This £10M Founder Got Scammed by a Billionaire: Sam Stoffel

0:00I am Sam Stoffel. Ten years ago I was completely broke, had absolutely no money, in fact I was on benefits, and ended up becoming a millionaire within a year, and then I sold it last year for 10 million. If I take time away from work, I have this nagging voice in my head that's like, get back to work, what are you doing? You're wasting your time, you've got goals you need to achieve. and I was introduced to a supposed billionaire and he ended up, he was a conman. I was probably six months away from the whole thing going bust and I would have ended up losing the whole company to this guy.

0:33Sam Stoffel:Sam, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us. So we're going to hit you with a big open question as we always do. Who are you and what problem do you solve? I am Sam Stoffel and I help entrepreneurs start and grow subscription businesses, recurring revenue businesses, anything where they can continuously process payments every month. Nice. So this might be an even bigger question, but if entrepreneurs are listening to this and they want to get the most out the next hour when it comes to advice, why should they listen to you? so i uh 10 years ago i was completely broke had absolutely no money in fact i was on benefits and uh i ended up starting a business that was a subscription business and uh ended up becoming a millionaire within a year and then i sold it last year for 10 million um so i've learned quite a lot along the way of uh you know problems to overcome what's difficult about running a subscription business all the different tools you need payment processes customer relationship platform managing your orders, managing your billing, all of that.

1:35I've basically built into a single platform to enable anyone to launch a subscription business. Wow. So what would the, so take us by then. So from benefits, what are the skills that take someone out of benefits to being a millionaire? There's obviously many steps. There's many. What I did is I studied entrepreneurs I admire, Richard Branson, Lord Sugar, Dragon Thin people, you know, Duncan Bannatine, Peter Jones all of those and then you kind of start to see similar patterns of skills they've got you know you've got to be really good at marketing you know you've got to know how to write copy you've got to know how to sell you know you learn email marketing you learn how to create content how to run ads but you kind of just figure it out bit by bit as you go and you try something and you fail and then you try again and you try you know you just keep testing different things and you know you just keep growing and growing every year and you have setbacks along the way but as a whole it sort of keeps going like this as long as you keep going so so was the initial thing that you spotted then a problem in the space or was it out of desperation um it i wouldn't say it was out of desperation it was out of i knew i wanted to change my circumstances because i hated the idea that i might have to spend my whole life working for someone else doing a job i hate that just didn't sit well with me um and so it was more about okay what can i start that would allow me to you know to change my life and i knew so i'd done something called matched betting whilst i was at uni which was basically a way to make money by putting bookie free bets against each other and you could make a guaranteed profit and i made about 20 grand whilst i was at uni doing that i was like right if i could teach other people how to do that people might pay for the convenience of being taught how to do it kind of handholdy step-by-step style and so I set up a website to do just that literally video tutorial do this do this place this bet place this bet and this is how much money you'll make and we charged a subscription for that and we got 200 ,000 people to do it over the 10 years that I ran the business so clearly I did latch onto a problem but it wasn't like I set out with that in mind straight away it was like okay what problem can I solve that's something I know a lot about and I think a lot of people would pay for it so you made money for

3:47Sam Stoffel:yourself to start and then take us back I really want to get get into the weeds with this so like where were you what was happening when I guess your first customer your first couple of customers come through how did you know that the green lights were on um the very first thing I did is is I just started pushing it on on Facebook like to my own friends like it was literally I've started this it's legit um and of course I had people messaging me saying have you been hacked because it sounds like the scammiest thing in the world plays bets and make guaranteed return it doesn't it sounds too good to be true um and I had a family member buy an annual subscription she was the first person to kind of believe in me as it were and to buy it and then it kind of just word of mouth kind of took over quite early on we had an affiliate program so anyone could sign up and refer someone else and get 50 % of the subscription, which was just massive because it just meant that lots of third-party websites started popping up, kind of promoting us.

4:46And so it just spiraled from there. So I think we did£3 ,000 in the first month and then£10 ,000 the next month, then£30 ,000 the next month and then£50 ,000. And it just kept going up. So it probably got to about six months in and I was like, oh, I'm basically a millionaire. Maybe not six months, maybe 10 months. so it was pretty it was pretty quick the snowballing effect once I started you know hammering on it

5:11Sam Stoffel:wow so many entrepreneurs will be sat here thinking I've been slogging it for three five years and this guy had started on benefits but I suppose you know I suppose the part I haven't gone into is before that you know for six months of building the website where I didn't go outside and I was working 100 hour weeks just getting the thing live and for a year before that I was going to seminars and watching YouTube videos and reading books and just figuring out what to do. So it wasn't like it was an overnight success. It wasn't like I was an overnight success, just this particular business kind of was.

