The Wild Story Of ‘Mr. Tull’ - From Laundromats To $3.5B Hollywood Production Company

24:29I mean, what the politicians do in basically a year and a half, it's pretty phenomenal in terms of deploying money for marketing. And they're savage about it. Dude, the presidential election is a marketing contest between two agencies. And they each get to pick their front man and then they run a marketing blitz and they spend$500 million to a billion dollars marketing over the course of 18 months. In like eight months. Yeah. And like, that's it. So it got two presidents. The last two presidents elected was the Moneyball for X. They used it in politics. It helped the Red Sox win the World Series.

25:03It worked in baseball. It built tons of DTC brands. The Moneyball approach also is, you know, in finance with all the quants, quant funds or hedge funds that are using this or Renaissance. So it's pretty interesting to see how you can use Moneyball in any industry that is still not data-first, so not data-driven. And if you ask, how do you guys make decisions? And it's basically some version of gut, eyeball, taste. There's probably a Moneyball variant there. I know a guy who is doing it with HVAC. He has an HVAC business doing like$150 million a year in revenue. And he tells me constantly all the data stuff that they're doing.

25:42And he's like, people don't do this in our industry. no one is doing this where it's as simple as we're looking at the data of what can we send and how many emails can we send to get more Google reviews but they just changed their data it's like they're running it like a tech company a little bit where they have a small data analytics team and he says that very rarely is anyone else in the HVAC industry doing something like this Dude, Sam I gotta ask you, I already know the answer to this question but I gotta ask you did you watch UFC 300 on Saturday? The full five hours or six hours. Yeah, I sat the whole time.

26:17It was amazing. Did you make like a seven layer nacho dip and just sit there for seven hours watching it? I watched the entire thing. I think it started at six o 'clock and ended at one o 'clock my time. So I want to talk about it because A, we're both UFC fans and it was amazing. But B, there's actually a great business CEO lesson in it that I want to go to. But first, can we just explain for anybody what Max Holloway did? Because I think the Max Holloway thing alone, if you don't even watch the fights, you need to know that this happened. Well, let's explain UFC 300. So UFC's been around since the 90s.

26:53They've done thousands of events, but the major events, they number them. UFC 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This past weekend was UFC 300. Typically, what they do is a card has five main fights. and then before the five main fights, there's 10 prelims, which are no-name fights that are up-and-comers. This time, they didn't have... They had 15 fights, but all of them were famous, great people. And so it created like five hours of epic fight cards, right? Yeah, it was crazy. And one of the fights was for a made-up title called the Bad Mother Effer belt, the BMF title. and it was two guys who are popular, but they're currently not at the tippy top of their thing.

27:40So one guy, this guy's named Max Holloway and he's fighting this guy, Justin Gaethje. And they're fighting and Justin Gaethje is a big favorite coming into the fight. People think he's going to win. Max Holloway has kind of gotten, he's kind of looks like he's on the back end of his prime or maybe on the decline a little bit. And so two things happen. One, Max Holloway starts to win. Okay, that itself was cool, remarkable, but nothing compared to what happened at the end. So the guy, the way UFC fight works is five rounds, let's say. And basically what happens is if you're winning, you each round gets scored.

28:10If you're winning each of the rounds, you have it locked up. So what happens is, let's say you're winning three rounds to two or four rounds to one. Your corner tells you, hey, you're way ahead. Just play it safe. Just the only way this other guy can win is if he knocks you out. Don't play it smart, right? That's nine times out of 10. However, this is fighting entertainment. And some fighters understand that and some fighters don't. Max Holloway understands that. So what he did was he wins all five rounds. So he's not even up three, two for one. He wins all five rounds. And at the end of the fifth round, he's basically broken this guy's nose.

28:44He's got this guy kind of a battering bruise. The only thing this one guy can do, and this guy's a power puncher. The only thing this guy could do is knock him out. Max Holloway decides in the last 10 seconds where most guys kind of just circle around, raise their hands, try to tell the judges they won. He points to the middle of the ring. He points down and he's like, stand right here. Neither one of us backs down and just let's swing as hard as we can and try to knock each other out for the last 10 seconds. Now, this sounds very savage. What this actually is, is incredibly courageous and brave and entertaining and reckless and stupid all at the same time rolled into one.

