My First Million's Origin Story, How to Find Winners, and More

describe your approach like okay you're starting a company from scratch i would say like it's just a question of priorities and i would say this versus priorities building an awesome team they're recruiting like high level people and then like really setting a cultural foundation around that so that's like the that's the non like non poking fun way of looking at is like that's that's their priority so what's your priority when you like start an endeavor did you see this email i sent you so i forwarded you and then like an investor update i got did you read did you see that email from who like i can't say but because i was sort of like you know this person smart they actually sold the company before which address did you send it too i don't know maybe you're hustle i don't know but to see if you stop see an email me anyways i'll just explain to you you don't even need to read the email basically this is like i was like this is so different than anything i would and i was like if if this person wasn't already successful like they were they did they built a cool company before this they are a smart person i've met them before but they you know their their company updates or their investor updates are highly like aspirational like so they haven't launched yet the team is like it's like the team is growing we have like i don't don't how many people they have thirty forty people now we did our you know a second off site because remote work you know is hard to build our bonds and on our off site we played these games and we did this mission statement and here's our values and then like on top of the values we're thinking about like how to build a culture that's really you know transparent collaborative and like they again haven't launched yet no revenue no nothing but like professional photographer but yeah i have have professional photographer the update is like super robust and like again on one hand like when i read this i'm just like oh no like this is this is like i use like watching a car or drive off a cliff it's like this is like all the parts of a startup up except for the important parts and like i know they must be doing the important they must be building the product too it's not like they're not but like i would never prioritize these things in my own companies i know you're the same way where we're both a little bit like you know bras and like you know you're like no the office doesn't have cups like we we use these yeah like can you put your ham like this their ads are for dog yeah like they call the sam water part for no like that wrap the nose and suck some down like if you need some i'll bring it to your desk so you waste time he's convenient the hose is eighteen foot i sprung for the big one and it's like and so i know you're like me we're like we do this like very boot like company building and like you know oh like we look up and it's like oh shit we have eighteen dudes okay diversity yeah okay like we're you know we're gonna change that or it's like the company culture like oh yeah come to come to my house tonight i'm gonna cook for you guys i don't know what like can you guys just stop at safe way and just buy like bunch of chips like every you're like chips right like yeah alright every like relationships growing every everybody go buy your favorite bag chips that's what we're doing tonight like you know it's like these kind of company building at the minimum and it's like the as you go style and then i see this and i'm like either like either there's just like many play styles that's how you you can win in different ways or they're way wrong or i'm way wrong i don't know and what do you think about this sort of thing i think that for a very particular type of person i wouldn't be concerned about this type of email i think that you should most likely assume you're are not that person that's not even like you but like anyone anyone do they should all they should default today or not this person like if you are you know like some like big swing dick some big deal here's the analogy it's like steve jobs didn't like you know he was like a perfection he would like build it and then release the perfect product he wasn't trying to iterate he didn't ask consumers for feedback you know like early on early and often he was a product visionary genius okay but like to assume that your steve jobs ish yeah that assume that you're that is like dangerous that's a dangerous path to go down i think this is a horrible idea you and i have a friend that started a company and when there were only two people him and the business partner they hired a ceo coach so they could help with culture building and that's another sign but yeah i think and they would go to like retreats like for like right this type of stuff so no i think that this is not a good sign it's not very good at all have you i guess i what's your describe your approach like okay you're starting a company from scratch i would say like it's just a question of priorities and i would say this versus priorities is building an awesome team they're recruiting like high level people and then like really setting a cultural foundation around that so that's like the that's the non like non poking fun way of looking at is like that's that's their priority so what's your priority when you like start an endeavor you know so yeah i'm doing that now so like i'm gonna start getting it and we could talk about it but i'm gonna start getting into something and i'm thinking like alright is this something that i wanna build to sell or is this something that i wanna run forever because that actually kind of matters on how you set up your entity so i think about like what do i want personally what type of life do i want and how long do i wanna operate this for so what want you do differently let's say build for a bill own forever or build this out what what's the what's the core difference well if you wanna pay yourself from the business as you go an llc makes sense if you wanna sell the company and you're willing to not pay yourself a little bit or you only wanna pay yourself as a w two then you wanna be a corp like a c c corp and if you wanna an i guess you could be an s corp but if you wanna sell your company in in five plus years and take advantage of q sbs which is ten million dollars of sa or sorry three million dollars of tax savings then you for sure wanna be a c corp because you can't get that on the other two so i i would i would think about like that like what type of structure do i want this to be of course i have a history of getting hits so like if you don't have a history of like making money then like i wouldn't even worry about that shit you know what i mean right like i i proven to myself that like if i say i'm gonna do something i follow through you know i'm not you don't wanna be a the nerd that just buys business cards before you even have anything done credit point okay so that's like that's like a literally a company structure but by the way i i i think i told you this one of the kinda of like tax slash lawyer people that's like kind of advising us they gave us a pretty great structure they gives us best of both they're like just have a c corp that owns the business assets and that's what we'll be eligible for q usps down the road but then the the c corp will pay your llc you know your llc for each you you you know the cofounder like as a management thing and so you're gonna get you're gonna get personally paid out through your llc and then but you still retain the long term benefits of raising money or selling a c corp yeah that's but is the is the stock owned by the c corp yeah so the company well c corp is the one issuing the stock it has the stock that's stock that we want to so if you do a stock purchase and we can either we and then the ls llc doesn't need to own that stock it's that's a a management company that's like savvy shit that i would have to like look into and make sure i'm doing it right because there's a there's a clock you need to own it for