i i was in the sun this morning thinking about you guys and i was just i was just thinking about how grateful i am just there's just so many cool people i don't know just crossing our paths across our whole life just made me kinda little emotional but also just happy we're supposed to get touchy feely at the end it's not not at the beginning youtube stats shows that touchy you feely at the end works but at the beginning people just bounce i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days off on a less travel alright no we're live we've got noah ka one of my dear friends one of the og of internet marketing of entrepreneurship on know on on the on the internet one of my inspiration you run this company called the app sum it does like eighty million in revenue now you're a youtuber you have what one point something million subscribers and you're here to promote a book which you've clearly placed the right in front of you even see that there give us some of the the sort of wisdom bombs or insight bombs from the book so can me give us some of the the the key ideas or highlights that you think you know you want people to take away when they read the book alright sean i have a quote of view you in the book i don't know if you actually said this though is great gotta ask you while alright but so we we kinda read this book like a text start where we did like surveys and beta testing and all this stuff and so one of sean's quotes trying to help you said this yeah i'm saying you see the word worry i got you back show me an experiment and over the long run i'll show you a future winner that's true i did say that yes thank god i was guys like have to reprint inside tens of thousands of books from the you know what i will say from the surveys that we've done and what people said the results that they got number one thing is this now not how idea and it just means to just fucking start right away but people get so especially with you guys see so many people listen to your show and they're like i don't know i wanna listen more shows i need to go listen to these like fake you youtube guru that are out there that don't run real businesses but realizing they can actually do things like right now like how i don't get a buck right now just go get a dollar v at noah go get it from a friend go get it from your uncle and i think people are waiting to be ready and they're just never ready and people like yourselves me who ultimately have gotten to somewhere of wealth we're just doing shit you used just have this course called the monthly one k i i tell people there's two courses that i paid for that changed my life and it was neville copywriting course and then it was your monthly one k course i remember i bought this back twenty twenty three years old i think it was three hundred dollars and it was like a really big deal for me to buy that and i started a a a business based off of it that was like making thousands of dollars a month and then i shut it down and one of the first lessons in the book was to go to a coffee shop and ask for a discount and i was petrified to do that i remember i was so afraid to do that but i did do it and then you talked about emailing people or calling people and getting customers before you even build the thing which at the time now everyone talks about that but at the time i was like that was it kinda of blew my mind and during that period of my life it was all about action and so i don't know if i could show my skin here because i i don't know if i can move i won't even try it but i got i i i went and bought like basically a sewing needle do you guys know what stick and poke is do you know what a stick and poke is sean sounds like a jail cell tattoo it is listen you get a sewing needle and you get the thread and you wrap it around the edge of a pencil so just the needle is sticking out and then you go and buy india ink for five bucks and you dip it in the the the the needle and you just put all these little dots and i've got the word act on my left foot in the word now on my right foot and this was when i was so partying in then drinking a lot so i was little i was in knee braid when i did this but and i was like every day this i was like this course is so good every day when wake up in bed and my and i could see my feet and i put my feet down at you know at the end the bed at the end of the when i get up in morning i'm gonna see act now and that's my whole like life you know for business at least my mantra business and i remember it like taking your and i was like it's all about action fuck planning business plans are stupid business cards are stupid llc are stupid it's all about action and social media yeah that's the roi sam that's the roi right there he made you get tat up that's the roi dude thought he was gonna say his tattoo was act noah that there was gonna say noah not now dude those are some feet yeah dude some people some people would would look at it and they're like what's act i was yeah i got sat on the other foot i just love testing you mad on his ass yeah no i so number one for the book now not how just what can you do today i don't think you realize how much more shit they can do today the second thing is what you just said which is the power of asking like the upside of asking is like i got on a private jet the upside of asking when we teach it through the coffee challenge and other examples coffee challenges what you did which is yes for a discount so i did it i did the coffee challenge last week i did a a youtube video where i tried to do the coffee challenge i got rejected a ton and then you know what you're rejecting you're like oh shit guess what that's okay let's go forward dude this is such an immigrant mentality and this that's why i love or children of immigrants know you're you're you've got immigrants your your father and then sean has an immigrant family most of my best friends do they all have this energy where they ask for shit that i was so embarrassed to do and then i out with sean for a little while i see how we negotiate i out with neville for a little while it's just like this this shameless ability go and ask for stuff and it totally changed my perspective was i used to be so embarrassed like i would go out to eat and if you if i ordered a pizza and you brought me like chicken parmesan john i'd be like fuck it whatever just give it to me i'm i'm not gonna say shit to this person i'm i'm not gonna complain at all and then i started hanging out with these guys and it totally changed my perspective on just being like ruthless about asking for things and it in it one hundred percent worked i mean that's all business is right business is like hey will you be my sponsor for your guys show necessarily or will you be my customer will be my partner or will you be my employee it's an ask so at camp m so this is a slide i don't know if you could see it so this is this is joe ga the founder