. And every time you travel, you're like, oh, shit, I want to do a day trip, but I don't want to carry my computer backpack when I don't have anything else. So I always leave a similar one to this in my bag. So literally I was going to be
buying one of these in the next few weeks. So thank you. That's a yay. This is a yay. It's 100% a yay. Because as you said, you think you already have a backpack, but that thing's full of your laptop and all your shit and it's heavy. And you sometimes just want a day pack. Exactly. That's what this is. So this is a, thank you. Awesome. You like board games? This has been the go-to board game. Shot and Totten. Shot and Totten. It's $11.99. It must be... Oh, look at this. Okay. So I've never,
I've never played it. It's a more basic card. It's kind of like poker, but with cards. So you get all these different players and these... Like, it's happens to kilt. Explanation mode. That's a tagline. I like it. So I know you had the Tacocat game. I bought that because you're a five-boat Friday. Yeah. It's a fun game. Similar game. Basically, you lay out cards. It's a two-player game. And then you just play against for different... Each of the cards is about 10. You play three cards. I play
three cards. No, I have the better three set. Gets that card and whoever gets the most cards wins the game. That was a little fast. Amazing. Super awesome game. Shout out to our South-Polys. They want to brought that board game to me. Yeah. Thank you. And also, I want to highlight something here because I recognize something. So Shot and Totten, I was like, this must be German. So of course it is. And the Germans are very good at designing board games. And more precisely, Reiner Knitzea,
believe that's how you'd say his name, who designed this. Yeah. Is one of the most prolific game designers in his... Oh really? He's designed hundreds of games. And he's won all of the awards. And he has this incredible set of processes and sort of creative methods by which he's one of the most successful game designers of all time. So that's also cool to see his name on that. I didn't know that. Shot and Totten, one of my favorites. Thank you. You have element. You've tried element, right?
Oh yeah. Sponsor of the podcast too. I was going to be... You already have a bunch of it, don't you? Well, a little bit of food she got. Yeah, just like that. I brought you the citrus salt. Oh, I got a ton. Yeah, thank you. That is one of my favorite flavors. But yes. Element. I took it. I take it every day. They sponsor me too. Do you invest in them? No, no, no. I didn't. All right. I couldn't get it in time. So I just printed it out. Dude, this is shoutouttinin.com.
One of my best friends in the world. What is it? This is... He was going to talk to me about this. It's basically travel glippers. I'm a huge nail clipper. And I'm very particular about my nail clippin. Like all these fucking Walgreens CVS. They're just shit. And I finally got this because I on his recommendation and it's a game changer. I wasn't going to give you mine, but that's kind of this too weird. Yeah, be a little gritty. Little weird. So this is going to your address. Okay,
I'm a 39.99. It's literally this big. Okay, so it's like the size of your pinky finger. Size your pinky finger. You can't... It's very low profile. Super low profile. And for people who want to find this, how would they answer this? This is a... This is a Zwilling. Zwilling. Oh, it's a Zwilling. Yeah. For the kitchen knife company. Exactly. And this is fire. So super tiny, but it opens up and the sharpness of it, which I'm very particular about, you can ask my girlfriend. She's like,
you always cut your nails. I'm like, yeah, I hate long nails. I love this guy. So big shoutout for this because I've always been looking for like the perfect one. Wow. 39.99. What is it? Zwilling. All right. We'll put this in the show notes for everybody. Along with the other Hanukkah gifts. Hanukkah holiday. I think you mean I'm ready, but I brought you my favorite... I'm memoir book of all time, million miles and a thousand years. I am actually going to admit,
I have never even heard of this book. So tell me more. This guy, Donald. Okay. And quote from Anlamot, who was the author of one of my favorite books also. What book is that? Word by bird on creative process. Oh, by the way, you're Julia Cameron artist's way. Oh, thanks. That book is... Yeah, it's a good one. It's a good one. Yeah. So Anlamot has an amazing quote on the cover of this. So Donald Miller. Donald Miller. And this is how I learned to
live a better story is the subtitle. That's cool already. A million miles in a thousand years. This is the book I gift the most. Okay. And it inspired me to bike across America. But the bigger concept for him out there is that we all want to live a life without regret. We all want to live... Not even with regret. I don't know where about that. We all want to live an interesting life. And so how do you do it? Hmm. And so Donald doesn't... And he's a Christian author. Talk about Jesus. I'm Jewish.
