Sam Reveals The Company He's Worked On For The Last 8 Month

i will predict and guarantee really that this is going to be a greater than hundred million dollar a year revenue business which means it's gonna be worth something like low end three hundred four hundred million high end billion dollars alright we are live sorry i missed last week how to do a thing but today's a big day for me i'm launching my thing i'm finally talking about the thing that i've been working on it's called hampton join hampton dot com i'm i'm excited this is your steve jobs moment dude is it every once in a while something comes along that changes everything triangle hand pose yeah i'm just gonna start to city like that this is the first time that i've been working on something that i haven't talked about it like within twenty four hours of having the idea and it's killed me it's killed me and i have hated it i've hated it i'm so nervous and so why now so i'll give it people background so my new company that i've been working on i think i've been working on it since july but i've had the idea for a long time and i like even interviewed people in the space on the pod so by way that's the funniest part of this whole thing you invited people into the podcast ask them every hey how do you run your business how do you grow it one of the numbers how much money does it make how you start it where do you hire from blah and did you just launched a competitor like in the ninety days later it's not a competitor so we had a chief on does not a competitor chief we had tiger twenty one on not a competitor there to them but yeah so i wanted to prove because i you you remember how i said i hate the question when people say how would you start if you could do it over again yada and i would tell like well it's easy for you have an audience so i was like alright well i'll just do it in front of you and it just approved to myself and this little chip i have on my shoulder that i can create stuff an audience so hampton is it the url is join hampton i couldn't get hampton dot com it's like owned by a holiday inn or whatever the the marriott company or whatever it is but it's it's pretty simple it's a vetted network for founders and entrepreneurs so basically if you're a founder our sweet spot is like if you're the ceo of a company our sweet spot is like ten million year revenue need at least a million in revenue at least three million in funding or well these are explain what it does before you the yeah these what's what i'm going to so what i'm saying is you need like it's for a certain size of ceo but basically you sign up we vet you you and i'll interview interviewed all this stuff and what you get is basically what you and i had so before sean and i started this pod before he started this pod him and i would meet once a month it would be me you and like five or six other guys and we would like it was basically like group therapy for business and we did it for a couple years and then we did it informally for a long time and i've done it i've done it informally with a bunch of people but it kinda changed my life and so we decided my partner joe and i to create that but for people who are all over the country so if you're in idaho and you have this company it does like twenty million in revenue you're kinda like a freak you're like an outsider in your community and so what we did was we made this thing where you can sign up get vetted and we put in a group of eight to ten people with a executive coach we come facilitator who guide conversations that you have once a month and then there's a hampton wide community that you can talk to other people anytime and then we we're we host dinner so we have like dozens of dinners we have adventures so like a bunch of members are going to a rally car event next week and so we do all these things but basically it's like i hate using this but it's almost like a safe space so we had people like posting you went there i you might know where about this business i went there it's like a place where you could like talk to you your would you say that you're yours feel seen you can you can bring your whole self but you can bring your work self and your personal self but it's like a place where like let's say you have to lay people off you can you can ask people publicly know one's gonna make fun of you like i i have lay people off how do i do this or you could be like i'm bummed i'm really sad i have to lay people off or that opposite you're like i'm killing it money is coming in how are you folks investing and so when i had my group i used to do one with you and i did one with my now partner joe pfizer like he knew my net worth he knew my relationship issues with friends and family he knew when i was selling the company i was like dude how do i not look stupid when i'm selling this this company i like i i i feel very ashamed about x y and z and so it's this place where you can it's kinda like this pod but more intimate and that's kinda why we had the idea i didn't wanna launch it publicly because a i wanted the product to be perfect like i wanted to to be great and b communities like this it's not like software where you just throw bodies at it and it doesn't matter how many people are using it we had to like really be careful so we've added all these awesome people and we like it was very hand curated and it still will be but like i wanted it to be like that early on and so so i think you pitched it you almost didn't do yourself justice there you know when people come on the pod and you're like let me just do that for you real quick that's my this is understand yeah yeah i feel like the nerves are getting the best to you because here's how i would explain this i think you got the i think you got one part right which was most important the most important thing which is you were a customer of a product like this before yeah you built this business so you didn't just build this business because you're like oh this might be a great idea when we met i don't know ten years ago almost it was through something like this we created a group it was me it was you jack smith who went on to sell his business for like i don't know seven or eight hundred nine hundred million dollars but at the time he he wasn't in that spot a guy named c who was at the time doing this kind of class notes college business that wasn't really gonna end up being that big but his next thing enduring ventures has turned out to be pretty big it's a a hundred million dollar plus company now there was a a small group of us and we would be twice a month and there was one really important thing that it did which was it gave you like he said the safe space now what is it safe from well for most ceos most of the time i would i would say most people thinks starting a business is hard or being a ceo is hard but they think about the beginning like oh it must be hard to like get the idea or get it off the ground and like as anybody who's actually done it knows that's like one percent of the journey like the hard part is actually decline it's like once you've got your idea and right here yeah like now seven years of day to day with a bunch of unknowns and a bunch of like fires that are gonna pop out of nowhere and you have to you to put out those fires and just staying happy and healthy and sane and being who you are during that seven year climb is actually the hard part and so who helps you during that climb is i think the important part and you know the hard thing if you're a ceo is you talk to investors you gotta tell him everything's great everything is up and up and up we're crushing it you talk to your customers you need to tell them how great everything is you talk to your employees or your teammates in the office every day you can't be telling them about all your problems you have to again tell them how great everything is so this was for us this was the one group or you could just say how things actually are this is what's going good this is what's going bad i don't even really know about this other thing i gotta figure that out i've been procrastinating that just because it's like looming and i don't i don't really know what to do and it is this founder group therapy thing where you sit down with you know six or seven other people and i would say it's like seventy per the the conversation is like seventy percent tactics thirty percent dude i've been there you know don't worry about this like the the therapy but the value is almost on the other side it's like the connections that you make you know the ideas that you get the relationships like you know si ended up you know being one of my groom i think in my wedding you know we invested in a bunch of companies from the mastermind and that made a bunch of money you know had i not been in a mastermind with you i wouldn't have seen how you built the hustle and i wouldn't have known how to build the milk road a business i didn't know i was planning to create five years later but that blueprint was etched in my brain from those meetings and so you get all these like