of airbnb and he's he gave us a a impromptu presentation off his phone so he had a he basically had like some old presentation he had given that he kinda like found slides on his phone started he basically started screen sharing from his phone onto the tv and he goes he was he was like oh this was our sales formula so this is the airbnb founder sales formula and it's s w squared plus w c equals m o so i don't know if you can if you've ever heard that he's like everybody heard this for like no he goes no so here's what it stands for some will some won't who cares move on and he's like this sales formula once you realized that some will say yes some won't who cares move on he's like you know now you have the entrepreneurial sales formula the ultimate formula that will serve you yeah but did he tattoo that on his ass no do you know that air airbnb is like it's it's featuring the book it's also a great example of how to get started super fucking quickly you guys know how they started on craigslist right they they they they they had like a designers conference with in town so they had a designers conference and they sent an email to the designers conference saying hey does they wanna say stay our couch that was how they tested the business that's now worth a hundred billion dollars i think that when you start realizing like there's other ways of doing this so you don't have to do like some silicon valley funded way you start realizing like oh facebook started that way in a weekend airbnb did not a lot of other companies can too so sean and i lived in san francisco for a long time he's still there we've had i probably have had ten silicon valley friends and i imagine sean has had more and they messaged us and they're like hey you know i used to invest in vc stuff you know i i invest in startups and they'll see what sean's doing a little bit about investing in cash flowing businesses and they're like can you teach me how to do that that is so much better or like they they wanna just make profits now as opposed to you know waiting twelve years to sell business and it there there is definitely the shift it seems like that's happening have you had that sean a bunch of your friends at holler at you about that no now they're not like asking me how to do it's pretty straightforward how to do it i don't think that's the question i think but you are right had a bunch of basically it's the losers of the silicon valley lottery right the winners are like yeah he you out with joe he's not asking me about how to invest in cash flowing businesses right he's not he's not it he's not trying to find you know the next ten percent compounding or whatever it's but it's the rest of us it's the ninety nine percent of the popular who played the silicon valley lottery for ten twelve fifteen years and then we're like alright i am smart but guy can i play a game with a little bit higher odds of success because guess what i don't actually need three trillion dollars to be happy you know i i actually just like to be financially free and i'd like to use all this business knowledge i have but in a way that's not ninety five percent based on luck and variance which is what i would call most silicon valley startups and so yeah there's definitely a shift to doing things that just work maybe buying companies that already work and making them work better and also people realizing that it's a lot more funny to have it's a lot more fun to have money now than it is to maybe have money out an ipo ten years from now and so sure the all those are definitely on trends as far as i can tell you said most of these companies succeed by luck in variance yeah i think if you put if i put a hundred of my friends were silicon valley in a room and i said you know and what ended up happening is that let's i five to seven of them ended up doing the thing we were all trying do we're all trying to build a billion dollar company if maybe five to seven of them did it i don't think it's because those five to seven were smarter or more talented or harder working than the other hundred what the two things that i think they did do is project selection market selection so i think they picked the right idea in the right market but it's not that they're better at doing that necessarily it's not the that they those guys had a different insight or a a a higher skill at picking you know they they happen to pick or the thing that curious about happened to be on trend or happened to be the thing that where the bigger opportunity was so i think that's one and the second is you know the there are you know still like twelve you know p balances of the of the puck as they go like i'm talking to the airbnb guy my biggest takeaway was this company should have died like seven times and i actually give them credit because i think they are in the top point o one percent of like grit and resilience that they actually did have a different thing that pushed them through but mostly people i know that made it it they didn't have the same number of times it could have failed once they once they got going if that makes sense so anyway i i guess i don't think out of the batch of a hundred people that the difference was between and the winners and losers was intelligence or talent or hard work i don't believe that that's what was the difference i agree with that i think these people figure things out but it is interesting because right now we glorify this person that like it's not working for a hundred years and then finally like the light bulb works you know it's it's interesting we glorify that but a lot of it is like for you guys and myself how many things have you guys done that did not work i mean at least fifteen twenty projects that i've tried that did not work right some of a day project in somewhere two years projects for three years yeah i mean i've i've done many many many things and like three have taken off this podcast being one of them yeah so like thirty ten percent have worked i think we think that the people are smarter though sean we're like oh these people must know something i don't know and like i i talked to a bunch of ceos when i came back to apps sum because i left for few and i remember i interviewed like the founder of the ceo of view to me at the time and all these other like famous kinda ceo people i was like these people aren't that much better than us and i think we that take some time to recognize though and then you it does maybe they have more experience which is stuff we can learn over time you're fascinating right now i think because you've you run one of these companies that was talked about a ton when you first launched it because you were one of the early guys and you're you're were kinda in this world with tim ferris and ram and so you were part of the kind of the zeitgeist in two thousand and eight to two thousand fourteen maybe and then you started this company apps which is like