From Blogger To $100 Million Business With Neil Patel

to say in your blog post that it you go fifteen thousand dollars a month is all i need i'm happy that was like ten years ago i think but right that's but you used to say fifteen thousand single and no kids is easy right now if i had a guess on my burn rate one twenty to one eighty a month what that's insane so what is how does that break down so what's the like what's the bulk of it where the so house probably is the biggest one no i have no mortgage okay yep so you're spending a hundred twenty to hundred eighty k without spending anything on your home so neil i i was telling you a little bit about what you're getting into we record everything by the way it's like we just hop to it but i sean kinda knows who you are i've been a fan of yours for like ten years can i tell sean and the audience who i think you are and you could tell me if i'm wrong and like what i'm missing sure go for it alright so you're in neil patel so i know you because used to have this blog called the quick sprout i read it maybe ten years ago it's probably a fifteen year old blog if i remember correctly at first it was mostly about like seo but eventually it kinda like warp into being about seo about content but just about business in general and you would do like crazy stuff like you would build a business that made a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue by like you just picked pick like a random niche and i think it ended up being supplements and you like blog every month about how that was going and you used to blog about all types of crazy stuff but then eventually you also started a company called crazy egg which i heard was doing many millions of dollars a year in revenue and it was a bootstrap and you own the whole thing then you and heat and started kiss metrics and raised a bunch money it didn't end up working out wonderfully but it was like it could've have been actually quite huge he wrote a great blog post about like where you know where a couple errors were made but now you've got like a seven or eight hundred person agency that is also a bootstrap like the rest of your stuff and you've just kind of been ball out like for like fifteen years in the world of business just killing it with agencies is that right did i did i get everything mostly right mostly closed so crazy it came first he thinks a c founder on that he has it all or you know he owns crazy egg as well so it's not just me anymore and then there's another guy named john butler who was also part of crazy egg at the beginning and then quick sprout came later i started blogging on about business and stuff like that kiss metrics then came kiss metrics didn't work out quick sprout started to have a big audience relay related to marketing we tried to create a seo software on there i do that with my c cofounder heath then at of the time he's like alright i how about we create a company out of this i'll do the software that didn't work out i don't wanna be part of it anymore he took it over and he ended up making it you know business site directory you know informational site whatever you wanna to call that has affiliate offers which you already know about and then the last one was the ad agency which is correct and then there's been a lot of stuff in between here and there a lot didn't work out but generally speaking i tend to do one thing at once focus and currently it's spent all my time on my ad agency and that you're you're at six seven hundred how big is that at the moment and it's only like five or six years old right yeah so we're on our fifth year ended of this year will be end of year five we're at roughly seven hundred people i think maybe a little bit more maybe by end of year nine hundred ish if i i guess who are these people you these like seven hundred anonymous indians in india what's going are these people we do have some people in india but what's funny how many people do you employ in new york that's why what i wanna know that's my agency test you're in brazil too though right yeah we're in brazil majority of our people are in the united states if i look at region wise united states has a biggest head count we also have offices in australia canada uk brazil india i think we're opening up germany soon we're looking at italy we're looking at france in a few other regions as well but our model is is like our ad agency in india markets companies in india it's not really used to outsource american work into india and what work are people doing like what's the service that you're providing all digital so like seo paper click email marketing conversion rate optimization organic social paid social the list goes on and off and do all the customers come from neil patel dot com it used to be that way then we started getting a lot through word about i would never really guessed that word drives business how how many could he say how many so most people i would say like our audience it'd be like oh it's cool to have like a personal brand but me and sam figured out oh wow this shit really does open up more doors than you would have expected you've been doing this for a long time so neil patel which is kinda like personal blog where you're talking about like you know hacks and experiments and strategies that you've you know figured out how many could you say how many millions that brought in in client bookings what for the agency like what how big did just the referrals from neil patel gets you before other stuff kicked in like word mouth and being recognized in the industry and other things like think the neil patel brand got us to around like thirty forty million in revenue and then word mouse started kicking in and then other things started kicking in and employees started bringing in their own deals because they worked in the space were so long and then we saw more and more growth got awards that brought deals being a minority own business that helps believe it or not there's if you're indian and you live in the united states you're considered a minority and i was about to say are we have minority i think you guys like i get my door like you're you're the majority of ceos out there so i mean funny because we go to rfp and some of them ask if you're it was it like mb certification or something like that i forgot when it's called or minority business enterprise and i was like well i'm not a minority there's like one plus billion of me in this world right and they're like oh you're minority i'm like what are you talking about like a billion plus indian in this world how are we a minority and they're like oh in america or minority and in some of these rfp they're looking it says in there we're looking for lgbtq i i don't know what the yeah yeah all four of the letters are probably you have the tattoo on yeah is yeah the shoes there yeah and then women owned businesses owned businesses and the other one was minority and i was just like wait there's actually a quota that these big fortune five hundred companies have to hit and they're like yeah and i was like well i'm a minority that they're like well you need the certification and i was like i gotta have a certification to tell you that i'm a minority and at first i didn't realize i was minority they were telling me oh you're a minority we reached out to you we're hoping that you'd be a good fit and i'm like i'm a minority they're like yeah you're minority in the united states you and help us meet our quota do you have the certification i'm like what are you talking about and then we went through the process and got the certification you gotta get your papers bro you gotta get your papers right i i would've have been offended and then as soon as i realized wait this is to my advantage oh hold on yeah i also got solar panels on my house does that help you know like i'm a dog glasses wonderful yeah exactly i i have a vision impairment called far side of this you know so what else works in my favor here you know like was the just turn the webcam on and it looked at you and was like yep no that's not enough and what's funny is our coo or vp operations one of the titles i forgot what tracy title is she asked me for this like six months before we did it she's like hey need your birth certificate and i'm like yeah why do you need my birth certificate she's like oh we needed it for this certification like whatever and the moment someone that are telling me how magic johnson generates a lot of his revenue because he's a minority and gets a lot of contracts partners with other businesses white labels it and uses his name becomes a quote unquote owner of that business and then outsource oh wait tell me about that give me an example what's what's what's an example of the magic arts formula so i don't know if this is true this is just what someone in the minority space and telling so that's the caveat i don't know if this is true or real and they're saying let's say if someone has a food company and they have the contracts with a all of the hospitals that are run by the government like the va they're looking for minority to surprise it but there's already a lot of big corporations that provide the food so magic johnson mako go credit business that's in that space partner with the big supplier already provides a few of these hospitals he'll go get the contracts and then work with them to actually put those yeah we you never heard you you never heard of this my my my in laws my laws own a a moving company and their minorities they're black their haitian immigrants and they win deals partially because