and then we were like alright fine deals like that's you know this business was so freaking hard like i just try this and in the end i don't think it i'd ever ended up working but you got the customers and that's the point of the episode yeah we go exactly the subsequent failure is it irrelevant yeah i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a less truck alright we're live sean we're gonna do a q and a session today we got a bunch of questions i have a feeling we're gonna spend most of the time on one question so but the question is how did you get your first hundred customers in your businesses and what are the best ways that you've heard of so i'll ask you sean but i've personally have grown i think five things to a million to ten million in revenue i've grown one thing to well north of ten million in revenue multi million dollars per month i've grown a bunch of stuff to thousands of users i've grown a bunch of stuff to hundreds of thousands and i've grown one thing to millions and we'll go through examples and you've done the same you've how many did bib have or a lab lab had like four million users yeah basically we've done this a bunch of different times in a bunch of different ways and so when we get this question you know how did you get your first on customers i actually really like this question this is a very different question and like you know what's your advice it's like forget the advice let me tell you literally what i did when it comes to how we grew our businesses at the very very start because if you're at the start it doesn't matter what somebody did to go to get to ten million dollars in revenue what matters is what how they got to ten dollars in revenue how do they get the ball going how do they get the initial momentum because if you don't do that by definition you don't really get to you know you don't get to step two unless you've done step one and so this is the the step one episode and i thought it'd be fun if we take the our own like just all the different projects that we've done and just try to label the method that we use to go and get those first hundred customers that are that got the ball rolling do you wanna go back and forth yeah let's trade off alright so the first thing that i grew i'm actually not gonna talk about it a lot because i didn't realize it but i was breaking the law but it was i had an e commerce store and i originally got my first hundred customers by posting in forums but i'm not gonna mention that statute by the way is that a real thing the statute limitations like is it is there a real thing maybe we need producer ari to let us know and by the way show her in her sweater fantastic sweater okay it's not a thing alright so so correct do not tell people what you were doing i thought after ten years everything's forgiven no i'm not gonna mention that but alright the first my first business was called bunk it was like my first like actual startup up out of college it was called bunk it was a roommate matching app it was tinder for roommates which i would say was stupid we should have done tinder for tinder because this was the right when tinder came out it was like the swiping like clicking less yes or no but before it became an app we actually just had a website that was built on wee we probably did fifty thousand in sales in a handful of months something like that and what we used to do is in san francisco it's mostly transient people some people like me and sean who moved there without knowing too many people and you wanna rent a one bedroom apartment but you can't afford to one bedroom apartment and so instead there's a four bedroom apartment where there's one room left and you apply to move in there what a lot of people don't know is back then and i don't know if it's this right now but back then literally a hundred people would apply for that one bedroom so the way that we got users is we went and found people who had like landlords who had four bedroom apartments and three bedroom apartments and we said hey we're gonna host an event it's not gonna be a party it was a party it's gonna be an event at your three and four bedroom apartment and we're gonna have a bunch of perspective tenants there and they're gonna team up and get their own place and so let's say that it was a four bedroom place for four thousand we would create individual ads for a one bedroom at one thousand dollars and we and back then on craigslist you could use h gmail and create these beautiful like images of what the apartments look like and it said this is bunk s of we help people match people this is a one bedroom and a four bedroom but we're gonna help you team up and we end we we would get like ten thousand users a week coming to our bun dot com website and that's how i got our first video users was through craigslist and the point being the takeaway away by the way is we already knew the seekers were there and so just a piggyback where people already were so the the smart part there is using craigslist because craigslist already had a lot of search volume basically instead of seo you use basically ceo says i go go to craigslist and get use that traffic but then hosting the event would you do in these events by the way was there anything special you did or like how did you get people to did you have to make it marketable or did you just make it normal because i know for the hustle you had these great little events that you use called pizza in forties where yeah you would invite a speaker to an event but the you would tape two forty ounce beers to their hands and the rule this is genius by the way this was so good i remember when you did this i was like that guy sam is cool i wanna be friends i literally had that thought and then i i didn't even drink by the way at this point i didn't even drink but the day of the game was pizza in forties because we didn't have a lot of money so we'll supply costco pizza and we'll have beer and the speaker has to have a forty ounce spear and the the interview is done when the forty ounce beer is done right right it's like a ted talk but instead of eighteen minutes it was however long it thinks have the beer if he wants to get off the stage tug baby chug and and did you get a little bit more lucy goose with the questions towards the tail that was genius so that one was marketable was your did you have to do that for their apartment or was it as simple as saying hey come check out so we would get like hundreds of applicants for a one bet for like a four bedroom and we just emailed them and and we are very transparent in the ad it said this is not a one bedroom it's a one bedroom and a four bedroom but what we're doing is we're gonna host a party with fifty people here's the types of people who are coming show up at this time and then they would team up and get a place and once they got a place the landlord would tell us it came from us and we would take money from both the user and the landlord and yeah we were just really transparent about it and i would literally like ride my bike at the time to the house it'd be like knock knock i'm give me a hundred dollars please or three hundred dollars or however how much it was and that's how we made money but no it was that it was very easy but now you can't do this craigslist has changed how they