#717: Noah Kagan — How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend

23:58I think a lot of times it's like, well, I want five versus 10. Why? So have clarity about why you think it's that price. Like, hey, here's comps, here's something that you can actually base this on. So have something where you're like, okay, I'm paying, what we do at AppSumo.com is we do a biannual review over every single contractor and every single software subscription. We don't use software. We literally just have a list on spreadsheets. So twice a year, you go through the list. Every single thing. Of your sort of recurring costs. Yeah. So our server costs and electronic costs a month, give or take, is 250 ,000.

24:28Contractor teammate costs is somewhere around one and a half million a month. So you add that up over a year, it's a lot. So every biannual, Anna, who leads our people team, she's amazing, goes over that. And then we basically have two columns, which is price of it. And then we have the return on investment or how valuable we think it is to the company, low, medium, high. And then they literally go through every single one and see if they can contact anything that says low and then just get it canceled. Either get it canceled or get it negotiated down. Anything that's high, we still ask for a discount as well, but we more or less leave those alone.

24:57Last tip I'll give for negotiating prices. And again, I recommend everyone doing a biannual review personally or professionally. When you give the number, shut the hell up. I don't know if you've heard this, but this is one of my favorite. I do this all the time. I literally did it two days ago. And when you say when you give the number, that's effectively what you're asking for? Yeah. So million dollar weekend and you can have sumo.com and life in general, everything is an ask. And so how I like to do it, I bought a sauna and they didn't deliver it for six months. And I was a little frustrated.

25:22So I did a chargeback. People in Europe don't know about chargebacks. You know this? Americans are like, I'll charge you back. Europeans are like, what is, what's happening here? So I charged back and they contacted me. You define a chargeback. That's basically you're asking your credit card company to reverse a charge. Yes. Which everyone should do, not all the time. And it happens at AppSumo when we do your best to rectify what customer thing is wrong, but it's a really nice way of getting a company's attention because they get charged for it. They get a$35 bill and they get notified like, Hey, here's a chargeback.

25:50You need to solve this. And so I wouldn't do it all the time. I'm not saying I'm doing rightly, but if someone, I try to return something or they didn't deliver for six months, I did a chargeback. Now I'll talk to you in the negotiating part. So the owner of the company three months later after he notices it is like, Hey, I got a chargeback, man. Like, what the hell? And I was like, on my integrity, I'm going to pay for your sauna. But let me just tell you my experience we have a chat this is literally three days ago and he's like all right man he's country actually he's like all right man i got you i'm gonna hook you up a little discount there noah i was like all right there craig he's like i'm gonna give you 10 i was like okay craig i was like craig you know let me just i think what times when you're negotiating people do like they go back and forth emotionally and it's like get off the emotion and get to the solution you get the result yeah get the result instead of being right instead of 100 100 you're like well Craig you know instead of being righteous exactly 100 and so with Craig he said 10 and I said all right you know well Craig let me just let me just walk through what happened you guys charged me 13 ,500 for my sauna which I love it didn't come for six months you lied to me every week I think what's the reason they lied to me that was coming every week I've asked every week and they're like oh yeah it's coming this week for six months five minutes took it for those people who've seen snatch what is it it's a movie reference it's people who get it doesn't matter it's a movie reference it.

27:05People who get it will get it. So the last negotiating technique, and this is a million dollar a week and we talk about how to sell better. And there's a very simple framework everyone can copy. But with Craig, I said, all right, Craig, let's do 20%. This is the power move. You say your ask or your number and you shut up. That's it. I don't know if people already do this or know about this, but that is the power move. So the final low. Let the silence do the work. Just be like 20%. And Craig is like, all right, no, you got a deal. Let's get it done. And so then we got 20%. I was able to get an extra thousand bucks off the sauna.

27:34I'm happy. he's happy we can move forward so that is a lot of how i like to negotiate and if you flash back to earlier days smaller company maybe it's when you're solo yeah maybe it's what you did before starting app sumo this is not a new habit this is a habit you've developed over a very long period of time yeah and i'm looking at a transcript of an interview from mixergy so i'll throw in i know going into the archives and wanted to throw this out there just in case it's helpful to folks or for just jogging other techniques in terms of tightening the belt, which is something I did also before starting my very first company, the sports nutrition company.

28:14I went through my credit card statements. I was like, okay, what can I cancel? What can I get rid of? So I feel like I have more of a buffer, right? My burn rate is as low as possible. Here's what we have in front of fact check. Can't trust everything you read on the internet. But here's what we have. My most important thing is that when you're emailing someone, I think you've got to do a few things. First, tell them the exact price that you want. So you kind of alluded to that. Number two, say, hey, I can't afford this right now. And number three, say, this is what I need for now. We can revisit it in six months if the economy recovers.

28:43This is a great way to keep me as a long-term customer. That's a pretty good line, right? Any other thoughts on negotiating prices down or out, right? Just deciding what to cut. I think the bigger concept that I reflect on for everyone out there is that you can actually ask for discounts. And I don't think people realize that. Yeah. I think that's actually the bigger, one of the bigger things, not the only biggest thing, which is I went to, you know, Ali Abdul. I do. Yeah. I don't know him personally, but I've had a little bit of contact. Oh, he's awesome. He's like a beautiful person. I love this guy.

29:13And I went to hang out with him in LA two weeks ago. I go to his hotel. Seems like he's done a very good job on a whole bunch of different levels. And he's, yeah. And he's kind about it, which I really admire. and i go to his hotel room like dude sick hotel room really sick hotel room it's like literally corner santa monica facing the beach me and isaac the videographer were sharing like a tiny one bedroom like cuddling on a bed like poor people i was like dude not not poor people but like i call it small rich that's the new poor that's my new term small rich because it means you know there's still a chance to get rich soon or yet so anyways i asked all i was like how much is this room man this must be like a thousand a night he's like you know what mate he's in london he's like you know what I made?

29:51I just emailed them and said, I'm doing videos and stuff in the room. Do you think you can give me a little discount on the room? They gave them the room for free. Yeah. They gave them the room for free just by asking. Doesn't hurt to ask. And so I think the bigger thing is not necessarily how to grind other people. And I don't think that's what we're encouraging at all. It's just thinking like, if you can't afford something, if you want something, how can you just ask for it? And I think what Tim said, what you highlighted from what we were talking about is, I like the phrase whiffed. What's in it for them?

30:16Just think whiffed. How can I tell them I'll be a long-term customer? That's what you called out, which is great. Or like, hey, I can't afford this, but I can't afford this price. So I could do something now. And thinking about how you make it in their interest, like maybe I'll leave you a review. And thinking more in that instance makes them more likely to do it. So let's give an example of an optional practice. And I know we've talked about this. And for any number of reasons, I'm just in love with it. And that is the coffee discount. Because don't practice your first round on the important stuff.

30:48That's ridiculous. this. That's asking for all sorts of problems and all sorts of like self-imposed PTSD if it goes sideways and then you're not going to do it again. So practice on things that don't matter, right? It's kind of like if you were going to have a really important job interview with your top pick, don't make that your first interview. Just go get a bunch of practice rounds with other companies where you don't care about the outcome. So in this case, what is the coffee discount? Yeah, the coffee discount, it ties all into starting a business, which people are like, really? I'm like, yeah, it is the thing.

31:17It's you go to anytime you buy coffee, tea, anytime you go to a store, even a restaurant, you can do it anywhere. You go up to the counter, you make your purchase and you say, can I please have 10 % off? And then they look at you really strange. And you say, well, Noah Kagan, a million dollar weekend. I'm doing this course. I'm trying out this book. They said I should do it. And they keep looking at you weird. They go, let me talk to my manager. Okay, fine. You get 10 % off. Or they come back and say no. And you get your coffee and you move on. And then I always love asking people like, what did you learn about yourself?

31:43and everyone's always like, I was scared. I had courage because I faced my fear and I realized I can do more things and it's not as scary as it actually seemed. And now you can start applying that frankly in everything, in your jobs for raises, with your dating, asking someone for a date and especially in business, which is, Hey, will you come on my show? Hey, will you be my customer? Hey, will you give me feedback? Hey, can I interview you? That's all this whole life is, is asking people things. And if you ask, guess what you can get. I don't know when I originally said this or wrote it, but it resonated so much that I was like, huh, maybe I should think about this even more myself, which was this line, I can't believe I'm quoting myself for God's sake.

32:20Save me. This is what the internet does to you. I haven't started quoting myself with my name signed. I haven't started doing that yet. But life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. And this ties into my earliest beginnings prior to the four-hour workweek. And I don't know if I've actually talked about this publicly, but when I was giving the guest lectures and high-tech entrepreneurship at Princeton twice a year from 2003 to 13, I think, and I was invited by a professor. I didn't have any special credentials other than everyone else he invited in as a guest speaker was venture-backed and traveled that route.

32:58They had some type of external financing. I was one of his students. We kept in touch. We got along really well. Ed Schau, I've had him on the podcast. And he wanted me to come back to share my experiences on the front lines because I was a recent grad. Also, I wasn't decades out. Bootstrapping. So I went back. And the crux of my presentation every time, and it modified, it grew and it evolved. And the notes for that ended up becoming the backbone of the four-hour workweek as I ran all these experiments. But the opener was effectively who here wants to be a salesperson and no hands would go up nobody would raise their head right so good especially because this is princeton right and they're like sales like makes my skin crawl you know so you had people who were maybe going into entrepreneurship more likely investment banking or management consulting probably but a lot of them had aspirations to be an entrepreneur and i said okay whether or not you want to be a salesperson is irrelevant.

33:55And if you don't like that label, that's fine. But you have to become a really good dealmaker. You have to become a good dealmaker. And a lot of those presentations focused on the kind of stuff that we're talking about. Asking for what you want, deciding how to position it, deciding how to really determine what the other person wants. Because maybe you are causing a fuss over something that is just an indicator of what they actually want. And there are books that help with this. Getting Past No is one of my favorites. There are many others. And that is why we're spending some time on this. Are there other, let's just call them comfort challenges, let's say, besides the asking for a discount on a cup of coffee?

34:32And I want to make one modification to what you said, which is when you first, maybe the first time you do this, we'll make it softball. Fine. So you can ask for the discount and then you can mention you're doing it as an exercise for a book or something else. But then when you've tried that once or twice, now you can't say that. Make it more uncomfortable. Are there other small challenges like that where people can build their tolerance to discomfort in a similar way. Yeah. And let me give you two, one you could do right now. And so this is something from the book about, and it's the only book I think that you actually make money in the first few pages.

35:06And it's something that literally everyone can do right now. Ask one friend to invest a dollar in you right now. Literally get on your phone, Venmo, PayPal, crypto, whatever it is, and just message someone on WhatsApp, whatever it is, and say, Hey, I've got this idea for a business or I want to start a business, but I'm looking for one person to be on my board of advisors or my investor. Will you Venmo me? One dollar. And I did this with a guy named Jake about a month and a half ago, and his hand was trembling. He's like, and then you want to make it harder, call the person. Don't just text message them, call them.

35:35And it's silly, right? And I think business should be fun. I don't think we should have these day jobs that we hate all day. That seems horrible. But this is a fun thing that you can do, just a little dollar, one tiny little dollar. And that's, But guess what? Every billion dollar company started with the dollar. And so building up that practice where you just kind of asked for the dollar and then you get it, like, oh shit, that's the beginning. This is going to be such a mundane, procedural, stupid question I'm going to ask anyway. If they're like, what am I getting for my dollar as an investor?

36:05What do you say? Exactly. So the line I like to use is, I love your support as I'm starting my business and I'd love for you to be on my board of advisors so I can keep you informed as I'm working on my business. And it's a way to have people that care about you are just a part of your journey. And I think people are surprised how much people want them to succeed. And so Jake called his brother, Jake called his other friend, Tom. And they're both like, who's Jake? Jake is a guy who read Million Dollar Weekend and lived at my house for 48 hours. So I wanted to see if the book worked. So he read basically a prototype galley, something like that.

36:37Yeah. And so he called these two people. He said, hey, Tom, I really love for you to support me. can you send me a dollar right now? And he was shaking. Tom sent a dollar live. We saw it on Venmo. And Jake was like, and everyone can do that right now. Especially if you want to start a business and you want to get going. Or guess what? If you have a business, do it to one friend, do it to a colleague, do it to your significant other. So that's one I highly recommend. The other one that this is stuff I still do to this day. They're silly, right? And business should be fun. And guess what? As you called it out really well, practice on the small stuff.

37:07So when you get to bigger stuff, it's not as big a deal. I'm going to people's houses and knocking on doors. That's pretty scary. Most of my videos on YouTube are me going up someone's door. I don't know them. And I ask them, what do you do for a living? That's a very big ask to a stranger. Imagine me knocking on your door here. You'd be like, get the hell out of here. So the other one that I'd recommend, and this is, again, these are universal. You don't need money. It doesn't matter your gender. It doesn't matter how rich or poor you are. You can practice these and build your skills up and your confidence up to be successful in business.

37:33because you said sales is the basis of billionaires. A lot of billionaires were really good at sales. Just footnote, don't lose track. If you're not selling customers, you're selling people on your ideas. You're selling people on why they should use your design specs instead of something else. You're selling them on why you deserve, or at the very least, it's okay that you take a week of paid time off. You are persuading. You are going to be in the persuasion business even if you are the most antisocial of coders at some point you have to interact with these bags of flesh called humans yeah and this is part of the game it is the other one that's universal and i do it i did it last week it was actually pretty fun is the compliment challenge the compliment challenge really it's what it sounds like and specifically what i like to compliment people on is clothing i've never been a good dresser you grew up in california mervyn's i grew up on low island yeah forget about clothing but yeah you you know you moved to the bay area like you know mervin's remember that store mervin's vaguely no man it was bad that's the only place my mom bought his clothes from and it was rough most of my life as i got older i was like i kind of want to dress well and so the compliment challenge is anytime you see anyone with something nice that you're like that's kind of a cool hat cool jacket cool shoes so two weeks ago i was at the best western and as i like to call it it's the okay western hotel it's definitely not the best she rebranded this lady had shoes on i was like and then the way i like to think about it specifically with these challenges is you have a three-second rule.

39:00For me personally, as I won't negotiate with terrorists, I will not negotiate with myself. So within three seconds, I have to make the decision to do it. Just go do it. Don't even think about it. And by the time you do it, you're like, that was never so scary. And I still have the fear. It's not like at points it goes away. Just get a little bit easier over time. So this lady was sitting having breakfast with her husband, and I'm like, oh, I'm bothering her. I'm definitely bothering her. And that's actually a really misconception in big entails. We're like, we're bothering the other people. Here's what's fascinating.

39:24I go up to her, I'm like, I'm really sorry to bother you guys, but I love your shoes. She's like, thank you so much. I was like, do you mind telling me where you got them from? It's like, yeah, I got them from JC Penney's. I was like, awesome. I think my girlfriend might like those. Have a great day. And she's like, thank you so much. That was really nice of you. I was like, okay. Went back to my chair. And so that's, that's one of the misconceptions in sales is that we're actually harassing or bothering people when maybe it's actually a good thing and people need to maybe reconsider their perception of what a sale is.

39:49Quick pause. If the book title keeps coming up, we're going to have to cut it. No, no. Did I say it again? You're good. We can mention it, but if there's too much density, we'll have to thin it out a little bit. No worries. So back to the story. By the way, great feedback. Thank you. That's like a superpower. I mean, that alone is great. I don't know if you want to include that in your content. We could include it. Actually, I mean, shit, if you're okay with it. Yeah. I think this is like, like one of my superpowers at AppSumo, we could say is not just my superpower, one of our values is feedback is a gift.

40:15That is also on walls at the artist formerly known as Facebook, right? Feedback is a gift. Is that what they said in there? Yeah. Oh, wow. That's the thing. But it is, and this is fun. Okay, yeah, if we can keep it in, that'd be great. Because when I was, as an example, right, when I was early on preparing for the four-hour work week, I went to media training. I'd never done real media before. And they were like, you must say, as in my book, right? In my book, mention the title. And I did it. I got really good at it. And what I would say to folks, if you're on morning television and you have 45 seconds and they're going to mispronounce your name and get your book title wrong, yes, it's a good idea to get it in.

40:59With longer format, you have the time to work with nuance. And I will tell people right now, look, I'll keep it simple. Just go buy the fucking book because I've seen what the blog post has done. I've spent enough time with you. I've seen you in action. we've collaborated way back in the day on the Tim Ferriss experiment, the TV show, got to see a lot of this stuff live, got to practice a lot of it live. So you know what you're talking about.

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43:04So coming back to the sales, I will say, don't assume that complimenting someone or approaching someone is going to be bothersome or harass them. However, there are times when that can be the case in the sense that I remember in Silicon Valley, man, this is part of the reason why I was like, I need to take a break from this place geographically. I would be at dinners. Dinners. Sometimes with my girlfriend, we'd be on a date. And a dude, it was always a dude. It was always a dude. Some dude in his mid-20s would come over and be like, hi, Tim, and pull up a chair and just sit down and pitch me on his startup.

43:44And I remember on multiple occasions, there were times when I was not as delicate about it, but I would just be like, John, is your name John? You didn't even mention your name. John, I'll just call you John. I mean, I'll pick John. It does not matter how good your pitch is right now. It could be the best pitch in the world. The timing is not good. And I'll just share one more that I thought was amusing, which is a counterpoint. Although I will say oftentimes the, it's going to bother someone, it's going to be rude. It's going to be fill in the blank negative label is an excuse for us to avoid doing the thing that is uncomfortable.

44:17However, one counter example, We're sitting here in Austin. I was here at South by Southwest. So that is a huge festival here in Austin. Great fun. And I was on an escalator and I was exhausted because I'm an introvert, which people may not realize because I have one-on-one conversations and then broadcast it to millions of people. But very introverted, I get depleted. When I go to events and I do things like book signings, I'm toast for two, three days. So I'm on the escalator and literally like putting my face, like nuzzling into my girlfriend's neck because I'm trying to hide from the world.

44:51And she's above me in the escalator. A guy reaches over her shoulder and taps me on the shoulder to pitch me on his startup. So don't do that. So don't do that. Dude, I got a guy and I was in Barcelona. I was in spandex, just to be clear. I just finished a bike ride. And this guy pulls up a seat next to me and he's like, you're no a Kaganer. I'm like, yeah, I'm no Kagan. He's like, dude, give me a hug. I was like, I don't know you. And then he's like, he's like, you got to come meet my friend. I was like, dude, I just getting a beer. Just let me get my Australia dam and chill out, dude. And yes, I'll come talk to you and your friend.

45:23It was just a little bit too imposing, but just, just look, I don't want to turn this into a like total fetch marathon, but I will say that for me, this is very much an Austin thing too. If you meet anyone for the first time and perhaps I've spent too much time in Japan, who knows? But if I stick out my hand and you say, I'm a hugger. Oh, the worst. Don't do that. And then they bear hug you. Those are always the bear hugers. Or they do like Will Ferrell comedy extended hug. Don't do that, guys. Don't do that, guys. Do the fist bump, do the bow. Just about anything is fine. Please don't. That's so imposing.

46:02Like, I'm a hugger. It's like, all right, I'm a kicker. Doesn't mean I'm going to kick you, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a slapper. Yeah, great. So, pro tips. Let me drop, I'll drop one thing, especially in sales. We're talking about challenges. And by the way, all these challenges do lead up in what I think has helped me be successful is asking and practicing. And so for sales, I have a little framework that works super well. It's called Lot. Listen, options, transition. And this is the same thing in asking. Just listen to that person. So first off, I'm going to listen to Tim. Talk to him about their problems, especially if you're starting a business.

46:30You're like, let me talk to you about your shirts. What do you like about your shirts? What do you not like about your shirts? Tell me more about your shirts. And just listen. Just think of you're doing a podcast interview and you're just interviewing them and getting feedback. Okay. Then you present an option to your person. It's like, hey, oh, you like shirts? What about this shirt at this price? And they say, yeah, that actually solves my problem. Or if you can't, you don't. And then you transition them to, all right, pay me. All right, let's move on to a next step. Let's put it in the calendar, which I'm always a huge, like lock it in the cowl.

46:57If you're trying to get sales, always in the cowl. How do you lock it in the cowl in a case like this? What goes into the calendar? So what I'm doing, I'll give you an example. Yesterday, I was talking to this woman at a company that I want to work with. And it was like, all right, well, we'd like to do something together. Cool, I'll follow up an email. And I'm like, let's just do it right now. And so my phrase is always this, I have my calendar open. How does this date work at this time? And that is such an easier decision for her to then make and say, actually, yeah, cool, let's placeholder it.

47:23It also saves so much bandwidth over time. 100%. Right, like you add that up over as a process, right? If you're constantly doing follow-up emails. Yeah, and I want to make sure I have the next step. Now 10 % of your life is dealing with those follow-up emails. So let's talk about what we left maybe 10, 15 minutes ago. Just because I like to bookmark practices at different stages, because I do find that they inform a lot. And I'm also personally curious. These conversations are ultimately always personal to me. So CEO frameworks. Things that you do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You mentioned the biannual, for lack of a better descriptor, recurring expense review, right?

48:03You mentioned that already. What are some other things? Because you've had quite a bit of practice now. Yeah, let me show you a few, because I think it's kind of cooler when you get to see it. so every single day at absumo.com can i say the website or is it am i saying too much that's fine everyone every single day dot com beep dot com yeah we'll bleep it out you can check this out i think you're gonna and you could talk through it i'm happy oh wow you can share these numbers so every single day this is something keith raboi does and okay so this is so every day we have a daily pulse that's what we call it and let's zoom out for one sec have one singular goal that's what i've learned from zuckerberg and that's what i do at absumo.com and so with absumo.com this year our one singular goal is$45 million net revenue.

48:42That's net. Gross sales is definitely around$77 to$80 million, depending on how the year ends. And then every single day, there is this Slack bot that posts all of our key metrics that lead to our number one goal. And it's tied into automation. Yeah. So what are you using there? We're using Zapier, and then we use Snowflake when we have a two-person business intelligence team. But anyone could do this on a spreadsheet. Just every day, you have one goal. How are you doing? Can I say this for a second? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go out and talk out some of the numbers. It's pretty interesting. So we have data updated through.

49:14This is a pulse bond. So it's being automatically posted. You're not manually pulling this, but you could. Yeah. And you can also, by the way, if you're just starting out, just have a spreadsheet and check it every single day. Yeah. So you have month to date, actual as compared to goal. So that's in and of itself meaningful, right? And so you got total gross sales, 4.3 million, let's call it, versus 4.43, 8 million total net revenue, gross profit, AOV, which is average order value. Yep. And new buyers, total buyers, plus members. Those are subscribers. Those are our VIP customers. VIP customers.

49:49Daily sales, which is broken out. New buyers, new buyer conversion rate, new versus existing buyer gross sales month to date. That's an interesting one. And then daily KPI report with monthly projections. So the KPI key performance indicator. So this is quite a bit of stuff. And I'm wondering if you had to 80-20 this for your business right now, because I'm not sure how Keith Raboy does this or describes it. There are, I believe, examples that say Y Combinator of talking about the single weekly metric, right? Picking one or two weekly metrics that are tracked over time, and you're trying to get that to compound at 10 % a week or whatever the number might be.

50:28So what would you choose as your 80-20 priorities in that list right now? For everyone out there, it could be different. We're more of an e-commerce site with our business. There's three numbers that I would just look at. Three numbers add up. So again, start with one goal. What is your goal and what's your date for that goal? So our goal is from zero January one to the end of the year, how do we get 45 million net revenue? And the three goals, the three KPIs that lead to that, it's basically just three for us. Traffic. So how many people are coming to the site? How many people actually buy, which is our conversion rate?

50:57And then how much do they spend, which is our average order value? That's it. That's all I would look at. Now, that's the most simplest version of it. So if you have traffic times how much people buy, how much they spend, that gives you your revenue numbers. But then we have sub numbers. That's where it gets complicated. If I had to do 80-20, it would be that. Now, what other people need to be thinking about, though, is what are the things that impact those three KPIs? That's how you now get way more complicated. For sure. Just for fun. If you had to pick one of those three to optimize for 2024, which would it be?

51:25With AppSumo.com. Top of the funnel. So traffic, conversion, or average order volume. Yeah. If I only could pick one thing out of all of it, I would actually pick just number of deals for our business. Number of deals. Yeah. So every business has a core. So the number of products that you're offering, which should help with, I imagine, the conversion and traffic. And so for every business out there, what's the core input that leads to your main outputs? Let's just take a lot of different examples. So YouTube. Lately, and this has been a big transformation for me, is I'm sending unambitious goals.