of that reason because like morgan stanley or something like that if they wanna move they wanna they have some type of policy in their company it says we we wanna get rfp for or we wanna get bids from these types of companies i had no idea how i didn't obviously i do this exist i just didn't realize how significant knows i definitely didn't know the magic johnson formula which is frankly genius on his part if that's if that's actually what he does we don't know that part it's true but think of it this way right it's a quota so if i go and i get a rfp let's say from bowie which funny enough we lost rfp because we're over bikes for what they wanted and let's say the price is very similar to the competition i have the reward showing that we were the agency of the year so like alright these guys are good at what they do we have the case studies and if we're similar pricing and like oh this is minority helps us hit our quota let's give the business year right yeah yeah of course you you have some merit to go with it for the first thirty million dollars of business you got that and you must have gotten that by year two or so if you're growing this fast what was the main year three sorry two three what was the main service like when i think of like because i went to your website and i actually submitted a lead to figure it out there was the maximum you you ask what your website is and what your budget is and it's like zero to ten thousand ten thousand and twenty thousand and then just fifty thousand plus so were you serving like mostly small businesses and what like what were you were you doing as simple stuff as like making their yelp page good like what were you doing yeah so it's not that small we do have some smb like that but we actually first started off in mid market our clients would pay us like a minimum of ten grand a month and what would you do for ten thousand a month so nothing was cookie cutter it was all custom so like maybe they need seo maybe they need to help on paid management maybe they needed some cro or email marketing or a little bit of everything right but the plans would start at a hundred and twenty a year right ten a month and scale up from there to twenty a month thirty a month whatever it may be what was most in info as the service when you started like the the trend everybody wanted and then what's the in invoke thing today the when we first started was mainly as seo i and what does that mean though what does that mean you use a reps or something in your employees like look which terms they should rank for and then you write an article for them so it was optimizing their on page code helping build links creating content promoting the content and making sure that traffic converted into leads or sales assuming if they weren't services and it was a positive roi or the sounds like a ton of work for ten thousand dollars a month it would start at ten it depended on the keywords how hard they were to ring for and it would go up from there and what about now yeah i love when you describe people's business because you're just like so what does that mean you just googled their name and then it doesn't show up and then you go write an article with their name and it's like what's the hustle dude did you just read the new york times and then you just cut out half the words and then you hit send in an email like is that what is that what the hustle is yeah nailed it i mean it kid be it like like like you know there's there's always more nuance in complication in reality but like if you you can explain things in a in a fairly simple way where it's like what's hubspot oh they just make software so when you people sign up your website you can email them and call them like you what i mean like you could i'm just trying to dumb it down a little bit hubspot but when you look at the business when i first started massive churn how to add tons of features how to figure out onboarding how to figure out a training there was a lot of stuff that went to make up hubspot total little billion dollar company right but a lot of people look at as email but they do more than email they do more than a crm they've added actually if anyone in the space has a tenant traction they have a history of adding a lot of those features for free which is a smart model and then gobble up market share get them into the ecosystem and hopefully they stick around and so what's what's the popular you should do the ad reads for us yeah that was amazing by the way sam i think you should make suburban dictionary which is just you explaining businesses without like any any of the complicated stuff like yeah what is it and wonder if you get custom the tool three palm and email them the the the three syllable dictionary like i i explained complicated things but no word is above three syllables that's what we you call exactly what by the way i was just gonna say ben brought one point on that minority do you ben you wanna say that i sound pretty interesting you slack to something neil kind mentioned this too but like this is really really popular in government work because the government is like very hardcore about hitting their quotas for racial minorities and so around here like i actually know a couple guys and basically what they do is the the people i know are all african american they get the contract they put their name on the contract they then outsource the entire thing to like deloitte or k g or whatever and they take like you know fifteen percent of the revenue or whatever they create a consulting firm that's like the minority minority inc and then minority ink goes against the contracts that farms it out to to like deloitte or whoever that's great i can find this client in full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned though out of sync spreadsheets are doing databases hubspot grow better i i lived in in indonesia for a while and they had such a bad traffic problem jak is like i think the worst traffic in the world like you're just going two miles you might be there for two hours and so they were like okay we need to create like a carp pool incentive so how do we create an incentive where if you have three or more people in your car then you can go in the fast lane and so this so it worked for like you know a month it was like oh wow this is great if we carp pool we get to go faster and then this like little industry sprout it up where people would just stand at the edge of the carp pull lane like a hitch hike and they'd be like i'll get your car if you wanna a third ride or all i'll just hop in and we could ride into the fast lane and then they would get off on the other side and ride back with somebody else and so they would be professional like you know o lane participants so they would just set spend all the day riding with you in your car so you'd be sitting there and someone would just get in the seat with you it's just like a random indonesian person and you would pay them ten ten like rupees or whatever and then ten bot and then they would you know get out on the other side a mile later it was amazing you neil was was quick sprout ben there they go was quick sprout i mean so that was your main business from quick sprout and crazy egg were your main business for a while before was just a blog and then my c founder heath then ended taking it over and now it's his blog so but what was your main source of of revenue and income because it i'm like i said i've listened to you forever like you've been crushing it it seems like for financially for like ten plus years i don't know if i'm crushing it but the main source income was crazy for most of my life and then it ended up becoming the ad agency and sam you said something at the very beginning that if i was listening to this i'd be like wait hold on i wanna hear that story you said something like just for kicks he would like spin up a business that like did a hundred k a month in revenue what's an example of that tell that story because that sounds awesome yeah so everyone thinks like it's really hard to make money online and then you got these shy or like buy this for a thousand dollars and you become rich which never really happens maybe every once in while but for most people it doesn't so i was like i create a business on anything people like go create a nutrition business my audience picked i give them like a lot of different they picked a nutrition business and i was like alright let's create a blog and a ranking this and traffic and then funnel people in through quizzes through emails and let's supplement into supplements rank higher on amazon get traction and see what happens and it did work and that took you like months years just how long they think it was months as was much more than that i think it was a year right a a little bit less than a year i think was like nine or ten months so it wasn't like one or two months sadly but a little bit less than a year so it it's pretty good it was an awesome it was an awesome blog post sean you got to google at google like quick sprout or neil patel then like hundred thousand dollars a month and it was like an a monthly update it was pretty amazing i i i don't think then you have deleted it now i don't know if it's still aligned but and then so i took the money i made from crazy egg and i would park it into other things so it's like stock market for a long time the stock markets had a really crazy run right then you also have things like investments a lot of venture funds angel investments and then sometimes you just get lucky sometimes you don't know this