How I went from $0 to $1M in 12 months

23:06And what would it take for you to switch to Twitch? And most of them hadn't even considered it, but a few people were like, you know, I do like Twitch, but the thing that I don't, you know, the thing that it's missing is X. And then he would go build X and he'd go right back to that person and be like, hey, we built it now. that was the thing you said you would switch for? And he's like, you know, sometimes there was actually two or three objections, but they would eventually, they would sort of cave to my level of ferocity of how I was approaching this. And one of the biggest features, the number one revenue driver for Twitch came from those conversations.

23:38There was one streamer he wanted to get on board. And the guy goes, I want to be able to make money. And he goes, yeah, but you have such a small audience, dude. Like your ad revenue will be so small. He goes, no, I want them to be able to pay me five bucks a month. and he goes, you know, people don't subscribe to individual creators. That's not really, it wasn't really a thing at the time. And he's like, that's not really going to work for these 10 reasons. He goes, well, that's what it'll take. So he goes, okay, I'm going to build this feature. It'll never work. But his current platform doesn't have it.

24:07If I build it, he said he'd move over. So he builds it. The guy moves over and he goes, indeed, he wasn't making big money. He goes, but I got a very valuable insight. Making any money streaming video games, even if it was just five, 10,$17 in a month. You know, their hourly rate was like in the cents. That to them felt like there's a path for me here if I just keep going. And he goes, it was unbelievable. I thought five bucks would never change anything for these people. And it immediately changed their behavior. And that feature subscriptions today drives like, you know, probably a bit close to a billion dollars in revenue for them.

24:43And that was a feature he never would have built had he not had those conversations. Which is more or less the exact, I mean, when I'm emailing these 400 people, Those conversations are exactly, even though they showed the slightest bit of interest by filling out this Google form, it is, I'm kind of good on my platform. And you don't have automations, you don't have X, you don't have Y, you don't have Z. And I think that's like the other trap that a lot of founders fall into. It's like the perfection over progress, where they see these existing competitors or like the startups who are already quote unquote successful.

25:10And they think that they always just like showed up that way, right? Like they came out of the womb, just successful, polished, like beautiful. And one thing that I've really honed in on is in addition to like the things that don't scale, it's like the shipping and being comfortable shipping things that are 80 to 90 % of the way there that you can get in people's hands to collect their feedback and then iterate as quickly as possible. Because if this thing's going to work out, you have to assume that where you are now is the smallest you'll ever be. And so to piss off and have a less than ideal first impression to your hundred first users is nothing if that means that you can take that feedback from those 100 people make the product 10 times better so the next 100 and the next 1 ,000 get a much more polished product.

25:51But I think so many people get stuck in not wanting to release that unpolished, unsexy feature until it's exactly right. And so like, I don't know, an example of like another thing that we did in the early days that didn't scale is like, email is like ripe with spam and abuse and there's like security complaints and concerns there. And when we first launched, we couldn't just have anyone sign up and just start blasting out email. because we'd be overrun with spammers. And we could have spent three to four months building this automated security check, which was discussed as an option. But that would delay us three to four months.

26:26And it would take so much time away from building other features that we knew that we already didn't offer. And so we actually had the highest friction signup of all time. You would sign up, you'd have to submit your name, what platform you're using, all this other information, including the handle to your Twitter and to your LinkedIn. And you couldn't do anything. You couldn't send emails. You couldn't use the platform. You were like in a brick until I approved you. On the back end, we had this dashboard where everyone who signed up to the platform would populate. And I would go by line by line and click on their Twitter profile, their LinkedIn profile, and try to look up their newsletter to see if they were legit.

27:01And manually click a button to say, this person is approved. And they get an email that they can now use the platform. Goes against everything in terms of like hyper growth startup, right? We're preventing people from using the platform in the name of security. The way that I flip that into a growth thing is when I would go to their Twitter profile and their LinkedIn profile, I would follow every single person who signed up for the platform and I would send them a DM being like, hey, I'm the co-founder at Beehive. Thanks so much for signing up. Here's what we're working on. Let me know if there's anything I can do to improve your experience.

