I feel like I can rule the world. I know where I could be. What I want to do we have here today the I would say you did both you did both you fulfilled the Brown man's obligation. You became a doctor but then you fulfill the dream in your heart and you became a content creator and you are now one of the most popular.
A productivity guys that people know on YouTube. This is Ali Abdul welcome to the Pod man. I've been watching you for a while. It's fun to have you here.
Thanks so much, and I've been a fan of the Pod for years. Now it hard to believe it's been years because I remember when you guys first started out and it was actually you know, how did you make your first million? I was like, well, what a great concept for a podcast and then teacher starting a podcast and everyone needs an angle and the my first million angle was just so good. I've been keeping up with you guys on Twitter and stuff for ages as well. So it's super nice to be here. You gave us a big shout out early on in our pie.
Cass I think you did a video where it was like 10 podcast that I like right now or something like that and no deal for us. That was when you go to those on my first million was still a small podcast and I was like, I've discovered something there's these two guys, like ask people how they made their first million incredible stuff.
I remember when I DM Sam the name of the podcast. I was like, I think I think about calling it this and he was just like it's so bad and I was like, I like coming up with my response because that it's perfect Sam. Why did you what did you think of this about it? What is that so bad?
That it's perfect. Well, I'm not particularly good at naming things. My company was called The Hustle. So I'm not good at naming things Sean. You're actually quite good at naming things, but it was for some reason it was it just I think that we've done a good job of appearing to be like internet marketing Shady almost like on the surface like when I go to the barber and they say what do I do for a living today? I want to cringe when I say the name
of the Pod, but then I'm like, but it's not what it
sounds like and so we I think it's a good name because it grabs your attention, but we've done a good job.
Of saying on the right side of I think like doing the right stuff and having good taste. That's Wednesday. I think I think it's a fantastic name. I I came across some occasionally people on Twitter like to hate on the clips on the podcast, I think because you guys are so open about talking about money and there was a quote tweet that I saw being like, uh, like, uh, you know, what would you expect from a podcast called my first
million? I was like
this perfect. That's exactly what you'd expect from a broadcast of caught my first million. I think that name is amazing. And yeah, I just love I just love how Brazen you guys are about to.
About money loved the Neil Patel episode in particular. You would just like asking him so specific
questions
such a huge fan of the show
you to this day I give him credit. He's the only guy that has a absurdly high life burn rate is burn rate for month was I think a hundred 180,000. It just said it matter-of-factly is like that's what I spend per month. Me and Sam fell out of her chair and we're like What are you spending 180,000 on and then he's like, what do you mean? Of course? I need that here. I need that is like, yeah, we ain't it.
Come on II
39 days my to housekeeper, like my all of that
stuff that takes a clip has like 10 million views because it's the whole comment section just hates of in that for saying that but I respect them for coming on here and stand it. He told his truth. What do the kids say? That's your truth man. You stood by your truth.
All right, everyone a quick break. If you're hustling in the trenches to build a business or bootstrapping your own. I want to talk to you about an AI power tool that can lighten up your workload. It's called Hub spots campaign assistant and it's a
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Interestingly just on the Neil Patel nut. I was at a mastermind that he was speaking at and I asked him a question because our business was doing I don't know 5 million revenue or something like that. And he was like man, why are you the info products business? All you can make with info product that's like 5 million you should be in the agency business because you can make a hundred million in the agency business and I was like, oh but like I want a lifestyle business. I want to chill out agency seem very stressful and he was like man, I probably work less than you. I work like four five six hours a week and I've got a hundred million dollar agency and then his
You know from the back of the rim piped up and I was like no no, hang on. Hang on Neal's bullshitting right now. Every we have 800 employees. We have so many people problems. He's stressed all the time. Like do not think that running an
agency as an easy business to be in just for the record. I love that and I love that
his CEO called him out because you do, you know our good friend Andrew Wilkinson and I think Sean and I are also victim to this as well where we oversimplify things and we act like it's it's no big deal. It's very low stress and
That's not the reality. I was just texting my friend Austin reefer runs morning brew and like morning bruised similar thing where on paper they're killing it on behind the scenes or in public either killing it and they
are killing it and it's so simple. It's just a newsletter. Wow. It's just a suicide idea. How hard can it be? Yeah,
and you know, we are bitching to each other about we're both saying how we had the sundae scary. So I was like, I've got to do this podcast. I got to prepare. I've got this meeting and that meeting and I got to go dude run this errand and I think that
It is not it looks cool. Just like your life Ali you're out your life particularly looks cool. You share your Revenue you're making profit. You're living a nomadic life. You've got a book coming out you seem well, you know, you're put together. They're all of our shit stinks and it's all a significantly more stressful and I think than it looks like
what what's the what's the hot mess part of your life? I
lie. The hot mess part of my life is that I generally don't enjoy filming YouTube videos, which is loved one of annoying, right? Yeah exactly.
Anyway, there are there are a lot of aspects about being a YouTuber that I really like and sometimes I enjoy making videos but I've made like 750 videos today. Try just speak to the camera and I've maybe enjoyed filming like 20 of
them and it's kind of weird because like
I love the reading the synthesizing the learning but when it comes to sitting down like, you know, I love doing podcasts because there's someone else on the other end and it's like there's energy it's more fun, but just speaking to a camera on my own like kind of depressing but hey, you know, that's that's the price to get.