operate but this by the way is exactly how airbnb got popular alright what's yours alright i'm gonna give you my first business as well so this is i'm twenty one years old we are starting a sushi restaurant chain and i'm living in denver and the way our thing worked was like a cloud kitchen so it was because we didn't wanna sign the ten year release and build out a physical location and have to go raise five hundred thousand dollars we had a mentor who was like what if you did a delivery only a delivery only method and you rented a comm of kitchen by the hour i remember we were paying nineteen dollars an hour instead of having to like the contrast was we were about to sign a ten year lease with a personal guarantee and drop up three hundred to five hundred thousand dollars to build it out or for nineteen dollars an hour we could start monday after fifteen years you're fifteen years in the future i mean you you nailed it yeah we were but still it and so how do we get customers back then door dash uber eats didn't exist so where are we gonna get customers for our delivery only restaurant i didn't know any better knowing what i know now i probably would have just run ads local ads maybe facebook ads google ads something like that for people looking for sushi but i didn't know that at the time and ignorance is a bit of a superpower so the ignorance led us to our planning meeting was like twelve minutes long i was like we need customers so like hey we got the kitchen now like we need customers hey i don't know walk around and ask people so what i did was i went downtown and i did a version of door to door but instead of door to door i did floor floor so i went into a skyscraper because i wanted density so i was like oh let me just go to this big office building there's thousands of people working in this one building so i have to walk around all day i could just go in the elevator click one get out and talk to whoever i see click two get out to i see i'll go up you know thirty or forty flights in this building and what i realized when i doing this was it's kind of amazing i actually recommend this to pretty much anyone which is when you have a new thing you you have all these ideas about why it's so great but you haven't actually like pitched it to somebody in a concise way where you have i don't know thirty seconds to a minute to like get your foot in the door and then maybe another minute to explain what your thing is and then you gotta make a call to action and try to get them to buy and my pitch really sucked but because i was floor floor it was like how four twenty by four you this was solid i knew so what i realized was okay you go in you can't just bother people in an office you have to find the front desk lady her job is greet a visitor so i said okay that's the accessible person she also had a lot of clout and so i learned about basically a local influencer so when people think about influencers they think it's gotta be a celebrity but actually in any any pocket of people there is somebody who is more influential than the rest any tribe of people and in an office that's always the person at the front desk it's the office manager the secretary of whatever you what i call it and so i would go to this kinda office manager and i would say i hey do you guys ever two so instead of saying hey would you like to eat some sushi was like no i don't just eat sushi from strangers i realized pretty quickly that was my first pitch by floor two i was like alright i'm not saying that again so four three four i realized okay i should actually ask them like do they ever do you guys ever do office catering for lunches or whatever for the for the for the group and they would say yes so i asked a question i had a very simple answer a yes or no answer if it was no then i knew don't waste my time on this prospect they're not gonna order but if it was yes now i had one person who might order fifty lunches in one order right like they would order bulk and so i would ask them hey do you ever order you know do you guys ever be catering for office lunches maybe a birthday or a big meeting or or just every wednesday and they were like yeah we do it every wednesday i'd be like awesome i said when you order where do you typically order from oh we always do the sandwich place blah blah i said awesome if you ever wanted to try something new we actually just opened up a restaurant and i would love to do a deal with you guys where we actually do it for free one time right so i created an offer i was like i'd love to bring you a sample tray just for you and you can invite a couple of people in the officers to try it out if you guys like it we'll leave a menu with you guys if you don't like it no problem we'll come back and clean it up and i created an offer i created an opening question and i am ended up getting my pitch right and this one thing we were profitable month one i remember we made like thirteen grand in the first month and like at the time everybody said restaurants you don't make any money and we're were like we're doing it we're making money this is fantastic and so this florida floor sales and understanding who is the gatekeeper who is the person i need to get on board and what is the the sort of risk free offer that i can offer them was way we got our first first customers how much revenue were you doing the year six or not your six month year six zero dude we quit in month three because what realized was we were like alright we were making out know tens of thousands a so i think we were doing like maybe thirty thousand in the first month and a little bit more in the second month and then by then it was like dude we were so worn out of the just the process of running a restaurant and we but we kinda had a realization like great we can keep scaling this but that means we're gonna have to keep doing this and it was yeah know we were waking up before in the morning go into the fish market staying there till eleven at night because we would do private catering at night and doing dishes and then like we didn't know anything was so stupid i didn't realize you should hire people we just did everything everywhere like you're like looking at your partners one day after working and you're like dale but they're like bail i like we're out we had a realization we we realized we were in the wrong business we realized actually the the the genius of this was the delivery part people actually liked food delivery but they only ate sushi every couple weeks max and so we were like oh you know what we should do we've been telling them for a year we're gonna create the next you know this chipotle of sushi actually what we should do is just deliver whatever the hell they actually want they want sandwiches dude they want burritos so we should just deliver that that's the business not the sushi part and then we're were like alright i think that's true do we wanna do that i was like and yeah we had a smart thing which was hey guys maybe the first business idea we ever had in our lives might not be the best one and we're still young and we haven't committed anything to anybody what if we just switch to a better to a different business altogether and i'm so glad we had that conversation because most of those time if something's working or making a