5:44Sam Stoffel:Talk to me about that obsession. Where do you think that comes from?

5:51Fear of failure, I suppose. Crippling fear of not... No, it is that because... So even now, if I go on holiday or try and take a break so I like gaming for example and I used to game a lot but I just I don't really do it anymore because if I take time away from work I have this nagging voice in my head that's like get back to work what are you doing you're wasting your time you've got you've got goals you need to achieve and so you know in some ways I can't switch off which isn't always a good a good thing but it has led me to be very very driven so yeah it's the fear of not achieving full potential and just kind of believing that you're meant to meant to do something and it just is a driving force have there been moments in your career that have validated that and you've thought oh i've done it there i've achieved something or has that always been quite an empty pursuit um it you never quite no you never have a moment of i've done it um because it's always like okay what's next well you know if anything yeah you reach a certain point and then it's like okay what's the next thing I'm in before this this isn't it you know and it's almost like you have to keep proving to yourself that you can you can do more so I remember it was about 2018 no 2017 and the business was doing really really well and I was like right I'm an entrepreneur I'm going to go and start a mobile app development company and a property company and an interior design business all at the same time and um and they all did horribly they just they completely they've failed um and at the time i was thinking okay i'm um you know imposter syndrome um i don't know what i'm doing i got lucky or whatever um and so you have those moments where you kind of doubt yourself and you just think oh you know should i just give up um but you you power through those and and you keep going and you learn you learn lessons from those failings do you think that's interesting but do you think then there is value in being the generalist or the specialist definitely specialist 100 and i think that was that's where i went wrong at that time because i was trying to do so many different things that once my focus was divided amongst every business and so they all suffered and you can't really effectively be ceo of more than one thing at a time not properly um so it's way better to do one thing really really well solve a problem for someone that you solve better than anyone else um and just yeah focus focus on that and i think as entrepreneurs we tend to have this shiny object syndrome where we want to jump to something new actually it's better to do 10 times more of what you're already doing and you know if you want if you're getting the itch to try something different you know try a new marketing strategy pivot within what you're already doing rather than let's start again with a new business because the grass is

8:31Sam Stoffel:greener over there so for any entrepreneurs that have that shiny object syndrome and they're looking at these hormoses, gadzies, and they're all like saying, do this business and maybe get a dropshipping business or a Forex trading business and set up an SMMA agency? How do you say, how do you really get them to focus in on one thing? Yeah. And it's tricky because any one of those business models can work. It's very similar. I always do this analogy of it's the same as like trying to gain muscle or lose weight. So there's a hundred different ways of doing it. You know, You can do a keto diet, a paleo diet, you can do low carb, low fat.

9:07At the end of the day, it's calories in, calories out. Just focus on eating less and moving more and you will get there. So it's much more effective to focus on just stick with one thing and keep doing it because all of them work rather than, oh, I'm going to switch to this and I'm going to switch to this and never actually following through with anything. Exactly the same in business. Dropshipping works today. Amazon FBA still works today. Ecom still works today. All these business models still work. but the reason you're not succeeding is you're doing it for a month you're giving up because you're not getting immediate results and you you're quitting on it i remember um probably it was probably 2011 and i did a a course on like mobile advertising and it was like the very very early days of mobile ads and i'd run a 50 50 pound ad i think it was and i decided that mobile ads don't work it's like you know now i've spent you know half a million quid on on mobile ads and i've learned a lot along the way but back then it was just you just kind of give up because you just assume it doesn't work and that's what most people do they give up and then they just move on to the next shiny thing actually keep going and keep learning and that's how you get good at something just hammering on your craft oh god i'm so tired i've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time how have you been doing

10:24Sam Stoffel:it because i've been cold calling people on my mobile and i reckon i've spoke to one person no no no stop that right now and use nooks.ai why what what what does nooks do it finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again so you're saying it's nooks.ai and i can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time no other better connection right wow nooks.ai and now i'm going to play devil's advocate and see where you take it how do you know when to quit then because sometimes you have got a crap idea and it's probably not worth pursuing.