29:18And they both start just swinging absolute haymakers at each other. And then he, in the last second of the fight, knocks the other guy out cold. I feel like I can't even do it justice. If you watch the fight, you already know what happened. If you don't watch the fight, you probably don't care about this. but it was remarkable to watch. It was probably the best UFC moment I've ever seen. Maybe for sure top three, probably number one. And I would actually say it was one of the best moments in sports that I've ever seen. Exactly. It was like I felt so much adrenaline watching this. I was like, it was in the middle of the night, my baby was sleeping and I yelled like as loud as I could.

29:57I was in awe. It was so adrenaline inducing. It was amazing. It would be like in basketball if LeBron James was about to win the NBA finals. And normally they're just trying to hold the ball, you know, stall, let the clock run out. And instead, he handed the ball to his opponent, said, no, come here. You have the ball. Come to the middle of the court. Everybody get off the court one on one right now for the game, for the championship, for the glory. And then somehow also if he risked getting knocked out in the process. So pretty insane moment. Mark Zuckerberg, by the way, was sitting ringside and every fighter would run up to him and start pointing at him and talking to him.

30:32It was awesome. It was so exciting. By the way, don't you think that Zuck should lean in more to this? I feel like this is the best PR that Mark Zuckerberg's ever had. It is his own heel turn into becoming a fighter, being at the UFC ringside, hanging out there, and all the fighters really love him. Going into the tough man sport, right? And he looked cool. He looked cool. He had a little afro and he had a white t-shirt on, baggy white. He looked like a cool guy. He did. Yeah, he has the oversized tee now. He went on TikTok shops and bought the oversized tee from some 18-year-old who was doing a dance video.

31:08And his wife looked cool too. It's called mob chic, what she was wearing. It was all black. She looked cool. They both looked cool. Did you Google that? I Googled it. I read a Business Insider article. I learned that word mob chic. So you know what he should do, by the way? This is a little PR lesson for him. I think that he should create his own... Zuckerberg bonus. So you should have the Zuck like the Zuck 500 and he just gives 500 ,000 to whoever had the most badass performance. So it should have just been like Max Holloway. It's like whoever just really put it all on the line win or lose doesn't matter.

31:39Somebody who showed the most heart like the underdog bonus and because these guys don't get paid and Zuck has all of the money. So if he just did that for every pay-per-view, I feel like that would be its own storyline. He'd get so much goodwill that you literally like gladiator stuff you couldn't buy it yeah um by the way the singer sia sia sia she does this for survivor so the winner of survivor wins a million dollars and sia is a super fan of survivor and she just called into the reunion one time and was like hey i just love that guy he didn't even come close to winning but i want to give him 50 grand and so it became no way a sia bonus of like whoever won her heart gets like extra money at the end it's pretty genius dude that's so funny that's awesome um All right.

32:21And so Max knocks out the guy. What happens? What's the business angle here? The press conference at the end is always entertaining. Dana White is a very unfiltered guy. Dana, please come on the pod. He goes on the press conference and somebody asked him, they were like, Dana, on a night like this, UFC 300, you try to build a car. But after that, it's out of your hands. Then it's up to the fighters. And how happy are you that it just turned out that way? Such a moment and such a great, great overall night. And Dana goes, people ask me what I do for a living. I don't, he's like, I don't organize fights.

32:53I sell holy shit moments. And tonight I sold him. I sold millions of holy shit moments. Basically, he's like, I sold a holy shit moment to millions of people. And I thought it's a great little lesson, which is what are you really selling? What are you really selling in your business? Is he selling a mixed martial arts contest? Is he selling an event? Is he, he says, I'm selling holy shit moments. And I thought about this, and marketers for a long time have known this, which is there's levels to marketing. And I want to give you my five levels to marketing based on the Dana White principle of selling holy shit moments.