little bit of money and you've been telling everyone for a year you just feel like you need to stay consistent with it and that would have been a terrible decision for us that's hilarious alright i'll tell you another one so i'll skip the book club one but i'll mention it briefly i had a book club the anti n nba dot com and i that's how i met ci i met ryan hoover this way some of my best friends dude i just put another ad on craig craigslist i said i'm an organizing a business book club and it was just from craigslist and i ended up getting ten thousand people signing up to my email list by the way again sorry can we name these methods i will call the first one you did either like you piggyback because you pay you piggyback craigslist or like host an event maybe that was the method you did yeah for mine it was literally door to door and like don't underestimate the fact that you can just buy brute force hand to hand combat go get a hundred customers that way it'll only take you a few days to do that and this third one you're talking about the book club we call it like the magnet this something different to because it wasn't just an event because what you did was you found a bunch of like minded people because it was a filter the only people who wanna do a book club for on for like biographies and business books are gonna be the type of business nerds that you wanted to be around the create a product for and so like the selective filter where for nine ninety five percent of people they're gonna be like hell no but five percent there it's a hell yes because it's like so niche to their obsessions and i think that there's something smart there that's different than just hosting a general event it's a magnitude the learnings by the way for a book club no one reads the book except me i was the only one who read the book i was just like teaching the book alright i'll do the second one though alright so bunk was acquired for a very small sum and we ended up turning it into an app called roommates we'll called this methodology made to stick i guess because i learned this i one of the books that we read at my book club was called made to stick it was by dana shit heath i think their experts on like morality and there was something in the book where it talked about i forget exactly the phrase but it but my takeaway was that phrase i always say niches make riches and the idea being if you ever see one of these buzzfeed articles and it'll be like fifty ways you fifty reasons why or fifty fifty things oli only long islanders will laugh at right or fifty things you know you're an italian american or fifty ways you know you're from s saint louis and the thing about those is they don't get a huge amount of traffic but the people in long island or saint louis or who are italian they will always click it they and so the click rate is through the roof and so we didn't have a budget when we launched the app roommates and so what we did was i stole that that that learning and i created we launched in la chicago boston new york san francisco five or six cities and so what we did was we made an infographic where we called the the typical roommates of san francisco the typical roommates of la and i had never even been to la or new york yorker or boston i'd never even been there and what we did was each image of the infographic it was eighteen people i think or fifteen people and it said here's the people from the marina which is a neighborhood in san francisco here's a typical roommate from the mission which is the hips area of san francisco and in each thing we said where do they shop and we named eight or four different places that they would shop where do they eat what what's a funny quote they would say and i would read yelp and i would find out in in let's say new york like what is a the most reviewed restaurant on yelp in that area and are people making jokes and saying that it's over hyped or whatever in which stores are the most popular and then what we did we made those infographics and we we shared them out on facebook and twitter and i think instagram i don't gonna remember where and we tag those restaurants in those stores and most people are like oh this is so funny they totally know us which we just spill it from yelp all the jokes right and they ended up sharing it and we got something like a hundred thousand users just from that infographic just from those five infographics and if you google you guys can google typical roommates of la and you'll see huffington to post or all the local newspapers of those regions shared it and that's how we got all of our initial customers from from those four i remember saying i remember seen this one it was really funny it would be like like you're making it sound almost like it was like like utilitarian but it was actually humorous i thought like it was it was funny i shopping like the marina it's and then you'd would be like whatever i remember exactly how you phrase it but it would be like here you're can find kelsey is blah blah blah and you would kind of like make fun of them but also backhand to compliment them and then you would say like you know the upside you'll you know you'll always have you know lou lemon around the house the downside blah blah and you would like kind of poke fun at them and because of that everybody shared it because for own neighborhood don't me true that's so true that's so us oh my god this is you and then for others that they didn't like the other neighborhoods same thing right it was like kind of like our team versus their team and so you a lot of people shared this thing i was living in san francisco at the time i remember seeing that right when i actually moved there and i was like this is actually quite it was useful because it's it's not info you really found anywhere else either like bryce it was like was be like say this the real the real take so here's an example this is w village in chicago i've never even been there but it's an image of a bro looking guy who i guess went to indiana university and he's wearing a cup shirt it says average one bedroom rent average two bedroom rent here's how much you would say if you had a roommate and it says three hundred and ten dollars per month or twenty merkel fish bowls which i guess is like a restaurant in that area or it would say avoids pi and anderson bill so it creates like the tribe thing those are other neighborhoods occupation a pe teacher or a weekend bartender at deuce you'll probably find them at rig w feel rooftops crushing old styles or doing seventeen shots of fireball secret spot the back bar at of the stretch trying to get the waitress to play find the water or calling everyone boss should they say hey bro won shot ski so like things like that where we would make fun of people but you'll notice we name as many brands as possible the name of the game was throwing in as many brands as possible and those and those are the people who share and that is how we got i forget exactly how many users we had but i remember i got paid on how many swipe people did and they were swiping millions of millions of millions of times right so that's how we got that's how we got traffic and users to the app roommates alright i'm gonna tell you i'm going in an order here so my next business was a biotech business