#84 with Noah Kagan - How the Founder of AppSumo Walked Away From $100m

no what's going on sam in meetings all day and i'm heading out to california in four hours so i was just i haven't been on this podcast in a minute because i was in austin i drove from california to austin i hung out with noah neville and a bunch of people and now noah is coming to malibu or i'm kinda s for a month and i'm gonna go to malibu for a month where are you staying in san francisco andrew chen house help that's right you told me i i've decided that i'm gonna give rid of my apartment in san ago and i'm gonna live in different cities for one or two months each we're copying each other sam you you went bald so i went bald you're i'm moving places so you're moving places i need to get glasses a dog be well yeah you need you need a few things i need a few things you're funny we we know each other well but can you tell the listeners who you are what does is up you sexy listeners noah i'm a cyclist i'm a chess player lately i'm making a lot of content on youtube about everything i'm learning at app sum dot com that's youtube dot com slash okay work i helped start sum dot com which is the number one site online for software deals and eight for your company been around ten years i was number thirty at facebook number four at mint dot com and then the two other things that i like working on and and playing with business wise at send fox dot com which is a free email list for content creators and okay do com which is my side about overcoming fear starting and marketing startups and noah and i have known each other for six or seven years oh a while now we're you're well i think your five or six years lit we're we're very similar personalities were a little crazy we have a a bunch of different ideas would you say is accurate yeah i didn't like you for a long time why so sometimes you'll hang out with sam if you guys have hung out or had the chance you hang out with sam was like how much money are you making doing this one thing and it's like it's like someone ask like how big is your penis you're like dude i don't know you and you're asking a really personal kind of aggressive it's almost it's it's like to the level of transactional that's just a little too much versus what you'd expect from a friend and i think sometimes it's interesting to observe the people or companies that we're jealous or the companies we're reacting negatively negatively to and really trying to understand that and our first experience i think if i recall you wanted me to come to speak at the hustle cops no i i wanted you it was yeah wanted you to speak at an event and i i you asked me to write a blog post for you and i wrote this blog post and then you didn't publish it and i was like what the fuck there was just weird vibes i getting from you and so it didn't make me excited to wanna do anything and then you sent me like a nut or some kind of item and i was just like this guy weird me out i don't like how he's behaving and so over the years though i started to appreciate your and it's probably like me i'm sure some people listen to me but like i don't like the style i think the point for everyone is not to just go and accept everyone and love everything but to observe our jealousy observe our negativity observe our criticism and think about what we're trying to really say about ourselves or learn about ourselves i think one thing i would say about you sam that i've appreciated is that it's interesting to observe the people in life who get what they want because those people you don't see all the things they're not getting and i really respect with sam how per you are and i think there's a lot of times where i'm like oh yeah this guy is gonna there's so many people i'm like they're gonna quit soon and i definitely you know the hustle wouldn't be anything without effort and i think without you just kept going and won't stop and i think more people have to people like i don't have that i'm not sam power i'm not no okay i'm it's like yeah you're yourself which is even better and it's just finding the things that you'd never want to give up on so find your hustle find your apps sumo find your okay do dot com and just find something you'll never quit on and then go it and that's one thing i i definitely appreciate watching your journey from afar you said you didn't like me or i you i rubbed you the wrong way were you saying that be and then you said jealous you're saying because you think i was jealous of you or are you jealous of me no i think at that time i just found you kind of i was uncertain of your motive i it's been in like six years so i'm not just exactly sure i don't i think everyone's favorite stories themselves so if you ever wanna talk to someone to be like hey you know what i noticed about you and they're like what but i think feedback is a whole another thing when we talk about that i think i just had a weird vibe and i didn't know what your intentions were and i think what was interesting is like other friends of ours were like yeah he is a good dude and he is but i like i guess i'm missing something so let's we're gonna talk about business in a second and i think this is kind of an interesting conversation because but i think that what has brought us to be friends is our mutual friend neville maduro who's is both of ours best friend he was the best man in my wedding and you have a well you have a brother but he probably had it not been for your brother he probably would be in that category for you as well and so it's interesting how like like you could we both see how we're loyal to one person in that brings like good qualities out of each other i think neville said i'm is number one i don't know if you talked it recently well we can fight over that what he says in bed to both of us he's was like no i never said he said i was never one but i you know we we both are we're both loyal to similar people so let's talk about let's talk about different interesting companies and businesses that we're both looking at because we're you and i are the same and that we're both like pretty big scheme and not that we do shit all the time but we both like like like to figure out how things work what are you looking at like you're really interested in the in the email space with send i'm interested in that as well what what interested you about email like why are you like because apps absolute pretty successful you don't have to start new shit if you didn't want to why are you choosing send fox i think choosing one of my favorite books around the words that you use is the dolly llama are to happiness and i love that you were choose right because i don't have to do anything i want to do things i don't need to do stuff i want stuff and i think it's interesting for all of us to be aware of that nam must everyone i think what in my life i think one of the things that drives me is curiosity and i think in terms of business like if people out there you know listen to this and say hey i wanna get my business started the best business to start is something that solves your own problem and so for me i was using mailchimp i've used convertkit i've checked out a whatever check one i found them way over expensive i found him way over complicated took me like forty five minutes to set up a mailchimp email and so i was like i just want something more affordable and simpler and that's why we build zen fox and i i think that's something where i i'll keep working on it forever with the team i think what's interesting is trying to think about what's gonna happen in the next six months to six years and then how do i be a little bit ahead of everyone else so if you think about it let me ask you sam do you think there's gonna be more or less content creators in the future absolutely more so i think you know the the one problem that i noticed with all the channels like youtube or instagram or tiktok or any of these is that ultimately they are incentivized to get you to pay to talk to your audience why because they have to make money and so email is the only channel i've ever found that can scale communicating with an audience that you can fully control and so i think if send becomes the number one place for people to grow their audiences one i i want it for myself number one and two is just a really big and interesting opportunity to work on so we send how many emails do i send a year maybe six or seven hundred million i don't