To Become Rich, Chase Pain

0:01The phrase here from the Four Seasons founder is if you want to become rich, like excellence is the capacity to take pain, right? How much pain can you take? And when you look at people in your organization, the people that are maybe, or not even your organization, people around you, it's not that you're smarter than them or anything. Most of the time, we're pretty much the same level of intelligence, right? I think that's the case with most people. But then they complain, they blame the rich. It's like, oh, why can't I be rich or whatever? But we've talked about this before, like the amount of times we keep getting kicked in the nuts throughout the years that we've been in business, sometimes you get kicked multiple times per day, right?

0:35It is your capacity to take pain because never once in my, I don't know, 15, 16 years of knowing you, have you completely lost your mind when things got difficult, right? And it's the same with me. Like you just keep going and most people just give up too early. And there's a book that I constantly remember. It's called Think and Grow Rich. And Think and Grow Rich, it's basically like you think of this meme where there's like two people mining for gold. One guy quits right before the gold's right there. The other one just goes a little further and gets there, right? And that's what it is to get to the next level, next level, next level, you just take more and more and more pain.

1:09It's not that anybody's smarter than you. It's for the most part, it's not because they're richer than you or whatever. It's just that they had more capacity to take pain. But do you know why? And I'm not saying this is how it always is. I've seen a pattern. Do you know why you and I are good at taking the pain and just going after it? Why? Because we grew up with very little to nothing. And we've had pain for the majority of our lives. So that's all we can remember is struggles. Yeah, it's good. But But pain builds resilience. And I think I was joking at that AI potluck yesterday where it's mostly like, you know, Indians and like, you know, Chinese people or Korean people.

1:43Like it's like it's kind of built into our culture, right? It's because we also grew up with nothing and we suffered and we struggled when we came here. Yeah. Okay. But now let's go back. All right. Our parents struggled much more than us. You agree with this, right? For sure. Much more pain. Yeah. Your mom, when she was selling homes and barely had anything, when she had a commission check and someone needed a washer and dryer, could barely afford it, she would give part of her commission check when she needed the money. She was making good money. At that time, she was making good money? She was making good money, yeah.

2:13But before, when she was helping people out. When she was starting out, yeah, like she absolutely would sacrifice for the future. Yes. While taking care of me. No, but also help out her customers as well when things were hard. Totally. Right? I get in the last part of her life, she had money, but she spent the majority struggling. They struggled more than us. Would you agree they know how to take pain better than we do? Yeah. All right. Would you agree that - Than their grandparents. Yes. Our grandparents. Yes. Would you agree that people like my kids, Eric doesn't have kids yet, will not be as good at taking pain?

2:45That depends on you and your wife. Okay, sure. But would you agree that their life is more of a bubble? Yes. And by the way, remember I told you we had like a dinner a couple months ago. I don't think you were at this dinner, but the one worry about this was like an entrepreneur dinner. The one concern everyone had was their kids will not be resilient. And I think that's a concern you probably have too. Very much so concerned. But when you're talking about pain, a great example of this is my kids don't know pain yet. They're young, four and six. You know, they're growing. But my son the other day, I live in a neighborhood where some people have a lot, lot, lot more money than I do.

3:27Right? Like I'm not sitting in a$100 million home. I literally have people in my neighborhood with$100 plus million homes. Meals is just a fraction of that. Correct. So then I drive a Honda Odyssey. That's my daily commuter. How many cars do you have? I got rid of a lot of them. You lied. No, no. I just got rid of them. When? The range goes to my dad this weekend. I didn't even know you had a range. Yeah, I have a new range. It's all blacked out. It's in the front in Valet. Oh, that's the car there. I was like, which ass is in the handicap spot? It's you. No, no, the Valet puts it in the handicap spot.

3:59Yeah, I was going to park in the handicap spot. You could have. Then they told me to stop parking there. It's for you. No, we don't park. They Valet our car. So whatever they put it. Anyway, continue, continue. Okay. But I got rid of, we're getting rid of more cars. The one I drive, and Eric knows I'm not the best driver. I tend to drive a Honda Odyssey because I'm very comfortable driving the Honda Odyssey. I could drive a nicer car. Yes, Eric's point is we have nicer cars in our house. So for me to get a Range Rover, you can imagine some of the other cars we have that I'm not giving away. I won't get into that.