five years additionally what you could do is you can issue shares to family members in different trusts so many many people could take advantage of the ac q usps and another other savvy long term capital gains things like that so i i think a little bit about that stuff and i i think like what right now i'm every business that i'm thinking of i'm think about how many employees do i need to run this and what type of employee am i gonna have to hire because when you go big with some ideas you're gonna have to hire these like smart ass ex harvard ex facebook type of folks you don't have to but you know like that like that type of thing or is this like no i can actually hire this like sixty thousand dollar year person where are they gonna be coming from and do i actually want or not want to work with that type of person right so i think about who am i gonna have to employ employ and what the business model is gonna be and so how stressful will that be advertising was really stressful because we had to go out and well you're you're in it now you gotta hunt every single month and that could be a that can be a bit stressful and so now i'm looking at what it's a little bit more recurring which is less stressful so i'm thinking a lot about business model i'm thinking about what type of lifestyle i want and i'm thinking about who i'd have to hire and you're thinking about these things but that's not your priority list right so like i mean like in terms of action right so that's thinking and planning cool that'll take you couple days to be kind of n on that stuff in terms of how do you like the hardest action that's actually the hardest part is figuring out because that's what benson said that's what figuring out figuring out what figuring out what you want but in terms of the action i figure out i narrow it down to what's the one thing that can make this fail or work and so let's just say that i'm creating let's say i'm creating hubspot let's say i'm hubspot a few years ago i'm creating hubspot so there's like a few items that could that need to work or at least i would think they need to work in order to make happen so like can i recruit engineers is probably one do people want this and are my engineers even capable enough to create this and so if i'm hubs hubspot well salesforce exists so i actually think that people can build this like it's i'm i'm i'm i'm able to build this product and number two i know a bunch of engineers and i'm pretty good at sales i think i can i think i can recruit engineers so then the then it's like well but do people want this so that's like the the the it's like okay boom that's it that's the thing where it's like i have to figure that out before i move on to the next steps and so i go out and try to solve that for a company like hubspot i would actually just do tons of phone calls and i would make a judgment call based on that for this like little small copy things the try copy that dot com that's think that yeah i i just no with that i just put a pre sale on there and i got five thousand dollars of pre sales and i've with trends we have fifty thousand dollars of pre sales so depending on how easy the transaction is if it's a thousand dollars or less in transactional value i can probably create a landing page and pre sell it we pre sold this thousand dollar thing for trends and we're gonna charge ten grand for it when it came out we pre sold i think we got a hundred thousand dollars so we got a thousand dollars from a hundred different people to to launch it and so if it's under a thousand dollars my first step is selling it and giving me giving me myself one month to pull it off right yeah that's exactly right i to me i simplify it like how do i make sure like how do i figure out do people want it step one do people want this and that's either pre selling talking to people just kinda of my own gut do do people want this second thing is where will i get customers okay i think i could probably get the first ten customers from here first hundred customers from there but like on an ongoing basis do i have like a repeatable way to get customers and if i know they answer those two questions then i just go and i don't do other things besides those two things i build the thing that they want and i give it to them and see if they want see if they actually love it or if they just kinda like it and then i see if the way to get customers actually works and at once i do those two things i don't really wanna do anything else besides those two things for like a long period of time and like all the other stuff raising money company culture hiring you know corporate structure naming branding packaging design all comes after yeah and you have to my opinion is not only do you have to not you have to like say i'm not gonna worry about that at at this point but you also have to say i'm actively actually going to avoid it so it's like i i'm gonna like actively not care about it know what i mean like you have to like and you kinda have to like take that stance and i think there's actually some products where the question is not do people want this so like there's some stuff that i'll create that i'm like already know people want this like i know they're gonna buy it the question is like can i even get customers to this repeatedly right and then that's actually tell you a couple tactics that help me with this i i wonder if you did something like this so i have learned that it's actually best to be a little bit what i'll call brutal about this okay so what do i mean by brutal about this it is very easy like when somebody hears that oh yeah you've you first figure out do people want this and you try to like you know pre sell it or offer it to them and see if they sign up for the waitlist list or they they pre buy or whatever and then you figure out where am gonna any customers repeatedly and like you test that marketing channel and like those the only two things you do you say note everything else that sounds so simple and then you like tell someone go try to build startup and they'll do everything else besides this two things excited is that like the embarrassing hard stuff yeah because it's the hard stuff and if they do if it doesn't work the car doesn't move anywhere whereas you could do a whole bunch of other stuff and it feels like you're moving but the reality is that i'm moving forward you're moving sideways and so but at least moving feels like you're moving and so people will gravitate and so let me give you some examples yesterday there was a tweet about fe who's my my old little c cofounder by line last startup and f is like you know a man of of action you know few words lot of action and you know like if you ever ask them like when do you think you could do this it is rare for him to not be like i should be able to ship it tonight now he only hits the tonight thing like i would say thirty percent of the time like thirty percent the time nothing happens seventy percent of the time he gets like a crappy version that's like not ready but like he'll at two am there will be a message from him be like here's where i left it and you know like ten or twenty percent time he actually finishes the thing but he almost never says anything besides like yeah we shouldn't do that tonight and so i learned that from him and every engineer we hired learned that from him we're like you can't give him a timeline that's not tonight he's if you say something besides he's just what the fuck you're talking about so he now has his new like incubator thing called f dot inc dude what was that picture of the dude sexy as hell right got this ten thousand square foot our least foot ten thousand square foot space in fort mason he it was beautiful when everybody was leaving san francisco and and then remote work shut down all the offices and schools and in person events he was like the only buyer he was like yeah i want a big space i'm in the middle of san in the best part of san francisco so he's like you could see the water the bridge got ten thousand square feet he's like i'm gonna put a robotics lab a