Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas | ft. Nick Gray

alright nick are you ready well i'm late because i had to go to party city you are party city dude you're the human party city no but the funny thing is i went out there because i wanted to get some cool stuff for you guys for sam i got hot dog hat thing to sam likes hot dogs sean you know i got the big basketball ka sean loves basketball and i got these balloons and as i'm leaving this lady sees me with the balloons and the basketball and she's like oh are you planning a birthday for your son i was like first that's sexist and second no i'm going on a podcast i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel alright so let me let me introduce nick i'll introduce him with a little bit of a story i don't remember exactly how we came in into contact with each other but basically i was in new york maybe eight years ago somehow nick contacts me and it goes hey do you wanna go to washington square park and play frisbee and i was like i i guess yeah okay so sarah and i go and and we meet him at washington square park and he goes yeah let's just like walk i'll give you guys a tour so he gives us a tour he goes this is the guy that's always here selling weed hey weed guy how are you this is my friend sam it's sarah and then he's like these are the people who are always tight roping hey tight rope people like and then we go with and we sit down and he brings out a blanket and he goes alright now it's time to play frisbee nick it's just a crazy person okay like we we've met him in a like you'll go out to dinner with them and he'll be like alright for the next five minutes we're gonna talk about my dating life and then from minutes seven to thirteen we're gonna talk about your work and then from thirteen to twenty seven where we wanna talk about philosophy on life like actually do this do show up to like lunches like this with agendas a hundred percent with agendas and sometimes even my own keynote presentations and let me hold on hold on let's i had to give his quick summary so nick's summary is basically he made money nick started a business he sold it he made money he put all of his money in tesla stock and got incredibly wealthy and now he is single in austin and he just lives life to have fun and he does crazy stuff like he just recently did a blind date to tokyo or he'll he just wrote a book on having a cocktail party because that's what he cares about and he just does everything to that that's fun is that right nick yeah that is directional correct i love to have fun and i didn't put all my money into tesla and but yes i did make a lot of money a couple times in my life and now we get to have fun and i get to i think i'm like the game that a lot of people are thinking about how to get to and they want to make a business and they wanna be successful but for what and so there's a lot of talk about when is enough and i think i found enough and this is what happens when you get there how did you figure that out because that is something that not a lot of people have been able to figure out so how did you figure out what's enough for you and how did you actually execute that did you figure out what you wanted what was enough and then do it you know one year i was doing my taxes and i had busted my butt in my business an absolutely incredible amount it was just one of the hardest years and i think maybe we netted it out like three hundred and fifty thousand dollars profit and it was one of the hardest years of my life honestly for a variety of staffing reasons and other things and as i was doing my taxes my accountant said like oh wow do you realize you made like so much more money from your investments and you did from your business and i never thought about my investments i don't even think i just buy it said it and forget it and at that moment i was like wow i'm like destroying my health and my sanity for this amount of money that's not even as much as i'm making off the investments there were a few moments like that that i've had over the last ten years that have just made me reconsider how i spend my time and you wrote a blog post because i went knee deep into the blog last night and you have this blog because you wrote a long time ago which was what would i do if i had ten million dollars i don't know when you wrote this but i found it in somewhere in the archive and you basically said you know i really want to have like ten million dollars and you know kinda made me think like what would i actually do if i had it what would i do today if i already had it and you and you put photos on there we should show this on on youtube there's like index cards and you wrote like swim more right you wrote like write a book about hosting a cocktail party which you actually ended up doing and you wrote all these things and you it sounded like the takeaway was first of all we should do this exercise because like money's a tools to improve your life but if you don't really know how much you need and what you're trying to improve like it's sort of creates like go into home depot for a house renovation project but you didn't know which part of your house you wanted to renovate or what what budget actually was and what materials you needed but that's how we treat our careers and then you got clarity on it and you actually implemented can you talk about that that exercise you did because i did it last night too after you after reading that oh you did it so i hope to give actionable takeaways for your listeners listeners this is an actual takeaway for you in that you can do this with your friends with your spouse with your loved ones to ask them if you had ten million dollars how would you live your life differently and get specific don't just say i wanna eat better what does that exactly mean now sean may know this this is a tony robbins exercise that he's done either at business mastery or up p w and the gist i'll forward you to the end is that the vast majority of things we say that we would do differently at ten million dollars actually you only need a million dollars to get there the vast majority if you think oh my life was a billionaire this is what i would do you actually maybe only need ten twenty fifty million dollars and i say actually that's still a lot of money but it helps you to realize that for example for a lot of people oh if i add a billion dollars of course i would have a private chef so they say okay well let's track that out what does that exactly mean for you of a private chef you wanna have meals that are set up in your fridge you wanna have a full time person etcetera and it was a very helpful exercise to me to think that in the past if i wanted five hundred million dollars well actually the vast majority of the things that i wanted i could do for much less without sacrificing all that time money energy to get to that level yeah there's but sam have you heard this morgan counsel quote about money he says there's two ways to use money the first is as a tool to improve the quality of your life and the second is as a measuring stick to measure the quality of your life and basically the people who are happy use money as a tool and the people who are you know the bitter rich the stressed rich are the ones who are trying to use money as a measuring stick yeah the problem with that is like i on my list it's like influence politicians overthrow governments you know like bribe officials and you need a lot more money than just ten million dollars for that for those of you that are listening by the way that are thinking that's not enough he has given up money is the measuring stick in the yard and the success of life i am totally with you and i lived that way for so much of my adult life there is money is just a measuring and stick right we don't spend it we just keep it and that shows how good we are and so i still respect and sympathize with those people who like sam want more money to influence politicians to buy private jets i'm joking joking okay but go ahead you're on the record as a lobby okay yeah say well what you we have a lobby before yeah the reason in for all i don't we have a proposal here for like larger serving size of bubble gum i guess sure it's all good that's ridiculous but nick but alright so you're like i you you used to be a measuring stick guy for money but in the this blog post by the way you say at the very bottom you say i would do all of these things which by the way by the way like sean didn't say but you a list of like you wanna go bowling you wanna play laser tag you wanna go go kart that's literally on your blog post but at the end it says i would also like to work on entrepreneurial pursuits to get the fifty million yeah yeah something like that i don't wanna get into the gist of this i wanna say that this is an activity that's helpful for listeners to do because it helped me realize that the things that truly make me happy playing tennis writing go kart eating more healthy go to the beach those things don't have to cost fifty million dollars and i keep a very low burn in my life right now so that it feels like i have a hundred million dollars sean something that you probably don't know about nick so he lived in new york city for a long time and he's been like a blogger a lot of people don't know this that nick matt noah ka and neville my buddies and ram remit via a blogging nick was like one of these early bloggers what are you your forty let's say now nick start blogging when you're what like in your twenties gosh i had a website since nineteen ninety six yeah yeah and because of that he's actually met like a lot of these guys that are kinda like lu now so for example he's buddies with matt mu for the founder of wordpress or he grew up kinda grew up in new york with the founders of vimeo and college humor and a bunch of these like interesting people that sort of shaped the internet that we know and and you are around them when you guys were all like up and coming and doing your own thing what was that like kinda like seeing some of these guys who were your peers become like these like people who are kind of controlling the internet or impacting the culture of the the internet well sam i'm glad you mentioned that because this brings me into the second lesson and i'll be using this little lesson