a numbers scheme we had talked about doing a content series like this to grow the podcast i was like you know i think one of the best ways to grow the podcast could be if we do a challenge like you what you would described and what one of the ideas is like what if sam created his own sam sticky his own condiment brand and we basically show how we build d brand like from from the idea to like branding to marketing to and we just do it all transparent to like like get people hooked on okay let me see how you guys actually build this thing now it's a lot of work which is why i think all the work we didn't do it but how well did that work for you was that like just kind of like a good content thing or was is it like no that was like drove a lot of growth for the brand and the blog i'm curious how well that worked for you it didn't drive this much growth for the brand but it did help out every little bit like i did crazy experience so i spent like a hundred and something or two hundred and something thousand on clothes and wanted to see what that did in business meetings spent money blank first class everywhere she wanted see what that would do but yeah i tried a lot of different experiments and it was just for shits and giggles and it was also a reason to justify some of my expenses and then wanna play first class because i remember my first time applying first class someone else paid for i'm like wow this is i've been missing out this is a lot better than being crammed up and flying all the way to europe from los angeles you know in economy and then i was like man let's do some experiments and let's see if i can justify this expense but yeah that's amazing and you just you did you say early on that you just gave heat so did you invest in heat and cha other companies sean n yeah yeah so we're both neil we're both investors in n which is he he your cousin right no or brother law correct brother laws yeah sorry and heat is amazing he's another he's a great blogger as well and sean and i both invested and his company called n which is either gonna be a dud don't or gonna be like the biggest company ever i know the the like it's like a company that's closed like they're gonna close like multi dollar contracts i would guess that's it's like a big old business potentially if they go business but did you say that you gave him crazy egg so with crazy egg what ended up happening is is what i wanted to do is we were doing business forever to get and then eventually i just said hey you can have the monthly distributions and i'm gonna go create another business why would you give that why why he didn't ask for it nor did he care for it nor did he want it you know he's never been about money neither him or i have and we're not rich i can't actually speak for him i'm not rich i've just done well enough and i don't spend as much so it's like don't really need the money does that make sense like if you just don't spend money you don't really need much cash at did you just send you dropped two hundred thousand dollars on of clothes what do you mean you don't need money well that was like experiment right but but that's not my daily life like i'm wearing a white t shirt with stains at my spits up bought and they're probably like ten twenty bucks i don't know what the white t shirt is cost but they're not really white anymore so i try not to do video recordings in front of white walls anymore because you can just tell the discoloration from it nonetheless so does samsung like you live in brazil is that what no i have a division in brazil like we do mark in brazil for brazilian companies and you live in texas where do you where do you live vegas vegas okay amazing and so have you is it easy for you to keep her burn rate down because like i i was telling sam this i spend like i don't know twenty five thousand dollars a month now just like and i i'm not i even feel like i'm due to all sean you might i think you might spend more than that now if i bet you added up because i know what how you spend i bet you it's more than twenty five it might be it might be a little more but it's not more than thirty i would say i don't think it's more than thirty so i but like it's yeah i got two little kids but i got two little kids but they're like babies like like you know like they didn't they don't need food you know so so you know there's diapers sure but like it's not them it's meat so i would take thirty you said it's a steep burn rate or it's a good burn rate i'll would take it i'll trade it with you okay gotcha you so when you say you don't spend much what what do you say is your monthly burn because i for most people listening right they like most of people we don't talk about much do they make or how much do they spend alright how much you make sometimes that sensitive how much you stand back on that if they need how much i'm burn enough but neil you actually wrote this in a blog post you said you said i spend this was i don't know if i actually i have no idea if you're single or if you have a family and you can i would than my right now but you used to say in your blog post that it you go fifteen thousand dollars a month is all i need i'm happy that was like ten years ago i think but right that's but you used to say fifteen thousand single and no kids is easy right now if i had a guess on my burn rate one twenty to one eighty a month what that's insane so what is how does that break down so what's the like what's the bulk of it where the so house probably is the biggest one no i have no mortgage okay yep so you're spending a hundred twenty to hundred eighty k without spending anything on your home property tax property tax for both my homes and hoa dues is probably close to two hundred a year okay great so when i like anymore we've got twelve thousand of the way there we're with alright yeah yeah yeah so there's a thirty okay flight difference is twenty five grand a month wow my whole life policy yeah that's twenty five to three hundred a year no no wait what wait i get what what the hell is a twenty five thousand dollar month life insurance policy what can you explain that is it just a benefit like if i died my wife and kids give money like life make insurance policy yeah i well i get that but is that normal i've never heard like either i'm dumb or you're dumb one of who's dumb here if am i dumb because i've never heard of anybody spending that much on their life insurance bills it's investment account it builds over time so it's not like it goes away right most life insurance policies are for call it ten years and then you buy another one mine just keep going and you can borrow against it just think of it as like a investment vehicle so that's twenty five a month okay i see i see i now i understand staff cleaners na driver we have a full time driver i think that ends up being around fifty seven a month fifty seven hundred fifty seven thousand thousand you know a driver uber what why not affordable i optimized for convenience in vegas i go through this company they charge a hefty premium i go through this company and i have d details on my car so if i do a meeting in front of a casino the car can just stay in from the casino and doesn't have to move if i'm going to the airport you can straight up pull up into the plane or whatever you wanna do and you don't have to go through terminals or anything like that so that makes like so part of your strategy that's i'm picking this up is that you live the best lifestyle you want and it's all ex the way you do it i don't know if it's all expensive use that which you meant with the d detail like it's a company it's like marketing it's like a like a marketing vehicle for you so there there's a limbo more company if i have their hotel in just like pay i can end up parking wherever i want in theory not literally wherever i want but in most cases i can park wherever i want the car can just sit there late for me so alright so what else anything else you fly private he's like i i buy a day we disneyland fast pass just in case i decide to go that day yeah you fly give it for convenience of time what's been the what's been the number one like kind of like where you feel like most people don't most people think this is too expensive and not worth it but for me i get way more value i'll give you an example of my life right so i thought i had been right till we started talking so this is great i'm feel feeling so much better about myself but the one thing i did was i i hired a private chef so i was like alright that i think i i always thought that's the lifestyle of the rich and famous and i i thought wow that's cool because you eat healthy and it tastes great you'd have to fuss with time and you know cooking and dishes and groceries and all that stuff and so to me it's like i no like dude to anybody with any kind of money you should be like that should be one of the like fancy car later private chef now like because i'm like to me the value the reward way outweighed the cost and i think most people don't typically make that trade sounds like you've experimented with many ways of spending money what has been a good reward for for cost trade that you're like this one is is great that most people don't do i i don't know i'm in i'm in a bubble because i have a lot of friends who are like me sadly in which we spend a lot we don't know what's reality i know that sounds bad to say but it's true right coke is not bad house and best so you don't have to do your own dishes and stuff although funny enough i enjoy doing that and ironing because it's it's kinda