SPECIAL: The Tools in the Solo Creator Toolbox

what do nasa astronauts olympic athletes u fighters and world leading neuroscientist have in common they've all been featured in the salesman an award winning podcast featured in the hubspot podcast network the salesman podcast helps b2b sales professionals learn how to find new potential buyers and win business in a modern effective and ethical way i love the salesman podcast why because where on earth are you gonna see fighters and athlete talk about selling stuff but look we're all selling something so it's kinda cool to get their perspective so listen learn grow with the hubspot podcast network at hubspot dot com slash podcast network if you're like goals to optimize for like wealth creation some of these apps or smaller relatively smaller ideas are actually significantly like to make you wealthy and perhaps be more fun along the way i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back what's happening in podcast listeners centers this is sam par i'm currently walk skiing around soho in new york it's friday after work and i'm doing something i never do i'm listening to a podcast that i was on you see a couple weeks ago sean and i appeared on the indy hackers podcast with cor and it was awesome it was really good and i'm listening to this right now and i was like i think our audience are you people m i think you guys would love this and so i'm sitting here on my phone walking on the walking from soho up on the water up to my apartment and i said you know what the hell we're gonna air this so i'm doing it right now we're launching it i hope you enjoy it let us know what you think about this my twitter handles thus sam par sean is sean vp and on your spotify there's this new feature they got this little bell click that bell for me that way you'll get notified when new features and new episodes come out and let me know if it works we'll talk to you soon have a good day i'm gonna enjoy the rest of my walk listen how loud that is can you hear that this freaking city it's so loud oh my gosh well enjoy the podcast see you what's up everybody this is court one from end hackers dot com and you're listening to the end hackers podcast more people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process and on this show i sit down with these hackers to discuss the ideas the opportunities and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same alright i'm here with sean perry and sam par to my favorite podcast host you guys host the excellent show my first million welcome to the podcast alright let me ask you your question all was the valuation of stripe when you sold to them i think it was like nine nine billion dollars like april two thousand seventeen three part question that results in sam knowing your current bank balance that was part one can't not gonna answer the third question i know the third question is i'm not gonna answer what's valuation now nine ninety it's ninety five billion dollars now i think damn and by way it wasn't even risky back then did did it feel risky when you when you no no no no it didn't feel risky at all at the time because trey was obviously a good company already also that wasn't even on my mind i wasn't making like what's the valuation of stripe i was more just thinking like hey i'm running this like really tiny scrappy website like how do i make it enough money to pay my rent and so i was just trying to get sponsors and i had this giant list of like the perfect sponsors randy hackers stripe was number one on that list like after i built up enough sales skills i was gonna reach out to them but before i got to that point patrick the ceo emailed me i was like hey can we buy andy actors so i was like yeah of course it's yeah much better than getting a sponsor they sean cor do you know cor has a brother yeah i found this out the other day that you have a twin brother yeah but they don't they don't look identical but yeah they look similar but he came to my he came to austin like a month ago or three weeks ago and he came over on like a tuesday or wednesday and we had a good time and then he ended up coming over on friday and we ate dinner and he was like you guys wanna go out and i'm like no i don't really go out but sarah my wife was like yeah i'll go out you they went out until like three or four a am like hard and i can't even get my brother to go with me i'm like hey dude come visit me in seattle and he's like i got better things to do i just saw last week for the very first time since the pandemic started oh my gosh yeah he's like my right hand man at hackers kind of in the same way that youtube work together on your show my first million why don't you tell listeners what your shows about in case i haven't heard it yet it's basically two dudes who started startups and have been doing it for like ten years just getting together and shoot the shit about what other startups either are cool that we've seen or we think would be cool if somebody started and so it's kind it's basically a brainstorm and what happens is if you listen to it you most people who listen to it they you know they get entertainment because it's kind of fun and it's off the cuff and it's you know me and sam go back and forth a little bit but the the big thing is it gets the wheels turning like once you start listening to this you'll just start seeing business ideas and opportunities all over the place almost to an extent that's kind of annoying it's a switch you can't turn off and that's how we're wired that's how we are and so we are kind of infecting other people with the same disease and a lot of people think that like we're just showing up and it's some like in some regards it's true and that we can totally go off the cuff but we also researched way more than people probably think so throughout the week we'll see stuff and like i i i i don't actually know how sean does it i think well he probably does the same thing but i'll like get on the phone with someone and i'll say tell me everything and i'm like taking notes and i'm like thanks so i mean it's almost like it's very like traditional journalism and i'm like by the way everything you say i'm gonna talk about so i don't talk up to me about anything you don't want everyone to know and it's pretty cool well i think the difference is a lot of people will be like that makes sense you have the show so you do research for the show the reality is that i think for the last ten years this is all we did in general we're just a curious stats who like can't stop so in the same way that sam's like what was stripes valuation when you got acquired okay cool then sam will be like you know what is the people aqua hire worth and then he'll like you know you'll do all this research just for your own you know shits and giggles and then that just gets stored in your memory bank somewhere so what happened was we just do that naturally as like a part of our daily work you know like we're lucky that our work our job kinda lets us just go down these rabbit holes you see a business like today i was going for a run and this this truck was driving it had like a like a piece of heavy machinery behind it called and it was it said van me and our good buddy's last name is van me and so i was like i was like well i'm just on this run where i'm supposed to be focused on running and instead i'm like i literally like paused for a second google van me i'm like is this like his great grandfather what is this brand i bet you do these tractor companies crush how much does this van mere company make and like what's their business model and and like how long have they've been around are there any new companies doing this and so that's like a addiction that i have basically that's my process my process is constantly go around the world observing things and then go down the rabbit hole to figure out what's the baxter behind all that so i did that the other day the i've seen have you ever seen these semi trucks and on the back they have what looks like a tail it's like a it's like a two foot how do i describe it imagine the back of a of a truck and it has these like wings but they kinda curve in so it's like the end of a cube i'm i'm not explaining it well the end of a cube but it's got these wings at point in so i saw one of these trucks yesterday other day and i was like what the hell is this and i looked this service like a spoiler for a truck i guess spoiler for a truck but it doesn't look like a traditional spoiler but yeah that's exactly what it is and i looked it up and i'm like what the hell is this thing and there was a company based out of redwood city making these and i just saw on the road i'm like what the hell and they promised that it's gonna make you like point five percent more efficient and it's only like five hundred dollars or thought whatever it is and i so i did the exact same thing i saw this on this truck i'm i gotta even know what this is and the company sold for two hundred million dollars like not that long a at dynamics that i believe is what it was called and so anyway this is like yeah the we do the exact same shit well it's addictive to listen to because even on my show i'll do like a brainstorming episode every now and then and if i just call an episode business ideas for twenty twenty one it gets like twice as many downloads as every other episode because people were like hell yeah i some free business ideas but then i worry that people who are like addicted to these types of shows aren't actually building stuff or doing anything because you just wanna hear more and more ideas rather than actually like start working on something i call that getting addicted to the medicine where you take the medicine it's supposed to cure the problem and she'll to like be able to move on with your life and some people just love drinking and rob test them every day at at some point right you don't wanna get stuck in that pattern where you just wanna keep getting more and more advice more and more ideas it's like well yeah if it's for entertainment which i think is what most people do they to get it for that you do use it for entertainment not they want to have friends in their life that wanna geek out about business the way they do and we are like their friends who who like to nerd out about business even more than they do and i also think that like we do have a lot of like legit baller who are listeners i mean if you said you're a listener so there's not that many people that ever take action on anything but i do think we've