27:32And I turned someone who was initially probably pissed off that they couldn't use the platform they signed up to, to like, wow, it's pretty wild that the co-founder and CEO just messaged me and followed me on Twitter. but as I amplify what we're launching whether it's new features or users having success I now have all of these people who followed me back as super fans who are now following the journey and engaging with the content so I think it hits on a few things of like one not letting perfection get in the way of progress and just being okay shipping probably the least optimal sign up flow of all time but also turning into a positive of how can I actually turn this into a growth lever where I can connect with these people have them become fanatics of what we're building, and then now be one of thousands of people following us on this journey.

28:17Right, right. What's the advantage that's buried inside this disadvantage? There's usually one. So, okay, if I have to manually approve them one by one, well, I'm already here. Might as well shake their hand. Might as well say hello. Might as well connect with them. Might as well get them to follow me because I followed them. And then all of a sudden, now you have a bit of a relationship with all those early users. And I think, again, the theme seems to be of like, you know, it's hard to build a startup. And the things that don't scale that no one wants to take the time to do in the early days, I think are the things that really compound and get you off the ground to get that escape velocity.

28:49And I think it's actually even that much more impactful later in the company when I'm still doing that four years later. And like that is our competitive advantage. And I've read something recently that was in a world where a lot of features are commoditized. It's the stories and the narratives and the people behind the company that actually becomes the competitive advantage. And that's like a early competitive advantage that I think anyone could take advantage of. We just had this guy on the podcast, Tommy Mello. He's built this billion dollar thing starting with zero, right? He was like painting garage doors himself, you know, day by day.

29:23And then realize he's painting doors that these other guys installed. They're making more money. He starts becoming a installer. He learns how to be a technician. Now he's built like one of the biggest ones in the country, A1 Garage. And he was telling us what he has his team do. and he's like, you got to pet the dog. And I just love this. I'm like, I feel like I want to put that on a poster. Pet the dog is basically like, when you go to their house, you don't just go there and you give them a quote and you hand them a bill. Like, no, you go there, you pet the dog, you say hello, you smile, you make eye contact.

29:52On the way over, he always has them and their script is like, hey, I'm just picking up a coffee. Can I get you anything? Oh, don't make me guess. Tell me, what do you like? You like it black or you like it with sugar? He's like, you know, we want to bring them something into the relationship because it's a relationship. I don't want to just be one vendor. You're just going to go for the lowest price. I want people to buy from who they trust and who they like, right? And it starts with who they even know. Do they even know you, right? And so what you're talking about is basically, how do you get them to know you?

30:21How do you get them to like you? How do you get them to trust you? Like before I even used, or before I invested in Beehive, I was listening to your Spotify playlist. I don't know if you have that in here as one of your growth hacks, but you made one of the best work music playlists called Big Desk Energy. And I used to listen to that every day. And so it was funny, like by the time we met, I felt like indebted to you. And so it was like this little thing that I, you know, I would have never thought that that would work, but it totally worked on me. I don't know if it worked on others. I hope so.

30:51I mean, we seem to be doing okay, but yeah, I think Big Desk Energy might be my greatest accomplishment to date. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20 % of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more.

31:19And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. All right, give us more of the sauce. What's next? I'm constantly listening to users. And so, and I eventually become a user and I have my own newsletter also called Big Desk Energy on the platform, which you should sign up to. we entered I guess I'll set the stage we there are 25 plus competitors that we entered this space into and when we first launched we had nothing right like you could we set up how to send an email two weeks before launch no automations you couldn't customize anything basically table stakes of what you could do on every one of our competitors you could not do on our platform and so basically what we decided we would do is we would ship one marketable feature every single week.