10:59Yeah. So you've got to validate your idea very early on. And the best way for me that I always tell people is rather than try and come up with a shiny new idea that you're the first one to do that you think is revolutionary, it's way better to look at something that's already proven and validated where there's already competitors in that niche and you can just find one thing you can do better. So, and the reason for that is if you're coming up with a brand new idea, either nine times out of ten someone has tried it before and it hasn't worked so you're not the first or no one wants i'm sorry and in which case it's because nobody wants what you're selling or extremely rarely that you've actually found something new and pioneering like it almost doesn't happen so it's way better just if you pick something where there's already competitors in the space it validates that there's already demand for that product all those businesses would not exist and so all you have to do is think what are they not doing uh as as well as you could so what frustrates you about their businesses so with sub spot for instance which is the new business i'm launching i noticed that there were um there were various competitors in the niche doing massive numbers like 200 million of revenue but they had like one loads of one star reviews on trust pilot not serving their customers or i found their customer journey really their product really difficult to use and understand um and so i just saw lots of areas of improvement where i thought i know i can do a better job than this or even um outplayed the match betting business i wasn't the first one to make create a match betting business there was there were already people doing it but their product was crap and their marketing was terrible and so i just thought okay i'm gonna take this idea i'm gonna do it way better i'm gonna deliver a better experience i'm gonna market it way better and um hopefully customers will love it more and that is the easiest way to scale a business.

12:49Okay. So let's take something you said then. So you said their marketing was crap. What is the difference between crap marketing and what you would do? I mean, it changes over time. I'm talking 12 years ago now. You know, back then they weren't doing any paid ads whatsoever. In fact, it was basically your old school. It was affiliate marketing and email marketing only. And that can get you so far. But, you know, zero paid spend, zero content creation, zero social media. you know it's leaving a vast well untapped today you know i would say there's tons of businesses that are really viable businesses that do really well and they're still not properly tapping into the power of tiktok you know how you can create one piece of content that can get a million views and you know you can do hundreds of thousands of sales from one video and so many businesses don't yet understand the power of that and that's a massive opportunity for people to do So there's a point where you're building your business.

13:49By the time of it, it was just yourself. Yeah, I mean, I had a team of people obviously supporting me. But yeah, I was the only shareholder. Okay. And then what have you learned about building teams, growing teams, working with other people that you wish you'd known back then? Never hire friends and family in the early days. Okay. That was an early lesson I had to learn. And that's just general advice because it's great when things are going well, but if things are not going well and that person isn't performing how you want them to perform it makes it really difficult to have a frank conversation with them without impacting your relationship and so my general advice is don't just don't just don't mix business and pleasure

14:29Sam Stoffel:it's just not not not a good idea this is the uh this might be the awkward bit sam so we we've been best friends since we were 15 and zach obviously set up the business in his bedroom yeah and i think three months in was like i'm far too busy do you want to come on board yeah fingers crossed we've you've not fallen out not fallen out yeah that's good you've obviously got a very good working dynamic um i mean like there you know that obviously it can work as a friend of mine that did work in the business for a very long time and it went very well with him but there's other instances where it hasn't worked out and it's you know fractured the relationship so to speak because it is difficult you know you can't it's very difficult i think to especially if you're someone's boss and they're also your friend it kind of you you've got this kind of hierarchy at work and then it just is very difficult to reconcile that i think in people's minds one one thing when i was kind of doing my research one thing i've noticed with all the businesses is you've always been solo never a co-founder and you hear such contradicting advice on this that feels like it was quite a deliberate decision for you um i wouldn't say deliberate it's more i haven't needed a co-founder yeah i think if you look at like y combinator and that they always insist that you should have a co-founder and i think the reason for that is generally one of you is more technical and can write code and one of you is good at marketing you do need both of those things i went down the route of learning up about everything so that i can kind of cover all basis not that i can do everything myself but i can read code and so i can tell when a developer is trying to pull the wool over my eyes and i can i know how long something should take even if i don't write the code myself and the same with marketing i can hire an agency to run ads i know if they're doing a good job because i know what i would do so it allows me to spin all those plates and delegate effectively whereas you know that's probably not realistic for most people to it takes a while to learn all those skills right so um there's a reason they say have a co-founder because it allows you to cover the bases much quick much more quickly and then so when you were talking about the story we were six months in 10 months in and you found out that you're a millionaire but business is booming i'm guessing in 10 years of business there's probably some some hurdles along the way what what did you feel like when you look back what was one of the most defining moments that was a bit of a crossroads for you um the the biggest one was only 2023 uh and i the the short version of the story is i was raising money to build a betting exchange um which was quite a different business model to what we were doing and i thought we'd need a lot of money and And I was introduced to a supposed billionaire who basically represented that, you know, he'd sold a stake in Jimmy Choo and all these other businesses.