harmonic throughout today's podcast i love it the lesson is you know about fifteen years ago when people were using twitter a lot and there were a lot of startup founders that i knew like dennis crowley of fours square and that client of vimeo and other people and i had absolutely no name on the public internet i was a blogger but didn't have followers i was just known amongst a certain crowd somebody figured out that all of these famous people or famous and successful people in new york all followed me i think this was when there was a list of kind of like the public follows were more available and they were like dude why do all these people follow you and i was actually waiting to get a message like that i think there's actionable data that you can get to from finding and looking who else famous and successful people follow now follow lists are still available on instagram so you can see the bulk of it i think on x they've throttle it back so you don't have the full follow lists available but if you are looking to make contact with some of these ultra successful people there's no way that you will they have pretty much too much inbound but you can be friend their friends and that can be your foot in the door that is the lesson that is an aggressive networking example you have to lead with value you have to have something good you can't just do it to take but i think there is ci there is alpha in looking to see who all of the major people follow because there's reason for that why do they follow you i think people followed me in new york city because i hosted events oh my god i hosted events that was my way to become interesting it was my way to be relevant and i just started hosting all these house parties so i wanna tie up the kind of like the shift from killing yourself kinda working her really really hard to make money to be successful which is where you know i've been sam a lot of the listeners will have been so that's a relatable struggle to then the the next thing you do you did with life shift where you sort of prioritize experiences adventure fun which i think a lot of us want to do but are sort of afraid to do fully it's hard to get off that money money train so can we just do the speed of like what did you actually do in your career how did you actually make it would you try would you actually do that worked yes speed of my career in middle school and high school i started to design websites i was not a popular kid i had friends but i wasn't in the popular crowd and i was really into computers and when i was in about ninth grade i made a web hosting company that just so happened to get lucky if you searched on yahoo for the phrase cheap web hosting then you would find my website you can see that at v s three dot net did did you do anything to be the discovered one or literally was it lucky dude it was just dumb luck we didn't even know about seo then it wasn't like trying to optimize it just so happened that when i wrote my description that's how it works so you're in high school and that helped pay for college as i understand so what what would you kind of roughly make on that business not a lot of money maybe so the web hosting was fifteen dollars a month per client i it cost me five dollars per month per client and at the most i probably had two hundred customers it more average was throttle out to about a hundred and twenty customers per month that helped pay for college but then i also got a scholarship for entrepreneurship which is very rare merit based scholarship that allowed me to go to a nice college so web hosting business i did some other stuff i sell these like alpha numeric pager that was never a huge success but i had all these little hustle when i got to wake by the way i started to sell speakers for laptops and i named the business wake speakers dot com and i'm going around door to i'm like oh you bought your kids this laptop they need speakers to listen to s am or whatever and then the lawyers the school lawyers called me up like you can't call this wake speakers that's like the name of our school meanwhile i'm like drop shipping palettes like onto the quad of the campus and when i was in college i tried to start a software company that was massively popular on campus but made absolutely zero money i tried to move to india to start a software company and hire people because i thought that i could bootstrap it farther there it was a terrible success i hired two people one of each was on boston bitch he said the story is hilarious i've i've heard him say this before he's like i moved to india because i was like i'm gonna bootstrap this so i need cheap talent so he moves to india to start a software company hires two people one guy's in poland and one guy's in boston and he's in india no you will you can do wafer you got that equation rock you you're you yourself and like if if it's like x plus y you you you put yourself in the wrong variable i know i outsourced myself to the wrong thing i did though develop a really nice relationship with the people in the country and it was just a wild experience well but let me the one question there which is nobody cares about this but i do which is even though that was kind of a failure right you go to you moved to india you hire guy poland a boston software company nobody knows the name of it didn't work out but there's something if if somebody told me that somebody did that today i'd like this person gonna be a winner this is probably gonna be the failure but they were that person is gonna be a winner what made you even wanna do that in the first place because that's a pretty radical step most went to college but did not just graduate and like move to india with the idea of bootstrapping a software company it did seem like the craziest thing to do at the time and i think that's why i was attracted to it let harmonic lesson you think i think so thank you so much so i do i use this harmonic at all my events as a crowd control device and i think if my legacy has anything it's that the harmonic can be a helpful crowd control device and that you can get people's attention in a calm cool manner without a whistle or like a right so consider that there's a tip within a tip why'd did i move to india yeah it just at the time it seemed like the future it did seem like a piece of the future there was all this news about bp and outsourcing and everything y pro moving over to india you you you had said your college roommates were the or the guys who created college humor and and yeah vimeo me were you involved in that or are you just kinda sitting invalid and they were doing it right next to you what what was that like i was very happy to not be involved in that and to be their friends and a sound board i was the first non employee user of vimeo i jake the guy who started vimeo famously said that our thinking helped him think about vlogging and stuff like that but they were absolutely an inspiration to me and it was so cool to be in that world of people really really great guys mh and then if you fast forward i think you're like the first time that you kinda you said you've made money like two or three times the first time was after that india trip with your you and your father right yeah he started a a business in the based of our house i didn't end up seeing that money till much much later and still lived very frugal probably i still live very frugal actually but i guess i didn't really have money per s until maybe ten or fifteen years after that but yeah my dad started in the basement of our house this was my next big adventure i came home from india i'm not sure what to do next my dad had been working on this business in our house that did flight entertainment equipment for small jets the sam and out out of plane with nick it's just the two of us out just played nick is like we get on and instead of just like sitting down putting his bag away relaxing he's like immediately f with all the gadgets on the plane he's like trying to like pull off the in screen monitor like where the the map is of the plane i'm like made him i'm like is there something behind that what are you trying to do here and he's like i wanna see which one they have like this is what and he's like did you know this and he's like giving me all these facts and five minutes later he finally tells me oh yeah this was the business that my dad and i worked on which was like they sold these little parts electronic parts two planes in order to like you know hey you see how your trade table comes out and how there's this little thing here that's what we did and it was like like i've talked to in his mom where it was the it was his mom and dad and then nick and i've talked to them about it and it was like a smashing success you know it took a it took a while to like work but it was like a it was a it was a home run in terms of like they were working on it together it turned out to be financially fruitful and his parents are like the cutest parents you'll ever talk to and it was literally like a mom and pop shop it was like a you know what where it's like nick gray and son like to have a business like the name is that's what really what it was that it's sounded awesome it's it was a very wholesome business were there any great stories from that that chapter where either unlock you guys figured out that made things work or a moment you thought it was you were screwed but then you figured something out is there any good stories from from that one thing i can tell you is that even in those early days search engine optimization played a huge role within the business and searching for faa certified in flight monitors what a niche thing and yet all we needed was one and we really got a million dollar deal from the seo because i bought every domain name i was creating fake blogs i had everything pointing back to our company that we dominated not just the first three results but like the first page of results because this was two thousand nine ish when there was a lot less seo stuff but even now it's such a niche industry one major lesson that i think i could say was that i was lucky to come up under this salt of the earth sales guy who ran our sales team and he was the type of guy you see in movies today he's got no social media he has nothing this was an air force guy who you know would