#151 - How To Go Viral, Grow Your Following & Tons of Ideas with Lambda School's Trevor McKendrick

yeah i feel like i could rule to where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never look him bag put out the bat signal today because sam could not make it to the recording because he is good news he just tweeted it out the hustle has been acquired by hubspot he'll come on probably at some point and talk all about that but because of that he's understandably busy today papa bottles and doing trillion shit that you do when you when the day you sell your company the day you sell your company you're a trillion okay so i put it out and i got a bunch of people responding some people on the dms we got some blue checkmark marks coming in saying oh will pick me and we decided to go with the underdog picked trevor mc kendrick to come on the pod if you suck nobody will ever hear this and this pod never happened but if you're good this is your time to shine baby you you were one of the all access past members that's how i first got to know you your chief of staff at lambda school and most importantly you applied intelligently to this call to action of come on the podcast you sent me a screenshot of a bunch of ideas and so i was like good that's way better than somebody just saying oh i'll do you know i'd be interested i'm down so you applied intelligently so that gets rewarded some other people did as well don't get mad if you didn't get picked i just said let's get it a shot so trevor how does it feel to be here feels super great i'm super excited to talk to you and do you normally listen to the pot no yeah i listen all the time okay great so you already know the deal you know how we do things actually you probably know how we should do things which is more about ideas and sometimes we get off script and bullshit too much so we'll try to stick to the script here so ideas are you do you consider yourself an idea man i try to be as much as possible yeah i got my list whenever something comes down write it up okay so we'll see how good your ideas are so what i want you to do is you start spit balling ideas and if it's interesting we'll start talking about it if it's dumb i'm just gonna say that's dumb and we could pass if it's just i have nothing to say k and so you're gonna be this the the machine gun firing out ideas and i'll just be deflect and doing whatever i gotta do alright so let's do it let's go what ideas you got for alright first up i call it the five dollar heads which is everyone wants a good head shot everyone's vain everyone needs a good head shot but most heads shots suck yes like why it's like we have all these editing tools we all these things why don't people have good heads shots so the idea is pay five bucks for an app that all it does is takes a heads shot editing tools specifically for a heads shot lighting the whole thing and the way that you grow it is you can share like three or four of your favorite pictures with your friends with the app logo at the bottom they vote this worked for like ninety nine designs nice so you get like confirmation that you got a great pick people everyone else downloads the app and you gotta pay five bucks to download your favorite okay so so you have a heads shot for your twitter account which is t kendrick did you pay to get this sent shot taken my wife is a wedding photographers she did alright wife did it for you you're on this yellow background was that the real background or you photoshopped a yellow background photoshopped that didn't the stand out gotcha it was white before that or what it was like a outdoors background or something okay gotcha so you cut it out okay great so i got a facebook ad if you look at the thumbnail of this podcast that picture you see is not just a picture that's an investment i went and paid some guy two hundred and seventy dollars three hundred dollars maybe i don't remember what it was basically some guy who went facebook ad said and the facebook ad was amazing because he just had a normal looking photo that somebody had is there like kinda linkedin bio and then like this like ultra like sick looking photo of that same person and he's like i can do this for you i take professional head shots if you take yours career seriously just come in and get a good photo taken you're gonna want that to to do things you know that's something i would make fun of publicly but privately i'd be like damn kinda wish you know when somebody asked like if you're talking on a conference or they always ask do you have a heads shot and i'm sending them this like shitty low res thing of me from college and they're like you don't gonna look like that anymore that's you seventy pounds ago so i went and got this done and i paid three hundred dollars for this so i'm am a believer that people would pay for this and i do think the tech could do this well i don't know how this is much different than just like a normal photo editing app like facet tune or some shit like that is there something that's actually head s there's friction so like setting up your light it lighting everything for pictures so like the app and tell you hey your lighting sucks pivot right left until it looks good and it's like okay you got the dotted outline take it here it can also do things like there's friction between like exporting for like the ninety different platforms that your heads shot needs to go into right so it can just one click bump out to all the different formats and if you look at like the facet two of the other apps the photo editing control they're like super complicated there's like for people that like the most vain wanna like make every pixel perfect i think you could dumb it down a ton for like average joe just wants a solid pick and make real like controls just built specifically for getting a heads which is a lot simpler okay i like it i'm a fan of this idea and i like the little viral mechanic i'm hey which i did this i sent it to my my wife i sent to my sister i said hey which of these pictures because and that when you go to a shoot they're like here's your gallery but you can only own two of these and i'm like you know shift alt four you know whatever like i can take screenshots of all this shit so so so so don't try to limit my downloads bro but basically yeah i did get their opinions and that was a kind of viral mechanic alright that that's a good idea i'll give it a b plus what else you got alright next one so always talk about like product product product like tech world is it obsessed with product we're always trying to feel like experiment and find the best product but what about a product that's built on experimenting with distribution channels and things that aren't tried in aren't arizona in the tech world like so for example using like direct mail so like direct mail you can find people that the tech world doesn't find like our grandparents and then you can come with the products like just an example like newsletters are super hot right now but i promise you that our grandparents are not in into newsletters i even know that like that's a thing right now how do you and this idea came because like my grandparents are always asking me about like what's new what's interesting blah blah blah and it's like i wanted like i think i could point them to like hey to talk to your grandkids better like what they're into check out this newsletter and it's like gonna find them probably not facebook ads to be too expensive but like direct mail there's no startup up using direct mail to target grandparents so yeah what do thinking of that okay so i didn't fully understand the idea so basically you're saying there's channels like direct mail then what's the business or what's the idea i mean i missed because i started thinking about a i started r on it in my head and i kinda missed what you said so explain it simpler to me i kind of changed it halfway but the idea is how do you keep your grandparents informed about what is cool for their grandkids okay so here's a fun silly idea which is just every you know sc with a newsletter right now every sc with a subs stack pay for seven dollars a month we'll print out your your subs stack we'll mail it to your mom and your grandma because they're miss hearing from you and they actually care much more about you than your shitty subs stack subscribers do so okay that's just a goofy idea but if you combine that with a company i invested in addressable addressable have you heard of these guys i have not super cool company if you go to addressable dot mail or addressable mail dot com or something like that they have robots the hand right letters and the handwriting is literally done with a real pens so it's not like a font it's actual writing with a robotic hand that looks like a real human handwriting and they do this for real estate agents or salespeople who need to keep like in constant contact with clients and potential clients or they do a lot for nonprofit who wanna like thank donors or potential donors they send them handwritten things to the through direct mail but how do you do that at scale right if you're a nonprofit with a ten thousand person email list and you're just getting lost in their email inbox well you could send you know personal letter to them through direct mail would take a long time to send ten thousand addressable makes it easy because they have robots that can write thousands of these per day so i'm invest in these guys because they're crushing it and they have an open api so like maybe you get hand you use addressable to do the handwriting and