33:30Okay, are you ready for this? Level one, you sell a product. And this is every shitty startup website. You go to it and it just says, we are a healthcare CRM using AI. They're just describing some product. and it's not compelling because I don't give a shit about your product. I don't give a shit about myself and your product is some abstract, you know, we're a blockchain-based, you know, Web3 arcade side scroller. It's like, what? And if you go to most product websites, to be honest, they're just selling a product. That's level one. This is what failing companies do, okay? Level two. Level two is you don't sell a product, you sell a solution.

34:14and this is effective, but it's competitive. This is like head and shoulders. Head and shoulders says, hey, are you tired of having that dandruff on your shoulder? Use head and shoulders. It gets rid of the dandruff. Okay, so selling a solution to a pain point. And this is where I would say, okay, if 50 % of companies just do sell a product, another 45 % are going to sell the solution to a pain point. Okay, now we get into the championship rounds where we're going to have more interesting ways of doing things. So the next one, level three, you sell a lifestyle. This is Lululemon. This is Slack.

34:53So if you've ever, if you don't believe me, go read the Stuart Butterfield, who's the CEO of Slack. Go read his post called We Don't Sell Saddles Here. And I'll spoil it for you, which is he says, imagine you're a saddle company. You make saddles. We could just describe the product, the saddles. We could describe some solution like, oh, your butt won't be sore on our saddle. Or we could sell the lifestyle, the joy of horseback riding and get people to want to be on horseback, to feel free, to have the wind blowing through their hair. You make that lifestyle aspirational. And then when they're like, I got to do that.

35:25Now they're super motivated and they say, well, what do I need? You're like, well, you need a saddle and ours are the best. And so he says that this is how the yoga companies, Lululemon and whatnot, this is how they got popular too, is they didn't say, here, we have the best yoga pants, which was a small market of people looking for yoga pants. they got people into the idea of doing yoga and once you get into doing yoga and the benefits of yoga, you're going to want to invest in buying better gear as you go. And Lululemon will say, well, we have the best gear. And so this is how you create a category.

35:54Or you just want to make your ass look dope. The lifestyle of being a big booty queen. And if that's the lifestyle you want to be a part of, then we are the pants for you. Yeah. The MFM merch store will soon have fat margin bottoms. And the real bottom lines. That's pretty good. All right. And four and five? Four is where I thought we stopped. There's actually five. But four is where I thought we stopped. This is the Dana White level. You sell a feeling. And I'll tell you that line that somebody told me once. I hired this consultant and I was talking about my content. I did the lamest thing. I hired a consultant for my personal brand just to know, what do these guys know?

36:38I didn't ever end up implementing really anything, but I did take away this one thing he said. He goes, I go, you've worked with all the big names. You've worked with whoever, I don't want to out him, I guess, but he's worked with a bunch of big names. I said, what do they do differently than what I'm doing? And he goes, you make content, they give out a feeling. I said, what? He goes, as any content creator, you are the merchant of feelings. If you give someone a feeling more consistently and more powerfully than anybody else, that's what makes you box office. And I was like, I love using the word box office.

37:10That's great. And this is what Dana White was saying, right? We sell holy shit moments. We give you that feeling that you can't really get anywhere else. Like in your life, can you really get, like there's a reason you love the UFC. My buddy Julian Shapiro loves the UFC like none other. Like he's like, I can't watch other sports. He's like, I can't watch TV or movies. UFC has ruined it for me. Well, Dana White said something amazing. He goes, think about this. You're at the Super Bowl. It's the final down. It's the greatest moment in NFL history. And a fight breaks out a few rows down from you.

37:42What are you going to do? You're going to stop watching football and you're going to go and pay attention to the fight. That's what people do. And that's the business that I'm in. That's why I knew this was going to be the greatest sport ever. Exactly. And so the greatest brands, let's say, Disney. Disney is amazing at this. Disney doesn't say, come to our theme park. We have the fastest rides or we have the shortest lines. No, they tell you about the magical family experience, right? This is going to be a lifetime memory for you. This is going to give your kids a magical feeling, a magical moment.