hardware lab desks i'm just gonna have a bunch of engineers come make stuff here you don't have for pay rent like just come it's like beautiful and like it look now like renovating it so it's it's started with an empty blank shell and now it's like it looks awesome so does he make stories does he make money for that or is he just spending money hoping that one of the companies he he he's like he's made a bunch of money and he's also just like i he invest in the incubator company and the company's that are there invested in a bunch of them and like those are already doing well so somebody tweeted it out somebody who where who's working out of there they go one thing that fe does around the office is if a developer spends like more than a day i think it's like if you spend more than a day on local host which is basically just means like you're building your website project but you didn't ship it to the world like nobody else besides your laptop can access the site if you spend more than a day he'll just start calling you local host until you ship he'll stop using your name and he'll just call you local host because you oh you're just local host now vi right like you don't want people to use your product so you just alright local hosts do you wanna get lunch and like i wanted to speed this out and you people to take it the wrong way but like that is a style we kind of inc at our last startup it's sort of like bully management and it's not that you're bullying people it's that you're bullying your values it's like how do i like live my values instead of just say we care about you know like building things fast it's like no if you don't build things and get it to customers you will get ridiculed here because that is not cool in our books you want cool you want respect then you gotta do the thing we respect and like if you don't we're gonna tease you until you do it i was given a a guy a hard time in the trends group because he posted hey so i've got six podcast episodes already recorded can someone give me an answer on which hosting platform is better and and my i reply go well that's not really the important the question the important question is why did you record six with like just release one and and right it just post it it that was like by the way so so i started podcast when i started this podcast what did i do i messaged you on facebook i go hey i'm starting a podcast and i think you know it's gonna be awesome you know here's the concept at that i was literally making it up as i was i made up the name i made up the concept right there on the spot i knew i wanted to do a podcast generally and i go i go you know you have this awesome audience but no audio content i make great audio content if you'll put in front of your audience and then i was like i'm a send you the first i'll send you the first episode later today there was no first episode i then go book a studio record the episode and sent it to you within twenty four hours in order for you to like see that i'm like being legit legitimate was live like two weeks later right yeah i was like okay is ready to go like here it's nobody's listening to it but it's in the store you can go listen the podcast if you want to the guy i was like we got we got six done and i'm like but that's not the question that you do like the question is why do you have six done and done none my like that's just crazy right because people default to they it it's embarrassing and it's to post that shit so let me give you some other examples of of this of being brutal about it at monkey inferno when when we were working there we would sometimes let like kind of interesting engineering guys like just hang out in our office and they would we just like out just work for here now you don't need to pay us is not a we work it's like the sick office we got extra space just come here and work just bring some good energy and so these guys came and they they were working there they had this idea that was really cool and then they were like they would always ask us questions that were like but like this investor is interested you know we're thinking about raising money you know how should we think about this can you look at our debt can you do this and that like and was like hey your guys is your guys product do you have your product built like do you have users i was like it's just like those are more important than this fundraising stuff but like i get it it's it's flattering when an investor wants to give you money but like now that investor just took over your day like and now your day is all about that instead of like the main thing right like hey guys and whatever happened the main thing so then no so then they get they get into y comb they're like oh we got into y comb and we're like awesome those guys will keep you on track and then over the next six weeks it was like y you're nyc like what's going on what's it like to be on see i've never done it like heard it's awesome and they're like the officers stars are great they're bringing up this and that and we're like so how many users you guys got and they'd be like and they would like they didn't know the number oh my god and me and fe kinda just they're like alright new rule if we ask you how many users you have how many daily active users you have you don't know the number like ten push ups and they're like hi we're like no we're serious about that and then they then they i still didn't know for two more days and they have to look up the dashboard and we're like alright it's ten bush of not working so we took a marker we started writing a giant zero on the like the the wall behind them and we're like this is the number of users you have according to us because you don't know so we're just gonna keep putting zero here and like it's your job to like change this to be like the number of users you have day when you come to the office you're gonna see if there's a giant zero above your head until you change that and like again this worked and like all of a sudden they started thinking about it i'm many users they had they want they didn't want that giant zero hanging over their head and i've just seen many versions of this i've heard a story about peter teal doing this too peter t values were all about like focus and so his thing was everybody at paypal when he was the ceo of paypal would have one thing that they were responsible for and the list could only be one they had one big thing to care about and if you tried to talk to peter like hey peter you know yeah the the market you know the the marketing stuff's going well but had this idea around this feature he would literally just leave the room if you ever trying to speak to him about the non one thing you were assigned he would just ignore you he's like oh that's not remember we decided what's important so by definition this is not important so by definition i'm just not gonna talk you about not important things i'm gonna right like i don't know how hard i don't know how real that's anecdote is because i wasn't there but like let's just say like directional it's true i think that that is like a really important way to like operate a young company what happened to the guys from your office they ended up getting into yc they ended up getting better they like they kinda grew but then they lost like like once the growth wasn't like instant that here's my read of it they pivoted they they pivoted and dis distorted they're all doing different things now one guy one guy like you know working on a different company and other guys working on a different company and the third guy i've never heard i know where you went and probably found some cocaine somewhere and he had told me something once which was just like he was like you know he don't really once he was like like they were building a marketplace of supply and demand and like they the reason they we were all excited about them was because they got this huge amount of supply really quickly they just posted on reddit and like people really wanted the thing and said they started posting but the demand side was slow