in australia that go to australia now biotech is a very like like we're talking about like scrappy startup up stories like how do get someone to download an app how do you get somebody to like order food biotech is like science and people in it was go to alley you're like hey man here's their needle do you wanna try well it wasn't like human body biotech it was basically energy clean energy so the idea was our our technology was there's coal that's underground and people think coal is real dirty because if you mine it you bring it up to the surface and you burn it yes it is very like bad for the environment however our technology was this thing where you don't have to mine it so you don't have to bring it out of the ground and you don't have to burn it instead what you do is you pump little microbes into the ground little naturally occurring microbes and their natural feeding is basically they eat the coal they they basically decompose the coal essentially there's like the eat coal they far out natural gas so their natural metabolism of it released natural gas which then bubbles back up to the to your pipe in the surface and boom you have a flare was this like a company like a big company yeah was it was a company it was a startup company so basically this the backstory was this guy in the united states the sciences in the united states had been had gotten forty million dollars of government funding to develop microbes that would decompose ammunition because the government had there's wars all around the world and part of like the environmental cleanup they had to do as part of the wars was they needed something that would decompose a lot of the ammunition and the the the waste product of the wars and so what happened was somebody realized you know the guy who the ceo of our company realized hey ammunition actually has a very similar composition to coal i wonder if these bugs could dig decompose coal and so but it was speculative and we didn't know if it would work it worked in the lab will it work in the field now what are you gonna do here to get your first customers right to get a customer you need somebody that has owns like land that has coal you have to have permits they have to let you like go do shit on their land how is this gonna happen like so much friction so what we did was what i'll call the method of the no risk offer so what we did was we would go to we we said who needs this the most oh we said well it can't be somebody that actually values their coal because we're gonna go and we don't have the money to go buy this call like we can't buy the land from them like if you own land with a bunch of you know coal that's basically like fuel like that's very valuable property so so we need to go to people that have stranded coal meaning they have coal that mining it would be une economic it'd be too deep it'd be too gnarly the way the the ground structure is so there is coal but like it's not good for mining and so we got really tight on basically finding some for somebody for whom this was excess capacity and i think they like airbnb that's what they did right they sold excess rooms extra space in your house so we had took that same message we said how do we make a no risk offer so we went to them when we said look you're sitting a bunch of coal what's that like who's a an example like the lando owner we would find we would do a geographic we looked at the geographic survey we would find where the stranded coal was meaning coal that's not economic to be mined then we would go figure out from the property like records who owns that we would go knock on their door we say did you know you're sitting on a bunch of coal and they'd be like yeah but like you can't really mind it we did a feasibility it didn't work and we would say great what if i told you there was a way that you could make this many dollars per square foot without mining the coal yeah i'm interested okay tell me more and we said well look we have this technology but you know obviously we need to prove it it'll only take us this much space and here's the deal we will do this all at our cost to do this whole method cost you nothing and but if it works we wanna share the upside and they were like okay so you might make my land way more valuable and i only pay you if you do it and if i don't if it doesn't work i'm out i'm out nothing deal and then we throw in a tray of sushi exactly so that we were able to do this now this is something that this is also how alex for mo did his gym launch thing if you listen to his story what he would do is he go to gym owners you'd say you know i have a marketing program they're like i don't wanna buy it we tried a bunch of marketing things i don't have i don't have enough funny money anyways to go do this i'm not gonna buy your marketing program for ten thousand dollars so he reworked his offer and he was like how about this if i don't increase i will i will increase your sales by hundred thousand dollars using my marketing method and all i say is that anything any of the incremental revenue we bring and we get to keep whatever fifteen percent that's like okay so you keep fifteen percent but like you don't get anything if you don't raise my my revenue it's yeah we if we don't raise your revenue by x we get nothing yeah no brainer harmon did her no no brainer offer main street did the same thing grew really fast in the startup community by saying hey there's r and d tax credits available we will do it for you we keep twenty percent or twenty five percent of all this all the extra tax credits that you get they're not gonna do this anyways so it's just free money for you and so a lot of people use this this no risk offer method and i think that's a very very fast way to bypass one of the hardest parts as if you're a new company which is you have no relationships nobody trusts you nobody you have no track record so you need to offer them something that has like zero downside and only upside how many customers did you get doing that well ironically what ended up happening was we had like five interested customers and then one of them was like hey hey if you're gonna do this i want i wanna own this technology like if you like basically don't go to my competitors with this offer like they're gonna then they're gonna have you know this benefit i want this and so then they they came back later and they renegotiate the deal and they said how about this we'll give you five million dollars and the land and we'll do the permitting for you but and then we're like okay what's the catch and they're like the catch is if this works we wanna be able to buy fifty percent of the technology for fifty million and then we were like alright fine deals like that's you know this business is so freaking hard like i just try this and in the end i don't think i'd ever ended up working or i'm not sure what actually happened because i left after that deal with signs i was like heads microbiome it microbiome don't even like charcoal so turns out no they they didn't weren't the way and it's like i think it would turned out to be kind of expensive or what what actually happened is this field trial was gonna take five years to do i wasn't gonna sit around and wait to the to the conclusion of this and so i think what happened it was like the