38:14All of their movies are the same way, right? You watch a Pixar movie because it's going to give you this feel-good moment, right? They give you feel-good moments more consistently than anybody else. So the Breast Barons do this. Louis Vuitton gives you a feeling of status, of importance. UFC gives you the holy shit feeling. Nike gives you a feeling of the feeling of greatness. When they advertise their shoes, they don't advertise the rubber shoes. They basically show you someone's striving for greatness, and it's that inspiration, that motivation that they sell. Okay, so now level five. Level five, I realized, is the highest one.

38:47You didn't sell a product. You didn't sell a solution. You didn't sell a lifestyle. You didn't sell a feeling. You sell an identity. And this is what the religions do. This is what political parties do. They basically give you a tribe. They give you a label. They give you a purpose. They give you a sense of belonging. It's almost like buying a Subway franchise. They're like, here, wear this uniform. Put this logo up. Here's the packaging. Here's a portrait of bread. Put that on your wall. You now have an identity. We gave you a brand for you to have because you didn't have one on your own. We gave you a purpose.

39:19We gave you something to do. It's an identity in a box. I think that is the highest level of what you can do is you sell an identity to people. Well, guys, when it comes to banking, the only time I feel truly happy is when I'm using Mercury. And that's today's sponsor for the show. That is the banking product I use for not one, not two, but actually eight of my businesses. I have eight Mercury accounts. I just went and counted. I use it for every one of my companies. It's an absolute no-brainer. Over 200 ,000 other fast-growing, ambitious companies use Mercury. It's one place you can go where not only you can, of course, have your money there, but you can send invoices.

39:56You can pay bills. You can create reimbursements for your team. pretty much all of your financial needs can be housed under Mercury. And the product is beautiful to use. And the reason why is because it's a product that was not made by finance people. It was made by a founder, Ahmad. He's been on this podcast before. And he used tons of products as a startup founder. And this is the one that he wished he had. And I actually reached out to them to become a sponsor for this show because I'm such a big fan of it. So if you need a banking product for your startup, use Mercury. You will not regret it.

40:23It's amazing. For more information, check out mercury.com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details first of all very good i'm this you've you've this was a really good monologue you tied in some of my favorite stuff congratulations second of all were you just watching the ufc taking notes on this stuff and just like no i heard him say that and the i heard him say that the press conference and i go that's exactly what he does that's why i watch because i can't get that holy shit feeling from anything. What else is as real as that? And once you know the stories of the fighters, that's really what works.

41:00If you're personally invested and you understand the stakes, you understand what's in it for each guy, it's pretty hard to compare that to really any of the sport. Maybe boxing is the other one. No, boxing doesn't even come close to what these guys do. They're in a league of their own in terms of giving me a feeling. I wore a heart rate monitor one time to see what would happen because I noticed going into the fight, I was so anxious because I was so emotionally invested. My heart rate went up like 20 beats per minute before this fight. It was insane. I get so into this that I find myself tired the next day.

41:35It's one of the very few times that I felt this in sports. It's the best. I feel a little bit in the Olympics because I get into that. But no, I mean, what he has done and what the UFC has done in terms of, what did you say, selling emotions, it's the best. I mean, if you go look at the old cigarette ads, if you want to see this. So if you go look at an old cigarette ad, they're obviously not selling the product. They're not selling a solution to a pain point. They're not saying, hey, your lungs need a little more tar in them. You know, like they're not doing that. It's all about a feeling and an identity, right?

42:07So they're giving you a feeling of greater, you know, self-importance, a cool self-image, right? So all of the marketing around cigarettes was a cool self-image. it's a cool guy and in his cool moment he takes out the cig and he lights it up or the woman doing the same thing go watch the Dos Equis commercial right the most interesting man in the world sitting in a bar surrounded by women but not paying them any attention looking at you dead in the camera making eye contact he's a man's man he's done this he's done that he's done this and when he drinks beer he drinks Dos Equis right it's trying to give you a cool self image that's what a lot of luxury products and a lot of commodity products have to do And so once you realize that, you're like, oh, and I love this because in our world, the tech world, the business world, most people are like absolute beginner, rookie white belts at real marketing.