17:26And he was very, very persuasive and convincing. And he took me to all these private members clubs in London and there were celebrities on the next table. And he took me to a chateau in France, all the wine dinners and all this stuff. And very convincing guy. And I let him take a stake in the business. And we came up with a way to make it kind of equitable. and he ended up he was a con man basically it was it was all a fraud uh and we ended up in a legal battle over the company where i was probably six months away from the whole thing going bust um and i would have ended up losing the whole company to this guy um and we were in a legal battle over it and the the lessons i learned from that one is be very very careful about who you invite into your company especially as a shareholder or in any kind of position of power and the second thing is cash flow so what what happened in our case is this guy um persuaded me that we should rebrand the company and when we did so all of our kind of organic search positions disappeared basically overnight so our traffic just disappeared and um we went from making 100 grand a month to losing 100 grand a month in about three or four months and because we only had x months of cash flow in the back we probably had you know we could have had about six months of cash flow because I'd been buying properties and investing as you're supposed to do.

18:43But I haven't prepared enough of a cash flow buffer to get us through any kind of crisis like this. So we ended up in a scenario where I had tons of assets. I couldn't liquidate any of them to pay my staff. So it was very, very hit and miss for a while. Wow. That's terrible. What was the moment where you knew he was a con man um it was after we after we started doing badly he basically started pushing so the the deep the detail is he he bought 25 of the company at a much cheaper valuation than he should have but the reason for that is i was going to take a salary basically equal to what we'd been making as profit so that he would only benefit if he increased the kind of revenue we were making uh and he basically when we started to do poorly he said okay i'll i'll put money into bail the company out but you've got to give up your whole salary i was like well no i'm not going to do that was the basis of which you you invested and it's just a short-term problem and then i realized that this was he basically engineered it so that the company would need cash so that he could take control um and then i um i started to hear things that he'd said that that people had told me were not true like he told me that his um the worst thing he told me he told me that his wife had died in childbirth and that he'd raised their children and i heard from one of his friends that his wife was still alive so i had a private investigator and she was still alive oh my god and then like he had this place in miami that he said he'd sold for 40 million and i found it online he sold it for 4 million so it's like he had money but vastly different proportions to what he said he did and so all these things started to unravel and then i realized wow so was his wealth from doing similar things yeah so he's a distressed debt trader background so he basically goes and finds companies that usually finds companies that are struggling and rips them apart and sells them for pieces but there's a number of other companies he's gone into that were perfectly fine companies and he's destroyed them and sold them for parts so one of the few that escaped yeah and is that the other thing that you can go and does he get off scot-free and go and do that again?

20:48Yeah, unfortunately, it's not what he's doing whilst immoral, as far as I can tell, isn't illegal. Other than the fact that, okay, yes, probably the fraud in terms of how he represents himself, that's illegal, but it's so difficult to actually pin that into a kind of criminal action. So take me back to the... Also, I wouldn't name him publicly just because it's not worth the... No, of course not. It's not worth the argument. Of course not. We've got an image in our heads of what he looks like. Big curly moustache.

21:16Sam Stoffel:like home alone something like that um to take me back to that those moments i guess from like a mindset standpoint how how are you how are you dealing with that emotionally that was definitely the hardest thing i've ever had to go through and there were days where i couldn't get out of bed with anxiety of you know what i thought i was going to lose everything i'd built um and my other half rachel came up to me and just said okay you've had your moment to you know feel down and to hate the world for what's happened but you've got to just pull yourself up and just crack on and deal with it and that's exactly what I did and I just persevered powered through made some changes to the company focused really hard on marketing the things that I'm really really good at to get back to the basics and managed to get through it and I'm very pleased to say I had his pants down in terms of getting him out of the company and it all worked out well and then I sold it the next year for a lot of money.