Like, and I love it. Still, it's still my most favorite book. And he's definitely... I love him. What he teaches you though is it's not necessarily like here's a necessity of the tactic. But how do you approach life to be more interesting? So how are you around more interesting people? How do you do more interesting things? Like he didn't like his life. And he was like, I'm just going to bike across America.
And so he joined a group and then bike across America. And he by doing interesting things, he let it interesting life. And I think it's similar to the four hour work week and a million-dollar week and where you're reading your like, I'm gonna go do something. And I think this really is that fulfilling an interesting life. Amazing. I'll give a little teaser then. All sense. So here's the top of the back of the book. After writing a successful memoir, Donald Miller's life stalled.
During what should have been the height of his success, he found himself unwilling to get out of bed, avoiding responsibility, even questioning the meaning of life. But when two movie producers proposed turning his memoir into a movie, he found himself launched into a new story full with risk, possibility, beauty, and meaning. And then I'll just give the first portion of the first sentence that then leads after that, which is a million miles and a thousand years chronicles,
Miller's rear opportunity to edit his life into a great story. Goes from sleeping all day to writing his bike across America. Amazing. All right. Yeah, man. And we all can live an interesting life. It's not hidden. It's not hidden. It's so far so good, man. I brought you back in old school. This in old school and our team was looking up things. This is what you put on your blog in 2011. Oh my God. One of your favorite times. I know what this is. This is hilarious. Okay.
This is like a monkey sling shot and it screams when you shoot it across the room. Wow. I haven't seen one of these in a long time. This is a early recommendation that you put on your site. This must have been from the Pleasine era on my blog way back in the day. Every day, a little research. I'm so excited. I know you like that. I got one from my house. It is fucking annoying. Oh, it'll drive you nuts. It's like driving you completely insane.
But it's a fun toy. I got it for other people for the holidays. And I think it's like, I'm like giving it to them and getting the hell out of their house because the screaming's loud, flying monkey. Yeah. No, it is not. It is not with volume. Thank you. Yeah, man. Happy holidays. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I can put all of that into the backpack that you gave me. That's also. Exactly. This is the last one. I love my pilot G2.3. I need to get
sponsored by these guys. I know you have pen that I've seen you have pens all around, but this is just like everywhere I travel. I always have with me here. I bring them to Spain, have it all around the house, boxes of them. Yeah, this is one of my favorite pens. And I needed one. And I use blue. I almost always use blue instead of black because I copy it a lot. And if you're printing stuff out in black,
blue just makes it easier. So nailed it. Thank you. Hi, I mean, how did you 2.3? All right. Where to go from here? I mean, what have we missed? We've talked. We've gone from the philosophical to hire my mom.com to nail flippers to bicycling across the United States. Anything else that you'd like to mention? Well, actually, let me ask you a question that relates to things I'm considering just to ask you for help. So YouTube, how do you think about YouTube? And do you think I should do
more video? Because I have conflicting feelings about it. As you know, and then there's always that voice, not always, but there's that voice maybe 10% of the time, which is just like, are you just being weak? Are you just afraid to compete? Right. Which comes up with various things like maybe you're intimidated by the production quality, the ability that you see here. So you're just not willing to play the game because you don't like losing. That's less of the time. That's like 10,
20% of the time. Thoughts on YouTube and specifically thoughts on if you think I could do YouTube in a way that would be fun and energizing in and of itself. So in other words, something that I would find intrinsically rewarding even if it doesn't pop. Right. I'm curious to voice in your head. Oh, that's that's with this YouTube. With like, yeah, with a 10 or 20%, well, it's not all the time. I was just talking to a friend of mine about this yesterday. I like competing. I've always been a
good competitor. Right. It drives me and I enjoy the stakes of competition in sports. I enjoy the stakes of competition in a million different ways. Like it drives me to be better. And it genuinely is something that I derive pleasure from. Like I get a lot out of competition. So there are things that, for instance, you know, at some point, I would love to compete in our tree and think there are some interesting opportunities there. I'm a happier person when I compete in some capacities.