4:27But my son tells me the other day, Daddy, you need to work harder. He's like, I need a Bugatti. Wait, how old is he? Dude, that is insane. I didn't even know what a Bugatti was that for. I don't think they were that popular back then. because remember though they came out i don't know like 10 years ago and they made the world's fastest car whatever time break but either way we knew what ferraris were when we were kids and stuff he straight up says work harder so we could buy because he asked me for a bugatti you know before his birthday he turned four last month yeah and i didn't get him a bugatti and i told him i would love to buy you a bugatti it's too expensive for daddy daddy can't afford a bugatti yeah okay so then it's it's an easier conversation to have you know just saying like Like, look, you need to save up money.

5:12I can't afford it. And then he ended up telling me, I need to go travel more and work harder to buy him a Bugatti. You're like, okay. I said, okay. But that's an example of not understanding. Like, I worry about that future generation not understanding pain like you and I understand. Can I give you a framework? I actually was listening. So it's interesting because I don't have kids, right? But on X and even on YouTube, I have like a parenting bookmark. So like for future me, right? But this one I got, I think you actually like this. So whenever your kids want something, they have to pay for 50 % of it, right?

5:49In the future. Maybe like right now, like maybe - No, no, we may pay 100 % of it. How do they get the money for it? They do chores. Great, right? So like they have to basically, like in their teens or whatever, they're gonna have to work for it, like whatever you wanna buy. If you, oh, you want the Bugatti. Okay, you're gonna have to pay for, get up to 50%. How much is Bugatti? A couple hundred grand? No, like two,$3 million. Really? I'm guessing, I don't know. I haven't looked it up. So he'd have to figure out how to get the 1.5 and that instantly requires everything. I'm not going to give him 1.5.

6:14You can pay for the whole thing. Okay, great. So yeah, but you get where I'm going from, right? That's like forced resilience. Like, hey, me covering 50 % is still phenomenal, but you got to figure out how to get the first 50%. No, we do the same thing right now, but we do it for 100%. Yeah. So if they want a toy and they don't have enough money, you're not getting the toy. Okay. Unless it's a birthday or Christmas. How much do I make if I'm your son every hour doing chores? they earn around 10 i don't know the hourly but i know weekly they're earning around 10 oh okay great dude so you have a nice framework yeah we have a nice framework yeah so like if we go into target target usually at least the one we go to has a starbucks inside i don't know if that's common with all of them yeah if he wants a cake pop because he likes them he has to use his own cash because we're not buying him a cake pop dude that's awesome and if he wants a toy and he uses his money on a cake pop and has no more money we'll tell him well this is all the money you have you don't get it yeah the other thing we're starting to do my son is actually better at math than my daughter he's four he does third grade level math at this point third grade is how old seven eight i think wow um he loves math he doesn't look at homework as homework he thinks it's fun and playing so he just wants to do it like at least an hour to a day of just learning math and reading and stuff but he's actually stronger on math he prefers that as a subject um but uh you know i'm starting to introduce this new concept that i'm trying to teach him because he has saved up around 400 ish dollars some of that came from like christmas gifts people giving cash or birthday gifts and i'm trying to teach him the concept now because he's understanding money uh better is uh if you save a portion of it every month and you don't spend it dad will give you interest mom and dad will give you interest so you're saving it and investing it yeah and i'll make up something that they're investing in yeah you know say like you're investing in dad's company and then they'll get interest on it.

8:03Maybe I'll give them like 5 % a month. I know that's not realistic, but a large enough amount where they're just like, wow, I can make money saving. Because if I give them like a quarter, they're going to be like, whoop-dee-doo, but if I make it large enough, not too big where they can buy tons of stuff, but if I'm like, wow, you made an extra$10 by saving and not spending, it'll teach them to save and then invest as well. So let me break this into like a takeaway for everyone here because what it comes down to is, okay, we grew up where it was tougher for us and we had to learn the resilience.

8:32You built a system for resilience for your kids, right? I'm trying to. And by the way, I got a lot of it from you. You're the one who talked about this like a year ago. I don't think you recall. I don't recall. Yeah, I forget things quickly. That's why I try to get it out. But I think if you're listening to this, you're like, well, why can't I be rich? It's just a matter of how do you build that system where you tolerate pain and you understand the pain actually helps you get to the next level. And I don't know why I want to share this story right now, But my CEO told me that there's this show on Netflix called American Factory.