pick up the phone at the at the at the shortest instance would cold call people there's a vivid memory that i have being at the trade show of somebody's badge being flipped around and they walked up and tried to talk to him and he just looks at them it looks down at them grabs like like gets in their space grabs their badge turns it around and says oh dan mc you asshole and and just like that that like good old boy type of attitude that i got to come up under and so there's so many people out there that are trying to solo that are trying to bootstrap that are trying to hustle that just don't have any experience that have never learned those lessons that i'm so thankful that i got to learn through him and so that was one of those experiences his name was jay heal he was huge influence on how i think about phone calls and sales and outbound and things like that oh wait wait a second i had a business idea so someone told me jack smith said this crowd loves business ideas and so i have a business idea for your listeners i have a couple business ideas but one of them is this you need to create a white label enterprise sales team quit trying to hire programmers whatever i want you going out there recruiting the guys selling cut code knives i want you going into the mall finding the most hustle guys selling that shoes soap stuff and i want you to start building them and training them on how to sell b2b saas if you are looking for an aqua hire salespeople people are in high demand if you have guys that can sell and girls that can sell this company will get bought i don't care what you're selling but start collecting salespeople and build a sales team you'll either to get bought out you can build a saas around it or you'll just get aqua hired in this is a good business idea nick what makes you special and sean experienced it because you guys hung out and i don't think that he fully understood like that this is the type of stuff that nick does it's the weirdest as quirky stuff but when he decides to be quirky and weird it's pretty authentic to him and he goes like a ten out of ten sam is exactly right and it's the same idea of why i'm getting you know things like the hotdog dog for for sam or the basketball thing for sean or like why do we just do little things interesting because i think that it's just different we can live life a little bit differently and i like to have fun yeah dude your crayon box has like four extra colors that i don't have that i need i need to pick up i need to go find these colors i when i when i doing the research last i made to know when i go i think that nick has chug the biggest glass of be yourself juice and now he's just be the the the the remainder out for the rest of the world and you had this great quote you said you tweeted this out it didn't go viral but i loved it you said quit playing it cool life is too short be intense and passionate and mildly insane now whoever's left hanging is your friend yeah yeah the lesson that i would have for listeners is that i can live that way now i think because i grind it out ground out i ground i grid it out i think that i can live that way now because i achieved some success and i did some truly great things this is not your car blanche permission to go be an insane person that's not what i'm telling you and there's a fine line between genius and insanity i'm not saying that i'm genius i'm probably more insane but i am forty two years old i have had some successful business i i've been playing the game of business for way more than half my life and i feel that i have the confidence today to be who i wanna be because i have achieved some of that success do get lonely probably i don't exactly know what it would be not to be lonely but i have a lot of friends you have a lot of friends and you have a lot of friends that are like i consider us to be very close where like i your family to me but sometimes i think to myself i want a nine to five just because people throughout the day can't hang out with me or i want like a routine just so i could have a family do know what i mean but then other times i see you just jet off japan on a blind date and i'm like oh that adventure seems fun but it's hard to have both the stability of like a family sometimes and the the eccentric like excitement that you get to have so do you ever get lonely leaning in to the one of those sides versus the other side the largest and most valid critique of me and my lifestyle would be that i am forty two and single and no kids and that people will say that that will be one of the greatest fallacies that i've waited so long to begin my life and my family and that no happiness can come from the happiness of a parent love in their child and i think that that is a hundred percent valid i also do not agree with the critiques that say just get married as soon as you can business will follow get married first above all else make that your priority i lived my life thus far through at least my late thirties making business success financial freedom my number one priority my number one in fact i hired a match maker for a little while when i was in new york and she set me up with like twenty or thirty dates and at the end of it she was like nick you know what i don't think you even want a girlfriend she said i think you just wanna go on dates she said with your business right now you have no room in your life you would never make a woman your number one priority and i said that's exactly right yeah we should've talked about this beforehand there's like there's no chant like my business is my number refundable yeah yeah and i said like that like this is my number one priority is my business i it it's all that i think about it's all that i do i would wake up i had this girlfriend in new york who was a poet and we would wake up in the morning and she would wanna you know color and and drink coffee and hang out i'm like babe i got it grind like i don't i don't have time to color there's no turn to color we can't call her today color me note with this plan yeah yeah no tie like babe you gotta go and i'm not here to hang out and that was a different time of my life when i was so focused on that so this leads me to my next business idea i am going to do potentially if enough people ask me for this the first seven figure millionaire match maker that is only based on a contingency fee so i'm gonna have no cost i'm only willing gonna take the top of the top clients we're talking people like i'm not gonna name names but but folks that have a minimum probably fifty million net worth five million social followers i'm going to be match making for these people and if they get married only success gentleman's agreement handshake million dollar minimum success fee i think that that's interesting for a few reasons number one because think about all the cool people that i'm gonna get to meet if i have this little roster of close friends and incredible people that i get to go up an approach and i'm like oh i'm match making for such and such number two is most match makers will never work on a contingency basis they only work on a retainer but i don't need the money like i have plenty of time like i'm happy to let this play out over five years can you explain how a traditional match works i don't think most of people know how much is it how much is a good match maker in new york cost and what do they give you i think there's a variety of different match makers and it's not just in new york city you can find these and dallas texas so you can find them in san francisco and chicago match makers by the way gosh let's talk about this there's a huge range there's a huge range and actually pe companies do like to buy these businesses i've heard of two of them brent b shores company has bought one and someone else we both know looked at acquiring one of them but match making services can go from five thousand dollars all the way up to a hundred thousand dollars and the ones that i have heard of it's it's roughly a that or sorry it's roughly five thousand dollars a date and they set you up and they extensively pre screen these women yeah and in advance you get like a pdf like i've i've helped some of my buddies like review some of them you get like a pdf yeah of like five different people and they it's crazy it says like lives in jackson hole but willing to relocate that it like does a profile on them and you kinda pick and choose and how how much better is this pdf than just if i went to somebody's these tinder profile and right click save as pdf what would i be getting that's different in this oh my god well the next piece of advice for listeners is you need to delete your dating apps you guys need to get off of the dating apps because you are not gonna be able to make a difference nobody cares about you unless you're above six foot you're devilish attractive the vast majority of men need to delete their dating apps please and i'll give you one tip you need to join a sports club specifically consider joining a kick ball league now why kick ball kick ball has the largest number of teams so the team size is larger than any other sport and generally both teams go out for drinks afterwards now you've heard other things like join a run club go to yoga classes things like that if you do those things you basically can talk to two people at each one you can talk to somebody before and you can talk to somebody afterwards if you're trying to ping pong around this run club to get numbers it's gonna be very very low signal and you're not gonna look good think about that start matthew you gotta you gotta answer sean's question you have to run which sucks okay sean's question was how much more details do you get from a match maker the one that i worked was a different way and so i would not get these detailed advanced prep sheets for the five thousand dollar date ones they are checking to make sure that the things that are important to you are important to them as well and sometimes they do that they do background checks on on every yes five grand a date i don't know if this is like the indian dna and me but it's like that sounds insane five thousand dollars a day sounds insane obviously even if you're wealthy may i get the rationality of why it i would make sense but that sounds crazy especially when you have a