So being very competitive, seeing the market get really saturated with podcasts and seeing some very good people come in and how it's skewed pretty heavily into entertainment. So it is gone from, I think, what I find plays to my strengths, which is mostly kind of education, practical, tactical, etc. skewed pretty heavily towards entertainer bust. You can have some of the how-to and prescription, but you must be entertaining to cut through the noise. And I can be funny
occasionally, but it's not my, it's not something I do professionally. There are people who are far better. Yeah, Prost. Prost. Yeah, like Rogan. I mean, he's pro. I like this is a super power that he's honed. And there are many others, a lot of entertainers, comedians, actors, actresses who are really good behind the mic and front of the camera. So I think there is certainly part of me
because I like to compete, generally hate losing. And you have to be careful how you define losing because you could find yourself caught in sort of a Venus fly trap of FOMO and all sorts of issues, which I don't contend with that much, to be honest. That voices one of, are you sure that you are opting out of this for good reasons or is it because you just don't want to compete? Great coaches don't give answers. By the way, they just ask questions.
All right. So yeah, you're reminded me you're not getting that out here. Yeah, we'll talk a little coaches. We'll do the 48 hour challenge. Maybe we can put front load a little bit of that. But there's the question around this YouTube thing. What would make the choice obvious? I'm being honest, I think the choice is obvious, which is I don't do it. I mean, I think that, I love that. I mean, I think it's pretty straightforward.
Harsely because I see no way to make YouTube pop without compromising my privacy more than I already have from a facial recognition perspective. And that is already a challenging aspect of my life from a privacy security perspective, like a lot of weird stuff happens. If anybody's curious, just read a blog post I wrote, which is titled, I think it's 11 reasons not to become famous.
And that'll outline a lot of the issues, by the way, that people who are just starting out maybe a year prior to that coming out have by and large, I'm in a number of private WhatsApp groups with various folks and a lot of very, very successful creators. And they're like, oh yeah, check, check, check, like write down the list. I've had to deal with all of those things. So it's not unique to me. And there are much bigger celebrities, of course, I'm not Taylor Swift or
something. But I actually really like my privacy. So I think that if I had to make a snap judgment decision right now, it's like, yeah, I'm not going to use that as a primary tool. It's appealing, though, because I recognize how effective it can be. If you do a great job, but there's also part of me that looks at it, I'm like, well, much like choosing a business, much like choosing
anything, a sport to play. If you don't have an advantage, and that advantage often is that you really enjoy doing it on some level, you're not going to have, at the very least, the staying power to persist over time. You're not going to have the endurance. So it's like, if you love golf, maybe you should consider doing something with golf. Instead of being like, well, I think Midwestern moms, even though I'm from New York City and I'm a male, I think Midwestern moms really need this
when they're kid is four years old. Like maybe that shouldn't be your business because if there's a Midwestern mom who has a four year old, who's got nothing but passion in her veins for that, she's going to beat you. She's going to own you, especially over time. So that's another way that I think about it. But I also assume that there may be things hiding in plain sight that I'm missing. I got suggestions for you that I think will be low effort high results. But before we get into that,
what's your goal? What's my goal? Yeah, what would you say your goal is? I mean, I think the goals around it would be to experiment with one of the few means that I see of expanding the podcast. Like I do a lot with this podcast in terms of pulling interesting levers in the world. Right? My guess is a means of attempting to the best of my ability to really impact individual lives, but also on a macro level to really change conversations around say psychedelics and
psychedelics is therapies also discussing risks. But there are many different things I would like to introduce people to and the larger my audience is, I should say qualified audience, and I'm not convinced that YouTube necessarily will contribute to the profile of my, say, audience
as it stands today, TBD. I think it probably could. If I could expand the reach of the podcast, and if I'm talking to most podcasters who have been around for a while, given a lot of the platform changes and given the black box nature of a lot of the analytics, once you hit a critical mass, it becomes very challenging to grow your podcast. There is nobody after two drinks that they've
been on with me who says anything otherwise. And there is a grace period in the beginning when you have that kind of meteoric up into the right, but it's like this is going to be an exaggeration. It's like once you become like when you're becoming Google, sure, you can have that like double triple 10x every year growth, but when you get to a certain point, it becomes more challenging on a percentage basis to influence the size of the, you know, the mothership. So the goal, and I'm not
convinced that YouTube is the only way, but it's to extend the reach of the podcast. At this point, there are other metrics I could pull in, but let's use that for simplicity. I think that's a great question is how do you stay hungry when you're full? Or do you need to stay hungry? I think that's another way. That's a great point. It's like what happens when you finally have the money, or when you have the audience. And so how do we rethink what that vision and that purpose is? I noticed
that was a shift for myself. We're like, oh, if I finally get money, so I got, like, dude, you got it. You don't need to be angry about Mark and Facebook anymore. I know. For myself, right? It was therapy and a lot of work to be able to get to the point where it's like, how do I want to spend that day? And it's like my day can talk about money and startups and business with people like yourself and learn how you think about things, run apps, zoom, we're promote tools.
