219 - The Secret to Standing Out without Going Viral with Nick Gray

0:00That's a really great point that, wow, I never thought about this before. I feel like we could just talk about it. The reality is that it has never been easier to launch and start a business, but it's never been harder to get customers and get some traction. Anyone can do this. You know how to use the computer. You know how to use AI tools. You can do this yourself, but you probably never will. Everybody needs a personal website. You don't have a domain name and a personal page. You need to make the$20 investment. And I'll tell you why.

0:32All right, Nick, one of my personal favorites. I'm freaking so excited to talk to you. For those who don't know you, Serial Entrepreneur, built and sold multiple multi-million dollar businesses. Your first business was called FDS. It was a family business. You guys ended up selling to private equity. You then started this really cool company called Museum Act that you built to like$2.8 million in revenue that you sold to your employees. You wrote a book. You're hosting these happy hours. You're friends with billionaires. You've got this amazing network that I'm envious of and I think people can really learn from.

1:01But I want to start. Tell me about your best, worst date story. My best, worst date story. Okay. I probably framed that wrong. But yeah, you know, your bad date story. Bad date story. All right. So for listeners, what Nick is doing is he's asking an icebreaker question. And I think of icebreaker questions as categorized into green, yellow, and red questions. An example of a green, yellow icebreaker question would be like, you know, what's one of your favorite things that you have for breakfast? That's an easy, direct question. Anybody can think about it. It expresses their personality. Yellow might be like, what's one of your favorite business books?

1:42A red level, which Nick has chosen, is like, what's one of your worst date stories? And a red level question is what a lot of people think that icebreakers should be. They're looking for the brain teaser. They're looking for the emotional vulnerability. They're looking to pry you open and rip you out from the inside out. And I think it's why icebreakers get a really bad rep. So what should I have asked? That's good feedback for me because I usually try to start these conversations where it's like highlight your experience, build some credibility, and then ask a really meaty question. the listener gets hooked right away.

2:18But I screwed it up. So I'm glad that I screwed it up because I don't mind being wrong and people can learn from me. How should I have done it instead? What's a better way for me to do it? No, see, you didn't screw it up. You know more about podcasting than I do. I don't know how to hook the listeners. I know that in social interactions, there's value to icebreakers and to doing questions like that to get the conversation going. But more and more, I think about like introverts and people with social anxiety and how when we host groups and we're trying to build relationships, how we can make space for those people and not for just people like myself who may present as extroverts, who's like, all right, I'll tell you exactly the question.

3:00So I do these icebreakers with just a little bit of scaffolding, but the reality is that a podcaster, a YouTube person, they wanna get right into it. They want the juicy meat of it. So I don't know. I don't know the right answer. It's a hard balance because in this conversation, what I want to talk about is like, how do first time entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who are getting into the game, position themselves within their local network as a connector. And in order to do that, you've got to build trust and relationships with people. So that first question, whether it's hosting a cocktail party or not, is so important to just start building rapport.

3:34I'll give one example. I hate when I go to either things for my kids or if I go to like a conference, you know, Main Street. Conferences, I guess, are a little bit different. But these big social gatherings, if somebody asks me, like, what do you do? What's your business? First question, I just, I don't like it. Because to me, that's not the social currency that I'm trying to play in. And like, if I get into the measuring contest, I'm going to lose, right? There's always going to be somebody smarter, better, richer, more successful. I like to ask questions like, oh, cool. Where are you from? What school did you go to?

4:05Just to like get to know the person better. But I don't know that my first question is always great. So why do you like to ask that question of like, where are you from or what school you went to? So I have a pretty eclectic background. I'm one of nine kids. My oldest brother's Hispanic. My older sister's half Chinese. We adopted my twin cousins because my aunt was a drug addict. My dad's a foreigner. He grew up in Brazil, but he's full-blooded Ukrainian, was a professional soccer player. So I grew up around Latin Americans, very eclectic. So usually if I hear somebody say like, oh, I'm from XYZ place, almost immediately I can say, oh that's interesting here's a thing that i have also experienced that instantly connects us that's how it's worked for me anyways so you asked that question to build rapport to seek the connection yeah just to build kind of kind of a connection yeah yeah yeah but i don't know if that's right it's just what i've always done yeah yeah i'm not saying that that's right or wrong i think there's something like messed up in my brain when i lived in new york on an average day, I would literally see, see tens of thousands of people because you're out on the street and you're surrounded by, that's not an exaggeration, tens of thousands of people.