even know to be honest how well apps probably has a similar amount of emails like hundreds of millions of cents per year i pay i think i pay ten or fifteen grand a month to send those is it does that sound right i don't really know i think what there's two things that are more interesting to me one i've been focusing more on the total audience that you have available because email isn't is a component of your audience right so you actually have like hustle facebook hustle instagram hustle youtube hustle podcast and your total active audience and there's overlap that number i'm actually more fascinated with and the second thing with email i think the metric cost is one thing but i think the that you said send you said send fox was trying to make it cheaper because you're because you're afford i like the word affordable yeah more affordable how much is that to cost a send i'll tell you if you take point zero zero zero two and then times that i how many emails so the thing that mailchimp and convertkit and all these guys so point zero zero zero two times your number so they make money if you don't send emails because they make money off your subscriber of course and so yeah the way that's so send is free and then we're a one time payment because most people don't actually email and so we're trying to fix that and work through those kind of challenges of people but the other thing i think people when need to think about in in terms of growing their community or starting in a news like if you don't have one start today you send fox dot com number one but the second thing is the number that's the most important is not your email list size it is your active email list size so it is the amount of people within three months that have opened and clicked your email because you know i've had hundreds of thousands for i think in my total lifetime of okay door i've had a hundred and seventy five thousand subscribe to the newsletter my active audience is only fifty five think about that and that's what we do too but we churn people every three months like we sunset set them like when we send them an email and be hey you're gonna get we're gonna take you off this list what percentage is it i don't know off the top of my head to be honest with you but i know that like one could tell you this so so like our open rates really really high right now it's like fifty five percent and i think the average person stays two years so you could somehow figure out what that is yeah but but like like if we don't get them on the hook right away then they're never gonna get on the hook how do you get on hook your welcome email needs to be really good your thank you page after they sign up needs to be really good you know this shit this is what you do it's good to here's the thing i'm still learning even your unsubscribe page needs to be great which you didn't you have a really good unsubscribe page but i i gave up on that one i think the thank you page and your welcome thing or like the two of the most neglected pieces of marketing yeah i call them like you have to make the the forgotten parts really good so like your thank page your welcome email your unsubscribe page just like little easter egg shit like that that needs to be good what do you recommend for those to make them good yeah well our so i get accused of stealing cd baby's email welcome email which i didn't even know what that was but then when i saw it i realized oh yeah i i totally understand why people see think i stole that but my welcome email was like a really detailed welcome email that it was like really long and explained what happened when you signed up and it was pretty funny and like if you google like the hustle welcome a lot of people wrote about it people seem to like that so just like being creative and writing long form content about what happened after those types of things when those people signed up it it works pretty well but with with so let's say like convertkit let's say convertkit is doing twenty million dollars a year in sales which convertkit awesome because i like the guy who started it i like convertkit and they reveal all their revenue numbers if they're doing twenty million in revenue like you said that you trying to make send fox more affordable i have no idea how much did they actually charge thing to or how much are they what's their cogs in order to send all those emails point zero zero two it's it might be point zero zero zero one five times how many subscribe how many emails are sending a month the profit is all in the people who don't email it's basically i think of email marketing companies is very expensive hosting you're basically paying a lot of money to host zeros and one's and digits that don't cost anything and so i i think more importantly if people are trying to start businesses like that's a really interesting business to start but also interesting business to disrupt like i think subs is done amazing with it coming at it from like hey email is actually free and we're gonna make money on the subscription part so you don't have to pay for email anymore same with send it's like it's mostly free and we're gonna be focusing we're focusing more on like youtubers and podcast so it's like who are the audiences that aren't really emailing enough or don't know how to email for the specific type of audience i think a market for that is musician spans i think there's a few like if you look at the money where musicians bake it's in concerts and they're horrible at notifying you when they're coming to town you have to serve a customer that i think you have an understanding of i think a lot of these entrepreneurs out there i'm like oh yeah let me go help musicians i'm like one i don't know shit about musicians i'm learning the to pay piano it's right here but the point is like i think we we it's not that you shouldn't go outside of your comfort zone i just think that there's easier ways of success and i think more too many people make it too hard of themselves and it's just like go into your own problems or go into problems of people around you that you have easier access to what about have you been looking into amp for email yeah some of this stuff i mean i also you know there's also talk about hey email is dying and all this stuff i'm like i don't know people are showing lifting and right i've seen an amp where it's like a little bit more of dynamic and faster loading email i think the most important thing about email is not necessarily the layouts and all that stuff i think the most important thing is how do you build a relationship where people are expecting your email we're like if i stopped emailing or the hustle didn't come they're like something wrong with my day and until you get to that point you're you're probably wearing about the wrong problems yeah i mean that's the hard part obviously that's like how do you create just i mean that's just about creating good shit but i still think the whole amp is actually super interesting what what i'm working on is a few ways to hack it because i'm i kinda am obsessed with like storytelling and email and so what can you like if you think about what is a gif to me a gif is a movable image that has no sound well so is most of the video that you use on instagram on facebook it's just audio or it's just video with no sound like because a lot of times you don't even click and so what i'm interested is how can i use amp to tell a story in an email in a video format or like all these other hacks like that that's incredibly interesting to me i think there something there with that the thing that we've been doing with send that we've been building in is there's kinda like two major components that i think are lacking in email so number one is how do you build in like what the hustle and morning brew have which is build in referrals so we've basically built that in so anyone can have their own referral engine with emails by the way that was a that that was a huge pain in the ass for no so we've built it and it works and i'm doing it on okay so if you go to send fox dot com slash noah you can see how it looks or sign up for yourself and it's built in for free i think the second thing that we're we're observing so what everyone wants is like how do i grow my audience and how i send consistent emails because if you're not sending something weekly you get forgotten and in this age of attention we're all fighting for it and so we built this