Wow, I can do this every day until I never die. Yeah. And so I think being clear on the goal of where it goes, like for me with my content, I just want to keep doing it for 10 years. So I'm going to 10 years, 10 year playing. And so that's a balance of I like doing just business stuff. I don't do bouncy balls. I don't blow for worries. I'm not in prison. There's no squid games unless it's a business related one. Yeah. And it's like, how do I do that with what I want?
And what audience is going to be benefited by for a long period of time? And that's, I'd say, specifically with content, my, my interest. Okay. So what might be sort of low effort, high reward experiments? So a few things. Number one, who says you have to be on the camera now when you're doing this? Yeah. So I was thinking that I just don't know what the alternative looks like. Well, it's just you're asking the question, but then your guess is the one getting
featured. So there's actually a reduction of the amount of exposure as well as on your YouTube thumbnails. It doesn't even show you. It just was the guest. Yeah. Yeah. And so there could be, there could be wide shots, but it really could be a show where it's more featuring the person you're talking to. Yeah. Totally. So that is, that is one massive thing that in your channel, right?
You can actually have great content, but it's not maybe you on camera. It's something how much, like I can tell, but how much are you putting into like producing your YouTube videos? Ah, I honestly don't even know. At this point, I want to be the tools we use shape us, right? So I
depends on what we mean by production. I'm okay with high production value. What I have seen on YouTube in the last year and a half, two years, especially is a lot of fishing for clipable moments with like the most salacious click bitty stuff used as headlines and text overlays. And I do not want to shape myself into looking at my 10th through the lens of like, when can I
clip something into the Jerry Springer fight scene? Yeah. Yeah. My baby mama, you know, like I don't want to, yeah, suddenly go fishing for that because I will start to affect the macro level. Right? Like I know people who play on their podcasts now around like the clips, the clips. And so the drive becomes the clips. Now I'm also, I think longer form YouTube. This is something where I'm on call if I'd to say, but I have had clips on different platforms that have had like
a hundred million views. I mean, I've had a couple go nuts, which is a credit to my team. However, with those clips, which have clear attribution to this podcast, I have seen effectively zero percent conversion to increased downloads. So the value capture from the platforms is a very subtle thing, but the amount of value that platforms are capturing, they capture is all
that they get off the value all the outside. That's the first is creator value capture is something I have paid attention to and continue to pay attention to, but why do you ask about the like how much I'm putting into it? Coming back on like small effort high results. So would you keep saying or the underlying subtext is that you want to grow the podcast? Yeah, it seems like growing the podcast is it and it's not clear that YouTube actually makes a difference. So I would
wonder what have you done in the past that grew the podcast? I mean, I would also say if I had to pick and choose at this point, frankly, just in terms of like, okay, winter is coming not to be all dramatic about it. But if I'm looking at keeping in mind, too, it's not like I have any insider
information, but I do know a lot of people in tech who work on a lot of things. And if I'm thinking about defensibility, long term viability, reaching my 1000 true fans and hopefully 1000 or 1 million true fans, 2 million true fans, you know, I mean, we're already in the millions with the newsletter and so on, but I would choose the newsletter over the podcast at this point. How can you come back to I think how we like to approach is how can you experiment? So let me give you specifics. How can
you experiment with YouTube to drive a newsletter? So one, yeah, I don't know, you're, no, no, but I think that's where I would look at it because you're thinking YouTube to podcast, but maybe YouTube to newsletter. So specifically thumbnails, not really that tight, your titles, not really that tight because you probably don't have pros like we have a professional person that just does title and thumbnails.