32:02So like we had a core team of engineers. Our core competitive advantage was going to be product velocity. And it was the only option. I would, I'd be reaching out to all these people on the wait list. I'd be convincing them to sign up to the platform. I'd do all this hard work and they'd be like, bro, I can't do anything on this platform. Like nothing works. And so like from the earliest days, I did such a great job selling, but the product wasn't caught up to like the expectations of what you were supposed to deliver in this industry. And so the, what we decided to do in addition to shipping one marketable feature every single week was we turn each product release into like a moment.

32:37And so what I mean by that is we would figure out what would be the most useful thing that would prevent churn. And that would be flashy enough that when I launched this on Twitter and LinkedIn, that people would be like, oh, one, that's super interesting. The platform I have doesn't even offer that. And when you do it repetitively week after week, it becomes more of a narrative of yes, maybe they don't offer what I have, what I want today. But if they're shipping something new every single week, it's only a matter of time until they offer exactly what I want. And it sounds like you, when you said, you didn't just say, make the product better, build features.

33:13You're saying, build one marketable feature every week. And I like the word marketable there. It reminds me of the Amazon work backwards from the press release. At Amazon, you don't get to build a feature until you have written the press release. How would we announce this to the press? Now, press release is like this very outdated thing. the reality for you is probably like, what's the tweet? What's the tweet? Like, why are we building this if there's no tweet? If nobody's going to care when we tweet this, why are we building this? And that simple forcing function of starting with the tweet and working backwards to do product is going to eliminate like 30 % of wasted effort, just doing, you know, pet projects or things that sound good on paper to you internally, but nobody cares about, the users don't care about.

33:54And that comes from a place of, again, like talking to the users from the beginning and being really indebted into these communities on Twitter. And like the framework that I would use for prioritizing what to build is like three part framework. One is preventing churn. In the earliest days, we had 10 users, right? If one user churns, that's 10 % of our revenue. So if someone says, hey, you don't have X. And if you don't build X, I'm leaving. Like I can't take that 10 % hit of revenue. So that's like top of the line. We have to ship that first. Next is unblocking growth. So as I'm trying to convince all of these people to leave their perfectly good platform to come to our platform, someone might be like, you don't offer this feature, thus I can't move over until you have that.

34:33Once I hear that two, three, four times, it becomes a pattern, that becomes something that needs to be prioritized to be able to unblock and bring new people into the ecosystem. And then the third one is just maximal hype, right? So some combination of what do I know, whether it's the morning brew referral program or X, Y, Z feature. When we first launched the AI writer into the editor, right? It was like at the peak moment, it was like a year after ChatGPT, like I knew that AI would hit, as it does for everything now. But some combination of like, we don't want the people that we've already worked so hard to get into this platform to leave.

35:04So anything to prevent that, what opens the door and casts a wider net for more people to come into our ecosystem? And then like, what's that sizzle at the end that we can add that we know that when we tweet it, working backwards from the tweet and like the press release, that we know will spread because it solves the problems of the people that we know we want on this platform. So that's how we would think about the product release. And we do a few different things with the product release, and this is like probably what we are most well-known for today, is when we would turn each product release into a moment, we have the email that goes to every user.

35:37And this is coming from a place of insecurity of I wake up every morning in these days and I have, you were one of them way back when, of like, hey, if you don't shit this, like I'm out of here. And so the email goes out to all of our users. I sent you some threats. Because you were one of your early users. I don't know what, like do you know roughly we were like in the first what? We'll call you the first few thousand users. Yeah. And we, I remember we needed automations. It was like, hey, when somebody signs up, I need to be able to like automatically send them this email first after a day, this one after two days.

36:05And then, you know, so on these sequences or whatever. And you guys did not have that. And we were like, yeah, we need this. And the funny thing is you had pitched us for an investment and I said, no, I was like, I don't know. Newsletter seems, I don't know. Isn't that a solved problem? It's kind of a small market. How many creators are there going to be really that create newsletters? Dumb in retrospect. but at the time I didn't understand the market. And so we passed. But we wanted to be a user. I liked the product. I was like, I'm a user, but I just don't know how many people that are like me out there.