they also mail it for you and you just have to find the use case that will make sense for it so they're doing it for real estate for sales for nonprofit and it sounds like what you're talking about is like keeping in touch with grandma grandpa paul or different things like that is that right yeah and there's i just like the idea of channels that non or tech people have not explored or looked at and like using you know handwritten signatures to like customize the thing make it feel more special and addressing like an older audience i think if it's that checkbox box yeah that's cool like i told these guys you know for e commerce commerce is always looking to like increase retention and lifetime value of a customer and these little things go a long way now if you try to do a handwritten letter through you know yourself to your customers or through your maybe your three p who packs your orders they'll charge you like a you know fifty cents or seventy five cents just to put an insert in and that's not even personalized so with addressable if you're sending it for two bucks and your customers are worth hundred dollars plus to you that could be a worthwhile investment a personal touch where they feel like this is the kind of a wow moment by this brand i bought from and for the brand maybe you're gonna like step up and be able to drive more lifetime value because you could see that those customers come back in order and that's the best part about addressable is they because it's all programmatic they'll tell you cool this person you sent a piece of mail to did they go back and act on your website you can connect those two dots because it's the same you know user id and an email that you uploaded so they'll pass it back and then you could check did they take any actions so i think that maybe you could do this for e commerce as well awesome so we go on yeah next one alright next thing is virtual shadow ceo so work so i'm the chief of staff for austin at lambda school and one of the things that was super interesting about that is you get to like get into the brains and see how somebody actually works like how do they process their email how do they choose who to talk to and like the real details you know we saw this a little bit with when you did all access pass and i think like what i want to do is shadow a ceo for a day like record their screen watch how do they do email how do they do like literally these little decisions because i think that most people would be shocked as an example by how fast these ceos make decisions about big things how they like view what to act on and there's just no there's no version of that what do you think so if i'm the ceo why am i letting you record my screen and all that we gotta figure out those details later man this this is no value prop to the customer okay so i like the idea of being able to shadow ceos i'm obviously a believer in that i did it myself when i moved to san francisco i specifically didn't go start my own company i wanted to work with somebody who had done it before and i literally just said i wanna sit right next to you and see how you operate because you've clearly had massive success this is to guy michael birch you've clearly had massive success and i would love to just work you you know i thought you seem like an awesome guy my secret intent was look if i could just see how this guy operates then i can operate more like him you know my okay i went to tell the other story but i a second version of that which was scott harrison is the founder of charity water and he's kinda really like this really inspiring guy if you ever go listen to him give a talk about charity water you know you're moved your move to take action to donate to do all these things he's amazing storyteller he's building like a tech company but it's a nonprofit right like the people who go work there are like ex adobe and you know google and wherever else mostly those folks don't leave for the nonprofit because he's pretty one of the reasons he's he's a pretty charismatic ceo and he pitches a big dream so i emailed him once and i said hey can i just come shadow you for a week and i said i'll work you know i'm gonna take a vacation i'm gonna tell my company i'm taking a vacation but my vacation is i'm gonna come shadow you and he said yeah let's do it and so i'm a big believer in this shadowing idea for the record i never did to actually go do it but a big believer in the idea not big enough to actually go do it but enough to email the guy and ask now the question is how do you make this pay off for the give of access right when i did the all access pass i charged for it you know i made good money doing it so i was charging for the access so how would you maybe solve that problem i think i would what would i do i got an idea for you so a lot of times with these ceos money is not the driver legacy is so something like master class they do make money on master class but i think the real appeal is kinda led to the ego it's like we're gonna like document this we're gonna capture you in this like super high quality thing and you're amongst this elite group of people who are like masters of their trades so in comedy we did it with steve martin and basketball we did it with steph curry and in business we wanna do it with you howard schultz like that's their pitch so maybe you could do it that way maybe you could capture it as a little documentary day in the life it's gonna be sort of over produced in like a spin thing but i think that's maybe the only way you can get them to do it there's like a slightly tweaked version of this which is recording how just like not ceos but like normal people work and like giving feedback on like how to to like work more efficiently yeah yeah work better which i think would be hard to do but if a ceo believes that they can get even one percent improvement like in a workflow that they just don't even know about i think the ego idea is actually better but if ceos believe like a one percent thing is worth it then that's also another angle one version of that that i think is kinda cool and weird is we've talked about this this app or this company called deep sentinel before on the podcast they're basically like a security camera company like you put the camera outside your house but there's somebody remotely watching it for you so whenever it beeps that there's somebody there there's actually a human being watching it that like well then send you a message that says hey it's all okay or hey there actually is a threatened where we're monitoring it we'll we'll call the authorities or whatever else right and so there's like a you know a security guard for the everyday home so i think there's a version of this that for meetings because i'm often in meetings and i'm watching people and i'm thinking man they have no idea how they're coming across either they're being rude their body language is totally dis so they're too aggressive they're too passive you know whatever it is i wonder and meetings are very important right like at twitch there's just one room that's the big meeting room it's on the ninth floor of the office and it's the big boardroom table and it's where basically the ceo i mean it just kinda sits there all day and different teams coming in and talk to him like the amount of value that's in that room right in terms of people time and their salaries and the decisions like get made is all like super critical but there's no feedback loop of like how are you doing in these meetings how are you running meetings right there's a lot of like executive coaching but they're kind of like therapy so i wonder if you could marry these three ideas right mary the idea of executive coaching and the deep sentinel and meetings and the way this would work is you put a little camera in your meeting room that gets pipe to a coach the coach is going to watch that back watch back the meetings and find game film like a like a basketball coach it and say they'll chop it up and they'll say hey they'll send it to you after the you know like a day later you know like four hours later or whatever and they could say hey look during this meeting when this person was saying this thing you were your body language totally dis interested or confrontational and look you could see if you pause right here you can look and see their reaction to it so that's a moment where you can improve because imagine like how much better we could be if we got that type of feedback that athletes get where they get real footage that says you look you did this maybe you could've have done why instead and then by the you know for the next game they like have that little movie in their head the question i'm asking myself for like all of these ideas for you is like how much are you considering viability when you're r ninety on ideas for me is like i was like i don't think the most important thing to sean which is why was like i'll pitch this shadow ceo thing will figure out the hard half later and then you like struck it down so i was like oh shit like maybe i gotta maybe my my calibration was wrong don't react me just do what you do say what you think is interesting but i would say like i always in general with ideas i think if you're looking at viability too early what's gonna happen is you're right most of the time that this is a a bad idea or it's not feasible or it's too expensive or whatever else the ten percent of ideas that actually had potential you kinda struck down too early and all you needed to do was think about them a little more tweak them a little bit pivot to an