Advice We Gave To 20 Something Millionaires, Modern Founders Will Be Half Influencer Half Founder, Every Company Will Become Half Media Company Half The Original Business What Eric Learned From Disappearing

0:01What is advice we'd give to our 20 something year old self? and this is more for entrepreneurs, people are trying to become entrepreneurs. What would you say? It would be different from what I would have gave to myself versus what I would give today. Okay. You want both? Let's do both, yeah. So I would have told myself, stick with the big TAM. So total addressable market. You have to penetrate one. You don't have to innovate and stick with it for a very long time. So pretty much have laser focus on something that's really big and give it 10 plus years. because I switched too many times when I was earlier.

0:36And you have a really good Charlie Munger quote that you posted on Instagram, I think two, three days ago in a story about waiting. The best returns are made by not buying or selling. It's by - The money is made in waiting. In waiting, yeah. And I totally agree with that. If I look at the majority of my success, it's come from the businesses that have just been around for a very long time and just waiting it out. The good economies, the bad economies. And that's what I would have told myself. But if I was dealing with someone who is 20 something years old, because I see still quite a few of these people at conferences, and I actually get way less questions from these people about life and career compared to what I used to.

1:19And my answer to them would be rely a lot less on AI, not from an aspect that AI is not here to stay. I think it's amazing technology, but I think a lot of these young entrepreneurs are getting too reliant on AI in which they're asking it for every little piece of business advice or coaching advice, and they look at it as gospel. And whether you're getting that, it's crawling the web. It doesn't, who do you know where it's really pulling from? And sure, some of the sources are cited, but it's not like you're getting advice from Sam Altman specifically or Mark Andreessen. And even if you did, they still don't have enough context on your life.

1:58Exactly. And I think it's really important not just getting advice, but you have to look at who you're getting the advice from. I know someone who has a ton of pharmacies, you and I both know. And at one point, their business was doing like, I don't know, like four or five hundred million a year. Yeah, four or five hundred million a year in revenue. They're crushing. Sadly, the company went bankrupt. They invested too heavily in technology instead of just realizing it's a traditional pharmacy business and there's nothing wrong with it. They try to go the quote unquote technology route. But if I wanted pharmacy related stuff, I would definitely go to him and ask him for advice because he's been through it.

2:36He's seen what works, see what doesn't. And more importantly, he's failed. He's built a lot of revenue, but he failed and he can tell you what to avoid. But I wouldn't go and ask him about running my software company. It doesn't matter that he built something that does 500 million a year and he built most of it without venture dollars, which is impressive. I think he got to over 100 million without venture capital. I would not ask him how to build my software company. I think the advice is gonna be not useless, but close enough to not being great. Yeah, I'll tell you what I told these three guys.

3:10It's funny because it's like three Asian entrepreneurs and they're asking me a lot of questions, right? And it's like, one, I'm like, the reason I'm doing this right now is to pay it forward. And I always feel like it's your job once you start to accumulate at least some level of success to pay it forward to the next generation, right? I think we've both always been like that. But I did say something that's similar. I said, look, you gotta focus on one thing. In your early 20s, your mid-20s, you're gonna try a bunch of different things, that's okay. But once you find the one thing, you gotta lock in on it and really go deep.

3:39My mistake is I tried too many different things and I tried to do seven different things at once. And that's actually not success at the end of the day. That's the first thing I said. The second thing I said is, I remember when I was 23, I called up an entrepreneur. I said, what's the biggest impact, like decision that you made? And he's like joining entrepreneurs organization. And it's not necessarily entrepreneurs organization, but it's surrounding yourself with like-minded people, right? You do that, I do that. EO is kind of my foray into that and then joining different groups and then forming my own groups too.