5:18And so there becomes a filtering mechanism that like just by survival. But those are kind of two different things, right? Like if I'm, if I build a filter to decide like, where am I going to put my time and energy? That's totally fine. If you have constructed like you do with these cocktail parties, or if I'm going to a networking event, or if I'm meeting people that are in the same social network as me because my son, our sons play soccer together, et cetera, the filtering's already kind of happened. Do you know what I mean? Like we've all already opted in there. We're already there. It's been filtered.

5:48So in those settings is what I'm saying. It's like, we're all here. We've already filtered. I want to get to know you like quickly as opposed to have to filter out those things. That's a really great point that, wow, I never thought about this before. I feel like we could just talk about like social dynamics. But in an event like that, where, as you said, there is no filtering needed. You are committed to your son's soccer practice. You will be there for the rest of the season. You will see this person. You have already made the decision that like, this is a person I want to get to know. When you have made that choice and decision, then I can understand why you don't want to ask those questions.

6:25Anyhow, here's what's important for listeners. If you are a entrepreneur, if you are a new entrepreneur, if you are starting a business, you need to have an army of people who support you. And you need to break out of every other entrepreneur that's launching new businesses these days. The reality is that it has never been easier to launch and start a business, but it's never been harder to get customers and get some traction. And the way that I found to be successful, the one way that nobody else is doing is to host meetups. To host these meetups maybe once a quarter. Some people go ham and they do once a month.

7:04But to host these little gatherings that can build these relationships and these connections in your town that I promise you will pay dividends in ways that you can't even imagine. How did you start doing that? Because you can't just be like, hey guys, I'm hosting an event. You've got to have at least a small group of people maybe that you build off of. When you did your first one, who were those people? How did it start? Was it organic or was it this preconceived like, nope, I'm going to do the cocktail party and this is what it's going to be and we're going to have name tags, we're going to do icebreakers.

7:36Yeah. So I'll try not to talk my book, but like I wrote this book called The Two Hour Cocktail Party, and I've since helped like 800, maybe 900 people host their very first event. These are people that know nobody that like have never hosted an event before. And then they host an event. By the way, when I say event, I'm talking about 15 to 22 people gathering for a two hour happy hour. This is not a dinner party. It's not expensive. Like anyone can do it. I started to do it in New York City because I was not good at nightclubs and networking events. I would go out to those things and I would, you know, I just wouldn't do well.

8:11It was loud. I don't drink that much. I'm not, at the time, I wasn't very outgoing or very assertive. And I would talk to two or three people. I get business cards shoved in my face and I'd be like, God, like this networking stuff is horrible. Like I'm never going to make new friends or meet new people. and so I kind of had this realization instead of going to bad events I'm going to learn how to host good events it's that thing where it's like if they won't give you a stage then build your own yeah but honestly it started like I was just having a birthday party and I didn't drink and I wanted to host my friends for something different so like we all came over and like made coffee and tea and played board games and that was like one of the first times I ever hosted something, which by the way, I feel very strong about this.

8:58If you're doing something for your birthday, it has to be on your actual day of your birthday. Like I'm, I'm pretty strict about that. You're very particular. Yes, I am. I'm very particular for like, for somebody to be like, it has to be on your actual birthday. Right. And then here's the Nick method that I've created. Like you've got your systems in place that almost feels like the other end of the spectrum of somebody who's gregarious and like you freaking took a trip to Tokyo and went on a first date with somebody to Tokyo right like you famously said you only buy one-way tickets because you like to have flexibility so it's this interesting dichotomy of super flexibility but then you're also very strict with some of the rules that you implement am I reading the tea leaves right or like how do you manage that part of your personality I don't know I feel for my fiance how do I manage I just feel like there are certain things that I have like tried and tested So video is cool, but I have what scientists call a face for radio.

9:56And so what's even cooler is long form audio via my podcast and my newsletter, nickonomicspod.com. Go there for free. Subscribe to my newsletter. It's one email per week, super tactical. And then go to my audio podcast. I do three to five episodes a week, depending on how curious I am. And it's stuff like this. It's all free. No sleazy sales pitches, nickonomicspod.com. So for example, for hosting events, I feel pretty strongly that dinner parties are a terrible way for people to start to learn how to host events. And I've done it enough. I've talked to enough people. I've just got the reps in enough that I have strong opinions that I've tested and that I've tried.