Message out there and I do enjoy other aspects of the process. What else do you hate about it? You said that there you said there's a few things you like and there's a bunch of stuff. You dislike. What do you what else you dislike? I don't like doing sponsorship ad reads. This is going to sound like very like first world problems because you know a sponsor Dad read is I have to sort of stumble through my words doing it every which way the brand says that all you have to say the wording in this specific way and then I'm kind of like, yeah, it takes me 20 minutes to do like a 60-second Audrey just because of all this tumbling and stuff. That's that's that's going through there by the way our producer.
Uh, sir Ariana's our producer our he's like grimacing because it's Sean's actually pretty good with words. I Stumble but I also have sites our main sponsor. I use HubSpot. I like the product. I own the stock whatever and I still freaking hate reading what they tell me to say because they phrase it such a way where I'm like, that's not how I would say, I don't even know this feature existed. So like it sucks man, I'll do it'll take me an hour to do about five minutes worth of
reeds. Hey guys, it's cute for very reassuring waiting time. Yeah is waiting.
Because with the new sales prospecting tool it's like oh God. Do I have to you sure I have to say this or let's do this eight. I can do it. All right. Yes on the script the right read this word for word. Please do not change this one because like you have what we have some we get to improvise and stuff. We
don't or we'll do our read that it's like check out my first million, wherever you get your podcast, you know, I like yeah, like I don't even like going our reads Yeah, we actually switch to HubSpot like two weeks ago for all.
Or rather have started using HubSpot for our CRM because we never really had a CRM for our course sales and rev Ops and all that
stuff. Is that because it's true for and it's winning time.
It's Q4. It's winning time may actually like I did my first HubSpot add read yesterday because there are now sponsoring my videos as well, which is cool because like as soon as we switch to them, they gave us a discount on the package the sponsoring the videos the really good our love Hot Spot check out hot spot everyone.
I wanted to ask you about some of your productivity stuff because if I go to your YouTube channel, which I have
Many times and I'll be honest when I usually go there I'm like, okay.
He seems like like such a good guy like someone you'd want to be friends with guys like in terms of YouTube success. He's not the funniest. Not the sexiest. He's not the smartest. He's not the most successful guy on the platform, but you really win and you do really well and one of the things you do well is you just share very useful just useful things and I think useful is actually kind of underrated. So instead of trying to impress everybody. You just try to be a little bit helpful like a, you know, like a friend helping you out and you had this
List of productivity things you do. You probably have like 50 YouTube videos about productivity, but you did this Twitter list. I thought was really good which was how you are more productive than the average person and I want to read you some of these and I want you to explain what they are because I
didn't know by the way Sean for the record. He ranks pretty high unlike the sexiest. He's got the good London accent. He's a doctor like he's dressed nice.
He's eat at least two notches above average on all of those things. Yes, but he's not the most in the world right like like if I go under
There's some twitch streamers where I'm like, I understand why she's doing. Well this this makes sense to me why this would appeal to people on this platform right? I get it. Alright. So anyways, let's go back to your productivity stuff. So you have a technique. You called The Daily highlight. What is the daily highlight
one thing I would say before is it if we're talking about this stuff this thread that you're referencing was actually a bit of experiment. I did a year ago where I got chat GPT to write the whole thing before Chad. GPT was cool.
So the first two are gel and the rest are just pure it's all bullshit made up by AI a great after a few
days. I was thrown away your best work. I
had a few days after I posted the thread I did another thread talking about how that thread was a i generated and now it's not news anymore because everyone's doing this but like at the time people were like, oh my God a eyes taking over on jobs a guys taking over the world, but the daily highlight is legit. The daily highlight is a technique. Basically you ask yourself. What is the most important thing I need to do today?
And that's it. Like it's one of the by far the most simple productivity tips you could possibly have but it's so needle moving because so few of us actually Focus down on what is the most important thing? I personally like to phrase it as what's today's adventure going to be because my whole shtick is to really to be productive. You got to find a way to enjoy the process and even just reframing something in your mind as an adventure makes you way more likely to enjoy the process. It's so true like the we are all children inside and we can use all of these different tactics to make us feel good about the things that we're doing.
And Adventure framing is one of them. So that's the daily
highlight with my kids whenever I need them to do something or like walk somewhere to go do something. Like if I just say, hey, let's go over here. They'll never like there's wander around they won't come they I'm like, come on. Come on, let's go. But if I'm like, hey guys, it's a mission. We have to find your jackets before we go outside and I'm like it's a mission that it's a mission and then they get really excited and then yesterday by myself. I couldn't find my laptop. I was like ready to do some more cuz I'd have no idea where I put in my house and I just told myself Sean.
Shit and I got kind of excited I can live the third grade teacher technique Works Sam. Do you do this kind of one highlight? He says he calls a day the Highlight I call it the one big thing where I like to do. I have a to do list of one. Do you do something like that or do you have a long to-do list every day?