like medi for me it's relaxing i don't know why watching tv and ironing nanny help so you get to freedom and you can watch your kids when you want to but you can also do meetings and stuff like that the the probably the the best expense i ever spend on is private planes not because i like it it's i don't mind playing commercial not really any difference for me but it helps me optimize for times that way i can see my kids more does that just sometimes do a lot of meetings for work and just going and then come back the same day just really in and out really quickly like sometimes i'll be home quick up like go from vegas to top for a conference speak come back and i'll be home quick enough to pick up my kid from school i like to meet we're well valuable that's where money are you saving any money then or or i mean are you just taking a fat draw from the agency in order to of per pay for this or are you able to expense a lot of it to the agency how's does that work i expense any of it to my companies as person pay so you're just the agency is just that profitable of a business it's doing that well or investments or savings i've been well enough in life where i'm okay why did you do an agency so me and sam always talk about like we have many models on this podcast for example we don't do public math for example you don't say you're rich you say your post economic these are things we've picked up from from guests along way and one of the one of the model one of the models that we say is you know agency suck and it's like and and the reason we say is not because they like they do well there's not that they suck it's like they suck as a business choice like if i could i always thought if i could choose between software or an agency and choose software because it's like oh it's not a services business it's gonna work while i sleep and it could scale up and don't have to open up offices in poland ended brazil and all these other places but you chose that you did software and you chose agency now why'd did you make that choice and what's great about agencies that i'm am kind of like not giving enough credit for so you you're looking at business as in software is more scalable it's more desirable by public markets ex hubspot versus accenture accenture has way worse multiples than hubspot accenture is a bigger company from a revenue eb standpoint but now take a different approach okay help hubspot publicly traded company you guys are both hubspot employees i'm assuming still is that correct kinda sure whatever you're as as deal is right but you guys are pretty much at hub song now imagine creating a business and you don't plan to going public you don't care for the limelight you don't care for any of that in business what's a successful business good revenue growth and good revenue and profitability right all that really matters at the end of the day whether you grow or not grow is how profitable are you would you guys agree with that statement assume you're doing something that's ethical and you're not selling growth no i wouldn't agree with that i would say there's a third thing which is like is this enjoyable and like do i like my day to day and with the more people you have most people would say that's just a little bit more headache than than but not software or consulting anytime you build a big company you tend to have large a large amount of people whether it's hubspot or whether it's accenture everyone has you can have you can probably have a much higher revenue per employee with software versus let's say you own a massive landscaping business you're gonna have to have tens of thousands of people oh but what's the difference from dealing with how many people does help hubspot have like six thousand i don't know five thousand six thousand is probably a lot i'm guessing on the number but what's the difference of dealing with five thousand or six thousand people and twenty thousand people there's a point where it doesn't matter and it's a lot of people either way like it's not like you're at fifty people you still have thousands of employees to deal with and you need managers and layers and all that kind of stuff yeah but you're hiring a some good or bad you're hiring a different type of person so for example if you're va or media they're based in new york they can probably only afford to pay some of their lower level employees seventy or eighty thousand dollars a year and so you just have to get a ton of people like that and have to have higher churn versus say a bigger company where we're able to pay a significantly higher salary because the revenue per employee is much higher so perhaps there's a a slightly different day to day with because of that why necessarily let's say you're banner media he could be doing it to optimize for profit once if i told you his lt tv was six seven eight years right and you have great then at that point you can still hire high quality people and pay arm and a leg okay you go what mean right like you look at accenture they're charging accounts so much money and their contracts are long and i don't know what va media lt is but there's a lot of consulting companies that have lt six seven years for clients and their clients are spending you know a hubspot yes just more revenue per you can say potentially in software you can get to more revenue per employee but i know consulting companies that only take on contracts that are like five six million dollars than upwards so you have high margins and you can have a high revenue per employee but either way no matter what as you build a big business you're going to need more people and it's a headache to manage whether you pay him seventy thousand or why you pay a hundred and fifty thousand it's still more of a headache and the notion that if you hire someone for a hundred and fifty thousand i'm not saying you're saying this it doesn't necessarily mean that are better employee right and it just means different types of headaches correct exactly engineers for an example are very expensive in this economy right so the point i'm getting at is a consulting company i had the demand for it a lot of people wanna pay me for marketing and there was just so much demand it would have been silly not to do and if i'm not trying to go public or i'm not trying to sell money's money green is green as long as you're happy doing what you're doing take the cash will you ever sell the company i wanna say i would never sell the company but i don't care to ever sell the company because i love what i'm doing we also have good growth too right like i don't know what will grow this year sixty something percent which is a bad you know with the market going up and down and fluctuating sixty something percent is my guess at our size this decent yeah the part i was actually talking about was a little bit more like i think you're you're totally right that like if you're gonna win big you're gonna end up with a bunch of employees and like you know it might look like a hundred fifty it might look like a thousand it might look like ten thousand but like you know in either case you're gonna have manager managerial work and headaches and it's just different types the part i was really i was like you know i've now built let's say a media company content and then it's like done educational stuff so courses which are like you know different thing and then it's like a built software company and you know we ended up selling that one and then it's like and then there's services which is the client services like like consulting or agency model and what i hate what i when i love about content media it's actually pretty fun to create and it's cool because a lot of people consume it to kinda you know you get that like hit but you gotta like you gotta bake the cake every day right so like you know the hustle or like the milk road or this podcast it's like we have to come on and create the content again you know for the most part we we're not doing like super long evergreen stuff so you don't like with the hustle the daily use newsletter or milk loads the daily user it or it's we gotta bake that cake every day whereas software it was like we built one product and yes we might we will improve it over the course of a year you know every year we're gonna improve it but like fundamentally we didn't have to like recreate the product come up with a new viral story or a new great content segment that like require like a new genius with software is like you come up with one genius moment and then you sort of refine it make it work better over time and give it a bugs and things like that so i prefer that part of software which was like making a product rather than making kind of like a disposable you know consumable piece of content or like i a e commerce company and like pain they ass to have supply physical products that are supply chain constrained and like we have a warehouse we got warehouse problems with our e commerce business as so i'm like man digital is sweet compared to e commerce but e commerce is quite profitable like kicks off a bunch of profits that's nice so every business has these pros cons and i always thought agency was like the part i would always thought was a pain in the ass was like the client services you are reinventing the next campaign and the next winning marketing you know formula for them and you have to keep clients happy all the timing clients are sort of like never satisfied in a way that like they if software is like you can have nameless face list customers that like yeah some centers of will will ride