10:35I have strong opinions about museums and museum tours. I know that maybe my birthday only host your birthday on the actual day of your birthday might be controversial, but I'll tell you what, that is the one day that you can ask your friends to do anything when it is on your actual birthday. Tell me a little bit about your philosophy. Like, why do you find this important and not the birthday thing, creating connection, creating an environment for people to actually meet and what results or like what success has actually come out of hosting a bunch of parties effectively so right now like here's the problem here's a lot of noise out there if you think that you're going to launch a business and it could be a software company a new ai tool it could be a bakery whatever it is if you think that you're just going to launch that on social media and that people are going to somehow care beyond your like extremely core group of friends, I think you're in for a rude awakening.

11:43The amount of noise that exists today as we scroll on our phones is overwhelming. What I found was that the way to create connection, the way to get people to actually care was to figure out how to add value to them as soon as possible. How do I give them something? And so I found that by hosting events, I was able to give someone the gift of new connections, meeting new people, host a little happy hour. I get to host them. And then I was able to get them into my world. Now, specifically how did it work for me? I launched a business. I launched this museum hack tour company from hosting all of these happy hours and then getting people to come.

12:27And I built that up to a multimillion dollar business. I've heard from so many people this woman in Seattle who read my book who said I just wanted to get together with the moms in the neighborhood, she starts to host these Wine Wednesdays, I talked to her six months later, she said she launched this like stroller moms workout thing where they do workouts in the park and she charges and folks pay her and they love it and she said I never would have done that if I didn't start hosting those Wine Wednesdays because now people want to come to my stuff. People know me. I get them off the screen and into real life.

13:03Yeah. And so it's a small thing, but I think it's just crazy important. I have a small story for that. I was working in Southern California and I went to this marketing event and I had just gotten fired from this company and it was not good. And the guy that replaced me was there. And I knew that it was a mess there. It was a mess at the company. I knew what the people that he was working for were like, et cetera. And I saw his name. Literally, I'm signing in the book. He had signed in just before me and I saw Justin Stenquist. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's the guy. And so I signed my name and I walk up to him and I'm like, what's up, Justin?

13:38How's it going? I'm Nick. And obviously he had heard about me because I'd been fired and it was a whole to do. He's like, dude, hey, what's up? And I was like, how's Angeles, man? That was the name of the company that we were running. He's like, dude, it's great. So good. Things are great. And I like, I put my hand on his shoulder and I was like, you don't have to BS with me, man. How's it really going? He's like, just like instantly the facade drops. And he's like, it's terrible, man. I don't know how much longer I have there. I'm pretty sure they're going to be firing me in a few weeks. Sure enough, they did fire him.

14:08But from that conversation, Justin and I became incredibly close. And when I built a home health and hospice here in Boise, I recruited him to come up. He ran it. We built that into a$15 million company. That's the one we sold a few years ago. And he's still running that agency. but it was just that like willingness to be in a place where serendipity happens. I think you talk about this, right? Like increasing your surface area of luck, especially as a first time entrepreneur, you don't think about it. Like you can't quantify it necessarily, but it's so important because you don't know when serendipity is going to show its beautiful face, right?

14:44And you don't know what moment, what conversation, what person might be that door that leads you to success. I love that. I'm vibing off that idea of which you're totally right. And I may have said, which is increasing your surface area for luck. What do you think would be most helpful to your listeners and viewers? Because I want to actually give them, I think my story is interesting, but what's more interesting is that I've helped hundreds of people to increase their surface area for luck. And there's various ways that I have done that with my stuff online, with my events. But now I really like helping people learn how to do it themselves because I have found that it does not take an outgoing, you know, super charismatic.

15:31In fact, sometimes the most introverted, socially anxious people are the ones who love having structure at an event like a two cocktail party because they know exactly what to do. Have you ever heard of a textrovert? No. What is that? They're like an extrovert over text that could be texting on the phone or like written. Wow. They're like this gregarious outgoing person. I think that's a really good point. You don't have to be an extrovert in order to build a network. But this is something that I really believe in. First time founders focus on product and second time founders focus on distribution.