4:06And us doing events together or like speaking at events, you start to find your tribe. And then once you find your group of like eight to 10 people who you love, you hang out with these people. Maybe at least once a year, you guys go on a trip and then grow old with these people. Because it's really like, as we get older, you realize that it is just friends and family that ultimately matter long-term. So I said that and like, stay humble too at the very end of it. Like I said, look, you have a bunch of creators here and things like that, right? The reason why some of them are really, they can be a little more arrogant or maybe even insecure is because they're not secure with who they are yet, right?

4:39But you and I know a lot of business people have achieved the pinnacle and they're still very humble as they're like, very like, oh shucks, like, you know, type of people, right? And I said, stay humble forever and find a peer group and focus for a very long time. And the final thing I said, this is a Winston Churchill quote, is if you're going through hell, keep going. Because that's literally just what life is. I agree with that. These young entrepreneurs are going in a very different world. You were talking, I think, I don't know, like four or five months ago, maybe six months ago, how one day there's going to be a solo founder unicorn.

5:18You saw the one that Wix bought for$80 million. I put it here. $80 million acquisition, one employee. But go ahead. No, eight employees. Eight employees? Yeah, it was eight employees. I just saw their employee count jump a lot in the last couple months or so. Even under 10 is still amazing. It's still amazing. But it goes back to what you're saying. That's still a far cry from a billion dollars. but it's headed in the right direction. You very rarely see any company getting bought for 80 million with eight employees. They typically have 100 employees, 200 employees or some headcount that is actually large but it's very rare to see 80 employees, I mean, eight employees.

5:58Yeah, and by the way, their ARR I think is 10 million or so and then they're a competitor to like Replit or like Lovable, like these Vibe coding tools and I think maybe at their stage, and this is no knock on them, maybe they're like, hey, maybe it's too competitive here and we should cash out and then move on to the next thing. I don't know what their psychology is, but I do wanna harp on one thing and then we can move on. You mentioned that founders using AI. So in your early 20s, you really don't know what you don't know. You have to establish that baseline level of intelligence. Otherwise, you're just gonna try to rely on AI for everything.

6:28And that means you're outsourcing what makes you unique, which is critical thinking. Yep. Six-month-old bootstrap vibe coding startup sold for$80 million and$25 million of the 80 was a retention bonus. And they grew to 255 ,000 users, hitting 10 ,000 users within the first three weeks, according to his post on LinkedIn, generating$189 ,000 in profit in May, even after covering high LLM token costs, which he also documented publicly. It's good for him. Dude, I want to call something out here. I don't know if you're seeing this, but so Levels.io, So basically there's been more people talking about on X.

7:09So we went from influencers not being considered a job to it being the only job. And then levels was like, yes, modern founders will be half influencer, half founder, I think. This isn't completely new. Look at Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, but I want to take it one level higher. Every company will become half media, half the original business. And so you see now, OpenAI just started a podcast. You see Sam Altman being interviewed by his company. Stripe just started a podcast. They interviewed the CFO of Meta. and I think they had some other interesting people on the podcast. And so we're gonna see a lot more of this and this kind of coincides with this whole me going to this creator pickleball event because everyone's trying to establish distribution.

7:47But I'm like, I was talking to one of the guys there. I was like, look, establish a distribution, but don't get trapped in trying to interview these people and grow a big reach on podcasts because that's not gonna drive revenue for you. I literally did that. Like I've been podcasting for like 14, 15 years, right? And so I was like, look, you can keep doing the creator thing, but that on its own is not enough of a moat. Like a lot of creators think that's enough of a moat but you actually have to learn how to become an operator in some way, shape or form. Maybe learn pieces of it. Maybe you don't have to learn people management but you're gonna have to learn the ins and outs.

8:17And also, so whenever you do a deal with someone they don't just run circles around you and you end up getting screwed on the terms. Dude, I'm with you on that. Yeah. I also believe that in the next like few years you're gonna start seeing more people like the Sam Altman and the Stripe founders and people like that creating podcasts. It's just such an untapped opportunity. We've been doing this for how long now? I think we're coming up on nine years. Nine years. Yeah. That's a long time. And it's really fast. It's gone by really fast. It has. Yeah. You didn't even have MP Digital before this. You weren't even married before this.