51:57Okay. Tell me more. you know i think it's silica value if you're not 10xing and i literally was with our board a month ago like if you're not 10x you know you're failing and i was like okay i've read that book and and so i got that t-shirt too guys i get it 10x everything is written by people that haven't 10x the business and the reality and let's tell you there's two parts there but there's cores for everything so the core for my youtube channel is two videos a month that's it that's what i found gets me to the main metrics that i need and they're supporting metrics around it but that's my core there, AppSumo.com.

52:28As of now, it's give or take around, I'd have to ask Sean, he runs the high level, but it's about 35 deals a month. If we can do 35 amazing software deals a month, we hit our targets, more or less. And so for your business, what's the core numbers? We talked about this in the past, but what's the core number you can really just like everything kind of works backwards off of? And so for us, it would be deals. Okay. So we're going to talk about other frameworks and then we're going to, at some point we are going to come back to YouTube because I have questions around that. Top three, bottom three.

52:55Hmm. What is that? You know, you gave me feedback early in the show, which is great. And that's awesome. That's how you improve. I don't know if people don't realize that. Like the only way you look at yourself is with a mirror. And that's the same thing when your relationships to ask your partner today, right now, hey, what am I doing well? Or what do you want me to improve on? And we're going to come back to this, but how much money have you spent on coaches, would you say, in the last five to 10 years? Myself and the team. Easily over a million. Okay. Easily over a million. so we'll get into that coach that yeah i like feedback that's how i can get better it doesn't mean i accept all the feedback but it means i can acknowledge all the feedback and make a decision so t3b3 something it's from travis actually at uber and so the idea there and andrew chin was one of my best friends and advisor brought it to me he's been on the show basically just like every quarter it's so light i just don't like sometimes feedback because it's like these 18 pages i'm like i don't know what to do you have 18 things to fucking do it's so much Just tell me the top three things.

53:48You can curse here. Don't worry. We can curse. It's okay. What are the top three things you love that I'm doing? So I know I can continue it. And what are the bottom three things I can improve on? Three things is definitely doable. If not three, just even do one. You can do T1B1. And I just have it in my calendar. I think more things you can just have automatic in your calendar, the better. So I just have my calendar. Ask team T3B3 every quarter. And so right now in your business, if you're in the junior department, if you're the leader of the company or even in relationships, whatever it is, just go ask your partner.

54:15ask someone that you trust and respect. Hey, what is the top three things I'm doing? What are the bottom three? And do that regularly and you will be able to keep improving. Can you give any examples of real T3B3? So on my desk, I print mine out because I want to see it. What you're doing well, you're probably going to continue, but what you can improve is cool. So the team gave me feedback that they want more autonomy, that I'm too much up in their ass. That I'm like, and this is the funniest part. Everyone's like, I'm not a micromanager. I'm Kind of like if you see on a dating app, anyone who says no drama, you're like, oh, you love drama.

54:50Huge red flag. Huge red flag. So they wanted more autonomy. And then it asked for an example. Like, what's an example or what's a moment? Give me a solution that we make sure that as it comes to it. So for instance, with AppSumo.com, I love going through our credit card bill. You know, our credit card bills, sometimes like November, because Black Friday, it's about a million dollars. Almost a million dollars. And normally, it can vary between three and five minutes. It's on customer acquisition, like paid acquisition. Facebook, our Amazon bill, 50K a month, and a lot of different ads. Just so I understand, Amazon bill, you're talking about AWS?

55:20AWS, yeah. So I was going through every transaction, and it'd be like a$9 transaction. I would love if your Amazon bill was just shit your employees are buying as gifts. AWS. I mean, you know, there's, well, as you get bigger, you also have checks and balances. Someone actually tried to scam us for 30K a few weeks ago, which was super impressive. But I was going through these credit card bills, and if we talk about coaches, we have a CFO coach for the VP of Finance. She's the CFO. She was the CFO of MailChimp. Pretty good job. You know, pretty good company. And we're in a meeting and she's like, Noah, you know, we talk about autonomy.

55:48We talk about trust. Do you think going through the credit card transactions and messaging people about a $10 purchase is really autonomy and not trusting your VP of finance, Kevin, who can do this? And I was like, good point. I stopped looking at credit card bills. So that was one of them. The other B3 from this quarter was around longer term vision. I'm much more of a tactician and I I like getting action. I like getting movement. And the team was like, you need to chill out and think longer for us and come back with some type of longer plan. And so the last six months of the year, it was really thinking about what do we want to do in the next three years?

56:19Because I've been so focused in business and generally about one-year segments. So we spent so much time and now we have like a 2026 vision. I think this is also very common. It's not true for everyone, but very common for people who have done a lot of bootstrapping. Yeah. More so than people who have raised a bunch of money. Yeah. Where a board, understandably, wants to know what the hell your long-term, what your long-term plans are, because they want to realize their equity, their return. Yeah. And that was the feedback I got from the team. They're like, get out of the day-to-day, let us do it.

56:50We got it. And just start moving the process forward. So I was thinking about talking to customers, talking to partners, thinking about ourselves, like what do we like doing? What are we great at? And where can we be in three years? And then bringing that back to the team, incorporating them, getting them buy-in, that was something I got feedback in the past, like, hey, you're just making decisions without us. So yeah, by the end of the year, I think mid-November now, we have a three-year vision and Basecamp's towards that vision. Basecamp's, project management. Not necessarily Basecamp.com, but Basecamp specifically, what are milestones?

57:19So our destination is to be able to distribute software tools for entrepreneurs. That's what we love doing. I love promoting things. And so how do we be the number one place to distribute software tools, not just deals, but software tools? And then what are the different key milestones numerically, as well as from what we want to do in the business within these separate years to be able to get there in 2026. So that was feedback directly from the team that they told me. And then we do this for everyone in the company. The top three, bottom three. How do people track that? Or how do people keep it present?

57:49Because it is one thing, having just come off of an offsite myself, and I actually think we did a good job with this because we sort of assigned ownership next steps and then did working sessions during the offsite. Like, okay, let's actually get these things in motion because it's great to have a bunch of meals, have some wine, walk around, talk about big ideas. Oh, we're so excited. Let's take a team photo next to the paper on the wall. And then like right back to status quo. How do people keep these top three, bottom three present or maybe a better way to word it is, how do they keep themselves accountable?

58:23A few things that work for us. So one is scorecards. Everyone gets a scorecard. If you're an app student, you get a scorecard. And so I can show you an example of it. I focus on the leadership scorecard. So I have a company scorecard. What are our top three things we're trying to do in Q1? And Sean, he's our head of revenue. Alona, she's our COO. They each have a scorecard with just what are your top three things based on what we're trying to do in Q1. Okay, this would be for Q1. Yeah. And so that is a helpful way where maybe it's something they want to improve, or maybe it's just something that they need to work on, or it's just an outcome that we want.

58:52And then we agree on what those are. They propose it, I review it, and then we decide it. Got it. It doesn't mean necessarily like, hey, it's going to be one of their B3s. But that for me is like the three things that they want to get better at or they want to accomplish. The other thing I would say, you know, it sounded like you guys had a planning session and all this stuff. We had, you know, I told you we have a three-year vision and then we have like all this stuff. But on Monday, I was with one of my coaches, Dan Putt from Reboot. And I was talking to Dan. I was like, I don't know if we're on the same page of what we're doing because I'm not really clear.

59:20He's like, well, if you're not clear, they're definitely not clear. And I was like, oh, that's interesting, right? It comes from the top. How are you leading by example? if I'm not clear where we're going to go necessarily in the next quarter like does everyone else know so we had a meeting and so that day and I was like everyone needs to bring their top scorecard projects we need a line on them make sure they're tied to the main thing and have a one pager around it had a meeting next day everyone brought their stuff and then we have a one pager that ties all this together and so now being very very clear like what's our number goals what's our key projects and by the way this is something that's counterintuitive in businesses is like if there's not fighting you're not really getting the best ideas I want more people saying no.

59:59The best people at Facebook when I was there were always saying no to Mark. And I was always like, yeah, Mark, that was a pretty good idea. That's the way I got fired. But over time, I've realized that challenging respectfully is very healthy. And so you ask about feedback and all that. It's ask for feedback rarely. Be clear on what success is. That's what a scorecard is. It's like, here is success for me with our work. And then you can be able to measure against that in a very clear amount of time. Okay. We are going to come back to saying no pretty quickly because a big part of enabling yourself to say yes to the things that matter is being able and equipped to say no.

1:00:33Yeah. So I do want to come back to that. Other frameworks that you would like to mention? The other one I do that just changed everything for me in the past two years, especially as a CEO, was a weekly review. And so I only have three questions. And really noticing what you actually do. A lot of people are like, I have all these frameworks. And then you ask them like a year later, like, yeah, I don't use it again. So maybe they've evolved it, but really it's not sticking. And so this is one that sticks with me. And I can show you. It comes up on my phone. So every week, I get a Slack bot. Here it is.

1:01:02You can see. So it says, complete your Friday weekly review. So today's Friday is where we're chatting. You can click on it. And there's three questions. And the three questions are very, very simple. It's, how was the week? One through five, and why? And this is, you could do whether you're CEO or whether you're a junior person. And so we track it. We track the ratings every week. One is sucked. Five is fantastic. Yeah. So this week was a five. This week crushed. And that's thinking about, okay, well, what made this week a five? What happened this week? I got to hang out with you. We had lack of clarity on Monday.

1:01:33On Tuesday, we dialed in our Q1 planning and everyone was like super hyped on that. I finished executive compensation, which was challenging about how much people get paid. So this week was a five and then explaining, line adding, all those different things. And it's not always like, I just bullet point. I don't necessarily need to write stories. Number two thing, especially as my leadership style, I noticed I was very inconsistent. Yeah. Were you consistent? Yeah. So my number two question is, was I consistent this week? One through five. basically because I'd go into a meeting and I would just start fucking ripping on people.

1:01:59Like I was in a meeting with Mitchell and Ullman and I'm just like shitting all over them. I'm like, your ideas are sucky. And I wasn't coming with solutions. That week was a three. That was not a good idea. Because as a leader, you want consistent experience for the people you work with. And you're being consistent based on feedback you've received from the team and your top three, bottom three? Is that sort of a... A little bit. It's also, this is more my own subjective opinion. Got it. This is how you feel. Yeah. I found this really, really helpful. And then the last question is, what am I top three for next week?

1:02:29So it makes me be very more focused about, okay, I have a singular goal. We have Q1 priorities. Now I can break these down to smaller levels and say like, okay, this upcoming week, what are the three things you want to work on? Then with my executive assistant and our chief of staff, we can help realign my schedule. Like, is that actually what I'm working on next week? Or is it a bunch of other things? One tool we stopped using because it costs money. So we stopped paying for it but there is a tool that does this t3b3 and then follows up and you can have all of it but i was like i think we can do it in google forms for cheaper uh is lattice lattice lattice hq.com it's sam altman's brother jack got it but it was like 15 000 a year and i was like i think google forms for free a year can do pretty equivalent and just it's a little more work on the team shout out charlotte and anna and angelina for helping facilitate it but yeah that actually will do your tracking and then you could double check how you are against it versus because honestly, Google Spreadsheets is comparable.

1:03:20Q1 top and singular goal. Do you want to talk about either of these? A lot of it, when you're trying to go anywhere in your business, is like, where do you want to be by the end of the year? So right now, for anyone who's watching this, it's coming out in January, where do you want to be December 31st, 2024? And just pick a destination with the time. Most people don't do either. They're like, dude, you've influenced so many people on health. Like, I just want to be healthier. What does that mean? Be healthier. So be more clear on your goal and your destination. That's something that Zuckerberg, I've talked to you about it, where he brought me in a room.

1:03:46He's like, I want to get a billion people. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. and this is when we had 10 million yeah that's a big one that was amazing it was exciting and so have a very clear singular goal that you want to accomplish but maybe it's like a thousand subscribers and my goals lately are much more unambitious because i want to focus on goals i can sustain could you give an example of what that looks like so with appsuma.com in the past if we didn't 2x a year i'm like oh it failed and you'll hear this you'll say like shoot for the stars and if you're in at the moon, you're good. But also that means I'm running really fast.

1:04:19You burn out because you're working really hard and you're not getting where you want to go. And so now with Absumo, our general growth range is 5 % to 10 % a year. And so this year for 2024, I believe it'll be around 7%. And the reason that is, is because if I can do 7 % over year after year after year after year. Yeah, you end up the warm buffet of Absumo. Exactly. And the other thing that I've noticed through these unambitious goals, and I'll give more examples, is that it creates more freedom for taking 10x experiments. So we're doing a lot more content this year by the time this comes out.

1:04:49We're going to be trying doing like an alternative to product time and some of these other options. But if we're so focused on having to grow revenue and do all these things, you don't really have oxygen to experiment in a way that feels confident. So same thing with my YouTube channel. I'm going from 1 million to 1.25 million this year, you know, like 25%, but you know, we've been going 50%. And that's because I would say we've had less aggressive goals. And so thinking about that for everyone out there, I do think Silicon Valley and what they're telling you, oh, you got a 10X. That's because these investors don't care if people fail.

1:05:19I would add to that. This is super important. I'm glad you're bringing it up because I do like how some of these outrageous questions break your mental models or your assumptions about what you can or can't do. So how could you achieve your 10-year goals in the next six months? Love that. Great. That's an excellent thought exercise. But if you are applying to yourself as a bootstrapped entrepreneur, 10x or bust. And if, let's just say, well-being or happiness is reality minus expectations, you can paint yourself into a precarious corner and you can paint your team and employees into a very precarious corner.

1:05:59In the venture-backed power law distribution of startups and venture capital, there are a few things you got to realize. The first is that investors are banking on that kind of power law return within tech. So they're looking at huge possible multiples, right? So they can make a thousand X on something that breaks out. This happens. And that pays for all the losses. Other invisible, I would say invisible to the public factors include the incentives you may not see in the headlines. For instance, if a founder is able to take money off the table with large rounds of financing, they're already in the black.

1:06:37And then for the company outcome to have a huge impact on their quality of life. They're willing and able to make enormous outsized bets with ridiculous ambitions because guess what? It's not in the news, but they already have 20 million in the bank. They're good. And this is why I think what you're saying is really important. The consistency matters. And I want to tie this because everything is related to everything in some respects. And I want to talk about YouTube briefly. We are going going to talk a lot about building. But guys, these are the ingredients that allow you to build an experiment consistently.

1:07:15You need to develop certain attributes and frameworks. We can talk about KPIs and goals and what we want to achieve. There's a survivorship bias in entrepreneurship where you tend to hear about the success stories. 100%. One of the things you have done on YouTube, I'm not sure if this is going to be fertile ground for harvesting, so we'll see. But you've asked a lot of millionaires, billionaires, versions of, was it worth it? What do you regret? Et cetera. Are there any takeaways from that that were either non-obvious or that have really stuck for you? Because it's easy to find every year, some version of the article that is like, so-and-so talked to people on their deathbed, and they all said, I wish I'd spent more time with my family and less time in the office.

1:08:03It's like, okay, fine. Right. Don't neglect your health. Fine. I get it. Like these, these are all kind of predictable things you would expect and no one on their deathbed if they would want to be considered like a miserly cunt is going to say, my family sucks. I really wish I'd spent more time in the office. They're just not going to say that as their legacy. So has anything really stuck with you from those conversations or lines of questioning? Was it worth it? If there were any regrets, things they would have done differently. For context, for the listeners, interviewed John Paul DeGioia, founder of Patron Tequila, Paul Mitchell Hair Care.

1:08:40Paul Orphelia, founder of Kinko, sold that for$2.4 billion. John Paul sold Patron for$3.5 billion. Founder of Qualcomm,$100 billion company. There's a few things that have stood out from chatting with them. One, none of them became billionaires within 20 years. Not one, not paper money where it's coming up and down super quickly or crypto billionaires where it can go away. It took a long time, long, long time. Number two, they all got rich. And this is kind of people know these things, just like you said, like deathbed people know to spend more time with their family, but they don't do it. This is another one.

1:09:14They all got rich in one way. Just one thing. John Paul DeGioia, just Paul Mitchell hair care. Then he able to do it again, which is, we can talk about that. There's something there. Kinko's, just copiers. Larry Janeski, just basements. Michael Hudner, just ships. But all of us are like, no, I'm going to diversify. But then you think about all these people, it's like, ah, they just did one thing. Two other things I would comment from billionaires two to three. They're all entrepreneurs. They weren't W-2 employees. They hired W-2 people. The richest people on earth, they hired W-2 people. And so it's realizing like, oh, maybe this entrepreneurship is, there's some upside to that.

1:09:51The one that you commented on, another highlight there. And this is from John Paul DeGioia, which I thought was super powerful. And this is something you start noticing with billionaires. They're actually all really good at sales. And that is a skill you're like, oh, it's asking. How can I practice it? And John Paul DeGioia, I don't have hair. You don't have hair. He was like, give me your hand. I'm going to put on lotion. And he rubbed it on my hair. He's like, how's that feel? I was like, it feels actually pretty good. He's like, how are your hands feel? I'm like, they feel good. I literally went home and bought Paul Mitchell hair care.

1:10:18I went home and bought it. And he was just like, what I like to do is find the best product that exists and make sure it's a product people reorder. I'm like, oh, that's smart. And then I'm really good at selling. And I was like, ah, that's really interesting. So there's something about selling, I would say, that stood out for me. And then lastly, yeah, I think, I would say 50-50 seemed like they could be happier. I just don't know if they all seemed as happy as I would have imagined. I'm like, dude, you're a billion. You can literally do anything you want all day forever. And I think like Jean-Paul DeGioia for me stood out where he was just very kind.

1:10:47He was kind with me. He was kind with the staff. He was kind. He sold Patron, and he sent a$50 million check that day. And he felt like he had a good balance. I would say the Austin balance of, I'm not trying to be a Silicon Valley workaholic, but I'm trying to work, make a lot of money, and have a great life. And I admired that. Yeah. He gives me that impression. I've had him on the podcast. Yeah. And what that proves to me is that it's possible. Yes. Because there are a lot of prick billionaires. A lot. but you don't have to be a prick. It's not a prerequisite. You don't have to be Gordon Gekko.

1:11:22You don't have to. But I would add to that is that there are many different ways to be good at sales. When I first graduated from school and when I first moved to Silicon Valley and I was selling fiber channel storage area networks and I was the lowest paid sales guy, which I learned because a spreadsheet got emailed to the wrong place. And one of my buddies was like, bro, you're going to love this. And he showed me the annual salaries. And I was like, you know, barely above the receptionist, which I was actually okay with because it was commission-based. But I didn't love the fact that I hadn't negotiated harder on the front end.

1:12:01But at the time, I was pretty desperate because I had gone without a job for a while. My parents were like, so you can stay here as long as you want. But what's going on? The point I want to make is I had a desk and a chair in an emergency exit. It was like shoehorned into a fire exit. Totally not up to code. But I took a lot of opposite approaches from other sales guys who had come in from bigger companies like EMC. And there were some great salespeople from EMC, as an example. They had a really good training culture, really good hiring practice, generally competitive athletes or former competitive athletes.

1:12:36But the approach I took was two things. I'll just mention this briefly because it might alleviate some of the allergic reaction that people have to this word sales. The first is that I looked at the biggest block in the vein of the task that hinders your task is your task. And what I realized, I couldn't get the deal makers on the phone. I couldn't get the CEOs and CTOs who would have to green light a seven-figure investment on the phone because there were so many gatekeepers. So I just did the opposite of what I saw around me, which was instead of making calls during nine to five, we just made calls before and after nine to five.

1:13:10And guess what? Those people who are working dogs, men and women who have really gotten to the top, still tend to work a lot, by and large. And so they would pick up the phone. The second was I studied the tech inside and out to the extent that when we got to the point of closing a sale. And sometimes they'd get handed off to accounting and the accounting department or the VP of finance would ask them, who's your sales guy? And they would say, I don't know who my sales guy is. And then eventually they'd be like, oh, wait, is Tim my sales guy? Because I came in with not quite the knowledge of an engineer, but I spent all my time with the engineers.

1:13:48So I had technical conversations. I'd be like, oh, well, let me guess. You probably have this Solera system and this and this and this and using this and this. You might have problems with this. And you can approach it in a technical way, as one example, with certain products. It doesn't have to be Glengarry Glen Ross. So I just wanted to mention that. The following I'm curious for you, and this is something I've been thinking a lot about, is how come immigrants are so successful? And specifically, I think one, you can control their attitude. And I think they have good attitudes about like, I got to figure this out.

1:14:21And the second thing is effort. There's no limit on effort. There's only a limit on time. So I was really curious because especially with four-hour work, I just remember your effort was insane. And so I wanted to know, and this is sales, right? Sales is like, all right, well, I'm going to put in effort to see if I can help this person if I believe I can. So I wanted to hear more. I was curious to hear more about what effort you put in. Because I just remember at the time, I was like, who is this guy and how hard it is? Man, he's working hard. Into the book itself, like the writing or the launch?

1:14:46The launch. The launch, yeah. Let's see, where to begin? So if I think back to the launch of that first book, I still approach my launches very similarly, believe it or not. As the tools have changed, and the technology and the platforms have changed, the general principles that I used, I still use to this day. For instance, for every launch, book or otherwise, I have looked at the landscape and interviewed people. So for the book, for instance, I interviewed, and you can interview people who might seem out of reach. Keeping in mind, I had no platform, no nothing at the time. I know, I remember.

1:15:25But I just had to reach out and ask. And if you get somebody on a good day and you've, you know, maybe you take your hat off, put it in your hand and do a little begging. Best writing authors were very forthcoming with their time. So in a number of instances, I was able to interview best writing authors. What I mean by that is real prose masters and prolific nonfiction writers who had very, very high quality output on their writing process. So I did that prior to writing the book. Then seeing that the end was near, and this was all on a schedule, although I faced a lot of hiccups and a lot of challenges along the way, so it wasn't a straight line.

1:16:07But when I knew that my book was probably going to be delivered, was scheduled to be delivered in, let's just say, three months, I started interviewing best-selling authors, which are not always the same as best writing authors. And the questions revolved around their most recent launches and specifically the vehicles or formats or people who seem to be diminishing an impact and those that seem to be ascending an impact. And those that were ascending an impact, I assumed rightly at the time, and this has been true almost every time, would be uncrowded. So for instance, for the four-hour work week, it became clear even then that television and radio seemed to be, television especially, television seemed to be diminishing in its impact on sales.

1:16:57Nonetheless, the dominant playbook included tons and tons and tons of, say, morning TV. But almost every best-selling author I spoke to said, by and large, not worth the effort. They said, however, there are a few other things that have been impressive and notable. Number one is that certain radio programs like NPR and so on move a lot of books. This is again, 2000, let's just call it six prior to the publication in 2007. And then towards the end of 2006, and I actually remember this because we're recording this at the end of December. and I remember sitting at my parents' kitchen table after Christmas and sitting down to really put together a plan for the first book.

1:17:45And another pattern that had emerged is people said, you know, I'm not really a tech person, but there are these things called blogs. And for whatever reason, these single author blogs move a lot of books. And not a single person I recall in publishing gave a shit about blogs. So what I decided to do, I also had a very self-imposed and also practically limited budget for the launch. So for me, it was like five to 10 grand. I can't remember. I had a huge whiteboard and decided to make my target blogs. And there were many conversations that went into this, but decided to put my effort into blogs.

1:18:24What's the most crowded channel? So I'm not asking it just about the formats, but also the means of reaching bloggers. What's going to be most crowded? Blog comments, email. These are the most crowded. So I took my budget and allocated it to in-person travel to events where in the hallways and at after parties and so on, I could have drinks around or with bloggers. And I spent all my time in the lounges. I spent all my time in the waiting areas. and that is where I committed my investment of time and money. Who knows if that was the right thing to do, the only thing to do. Maybe I just got lucky, but it worked incredibly well.

1:19:12And I'll just give one more recommendation. And actually, people can find a talk I gave ages ago at South by Southwest, which is called How to Build Your Network in Record Time or some clickbaity sounding headline, but it does deliver. It explains a lot of this and also how I use South by Southwest. Similarly for the book, because South by was where the book really broke out. But there was a bunch leading up to it. So this is going a little long, but it might be helpful for folks. Rule number one, be nice to everyone. And this isn't some feel good, snow white, hummingbirds landing on your hands kind of thing.