kinda crazy outs outside benefits and basically i think most people massively over rate the idea of a mentor because i think it sounds like the easy button it's like man i wish that there was just some some genius who knew everything and had done everything who could just tell me what to do and solve all my problems and of course that doesn't really exist but like some mentors are pretty overrated but peers i think are massively underrated and what you've done is basically curate a bunch of people who are like you so if you're in that kind of like i've got a successful business i'm on my seven year climb i wanna make this as big and as generational as i can you want other people who have already done that or also in that journey with you doing that at the same time that's my my sales pitch for you you've done it better than me you've absolutely thank you you've done it way better than i did it it's just like well well the other thing is i i'm gonna think of it too i'm not doing really for you i i remember the first piece of viral content i had so was me writing how i set my how i set up our mastermind how we ran it and how you should like if you wanna do that too here's how you should do it and this was like i had some crappy pdf somewhere but it's been downloaded like i don't know ten thousand times now wow i don't i don't even know where those emails are i should go find them but like that thing has had like ten thousand ten ten thousand downloads now in a couple of years because and i i don't promote this thing it's just i set it once on a podcast a long time at the very beginning of this and consistently people it resonates people are like i want that how do i how do i set mine up so i could have my own version of of what you have now you what you did you made it easy you made it a product you were like don't worry about figuring out how to find the right people how to organize this how to make sure the discussions how a huge waste of everyone's time and it's super productive you just turned that into push a button and if you're accepted in you you get all that out of the box which is smart and i used your thing i i used that the down the list that you're talking about i used just my experience with r thing and then i went and studied it you know i was talking to a lot of other of these groups trying to figure out i've been calling it speed of vulnerability how do we like get people to be vulnerable quickly and it sounds weird but we have like people like crying at some of these things and i'm like yes yes gotta tears to fuel me yeah once my done revenue the tiers of my customers well particularly men like men are like have like some people afterwards are like this was amazing why haven't other people done i'm like yeah dude it's called therapy like people it does this for years it's just a lot of men in particular don't do this type of stuff that's why i haven't joined i don't wanna cry last time i cried somebody gave me a tit twister and that i just decided after that day it's not happening again so so yeah i've been avoiding your your emotional trap here for a little bit by the way this is not just something you studied like oh there's these three companies that started in the last ten years that do this this is like on some benjamin franklin shit right like this is a i think here june or un i don't know what he call i don't know how you pronounce it but like back in the day this was like a ben franklin thing even every friday he would go to this like one bar i you might know the story better than idea i'm kinda butcher do it but he went to this bar every friday and he invited a community of like minded people and he called it i think a a a club of mutual benefit like benefit or something like that which is basically meant it's a club of people who we are gonna make each other better like i want spa partners when it comes to business it's kind of the way that that that you you think about it her or i think about it but he was doing the same thing here's was a little less little less business oriented it's a little more like topics of you know society and law and whatever like they were just debate random things but he like attributed a lot of his success to doing this regularly to having this regular recurring meeting with peers who played the game at a high level and that makes you know iron sharpen iron type of thing and so yeah this is not like a new idea that's it's been around for a little while how do you think about how this compares so people have heard of oh y po they've heard of whatever the these other ones tiger twenty one vintage all all these things how does it get compare i i know i i have my opinion you might have to be politically correct around how you say all like no no no we're all different in our own special way but like i see you as the sex modern more fund version that i would wanna be a part of is that not like it or is it is it much different my whole career my like fifteen year internet career it's been based on like taking old ideas and just putting new spins on it and so like that's what be with newsletters newsletters have been around before the internet and we just put a different spin on it and people are like oh you created this amazing interesting new thing i'm like no not really it's not that new it it's just we just like know put a different logo on it and we had our texture we added our texture to it and we do the same thing with this one but like i if i make fun of these other companies i'm just only joking because they're they serve a need but like there's y po so y pos has been around since the fifties it's a really big business you but y po it's like fifty and six year old men and we make a joke at hampton where we're like not a lot of people in our group their businesses aren't inheriting fifteen apartment buildings in south florida y po exists for that and y po does have like a lot of like tech people and internet people but it is a little the age range is much older it is a little bit more boys club y po without cia works the shopping some marketing some yeah i can say these things that it's not much business and they're cool all but they're just they're just older and so hampton it's it's digital first so like we have d companies who aren't tech companies and we're like should we call it tech companies and like they're technically not tech companies but they're tech companies if you call if you tell your mom what you do so they're like tech companies internet companies that's where they are a lot of people who you recognize on twitter are members so that type stick a lot of like just consumer software companies a lot of b2b software companies but almost everyone's software or internet based and it's significantly younger than a lot of of these older companies and then compare it to like a mastermind which i don't even use that word those are typically like fifty a lot of them can be like fifty grand and it's a little bit more internet marketing so this is very much like a startup plus internet i think the best sales pitch like with any community is who else doing bad no no you're too good i just wanna make sure i get you to the good beds right i'm i'm your wing man here i'm trying to get you laid here so here let let me let me help you out it says on your website your website's is nice by the way i wanna talk about one thing in a second here which is that you did this differently than your other stuff you like hire fancy design agency and you like picked a good name you like built it in stealth you like violated a bunch of your own rules which i think is kinda of all i wanna hear about those in a second but first it says the average hampton member has twenty three million in annual revenue and then there's some minimum and like any community the most valuable thing is who else is here because that's what i would care about right like okay you i like the idea i always like the idea was like any i like the idea of a party but who's coming and so who are give me like i don't know three four five how many you want like give me some stories of interesting members you've met that have made this like fun for you to but come can you for even you to be a part of i'm gonna give you two categories one the people who you know and then two the people you don't know the people you do know covers pop covers a one hundred percent of the pie chart dude so like pop anthony pop pop who who's on the pod a few weeks ago he's a member so pom has a media company and an investment company and and you guys have if you listen to pod you know he is patrick campbell bootstrap his company profit well to like a two hundred million dollar exit your friend's bump health you know bump health of course i don't bump they make yeah then well you know what's the name leland his wife christine is a member they they bootstrap their company to tens of millions in revenue and they create it's it's a service with for pregnant women yeah yeah cb insights a non from cb insights one of the most impressive people i've ever gotten to hang out with very