adjacent market and all of a sudden a bad idea became a good idea so my process is desi first than viability so the desi ability was yeah i actually think you do learn a lot from shadowing people i didn't understand what the incentive was why the other person would desire it why would the ceo desire to have their moves tracked and so that's why i went for a different idea that i think i've personally seen that these meetings are worth thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars each and that was hard for me to fathom till i worked at a big company but it's true the you know if you're a partner at a at a consulting firm or you're a executive and a company every meeting is worth thousands of dollars of your time other people's time and then the decisions you make multiply that to become hundreds of thousands of dollars ideas or millions of dollars maybe you could get coached like an athlete get coached i find that to be interesting but also so weird that i don't know how to interpret alright next idea shopify for cash based doctors so if you want to get a procedure done you can get it done generally a lot cheaper if you pay straight cash and more doctors mexico or what you talking about what what's going on here who's taking cash i've never paid a doctor in cash nor have they asked me is that a thing this is like a growing trend in the us where people minimum insurance yep and because it's just so much cheaper to get a a cast procedure done so there are individual loan doctor's offices that have i rolled their own to be able to accept a direct payment but this is like a you know call it like a secular shift a growing trend so second half of this you know this because you were almost a doctor being a doctor can suck a lot because you lose most of your independence depending on what type of doctor you are one way to regain that is to open your own practice and a way to bump that even more is to like not deal with insurance right and just like sell to your clients right and so making that as easy as shopify to start being able to do that yeah i like that idea a lot i didn't realize this cash payment thing was a big deal but just a quick google tells me that there might be a there there that seems like it like a real opportunity i don't know enough about it to like intelligently talk about ideas but i know enough to know that that's where there are opportunities like that and i'm just curious in general who is building the kind of angel list stripe atlas or or whatnot for starting your doctor's practice like i'm guessing today that starting a practice is a bunch of work a bunch of paperwork a bunch of legal work a bunch of insurance work compliance work and like whoever figures out how to streamline that into like what angel did for starting funds what stripe atlas did for incorporating companies and i'm sure somebody to say that exists i bet you you could take it down like one more order of magnitude in friction and make it even easier right because like you could have said legal zoom exists why do you need stripe atlas and then you use stripe atlas and you're like oh okay yeah that's exactly why you need stripe atlas and i bet you somebody's gonna do that for doctor's practices yeah okay next one this is kind of an out there idea it's more like a almost like a reality show thing which is and it's also like an entrepreneurship hustle behind it which is like watch me as i try to get on the joe rogan show what does that look like who am i talking to who am i networking with and the end goal is really specifically really clear so just a mission yeah just a mission and like how do get there how does that happen oh okay i like that a lot i'm a fan of ambitious mission watch me document my journey because you have a no lose situation you're gonna get a bunch of people rooting for you that actually increases your odds of the thing happening even if it doesn't happen you got a bunch of people who really root for you and like i think pixar has this quote which is like it doesn't matter if the hero wins but it does matter how hard they try something like that and basically that the audience is there not to see you succeed it's there to see you try to succeed and that's one of pixar like golden rules of storytelling don't make it too easy for the hero the audience is there to watch you try to succeed i think that applies to basically every youtube channel there is you they have something to care about right and like whether you succeed or not is like a irrelevant so what would yours be getting on joe rogan yeah i do joe that's the that or like sam harris which is like a not my first million one of them yeah i want nice making the video today we hope we hope yeah i think jar is a great one i mean oprah whatever maybe of last generation i do think also it's cool to have something be authentic and slightly quirky so like it's one thing to say you know i wanna them joe rogan is i think the joe rogan one is good but i think a better one might be like let's say michelle obama not barack but michelle because i think if it's an obvious you just want power people don't root for it as much but if it's like something that's someone that really mattered to you and you have like a real story about why that matters to you and why you why you want it so bad you want it more than you should that's what we'll get people to share it because it's sort of more remarkable than when we all wanna be rich right we all wanna be famous so it's like i think it's gotta be both specific and i actually think quirky specific will work better so it's like getting on like you know the mori covid show might work better than oprah or whatever it is totally i mean your good at ideas man and i build a sensor like community around the quirk ness people like select yeah we saw this with the wall street best thing i think that's one of the reasons why people got behind it right there was the david first goliath underdog story people love that there was the like you know revolution people love that people love that they could get a little bit rich if they're were doing it but there was also the absolute randomness of what was your own why games stop why like you know this reddit wall street bets this quirky community going after this random mass stock and trying to take down the big guy you know like it's interesting when it's that versus i don't know if it was microsoft wouldn't it felt the same i kinda don't think so i think because it was games there was even more juice to that story yep and there's a lot of people like wanna start a podcast wanna starting here so they wanna grow an audience but you need like something to talk about that makes you interesting mission and having a mission yeah through the next one so one of the things we see at lambda school is we're training people to be programmers to get a job technical skills but fifty percent of getting a job is having like the right social skills like how do you network how do you email how do you how do you be like a white collar worker this would be you could do any number of things but i think one course that you could offer is like how to email as a professional the hard part about this is that people that don't know they don't do it right don't know about it right and so you have to kinda convince people that there's value here but it is a huge gap in the people that are like trying to make it and there's so many little tweaks and email that we don't get taught anywhere don't love that one because i think that it hurts in two ways i don't think people will tell other people they're they're taking that course necessarily because it sounds kinda stupid of them and then the second thing is that that's the problem you said which is that they may not realize that they need it and so this might be one where like when we have to give medicine to our dog you have to put it in a pill pack which is like a treat that you shove the pill into so it's like here i'm giving you this treat but the thing you really need is this pill and so i kinda think maybe you'd need a different hook which is like people come to learn you know x a thing that they feel like is a something that they are aspiring to do that they want to do and then in it you deliver some of their vegetables that they need to take which is like hey by the way here's how you email we do this little here's another way here's another way okay this gonna work a little assessment so the old you know american pharmaceutical industry thing you diagnose the problem then you sell them the solution so you could make a viral sort of quiz which is like what company do you write like and you have to write it it just comes in and it says oh you need to write an email to your boss saying that you're gonna be late to today or you know you're gonna be out this week for due to personal reasons and your coworker is gonna cover it for you just write that email and then it tells you you you right at the level of a wells fargo employee like like know you've right at the level of a mckinsey associate or partner or you're a lawyer or whatever and i think that would be viral and then you can up upsell the by the way what do you think of my diagnose the problem than sell them the solution idea i think it is a much better version or is a great way to sell what i was talking about i think would be super tough to judge kind of what the writing level is it's just arbitrary doesn't even we fucking matter right you just oh you're just like labeling yeah you just like you know you take a couple rough here like what's the