and he was like he's like when i he's like the with the supply side it felt like i stepped on a land mine i just like did i took one step and is blew up goes i want the demand to feel like that too dude so what i one hand i respect to that on the other hand i like dude sometimes you gotta like figure out how to get out i don't respect that and the reason why you know we're taught like you know people could change we can evolve and i've actually i think last year i actually made the decision i'm actually going to assume people don't change the way you are is the way you are and you're never changing and that that that way of thinking how hopeful of you it's actually been amazing because like i'll meet someone and i'm just like oh you are a loser and you're always going to be a loser you say you're gonna do something you don't do it you don't have big dreams you don't work hard like innocent yeah yours is guilty until proven it one hundred percent and then i meet someone who's just like a baller or like steph smith and i'm like oh well you're just a winner so just like maybe sometimes you're gonna swing and miss you're always gonna swing therefore i'm on board forever with anything you do because i know exactly how you are and people never change and you're just a winner you win consistently whereas there's a bunch of other people i there's a great article it's called losers exist avoid them and it's the founder of bleach tree report brian greenberg or goldberg and he writes a blog post about how we interviews people and he's like yeah see i just think that losers do exist and like not everyone's a winner and i'm just gonna try really hard to avoid those types of people and his way of doing it is he would say i ask you about the bottom fourth of your resume so where are you with a so if i'm interviewed a candidate and she can't tell me like passionately about something that she studied for four years it's like oh you're just a loser like you're not in you you don't care about philosophy even though you studied that for four years you're you're uni interesting and thus or a loser but you interview this other woman and you could like passionately tell you a story about something and it's like well why don't even care about philosophy but because you entertain me like you clearly you are curious you're a winner so anyway my way of thinking as of late is just people never change my sister has a great phrase on this unless you guys people will say that people don't change did they change for the worse is so her default is even it's like yeah this person will change over time they're gonna get worse they're gonna decay basically and like harden in these like bad patterns until proven otherwise i think that's actually pretty good way of thinking about things dude can tell you about this last thing like this experiment i'm doing that i think it relates to this which is like losers exist how to avoid them so here's my right right it's brilliant here's my my inversion of that winners exist here's how to attract them and so i put out this thing the other day i tweeted it out there i was like fifty thousand dollar thing yeah i was like yeah we just made twenty five grand like a wire just came in for no ground for twenty five grand i did not think that was gonna work i wanna give it all i wanna give it away and i said that you know crypto has has full of spec there's too many spec not enough builders so if you wanna build something here's the deal i will give away one one eth which is like three thousand dollars i was like i'll give you three thousand dollars no strings attached no equity to build whatever you want like your you scratch your itch and i just wanna give it to builders here here's a link to apply go and two kind of amazing things happen of how like winners exist here's is how to attract them first a bunch of people who are winners were like hey great idea i'll put in money too and was just an excuse to touch base of like a bunch of these winners so the prize pool is more than doubled already and like now we're giving away more money to more people because people are were like oh this is cool i wasn't it was like the calm guy it was fe con yeah the founder of come fe con was like we'll match it and then like there's more people but we were like hey let's just give away this first batch and then like if this is cool we're gonna like we'll do more we can just grow this into a self sustaining like builder grant it's phil but like i don't instead charity i'd rather give to like people building shit and like i'm sorry to you know people who are like no there's people suffering out there like yes but also like this is where i wanna give money to is it something like this and by the way the whole like a wire came in today that was all bullshit like that was just like for the story like we just i was like i wanna give away just i'm willing to give away this much money and the gonna we need to realize that lying for the sake of a story is actually okay have you remember the book that we read about storytelling yes which one story worthy story a story worthy and he was like he's like just lie like for example if you're talking about like yeah so was in the car of my teacher and she started flirting with me like and he was like well there was actually like three people in the back seat like i couldn't say that because it really the thing was like don't lie to add lie to omit details details just omit details that don't add to the point of the story and and so yeah but mine was like yeah i kinda just framed it as like oh wire just came in and because everything wire could have came in oh okay came in and it did come in pieces like the money did come to me somehow never received a wire that day and so like so va but basically i told like this came on a whim so i told you we heard that you guys saf on and i was like sephora on seth twenty two i think and he's awesome and i just like having winners around me like young awesome energetic people who wanna like make shit happen and i was like y i want more people like he around i'm not gonna hire all of them but like how do just get more like you know what there was peter taylor that thing where he like took like young people's blood and like put it in his body i wanna do put yeah i'm like young young blood in my in my body how do how am gonna do that so was like alright let me just put out a grant for builders this will attract people who a can build things b like know what one theory one eth is and like want one ether like and the three thousand dollars like mean something to them that they this could like unlock like a month worth of like is it an excuse to go build that thing right so what happened almost a thousand applications came in in a week and how long our application it was like a form that was like you know who what's your was like what's your story i was just like kinda open ended and it was like what do you wanna build give me the tweet pitch of it why do you wanna build it you know what's your handle what's your address which your email what blah and so people wrote in and i'll share the eighth air table with you it's kind of amazing alright so there's like a bunch of junk we shortlist listed like about a hundred fifty people out of the like close to a thousand as like strong like this person's kinda like either their story or their ideas is strong and then we like kinda got to the finalist which are like these thirty five people that are like okay these thirty five people they all seem like kind of worthy of getting this and we're ultimately gonna pick i don't know fifteen or something for the for this this batch of grants and and i think doing this is like this whole thing is gonna take me i think maybe three days total to like of attention to pull off but what it's gonna create is like just a bunch of young awesome energy young being just like not on your literal age but like more like people who like psycho grass somebody who yeah it's like somebody who has an idea has energy has optimism and like doesn't it think of all the reasons