group on for software discounts and you've kind of been quiet or at least the company has been quiet apps but it's one of those stories where you're like what's going on with that soon and then you find out that they're just quietly crushing it wherever you you know i don't know what you did the year one but it's probably ten years old you're eighty million in revenue and when i admire about apps and what you've built there is that you've just done the same thing or about a decade or even more and it's just been quietly crushing it how long how how old is it so it's fourteen year almost fourteen years old it's going through puberty so we've got some growing pains here but it but it's been it's been cool though to see that you're just like i think that there's a few companies like this i like one example and i have no idea if this is true is like you know you guys you know hey dot com and superhuman the email software companies yeah they do i think there's a bunch of companies that like they get a lot of hype and then they just get quiet for five ten however long years and they just are quietly killing it and building the business i'll give you an example of one card oh yeah we talked about it about seven to ten years ago it was really popular to create like your your personal website right you're about stop me and then there was like wix and wee believe and those are like hot yc startups ups that were you know that were doing the thing squarespace was like on every podcast advertising everywhere and then card came out and it was just simple single page websites i still use card today and i i love this love this app for what anytime i need to make a site it's a it is for me still the fastest way to make a website like i think web flow is more popular probably cards easier to use what it's really hard though yeah like i need to find there's there should just be a blog for low iq people it's like hey if you're just you know let's be honest about where you're at case capabilities and talent wise this is the software you should be using it's like card is is in that that bucket of really really like stupidly easy to use and they came out they were like kind of hot on product hunt and stuff like that like in the kind of when indie hacking was like it had a little moment then they kinda disappeared nobody really talking about it for a while i met the founder one time and he's told me the numbers and they were just crushing it and i was like what he goes yeah i know he goes actually a really random thing happened he's like every like political movement started using cards so like during the campaign like twenty sixteen twenty twenty thousands of websites got created using card to promote like election stuff or any cause it was it became like a thing for causes he's like yeah that drove a ton of growth during that period and now yeah and i think they just raised like a bench around ten years later like they boot up for ten years and then raised like a single round from investors because they kinda couldn't deny hey this is now much bigger than a two person project we should probably like i know hire an employee and see what we had two people for ten years right yes this a guy aj and i think one other guy then that was it and then now they raised a little money now they're trying to go for it but it was this company that you heard about and you just didn't hear about it for seven years but that didn't mean it went away just meant like it's out of the you know tech crunch or whatever i think there's something not talked about about longevity right like just doing it over over and over and over and over and over for very long time i think the second thing is really market selection right like we've stuck with it fifteen years almost but really it's also we chose a good market right like software went from ten deals our first year give ever or take to not like how many software products out there hundred thousand plus and more coming and so something when people are starting businesses it's like okay well is this something that's gonna be bigger maybe in the future and then how do you at least be mindful of that as you start you bootstrap it or did you raise money a bootstrap so you bootstrap it fourteen years in eighty million so it's profitable i don't know how wildly profitable or just sort of profitable i can share the numbers i'm happy to just talk about it okay great let's do it in terms of net revenue i think we ended it was seventy six something was the actual final at the end of the year and that's like gross revenue meaning you give everything you give a percentage to the software companies i thought said net so that's after you paid out the software company right so gross sales is seventy six point seven net revenue was fifty six wow pretty good and then profit was seven point five and what do you do with that profit that's like no was piggy bank or where where does it go yeah no no it it doesn't go there so what we do is it's been the same approach we've had so we copy amazon if you actually look at our net profit over the past literally fourteen years it's like point five percent net income margin and so what we do is in q four we try to spend all the profit we have so that the every year gets bigger and bigger so take everyone on the team to mexico adds servers sponsorships if we can hiring investors prep paying for things whatever we can within tax rules i didn't pay the team distribution and then whatever's is left after that then me and my partner gets some distribution wait what so what what's what's confusing about that what's confusing about that is what's the point wait so you're but you're including you're paying yourself out of me right like what's the point of running this business for fourteen years without the profits is my my question he he included he included it just this distribution and then you prep ads for the next year yeah you you try to invest everything as much you can theoretically if it's a if do you think it's a positive investment so that the next year is bigger yeah but it's pretty hard to do that i we do for our e com business it's pretty hard to pay seven million dollars ahead of time so what's the goal cost no we spend like i think almost two million dollars distributed back to the team just so that they have bonuses and for the first five just for what was interesting though first five years i didn't pay myself anything right i was like how do i put everything back in even though we were doing pretty good in terms of the business like the business hit right away which most businesses don't you guys know that like you try a lot of things and not of them work but after i think of year six i was like i got nothing to show i don't think i'm gonna go public no one's trying to buy us like i'd like to have some money in the bank so i think were you broke i mean because like before this you'd ran what was