average word length that they're using how many words total did they use did they you know whatever you could program in just a couple of quick things and and you it doesn't matter it's like a personality quiz right like i referenced michael earlier michael berkshire was investor of my previous company he when he previously launched a social network he was trying to think about how do you get users right away he had just sold this company to a company called tickle which back of the day all tickle did was quizzes and they started with really like kind of the kind of scientific personality quizzes that are like deeply rooted in whatever bullshit science that those are rooted in you know they sort of evolved based on what the market wanted to like the the most popular quiz was which dog are you and you just take a quiz about shit you like and then it's like you're like a wiener dog you're like a a poodle and people would share that they would love their results and they went viral so that's how tickle grew like a hundred million dollar company was through these quizzes so when he wanted to seed the social network he's like alright cool we need a social network but like how do we get all the users he said he went back to the well he made a quiz and the quiz was the best friend quiz how well do you know me so you would answer a bunch of questions about yourself which is your favorite topic then you would send it to your friends and they would say hey this is a quiz to see how well you know me they're kind of intrigued how you know let me see what i get they would try to answer what you you know what your guess what your answers are and they would get a score at the end of here's your best friend score you're a seventy six percent or whatever it is and then it would say by the way you should do this too you take your quiz and send it back to them nine days one million members and so i've definitely seen these kind of like simple viral quiz type things the really high engagement and high sharing they're not great for longevity but in this case you're actually selling a course you're not you're not trying to get them to come back and keep taking a writing assessment and then you can have people compete against each other for like which label they are how good they are and that's incentive it to share it you can track between your friends and then you're the whole time you're selling whatever course it is that can help right improve writing okay so if any lambda school student wants to make a a project out of this i will sponsor is that how it works can i just be like i'll pay three thousand dollars for any student who makes a good version of this can i do that at lambda school we'll get you someone for free to try for a month oh perfect okay great so you heard this on the podcast and then this is my mission i'm gonna collect i'm gonna call it a hundred thousand email addresses of people who take this quiz that's gonna be built by lambda school student as they're like internship project i'm gonna show you the how viral this can go i love it alright this justifies my presence here to austin i can be like hey got i i fine pi that's your investment too so we're good here we're good on both sides alright exactly next up a call it github for contracts for for lawyers so if you've done any deal on the face of the planet involves lawyers it is the biggest pain of the ass because you're sending word docs back and forth from each other with red lines and it's a whole thing so getting this started would be difficult but the idea is creating a github where you can track changes on a single doc between all parties you can't hide anything on a single place and it's easy to track and it's one thing the benefit of this is like you become like the platform for contracts that everyone uses and the trick is like how do you get how do you get those first start your first users so this idea has been around for a little while and it does feel like fuck this should exist i was also like i think five six years ago i was like why doesn't this exist and i talked to our lawyer and she was like well like the thing is lawyers don't really love to change anything like we all use desktops and laptops and we use microsoft word and we all understand it and like we have our file history and i'm like no but it could be so much better if you just did it this way and so you i think the challenge here is just a lawyer adoption i i know this company iron cloud is doing pretty good here but i think this is a a good idea that when it happens it's gonna be seemed so obvious but i don't know how you get lawyers to use it because i think that's where the real point of friction is for this unfortunately so they should do it should it's not not yeah need should is not will or what's that phrase like you know if grandma had she'd be grandpa type of thing like yeah that's what this is they should want it if they everyone did what they should then then the world would be a different place alright so the next idea is children's books like pick the thing that pick the value that a parent wants to get into their kids and like make a children's books for that right i've seen like children's books are out like the health care system or about like libertarian is whatever it is like parents wanna like plant these freaking ideas into their kids heads and so make like a decent children's book for you know pick your top of choice okay they'll love it next idea next idea alright alright what is the best idea on your list have you already done it or is there one that you got like in hidden in the wings no i'm not hiding anything like i do my best already what else we got okay answer to this i had said a lambda school for x idea before i said lambda school for executive assistance before was that a bad and i'll i'll give you the two sentence y ea make actually great money so they make almost like a you know a programmer is big leap ahead of where you were if you were kinda like not in the white collar tech industry so ea in the tech industry will make seventy five thousand dollars plus i believe and could be you know hundred twenty or thirty hundred and forty i think that's possible check me on that if i'm wrong but i believe that's true so there's a really specific set of teachable skills like the actual skill of calendar how to do that how to do meeting minutes how to organize you know these events or sort of like little off sites to whatever it is so just i think it's something that could be taught in six months where you could become a staffing agency basically you could say hey higher from us we have a guaranteed pipeline of really good a's that whenever you need one they come out with you know a specific set of skills because i think typically right now ea are just people who were doing one thing and then they get asked to do it and then boom now you're and learn on the job you know they're like kind of in rare quantity because when somebody has a great they they never wanna lose them it's like that executive you know safety blanket is that ea so they never they they work with them for like ten years sometimes so there's like a lack of liquidity what do you think of that idea i off so there's like two ways you could do it i think it could work assuming the salary for these ea is high enough the one way is like they pure lambda away where you train them you help them get a job and then they pay back like an income share agreement so but the other way is to and we've started toy with this too at lambda school is you know collecting on is hard making sure everyone that comes to your school actually once a job can be hard and so instead of getting paid for an you turn into an actual staffing agency and if you're actually good at training people you can take someone who doesn't have the skills turn into someone who does and then charge them out as an actual agency right and then when you if someone really likes their ea they can like buy the contract offer you or whatever and i think that second way solves like a lot of problems it's solves for like the selection issue and it actually it gives you a better feedback loop on whether you're doing like training them well because you're actually hiring them them out right but yeah i think you know barring is has being totally like kind of shut down by the government i think it worked for any any number of industries okay cool let's do two more ideas and then we'll switch and you could see say ask me whatever questions you want alright here we go man bible stories to get you to fall asleep so the reason i like this is because this whole asmr genre has a it's a trend and b there are specific spotify people and youtube people who all they do is they'll talk slowly for you to fall asleep and so like how to do that better well you make people like feel good about it in the process right and so you read them the thing that they're supposed to be reading or they feel like they're supposed to be doing in the first place and it like happens to make them like fall asleep okay i like that idea i like combining anything with sleep with anything with religion so you're speaking my language those are to themes i'm always trying to find excuses to do businesses in because i think there amazing places to do business so so so i'm in on that idea like that as a former atheist bible salesman man i can tell you religions a a good business to be in was that story so you were an atheist bible salesman that sounds cool i like that that leads on the resume what does that actually mean so i started a spanish