got a really good ratio of that i i think in the future i think actually we should consider almost i'm incredibly fascinated with the idea of going daily we haven't discussed it yet but it's like an it's something i think about and like because i find myself listening to like brendan in shop and all these other podcasts and i love them because they talk about current events and they give their penny on it and i think there's a world where we could kinda do that and and and the reason i'm saying that is we kind of already do so like when something happens like the other day when bitcoin like dropped sean did a thing right away on a sunday morning and it was a huge hit and so like we definitely we're we we don't do like a traditional maybe like a lot of people in our industry do where they're doing like interviews or something that's a little bit more evergreen and we we do evergreen stuff but we definitely can react really quickly to things with our angle and that's kind of intriguing yeah i think evergreen content overrated it i mean it's it's kind of a cliche that that's the type of content you should be putting your time into but if you're trying to do something that's entertaining and you want people to come back every single day like nobody's really creative enough to make evergreen content every single day but if you're just giving your opinions on the news like shit happens and people wanna know about it and they like your personality then you can just get on the air and just be authentic or just write authentically with your voice and you can rack up like millions of listeners or subscribers in fact this is how most of the big media companies online operate sam your newsletter of the hustle has a couple of million subscribers just giving your opinions and takes on the news it started i don't know if you know how it started but it started off when he was the beginning it was more like evergreen hits long form super interesting blogs like like kinda like going for home runs like we're gonna talk about a topic nobody's talking about in a way that nobody's talking about it it's gonna be amazingly manufactured and then we're gonna distribute that and try to get that one blog post to like millions of visits and it was working but it was also like dude is the treadmill i wanna be on or what if we just went lightweight daily react to the news summarize and react to the news give people what they need to know in five minutes and like not try to be a kind of like genius original content creator every week as my summary at sam i don't know if that's accurate that's very accurate it it was hard i mean i could do it probably but it's a hard ass life and it's really hard to hire for there's a reason why casey neistat dad did what he did for a year and then quit he was like oh my god this is exhausting it's challenging yeah it's just too hard like if your if your goal is to produce content and your strategy is that you're gonna come up with new interesting ideas for every video or every podcast and like that idea is dead on arrival i think you gotta index on some other source of novelty whether it's the news or on this show like i don't ever come up with new business ideas you i just have people on who have their own business ideas and like that is an endless process like i'm never gonna run out of people at interview who have cool and interesting new business ideas and so that's just a much better way to go about it and i think you guys on your show my first million you have i don't know you kind of the same thing you're talking about other business ideas that others have come up with and you also just got bought by hubspot so i'd assume at least you sam probably have some sort of financial incentive to keep working on the show and making no i i mean so we the podcast is his job yeah the podcast is my job so when we like we were gonna sell like we they started reaching out to us and during that time i had basically already made an offer to someone to be the ceo so i could do podcast stuff and when they wanted to buy us and they i go okay well i'm gonna have to res resign my offer to this guy because i was promising him that he's gonna run it independently and that's no longer gonna be true so i did that with him and i go but then you also have to promote someone from within or hire someone to be like the boss because i'm not gonna be the boss i i would love to be here and continue doing and do content because i i love it but i'm not gonna be the ceo so i and and also there's no we don't have an earn out like there's no there's like milestones that we wanna hit but like i don't have like money on the line to in order to hit that milestone and so it's a little bit different like when you're saying like i'm in the trenches i am but like if i i would do it anyway i would say i would say it's more like there's a period when you get acquired where you're like alright give me the ko aid past the ko aid like i'll drink it you know like i think from i think for a lot of people i i was this way at least i'll just speak for myself there's a period where were like they give me the swag and then i show well at least when you're in imp it's a lot easier than when you're a remote but like it's very easy to just get swept up it's like oh i'm gonna add you to this meeting and oh we'd love to pick your brain about x you know you start getting pulled into all these strategy things because you're the strat smart new like high energy strategy guy who's not like scarred and jade by all past failures and so you know you you start getting pulled into all these things and you're able to contribute and you meet all these people and you're you're in the cafeteria and you're like god my life is no stress now because i sold my startup up like there's a period where you're like all about it and then what i've seen i'll just speak for myself there's a transition period where you're like okay like working super hard here really doesn't really get me any more or less than if i just do what i enjoy and i work a like certain amount of freedom and lack of oversight i think karl you're talked about this a little bit earlier i did this at at twitch which is the first year i tried to kill it i i did everything i could i wasn't like working a hundred hours a week but the hours i was working i was like i'm gonna do the most high impact thing i could do for this company at all times and i'm gonna be me on blast and i was doing it and then then like a year in i was like well i'm leading this team and at a big company it's really like you're doing all the jobs of a startup up ceo without the upside it's like hire and fire people set the strategy dictate the road map manage a whole you like thirty people or whatever pitch for funding basically and your funding is just head count and resources and so it's like all the jobs of a ceo without the like actual freedom and actual upside of a startup and so i went to the the ceo and i was like hey like you know i just hit my one year i'm thinking about what's next you know it's smart to either like sign up now for another full year or like bounce if i wanna bounce and so i said you know i have a lot of fun here but like if i'm gonna do all this work for a start i should just go start my own start i should own all my upside you understand he's is he's a founder so understood and he said i said but you know there could be a model here that works like here's what here's what i would like and i and so i like sort of laid out a role that i thought would be fun for me and it was basically like you know something i'm interested in with no direct reports with no like kind of like it's not like a mission critical project like the one i was doing before so it's like more of a creativity fund freedom type project and i was like you i'm gonna work this hard and i still think i'll make an impact but i'm gonna work like roughly this hard and i got all these other things i do the podcast is growing so like if y'all all are cool with all that then i'd love to stay on and they gave it me and i guess like i've seen that that's a pretty typical path of a founder you go from like i wanna crush it justify it learn everything from the learn everything i can from this company and like prove myself then you're like okay don't need to like prove myself so much anymore prove myself learn learn a bunch of it's kind of repetitive now let me transition to either out the door or chill mode you know where you're you're cruising do doing with what just just the parts you enjoy with none of the stuff you don't enjoy and then and then it's like gets the gets the itch to go do the thing again that's the pattern i know that the buyer's know and they know that yeah at first i was so afraid to be like hey but i love i really love these people i and i connected with them i was like hey i'm gonna level with you and i was waiting for them to flinch and they're like dude we've seen this radio like a hundred times like we get it i know who you are and knew that when i got you like you know when we bought the company and like look i want you to be here forever but if like literally emmett at the ceo messes me one day he just goes look i know you're gonna wanna go start a company someday i wish we could keep you forever i know that's not gonna be the case when you do your next thing i'll be your first check and so that was like a totally different mindset than this like what i thought would be no that like what you're saying is bad and evil right yeah how dare are you but there's like you know the people please are in me was still like a little bit hesitant exactly just be fully honest but when i did i was like oh great this is no problem they understand their yeah and this and it's a big show like i think i'm the star and they're like dude there's thousands of people at this company and next year they'll be much yeah there'll be a new you we've we've seen this turnover five times and and there's also this middle ground which is like you it does who cares what the paperwork says like there's a handshake agreement that says you got your ethically say i'm gonna provide value to you you're gonna provide value to me me personally i'm still more important like i'm more important to myself than that company so i'm not gonna like die to help you but like we have a hair agreement i'm gonna give you value i'm also gonna extract value and hopefully it's a fifty one forty nine like when you get more value but that's what we're gonna do well there's this path that i