42:59And even the best in class is just saying, sell a solution to a pain point, sell the benefit, not the feature. And that's like level two. And they just stop there. Nobody really goes beyond that. And so I like taking what is the best in class look like when it comes to marketing and brand and actually doing something that gets people to move and take action. And, you know, how do I bring that into our world? Because then you have an unfair advantage. And it's not always around violence. So if you're listening to this and you don't know anything about the UFC, go to YouTube and type in UFC Rose I'm the best.

43:33One of the best moments from UFC is also this young woman named Rose Namajunas and she's about to fight and she clearly is scared and you see her mouthing to herself, I'm the best. I'm the best. I'm the best. And I remember distinctly where I was. She looks like your little sister. And the person across the river looks like the Terminator. And so you can just put yourself in that person's shoes. Oh, man. They're about to fight somebody who's clearly just bigger, stronger, faster, everything. And she's mouthing to herself, I'm the best. To kind of like... It's like she's walking into the lion's den.

44:05And she's got to believe this. Otherwise, she doesn't stand a chance. And she knocks her out. She knocks her out in the first round or something like that. And it was another great sporting moment. Holy shit moment. And so the two other moments. First of all, there was two Chinese women fighting, which is the first time it's ever happened for the championship. And one of the ladies chokes out another woman, and she goes unconscious right when the bell rings. So they're able to keep fighting. She doesn't really wake up until she gets punched again on the second round, which was just epic. And then the third thing that happened was in the last fight, Alex Pereira gets kicked in the groin.

44:37The ref goes to stop it. He waves him off. And then 10 seconds later, knocks out the other guy. it was just full of badass moments where this whole thing, it was just it was epic. It was an epic event. And by the way, let's just tie this principle back, by the way. I did this with the podcast. So I was like, what are we really selling here on the podcast? Is it ideas? Do people show up because they want a business idea? That's kind of lame. Like, sure, it's fun to hear ideas. It's fun to talk about ideas. But if you're really like, you know what? To be successful, I'm going to go to this YouTube channel and find a business idea that these random guys are going to say out loud.

45:14Honestly, that's a bad plan. It might happen, but don't do it for that reason. And the same reason we might talk about the UFC or something else. That's probably not the most effective thing for you to do every day. It's not a product. It's not a pain point. One thing that I figured out was when I talked to a bunch of people and I tweeted this out, I go, what is something you remember? And what's the reason you actually listen to the pod regularly? What keeps you hooked? And the number one word that kept coming up was, oh man, I feel so inspired after I listen. And they're like, not in a cheesy way, but they're like, literally, if I'm driving and I'm listening, I sometimes will pull over because I got to write something down.

45:52Right? You guys said one phrase that really stuck with me. And I was like, oh, that's going to be an unlock for me, either personally or in my marketing or whatever. Or it's, I heard about this idea. I'm not going to go do that idea, but I'm inspired by that idea. Or you tell the story of some Billy of the Week, some guy who's really crushed it or some business that's under the radar, that's crushing it. and all of a sudden I feel like success is abundant. I'm inspired to go make my shit happen. I'm not going to do what they did but I'm going to go make my shit happen. And so we sell inspiration.

46:19That's the first thing. We actually sell one secondary thing which is, have you ever seen that meme of the kid eating cereal next to his TV box? And it's like there's three friends on the TV box and he's just like cozied up next to it. It's like me and my four friends but it's just like Oh, that's awesome. The other one's a photo. And it's basically like companionship. And people have posted before like this is me when I listen to podcasts. It's kind of like you're hanging out with your friends, except for they're not there. But it feels that way. And so that's the other thing. For a lot of people who listen, what I learned was that even more than the inspiration, the ones that are super sticky, it's companionship.

46:51It's basically, my real-life friends aren't as nerdy about business as I am. Or I live in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. Or I'm in Belize. Or I'm in wherever. And I don't know six other people that I can hang out with twice a week and just nerd out about business with. And so you guys are basically my substitute for what I don't have or don't have the time for in my day-to-day life. This was an A-plus segment. Good job. I dig that. Let me tell you about something. So I launched something a couple weeks ago or a week ago, and I think there's only a 30 % chance of it working. But I thought I could reveal some of the numbers behind it.