thing called weekly newsletter template or we i think they're are called branding its smart campaigns and so the idea there is that we suck in all of your social information and we look at what's most popular and then we basically just like we recommend like hey here's the three things that you should email your audience this week so that's what i do every wednesday i just pull my two of my favorite things in one of someone else's to try to spread joy and love and build relationships with people i don't know yet how many people are working on zen fox i think there's two developers one designer david is the gm maybe like six so hey you did you you see hey long obviously you saw that so for those who don't know hey dot com it's a new email service it's pretty neat i don't know if it's gonna be big but i definitely i think it's cool that they are trying that i think i i think it actually will be big but that's irrelevant what that company did it started by thirty seven signals they have a team of like fifty people and they make money through base camp i think right that's the main thing yeah and they've used all all they've used all those profits to fund hey which i don't know how many engineers they had on that probably a lot actually it's pretty robust already at my company what i'm trying to do we're taking all our profits and we're launching more stuff how are you figuring out how much of your profit to allocate to these side projects like sen and like these new products so the way that we've approached it recently is a little bit more structured the q the question that we ask is basically two things one can we make our money back within eighteen months got it eighteen months so will we make breakeven even money back took eighteen months and secondly is it at least a seven figure decision so is it at least if it's not a seven figure opportunity we won't do it the reality is the majority of the money is best spent into whatever is making the most money from a capitalist standpoint some of that time stuff is short term versus long term and so with send fox right now the number we made our money back immediately because there's only one developer part time in one jamming and then as it started becoming more profitable it was like alright well let's keep it let's make sure it's a seven figure business and now we're focusing on because we know it's seven figure opportunity we're saying how do we get this to be a you know hundred figure hundred million dollar business whatever whatever yeah but we're more focused right now on building our our our goal there is active audience so i think one thing with company metrics is how do you align your customer success to your company metric success your nor star so for zen right now we're at a million active audience meaning of all of our customers we reach a million active customers through them and so if we can grow that number to three million that's our goal this year then all of our customers is more successful and then we will be subsequently more successful so how long has it been how long have you had people working on it sun fox is about two years i mean what's fascinating about this just as a quick side note sam is that there's a debate internally not debate but there's discussion internally that if we would've spent all the money and time that we built on cent fox and kin ts and haul drop and meat fam and all the things we've done just on apps the main thing would it have been a hundred million dollar business today and and the likelihood is yeah i'm going through the same process i'm like man i got this cash cow and a lot of people listening they also have the same thing where they have these companies but like we're fucking d degenerate and we can't not make shit it's mean well our strength our greatest strengths are generally our greatest weaknesses so our greatest strength for i don't know i won't speak for you my greatest strength is exciting like i go and start something and i'm like really quick and i'm fast my greatest weakness is is like consistency i always thinking of it as like i'm a great igniter but i'm not a great consistent source of fuel and so you have to find that balance of who is your fuel so for me ea is fuel david over at ci fox is fuel and then i can go focus on the exciting part and i think that's where you can find success in life which is what are you fucking amazing at just do that stuff it's hard because we we feel guilty or we feel weak but it is finding the people that can compliment you on those there's those other sides but take another example like like the two my two my favorite examples that everyone knows netflix in amazon netflix is worth two hundred billion dollars from one nine ninety nine a month subscription so amazon on the other hand is worth a trillion and they've got in terms of significant revenue streams for probably like three or four and so i don't think there there's many different ways of eating a reese's peanut butter cup i think you have to kinda figure it out for yourself what style of business so for me with with mine i literally i thought about this this morning my my my ambitions and and enjoyment and fulfillment come from like promoting dope stuff which we do in apps sharing what i'm learning while doing that which is happening on youtube and my podcast no presents a podcast and then three making things that i want for myself which is send fox and i'm like can i just do this to till i die or maybe i'll do this if i can live forever and i think that's what we're all we're all striving for can i ask you the i did a pod recently where i talked about del and hiring like a ceo and general managers can i've learned how to do this through reading a few books i learned how to do this from talking to david h who were friends with i learned how to do it through talking indirectly like learning from you on how to it like i i talk to ea i would talk to you a little bit about it i talk to neville what was your process like for doing that because you have three or four or how many gm you have or whatever you call them i think there's three gm right now so there's hall drop there's apps and then there's send fox david does s and king sumo i think what's actually interesting taking a step back how many ceos do you think there are in amazon ceo title or or or job people who were ceos in their own businesses that are now running divisions of amazon i don't know what you yeah exactly and so the people that wanna start their own businesses is if you can figure out how to align their incentives and their motivation within your business is how you create a trillion dollar business and so you there's a bunch of examples of this by the way there's alibaba rocket internet has done this wonderfully sounds like you're doing it well who also done a well amazon has done it well there's way more where they a a company i'm obsessed with this coke coke family the coke industries they've done this cock i always call it cock but i get corrected and it's coke cares let's call them rich the old white fox no i i don't know if they're fucked but i i i think in terms of delegation i actually think one of my superpower is just like observations of greatness so here's something and it's like who fucking cares about no i think what i would do as a listener and this is what i still do this day i'm almost forwarding and i still do this anytime you notice anything impressive reach out to the person that's it and over your lifetime figure out how the fuck do i get around that guy or girl and i think that will lead you to an easier chances of greatness because it's a lot harder to like go out and try to like date and find people just from the ground up it's much easier if you're like man like you know the people i worked at facebook honestly the best ever literally the best ever so it's like oh shit any of you're i haven't been able to keep around them is we we had it falling out obviously but it's like alright how do i be have more of that so like garrett garrett the lead developer on sandbox he built a wordpress plug and then i bought for like a hundred dollars like six seven years ago and then i said hey can i pay you like twenty five thirty bucks an hour to fix it and he was so impressive and he did it for a year and i told chad my business friend i was like dude this guy is fucking fire and i was like we just need to hire in full time to and let him do whatever he wants and pam