see a lot of people taking right now that sean you kinda seem to be on it and it's kinda like this individual successful investor rich tech guy path and it seemingly goes like this you build an audience for yourself you've got a podcast or you're on club house or you're on twitter all the time you just sort of put out your wisdom and your knowledge in the universe and the people who like you gl on to you and the people who don't don't follow you and you keep doing that day after day week after week like you treat that like a full time job and you build an audience and you start to get to know a lot of people and through that you start getting access to investment opportunities so overall you're converting social capital and to financial capital the social capital is all the trust that you're building with your audience day after day kinda showing up and improving to people that you actually are who you say you are and you know what you're talking about and the people come to you with deals and you can invest much earlier than the average person gets a look so for example somebody who's doing this really well is sa from gum road you started gum road gum wrote huge and that doesn't necessarily mean he's super liquid right like the company throws a lot but like he hasn't sold it or exited so where is he gonna make money well turns out people really like saw hill they like what he has to say and so he's constantly going on every podcast he's tweeting like it's his job he's he was early to club house he's got a huge following on club house and then he also set up a rolling fund and i don't know how often would be once every week once every few days somebody just puts like twenty twenty five thousand dollars and he was rolling fund for him to invest and now i think he is like thirteen million dollars that he's investing on behalf of other people and he gets to keep a percentage of the profits and also a percentage of the money in total and that's pretty lucrative if you have a big audience so sean it kinda seems to me like you're going down the same path yeah well i think it's i actually think it's fairly it's it's fairly paved to this path but i think that it's like a path that's been paved but then all of a sudden they built all these new roadside things it's like oh that restaurant wasn't here before oh there's a gas station wow now we can go way further right that's what i see so so i grew up and like i there's a couple major influences on me when i was kind of like baking a shifted to business and the first was tim ferris so somebody somehow somehow somehow some way i got my hands out for hour workweek and i had what what you call the four hour fever which is when you finish the book for the next four hours you're like fuck everything in my life i'm changing everything i'm like i'm doing all these things what why don't have passive income am i working so hard why don't have a virtual assistant why don't i travel i why don't i you know get fit like you wanna change all these things because he makes it seem so desirable and so achievable right so that was the first big influence on me and a guy like tim ferris you know in in many ways when you know the person who sort of shows you the way you're like well i respect you i like you but also i kinda i wanna be you it's all i saw okay here's a dude who basically took his own life experiences dis distilled it down into some kind of operating philosophy and then packaged it up for the world to consume through books and blog essentially and then later a podcast later a newsletter other things he translated his fame into access for deal so he invested in uber invested i think twitter at a a couple couple other big ones and also had like a great kinda like friend group that that emerged from that was just always hanging with interesting people that seemed super fun to me so i really like this guy's lifestyle and i thought i i didn't really even like decide at that time but i always just thought oh that's amazing but to me at the time it felt like if i wanted to pursue that i felt like saying you know wanna go be lebron james or like i wanna go into hollywood and you know be george clooney it just felt like a well that's a lottery game maggie there's not i can't name fifteen tim ferris at at the time at i thought this there's only a few people like this is it's probably not a good path to bet on so that was the first influence second one was tony robbins same sort of thing i was like oh wow this guy's great i discovered his content helped me out a lot but changed the way i saw the world with his operating philosophy and i was like i went to one of his his events and i was like holy fuck there's ten thousand people in this arena paying thousands of dollars to like like just attend this guy show his performance i like i've never seen anybody like this never seen a speaker cap people like this how the fuck does this guy do it and i was pretty like enamored with that i was very like into to see and i thought okay i don't really want this lifestyle like just like with tim ferris i didn't wanna write books and because that seems slow and kinda of boring just like tony robbins i didn't wanna go on tour but i wanted elements of what they had which was a cool set of life experiences which help you with which you then dis steal until operating philosophy you share that you build a big trusted audience and then that you turn that social capital into financial capital so that that funds you doing you full time your job your company is you and so i just thought oh that's pretty fun like i i think a guy like tim ferris i think he basically wakes up i don't know sam actually knows him but i i'm i at of once and it he seemed like a pretty curious dude it what it seemed like his life is is he wakes up he's curious about a thing like it might be because he's having some pain point in his life like i wanna lose belly fat or like i just got diagnosed with this like disorder and this is the traditional medicine but it doesn't seem to work so well what are the alternatives and then he just goes down that rabbit hole he learns about it from the best he self experiments and then he comes out the other side and he teaches that to everybody else and i thought oh that's dope this dude just gets to be like a curious student and gets paid millions of dollars for it that seems like way more fun than what i was doing than a normal job for sure but even more fun than being a startup ceo picking up market raising money from investors having a team that you gotta go into the office every day and ra ra keep everybody happy and keep everybody motivated come up with your strategy so i i basically just looked at it once i sold my company i was like alright am i might gonna stop bullshit or what like am i gonna try that path even though the odds seem bad or or or am am my put away that bad idea for forever because i just decided to into it odds aren't that bad at the time it felt really hard and impossible well to be embarrassed like you said he was like one of the only ones doing that it wasn't like a clear path follow whereas now there's just so to see that there's lot right yeah he might be number one in that kind of field actually tony robbins and others are kind of a little bit bigger than him but then than you have him but then you have like you know a rung down you'll have i don't know whoever pick your favorite james clear or you know ram ramirez cynthia or whoever and then you have in every niche you have a thought leader so you realize okay it's not an all or nothing game like at the minimum i can land it in kinda like level three right now and feel some version of success and then if i just keep going maybe i'll get there and i'm pretty like i don't know cocky slash confidence so i was like okay you know why not me right like i met tim i was like there's nothing there's nothing magical about this guy it seems like a normal person just like me who like he just did him on blast for ten fifteen years i could do that that seems that seems doable so that's how i described this path and it's not always about an investments like sure tim ferris made a lot of money from investing but talking about james clear i just spoke with him and mark manson the other week they were both prolific bloggers and the james clear for example he was able to grow his mailing list to like a million subscribers just from blogging consistently and had been really good at seo and then they both wrote books and they're just gonna took their best blog posts that they had proven and worked to the best and they turned them into like best selling books out together yeah exactly mark i think mark's book if you read like i i went and read like an annual report from fox or news court whoever owns like penguin books or something and they're like what's his book called that's like called like fuck i don't care the subtle art of you giving to fuck subtle are not giving a fuck it was it like they like positioned it as like the breakout hit that saved the company mean it was like a pretty big smack success right it's huge it's huge i mean people severely underestimate how much money you can make from a really good book if you have a huge audience like most non fiction books probably sell a thousand or a few thousand copies if you're lucky i but the subtle of i'm not giving a fuck sold something like fourteen million copies and mark probably makes two or three dollars a copy no way least so you're telling me you think he made over thirty million dollars off that book i think he made at least thirty million dollars no way i book so don't believe that that's amazing yeah books could be ridiculously lucrative but it's hard like james clear again he had a million email subscribers in addition to doing all the work of writing a book and getting all those subscribers he also did like four hundred podcast interviews before the release of atomic habits like these are like the top books in their categories but i suspect that if you have a huge audience beforehand you can kinda play publishers off of each other like i've had multiple publishers email me about doing a book for end hackers and you can probably negotiate to get higher than like the end industry standard of like fifteen percent royalties on book sales right i don't remember if it's tim that told me this or if i read it about him but i think he said in order revenue streams were something like so highest to lowest was investing advertising revenue and then significantly blown number three