Look, I know it what the audience is thinking they think Sam your this wonderfully attractive man. You're so charismatic. You're so productive. The truth is is I actually struggle with this. I just have a to-do list. I keep a notebook here and I just like make my list.
In the morning and frankly. I find it very stressful and like not my productivity scheme is I find very unproductive what I believe and I actually think this is I believe Shawn might do this too. And I think this is actually may be wrong of us is I leave a lot of open space and I just kind of Follow My Heart of like what's going on and I used to tell myself. Well Paul Graham said it's the manager versus the Canadian artists. Yeah the maker schedule and it's okay to have open space.
Ace and I find myself getting really stressed when I have things to my calendar, but I found myself just messing around far too often than I should be
probably the manager scheduled to make her schedule and then the skater boy schedule a time just like we're doing around the house. You know, like what if Warren Buffett said we made a joke, but it was real Warren
Buffett says he just reads all day. So just read like fiction books and my cam productive. It turns out he's reading like annual reports. You know, he's working actually but no I find my I find my productivity scheduled to be pretty shitty and I'm actually wrote down the daily highlight and then
Next one you have is The Hourglass. I find some of those like little tricks actually helpful, but don't do anything. Do you
Sean? Why do the one big I call it? The one big thing? In fact, I had somebody build me a Chrome extension so that every time I opened a tab, it would say you're one big thing is and it's just a huge like text of what's the one thing and the beauty of this is what I used to do like I used to do a to-do list. And here's how you here's how I would do The To Do List It would be written down. So there's no particular order like I
Wouldn't rank it by like kind of most urgent or important. I would just sort of write down the things as they came to mind and then I would like it's like if it's a plate of food, I would just go for the french fries first every time so I would always do the thing. That's not actually the thing ideas for. Yeah, I do the easy one. I would talk myself into oh, it's getting the momentum. Then I would go on a tangent and I was just never get the important shit done and I would never finish the to us everything. I did would add stuff add more things to the to the to do list. I emailed this guy. Okay. I got a follow-up. He said send them the deck now I got to make
It make the deck. I got it. It's always always adding and it just was a source of stress. So I had this my coach my trainer. He said this thing to me he goes, you know, what if you did it a little bit differently. So, you know, like what's one thing where if you just had this one outcome of the day the whole day is a success whether you did anything else or not. Is there such a thing and if there's not then you're sort of like hunting mice you're just nibbling on little stuff. You don't have anything that's actually impactful that you're that you're striving towards but
If you have one impactful thing then that one thing should be enough for the day and imagine just doing the one most important thing every day for 365 days out of the year. You would outpace all the productivity nerds out there.
I've got these days I lie where like I feels like I was busy all day and at the end of the day, I've got nothing done. Do you know what I mean? Mate? I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. I feel bad at the end of the day. I don't feel good. Yeah, I find that that happens to me a lot when I have like the day chock-a-block with calendar events, and that's when
Find that like you know, as found said I haven't made time to do the one big thing the daily holiday Adventure, whatever the fuck you want to call it and just honestly just doing nothing makes such a huge difference to everything else because it's like you've hunted the big thing and now you can hunt the - if you really want to because like the small stuff does build up and it's important earlier send that email send the follow-up all that crap. But actually the thing is really going to get you to where you want to be is generally making big progress on that one big thing.
And by the way, it's not one big task. I don't do it as one task. It's one like outcome you're
In for like oh today, I'm gonna find the right person for this role which might involve be doing five tasks like go through the applications shortlist the best five email them and research them or whatever, right? Whatever. It is schedule a call with them. But like it's one outcome that you're going for. What's this hourglass one is as this for like timeboxing. Yeah. So The Hourglass one is
is interesting. So one of the things that I've discovered about procrastination from doing a bunch of reading and interviewing professors about this shit, is that procrastination
Is generally a problem with getting started with doing the thing because usually once you've got started like you have a mentor and then you can like finish, you know, it becomes a lot easier to sustain the thing once you've got started and so how do we how do we hack our brains into just starting a task and back when I wasn't traveling around the world digital Nomad and I would have a five-minute hourglass on my desk and I would be like, all right. I'm going to film the video for just five minutes and I turn The Hourglass over and I would genuinely tell myself. I'm just doing it for five minutes and then usually I'm into the flow of it and then the hour.
Last time is way gone, and I've I'm now into the flow with the task. But sometimes I would just do the thing for five minutes and it's just a little practical. I like I like physical things that help boost productivity because it's like yeah, you could set a timer on your phone. But then you see notification and Bob the phone is too much of a multitasking tool. Whereas literally an hourglass. It's five minutes is has one tool and that is this is the thing that stops me from procrastinating
that's fascinating. So you're saying that's a fascinating Insight procrastination is not
Putting off finishing the thing. It's I'm pushed putting off starting the thing and as soon as you start your light, you know your it's actually quite easy to just keep going and finish the thing for most people.