And we have a thumbnail specific just designer for the team. And it is interesting. Do you want to compete in it? Maybe not, but I think you're already doing it. You have cameras here. Yeah, I do. I mean, this is passing that to a team that chops it up. So for me, I show up to the video. They have the pre-production done. I've already chosen the topics. We've agreed on that pre-production done. I
show up, do my part and then it just that happens, but they're testing thumbnails. They're testing titles. There's a shorts team that does all the short work. And what I my recommendation is is that I think you can invest a little more in that and then just put that into your newsletter. All of YouTube is is a lead gen, lead gen always sounds so creepy, but like is a generation of audience that you can
then have as a frequent audience in your newsletter? Yeah, I wonder. I wonder. I mean, we're testing. I know we've tested different subscription options. I don't want to take us to to a foreign field. Yeah. So again, I think you can do have shorts team probably actually a dedicated agency. I wouldn't even bring it in-house. I can recommend someone. I would also consider just having someone that does your titles and thumbnails on a consistent basis so that as you're doing great
content to someone want to watch this six hour interview. Yeah, a lot do, but give them some shorts because they see great shorts. They're like, oh shit, where's more of that? And then go to the video. They said the video then in the videos, it's like, let me go to the newsletter and everything is around the newsletter. Now in the podcast, I always again in business, everything's about what's the goal and what's the thing that actually makes impact on the goal? So on podcast, I do think you
get potentially going on other shows. Could be. Yeah, it all works. Yeah. If you want to do it, that's an important part that you said. I don't want it. I want to do it. I don't like, have to be mindful of what we want to actually commit to because that's how people burn out. It's doing the thing they don't want to do to the goal. They may or may not actually want. I'm aware that the drive to compete can lead me to do things that are not actually my best interest.
Just because you can win at a game or think you could win doesn't mean you should participate in that game. That is how you create a life you don't want to live. Yeah. And so, yeah, I don't feel, I don't feel rushed, TBD to be continued. So I may, we may pick up offline chatting about that. But let's make sure we talk about a few things. So two things. So the first is, and we don't have to spend a ton of time on this, but spend a little bit of time. Lessons from spending more than a
million dollars on coaching. So I've got all sorts of bullets here. CEO coach, biz coach, boxing coach, therapist, health coach, marketing coach, dating coach, three different ones, Hebrew and now Spanish coach. And the question I want to ask is related to all these inputs because we also talked about the top three bottom three, the weekly, the monthly, the Q1, the this, the that. And what we're talking about is, you know, I've seen many examples of people, including myself,
get inundated with inputs. This happens also when people read too many books or they have too many advisors for the startup. Now they have 20 people, they respect, or 10 people, they respect, even four people, they respect, giving them conflicting recommendations. Or it's just too many recommendations. If you have a hundred nearest resolutions, you have no nearest resolutions. So the first thing I'm curious about is like, how for yourself do you choose what to act on outside
of the business, KPIs and stuff? Let's just say, let's break these down. Let's take my marketing coach. So I work with Moody Glasgow and Gold message to him on LinkedIn. Now, when you think about coaching, I think instead of having mentors, let's have very specific coaches in very specific areas that I'm weekend or people around me. We have a lot of coaches for the team, every almost every single leader in the executive team of AppSum has a coach. And with Moody, it was going to him and
saying, I'm not as strong on some of the data stuff. I'm not as strong as some of the marketing research stuff and branding stuff. Those are my specific areas of need. And when we meet, let's really focus on that. Now, this is really the interesting caveat with coaches. You're getting a coach because it's the things you don't want to do or the things you're not aware of. And so you have to be mindful of resistance. The resistance is almost always the direction I've noticed that
ends up happening. And I just maybe don't always do it right away. So Moody, for instance, is really want to do a lot of surveys. I like Moody. I don't do surveys, man. Just let me go like put up some ads. Let me go do the school more affiliate marketing. Let's do more video ambassador sponsorship. He's like, who are you doing that for? I don't know. Dude, I don't want to do research. Let's go do stuff. I'm a doer. And so his balance of these things is saying,
let's go do some research. So we know who we're doing it for and be very specific who the customer is. Now, you asked the question of inputs. I think the inputs need to tie to your main priorities. That's it. So what is the priorities I'm saying? So within our marketing team right now, it's getting a VP of marketing. It's just content and it's brand awareness. Also video ambassadors
getting more of those. And so within inputs, I'm just like, I'm specifically going over those specific problems and saying, walk me through how you're normally thinking about solving this. And then he normally is coaching me and we're having a discussion around it. What I have found with most of the inputs is that I end up doing them almost always six months later because I resist them and I'm going to do what I want to do anyways, just like most people here maybe want to start
business their way. Then six months later, they think about the coach. The other thing with him, specifically on taking inputs, I record all my coaching calls every single one, every single one. And then I go and listen to him again, not all the time, but selectively depending on if I'm trying to learn something, noticing how I'm resisting, noticing where I'm paying attention, and that helps me be able to be a better student with my coach. So coming back full circle with
coaching in general, how to choose the input. I think it comes back to my priorities and specific problems I'm going to them with. And a lot of times it's been sitting with the answer that they bring back to me. So how has as one example from the bullet list, so CEO coach, would that be Dan from reboot? It's Dan Pud as well as Aiman Al Abdulah. So Dan has more feelings and then Aiman's more strategic. So how would you describe some of the benefits from working with those guys?