was books right and that isn't shock i mean i think successful tech startups ups are a lot more lucrative than books and i think tim was like early to uber or something crazy like and shopify dude just those two alone a another level it could be an a hundred million plus being early to a hundred billion dollar showed up is among the best investments that any human has ever made ever but even even that that's what i could say when there's new stuff built on the road what other the things that you know for me i used was this idea of a rolling fund sam does sp and syndicate on angel so like i pretty sure tim was investing his own money maybe there was like some back end deal where like whatever sequoia gave him money as a scout or something but i think he was just investing his own money but like for example we're nowhere near tim's size now we're not not even close and tweeted it out hey i wanna raise a rolling fund you know if fed if people wanna c invest in deals with me i've been investing and here's you know here's here's an option here's a link basically and that turned in for me with zero outreach zero meetings and zero reaching out to my own personal network so these are all strangers from the internet who just follow the podcast or follow me on twitter and that became four million a year of invest income just to put that into terms that's not a huge number right i think sam will probably invest even more maybe five times more this year off his syndicate and he did the same thing just leveraged his own fame to raise money and so if you just do the math on that right so let's say four million a year my you know standard carry twenty percent don't take any management fees but like i could take a two percent management fee so two percent management fee that's eight that's eighty k a year so that's like you know pretty much like a starting salary you know for yeah i mean that's like that pays the bills that was my salary you know that's my salary when i started yeah so that's the first part then you take the carry so you're basically saying of every four million invested or every four million invested it's the equivalent of me getting to write about eight eight hundred thousand let's just round up to a million a million dollars a year of start up investments so and these start investments take you know let's call it ten years to to matured for that fund to to fully pay out so that's basically ten million dollars of investment of of money that i get to invest that i didn't have to take out of pocket so that's ten million dollars of equity value without accounting in the appreciation of any of those investments right and a good fund my three x in value and so you know a a good fund it could do better but but even just like normal solid returns over the ten year period would be a triple and so that would mean that my ten million in equity value it becomes like thirty million in equity value and this is for something that i did put that's i just tran i just snap my fingers and turned audience into cash but it's a win win it's not like i'm charging them something i'm giving them access into a my brain of knowing what start investments are good and bad but b my deal flow of deals they could never get access to in the private market so you get this win win with your audience but it's pretty massive value and that vehicle that rolling fund that didn't exist for you know tim ferris it didn't exist for tony robbins they had to find a different way just everything's easier now just like stripe made it easier to take payments like it's easier now to raise money it's easier to create merch it's create it's easier to create a course it's create easier to do all the different business model tactics that you can do like pump pom is another kinda like solo creator and he's got like a job board and so he's big in bitcoin and he's that's what he's known for we created pom crypto jobs dot com or something like that so he's making i i believe he didn't he didn't confirm this but you know just my own kind of snoop here he's making almost a million dollars a year off his job board right so he was like a you know high level person at snap at facebook whatever he's basically replacing that with a passive income stream again just snap his finger who spin up a financial asset tim ferris could have done that right but it didn't have these tools nor awareness to use it they were following the traditional playbook which was like write books give speeches like go to go get paid thirty thousand dollars to go talk at some company and the last one was like he created a tv show it was like you know go for mainstream media and and now we have like way more tools in our tool belt that we can use to generate much more income right and despite all these tools and help you make money i i i still don't think it's like necessarily the most accessible path to start with because you gotta build an audience first right and that's a doggy eat dog world like a ton of people are out there hustling trying to make a name for themselves and most the people i know who succeeded are kinda like the two of you where you have these previous business successes that lend credence and help your audiences like build trust with you but by by the way we didn't we didn't have that audience either like eighteen months ago and neither did pop pop didn't have that audience to your ago three years ago so it it can be built fairly quickly but you're right not everybody wants to or can i'm this is not a thing where i'm like anybody can do it it's or sorry it's it's it's anybody can do it but not everybody can do it right so it is open to all but it is not gonna be achievable by all alright look most businesses have something that i hate silos say it with me silos what does that mean it means different people are using different information across your company and no one ever actually knows what's going on or they're using one source of truth it's a pain in the butt and it costs you money it costs you time and it hurts it hurts so with the hubspot crm platform you can bring all your data together in one roof so this is like sounds a little fluffy and these big words but i'm gonna put together a very simple and easy to understand way look you have salespeople they're going out and selling stuff they need context they need to know who's talk to a particular customer they know you need to need to know how that customer has interacted with your website with your customer service they need to know what's going on so when they go and talk to that potential customer they can make the sale and they can get it done now most of the time they're gonna be prospecting spending tons of time researching how does this person know us how do we know them what's their background yada that's a pain in the butt that is called silo information and waste time you don't wanna do that that is why hubspot crm platform exists so with the hubspot crm platform we're bringing together all the data under one place with no lags between marketing and sales you need to sync your data and keep it clean no problem that's what the operations hub is and that is what it can do connect to other apps clean customer data and automate business processes this is music to my ears so check it out hubspot crm platform just go to hubspot dot com and save about a decade of tears and trying and heartache over not being able to have your data across your business check it out okay so let's let's get into some ideas let's talk about ideas that like the average person can do or build you guys have your own sources of ideas sam you've got the hustle you've got a team of journalists who are literally working around the clock to find new interesting business stories and ideas to bring to you for me i've got andy hackers i'll go to the hackers product directory yeah i'll just sort by like recently updated and then i'll look at who's making at least ten thousand dollars a month of revenue and just see what pops up like see what cool ideas people were working on you need like a growth rate one yeah i should add that for sure i built this whole directory a few years ago and there's only like a hundred products on it and i checked the other day now there's like over fourteen thousand products where people will sort of shared what they're doing and how much money they're making what they're working on and how they come up with their idea and stuff so i should definitely had more features to it at this point it's pretty cool but one of the trends i've been noticing is there's just people sort of d and making like really small niche versions of big venture funded apps so a good one is like calm dot com it's it's a big mindfulness and sort of meditation app and there's some others in the sector that are making like tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and they've got like a ton of investment and then on any hackers i've found people who are making like little small versions of them so one of them is called mantra was built by this guy a few years ago and you can look at his timeline and see like exactly what his thought process was so he says he was lying in bed watching his girlfriend at the time he use a daily affirmation app happening and he figured he could build something better and so this is the very first app he's ever made and it's super simple like i downloaded the app you open it up and it's just got different categories for affirmations so it's got like improve your sex life these affirmations will help create a more satisfying sexual experience in your life and generate wealth these affirmations will help attract wealth abundance and prosperity to your life and just stuff like that that's hilarious and so it turns out a few years later two hundred thousand people have downloaded this app and he decided to add subscriptions so you paid twenty bucks a year to get access to themes and music and whatever and i think he made thirty five hundred dollars in his very first month he's got ten thousand reviews and the average rating is four point eight yeah i think doing pretty well so his latest update he's now at fifteen thousand dollars a month in revenue and he writes about how he's completely underestimated how big his app could get he totally under invested in it he hasn't put a single dime on paid marketing and instead he's spent like the last few years just working on other apps so he kinda regrets it and that was going back to work on mantra and give it more attention sean you should tell him about horoscope