level headed and but like just quietly building you know cb insights i'd have you heard that low wayne quote where he's like real g's moving silence like lasagna that's that's a nun austin reef he's in my group so my former enemy now one of my closest friends austin reef for morning brew is a member nick hub saw hill si all these types of people but let me tell you about the people who probably don't know have i ever told you about brett ad cock i've you've mentioned this guy because he took some flying car company public or something like that but tell the story alright listen to this so this guy named brett ad cocky started this thing called vet which was a marketplace for talent but it was very much like hired so if you're an engineer you go through all these tests they kind of like algorithm and kind of manually match you with cool interviews they eventually bought hired he sold it for a hundred million dollars he took a bunch of his earnings from that and he started archer which he took public at time for like two billion market cap now is like six or seven hundred million but it was a flying car company basically they kinda look like helicopters but they're like unmanned flying things that united airlines bought a bunch of and he took time off between veterinary and archer to study how it worked he literally went to like university see of florida it's like learn how this works now his latest company which i'm a personal investor of is called a figure and i went to his factory and he's like and they basically already these robots that looked like robo cup and instead of killing you though they just you know load t shirts into packages for walmart walmart mart is a hypothetical one and they ship ship it off so you know there's like millions of people who are doing this who are getting paid yeah pick or what what do you call yeah pick and pack there's twenty thousand of these three p in in america do you know that i didn't know there's twenty thousand for our eco comm where we ran one right so i hired a bunch of people to do this i've done a lot of pick and pack myself because people call it sick to work it's crazy so he's built these robots that could basically run he called them humanoid and he's like they can run for twenty hours a day they charge for four hours a day and they're just pack stuff and it's all using robots but he took like twenty or thirty million dollars of his own money and he was like i basically own two stocks or one stock archer my public my public company and then all the cash that i have i bought a house and then i put invested all of it into figure my new company this guy is like all in on it it's pretty wild another interesting person we talked about an of rooted she's the one person meditation app it's a panic pack app that does over a million in revenue so it goes all the way from folks like brett who are on their ways to be billionaires all the way down to an who's got a million dollar thing that she's slow growing slowly but she owns one hundred percent of it another interesting one a aj patel another guy who's pretty under the radar but pause guy yeah he bootstrap zest paul to a six hundred million dollar exit now he has a new thing called high key we talked about him a lot he's he's he's pretty baller and and so how work these people you you get put in a group of peers so you get you apply you get accepted you get match into a group and then you meet once a month with a facilitator who guides that discussion right yeah and the meetings have these like like we've like like we review each meeting afterwards and we like study what's the good what's the bad and then we've just shaped the the format so what makes a great meeting versus just okay meeting so what i learned from the podcast is basically these meetings are basically content so i i try to find juicy good content a really good meeting we do this thing called the business breakdown well someone will like to do a swap analysis strengths weaknesses opportunities correct what's the other t threats on their on their business and they'll explain how it works what their c is where they're getting customers and they just reveal everything and they're like here's where we suck here's where we rock what do you think i should do and here's the issue that i'm facing and so that's a really good meeting when they do that so triple whale you one of your best investments of all time he's he's a a member and they'll just explain how the company's works and they're like on on paper and this is no threats for triple yeah this is what i'm might say is not for for max this for everyone what they'll say is like it's going well but like we're so here here and here or about to lay people off or we just got an acquisition offer and it's way below evaluation whatever and so they like we'll and so people will have all types of contacts on their companies to in order to give advice so that's a good meeting and then we've hired how many do we we probably have thirty or forty facilitator on staff right dude and that's hard w these people up is hard and like training them so it's been like a that's been the biggest challenge and that's our biggest cost is is trying to figure out how to get these people to do stuff well let's talk about how you decided to start this so again i think if i had said what is the sam par startup up method i would've have said the first bit i think was was kinda correct which was sniff around for the opportunity i think you are world class you know hound sniff yeah top five sniff for i know easily so you're good at fine opportunity and that what that means is you talk to a bunch of people and you bluntly asked them be like is that a good business and then they're like well yeah i mean we did this bunch of revenue you're like oh i was just asking but thanks for telling me you do a good job of basically finding interesting models or you know that our businesses that you think are good businesses so on that part i think was straight out of a straight out of your normal playbook and so you did a good job with that then you were like okay i could see this business and i think you even like talked to somebody who had bought a company like this i can private equity yeah and you were like yeah why why'd you buy call them how did they grow with year by year what's your plan with them would you buy a was this like a one off outlier or are there other businesses like this and you're you basically got confidence so there was some of your method dude i called i called the guy and i was like look hey i just got i found your number on the internet i don't wanna sound like a douche bag here but here's who i am so i'm kind of like legit and i'm gonna create something that have a feeling you're gonna want to buy i don't know if i'm ever gonna sell it i have a feeling you're gonna want to so it it's it it makes sense for you to have it talk with me right now and i have a particular set of skills i've honed of well thankfully worked like taken speech a very humbly i was trying to be very humble but yeah and you like told me a little bit about the business he didn't reveal anything that i i i could've have found a lot of it online but he didn't it's not like like broken the like competent confidentiality stuff but yeah i did that and then i just created a type form and i created a google doc i just wrote out in one page what my new idea is who should join who shouldn't join and at the bottom was a tight form and i sent that google doc to like fifty friends and like twenty of them signed up and i interviewed all of so i actually took a screenshot look at my calendar you see my calendar on here no my calendar it's like a zebra there's like stripes basically i did like fit word flex for alright zebra calendar i got that zebra calendar basically like there's no meetings on the day that you'll see there's no meetings on the day that we record the the the pod but besides that there's like ten to fifteen meetings every single non m day yeah i would just bought you one of those bluetooth headsets like you're a tele marketer because i was like i think sam is just doing these like twenty minute calls all day like for a while you were doing that right you were doing basically on a thirty minute sales call or discovery call every day all day because we used to be completely un scheduled right like we had that elephant schedule just clear gray nothing there and i could call you anytime we could have a little chi chat it was fine and then all of a sudden you started this business and you became the machine was it hard to became the machine it's hard to flip with heart or in a way i here's my suspicion in a way you kinda missed that and it felt fun to go like super like hardcore about it it was awesome but it was hard it was like lifting weights like during it like i was proud to do it and i was happy to do it but it was very challenging and so i was like doing all these calls and i would interview people figure out who is interesting who's not interesting who we should turn away who we should accept and