language bible app that was free to download and you monetize it by buying the audiobook book of the bible in the app grew it to over a million users it's all bootstrap and then it got acquired by a public company and the reason basically i started it as i was leaving mormon and so it was kinda something i believed in initially but a later was like oh this feels like i would i would get emails from like you know poor people and like mexico they're like hey they didn't know not like an app guy that was like a pastor or something so they'd be like hey can you pray for my son his leg is broken or something and i was like oh this feels a little this just get a little too real for me but yeah i was in eighties atheist bible salesman and then company came along and and bought it okay that's amazing why are you a chief of staff chief of staff because i wanted to learn how to run a company without actually kind of doing it first if that makes sense so i get it i get all the visibility that austin and the ceo have without necessarily like the responsibility of delivering on like a venture back startup which is probably not like the best reason but it's been amazing to go from you know i was number twenty to like the two hundred people that we are now who should become a chief of staff should become a chief of staff if you think you wanna do a venture back startup but you're not sure because it's like the easiest way to test it out with almost no kind of risk or stress on your part i mean yeah it's regular work and a stressful but it's nothing like actually being in the you on a day to day basis like what percent of your day are you doing like bitch work that you don't wanna do the percent goes down over time as you get good and you earn trust but what did it start at and what is it now yeah started let's call it at sixty percent was bitch work and define like what bitch work is for people who don't know what bitch calendar responding to emails that type of stuff k today it's like ten percent so eventually you get good enough for you like we've hired in our ea for austin who like does most of this stuff gotcha and now what do you do what do with the other ninety now i do you know like big company stuff so goal planning o ours internal comm a lot of external comm marketing on the p r side stuff that's like very broad across the whole company but not like not super deep anywhere and you're basically like as a chief of kinda like in a relationship with the ceo totally totally so texting twenty four seven access to their email you know in austin's is like one of the easiest ceos to work with quite frankly like super chill and and pretty easy going you know it's if he need something i'm trying to do my best to get to get whatever that is what's a embarrassing story about austin he wouldn't want you to tell on podcast but you're going to i don't know if i can do that i mean we can talk about the fund that was not raised for him on twitter by su hill which is like insane people haven't seen this is pretty cool he was like oh shit i raise a fund and then so saw he'll like tweeted out hey austin's raising a fund and then some ridiculous amount of money came how much was it the number that i heard was like thirty million i don't know which of those actually like came through but yeah it was thirty million so thirty million dollars of interest at least through like a survey a type form or something which i think would translate to roughly based on on my front as it probably to twenty million of actual commitments which is no joke and then in respect to austin for not getting distracted by the shiny and he was like that's way too much i don't need to do that so no so i like that okay so i've asked you some questions you've given me some ideas let's do fifteen minutes or twenty minutes how long you wanna go i i'm cool i'm i'm done with meetings for the day of any questions you wanna ask me yeah so you've been getting better in shape you know that's a goal that a lot of people have similar to like wanted to start a business kinda like all these classical goals and like some people for whatever like can't do the thing they're like not motivator whatever the reason is for a long time you weren't able to get in shape i know you say like i've hired a coach and i like built this system do you think it would have been possible i wanna wanna hear about how you would've done it without that stuff or if it was just not gonna happen so i was that exactly that person that was like shooting all over myself as we say i should get in shape i should work out i should go to the gym today i should eat better i should not take this tenth nacho like whatever and i had tried to get in shape i had half tried five times which results in zero times of actually getting in shape and so you know i'd say there's really like two kind of core things to get done this is my tony robbins like preaching coming through here we don't get our should we get our must and so when it becomes a must for you it happens when it get becomes a must for you you make things move the right direction that they need to in order to just come through and so for me it became a must because it really just elevated to that level of importance to me where i i said i put it as my number one goal for the year so you could see a friend made this for me but he sent this little is cool well i've talked about ramon on the podcast before saying he's a great guy and he's an amazing friend he texted me like hey what are your goals for twenty twenty one and he made them into this like little printed them out got him in on a little plaque thing and it there's like sean's twenty one one goals and the number one thing you see there is get fit through habits and i made it number one and i committed publicly that i was doing this so there's no backing out you know there's all kinds of little mechanics but really all the how comes after the why is big enough so my why got big enough where i was like no no more and i made a commitment to myself that i was gonna do that and that this was the time the must for me was like look if it doesn't happen this time when i have all the resources i'm literally sheltered in place at home and like you know i i've said it so many times if this isn't the time then i'm just not that guy i refused to accept that like i am that guy i am that guy who decides something and then doesn't and so it became a conflict of ego with myself and so it i had to be like i had to do it so that was a must and then i started saying okay cool now i'm gonna stack the odds in my favor to make it happen so that's when i was like okay cool well what do i need it to i to be easy so right why i make it hard so then i was like cool i'm gonna do it at home not have to go to the gym let's take that out food cool i'm gonna like meal i'm gonna get meal prep service so that i don't have to decide to eat healthy each meal each meal is not a decision no each meal is already in the fridge meal prepped boom like that that got done then i made it fun because i was if it's not fun i'm not gonna stick with it so hired to trainer i liked who's cool to hang out with that you know makes the exercise fun and i found food that i actually like that's healthy and i put no pressure on myself i said it doesn't matter if this takes me three months six months twelve months twenty five months thirty six months i don't care how long this takes me i took thirty two years to get fat if it takes me three years to get skinny that's alright it's okay with me and so that reduction of pressure took a lot of the stress away also of doing it and made it more enjoyable for me to do to make it happen so those were some of the things that like changed for me that shift i think it's important to note that you the order that you did those because the second was like the infrastructure whatever the first was like no i'm just gonna going to do this and i found for myself to too i lost twenty five pounds last year and it was kind of like the same thing where it's like now this is just this is a has to happen and i think i think people will underestimate just having will how much having will can make things happen you don't get your you're what you want you get your must and that's like the the biggest thing and so once it becomes an actual must the world will start to move my method is irrelevant whether you can afford a trainer or not and you can you have time to meal prep or not those don't really matter in the end because the person who for whom it becomes a must they will figure out the way to do it right they with no you know guys in jail with no equipment can just do push ups all day and then eat sloppy and get you know ripped and so there's really no excuse i also heard a funny thing which is my friend said this totally politically incorrect but i'm gonna say it because i think it's funny and i struck a chord with me it's not okay to be rich in fat he goes he he goes he goes if you're poor look getting in shape is probably like you know maybe not the most important thing for you maybe you don't have access to healthy food maybe you don't have time maybe you're working multiple job but if you're rich no excuse bro and and i just thought it's like it went against what i normally see which is that usually the richer you get the you know the chu you get and i thought that's so true there's no excuse your excuses are gone if you're rich to be fat so that in that case if you have no excuse then you can't do it you can't be rich and fat and i adopted that and i can't say his name anymore