low hit rate or low success rate with it but if you asked me today how much would you pay if i could introduce you to your perfect person that i'm a believer in if you said and and i've actually told figures multi i'm like you should set up a bounty which is that if you introduce me to somebody that i i you know if fall in love with or or get engaged you'll get married to like why would you not put up a million dollars two million dollars for that for them it would make such a huge difference in their life it's it's the best thing money you could buy for those people and that is why i'm re tit myself to be nick grade babe bounty hunter and if you are listening to this and you are interested in putting up a seven figure bounty to find your person give me a call dude babe the bounty hunter that's a good monica you could have your tv show with this sam nick is so funny because when we hung out he was the only person i've ever met in my life who calls people babe but not like no he's called turbo babe yeah he's just like i was hanging out with these two babe and i was still alive i was like i've just never heard someone what's say it's like yeah they were but it was cool okay so you're babe the bounty hunter million dollar contingency fee sell a private equity i kinda love this idea you know i don't know if you're raising for this but i'm i'm interested we can get you some distribution on the pod we could do some special episodes once a month we talk about our our our our suit here i'm super stoked i'm excited i'll cut you guys in easy it's a yeah yeah it's a good deal look here's the thing it's very very hard for extremely successful people whether it's men or women to sell and to market themselves appropriately and i don't necessarily believe that having money is a bad thing i think it is something to be proud of but there's no good way to say that about yourself anyhow do you know a lot of single wealthy eating men sean yeah i know so many of them i call peter pans like i've got i yeah sorry nick it's you're a peter pan and what's crazy to me is mix not one of these guys typically i would've have thought you'd be good at some type of public speaking whether even if you just have a team of ten people like you could talk to them in in front of them there's a lot of attributes that you would think would translate to women not the case not the case with a lot of fred and i if that has always bog my mind you know what i mean do you have fred like that sean and doesn't that seem kind of crazy yeah i mean the crazier part honestly is that you you know you'll talk to him and it's basically like yeah this is the one thing i really want that's the area of my life that i wanna you know invest in i want to to to grow to bloom that's the part of my garden i want to bloom and then then you talk to him they say that to you but then the next four weeks they're like i'm on the road i'm doing sales calls i'm going to this pitch it's like dude you took you took forty nine pitches in the last two months but you know one date and it's like the priorities don't match the calendar but i get it it's because there's a human tendency which is that whatever is not going well for you wherever every area you're struggling in it's easy to just avoid that and gravitate towards things that are giving you that immediate dopamine the hit of success of progress of being great at something and i wish that they wouldn't do that you know the the the ones i respect the most are the ones who like fight against that grain and they're like dude an the incremental dollar does nothing for me at this point but meeting you know my life partner would be an amazing thing for my life and really put match their calendar with their priorities dude i have listen to this sick i hung out my friend yes last week he's worked probably two hundred million dollars sold like sold the company fabulous wealthy he's six four he's polite nice he's awesome he's just an awesome guy and i met with him and my wife and i met with like we hung out with him and he was like hey i i met this girl on hinge and we match i don't know what to say to her can you guys like could like run to my idea i'm like are you kidding me you're nervous to have this text based conversation i'm like dude you're the catch here like you're like the you're like perfect what are you talking about and he was nervous we had like go through each line he's like does that sound weird does it sound weird if i say this and i think there's a shockingly large amount of men that are like that which is which is insane to me the dating thing is interesting i sean i put my hands up when you're were doing this because i was like yes the calendar doesn't lie if this is important to you but you know what i'll say something that folks are saying online if you're listening to this podcast because you wanna be financially successful i think you need to have priorities in life and it is very hard to run and be laser focused on your business when you're trying to build a relationship dare i say it's almost impossible just a bunch of dudes playing with harmonic with balloons talk about how to get shit yeah yeah oh what are you doing over there johnny on list this guy in the hormonal harmonic talk about how to find your life partner oh he must be very successful it's from mary it's no he's single what was what was your other ideas have another idea okay i got another business idea i think we should bring back web hosting companies specifically services agencies to help local small businesses build very basic wordpress websites we poo poo these simple ideas notice what the focus is the focus there is sales can you sell it to them but you go to somebody and say look for fifty bucks a month i'm gonna host your site i'll make sure it doesn't get hacked i'll keep it lightly updated you know you can buy an additional thing if you wanna make updates but this is a saas business you are now creating websites where you are selling them this service hacker web hosting whatever you're just doing the basic stuff i think we think that we have to come up with this new ai stuff go back to the basics like start making web pages for restaurants in town and start at the basics i think we need to bring back web hosting companies i got a cool twist on this which is the why now or what you could do differently now i have a friend who's doing this right now they took i won't give away the category because i don't want them to feel like i invited competition for them but they they found a specific category so a specific type of business it's not pest control let's just pretend it was pest control for a second so they picked a category and then they were like cool if i hired like a fancy new york design agency to make an awesome website for this company it doesn't have to look super super slick but like much slick than what they have by default and checks all the boxes of what a company like that needs oh they need to immediately to be able to request a quote they need to be able to do x y c cool got the requirements got five design templates made and then what they did was they were like cool you know ai is actually amazing so they told the ai they were like ai go find every let's just use pest controls as example every pest control business in new york right now that you can find on on the online easy to do it crawls it gives you a a spreadsheet of all the the names of the companies and their urls says great then it created another ai agent that said take their existing website pull out the info and then apply it to one of these five templates and it did that and then it said and then he said another ai agent it was draft a cold email to this list of prospects and include a mock up an attachment that was made by agent too that that read redid their website and so they're getting this crazy response rate because they're going to these business and they're saying hey i was checking out your site just so you know i'm a web developer i help companies like you i actually made a mock up of your i've made a mock of your your website like of what i think i could do with it if you think this looks cool i'll i'd be happy to do it for you for this monthly fee and they're doing lead gen they're they're getting amazing lead gen because they're coming with a hyper personalized offer which is not just hey do you need a website or hey i make websites for companies like you but hey i looked at your site i thought i could you know improve it here's what it looks like improved do you want it and that is is just that makeover can now be automated with ai which again i don't think you'd need to make our ideas successful but it does add a turbo juice that like didn't exist before that now can work what do you use for that that i mean that that's that outbound seems amazing for everything it is amazing it's the the ai sort of go to market idea which i think right now the people who are gonna make the most money ai or the people who the ai tool providers but then also but then the second one is gonna be people who can string together ai tools to like turbo charge sales i wanna use them do you know what they are yeah i mean it's three different things right so there's like let's say for the automated emails there's a certain tool called clay that's really good at that clay said personalized emails it basically takes gives you a prospect list it'll enrich the prospect list so it'll say cool give me all the companies who fit this criteria it'll give it to you then it'll say add in how many employees they have roughly their revenue range who is their ceo and what's their phone number it'll it'll fill that whole table out for you automatically and then you could say cool draft some email scripts for me to email these people and it'll basically create templates that that can be sent hyper personalized templates but before that let's say you need the other piece well you might use claude or something like that where you're gonna say build a tool build a little tool for me where i can basically input this and i can get out a website in this format so you maybe use cloud with artifacts to do that or some custom work around that and then the first piece which was just the prospecting that's pretty easy there's a lot of tools i could do them just just the prospecting side