Yeah, absolutely the law of inertia. It's like if you're you know one I I still struggle with working out. But if I just get myself to the gym and just do something for five minutes and they're already I might as well keep going and it's kind of fun and I kind of get the endorphin rush and all that but it's that first step of I getting, you know going downstairs to the hotel gym or wherever I am these days. It's actually just lifting the
Twain that's by far the hardest part and that's the hardest part of any task is just getting started. I went to this like conference on Thursday and Friday Sean. Do you know Nick
Gray horse? I know Nick Ray. He's like, yeah the inventor of the to our cocktail party. There were there really wasn't why I tell he made
it Ali. Do you know noon? Have you seen Nick Ray? Yeah, we hung out in Austin a few months ago, right? Yeah. So he's a character. He's like a type of guy where you think you're hanging out with him. You're like, is this a stick? Are you just acting and it's not like for example
Wife and I got lunch with him one day and he goes. All right. I have a list of topics first. I want to talk about my dating life and then I'll at 11:24. We're going to switch Sarah to what you're doing at work. And then 11:44 say I'm I want to ask you an update on this thing like and it's like that's like his real life and it's like exhausting at first then you realize it's pretty wonderful to
hang out super intentional. He's like the walking equivalent of may I have a kiss? Yeah.
He's like
he's wild and for his 41st birthday. He wanted to host a conference. That's what he wanted to do. And so he convinced cloudflare which is a stock that he owns and he loves it. So that's why he did it there. He convinced them to let him have this 40-person event there and he had all these people come and is 40 people are so and we basically just went into groups of 8 and we would discuss a topic that was like, it could have been parenting and healed the parent who want it could been whatever and there was a bunch of YouTubers there. So there was Patty Galloway.
Who's a really fascinating guy and this other guy? I've met who I didn't know at the time. His name was Josh Wiseman because sort of Josh Wiseman. He's a chef the chef. He's a chef. Yeah, he's really incredible YouTuber like mine. Yeah. He's right Buzz. Yeah, yeah or more. I think it's like eleven million. It's a lot and he was in the investing one with me. So we're talking about finances and then I there's a bunch of other YouTubers there and it was first of all it was one of the best events I've ever been to I've met so many interesting people but second there was like maybe
birthday
Haven't you ever been to best best
41st birthday cards I've ever been to do there was this one time so Nick owns a bunch of cloudflare stock and he goes hey, I convinced a VP of cloud fair to come down here to meet me. He has no idea what he's walking into it. He goes when you
guys get here, I need you to start
cheering for him and telling him how much you love cloudflare.
And so this guy this like, he's the VP of engineering he just walks in and he think he's just meeting Nick and we're like, who is that the VP of engineering of cloudflare?
Tell us your mission and he goes, oh God
fares mission is to make sure the internet doesn't go down
and we're like, I believe and we're like screaming and cheering and he's like convince this guy and he never told the guy that this was a joke. So this day this
guy still thinks that we were there to like discuss how much we love cloudflare. It was amazing. But anyway, all these YouTubers were there and about half of them didn't first of all they're making so much money. I didn't realize it would be like a 26 or 27 year old guy who's making maybe 10 million a year. If I had to guess a lot of them don't it didn't
By the way, you want to know the craziest thing a lot of them. They're the biggest problem that they were discussing was like they kept a lot of their cash just in a checking account as opposed to like investing it because they were afraid to put it even into a high yield savings account which blew my mind of how many successful people do that. But a lot of them it seemed didn't run their business like a business. They ran it like almost a hobby but the numbers were astronomical making a million dollars a month I imagined but it seems like you're running your business like a real business and like you've hired like, I don't know 15 or 20 people. Have you seen this?
Of all these YouTubers were there just like it's like run like a 26 year old who's just creative as opposed to a business. Yeah. Yeah. I see this quite a lot. This is like the biggest thing I talk about when I hang out with other YouTubers. I haven't met many who are like 27 and doing tens of millions without treating it like a business that I think that would that the that's a very unusual state to be and by the way, I'm not referring to that guy Josh. I'm just referring to in general. I met people I don't want to like break any comfort in the other thing. Yeah. Yeah in general I find is that a lot of a lot of YouTubers?
They're creatives at hot and not business people at heart which is why they started YouTube in the first place and they have this Reliance on AdSense and brand deals in particular. Like I know I know good couple people would like millions of subscribers who are so stressed and kind of hate their lives because every video has to get a million views because if it doesn't get a million views than their brand deals revenues going to go down and they need that brand your revenue and especially entertainment YouTubers find it really hard to monetize off of the platform because it's not you can't just sell a course if you're an entertainment you like or you can do it.
Of course on how to do YouTube with your audience doesn't want any way. We thought yes Theory, you know, you guys know yes Theory, you know, 10 million subscribers. They tried to release a course about doing YouTube and the audience hated them for it and we released our course on like the same day about how to do YouTube We charged five times as much and our audience loved us for it. So it's like there's this weird thing where entertainment YouTubers in particular are reliant on brand deals and that's a very stressful existence and I think business is finding an operationalizing and stuff is like the way a lot of these guys.
Up. All right, everyone a quick break. Today's episode is brought to you by the hustle Daily Show. It's a podcast that brings you a healthy dose of irreverent off be informative takes on business and Tech news and let me give you some examples. So at the hustle used to do these Sunday emails where we would break down different businesses. And that's one of the series that the hustle Daily Show does my favorite one is they do this one on the Dolly Parton industry. So actually on our pod Shawn didn't even know who Dolly Parton was by the way, but Dolly Parton this amazing singer and she's built this huge business with an amusement park with songwriting with casinos.