into your help desk that's in the philippines or whatever but like you're not having to like you know send account reports to your you know your your big client to keep them happy yeah but you everyone has their own problems in software a lot of people have turned to this issue and they can't figure it out or they have competitors that come into the marketplace and just undercut them on pricing for the same features because it's cheaper and cheaper to build software these days right so they all have their own problem to me i look at it as if you can find the right people so every time i start a company i find people to put in place that have already done it multiple times before because your risk failure are lower and there already do know everything to do so i don't have to deal with client relationships i don't have to deal with customer service or anything like that i get to do what i enjoy doing which is go and create content be the face etcetera and my wife enjoys wish she gets to do right she gets to donate the money although we don't really consider as donations we look at as investing we're investing in people although we really don't ever collect any money back it's more so you're investing into making the world a better place where people's lives a better place or whatever it may be what's a who who who are your first three clients at this at this agent because i don't know there were small companies and right now who's an example of client like a fortune one hundred software company like that is a typical company a think of any big large corporation in b2b that's a great example of one of our customers or even b2c actually think of any fortune five hundred company that's a prime example of a customer what's and who's the ceo of your agency are you no i'm never the ceo i'm a terrible manager of one of the worst managers ever his name is mike go he was the ceo oh no he was the president of i prospect which is a ad agency owned by dents sue i believe in eye prospect maybe they had four or five thousand people is my guess and what when you how early into the business did you have a a hired ceo or hired leader day one i won't start a business without as ceo from day one and what did you pay them in the first year first year is my c cofounder so like a hundred grand and that's because you basically went and jumped up a hundred grand worth of business and you're like hey mike i got i got this clients to give a hundred grand do you wanna run this thing for me and and help it get deployed no our business in start off that way i'd probably put in total of five million bucks into the business and my own money those bootstrap but not really bootstrap if that makes sense it's kinda cheating and it gets easier and easier as your entrepreneur right the more the more success you have and i'm not seeing them i'm successful by any means the more of capital you have to deploy into the next thing so reduces chances of failure and when it's your own money this is just my thesis and i could be wrong on this i have no data points when is your own money are much more careful than when if you raise like fifteen twenty thirty million dollars of venture capital right you really look at every single dollar but mike was the ceo from day one he's a great operator has no agency experience eventually we got an a president and then eventually from there we got in a ceo and have you guys crossed a hundred million in revenue yet yeah we do nine that's crazy man so what i mean it's just pretty wild that you're able to like par this blog that was already all always kind of a juggernaut but this blog into a nine figure a year business i mean that's amazing no this is it's been a good run i hope it i'm knocking on with although but you probably can't hear it to the crisp but i i hope it keeps going and more so we're just having fun like for me what i enjoy doing is building in business i know i have an expensive lifestyle i generally don't do stuff with the money like i over pay like house staff like na and stuff like that when i say over pay i drastically over pay not by like ten twenty thirty forty percent like i really mean drastically over pay because i look at people and like if you're cleaning a house how are you gonna live on this like i'll give someone six figures to do that i know that sounds kinda crazier stupid but like i'm not giving my kids money so might as well take care of other people in this world who need it more than but we do did you just back you're not giving kids money yeah i'm not gonna give my kids money nothing leave leave nothing we have a trust set up what they'll get maximum is like if they're on the street and they can't provide and they're gonna be suffering like i will help pay their bills or put them in a normal home or like if my kids like i wanna be a doctor and i wanna go spend all my time in africa helping other people out and i won't get paid for this and i need you know x five thousand dollars a month to live ten thousand so i can just go volunteer all my time like sounds good all i'll paid for but like i won't give a money for the sake of like if they're like i wanna go travel to see italy i wanna a honda accord and like go buy your own honda accord go travel on your own with your own dime like you know i don't believe in just giving people money because i think there's other people to need it more than we do sean are you gonna give you your kids money i don't really thought about it like my oldest is too so i think i got some time to figure that out but i i lean more so i've kinda heard both arguments like i know somebody who they if some people are like you know you know i do there's some people that i i i'm definitely not on the camp of i do this for my kids i wanna leave my kids with a whole bunch and something like that may be the worst thing you could do for them not because it means that they're have drug addicts yeah you take away you know agency in a way right like you you want people to like it's i thought that it's good or bad it's actually just it's just way lower on the tote of priorities it's like i just don't even focus on that it's like i'm gonna leave them something it's gonna be a certain set of character character traits and skills and like mentality that's what i'm trying to leave money is like i don't know fifteenth on the list of like i don't know we haven't even gotten to think about that yet but i've thought a lot about what are the character traits and mentality and like mindset and skills that i think i can help build and like that's the focus that's the one that matters that's the that's the gift if whatever else comes from beyond that i don't know we can figure out like the it's like the footnotes so like we're very someone my my i have a two year old in a less than one year old right yep and i look at it as you want them to be productive units of society right you want them to be ambitious hungry caring thoughtful happy like whatever it is there's a lot of characteristics that you may want children to be but i look at as like they don't need money even like with my wife and i we go over our expenses and we look at what we spend on travel and we do some of this because it's easier but like my wife and i are actually considering cutting out all private and just going commercial now the main reason our expenses are highest due to covid so if it wasn't for covid i would just be going in a normal airport i didn't know how covid was gonna impact with young kids could afford it i was like guess to start flying private and we haven't gone back to commercial yet but we're thinking about going back because like my wife and i look at the money is like yeah we spent this money on travel and air for and hotels if we donated the money people would have a better life to be really needed that much what do you do when you donate that like what's the good way to donate in your opinion so there's like you know ranging from not donating to donating to one thing to donate to a bunch of things to like getting involved or seeing the impact or like you know i know people who if they donate africa they'll actually their family will go take a trip every year so that they're more connected to the people and they actually see the impact and they take their kids with them so they see the impact like what have you found that's a good way to give so we we have a balance it's my wife and i team up this is gonna sound bad but i don't like volunteering my time my wife loves volunteering her time i think it's very inefficient for me to volunteer my time i should make the money versus volunteering my time because the money for the hours that if we donated need the money it would have a much bigger impact to the cause than if i actually spent my time i don't my wife yep and my wife loves spending the time and like from going to soup kitchens or whatever it may be so she picks the causes we have a few thesis so like one thesis is we or not really thesis but rules one rule is is we don't like money going to organizations that have tons of high overhead we actually want our money going to the causes so if it doesn't go to the cause then we tend to not pick that organization the second thing that we look for is organizations who are like a self sufficient right it's just like how can this continue going even if someone wasn't managing so like a great program for example is my wife likes donating to women's education we used to donate also to men's education as well so you find these people in these villages you say hey you can't afford to go to