for that's crazy that is crazy goddamn help me think about this guys is there something here that i wanna a r on which is that chandra just had this great idea notice that my idea was go to local restaurants and try to sell them a new website sean took it to the nth degree no write a script so now you can do five thousand a day and blah blah blah and i wanna pull listeners back to my side of yes i think i think i mid wit memes it for you which is to say like there is beauty in the simplicity of getting started and and calling in and hand coding and building in your business and that is shown up for me when i did my museum tour business i was a tour guide you guys i built a multi million dollar business out of being a tour guide every friday and saturday night i i was literally leading people at the museum and i did that for two years before i even hired my first person how much were are you making just you doing that during the tour guide each ticket was like eighty dollars i would tour for ten to twenty people a night and doing it every friday saturday night so you can do that math did sean my so nick had this company called museum hack where like was it was it mom or where what museum metropolitan museum of art at the best museum in the whole world that's where we started he just hijacked it so like he didn't ask them permission if he could give tours yeah you called it renegade museum right yeah he's just a part of their their offering and so he built that business sold at whatever sarah my wife and and nick are our close friends and she was like hey nick can you give my mom and eye like a private tour of of mom or the mess something like that and he's was like yeah got you so apparently and my mother was like you know i liked nick but i kinda felt dangerous being around it because like the security guy would be like hey you can't go through that elevator and it could be like oh no no and trust me it's okay and he would just like walk on the elevator like he like he would tell them like no you're wrong it's okay trust me and he would just go and do whatever you wanted to do and that's is how you ran your business yeah i like to think that some of those guarded off areas are more suggestions rather than rules and that is long not a false yeah exactly exactly well can't go under it watch me no no no i have a lot of respect for these museums and for the art but we would do different non traditional things we would lay down on the floor to look at the ceiling we would sit down to talk about the art we would talk about how much the paintings cost which is a very taboo thing in the art world and we would do all these non traditional things in a museum space to really do museum tours for people who didn't like museums and i wanna just say that again i did tours myself as a side hustle while i was still in the family business this was my thing to build up enough money so i could quit the family job and start my own every friday saturday night like like that is why i had no dating life because i was running this business which brings me to my next business idea airbnb experiences if you are interested in starting a new side hustle you can sign up on airbnb experiences to lead a tour in your town and charge people for it this is a way for you to immediately start to get money from people searching for cool things to do now this only works in major towns where the launch airbnb experiences but it's generally tier one and tier two cities find your favorite stuff do tours for locals show them around to some of your great stuff provide a great experience beg for five star reviews and you can literally create a side hustle on airbnb experiences did i love airbnb experiences i've done probably fifteen of them i freaking love them you ever do those sean i've never done one but i've looked at it a bunch i like mixed framing of this which is like i've been thinking about this a lot like starter businesses because i wrote a i wrote this blog post this essay last week that was about my kind of like first two years out of college this like really i called it being strategically broke i like just avoided getting a job i'm not gonna get a job i wanna have max freedom and so i calculated it instead of how do i make the most money how do i make like what is the minimum money i need to have max freedom and that shift what everybody else that i graduated for was just like how do i get the best job get to make the most money which don't even make that much money anyways it's an entry level job they all suck and so i think skipping that level of the game altogether was a great choice but at the time it looked really bad like my apartment looked like shit i lived super scrappy with slept on air mattresses is like all of that stuff you know we afford to dogs we got a mouse like you know we did a bunch of like random things like that but then we did little things that were starter businesses like i had a little tutoring company and then i started doing like a basketball camp once so you know they're during the summer and then we did this like thing where we sold wristband to like so and f attorneys who needed like just like a themed thing like they wanted their name written on some shit and that taught me how to make a website and go to alibaba and like none of these were like businesses that were super lucrative or i most made no money some made a little bit of money nothing you do impressed by but they were amazing starter businesses that get you your first dollar which is like a very addictive feeling and it it's it gets you out of theory and into reality and it gets you moving and it teaches you a bunch of the core tools and skills that you need like sales and marketing that you're gonna have to figure out when you're ready for a bigger business and airbnb experiences i love this idea because it doesn't even sound like a business it's that much of a starter business anybody could do this this is literally now just a question of like are you willing to actually do something or you just gonna talk about it for the rest of your life and anybody could sign up to do one of these like can you walk in your the area where you already live and can you point your finger at things if you can do if you can do that you could host an airbnb you'd experience and i think it removes all excuses and it gets the ball rolling for people i love these starter businesses love what sean said that it takes you out of theory and into practice my first million listeners some of y'all have never run a lemonade stand and it shows okay and so we're gonna give you some ideas star got here's the next one it's a similar one because you may not like doing tours like i'm not a tour guide geek squad type neighborhood computer service i'll give you one that is a genius i was hanging out with a friend yesterday her laptop was disgusting the screen is all sm up there's cookie crumbs in the keyboard there's all the stuff and i've had this fantasy of doing of dressing up and just go door to door to help fix people's stuff i'm talking boosting their wifi cleaning their computer helping them with some basic tech support stuff measuring the power another pet peeve mind as a lot of people have really bad cell phone chargers and cables they're not charging with usb c with the full max power new business idea it's geek squad as a service where you go door to door maybe even just to clean up their laptops and phones i found this gunk online that's this like gel sludge that you put into keyboards to suck up all the dust and the dirt you can walk around with a little toolkit and for a hundred dollars make some massive improvements for people you all you need for that is about a hundred dollars where there's a applies you need a little bit of knowledge on the tech side and need to dress up nice and look respectable but thinking about these things that don't necessarily scale do those things start there you need to get your hands dirty in these type of environments that's my suggestion did you see sean when nick travels did you like did he show you all the gadgets he keeps in his bags yeah he well i and see two he's he had a pillow he had like apple vision pro i don't know what else he like you y some juggling balls you know i mean get you know the essentials dude he he's so funny when he travels like he researches the stuff like crazy like he'll have like the best charger but he also is he knows how he wants to live if he lives that way so for example apparently i don't even know what buckwheat is but there's a buckwheat pillow that he loves and whenever he goes to a hotel he buys that fifty dollar or one hundred dollar pillow and he has it shipped to the hotel room because he's like i have to have this buckwheat pillow nick what's up with the pillow think how wild this is that we will spend three for sometimes five hundred dollars a night for a hotel even two hundred dollars a night and yet your sleep can be ruined by some of the smallest things the pillow was the one variable that as i traveled the world i realized that i could control and someone once said to me strange pillows equal strange dreams and i realized that i might might not be able to control the mattress but i cannot at least control the pillow and so i learned about these japanese buckwheat pillows when i was over in tokyo you kinda even love them or you absolutely hate the hard as a brick have you ever have said i think i might have done it wrong you need it's mine is so hard yeah you need to remove half of the holes okay so if that's a complaint that you have that it's too hard then just dump out half of the holes and the good news is it's buckwheat you can have it for dinner i guess what i appreciate about you is so like i think sean's the same way as me where i will see something or something disappoint me and i'm like my fuck i'll live with it you wanna be like oh yeah you brought me pesto pizza i ordered a steak we have fuck it whatever like i just i even like pesto but like i'm just gonna deal with it whatever or my haircuts bad and i don't wanna complain i it'll grow back fuck it you are not that person yeah when when the barber asks you do want it rounded or squared you have an opinion whereas i like whatever yeah you don't have to do it just i feel like eat now you want the money place fuck