8:48You didn't even have kids before this. Dude, we were recording in my Vegas condo with no air conditioning. Yeah, no air conditioning. Yeah. He had to turn off his AC when it was like 115 degrees outside. So it got hot really quickly and we had this cheap mic. Guys, we started cheap with this thing. We had a Yeti mic. which is not a bad mic, but it's cheap. It's like$100 or so. And we're like very close to each other in like really hot temperatures. Yeah. So yeah. And now if you want to start really cheap, the microphones on your iPhone and some of these devices are also good enough to start with.

9:16So you don't have to spend money. Yeah, get a DJI Mic 2 and then just hook it in. That's a great microphone. We use that to record in Miami. And we do use a DJI Osmo. We had a second one and we did a DJI Mic 2 and that was good enough for us. But yeah. All right. So what do you want to talk about next? Well, I do have, I do, okay, I've, because of my mom's passing, I basically tried disappearing from my company, quote unquote, for two, two and a half weeks or so. And so I'm happy to share some lessons because the, you always learn quite a bit whenever you disappear or you try to disappear. So basically I stopped appearing for a couple of key meetings, right?

9:51But what I learned is that you see who steps up and who can actually handle things on their own. And so, you know, in some cases, like the internal marketing meeting where I was driving a lot of energy, I was like, oh, I don't need to drive the energy as much, but they still do need me for like some critical things. Okay, fine. That's a new learning, right? But then I sat in like one of our leadership meetings and I was like, okay, this meeting definitely needs me, right? Because it started, we kind of started to sweep key metrics under the rug and like, oh, we can defer it. I'm like, no, no, no.

10:19What are we deferring, right? And so I think what you realize is you will see where things start to really need you and where you need to apply a ton of pressure, similar to how you do it. And it's good. This is why the saying is like, if you want to see how good your team is, go on a vacation. And it's like, there's some areas where we're really good. There's some areas where we really need work. And so highly recommend trying to disappear. I was still working the whole time, but I just wasn't appearing to some of these meetings. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast.

10:48That's where Framer comes in. and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours, animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code. It was easy to use, and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click, so your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together.

11:21No issues with versions or miscommunication, whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates. Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS, rules and restrictions may apply. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real.

11:52I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style. Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify has got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos.

12:24Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. So you're working. You are at some of the key meetings. Some people stepped up. Some of course did not. That's natural. Now you're back into the swing. I would say things are, your life is, you've adapted to what's reality, which is your mom's no longer around.

13:10Um, and you were pretty resilient yourself. I know when it happened, you're like, I got to move on. Work is work. You know, the world doesn't stop and you didn't stop. Um, do you still go to some of those key meetings now or have your team, the people who stepped up, are they continually stepping up and showing that they can do things without you to make your life easier? It's both. So I, it's funny because someone from my team earlier said this week, I said, I was like, I was already going to stop appearing all the time because now we're in a season, that doesn't scale, right? And so this was the main test.

13:44And then she was like, we don't need you in all of these meetings because I'm always trumpeting a message, right? But sometimes the message gets lost if I keep saying the same thing over and over and all the time. And so where I've landed is I will appear where I need to appear and I can release some of the iron fists that I had from the last couple, because I needed to take control of the company to bring the company back the last couple of years, right? But now the team's a lot more competent. So now I can back off and back off more. So I know where to step in on and I know where I can step out.

14:15And that's extremely valuable. Yep. Yeah. That's great. I also think that'll make your organization much more efficient because you can now spend your time on other things that are important that aren't getting the focus and the attention. Yeah. Which is, I mean, the beauty of what Neil has and the beauty of what Darmesh has is you get to do that 24 seven, basically. Yes, but he's done a much better job than me. His company is also much larger. And I'm not saying... His company's been around longer too. How long has it been around? 10? No, more than 10 years. 20 years? Maybe a little longer. HubSpot, maybe 1999?