school get a degree we'll pay for you to go to college go get a degree come back teach kids in your village for a few years whether it's under a tree or anything people can learn anywhere right and then you know go move on with your life and do whatever you want but at least you're giving back to your own community and what we found is when we started giving because we've been doing this for so long now so well actually not that long but what i mean long i'm talking about like ten eleven years where we've been donating and it it's picked up quite a bit over the last like five six years when we started giving the money to men a lot of the men we saw a very low conversion rate from them actually coming back and teaching people in the village well when we gave the money to women for their education a lot of them came back and fulfilled on the promise because it's not like you get a signed contract right it's just like hey we're gonna vape everything come back help people out within your village which country we've done this in both india and africa so different parts of africa and in india and then another problem that we've done is like growing gardens where a lot of people who have aids don't take the right don't take their medication and aren't doing well they're getting they're given the medication for free but if your body doesn't have the right nutrients every rejects it so what we'll do is we'll do programs like growing gardens we'll give them money they grow food and then not only do they eat nutritious or well they'll more likely to take their medication and you're also growing enough food so that way other people in the village can also eat so i was like but my wife picks all the causes she bets them she loves it like she'll go this is wednesday in two days she'll end up going to a function scouting out more nonprofit and organizations i won't go like i think it's a waste of time i'm like if i'm gonna go make more money she can donate it it's a better roi than if i go spend three four hours ming when she could just do that and i can go make more so that way we can donate more other than your own private businesses what have been your best financial investments that's allowed you to to donate and and make a lot to to give away stock market has done really well companies like apple amazon and google facebook and on facebook's down but they still have been at tear if you just bought their stocks early enough because some of these companies have grown thirty forty percent a year and in the public markets compounding right and it really adds up angel investments have done really well for me and i would say probably those are the two biggest stock market still has done well i'll go in the last six some months i've taken a beating because i'm in a hundred percent tech companies like i don't diversify like everyone's like you need some oil and you need this and i'm like yeah i'm just gonna go all tech and people are like oh you're silly look how much she lost but if you look at the whole time when i first got in i've done well and i invest in what i understand on thirty seven so who cares you know another ten years everything should rebound assuming you pick the right companies what your portfolio look like in terms of percentages i including private businesses my public portfolio i if i had a guess they probably don't even have more than twenty stocks amazon i i i i won't be able to name mobile amazon google facebook apple microsoft hubspot salesforce adobe atlas shopify i'm missing some as well and of your liquid of your of your liquid net worth how much is in public equities versus other versus real estate liquid network or else yeah just non agency if if if i think at your agency is there agency the only company that you own a significant stake if yes exclude that then what's your portfolio look like no i have quite a bit of other companies because started using a lot of the cash to buy other companies for like three four five x eb and then you just fix them and grow them and then just cash flow i would so if i look just at cash invested in other companies that aren't mine like not companies i'm buying out or anything like that i would probably say eighty to ninety percent is in stocks what companies were you buying any that we can find that we like like we bought uber there was a software company bought it for a hundred and twenty put three million into it it took i think less than seven or eight months to get to a million dollars a month in revenue what deal uber suggests hr competitor that did well we just bought another lady named lisa crazy and then we but we just bought another one we haven't announced it we bought it for eight point six i think a month ago month and a half ago so we'll see that it does a hundred thousand a month we think we can grow it within twelve months to probably like four or five hundred grand a month and profit so forget revenue we just will look at as a cash flow so do you have rules around that like okay i have to be able to grow it using the patel dot com or has to be in the marketing needs so the agency benefits no it's like would you buy like brick you know like a fucking laundromat or if i can grow it i won't do too much brick and mortar but i've invested in other people's brick and mortar like i have a friend who does a lot of brick and mortar businesses like one of my buddies has a roofing company and i was like oh cool you can buy up to three x it's good size and i can show you a few things and we can probably increase the profit by like sixty percent within twelve months sounds like it's just good cash flow right if you're getting like thirty forty fifty percent returns on your money it's great and then you also have to keep in mind because of my my history and i've been doing this long enough i also can get debt at really cheap terms and large amounts of debt like i can get debt at like three point six plus percent plus sulfur so if i'm buying a business for five in many cases because of the economics of my whole portfolio you know at some businesses i put down like on the one that was eight point six two point six was paid over twelve or eighteen months or something like that but we put six mill up upfront could've got a loan for but i was is it's easier to put the six million and not deal with the paperwork but sometimes we'll just do loans on the hundred percent of zero down right and what do you like okay so you do what you do now so you have your time and it's pretty much probably fully allocated let's say to the agents and then some of these other things if somebody was smart but didn't have your you have a bunch of visibility you kinda know where your industry is going you see adjacent opportunities but hey i'm not gonna go them i don't have the time what are opportunities that you see that you think somebody listening to this who's just like smart hustle like so i got more time than i have ideas i got more time than i have money where would you go if you were that person what would you what would you suggest for them to look at is like you know opportunities that you see today i would look for opportunities and anything that they're good at and i know that's not the answer that you're looking for but what i found that the issues when people will look for things that make some money when you're not passionate you don't put in the time and the energy required to act to make it successful that's a big issue we see maybe some people have it in them where they can make something successful because we'll just step it out but most people we see will just quit because they just hate what they're doing and so but i think a lot of people don't know what they love to do they don't have like they don't if they already had what they love to do they wouldn't be you know looking for opportunities so you know sort of like a by definition problem there so somebody who's who's thinking about okay i don't love what i'm currently doing i'd like to i wanna get to where this guy's at but which is basically like seems happy and successful right he he seems like he he said he loves what he's doing and i'd love to do that but what if i don't know like when my sister was going to college my dad asked her you know she's like what's i major he's i know what's her favorite subject and she was like lunch like you know i don't i don't have a favorite subject i don't love any of these subjects so what what am i supposed to do like i just out you know i'm just not one of those no you can a lot of different until you find what you're passionate about because if you try a lot of different things you'll typically find something that you're naturally good at usually what you're naturally good at you'll also tend to favor in what you like and then just double down on that but if you're looking for industries with opportunities i see a huge slowdown in e commerce not see the e commerce market shrinking i'm not saying that but the growth in the e commerce market isn't as what it was once used to be right when covid first kicked off so you're gonna see the multiples go down to buy e commerce shops d to brands right so great opportunity for buying and go fix them up and grow them and scale them another great opportunity right now is free so i look at the whole software market as really backwards okay in which right now it doesn't matter if you're helps hubspot canvas eventually someone can just create a me too company and just under undercut you on pricing and what i've learned is if you can create a software company that already has a