because that's the exact same thing here what what about horoscope so we did we interview the guy his name is ross there's this guy who raised money from much of new york media folks maybe he raised fifteen million dollars and he was his app was in the same space as this mantra app but basically cor did you know that like women love horoscope i've yet to date anybody who wasn't into est astrology so yeah i'm aware so like even like i dismiss horoscope as like some like woo woo nonsense bullshit but even like smart women like my wife and like sean's wife like our into it even if it's at a casual level and and and i was like they can like oh i'm also into like a ton of like bro science as well so it's just like their version of bro science and there we we we found so there was this app that raised maybe ten or fifteen million and they're probably making millions of dollars a year doing horoscope then we went and found horoscope was it horoscope soap or su something like that where it was like the most like old school not nice look website and they were very likely could be making ten million a year off of these things and it was just getting crazy amounts of traffic because the amount of people who read or consume horoscope content is like like half of america because it's like eighty percent of women like check tomorrow and in part too because it's daily like you don't just check your horoscope once and then never again like you come back and check it every single day it's like what we were talking about earlier with the news and entertainment like this is something where you can collect subscription revenue and people aren't gonna stop coming back i was given an example of there's a guy who's building some app that's like it connects you with like kinda experts so it's sort of like oh if you're redoing your kitchen you can actually like get a fifteen minute video call with this that person from hgtv tv right so they found all these like hey justin bieber stylist will like give you style advice for thirty minutes if you wanna pay a hundred fifty bucks or whatever and so it's sort like cameo but you're booking these like fifteen thirty minute calls with the who's who of fashion beauty home improvement all these categories and i was looking at their their number i was like yeah that's great you've seen some growth like which which vertical is it is there one winner and they were like yeah yeah you know it's spread out and i was like yeah but like certainly one has to be doing better than all the others and they're like yeah actually astrology is doing pretty well and i was like it's like not even on your site he's like yeah it's like over there on the far right under this thing because even he was kind of like you know stop the thing we wanna lead with while we're fundraising and like he didn't say all that but like you could tell it wasn't tough it wasn't what he thought would win nor was it what would they promoting the most but it was the thing that was working the and he showed me and so i went down the rabbit hole again i'm professionally curious so i go on instagram and i start finding all the instagram astrology accounts astrology influencers basically and it's like eighty thousand ninety thousand two hundred thousand five hundred thousand followers and these are like just like you know some chicken florida or like you know some chicken like huntington beach who like you know dresses us the way you would imagine and like her her every every post is like you know like the shocker are aligned and like today if you experience a good event it's because you've i told you this or whatever like some bullshit and and then in like link in the bio is basically like an only fans to book a reading with her and you go so i'm like alright hell yeah let's book a reading let's see let's go end to end with this this professional curiosity and it's like sold out just every session is booked for like weeks and and so what he was doing was those some of those people were using his platform but even others were just using a boot like version of this it made me think there is an only fans for for palm reading astrology horoscope you know like sort of like relationship like voodoo whatever and like the same thing happens not just like in america in india this is a huge thing in india when you have a kid you take your kid to like the the local guru because of course every village just just happens to have like a mystical guru that lives there and he'll like you he's like raf graffiti holding the baby you know sim hey like looks at i mean he'll just like he'll write you on a scroll like your whole life story and like the do's and don'ts it's like you know don't eat black beans don't get married in the month of september you know don't date anyone with the letter j and in the name and it's like and people believe this like to their core they're just like you know he's a great guy but like his name is you know you know t in or whatever like he's got a j in there we can't we can't take dictate trades we gotta break up with t here and it's like like people believe this in every every walk of life and i think that's one area that like s to silicon valley doesn't talk about but b there's is a lot of simple software solutions you could build that that can get you maybe not till hundred million dollars in revenue but like you get to ten k month the profit you can get to fifty k month of profit doing these and they'll make you rich like yeah exactly we like talk a lot about that in the podcast for like it's pretty like raising money and going big i think it's sick and i'm happy that the people who do it do it and maybe i'll do it one day but if you're like goal to optimize for like wealth creation some of these apps or smaller relatively smaller ideas are actually significantly like to make you wealthy and perhaps be more fun along the way and a lot of them are just repurposing ideas that have existed in the past and some form or another that used to be doing really well so you can kinda just look at like what people used to do that worked and then just try it again so like the horoscope industry you know has always had these influencers who people really trust and i know if you guys remember miss cli she had like with mystical hotline in the nineties yeah you've heard oh yeah okay like that business was crushing it like they made like a billion dollars or something busy with that i mean yeah she was just a a hired model or like i mean actually was well she wasn't mystical or she would like she was like a professional palm reader but like the owners of a marketing company like heard or speak and they're like oh my gosh like you are are perfect you're gonna be our woman you know you're our our spokesperson and they paid her like not you know like a hundred grand a year i'm like normal salary and it was pretty wild and and a lot of the stuff seems scam me but here's there's other examples like there's like sleep is a great categories of your time of calm and one of comm biggest features is sleep stories and it's paid feature but like we we know and have met owners of sleep apps that do everything from you know just white noise or like rain drop sound effects or whatever to sleep stories to sleep stories but just in other languages and they just focus on like you know the spanish speaking market or whatever and there's just like an infinite number of these niches that exist both in software or you know d like for example just to tie back into what we're talking about earlier in the d space like the fact that tim ferris doesn't have his own like ne drink or like kettle bell brand left money on the table you know what i mean like and and the person who actually did this really well was joe rogan and you know right he has like alpha brain or whatever that that that supplements company is and i think sam you dove the numbers better than i do on this but that's like a hundred million dollar your company i think it's just sold maybe i'm a little it was over it just was acquired the other day and friends who know the company told me it sold for three hundred and fifty million dollars and that joe owned like twenty percent of it right and so like he at hey that's his his own passion area he talked about in new ways why take sponsors money to talk about somebody else's brand when like you could just be part owner or white label any of these things right so there's a whole suite of those types of ideas and this happens again like to look at another country look in india all the famous like kinda like guru in india it's like oh this guy's a saint he only accepts donations and like makes millions of dollars of donations and then the as they get famous like miss cl style like the i think the top guy like has like his own ramen noodle company and like yeah right so he just license his face onto ramen noodles and crackers or something like that and it's like a billionaire from from this ramen noodle company and yet at the same time it's was supposed to be this like religious saint just the most basic stuff right but like we can learn from them like if you're trying to learn this like what is this solo like kind of solo creator playbook but you gotta know what are all the tools in the toolbox and then use the ones that that you want but actually i was gonna ask you a different question which is joe rogan remind me of this who is having the most fun it's a great question with what they do for a living i somebody had asked me this question or or in our group chat somebody asked this question and i was like it's a great question right because once you see that you see a model you're like and it's it's not there having the most but it's like i think that would be super fine if that was me it's kind of like a one question one version of the question because that that can become a blueprint then like why don't why don't i just going for that and my answer was joe rogan and i'll give you kinda of my defense with joe rogan but i would love if you guys have other answers of somebody who you've seen just having a blast or you they're having a blast and you think it would be a blast for you too i'm curious if there are any other answers like the joe rogan reasoning to me is he basically he's got the podcast which like clearly he does for fun because he was doing it before it made any money before he sold it to you know before he sold the rights to spotify for a hundred million dollars a year he was doing it for free kind of in his in his bet bedroom and when