Just in terms of looking at the rearview mirror, because I can think of a number of coaches I've worked with. It's like, oh, I picked up the whole body, yes, from that person. That ended up being really important. And then you give another person, oh, okay, I took this thing away from them, and it was very valuable. What are some of the things you would point to? Let's take Aiman Al Abdulah,
for instance, I am going over 2024 strategy. And so I talked to customers, I talked to partners, I talked to the team, we look at historically what we've done and we put together one page of plan. And one of the ideas is we have original products. We basically create affordable low entry versions of popular products. So MailChimp, we have an alternative, Calamely, we have an alternative.
And I went to him and I said, hey, we're going to let me walk over. The one thing I'm uncertain of is 2024 and around what we should do with new products and brought it to him, walked over it, not you know, I'm so convinced that we need to build a bunch of new things. I'm like, do this new stuff. It's going to be so sick. We're going to build a loom alternative. We're going to build this other product alternative, maybe a docuSign alternative. And he's like, and because I have a mirror,
I have him. And I like coaches who've done the things I want to do. He's ran the business, he's former CEO. So you know, what's working in your products that you guys have built? I'm like, oh, we have this one product, it's crushing it. Okay. So you have a product crushing it, and you want to do a new one. How come? Oh, my God, that's good. We're not doing a new product yet. We're doubling the team so that we can have a core team keep
investing in what's working instead of moving off to the new thing. And so that was a really powerful example of him just asking questions based on strategy and understanding our business based on something I was like, oh, here's my thing. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's my problem. What should we do next year? And then he's redirected me and I think in a very effective way. So that was one example of him. We talked about Dan Putt just having an outlet,
frankly, you've gone to therapy. I'm still good at therapy. So with Dan, we were talking on Monday about he was just asking me how you feeling about the future. I was like, I feel really unclear this what we're talking about. I don't feel like the whole team and myself really are crystal clear and fought what we want to do in Q1. Huh. What do you want to do about that? I'm going to set up a meeting right now for tomorrow so that we can all be in the same page for Q1 and their scorecards
for each of the for the company and then each of the separate teams. And that was from a five minute question with Dan. So it's really just thinking about all these different areas. Like Moody two weeks ago was like, no, we're trying to hire VP marketing. That's one of your number one priorities in the marketing team and you're not doing shit. I was like, I know because I'm really busy on the book and my girlfriend. He's like, well, what do you want to do about it? Because that's not
moving forward. What you said to priority. So I think a lot of inputs come back to what I'm bringing to them as what I believe is the top problems. And he said, what are solutions around it? It's like, can you help me do it? He's like, yeah, actually, I'm really good at it. I've hired a lot of VP's. He's been to see him out big companies. And so now he's spearheading it. And I'm not the bottleneck. Have you bootstrapped this or have you taken financing for or investment for absolutely? Okay.
Now you mentioned a board. Do you have a board of directors or an advisory board? Maybe I'm maybe hearing you. No, no, you're you're having a crackly. So maybe taking a step back, how everyone can do this for themselves and copy this is think about what's the weakest part of your business and think about who would have the five companies, even three companies that might have the person that you could get to help you with that. And then just go look up those people
and LinkedIn and then offer them a thousand dollars to talk to you for one hour. And that's how we've done it. Okay. All right. So this is a group of people being paid for their time to help give you various types of strategic. Yeah. And so you can set up different retainer agreements. You don't always have to do a thousand. It could be more. It could be less. So we have a CFO advisor. As I said, from Mailchimp, we have a chief people officer from Duolingo. Shut up. Christine. Yeah. We have a
CR advisor from Outdoorsy. And then on the board, we comment saying them as well, Roger T. Schmucker G from Indeed, because I'm very good at starting businesses and I've struggled. Now that there's more people, Roger T. Schruins, a 2000 person organization. Yeah. Quick question just to zoom out though. So because you have CEO coach, but the CEO coach is really two coaches. I have a CEO coach and a business coach. There we go. And then you have marketing coach, marketing coach,
and then you have the board. So I'm wondering what you get from the board that you don't get from those other things. What I have found most helpful from a board is one accountability. So it's just like, here's what I said, I do this quarter. Here's how I did. And then secondly, it's providing an outside opinion of people that are thinking differently. So normally every time I go to the board
meetings, it's like, why aren't you growing faster? You're not growing fast enough. And then so it's trying to figure out what things we should be doing differently based on the pace that that personally I would like to run the company. But a lot of times almost all the coaches are challenging in some capacity. They're finding things that you're not necessarily thinking about or doing. And they bring that to you, you know, you may not want to hear it. So let's jump to the grand finale.