it called game kick or kick clip was one of them and then ga and then you were with mint and then you were famously with facebook were you cash poor for a long time no i've i've never been broke i had a million dollars of thirty from day jobs i think that's kind of like not recognized by most people meaning one i was super cheap right so i lived on floors for a year that's a good way to save money lived in my mom's house lived in my aunt's house so just as as cheap as possible i did get two payday one payday was from the ga payments company so i think i made around three hundred and fifty thousand that was payments for farm bill and all those annoying games and then the conferences so those plus just being really conservative with the cash like it was about a million dollar liquid around thirty could you tell the facebook story i know you've told this before but like i said i think a lot of this is buried in your blog that people nobody's reading blogs anymore and so i don't want this i don't want the store to go untold what what happened with facebook how did you kinda blow like a hundred million dollar payday it was more of a few hundred million dollar payday every year get it was a good it was thanks for robert do you know this word short in freud yes you have pleasure other people's pain right it's like one of my favorite words it's like they have a word for that i think it's just got other wild big about it i mean you know it's funny i posted on twitter some of these like old facebook memories with like me and z and mo and bo who's now the cto or chris cox charlie ke adam d it was it was you know barring from tech crunch it was wasn't a it was a special time man it wasn't really self story so how did you get there what were you doing what was it like and what happened i worked at intel i had a day job but i was always building stuff on the side so i was always kinda just doing things like the college up dot org craigslist for college students no one used that ninja card dot com discount cards for college students that did really well and then i was putting on conferences so entrepreneur twenty seven i was just really wanting to get the hell out of a day job and and have an on own business so i sent in my resume cold but the differentiator was that i sent in mock ups so i i took facebook and i was like here's facebook maps if we ever to have a facebook maps feature so if you wanna go see your friend here's how it would look and they were like wow you have a bunch of businesses for college students and you're doing you're showing us what you would do here and you're not a designer right so you're you're scrapping these mock together or you paid somebody would you do no that was myself so i think i was either using google slides i don't even know if that was around probably microsoft paint like talking super basic it doesn't have to be fancy who slides is probably went that in can probably the best free things you could use did you just cold email z or how how who'd you said no no i so i was gonna quit intel in december because i was waiting for my health insurance to kick in i wanted to get my hsa payment and then i just saw the job listing i didn't know anyone there and so you you send that in they're like cool you go what was your first impression walking into the office i i guess what what was it like back then because what and what year was this for facebook this is two thousand five i think one of the things for people out there if you wanna get a job which i think could be cool is just go look at what you're using all the time you know if you listen to a podcast you're work working on our product to be clear though it is work people think that at app sandler they're like i'm gonna come party with you guys like you know realize like ninety percent a day sitting on computer working ten yeah we do a lot of cool stuff but when i came in there it was chaotic i mean i posted one of these photos it was a good memory where like there's cables everywhere the desk were kind of all over the place but it felt like there's something special happening it felt like there's like holy shit we're we're on a mission that no one else is a part of and we know where this is going and then we have this this truly fearless leader that that seemed like a sa that was he's definitely awkward as hell but i was really impressed about you know what he was able to do and how big he was thinking about this company would could be what numbers were was he throwing around yeah so a few crazy things crazy things that people forget though he copied connect you i don't know if anyone remembers in a weekend he copied someone else and then emailed out his emailed out to his dorm and that's how it got going so i think people think these big companies start very complicated no he copied someone else launched it it worked then he kept going and then he changes his vision so some of the crazier things that i recall was at a very early time he rejected a billion dollar sale which now maybe sounds a lot or a little but imagine like sean you're what thirty something thirty thirty five yeah thirty five you're twenty four years old and there's like hey give you a billion dollars this is yahoo i think all of us would take that in a heartbeat i i took a hundred thousand dollar job so i think i was gonna take the billion dollar to offer to i heard this crazy story where they're like i think it was yahoo that was offering to buy him where you know it's execs sit there and all the yahoo gray hairs are talking to him and they make the offer and he was like hey can you guys leave the room so we could discuss this and peter till in there and the executives leave the room and everyone's looking at suck like alright so let let let's take this and he goes so i just wanted to like sit in here and pretend like we're talking about this because obviously we're not gonna take this deal by the way you're totally making this up that's no one i and that's what i heard i i read a post out story is they got the offer then there was the next board meeting at the next board meeting he was like which is like peter t and others where he was like okay but housekeeping we gotta discuss you know we're supposed to talk about this got this offer obviously not gonna take it and they were like whoa maybe we should mark that's a lot of money we should talk about this that's what they said but even that i think is on don't let facts getting in the away of a good story well i think there's even more revision history which which is interesting here because then later there's another story that z actually accepted an offer from i think it was i think it was yahoo and if the yahoo or microsoft i don't remember and then they renamed they came back and tried to negotiate down so like you know he took one point two and then they came back and said no it's gonna be like nine hundred or something there's another