8:59And it's where this Chinese business bought this American Factory, right? And then one time, they brought all the Chinese people over. And the Chinese HR was talking to the Chinese team. He's like, guys, make sure when you talk to the Americans that you compliment them a lot. They love compliments, right? And all the Chinese people started laughing. My point is, in Chinese culture, for example, you kind of disregard the compliments. And you look for the criticism more. Because that is a level of pain, right? So if somehow you can engineer some level of pain and resilience into your world, going to work, waking up early is painful in the morning.

9:32Going to the gym is painful in the morning. Eating healthy is painful. You start to build those and they carry over to business. And you're like, where else can I find the pain? And then you're going to get stronger. And you just realize that's part of life. And if you can't take the pain, what's going to happen is you end up drinking all the time. You end up eating a bunch of food. You get fat. And you start doing all these drugs and all that. And no wonder you're depressed all the time. So the solution is you take the short-term pain or else you feel the long-term pain. That's right. And by the way, Eric is as American as you can get.

10:00When he was giving the Chinese and American example, he's not trying to say it's better in China. I'm pro-America, guys. Pro-America. He's not trying to say it's better in one place or another. Yeah. He's actually very pro-America. It just is. It's not better or worse. It just is. Yeah. All right. Okay. So now you want to talk about the cursor price increase. Uh-huh. The moat. Okay. And by the way, before we get into that, the example I was giving with Cursor is, I do think it's great. It does like 80, 90 % there. And yes, you may need help on the 10%, but it still saves you a ton of money and time.

10:27Yeah. Okay, so we'll talk about the high pricing and then we'll talk about how marketers are actually using Cursor now. I think you'll like it. 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. That'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.

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12:46So basically, Cursor went up from$20 a month to$200 a month. I think since then, they've maybe rolled it back and said, hey, we'll refund you. I think they're still going to stay at the$200 per month. But this guy, Simon Wilson, tweeted this. I think this highlights a few interesting trends with this price increase. Firstly, the era of VC subsidized tokens may be coming to an end, especially for products like Cursor, which are way past demonstrating product market fit. Tokens are, you know, open AI, like when you're, yeah, tokens, right? Secondly, the$200 a month plan for 20x the usage of$20 per month plan is an emerging pattern.

13:17Anthropic offers the same exact deal for Cloud Code with the same 10x price for 20x usage multiplier. Professional software engineers may be able to justify one$200 a month subscription, but I expect most will be unable to justify two. The pricing here becomes a significant form of lock-in. Once you've picked your$200 a month coding assistant, you are less likely to evaluate the alternatives. Yep. I think the 10x price increase is going to get them more lash back, but I bet you that'll make them way more revenue and profit. Yeah. Which is, by the way, this is the same PE playbook for SaaS companies for a long time.

13:53And I love that it's a 1020x. 10x, 10x. VISA Equity has been doing it for ages. They buy a company, they figure out where the value is, and they jack up the price in those areas, and they make more money with the same product. There's also switching costs too, right? Once you start to, like for ChatGPT, for example, because it has memory, I'm less likely to use the other ones now. And then the O3 Pro and the Deep Research and MCP connectors, I actually use it a lot more now. So let me talk to you about how marketers are using Cursor now. So imagine you can go into Cursor, which allows you to code complete and things like that.

14:25But you can work inside of cursor to have it say, hey, hook in with the MCP for Appify and scan all my competitors' Facebook ads over here or scan their landing pages and make a new one for me. Oh, I want to invoice Neil. Okay, you know, invoice Neil. Boom. It's like you're working inside of the terminal and you're just commanding it to do a bunch of things for you. And I've been doing something this week where I'm not necessarily using cursor plus cloud code yet with this MCPs, but I am using the OpenAI's, the ChatGPT MCPs. Meaning I'm hooking in with Google Drive and I'm hooking in with my HubSpot.

14:57I'm like, hey, how did our one-on-one documents are all in our Google Drive, right? How did all these people perform in the last 90 days or so? You score them, right? Oh, HubSpot. Wait, which leads should we be reengaging with? How have these companies done? Like, look at my Google Drive. Who are all the proposals we pitched in the last three years or so? And which companies have actually grown? And then it shows me a column because it does deep research on the net. And then it shows how employee size, how it's grown over time. Who should we be repitching? Why? And then I'm like, you can do all that within there.