22:12And had he not been a con man, he probably would have benefited from that.

22:16Sam Stoffel:So talk us through that. It feels like there's a big gap in between getting rid of this home alone villain and then getting to the point of sale. So how did you engineer that? What steps did you need to take to get to the point of sale? So in the period where we were doing really poorly, I approached one of our competitors, so about potentially merging with them. And we had lots of conversations about whether or not I could work, et cetera, et cetera. And then throughout the process, I decided actually I'm kind of ready to exit this space because for me, it's not an area that I'm enormously passionate about.

22:55Like it was a problem I could solve, but I don't like football. I don't place bets outside of, unless there's guaranteed profit involved. I don't place bets recreationally. So it was always about making money for me. And I just saw something else that I would rather be doing, which was Subspot. And so I thought, actually, I'm just going to approach them and say, actually, I'd prefer to sell rather than merge, which I did, and they were interested. And so we actually did that whole deal in three days.

23:22Sam Stoffel:Three days. And it was because there was the new Labour government who'd come in and we knew they were going to raise, or we suspected they were going to raise capital gains tax on a certain date, 31st of October or something. So I knew if we did it before that date, you'd lock in the lower rate which ended up only being a four percent increase but still how how so how did you i guess what what did you need to do in those negotiation stages to drive that so quickly i think the fact that there was a deadline looming helped because i i knew what my price was and i said if you want it that's the price and i was happy to the the biggest thing in a negotiation is have something they want and then have nothing you want and i knew they wanted the company and i was prepared if they didn't want to buy it i was perfectly fine to keep it it was generating a lot of profit again at that point so you know i was fine i'll keep it and i'll i'll run it as a cash cow so i didn't really have a downside and therefore it was very difficult to beat me in a negotiation there's something in that isn't the power of negotiating this is you have the ability to just say i'm pretty cool yeah just leave it you've got to be able to walk away at any point because the moment you're not willing to your whole leverage is gone so then what's the feeling of you've invested so much time both mentally physically emotionally into this business and then there's the keys see you later i've got a nice bit of money in the bank now but what's the reality of that feeling it i wouldn't say you know i wouldn't say it was like the best day of my life selling it but not the worst either it was for me it was very much right on to the next thing it was it was you know the next day business as usual what's the next what's the next thing i'm going to be working on um i had no i didn't know there was maybe a sense of loss uh because i've built this thing up for so long but i'm not like enormously it's not like it was my baby so but that's probably not the normal reaction to say your business but for me i'm like super pragmatic so it was just right that's that decision made i think you know it's probably more like agonizing before that about whether or not to sell it that was probably the stage at which i had those thoughts at the moment of actually doing the deal it was i've already decided this is the path for it so let's crack on i remember hearing uh andrew wilkinson when he became a billionaire reading stories to his kids and he looked at his phone was like i'm a billionaire and then put his phone away and carried on reading this he was like nothing absolutely yeah yeah yeah and it's it's what's it um i think it's jimmy carl i saw a podcast and saying it's not the pursuit of happiness it's the happiness of the pursuit so it's it's about you know what i'm moving towards the when what goal am i chasing but when you actually get to the goal it's like okay now what yeah what's next else there's a horizon as humans we kind of need that we've got to have something we're chasing because that's what gives you fulfillment and purpose that's why you get so many depressed celebrities you know they they have nothing to pursue so you're miserable yeah a bloke stopped me in the street the other day and screamed where and i thought he was trying to get to the nearest dry cleaners but he wasn't you know what he was saying he was saying where do you get your hair cut no he wasn't because you'd sue them thank you where do you get your data when cold calling oh and what did you tell them well i told him i know a little place where it's 98 accurate you didn't know how to spell it did you i didn't know how to spell it it was prospio prospio that's p-r-o-s-p-e-o oh dot io dot io prospio um if you are looking to get stronger contact data for finding your dream clients that's prospio.io is there um so so you're looking at what's next there's money in the bank but there's also experience as well is there a completely different way that you're approaching things now based on what's happened before um Um, obviously the first time I started up, I had no money, so I had to do everything myself.