story like that and so none of these are concurrent because peter teal tells the story right that's where that was the source of that story where he was just trying to say how zach is this you know he was this like visionary you know balls of steel turned down the billion dollar offer but then there's this another story where he kinda took it and i'm like well and they're like i think he wanted revenge because they they negotiated him was like but wait he said yes so i don't really know what the truth is but i know there's a lot of this bs in start lore where people make a stories that make somebody sound more more brave or i i would you know someone asked me few days ago like is that good or bad and i think he's good i think people might have negative impression but he was he he's he's ambitious but i think he always at least when i was there had good intentions of being ambitious it wasn't like i need to manipulate the media he's probably like what are you talking about it's just an algorithm i don't know like change it up again we'll fix it no can i start the environment because i remember once in when i lived in san francisco we were i was doing a startup i thought i was doing a i thought this is it we're we're all we're just like every other startup we're in the race we're in the hunt we're gonna make the next big thing and then i went to a friend's office who was doing a startup and they actually had product market fit and like the market was pulling their product they were growing faster they could handle yes and i walked into that office which was smaller way less nice you know didn't have like didn't have it wasn't super organized they had like you people were sitting on the floor and like there was just like people everywhere there's cables everywhere it was like a different vibe it's the company still around yeah yeah it it's it actually sold for you few hundred million dollars and so i walked home and i remember thinking on my way home oh fuck we're just playing house like that's what it's supposed to feel like when it's working didn't even actually realize it till i stepped foot in there but that's a totally different energy yeah they have it and we don't and did you feel that when you went into the facebook office a hundred percent i felt it i've been lucky to feel it a few times that mint i felt it app feels it and i think it inside at facebook one my boss got fired the day i i i started so i walked in and my boss is walking out that which is a really strange you know i just love intel which you know i had you know eight meetings a day and i had all this training was horrible and you know i go into a room and z like your your boss doug who ended up founding good x he's has no good x yep oh wow pretty pretty pretty impressive i just fired him because he he wanted he's a lot of guys from facebook came from yahoo and he's like he tried to sell the company so it's my company i fired him welcome to facebook and then i just grabbed literally a corner of a desk and it was like alright well what should i work on right and it it's literally like a stark contrast from intel where like everything is regiment and it was amazing i think the thing that was interesting that others didn't know is that we saw the internal metrics about the growth so we knew there was something happening that others didn't see in terms of like i think we're at ten million a day i started by the day i got fired it was about fifty million so we just saw that like wow this growth but the threats were serious like google was a threat which people you know kinda of forget today myspace was a huge threat and obviously now those things are really talked about what were you doing the the math when you were thinking about how much your stocks eventually gonna be worth where you're like man this might make ten million dollars my whole thing was i just thought the equity is gonna be insanely value i didn't know at mint i had a very specific number i thought i would sell for which i was accurate there facebook i was like i don't know the limit because z vision was to connect the entire world and his whole his quote was like we wanna be a toll booth for the internet i remember that and that was inspiring it was nice you know even at i'm soon i'm now like okay what are we excited about and we're excited to promote software like we love for money software and it's like his was like i wanna connect the entire world but you imagine showed up to work and he's connecting the entire world and and what he did a lot of really clever things which was how do we reduce all distractions so like he paid for all of our parking tickets i paid for all of our cleaning he paid for us to live close he paid for like everything so all we had to do is focus somewhere and that was it was normal back then right like no i was paid parking tickets and be like hey there's gonna just bring your laundry here shit like shut up about your life and just bring your laundry here and just work because yeah we when we were hanging out with mister beast jack smith said this the other day he got we were hanging out and he goes i like how he just has no disregard for social norms because we were like how'd do you hire this guy or like how do you train people and he's like they move in with me basically like they just i attach them to my hip they follow me everywhere we work seven days a week and then after six months like now you could start to give your ideas because you now you have now fully absorbed me they're like alright well i don't think i could i send there like california labor laws like how does this work and and and i i think it was right the absolute disregard for social norms i've now learned is like a very very positive attribute or signal in highly highly successful people sounds like zen was kinda like that too i don't know that i think asking and doing things that you believe i think you guys are very good at that but there's also i think negatives like i remember this guy dan died in a by a tree filled on him this is during one of the work days he was biking and a tree killed him and i'm like okay are we gonna put a bike wreck outside or we gonna have a moment and there was not even any acknowledgment it was like let's just work and i just thought what that was i was insane i mean there's a price to pay for being crazy like that right like there's pros and cons yeah i mean it's special to be part and you have to think like we had harvard phds and customer support like imagine that like people that wanted to be there so badly doesn't matter your degree you just can work there and so being in that environment was really special and just like learn seeing all this amazing talent that that was there and that has left to go do really cool things and so why did they fire you it's funny i was actually looking at the pictures i was fired dick basically because of coachella like you you dipped