me right you have an opinion about stuff and i appreciate that thank you thanks i any like put in the effort to like have life your way i i don't really do that as much is there some story about like a billionaire who does the same thing nick but not with a pillow but which heel does that with a mattress right yeah what's the story i don't wanna comment on it i have heard that somebody does has positioned a couple dozen mattresses around the world in major metropolitan areas and so that when he goes to the hotel his advanced team moves the mattress into the hotel room so he has the same exact sleep anywhere just to remove any number of variables possible sam what does your advanced team do yeah i have reply to that my advance team yeah i'm here nuance team i love being sam's advanced team at events i love to get him himself what's the name for that were you you because my body guy so tell sometimes i like for example sometimes i'll get invited to speak someplace and i'll be like i'm only gonna go like for example we had one and i was like i'm only gonna go if neville and nick will go with me because i don't wanna go alone and i'm like nick do you wanna come with me he's like yeah be your body guy i was like well i just want you to come with my friend he's like well but can i be your body guy i'm like i don't know what a body guy is but yeah i guess like as always as yeah sure as long as like it's nothing that will make my wife right usually that yeah and so he's my body guy and he like he goes it's him so what that means is like so on wednesday your schedule is this is this we're gonna go here here here and here and like i go to this talk and there's like ten people in the crowd like no one came and he's like alright we're gonna do autograph and photographs over here so nick sam come with me and like i'm like dude nick like this like you're no no one wants to do any of this stuff he's like no we're do this and then and then i would be like it'll see someone walking by it'll he'll grab them and being like hey so he isn't true that you wanna take a picture with sam and he's like you he's like i'm like that what a body guy me a body guy like the opposite of a bodyguard bodyguard keeps circle go away a bodyguard guy brings people to you that's great i love it yeah if he like created his hype he's like a hype man that it was so funny i had the funniest embarrassing interaction to the day so was when i went to that trip in san diego i was wearing this hat this hat right here and so i was standing waiting for like my tacos at the taco shack and this guy goes hey i i don't wanna bother you but like do you mind if i take a picture and i was like oh sure man that's cool you know you've been listening for a while he's like no no i just like i like your hat my friend has a company called west and i just wanted him to to see this and i was like i was like oh yeah i i just assumed that you will wanted me oh you know you know what are you getting tacos do you want my tacos i had no way out of that that moment it's you new a moment by the way nick ke monica i got a r on your idea your geek squad thing i think a simpler version of it which is every parent i know that's like kinda like my parents age has this box in their house of just old home videos and so i think a even easier one versus like can i help you with your stuff it's just to say hey do you guys have any like home videos from your kids because i can convert them into stuff that you can have you know on your computer on the internet so you'll never lose them to live forever can't even find v player anymore so i could take if you just have that box i'll just take the box and i'll do it for you and then you basically drive it to like you know cvs or costco and they do this shit for you but like there's a gap there where most people don't they're not really aware of the problem or it's on there to do list they'll never it but if a kid showed up at their door dressed nice million dollar smile and said i'd love to take care of that for you i'm doing that for people in the neighborhood i could take it from you right now just show me the closet where it is and i'll go grab it i think that you can make you know an easy few thousand dollars you know in a couple months of effort effort there which sounds like not that much but you know at different phases of your life a few thousand dollars is all the money it's all you need right and and it gets you going knock knock ma'am can i ask you a question how much are your memories worth boom boom keep your memories safe yeah it's an easy it's an easy sell use the wolf of wall street fair enough close yeah it's like you watch all the youtube videos about sales and you over share your complete overkill going door to door it's like sam have you seen that that company that's doing these nap disney nap bands mean and nick talking about this on the plane there's like you haven't seen this on twitter it's this a nap band they have this like device that's like you gotta find it's called element or something like that it's to put you mind to send in my friend mind shipping they're begging these guys to try because i'm a i'm a prolific map and mapping is like part of my brand and i really spell it e l e m i n d and sean and i can act at the skip that we're gonna do for your i'm i'm deepak chop or a billionaire that's what they're doing right now it's a pre released product but they're building insane hype on twitter because they'll go to a famous person so nick i'm the billionaire and you're the founder of l mine okay deepak i'm gonna give you the new l mind why don't you put this on and see if it'll set you to sleep just like this okay that's it mh mh what's up everybody i'm susie ceo of l this is deepak chop look at that little bitch fell asleep in five minutes he's out like a light bitches you can't even hear me what's up deep deepak little bitch free orders open now this final special strategy right now they take a famous person and they just knocked them out so fast but almost the part they're just drooling and it's like y they're she literally puts a picture of them sleeping it's like my worst yeah it's like punk it's like a mix of paint sleep and ashton k coming out the van it's amazing it's the best part can't have seen a while she does have the attitude she's like deepak chop got him is this a leader of the fruit world right now but watch this boom out like a light bitch yeah oh sleeping like a little baby little ceo needs nap time it's is this legit at all i think legit i think yeah i wouldn't pay for this i honestly i want yeah yeah so this is insane there's no way this works right no i think it works yeah i'm a believer speaking of unique marketing strategies can i talk about what i did on google reviews with my google maps photos well and by the way the e lady came up on this element l thing i wanna hear the e tell you can my story first because i hadn't heard that before until you texted me last night but i have only heard what you texted me so i don't i don't know the story great so first of all the moral of this story i'm just gonna cut to it is that listeners next experiment that you need to be doing bring back blogging you need to fill the ais and the ais need to have data from the public web to scrape i've been saying this for a long time blogging needs to make a comeback take some of your best tweets put them into your blogs if you need to you don't have to create new content but just put the stuff you're sharing elsewhere into blogs a great example of that is my own monthly recap if you go to nick gray news dot com you go to the blog you click the monthly recap i take some of my best posts and i put it there on the blog on the public internet in order to scrape and you need to do this for a few reasons but one of the reasons is for nefarious purposes i wanted to find a list of all of the e gyms in new york city that had swimming pools very hard to find and so i made my own list of all the e gyms with swimming pools it started to rank pretty quickly is the number one search result for other people searching for the same thing unfortunately my gym started to get very crowded and i would have to wait for the lanes to swim at my gym and i'm getting fifty a hundred visitors a day to this page and so i closed my gym swimming pool according to my blog for maintenance for a year so that i would have to wait for less people and people would say hey they'd go there they'd say hey guys sorry this pool closed for a year you know we're res surfing the bottom pavement but these are some other nearby pools and yeah so that's shot doing trying good let's a shot google like nick e he has a pdf on his website yeah download download my full list of e james with pools and you could and and if you sign up we'll send you the pool link for each of the new york city e x bulls you know i got that lead magnet for the friends news newsletter many lead magnet yeah you're gonna be you're gonna have just dozens of pool fans in new york to worship you right literally that's my life a dozen here a dozen there alright so you do hacked your way into having your own pool time for free because you told everybody the pool closed that's on this for not having better seo cool yes yeah i have a couple other stories like that okay us give us a couple other i like these cool so you know gray area oh the the gray area perfect theme with your last name alright to growing gray area i like it alright here's another reason that you should be blogging and writing about interesting things i noticed that that movie about herbal life the bill ac movie was produced by this hedge fund guy and named john fit thorn and i couldn't really find a lot about him and he wasn't ranking for a lot because some of these basically that john must have been pro herbal life and act was anti herbal life and so they were having like a p fight john he was anti as well and was funding this movie to show bills sort of anti story some some reason another john got involved i don't remember the gist of it but he was a hedge fund guy who was a producer of this movie and there wasn't a lot about him so i wrote an article about all the stuff i could find about him various news articles whatever i scrapped it i put it all into a thing and literally like six months ago he called me up