guy you said yes got fired or took another job the next guy who came in was like i don't know i don't wanna fund this and i have no idea what happened it's kinda died on the vine but you got the customers and that's the point of the episode yeah we got exactly the subsequent failure is it irrelevant okay yeah that doesn't matter alright my next one so i started a conference series called hustle code i ended up hosting this event maybe four or five times the first time i hosted it i decided to host it in may and i think it went the event happened in july july one or july fifteenth but i had roughly six weeks between deciding to do it and it happened and i think i made sixty grand in revenue and i think fifty thousand in profit the next year i think it was something like a hundred and eighty grand in revenue and my cost were only twenty grand or whatever that is that's what i made and then i did it again and i think i made like a quarter of a million in revenue and like two hundred thousand in profit and then we hosted a bunch more events peak did like six hundred k right yeah it made each event was doing like a couple of times we got close to a million and i made a ton of mistakes the biggest mistake i made is i made it like a ted event not like a trade show had i made it like a trade show i probably could made tens of millions per event but i just didn't know what i was doing and i also charged like three hundred dollars with tenants event so i screwed up the business but i did get a lot of hype right away and the way that i got hype was i actually found one of my old posts i would this one is on price so this guy ro rohan he has a blog called price economics and at the time they were like the best bloggers out there he was such a good blogger and he would go viral all the time so he was gonna give talk on content marketing and what i would do is i think i had eight speakers i wrote a blog post every tuesday and thursday on each speaker and i would go to hacker news and i would go to reddit and i would figure out which subreddit would this article fit best in and then later on in my second thing i'm gonna talk about f after you go is i ended up eventually writing blog posts specifically that would go get popular in reddit or on reddit in different like sub reddit but at this point i hadn't figured that out and so right away i think on the first day of business i think i got a thousand people to come to the website and then after that it would go to like one thousand to five thousand on any given day and you would go to the website you know would say a funny pop up that i would get your attention and i would say give me your email and the hustle dot com you couldn't even purchase a ticket unless you gave me your email you couldn't even see all of the details and so i would get people's email and i would subsequently like the way i had it set up was i would write blog post number one put it on reddit blog post number two put it on reddit the traffic comes i collect their email when i get their email they go into a cycle where they get sent blog post number one that may get blog post number two and then i would keep writing block number three number four number five and i would keep emailing it to the past people so it was like cycle and those people would share just a little bit and that's how i eventually got two three four or five thousand people coming the website and i did another thing where i made this speaker look like a hero so it was like a glowing article about them and they would share it within their company and that each employee would share to be proud and that's how i got two three four five thousand people and i think i think the email list i if you google hu con ne blog my friend neville ne and e b g he wrote a blog post about how i made sixty grand and like six weeks and i list all the blog posted emails that i sent and that's originally how we got our first i think ten thousand email subscribers is just doing that blogging and and and when i say we i mean me in my kitchen just like doing this in my crappy san francisco school apartment that's yeah that's great i remember reading those blog posts they're really good i highly suggest you go read those they're detailed and specific and you literally have screenshots of what you wrote in certain emails and i think that's really cool to go see i like when people share those specifics oh do you hear that you hear that that's no dude that's the that's a thrill of the shell i got we had a pause i thought we had a pause like wait what alright you've got ninety seconds to to to thrill me alright and those she'll remember the thrill of the shield is where we show a think but the way we do it is with value we do it with we by we'd by entertaining with a little bit of story so i was gonna talk to you about shepherd but the way i did it was i asked marshall i yeah when you launched this thing because this is now a business that is coming up on like i i guess i really should say but millions of dollars of profit a year so the very very very healthy business how are they four years yeah like less than four years old so in less than four years getting to know basically eight figures in profit profit not revenue profit so anyways i was like hey dude i'm doing this episode about how you get your first hundred customers what did you do for for shepard and he goes he goes i did a couple of things but he's like what i did was i he linked to me to the tweet so he did three like three or four steps in a row so tweet one i'll show this on the screen he just goes i'm launching a new business tomorrow and then he did the sign emoji and he said hint it's an agency he had a small twitter following about ten thousand followers at the time not like a huge mega influencer but enough and that that post itself has three hundred and fifty likes so that post itself probably got a bunch of people being curious getting him down and then what he did next is he's like i'm gonna explain it on my newsletter so he goes to the newsletter and he writes this post and he goes sam am launching this new business but let me tell you a story and he goes a few years ago my business is struggling here's why so it does what i call the personal story tactic which is instead of pitching the solution that you've made you pitch the problem that you had and tell a personal story where you reveal some information and you do some vulnerability and hopefully other people resonate with the problem that you had so he goes my business was was doing good and he's like but i alright so he's like he's like i had this business it was kinda struggling i was working all the time but we never really had any profits i realized i i always thought i could solve the problem with growth and then finally one i was like maybe i should try to lower my cost i didn't really know to do so i looked for where could i lower my cost he goes i heard about a guy who had hired somebody in the philippines for less than a thousand dollars a month meanwhile i was paying somebody five thousand for the same service so i did it i did another one here's a picture of me in the philippines you know we went out and met them because i was so amazed at how this worked he goes and so then that became my secret weapon i was hiring overseas and