then we just sent a stripe link and we accepted payment and then we said alright you have a thirty day delay we went out and found the executive coaches the facilitator we trained them and then the first meeting started and we did that for about a hundred people without any website and we didn't create a website until around december and when we created a website that's in correct months in no yeah many seven figures in revenue the way you talking nobody is so funny many many centers that everyone's sent these are alert humans ones don't talk like this millions millions in run rate it it was like we were doing good i was doing good it was just me and joe so basically he would go out and find the facilitator and i would go out and like find me by way there's a great story here because if you actually go to the website ceo o mastermind dot com the same business idea that you're doing right now was a business i started at the very beginning of the podcast very loosely i i was like hey this mastermind thing is really great it helps me a lot in my life anybody wanna join one a create one here put your thing in and i think i did two hundred fifty dollars or three hundred dollars per month per person it was like three to i thought that was club lt tv which was like the greatest stain average separate so no separate first was ceo master if you i think i still have the website ceo mess it just says index i think yeah maybe i didn't renew or something like that but yeah something like that basically i had created this website this is how i met ben by the way ben was the one of the six people that signed up for this in the first batch i said oh i'm only having one group and i made this thing on click funnels and they joined the group and i was the facilitator which was you know bad move a bad move because why did i click i was like i don't really wanna be facilitating this anymore so i'm not gonna do this business and the obvious is it's the same mistake i actually made in my sushi restaurant which was the restaurant was actually quite profitable from month one but i hated going every day at five in the morning to the fish market and picking up tuna and then making the spicy tuna makes that hated all this stuff and any smart person would have just been like you need to hire somebody to do that and in my head it was just if we hate doing this other everyone's gonna hate doing this this is terrible i don't wanna do this anymore i don't give me an and similarly for the c and i think i was the facilitating which was a bad move because really what ended up happening was i couldn't resist solving everyone's problems and everybody who joined was a fan of the pod so they really just wanted to talk to me didn't really care about their peers and so that was a mistake on my butt but i'll tell you tell what there ben came out of that so i got my win out of that which was i met ben he became my business partner the second thing was it is a great lesson in turning the intensity knob up it's like for anyone out there who's was like i had that idea no no i literally had this idea i was in the same position as sam had this idea before sam created the website created the prototype did the first round of it for a few months and then decided i don't really care about this six grand a month right now i don't really wanna i know if i wanna grow this i don't know how how i don't know and i just sort of let it die on the vine fast forward three years sam tells me he sends me that google doc if i wanna start this business and i'm like oh that sounds super familiar i know that idea that's that's interesting i actually i you know what i was did think that was a good idea but and so and then i got to see i got to watch it's like watching your buddy d x it's like i got to watch i've said me a chart every day of the arr going up like just exploding like oh dude we're gonna need bigger paper by eleven not cutting it the bar charts going off the page and i was like this is a great example of when you turned the intensity knob up to twelve because you were willing to do the sales calls every single day every you know every thirty minutes all day you were immediately going out and hiring people so that could scale and you wouldn't have to get bogged down in the operations you could stay focused on growing it you did all the things that anybody would anybody smart would advise somebody to do you were doing all those things and it was great to see and i say this not to say that you that you wink v or that that's not what that's my takeaway away but i say it as a joke because i really that is my takeaway which is the difference between success and failure is often just turning the intensity now up now at that time i had just sold my company i'm still working at twitch i i i don't think i really would have gone and done that i i don't think i really even wanted to do that but man is it a powerful way to see like an ab b test here's somebody who does it as a one of the ten things that they're doing in a light intensity and so isn't really fully committed and versus somebody who's fully committed who turns the intensity job up to twelve same idea using the same you know fundamental platform of this podcast is like you know your your launch bad for that where i don't know maybe not the launch because you a promote around here but you know the credibility you had when you hit up those people like a lot of those people you mentioned were for you i think this this business would not be good for you in fact i don't think this business is good for me to run so i've hired i we got it to a certain size and then once we could we hire a ceo and that's with been less than a year right which is unusual but i think probably you had a reason you wanted to do that or you you actually probably plan to do that from the beginning why is that no i we didn't plan to do we we or we didn't plan to hire this person we hired jordan but did you did you show you would be the ceo or did you know once it once it started working i was like oh man this is gonna be significantly bigger than that i think it can be and also i don't have the skill set it's a very operational heavy thing and you have to be very calm and patient and talk to people like really politely constantly and it's a very people heavy business so you know we have dozens of these facilitator and like w them up and like figuring all that out figuring all that out it's quite hard and i don't have that ability and i don't have the ability to run a really big company which i think this is gonna be so no we i don't think you could have done this i i know for a fact i could have done this or could not have done this and you would have had to hire someone as well hiring a ceo this early is hard hard to hand over your baby so i think people i i know andrew comes on people always ask oh ask them about hiring a ceo i i don't know why i think it's another one of these easy buttons people wanna push of like again it's like the mentor oh this person will solve all my problems oh only i found a great operator that i could have all of the ownership and none of the work this sounds fantastic and of course that does happen it's not that it doesn't happen but i think a disproportionate of where people are interested in that do you have anything interesting you could say about finding and hiring the ceo and how you know that they're the right person for for this business and taking that big leap a faith of handing a working but early business to somebody else so when i write like three months before i was selling the hustle about like literally three weeks before i started selling it i got the email from hubspot i started talking to this guy named jordan who is the chief growth officer at motley fool which is you know like at the time like a five hundred million dollar a year thing and i was like jordan i wanna hire a ceo for the hustle and i started recruiting him went to his house wine d and he was like i'm in and then i got this call from hubspot and i signed an nda and they're publicly traded so i couldn't tell him and then about a week before the deal closed i was like jordan i've got a back out of our deal you like i have to take this off and he was like i understand but you know i told them hubspot still need someone to run the organization within do you want it and so he said yeah and so he ran it and so now i think hubspot media which is what the hustle call it has like a hundred people and he's done a good job then a year and a half later two years later he quit and and he was like hey you wanna i heard your work on this new thing can i consult with you and i was yeah that'd be great and i was like talking to him and he was like do you need a ceo and immediately i i said yeah but i had this weird conflict with hubspot and so i just at hubspot and i explained the situation i go man he bailed already he wants to work with me are you guys okay with it and so they said yes and so we immediately got room and we just hash out a deal where he's highly incentivized to grow the company and