out i was like i i was drunk high coachella and then for me i i was blogging about facebook because i was so excited about it i think go find things you're excited about it and tell the world about it if you think it's a good thing that that's how i've always felt with the stuff i do and i'd let eric at tech know like hey facebook's opening up to at microsoft and at corporate emails in the morning i think you should write about it and get and and talk about it because facebook wasn't gonna do any press and he wrote about it that night and then i emailed z in somebody other other et team i let him know what i did so i think it was that and then i i think for me i also felt frustrated you got you guys have seen these people where for me at thirty people when was like no it just figure things out so i was like alright i'm gonna help build mobile with s or i'm gonna help build ads or i'm gonna help do the status update thing which they didn't even wanna do was just fun it was very like there's a lot to do there and and i was also probably more immature and then as it i got older and it grew i i didn't wanna be in meetings i didn't wanna do excel project management i didn't wanna have long discussions with thirty people about basic ideas when did it become corporate i mean at that point it was a hundred and fifty people it felt very corporate to me it felt very you know and if you look at facebook what's the last great thing z has done since two thousand five besides acquiring other people what does he come up with portal that was a flop like name one thing he's actually done besides make he's acquired he's making decisions acquiring people i'd say that yeah just gotten bigger i mean he it that that's why facebook's is great it's just it's because everyone uses it i mean it's so big i remember when sarah my wife worked there they were like we're doing this thing in india where we put b or drones up in the sky and i was like why are they doing that they're like well because the only people who aren't on facebook are the people in india who don't have internet so we're just gonna go give them free internet so they can use facebook i mean his relentless drive towards growing to everyone is is what he's done yeah and stuff like you know the part thing is the bigger you get the harder is to move the needle so it's like marketplace super successful but kinda like who cares it's like yeah you built craigslist inside facebook it's fine you know they need us they need to do something so big right that's why it's like the meta or ai like they have to go on these huge waves just to kind of like move the needle for you know how big facebook it is i think what what was really interesting what people can think about their own businesses is the core really great because like facebook marketplace or facebook events i was really excited to to grow and improve and monetize early on and he was just again it completely and i noticed that with app sumo or it's our core businesses go find cool products get a deal on them modem that's it right but it gets very exciting to think alright could we do mr r can we do all these other options but really it's like can you do the core excellent and then start adding new things at a later point some of some of the cool stuff so you you've had this video where you went on this plane with this guy who i think was a commodities trader or i don't i i think the somebody said you know and i assume he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars i know that you have a bunch of friends who are billionaires you told me ahead of time you said most billionaires that you know are unhappy what what tell me more about like what you've noticed about hanging out with some of these like uber uber successful people most of them didn't set out to be billionaires like hear are people like i would be a billionaire it's like almost every billionaire i know and i've worked for them or multi multi millionaire was just like here's something i'm curious about or excited about and yes maybe in private equity of finance but a lot of the entrepreneur ones it was just like stuff they're curious about all of them got rich as well in one way like i was just at fedex this morning because i interviewed the guy from king coast he just focused on copier that's it but a lot of newer entrepreneurs i've seen or ones i haven't had as much success like i'm gonna do five different solar startups ups this weekend it's like okay can test five but which one's working let's just do one these billionaires just did one but they tell us to diversify and so i i think that's always fascinating for you is they do one thing and and this is again we kinda come back to the op stories is they stuck with it for a very long period of time like think about any billionaires you know how long did it take yeah i mean twenty years thirty years a lifetime a a career a lifetime a lifetime and we're trying to get rich in a weekend or which you know crypto rich in a month and i think the the slow compounded growth over long periods of time is what doesn't get recognized sean didn't you say that was like your major takeaway from your camp m mfa yeah i wouldn't say it exactly like that but when i was talking to jimmy and i was like yeah i think the thing i'm you know most the thing that's standing out to be the most as i i get out of my bubble i reassess i reflect it's the started of the new year is i think i'm spending so much energy but i'm spreading it out i'm spreading it too thin and that's a mistake like i'm doing more and getting less and i put it differently i said i think you have a thousand times more opportunity hit you know opportunities coming to every day and you've said yes to half the things i have so something's wrong here i think in general the more successful you get the more opportunities you get but the more things you should and and you should be saying no to i think h said a nice thing about this that i i thought resonated he goes let's say you get let's say you're making ten thousand a month and now somebody comes and offers you something that's gonna make you a thousand dollars pretty easy to say no that you have a going rate you if you're making a hundred thousand a month if somebody comes to you and says here's something make you ten grand easy to say no the hard thing is when you're making a hundred grand and somebody comes you and says here's the thing that can make a hundred grand and you're like that's my rate but what happens is you now have you you've now split your focus and you're basically you're you're losing life balance but you're also doubling down in the amount of mortgage if you only to get you know one more unit compared to where you were is like the best people the smartest people they basically when they're at the hundred they don't say yes to the next thing that can get them a hundred or two hundred they will only say yes to