And the hustle daily podcast breaks that down they have another episode where they talk about the real cost of Thanksgiving dinner and shocker. It's a lot higher than you think so check it out the hustle Daily Show, wherever you get your podcast. All right back to MFM. There was this one guy there who had this big audience and he said we were talking about cancellation like getting cancelled for saying the wrong thing particularly with Israel and Palestine going on and like taking a stand and do you have to that was like the discussion and this one guy was like I've basically created an audience that's going to cancel these.
I'm in the near future. I don't know when but I know it's going to happen and like that. It was a really stressful stressful life. He seems like he had he's like they're going to like I'm their monkey at the moment and I'm dancing for them, but they're going to come after me eventually and it seemed really stressful to be living that life.
Yeah, I'm pretty stressful place to be I know what about one of my big things is all about like treating clear treating treating the crater thing more like a business because like almost no one that I speak to actually treat it like a business and I think if you do learn if someone's listening to this in their creator, if you learn like the basics of business, like what is an sop and reading books like the e-myth and traction and things like that you end up with like oh shit. I can apply all of these principles of business. Okay ours and kpis and shit to my YouTube channel.
Channel and therefore I can like oh, I can use a CRM I can use HubSpot. I can drive sales to a product. Oh, that's cool. And you get this whole new skill set which then serves you for the rest of your life, but also really benefits your YouTube channel or whatever. The thing might be. Well, let's put up on the
screen on YouTube your you did this. You're very open about much money you make and you show your Revenue year by year. So 2017, you did two dollars and 27 cents, which was your AdSense for every when you got started, but then it goes
130,000 so I want to point out here you're now three years in and you were a doctor. So you're in three years basically making less of what a kind of traditional full-on doctor would make I think you were like in your whatever the UK version of residency is some version of that but then 20 and 20 20 you jump from 130,000 up to 1.2 million. What happened there in that jump was that you released the course?
Yeah. So we had that was when we had a whole year of releasing classes on skillshare.
Which made like I don't know 500k that year for me. That's one. Okay, and we release my YouTube course which was about how to be a part time YouTuber which is not at all what I'm known for like I should have released a productivity course, but I was like nah, people keep asking me about this YouTube thing. Let me just make a course and it was the pandemic live cohort courses were all the rage then with building a second brain and rite of passage and all these other cohort based courses. So after speaking to tell go for 10 David Pearl who ran these courses they basically talk to me and to charging loads of money for a life course.
And then that became like it was meant to be a bit of a side Hustle but it ended up being the majority of our revenue for the next like three plus years and that is still the cash cow that funds the entire business basically because more than half of our Revenue comes from this this one course, it's now Evergreen and we've got like a service-based offering on the back of it and like a higher ticket thing on the back of it, but just randomly this idea and a coffee shop of like, hey, let me make a course about how to do YouTube has now just like transformed a business completely. So that was the big jump from like 100 kg and
130k.
8 to 1.2 million than 4 million in 2020 14.6. I think that was the last one. I saw in 2022. I think he finished a little higher than that maybe and you're profiting, you know, the profit margins were very good. So would you read 1.2 million in Revenue? Your profit was 950 queso like incredible profit margins. I don't know that it has roughly 80 percent or something and then you know, you've done two to two and a half million of profit the last couple of years. I'm curious of two things one.
Why do you think your course hit when so many courses fail or just failed to get get the same type of traction? Is it? What do you what do you attribute that to hmm?
Why not cause head I think we got really lucky. We got really lucky with the timing in the pandemic and the thing that I would tell myself the thing that I would do differently is just spend a lot of time crafting the offer like at the time hundred million dollar office haven't come out. I didn't even know what an offer was. I'd never read a book about marketing. I'd been on like Russell Brunson and Neil Patel's email list since I was like 13, but always thought there were bits Kami and I was like what? You know, what could they possibly teach me? Like, you know, it's all just scummy. Click fun.
Bullshit and so when we first made the course, I think we got very lucky but just the fact that it just happened to hit at the right time when the course made real money was the final cohort after I'd read a hundred million dollar offers.com secrets copywriting secrets and we've revamped the entire landing page the entire offer the entire product purely based on the advice of what Russell Brunson and Alex Formosa have written in their books and just literally following the step-by-step method and that was when a single launch of the course did like two million in a week, isn't that hilarious?