1:19:47This is the right thing to do, but it's also the most practical thing to do. and I'll give a real example. I went to Blog World Expo or something and I'm hanging around, didn't go to any sessions. In this particular case, a lot of folks had pointed out Robert Scoble as a power broker, hugely influential, which he certainly was, and a super sweet guy as well. And at that time, I had no contact with him. He was the hottest girl at the prom, right? Everybody wanted to talk to him. And I didn't really know how to navigate the event, but I knew there would be people who were familiar with it. So I went to a lounge and I think it was a Seagate lounge or something like that way back in the day.

1:20:29And there was a woman checking people in and kind of handling the inbound traffic. And I just struck up a conversation. I was like, I bet you're meeting everybody. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm working on my first book. I'm kind of lost here. and we just talked. All that was true. We talked and we talked and we talked and I was explaining them. Here, I laid out my whole plan. I was like, well, really my best option is to focus on the blogs because the publisher owns a bunch of different territory. This is not their first rodeo, but it's my first rodeo. So this is kind of key. There were a bunch of things that I assumed were off limits for me.

1:21:04I don't understand radio. The publisher's going to handle radio. I don't understand television. The publisher or other publicists are going to handle that. So the one of area I felt where I could play and potentially leverage things was blocks. So I'm explaining all of this. Well, guess what? That woman who was checking people in turned out to be Robert Scoble's wife. And she was like, oh, you should meet Robert. And then that led to meeting Robert. I'm pretty sure I gave him, sent him a galley and I made it absolutely zero expectations. So first of all, I was like, if it would be of interest, I can send you a galley after I described the book for certain facets of it.

1:21:42And I said, what I can do also, because you're not going to probably have time to read the whole book. I'll just put in a couple of post-its for like the four or five pages that I think you'll find most interesting, most tactical. And he's like, great. Sent it off. That turned into a blog post he put up about what I'm reading, something like that. Went nuts. I don't recall the exact timing. That was before or after South by Southwest. And South by Southwest was in March. Talk about sales, right? I pitched myself to Hugh Forrest at the time, who I believe was director of programming just for South by Southwest Interactive, not music, not film.

1:22:19At the time, it was like the redheaded stepchild. Nobody gave a shit about Interactive or Tech. It was just nerdville. It was small. That was also the year that Twitter launched publicly at South by. You could see all the tweets in the world on one big screen TV where they were scrolling through in real time. And Hugh, to this day, I feel a debt of gratitude. So part of the reason I come back to South by every year is because I feel like it's just karmically the right thing to do. And Hugh is now running pretty much the whole show, I believe, at this point. But I got a last minute cancellation in the cafeteria, the Adobe-sponsored cafeteria.

1:22:54Somebody backed out. I took a last minute spot. I gave a presentation on the four-hour workweek, I was able to print up flyers beforehand, which I did at the very last minute. And I am blanking on his name. I feel really badly about this, but it was the developer behind Firefox. I think so. Like Ross? Yes. He had very graciously given me a quote for the four-hour workweek. He read a galley. And I can't remember how that came together. I owe him a debt of gratitude as well. But I printed up flyers with that quote, with a couple of other quotes, based on galleys and encourage people to attend this cafeteria.

1:23:34Oh, you put up flyers for the event? I handed them out. Like I had people handing them out. I put them up all over Austin, right? Printed them out, I'm sure at Kinko's. And I practiced in my friend's garage because I was crashing on a friend's couch. And I remember practicing in his garage with his chihuahuas. You mentioned chihuahuas. He had three chihuahuas. And clearly the chihuahuas do not understand the content of my talk, but I used them as the gauge of whether I was engaging or not. If they started wandering around, then I had to change my mode. I had to be more Tony Robbins. And I prepped, I prepped, I prepped, I prepared my ass off for this thing.

1:24:11It was my first and last opportunity to nail it. And got up on stage. I had this entire presentation with all the visuals. Of course, what happens, laptop dies. And so I had to improv and just do voice only, which I think ended up being a very good thing and made autoresponders available. I gave people, this was key, and this is something you do very well. I gave people real time challenges. I was like, here's something you can try today. You're going to be going to a lot of sessions at South by. You're going to take a lot of notes. Here's what I suggest. Everybody gets busy. Things get lost. Here are a few things you can try today.

1:24:51Here are a few things you can try in the next week related to autoresponders. send me feedback. Let me know how it went. Go on my blog. Let me know. I will give you also feedback, like constructive advice. And it just went ballistic. It went ballistic. And that set the conditions such that I could execute on other things. But lest people think this was this home run international phenomenon from the get-go, that's not what happened. it did hit the extended bestseller list in its first week but keep in mind the publisher only printed 10 000 copies nobody expected it to do anything and with those copies sold the vast majority of them but that was not enough to hit the real print bestseller list for advice how to especially which was hyper competitive at the time it hit the extended list so people in the in the business knew that it was on the list but not in the print edition it took an additional five or six months, if I'm doing the math correctly, to get to number one on the New York Times for the monthly business list.

1:25:58And then it just stayed there for years. But to answer your question, in terms of effort, effort isn't enough. Effort is not enough. You need a means of focusing that effort. So for me, I used this, what's uncrowded, what's overvalued, what's undervalued. That's how I found podcasts for The 4-Hour Chef. stuff that's how i found other things for the earlier books and that's how the four hour chef sold whatever 100 000 plus copies in its first week was because i jumped on these new things called podcasts that is also the impetus behind me then starting my own podcast in 2014 but you're right i put a lot into it because first and foremost and now i'm getting on my soapbox again but I really, really, really, really put everything into that book.

1:26:47I did not leave anything behind. I put it all on the playing field. And based on early feedback and based on also the many feedback forms, many questions I had asked, many revisions I had made for years, workshopping it in classes, I knew this stuff worked. I knew it worked. I knew, in other words, talking about AppSumo and your metrics. I knew it converted. I just needed top of the funnel. And that led me to the blog. So very similar approach that I would take today with most things. Wow. You seemed a lot happier when you were recounting that story. I was noticing earlier in the show, you were kind of like, I don't know if you felt frustrated or I don't know how you were feeling, but you seemed excited and proud.

1:27:38So tempting. and often the case, right? When you're in the weeds and you're just like running through this jungle with a machete trying to make shit happen and it's hard and things are going wrong and you think about that as the thing you have to do to get to the other thing. But then you get to the other thing, meaning like you reach some escape velocity with your business success and then you're like, okay, this is the thing I thought that I was getting through other things for and I'm happy with where I am, but I'm making trains run on time. And that's cool, right? Like I'm like a Swiss operator on some type of transport platform and I'm tweaking things, I'm pulling levers.

1:28:22I have other people doing a lot of the grunt work. But those early chapters, when I look back, that's where so much of the juice is, like so much of the excitement for me, right? Where you're like, fuck, my computer broke, right? Gotta fix it, gotta figure it out. I got to print out flyers. Fuck, you know? All right, flyers. Flyers. Flyers, okay, I'm going to give out flyers. Flyers. Okay, I don't have anybody who's around because my friend has to work. I'll give the talk to the dogs. All right. Yeah. You get a chance. This is true later too, but you really get a chance to prove how resourceful and creative you can be because you don't have a huge bank account to play with.

1:29:04You don't have tons of employees to delegate to things that oftentimes they shouldn't do in the first place, right? Yeah. And for me, that is the real heart and soul of entrepreneurship. And the fun of it is making something from nothing because you are resourceful, right? You look at a set of tools or a complete lack of tools and you see something different. You see a little gap and you're able to pursue that and manifest something in the world that otherwise doesn't exist. And the later stages are amazing. And there are people who are so good at the later stages. I'm not convinced that I'm one of them.

1:29:48Okay. But the early chapters where at the time we're like, you know, it's going to be great. One, at some point I have X, when at some point, when I cross my number, which is a moving goalpost, right? You cross like a million and then you cross this and then you cross this and it keeps moving. That when I think back to those early chapters, I get excited. It's like, I remember how unknown it all was too, right? And how fun some of the unknowns were. There were definitely hard times. There were all sorts of difficult chapters that I'm sure I've blocked out from my memory. But I wasn't frustrated earlier at all.

1:30:31I think it's just the juice of thinking back to those very nascent stages. That's my guess. Yeah. Well, it's also, I try to remind myself that a lot of my nostalgia is a liar. Oh, totally. I'm like, oh, starting Epsemo, I would drink most of the days, which we were doing. I was just like drinking with neville fucking around getting some deals and and then you remember like oh i felt lonely i felt really insecure i thought well for sure and um i guess i'm wondering is that something you're exploring now to like what what is that creation or thing that you can bite into yeah that was something i was wondering for you in that you know i've obviously known you a long time i remember it's funny when i'm doing this whole book thing which i'm not talking about what the book's called.

1:31:16No, no, no, no, no, no, no, dude. No one knows. Don't even look it up. And I think about you because I think that guy fucking worked hard. I remember you working hard. And it made me wonder where you're at today because I see you not chasing. I think in my older age, we're both in our early forties. I think I was chasing a lot. Like I want to get famous or I want to get money. And then I was like, I wonder not what you're chasing anymore, but like what you're enjoying or what you're not after is the right word and not what's next. but I'm noticing, oh, Tim's not really going aggressive on YouTube and chasing what other people are doing.

1:31:50And so I was, and it's not just YouTube, but I was like, I wonder how he's evaluating things. Yeah, totally. I think to your point of nostalgia being a liar, oftentimes, right, where we have this rose colored picture of the past. If I look at the chapters around, say the beginning of the four hour work week for our body, et cetera, I was very hungry. I was moving very quickly and certainly using processes and automation and so on. But there was a lot of uncertainty. And I would say that as I have prioritized mental health and just overall wellbeing, which includes physical, but at the time I was in physical prime condition, I mean, I was in very good shape.

1:32:32I was still competitive in sports. I would say that looking back, a lot of those adventures were formative and I enjoyed them, but I, in retrospect, should have enjoyed them more for what they were, which are these seminal moments. And I think part of what you're reading in me in terms of less chasing is that I feel like, and I suspect many people feel like, you know, the dog that catches the car or the greyhound that catches the mechanical rabbit. And you're like, this is what I was chasing? That's good. Fuck. That's funny. Like, it's kind of like tragic comic, but which is not to diminish money.

1:33:13It's not to diminish financial success. It's, I think, easier for us to have these conversations because there's a degree of security and stability and comfort. So it's not to diminish any of that because I know what it feels like to be like, fuck, I'm not sure what I'm going to do about healthcare next month. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about this next month. I know what that can feel like. And it's not a good feeling. Eating from Jack in the Box. I remember eating so many meals from Jack in the Box on Shoreline across the street from my shitty apartment with my terrible roommate who just ditched and almost got all my stuff yanked because there were all these eviction notices.

1:33:50I remember those days. I don't want to return to those days. But having caught the thing that I was chasing, I've realized that none of these targets are panaceas. They're kind of placeholders to keep you motivated. And I've also, if you look at patterns in my life, I tend to do things, if I'm going to do something well, seems to be in the five to 10 year range. Books, startup investing predominantly, I focused on from say 2008 to 2015. And then I published this blog posts. I'm taking a long startup vacation and stopped that categorically. I stopped doing it completely for a period of time because the game got saturated.

1:34:34It got more complicated, much more competitive, much riskier from a terms perspective. So I stopped. And then you have podcasting. I'm coming up on 10 years next April. And it's a good time to pause and reflect. And I feel like podcasting also, and I will have questions for you about YouTube, because I go back and forth on my thoughts on YouTube. But when I see best practices emerge or converge, maybe is a better way to put it, with a lot of the algorithm-driven growth slash lack of growth that we see, I really want to step back and see if I am in a position where I'm uniquely differentiated or have some type of competitive advantage?

1:35:20Not because I care about competition per se, but it's like, am I in a red ocean that used to be a blue ocean? Or am I developing practices that are going to lead me to a point of not just uniformity with others, but like, are we all running towards a cliff like a bunch of lemmings in the sense that, for instance, email, I'm going all over the place, I realized, but like, with like email, blog, especially if you're open source, like I'm based on WordPress, you effectively own your audience. You don't own your audience. You have a direct relationship with your audience. Your audience is portable.

1:35:55If you're on a platform that includes almost any platform, there's some technical workarounds for these things, but you are renting your audience. And so I've seen multi-million dollar Facebook pages back in the day when that was a huge thing. Get turnoff, just like PG &E might turn off your power during a rolling blackout in California. It's like one day you're on and you have employees and a big business. The next day you are turned off. And I've seen that over and over again. I've seen, for instance, organic reach get throttled. Now you have to pay. I think it's foolish to assume that can't happen to whatever platforms you're using today.

1:36:31And as we've seen a number of precipitating events, COVID, for instance, the writer's strike, another example, drive people to what they've realized can be a profitable model in the form of podcasting, YouTube. As the mimicry of TikTok has engendered a drive to video and short-form video, I feel like I have fewer and fewer differentiators and advantages. And the human basis of recommendation has been replaced by, in large part, kind of top-down corporate directives and algo modifications. So I feel like I'm in a transitional period right now, potentially, where I'm taking my foot off the gas, because I'm not sure the car is going in a direction where I want to take it to 120 on the Autobahn, you know?

1:37:28So that's where I am. and I'm also not in a rush because maybe it's just fatigue, frankly. I mean, like I started the podcast 10 years ago and there are people with incredible longevity and not very many, but like Rogan as an example. I mean, the guy's a machine and he's very good at what he does. 10 years is also a long time for me, right? That's a long time to do one thing consistently. I'm going to continue doing the podcast, but from a growth perspective, I feel like YouTube is probably one of the more appealing avenues for growth currently, but offsetting that is a desire to increasingly be less publicly, visually recognized because there are compromises that I've made related to that.

1:38:12There are safety issues, there are privacy issues, there's lots of weird stuff that happens. I'm not sure I want to, actually, I'm quite sure I do not want to make my face more recognizable. On the counter-argument side, I know we're going all over the place. Dude, by the way, this is fire. Okay, good. This is fire. Keep going. I want to know. On the counter-argument side, and this is both a reason not to do YouTube, but also a reason maybe I'm over-evaluating the risks, and I've talked to some folks, I don't want to name them, but very well-known, iconic writers, photographers, creators who did one thing very, very well.

1:38:49One thing. Which also makes me question sort of the jack-of-all-trades approach that I think is in some respects, a norm now where you're present and growing on many, many different formats. But putting that aside for a second, the half-life of fame, I think, is going to drop precipitously as algorithm chasing becomes more and more dominant and more and more determinate of what has surfaced in the sense that there will, I would be shocked if there's ever again someone as dominant as, say, Oprah was for effectively, let's just call it, who knows, a third to a half of all the women in the United States, one person, one show.

1:39:38The sort of long tail of personalization, I think, has largely removed that possibility. And if you even think about the personal half-life, which I think we can extract, like studying the micro to study the macro, because the macro can seem super intimidating and abstract and ungraspable. If you just think about your personal experience, and I've talked to friends about this 10 years ago, if you got sent some crazy video from friends, like that video would stick around for a while, right? It might be the video that sticks around for like a week. Oh my God, you see that crazy video of the thing?

1:40:14How many of those do you get per day now, Something that would win the gold medal of the meme Olympics crushes all of the stupid things that you would have looked at 10 years ago. Infinitely more attention-grabbing. And the half-life is what? 30 seconds? 60 seconds? So I think fame as a phenomenon in most cases online will have a very, very short half-life. and that worries me a bit from a psychological adaptive perspective because i think that has supreme implications for the sort of dopamine hit rat stepping on a cocaine pedal aspect of content creation if what you do is less and less persistent meaning has less and less durability what game are you signing up for and what is winning that game look like these are really critical questions, right?

1:41:08Okay. We're all playing games right now beyond food, shelter, a handful of things at the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We're all playing games. What games are you playing? And just as important, like what does winning that game or those games look like? And is that the life you want? So looking at how things are developing, and maybe this is a very fancy way of rationalizing, just being older and more fatigued. I don't know, But I find where things are trending super, super worrisome. So if I could be long a number of things, I'd be like, okay, mental health therapeutics, dialysis, which seems pretty dystopian, but I would be very long those things.

1:41:49I think we haven't even seen a glimpse of some of the mental health challenges that are on the horizon. So probably a long answer to a very short question, but that informs, I think, a certain, it's not just calmness, although there's a lot that goes into that on my side compared to my earlier self, but a not wanting to rush into committing at high speed in certain directions that are very appealing right now at face value. I'm like, you know what? If you have, here we go. I'm going to shut the fuck up in a second. But it's like, here's the thing. If I think about the authors I respect the most, if I think about the filmmakers I most aspire to be like or admire the most, they're not playing a volume game, right?

1:42:39Like Miyazaki, who just put out, I think it's the boy and the heron, the Japanese name is, like, how do you live? It's a totally different name. But they put out great work that is uniquely their own. You watch that movie, and if you've seen other Studio Ghibli Miyazaki movies, you're like, that is the signature. That could not be anyone other than Miyazaki. You see like a Daniel Day-Lewis film. There are so many examples of this. These people have unique capabilities they've harnessed. They don't need to rush, right? So if I find myself feeling compelled to rush, either it's a false signal I should ignore, or I'm about to do something that a lot of other people could do.

1:43:17And that for me is a cue to really chill the fuck out and be like, wait, wait a second. Let me go back. Let me read Blue Ocean Strategy. Let me go back. Let me read 80-20 Principle. Let me go back and read any number of things. I mean, I do like reading. Let me go back and watch these following documentaries about people who really took an unorthodox path. And then let me sit down and ask, why do I feel like I am compelled to rush? So there you have it. bro that was one that was fucking fire thanks this has been on my mind non-stop for the last couple of months i think people confuse inaction with patience okay tell me more what i heard and i'm curious how you approach it is that instead of rushing really quickly you're understanding yourself and thinking patiently okay what is my right play for me to move and i think in the past you know and maybe you can revisit it is okay let's go rush and find things and maybe stuff will happen.

1:44:16But now you're like, you're observing. You sound calm. You sound, you're thinking about what's happening, where are my advantages, what's going on, and where is a place that you frankly want to play. And instead of rushing into, let's say, YouTube world, which does feel like a lot of people are rushing into these kind of things, really thinking about what your play is. I love that. I guess the question I was curious about, what is your approach for thinking about what's underserved? Because what you said, I thought was fucking powerful. It's like you can put effort, but in the wrong thing. When you did your book, you're like, oh, blogging is it.

1:44:47And then your second book, podcasting is it. How are you approaching thinking about getting to, like even now you're like, all right, I like podcasts, I'm doing podcasts. Yeah, I love doing podcasts. I love doing podcasts. It's going to get a lot harder as a business. It is already, I'm very fortunate in the sense that, and this was not accidental, right? Like this podcast and the audience for this podcast, this podcast is intended to be long form thoughtful dense and incredibly practical tactical and i'll mention it because you've been very good at receiving feedback but million dollar weekend we are going to get to it and talk about very practical steps all of this is practical though if you look at it through the lens of making decisions this has been positioned as high ultra premium as far as podcasts go advertisers audience right and we've done all the polling and so on.

1:45:37So it's like, if you want to reach Ted, this is the podcast, right? If you want to hit millions or at least let's just say thousands of very, very well-known creators with one podcast, like this is the podcast. So the premium positioning means that like for the next year, we're basically already sold out with advertising, right? So I'm in a very good position, but I think overall it is, this is true on YouTube too, but, and it relates to everything I just said, it is going to get and is getting harder to differentiate right like back when i had like jamie fox and arnold schwarzenegger on the podcast that was insane blew people's minds right like that was just not something that really happened and now that you have incredibly talented people comedians entertainers writers right that's why i mentioned the writer's strike earlier who for a period of time did not have the option of doing what they normally do and they dipped their toe into podcasting they dipped their toe into youtube and they're like wow actually i'm really good at this and I can get paid.

1:46:32Interesting. There are exceptional, exceptionally skilled people producing things for podcasts and YouTube. What I'm saying is the bar for quality has gone up dramatically in all of these areas, but the possibility for originality, I would say, has diminished as a result of the sheer volume of entrance. So in terms of thinking about what's unserved. I would say that I'm looking for a Venn diagram because if you ask any of the questions I'm asking myself in isolation, which I've done in the past, you can lead yourself to bad decisions. So if you ask yourself, what can I uniquely do? And that's your question.

1:47:13And you use that to determine what you do. You can end up doing things that you dislike, that are draining, that don't have any type of market fit whatsoever. So that's not enough, right? Although for me, that is necessary. Like what am I uniquely suited to do? Because that will give me not only an immediate, say, first mover or early mover advantage, it gives me endurance. So being uniquely suited to something doesn't mean that you are the only person that can do it. Maybe you just love it more, right? Like with me and language learning as an example. Now that's not a business. I mean, it did lead to me being one of the first investors in Duolingo, so that worked out.

1:47:52But I have infinite endurance for that in a way that most people don't. That's a huge advantage, even though other people could technically do it. So there's, what am I uniquely suited for? What do I find easy that other people find hard? Then there's what is underserved. But if you approach that by itself, you can make some really bad decisions. And I've done that in the past. What do people need? Now I'm not the boss of myself. I've turned my audience into the boss of me. This is also how people get shaped in horrifying ways by social media or their audiences on YouTube, right? Your most extreme behaviors get reinforced.

1:48:29So you repeat those, you exaggerate them, and your stage presence, your social media presence becomes you. This is really important. You have to be careful about the masks you wear because you will become those masks. And I've seen that. I'm sure you've met people like, it's terrifying. You will be shaped by your audience and by these creative decisions. So not just asking what is the unmet need, but a question I might ask is like, what experiments can I run that I think will meet the needs intended by say the podcast in a different way? And also, I mean, another question that I ask is like, instead of like, what is the new, new thing?

1:49:08Like what is something old that is being neglected? It doesn't have to be new by the way, right? So for instance, that led me to start Five Bullet Friday in the newsletter ages ago. Because people were like, email's dead. Nobody's going to use email anymore. Email's dead. You hear that every year. And that was particularly true when I launched Five Bullet Friday because social media, Snapchat, young kids are never going to use email. And I was like, well, it's true until they get a job. And then guess what? They're going to use email. So in that particular case, I wasn't looking for the new, new thing.

1:49:38I was looking for something old that was kind of neglected. And I wanted to also own my audience. So that led to millions of people for the newsletter. So those are some of the questions that I ask. I think I've learned, for me personally, I make better decisions when it's a bit of a Venn diagram. If I go after any one of those, which could include profit, by the way, that's one that gets people. Boy, oh boy, I've succumbed to that too. If you're like, what has the most leverage for revenue, profit, et cetera, that can lead you in directions that end up compromising well-being, end up compromising long-term growth, end up compromising fill in the blank, personal and professional and organizationally speaking.

1:50:19So damn, that was fine. I mean, someone said to me recently, like, don't trade your nine to five for a 24 seven. And it's like the cool part about entrepreneurship is that you can create a life you want, whether you want to live in Austin, you want to live in Spain, you want to live wherever, Tokyo, but it's then, are you actually living the life you want? I think that the two comments, one common one question, I love that you said experiments. I mean, that was kind of super early for you and how you developed a lot of your stuff. And I think for a lot of people, it's like, oh, well, I got to make this big decision.

1:50:47It's like, well, how can you test it right now? How can you test for really cheap? How can you test it and see if that's actually the case? So I love that you said that. The other thing I was curious, when's the last time you read 4-Hour Workweek? You were talking about books you read that you come back to. I was like, I wonder, sometimes we come back to our own things. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I was looking at 4-Hour Workweek a couple weeks ago, actually. Yeah. Because my books I make, I mean, they reflect things that I am doing and have done, but they also act as references for me. I go back to The 4-Hour Chef all the time for various things.

1:51:17The 4-Hour Body, I go back to it all the time for various things. And The 4-Hour Workweek in this particular case, because I'm thinking about virtual assistants, which have really up-leveled in the last handful of years with technology and also different companies and types of training, I've been thinking again about virtual assistants. And so I wanted to revisit scripts, principles, et cetera, because I've shifted from VAs to in-person, full-time, org chart type stuff. And I'm experimenting again. I have a full-time VA, also on the payroll now. And I wanted to revisit some of what worked in the past, because very often the things that worked then are still going to work.