Speaking of accountability. So 48 hour challenge. Yeah, let's do it. Me and Tim love people taking action for themselves. And I think I said it earlier, is that the reason Tim's audience likes Tim is because you give them things they can get results for themselves with. And that's why people listen to you. And among other things, I think that's probably one of the top. So I want people to take action from some sort of they've made it this far. I want people to see what they can do and how
they can change life for 48 hours. So this episode comes out within 48 hours of launch. I want to see how people can change their life in either starting a business. And if you already have a business, what can you do in your business in 48 hours? And I want you to leave a comment on Tim's blog and hashtag 48 hour challenge in the comment. So that makes sure you're paying attention. So Tim the blog slash podcast find this episode. You're going to do a little work. No, Kagan. It's not
that hard. Put in the guest name. It'll pop right up. Go to the newest one. Leave a comment with hashtag hashtag 48 hour challenge. And what result have you done in the past 48 hours? What can you do? Maybe you have a certain amount of customers. Maybe you have one customer. Maybe you posted videos. Ideally, here's what I'm really looking for. I'm looking for the people who are willing to put a little more extra effort. Like if they've taken and you can follow a million dollar weekend,
you can do whatever it is you want. See how far you can go in 48 hours. And I think there's going to be some people who are like, I made $10,000 from zero. What's the price? The price is an all-inclusive paid trip one day with me helping you with your business, whether you're starting, whether you're going in Barcelona, Spain this year. So we'll be delivered within six months. So I'll fly you out
no matter what country you're in the world. I'll put you up in a hotel and we'll have 24 hours together and be able to change your life. If they want to scale their business, they want to just go to the beach. We can do that if they want to do cycling. But the idea is that if you limit your time, even if you have a growing business, I want people to apply. How far can you go in 48 hours? What can you do?
In the equivalent of a weekend. Which we all have 48 hours. Any other recommendations for people who hear this or are like, I'm excited. I want to give it a go. Any other specific, catalytic ideas, anything at all that you like to add to that. So again, folks, you're going to go to Timed Up Blog, slash podcast, look up Nookagan, go to this episode. There'll be a blog post for it. And then you're leaving a blog comment with hashtag 48 hour challenge 48 hour challenge. If you forget that,
they're going to be probably a lot of comments. So you'll be disqualified if you don't do that. Follow the rules. Any length limits or anything on this? No, I will speaking of it. I actually just saw this on Facebook. I printed it out for you. Do you remember the Tim Ferriss experiment? This was Cindy. So Cindy was someone who followed our material from one Tim show. Yeah, this process. That's right. And she changed her life in a very short amount of time.
I heard this was documented. Not everyone was documented. She sent me a video too. Oh, amazing. Oh my god. I got a video for you. Blast from the past. So she sent a video where... A lot of events. So she has a video. So 10 years ago, I mentored under Tim Ferriss's wing, which was the catalyst to me stepping into
the entrepreneurship journey. And I have to say I'm so grateful. I did that. I'm so grateful for Tim and Noah because ever since that day, 10 years ago, I've been able to be the leader that I truly want to be. I have my own company now. I have tons of people coming to me for support. They want to grow and scale their businesses, their companies, learning how to build inclusive communities for their brand. And so it's been very fun to how to where my network has grown.
Like they say your network is your net worth, right? And so I look back at those moments where I work with Tim. And I'm like, wow, I have grown so much, literally. And what Tim teaches has lifelong benefits because the way that Tim thinks, the way the concepts around the deal concept, the EAL has definitely been instilled into my life. And so sometimes I think about when I move into the world, I'm like, hey, how would Tim think about this? Because I know that like being an
entrepreneur could be really overwhelming. But the thing that I have learned is that to keep things very simplified and results driven. So anyways, I'll say thank you again to Tim Ferris. It's definitely been a journey for me. Sometimes not easy, but it's definitely been a very fulfilling journey for myself. And actually, yeah, maybe my family just got back from Thailand two months ago. So, like I said, I've just been living the life. So yeah, thank you.