15:27And like, imagine all the more you can do within Cursor and you're seeing way more people now saying, marketers saying, I'm using Cursor, plus I'm using Cloud Code and I'm just operating in there all day. So I had a presentation about this with around like 13, 14 people on my team and marketing. You present it? Uh-huh. Okay. And the example I gave with Cursor, it's like a modern computer within a computer. Yeah. You're using a computer to log in and you can do things with cursor, it's just like, it's a virtual human in there that's helping you with everything that you need to get done. Even if you don't have the skills, it can help you out.

16:02And then what I did is I started having them ask me certain things that they would do on a regular basis. Tell you or ask you? Tell me, or they can say, Hey, can I, you know, they would just tell me what they're doing. And then we would go over together on how they can actually do it with cursor. Cause we have someone on our team who just specializes on cursor and helps other people on board and use it for their daily work to become more efficient. And we're teaching them how to just become more efficient and get way more done. Are you using cursor yourself? Not really. Because the thing is, it does...

16:36I have it. You have to spend time setting it up and all that. I'm just too lazy. And then tomorrow I'm like, okay, fine. I'm just going to do it. But you have to set up... Remember using MS-DOS back in the day? Yeah. It's like using MS-DOS, right? You have to CD this and that. Like you have to learn a couple of commands and all that. But if I'm going to become way more efficient with it, like why wouldn't I do it? So I think we're going to see a lot more people, not even just marketers, using IDEs like Cursor to get their jobs done faster. Yeah, like I did a four-hour crash course of Cursor with Kyle on my team.

17:05So he sat down with me, we're screen sharing, and he taught me how to use it and leverage it to make things more efficient. And then at the end of four hours, it was great. I really ended up learning a lot about Cursor. I should be using it more and more. But the majority of the stuff I do on a daily basis has no need for a cursor or a chat GPT or any of them because a lot of my stuff isn't research or actually doing busy work. A lot of my day is like selling to customers, building relationships, speaking, doing meetings. But if I had to pick like one thing, most of my stuff that I do on a daily basis is actually just pushing.

17:49When I say pushing, like calling someone and be like, did we get this done? Why not? What do you need to get it done faster? Or like, what are you working on? Remove these three things. I only want you to focus on this one thing. You had four. Just focus on this one thing. When is it going to get done? That is the majority of my day, believe it or not. Do you check in with them to see if they got it done? How many times a day do I check in with them? Yeah. By the way, Neil's not just a question That's the real question So you can't, pushing, just pushing is not enough You actually have to check back in with them You agree with that, right?

18:19Oh yeah, dude I drive people crazy so much I check in with people so often That some people will tell me Hey, just as a heads up, Neil When you respond back to me I'm traveling in Europe right now So I won't be able to get back to you When you respond back Because they know I'm going to bug them within an hour Being like, is it done yet? dude I have a guy on vacation right now he's amazing I love him to death he hasn't taken a vacation in four years so he's at home right now but he's still focusing on a lot of our AI stuff because he's finding it so fascinating that he loves it so he we called him during his vacation and we and we didn't know he was on vacation until we called him and he's like dude I love it so I'm still working on something I'm like okay we still want you to have your vacation and during it we still talking for like 30 minutes.

19:09So like, so when's it going to go live? And he's just like, I don't know yet. I'm missing X, Y, and Z. I'm like, don't worry about it. You'll get that today. He's like, you sure? I'm like, yeah, yeah. So then Mike and I just go call other people right there. Like I need it in the next hour. So we ended up getting it within like two or three hours. We didn't get it right away, but close enough. Get it to him. And then he's like, I'm going to take my vacation, but tomorrow I'll have timelines for everything. So then Mike pings him. We both are actual pushers. and it was funny dude what was a message i gotta actually oh let me i gotta read this um it was where this is my where's mike uh here's the image i'm getting close to it uh uh let's see uh no either way i can't do we have so many text threads it's just so hard to go through all of them but um mike starts with something like uh oh he says his name and then because the guy's on vacation it's eta day smiley face and then he has a smiley face yeah it's eta day so we're like and then i'm messaging him too so once we got the eta yeah and then i'm like cool that's for uber says but what's the eta for atp or answer the public right and i know he doesn't have everything for it, but you still got to ask.