Various I went to the the exact same thing where I'm like Russell Brunson Neil Patel scam and then I like start reading their stuff and I'm like no this kind of scam at all. Maybe I think a lot of scammers consume that stuff and implemented but it's definitely not it's really helpful stuff. Yeah. It's incredible stuff. When I first read welcome secret. I was like, I can't believe I've been sitting on this for 15 years. Like I should have been reading all the Russell Brunson stuff from day one essentially the before-and-after was before when I was selling a course. I was like, oh
I'm making a course and then selling the course. Is that right? So like what? How can I just explain what the course is? Basically it was like a very sort of unsophisticated way of doing things. I didn't have any formula for writing a landing page of just like I think maybe they should go on at me. I was just sort of making shit up as I went along and two years later when I read 100 Mendel offers in.com secrets and explored this world of marketing a little bit more. That was when I realized hang on people have been selling courses online for like 20 years plus at this point. They've got a Playbook they've done all the testing and
And one of the big mindset shift was separating the offer from the Fulfillment of the offer. Like the thing that people are buying is the offer and the offer needs to be a grand slam offer to the point that people feel like they're a dumbass folks saying no to it and then you can always worried about the Fulfillment
later and this is the there's
something weird about separating it into those two of like Okay, cool. So now when we're when we make a course, we just focus on the offer. We're like Untold the offer is amazing and the landing page is amazing. We're not even going to bother creating the course because like what's the point and the creation of the
Will be sort of based on what the offer is based on like, you know talking to users and talking to people in our audience and be like hey, what do you need to know about productivity and then just following a formula for like funnels in terms of like upsells and down cells as per the Russell Brunson method and there's a really good book copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards He's like one of Russell's like acolytes and that's really freaking good and I was like, oh the headlines really important. The subhead is really important shit. This is the structure of a landing page. You should talk about the users problems. Okay, let's just do that and we did that and
And that you know final code of course did like two million in a week and I was like fuck. I wish I'd done this earlier. So my issue with the thing I've read all those books to and I think they're awesome. My issue that I've always personally challenged struggled with is like for example in Alex from OC's book. He was like for Jim launch or whatever business he had he was saying like, you know will prove that for you spend 40 Grand with us and then you make a hundred fifty thousand dollars in additional Revenue like will somehow prove that and if you don't you get your money back.
So he was like you gotta make it yours irresistible. So of course you shouldn't spend 40 K. You'll make 150k and I was like, yeah, that's that's irresistible. But I got to figure out how to do that and that's actually quite challenging. I mean it like it was hard just to come. I mean I could make a landing page sound amazing. It's actually quite challenging with the course. It's a bit easier because it's a sometimes a one-time purchase and you just have to like be like, well, here's just the information that I've got to give them.
How do you bridge that gap between fulfillment and promise? Yeah, this was another big sort of before an ultimate
beauty of it. You
don't that's when your team's values is just fuck up. Yeah, exactly one of the big insights from from home. Oh home. Oh, these book was this idea of like what? What's the dream outcome? Like, what is the actual thing that you're selling? And I didn't really I didn't really have a
A sense of this when we launched the course initially and I've been selling courses online since like that 2013 or something and I just never had a sense of what is the actual thing that we're selling? What I realized after reading. The books is with our course. They are YouTuber Academy. The thing was selling his time was saying we will save you time and that is all we're saying we're not saying we're going to make you money because that's what we cannot fulfill on that promise because like YouTube channels like very few succeed people have to put in the work all that crap, but we can absolutely save you time and as soon as we changed all of our messaging to hey, we just save you.
Ooh time if you value your time, you should take our course because we've done all the work. Yeah, you can control the internet and find all this stuff for free if you want if you really want to but if you value your time join our cause because will save you time saving time is a very easy promise to fulfill because obviously we're going to fulfill it and massively over deliver on it. And also we have a 30 day money-back guarantee. If someone doesn't like it for whatever reason we literally just give them their money back because we don't need the money. So those two things we save time and we give you your money back. If you don't like it that gives us all of the conviction we need that like actually this is a really fucking a product because we are not
Hey will make you
money.
Do you
have a so the business is going? Well, I think in your latest video you're living. You said you're living nomadically. Now, you said you're going to do 5 point something million in Revenue. What's do you have like a like a North star where you're like, I think the business can get the here like, is there a world are you one of these guys who you're like, I want to get to 50 hundred billion dollar business. Do you have an ambition? And what is it and what businesses are you going to launch to get there? Yeah. My question. I actually don't and I
love to get your guys take on this my North Star is
when I'm dead and people are speaking at my funeral. I just want them to say I wasn't I was a nice dude, but be that my my my stuff helped them in some way like help them live a better life or like I taught them something or something like that. Like my whole North Star is how do I continue being able to learn synthesize and teach forever? So I'm super inspired by for example people like Tony Robbins. He's got his downsides but like the cool thing is he's been doing this stuff for 47 years and millions of people around the world. Say his stuff changed A Life That's
Be cool. Tim Ferriss have been doing this stuff for like nearly 20 years and a lot of people around the world would say he changed the life. I would say Tim Ferriss changed my life. That's pretty cool. So that's the North Star. It's like, how do I just it's I think of like, once you're playing your infinite game, which is why I'm playing right now, like the only objective that makes sense is to be able to continue playing the game. And so I don't have any Revenue goals. I don't have any profit goals be AA. I have a bit of a profit colleges. Like let's just make as much profit as the year before at least please but beyond that I'm I'm not shooting for
10 20 50 million hundred million. We are building like a SAS product on the side that I'm a sort of co-founder in. You know, I like hearing the ideas that you guys come up with in the podcast. I'm subscribed to Trends just to see is there anything interesting that I can I can come up with here, but honestly for me the main thing is, how do I just keep on being able to make content write books make videos do podcast whatever whatever formats are going to come along in the future to be able to teach and so being being a good teacher is my North Star. So hopefully that's simply to challenge me on that because I don't know if I'm
Shitting myself what I think you're deathly tell yourself a story but we all tell ourselves that whatever the answer is. It's a story that one sounds like it serves you pretty well. So so keep it I would say, you know, it is probably worth worth questioning like if I just asked you
What would be a more true answer
I think will be more true is I love teaching and if someone offered me an easy way to get to 10 million, I wouldn't say no to it. But if yeah, so there isn't a million.