36:33And then as we're using it and you had this crazy story where your co-founder passed away, your technical co-founder passed away and we were sitting here badgering about features. I felt like such a jerk when you're like, hey, here's why we're just a little slow for this, you know, the last couple of weeks here to get it back to you. And then you guys picked up the velocity like crazy after that. And I just thought, man, man, this guy's a force of nature. Like if he's going to do this, he's going to solve our problems this fast and this well, I got to make this bet. I actually didn't change my mind about the market at all.

37:05I was like, I still think all those bad things about the market, but now I think new things about him that's going to trump this because I've seen that founders who have that sort of force of will that they create the sort of avalanche of momentum, whether it's with product or with marketing. I don't know. They get like many shots on goal. It leaves a lot of room for error and you can recover from whatever your shortcomings are. You can overcome them that way. And so that's been one thing. And I think you've parlayed that with your investor updates. The company does well. You talk about how well the company's doing.

37:37It makes the company do better. And then that flywheel. And I've always been hesitant to do that because it feels like you're exposed, you're naked, you're vulnerable. You're putting out your numbers out there for the world to see, but you've done this. So I guess like show your investor update here and like, why does this, like, does this work and why does this work? Yeah. I mean, I'd even take a step back in the sense of like, you know, building in public. I mean, everyone talks about it now on Twitter and like, that's something I've been very intentional. There's like an altruistic view of it of like entrepreneurship's great.

38:07There's a lot of people who are successful who don't share their secrets of like why they're successful. And like, that is to the disadvantage of everyone else who wants to build something. Right. And then there's like the more selfish reason of I could tweet and post about newsletters all day long. And there's probably a few thousand people who would love that content. But if I were to post all day about, here's how we hire, here's how we built this feature, here's the strategy and tactic to get us from 1 million to 2 million, then all of a sudden, like the addressable market of that content is 10 times bigger.

38:36It's anyone who wants to build a startup. It's anyone who's at a small, medium-sized business. It's anyone who's like an early startup employee who's thinking about maybe going off on their own. And so I made a very intentional decision from the very beginning of, I want to share everything that we do. The ups, which is, you know, from zero to a million to one to five in the second year, the downs, obviously you hit on the worst moment of the entire journey, which is us losing our co-founder and like just all of the different things along the way. Cause again, I think people follow people and they want the story and they want the narrative.

39:05And also if I can turn that into useful tactics that other people could take and use for their business, now I become someone that they look to and that they trust. Yeah. Do you have like data on like how these get forwarded around or how many people sign up from the investor updates? Do you know anything about that? Or is that, do you not track that specifically? So the investor updates, it says very clearly at the top, you're not supposed to forward these, people do. And it's like private-ish, right? And so, yes, so they hit on the investor update. It's like, whether it started on Twitter when I would say, here's our first 100 users, here's how we got a million dollars.

39:37Eventually, I turned that into sending an investor update to all of our initial investors. I also have everyone who passed as an investor You were on this list as well. Yeah, I think I got a few of those and that made me have some FOMO. Right, exactly. So like to me, to your point of like being exposed and naked, like yes, but that's kind of like where I think I thrive. Like I want the accountability and I want the pressure on that no matter what happens, at the end of the month, I'm going to send an investor update to 500 people who trusted me with their money or passed. And I don't want them to get the gratification that they were right in passing.

40:08And I know that we are going to be exposed and share our revenue numbers. And I want those numbers to be up and to the right and green. and so there's like a inspirational like motivational tactic behind it. There's also like a very tactful like a lot, time is your biggest resource especially as a founder when you're being pulled in a million different directions and like we went down the venture backed route and so as you're building in public and sharing your milestones there's always investors who are reaching out on Twitter. Hey, you want to grab coffee for 30 minutes? Hey, you want to do this?