he'll get canceled alright i'm okay i'm gonna keep saying things so nobody can cancel me because there's just too many i'm going the trump route say everything and you've eventually become immune you know it's like person with a great immune system you know after living in the swamps let's talk about you growing your audience so this is clearly a goal that you have made and you've played around with like the i think you've called it like the the what red pill are you like what is the thing that people know you for i think in your twitter by right now it says the idea guy which just to me it's funny because people like always shit on the idea guy yeah so how do you think about growing your audience so also became a must for me i was like i gotta do this and so in the last it's been crazy dude in the last sixty days i think i went from i don't know thirty thousand twitter followers to ninety five thousand twitter followers and it's just from like a concerted effort to do it and so that part's working i would say i still haven't found my red pill i am actively searching for it i'm trying out different things so for people who don't know the red pill framework was this guy andrew finn who is one of the guys behind weight but why one of my favorite blogs i think he lives to the podcast i don't followed on twitter at ibm i was like dude i'm a big fan would love to you know hang sometime time and we we talked one time and i asked him you know what's the what's the trick with content and i just asked all kinds of random questions like this but i said what's the thing about content that people just don't get for now one of these questions triggered him to say this he goes you know that moment in the matrix where morph reaches out he's got the blue pill in one hand he's got the red pill in the other and he's asking neil like you know do you want the truth or do you wanna just keep living in sort of your fairy tale fake life if you want the truth you can see how far the rabbit goes it goes you know that's the red pill like handing him the red pill was basically handing him the truth he goes for your content for your if you wanna build a follow you gonna build a big blog or twitter or podcast or whatever you gotta have your red pill what are you handing society that they're not hearing everywhere else what's the truth that you know that you've uncovered it's just like comedian comedian do the same a funny joke is just a truth well told i think that's the same thing for people who wanna build an audience you gotta figure out what is your red pill i'm trying a couple one is ideas so this podcast is about brainstorming ideas and i think it goes a little bit deeper which is that like look i good ideas are everywhere ideas are plentiful and look the execution is not that hard it can be done fast just take massive action and so i tell stories about ideas and how i would do them or how somebody else did them and how you know it's not that hard it's not that's it's not that complicated it's so simple go do it but i feel like i haven't found that red pill like i'll give you some examples i look at a guy like pump pump built a really big audience in the bitcoin space because his red pill he he hits his wagon do was that bitcoin is the way he did this in twenty seventeen and he said gonna be the loudest bitcoin bull i'm gonna say that bitcoin is gonna change everything and i'm gonna keep telling people i how bit cannons is changing everything that was the red pill he was given everybody there's a bunch of different people who have different versions of the red pill and i'm still searching for mine i would recommend people listening so i the all access pass was awesome but it was paid and now you basically made it free in the current newsletter so just a pump for sean murray dot com yeah i'm trying to get the newsletter to a hundred k also it has also doubled in size in the last month so sean p dot com if you're at this point of minute fifty five in the podcast or whatever and you are not subscribed to my newsletter that is a direct slap the face to me and to yourself don't do that to both of us you deserve to get this newsletter for free what a pitch what a pitch okay you talk about this like concerted effort to grow and i see you have a lot of viral tweets you have like these viral threads like are you drafting these and testing ideas are you trying things with friends or are you just like pumping the first thing that comes in mind and see what happens with it i have a method to like try to get good at something which is the former little mastermind of other people who are in the same boat trying to get good at things so we have a text thread i think i've mentioned this once before but we have a text thread called the hundred k club and it was a bunch of us that wanted to get to a hundred thousand followers at the time i had thirty now the biggest guy had sixty and this was a month ago and since then two people have crossed the hundred k mark i'm about to at ninety four point four as we tape this and the you know the others are gonna get there too so one thing i've did this when i trying to get good to poker same thing go move into a house with a bunch of other people that have the same dream as you and every day when you eat sleep and breathe you guys are all chasing this dream and you'll be sharing tactics and tips and you'll be inspired by each other's successes and when you fail the other people will pick you back up that's the best way to win at something so i'm doing that with the content side so they basically shared some tips and tactics how to optimize your your profile page so when somebody checks you out after your tweet that they actually click follow when should you tweet out should you re tweet compliments of yours should you not you know should you at the end of your tweets trigger thirty feels awkward but if you put in the call to action that says hey if you like this kind of stuff follow me and boom your you know your followers are gonna spike just by doing that kind of awkward step so that's really helped me do that plus the consistency you know when i see somebody else's tweet go viral i'm like fuck why isn't that me and then i go to you know i go that night and instead of watching you know that thirty minutes of tv or forty five minutes at tv i write out some content and that's what's worked for me that's awesome yeah it's one of the things i've tried to do is i don't know if you've heard of read wise i've heard it yeah one of things it does i'll let you save twitter threads and they have a leader board of who has the most saved threads and so trying to march up that is like a sign of not just quantity but like quality like how much people you actually like the things you're making i hate those things by the way every time i tweet something everybody the first comments are always like at read wise at thread yeah or it's like dude what is his spam like what was it so hard just to read this like why do you need this like compile this for me it doesn't twitter do that what is the appeal of this i don't understand i love it like these are the people that like most interested in your content and you're like what the hell are you doing save in my words i don't even understand it why are they doing that why don't they just read the thing because i wanna reference it so they wanna like save bookmark they can sort them do a document that they can save in in yeah to bookmark exactly oh wow okay yeah i'm not saying that's smart things you you don't need to save all the shit i just hit to reach me button and move on that's all i ask so at least i don't think you talk about this much on the podcast from what i've heard but it's obvious that one of the things you're really good at and you told a couple of stories about this is persuading people to kind of get behind whatever your vision or your idea is you told some story about you had dinner with this random guy who also had a bunch of charisma you like yeah how do you how do you deal with your superpower you know you have an idea you i think you wanna do how do you think about rallying the troops to kind of kinda get people behind you and into a thing oh i think it's super important first of right so i place importance on it a lot of people think it's nice to have for me i'm like well that's what i do that's important like i've i've seen so much value come from it i treat it like it's work you know it feels like i play but i treat it with some importance is what i mean i don't just like i hope it happens or like get to it when i get it i'm no let me actively try to do this yeah i think people respond best of stories and that's why i talk about storytelling a lot that's why i told that story of that guy billy that you remembered right like this guy met a sushi restaurant and he was so charismatic and then i asked him like dude you have this power of frustration i'm like me by you guys awkward it sounds like we just had a date and that was a great date you know you just took me out the sushi and and and wind to dine me that was awesome how do you deal with this and he he told me in that moment he goes is if your intentions are good they'd used all you got right and so same thing i don't feel awkward or manipulative some people feel sales if they're trying to persuade somebody of something or get somebody behind something i don't think that i just have a really tight filter at the beginning i don't i try not to do shit that's bad that'll be bad for you or stupid or a bad investment or a bad product i try to just deal with good