he was is perfect for this because i i think i've known like what he's about but it was like a i guess technically a two and a half year process and the takeaway from this is i've i've been recruiting this guy for two and a half years now to like come and work with me and so it took a long ass time and so when we comedy honestly that sounds sounds like oh that's unusual no it's not unusual often the best people are people that you kinda have this like almost oh maybe the timing is not right yet and it eventually in a weird way things do fall together later much later but those relationships get built over time and they see you get to see them operate over time they get to see you operate over time and it builds a lot of trust so it's pretty common i think it's a good reminder not to burn bridges and not to close doors well that's i was say you have to keep people you gotta to treat people right so when when we sold the hustle i gave him like a thank you check it was like you didn't work here but i feel really bad i just wanna you this as a token of my appreciation he's like and like it literally a check that just says thank you sam what what i you supposed do this when i say big check i mean it was physically a large give that i handed an over to it but i shook his head in front of it and but dude you gotta treat people right like you know steps miss another person who i've worked with three years she went and worked at recent h and when i was starting this i was like just so you know this thing's available but anyway this is a long game and you know you talked to james carrier james carrier partner is someone who he met james courier is like i don't know close to billionaire guy who has a incubator and a bunch of other companies he is partners with someone i believe who he's known for like twenty or thirty years but you have to like it's a really long game to recruit these people yeah and by the way stan who's his partner they've been they did businesses stay together for like know fifteen twenty years stands currently not at n fx which is where where james is the thing that they i think i think the c cofounder the together maybe they didn't c cofounder the other but they were you know they've been doing business together for twenty years naturally he would have been doing that but he got recruited by mark zuckerberg and z had been recruiting him for ten plus years and finally got stan to agree to go to facebook after ten years of recruitment and and i think now he's left but but he he worked there for you know three four years during during that period and and i think james was like yeah that's cool like go ahead go for it go on tour have that experience that's great like you know our partnership is still intact even if you go do that which i think is like a pretty awesome thing you know i had a and a moment like this recently where i i so i i'm starting a new thing i'm not talking about it yet either so i'll come out closet let's talk about that in this in a minute about why neither of was talk about stuff exactly so i the plan was me and ben are gonna do this great we've we just built and sold the bill crow that was a big win in a in a short amount of time we raised our fund together in like one month raised if reins raised our own rolling fund that can deploy i don't know between seven to ten million dollars per year we built a course business that's a seven figure course business we you know we've done like four or five things together now me ben and i'm like oh we have our team we don't need anything else but as we talked about this new thing was like you know there's one person that i would recruit to join this that i would give equity in this too because i probably wouldn't give equity to anybody in this because i'm like i'm sure this is going to work i think this is gonna be big so i value the equity so why would i give money need anybody i don't need anything from anybody i don't need capital don't experience i don't need don't need anything there was one person and so i hit up this one person and i said listen i'm doing this thing i think you're a perfect fit for it and for that person honestly this is a perfect fit it wasn't even like a sales pitch where i'm trying to convince you it's like literally is a perfect match like you know the thing you really love to do that's all we do you know that real that problem with your current thing where you don't own any path to wealth i'm offering you a path to wealth you know you'll own equity in this thing you know you always wanna feel special literally i'm not recruiting anybody else this is either your job or there's no job and i was like you don't have to interview this is i know you you've known me this this is something that can work and the person was like wow this really does sound perfect but you know hesitant because of this one visa thing this logistical thing and i was like this person called me a few weeks after they they spoke to you and i was like oh well all those things are sol blah blah and so anyway anyways long story short the person was like you know what i'm just too nervous about that i don't wanna you know i i i i i'm not sure i'm not sure i'm ready to leave blah blah blah and in my head my reply was like dear idiot you're idiot thanks for notifying me about your dumb decision yeah it's like it's like it's like what a cute girl like you know like bridget here it's like i don't even want you anyway right you have ugly ankles and so that's all i felt i was like wow yeah i can't believe this person didn't take this offer and so anyways i i like have this like thirty second reaction where i'm like oh my god i can't believe this person to make the offer doesn't make any sense to me and then i was like you know what life's complicated i'm sure they have bunch stuff going on like you know it's not as easy decision these are big leaps of faith that somebody would have to take and you know what i thought they were great before this i still think they're great i think that the you know this decision i think is is probably the wrong decision for them but who knows the you know the life is long i bet you i bet we'll end up working together in the future anyways it's because they're they are awesome and i think we're gonna keep doing awesome things eventually those things will intersect and and so i i i was like okay that was my like reaction it brought brought up two things for me one is reminder to myself don't let the the in the moment reaction be the response right so it's like don't let the rejection or the feeling of oh it didn't work out like for example for jordan in this case he could've have when you when you rug pulled him on the job off or been like f this guy and when we sold the milk road same thing we rejected the people who we eventually sold to first at the last minute and then they didn't get pissed instead they just followed up like you know forty five days later or whatever and we're like hey what's up i didn't hear any news did you guys not end up selling like we're still open if you would like to and we went back and ended up doing a deal and so i've learned over time that the real the real bought baller know they don't react they respond and so don't let the in the moment reaction take away your future opportunities that's the first thing the second thing is it highlighted to me that courage is actually massively underrated and i was like this is was like this person is more talented than me and in fact often when i work with people like this person is much smarter and more talented than me why do i get the job why do i get the ceo job or why do i have the most equity it's like because i think i just have one thing that a lot of these people don't have which is i have a lot more courage and guts to go for things that i want that more talented people end up over analyzing and not going for and it just highlighted to me the importance of have courage in having guts to chase after something that's good even though there's some unknowns or some risks involved in it and not talking about this person's specific situation but just as a common trait of like what's the difference between an entrepreneur and and and the non entrepreneur it's not intelligence it's not charisma it's not any of those things it's often simply having the guts to go and choose to go do the thing and so it just highlighted that for me i'm like man this is a person with double the talents i have but they're gonna get half as far because they're lacking that one thing i hope they over time develop more of that confidence to go for it and wow it it maybe act would go rep price how important that is as an attribute i can find this client in full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data every application every team could stay aligned though out of sync spreadsheets serve doing databases hubspot grow better so i used to do this thing called hustle con which was like you you know we did it five or six or seven times and we would get founders of interesting startups to come and explain their story