brand that has a free product and you just make it really good or free and you just keep adding more and more to it i'm a great example of this is photo p so there's this company called photo p it's we love it auto photoshop and it's like they make very little to no money so i head up one of my buddies who is great at outreach reaching and i told him i won't photo so offered him ten million he said no offered him twenty million he said no i can take photo make it a really good canvas competitor undercut him on pricing whatever be worth ten twenty forty billion whatever there or no but i probably can cash flow that thing to like four or five million a month in eb right it's like he here's what i sells for or what is where if you're saying make it free and you're saying your cash flow is like a motherfucker so what how do you take a free product and cash like about how would you explain that well he said he said a cam a cam knock off cam knock off so you make you make almost ninety nine percent of it for free you charge for one percent but that one percent is enough where you can drive in the revenue so you don't ever make as much as like a can or like a mailchimp or a hubspot but hey if you can make millions a month in profit is still good what's your math there so when what's the calculus when you were thinking so like let's say photo p according to similar web has ten million unique a month or something what was your math is that right yeah it is right yeah we researched it monthly yeah like what was your calculus to get to four million in eb a month like what would how many people would you need to run it and what was the what's the calculus there sure so i can probably get the thing from ten million visitors i can so let's say about it for twenty right he wouldn't sell it to me for twenty i've never outreach him but i had a buddy outreach him for me who just does all my outreach so let's say i bought it for twenty i would put another ten into it and i'm out thirty million dollars i'm really good at growing traffic and i know i can grow the team to roughly forty million unique a month i just have a i don't know how but for some weird reason i know traffic really well and how to calculate what i can get it to and all this kind of stuff right and i've done enough research and competitors of what features drive amount traffic just looking at so many competitors in the space so let's see say if i get it to forty what does it call forty million and what what one of the one or two things that you'd get it to forty million like seo basically so more seo more viral increasing the quality of the templates increasing features adding ai in there like click a button we can automatically detect backgrounds remove it filters for social media because a lot of people use them for social media logo or website as a lead shit like that right so then so let's say you got up to forty million right at forty million i can easily monetize let's call it like one percent of the traffic or let's get be even more conservative like a half four percent two hundred thousand people if i have two hundred thousand people hypothetically paying three dollars a month okay that's six hundred thousand the reason i give you on average three dollars in certain countries you may wanna charge different pricing like indian and stuff like that so more affordable so three dollars a month and at three dollars a month if a customer stays for ten months that's six million dollars probably run the thing with less than a million million and a half million and burn each month so then you think oh so then for a million and a half burn you would need for you once you have tons of revenue right when you don't have tons of revenue your burn is much lower a monthly basis but so then how many people then if it's you're looking at thirty people you would need to run that operation i i don't even think thirty but let's say thirty total so i think i can actually run the thing for hundred million dollars a month right so i'm just trying to do the math of my head but i mean the revenue was like you under hundred million too there it was like six hundred thousand something right six hundred thousand a month but if a customer stays for ten months you're looking at six million dollars different no no okay if they're paying three dollars a month if you have four forty million not four million but forty million you're converting a half a percent that's two hundred thousand paying customers a month if they pay three dollars a month that's six hundred thousand they last for ten months at six million dollars a month in mr over a year you're making seventy two million dollars in revenue that's crazy you're a very interesting person you i just i think i dig you because you've got your hands so many different things i honestly don't at this point i don't want anything i come up with ideas i have really good operators for a great that execution i'm like go do this it'll make money here's a playbook go and just do it so how many businesses do you own i don't know i don't really count i really look it over under ten over over under twenty i don't know twenties probably getting close so probably under if i had a i guess and how many of those twenty and how many of those twenty companies have more than five employees full time employees i don't know i don't really count employee head count ali know my ad agency head count because they do reports and i get in my board meeting decks i like like oh we got seven hundred people and you own a hundred percent of most of these companies it seems like you're not raising national capital you might you give her ceo really anything i always give equity to profit share i i you have a partner who runs things so we'll get equity and then i'll do profit share what's the ideal setup for profit sharing and equity for your partner partner give them maybe ten percent of the business they run it plus a really nice salary wanna i mean nice salary industry or more than industry and then you have a pool for employees like another ten percent pull so then you lose total twenty percent i'm left with eighty myself i put up all the money if it does well great if it doesn't i lose the money no one else on the line if it does well no one has to pay me back the money everyone just takes their distributions a moment it turns profitable from a monthly standpoint does that make sense they don't actually have to pay back any of the other stuff and then do you'd also do give them ten percent the distribution or do you make that even heavier for them no well if if i'm losing twenty percent in total which is my deal structure then twenty percent of the profits gets distributed on a monthly basis what's crazy i love hearing about this but what he thinks sean yeah i think it's dope i i had just seen you kinda from a afar for a while that i i i got i know he you know loosely like with friends but so you know i didn't know a lot of the story i know i knew sam sam has talked about you before on the pot i think it's or maybe off the bottom i'm not sure but sam told me some cool stuff but i didn't know a lot of this so for me this was dope because i got to learn a bunch of new things sometimes when we have a guest like dude i've already listened to ten of your things i've been following you for five years you know so it's like i already know a lot of it and i'm doing sort of like translation work for the audience i'd like tell him about this hey tell tell him about that thing you did versus in this like i i genuinely wanted to know a bunch of this stuff and i thought you know this interesting to me yeah you're you're great there's two people that i wanted to talk to sean who are like neil so i mean there's neil so i wanted a neil i i like finding these people that like are doing really well and a lot of people know about but there's also this whole other world the people who have no idea who they are neil you're one of those folks i've been i'm an og g reader so i'm no you forever the other one is sci so sai we've talked about sci a bunch on here him and neil i think are very similar which is very generous but also like pretty cut through when it comes to business and has their hands in just dozens of different things and they're just quietly crushing it and not even talking about it and he's very generous person too i know he has a school i think in the same city i have a school in or a different city i don't know he had actually went to go see his school but really generous guy him and i have bill schools in their rural countries and stuff like that fred yeah it's just like you you too you you guys are i don't know if you're like this neil but i know it seems like he's like this where he like has this you know software business that's making who knows tens of many tens of millions in revenue and probably that much in profit but and he like buys a gas station or like he like it just it's just like dude are you kidding like you're a you're like a tech ty and you also own like thirty gas stations it's just kinda funny here's the thing some of those businesses sell like three x eb you get thirty three percent returns on your money if you have good operators and you can put technology in place in marketing and you can grow to maybe a fifty times irr that's great it's just the question if can you scale it up and you can you do ones that are large enough i know i'm just saying it's cool that you know this stuff that's what you're ec yeah him and i i actually i shouldn't speak for him but i'm a little off right but the the