whatever everyone wants and pretty much what we've done now he works in send fox and his output is remarkable and so i think with gm and things like that i i'd say ultimately it's like you wanna find the people that blow you away but those people basically want the people who wanna run their own businesses and then two things you wanna give them a a challenging goal and then you wanna give some boundaries and then leave them alone and and that's the simplest and most complicated thing to do can you elaborate on that more because so i've hired a president of my company and it's pretty great because like i get just all the shit i don't wanna do he likes to do so it works out well where i struggle is i still like get into and i get in his way i'm like hey this sucks you need to fix it this way this way this way and this way are you doing that with your people so let me correct you they're not my people the people who you work with yeah i think that's a big difference and i know it might sound like oh well it's no but i think i say employees i never say it's mine is there the technical technicalities of do i own more of the business and others yeah but i think if you want people to be leaders they have to lead and they can't ask for permission to do it you know a lot of times one of my favorite lines that i've been saying in the company lately is people ask me something i'm like who's in charge i say this a lot i probably say this at least once day i'm in charge they're like me i'm like yeah damn right at you don't fucking look at me i don't know and so i think the more that you the way i've been looking at myself lately with the team is where's is my excellence and where can i be the best job of coaching and i hate i hate when i heard that because so when heard that i'm like what does that mean what are they coaching and so let me be specific so with do like i've hired a team of four people to help build out my brand and to help spread the message of overcoming fear and starting businesses and there these these people went through the gauntlet to get the job i'm clear on where they want to go i'm very clear on where they personally want to go and so my job is to help them get what they want and it's kinda like the gym run wrong quote if i can help them get what they want i get what i want and so i think i learned this when i got rejected from microsoft as a job i had an internship and you know when you intern you get the job guaranteed you know what that no most times when you intern you get the job guarantee i was like the one of the few that didn't get it it's like damn i'm an underdog man i'm still fucking fighting but i did learn something in the job interview i never forgotten he's like here's the best way to lead i'm like tell me and best way to coach he's like you give them the football you tell him where the end zone is you say hey here's the boundaries to get to the end zone you wanna score up to you and i think what i've learned really well over the past two years is i don't you don't wanna be a seagull you know the seagull theory no come in so you just we you just chirping adam yeah you come in shit and fly away i was doing a lot of seagull theory for for a few years did did you coin that or is that a thing i mean is that you're at your phrase yeah oh that alright cool well i didn't i don't want to be shitting on people and flying away i think it's like how do you lean in sheryl sam style and step into these challenges and b because i think what i always admire is solution thinking right like am i coming and complaining and am i being more problems or i bring more solution so in turn and anyways in terms of coaching like with ea who's running apps sumo especially lately i feel like more of an adviser in a very effective way and i think it's a really fine line because you don't resentment so ea wants to do this one thing recently and i'm like do i just let him do everything and resent it like oh fuck you man i totally disagree you or do i say no ea do this thing you must do it my fucking weight the noah a k way my dad used to say this in i was little kid my way or the highway i was like dude i am eight years old like i don't know what you want for me and i don't think you could be either way of those i think it needs to be somewhere in the middle where i don't wanna feel resent i don't resentment towards aiming i don't want it to be a dictator because then the the the the worst thing i think you could do is is hiring someone is demo motivate them that is probably like one of the dirtiest things you could ever do to anyone is like demo and i've done that twice to aim and chad and they both said it to me and i i felt really bad about it and i felt really like i i don't want them working for me i don't want them i want them waking up thinking about it and loving it which is what you want from a lot of people in the team and so i think with ea ultimately it's saying like how can i like a lot of times we have goals he has boundaries budgets and then the question i ask is how can i be most helpful and so really kinda coming from that approach because at the end of the day if he's driving the results i don't give a fuck how he plays the game at the end of the day as long as the scores looking good within the boundaries so sean is joining us now go ahead sean i think you have i'm i'm a student at the moment yeah sean i'm gonna say first what's up noah buddy sorry for joining late i've been following your blood for a long time i remember you you wrote a bunch of shit that was like you know i walked away from a hundred million bucks or whatever it was i didn't want why i got fired but yes yeah you know my hundred million dollar mistake or whatever it was but i and have pointed to a bunch of your tools and so i wanna pause for a second say one of the ways i got good at marketing is by stealing your shit and if somebody out there wants to get good at marketing especially content marketing go read the stuff about how you built mint and you know just how you built your own personal brand just go observe the meta of what you were doing look at some of the spreadsheets that you linked out that shit's actually pretty useful and there's like a fine line usually between like i always have this like big skepticism when somebody spends so much of their time telling me how to do something i'm like well how much of that time how much of your time are you actually spending doing that thing are you even are you one of those people who you get rich teaching other people to be rich type of thing and you know the thing i liked about you and and a few others that we we rev vouch for on this podcast is no there's some people who actually have done it they've actually grown shit from scratch to scale several times they felt they probably fallen over and failed a couple times but they just like to talk they like to share and they like the feedback loop of sharing out that knowledge in those experiences and they're legit and so i would say like go back go to the archive i don't i haven't read any of your new stuff but go read the archive of have the og shit because it was really good thanks bro yeah i mean i think one of the things i'm doing recently in terms of marketing i think overall you know when i fill out when i fellow out applications like i was filling i'm signed up for relationship therapy start next week she's like what's my occupation and i was right engineer because that's what i always dreamed of being i'm not i don't think i'm smart enough so i faced it this when i was filling it out i deleted that and i was like marketer marketers always seems like the therapy starts here you wrote engineer you're not an engineer like let's forget your relationship now so anyways i think what i've accepted it's not that i've ever been a marketer i'm just i'm a promoter of of greatness and i'm looking for it and i'm sharing it and i'm exploring it in myself i think the thing that i've done recently that it's a it's marketing one zero one is with my youtube that's that's been like our big focus so i think the two there's a few things in i'll say three things that i think our simplest simplest in some world but number one how a just singular goal facebook did it apps sum dot com has done it and i think with even recently with my do world and helping people overcome fear and in our businesses i'm kinda like having a bunch of goals i'm like here's our tiktok goal here's our