and we we would have five hundred up to twenty five hundred people there you spoke at a couple of them and i used to tell these people alright you're speaking slots at three you have to come at noon for the mic check and we'll be backstage and whatever and little did they know there was no mic check the might worked perfectly there is no mic check like you don't do a mic the mic check take one second and so you you get into there three hours early tactic yeah the the mic check they're they're ain't a mic check we're just gonna put this little the lapel mic out you're good but i would tell them that because i was like sick i'm gonna i'm gonna get to spend time with all these like billionaire type people backstage and the best part was i would get like six of them backstage at a time and there was like a time where it was like the woman who started class pass it was the guy who started grammar the founders of away you know the travel company the casper founders the founder of we work and i remember having them all back there and i would do what i do which is i just like throw a question out there i went insert my opinion but they're i out a question out there and i would hear them talk and people were complaining about like there's this one person who was like i have to fire my vp of finance they're horrible you know they've been working working with me for two years and i'm known they've been horrible but i'm too afraid to fire them because i don't want the confrontation and there's another person saying like dude i've been raising money this whole time i gotta keep raising and i don't know if i'm ever gonna make anything from this yada and then there was a couple people like max grammar who it's just like killing it but i get to like hear what he has to say and i remember thinking at that moment i remember thinking a lot of these people are twenty or fifty times more successful than i am but they are not twenty or fifty times smarter than me i i i think that might be the case with a couple of them like the grammar league guy max but most of the people they're like they're not you know we had the tom from quest who sold this company for a billion dollars i remember hearing him say like whatever he was saying i was like i have those same thoughts the only difference is is that you are more courageous than me and you started to journey a little bit earlier and you're getting after it and i remember like being around that group and then being around our group that we had it did a few things one it normalize success and like another example of this is like sports like i don't think that brazil is necessarily or argentina has genetically superior people that makes them good at soccer it's just that they just grow up playing and they expect to be good and they work together and it normalize that type of excellence another thing is it made me realize that the people who i admire they're fearful they are exactly like i am you know i heard this guy complain about not wanting to fire someone because he just hated the confrontation the difference is is that they do it anyway and so meeting my heroes that way it really made me realize that they shouldn't be on a pedestal other than the reason of like they're just they just did the damn thing not they're not necessarily smarter and so you and i have had people in this pod who are significantly more successful than both of us and a lot of them not all of them they're not much better or sometimes they're even worse sometimes we've had some amazing guests on i'm like it's kind of an idiot like there's been times i'm like but they've killed it they've they've pulled it off andrew looks is another guy who i wanna talk about like i feel like we're almost in the same ballpark of like patients of of iq of like you know maybe one person's better or worse but his success level is huge because he's just been doing it for longer and he actually like tried something that was against the grain so anyway that's one of like the big or the big things that i learned being part of hampton and also being part of our group and that's one the reasons why we wanted to launch it was to like make like normalize this type of success so if you're in idaho so we have this woman named genes vanessa has a company called simply el lo you all they do is they sell like wedding packages basically it's a little bit more complicated map but simply a lo you can check it out she's in idaho has like a ten million dollar year business eight million dollar a year business who and she's like in my neck of the woods like no one's doing what i do so i think that like i'm at the peak right now and so it's nice to be around other people who are killing it a little bit harder than me and now i now i have like i know what the next level is in the next peak but yeah that's one of the big learnings i have being around some of these successful people and we can move on and talk about other stuff but i'm pumped this is out another thing that we're doing by the way we're my partner wanted to try p r and tb if it's gonna work or not but it's miserable to talking to these journalists it's horrible i hate it i told my ago i'm doing this again man being around these people you never know like what they're gonna take out of context or like if they're gonna come like angry it's sucks man i hate doing p i've never done it and i'm never gonna do it again doing p i feel like it's like you know those scenes where it's like you take out a knife and they have a knife and it's like we're sort of approaching the other's knife we're gonna have to get really close if we're gonna either of us wants to do this and i hope you're not trying to do that i have to my knife in case you do that's how it's a mexican standoff baby it's an old in fact we should we should drop the hard j of journalists and just call a her because you know the this mexican standoff is is tough it's tough to do but i think there's i think there's a lot of value especially for something like what you're doing because you're gonna have the seed community of people who are like founder type people who probably listen to the pod they know you or they know about the hustle and they trust you to build something awesome then you're just gonna have a bunch of people who've got good businesses that are like i don't listen to podcasts and i don't know what the hustle is yeah you know no i i don't do that but i do read the wall street journal and if the wall street journal tells me about this thing or if whatever tech crunch tells me about this thing in my mind it's like credible and so i think or you know you you reach out to somebody to to join they're gonna google you what are they gonna find when they google you i think is a is an important like question for people to answer when you had done this you did a really good rant a second ago and there was like three or four things i thought were awesome and and that what you said one of them reminded me of something i watched last night so i was watching i was going down youtube rabbit hole and i was listening to i watched this video that was a compilation of martin sc greatest advice and which is probably pretty good point did a point so other than though like the whole like you know like securities from wall yeah you know besides besides that besides that you know well i i probably ninety nine good things to say i am buying a lot of sc stock because everybody abandoned he became a penny stock everybody's abandoned everybody needs just sort of wrote this guy off and i'm not saying that i would give this guy my money but this is a very smart person who has very interesting things to say he is very entertaining first of all and secondly he's got interesting things to say he's he's very very intelligent did he do something wrong did he commit a crime it sounds like it i don't know i didn't go look at into everybody with jail would i you know trust him with everything in my life when i give him you know password to my bank account and hell no but i do think that in general people just write off people way too quickly what did he say and there's a whole bunch of interesting thing so in this it's like a thirty minute compilation and halfway through he goes does this one thing somebody's like oh yeah you know something about being successful and martin's like he's like you know first of all you don't have to wanna be successful right like you you you get to choose what you want what's successful for you i play this capitalist game i like success success in this way and it's what matters to me and he's like so so if you wanna do that he's like oh iq nah like iq is not the thing he's like there's like a minimum amount of iq you probably need it's not as high as you think if you're watching this video you probably got it and he's like also bad news right iq he's not gonna change so worrying about iq isn't gonna help you he's a pretty iq he's he's i think he's a high iq he's a high iq have a guy but he's he's he's like i've met a lot of people and he goes actually the higher the iq tends to