something that might get them you know ten x more than that and so the right way to do it is to basically say alright this gave me the right to say no to certain things and the hardest one to say no to is the one that's at the current level where you're currently at and the people who really break out get to the next level they're the ones who are able to to to say no stay focused until they see something that is truly ten x better opportunity than what they have so how are how are you changing this year well i said do a bunch of things i shutdown down two of the things that i was working on that were working but they were more in that like one x one x type of category and then every day i basically start my day with the first three hours because i was like the main thing i wanna focus on is is making great content the thing i love doing the most is something i think i i'm i'm best at but the hard part is a deal comes on the table and now i'm spending you know the first eight hours that day working on that deal or that investment or that opportunity or that new new idea and so i just carved out where the first three hours of the day i'm only doing content and i was like cool i want this to be eight hours ten hours a day but the thing i can control is that the first three hours i'm not gonna say yes to anything else i'm only gonna say this and the cool part is as soon as you do the first three hours of have so much momentum the natural thing to do is just to keep going and so that's been very effective so far where are you sean where are you gonna start making content like what when you keep saying content creation are you talking specifically text yeah are you talking about text blogging is coming back sean blog on i come back now all all ideas are on the table so right now i'm just prototyping so i'm basically trying to figure out which one do i enjoy the most i knew i would enjoy podcasting i listened to a ton of podcast podcasts i had prototype it so before this podcast i had recorded two other one with my roommate and brother lot at home where we talked about sports and never released it there's only been three listeners ever it's me and the two guys i did it with then i did another podcast at my office when was doing a start is me fe kinda a couple couple of guys three episodes i think they're up on youtube somewhere nobody ever watched them but doing that even though those podcasts went nowhere it did do one thing which has showed me oh man i really like doing this and how cool would it be if i actually like could do this all the time or it was actually you know if people actually listen to it man that would be amazing and so i had prototype felt it out before i in order to know that that's actually something i wanted to do so when i say new content i'll dabble with let's say short form or or write you know i'll write a a a brief to a book like you know and outline to a book of the first two chapters because i'm trying to understand what do i wanna write a book or not i don't need to commit to that because i can prototype and fill it out first you definitely should go the book route the problem with the book route noah you've seen it seems so fucking hard it seems so hard everyone i know who who writes a book they describe it exactly how my friends who run marathons do where they complain constantly while they're in training they say the race is miserable and then about two weeks after the race happens or the book goes live they go alright i think i'm wanna do this next book on this topic and i'm like man i just heard you complain for two years you've been talking about this freaking book for years i think it's been way longer than four years actually i remember you talking about how you wanted to write a book forever and it took four freaking years to do this thing is it do you think it's gonna be worth it what's the roi gonna be i like it i'm proud of it i think it's first off and and i ain't know coming back to well and the the roi on that i think it's gonna impact people i think one person at a time i've already seen it right i've seen people read it and i'm like holy shit really you know even i think these things like what what you guys have done with your show and sean's is like what you're exploring when yours your content is like what's something you're excited to do and that's kinda hard like no one's ever proud of themselves like yeah i wrote i walked five feet like but if you run a mile or if you run a marathon you're like dan that was hard but i can actually do this and i think that that to me was really the ultimate era in this book thinking it can i actually face myself and and work on a book and to help other people and then can people do it for themselves did when did you become so political what do you mean where like it's called you're like a you're like a politician my friend like i so old noah i gotta tell a story about i remember sean one time there's a coworker who i work with who sean you are friends with and she we go into this meeting and noah shows up shirtless he's got no shirt on he's in his house i think he's like on his couch and i'm like noah what the fuck are you do it dude like he he was just like crazy mad man and that's actually what made brilliant was like he would do all this crazy stuff and he executed crazy stuff really really really well but now when i ask what the roi is of this you're you're showing so much evolution you're talking about changing people's lives it's so funny to see you say this this stuff what one thank you i think we should all change people's lives back then too just in a different way one nip at of time yeah one time i've also i i i was gonna talk about inverted my inverted nipples which i'm very self conscious about okay i mean look i'm maturing do i wanna show up shirtless maybe if we're hanging out in asana like come over but i i think as we can get older you also realize like what kind of behavior do you wanna do and i think that's fine do the book i think people have these these like bullshit roi things like i wanna help a million people i don't give a shit about that i don't but i am happy if like one or two or five or a thousand or ten thousand then read the book and do something for themselves noah we appreciate you doing this ma'am i i forgot to i should plugged this earlier on but i'm doing i'm i'm buying how many how many books am i buying thirty fifty books something like that so i bought a bunch of books i'm trying to do my part to help you rank up in in the list so if you go to the anti nba dot com between now and february fifteenth who gives me their email i'll just like pick i'll randomly pick fifty of you guys and i'll send you a link to buy the book for free or to enter your address it and then i'll and we'll send you the book i'm excited to see you do this i hopefully hopefully you impact some people which i know you will but also the the ego side