they shouldn't do it instead they like yeah fuck yeah apply i'm gonna do this and so they're gonna be around me and i like i i think this is gonna be so roi positive in the long run that it's like insane dude just have that i've done these things before and i think you did it before when you gave a business to someone right yeah and i've never had it work out like yeah it just kinda like get went on the back shelf or they and they just kinda forgot about it yeah it could be and like you know that's why the main filter is like are you gonna actually do anything or you just talking about it or like is your day job or your you know your student status whatever gonna just trump this and you never get around to like actually making shit happen that's the number one criteria here but do the the stories are like amazing of like who writes in it's like it is remind you of like oh wow the world is way bigger than like the amount of people that i interact with or a day to day basis are you given the money all one person no no no there's gonna be like fifteen people who get the grant and it's like a few grand each yeah alright well you were to see what's that happen what's gonna happen when are you gonna decide we'll decide like in the next five days who gets it and then we're just like setting up like we're just gonna run the whole thing and know just like a telegram group or something like that and yeah know see what happens but i think guys my point is do things that create that like attract winners to you is if it's is the opposite lesson of like lose exists and how to avoid them that's great advice i think actually slightly less great advice is winners also exist here's how get near them get around them get them around you and like figure out different ways to like get them around you this was one that like you know know not everybody can afford to like do a grant program or whatever but like yeah but i had no if i had no money i could've have also didn't created this grant program instantaneously i could've have said i could emailed you know fifty people and been like hey will you put up a thousand dollars for this here's all the benefits you're gonna get and you know which is how by the way i hired saf he initially emailed me saying hey you should do a grant program here's five reasons why and i was like oh that's actually a great idea well you do all the work he said yeah i'll do all the work did you ever read a san francisco subreddit no alright so i used go to the subreddit for san francisco all the time and there was this guy it started like five years ago he just said hey everyone and he posted a picture of himself holding up beer he goes i'm at this bar i forget it wasn't in hey ash i'm at this bar come down and your first drinks on me and he just posted that and like people made fun him and then he did it again the next week and he did this for literally like sixty weeks in a row and then he like became famous for the guys like oh you need it you wanna have a good time seems was really nice everyone goes to talk so he's it's really cool dude and it'll buy your first drink drink whatever you kinda if you do that with like building cool shit it actually works out quite well where it's like hey i'm building this thing tag along for the ride right it tends to work well the guy does it all the time it's great it's got he's like became famous was like oh come have first drinks on me i'm down here i wonder how much he spent dude we used to do these mixer mixtures these roommate mixtures in san francisco and we would like only spend five hundred dollars but we were like the man like we were like the most popular people for a long time we did it every week for like two years what and what were you doing what five hundred bucks went to doing what i bought everyone beer at a bar or at a bar and your we you toast them at a bar and i would just like hey can i get two dollar beers and might come every week and i'll spend at least five hundred dollars and i'm like alright cool and so i was like alright here's my card stop at five hundred it was pretty sick can we turn the ship around we need to circle back business term let me tell you about a cool company that i just discovered and the guy told me to tell you hey so do you i don't know if you know i don't know if that was like he's a fan or of if or he actually knows you have you it's called so i i am i'm i'm linking to it in here in the doc i'm highlighting it right now it's called get cyber leads dot com have you ever seen this no who so who's the guy well i don't i don't know i don't even know his name i just d him with alex alex west okay yeah i don't think i know this first he said tell sean said hey alex west is his name i i didn't know if he was saying it as like a way that he knows you must just be a fan alright let's get cyber leads the reason it's cool is it's just him and basically what it is is you pay let's see how much is it is it so like you pay between a hundred and a thousand dollars a month for a different a bunch of different versions but basically you every month just one time every month he sends you a thousand plus handpicked companies that just raised a lot of money and are highly likely to go and look and look to outsource a whether it's technology or design they're looking to outsource stuff and if you're an agency owner you sign up to this and every month you just get a bunch of new leads and the lead list it includes the ceo's name the ceo's contact information what this person is likely to outsource where they're located how big they are and how much or how much money they just raised and the reason why this is cool is because it's so freaking simple very clear value it's just one person it's making three hundred thousand dollars a year so or sorry yeah three hundred thousand dollars a year so it's making in march he said he did twenty he did twenty thousand dollars a month with a net profit of seventeen thousand dollars it's now gone up to like thirty thousand a month but i just thought this was unique and i love these types of businesses because the value proposition is so clear if you just one of these things closes a deal it's worth it and i actually think that you could do this for a bunch of different verticals you've never seen this before no i've never ever seen this how does he do the like what they're likely to outsource is he just guessing based i something i go are you doing this handpicked he goes yeah every report takes me out a hundred hours to do the whole leads list any sense one email per month and if you go to the website and you click live demo you can basically see what he sends you is it's just like an air table an air table table and you could kinda see all the information wow that's kinda cool alright is pretty cool right yeah gotta give her him and i it's just him and he's like as i can this scale he goes i think i can get a million dollars a year pretty soon and i'm not sure what i can do after that but i think just me this could get a million dollars and honestly i totally agree i think this is a beautiful business i think this is really really cool so he said okay so let's just look at his march numbers alright so he said march revenue twenty thousand cost three thousand a month net profit seventeen k profit margin eighty five percent last march for example he was basically five times less so revenue was four thousand and now it's twenty thousand and so this is pretty good this is what basically basically one guy and a va can run this yep one guy one guy in a vehicle can run this thing and it's providing like you said providing clear value in the sense that like if i pay for this i'm likely to get more customers and make more money so it it's like it pays for itself and like it pays for itself is actually like a pretty valuable thing which is like there's a bunch of things in my businesses that i'm like oh yeah i wanna do that but you know i kinda have these other priorities and i was like well i really do just need to look at all these things as like can i hire somebody and it be