27:24So I'm delegating a lot more now. Um, and the reason for that is I want to focus on the things I know that really can move the needle. So making amazing content and making great ads, you know, it's the marketing and the sales that are going to drive your business, all of the operational stuff, admin stuff. I don't do any of that because it's not worth my time. So it's more, I'm delegating more. And I think in the early days, or even up until kind of three or four years ago, I was, what's the word? I hesitated to delegate things because I had the incorrect belief that I could do it better. So, you know, for instance, the blog on Outplayed, there were articles that we used to write to try and rank the search terms.

28:10And I knew how I wanted them to be written and I tried to hire a writer to write them in my style and they did a terrible job and I was like oh it's easier to just do it myself actually it's because I hadn't taken the time to properly train them on how exactly I wanted it done so I took the time I prepared like a full SOP standard operating procedure of this is how to write this is the tone of voice to use this is where to put links this is how often to put images that kind of thing and then I did a loom video showing myself writing an article and how I did it and then I gave it to them and with all this information all of a sudden they were able to produce perfect articles that i was very very happy with and i've not had to write an article since so having that revelation of oh actually it's me not properly training staff not they can't do it yeah it allows you to kind of

28:56Sam Stoffel:delegate much more effectively i think that's a common problem with entrepreneurs that struggle to delegate and it's like lean into your strength so sam i want to talk to you about money which for some people it can be a dirty word um what age did you become a millionaire 25 25 so then take me back when you were younger what what was your relationship like with money before starting the business uh i mean i didn't really have any so i i always been quite savvy you know i did things like switching bank accounts to get you know the credit for signing up to a new bank and i was i was always very you know i was not one of those that just stuck with the same bank for years and years things like that or i'd always be very good at comparing you know before like comparing insurance was a thing i was always quite good at that so i've always been a saver but not that i had much to save if that if that makes sense um i wouldn't say i had any you know it was something that i wanted to have but didn't know how to get it i suppose so when we talk to sales people all the time it's like what what is your like your why you've got to have a reason of why you're doing and some people say I'm money motivated.

30:06Sam Stoffel:How much do you feel that money has been a driving force in terms of your success? Money, I mean, yeah, the truth is it's, you know, a lot of people say, oh, I'm just in it for the passion, which I always find a little bit hard to believe because you go into business to make money. That's why you do it. So I think it's a bit disingenuous. I started the business to make money. That's why I did it. And that's why I'll do the next one because money is a tool that allows you to, you know, make the changes you want in the world, whatever they are, whatever your motivations are, you need money to do it.

30:41So yes, there are things I want to do in the world, but money is what's going to make them happen.

30:45Sam Stoffel:And do you feel that a millionaire 25-year-old Sam, compared to where you are now, how much has changed? I didn't know anything. I still don't know anything. Every five years, you look back and you're saying, you think yeah you i had no idea how the world works um that's just part of growing up getting older so if someone's listening to this right now they've obviously you've sold your previous business and now you're building the new business what might they be experiencing that makes it worthwhile looking into what you're doing now um there's there's so many there's so many things i think if you're building a subscription business you might have the the biggest problem i had is you have to have your payment processor, you've got PayPal, you've got to have something to manage the orders that are coming through to your system and you need to fulfill them.

31:36You've got to have something to look at the analytics of how your customers are interacting with you and what the lifetime value is and what your cost of acquisition is. Because without knowing all these numbers, you can't market effectively because you don't know what you can spend to acquire a customer, which is fundamental. Actually, these tools don't exist in one cohesive environment. You kind of have to piece them all together and then the data never matches up between them because your payment processor says one thing but your analytics platform says something different. And so trying to make decisions without having real data in front of you is nearly impossible.

32:05So I always wanted one platform where everything was in one place where I knew it was all correct and so I could make decisions based on that and that is essentially what I've built. So any of those problems is kind of what we built SubSupport to do. um you know other problems nine times out of ten if you've got a problem in your business is because you're not getting enough customers or you're not charging appropriately for the product you've got or you don't know how to convert the leads that you're getting so if you're focusing on marketing and sales and pricing with 90 of your energy that's going to solve most of your issues for nine nine out of ten businesses i would say so then what's the someone might hear that and think oh that sounds quite technical i'm not a very technical person how how what's the reality of them working with you to fix those problems um there's there's nothing you know it depends what we're talking about here if we're talking about the the new tech startup i'm working on that the whole point of that is you don't need any technical expertise it's meant to be like you know there's a drag and drop website interface so you can just drag you can design your website just with your mouse wherever you want you know everything is kind of at your fingertips automatically like you can just see all of the key metrics about your business if we're talking more about business education and how to start and grow a business which is something i also teach um that's that's just learning about how to create amazing ads that you know they get attention and stop scrolling and you know how to tell a story and it's all today you know getting lots of customers is about you know how do you create content that people want to watch and consume and a lot of that is how you tell really good stories that's something that i can teach very