he's like hey is this nick grass was like yeah he's like this is john fit you wrote an article about me i was like oh my god i'm so sorry like do you want me to remove it he's like no i just wanna fix some things can you change some of these things that you got wrong and we ended up having like a thirty minute phone call he told me about his new strategies and ideas and all the things he's doing super cool connection that he didn't know me from anybody but because i rank for him he reached out and he wanted to help out that's one reason i've done this in other times if there's this art thing called the normandy panels okay the ss in normandy was a french cruise ship that traveled the world in the nineteen thirties basically to to the world that france is awesome and it had some of the most amazing art d interiors i became captivated with the story of the ship world war two broke out the ship was changed into a military craft and all the guts were ripped out and now show up in private collections around the world i love this stuff nobody was really tracking these panels and so now i am the d facto resource for these panels on the internet just as a hobby project that i've maintained on my blog last week i literally got a call from a conservation at expert at the metropolitan museum of art asking me for advice about who they can talk to as they're thinking about these panels and how they're gonna show and display them all of this is through publishing and live in your life online he's a little moments of when i've done that that have paid off for me in the long game it's important to know this didn't happen overnight this is a long term investment nick there was a guy who i did a podcast with a couple of days ago sam couldn't make it it is a is a guy named guy spear and he's a he's a kind of well known value investor he's a disciple of warren buffett and charlie mon he ended meeting warren buffett and all the stuff and one of the things that came out of it that he didn't realize is he he read the book persuasion by robert gil or whatever the i forgot what the exact title is i think it's been influence influence sorry and i guess the context is he had a fund and he was investing kind of friends of family money he's like dude i'll never get beyond friends of family money if like i don't learn how to do sales and marketing i have no idea how to do that but like let me go try to read a couple books so he reads this book and he reads about the guy who was the number one car salesman in the world he says this guy broke the guinness book of world record sold the most cars more than anybody else and they went and they studied him and they said what what are you doing differently what is your influence what is your persuasion technique and he used to send out thousands of handwritten notes to anybody he would meet he would send a letter and the letter was very simple he would write their name and he would write i like you and and he's like you know people like to be liked that's it it just said dear sean i like you exactly cards i don't know the exact that's what the book says i don't know if there was more to it now he reads this and he's like he's like i don't know much he's like i'm not great at anything he's like but when i do here something that like might help me isaac he's like i'm desperate enough where i just throw my all into it the one good thing about me is i don't have to go in so he's like i decided or i'm not leaving work any day until i've written at least three notes he's like i first one he wrote was like you know sam i like you he's like oh my god i can't on this this is feels so weird so he's like okay i'll change that too thank you he's like i can always say thank you he's like thank you for blah blah he's like i always find something to thank them for and so he started writing through you know today and he started writing that and he started upping the volume and then he tells a story about how that led to ultimately him actually meeting warren buffett he's like you know it's not that everything you note turned into some transactional things but i didn't want that he's like it's not even that i actually genuinely felt it in the moment he's like i forced myself to do it but then i started to kinda feel it like as i went because i'd i have to what am i thankful before and if you keep asking yourself what am i think before in this person you'll start to actually appreciate them more it started to work and what happened happened was he went to the annual meeting of this guy mo b and mod was a famous measure he he's been on the pod he wrote him a letter afterwards it just said thank you for having me at the event and by the he didn't invite him he just said thank you for having me at the event had a great time and that was it mo called him the next day and he goes hey i don't know he's like i'm mona she's like wow how how'd you get my number he's like he's like well i looked you up because you're you i've been having these meetings for for years and you're the only guy who's ever wrote me a thinking note afterwards i so i just i just had to get to know you you would you like to get lunch tomorrow so they get lunch and at the lunch says you know this lunch is great warren buffett has a charity lunch and i think we should bid on it would you come in with me like you know whatever amount you're comfortable with i'll cover the rest i'll cover you know four fifth of three fourth of it you cover whatever your shares but i wanna go to it with you oh so guy spear was more up and coming with than man yes exactly mu had like a he had like a at the time like a eighty million dollar net worth guy was much smaller that a single digit millions and guy was like i i think i put in like a hundred and fifty k two hundred k two hundred fifty k max please and and so they they bid on it they won and then they end up beating warren buffett now the sword goes will circa while we're doing the podcast he could reaches back and he goes is this on video and he pulls out a letter that warren buffet sent him just saying guy thanks for coming to the event you know you know blah blah and he's like warren he's like with his assistant sends out these holiday cards every year to thousands thousands of people and he's like he's like warren gets this principle of basically everything thing you publish out there whether it's a direct thank note or nick in your case these blog posts that you know publishing to the world is a invitation for serendipity you don't really know what's gonna come out of it but if you do enough of it in the long term like you will far out kick your coverage you will get a huge return on this investment plus it just feels good to everybody involved doing it you'll feel good doing it they feel good such a good story that's a great story the surface area of serendipity and they talk about that in a lot of different things right that's why we we you don't get lucky you put yourself in the opportunity to become lucky right you we wanna hear another fund fact about nick i he's the only person who has host parties and literally five of his ex girlfriends will be there at the same time and they all love each other and they get along perfectly i wanna host a girlfriend conference i wanna host a conference for all my ex girlfriends because i really do think that they would get along and there's such incredible amazing people it might be the worst idea ever but but i do know i think shoot a hundred percent do that i think there's no doubts love this idea yeah see no potential issues yeah i i was i think this is this is going to go wonderfully i i think that's i think that's perfect i think you've nailed it over run nick can you talk can you give us the five minute crash course on how to throw a party you know what is the i haven't read your book yet i'm sorry i bought it but i haven't already it what how many copies have you sold by the way twenty thousand maybe twenty one thousand it's pretty good great pretty good right each one here's the thing about a party book by the way nobody wakes up and says you know what i need today is a book about how to host a party they want books about how to get rich they want books how to lose money how to blah blah blah nobody says they want a party book and so that's been an uphill battle so i'm very very proud of that self published sales figure and but i i understand you have something called the nick method i don't know what the nick method is what is the nick method for hosting a party so the nick method to host a party will absolutely level up i'm gonna do harmonic on this because if you do this one thing you will level up your events to be so much better and the reason is that the bar is so low for a successful event think when somebody invites you to like a company happy hour you're just people standing around at an open bar it's like bad that's the that's the old way and the future can change if we bend our will to make it do that you can do that with the nick method when you host events n i c k like my name the n stands for name tags fill out the name tags first name only big block letters the name tags i like are the q three hundreds i also like the avery fifty four twenty fours the q three hundreds come in physics different colors and you guys may know those they discontinued the fifty four twenty six which was really sad yeah it's the vintage you you should be a good idea you should completely make up the model numbers by the way and just see if anyone ever finds out it'd be like i've been waiting i have an envelope for the it's a golden ticket it's like for the first person that realized that i was completely making up the model numbers of these name tags you are my fellow nerd i may have got those model numbers wrong what why does the name guys matter because i went to a party with of yours and at i first i was like okay it's a second grade this is cheesy but then it was kinda useful obviously because i don't remember a lot of people's names but it seems like there's more to it than that what is the like what's this why behind the why the why behind the why is it's like a sports jersey to show everybody that we're on the same team have you ever walked into an event it's the first time you've gone to something and you figure that it's me walking into something