16:03What that means is it doesn't matter how good your product is, right? If you don't have a means to sell it. And your network for many entrepreneurs become your distribution network, right? Like the people that I know who want to go to bat for me that I built a reservoir of respect and trust with, I can then tap into. You've done two really cool things that I want to mention. The first one is you've now started a company where you're building personalized websites for people, which I think is genius because I don't want to go to LinkedIn. I don't want to go look at somebody's curated manicured like i worked at this company and these were the things that i did there right i think it's a beautiful way to like put yourself out there and then the second thing is in order to build relationships you've got these cocktail parties so i'd love to hear about the first of why you built the website business and then tactically how do i do the cocktail parties how do i launch it who do i contact how does it go who do i do for the catering etc i think those two paired together would be really cool rest of the conversation and let me paint the picture of the website thing and how your listeners can do this themselves.

17:04They don't have to hire my company. They could even build a business doing this themselves if they wanted to. But first, let's talk about the importance of why I think everybody needs a personal website. And if you're listening to this now, if you're watching this on YouTube and you don't have like your name dot com or dot net or dot co or something with your name on a domain name and a personal page, you need to make the$20 investment. To buy the domain, you can go to card.com or card.co, C-A-R-R-D.C-O. You can go to wordpress.com and get a$4 a month WordPress. But you need to have some homepage on the internet, even if it's just a simple text page with some family photos or something.

17:50And I'll tell you why. Because as we talk about that surface area of luck, I think there's also the surface area of your personal reputation on the internet. And by the way, if you are looking for a job or if you think that at some time you may need to be, I have heard repeatedly from recruiters that whenever someone has a personal website, that is a strong positive signal for them. Because like you said, it's beyond just having a LinkedIn or something like that. We want people, what shows up when you search for your name? So when you go online and you search for your name, I try to get people to hopefully have really good results in that.

18:27And we know that day to day, it may not be every day, actually, maybe it's a couple times a week. Somebody might be searching for you. It could be an employer, a coworker. If you're buying businesses, it could be new employees. If you're thinking of starting a company, it could be freelancers or people you want to hire. It could be parents just in school with your kids that are just curious who these other parents are that are inviting to a birthday party. But you want to control that narrative online and you want to set it up before you need it. And so that's what I talk about with like the surface area of your online presence and what shows up.

19:02Well, it's like how many times I know for me, how many times if somebody asked like, oh, hey, Nick, tell me about yourself. And I'm like, I've gotten better because I talk to people all the time about this stuff. But many people, it's like, oh, well, I went to the school and then I did this. They just stutter and stammer through it. Whereas this is an easy way for them to put something curious, like what they want out there in the way that they want it formatted. Do you have an example we can look at? Is there somebody who has a personal website? Yeah. So someone that we made, you can go to danlerman.com, D-A-N-L-E-R-M-A-N.com.

19:38This is a guy who's a SAT tutor. And, you know, he, parents are probably looking him up. He only had his business page and his Instagram and his LinkedIn. And we made a just simple homepage for him. And by the way, since I've been sharing so much of myself online for many years, I've hired all these folks who work for me. So I have like a little team of three full-time people that help me with my stuff. Cool. But now I'm wanting to help other people. So we do it for like$30 or a hundred bucks a month. You get on a phone call with one of my people once a month. They talk to you. They do an interview.

20:14They record the call. They help write it. Anyone that is like super savvy that's listening and watching, you can do this all yourself. But I also find a lot of people just will never do it. They simply say like, oh, I should probably do that. But they'll never make it a priority. And I found, you know what, through a 20-minute phone call with someone on my team, we can just knock this out for you. All right. So here's Dan's page. Dan Lerman, I'm a Columbia professor and human intelligence expert. The go-to tutor for families who want top scores, dream schools, and lasting confidence without the guess.

20:48Work. I'm going to say one thing. Yes. AI has ruined the M-dash for me. It's ruined it. I hate it so much that I don't hate the M-dash. When I get like output from AI, it's always got the M-dash. And I'm like, man, now everyone thinks it's AI written. Anyways. Yeah. Why is this the first thing that I'm looking at on his webpage? Like you're smart, you know how to get attention, you know how to hook people. There's a reason that you started with this. Can you walk me through like why this first? I think people want to know sort of reputation or they just want an easy, like, what is this person?