run into one problem which is they just overthink everything they over complicate everything and he's like he basically described my favorite my meme of the year the mid wit meme which is basically like you know the idiot the the the sort of numb skull on one side and the jedi on the other and in the middle is the the sort of the the mid width which is the the the person who's got the high iq but the lack of courage and the the lack of wisdom to know how to zoom out and they over analyze and over assess everything he he was basically describing how this happens for most people and i thought man it's so true what he's saying that like often the hierarchy iq he's like they he he goes they just get in their own way and i gotta tell you that shit hit different when he said that i was like it's so true i know the times of my life where i get in i get in my own way and what's an example oh tons like like i i i'll give you an example because i have somebody who's like a mentor of mind that i text all the time about my business stuff and usually just the act of typing it to this person i'm like i know what they're gonna say because they're the they're they're on the jedi side of things where they're like like i was talking to them about i've given this example before my e comm is where i was like i was okay we got the facebook ads up and running it's working you know i think we should do influencers i think influencers could be huge for us and i'm thinking we don't have google but people you know obviously there's a lot of search traffic look i attach pdf of report of search traffic and what do think about seo i feel seo could be good because it's cheap and then what do you think about and i was just like saying all this shit and then my my jedi friend was like don't talk about don't say the word influencers until you're making four hundred thousand a month on on facebook ads and i was like oh okay he's like because remember like we said at the beginning of facebook's probably could be the biggest driver so if you can't get facebook ads to work none of this other stuff probably gonna work and the best way to get facebook ads to work would be too i was like focus on it he's like yes and so just having somebody who could just jedi zoom out and be like don't say don't say all these words like don't say the word influencer until you get to this amount of money then you're allowed to talk to him about peter till has the same thing he used to do at running paypal famously it's like was peter till a good manager and people are like no like managerial skills or like soft skills are not what peter till is known for but he did one really effective tactic which was everybody in the company would have their one key thing that they're working on their one mission that they have and if you ever tried to talk to him about not your mission he would simply get up and leave the room like he would be like oh you're talking to me about not the mission bye what did you say like we'll get said this a a balloon floating okay just blows there hot air balloon just turns on the fire floats away by as he turns it to a speck in the distance and i've taken that like philosophy i'm not as hardcore about it as i wanna be but like that's how i feel when i talk to me my company and i'm like oh remember that thing we wrote down that we said was the most important critical thing the main thing oh you're not keeping the main thing the main thing big problem alright great and and you see this all the time like the example i gave of the smart person who turned down the job that was perfect for them they needed the jedi to be like you want all these things and you just got offered all those things like take it figure out the rest after that you know you know that's that's those jedi zoom out and so similarly i think that being in these types of groups helps you with the jedi i zoom up because you will you will get out of your own way about some part of your your brain that's tangled up in a knot where you are overthinking over analyzing over complicating something it'll happen with like you know yeah i heard this guy it's just not working out but i feel like maybe i haven't put in the right position blah blah and then the peer group of like so you're saying that they're lazy they mis misrepresented what they did before and you've try to give them the freedom to do something and they're just not doing you know sounds like it's not working out maybe you should let them go and then yeah you get obvious i'm gonna the my hands they're like do you think that in the six months it's gonna improve no i missed there's no way so the and do you think you should do the sixth right it's like it's the just obvious it's the common sense but common sense is fairly uncommon and this is the first time i've launched something significant with an audience and i remember talking to you with the milk road i think you launched it january a year ago yeah the first year was like in end of december january yeah first edition came out there and you like we're so excited and with this pod we don't hold back and so you're were just like telling me how excited you were but it was live and then it was working and everything but i remember you like forwarding emails or just talking to me you're like well here's the milk road for brazil it's live already they're just like they send it ten minutes later but they just copy and paste it and i actually met one of these guys the other he was like yeah i one of the guy's copying milk road and he said like he said the most beautiful thing ever or at least to our years he was like but then i only did it for like a month or two months and i realized it was too hard and i can't i can't actually pull it off and i was like awesome that's exactly what we like to hear but i remember you like i remember you were like yeah this sucks like all these people ripping us off and it i don't think it made any impact on the actual business but it does like distract you and it here like cortisol levels going and it was the same thing with us with this audience and so there was a few times where i would throw like little easter eggs out there like i would throw like a domain name like one time i just mentioned marathon rant which was like url of of of my airbnb and i didn't expect anyone to actually book it or i would mention like these other things that i had access to and i'd go and look at the analytics and i would like wow ten or twenty thousand people came to the website i'm gonna not mention this because i've learned from sean's stuff of like let's not mention something until it gets to a certain size and there's a bunch of other reasons which is like you don't want the community to get too big too fast and all that but just the pressure of like people talk about like they they build in public a lot of people who build in public they do it as a marketing scheme they do it to get traffic or to get awareness you know buffer did this buffer was one of the first peoples i've ever seen where they revealed all their revenue and they also revealed all their salaries and that was like they're stick like that's how we know about them other than their product's great and everything but that's how they got out there but once you and i were in the very fortunate position of having an audience the name of the game for all for us a lot of times is just shut the hell up don't talk about shit and i remember like being in like seeing what you're going through and i'm like i'm not mentioning a thing anymore about certain stuff but well i think i think you're right but you're focusing a lot on the like competitive aspect of it which i think is overblown and doesn't that's overblown yeah i think overblown i think it's the pressure and the lack of flexibility which is in the early days of something you do you don't have a lot going for you right it's like it's like do i have a big brand name no do i have a good track record of success and a bunch of customers no do i have a well established product no i just built it last week right so it's like you don't have where are the attributes you don't have any of those attributes but the one attribute attributes you have is basically like speed and agility the ability to to change be flexible adapt and and and and and turn on a dime as you see oh the market actually wants this and so the reason for me to not talk about something early on is typically that well two things one is with the podcast you're inviting a bunch of guests over to the house i'm gonna clean up the house a little bit right because they're i'm gonna get a lot of traffic from day one whereas before i had an audience i wasn't gonna get a lot of traffic from day one cool i'll i'll shout it out only ten people gonna come to the sign anyways doesn't a matter how crappy it looks with something like this a a bunch of people come so you you kinda don't wanna put you your worst foot forward there but the most important thing is you don't wanna go tell the world i'm doing next it's gonna be the best thing ever and here's exactly