1:51:56And the principles are the principles for a reason. The tactics, the tools, the platforms, the hardware devices, those all change. But in terms of human communication, clarity, lack of clarity, the words are still words. So I wanted to revisit some of that. So as an example, I mean, I've been thinking about going back to text. I've been thinking about going back to blog posts. It's so antiquated. It's so out of fashion. And it's so high labor too. I mean, because that is something where I do not feel comfortable delegating. If I'm putting my name to something, I want to be the one who has put those words on paper or on a screen in this case.

1:52:32but I've thought about it I've thought about it quite a bit we'll say I mean that's a heavy lift it is a heavy lift but that's also something I want to be aware of or cognizant of and that is am I doing this because it fits into the Venn diagram or am I doing it because it requires less work because requiring less work does not automatically mean elegant combination of things that leads to my goals right and if you don't have those KPIs like you mentioned watch out for vanity metrics too. Like, okay, this matters. Why does that matter? Because it leads to this. Okay, why does that matter? Why does it lead?

1:53:04Because of this. Okay, because of this. Ultimately, it's going to come down to, all right, you want this amount of money? Okay, why do you want that money? Because I want to trade it for this experience or this possession. Okay, why do you want those? Because you want this feeling. Okay, well, let's keep that in mind. You want to sleep well at night? Don't do all this other shit that is going to cause you anxiety. And let's come back to - Can I highlight what they - Yeah, of course. So two parts. One, I want to shout out for people looking for VAs. the site I use is HireMyMom.com Really? Yeah.

1:53:31Okay. Alright. Amazing. So HireMyMom.com. I'm not affiliated. No cuts. No nothing. They can sponsor my podcast or Tim's podcast. But basically it's moms who want to spend time with their kids that are super elite moms and they just don't want to work full time though. And so you can basically get these super impressive parents at pretty affordable prices. So I hired someone recently who was the executive assistant for the Dallas Stars, the hockey team. Oh, wow. Okay. Right. She has two kids. She wants to stay at home. She did quit last week. Telling you real, she quit. But it's like you're finding that level of caliber at, I'll say because she's not working.

1:54:07She was 30 bucks an hour, which is insane. Yeah. For someone who's a really impressive woman. Why'd she quit? She is an executive assistant and she thought I was asking to do some assistant level work. So I asked her to schedule some appointments. I asked her to make some purchases and she's like, I just want to do the business work. And so I really admire and respect when people know what they want. I was a little frustrated because you quit all of a sudden abruptly, send me a voluntary termination letter. I've never received one of those ever. But she's a professional. But you go back to it and that's part of business.

1:54:37I think a lot of people do it once and then they, like you go, it doesn't work. It's like, yeah, that's part of business. It's like, okay, I'm going to go and find another one and improve my process to understand like, hey, in the hiring process, you're going to have to purchase something from a store. Is that going to bother you? Great. doesn't, okay, we can move you forward. My recommendation there, especially if you're considering a full-time hire, test them for a few months and have them do that stuff. Because people know how to interview. And a lot of people will say, absolutely. No task too small.

1:55:04No problem. And that's horseshit. In the same way that they say they're going to buy whatever you're offering, ask them to pay you. Then you know it's real. So if you can try before you buy, especially on the EA, V, APA. Hiring in general. make them do some of the grunt work. Not grunt work, but just smaller things. And by the way, anyone who's got real chops, it's kind of like Jean-Paul DeJaray, putting the lotion on your hands. That guy has done every job. He's done every job. And this isn't always going to work, but you want someone with that same type of ethos. Yeah, we will. And I mean, it's how we hire almost every person to have someone who's a contractor to start.

1:55:47And it's like, hey, we're going to, and even with my YouTube channel, I'm going to pay you to do your trial video. Great. You can see if you like me, maybe you hate me. Maybe I don't like you. Maybe we'll do like each other, but you're at least getting paid. So there's not really as much downside for both of us. Yeah. The other thing I thought was really cool is looking back on our old lives that you said, looking back in your old work. I used to live in this really 800 square foot shitty house and I went back at it. And then I also look back on my photos every month. I do a month review. I look back on my photos and it's, it's nice to look where we've been and where we are.

1:56:15So if, you know, everyone, I do a month review, you can literally just scroll up on your phone, go to your photo, scroll up really far. And almost every time, you're pretty proud of where you are now. So those times were frustrated. I went back to that old house and I felt, wow, man, I'm so proud of where I am now. But I didn't really always notice that. I do. But going back there helped that for sure. Yeah, totally. Especially if you're used to looking ahead, right? Always forward. Yes. And you've developed a certain set of habits and attributes, being in sixth year, always being in the fast lane, it is a practice to augment that with other abilities.

1:56:50100%. This is why a lot of people self-destruct when they quote unquote retire. If they're trying to go from like Autobahn to park, it's like, well, hold on, maybe we should get used to some other gears. Let's see what happens. So let's talk about tests. Let's talk about experiments. Let's talk about small steps. Million dollar weekend. Number one, what is the, well, here, let's do the subtitle. The surprisingly simple way to launch a seven figure business in 48 hours. So for people who find this tantalizing, I guess, number one, why should they believe it? Let's start there. Like, why the fuck should they listen?

1:57:22Because they're going to come across a lot of promises, a lot of clickback on YouTube. And then they click on it and they're like, oh, come on. So why should they believe it? Maybe there's a case study or two or example you could share. And then if somebody wants to test drive something from this podcast, Are there things they can do? I've come up with a simple rule because what's crazy on YouTube and podcasts now, you can make whatever title up you want. There's people saying, oh, I'm worth a hundred million. I'm like, really? You can just write that? And so don't trust any author that has gotten rich from their, any business author, I would say, that's gotten rich from their book or their course.

1:57:56I think that's a pretty straightforward approach. Like if that's how they got rich, teaching you how they got rich, like double check who they are and maybe look for someone else that's maybe, I worked for Zuckerberg, helpstartment.com, I help start kickflip.com I help start canva.com somebody who has a very well-groomed mustache my latina girlfriend loves the mustache I don't normally like it but she's like you got to keep that I was like yes baby and you know running app sumo.com and so you can I'm not getting rich on the book and I think that's a very simple test to think about who you want to listen to specifically in business and secondly can you see their businesses a lot of times like oh I've got these businesses you'll never see it though why not because you can't know about it why not yeah never get to the answer that's probably why you don't ever have them on your shows now in terms of the surprisingly simple way in that i'll just give you a case study of jake so jake lives up north texas he's got three kids got a day job and he's had dreams just like a lot of people have had and he's had it for two years i was like jake how do we change you in 48 hours because everyone has a weekend and now i'm about to have a family and i'm realizing like family youtube book prioritizing my partner and our kid, it's hard to have time to start a side hustle.

1:59:05It's hard to have time to get going. And the reality though is we do all have weekends. We have 52 of them. So we can do something in a weekend, even if it's really small action. And by the way, it doesn't have to be a million in a weekend. It's through every weekend you can pound it over some time it can get there. Now, the things that people can do in a weekend right now, this is the thing with books. I think your book is phenomenal. If everyone gets two books, it's yours for a work week and a million weekend. Your book has such a great recipe. It's such a great recipe. But what I noticed when I've worked through my course, which I'm not going to call it, I've worked through a course, 10 ,000 people have gone through it, YouTube channel, millions of people.

1:59:39You can give them the recipes, but they still may not do something. And I was kind of like, what the fuck is going on? Right? Like you have a big dream. You have a dream like, hey, I want to work here. I want to make a thousand bucks a month. I want grocery money. I want whatever it is. But then you haven't done nothing for two years like Jade. And the reality is that most people are afraid of starting. they're not ready they feel they're not right they're actually all ready there's a lot of rich people who are really ordinary i think people think it's all like oh no i grew up in silica valley and tim did these things like no there's a lot of really normal people that are rich but they all got started and we got started over and like how many times you did brain quick and you've done all these things opening the kimono yeah you've done a lot of things and so how do we overcome the fear of starting then you can do that right now that's why i asked people and we did it earlier do the dollar challenge just get a dollar right now just go get going right now and we surveyed just like you did with your book and the number one takeaway from the book by far was now not how i was like what do you mean not how they're like yeah no you always just do right now i'm like what do you mean just right fucking now what's the smallest action you can take that will get you momentum so you want to be a content creator post a video right now with your phone my first youtube video was with my phone just shirtless in my little house eight square foot house you say shirtless yeah yeah it's not impressive it wasn't like ripped shirtless it It was just like sweaty, just got off a bike in my spandex.

2:00:54I actually just watched the video a few weeks ago because I was like, is this true? And I was like, wow, it's on the channel. And now my videos are, you know, give or take around$30 ,000 to make per video. Wow. From all the salaries. Oh my God. But that was a shirtless thing with an iPhone X that everyone can do right now. My most popular YouTube video of all time. And we're sitting here with like a pretty nice video setup. Got a basically a studio, the whole nine yards. My most popular YouTube video of all time is me in my kitchen. somebody with like, God knows what kind of old phone, the resolution's terrible.

2:01:23De-shelling hard-boiled eggs without peeling. That was my most successful video of all time. A bit sad about that, given how much effort goes into other things. But yeah. Yeah, dude. I mean, one of your favorite videos of mine is microwaving eggs. Yeah. We talked about it last. I love microwaves and I love microwaving my eggs. Sometimes I use a stove. My girlfriend's like, let's use a stove, baby. All right, let's see. So what can we do right now? Let me give you a great example as well. I'm a big pinballer. So I have two pinball machines at home and this morning literally I was watching how to make a pinball machine by godzilla It's the number one rated pinball machine in the world sick.

2:01:56That's what I have at home and You know when most people think I want to start a pinball business. What do they think? Holy fuck? I've got to bin this machine I've got to go figure out software. I've got to do oh, I got to probably get a website maybe on shopify Shout out softify. They sponsor your podcast Which you'll eventually need maybe I need a lawyer because i've got a patent idea and then that's six months, 12 months, two years of nothing. Now what's crazy, Stern Pinball, the number one maker of pinball machines, they put out this video behind the scenes of a Godzilla. They literally took like a board and then bent some metal and just kind of threw the ball.

2:02:25You could do that right now. You could do that in one day and go to people, literally on your phone, in person. Hey, we're working on this pinball machine. Let me show it to you right now and see what you think. And you could get people to purchase your pinball machine before you spent six months, six years doing nothing. Same thing with the Cybertruck, six years and barely it's getting delivered. And so there's things that people can start realizing. Let me actually see if people really want this and find out right away. So that's really around surprisingly simple. It's like, there's business models.

2:02:53There's all these things you can do. It's like, well, if I only have a weekend and I don't have a lot of time, how do I break it down to the essence of the simplest form? And so in terms of the book where I think a lot of the breakthroughs happen is how do I get going right now? Like with the pinball machine or with Jake, Jake had a dream to do golf trips. He wants to do golf trips, like super bougie, high end and do golf. I don't golf. i have golfed i wouldn't say i golf yeah i don't golf i like disc golf yeah you know disc golf yeah yeah like i'm a cyclist but he wants to do golf trips and so he's been thinking about it's when these people i'm sure you've noticed them they'll like talk to you about a dinner they're like oh man i hate my job but i'd like to try this and so it's like all right we have 48 hours jake Thank you.

2:03:30how do we actually do right now to see if other people want golf trips because that's what you think is a problem. Now, I think the best problems in business are your own. Yeah, I agree. Like your show really, I mean, if you think about it, you getting to talk to people you want. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. That's a problem you have about learning different areas, business, science, health, fitness, and then you publish it and make a lot of money doing that. Like, how cool is that? Best job ever. Dude, it's a sweet work. It's super sweet. So in terms of the book, it's one, how do we just get going fucking right now, right now, and then giving people more momentum, stories, actions like the dollar challenge, now not how, freedom number, which is understanding what is the number you need to quit your job.

2:04:06For me, it was 3 ,000. Do you have a number? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Slightly different moniker, but same idea, like target monthly income, which was not just the replacement. It was a bit more part of this exercise called dreamlining. Oh, yeah, yeah. Exactly. But very similar idea. Totally. More like figure out the basic math, because maybe you need less. Very often, you need less than you think you need. I live in Barcelona. I think our apartment's a thousand dollars. It's not huge to be clear, but it's like, you can live actually a lot cooler life than you think for a lot more affordable than you realize.

2:04:35Yeah. So part one is around that. And then we can get into the recipe. And I think, you know, the four hour work recipe is fire. You know, I shout out you in the book and honor how you approach it as one way. But even before that, it's how do you understand the upside of asking and how do you become an asking machine? How do you build an asking muscle? Yeah. So what did Jake do? So Jake, I mean, first off we did the coffee challenge. So we drove over taco deli and i was like all right jake let's go ask for 10 off he's like ah he just done sales before he's like it's easy it's always easy until you do it and then guess what it's it's not as hard as he thinks and that that's really true for a lot of life we're afraid of things and you know this every almost every time we face the hard thing it's never as hard as we thought like an ayahuasca for me part of it i was so afraid and thank you for giving me time and coaching me around it before i went in but a lot of ayahuasca was just like facing something hard more than all the other stuff it was just like it's so challenging for me it felt so challenging and be able to overcome it.

2:05:25Same thing with the coffee challenge. Just go do it today. Commit to do it right now for yourself. So Jake did it. Bam. Just to be clear, I wouldn't do the take ayahuasca today as a translation of that. No, no, no. I would say the coffee challenge. Coffee challenge. Coffee challenge. Then Jake did the dollar challenge. Just get a dollar. And he was so nervous. But then he was like, wow, I haven't done shit in two years. And literally in like six hours, he already had a lot of momentum. Now, once you kind of get practice on those different things, really the book breaks down in two parts, which is how do you build and find something that people works that I'd give you money for.

2:05:53Now that you're better at starting and asking, all right, let me start swinging. So it's thinking about, okay, how do I come up with ideas? How do I see if there's a million dollars in money I can make on it? Check out a one minute business model. And then the third part, grow it is like finding social media for customers, email to actually, as you were saying, sell them and communicate with them. And then the growth machine, which is the playbook I use at mint.com and appstoolman.com, YouTube, the book, it's the same marketing playbook I use over and over. And then these are all things, by the way, people are like, oh, I want it more complicated.

2:06:18And I need it. It's like, it's 48 hours. And then you know, this, like by having these limitations, bring out a lot more creativity, bring out a lot more resourcefulness. Yeah. I mean, I would go so far as to say like, this is going to be a broad statement, but like the best creativity comes from constraints. You need constraints. Those sound bad. They sound like restraints, like you're strapped into, you know, electroshock therapy or something, but you need constraints and weekend is a constraint, less than a hundred dollars is a constraint. Two hours is a constraint. These are all four hour work week, right?

2:06:52Which is a constraint. It's a constraint. And how is it an advantage? I think most people think I don't have money. It's like, that's a great thing. Okay. What do you do now that you don't have money? Okay. How can you make it happen? And then you realize like, oh, maybe there's something here for the, just like a pinball machine, which is crazy. Like, no, you need to build an engineer. No, take a piece of wood, then some metal. See if you can get a three P I generally say three people in the weekend. If you can get three customers to me, that's validation, meaning that this is something you can invest in.

2:07:17That's it. You can do that in 48 hours. And I think people give themselves so much time and so many excuses. That's why the book starts with frequently made excuses. Yeah. Frequently made excuses. Yeah. To be able to get them past that so they can get going on their journey. Yeah, totally. And there's so many examples of low stakes, low cost, say prototyping, right? I'll just mention one guy, people can look him up, Stephen Key, fascinating guy. And he has licensed tons of toys to huge manufacturers. And so his game is licensing, right? He's not actually in the venturing business. He's not in the manufacturing and the distribution business.

2:07:54He comes up with ideas. It's like, this is a great game. And he sells it to Hasbro or whoever it might be, these huge companies. He uses construction paper, some glue, scotch tape. He'll prototype it, take some photos of how it might work, and then off to the races he goes. And he just does that over and over and over and over again. There's a lot of examples of this. Airbnb,$60 billion,$100 billion company, that literally started in a weekend. They posted to some design conference like, hey, we have a couch. Does anyone want it? There wasn't some fancy website. There was no Mark Andreessen funding.

2:08:26There was none of that. And now that's$100 billion business. So the thing that we talked about a long time ago is that you only need to get lucky once. but to get lucky you have to be doing things consistently every single weekend to eventually get to that point and i think people miss out on that so once jake had a little bit of movement so taco deli etc what happens then for someone like a jake doesn't need to be jake but like for someone yeah let's let's break it down i think the more concrete tactical i know that that's what we both appreciate so now it's like okay well what do i sell and so again there's a lot of different ways.

2:08:59I'll just give you one. Literally just make a list of your day, do breakfast, lunch, dinner, and try to write everything that sucked. So for you right now, you've already told me one. Finding a VA. EA. Opportunity. Jake, his different ones, he has kids. So toys. He found it really annoying that his kids get older. Now to find toys, he's like, oh shit, I need to get rid of these toys and get new ones. Maybe there's a toy rental business. Oh, it's kind of cool. I mean, look at Chegg for textbooks, right? Huge business. Chegg for toys. Doesn't exist. So someone does that. Sorry, Jake. He didn't end up doing it.

2:09:28But it was going through different problems that he was excited to solve for himself. He had a coffee problem. And what he stumbled upon was that he went on a golf trip with guys a year ago. And he was like, I really love that. I want more of that in my life. I want to have something to look forward to on my calendar. And I didn't want him to do that business. I want him to do the toy rental. So one additional approach I'll throw in there, because it's actually how I started BrainQuick. You know, the first business, sports, nutrition, et cetera, which is where I cut my teeth for all the things I followed.

2:09:53but I, as part of my calculus, I went through all my credit card statements. And at the time I was making, I don't know, like base salaries, 40 grand a year in the Bay Area during like one of the peak rushes. It was, it was partially explains why I was eating Jack in the Box. But like with California taxes and like rents, it was like gone before you know it. So I went through my credit card statements and I looked at what I spent a lot of money on. Like what did I spend a lot of money on disproportionate to my income. And that's how I landed on sports nutrition in part. I also had some knowledge around it and the ability to find people involved with that.

2:10:30But another approach I've heard from several different entrepreneurs who ended up building huge businesses is they looked at where they were cobbling together solutions. Like where are they paying for multiple things or using multiple things to MacGyver some half-assed solution to a problem that they have. Opportunity, right? Yeah. Another one I've liked, and to be clear, you can have that and then still there's no business there. So we did that. We tried to compete with Klaviyo in e-commerce and we were cobbling together a solution. I don't know what they do. They're MailChimp or ConvertKit, but just for e-commerce.

2:11:04I see. And so we cobbled together a solution and we're like, oh, we could sell this to people. And then when we tried to sell it, no one wanted to buy it. Yeah. And that's what we get to later in the book. And so I think the other comment I would actually highlight that it's great, you called it out, is what's on your to-do list that you're just avoiding doing. That is actually a really interesting business. So for you, your to-do list is to find an EA. What else is on your to-do list that's maybe been there over two weeks? Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. Let me think about that for a second.

2:11:29Yeah, what is? I can tell you one of mine. Yeah, let's do one of yours. Fuck, dude. I need a house manager. Yeah. I need someone to... Just handle property stuff. My painting fell. My grass died because I put my car over it. It didn't get watered. I have a cold plunge. that needs to get refilled. And I have my girlfriend who's pregnant, so I'm taking care of her and prioritizing her. I don't have time to even find the house manager. Yeah. So there's one. So in the case of, and if a better example exists that we want to run with, but let's, since we've introduced Jake. Yeah, we can stick with Jake and we can also do the VA one.

2:12:00But Jake's thing was, I want to do golf. Let's stick with that. Next up, is it a million dollars of money that you can make in that? So how big is the market? Over what period of time? A year or what period of time? I'm more just looking at the market. I'm not necessarily looking at a timeframe on that. It's just like, are there people now, today, that at least a million dollars? Like I would literally, what's crazy is AppSumo's success, I would say is significantly because the market just grew. We chose a great market. When I started AppSumo, there was 10 software products. Now there's at least 10 ,000 software products, if not more.

2:12:28And so we chose the right market. So with Jake, he was basically, there's two ways you can do it. One, just look at Google Trends, which is super basic. Most people know this. Like, Google Trends is a flat, declining is a growing, and look at it relatively. In terms of search terms, right? Yeah. Go to trends.google.com and just double check it. And this is, again, this is almost identical to the blog post we had. It's just been evolved on your blog, on Tim Ferriss' blog, 4hourworkweek.com. And then the second part is, all right, is there a million people, or not even a million people, how many people and how much do they spend on this?

2:12:55Same thing with chihuahuas. How many people have chihuahuas? How much do they spend on chihuahuas? So for Jake, it's how many people are golfing? How much do they spend on golf? And can you get any other data points? But that's probably the most straightforward way, because again, we only do it in a weekend, to see is there at least a million dollars in there. Golf is a billion-dollar industry, multiple billions of dollars. So you can look at the clubs. You can look at things, but simplest way to do it, go on Facebook, do an ad. How many people are searching golf? And then you can Google, how much do people spend on golf a year?

2:13:19Okay. Is there at least a million dollars in there I can make in it? I would imagine at this point too, I'm just throwing this out there, but that some of these tools like ChatGPT or Bard could also be incredibly helpful. 100%. 100%. How much money do people spend on golf a year? How big is the market on golf? You could put that in right now. And again, people are like, well, I need to do more research. It's like, no, we really just want to understand like generally because we only have a weekend. Otherwise, that's the thing that, okay, two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, 10 weeks, and nothing's happened.

2:13:45So next up, how do we actually understand what the business model looks like? Again, not, I went to Berkeley, went to Princeton. Like there's all these complicated discounted cash flows. You've done a lot more investing than I have. I just want to know, can I make a million dollars in the business? So the real simplest business model is one minute revenue, cost, expense divided by a million. And I have a bunch of templates on the website, But really, again, I'm trying to understand, is this realistic? Trying to sell a business that, let's say a golf trip, that's what he was excited about. $5 ,000, it's like$3 ,000 to do it,$2 ,000.

2:14:15Can I sell this many golf trips and how long will that take me? Help him adjust the business model. Like when I did Sumo Jerky, and even when I've done AppSumo, I had to do the same change. When we did AppSumo, I did bundles. Remember? I do. Yeah, because your productivity bundle, you helped put it on the map. We did these bundles and I was like, dude, I'm doing fucking two months of work. Sell them for 50 bucks. I made$5. Andrew Chen came and he's like a math genius. And he's one of my best friends. He's like, let's just do this quick model. And that's what we've replicated. Stop doing bundles.

2:14:43Just do one and do one a week. What's the margin? I went from$5 margin to$25 margin. Can you say that one more time? Yeah. So let me back up. So when you're doing these quick models, and again, I don't want people to spend a lot of time. People are like, it's so simple. I'm like, that's the point. Have a one minute. By the way, not to interrupt, but like the vast majority of incredibly profitable, elegant businesses are simple. Yeah. Right. At their very core, they're simple. Beautifully said. At their core. Like Google at its core. I know there's a lot of complexity that goes into delivering it, but as a business model, very straightforward.

2:15:20Uber at its core, very straightforward. Airbnb at its core, very straightforward. and Patron, right? I mean, like at their cores, these businesses are Geico even, right? Like very simple. And one thing I want to take a step back on is entrepreneurship is awesome. It can create a great life for you. And that doesn't mean you have to be a millionaire. That could be even grocery money. And I don't think people realize they can change their life and have that option. Like I was fired. Have you been fired? Yeah, from my first job, fired. Ice cream shop. It's a long story. You have to like try to get fired there.

2:15:53Well, it's actually kind of funny. I mean, my first job, so the way this guy was doing stuff, the big boss, I was like 14, I don't even know if it was legal, but I was working at this ice cream shop and I was the cleaner. So I was cleaning the machines and doing this, that, and the other thing. And the way that I was taught to do it made absolutely no fucking sense. So I came up with my own system for cleaning and I did it in like one 10th the time. The mistake I made was I stayed at work for the rest of the time and I read Black Belt Magazine and I took the broom handle off of like one of the mops and I practiced karate moves or something in the parking lot.