madness or the methodology i think is great for cash flow it's terrible if you wanna be like oh i'm gonna create the next airbnb and take this thing public and be like on the forbes list like it's not what i do is that are you motivated to become a billionaire what what what's your motivation factor what what why are you motivated by well i won't ever be a billion i'm not saying i have the opportunity to but even if i did i would never be there because we donate our money and when i being donate like not wait pay your debt to donate like actually actually donate on an annual basis how do you figure out how do figure out how much you wanna give because there's always like like when i think about it i think like well i could also invest this money it's gonna grow i'm gonna give more later but then i'm not helping somebody now and so what's the right number what's right percentage basically for me to to be giving on an annual basis how do you figure that out for yourself whatever my wife wants to give what person what percentage does that come out to we we don't have a percentage keep in mind businesses are so large i can get loans for anything on almost any type of business i can't go buy a business for a million dollar or a billion dollars but if i wanna buy a business for a hundred million dollars i can go get a loan on that like literally for most of it so at you know i don't have to worry anymore about do i need more of it to invest it's just we find the right causes and is it gonna make a big enough impact that's more that's more about how we look about donations we don't really look at it from the aspect am my donating x dollars or two hundred percentage we look at as we actually think it's gonna make a big impact in the next year short run or two years we don't wanna wait like ten twenty years to see a impact we also don't wanna put money towards like things like cancer research i think cancers william important i know a lot of people who have died from cancer but i don't have enough money to make a dent into cancer versus you know solving some of the basic things out there like i can make an impact on things like education in a region i can't make an impact on cancer i just don't have enough cash for that where what is your school said i have a school it sounds tight i wanna a school i never seen it we have a school i think it's in cambodia and we've done a few others but i don't really keep track my wife does and you know the bigger thing is not my school it's more so the kids school are they learning and getting diagnosed from it in the time i i remembered the first school that i bought forgot about i was gonna say when i buy my school it's for sure gonna be my school they might attend my school in cambodia yeah like that get i've bought a couple i i put a couple schools in this couch cushion back here it just i just forgot about it i just it's this a little scene i played in a while ago i remember when i was on college camps i saw like you know whoever the roth child or like the rockefeller name plate or whatever on the like the the library at at at duke campus and i was like who would do this why what's the point of this you know like so it's already nice not that kind of schools i don't have that kind of money mine like little kids i didn't understand the appeal until you said you basically describe the school you have and forgot and have i've never visited it and i was like a that sounds like something i want i don't want my name plate on you know yeah the villa nova like tenth library on campus but like just to know that there's you know twelve kids in vietnam attending my school they're wondering why does this name of somebody a's in it you know who is this who is this ben silent ben who has forgotten where our school where the school is that sounds like a perfect blend of giving and ego romania the i live for so that's perfect neil we we usually so we don't have guests on often and when we do we typically never just ask them questions like this we like it's more of a conversation where we're brainstorming stuff we ask you tons of questions because you're just a very fascinating person i hope you'll come on soon and you can actually brainstorm like the another uber suggests or something like that you know like actually go through some of i i i hope you'll come back again because this is awesome yeah it was so funny i was do the interview i'm like oh crap i should've never told people how much i spend a month have never told people i donate money and i was like it it goes against a lot of what my wife and idea we're more don't tell anyone anything live our lives and do whatever makes you only told it because it's not like you're bragging wheel like kinda begged you to tell it like we were kinda of got under we were like yeah tell us go go tell us it's not like you're like i don't think that's bragging it's it's not even bragging it just feels weird to talk about expenses right because there's so many people who struggle for like clean water or shoes right i was like yeah yeah so yeah it interesting those people if they ever listened to this podcast they've already been filtered out by our ness in other episodes so don't worry those anybody who sensitive it to that it's probably gone by now but also there's there's actually a lot of like i actually pretty passionately believe this like not only am i curious from like a oh i wanna know i wanna learn but like i'm actually pretty strongly believe that the way that people are like treat money is a pretty taboo thing actually is like a net like a huge net negative on most people so like you know people don't know what other people make therefore they don't know what like they don't know when they're under underpaid they don't know what's possible they don't ever like sometimes the most valuable conversations i have with somebody it's just somebody for whom they do something like something's very normal to them and it would be abnormal to me but it has now expanded my world view of what's possible and what could be normal for me like oh maybe it could be normal to actually like give more donate more have a school actually that sounds like something i actually gonna go talk to my wife about today is like something we should go do that like it's not because you you weren't bragging about it you highlight you just kind of we're honest about how you live your life which is no there's nothing wrong with that that's great i in my opinion and it expands other people's worldview view for something maybe they wanna go do or something that they haven't considered and like it's really weird to me that we keep the stuff under wraps and if somebody's just honest about like the way they live their life it's sort of like there's like all these like negative taboo around it like fuck that i don't like that at all and it's it's been like when when sam first met me i think this i i told the story for but like the second day i met him and then like the next day he messaged a face investor was like so like how much do you make and he was like like what he pay he's like so then what do and then i like i like well that's like super forward and he's like mean he told me why he was like so i'm trying to figure out how much to pay myself as entrepreneur i have no fucking clue and like my investors think i should make this much but i don't know if it's that normal and like i can kinda ask you and dance around it or like i'm just asking like five friends what they make and the same role as i am like start up ceo and like that'll help me figure out what's normal what's the range of like possibilities here and then after that he was like so what do you do with the money like what what are you he's like well that's a lot you know what are you investing that and i was like yeah and he's like are you investing in i started telling him and he's was like cool i'm investing in this and now i got new ideas about what i could be investing and i it really became very obviously in that moment i was like oh shit you're at a massive advantage if you have a few people you trust that you can talk openly about this sort of thing with and the podcast was basically taking that and doing it at scale was like alright well what if me and sam we're pretty honest about like the shit we do and like what if we could get guess to be honest about the shit they do they're like that's actually pretty valuable resource for people who don't have five they don't happen to have that lucky group of five friends we're all motivated entrepreneurs were also open and honest about what they do it's like well not everybody's located in a place where they have five people geographically around them that they can trust to talk about that stuff and so the pod kinda like serves as that so that's my justification for why you shouldn't feel bad about about sharing that information do you did it work neil do you do not feel but if you want we'll bleep it out or whatever if if you feel like that too okay it is what it is i still feel bad what it is what it is call i thought what i thought it was a great speech shot i i i felt good about that make your deal tell this a great speech but i i i still feel bad because i look at money as like a tool to help other people and i'm not saying that's right or wrong that's how i just do but i also know i spend more than i should and i probably should cut back and live a more humble life and spend a lot of this stan dude i'm inspired by how you spend and how you live and it you know you've done some good in the world by inspiring me