instagram goal here's our email list goal here's our organic traffic here's this i'm like what is our most important goal and i was just even pick one for some period of time and so i think i've come to that realization like let's just pick youtube and just be okay with that and i guess what that'll rise all other ships so don't be ignoring a no ignorant of those other ones but just focus on one second thing is that as i was doing a lot of this content recently which has gotten me really fulfilled and it's it feels good feels great it's youtuber okay door dot com mostly youtube mostly in youtube world the second thing that's been most critical and this is really hard because everyone does says they do this or wants to do this but doesn't who who is my audience who is the audience that i really want to be helping and communicate with because on one hand i wanna i wanna connect with like nine figure ceos and ten figure ceos and you know i actually don't think there's a lot of content of how to go from seven to eight or eight to nine and i can share how we do it but that audience is really small and they don't really need as much help and so we've realized like our audience is dudes twenty five to forty that i've tried to start a business that haven't been successful that are afraid of failing and need a little bit of help and so i think the second part in marketing that i've gotten revisiting is who am i really trying to talk to and what are the words so like here's some words that we've even identified that our audience resonates with rat race freedom so i'm like really alright self doubt so those are some of things that i thinking about and the third part that we're we're i think that's applicable for every businesses what is your unique strategy of success like so with that we have two parts one what's our core messages that we're this is our unique like bread and butter that you will know room i was talking about the meat about this and he's like what did them you have so many messages just pick three so i was like alright challenges to overcome fear million dollar weekend and behind the scenes of an for company that's the three that we're gonna do and that's it and then the the second part of wait wait say that again so those three are the three what the so basically let's take a step back so one what's your goal pick one goal number two who is your customer number three what is your core messages that people know you for so for me those are the three that i'm gonna be known for challenges which i always tell people to do the coffee challenge which just take get after for ten percent off when you buy coffee you're gonna be afraid you're gonna learn about yourself and you're gonna grow secondly is behind the scenes of an for company so like how do you like that there's not a lot of people that have that experience and i can do that and the third part is how do you actually get a million dollar business or a hundred dollar you a million dollar business starting a weekend which i've done many many times and i i can share which is unique and then the the last part of this marketing equation that i think i'm exploring and revisiting around all these things is what is my unique strategy or what is my strategy of doing that i think where i've been very successful is i just do a lot of stuff and eventually something works but i think i will be even more successful slowing down being a little more thoughtful with these things and so our unique strategy lately has been do the fast stuff but on lower risk items so basically tweet and instagram and linkedin post fucking everything like throw it at all out there unlimited and then based on what works lot aligning to our core messages that's what we'll go deeper and that's what we'll write a blog post about that's what we'll do an interview about that's what we will do a youtube video about and so it's just having a higher likelihood of home runs interesting i'm curious so so how old are you now you said you're you're almost forty i look and feel thirty you two but i'd say i'm i'm about in physicality in in our society thirty eight not physicality in our whatever traditions i'm thirty eight okay cool you the years i am thirty two and i look and feel thirty eight so you do look thirty april i'm trying to go the other way so and i would love so so if you were twenty one again twenty one no network no name brand you're starting up from scratch and you don't have to go the same pathway you went i'm curious you know if you had the luxury of picking any path now that you know of so many more paths than you probably knew about when you were twenty one what path would you go down honestly i i copy my path which which would be so you're twenty one what do you do i'll tell you exactly what i did i didn't know what the fuck to do so i went and try a bunch of stuff out to figure out what to do i think the only i think one question is what delta would i have chosen and i'll tell you exactly what that was so at twenty one i didn't know i don't even know what a bs was i got i got it from berkeley i was like oh ba science this school i everyone kinda follows a stream right like when you graduate from college which i i think less and less it's becoming important everyone's like get a job go to intel go to wherever and i was like i okay i guess that's what everyone's doing but i've always wanted to start my own company i just didn't know what to do and so i think the two things that i did really well when i had that day job it intel was i use that as my investor and the two things i'd recommend is that i started a lot of businesses so if you're like i don't have any idea two things you can do one go to ci dot com and start a newsletter and send an email once a week for three hundred sixty five day or for fifty two weeks that's number one or number two go on youtube take the ryan holiday challenge and post a video on youtube for thirty days start there the second thing that i did is that i connected with people very aggressively and i asked anyone i knew for anyone that they knew that was really smart that's how i met tim ferris that's how i met warren hoffman dave james hong max left and ram seth i basically put on events i hosted lunches i organized conferences i didn't know anyone but i wanted to bring smart people together so if you don't know any smart people find one smart person and say hey you should meet this smart person and then just go and hang out with both of them guy can girl and guess what you can do it on zoom if you're in remote country or if you don't have any connections i think one of the ones i've really observed lately every person i've hired that's been the most impressive has done two things they've offered something for free to a value that i've wanted and they did it without asking and those who live in the most impressive and guess what now they're hey i wanna meet this person i wanna do this thing i wanna grow here and i'm like that most of them are now working with me and so i think i would have that was something very early on i was very aggressive on meeting people and just trying to build my brand in terms of career i i think the two thing one thing i did very well is i was really great about following my curiosity and things i was really excited about so i really loved facebook and i really loved mint and i was like i'll do whatever it takes to work there i think the only difference i would have chosen is find someone ten to twenty years ahead of me that i think is doing the things i would will like to do in ten to twenty years and be obsessed or aggressive in figuring out how to make them excited to wanna be a part of my life so i had one guy doug hi she was my boss at facebook and it didn't really work out as well for as a mentorship but it's nice because like you can say oh that's how you do a relationship oh that's how you do a career and it'll shortcut it you just have to figure out the real most important things is do you get them to give a fuck about you and the best way to do that is help them with whatever they're working on do you wanna hear something crazy sean i don't know if you know this but i i don't know if noah one knows it but i launched my i created my so my company which is a it's an okay company it's been good for me it started because noah had a blog post about organizing conferences and i was like i what what was it called it was called like how i made how i made ninety