so now all of a sudden i went from profit margin of zero to profit margin of whatever fifteen percent and that made the difference between the business sucking to the business being good so i started doing this for a few friends just for fun finally decided i'm gonna make a business called support shepherd dot com to help you find quickly amazing employees that are eighty percent less than the us equivalent it goes blah then they sent me the screenshot we could show this on the screen so this news that went to twelve thousand people it had an eleven percent click rate which is the power of a story versus an ad and normally an ad would get like a one to three percent exactly so this ten times better why is it ten times better because again he kinda opened up the kim and told story so two support shepherd dot com says a thirteen hundred people clicked that link and then that's where he got you know you can even assume even like a three percent conversion on thirteen hundred people is gonna get you you know you're whatever your i don't know math but like let's say your first twenty thirty customers to get the ball rolling and for a business like this where each customers worth thousands of dollars that was enough to to sort of really actually move the needle and then what he did was he just kept doing the same thing and so if you wanna hire people go use she that's really the the shi but i actually like this method a lot i remember that ryan hoover did this amazingly with product ton also i remember him doing this so he did the hand to hand combat where every morning he would go to phil coffee san francisco at like five or six in the morning and for the first three hours a the day all he would do would be reply to people's tweets so anytime we said about something about product that he would reply personally anytime somebody mentioned a cool product he would be like that's awesome do you wanna post that on product hunt i gave you access and he would he would manually brute force do this in the morning but then he would go and he would go to fast company and say hey if you wanna cover product hunt and they're like i never heard of it no so he's like damn i really wanna get pressed but i can't they're not they don't wanna talk about products and it's not sexy enough so then and said what he did was you'd would go to fast company would say hey i signed up a thousand customers for my side project in the weekend can i tell you how we did it and i wrote this blog post it's already written in this google doc will you guys run this and as a guest post and then if you go look product that has a bunch of posts that he wrote and so it was like he would get to a hundred customers then he would write the post of how we got to a hundred customers get that posted somewhere on indie hackers or whatever that would get him into a thousand then he'll go write the post of how i got to a thousand because he's like the generically interesting story people aren't that interested product hunt but they are interested in how a guy can bootstrap his side hustle to a thousand customers in a week he did the work for them and he did the work for them and so again it was a no brainer offer to to basically say hey it's written do you wanna run or should i go you know i i like that update you guys should run this if not i guess i'll go ask somebody else and that that method i saw was something somebody else did that worked really well alright solids thrill the show good job you forgot the call to action join shepherd dot com support shepherd dot com support shepherd dot com alright what's your what's your next one okay so my next one i call pissing in the pond and piss in the pond is as good of a method as it sounds like so what you wanna do like you said got horrible method there's riches and is similarly what you wanna do is not try to boil the ocean bad phrase you wanna piss in the pond okay so boil the oceans is when you go try to get them mass market to care about what you're doing doesn't really work what you wanna do is say alright i'm small anyways to me when i have no customers ten customers is a big win hundred customers is a a phenomenal win and so where can i go that is small but hyper obsessed and so what we did when we launched our e commerce brand was we know we knew that there were facebook groups dedicated to literally like comparing products in our niche these weren't big right there maybe five thousand people total and this is like in facebook i was like that's a that's kind of a small overall facebook group and what we would do is we go there and we would do the marshall just like he did was shepherd we would go tell our story which was why we started this brand so instead of saying buy our product we would say hey y'all all wanted to share my story the ups and downs that's gone over the last six months trying to launch a brand that does this and then we would share like here were some of the ups we had here were some of the downs we had when we got screwed or we got scammed but we were so naive and people really started rooting for us and you could get people to root for you and so that's how we for my e comm biz we did i think thirty thousand in month one in in revenue about i think twenty eight thousand specifically and our ad spend was only maybe five hundred or a thousand we did try ads but most of the the revenue that first month came from this group and this was really good because who those hundred customers are actually matters and if you can get a hundred hundred of the hyper obsessed people of a niche to actually keep give a shit about you and know about you they are the ones who spread the word they're the ones that other people look to for recommendations and so it's actually quite valuable to go get to go piss in that pond and so you go to that group and the way you do it that's acceptable where you're making the water warmer not uncomfortable is you tell a story of the ups and the downs you've had trying to build something cool in this space why you started what worked for you what did work for you some of the big mistakes you made and people will then root for you because you're the underdog now let me tell you another example of this so i can't believe we even did this business i'm embarrassed to even say this is a business i was doing but in our idea lab we had a hack and in the hack our our devops ops guy was like hey i built this app it's like four four was hot at the time and this way back in the day he's like four it's fours square for beers and he's like basically every time you drink a beer watch this you scan the label and it checks in that beer and it keeps track of all the different beers you've drank and then everybody's like starts laughing and we're like that's awesome man that's cool you beer who love who doesn't love beer and so we were kinda like maybe there's a thing here and actually to this day actually there is a business called untapped that does and there's a there's a version of this for wine we were just the wrong people to start this business similar to the sushi business i made the same mistake again which i live drink beer do you the guy drink beer but i'm not like a craft beer a out guys know like try new craft beers old like make you're like oh yes yeah miller light this is