when there was no promise of money so he's just meeting badass ass people elon musk neil d tyson and he's just having conversations with interesting people through that he gets a bunch of fans who love him that sounds fun he loves the u the u c comment but he also does it where he doesn't go to every event that would be exhausting that would be like the trade off where the job become the hobby becomes a shitty job and it said he's like no i'm only gonna do the big paper views in vegas so that's an easy flight for me i'm not gonna travel around the world trying to chase this thing around anymore so that seems fun and then he's a stand of a comedian which is like a hard challenge super fun thing to do and he sells out arenas all around the world and so like and then he's got his brand alpha brand or whatever and he works out all the time like joe ro just seems like he is doing all the things he wants and at the highest level and so it seems like that's a blast who do you guys think is having the most fun okay i'm gonna go with the founder ceos of these humongous like hundred billion dollar plus tech companies and so i'm talking about like the patrick call of the world bill gates larry ellis and oracle jeff bezos and amazon just these absolute titans who are controlling a ton of resources and they're not like just some hired guns ceo who came in later on like turned the ship around like these are people who are working on the projects that they started that used to be tiny so it's kinda like their life mission it's kinda like their baby and once it gets big enough like it takes a lot a lot of work a lot of harder to get to the point where they're at now but once it gets to that size like you can kinda delegate mostly important like urgent work to other people like your trusted to do tenants and then you kinda you know in control of like a massive amount of resources where you can work on your favorite thing and you can do side projects and all sorts of stuff so i think that's kind of the most en invisible position to be in we're having i think next week we're having the cofounder of hubspot on da and i'll ask him but i talked to him regularly and i'm almost positive he doesn't have any direct reports and i'm also you can look this up actually i think he's the largest individual shareholder of hubspot and his value of just hubspot shares is over a billion and i was like what did you do this week he's like oh i bought my wife for her fort or fiftieth birthday i bought her this domain called human dot org it's like a it's a it's this like philosophy we buy into and it's this community and i was like is this what you do for fun he's like yeah it's like it's the greatest job about earth i'll have to ask them so i'm not ins this but i'm it appears as though he's got a pretty nice life yeah and it i i agree with you that having the resources of a huge company is quite amazing it's almost like you're at the top of a cult where you've got millions of people like you know maybe they're not following you because they believe in you they're following you because they're getting paid but they're still following nonetheless they'll basically do whatever you ask them to do you can set up whatever lifestyle you want to do and you have a certain amount of power that i think comes from only having lots of people working in concert with you that you can't get just from having lots of money you now you can deploy that money if you're super rich to get people to working in concert with you but if you have a company kind of everyone's bought into the cool aid and they're pushing the same direction and you can launch any sort of cool fun side project that you want to or you could just go take off for a few weeks and like people won't really notice that you're gone because everything sort of delegated and when i compare that to like the content creators of the world like ten ferris i'm sure ten has some fun but it seems kinda stressful like have to be ferris all the time it it by the way it's definitely stressful my my i mean he's like blog about like depression and shit and he suffers although i would say that's part job part genetic but my best friend jack smith jack smith sold his company for eight hundred million dollars or something like that he probably walked away with before tax nearly nine figures so nearly a hundred million dollars he started the company when he twenty three he quit working there at when he was twenty six he's now thirty three or thirty two he lives in a house in hawaii he has no social file he has a twitter handle he has a facebook profile but he doesn't like probably has a hundred and fifty followers he's not trying to impress anyone doesn't do any angel investing what he does in this free time is he's he's a pen pal for inmates in prison and so he's currently compelling with the guy who's like a map who like taught himself math and he like gets joy out of helping he'll the guy's is like yeah i wanna get this book and subject jack just buys in the book like the math book and he enjoys con converting about it he he loves testing different supplements and testing different products on amazon and he doesn't have that need to create content or be a big shot he's incredibly comfortable in his own skin his wife started coffee meets bagels so she's also a big shot and so he lives on the beach in hawaii in a rental unit that he probably pays ten thousand dollars a month for and i think he is having the most fun because he doesn't feel the need i think both sean and i and probably you cor because we're like these like public facing things we definitely have this need to be loved jack doesn't really have that he he know he only wants to be loved by his close friends and and i think that there's something great to be said about like contentment and like humble and you you are happy with what you have and you don't nearly we don't really need much or want more and he's also not like on the content treadmill no he doesn't to it's not on any treadmill he's not on the money treadmill he's not on the on the social climbing treadmill he's not on the content treadmill he's not on any any trouble i i of agree with you sam which has its downsides like not having a mission sometimes seems to get sad so we'll have to like pick a project ahead i was gonna say i i i so i totally disagree with what you said cor and i kind of agree with what you said sam so i'll give you both so cor i i totally disagree in the sense that what i've seen at least is the kind of the ceos the unicorns here's your day your day is mostly a combination of people problems so like you know your whole job was to put the right people in the right places but then all but people are one of the like bug pieces of code out there right so you're always debugging that you're debugging people and then the second thing is you put not fire so there's like always a fire in any big company any sufficiently large company there's always you know some rotating set of crises every month and you know that requires your attention and so like you know i don't think when z creates facebook he wants people to be like sharing cool photos of their lives he doesn't want fake news misinformation and like you know how much of these guys day has to like go into like solving the gnarly problem of the of the moment and so so i think you know they try to hire away that but like at the end of day they're accountable for it and so they have to like ultimately deal with with these problems people problems then you have big company problems and the last bit is like you sort of lost the magic and the connection and the fun of like building something yourself hands on which is probably what you like to do if you started one of these companies secondly working with a small crew people because now the place is so large doing recognize people in your own company and also like you lose the like you in order to make a large company run you need to recruit certain types of people right you need generals of armies and not like gorilla a warfare like you're were used to at the beginning so a lot of your good friends from the beginning of the company have moved on to do other things if you're still there so i've seen there was a big trade off in addition to the cool stuff you mentioned and so that's why i wouldn't say there's too many trade offs for me to say oh they're having the most fun i think they're the busiest i can see it's stripe you can see everybody's calendar and i i just like pulled up patrick collins calendar like what's this guy doing this i could see like every single event that's on end good it's not let's it's not knock that screen share bro let's go well it's it's one of two right it's either thirty minutes thirty minutes thirty minutes thirty minutes and there's an executive assistant or two dedicated to lies one getting this like they work their job is his calendar basically and like everybody wants his time and he's got and he wants his own time and so you know there's thirty minutes back to back everywhere and then there's the other one which is super spa where it's sort of like well i kinda don't do anything now which is sort of fun at first but i could also just quit if i really wanted to do nothing so instead i'm kind of like in this like slightly un unsatisfied position of like my job is not to do any of the jobs it's and i'm sort of doing nothing i'm was supposed to think about the vision and shit like that and so what do you think about that is that true which one is he it's it's it's the it's the first one it's a thirty minutes thirty minutes thirty minutes hear them you going but also like he does a lot of projects outside of and it's like very strictly like eight to five nine to five like been done there's nothing outside of there are no obligations and like he is working on extra projects so he does for example the fast grants during covid where they're giving out money which researchers those are super awesome and this is like kind of a fun project and before that he was working tyler cohen on doing a research project with like why scientific progress has like slowed down and he's also like learned to fly planes i was talking to him a couple of months ago about like a project we might work on together just two of us about like helping to fund like underrepresented minorities and groups to like basically cool do cool things and so it's like i don't know if he's a superhuman who just works sixteen hours a day but like he's somehow finding time to work on all these cool