else everybody else must know each other they must all be friends already i am the outsider when you have name tags you show that you are all on the same team this is not a party of clicks we're all here together by the way if you host meetups you absolutely have to do name tags when you host at a bar or another public spot so you know who is there for the meetup have you ever gone to a meetup and it's at like a beer garden and you're like well who's here for the meetup like oh these people it's like great i guess i'll just figure it out on my own amateur hour alright name tags i mean i buy yeah and his name tags i stands for intros or ice breakers when i read the book i called to my breakers but there's such a cringe reaction to the idea of ice breakers on that word so now i call them intros and this can be in small groups it can be your whole group together but what's the first thing that everybody asking meet you what's your name what do you do for work we're gonna get that out of the way by having everybody say it real quick i think it is important by the way to say what people do especially for listeners of this pod because you never know who's looking for a job who wants the network who's working on growing their business but those rounds of intros give you an excuse that the conversational crutch for your guests to go up and start new conversations your rule is the holiday great way to do that like is there a better and worse way to do those intros or ice breakers my man of course there dude i've done more ice i i live in breathe ice you have come to the right spot welcome to nico party ice breaker therapy because i've spent a lot of my life doing ice breakers here's the deal there's no do you know stefan from snl weekend update yeah like the you are stefan right now that is the that is you i'm so passionate about ice because i've seen so many bad ones you an example of a bad one is alright everybody team meeting let's go around and say one fun fact about yourself that's a terrible ice breaker so much of my work involves making people that have social anxiety or consider themselves introverts to feel more welcome and i know that some of them are gonna hate this idea of intros but ideally what they like is to be able to know what to expect and minimal surprises and so a green level ice breaker or intro at the beginning of an event when there's no social rapport when people are new and a little uncomfortable is just an easy one that doesn't take time the exact question that i have most people do is everybody real quick let's just do a around intros you gotta say the why the why is that there's a lot of interesting people here and i really want you to go meet somebody new so we're gonna have you say your name say what you do for work or how you spend your day and then tell me one of your favorite things one of your go to things that you like eat for breakfast now that's a bit of a red herring because i actually don't wanna know their breakfast i wanna know what they do for work but we take away the attention we make them think about the breakfast the breakfast one works because it's easy it's subjective people don't judge you for it and it's not hard you don't get locked up in your head a bad example would be hey everybody let's go around name what do you do for work and tell me your favorite business book favorite is definitive it is your absolute favorite people are gonna judge me oh my god favorite what's my favorite what's my favorite so we start with a very easy one so you could do the breakfast if you wanna make it a little edge you could ask people and say your a favorite vice or say what was one of your first online screen names and why did you choose it or what was one of your first jobs that you ever got paid cash money for now those are beginner level ones i wanna tell you an advanced one but i wanna check with you guys can i keep going yes yes keep you going as you continue the event about an hour later you wanna do one more advanced round of intros and this is what i call a value additive intro value additive means that everybody's answer adds to the benefit of the room and so for sam for example who lives in connecticut now say that he was hosting this in west chester you would say hey everybody we're gonna do our last round of ice breakers your question is gonna be what is one of your west chester pro tips or life hacks or little secrets what's a small business you support a dog park you like a hiking trail you enjoy what's the best coffee shop in town tell us one great thing in town that you like and wanna shine a light on k so that's one example one more example if you don't wanna focus on your town would be hey everybody we're gonna do a last round of intros and i want you to share a great piece of media that you have consumed recently what's a movie you watch to documentary a podcast like my first million like and subscribe gentleman's agreement what are some of those things that you liked and you wanna share k and then you go around the room and you do that why does this work it works because every answer gives somebody value oh i've been meaning to go to that restaurant oh my first million i love those guys oh i i heard about that book i wanna check it out and you do it towards the end of your event so at the end people get all these new ideas they've met all these new people and they leave with a feeling of value they leave feeling that they're better than when they showed up that's what a good party is you did something at a party i went to of yours where i don't know if you were like lurking around or you were hopping from combo to combo but then when you brought everything me back together you go james will you tell people that amazing email trick that you did that really improved your your open rates and the guy said something that was like so useful to me that i was like that one thing alone made this party worth going to because yeah it's like you had eyes and ears around the room so you could pluck the best kinda like pro tip that you heard and you had two or three people go and you just had them share with the whole group in that moment i thought that was pretty awesome that's an advanced tip and and the main thing i want your listeners to know is that i found that interesting people want to meet people that are doing interest in things and the fastest way to become interest in was for me to host my own events so we talked before about those business ideas that you don't need a lot of capital for hosting events is kind of the same way you can do it with very little money each party should cost you less than a hundred dollars these strategies start from beginner to advance and i've helped hundreds of people to host their very first party using this method you should be going through life collecting the interesting people that you meet and why is this helpful will it help me launch a multimillion million dollar business called museum hack that was launched on the back of the network that i built up from hosting all of these events i hear from a lot of people oh my god i'm do a startup up party i'm a do a launch party for my new app i was like awesome perfect how many events have you hosted when was the last event you hosted oh i've never hosted anything i'm like bro you have a cold list like nobody knows you like no offense but like in real life nobody knows nobody care this is not gonna be a successful launch party you need to start building up and hosting these little events by the way the perfect size for a happy hour in my opinion is about fifteen to twenty two people i could talk forever about this but a small plug i wrote a book called the two hour cocktail party that is really more like a workbook or a step by step guide that helps you actually do it and by the way if you wanna go through a cohort or something you'll give me a hundred dollars at the end of hosting the party i'll give you the hundred dollars back that's how it works but host you the might change the book made you like the king of the introverts because i had so many introverted friends who like read the book and they started hosting nick gray parties and i would be like walking around austin at like seven o'clock at night and in austin all the bars are outdoor bars and i would see i would i swear to god there was just one one mile walk through east austin of like where all the bars are and i would see multiple nick gray party's happening monica all throughout downtown austin joe is in the night they would be in a circle and they would we i call them we would call them name tag knicks so they always had nick's named tags and they would be in a circle and i could see the person in the middle pointing exactly like he tells me to do in the book i swear to god on one one mile walk i saw three i saw one at lazarus one at whistler and won this other bar it it was three nick gray parties it was insane it's like you're are the introverts king for a handful of months where i would in in austin so many we're doing it the reason we're doing this is that people are hungry for in person events we're all digitally saturated we want that human connection and i found that you can add value to people by introducing them to other interesting people if you're looking for a business idea if you're looking to raise your status in the world you have to start by adding value and hosting a party introducing the interesting people you know that is a way that you can add value dude do you have so many stories we we probably should wrap up in a minute but you got like so many freaking stories i i just wanna i want you just to like rattle off stories i just like hearing all the most interesting things even without explain for the completion is can you just say what the c of the k stand for in the nick method the nick method n i c k and his name tax i intros c stands for cocktails or mock tails only do not do a dinner party i talk about why dinner parties are a recipe for failure for new first time hosts and k thanks for kick them out at the end this is only a two hour gathering you wanna keep it tight you want people to leave when they're wanting more leave when they're wanting more end it when it's going great just like this podcast thanks for watching bye bye i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back