immediately value like you know acc in the next six to twelve months because that job that i'm hiring them for is not to just make my life easier it's to literally generate revenue and profits and so like there is no way that if i hire this person if they are competent this has to be an roi positive thing to do and you know the only thing i need to consider is like do i have the do i have the the bandwidth to hire this person and so and so to me you know like that's and then there's products like that too this is a product like that where it's like yeah i pay ninety nine dollars whatever over a hundred and ninety nine dollars a month whatever this thing costs and like if i can't make more than a hundred ninety dollars off this like that's just my own incompetence at that point it's sick man it's really sick and so it says it says there's a thousand leads if you go to pricing for the prices range from two hundred dollars to two thousand dollars and it says let's see it says you get a thousand leads maybe that includes like all the past months it's pretty this is pretty cool by the way check out this tweet i put in the chat this is a good example of like content that's not like it's like this is the easy easy mode of creating content that people resonate with so this is just like a beautiful alright since guy tweeted out december twenty first he goes one year get one year ago today i was fired for my job making two thousand dollars a month today i'm making six thousand month with my own business and they post more importantly i post a screenshot of his like calendars planner and it says fired exclamation exclamation point last day at work that's like on the twenty first on the twenty second day one is self employed man exclamation point and it's just like you kinda root for the person and you know what's in this content it's nothing but it's like by showing the raw like planner and like what i wrote to myself that day like these are like these the these have like an emotional impact on people and i think that's one thing that most people get wrong in content is that content is about emotion not information and something like that it generates like a feeling and of like rooting for the person that is like mo i know are really smart and so they try to like outs smart everybody on content and it's like you don't need down smart everybody you need to trigger an emotional response whether it's outrage it's like compassion it's like you know awe inspiring whatever it is and this is a great simple example of how you can make somebody root for you is you know a little sweet like that this guy is a good fine i think he kinda so there's this guy that for context where listener there's a guy named peter levels who i've been begging to get on the pod and he keeps like saying yes and then ghosts and yeah so but anyway this guy peter levels he's not exactly a one man operation i think now he's got contractors but he's got like four or five different businesses they're basically all the same thing like job boards collectively doing like four million or or or so in revenue and he posts like cute cool insightful content on twitter and blogs this guy alex west is kinda like in the same ballpark as that as that guy peter levels right like he's like it's like cool well designed it looks like he's like a like a no mad as well but but somebody needs to make the list i feel like steph smith needs to do this she needs to make the the definitive list of these like solo freelancer digital no basically like the peter levels this guy where it's like yeah this person's on some journey they're trying to get to a hundred k a month and like personal revenue but they have these principles like they're not trying to raise money they're not trying to build a big team they live nomadic they're like just a good enough engineer and just good enough designer and just a good enough copywriter to make it happen and they're like doing it all in public and like there's like twenty of these people that i found on twitter all of them are entertaining to me and i feel like most people just don't know who those people are and like actually like a good service would be to just aggregate them put it in a newsletter like hey i'm following all these people doing this thing check this out this guy posted an update about this thing and like you could just make a newsletter following their work and probably like you know build an audience of fifty to a hundred thousand people following you following them which is sort of you know meta do you ever read indie hackers i don't personally go there much but i have for sure the past indie hackers is awesome it started by two guys cor and chan i'm i've twins right they're twins yeah i become friends with chan over the years basically in it was like a forum for this weird genre of entrepreneur is called indy indie hackers but they sold it to stripe and i have a feeling that each brother will make in the world of twenty million dollars when stripe goes public i wouldn't be surprised if we were a little more but i can't i i actually think it's above twenty they've never told me i just am guessing because because of when they sold to them and if they sold for a million dollars who would have gone up by like that much so anyway i on their website they list interviews and they list all the revenue of the companies and it's pretty amazing and you could sort by revenue and you can just find like a list of companies that basically you wanna like get inspired by or copy right yeah that's cool and by the way just look at their traffic like their traffic shows about a million million to a million and a half monthly visitors so you know good good job by them of like this is like real scale and in fact this is probably like like for milk road i should go tell our story on indie hackers and product and could probably add ten thousand new subscribers with one day of one day of like just crafting a story that goes on that just posting on both of these i completely agree i've done it both times we we did it for trends and we made a lot of money i like it hops hubspot allows all our teams to work together seamlessly so no one's falling overboard unless we want them to okay what else do you got i don't know you tell me what do you got i see what know says wait i have a question alright yeah let's let me ask you you i see this question you're about to ask her alright you ever seen those movies where they are it's about like drug lore the shit and do you find and you see just like a normal guy in a boat off the coast of florida and he finds like a brick of cocaine yeah like like like seeing that like premise my question to you is if you because i'm reading this book have you seen the movie no country for old men no so it's like a movie i've heard of it but you know what is name to me sounds so boring that i will never click on that no it's not a boring one at it's like a thriller but i'm reading the book and basically the premise this guy like comes across a drug deal gone bad everyone's dead at the scene and there's two point a half million dollars as well as a truck full of cocaine he takes the two million dollars the drug guys look for him and that's the that's the book and my question is if i came across that cocaine what would i do and what what would you do if you came across like i have no idea how cocaine is measured but like the that movie scene where you come across like a brick yeah or many bricks i guess what do you what do you do with it take a picture put it on instagram be like oh my god get the social clout and get the hell out of there i am not picking out the cocaine i'm not gonna becoming a drug dealer there i'm gonna figure out how to flip this you could also replace that with like oh i find a you know a large supply of copper wires which have a like decent market value i don't know i've i've actually been down this path before once i think i talked about this on the pod where we met a guy who had this giant comic book card collection yes and like we had this opportunity to buy it for like probably