how it works because you lose a little bit of that flexibility and adaptability that's really your only attribute when you're when you're young right it's like a a kid or a baby like they're hyper flexible and they can fall down like you a kid can't spray an ankle because they're they're everything is just too like malleable right they can learn seven languages because their brain is like so malleable startup up is kind of the same way when it's when it's young which is that the only advantage it has is that it's really valuable so don't harden that too quickly by going and publicly announcing it when you may not have you know tested it enough to understand exactly what you want it to be and how you want it to work that's my my take at least and let me give you let me give the audience two business ideas that i've discovered while working on hampton the first have you heard of har it stands for help a reporter out har h a r o so har was launched i think in like two thousand five it was pretty early and if you're a new start up or even just like a small ish start up and you want backlinks it's based and so you're a user you sign up and you're p per or your you're a startup up person and you're or you're a p r person and you get an email once a day sometimes like three times a day and on the other side it's a journalist so someone at bloomberg says i'm running an article about the surge of interest in homemade bread i need i have a deadline tomorrow so i need to get on the phone immediately and so the recipient will receive an email of like ten of these types of requests and they reply and they go oh yeah i actually am a bread maker or i'm a bakery and we just switch entirely to selling home kit right get me on the phone and they do that because they want the link or they want a little bit of press that company was acquired by cis was it called cis precision yeah cis precision and it's kind of like just kind of floating around doesn't seem like it's being innovated or anything like that but i'm pretty sure they have like one and a half million subscribers and people pay money to access it i think that someone can redo har because we've had like reporters come to us and be like hey can you introduce me to like a founder who's doing this and this i have a story i'm like yeah sure i we have hundreds of them i think someone can build that out in a little bit better inch more interesting way and could have a pretty nice sized company really quickly so har but redo it another one i still in our community the number one most common thing that people talk about is does anyone know of a good blank that can do blank does anyone know like has anyone use triple whale or a competitor what do you think has anyone does anyone know of a good lawyer right does anyone know of a good freelancer who could do blank i think you can look at just all the categories and i would create niche websites for each or niche newsletter so cut long form copywriter here's the fifty people that we've vetted and we like you can pay access to view the list or here's a bunch of graphic designers who turn around quicker than normal they're cheap and they're reliable this is this list or lawyers or payroll software whatever and i think that you can build a pretty big business doing that because this is the most common problem that a lot of people are posting about in our community is vendors it's wild i'm shocked at it's consistently that i have a buddy who's doing something like this julian shapiro and so i don't know if this is up right now but it's called while you're talking i i thought about making just like people are always like i need writers and i'm like i should just create sam's and it cost like five hundred dollars a month and i'll just update it with interesting people that we're vetting right who are good writers and we approve of but i think i think you could do that so we might have to bleed this out but it's called the pineapple list so basically julian was like alright he's in the growth world and he's been doing growth for a long time with demand curve and a bunch of things like that and so he's like basically i've interviewed thousands of founders to figure out which agencies they use so which growth agencies design agencies contact agencies are good that we use and he's like so all you gotta do is you come tell me what type of agency you need what your budget is and then we will just give you here's the top you know one or two or three and we charge you no money for that recommendation we'll even you know kind of hop on a call and review some of these agency for you and the agencies pay them for that lead this is a genius idea i think this is gonna work really really well and and yeah i i i think this is a great idea and i think it solves an important problem which is you know in our founder group chats what question gets asked all the time hey anybody got a blank and blank that they love or hey anybody tried this i'm looking at it right now and then you get the like the real inside scoop of visit legit isn't not is is it just okay is it great so there man i think these can be big and they're they're they're not they're they're hard but they're really simple and if you have three months of free time just go pick a niche and go interview all the vendors in the space as well as all the customers in the space as many as you can and get the truth about what they hate and what they love and create like a really vetted highly vetted list think you could make a lot of money right doing something like this and it's a it's just a very crystal clear product market fit type of type of solution right yeah that's a good one alright do we wanna do anything else should we wrap i think we should wrap thank you for i putting my company describing it better than i even could i'm nervous man i've never been this nervous or at least i been this nervous in the business years business is already kicking butt you already have a great community this business is going to work this is there's nothing to be nervous about at this point also i think you know i hope we did a good job of basically not only explaining what it is but like hopefully some of the interesting things around it so that this isn't just like a one hour long sales pitch about hampton but like you know some of the thought process that went how did you launch it what did you do differently this time you know i hope there were some good nuggets in there you could let us know on the in twitter if we went too far if it it was good and and the last thing i think is you know you've been working on this now for how many months since july so it's march nine months like that yeah you know that's a long time a long build up and so i think you deserve to have this episode to to kinda talk through the whole the genesis of it how you went about it how it's going on interesting stuff that's happened along the way you know that that is well well learned well deserved and i guarantee you i will predict and guarantee really that this is going to be a greater than hundred million dollar a your revenue business which means it's gonna be worth something like low end three hundred four hundred million high end billion dollars i think i think that that is the case extremely high probability in my head well thank you that's awesome and that makes me feel good you would've gonna you you know it's true dude it it it it it ebb and flows so i just want everyone to know that like i've built a six successful ish company before with the house you know we had tens of millions of revenue and it exited all that every single day i wake up and i'm both one i'm like this is gonna conquer the world and then the next hour i think this is impossible how are we gonna get this done so like i want everyone know that the emotion still there that like it it the it doesn't go away you know it doesn't matter how fit you are running a race is painful it's a different type of pain but it is always painful and there's and hopefully it's also rewarding but it doesn't matter if you're lifting a hundred pounds or five hundred pounds going to ninety nine max ninety nine percent of your max is challenging yes good news bad news good news hey that's feeling is normal bad news it doesn't go away when are we gonna when are we gonna when are you gonna launch your or announcer your thing do you know i don't know a little bit of time a little bit time alright well thanks for listening if you're interested join hampton dot com i'll bring it up every once a while on the pod but yeah just check it out we're not gonna we're not selling it too hard or i'm not selling it too hard the point it's like a harvard it's like harvard baby so we wanna r r our metric of success is how many people we've turned down yeah exactly so go ahead and apply just so you can get that buddy fat rejection and then you can get that acceptance rate under one percent yeah yeah we need a lot of people apply so we have more people turned down i'm kidding thank you for your else join hampton dot com thank you everyone that's it