2:16:22And the boss, understandably, didn't find that terribly inspiring. So he was like, I don't care if you already cleaned it, clean it again. And I was like, but it's clean. And that was early proof that I'm effectively unemployable. So yeah, I got fired. I would agree. I'm sure maybe I got fired from other stuff, but I definitely got fired from the first job. I was trying to wish I could see that, dude. I wish you could have some cameras and I could see you with your broomstick. There's a good chance I had a rat tail or a mullet too. there's a very high likelihood that i had a rat tail or a mullet at the time my point of going back and what we'll stick with the jake example is that i was fired and that was one of the most traumatic moments of my life and then i was like i'm never fucking again i'm going to be dependent on someone yeah ever fucking again and so i at that moment was very clear like i need to get to my own level it's taken 30 years to it's taken therapy to work it has i mean therapy has been an amazing thing oh i get it i'm laughing because also i get it yeah like but that was a realization that like one person determined my fate.

2:17:19I never wanted that again. And so it doesn't mean you have to quit. Like what's crazy at AppSumo, dude, we have a lot of people with really interesting side hustle. Amy does flowers. She heads our customer support. Nick heads our growth. He has a teeth whitening clinic. Amazing. Yeah. Old man and his wife have a facial clinic. I'm like, I don't know. It's kind of cool. But at least they have the option. They seem to like their jobs at AppSumo, but they have the option that they can do that. And that's why I do think people should consider it no matter what they're doing. And it does take time to kind of get to these places.

2:17:45Like I didn't, my first sale at AppSumo it was 12 bucks. Yesterday was 200 ,000, but that did me getting going, be able to get to that point. And I'll throw this in there too, that much like, despite everything that I've said in the fricking Ted talk that I gave earlier about all the things I'm thinking about, despite all of that, I still think everybody should start a podcast because you will learn a lot about yourself and your own thinking. You will need to get better at communicating. And there's a lot to be taken from that, even if you stop it after five episodes. I still believe that for improving your ability to communicate, identifying verbal tics, cleaning up your thinking by going through that process makes it worth starting a podcast.

2:18:26Similarly, I think everybody should start a business. It does not mean everybody should be a lifelong entrepreneur. There are upsides to nine to five. The ability to just turn off your work, go home, throw on the TV or watch some YouTube and have a couple of beers with your friends or family. There are arguments to be made that that in the right circumstances. I'll tell you like Monday we have a lawsuit because someone doesn't like something. Two people are upset about their salary. That was Monday. Yeah, right, right. I'm just saying like there's trade-offs. I was at this rock climbing gym not too long ago, last week actually here in Austin, a lot of good rock climbing gyms.

2:19:00There's a new one, Mesa Rim, that is much taller in terms of their top roping areas than anything else I've seen here. In any case, I was there and I saw this woman climbing and she had a shirt on that said no solutions, only trade-offs. And I looked at it and I said, okay, maybe that doesn't make sense. Maybe it's like a Japanese billboard. Who knows? It seems like English, but it's not quite. It's grammatical. They're English words, but wait a second. Bear is the best friend? Wait a second. What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. But I sat with it and I was like, you know what? That's actually a very healthy way to look at a lot of decisions.

2:19:34It's like, there is no one best. There are always trade-offs. So coming back to Jake, Jake and business model, how did you tackle this? And it can be Jake, it can be other examples, but to the extent that you can give real world examples. All right, so let me give you two examples. One Jake and one very clear as well with AppSumo. So Jake's official - Oh, with Andrew Chen when he came in and modified it. So that was one example. The other example, and I'll show you the, there's dials, kind of like where we meet with your finance dials. There's revenue dials in your business. And so with Jake, he was like, I'm going to do 10 % profit.

2:20:08I was like, okay, hold on. Let's look at a one minute model and see what you can actually make and how you can make a million dollars doing this. So we put it into the one minute model. And again, it's very simple. We don't have a lot of time, revenue, cost, profit. So let's be specific with Jake. I was like, Jake, how much can people pay? And again, let's just try to see what we can put together as an offer that we'll bring to people. How much you pay on your golf trip before? I spent 2000. What do you think is reasonable for a 48 hour amazing experience for people to go golfing? 4000. Great.

2:20:344000. Now, what are the the costs that go with that? Do you have to pay for travel? No. Make them pay for travel. Okay. Hotel, golf, whiskey, cigars, food. Great. How much is that? Just real quick. $2 ,000. So your old model was like you took a percentage, but now we just do a one-minute model. It looks like you make like$2 ,000 to$3 ,000. Let's just call it$2 ,500 per each golf trip. Divide that by$1 ,000. That's not that many sales. That seems actually very doable to create a million-dollar business just having golf trips. So just by understanding that, it's like, okay, cool. We have an idea we like, we see that there's a million dollars because a lot of times you're going to work really hard in the wrong direction or in a market that's really small.

2:21:07And you actually understand that this is a business model relatively that can work. Now, we talked about revenue dials. Let's just say the average order value, like people are going to pay 1 ,000. Holy shit, that's never going to get there. That's 1 ,000 people that you're going to have to sell. Yeah, 1 ,000 people. That's a lot of people. So if we can 5x that, maybe we make it more expensive. Can we get people to buy it twice? Is there another types of products? And I've written down the revenue dials in the book and there's free on the website as well that you can be like, how can I change this model so that it's easier to get to the million dollars?

2:21:36So people can find some of these resources for free at milliondollarweekend.com. Totally. And now with that, it was like, oh, okay, cool. If it's$2 ,500, I don't have to sell that many people to get to a million dollar business. Now let me see if I'm going to get even just three customers today. And I will tell you at this point of the day, Jake was really frustrated because we had no sales. You know, we finished this model and it's like, shit, man, like, I don't know. Like, I don't know if this is going to work. and I think that one of the most powerful things you can do is go for a walk and that's all we did it's like Jake for two years you've thought about this idea for two years you've wondered what if and you want to be an example to your kids and in 24 hours so far you have an idea you have a business model around it and now we can actually find out if we can make a real business out of this and I think that's just kind of amazing for all of us like how can we change our lives in a very quick amount of time give yourself a fucking break if it's not immediately a million dollars There's like, go for a walk, get a good night's sleep, go look at old photos to realize how far we've come.

2:22:31So the next morning woke up and what we did within, I don't know, an hour is he put together on a Google doc pictures of a golf trip, golf course, food, cigars. I don't know people do golfing, clothing, polo shirts, and then a price, 4 ,000 bucks, 5 ,000 bucks. And I was like, all right, cool. Let's just call people. So there's three different validation methods to see if people want to have a business. And number one is pre-selling. This is one of the most popular events. Oh, I see. See if people will purchase. Yeah. So you have an offer. He literally put together a Google Doc because I do think it's nice when you sell something that you can get people like, oh, wow, I can visualize.

2:23:06I can see it. Same thing that Elon's done with Cybertruck Model 3. Those are six years and 10 years before he actually delivered. And he pre-sold thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. So it's a very effective model. Same thing with airplanes, hotels. They all pre-sale to see if someone wants it. Apartment buildings. I mean, we're looking around here. The vast majority of these were sold before construction was finished, certainly, but often before construction started. 100%. And when you're doing businesses, find a problem you're excited about. As you said with your stuff, if you only do that and make sure that no one else wants it, you don't really have a business.

2:23:37You just have a hobby. So Jake has that. The other thing I think is a super common mistake for new entrepreneurs is like, well, I want to do AI. I'm like, okay, have you done anything? That's so funny. I was going to bring up this exact piece. I love AI. I'm like, have you used ChatGP? Not really. Have you coded anything? No, not at all.

2:23:57What do you do? What's your day job? I'm in sales. Okay. What do you sell? I sell solar. Okay. Maybe it's easier for us to start a business selling and you can sell AI and do something within your zone of influence and your zone of expertise versus so far outside of it. People make it way more complicated on themselves, especially new entrepreneurs. Like what are problems you like? What are groups or zones of influence you have? Doesn't mean you can't, but just makes it so much harder. And so with Jake, he plays a lot of golf. so you know golf he has a lot of golf friends so the pre-sale method he also knows how to find those people right like he knows what which websites he goes to he knows which celebrities he follows he knows where to go fishing yeah i don't what's a golf course and he has more credibility in selling it too if he's like this is the trip that i have always wanted to design for myself there's a lot of weight behind that when you're talking to someone yeah it was cool it was cool to see him excited to create a business around that and there's some some mistakes that he ended up making that others can avoid that i'll cover but through that it was like all right jake you have a doc you got a model let's contact these people let's just call them right now you already practiced it remember in the beginning we talked about starting you got started let's start asking and he called his brother and people like nah my brother like it's too easy it should be easy make it fun like people know it's got to be hard i gotta make it challenging myself like why why do you want to make it hard on yourself what's the advantage in that because that avoid you actually facing reality.

2:25:19So he called his brother and his brother's like, and again, we talked about that listen option transition. Hey man, I need feedback. I'm doing this process. I'm trying to start a business in a weekend. Do you remember the golf trip? He's like, yeah. How did you like it? Oh, I liked it. Is there anything you missed on it? Would you want to do it again? Do you have another one scheduled? Oh, you don't? Oh. So you're listening to see what problems they have. Then you provide an option. Hey, I've got a golf trip. It's going to be in April. It's going to be to this place. It's going to be 5 ,000 bucks.

2:25:44And it sounds like something you'd be excited to do. Transition. Do you want to give me$100 right now as a deposit that's totally refundable for this trip? And then shut the fuck up. His brother sent him$100 right away. Okay, brother. Fine. Easy. Jake, who else have you golfed with? Let's make a dream 10 list of everyone you've ever golfed with. Just 10. Super easy. This is inspired by Chet Holmes. So I got to give him a shout out. Ultimate Sales Machine. One of my favorite books all time. And he has a dream 100. I'm like, 100's a lot. Let's just do 10. You only got a weekend. So then let's just go through your list.

2:26:17Who else plays golf with you? Who else have you gone on a trip with? I went on a guy named John, calls up John. And actually we recorded the calls. He's like, yeah, fuck you, John. I'm like, that's how you talk to your friends. But they're friends. And then he calls John. He's like, yeah, man, can I just get your feedback? Because again, when you're selling, you don't have to make it this big, scary thing. Talk to someone. Hey, I'd love to get your feedback. This is what I'm working on. Is that something you're interested in? You are? Okay, cool. Do you want to give a deposit to commit that you're actually serious about doing it?

2:26:41because a promise of a deposit is a rejection. A promise is a rejection. Hey, yeah, yeah, I'll do it. Just when you get closer, that's rejected. That's actually a no. You know this, you've sold a lot, you've done a lot on this. And so getting them to actually tell you the truth with their wallet. And for me, a lot of times with rejection, it's do I actually want to do this business? Do I actually want to make this thing possible? And so it's a test if you want something. That's it. And so when you're getting rejected, be like, as I'm doing this book and as I'm doing other things, even with asking people on my YouTube videos, is, do I really want this?

2:27:11I'm like, fuck yes, I do. Do you want the thing that is being rejected? Am I proud of what am I doing? Like, is this the thing I actually believe I want to do? And that rejection is just a test for yourself. And everyone can pass. It's up for them to choose. Yeah, those are also, like those early rejections are valuable because if your commitment starts to waver, you're still in the honeymoon phase. It's like you are going to have hard challenges. You are going to have hiccups later. And if it's not going to work, like if you are going to waver or you might fold, it's better to do it in a sense early than later.

2:27:44And you're really, for me, getting rejected is an opportunity to learn. And this is what I do in sales. I do this all the time. To this day, I'll just say, I just want to learn. And I frame it. That's my first phrase. Second phrase is, you didn't want this. Just tell me why not. I want to learn. People will reply and they'll tell you. Really? Yeah. They just do it. I don't think people are like, no, I won't want to tell this person why not. And a lot of times after they say why they didn't do something, you can answer that question and sell them again. So Jake called John, he makes fun of this guy, so forth.

2:28:12And then, hey man, I have an idea of this golf trip. I love your FIAC. What do you think about it? Dude, that sounds awesome. Yeah, it's in April. Do you want to do a deposit? Another deposit. And then he ended up getting, I believe, five deposits within 48 hours for 500 bucks. And then he also had a partnership with another guy that he went on a trip with. And now three weeks later, he's securing the location. He's getting the$5 ,000 or whatever the end up price is going to be along the way. Now, there's some interesting things around this. So one, and this is mistakes that people make, you have to deliver what you just promised.

2:28:41So focus on that. You just promised like, hey, give me a deposit and let me take you on an amazing golf experience. So over deliver on what you just promised. Common mistake that Jake was making, he came back to me, I checked in on him. He's like, dude, these people are buying it. It's exciting. I'm going to get eight people. Here's the model. It looks great. One guy talked to me about an app. So I'm going to start an app. Oh boy. Oh boy. And I was like, squirrel. Squirrel. squirrels. That's a good movie. By the way, I love squirrels. Until the Titans, I put squirrels, my favorite animal. And so they're very easy to get distracted.

2:29:11Very easy to get distracted. And this is the best businesses are the ones that work. And so I'm like, Jake, you just sold five people. Another mistake that very, very common. You know, I don't know about these trips because I don't think I want to go on them in a few years. I was like, dude, you haven't even gone on one. Yeah, yeah. Guess what? You know how much work I do at Absumo Day-to-Day? Zero. I don't do any work. And that's not as like a flex. Like, I don't them do any work. No, I hire the people that do the work and they're excited. And frankly, they're better than me at the work. You don't ever have to go on a trip.

2:29:39Maybe for a podcast, if you're the signature host, it's called the Tim Ferriss show. You probably need to be doing it. And let's say AI your voice. But for these golf trips, don't be so worried about making a million when you haven't made one. Just deliver the product. And guess what? Then do it again. And then again. And then again. And so that was another common observation. I was surprised and I've seen it by others. How's it going to scale? You haven't even gotten a dollar. Don't worry about scale. Don't worry about it. Yeah. And let's deliver the experience, which now he's getting it going in April.

2:30:03He's getting these people to pay. And then it's like, hey, just after they pay in April, you know what you do? You just do it again. And then again, and then again. And then the rest of the book is now, how does he get it beyond that so it can be beyond his network and his zone of influence? Also, just to emphasize a few things that you've said, and also just add a couple of comments, right? The whole scaling thing, look, I invest in businesses that scale. But I think that what a lot of entrepreneurs tend to do, especially if they're fantasizing about doing something big, like if it's not huge, it's a failure.

2:30:35If it's not 10x, it's a failure. If it's not, it's like paradigm shifting. Most businesses that help their owners to craft unique lives that are incredibly rewarding are completely invisible to you. The businesses that you see on magazine covers or in these tweet threads and so on, X threads, whatever the cool kids are calling it these days, are outliers. And trying to just model those crazy outliers is like deciding for New Year's, you want to get into shape. So you watch the Super Bowl and you're like, okay, so I'm watching how Tom Brady moves. And if I can't be Tom Brady, then it's not exercise.

2:31:23And you're like, well, hold on a fucking second. It's not the right way to look at it. Chances are also you're not Tom Brady, right? So maybe before you're like, it's not worth me learning to swim unless I can be Michael Phelps. You're like, well, look at his ankles. Can your ankles do that? No. I don't think so. Are you shaped like that? No, you're not. So just reminding folks, you do not need to mimic the top 1 % of 1 % of 1 % of outliers who probably are mutants on a bunch levels in order to have a business that fulfills the dreams you have associated with being an entrepreneur. I just wanted to say that because it's so common.

2:32:01It's really common. And what you've been saying also echoes something that Seth Godin has said on the podcast, which is, and I'm paraphrasing here, but effectively like do the smallest thing possible. He's like people hide behind the big because when they have this like, I want to do an AI app that does this and this and this, which isn't to say those things can't exist. But when they've got this huge idea, I want to help 5 billion people, whatever the thing might be. You can hide behind that and never get started. It's easy to hide behind the big thing. But if it's call five of your friends, you can't hide behind that.

2:32:38I mean, business really is three W's when I look at it. It's what's a problem you're solving that people care about? Who are those people and where are they? That's it. What's the problem that people care about? So for Jake, it's a golf trips. For For AppSumo.com, it's software deals at good prices. For Tim Ferriss, it was learning very tactical, practical things in different areas of your life. Who are the people that listen to that? And then where are they? It has been awesome to see someone like Jake who's had that dream to be able to make that change. There are other validation methods I'll just share because I think people want to see other ones.

2:33:07So one is pre-sale. Whether it's a pinball machine, which we talked about, whether it's even AppSumo.com, I was able to get this going within a weekend as well. The same exact method. It wasn't even pre-sale. I was able to close it all in 48 hours. So just to share another story of that, I noticed through all of my work that I was like, I like deals, I like marketing, and I think the software thing is going to be big. How do I do this very quickly to find out if this is something people actually want? And that's the reason you have weekend, because you have 52 chances to change it. If it doesn't work one, guess what?

2:33:35You have another one and another one. And at least understand a process. You're so good at this. You're so good at thinking about that. So how do I experiment? And so with AppSumo, I was like, I think there's something with these three things. Let me try to do it on a weekend. I cold emailed Imgur, this college kid. said, hey, I want to do software deals. I'll pay$7 for everyone I sell. For him, he's like, I'll get free money. That's cool. So a cold email. It was just, and it's funny. How did you find the college get the cold email? Because I went to Imgur.com. Oh, sorry. Yeah. No, no, not a random color.

2:34:02I thought that was some name from Azerbaijan. Okay. No, no, no, no. The website. Imgur.com. So I knew that the problem was software deals at good prices. I knew that I'm a Redditor and I was like, well, that's where the customers are. And then that's who the customers are and where they are. And I was like, they want Imgur. That was the most popular product at the time. That was all over it. So basically, cold emailed Alan, just Alan at Imgur.com. I was like, hey, I want to promote you. $7 per deal. You get free money. There's no cost to you. And then I was like, well, I can get this posted on Reddit.

2:34:31And I even cold emailed the founders of Reddit and was able to get them to give me free ads. Yeah. How did you do that? Just like you asked. I know. Why would they give you free ads? I don't really know, actually. That's bullshit. No, no. What was the pitch, though? The pitch was twofold. One, I said I knew someone they knew. So I worked with Chris Smoke when I started previous companies. He knew Chris slow. That's where Chris Smoke's slow. So when you're sending an email, it's a really strong subject line or any messages like referred by blah. At least you're going to get an open reply. And by the way, don't bullshit that because you'll get fact-checked.

2:35:02I just got someone fact-checked with me, like Jordan Harbinger. You know Jordan Harbinger? Yeah. He's a good buddy of mine. He fact-checked someone who messaged him like, hey, Noah Kagan's working with me and Jordan messages me. Of course, immediately. Yeah. I was like, no, I'm not. Yeah. It was a little bit more than that. Basically, I said, hey, I'd love to just treat you to lunch and share more what I'm working on. And so I took him to Pork Store Cafe in Haight. And I just shared what I was working on and said, I'm doing this idea for software deals. I want to focus on Reddit. I'm a huge Redditor.

2:35:26I've been to Reddit since 2006. It's with Imgur. I'd love to see if you can give me free ads. There wasn't a bigger ask than that. Again, we come back full circle. It's because I like asking. I practice asking. Everyone can ask. He's like, sure. Crazy part of that story. Fast forward about six months. I asked him again. And he's like,$10 ,000. But I highly appreciate Chris and Reddit for giving me that free. They were just getting their ad platform out. So it was a good chance. And that was a good chance for them. Now it's like to showcase something or have a case study. That it worked well. So I launched it.

2:35:59I was like, if I can do 200 sales, this is obviously a little bit bigger than what I'm encouraging others. If I can get 200 sales within a very short time, this is it. And let me just break down the website. I paid$48 to a guy named Muhammad, who I can still recommend to people, to help me put a PayPal button on AppSumo.com and I spent$12 on AppSumo.com. Which, I know, I should have maybe done even not the website. But that PayPal button, people would, and I post on Reddit, hey, I've got a deal on Imgur Pro. Instead of$24, it's$12. And I gave Alan$7 immediately. That first$12 sale was the best, dude.

2:36:28Yeah. That was so sweet. And I remember, and this is the thing, people were like, well, how do I scale? I emailed the codes for every 200 person. You know what my backend was? Gmail. I got the PayPal notification and then I sent him an email saying, thank you so much. Here's your code for Imgur Pro. What other deals do you want me to get? And that is what's led now to like a hundred person team. And we have all these crazy products. We've launched on so many different things from AppSumo. We have, I think, a 20, 25 person engineering team. It started with literally manual Gmail codes. And so the concept there is just how so fucking basic.

2:36:59I didn't let all these other things get in the way. Yeah. And also that super primitive back end that you're talking about, highly manual, But high touch with the customer. Yes, yes. Gives you a lot of really valuable input. And even though we've been talking about the word scale is kind of a four-letter word, in one of the very first episodes of Masters of Scale that Reid Hoffman did, he interviewed Brian Chesky of Airbnb. And it's a great episode. And one of the key tenets in the beginning for Airbnb was do things that don't scale. and those things tend to be highly manual helping people take photographs of their places and what they learned then led to a lot of what we've seen i mean even think about yourself i hope i recall correctly i thought you super responded to everyone super early on i recall you in the comments on your blog oh in the comments when i was building that community for sure and this is highly responsive in the blog comments you were i remember that it stuck out to me and that's exactly if people were like well how do i like have high touch and how do i do things to scale.

2:38:03That is literally it. So for me on YouTube, I still reply to my comments, not every single one now, because there's a lot, but I reply to them. And guess what? When you get that message that someone actually connected with you, and this is great, especially if you're at one, two, three, four, five customers. So early on, I don't know if I've talked about this at all. When I had decided that bloggers were the path, at least that was the hypothesis worth testing for launching the four hour work week. I went to a bunch of their blogs and I left comments. And my comments were like blog posts unto themselves.

2:38:33I mean, they took forever, right? But I put a ton of energy in and I would do that in some cases, like two or three times on a given blog, where the authors were active in the comments. And they noticed that. And people, bloggers in this case, in many cases directly reached out to me to thank me for the comments. And that laid the foundation. It was like super targeted, very much sniper shot. It was not me trying 100 ,000 different things. But you also, in the beginning, need to throw a lot against the wall. You don't know what you're good at. You don't know what works. So you try a lot. And going back, it's fun taking the trip down memory lane.

2:39:09For BrainQuicken, way back in the day, the sports nutrition company, and I say sports nutrition because it turns out Americans did not want to be smarter at all. So selling something for improving cognition at that point didn't work at all. But I got reports back. This is when very high touch from athletes, especially NCAA, athletes who bought it for studying. They're like, yeah, I don't really care about studying though, but it improved my time off the blocks for my track event. It helped me with this, helped me with that. And being the idiot that I was, I ignored that for ages. I was like, no, this is brain quick.

2:39:40I'm right in my own head. So I kept pounding my head against a brick wall. It didn't work. And eventually I was like, well, wait a second. They're using this for sports. The only reason I spent so much money on my supplementation as a percentage of my income is because I cared about sports performance, really. And then pivoted and that's when the whole thing took off. But that's not the takeaway that I was going to share. What I was going to share is at the very earliest stages, I had a website up, which a coworker at work at TruSan had put together for next to nothing, right? Because we were always scheming and we were always just like going out to lunch and bullshitting.

2:40:13We were friends. So I paid him, but I couldn't pay him much. And he was like, it's fine. And he put together a website for me. I had not manufactured anything. I had done quite a bit of basic math to figure out if the economics would work. Nothing fancy though. It's like, how much do I think I could manufacture this for? What are some of the basic costs of sourcing? Da-da-da-da-da. Landed on a retail price. And at this point, nothing has been made. Nothing has been manufactured. There's no product to ship. And I just went to coworkers who are friends. And it wasn't exactly guilting, but these people at that point didn't really need this necessarily.

2:40:49It could be a benefit, but I was like, hey, I want to try this out. Would you be willing to just prepay for one of these so that I can try to do a first manufacturing run? And they're like, yeah, sure. Why not? 50 bucks or something at the time. And that gave me just the bare minimum of capital to start having conversations. I love that. And then I had to negotiate everything, right? Because I would go to these contract manufacturers and they're like, well, our minimum order size is this. And in my head, I'm like, impossible. That's never going to work. And then they're like, and our minimum term of commitment is this.

2:41:18I was like, yep, also impossible. So I had to sell the vision. And at that time, I was able to, because I'd learned through cold calling off hours, get ahold of the president of this manufacturer, got him on the phone at one point. And I was just like, I know at some point, somebody gave you a break. I'm not asking for anything other than, can I drive to you at any time and just tell you about my vision for this business? And if we are able to find a way to work together, which I would like to, I promise you that I will work with you exclusively as a manufacturer as we grow the business. went down and I think he was maybe just amused more than anything else.