pet projects with like small groups of people and to fund it because he's got the resources of an entire organization behind him so probably you're right it's like not the most fun job he still has like a crazy responsibility could buyers you could cut out the strike part and do all those things also right because yeah if if he wants to go to these things sam sam brought up a good point which is like there's the people who no longer are chasing desire and they're happy because they're sort of at peace they're not just like at war with some part of their life and that's like you know the monk but there's like the modern day monk and you do meet some people like this who just like they're not like driven by their desire if their desire right because desire basically saying i lack something right and so you're you're agreeing to be unhappy with the current thing to go desire more and then there's like the people who i think me and sam i'm try to be more like right now which is i don't think either of us try to be that guy with no desires i think we try to be well i have healthy addictions the things i want i i i think are positive for me in the world and the pursuit of them will make me ultimately better healthier have more fun and a happier person alright so like the i gotta choose an addiction at least i chose a healthy one and i think those are the people like kinda second second second most was fun what what's the game though because i'm like i guess in a way like me and sam are like following your footsteps like both of our companies got acquired both of us are still working at the acquire it's like i don't have an end in mind sam i don't know if you have an end in mind saying like when did when do you quit hubspot and when did you after that i don't have an end in mind like i think that you and i cor are in different positions maybe well you guys don't have like like i don't have like a goal that i have to hit and if i don't hit it i don't make money so like truthfully like my life is awesome like i i thoroughly enjoy what i do i spend most of my time doing podcast stuff i'm happy i'm i'm happy with my life i think that i enjoy being a hubspot employee inevitably i'm going to quit and when i do i probably won't start something i'll probably chill for three four five years and then start something but there i don't really have an end game i do think about it a lot and it stresses me out so i try not to think about it i'm really trying to enjoy the journey as much as possible i'm in a position now that like i have no once out like i have i'm happy where i am i would be happy with significantly less though and so i'm i'm a little i'm quite in a satisfied area for now but i like like i do experience envy like sean people love it when he invest in their company and i'm like fuck that's like easy money that's like a great deal and he also is really good at spotting them and so like i i experienced like envy or i experience like oh i wanna do that too but i it's definitely not like a i'm willing to dedicate my life to doing that at the moment sean what's your in game because you don't have some date you know in the future like sam does where he's gonna quit and do something else you're kinda just like stare ahead of the rest of your life so what's what do you do when you necessarily have like a specific goal in mind yeah so i'm basically chasing this thing called the perfect tuesday and what i realized was having these like goals or milestones or accomplishments is a false promise you make with yourself for you you're like oh that's what i want and then you know as you get there you're like okay well you move the goal post and you you want something more right like for already i have more than i would have ever asked for ten years ago and now i'm like oh want more more and more and more i mean this like this disease of more and so instead i basically went the other way and i was like okay instead of thinking about what's this ten year vision for myself and what's the end endgame it was sort of like what's the now game what is the what is the perfect tuesday for me right now the perfect average tuesday and so i did this exercise once that kinda changed the way i look at things which is i said what's the perfect normal day for me and and not perfect like everything goes right but like if i was just to do all the things i love in a normal day what are all those normal things and they're they're not that hard right like it's like you know i love to wake up with without the alarms so like i love to wake up naturally rather than an alarm waking up saying shit you gotta do something i feel groggy so now i wake up around seven thirty just gonna start go to sleep earlier because got a kid but like i don't wake up with an alarm anymore and so that that's already was like one thing and i just these are gonna sound really stupid but like i'll just give i'll just walk you through some of the examples like of how stupid this is which is like i i i like i love to shower like i i just love having a shower i'm like i get great ideas in the shower shower is super relaxing i just noticed like on a normal day that's like one of my favorite parts of the day is taking a great shower and so then two things i like started to appreciate this thing that seemed really mundane it seems like stupid to have a goal of taking a great shower every day but now i have a goal of taking a great shower every day because i know love showering workout i love to work out workout so i wanna have a great workout every day and not just like generically a great was like one of the most fun types of workouts for me i wanna do those every day and so i have this day kinda mapped out where i'm like these are the things i love doing on normal days they don't take an outstanding event or it's not a vacation it's like if my normal day was like this i'd be a happy camper right now and then i saw i have like a great day then i mapped out in a what's a great week meaning like what's the thing i do once a week not gonna do it every day but i wanna do it once a week what's a great month what's the thing i wanna do once or twice a month that i'm not gonna do every day and then what do i do once or twice a year and so i wrote those out and i i love the this say so much i had my mom do it i was like mom you're getting old you gotta be having great days alright like you you know you don't think of yourself as an ambitious person but you should be like you've you've you've did all the hard work you raise the kids you worked your whole life like now you should just be maximizing joy i should also be maximizing joy this exercise helps me be maximizing joy and so now i'm basically just chasing architect my life so that i'm having that perfect tuesday as often as i can and getting as close to it as i can and same thing with the things i wanna do every once a week or once a month so i know it's a little bit convoluted but that's what i'm asking no i it it makes perfect sense i think get of every group of people on the planet entrepreneurs have to be the most neglect of the present moment like we're always obsessed with some huge goal we've set you know we're gonna build that company we're gonna you know launch this app and we kinda to forget about the days in between now and then you know like we just sort of neglect the present for the future done because the present is what life is made out of made of an endless string of present moments and so if you wanna have a good enjoyable life like you can't you have to kind of resist that entrepreneurial urge to only care about that if you just imagine like draw draw a line and that's the time of your life right and like let's say it's a year or ten years that line represents and then like you have this milestone at the end this goal at the end you're shooting for and you have two options either you say i'll be happy when i get to the end okay cool or you say i'm gonna have fun the whole way all along the way right like it's very obvious when you draw that line which of these diagrams is better the one where you have fun just in that dot at the end or the one where have fun on the every single dot along this line as this so obvious is nothing new it's nothing insightful everybody's heard this cliche i've enjoyed the journey not the destination like when i look at that diagram i'm like what the fuck who cares what that end destination is i want this like this line to be dope i wanna be i wanna you have having fun all the all the way especially if this line represents ten years of my life then like i gotta make that that happen and so that becomes the focus but i think the issue is like people hear this and it's almost like a cliche and that doesn't mean that it's wrong i think cliche is something that's smart enough that it became common advice you know it's about the journey not about the destination but it's still hard enough that people have have been repeating this for years and people still don't understand or follow it you know i think people hear this from a couple of rich guys like youtube and they're like okay yeah these for you to say but in their shoes they often see themselves as having to have this difficult ar journey to get to the point where they have enough money and then they'll use that money to have a good journey and do something else so like sean you are at this point where you can design this cool life for yourself in part because you have enough money that you don't have to go to a nine to five job ever again and so when you say this it's not like it's not easy for other people to follow that advice well so so so what i'm saying is what i'm basically saying is i'm not telling people don't chase the money i guess what i'm telling people is it's a false choice that you either you know you suffer till you have money or you have fun but you don't have money right there are plenty of examples and so if there is even one example that means it is possible there are plenty of examples of have fun have fun and make a ton of money that's a by product so if that's an option on the table you're crazy for settling for anything less than that if you're a sufficiently talented person right if you're if you're a talented enough person which most people are who are listening to this if you're sufficiently privileged and you have your faculties about you that is an option on the table you know have a shit ton of fun and make a shit ton of money both then choosing one or the other is a silly option okay so question for both