like ten cents on the dollar of what it was like what the individual like some of all the parts would have been but we had to like figure out like what the hell to do like here's a warehouse you now have the cost of this warehouse and then you have all this stuff and none of it's graded and none of its like categorized none of its inventory is like you know you gotta go do that like you know american picker style like junkyard flip type thing for this stuff and when i kind of like i got excited at first is it was like it would have been a like multi million dollar flip if we had done it how did that end in ended would be realizing this is not worth the time and energy to go do this like this is so much energy but but so the story was basically you came across a guy who owned a warehouse and a used really old guy really old guy who was like finally ready to like sally thing he'd been collecting for your thirty year years like tens of millions of like baseball cards or something yeah like he had millions of cards most of which are useless but for sure some of it is valuable and like the question is like and you had to buy the whole lot you had to buy the whole like thing and need didn't do with deal with it i think he i know nobody bought it because again nobody wants this headache and like even the discount i was like okay let's say this is discounted you know based on our estimates this things discounted like ninety percent even at a ninety percent discount the like mental overhead the literal overhead and like some people thought they're like dude i would done it and like you should go it if you have no better options get you should go do this but for me i was like wow this is a lot of work so i would not i wouldn't do it in the legal case let alone the illegal case of figuring out how to flip these bricks of cooking is kind of my what's your answer to that it depends what stage of life i'm in like alright so let's let's take it by decade you're twenty i'm twenty and like like one of these bricks if could they be worth like two million dollars let's let's say the whole thing is worth you know six million dollars if you if you you know sold it all that at like street value so let's start at the end you having all this cash let's say you as you know we do we do move to the end i'm moving straight to the end assuming that i had six million dollars in cash i wouldn't even know what to do with that if you buy a if you buy if you buy property with six million dollars in cash can you even do that or even allowed to do that i mean would you keep that money yeah i don't know what you would do you'd have to like figure out how like lau it basically to like legitimately own it or you'd have to figure out a way to like do some you know off off oh over the counter transaction of like gold bars or something else or do you just live a like a cash life forever yeah you go under the mattress you just pay for everything with it with tens to twenties this is breaking bad right this is the plot of breaking bad basically so what would i do if alright if i was twenty and i found it i i i don't even think you're taking it i don't even know what i would do i i would not be maybe when i was twenty maybe i wouldn't be opposed to trying something but i literally would have no idea where to start where would you even start i don't know people who i even know it i don't know people who do okay cocaine i don't hang out but you're in the moment you you have to make a a split decision in the heat of the moment i know have that i have to figure it out no i'd have to call the cops i think i would call the place i wouldn't know what to do i wouldn't even know how to execute this yeah okay so that's one i if you're not gonna do in your twenties you're not gonna do it in your thirties one so i i don't think it matters the change of life here you're there is a couple other you know methods here right so like let's say you're in this the what was that the old white country for old men or something like that like you know basically the guy finds the briefcase if if i find that briefcase i'm taking fifteen percent of the cash out i'm leaving the rest there this was really gonna change me down for the fifteen percent so i think i get like you know and you you know i get i get like really none of the work as well easier so i did the math so the book was set in nineteen seventy nine and it was two and a half million dollars which is the equivalent of like eight million dollars today so finding eight million dollars today and the this is sent in el paso texas and the guy lives on a trailer like a mobile home so seven million dollars might as well be seven hundred million dollars it's just a world changing thing if i'm that guy like that's easy you just find it you get the car and you just never go back home and you just you you're just gone yeah but i'm i'm what i'm gonna do sleep you know with one eye open every night wondering what's gonna happen if i see that two million i'm taking two hundred forty seven thousand out no say here they're never they're never gonna they're gonna not even understand why two hundred forty seven it works two hundred forty seven thousand short and i'm living a happy calm lifestyle just as my life was with an extra two hundred and forty seven thousand that's mine that's my move that's so funny i i don't think i could take fifteen percent i would yeah i would definitely take the whole thing the the i was thinking about this so today this came up i watched survivor yeah i like still watching you know season forty eight of whatever survivor that's that's going on and and shout out to the survivor casting directors i'm i'm getting in shape so that i can go on survivor soon but they have this new twist where they have this thing you find and normally it's like survivor you go out the wild and have this this this little prize for the immunity idle if you find this thing you're stay from the vote you won't get voted out this week so people always want that thing and when they find it it's this joyous moment they un un un unscrew the scroll and they're like yes i found the thing but they added a twist this time it which it says on the top of the scroll it says beware like this is called a b beware advantage like you know there could be something good this this comes with power but also you know some drawbacks and they say you could just put this down right now and you could go on with the game as it is or if you open this you have to you know you get the power but you get the disadvantage as well you get the advantage and disadvantage hundred percent of the time they open up the scroll and i'm just thinking there i'm like the you know the game theory here is that this is gonna put in a sticky spot they're not giving me something that's gonna give me like it's mostly great with a tiny downside it's gonna be like potentially great later with a downside today right like they find the game that's how i'm organizing this game but everybody picks it up and everybody opens it and i thought what are the things of life that are like this which is like you pick it up you know you shouldn't do this you know this has like drawbacks but you can't resist you just do it anyways because you know yellow and like i started late thinking about like what that is in real life right like there's that with food like most junk food is that way you know pleasure now pain later you know but what what are the other areas of life you know what is the career version of this this is like that you got that really great job but like now but you know you were thinking about maybe you wanted to to start your own business or or do your own thing but then you get this like you know job at mckinsey and you're tempted to take it because it has the prestige and it has the money but it also comes with the sticky trap of like this is for sure gonna set you on a path for multiple years in a direction that you don't think you want to be your end goal but you do it anyways and so i'm now looking out for these what i'm calling the beware the b