40:40And like my time's too valuable to have these coffee meets but I do need to nurture those relationships in some capacity if I do want to raise a later round. And so the investor update to me became the greatest life hack of saying like, no, I'm not going to spend 30 minutes meeting for coffee, but I'll add you to our investor update. And you will learn far more about me and the business and how I think about this and how we're growing month over month by reading three to four months of our investor updates than you would ever get in like a 30 minute coffee meet. And so by using these investor updates, we actually raised our series A in one week.

41:10It's$12.5 million in a week. I don't know with AI companies, maybe that's not as impressive, but it was amazing for us. Love it. Was there anything else as you were reflecting on what worked, how you guys grew to a million that you're like, oh, I got to share this. This is a good one. This thing works. I mean, again, it's like the little things. So we built into the company this very social first culture where everyone is distribution. and what I mean by that is like when you get hired at Beehive our social media manager shows you how you should use social media and engage with our content and promote different initiatives at the company and so starting from the top of like me actually building in public is like I have this constant stream of content out about the business we have our employees who we do a few different things internally one every week we have like an award of like who was like we call it the social media girly of the week who's like who was the most active and engaged on socials there's like some like incentive built into that we have a Slack channel called Pump Channel or Pump, whatever.

42:10And the whole purpose of the channel is like anytime that one of our users says something positive about Beehive, whether they're having success, they had a milestone, it's so much better than their old platform. Someone sees it, drops in that channel. Now the entire company gets that notification, jumps in, engages, retweets, and likes. And so we've been able to build this narrative of one, like the early days, it's like, oh, everyone's seemingly moving to Beehive because every time that someone says anything remotely nice about us, you get a retweet and like from me and the house account and like 15 of our other employees.

42:41And so like a very grassroots method that we've been able to scale now to over 100 employees in the sense that we utilize every positive thing that we can get and all of the employees at the company to help amplify the different messages. Yeah, it's frustrating because everything you've said here so far is so simple. And then when I run back through an audit of stuff that we did in any of my startups, I'm like, oh, yep, didn't do that. Didn't do that. Yep, left that low-hanging fruit right there. Didn't grab that either. It's annoying, but it's also a good reminder, a good kick in the butt of like, dude, stop searching for the genius strategy.

43:17Stop searching for the one thing that's going to cure it all and just look for the obvious. It's like, hey, people are saying good things about you and you guys don't even reply. Do you think they're going to say another good thing? You don't engage. You don't spread that. There's this amazing thing, but nobody saw it. You launched this feature, but you didn't think about what the tweet would be in advance. And so you kind of spent a month on something that nobody really cared about. And so everything you're saying is straight from the department of common sense. And that's why I love it. Yeah, which is why I'm always self-conscious and almost sharing the tactics.

43:51Because to me, it's second nature. It's very, if you wanted to build a business that people love and people love you as the founder and the person who's building behind it, engage with them, listen to their complaints, build and prioritize things that they want to use on their day-to-day basis, solve their problems when they run into them. And it sounds so simple and intuitive, but I feel like a lot of people overcomplicate the startup building journey and don't do the little things right. We want it to be complicated because if it's complicated, then that's why we're not doing it yet because we just didn't know this advanced thing yet.

44:24But when the answer is you're not doing the obvious, simple, no-brainer, brick-by-brick tactics, then you got to look in the mirror. You're the problem, right? And it's like, go look at the best investment advice. Go look at what Buffett says. You know, Buffett doesn't open a spreadsheet. Buffett doesn't, he doesn't do any of that stuff, right? He's like, you know, we invest in, you know, companies that are, you know, well-managed, that have a good brand, make products that people like, have been around for a long time and make, you know, a healthy profit, but not even too much where they're gouging their customers, right it's like stuff that you could fit you know on the back of a cereal box it doesn't take a phd to understand it and yet so few can actually execute it we'll all chase the next you know dog coin or whatever you know trying trying to do something fancy like you're showing this thing on the screen right now it's literally a little button at the little badge at the bottom of of the probably the free email tier which is like hey this this email newsletter that you just saw this nicely formatted thing powered by beehive right inherent virality and every single email that gets sent out.