k hosting was a conference or something was that it noah mh i made a quarter conferences because i i didn't know was gonna make money doing them yeah so i saw that and i was like well i i had a book club at the time and was like well i've been mean i've been hosting these meetups but i don't make any money from it i should like make money off this thing and so i started my company and i've made millions of dollars personally off conferences because of that blog post and more importantly or maybe not more importantly i've met i met actually all three people on this call and most of my friends and coworkers because that blog post because of that blog post i met neville because of that blog post neville the best man my wedding i met because of that katrina so so what you're describing of what you would do and how basically you described like hosting events and which is similar in a same vein as posting content i did the same thing and it made me millions of dollars and it i it met all of my best friends that way awesome i mean i think the only other thing that i was doing at the time that i think everyone should do so number one build your brand in some way even if you're not trying to be a personal brand i think practicing writing is a skill you can use in sales you can use development you can use in design you can use it almost literally forever i think the connections very valuable but literally probably the reason i'm a multi millionaire is because of being i've been able to meet and help people and connect people connecting and meeting but the third thing was that i was starting a lot of businesses and then i think what's beautiful is if especially earlier in your life your cost of living is so damn low in my cost living is still damn low because i'm i haven't grown up in some ways and i'm maturing in certain ways that it's so low that you should take a lot of risk very early on in trying a lot of things out so i like when i was working at intel i was doing this college consulting i did a thing called ninja card dot com i was putting on these conferences that i charged for and then i was working at mint i started doing the facebook apps like i did all these games and i started making a lot of money and i was working at morning i was working on weekends i was working at lunch i was working at nights i was working i was i kept going and i kept trying a lot of and eventually after probably two and a half three years got o four and three three years later my side hustle finally became my main hustle did any of those like i have we actually have a good friend encore i don't know if you know him sean but me and noah dude who did the same thing about the online he did like the facebook apps and facebook games and when i think of that shit i'm like dude that is just some scam get rich quick shit is that an accurate assessment of what those were and because i i was a little bit i was too young to be doing that shit in two thousand and ten or whenever it became popular right i wasn't interested in the internet was that is that an accurate assessment of what those were i think what's interesting is like how do you become a part i think what's about the facebook games besides whatever people spam or not spam is like how do you be around the tidal waves so i think where i've been very fortunate and lucky is that my career either i'm an ambulance chaser or i'm like a visionary or maybe a little bit of both where like i was in the facebook game world i was in personal finance world i was in social networking world i was in saas world with sumo i was in ecommerce world with you know some of a shopify and lately i'm back in content world and i think what's been the beautiful part about that you know in an app whom i've been in the software world which has been amazing i think the the amazing part about that is that it's opened up a world where my life is more rich not rich being monetary just like rich like fill fulfilling because of all these really cool people i've gotten to connect with like i gotta meet this guy nick n and i'm gonna talk with him on friday about videos and then i've gotta meet this guy javier mercedes who lives in austin who came over and showed me how lighting like okay look let's switch lighting here let's switch that in here and i think what's amazing is try to figure out which category is gonna either be big or which category you're interested in and then how to interject yourself in that conversation so you're like well no i'm not a developer don't have any e commerce products to start guess what start a fucking youtube channel reviewing those products or start a instagram account where each day you just post hey here's my favorite e commerce product day here's why or start a newsletter on sun dot com like hey here's my weekly e commerce product to the week and email that company hey i just promoted you this week of the easiest things that anyone especially early on can do is flatter people jet legitimately don't just bullshit because it's obvious but just flatter hey i love your stuff that's the easy way to open the door and then do what you can to start helping people and so i i think i've been lucky and intentional about what am i curious about and what's becoming more popular and how can i connect with people that are inspiring me i would also say like sam i wouldn't call those that that facebook game era because there's a whole bunch of other friends that we have that started or like kind of caught their first big wave on when facebook platform opened up like the very first episode podcast su that's how he caught his big wave was he made a facebook app called super spur and it was about you know saying which of your friends is most likely to end up in jail or you know stuff goofy stuff like that or you know i know some of the low apps guys listen to this and they were you know they were you know the fastest growing company in the world at the time probably like you know oh my god you know you'd launch a product and get to ten million users in a day and that just breaks your mental model of the world and so i think two things hey you're right that the people who go there were the type of people that sniffed out interesting spaces before they're proven out so if you're that type of person you're gonna end up in a lot of those types of situations the second is you get this crash course on hyper growth and marketing in a way that's like you can't learn like this guy who the guy who sold tb h to facebook recently oh yeah yeah yeah i tweeted this thing out yesterday that was like it was good first time social app founder is like oh we're gonna build a platform for intellectual conversations it's like you know i get twenty three users and five percent retention and then he's like by the fifth year that same founders is like alright let's just have people vote on who's hot and it's like result ten million users forty percent retention it's like you know is very true it's like the only way to really ever get good is by putting yourself out there so when you're saying go start a youtube channel or somebody goes and has to build a facebook app and you see that the apps that grow are the ones that tap into people's core needs like they wanna know about their friends they wanna take quizzes about themselves and learn you know goofy personality quizzes and it's the person on the sidelines who's like oh all that stuff's dumb and what they're missing is that they don't sort of figure out you know at the end of the day you get rewarded for giving people what they want not what you want people to want and then the second thing is that if you really wanna get good at anything you gotta be in like the eye of the storm and these new platforms are these areas where there's is a lot of growth a lot of action happening that's where you sharpen your skills so you you know you might not have ever made money off the facebook games right like got a bunch of users and i money well you might have made money most question is if you i think you need to pick are you trying to make money you trying to learn because i think sometimes when you're younger like i wanna make money off this person it's like well maybe there's a lot more long term dividends by just trying to focus on what you can learn but the the but also wouldn't you say like i've seen this in my life sounds like you were with in the same where it's when you're trying to make money that you're