2:41:53He's like, okay, sure. Like after all was said and done. And then I used them for years, right? And that's how the deal got done. But it all hinged on in the very beginning, the pre-sales. And also I was buying, I mean, negotiating at that time, you want to talk about a real pain in the ass, magazine advertisements, feedback loop is really slow. After you have put out the cash for the advertising, you might not know what you're selling for months. It could take a really, really long time. And so what I did when I started getting more ambitious, because I started with small ads, of course, and then once I got to kind of full page ads, I would go to, say, distributors, and I would say, I would love to feature you exclusively in this particular ad, but for that to work, I would just need you to pre-order X amount of inventory.

2:42:46So they buy X amount of inventory. Let's say that's$10 ,000. And I would also say like, it's$10 ,000, but the rate card for this full page is like 40 grand. And they'd be like, okay, well, seems reasonable, especially since we're going to make a profit on the product. Then I would buy the ad space as a remnant. So I would negotiate last minute. I would get that for like five grand. So what has happened? If I had them pre-order, let's say 10K. I paid five. I'm already in the black, no matter what the outcome of the advertisement. And this is the kind of stuff most entrepreneurs are going to have to do on some level, something like that.

2:43:20Two things I want to highlight from your story. One, it's beautiful. You seem to have a knack for finding underserved opportunities. And that's where the opportunity is. If it's a market, there's no opportunity because people know about it. You finding remnant inventory. I think there's something with AppSumo, we've had a lot of times where like when the news feed came out years ago on Facebook, no one was really advertising. We're like, oh, this is huge. No one else is doing it. Let's go hard on that. And there's something interesting in business and finding what others aren't noticing just yet.

2:43:47Specifically for me, I'm interested in the kind of the marketing part. I think the other thing that was interesting about what you do is you put a little bit more extra effort in. Just the sprinkle of the hot sauce. That's what you do, right? So one thing, and just to highlight for others out there to copy, copy it. Like success leaves crumbs. When you wrote a blog post comment on other blogs, you didn't just write, hey, cool story. Thanks, Tebow. You wrote actual in-depth things that made people want to reach out to you. Like many, many, many hours on a single comment, like 17 revisions kind of thing.

2:44:18And the same thing goes for when you wanted to do the manufacturing. You didn't just say, call the guy and be like, I'll show up to your door. Tell me where you're at and I'll be there. That's a little bit more. It's not a lot and it's not exclusive to Tim Ferriss. That's available worldwide. Just put in a little bit more, take that little bit a chance. And what a cool story. If it doesn't work out, at least you have this crazy story that you can talk about. Exactly. And another little tweak, because it's not like the story, I think, that's appealing for a lot of people to hear, which is not what we're saying, is I did 100x more than the next guy.

2:44:50That's not what I did. I did like 10 % more with some degree of focus. The details matter. And keep in mind, I'm copying people too, right? I had a three ring binder, which I treated as my swipe file. Whenever I bought something, and at that time magazines were a big deal that's changed of course but like print advertising and stuff was the game that i was interested in anytime i was about to buy something or i bought something or i flipped through a magazine and my attention stopped for a period of time on an ad i would take out the ad and i put it in a threading binder and i would study the ads i'd be like why why did this affect me and then i would copy it and to give an example just to a fine tune right how many emails have you received where someone's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

2:45:32I'd love to pick your brain and meet for coffee. How about next Tuesday at 2 p.m.? And you're like, that's pretty presumptuous. Maybe that works, right? But it's a little forceful. And in the same way that if someone's like, I'm a hugger and they invade your space and you back up, don't cause that instinctive defensive response in somebody who reads your email. So even in the very beginning, and I still do this because believe it or not, I get rejected. It still happens, right? but in the case of, say, the manufacturer, there was no presumption. It was like, I really appreciate you taking the time.

2:46:06This might not be of any interest. Like, it was very light. I wasn't like, I know what you need. This business is going to be 20X. We're going to scale, and you can be our exclusive provider. No, I was like, this may not be of interest, but I think there's a chance it is, because I've studied your website. I've looked at this. I've looked at your customers. I've identified this, this, and this, and would love to meet everything I just said. And if that doesn't work for you, I totally understand. Now, what does that say? Because there's sort of a subtext to this. What that says is, if this guy meets up with me, I'm not going to browbeat the shit out of him.

2:46:38I'm not going to follow up 20 times after he said no. So he's like, the risk of me meeting with this guy is low because he had a light touch in the beginning. Now, there's a time to be forceful, right? There are times to be more forceful. But I do find that the carrot works better than the stick, or a better way to put it is just like a gentle touch works much more often than a heavy touch. This was also true with the bloggers. If a bunch of bloggers or people I thought might be bloggers were having drinks at like an after party at South by, I would wander up and I would just say, oh, hey guys, I know you don't know me.

2:47:13Is it okay if I just join you guys about myself? And they'd be like, okay, sure. And then I'd ask questions, I'd ask questions. Eventually somebody'd be like, what's your story? Like, who are you again? And I would say, oh, I'm here because the only thing I can really control with my first book, I'm really nervous about it, is looking at digital stuff because the publisher's doing everything else. And then I'd stop. I wouldn't give them a full pitch. If it ended up being the right audience, or if they had any interest, they'd be like, well, what's your fucking book about? Well, it's about... Oh, funny you asked.

2:47:43Yeah, yeah. Well, if it's a group of six to eight people, chances are at least one person, even if they're just being polite, will be like, well, what's the story? What's the book? And then I would just pay attention to who was interested, who was opting in. Yeah. Right. And then at some point, not in front of the group, by the way, but like, I like buy drinks for folks. Like, let me buy you guys a round of drinks. I feel like I'm crashing your party. And then if somebody really expressed interest, I would say, you know, zero pressure. I know you, I'm sure you got a lot going on, but if you're interested, I could send you an early copy of the book.

2:48:11You're not going to want to read the whole thing. It'll take too long, but I could just highlight 10 pages that you might be able to use immediately because it has templates for this thing that you just mentioned. And they're like, cool. And I'll be like, yeah. I'm like, I'm not expecting to promote it. I'm not expecting anything. I just want to expose people to this stuff. And you have to mean it, right? You can't then follow up 100 times and be a prick about it. Like you said, you didn't expect it. Yeah, yeah. And that worked. It really worked. And that approach, that light approach has worked over and over and over again.

2:48:40I mean, it took me two or three years to get Jamie Foxx on the podcast. That was a long time. And then it was, at the time, podcast of the year. It took time. That's cool. I think the two comments I'm curious, one comment and a question as well. if you start with the light ask, you can do a big ask. So let me give you an example. When I knock on doors from some of the YouTube videos where I just go to literally the nicest houses I see and just knock on their door. If I go to your door and say, what do you do for living? Like you're going to close my door, close up my face. Instead, now what I do?

2:49:07Knock on the door. Hello. I love your house. They're like, really? Yeah. I just, you know, we're doing a documentary on the neighborhood and I just love your house. Can you tell me about it? Oh yeah. Actually that that's so crazy. Yeah, I thought this, I always drive by and I was always fascinated, but what'd you do for a living to be able to get a house? It's so great. It's definitely a different, it's the same ask, just done a little differently. That does take practice and through time and persistence, you do get better at it. One thing coming back, when was the last time you were rejected?

2:49:36You were saying you got rejected from something. I'm curious that last time. And what do you tell yourself? It depends on the type of rejection and rejecting comes in all sorts of forms, right? It could be silence. It could be light, like polite decline, or it could be something stronger. This relates back to my pausing around a lot of next steps for myself where I'm like, if you're rushing, it's probably because you have a scarcity perspective on something. And if you are, as I always try to, and this comes back to the question you asked that I didn't really answer directly. If you're looking to find something that is rarely seen or recognized or to meet an unmet need, you have some time.

2:50:16So I think those opportunities are everywhere. So my feeling is, if I get rejected, and I'm sure there are examples, I can't think of them offhand, but there are a lot of fish in the sea. If a guest doesn't want to be on the podcast, if they're too busy or whatever, fine. There are going to be 20 other people who will be as good, if not better, possibly. If there's an opportunity and the door closes because who knows? There's an investment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for X, Y, Z, different reasons. I want to make the deal happen, but they can't make it happen or I get rejected as a strong word, right?

2:50:47But for whatever reason, I can't be part of that deal. My assumption is there are plenty of deals. Like there are plenty of fat pitches out there. And that is based on experience. And I would say generally I tilt pretty pessimistic and that I have like a dim view of human nature, like very Hobbesian. Like I, I'm not this bright eyed, bushy tailed bunny that just hops around seeing gold everywhere and the best in people at all moments. That's not me. But I would say just based on my lived experience, there are opportunities fucking everywhere. There's so many million dollar and multimillion dollar opportunities out there.

2:51:24Like they're everywhere. And for that reason, when I get turned down, that's within the entrepreneurial context. I'm just like, you know, that's fine. Maybe I got saved from myself on this one. And that's happened tons of times. Like I don't get into a deal and then it's a disaster, unmitigated disaster. I'm like, wow. Okay. Glad life saved me from that. Bro, that sounds like you're optimistic. That's a little optimism. Here's what I would say. It's in this particular case, it is a very specific form of informed optimism. I'm not default optimistic. I look for hedging against worst case scenarios and so on.

2:52:00I mean, you have some of that too, right? With cutting costs and looking at these things. But in this particular case, I've just seen so many examples of successes where you would never predict a success. Starbucks gets turned down by everyone. They're like, another coffee company? Too crowded, no way. There are so many examples. When I started my podcast, I was told it was too crowded. In 2014, very smart people. I'm not going to name, but they said, you could do it, but I feel like that ship has already sailed. 2014. And I think I also have learned to have a less extreme response to what we might consider rejection.

2:52:43Because number one, if you're going to be a good resource allocator, if you are easily offended or get easily spun out, you're going to be exhausted a lot of the time. and I also frame so much in the form of experiments. They're not pass fail. This is feedback. And so I do so many things as two week experiments, one month experiments, three month experiments that applies to my podcast, that applies to everything in the business world that I do, that applies to my style of investing. Like, all right, I'm going to experiment with blah, blah, blah. And then I get my face ripped off and I'm like, okay, good feedback.

2:53:18Maybe I'm not so good at X, Y, and Z. maybe i should stick to my bread and butter okay well that was worth an experiment and i capped my downside so i learned great good feedback and for all those reasons i would say that i'm less reactive than i used to be but the truth is like you told the story of jake there are so many opportunities out there and i'll just say from meeting let's just call it unmet needs or finding niche opportunities that other people don't see there are a couple of resources i'll mention. And I return to these things all the time. These are things that I reread and I'm probably going to reread all of these again.

2:53:56These are just almost like mantras. I'm trying to train myself to recognize and think of these things. One would be Blue Ocean Strategy. I mentioned it before. Excellent book. Excellent, excellent book. How can you be a category of one? Another one I've mentioned a million times and I mentioned a million times because I'll read it a million times, 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. And then within the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, there's one chapter called the Law of Category. And it gives old examples. So don't get the for the internet because it was written in like 97 or something. Get the old version.

2:54:31And I think I may have even excerpted it for either Tools of Titans or Tribe of Mentors, but it's called the Law of Category. And they talk about, for instance, the invention of light beer or being the first light beer of X, right? And the first low cost airline. I mean, these are things that came out of nowhere. And how can you create a category of one where you're not trying to be the best? You have decided and positioned yourself to be the only, whatever that is. And I think of, there are so many examples. And part of how I assess playing fields also is I'm like, how hard is it right now to create a category of one?

2:55:06And I look at, for instance, some of the early innings in podcasting, and you had people who broke all the rules and became mega successes. Hardcore History, for instance, with Dan Carlin, my favorite podcast still to this day. His episodes, I think they come out, or they historically, like once every six to nine months, maybe six to 12 months, one episode. And they're four to five hours long. They're effectively audiobooks on history. No one would have predicted or prescribed. that as a successful format. Nobody. Zero. And yet, it developed this enormous call audience and has allowed him to do a million things.

2:55:42Now that would be a lot harder. Why? Because it's less human driven and more algorithm driven. So I'm like, huh, okay, maybe it's time for me to choose an easier game. I don't like hard games. I mean, sometimes I like to push it if I'm doing some board game or maybe trying to ski like right within the bounds of my capabilities. But in terms of big life games, I'm not looking to suffer. I'm not looking to crawl on my knees on broken glass for a hundred miles to make some really complicated business model work. I'm like, no, I want, until I find something that seems simple, until I find something where I'm like, hmm, maybe this doesn't need to be the hardest thing in the world.

2:56:19I keep looking. All of my best investments have been kind of obvious and low risk, all of my best investments. And when I've deviated from that, so the same criteria that I use for entrepreneurship, for content, the same criteria I should use in investing, at least early stage stuff. All the same stuff. Are there other people who come to mind who either worked off of the blog post or that you've interacted with personally who read early versions of the book outside of Jake where you're like, you know what? This is a good example of another person who's put it into practice. One thing I wanted to comment on, I got rejected yesterday.

2:56:57It was like a mutual friend of ours. He's like, yeah, come on the show. And then yesterday he's like, no, don't come on the show. I don't like you. He didn't like that I made a comment about him. To his face. Yeah, yeah. Well, I did to his face. but he's been promising for two years and so I think younger Noah 20 year old Noah would have guilted him and be like what the fuck dude you said you would do this thing but what you said is actually something I work in therapy a lot which is instead of emotion and react pause and respond and I tell myself that no pause which I love that you're saying I'm like we're going to the same therapist off mic we'll talk about it oh my god Jorge what a small world but the pause and respond was like okay and you're not going to guilt anyone really into doing something they're excited to do.

2:57:38And I said, hey, thank you for being honest with me. I appreciated that. And I'm sure that's not what he was expecting me to say to him, but I appreciated it. And I was like, yeah, that must've been hard for him to send. He said, it sounds like there's a little miscommunication. We're probably going to have an experience in the future and we might work together in the future. Let's go for a walk. And he's like, sounds great. Let's do it after the holidays. And that's definitely a matured experience for me. And so the rejections keep happening. But how we can choose to respond to them and approach them can change.

2:58:04there are with most things there are always more opportunities it's easier for me in the business side to see this right so for instance you know i got out of a very long for me relationship you know five plus year relationship about a year ago so in just say the dating world which is has changed a lot in six years and is very bizarre on a whole lot of levels for the same reason that content creators and creation have become very different i mean a lot of the same factors are play gamification volume paradox of choice i mean all sorts of things sort of gamification of fomo right i mean there's a lot that goes into the similarities but on the business side just because i've spent so much time looking at that and i've had so much feedback from people who have read the first book and i've seen so many hundreds of businesses i'm like guys there are opportunities everywhere yeah everywhere you also have to believe you're commenting on dating i was struggling with dating in Austin.

2:58:57And then I struggled in LA. And then I struggled in New York. I was trying all these places. You also have to understand that you have to believe it exists. Yeah. You really do have to believe it. I found that it was easier to believe it exists in Barcelona by, you know, one, optimistically, and then working on it and being like, holy shit, could there really be someone out there? And it's like, yes, there is. That is optimism. And it's something learned. One of my favorite books this year is Learned Optimism. Okay. Tell me what this is. Seligman? It might be. I don't know exactly. But the idea is that you can actually learn it and practice it.

2:59:24Did you even write Learned Optimism? oh i do a lot of homework i do a lot of research oh yeah i love that book and so it was believing that my friend said to me once his name one of my best buddies jr was like there's gonna be a woman you'll meet who's all of us combined in one and i was like that's bullshit and it took me a few years and therapy and relationship coach and being alone to be like maybe there could be and being patient that that existed and then finding it being and being like wow it really does exist and it does still take work but it's like that was out there yeah same with business and all these things like believing you can have these things.

2:59:55So who's another example? Yeah, there's a guy, Pat. Pat is someone, you know, he is in customer support in Poland. In Poland. All right. Yeah, he does a customer support job. Probably makes like 25 ,000 a year, give or take. I don't know, maybe that high, especially in Poland. And he's dreamed of being an entrepreneur. And he loves YouTube. Loves YouTube, loves it. And so he's like, I'm studying YouTube obsessively. Maybe I can help local people with their YouTube channels. And so he, and it's not necessarily the pre-sale method, but close to it. He just started contacting people that he knew within YouTube and said, let me run your channel for you.

3:00:27And now I think he's close to about$10 ,000 a month in Poland, which is basically he's a billionaire. But the idea there, just taking a step back, what are the elements people can learn from? Where are you spending your free time? And he is obsessed with YouTube. He's just like, I love the channels. I love the thumbnails. I love the title. I love the content. How do I make that my career, not being in a customer support role? And then if I understand it, maybe even go work for free. It sounds like you have experiences around that were like, let me do a great comment. That's a free work, frankly.

3:00:53A great comment's free work that gets attention. So as he reached out to people and started helping people, now he's actually got retainers on clients where he's running their YouTube channels. And so I don't know if he's quit his job doing that. I'm not sure exactly, but that was another example of him feeling good about starting, feeling good about asking, asking people. And now he's got a$10 ,000 a month business helping people with their YouTube channels. I want to triple underscore the free work piece because there's a lot of righteous indignation online about this. It crops up a lot with spec work on behalf of artists and things like that, where it's like, I'll never work for free.

3:01:29People are being exploited, blah, blah, blah. And there are cases where that's true. Everything I have done has been built on free work. If I look at all of my biggest wins, I can't think of a single exception in the sense that first job out of college, why did I get that? because a guest speaker who was the CEO, a young guy, came in, talked to our class. I wrote my entire term paper on that business because I wanted to do a free competitive analysis and show how valuable I could be to the business. I wrote my entire term paper on that. Free work, right? If I look at four-hour work week, how'd that come about?

3:02:03Guest lectures twice a year, tons of prep. Took it super seriously. Got feedback, everything to iterate, iterate, iterate. Never got paid a dollar, right? I spent my own money on travel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all free. If I look at my investments in the startup world, I, in the beginning, would do anything I could to co-invest with someone to get a tiny amount of money into the company. And I mean, just a few thousand dollars. And then I would proceed to do like$100 ,000 of work in terms of being the most valuable, low cost person on their entire cap table. I wanted them to be like, wow, okay, this guy owns nothing of the company.

3:02:42And he's materially impacted the value of this company, including the value of my own shares as a founder. And then what happens is I get those people who are like, Tim's fucking awesome. And they are willing to do what? They're willing to say that to other founders. And then it builds and it builds and it builds. And people have gotten, I mean, this is not going to work right now, folks. So just be aware I'm in the process of streamlining everything. But as one example, like Charlie Hone, who worked with me for years, he did that by sending me basically the equivalent of like the term paper that I did for my first job, right?

3:03:20He would hear me or rather not hear me because the podcast didn't exist, but he read my blog posts and he got a pretty good idea of the things that would be helpful to me. And he just did them. He just went out and put in like tens of hours, maybe more into these various projects. and you'd be like, just wanted to send this to you. I thought it'd be helpful. And that's it, right? And eventually, after two or three of those, I'm like, okay, this is actually very helpful. This guy's very proactive, very detail-oriented. Let's have a conversation. So that is just to say, sometimes the best bargain that you have is doing something for free.

3:03:54Especially if they have time. Everyone has the time. I mean, I can give a few other examples to kind of just keep encouraging that. I got my job at Mint because I spend a week for free putting together a marketing plan. There you go. Because he said no to me. And I said, let me just at least present you a plan. So I spent more or less at least 40 hours, if not more, working on a plan, brought it to him and said, if you like this plan, I'll execute it. You can pay me this amount for three months. And if I do well and you like what the output is, then you can give me equity and$100 ,000, which I got three months later.

3:04:21Yeah, amazing. But that was because I spent a whole week for free working on it. I mean, same thing with a lot of the best people I've hired within the company today, Jay Yang. He's 17 years old. He still has to get a permission slip to work with us. He lives at home with his parents. Shout out, Jay. I love this guy. But he put together, I think, a 30-point Google slide presentation showing me everything that sucks with my social media and my email. Now he's making good money living at his parents' house. So this guy's going to be a beast. He's phenomenal. Same thing with Jeremy, who's a producer of our channel.

3:04:49He worked on my Instagram thing for free two weeks. Dylan, who's our new producer, put together a website that's like, I want to work with noakagan.com. I almost always ask that question. How much hours did you put in this free work? And they're like, a lot. It's almost always a lot. And that's a little risk, right? But at the same Sometimes, one, you have something cool you can show. Two, you learn. And three, the opportunity for the ask is pretty high. And the downside is you spend a little bit of time learning. So I think that's a great call out. Oh, it goes on and on too. Now that you're talking about it, I mean, certainly the podcast had no business model for ages.

3:05:18I mean, I don't think I had any sponsors until, I'd have to go back and look, but episode 30, 40, 50, I can't remember. And rewinding the clock though, you mentioned something in passing that most folks are not going to recognize. and that was opening the kimono, OTK. So this event that I put together. And when I did this event, I was curious. I always try to go, and I'm not saying this is the right move. I just like the mathematics and the lack of crowding in high end. I always like to go high end if I can. It provides a margin of safety that I think is, there are many reasons for it, but it provides a margin of safety that's very appealing from an economic perspective, right?

3:06:02The better your profit margins, the more room you have for making mistakes. And then I work backwards. So in this case, what I did was I was like, okay, I can't remember exactly what I started, but I was like, well, could I make whatever the number, five million bucks or whatever it was from one event? I can't remember. I'm making that number up. The math isn't going to actually compute, but I worked backwards and I was like, okay, if I'm going to do that, I'd gone to some high-end events that I'd paid for. And I was like, well, it looks like I'm going to have to charge a lot. So it's going to have to be, let's just say minimum 10 grand.

3:06:28and then the sooner people purchase, the less expensive it is. It's going to escalate. So it's going to go from 10 and the next week it's 12.5 and then the next week it's 15 ,000. And it was effectively, as one would expect with the name, sharing everything that I'd done with my first few books. At this point, I guess it was my first two books. And it was, it seems very quaint at the time because of how constrained it was. now it would be like a million and one different tools, or at least that would be expected. But content marketing at the time, which was, it's more like a biathlon instead of like a quadruple decathlon, which it is now.

3:07:07There's so many different options. And I put together a blog post, which is the equivalent of like a sales page or an email, a million different forms this could take. And then there was an application process, which was legitimate. That wasn't bullshit. I wanted to make sure the composition was impeccable. I wanted the room to be not just diverse from an experiential perspective. I wanted a lot of people from different industries, different strengths, different weaknesses, different networks. I also wanted people who were fucking cool and low maintenance. I just did not want assholes. And one of the ways I vetted for that, I didn't want anyone going into debt to go to this event.

3:07:44I didn't want anyone jeopardizing their finances. I didn't want anyone taking out a second mortgage. I didn't want anyone, I didn't want to be responsible for anyone else's bad financial decisions if they were betting the farm on this. So I asked people to provide in their Google form application, I was like, would you be willing to provide proof that you have, say, at least$100 ,000 in savings if you're going to spend 15 grand on an event? And one guy replied and he was like, I don't think you need to be my financial nanny, but if you want to come onto the tarmac and look at my private jet too, you're welcome to do that.

3:08:13And I was like, thank you for disqualifying yourself. You're like, don't need that guy at the event. No, thank you. And this is going somewhere. So I pre-sold the event with a blog post and a Google form. That was it. Might've been woofoo at the time. And then, then I was able to decide, by the way, at that point, do I really want to do this? I can still back out. I haven't taken any money. People have committed like they're in. So I thought about it. And then I was like, all right, now how do I work backwards from this cost and ensure this was going to be, I think a three day event, if I remember correctly, like, how can I ensure that I have the peace of mind of knowing I've delivered that value in the first few hours of the first day?

3:08:53And I was like, okay, how would I do that? Right? This is a question. I didn't have an answer at the time. I was like, well, I'll do something I've never done. I'm going to share my actual book proposals and marketing proposals and I'll redact a few things. But like, otherwise, like as soon as we get there, that's one of the first things I'll do. I'll be like, here you go. Keys to the castle. Boom. Like you just made your money back. This is worth what you paid. The second thing I did, this is not relevant to the, well, it's going to get to the point because I was talking about buying. Sometimes you have to buy your first customers or your first like proof of concept.