beautiful like been tour once and the guy was like smell these hops and i was like nothing i don't see it you got have french fries exactly i was like i just drink it i don't care about all this so anyways we had this app called beer hunt okay so how do you do it there was a craft beer so it was like where do you get again if you go to the the mass market mass market is like me they don't care about beer enough to care about this product but instead there was a craft beer tasting festival or something like that in san francisco we went there and we tried to make a splash this is also the what i'll call the booth babe method is how do you actually make a splash at an event and so we weren't hosting this when we were attending and so we dressed up like it was oktoberfest fest we dressed up like in our like whatever leader halls and whatever we wore outfits like we were straight from germany and we came and we created we were like people probably won't just download our app if we say download our app so how do we gave you when you did this twenty three twenty four and so we but you know we our whole company was is older but we're all there and they were there were down for it which i liked know like our engineers are doing this and so what we did was we created a scavenger hunt for the conference we were like hey here's a little card if you can mark off all these things at this conference we're gonna give one person like you know they're like whatever some beer dream it was like you know you're gonna get a year supply of of craft beer and it was like it didn't didn't matter what the prize was the idea was like people are gonna wander around this place anyways they were happy to play the game of like marking things off as they went so we had our branded little scavenger hunt they would do it and at the end we would had a guy standing at the door he would collect them he would give them out and he would collect them and on it they had their email address and so now we had basically i think we had fourteen hundred leads or something from the stairs fourteen hundred leads of people who are so into craft beer that they will go to this like craft beer like paid money to go to this craft beer tasting festival type thing and so then that those became the first you know whatever seven hundred customers seven hundred people to download our app and they really gave a shit so that that really cranked the engine to get something started seeing you at a twenty three old view at a like fancy brewery it reminded me of a time one time i had told neville i go neville i've never been to a ship club somehow it came up and he was like i'm gonna take you right now and was like i don't really wanna go to a ship club he's like well you have your flight at five pm there's a ship club near the airport in texas it's two o'clock let's go and i don't drink so like it's even worse and we go out to the strip club and i'm so uncomfortable i'm rubbing my hands i don't know what to do my hands and like and like these stripper come up and like touch my shoulders and then like hey can i get you anything and i was like yeah can i get some ketchup up for these fries like to waitress just yeah like and the food was only six dollars it was one dollar for fries five dollars was sandwich i remember texted my wife was like do i how much do i tip because i kinda took up a seat but i didn't do anything it's she's like it was suppose uncomfortable that i've ever been it's like the first and the only time i've ever been to a strip club was two o'clock at the airport at austin strip club and just because i sit the one time i went to strip club it's it's a incredible story so i've been one time in my life yeah know maybe twenty two years old of something like that and we go and it's me people know me i don't need to describe me but it's my buddy who's like the ladies man this guy like was the big man on campus he you know like your dorm has like an ra he like hooked up with the ra girlfriend and it's like i gets a ceo refreshments like wow he's guys just amazing and so we go with to this same he's the man and then we go with our other buddy who it was like mister long term relationship so he's been in a relationship forever and never met never known this guy not in relationship but he had just broken up and so we go to a strip club because you know like in vegas they're like boys you wants drink getting this limo we're like oh wow what's the drink have you tried like thirty minutes away to a strip levin in there now you're here and you have two free drink coupons that you can go redeem at the bar so me and the lady event we don't know what to do none of us have ever been to strip up so we go to the bar again what do i'm uncomfortable let me just like find a safety that like we'll still get a drink yeah drink drink drink that's a good idea and we go and then we turned and look for our friend mister long mister always wiped up and he's not only not with us he is holding hands with a stripper going into the back room and i'm like it's been less than like two minutes got not we're like we're like what he doing it's we had several questions one i can't put like why is he doing this so fast and number two why is he going to the back isn't that like for like the the high tier stuff like why isn't he just sitting here and watching the the sugar and three most importantly was why do he pick her because yeah just objectively completely scientifically the lease attractive stripper in the place and so fifteen minutes go by he comes back out and we're i'm like i have a thousand questions what happens in the back room how much does it cost do you have to tip on top of the cost i have so many logistical questions but most importantly why'd you pick her man he could've have picked anybody here and he goes oh you could pick he goes he goes oh he goes he goes i thought it's like harry potter the wand chooses the wizard and he said to this day the line the one chooses the wizard is like etched my soul it it it just applies to any situation and neither of us have been to a strip club since it's never went again it's saying can't top back alright i'll do one last one yep trends trends c trent we're gonna go from shipper to what the yeah yeah i hope people have made it this far trans trans was a paid research newsletter that i launched when we sold it eighteen months after launching it i think it was doing four or five hundred thousand a month in sales i think we had twenty thousand users or so and it was great whatever i screwed up a bunch of stuff with that but we got some results and the way that we got results is we started and i i did a like i as a little sku project and if you actually see the link i list to my original gum road project i made a gum road page and i think it was like four hundred words of me just writing like a story explaining so basically the story was like in nineteen ninety six jeff bezos saw this amazing stat which was that the internet was growing at twenty three hundred percent nothing grows that fast bezos said unless it's in a petri and immediately then he knew that he had a start an internet company that sold something and so that was how it started and then i said hey everyone i'm sam i invested in a lot of companies or i and or i have this company called