into learning because you're trying to do something hard and you have you learn the hard way like what actually works and what doesn't versus if you just say i wanna learn a lot of people take a very sort of passive or intellectual approach to it now that's different than saying i wanna make money so i take this job at intel that pays me a guaranteed six figures or whatever it is you may not learn the most doing that path because you're not actually challenging yourself in the same way but what i think the two things i would highlight there is that i think there's passion or interest or curiosity and i think there's opportunity and i think i've i've chased opportunities to make money which have been fleeting they've been profitable but fleeting and i think when you're in your twenties you should do those frankly you should just do the things that are like hot and exciting if you think you wanna make money and then in your thirties you start reflecting more like wow mortality is real what's really important and i think you'll come back to finding how do i work on problems and things that i want created for in my own world and for you that's what that's helping people sort of overcome their fears to start businesses is that the or is it one step removed from that no it's exactly that it's like i wanna be on the ground level helping people overcome fears start businesses and and marketing in businesses i i love seeing the underdog sixty i love seeing like this guy ali is a popular youtuber or i love seeing companies like meat fox who got promote an app and now they have a business around it or a phone wagon is a popular one today for doing phone calls and that guy ali he's great he's i think he listens his pocket but he's a a doctor right he's a doctor youtuber or is that yeah i mean he's so impressive he's like you know people like i don't have enough time this guy is a full time professional doctor making three high quality youtube videos every week annie engages in an audience annie put you know it's just very genuine i i really enjoy can you spell his name a l i a b d a a l you know what i think it's interesting is that you have to think about on the reverse that how do you become someone that people want to meet how do you make things or do things that others want to connect with and i think we're like oh i'll just do stuff and hope covid it happens this guy looks amazing i just love the what like i just did a quick google did joke bad dude just dope i love this guy he's just like i found him because he blog like hey here's some cool shit i found this week and our podcast was in it and so i was like okay who's this guy who's giving us a shout and then i checked out his youtube channel and i was like this guy's is amazing well i think that's something that even my that are every week now we have an a section where we prune other people i think the more that you can go in this is one of the things it's like stupid obvious but no one does it's like go help a bunch of other people and there's a good chance that you'll be able to connect and get a lot of things you like the quote i heard yesterday that was like really powerful to me was it was like your rewards in life will be exact proportion to your contribution that's interesting i don't know if it's true though because i feel like i you can definitely make money by like some bullshit facebook app you know what i mean but i definitely make the way to live by but can can i bring something up within the last three minutes so four weeks ago or three weeks ago sean told me about a book called happy body and i told i was with neville noah last week or two weeks ago and i like yeah i sean told me about this book i'm gonna buy it and neville was like oh i have it upstairs let me go grab it for you he gave it to me he gave it and then noah was like wait what's this book and i think he ended up buying it i've been doing those exercises in that book i feel great have you guys been doing that so basically got the book yesterday so i have no idea what you're talking about oh my god my basically i'm when i'm realizing and is i on this podcast said i had scoliosis and i had like thirty or forty people reach out to me say they also have scoliosis and so then i started doing this book to help fix it it's been awesome i my back feels so much better you got has does your back feel better sean i never had back pain so i what it's not my i wasn't doing it for that i just like i read the philosophy and i was like oh i vibe with this like this makes sense to me i don't feel like i'm being sold to i think this this seems like one of those like fundamental truths about the way your body works and how you should like sort of tune it and so i started to like it but i haven't been like doing all of those actually i've been swimming a bunch but like i haven't been doing those exercises in there but yeah if you're if you're back it's give it a shot you know like back pain is one of those like you know quality of life ruin if you have it and so you know you just gotta try fucking everything if you have back pain well noah was talking about getting older and trying to feel younger and before this podcast he took a shirt off and showed me body and that's what we do that's what real friends do but golly this thing has totally made a difference we aren't get i'm not getting paid to say this but that should off alright so no let's ask you then what has been the the best either decision purchase change like that has lifted your quality of life on a day to day basis that you've done you know in the that comes to mind recent memory i think there's probably about i'll say three and then i i gotta jump off so number one buying my tesla i think it's not about the tesla but i think it's about i think i we're conditioned that like in material is evil and i think it's more about is there ways that we could use money to make our lives better so i think that's been really powerful for me to like wow really enjoy something versus getting the cheaper like i like mia out and i have me out in the backyard but it's like nice to have amazing and i wonder what else in my life gonna have that would be amazing and that i can also be amazing because i think it's something to say about what does your stuff say about you think the second thing i would think about is journal right so i've been using bear app i think one of the business you guys ask for three business opportunities one of them is technology adviser there's so much new tech new cameras new everything like i you can go make a lot of money coaching people and no bare bear app bear dot app or bear app notes i really enjoyed every i literally journal five days a week and it's been really helpful to understand myself better and learn my interest and motivations and fears and all this stuff and then that that those two have definitely been powerful i'm trying to think of the third thing that's really and i think the third thing that for me has really changed my life is observing where i'm living and how much my space affects my energy so i've been renting airbnb and i'm gonna be moving because i'm like you know there's something there about your space and how much it can impact you professionally and personally guys i gotta go i love you guys apps dot com thank you sean let's stay on but noah let's come back again and actually talk about some business stuff because is awesome and i also wanna do the other thing thank you have a good alright guys you too yeah thanks sean bye you wanna talk about anything noah said sean you know a lot of it is really relevant to me because i think the things he's talking about like the thing he spent like i don't know fifteen years doing now is building up this audience this like putting out great content that's gonna help people and like dis distilled down his wisdom like okay if i learned something the act me trying to teach it to somebody else will help me learn it better i think that's the vibe i get from him that's what i wanna do that's what i find most enjoyable in my life anyways so person i thought that stuff was interesting if you're not trying to be a content creator i don't know how useful that part will be for people but honestly these are pretty universal like just like tactics to get shit done and get shit out there and like be an action person and so yeah i like like his message around being an action person i wish we've gone into ideas because i