3:09:22If you want marquee clients, sometimes you have to take a loss on that in time or money to make it happen. I really firmly believe that for a lot of things. Just like Reddit wanted to prove its ad system worked, they want a case study. So what do they do? They give you free advertising. Brilliant. That's a good trade. So in a way, they bought their first case study. I'll share one more thing just because people who run events might find this helpful, or even just small groups, masterminds. There were bios for every person at the event. And people had a bound book, basically, with everyone's short bios.

3:09:51and we took, I want to say probably two hours or roughly a hundred people. And everybody in the room stood up and they got to do a brag, a give, and then an ask. Ooh, I like that. So they get up because people, especially at higher end events are like, well, you know, I've run a tech thing. Like, oh, I have an app. And it's like, oh, that guy's like the founder of Instagram or whatever. Come on, like give us a little bit more color. And that's not a real example. None of the founders of Instagram were there, but sometimes you end up in these scenarios where people, for a lot of good reasons or not for bad reasons, are being excessively humble.

3:10:28And then you really just don't have an idea of what the hell people are doing. And so I was like, get up and give a real brag, like detailed brag. Don't make it 20 minutes, right? This is give one to two minutes, like real brag. Then a give, something you're really good at or something you have access to where you feel you're world-class. Where can you help people? Give a give. there's one give and then an ask like something you really need help with or want help with could be anything and everyone who's listening for every person if they have a give you need take a note if they have an ask that you can help with write it down and that alone i think made the event hugely successful to this day i'd have to go back and check but i mean literally this was, who knows, I don't know, 2012 or something.

3:11:17For at least five years, maybe still to this date, there was a Facebook group for those attendees that was active every week. And people still talk about it. Now, coming back to the original point, I'm talking so much in this, but it's more like a conversation than a podcast at this point. Isn't that a podcast? Podcast. It's a podcast. I spent so much fucking money on that event to over-deliver, rented out a castle, had flamenco dancers, classical musicians. And plus, by the way, if you do an event in Napa, you're dealing with basically the cartel. Not like mafia cartel, but coincidentally, everybody's going to charge$8 for a cup of coffee.

3:11:53You're not going to be able to negotiate anything is my point. So this event ended up being so incredibly expensive, basically made nothing, but was a huge home run for people. I felt really good about it. I learned a ton. It was an incredible investment of time. So one could argue that was that was a waste of time. But I developed relationships with 100 people who I handpicked. I had speakers at the event and a lot of questions that informed the whole thing. And if I ever wanted to do another event, I would guess I would have at least 90 % of those people who would immediately book a second, like OTK2, done, no problem.

3:12:29So if I ever fell on hard times, quit the podcast business, I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to do like one event a year. I know that that will work because I can pull different levers. I've talked to people who went to that event and they're like, that was the best event I ever went to. And I was a little jealous I didn't go. I don't know if I saw the blog post, but a few comments. It's like, it's really interesting. You're like, you didn't build a website. You sent out an email, which everyone can do that right now if you want to start a business. You can pre-sale. You can have a form.

3:12:55I like that idea of like, how do you survey people? And then you could filter who do you want to sell to and see if they're raising their hand to be customers and then you could sell them something. I love that. Something you said literally years ago, it was in Denver. Remember the, what was the conference we were both at? somewhere in denver's 303 conference i can't remember it was the those two brothers born team bros okay yeah yeah yeah you said on conference i never forgot about this because you said i either do the most expensive or free yep and i love that because i'm always about the best price i'm the low end that's my thing i love it i'm like give me the best deal and so absolutely was about great deals and then you as well like you want to do podcast partnership it's going to be 50, 60, whatever, 40k.

3:13:36It's going to be the most expensive and you're going to get a very high quality delivery. And then how do you work backwards from that? You don't have to figure it out in advance, right? I decided like, okay, part of the marketing positioning is how premium this podcast is. It is incredibly expensive. I mean, we're going to get into the weeds here, but talking about like the 10%, what's the extra 10 % that you can do? Like in the case of me pitching the manufacturer or whatever. So one thing that I've done with a lot of my sponsors, Not everybody, because not everybody needs this. But what are the levers in a podcast?

3:14:06Well, let's just say the basic economic model for most podcasts, not all, is sponsorship. People are buying ads. Why are they buying ads? Because they want to sell products. What are some of the metrics that matter to someone trying to sell products? Let's assume for simplicity's sake that we're talking about direct response. Let's say we're talking about AppSumo. You're going to be tracking the numbers that you just mentioned. Traffic, conversion, average order size. Now, let's say AppSumo came to Tim Ferriss' show and decided we want a sponsor. Hypothetically, let's say, number one, I have to try the product.

3:14:37So I test every single product within reason. There's some enterprise stuff, in which case I'll do a bunch of polling and determine how my audience feels. Like one to 10, no seven allowed, how strongly would you recommend this to a friend? Do it off hours so the people who work at the company don't see it and can't spam it. Anyway, There are ways to do it if you don't test, but I generally test stuff. Let's say I test apps and I'm like, great fucking product. What is the additional 10 %? The additional 10 % is I will look at the website and I'll say, how well does this convert? Because what is a nightmare scenario for me?

3:15:10Because one could say efficient, one could say lazy, one could say they're similar. If someone has a great product and I put time into a great read and I put it in front of my audience and then their website doesn't convert and they blame it on me, that's way too much brain damage, way too much wasted effort. Now I have churn, right? They're like, well, your podcast didn't work and they leave and then I have to find another podcast sponsor. So I might send my team to that sponsor, record a loom and say, would love to have you as a sponsor, but we'd like you to make these following changes to the website, at least to a unique landing page to improve conversion.

3:15:47We'd like you to improve in the following seven ways. In the same way that that 17-year-old sent you a video which was like, here's how these things suck. I wouldn't word it that way, but I'd say, we want you to convert as strongly as possible. We know our audience really well. This is how they're going to read your website. Here's what the flow looks like. These are two places where they're probably going to abandon the cart. Fix, fix, fix. Doesn't take that long because we've done it a million times. And then guess what? Then I have a sponsor who lasts like a year, two years, three years, and they spend millions of dollars instead of spending a lot on the upfront and then churning.

3:16:20It sounds like a lot, but it's actually not that much effort if you have the right team. So let's hop back into the weeds of entrepreneurship. That sounds bad. Onto the front lines. Validation. What are some other means of validating your idea to try to ensure that you're not diluting yourself anymore than is helpful? I've done it the other way, where I've spent six months. I built a site, betarcade.com. Spent six months,$100 ,000 on engineers. And then I spent$10 ,000 flying to Vegas talking to a lawyer. It was a sports betting site. First off, I don't gamble. Not a great business for me to even start.

3:16:52Launched it, no one came. I could have easily found that on a weekend instead of spending six. And this is the thing, I'm trying to tell people, I've done it the other way. Maybe you need to go through the other way to find that truth for yourself, but there's another door. So two other ways that you can validate business ideas that I really like. I would say the one that you really made famous, ads and landing page. The only thing that, one, I don't like spending money if I don't have to. Ads cost money, and then you have to figure out the ad and landing page. But it is a way like Kettle and Fire, you know, Justin's company.

3:17:18That's how it got started. He did bone broth ads. He found out it was a super cheap term, had a landing page people could buy. And he's like, this is working. And now it's a$100 million business. So he followed your method. The other method I would say is marketplaces. So where are people already spending money that they're raising their hands? So Etsy, Craigslist, Facebook, Amazon. And how can you put even a fake or real product, ideally, and see if anyone's going to buy it? So let's say you want to do like a digital equipment, and microphones, cameras, whatever, lighting business. It's a rental.

3:17:48You can go put that online right now on Craigslist in your local area or whatever site is local and see, does anyone actually message you about it? And if they do, cool, go get the product or figure out now you have a business. Or if they don't, okay, try something else out. So those are the other two ways outside of, I would say, the pre-selling validation method to seeing if you have actual customers who want what you're doing. And the constraint of spending as little as possible will generally, this is very broad strokes, but in my experience and certainly in the experience of a lot of people who are building businesses not mimicking the 1 % of the 1 % of the 1%, right?

3:18:21Like the, I can't get fit until I'm Tom Brady, which is generally not a great approach, but the people who are building real businesses, businesses that produce a lot of cash, very often test incredibly inexpensively. If you look at the origins of CrossFit, that's the case, right? I remember the very early, super early days of crossfit this was not a let's put 30 million dollars in and see what happens it was prototype iterate prototype iterate small group second location considering business models etc i mean this is true in so many so many so many different places any other means of validation that you want to mention or an example of someone who used any one of those that comes to mind me already mentioned kettle and fire but yeah i mean another one you could think of what's kind of silly is Facebook.

3:19:07I mean, Zuck copied, he didn't even invent it, this website. And that wasn't his first business. He actually created a face thing that got banned by Harvard, say, to start again. Then he created Wirehog. No one knows these ones. I don't know anything about that. Yeah, Wirehog was a Napster competitor. Okay. That didn't really do much. But again, one thing in the beginning of the book is how do you get going? And he at least got going. And his third idea, which was Facebook or thefacebook.com, I believe he built it in a weekend, if not three days, give or take. And just by him, he sent an email, built it really quick, sent an email, and then it went viral instantly.

3:19:36It wasn't even his idea. He copied the Winklevosses. And there's just a lot of these ideas. You're like, you start realizing it. Most of the biggest businesses didn't start big. Like, okay, Google, two dudes at Stanford for a research project. Huh, that's interesting. Zuck in a college dorm, Bill Gates in Albuquerque, shout out Albuquerque, you know, working for someone else, creating software. And it was by doing these things where you had validation very quickly and had success that people wanted it, led them then to continue it for extended periods of time. And that's possible. I think here's what happens though, Tim.

3:20:04If I may. This is the fucking problem, man. Everyone's like, my business is different. It's the unique one. I'm like, you're the unique one? Really? It's you. Okay. Do it. Just go try it your way. And then let's try maybe an alternative way after six months with no results. So corollary, do the easy thing first. If you want to, okay, you really want to do the hard way. Okay, fine. What you really want to do is build the flashy website and do the thing and hire a bunch of influencers and have girls in bikinis prancing around with your energy drink, whatever. Okay, fine. Maybe you could start though with a blog post.

3:20:41Maybe you could start with an email. Maybe you could start with something that's very cheap, very fast, fast, fast, fast constraints. Are you hiding behind something big? Are you talking about the sexy photo shoot and the Super Bowl ad that you're never fucking going to do? Not because you couldn't do it, but because you're hiding behind the big thing and you're not trying the small thing. And what is the easy thing that you can do first? Do that. And this comes up all the time in my business when I'm talking with employees, for instance, who have already embraced this by this point of it. I'm like, we can do the hard thing.

3:21:14We can do the expensive thing. I'm not averse to it. But what is something fast or something cheap that we can do first? Because if it works, then that is a game changer. And then And we have these backup plans. I'll give you another example. How can you keep your life incredibly simple? Well, in the case of podcasting, in the beginning, I realized if I end up with tons of accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoices, net payment terms, etc., that will insert a lot of complexity into my life. So from the very beginning, I did something that a lot of folks said would never work, which was you prepay for all your ads.

3:21:57there's no, you book and then you run it and then you pay us 30 days later. And then that drags out because it's the holidays or maybe you don't reply to email and then we're chasing you. There's none of that. You pay up front. That's it. And that is an example of let's try the easy thing first or the simple thing, the beneficial thing. If people say no, we can always go to that 30 because everyone does that. But let's try the unorthodox thing first in the sake of simplicity and every once in a while it works. And that ended up being a key determinant, I think, of my ability to build and scale and most importantly, sustain this for 10 years.

3:22:39My dad would always joke, it's better to be chased for the money than you chase them. Oh yeah. Better to be on that end of this. That's definitely how the AppSumo model has worked out. The idea with AppSumo, just maybe a few more examples to get people like, oh shit, I can really get going. We say now, not how. And that's definitely from the book. And so examples of this is the team's like, we definitely need the engineers to build this first. Definitely. I'm like, really? All right, let me give you two examples. So one of them was we wanted, as part of our VIP memberships, we wanted to give out credits.

3:23:09So kind of like your event, how do we make spending$100 for our membership a no brainer? Well, we give you$100. So they're like, well, we need to build it. Right? We did the model. Fine. But let's go build it. I'm like, no, no, no. What's the fastest way you can find out today. Let's email people who are not customers or people who canceled, give them free credit, tell them to buy your membership. And if they buy their membership, they get free credit. They did it. It was a 17 % conversion rate. Now we're building that kind of stuff into the business. Great. You did it. And if it didn't work, you can ask those people, why not?

3:23:36Or you can try something else. Instead of us spending a week, two weeks, four weeks, a month, two months now, product management and designing it, all these other things. There's another example recently where we want to offer a new feature for this VIP membership is the same thing. They're like, well, we need the engineers to build SSO, single sign-on, so that you can make it easy to log in. Again, have you asked a customer? Just go ask the customers to pay us for it. If they want this feature, see if they'll prepay for it. And if they do, great, we'll build it. If not, we're not going to build it.

3:24:02And that is something that you can keep doing, whether you're an 80 million or a hundred million or a$1 business. Yeah, totally. Yeah, a lot of the time, in terms of now, not how, we think oftentimes, and there's a place for this, but ready, aim, fire. Sometimes it's ready, fire, aim. I'm just fire. Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire. All right. So we're going to take a hard left turn here because you mentioned before we started, you mentioned Hanukkah gifts. And a question I often ask is best purchases for under$50, under$100. What has made some impact? Because the goal is to give people listening some things that might be helpful or interesting that aren't going to break the bank, right?

3:24:45What you got? All right. So Hanukkah or the Jewish Santa, AKA Noah Kagan's here. I brought you Hanukkah, holiday, Yalda, Kwanzaa, all the gifts, depending on whatever people want. And so these are my favorite things. I think almost every single thing here is under 40 bucks. Great. That I've brought for you. And I don't, and by the way, you could totally give it back. You know when people gift you and you're like, fuck, I really don't want this. Feel free to be like, yay or nay on it too. Okay. All right. First off, didn't expect a bag of goodies. Okay. This is my, I wasn't able to get the Amazon basics one because it's sold out, but this is a, I think$14,$15 tiny travel backpack.

3:25:17And so I always leave one in my main suitcase. And every time you travel, you're like, oh shit, I want to do a day trip, but I don't want to carry my computer backpack and I don't have anything else. So I always leave a similar one to this in my bag. So literally I was going to be buying one of these in the next few weeks. So thank you. That's a yay. This is a yay. This is a hundred percent a yay. Because as you said, you think you already have a backpack, but that thing's full of your laptop and all your shit and it's heavy. And you sometimes just want a day pack. And that's what this is. So this is EA.

3:25:48Thank you. Awesome. You like board games? This has been the go-to board game. Shot and Totten. Shot and Totten. I think it's$11.99. It must be. Oh, look at this. Okay. I've never played it. It's a more basic card. It's kind of like poker but with cards. So you get all these different players and then you just have... License to kilt! Exclamation boy. That's the tagline. I like it. Because I know you had the Taco Cat game. I bought that because you're a Five Bullet Friday. Love that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a fun game. Similar game. Basically, you lay out cards. It's a two-player game, and then you just play against, for different, each of the cards, there's about 10.

3:26:19You play three cards. I play three cards. Whoever's the better three set gets that card, and whoever gets the most cards wins the game. That was a little fast. Amazing. Super awesome game. Shout out Eric Southwally is the one who brought that board game to me. Yeah, thank you. And also, I want to highlight something here just because I recognize something. So Schottentaten, I was like, this must be German. So of course it is. And the Germans are very good at designing board games. And more precisely, precisely Reiner Knizia, I believe that's how you'd say his name, who designed this, is one of the most prolific game designers in history.

3:26:47He's designed hundreds of games, and he's won all of the awards. And he has this incredible set of processes and sort of creative methods by which he's one of the most successful game designers of all time. So that's also cool to see his name on that. I didn't realize that. Sean Taunt, one of my favorites. Thank you. You have Element. You've tried Element, right? it. Oh yeah. Sponsor of the podcast too. I was going to bring it. You already have a bunch of it, don't you? Well, let me, let me see what you got. I brought you the citrus salt. Oh, I got a ton. Yeah. Thank you. That is one of my favorite flavors, but yes.

3:27:18I took it. I take it every day. They sponsor me too. Do you invest in them? No, no, no. I didn't. I didn't. All right. I couldn't get it in time. So I just printed it out. Dude, this is shoutouttynan.com. One of my best friends in the world. What is it? This is, he was the one that taught me about this. It's basically travel clippers. I'm a huge nail clipper. And I'm very particular about my nail clipping. Like all these fucking Walgreens, CVS, they're just shit. And I finally, I got this on his recommendation and it's a game changer. I wasn't going to give you mine, but that's kind of, it's too weird.

3:27:48Yeah, it'd be a little grody. A little weird. So this is going to your address. Okay. These are$39.99. It's literally this big. Okay, so it's like the size of your pinky finger. Size of your pinky finger. It's very low profile. Super low profile. And for people who want to find this, This is a Zwilling. Zwilling. Oh, like the kitchen knife company. And this is fire. It's super tiny, but it opens up. And the sharpness of it, which I'm very particular about, you can ask my girlfriend. She's like, you always cut your nails. I'm like, yeah, I hate long nails. I love this guy. So big shout out for this, because I've always been looking for the perfect one.

3:28:20Wow. $39.99. What is this feeling? All right, we'll put this in the show notes for everybody, along with the other Hanukkah gifts. Hanukkah, holiday. I think you may have read it, but I brought you my favorite memoir book of all time, Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I am actually going to admit, I have never even heard of this book. So tell me more. This guy, Donald. Okay. And a quote from Anne Lamott, who owns the author of one of my favorite books also. Oh, what book is that? Bird by Bird on creative process. Oh, by the way, your Julia Cameron artist way. Oh, thanks. That book is so funny.

3:28:54It's a good one. It's a good one. Yeah. So Anne Lamott has an amazing quote on the cover of this. So Donald Miller. Donald Miller. And this is. How I Learned to Live a Better Story is the subtitle. That's cool already. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. This is the book I gift the most. Okay. And it inspired me to bike across America. But the bigger concept for everyone out there is that we all want to live a life without regret. We all want to live, not even with regret, I don't even worry about that. We all want to live an interesting life. And so how do you do it? And so Donald doesn't, and he's a Christian author.

3:29:24He talks about Jesus. I'm Jewish. And I love it still. It's still my most favorite book. And he's definitely, I love him. and what he teaches you though is it's not necessarily like, here's necessarily the tactic, but how do you approach life to be more interesting? So how are you around more interesting people? How do you do more interesting things? Like he didn't like his life and he was like, I'm just going to bike across America. And so he joined a group and then biked across America and by doing interesting things, he led an interesting life. And I think it's similar to the four-hour work week and Million Dollar Weekend where you read it and you're like, I'm going to go do something.

3:29:53And I think this really is that about how to have a fulfilling and interesting life. Amazing. I'll give a little teaser then also. So here's the top of the back of the book. After writing a successful memoir, Donald Miller's life stalled. During what should have been the height of his success, he found himself unwilling to get out of bed, avoiding responsibility, even questioning the meaning of life. But when two movie producers proposed turning his memoir into a movie, he found himself launched into a new story filled with risk, possibility, beauty, and meaning. And then I'll just give the first portion of the first sentence that then leads after that, which is a million miles and a thousand years chronicles Miller's rare opportunity to edit his life into a great story.

3:30:29Goes from sleeping all day to riding his bike across America. Amazing, all right. Yeah, man. And we all can live an interesting life. It's not exclusive. So far, so good, man. Oh yeah, man. I brought you back an old school one. This is an old school one. Our team was looking up things. This is what you put on your blog in 2011. Oh my God. One of your favorite toys. I know what this is. This is hilarious. Okay. This is like a monkey slingshot and it screams. when you shoot it across the room. Wow. I haven't seen one of these in a long time. This was an early recommendation that you put on your site.

3:31:04This must have been from the Pliocene era on my blog way back in the day. We did a little research. Amazing. I know you like that. I got one for my house. It is fucking annoying. Oh, it'll drive you nuts. It'll drive you completely insane. But it's a fun toy. I got it for other people for the holidays. I'm giving it to them and getting the hell out of their house because the screaming is loud. Flying monkey. Yeah, no, it is not low volume. Thank you. Yeah, man. Happy holidays. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I can put all of that into the backpack that you gave me also. Exactly. This is the last one.

3:31:35I love my Pilot G2.38. I need to get sponsored by these guys. I know you have pens, and I've seen you have pens all around. But this is just like everywhere I travel, I always have them with me here. I bring them to Spain, have it all around the house, boxes of them. Yeah, this is one of my favorite pens, and I needed one. And I use blue. I almost always use blue instead of black because I copy edit a lot. And if you're printing stuff out, it's in black. Blue just makes it easier. So nailed it. Thank you. Oh, yeah, man. Probably G2.38. All right. Where to go from here? I mean, what have we missed?

3:32:08We've talked. We've gone from the philosophical to hiremymom.com to nail clippers to bicycling across the United States. anything else that you'd like to mention? Well, actually, let me ask you a question that relates to the things I'm considering just to ask you for help. So YouTube, how do you think about YouTube? And do you think I should do more video? Because I have conflicting feelings about it, as you know. And then there's always that voice, not always, but there's that voice maybe 10 % of the time, which is just like, are you just being weak? Are you just afraid to compete? Right, which comes up with various things.

3:32:47Maybe you're intimidated by the production quality, the ability that you see here, so you're just not willing to play the game because you don't like losing. That's less of the time. That's like 10, 20 % of the time. Thoughts on YouTube, and specifically thoughts on if you think I could do YouTube in a way that would be fun and energizing in and of itself. So, in other words, something that I would find intrinsically rewarding, even if it doesn't pop, right? I'm curious the voice in your head. Oh, that's, that's. With this YouTube. with like, what's it coming here? Yeah, with the 10 or 20%, well, it's not all the time.

3:33:20I was just talking to a friend of mine about this yesterday. I like competing. I've always been a good competitor, right? It drives me. And I enjoy the stakes of competition in sports. I enjoy the stakes of competition in a million different ways. Like it drives me to be better. And it genuinely is something that I derive pleasure from. Like I get a lot out of competition. So there are things that, for instance, At some point, I would love to compete in archery and think there are some interesting opportunities there. I'm a happier person when I compete in some capacities. So being very competitive, seeing the market get really saturated with podcasts and seeing some very good people come in and how it's skewed pretty heavily into entertainment.

3:34:04So it has gone from, I think, what I find plays to my strengths, which is mostly kind of education, practical, tactical, et cetera. skewed pretty heavily towards entertain or bust. You can have some of the how-to and prescription, but you must be entertaining to cut through the noise. And I can be funny occasionally, but it's not my, it's not something I do professionally. There are people who are far better. Yeah, pros. Right? Pros. Yeah, like Rogan. I mean, he's a pro. This is a superpower that he's honed. And there are many others, a lot of entertainers, comedians, actors, actresses, who are really good behind the mic.

3:34:44and in front of the camera. So I think there is certainly part of me, because I like to compete, generally hate losing. And you have to be careful how you define losing because you could find yourself caught in sort of a Venus fly trap of FOMO and all sorts of issues, which I don't contend with that much, to be honest. That voice is one of, are you sure that you are opting out of this for good reasons, or is it because you just don't want to compete? Great coaches don't give answers, by the way. They just ask questions. Oh, you reminded me. You're not getting out of here. We'll talk a little about coaches.

3:35:19We'll do the 48-hour challenge. Maybe we can put front load a little bit of that. But here's the question around this YouTube thing. What would make the choice obvious? If I'm being honest, I think the choice is obvious, which is I don't do it. I mean, I think that like... I love that. I mean, I think it's pretty straightforward. Partially because I see no way to make YouTube pop without compromising my privacy more than I already have from a facial recognition perspective. And that is already a challenging aspect of my life from a privacy security perspective. Like a lot of weird stuff happens.

3:35:51And if anybody's curious, just read a blog post I wrote, which is titled, I think it's 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous. And that'll outline a lot of the issues, by the way, that people who are just starting out maybe a year prior to that coming out have, by and large, I'm in a number of private WhatsApp groups with various folks and a lot of very, very successful creators. And they're like, oh yeah, check, check, check, like right down the list. I've had to deal with all of those things. So it's not unique to me. And they're much bigger celebrities, of course, I'm not Taylor Swift or something, but I actually really like my privacy.