That's amazing. But I was someone that you were able to get started. Yeah, yeah. And we probably had roughly one or two days. I mean, it was not a lot of time. We had a little bit of time and it was constantly for a TV show. So you're stopping, you're starting, you're starting to start. If you add up the total number of hours, that's wild. That's super cool. Same with Daniel Bliss, who was on your blog when we helped him. He was a
postal worker. He was actually able to leave, to move to Thailand. He was sick. So I wasn't able to get a video of him talking about some of his results. But I think the reality for when out there, he asked for some tactics and tips is y'all have your phones, y'all have the ability to text, call, go to people in person, see who you have in your network like Cindy, really like yoga. And just by getting going, maybe yoga is not the million dollar business. And maybe she doesn't
need a million dollar business, but she got that going. That's a letter now 10 years later to be able to have her own business. That's wild. I'm just looking at this, which I haven't seen. And she sold out her event. That was original. Getting started the original. And I'll just read this because I think it's worth reading. Of course. Well, first of all, congratulations, Cindy.
That's so fun. So here's just a portion. The trick I learned while mentoring with Tim and Noah is to keep things as simple as possible, focus on the most leverageable and important thing that would yield the fastest all caps and best results. So this is after she mentioned she sold out her event. And she says, would I have sold out this event in 36 hours if I'd used paid ads? No, all caps. Would I have sold out this event if I'd gone around to find the nicest most expensive place to
rent? No. And then in parentheses, I got a free office space instead through a colleague and brought my discolites. Would I have sold it out if I just sat in my chair complaining that there wasn't enough time? No. Would I have sold out if I reached out to people who didn't know me? No. It went on and on and on. And that's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah. That's wow. 10 years later still going. Good for her. And so it's interesting to think for the other people who change their life in 48 hours
from listening to this one episode where they'll be in 10 years totally. And it works. People have done it with past appearances. People have done it with writing that you've shared on the blog. And now you've encapsulated it all after a lot more experimentation. Many more businesses. And for years. Many more years. In the books of the book is a million dollar weekend subdued all the surprisingly simple way to launch a seven figure business in 48 hours. People can find
that on the website million dollar weekend dot com. If people want to interact with you online, do you have any preferred socials or anything else you'd like to point people to? The website's great. We can dot com. Yeah. Also looking at no Kagan. That's everywhere. No Kagan everywhere. So million dollar weekend dot com. And again, if you want to throw your hat in the ring and give the 48 hour challenge a shot, listen to this episode. Certainly check out the book, but suppose
you don't have to check out the book, right? You just have to do something. And hashtag 48 hour challenge in the blog comment on the blog post associated with this episode. Noah, good endurance. Amazing what ketones will do for your brand. I cheated. But thank you for the time. Always great to see you. Great to see you. Congratulations on all the crazy success. I had no idea that it had grown in the way that it's grown. And what fun amazing Barcelona life is great. Yeah. But is there anything
else you would like to add Noah before we land the plane? I was thinking about how awesome my girlfriend is and one of the message I was thinking for everyone out there is just a little bit more kindness for ourselves. If everyone can just even today like give themselves a little bit of kindness. Like, you know, I came a few minutes late and I was like, oh, you're late. What are you doing? It's like, and I think for all of us, just a little bit more kindness and make the world a
better place for ourselves and for everyone else here here. That is definitely true. And also, it will just preserve the gas and the tank too. You know, life is short, but life is also long in a lot of ways. So spare your calories when you can be kind to recharge yourself and others. And you're going to have off days too. There are days when you're going to wake up and you know, as I've heard said before, it's like if you wake up and you meet an asshole and a given day,
that person's an asshole. If you wake up and everyone's an asshole, you might be the asshole. And they're going to be those days. So just make a little bit of extra effort. No, thank you so much. This is fantastic. Check it out folks. Million Dollar Weekend. We will put links to everything in the show notes, Tim Duplox slash podcast. And until next time, thanks for tuning in everybody. See you soon. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is
five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.
It often includes articles on reading, books on reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on. They get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts, guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to
TimDuplox slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.log slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and seat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm
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