33:50Sam Stoffel:easily it feels like your superpower is obviously like the technical side of making a good product that you know people are going to want and then also like the the sales and marketing what's your what's your hot take at the minute when it comes to ai and obviously there's tools like replit so some 16 year old here is going to be watching it thinking i'm going to try and copy his business and i'll spend all night on replit what what's your take on the ai stance at the moment i'm a big long-term believer in ai i'm a hold a big position in nvidia um it's not there yet so it's a you know for marketing purposes it's a great brainstorming tool what i'm so sick of seeing right now is every other linkedin reddit post is clearly ai generated you can see it a bloody mile off and they've all got those double hyphens and i find it so frustrating ai you know it can give you a good first draft of a piece of content or it can help you brainstorm an idea but you shouldn't just take what it gives you and just put it into a piece of content because it's not going to work you've got to have your own it's not very good at being creative it's much better at kind of being analytical and also it you know hallucinates and the other thing i was reading about ai psychosis the other day where someone was like getting legal advice on it and they decided the legal advice from their ai and they decided not to get a lawyer because they were so convinced in what ai told them and they were completely wrong so yeah you you've got to take it with a pinch of salt but you know in 10 years from now five years from now three years from now it's going to become a lot more effective so learning how it works and how to use it effectively is a really important skill um it doesn't take long to learn and as you gear up for launch of the new business what what hurdles are you predicting that are going to come your way and how are you thinking about overcoming them um the the biggest hurdles are going to be um do the users like the product that we're building and so very much the approach is we're doing a version one we're going to get it out there we're going to get user feedback and we're going to adapt it based on what they say because there's nothing worse than spending three years building a product to find that no one actually likes it.

36:05So it's getting product market fit. I'm really good at that. So I'm not really worried about that. It's just how you, it's just, it's scaling, it's scaling up. So going from spending 10 grand a day to 100 grand a day to a million a day on Facebook ads is a very, very different game. So it's just how you kind of ramp that up in a way you know i'm building this not to sell it for 10 million but hopefully sell it for you know a billion you know that's that's the aim with it so i want to do on a much bigger scale than i've done previously i'll figure out do you think if you got to a billion you would have the feeling of okay maybe but knowing myself probably not so i say to myself today that's enough yeah but uh i i can't imagine ever retiring is that if you know if we were you mentioned um getting married soon if we were to talk to all the guests at the wedding would that be the the driving feature that he never stops yeah probably yeah all right and i have obviously i have a young family as well i've got a five-year-old and a three-year-old so i'm it was much easier to build the first time because i could spend 100 hours a week you know on the business i can't really do that now um so you know your time is a lot more limited um i it made me think Think of, I saw Hormozy talking about people who say they've got no time to go to the gym and they're like in their twenties.

37:28And it's like, you're never gonna have more time than you have right now. It's just, this is the most free you're ever gonna be. So if it's not important for you now, it's never gonna be important for you. Yeah, I love this.

37:39Sam Stoffel:So Sam, thank you so, so much for joining us. In terms of like, there's gonna be so many entrepreneurs and people that have sat there with a good idea or they're thinking about doing something. In terms of, if you could leave them with one piece of advice, like go and do this, this will get you to your next level. What would you leave them with? Follow a formula and don't quit. And by that, I mean, look at what, so if you want to start a podcast, there's a formula for how to make a successful podcast. You know, what's the optimal posting? You know, how frequently should you release an episode?

38:09What equipment should you use? You know, what, how should you structure the interviews? There's like a, someone's done it before you, they've done it successfully. So you should learn, learn from what they've done, replicate that and just add your own spin on it that's how to make anything successful so find a proven formula add your own spin to it and then keep going way longer than everyone else would

38:28Sam Stoffel:never give up and then you will get there i like it and if people want to find you check you out get in touch or get in touch with the new business how should they do that best way is instagram at sam stoffel or tiktok or any of the other social media platforms it's uh all the same beautiful thank you so so much thanks very much good to meet you both Thank you.