3:36:25So I think that if I had to make a snap judgment decision right now, it's like, yeah, I'm not going to use that as a primary tool. It's appealing though, because I recognize how effective it can be. If you do a great job, but there's also part of me that looks at it, I'm like, well, much like choosing a business, much like choosing anything, a sport to play, if you don't have an advantage, and that advantage often is that you really enjoy doing it on some level, you're not going to have, at the very least, the staying power to persist over time. You're not going to of the endurance. So it's like, if you love golf, maybe you should consider doing something with golf instead of being like, well, I think Midwestern moms, even though I'm from New York City and I'm a male, I think Midwestern moms really need this when their kid is four years old.

3:37:12Like maybe that shouldn't be your business because if there's a Midwestern mom who has a four-year-old who's got nothing but passion in her veins for that, she's going to beat you. Like she's going to own you, especially over time. So that's another way that I think about it. But But I also assume that there may be things hiding in plain sight that I'm missing. I got suggestions for you that I think will be low effort, high results. But before we get into that, what's your goal? What's my goal? Yeah, what would you say your goal is? I think the goals around it would be to experiment with one of the few means that I see of expanding the podcast.

3:37:52I do a lot with this podcast in terms of pulling interesting levers in the world as a means of attempting to the best of my ability to really impact individual lives, but also on a macro level to really change conversations around, say, psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapies. Also discussing risks, but there are many different things I would like to introduce people to. And the larger my audience is, I should say qualified audience, right? I'm not convinced that YouTube necessarily will contribute to the profile of my, say, audience as it stands today, TBD. I think it probably could. If I could expand the reach of the podcast, and if I'm talking to most podcasters who have been around for a while, given a lot of the platform changes and given the black box nature of a lot of the analytics, once you hit a critical mass, it becomes very challenging to grow your podcast.

3:38:52There is nobody after two drinks, they're being honest with me, who says anything otherwise. And there is a grace period in the beginning when you have that kind of meteoric up into the right. But it's like, this is going to be an exaggeration. But it's like, once you become like, when you're becoming Google, sure, you can have that like double, triple, 10x every year growth. But when you get to a certain point, it becomes more challenging on a percentage basis to influence the size of the mothership. So the goal, and I'm not convinced that YouTube is the only way, but is to extend the reach of the podcast.

3:39:21At this point, there are other metrics I could pull in, but let's use that for simplicity's sake. I think that's a great question is how do you stay hungry when you're full? Or do you need to stay hungry? I think that's another way. That's a great point. It's like what happens when you finally have the money or when you have the audience? And so how do we rethink what that vision and that purpose is? Right. I noticed that was a shift for myself. We're like, Oh, if I finally get money, so I got, it's like, dude, you got it. There's no, you don't need to be angry about Mark and Facebook anymore.

3:39:47No, no, from, from myself, right. It was therapy and a lot of work to be able to get to the point where it's like, how do I want to spend that day? And it's like, my day can talk about money and startups and business with people like yourself and learn how you think about things. Run AppSumo or promote tools. Like, wow, I can do this every day for until I never die. Yeah. And so I think being clear on the goal of where it goes, like for me with my content, I just want to keep doing it for 10 years. So I'm on a 10-year plan. And so that's a balance of, I like doing just business stuff. I don't do bouncy balls.

3:40:18I don't blow up Ferraris. I'm not in prison. There's no squid games, unless it's a business-related one. And it's like, how do I do that with what I want and what the audience is going to be benefited by for a long period of time? And that's, I'd say for specifically with content, my interest. Okay. So what might be sort of low effort, high reward experiments. So a few things. Number one, who says you have to be on the camera now when you're doing these videos? I was thinking that I just don't know what the alternative looks like. Well, it's just you're asking the question but then your guest is the one getting featured.

3:40:47So there's actually a reduction of the amount of exposure as well as on your YouTube thumbnails that doesn't even show you. It just shows the guest. Yeah, yeah. And so there could be wide shots but it really could be a show where it's more featuring the person you're talking to. Yeah, totally. So that is one massive thing that in your channel, right? You can actually have great content but it's not maybe you on camera. same thing how much like i can tell but how much are you putting into like producing your youtube videos uh i honestly don't even know at this point i want to be the tools we use shape us right so i depends on what we mean by production i'm okay with high production value what i have seen on youtube in the last year and a half two years especially is a lot of fishing for clippable moments with like the most salacious clickbaity stuff used as headlines and text overlays.

3:41:37And I do not want to shape myself into looking at my tent through the lens of like, when can I clip something into the Jerry Springer fight scene? Yeah. Yeah. My baby mama, you know, like I don't want to suddenly go fishing for that because that will start to affect the macro level, right? Like I know people who plan their podcasts now around like the clips, the clips. And so the drive becomes the clips. Now, I'm also, I think, longer form YouTube. This is something where I'm unqualified to say, but I have had clips on different platforms that have had like 100 million views. I mean, I've had a couple go nuts, which is a credit to my team.

3:42:16However, with those clips, which have clear attribution to this podcast, I have seen effectively 0 % conversion to increased downloads. So the value capture from the platforms is a very subtle thing, but the amount of value that platforms are capturing, they capture is all the, they get all the value, all the upside versus creator value capture is something I have paid attention to and continue to pay attention to. But why do you ask about the, like how much I'm putting into it? I'm coming back on like small effort, high results. So what you keep saying, or the underlying subtext is that you want to grow the podcast.

3:42:55Yeah. It seems like growing the podcast is it. And it's not clear that YouTube actually makes a difference. So I would wonder, what have you done in the past that grew the podcast? I mean, I would also say if I had to pick and choose at this point, frankly, just in terms of like, okay, winter's coming, not to be all dramatic about it. But if I'm looking at, keeping in mind too, it's not like I have any insider information, but I do know a lot of people in tech who work on a lot of things. And if I'm thinking about defensibility, long-term viability, reaching my 1 ,000 true fans, and hopefully 1 ,000 or 1 million true fans, 2 million true fans, we're already in the millions with the newsletter and so on.

3:43:36But I would choose the newsletter over the podcast at this point. How can you, coming back to how we like to approach this, how can you experiment? So let me give you specifics. How can you experiment with YouTube to drive a newsletter? Yeah, I don't know. No, no, no. I think that's where I would look at it because you're thinking YouTube to podcast but maybe YouTube to newsletter. So specifically, your thumbnail's not really that tight. Your title's not really that tight because you probably don't have pros. Like we have a professional person that just does title and thumbnails and we have a thumbnail specific just designer for the team.

3:44:04And it is interesting. Do you want to compete in it? Maybe not. But I think you're already doing it. You have cameras here. Yeah, I do. And so passing that to a team that chops it up. So for me, I show up to the video. They have the pre-production done. I've already chosen the topics we've agreed on that pre-production is done I show up do my part and then it just it happens but they're testing thumbnails they're testing titles there's a shorts team that does all the short work and what my recommendation is is that I think you can invest a little more in that and then just put that into your newsletter all of YouTube is a lead gen lead gen always sounds so creepy but like is a generation of audience that you can then have as a frequent audience in your newsletter I wonder I wonder I mean it's worth testing I know we've tested different subscription options I don't want to take us too far afield.

3:44:46So again, I think you could have a shorts team, probably actually a dedicated agency. I wouldn't even bring it in-house. I can recommend someone. I would also consider just having someone that does your titles and thumbnails on a consistent basis so that as you're doing great content, does someone want to watch this six-hour interview? Yeah, a lot do, but give them some shorts because they see great shorts. They're like, oh shit, where's more of that? And then go to the video. They see the video, then in the videos, it's like, let me go to the newsletter. And everything is around the newsletter.

3:45:11Now on the podcast, I always, again, in business, everything's about impact on the goal. So on podcasts, I do think you get potentially going on other shows. Could be... Yeah, it always helps. Yeah, if you want to do it. I think that's an important part that you said. I don't want to, I want to do it or I don't. Like, you have to be mindful of what we want to actually commit to, because that's how people burn out. It's doing the thing they don't want to do to the goal they may or may not actually want. I'm aware that the drive to compete can lead me to do things that are not actually in my best interest.

3:45:40Just because you can win at a game or think you could win doesn't mean you should participate in that game. That is how you create a life you don't want to live. Yeah. And so, yeah, I don't feel rushed. TBD, to be continued. So we may pick up offline chatting about that, but let's make sure we talk about a few things. So two things. So the first is, and we don't have to spend a ton of time on this, but spend a little bit of time. Lessons from spending more than a million dollars on coaching. So I've got all sorts of bullets here. CEO coach, biz coach, boxing coach, therapist, health coach, marketing coach, dating coach, three different ones, Hebrew and now Spanish coach.

3:46:18And the question I want to ask is related to all these inputs, because we also talked about the top three, bottom three, the weekly, the monthly, the Q1, the this, the that. And what we're talking about is, you know, I've seen many examples of people, including myself, get inundated with inputs. This happens also when people read too many books. Or they have too many advisors for the startup and now they have 20 people they respect or 10 people they respect, even four people they respect, giving them conflicting recommendations. Or it's just too many recommendations. If you have 100 New Year's resolutions, you have no New Year's resolutions.

3:46:54So the first thing I'm curious about is how for yourself do you choose what to act on outside of the business KPIs and stuff, let's just say. Yeah. Let's break these down. Let's take my marketing coach. So I work with Moody Glasgow and cold messaged him on LinkedIn. Now, when you think about coaching, I think instead of having mentors, let's have very specific coaches in very specific areas that I'm weak in. Or the people around me, we have a lot of coaches for the team. Almost every single leader in the executive team of AppSumo has a coach. And with Moody, it was going to him and saying, I'm not as strong on some of the data stuff.

3:47:31I'm not as strong on some of the marketing research stuff and branding stuff. Those are my specific areas of need. And when we meet, let's really focus on that. Now, this is really the interesting caveat with coaches. You're getting a coach because it's the things you don't want to do or the things you're not aware of. And so you have to be mindful of resistance. The resistance is almost always the direction I've noticed that ends up happening. And I just maybe don't always do it right away. So Moody, for instance, is really want to do a lot of surveys. I'm like, Moody, I don't do surveys, man.

3:48:03Just let me go put up some ads. Let me go do more affiliate marketing. Let's do more video ambassador sponsorship. He's like, who are you doing that for? I don't know, dude. I don't want to do research. Let's go do stuff. I'm a doer. And so his balance of these things is saying, let's go do some research so we know who we're doing it for and be very specific who the customer is. Now you asked the question of inputs. I think the inputs need to tie to your main priorities. That's it. So what is the priorities I'm saying? So within our marketing team right now, it's getting a VP of marketing. It's content.

3:48:30and it's brand awareness. Also video ambassadors, getting more of those. And so within inputs, I'm just like, I'm specifically going over those specific problems and saying, walk me through how you're normally thinking about solving this. And then he normally is coaching me and we're having a discussion around it. What I have found with most of the inputs is that I end up doing them almost always six months later because I resist them and I'm going to do what I want to do anyways. Just like most people here maybe want to start business their way. Then six months later, they think about the coach.

3:48:55The other thing with him specifically on taking inputs, I record all my coaching calls, every single one, every single one. And then I go and listen to them again, not all the time, but selectively, depending on if I'm trying to learn something, noticing how I'm resisting, noticing where I'm paying attention. And that helps me be able to be a better student with my coach. So coming back full circle with coaching in general, how to choose the input. I think it comes back to my priorities and the specific problems I'm going to them with. And a lot of times it's then sitting with the answer that they bring back to me.

3:49:25So how has, as one example from the bullet list, so CEO coach, would that be Dan from Reboot? That's Dan Putt as well as Eamon Al-Abdulla. So Dan is more feelings and then Eamon's more strategic. Okay. So how would you describe some of the benefits from working with those guys? Just in terms of looking in the rear view mirror, because I can think of a number of coaches I've worked with where it's like, oh, I picked up the whole body yes from that person that ended up being really important and then you give another person oh okay i took this thing away from them and it was very valuable what are some of the things you would point to let's take amon al-adulo for instance i am going over 2024 strategy and so i talk to customers i talk to partners talk to the team we look at historically what we've done and we put together a one-pager plan and one of the ideas is we have original products we basically create affordable low-entry versions of popular products so mailchimp we have an alternative Calendly, we have an alternative.

3:50:21And I went to him and I said, hey, we're going to, let me walk over. The one thing I'm uncertain of is 2024 and around what we should do with new products. And brought it to him, walked over it. And I'm so convinced that we need to build a bunch of new things. I'm like, dude, this new stuff is going to be so sick. We're going to build a loom alternative. We're going to build this other product alternative, maybe a DocuSign alternative. And he's like, and because I have a mirror, I have him. And I like coaches who've done the things I want to do. He's ran the business. He's former CEO. So, you know, what's working in your products that you guys have built.

3:50:50I'm like, oh, we have this one product that's crushing it. Okay, so you have a product crushing it and you want to do a new one. How come? I'm like, oh, that's good. We're not doing a new product yet. We're doubling the team so that we can have a core team keep investing in what's working instead of moving off to the new thing. And so that was a really powerful example of him just asking questions based on strategy and understanding our business. Based on something I was like, oh, here's what I'm thinking and here's my problem. What should we do next year? And then he's redirected me, and I think in a very effective way.

3:51:22So that was one example. I mean, we talked about Dan Putt just having an outlet, frankly. You've gone to therapy. I still go to therapy. So with Dan, we were talking on Monday about, he was just asking me, how are you feeling about the future? I was like, I feel really unclear. That's what we're talking about. I don't feel like the whole team and myself really are crystal clear and fought what we want to do in Q1. Huh. What do you want to do about that? I'm going to set up a meeting right now for tomorrow so that we can all be in the same page for Q1 and their scorecards for each of the, for the company and then each of the separate teams.

3:51:51And that was from a five minute question with Dan. So it's really just thinking about all these different areas. Like Moody two weeks ago was like, no, we're trying to hire a VP marketing. That's one of your number one priorities in the marketing team. And you're not doing shit. And I was like, I know because I'm really busy on the book and my girlfriend. He's like, well, what do you want to do about it? Because that's not moving forward where you said it's a priority. And so I think a lot of the inputs come back to what I'm bringing to them as what I believe is the top problems. And he said, what are solutions around it?

3:52:15It's like, can you help me do it? he's like yeah actually i'm really good at it i've hired a lot of vps he's been a cmo at big companies and so now he's spearheading it and i'm not the bottleneck have you bootstrapped this or have you taken financing for or investment for absolutely okay now you mentioned a board do you have a board of directors or an advisory board maybe i'm mishearing you no no you're hearing me correctly so maybe taking a step back how everyone can do this for themselves and copy this is think about what's the weakest part of your business and think about who what are the five companies, even three companies that might have the person that you could get to help you with that.

3:52:49And then just go look up those people on LinkedIn and then offer them a thousand dollars to talk to you for one hour. And that's how we've done it. Okay. All right. So this is a group of people being paid for their time to help give you various types of strategic advice. Yeah. And so you can set up different retainer agreements. You don't always have to do a thousand. It could be more, it could be less. So we have a CFO advisor, as I said, from MailChimp. We have a chief people officer from Duolingo. Shout out Christine. We have a CR advisor from Outdoorsy. And then on the board, we compensate them as well.

3:53:17Roger Tish Mukherjee from Indeed, because I'm very good at starting businesses and I've struggled now that there's more people. Roger Tish runs a 2000 person organization. Yeah. Quick question, just to zoom out though. So because you have CEO coach, but the CEO coach is really two coaches. I have a CEO coach and a business coach. There we go. And then you have marketing coach, marketing coach, and then you have the board. So I'm wondering what you get from the board that you don't get from those other things? What I have found most helpful from a board is one accountability. So it's just like, here's what I said I'd do this quarter.

3:53:47Here's how I did. And then secondly, it's providing an outside opinion of people that are thinking differently than me. So normally every time I go to the board meetings, it's like, why aren't you growing faster? You're not growing fast enough. And then so it's trying to figure out what things we should be doing differently based on the pace that personally I would like to run the company. But a lot of times almost all the coaches are challenging in some capacity. They're finding things that you're not necessarily thinking about or doing, and they bring that to you even though you may not want to hear it.

3:54:13So let's jump to the grand finale. Speaking of accountability. So 48-hour challenge. Yeah, let's do it. Me and Tim love people taking action for themselves. And I think, and I said it earlier, is that the reason Tim's audience likes Tim is because you give them things they can get results for themselves with. And that's why people listen to you, among other things. I think that's probably one of the top. So I want people to take action from this episode. If they've made it this far, I want people to see what they can do and how they can change your life in 48 hours. So this episode comes out within 48 hours of launch.

3:54:42I want to see how people can change your life in either starting a business, and if you already have a business, what can you do in your business in 48 hours? And I want you to leave a comment on Tim's blog and hashtag 48 hour challenge in the comment. So that makes sure you're paying attention. So tim.blog slash podcast. Find this episode. You're going to have to do a little work. Noah Kagan, it's not that hard. Put in the guest name. It'll pop right up. go to the newest one, leave a comment with hashtag. Hashtag 48 hour challenge. And what result have you done in the past 48 hours? What can you do?

3:55:13Maybe you have a certain amount of customers. Maybe you have one customer. Maybe you posted videos. Ideally, here's what I'm really looking for. I'm looking for the people who are willing to put a little more extra effort. Like if they've taken and you can follow a million dollar weekend, you can do whatever it is you want. See how far you can go in 48 hours. And I think there are going to be some people who are like, I made$10 ,000 from zero. What's the price? The prize is an all-inclusive paid trip. one day with me, helping you with your business, whether you're starting, whether you're going in Barcelona, Spain this year.

3:55:39So it will be delivered within six months. So I'll fly you out no matter what country you're in the world. I'll put you up in a hotel and we'll have 24 hours together and be able to change their life. If they want to scale their business, if they want to just go to the beach, we can do that. If they want to do cycling. But the idea is that if you limit your time, even if you have a growing business, I want people to apply. How far can you go in 48 hours? What can you do in the equivalent of a weekend, right? Which we all have. 48 hours. Any other recommendations for people who hear this or are like, I'm excited, I want to give it a go?

3:56:06Any other specifics, catalytic ideas, anything at all that you'd like to add to that? So again, folks, you're going to go to Tim.blog.com slash podcast, look up Noah Kagan. Go to this episode, there'll be a blog post for it. And then you're leaving a blog comment with hashtag? 48-hour challenge. 48-hour challenge. If you forget that, there are going to be probably a lot of comments, so you'll be disqualified if you don't do that. Follow the rules. Any length limits or anything on this? No. Well, speaking of it, I actually just saw this on Facebook. I printed it out for you. Do you remember the Tim Ferriss?

3:56:42You obviously remember the Tim Ferriss experiment. This was Cindy. So Cindy was someone who followed our material from when Tim showed us this process. That's right. And she changed her life in a very short amount of time. Hers was documented. Not everyone's was documented. She sent me a video too. Amazing. I got a video for you. Blast from the past. So she sent a video where... Sold out events. So she has a video.

3:57:11So 10 years ago, I mentored under Tim Ferriss' wing, which was the catalyst to me stepping into the entrepreneurship journey. And I have to say, I'm so grateful I did that. I'm so grateful for Tim and Noah, because ever since that day, 10 years ago, I've been able to be the leader that I truly want to be. I have my own company now. I have tons of people coming to me for support. They want to grow and scale their businesses, their companies, learning how to build inclusive communities for their brand. And so it's been very fun to where my network has grown. it's like they say your network is your net worth right and so I look back at those moments where I work with Tim and I'm like wow like I have grown so much like literally and what Tim teaches has has lifelong um lifelong benefits because the way that Tim thinks the way the concepts around you know the deal concept d-e-a-l has definitely um been instilled into my life and so sometimes i think about when i move into the world i'm like hey well how would tim think about this because i know that like being an entrepreneur can be really overwhelming but the thing that i have learned is that to keep things very simplified and results driven um so anyways i'll say thank you again to tim ferris it's definitely been a journey for me sometimes not easy but it's definitely been a very fulfilling journey for myself.

3:58:50And actually, yeah, me and my family just got back from Thailand two months ago. Been, yeah, like I said, I've just been living the life. So yeah, thank you.

3:59:04That's amazing. But that was someone that you were able, I mean, you were able to get started on her entrepreneurship journey. And we probably had roughly, you know, one or two days. I mean, it was not a lot of time. And we had a little bit of time, but it was constantly for a TV show, right? So you're stopping you're starting you're stopping if you add up the total number of hours that's wild that's been super cool same with daniel bliss who was on your blog when we helped him he was a postal worker he was actually able to leave to move to thailand yeah he was sick so i wasn't able to get a video uh of him talking about some of his results but i think the reality for when out there he asked for some tactics and tips is y 'all have your phones y 'all have the ability to text call go to people in person see who you have in your network like cindy really like yoga and just by getting going maybe yoga is not the million dollar business and maybe she doesn't need a million dollar business, but she got that going.

3:59:45That's a letter now, 10 years later, to be able to have her own business. That's wild. I'm just looking at this, which I haven't seen. And she sold out her event. That was getting started, the original. And I'll just read this because I think it's worth reading, of course. Wow. Well, first of all, congratulations, Cindy. That's so fun. So here's just a portion. The trick I learned while mentoring with Tim and Noah is to keep things as simple as possible, focus on the most leverageable and important thing that would yield the fastest, all caps, and best results. So this is after she mentioned she sold out her event.

4:00:17And then she goes, would I have sold out this event in 36 hours if I'd used paid ads? No, all caps. Would I have sold out this event if I'd gone around to find the nicest, most expensive place to rent? No. And then in parentheses, I got a free office space instead through a colleague and brought my disco lights. Would I have sold it out if I just sat in my chair complaining that there wasn't enough time? No. Would I have sold out if I reached out to people who didn't know me. No. It went on and on and on. And that's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah. That's wild. 10 years later, still going. Good for her.

4:00:49And so it's interesting to think for the other people who changed their life in 48 hours from listening to this one episode where they'll be in 10 years. Totally. And it works. People have done it with past appearances. People have done it with writing that you've shared on the blog. And now you've encapsulated it all after a lot more experimentation, many more businesses, many more years in the book. So the book is Million Dollar Weekend, subtitled The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a Seven-Figure Business in 48 Hours. People can find that on the website milliondollarweekend.com. If people want to interact with you online, do you have any preferred socials or anything else you'd like to point people to?

4:01:28The website's great, milliondollarweekend.com. You can also look me up, Noah Kagan. and I'm, that's everywhere. Noah Kagan everywhere. So milliondollarweekend.com. And again, if you want to throw your hat in the ring and give the 48-hour challenge a shot, listen to this episode. Certainly check out the book, but I suppose you don't have to check out the book, right? You just have to do something. And hashtag 48-hour challenge in the blog comments on the blog post associated with this episode. Noah, good endurance. Amazing what ketones will do for your brain. and I cheated. But thank you for the time.

4:02:08Always great to see you. Great to see you. Congratulations on all the crazy success. I had no idea that it had grown in the way that it's grown. And what fun, amazing. Barcelona. Life is great. Yeah. But is there anything else you would like to add, Noah, before we land the plane? I was thinking about how awesome my girlfriend is. And one of the messages I was thinking for everyone out there is just a little bit more kindness for ourselves. If everyone can just, even today, give themselves a little bit of kindness. Like, you know, I came a few minutes late and I was like, oh, you're late. What are you doing?

4:02:37It's like, and I think for all of us, just a little bit more kindness and make the world a better place for ourselves and for everyone else. Hear, hear. That is definitely true. And also it will just preserve the gas in the tank too. You know, life is short, but life is also long in a lot of ways. So spare your calories when you can be kind to recharge yourself and others. And you're going to have off days too. There are days when you're going to wake up. And as I've heard said before, it's like if you wake up and you meet an asshole on a given day, that person's an asshole. If you wake up and everyone's an asshole, you might be the asshole.

4:03:16And there are going to be those days. So just make a little bit of extra effort. Noah, thank you so much. This is fantastic. Check it out, folks. Million Dollar Weekend. We will put links to everything in the show notes, tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time, thanks for tuning in, everybody. See you soon. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.

4:03:52Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

4:04:31If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top and repeating all of that ad nauseum. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the pod cover by eight sleep.

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4:06:16Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, one of my absolute favorite companies and they make some of my favorite products. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. And I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business. I tell that story in the four-hour work week, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify.

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4:08:01Shopify.com slash Tim. Go to Shopify.com slash Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com slash Tim.