47:31So I launched this thing called Sam's List. It's samslist.co. Did you see when I shared that online the other day? Yeah, I did. All right. So let me explain the background. So I was at the airport in January, and I had just gotten an email from my accountant. And it pissed me off that they didn't catch an error that I thought they should have caught. And so I tweeted out, who has an accountant that they love? I got about 300 responses. And I noticed that tons of people were bookmarking that tweet as if they're going to come back and hire an accountant, which was on the tweet. And so I thought, I think I could make a thing out of this.

48:07And so I hired a developer who works on Bubble. Do you know what Bubble is? Have you ever used Bubble? Yeah, the website builder. Yeah, man. It's awesome. It's like a whole app builder. And so we built this website where we got... It was basically, I wanted to create Yelp for accountants. A place where you can identify an accountant that's good based off of your friends. And I thought, this could be a good idea because when you hire an accountant, you don't really have a place to see reviews. You mostly hear about an accountant through word of mouth. And if you hire the wrong accountant, it's basically like a year that you have to stay with them before you find out that they kind of stink.

48:39So I was like, all right, I'm going to create this thing. It's called Sam's List. We're going to build this out. It's going to be awesome. I spent about$15 ,000 to build it out. And so here's what I did. I got 300 replies to that tweet. I called all of them. So I got most of them on the phone or some of them via email. And I asked them all types of questions. I asked them how much do they charge, who the perfect client is, who's the not perfect client. What services are their specialties? Things like that. As if I was going to hire them. I think you had told me one time when you went to hire an accountant, you created your own data room and you sent it to people and you're like, who can handle this best?

49:12Well, I kind of did a thing like that. I put them all on this website on Sam's list and it took me a few weeks to get it going and then I shared it. And I want this thing to work. I don't think it's going to. Why are you saying that? Is that like some weird, humble... No. Are you just doing some reverse thing where it's like, If only the community would rally. What are you doing here? Is this reverse psychology? It's not reverse psychology. I'll explain why this will be hard to work. And so here was my math. My math was basically, if I can get 500 ,000 people a month to come to this website, 3 % of them would answer the...

49:48Or would contact an accountant. Somehow I could charge the accountants $100 per person I sent to them, per lead that I sent to them. And if that were the case, that would be something like$1.5 million a month in sales. I figured that would take years to get to. But if I could get to that, that's an interesting thing. Well, I shared it online. In the first week, I got 13 ,000 visits. We made this really cool quiz where you could say how much revenue you have. Do you want this for your business or personal, whatever. And then we would recommend 3 or 4 accountants that you like or that could fit your needs.

50:21We had 6 ,000 people answer the quiz. And we also created this feature where you could schedule a meeting right there on the website with those accountants that we referred you to. Very few people scheduled appointments and very few people even submitted their information to the accountants. What's very few? So we had 6 ,000 people take the quiz in one week. I think we had like 100 or 200 people submit information to the accountant. But that's not the issue. The issue isn't the user. The issue is accountants are not clamoring for these leads. My big learning was that there's a massive... And this is for someone who can go and solve this problem.

51:03There's a massive shortage of accountants. There's not a shortage of people looking for an accountant. There's a huge shortage of people who are becoming accountants. And not only that, the people who are accountants, they don't really want to grow their business to be that large. And I thought that they'd be dying to get more customers. They're really not, which shocked me. That was a really big shocker. And when I launched this business, I basically copied or I didn't copy. I use... Have you ever heard of smartasset.com? No. So smartasset.com, I bet you've seen them if you've Googled what's California's taxes or California tax calculator.

51:40Well, the reason why they have all that stuff is they're actually doing... Well, I'm doing what they're doing, but they're doing what I'm doing for CFA, so Certified Financial Planners or Advisors. and what they do is you take this quiz and they tell you all like you answer all these questions about you know how old you are if you're retired if you're not retired what you're trying to do with your money are you trying to invest it or just live off it whatever and then they recommend like three or four people who might fit your needs but what i found on that website is if you click around they have to tell you how much they're paying per person per lead and so they actually say if a person has between a million and five million in assets this advisor is paying $700 per lead.