14:53HubSpot. Oh, wow. Almost 20 years. Founded 2006. Oh. So 19 years. June 2006. Yeah. So 19 years. There you go. And your company's been around what? Seven? Eight? this will be our eighth year at the end wow okay there you go so we've got quite a more years uh to go to try to catch up yeah uh let's see dude we're seeing a lot of sales from ai traffic it's converting higher than traditional seo um someone on the ahrefs blog also posted about this we have some data that i think i'm gonna end up sharing this week on the social web but for ahrefs i believe he said it was around like 0.5 % of their traffic come from AI platforms, but 12 % of their signups come from these platforms.

15:39Wow, that's a lot. That's a lot. And we're seeing similar data, not as high as 12%. And that was just for Ahrefs. But when we look at numbers in aggregate, we're still seeing some decent numbers driving good signups. I think I have the chart from um aj yeah here you go look at this chart that's percentage of overall sales traditional search like traditional sale like you know google versus ai mode chat gpt etc wow so b2b okay look at the sales they're pretty similar but look at the traffic difference yeah that's crazy and it's only going to get bigger because i don't know if you saw that there's So Ahrefs actually shared a graph today showing that most of the bot traffic from the web right now, 30 % is Google.

16:28But you can see OpenAI, ChatGPT has moved to 10 % and it's going to continue to rise. And so, you know, I'm sure you've heard the same thing is we are getting leads. And then a lot of them are saying that they're coming from very long, complicated queries, like very long tail queries used inside of ChatGPT. So, yes. And so I'm going to break this chart down a little bit more because you guys saw it on screen. Do you show it over here? Yeah. So the data is from 50 B2B companies and 43 B2C companies. They all generate at least$10 million in annual sales. All right. So they're not the largest businesses, but they're not the smallest businesses.

17:04We want to take a baseline of someone who actually does SEO and paid advertising, et cetera, right? Omnichannel. So for B2C, traditional search is making up roughly 27 % of the traffic. And this is organic, by the way. but 21.25 % revenue. And when you look at AI traffic from AI search, 0.49 % of the traffic, 11.4 % of the revenue. And when you look at B2B, 19 % for organic SEO, traditional, 90 % of the traffic, 11.6 % of sales. for AI search, 0.38 % of the traffic, but 9.7 % of the sales. It's lower on both ends for the AI search for B2B and B2C, but percentage-wise, it barely drives any traffic versus the amount of sales it drives.

18:05But I think the caveat here that no one's really talking about is you're getting way more impressions than what you're actually tracking because when you do a traditional search, you're going to a website to do your research. On these AI platforms, you're doing your research in platform. It's very layered. Yes. And you're learning about a company without clicking over to a website. So visitor count isn't tracked the same way it was tracked in a traditional search. So you're actually getting tons more impressions. You're just not seeing the revenue yet. Or you're not seeing the visitor account yet.

18:36But when they go over to your website, they've already made their decision. Do you know, remember you bought the same thing? So I shared this to social, this thing I do to kind of warm up my eyes. Yeah. The eye mask thing, right? It probably took me 15 to 20 minutes of querying ChatGPT to find that product and then determine that's the right product. And I bought that product. In addition, I bought some other like iDrop stuff, right? But that was all from within ChatGPT. And to your point, like how do you even count attribution? Because I'm going to go to Google after to search for these things.

19:04So Google is going to take the attribution. Or Amazon. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I did go to Amazon. I went to Amazon for maybe both. Yeah, so then the person who sold it would be like, oh, someone just found us on Amazon. But in reality, you did your research on LLM. Yeah, so I think what we really then need to monitor, I think, is really LLM usage over time and LLM bot traffic because that's where the rubber meets the road because attribution is just totally screwed. Yeah, anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow.

19:42Bye.