of you what's your favorite example or story of how somebody can do that like if you're an any hacker right now you're just starting out you got nothing how can you do something that works and that makes money and that's also allows you to find process i give one yeah give me one alright i was at a friend's house yesterday and he was like thinking about starting you wanted to help kids start shit and i'm like basically i think that like if you wanted to if you were eighteen years old and you had a summer and you wanted to build a business that made a hundred thousand dollars a year i think it would be shockingly simple not easy it would be hard physically to just dominate yelp for a local service that would take you only like three to six weeks to like master so maybe trimming trees or something like that i think that you could probably crush it that way and make hundreds of thousands of dollars in a relatively straightforward non intellectually challenging low risk way i i think that that that most people could probably do that right i think it's low risk i don't think it's super like strategically difficult but also is that like fun like how many people really enjoy going out the hot weather and like trimming trees i don't mind like i just paid a guy eighty dollars an hour to come to my house off task grab it to power wash and he had like a rink ding two hundred and fifty dollar wash or whatever and i asked him what his plans were for the day and he was like i got eighty of these planned so i mean like and is power watching that like no know does anyone love it i don't know but it's kinda fun to like start a job and finish it and you could work outside in the sun okay i've got one this is a company another company that i found on hackers it's called high performers so the guy calls it masterclass as a service for pro athletes so i'm looking at this guy's timeline line his first posted is from november of two thousand and twenty he says i spoke to five pro athletes and i've got one of them to agree a partner with me and then he helped this guy as athlete credit course basically like a powerpoint presentation he created and he put it on you to me and then he helped this athlete sell the course to his own followers on social media and so now eight months later he's got this whole process on repeat he's hired a salesperson person to do all the outreach so he only has to do the parts that he likes like actually working with the athletes and creating the course and he's making ten thousand dollars a month basically just doing what he loves and just making money in the process and the idea is isn't even that creative i mean it's just masterclass for a niche i did this with there's this guy named ben oscar who's in the u usc and he's a an olympic wrestler and i was a fan of his i became friends with him on twitter he started talking to me about digital stuff because he didn't know anything about it although he was like had a huge following and i was like why don't you start a course he's like i have no idea how i was like dude i'll just call you once a week for like four weeks and we'll get this shit done and he did it and he's got a a wrestling course and so i total i didn't charge them anything i just wanted to become friends with him but i he would have paid he offered to pay me money so i i agree that that could definitely be a thing right and you literally did that for free i mean so that was just be as you i mean i it's different people have fun doing different things so i'll just speak for myself if i was twenty one again or twenty two or whatever and i'm like alright how do i have a bunch of fun and make a bunch of money at the same time what i would do is actually very similar to these guys who hooked me in sam up with our podcast like studios that they set up for us and they're crushing it right now so here's r twenty one by the way they were basically like hey we're big fans of the show right because they are friends the show i would be a fan of our show if i was you know yeah a kid again and and they basically reached out there they're like hey your guy's camera stuff like looks like shit and your sound kinda sucks sometimes like we're really good at this do you want us to come like help you out like i'll set your thing up for free just you know basically like pick a weekend nick next weekend the weekend after when can we come and set your thing i like tired to listen to you guys with crappy audio and crappy video and i said we're like okay and then they they showed us their youtube channel they're like here's my youtube channel i only have a ton of followers but just look at the quality and you'll see like would you like to look like this was like hell yeah and then he sent me a menu he sent me three setups he's like here you could look like this famous guy this famous guy this famous guy which which setup looks best to you and i was like alright fine come on out here and give me give me option c and he's like great we'll be there this sunday they flew out here they hung out they did the hard work they didn't ask for anything in return and i was like dude let me pay you guys like something like this is you know so so what would i get to do i'd i'd meet somebody who really like i'm a big fan of i would hook them up with something using a skill that's pretty easy to learn really like you know they they basically found some lights they drilled into the wall and then they like picked the right microphone they plugged it into the right slot and whatever they they just they did the setup and then they they followed up and they were just like you know already i was like dude i wanna i'll help you guys out i'll mentor you guys i'll hook you guys up you we want another opportunity what do you want and they're were like i we're just trying to figure out what to do and what they figured out was there's a lot of podcast like us out there that had really good hour long content and what they did was they had from from their own content they had doubled into a the setup where they find talented video editors basically oversees in the philippines or wherever else and they trained them on how to edit clips and then basically they have a business where they just charge podcast was like us tens of thousands of dollars a month yeah have you seen that have you seen rs cor yeah they look super i see them on on twitter yeah we pay them thirty grand a month they look super good have you put them on youtube yet because i've tried to find you on youtube now we or we suck at that part right now i forget but i guess my point is these guys are making a thirty grand a month just off us has one client right and they can make they probably can't charge every day damn much but they can have like twenty clients doing this and basically they're just doing labor arbitrage talented people in the philippines and then they're they're getting to meet like yesterday's yesterday is all in podcast which is like one of the most famous business podcast podcasts it was like the whole first half of the thing was all about these guys they said their names probably fifty times literally they said their names talked to like yeah this kid henry henry bell cast keeps sending us clips and and then we're in dms with them and like dude jury dm i mean henry bill cast what what why and he's was like yeah they do a great job and they're were like it was like a professional info commercial for them they've become friends with these guys they're hooking them up with great content and sure enough those guys started paying for it and and you know the next and the next these guys will be making one to two million dollars a year of profit if they play their cards right as twenty two twenty three year olds just for operating a like you know sweat up a video editors in the philippines right that's what they're doing i can't believe they pulled that off they told me that they're were gonna try and do that and i was like i mean they'll work and he's got bad it bad it kept at it they killed i mean that's the wide podcast editor did for me he basically kept sending me clips of my show where he had edited it edited the episodes better than i was editing them so eventually just what does that do that just three things right you get good at content creation because that's you're basically practicing that craft every day that's a really valuable skill to start compounding at or young age second thing you meet a bunch of cool ass people they're are highly at network they love they know you trust you and if you ever wanted to do a if you have a bigger ambitions that you can hit them up in one call you're you're no longer cold you're warm and then the and and they know you're good they know you're hustle you do good work and last thing is they're gonna make at least half million dollars probably close to one to two million dollars of profit off this business in the next couple of years that's you know you're a millionaire congratulations right you had a bunch of fun doing it so that's a per that's an easy example to me of something i would have done and i was their their age okay so if you distilled this into like a playbook that people could follow first you find something that you genuinely like and you take the time to get really good at it and then you look to find somebody who's like famous or cool who's not really doing that good of a job at that thing and you do it for them for free and they'll probably take notice because these are like hard workers who really wanna get better whatever it is they're doing and so they'll hire you or they pay for your thing and they'll probably mentor you and you can just repeat this playbook for anyone you like and make a ton of money in the process we'll also getting to absolutely here that's a that's a that's one path that that's one path that works through many that's one cool well that's a good takeaway to end the show on sam sean thanks for coming on can you let listeners know where they can go to find your podcast and whatever else you're working on yeah you can find our podcast if you just go may have to scroll all the way up to the top of the charts because we're pretty high up there now so just go all the way up to number one and then we're just below that so my first million in the podcast app store whatever follow sam he's the sam par on twitter i'm s vp and twitter sean free dot com that's my newsletter yeah i feel like i could rule to where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less travel never looking back