21:24And so he's a Columbia professor and a human intelligence expert. If his goal is to get clients to help hire him so the kids will ace the SATs, I think that is really important and that that's what they want. What's more interesting, though, is on his page, if you click articles, I'll show you this is the kind of unique thing that we're doing for people. The name of the business I've been playing with is called Minor League Famous, which is like, hey, 30 bucks a month or so. Like I'll set up your website, I'll host it. And about once a month, we'll scrape and create these articles from what you're already posting on the internet.

22:01And so if you click any of these posts, these are just stories that he's posted on Instagram, tweets that he's written, LinkedIn posts. And we've just turned them into blog posts. Once again, anyone can do this. You are watching this podcast on YouTube. You know how to use the computer. You know how to use AI tools. You can do this yourself, but you probably never will. And you'll just never get around to it. Did he tell you like, hey, I want the SAT bootcamp in London to be featured on our website? Because he's probably putting a lot of content out, right? Like, how did you know to pick this one?

22:35We look for stuff that has like engagement and that looks like it could be good content for what they're doing. And so someone like Dan who posts maybe twice a month, maybe we can just choose something. Okay, so that's another one. So he was on a podcast. We found that he was on a podcast. We just stripped the transcript, wrote the article, took all this stuff. And so we do this for people. It's like, if you're on a podcast, we're just going to write it up so you can scroll. Yeah, yeah. Nick, that's so good. Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract.

23:06I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business. And you would like, subscribe, and leave me a five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value. But I just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify? It would really help. And if you want, even share this with a friend. Well, I have a lot of podcasts that I've been on, and my assistant keeps a spreadsheet for me.

23:41So I can go to the link and stuff. But people do ask, have you been on any podcasts? Because I don't usually talk about all of my history. I'm usually interviewing people. This is freaking perfect for him to have a place where, hey, if you want to listen to something that I talk about, go check out this podcast interview that I did. So good. Yeah. And scroll down. If you go to that, keep scrolling. But I think in the full transcript, we actually do the full transcript of it, which really helps. This isn't hard to do, by the way. The tool we use for this, by the way, that I like if you want to do this at home, we use a software called assembly.ai.

24:14You can also get transcripts out of this in Google Gemini. and I think AI Studio, if you can't do it on Gemini. But on AI Studio, you can just upload it and say, hey, give me back the transcript. Here are the two speakers. Give me speaker labels. I don't need the timestamps. So we have a whole bunch of prompts that we've written to make these things. Cool. So a lot of businesses run on AI then? We use a lot of AI, but I found that it's not to the point yet where we can just let it rip. sure so at at 30 a month i'm like i'm basically break even because we have a lot of human involvement still and so one example is if you go back to the page of the articles oh yeah yeah this is the best really quick yes this is the best if you click playground from their menu so it's really meant for you to use this based on their api but within the playground if you click into the playground you can actually upload your transcripts and then what you want to turn on his speaker labels.

25:13And so thankfully speaker labels is turned on already. Well, hold on. Hold on. So I thought this generated the transcripts. Is there another tool you're using? Oh, it does. So this will generate the transcript in like plain text. How do you import it? Do you just, let's say there's a YouTube video of Nick Gray and I want to get that conversation that he had with somebody. Yeah. Like how do I get that? You would upload the transcript. I don't know if they can take video files here in assembly AI. So you can click upload audio, but I think, but for the, Oh, but you can upload the audio. Okay. Yeah, you can upload the audio, but for someone who just doesn't even want to do that, I would use probably Google Gemini or AI Studio, and then you can upload the video file to that and then ask it for the transcript.

25:57Descript. So Descript has something, if anyone's ever edited with that, you can just copy the link from Google, from YouTube, and paste it in, and it'll do the whole video with the transcripts. I'll use that sometimes, but I've never used assembly. I like having something where I can put the audio because have you have you messed much with Notebook LM? I've only used it like five times. I love Notebook LM because it doesn't hallucinate. When I when I put in transcripts to a lot of the other AI models there's a lot of hallucination involved for whatever reason Notebook LM is just like really locked down and so everything that it spits out is sighted but Notebook LM has this insane function I gotta show it to you where I can take a conversation.