of me is like hopefully you rank on some type of best seller list which i know is also pretty cool we appreciate you doing this what do you wanna what's it's called million dollar weekend you're noah ka on twitter at apps sumo dot com noah ka on youtube i'm missing any other plug no man it's like look by the way noah i had an experience like this that shifted my life i'm a testimonial for this even before your book came out i was working on the start up my very first start up we were working on it for like nine months trying to get everything right we literally had a three hundred page business plan it was embarrassing let now they look back but we thought that meant we were you know doing everything we were dot every you know we're dots and t's and crossing i's out here and so we're i was like alright well at a certain point i looked at my my cofounder founder and i was like my c founder he's my roommate my friend and i was like i was like dude i feel like we just keep telling everyone were doing a business but we don't actually do any business he's like what i was like like how long have we've been sitting here with this whiteboard and this plan and like how much we have no revenue we've never made a dollar like who yeah i can't believe this and we just keep tricking ourselves into thinking that this is legit i just read the four hour workweek week and i was like alright this weekend we are make money i don't care i like we're in our we set a goal for a thousand dollars i said we're gonna try to make a thousand dollars in the next you know basically it was it was friday was like we're gonna make it by a sunday night and i don't care how let's go and instantly just by having that intention things started to fall together we made this website we found a product on alibaba we got a drop ship we made our first sale we sold basically i don't know a few hundred of these like wrist bands like kind of customized wristband like those fat like live strong bands yeah to somebody who's their parents were having an anniversary and they needed like two hundred of these we charge them like in know four five bucks per we made a thousand dollars in one weekend and i felt like the champion of the of the universe and i was like this is what business is supposed to feel like taking action actually going out there try to sell a product moving fast don't try to perfect everything you don't need a three hundred page plan and after that like literally my you know my whole game shifted just from that one experience and so i haven't read your book yet or you you sent i'm gonna read it but i already like in my soul am on board with what you're all about dude i did that wrist spin business too that's so crazy they they were hot at the time right like every kid was wearing them my every college kid was wearing them but i i think that the thing you called out which is interesting and and at that's awesome it's like because you said i'm gonna do something and i have this limited time and you have fifty two of them right so especially if you guys got kids and all this stuff you you don't have a lot of time but you can make an hour or two in a weekend to to do something and then look at what you did in a week what you didn't do in months right yeah exactly that you in the weekend that you didn't do in one so that's that's how it's exactly how it felt and then i was like i either can go back to the old way or i can go this new way this action way and the action way became the way and that you know basically that became i don't know like sam it's so funny you have that tat on your feet like that's it's been tat in my brain i was like the only thing you know i i remember literally looking around i was at duke and there's a bunch of smart kids at duke i thought when i in high school i was the smart then you go to a college with all the smart kids from those high schools and you realize oh you ain't shit and i was like alright yeah am i just gonna be like forget average because that's where this is going and i was like am i really gonna get smarter than these people oh gonna i don't have any like special talents that they that that nobody else has but i realized that a lot of smart people are over thinkers they hesitate they doubt they over analyze and i was like that's my thing i'm not gonna do that i'm just gonna immediately take action and that will be the difference and that will be my thing and i could just that'll be the bedrock that i can build any kind of success on rather than trying to have been like a special snowflake that was you know pretty pre destined to do great things and that just became my my my motto i've still got the needle bro we can change that we can help we can do add it let's tat well sean but most people who listening wanna make a money they don't ever make a buck and everybody you make that one dollar and that's where they have to get you know get up that that's those plumbers dude that was that was great like like grid lyrics nice nice words thank you like grow you're a forty year old youtuber how do you not know these things so i'm learning the the vocab but dude i read this good book last night sam you made me inspired about it it's it's called the art thief and this guy who steals art but one of the things you said that stuck with me is like what's the first thing you look at when you wake up in the morning and i i do respect that i love that you're like well this is the area one improve which is you know you saw on your feet i i don't see my feet first thing in the morning but i it's like puts there on your bedside puts them in out where you're like first thing you see in the morning maybe sean's face yeah maybe it's one dollar weekend maybe it's sucked but i love that idea i'm getting my whole legs done you know not you know i've got a kid now so maybe i'll do her name but i've got i've got i've got bold fast fun tattooed of my thighs because b f that's kinda what i live for when it comes to business i've got a pirate ship it is that is bro live left love is both yeah i mean it move to austin and i found myself yeah i did the work sean it's itself the work the work dude dude well you know the reason i like homemade tattoos is as you do it you want when i found out when you go to tattoo shops basically find an artist that you're like and you're like here's kinda what i want and they're like i'm just gonna do whatever i want and you're like too embarrassed to like tell them exactly what the what you want because this guy you wanna impress them and so i basically have a whole bunch of tattoos on my legs and i'll throw out my body that i was just trying to trying to impress hector my at two artists so so that's pretty much how work but it comes to tattoos no we appreciate you coming we'll wrap here it that's a pop i feel like got rude wear i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a roll less travel never looking back but