things that i genuinely believe it and then i carry zero guilt about sharing those with the world in fact i feel the opposite i feel like i'm giving a gift out whenever i i talk about it when i talk about it i try to talk about it through stories because i think that's what sticks in people's heads and i think that's what gets people interested in hearing what you have to say and so then i started to think about what makes a good story and started to practice doing that and anytime i hear a good story i sort of try to think about what made that such an interesting story oh wow they you know like one thing that makes a good story is stakes stakes meaning like what was on the line for the person who was telling the story so it's one thing to say when i really wanted this to happen but i'm you know i'm already happy and i'm reaching it's all good and and if it didn't happen it's all good well that story has no stakes and so it's not gonna stick with people but when somebody says you know i was down to my last dollar and you know if i didn't do this you know whatever was gonna bad things were gonna happen to me and i pushed my chips all in and boom here here's what happened from it now people are invested because stakes matter so there's just a whole bunch of different mechanics that make for a good story so i try to study those and i actually think i'm just like no we're i'm a white belt at this game of storytelling but at least i show up to the dojo most people aren't even don't even consider it an art so they don't practice it so when you say using storytelling to you know rally the troops like let's say i don't know you're recruiting someone for a new project whatever it is you find like a compelling story about what you're doing to get them invested or how do you how does that work yeah like give me an example of some time where you wish you had the superpower and if i've let me let's see if i've had an experience like that i mean i kinda of using an example of like recruiting somebody let me think about okay so like a project let's say as a hypothetical example at lambda i had a hypothesis that we should make it more difficult to get in not more difficult but have a higher bar so that the quality of people in are better so that we're more likely to get paid how do you persuade people that that's a thing that you know you have to get legal you have to get all these people to buy in how do you do that you gotta know your audience so if your audience is legal sometimes people are not yeah they have to first be open and sometimes they're not open because they are their job literally that was just one example though there i mean there's of core is first you gotta know your audience where is your audience at is your audience in a defensive position because they're so used to being defensive about things where they feel attacked in which case you're not gonna persuade them until you get them to put their defenses down right like if you're a boxer and you're trying to hit somebody it's not about just keep throwing punches it's in fact sometimes you make yourself available so that they stop playing defense as they go on office offense and now they become open and so first is like where's is your audience at are they familiar with the topic are they down in the dumps and they needed this inspiration are they defensive because they feel like they're being attacked so you gotta come of know where your audience is at first because that will change your strategy on how you're gonna approach this and then you sort of take out the the right story right so if somebody needs inspiration on how something can go i think personal stories do better than abstract stories you know if i had to pick let's say we were gonna do some project i wouldn't say you know when napoleon wanted to like you know invade wherever he you you know had this decision to make it that's our decision today you know we're making should we do extra why that's okay history is okay but it's not as good as a personal story even better it's a story about the about the listener that's like you know now you're really cooking with gas if you can really tell a story about them i'll you a story and the recruiting side there were somebody i really wanted to recruit and i knew that there were weighing other options and their other options were higher paying jobs at more reputable companies with a more senior job title so like i kinda had everything stacked against me and so first i tried to figure out where my audience at and i saw that they were you know somewhat conflicted and they were a little bit unsure and really what was happening was that they were feeling down because their last startup had failed they were feeling just like a little bit bummed out about themselves a little bit low self esteem and so the story i told was really about i told a personal story about why i joined the company what had motivated me and i told a story that tracked very similarly to where they were at right i was down in the dumps because i had failed before i'm at this guy i was sort of hesitant because shouldn't i go with this more sure thing but something told me i need to go with i need to make a bet here and here's how it all worked out for me and has this happy ending and in you i see you having these two paths here's what could happen you know you go down this story and here's how this plays out or i think it could go this way and just as a friend and i'm rooting for you to go down pat b right because i think that's gonna be the more exciting version that's gonna be the story you wanna tell your kids that's the store you wanna be telling on stage three years from now when you're at the growth conference and you're talking about how you led this initiative or how you made this happen and so i think it's about figuring out who's your audience what's motivating them right now telling personal stories either about yourself or about them and ideally like tapping into like you know whatever is most inspiring or or desirable to them how do you get someone who knows know what this person you're not like negotiating against each other but you know he knows that you have an interest in him joining how do you get that person to like open up about what they are actually thinking and what their kind of vulnerabilities are you just be honest you just be honest and you ask so if you first say look obviously it's in my best interest if you pick us i'm excited about having you here i'm excited about this like i think you're gonna kick ass and you know selfish like that's the best outcome for me but look i wouldn't pick what's selfish like honestly you know you being here is like just part of my world but for you if you pick this that's all of your world let's put me second in a let's put you first right so i'll say something like that because i genuinely think that's true like they should just make the best for them and i'll be honest hey i have a conflict of interest i want you to pick this so do you should know that going in you decide if what i'm saying speak to you or it doesn't right because i can just tell you my side of the story and if that resonates it's because it's true for you and then the second thing would be like what was the second part of your question or is that how do you out it was hey how do you get them to be open about what their vulnerable about what they're afraid yeah then you just add here you're just like look i think there's a lot here that makes sense but you're still undecided what's causing the hesitation in your head what when you go home and you can't decide why are you torn and they usually just tell you why they're torn yeah that makes i mean basically what i'm hearing is get them to trust you that you have their interest at heart to and then to literally just ask them right and if you don't ever they're interested heart it doesn't actually work in the end so there's a self fulfilling sort of cycle here where you genuinely have to have their best interest at heart or you get screwed in the end okay totally different question you have your fund i'm sure you see a ton of different deals and ideas what is something that you would love to invest in today so i did three deals today you did three deals today they all kinda got confirmed today they've they've been in the works but they all you know sort of got agreed to and you do like how many a month like how is that a is that a lot or a little sounds like a lot that's a lot that yeah that's not our normal day for sure we do like i don't know six deals a quarter or seven deals a quarter oh wow something something like that so you know basically two a month roughly you know what i want to be invested in right now is i'd love to be invested in coinbase and stripe like late stage companies i think those are like largely der risked but still not public and so you know if i could put a million dollars in there today i think i get two and a half million out in a short amount of time so i think those are like attractive for that reason whatever those numbers are made up there's a high degree of high likelihood that they go public soon you know in the next two years let's say and that when they do they're gonna be highly sought after stock and it's gonna go up from where it is right now so i think those are kinda like no brainer a hard part there is just access i invested in a company just now let's see which one can talk about so one i just invested in called gold cast these guys basically made it so that it's easy to do digital conferences you know you can use zoom but you