Yeah, the funeral thing I think is the part that smelled like, you know, where we borrow from others versus what's actually true in our core. Like what makes us want to do something. I personally have never been very motivated by like my actual funeral. I do think it's a good signal. It's a good side effect of a life well-lived.
But it's not something I would get excited about is like I'm going to do this because at my funeral they will this will be remembered you know, that sort of thing. Whereas it sounds like what you really have said is you love the learning part you like the teaching part you may not actually liked the format you teach today, which is like YouTube videos you kind of admitted that you know, you'd like to maybe 20 of the 700 videos you enjoyed making those but you really enjoyed the research at the learning part that that resonates with me. I remember we did.
Did a set of interviews in La where we try to book bigger name guest Mark Manson and Brian Johnson. We booked all these guests and to do it. I was like, okay, I'm gonna do the best job. I possibly can I'm going to research like as deep as I can go on all these people and I wish I did I went like I spent basically a two or three full days researching each of those people. She's been two or three full days researching somebody you have a PhD. I have a PhD in Mark Manson are like I have fully researched it like I win found. He was like had this pickup artist Alter Ego back in the day and I
Read all his stuff and then I read his first book that nobody even talks about models rather than the subtle articles are great book read all of it. Right? And so
then and I had so much fun doing it. I didn't do three days because it needed three days frankly probably needed three hours, but I got into it and I could justify it because I had this big interview book that we put the studio so I could justify do whatever the hell I want. And so I indulged myself and just went further because I was enjoying it then came the actual interview and he's a great guy interview turned out fine, but it was like a seven or eight compared to that fun. I had in actually like going down the rabbit hole myself and actually trying to learn things. It sounds like that might be true for you to wear the 10 out of 10.
Learning of the seven out of ten is recording the content for YouTube.
Yeah, I think for me the the the learning is 10/10. I think teaching and real life is also a 10 out of 10. I want to go back through my life and think of the most meaningful moments like I quite enjoyed being a doctor, but I enjoyed it weigh more when I had a medical student attached to me or who I could teach along the way and you know on days where I didn't have someone I was teaching I would kind of be looking forward to going home so I could make YouTube videos but on days where I did have someone I was teaching alongside I do.
The time would just fly I wouldn't be thinking. Oh, you know, when's the day going to end I'd be thinking fucking love it. This is so fun. So I want to do more like live seminar life teaching E-Type things next year. That's something we've got in the pipeline
my therapy and of my therapy session for you is I think the actual Northstar should be if the you're learning is a 10/10 today find a way to turn the teaching into a 10 out of 10 and then you've won right? Because then you're literally just doing the shit you you truly enjoy and the infinite game you could do that forever. I
also think Ali that like
So my bullshit detector was going off when you were telling me what your goals are because I think that you can have multiple goals. So I think that I think that I believe what you're saying about how you how you want to be remembered and all that but I think that it doesn't sound I think it sounds like crew to say like well, I would like to hit 10 million in Revenue Maybe by year 8 or whatever and I think that maybe you didn't say that because it sounds crude but I think that that's perfectly that's a wonderful goal. I think that like
I quit me personally I think of this business thing you're past the point where it you have security. I think that it's the same way that when you're exercising, you know, you're like I want to run a 5k at this time. I'm not going to be devastated if I don't do it, but it's just a really fun goal to chase after and I think that's the same with a lot of business stuff, which is you want to net worth by this age or you want your business to hit this much in revenue or profit or users and I don't think that you need to stake your personal or your self-esteem or your personal.
Worth on it, but I still think it's exciting like when it's like man this new SAS thing. I'm working on maybe one day this could make this much in revenue. And if it doesn't it could still be awesome so long as I enjoyed it, but that's just exciting, you know, like it's an exciting thing to shoot for or and I think that's okay to admit that but it's for some reason it seems like you didn't want to
yeah, I don't know I'm
the thing that excites me is is again that this could just be a sort of the story but it honestly is that thing of I just want to learn and share cool stuff and that focus on the process focus on the things that are in my control has led to that like this the score takes care of itself when you focus on the things that are on that are in your control.
Let me ask you question. You have this story about your the first business you ever launched and you were 18 years old.