52:20If it's over $5 million, they're paying $250. It gives you a range per cost per lead, per net worth. And it tells you all how they do their business. I thought I could just replicate it. Turns out, CPAs aren't dying for business. And so it's the exact opposite. They're actually overwhelmed with business. And so that's why I don't think this is actually going to make a lot of money. I think you're wrong. I think there's a need for this. I think that it will do well. I also think you know that. And I think you're... No, I don't. I'm going to shut it... I think you're playing us. Just going to put it out there.

52:54I'm going to shut it down on May 30th. Is that he's playing us? No. I went Trump on you for a second. That was good. If it doesn't work, if I'm losing money right now on this, if it doesn't start working by May 30th, I'm shutting it down. Like I'm not going to invest more money on it. Dog, just give it to me. I'll make this work. This is so easy. You're just being impatient. And it's going to fail because you have a much better business that you're busy with called Hampton. And you should focus on that. is going to fail and that's why this is a bad idea. But otherwise, it's a good idea. Let me point out a couple of the product details that I like and I'm going to tell you some of the things that you should do differently.

53:26So we can screen share this. All right. I love when I go to the site and it pops up the... So I go to the site and it pops up and it basically is like normally where there's an email pop up, but it's like no email, no BS, no something, like let's go. I was like, okay, already. I think you should just actually call that out a little more and be like, we want to help you. We don't need your email address. And then just have a button that says, thank God. And then they hit thank God. It takes them down the funnel. I love this part that you did where you read this first. And you wrote, I have this many Twitter followers.

53:59I asked if they have a CPA account that they love. Then I called all them. I asked them how much they charge, blah, blah, blah. Why would I do this? Because I'm a nerd and I needed an accountant. I thought, well, how about I make this useful for others? Blah, blah, blah. That's great. I love how you do that. I love how you put everybody's Twitter profile attached to their name. Nice touch. like your name here every accountant you can go see their twitter which for our market is actually a good idea you know most people can see their bio but for us it's cool um you should put the prices on the front thing because i think that's like makes it a lot more value add to the person coming in it's like oh good these people already went and found what the rates are for these and you also said like i asked them who their sweet spot customer is and blah blah blah like what I can't tell is like, you know, when, um, you know, when you go to cars and bids and Doug tomorrow has the Doug speech bubble and Doug's like, here's what I think.

54:54Um, I think you kind of need to lean into that. I agree. That's a good idea. I don't trust reviews. I trust review and I really just trust you. And so the question is like, can you, you know, not just call them, but call like, you know, 10 of their clients and be like, tell me everything. And then end up with one speech bubble that Sam saying, talk to them, talk to their clients. Here's roughly what they charge. And like, you know, this is like, you know, people are screaming endorsing or they're like, yeah, it's pretty good. And like, you know, so I think they're solid. And they seem to specifically help out this type of customer.

55:26I think that would make it better. I think that's a good idea. The reason why we haven't, I haven't done that yet is I would have to hire someone to help me call those people. And I was like, I need to figure out, does this thing even make money in the first place in order to like justify all this work? a few little dreams, baby. If you build it, they will come. Did you see... A few things. The design, I liked our design. I just ripped it off. We made it look like old Microsoft. And then the image is... I just copied Clippy. You remember Clippy from Microsoft Word? It's Calci. It's AI. And on the calculator face, it's only four digits.

56:02It's a 2, it's a 5, it's a 9, and a Q. Putting the Q in as the last letter is the AI knows something we don't yeah and so anyway I thought I'd fill people in on this I think it's hard I don't want to be in the business of selling leads to small accountants and having like hundreds and hundreds of different clients paying me versus I think in order to make this work you actually what you do is you get someone's information and then in order to do lead gen you usually only have a small amount of very large companies who pay you a large sum per month for a certain amount of leads versus one off. You know what I mean?

56:39I'm still trying to figure this shit out, but we'll see if it works out. Alright, you got anything else or are we done? No. You did great. That was good. Two bangers. That's what I'm going to tell my wife when I go downstairs. How was the pod? Double banger. Double banger. Alright, that's the pod.

57:07Put my all in it like no days off. On the road, less travel, never looking back.

57:17All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

57:45It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency. Well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

58:10For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.