know if you're trying to replicate the value of a conference a conference has like multiple stages maybe where you're speaking on and and as a you know it has like first an event page where you're like oh here's the schedule of today's talks and then like you click the button and you go to that person's like conference from the room and then when you ask a question they made it where you can just like pull the question up on the screen and it's big and large and everybody could see the question and you can talk to it and then it kinda like you throw the question away and then the next one can go up and then after the fact they let you export all the attendees of the event and you can export those into salesforce and let's let's now those are you know potential leads for our business or whatever it is they just did a really smart job of saying hey if you're a marketer throwing events for your company we are the best way to do that and it turns out there's just a lot of that that exists in the world they're kind of a competitor to hop in which was sort of got got a lot of press because you know within like a year they got like a billion dollar valuation or something that's because it's just a big space and it's gonna continue on post covid i believe so that's one what i'm excited about there's a company called joe coffee that i think it's really cool that it is invested in what they did was you know starbucks if you just look at like starbucks versus the independent coffee chains right the mom and pops and so starbucks on one hand has all this money to invest in technology so the starbucks app is like amazing you can order ahead you can find a nearby store you can pay without taking out your credit card just through the app you can save your favorites you get stars every time you go by so you're like incentivized to keep coming back so starbucks has this like app that's like this amazing experience and then joe coffee basically was like oh actually let's just give that same superpower to every mom and pop coffee shop that exists and so now if you're a mom pop coffee shop you could say hey download the joe app we're on there and then hey we'll save your orders you could pay ahead you could pick up mobile order like all those good things and they're kinda kicking ass they have like you know i don't i don't know how much i could say but they have like you know over a thousand coffee shops on board using them those coffee shops are seeing an uptick in sales when you know when somebody has the app they'll actually buy a little bit more because you can kind of quickly upsell things and they'll come back more because they're getting loyalty rewards and points every time they come back to you and you know their favorite order is saved it's super convenient they don't have to like wait in line and so i just think there's a really cool business that falls into this general category called you know it's the shopify model shopify i had this great quote which is you know amazon is the empire and shopify trying to arm the rebels well joe coffee is doing the same thing starbucks is the empire and they're trying to arm the rebels with the tools and they need to be able to compete in the modern day world is that joe dot coffee or joe other like a bunch of joe coffees joe coffee company dot com i think it's joe dot coffee i think it might be yeah joe dot coffee music okay cool and so okay you were one of the first people to do a fund which was rolling funding excuse me rolling fund thank you when your audience was much so at least your twitter audience was much smaller i assume if your silicon valley audience was relatively the same size it is today so why were you able to do that and like what makes you what gives you act us to the companies and the deals that you see today like if someone's like hey i wanna be sean in five years how do they do that i was a podcast listener and i felt when i listened to bill simmons or jason cal tested or different people i've been listening to a bunch of their you're you know a couple years of i've listening to their podcast i felt like i know this guy i like this guy i trust this guy you know like i felt that and i was like man it's really powerful i know podcasts aren't super popular maybe newsletters more popular maybe blogs twitter whatever else but i just felt like if i'm in your ears for forty five minutes a day you're gonna make a decision you're gonna say guy's are annoying i don't like them stupid and you're gonna churn out fair decision by you or if you stick around just like deep trust is gonna a form and i just said you know i told my friend i said hey i said i don't know why i wanna do this it's not a great like not sounds a great use some time for like money you know like i i can do more with business but i just feel like there's a lot of value in just being in people's your balls every day and he's like what do you mean i i just think if you wake up and you're putting me in your ears on your way to work i'm probably more influential to you than you know like ninety nine percent of the people that you work with your friends so people you don't hear from all the time because i'm just know in your ears all the time right and so and so i just thought that was valuable so why did the fund work the fund work because i did the podcast for a year whoever was listening at that point was like cool i like this guy i trust this guy i think this guy gonna do well with his investments if i can give him the money he does all the work great that's a great way for me to c invest into a bunch of cool startups so that's why i was able to raise the fund without tapping to anybody i knew in real life is that how you get access to deals to you think people know you from the podcast it sounds like you had a pretty decent network before the podcast yeah the deals i don't want to come from the podcast to be honest the deals mostly i want to come from my network in the world in silicon valley and whatnot because i think that's where the higher quality deals are than just like general inbound but it does help me get in because i say hey you know when i shout out joe coffee or gold cast you know like i bet you there's somebody out there right now working at a company and who's got like an event they wanna host for a bunch of potential customers or like an a meetup or you know conference that they wanna that they host every year and now with covid it's all thrown out the window they're gonna go and get customers from this because it's a genuinely good product and i brought it to limelight so it does help me get in because when it's a good deal getting in is the hard part it's i've said this before but you know startups are a unique asset it's not like a stock you if you wanna get in you just buy it and it's yours for startups you have to pitch why you know i pick you but you have to pick me too and so the investors need that's why you see so many investors try to build their brand on club house in twitter and whatever else because they want to be known so that not only do they get inbound deal flow but that when they wanna get in a deal those founders feel like they they know them and they want them to be a part of the company is it harder and more valuable to raise the fund or to be able to get into the deals or is that like the same thing for most people it's hard to raise the money right because where the hell else are you're gonna get all the money to invest for me i probably have just hit up people with my network and say hey i know i mentioned starting your fun and that was the good news of being san francisco for a while was i'd met enough wealthy people who i'd done business with they had seen me and so they would have invested could've so for me i probably could have got the money elsewhere so for me access is probably more important but for the average person i think that raising the money would be the hard part alright when you a couple more how are you feeling we can cut it off whenever you wanna cut it off i i have ten minutes but if you're like i don't really genuinely have any four questions that's also cool i got wild questions like why bitcoin and not ethereum well the answer is actually both right i've been i bought both i'm i'm like oh you did yeah yeah i'm i'm like eighty twenty split of bitcoin in ethereum kind of always have been i just talk about bitcoin more because i think the important thing right now is for people to just to understand a simple idea which is that bitcoin is like digital gold it is an amazing way to store wealth your cash is being diluted and inflated away because bitcoin is this generation gold and it's gonna sort of change the world in that sense i like to just talk about that ethereum is a much more complicated concept i'm a believer in it but i believe in bitcoin more and i think just for publicly talking about it i think that talking about bitcoin is just easier for people to understand and get their toes in the world of crypto and then once they taste bitcoin so like oh what else you got and i'm like hey here's an ethereum alright what's call it there cool trevor this been fun thank you for coming on thank you for bringing energy and ideas and we'll see if people like steps said where should they find you follow you and and all that good stuff check out my website trevor mc kendrick dot com have a weekly free newsletter it's got great stuff for you to read and then you can call me on twitter at trevor mc kendrick alright trevor it's good stuff thanks man see you i really appreciate this have a good one bye bye