think he is a kind of an ideal starter like he said i'll actually bring up something that he mentioned that is not related to any of this help help stuff which i enjoy but so he talked about his space and buying a nice car so i think i just spent three weeks in living in austin i think i'm gonna give up my place in san francisco i'm gonna spend four to eight weeks in different cities and see what happens so i'm gonna buy a car i don't know what type of car i should buy but i'm gonna buy a nice car and i'm gonna drive all over the country yeah that's great i i'm all all for it i wanna ask you on that but also to the listeners if you wanna rent my apartment i'll give it to you for six months it's four k a month i live in glen park it's a lovely neighborhood and it's furnished and i have a gym here a home gym a really nice one so message me on twitter if you wanna rent it otherwise i'm gonna give up and i don't want to this is lot dude you should charge a premium this is rents sleep in sam paul's bed for eight k a month actually you know get that good good jude no there is no pre maybe i should fuck i just blew my yeah to accept for guys he's willing to accept for i just blew my no i i wasn't gonna make money on it i just you just cover the expenses i austin's is amazing more people should i don't know what sometimes i'm like it's way better there so a couple years ago i made a decision to do something similar where i was like i was sitting in san francisco and i was like why am i just here all the time like life is so big the world is so big and so so i told my girlfriend at the time and i was like let's go you know now my wife but at the time we were just dating i think and i was like let's go live in south america for the next six weeks and like i'll just work from there but like let's just go pick a cool city that we are not gonna live in long term i wanna move but i wanna go live there and i was like wait a minute i can live there without moving and the way that san francisco works is like a arbitrage where you can airbnb and be your house or your apartment and you could make more you could literally live for free somewhere else in the world you know get a free vacation so that's what i did i went for five or six weeks we lived in buenos aires argentina and and we just lived there like a local not like or not exactly like a local kinda like a expat but it was better than trap it wasn't a vacation it wasn't like go site take a bunch of photos and leave after five days it was like okay we're gonna live here like what's the coffee shop we you go to how do we get groceries and like that was just a way better experience i was like i'm gonna do this every year but then one year was like we're getting married and then had a kid and now i don't know what i'm gonna do it so wait but you did do it i did do it for one year and i plan to do it again this year now that my my child is a little bit older i think we can go do it now because she's almost a year old so so i'll do it again so my logic is i'm only gonna go to places i can drive to for two reasons one corona and two my dog who i i consider part of my family i he's old and i would not wanna leave him behind and i don't know if you can bring a dog you could probably bring a dog to some european countries but like in a lot of places they have like a three week quarantine if you get to canada you could get to mexico that's cool well so i would move to mexico city in a heartbeat have you been there i've never been but everybody who i know says the same thing it's like amazing it's amazing like i remember i was there when trump was just getting elected and he was talking about the wall and i i was in like a hips or neighborhood and i asked my barber i what do think about this i told was wall he goes i'll give a fuck about what he says like i wanna he goes yeah build the wall that will keep you guys are coveted this is a amazing here we not try to go to america and i was like oh man you've just broken all these stupid stereotypes i've head my head thank you so and and so yeah they're gonna need a wall to keep me out of mexico city because that place is lovely so i would totally wanna live there the mexicans were awesome people i love the neighborhoods but corona i'm nervous about corona at the moment yeah corona and before this it was what's it called zika which like people didn't really care about but zika scary shit especially if you're like we were gonna have a kid we knew that and zika like basically you can become a carrier a year or so and pass it to your babies so that was like a scary so that's what that killed it one year and now corona it's like i don't know what i'm gonna it but i'm do think gonna do canada because i trust the canadians around corona where vancouver vancouver somewhere remote who knows because like but like why would you do a remote canada when it's like the same shit as like montana isn't it i also don't i i also would go to montana i'm at montana cool too but you know i don't i don't mind that that's a change of pace what car should i buy should i do this in a f one fifty truck should i do this in a subaru rude that i like put off road tires on what should i buy i thought about a tesla well that doesn't come out till two in twenty one and i wanna leave in august you could do you could do that as a tesla suv or you you could do the f one fifty i think that would be hilarious although that's kinda cramped and not the not the most ideal why not know one fifty is four door you get a four door of but a cyber or tesla would be fucking horrible wouldn't it for a three thousand mile trip why because like wouldn't you have to pull over every every three hundred miles for an hour the supercharger are pretty fast and it goes like i think the the new ones or whatever go like six hundred miles or something crazy it's interesting maybe i would do that yeah do it definitely do it in something that is not your usual well that's what noah said that inspired me i was like i'm not gonna penny pitch i'm gonna buy the nice shit that i want yeah you're just waiting for you're just waiting for somebody to be like you know what what's cool buying cool shit it's like yes i'm always that's right that resonated with me too i'm always doing like penny and shit so i need to step that up you wanna go over anything else i have a bunch of ideas that i added to the thing but i feel like we should do like an episode about it like a full episode about those ideas so i think we should keep this one kind of noah and then yeah i have a bunch but it would be like an hour okay i have a bunch two they range from interactive email to i have a bunch of ideas around privacy stuff that fa me a ton and corona stuff someone's gotta create the organic label but for like is your restaurant corona clean oh yeah yeah i like the it's like the you know the health score but it like this i'm specifically branded around corona hygiene so that's what i'm gonna bring what are you gonna bring up okay i'm just gonna read you some of my quick notes that i had here one it's called scott gallo being super wrong another one is i know exactly where you're going with that and i'm very interested another one is scams that i found interesting and i have four examples of scams that i found interesting another one is wikileaks for creeps because krista turned out to be a creep and then another one is how the thirty seven signals guys are marketing their new thing hey dot com i think it's pretty interesting how they're going about that and then i have a bunch of startup up ideas that are around one's around baseball cards one's around yeah we got a bunch of idea so we have we got a lot lot to come great i am am interested in all those particularly this scott gallo one and the hay dot com thing which think it's actually gonna be a huge business i just downloaded it have you used it no alright i'll tell you if you didn't like super humor may not like this either but i just downloaded i thumbs up or thumbs down i'm like ten minutes into the onboarding but i'm also like thumbs down so far but i really like those guys so i'm like just let me try it actually i i wouldn't say i've it a fair shake yet but the onboarding so far i'm not sold i'm in the same boat but i understand why many people will like it right okay we should we should jet here leave us for review tell us what you think tweet out us or whatever we'll talk to you y'all also soon yeah