the hustle and i'm be able to see a lot of interesting things next quarter i'm launching this product called trends where i'm going to break down interesting companies and explain how they works and hopefully identify a handful of trends as shocking as this bezos one that he found so you're gonna be able to catch the tidal wave instead of miss it i'm gonna charge three hundred dollars a year for this but right now you just spend a hundred bucks and you get a lifetime of of access and so i got originally i got a thousand or two thousand people to sign up for this and i'll explain how but before we even launched this whole project i ran facebook ads against a discover page and it paid sixty thousand dollars in pre sales and the way that i got the initial hundred users is the hustle at the time probably had a million emails and i just found the three hundred engaged users and i sent them an email that basically explained the story and link to the gum road page and then what i did was i actually got on the phone with all one hundred of them and i asked them why'd did you do this what are you looking for what what are your expectations and then i went and made the first report based off of like some of their insights and what they wanted and then what we did was people would sign up to the hustle and afterwards they would see a page that says thank you by the way we have something coming soon and it would link to this gum road page now that's a little bit if you're listening to this and you don't have an audience you're like wow what the fuck that's not really actionable but i had to share this is how we built like i think it was four hundred or five hundred thousand by month eighteen and so it worked and we built the product around just calling those people yeah that's like a you had a launch pad you had an audience that you had built for years and then you're able to do this and i wouldn't recommend doing that just a launch of product but if you don't really know what product you wanna launch it's not a bad idea to to build a launch pad along the way so just to i did the same thing with hampton and i would dm people on twitter and you could say i have an audience so it helps i didn't use my audience but i did use my reputation so some people had known me so i i but i called emailed people on linkedin and i called people on twitter so if you wanna do this methodology you could still do it that way yeah and we didn't mention a couple of the obvious ones so ads we kind of loosely mentioned it cold outreach reed so there's a bunch of traditional methods to to try to do this we told you what we did which was partly because we were young and dumb and we didn't know any better we didn't know that you could just i didn't know you could just run ads or just do cold emails i would go door to door instead but also you know it it some of it's in the specifics so for example for milk road i had an audience so i had a newsletter i had this podcast and i could've have just mentioned it but i layered on another tactic which is what i call the david blaine method and you know david blaine will do this shit where he's like i'm gonna freeze myself for a week yeah watch me you know slightly torture myself and try to do something incredible and it's alright thanks like i'm gonna freeze myself on a block of ice i'm gonna bury myself underground when i'm all my breath until i pass out yeah i'm gonna he literally did one way he's like i'm gonna hold onto to these balloons and fly away like okay dope and he did it he flew away like the movie up and so he david does this stuff so when we started the milk road i was like okay if i think if i told people that hey i'm starting a daily newsletter about crypto for people that wanna read you know the latest kind of news and info on crypto i think people would sign up but i wanted to like juice it a little bit so how did that go a little bit further i was like let me do a stunt so i said i am funding and of course you know you have to have some money to do this this version of it but you could really david blaine puts his body through torture i put some money on the line so what i did was i said i'm gonna put a million dollars in this wallet you can go look at the address right now here's a million dollars in a wallet and then i'm gonna try to turn this into ten million through trading crypto and this is like you know dave from bar stool does this with this the davey day trader you know jason cal can i tried to copy that and do j trader like people try to do a version of this where it's like watch me try to run this bank roll up i just i learned this from back in the poker i used to love when anyone would do this in the gambling or poker space and they'd be like i'm starting with this bank role i'm either going broke i'm going to this level i'm get i'm getting to this milestone and here i'm gonna post all of my history and it never works out but it's really fun to watch and that's what i figured and that's exactly what happened i managed to turn a million dollars because we bought it like a you know peak crypto into what became like three hundred fifty thousand dollars at the bottom and then now it's a little bit higher but basically it's like watch me lose money but either way watch me lose money is also entertaining people will subscribe to watch me get my ass kicked to watch they'll subscribe to watch me kick ass and even better they'll subscribe to find out whether i get my ass kicked or whether i kick ass and the other version of this is people call it now build them public people do that before that buffer and convertkit did the stuff where they would share like all their team's salaries they would share all their team's revenue or the company's revenue and it it tends to work i remember this guy named pat flynn from smart passive income he was one of the first guys to do this see what shares monthly revenue and where it all came from and i would go there every month to see like what he was doing and it totally worked the the extreme access works but i think the other one is calling your shot or basically creating a a storyline line so it's basically like what is a story there's the hero they have a goal and they have an obstacle and then there's some stakes there's there's something on the line and i think that's the way to like juice that up so it's not just i'm gonna build in public so i'll i'll provide a monthly update it's i'm gonna try to do x and if i don't do x you know like there's a there's a like i'm putting something on the line trying to get there and i'm gonna try to do this incredible thing not just inch my way forward you know i said hey i'm you know i'll show you you know my you know some of the things i'm investing and that'd be okay but to say i'm gonna try to turn a million dollars into ten million or bust that people wanna watch more and so you know i think the david blaine spectacle method is another one i wanna see you do that with your second trip to the strip club the bill in public bro i'm gonna order as much food and free water as i can until they kick me out of the drink can i make it over under six hours before they realize this guy's just here for the fries alright we gotta end there that's the pod i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back