45:25How many emails are you guys sending a day? No idea a day, but about three billion a month today. Okay, you're sending three billion a month. So you're getting three billion mini billboards at the bottom of those emails saying that these emails are powered by Beehive, right? That type of stuff adds up. Yeah, it's like the quintessential Silicon Valley example of Hotmail, where they had at the bottom of their emails, get your free email at Hotmail. And they went from tens of users to tens of millions in a few years just from that simple viral. All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story.

45:55Let me tell you the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes. And then they told me I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury. And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money. I can pay invoices.

46:23I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200 ,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to Mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC. I'll leave with one last thing is like, I love the concept of not making people think in the sense that like there's always, I mean, granted, I just talked about how high friction the signup process was, but prior to signup process, all of our competitors had this, the most complex pricing models.

46:59You're limited on how many emails you can send per week and contacts. You have to like calculate how much volume you're sending per month, which no one has any idea how many emails they're sending per month. It's like way too hard to even figure out the simple question of how much is this going to cost me to use? And so when we launched, we had an all-inclusive, every premium feature for$99. And you can send unlimited emails. In retrospect, not the most scalable model and not the most optimal model to make the most amount of money, but going back to not letting perfection get in the way of progress, I could explain that in a tweet at any time saying, for$99, unlimited emails, every feature you see here.

47:37And so I'm a big fan of living to fight another day in the sense that a lot of people get handicapped by trying to think of the most optimal solution in the future. But if I'm trying to figure out the most scalable pricing model that I can't communicate easily, I might not ever live to see that future day because we already shot ourselves in the foot. And so I'm a big fan of kind of pushing off some problems to be solved later under the assumption that later will involve us having more money, more revenue, more people to help us solve that problem in the future. Yeah, you've made it simple and you made it easy to understand, even if it's imperfect and not like sort of optimized yet.

48:13It reminds me of Robinhood. Robinhood built a$100 billion company off of free trades, commission free trades. So don't pay$9.99. I remember on E-Trade, it was$9.99 to just buy and sell a stock. And Robinhood got rid of that. Now that's a single sentence, right? If you trade on Robinhood, your trades are free. They didn't have to figure out, you know, today they have banking and crypto and they have mortgages and they have personal margin loans and options and derivatives and prediction markets. And they make tons of money. I think they have nine different product lines that do over$100 million in revenue.

48:51But the entire empire was built on a simple promise, you know, free trades, right? And it tied in with the story, the name Robinhood. We're letting sort of the little guy win, right? We're stealing from the rich. And, you know, we're enabling the masses here. they built the whole thing off of that one simple idea. And at the time, they forced the whole industry to change because the whole industry was based on this, you know, commissions model. And they realized like, first of all, you don't even make that much money off of the commissions. It's not even necessary. There's not that big of a cost to doing a trade.

49:27And I've heard an interview with the guy where he was like, because we did it for free, we had to innovate on the cost structure to make sure we're not going to burn too much money doing this. Whereas these other guys never did anything because they were charging so much. They had 90 whatever percent margins on that trading commission. So they never cared to figure out how to make their trades faster, cheaper, simpler to do under the hood. We had to because we did commission-free trades. And then that enabled the next layer of benefits to the customer. And so don't underestimate these things. That simplicity that anybody can understand, don't make the user think too much, that simple story can build, you know, a hundred billion dollar company.

50:06That's the goal. A hundred billion, right? I would enjoy that. As an investor, I would very much enjoy when you guys get to a hundred billion. Tyler, this has been fun, dude. What, what, uh, I guess, what do you want to leave people with? I don't know. Like getting started is always the hardest part, right? And I think if, if this journey that I've been on, if it shows anything, it's that I don't have, and where I always admire you is like the work smarter, not harder approach. I think my advantages have always been different, right? Like the only two things that I can control are my effort and my attitude.