20:36And then they'll tell you why they don't have an ETA. And it's like, cool, I will go and fix that stuff. And then I'll tell all the other people, like, next day, tell me the ETA at the latest for the other product. This is underrated. And I don't want to miss the details here. So one, absolutely, you need to have pushers, right? But you also have very exceptional memory. So you have like a project management tool in your brain. So I think you do actually remember when people say things or you're like at least close to it. So you'll know when to follow up. My problem is I have bad short-term memory, right?

21:02And so I had to make an Asana board called Delegated by Eric Board, and I'll just assign all these things. But even that gets annoying, right? So I hope there's a... I just gave myself an idea. There's going to be AI listening to it all the time, and it's going to be the remember pusher, and it's going to keep pushing. Because guys, this might seem like it's annoying and it's micromanagement or whatever, but if you don't push, you're not going to get the important things done because people just don't care as much as you do. It's just the reality. dude and i straight up said and the launch of v1 of atp the new version with ai end of july 2 wink you know that's when we started getting to eta about that yeah but when he told us that eta was end of august the first thing i did was i called our project uh product manager not project manager but product manager and i i told her straight up i was just like you know the feature that they're launching i don't want to derail things or any move anything around that feature is not going to be that used?

21:54The most used feature in Ubersuggest is the keyword research. Why not add it to their first? And they're like, I don't have the designs for that, so I can't get an ETA. And I was like, will the ETA of that affect the ETA of the other thing? Because if so, I can reshift. And then the first thing I ended up saying was, hey, why don't we do both and take the people who are working on maintaining the old product, which won't be in existence forever, shift them over and do them both simultaneously so I can have one of them done sometime in the next few weeks if possible. But you just got to push and you got to follow up and you can't forget.

22:28And you got to follow up multiple times a day, seven days a week. And I know that drives people crazy, but it works. It's true. And look, Neil's not trying to be a bad guy or anything. It's just, this is what's required to build something great. And let me ask you this. Does Mike have a good memory? Does he remember to keep pushing? I don't think he pushes. You push pretty frequently. No, he pushes a lot too. So he remembers. We both remember. Yeah. I don't know how he remembers. I don't make notes of it. I think it's just in your head, right? For me, everything's in my head. He is much more organized and he'll like write things down and have all his notes and stuff.

23:03I just store it in my head and I just know to follow up with people. And I know like, you know, when it's going to be due, when they're going to say, and I'll know to even follow up a few weeks ahead to make sure that they're on track. And if they're saying they're not on track, why? you? What do I need to cut to make sure they're on track? It's just all compromises and pushing. And if you don't have people who can handle that pressure, if that's your personality like mine, then you're working with the wrong people. And when I interview people, I make sure they're okay with that before I hire them.

23:31So that way they know what to expect. Do you? Okay. So we call this anti-sell, right? So we told them what they're going to get into. So how do you tell them that about your level of pushing? Oh, I'll give them examples right then and there so i'll say okay um we want to release llm features of tracking how many times you're recommended on different keywords uh or prompts on chat gpt gemini uh you know meta the list goes on and on now like how would you go about building it so asking all the questions making sure they're on the same page or thinking about it's like oh i'd build it all at once it's like okay that's overwhelming it's going to take too long to get something out i would have been like you're looking for logic like oh i would first do research on google trends to see which is the most popular platform and has the highest usage i think it's chat gpt because that's what i'll never talk about but i would verify based on that i'll roll that out first then i'll roll out the second then i'll roll a third i want them to even think about like oh and then i'd research which startup programs these have and then i would get the credits for them so that would save money so i'm expecting people to start going down that track um sometimes i guide them like with the credits or stuff because some of that stuff's not the biggest thing but i want people to be money conscious in my organization um and then you know assuming everything's running i'm like how do you deal with pressure?

24:41And most times people will be like, okay, I'm great. I'm like, how do you deal with being a player and coach if it's a manager role? Because I'll tell them, I'm like, I expect all my managers to get their hands dirty. It doesn't matter if you're a CMO or product manager, you need to get your hands dirty and actually do the work. And then I'll go into examples. I'm like, how would you react or how would you feel if I messaged you three times a day asking about this deadline? Okay. And then I would say, if I message you about the deadline and you don't respond, what do you think that's going to make me feel like?