beware advantages of life the big takeaway here though is with you wanting to go on survivor so let me tell you about something so there's this podcast called dead eyes do you know what dead eyes is no never heard alright so years ago tom hanks was the producer of band brothers you know it was like a tv show hbo about world war two and there was just one comedian who was like an extra of one of the guys who was shooting or something and tom hanks like looked at him and then whispered in the producer or whispered in his assistance ear and said like hey hey man you gotta go tom hanks apparently said that he had quote dead eyes and he wanted him off the set like he just didn't like him as an extra something that probably happens all the time he just not it's so just a flick yeah and then he it wasn't working out and so this but this guy created a podcast called dead eyes and the whole podcast was questioning why he got kicked off like beta had brother the same guy okay yes and and so the the whole podcast the whole premise is like he's interviewing people on beta brothers like asking like why do you think i got kicked off like what like let's talk through this dude how did you find this sound like the most obscure of the obscure well asking eventually tom hanks goes on it oh my god that's amazing and he lands tom hanks and he comes on at a as a guest and he explains like what what was happening from his perspective and what we need to do with you the wait hold on what was the explanation what did he say or he was just like i don't remember he yeah he was like i i don't like i'm sorry it wasn't let me see he's was like this is haunted you for twenty forty yeah he was like this i guess it just it just wasn't even like a he didn't really think about it i believe and apparently he said that like it maybe even it was like a mistake like maybe he said the wrong thing to the wrong person but like it it was just it just just missed him like it wasn't even like an issued in his life and this guy has this whole podcast called dead eyes have you've not heard of this it's hilarious no that's hilarious what were you gonna tie that in and you said i should do something well so with you wanting to be on on survivor we need to like have you go through the whole process and you're likely gonna get turned down at the audition but we gotta like do like a whole series of episodes of you going through this process of getting on survivor and documenting it and get that's a great idea yeah that's a great idea and we we like what you need to do is comment get the person who does casting for survivor and act like you want them to come on as a guest and we could do it just so like humor them but like on air be like so like can sean audition go down yeah have audition before already so i've been rejected once so i already got that out of about belt that no gotta have them on there we'll do it like funny like you know i think i said this earlier like we're wouldn't it be funny if we just start kissing right now like wouldn't that be hilarious like that's gotta be if i was on yeah like we're just hilarious that like can do could you imagine if i came on the survivor and if i what happen yeah is that allowed yeah would it be funny exact line that wouldn't be funny if we well we just kissed right now we kiss that's so funny that kills my funny vote at the like deepest deepest level i don't know why so there's that and the there's that one and then there's the other one that that i gets me so bad is like you've heard mean you heard this joke where it's like and then everybody started clapping no okay so basically this is it's like a at a recurring joke that comes in when like if you tell a story yeah like it's like when somebody tells a story and you by the end of the story you're like you're sort like wait what was the point of the story that you realized the point of the story was them saying them just saying how cool they were in a way that was like not even like the story is kind of exaggerated or not really believe like yeah we're at the restaurant and then this guy was choking and then like but like nobody heard him but i i just saw i was on the way to the bathroom and i just kinda like you know whatever just did the he but i don't ever watched the video and like you you're like what is the story where is this going why are you telling me this and then and then you basically like it's an awkward silence at the end of that story and they like and then they basically they realized the story you didn't do it and so they have to one up it and just say then everybody started clapping and so it's this it's this genre of stories these there and then everybody started clapping stories my version also cracked me up when that happened i see someone get stuck in a story like that i'm like oh yes it's happening they got them themselves trapped in a and then everybody started clapping story and they're about to start exaggerating because the story itself didn't hit and now they're stuck my version of that is and then i found five dollars yeah exactly did okay so i have a crazy story like this somebody tweeted this at us they love their orlando bloom story by the way yeah that's i mean that's the one where i i didn't wanna get stuck in that that spot but that's always all true so so somebody tweeted did this the this status and they go this this seems like it's up here alley and that's what do you know you're winning when somebody send you something really weird and they say i think this is up your alley and it's one hundred percent of my alley this is my home manager my po box is in this alley and so he's sent me this post and it's like a forum post and he goes what i'm doing is insane so here's what it says it goes i have a bot running twenty four seven that is buying and selling for zero target profit just to just to waste the irs is manpower and money i print and sand to the irs all the documentation about every one of these trades in paper form so that they can't automate it or like you know just i get through my my report in a in an easy way he goes i will sometimes mix blank pages double print ghost print use mark use black and white i will number the pages and put them in out of the order i will have people randomly sc drawings of dates into the into the pages i will send it as a whole palette of paper trades i even to send this palette i have to hire a guy with a forklift just to send it and i wanted to be in a palette so that is maximum maximum like troublesome for them and then it says like you know is this real yeah i i don't know if it's realized nice this is like some forum posts goes this cost me thousands of dollars every year and i make sure to send them an invoice so that they know that i'm paying real money on top of the pallet that i've sent them so whoever's is in charge of this knows that i'm wasting the equivalence of two months of their wage on this ass behavior on top of wasting their time and i was just like this needs to go to pet court it's like who are you why are you so troubled and like okay you know if you just wasted a little bit of your own time that's offensive to me but if you waste all of your time and honey at this point it turns into respect for my point of view and like i don't know what your mission is i don't even really understand it but i'd i respect the mission driven of this like of this initiative where you're there's no gain it's just mutually a short destruction on bombarding it's see that car south park where cart is dressed up like steve jobs at at the at the keynote and he's walking around and he goes instead of saying thank you he just says fuck you fuck you fuck you and the whole presentation is ways that they're wasting money and he sit around walking around the stage and he goes but we didn't just stop there you see we moved the couch from the left part of the room to the right part of the room and the whole presentation is just how they just reorganized the furniture his office that quarter that was all they did with all their money and this is a a good example of that