50:35And so I'm like the brute force of like, I'm up at 5.30 in the morning, I'm at my desk to nine o 'clock, different than your preferred life. But what I do and like what I found has worked best for me is just brute force working hard and doing the little things right that start to compound over time. And there's no secret sauce outside of like the very applicable things that anyone could listen to this episode and actually start applying and understanding who their target user is, get a MVP, a V1 out, start talking to your users, figure out where they're dropping off and where you can improve. So like getting started, I think, is the biggest thing holding back most founders and just focusing on the little things.

51:15Yeah, I love it. You probably shared, I would say, I don't know, seven or eight of the little things. Any one individually doesn't seem like it's going to be earth shattering. But when you start to stack them up and you take this attitude of, I'm just going to do the obvious common sense, positive, you know, one unit forward type of mentality, you can get pretty far. I don't know if you've ever read this, the story of the South, the guys who conquered the South Pole. It's one of my favorite stories. No. Do you know the story? Nope. All right. So back in the day, there was like all these like races.

51:46So there was the world wars and that's where countries competed. But in between the world wars, there was like, ooh, the North Pole, which country can get there? And it was a sort of like, you know, a bit of an ego contest between countries. And it was pride. It was who's the bravest? Who's the fastest? Who's the strongest? Who's the smartest? And so there was the North Pole, there was the South Pole, and there was Everest. And I'll tell you the South Pole story because I think it's pretty crazy. So there's these two teams that go down to the South Pole. And one team basically bets on, we're going to have the strongest animals to pull our sleds.

52:21We're going to make sure we're fully stocked. We're going to build like really sturdy camp so that we can survive. We're going to take this known route. And they were very smart and strategic. So they would, when the weather was good, they would like gung-ho, he would give a motivational speech and they would try to go as many miles as they could. And when the weather was bad, they would bunker down and they would wait it out. And it seemed like the smart, strategic thing to do. And so that was one of the guys. And then the other guy took the opposite approach. He's like, I'm going to try to go in a straight line.

52:51That seems like the fastest path. We're not going to bring all those supplies. It's going to be too heavy. So we're going to bring like just what's needed. We're going to use dogs instead of horses. Yeah, they're not as strong, but hey, we're not bringing so much weight. So with these supplies, so I think it'll be okay. And he took this like absolute brute force mentality and his approach was 20 miles a day. So it's like good weather, 20 miles, bad weather, 20 miles. It would just march 20 miles on average. The other guy had this huge variance in what they would do, and he was very dependent on the weather, the conditions.

53:26People have taken this lesson, and they sort of like, you know, like a moral of the story was this idea of the 20-mile march. That, you know, you could start in New York, but if you just take this approach of 20 miles a day of walking, it's not an unreasonable amount to walk in a day. You can get to California. You will be on the beach soon. There will be water in between your toes if you take this 20-mile march idea. if you try to like, you know, sprint some days and rest some days and run some days and jog some days and you try to like bring all, you know, you think you need all these resources to get there, you'll never make it.

53:58And so what I love is to me, your story is very much this sort of 20 mile march idea of like, you just wake up every day and you just do the next thing. You live to fight another day just by doing, you know, the basics really, really well. The common sense things really, really well. All right, Tyler, thanks for coming on. Everybody should go listen to Big Desk Energy on Spotify. That's my plug for you. Great playlist. And subscribe to your newsletter because I think your newsletter is pretty fun. It's partly, you know, founder stuff, how you're building your company. It's a pretty entertaining read.

54:29Yeah, if you liked anything in this episode, my newsletter is that pushed out, right? So subscribe to the newsletter, follow the playlist and thanks for having me. All right, that's it.

54:46All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.