And it didn't go well tell the story of this thousand dollar business that you had when you're 18 years old what happened? Yeah. So this was
from from like age 16 to 18. I was doing some like private tutoring. I was teaching people how to do well in maths and science exams and chair and I saved up about a thousand dollars and then I was like, okay, I'm rich now I can buy my first Apple product. I was like, yeah can find it funny for another product. And so I went out to try and find a MacBook Air and I bought one of some dude on
East but it turned out after what had transpired that he'd sold me a model that didn't work and it was really old and I was a dumbass so I didn't realize that he was selling me a kind of a dead a dead MacBook. And so this thousand dollars that I spent like years of my life working every week like hours of private tutoring like $10 an hour to get to this thousand suddenly all that disappeared and I was like cool. I need to find a way to recoup these losses. I need to find a way to build a business that allows me to make this money back. And so I still have the Evernote file from 2012 when
I was 18 when that happened where I was like, okay. What am I good at? I'm good at teaching. I'm good at med school entrance exams. I know how to make websites. So let me build a business that combines all those things and that was my first business. Like I've been trying to make money on the internet since age 13, hence why I was on Russell Brunson and Neil Patel email list since then, but that was the first business. I made that actually succeeded where I had the strong desire to do it and found this combination of things that I was already good at and then that business would like 10K or 100K you 250 K 3 and actually sold that business a few years ago to go full-time.
I'm on the YouTube channel, but because my YouTube channel originally started off as content marketing for that original business, which was teaching courses of how to get into med school. I've probably I don't know in total YouTube channel and all the stuff around is probably done over 10 million Revenue. So my thousand dollar loss which was like felt life-changing at the time has now transformed into like a 10 million kind of upside and I feel kind of like that's kind of cool like at the time. I thought to myself I'm going to find a way to turn this thousand dollar loss into a
Good opportunity and that was when that first business really really started and took off. All right everyone, it's Sam. I want to take a quick break to tell you about something. So the other day I got this tweet and it says when the going gets difficult, I just listened to MFM and things feel doable again, they normalize success and happiness and it helps me so much. I think that is the reason why a lot of people listen to our pot and I think the reason listeners feel this way is because me and Sean we spent so much time getting to know people who have achieved things that both we had.
Meyer and you The Listener have admired and it helps us see behind the scenes of how things are done. And that's why I started Hampton. It's a peer group and Community for startup Founders that have similar size and type of companies. You're put into a core group that meets monthly with other companies like you it's amazing because you get your frame broken tons of times. You think there's one way to do something one way to feel about something and then your perspective is completely changed on a regular basis. We also host hundreds of dinners and Retreats and other events. So if you're the founder or owner of a fast-growing company check it out.
Join Hampton.com. All right back to the pod.
Sam have you ever had that have you ever had like a big L? Let's turn that what felt like a big L in the moment that turned into a w
my whole thing was a like just growing up where like my parents controlled money and where it was like you're not allowed to do this or you know, like when your parents say like well if you're living under my roof you're going to do this and I there's been many times where I was like at a very young age. I was like, all right, fine money equals power that and
Basically everything that I've done since then has been because my parents probably because they said no to me a handful of times and I said, all right, then I'm going to be completely free and money is one way to achieve that freedom the yeah, I mean it all stems. Basically every great business person. I think probably stems from some type of childhood trauma, whether it's your parents selling, you know, or you see your mother be poor or you get scammed out of a
MacBook.
When we sold it velcroed, I asked the guys I was like man you guys have been they just been to a different businesses for so long and they pretty interesting track record. Like small wins big wins like that. And I was like, what's the driver because like, you know, once you if you Bank a hundred million dollars in you're still taking risks and starting businesses like you're not doing it for the money. I don't believe and I was like, what's the driver or what's in these? Like, I don't know what it is. Now. He's like what for a long time. He's like both of them had the same story and it wasn't like this wasn't on the pie.
As wasn't to look cool. This was like us hanging out and he said it matter of fact these like this girl rejected me when I was like 14 years old and he's like, I think I literally felt like shit and I was like, okay like I don't want to be rejected again. How do I make myself awesome and he's like, I didn't know what the answer was but immediately started a bit like, oh I'm if I'm if I'm okay at this, I'm good at this. I'm gonna become awesome at this instead. And so he's like, I was good at like the internet making website stuff like that and I just like went into
Overdrive and he's like the other guy had the same stories like yeah, I lived this. He's like I had six friends and in college and they had we wanted to live off campus together and they got a house that only had five rooms and I was the odd man out and I was just like fuck these guys. I'm gonna okay, I'm gonna go live in my by myself, but I'm gonna like I'm gonna go into the hole and I'm going to come out a different guy what
serves on because you seem like you've had your act together. I mean you seen emotionally stable.
Yeah. I've had a few things like this.
Really not like not like some huge disrespect or nothing that was that aware of but I do remember like I remember hearing this story. So I went to this got in this random accelerator that don't even exist anymore. It's called the mass Challenge and they used invite these speakers in is in Massachusetts. And one time I was at this this event. They had and Ben from Ben & Jerry's was there.
And he told the story about Ben and Jessa that the starting story of Ben & Jerry's has all these like interesting funny things. He started off being like yeah. I met Jerry because we were both like in PE class and I was like, you know the people like do you guys get along right away? He's like no, but we were both the fat kids. So like we would have to run the mile every day and we were just walking at the back and like first we didn't talk for the first two weeks to finally was like, all right.
Sup, man, like you know, what do you again? And so they became friends that way and he talks about like, you know, they start this they take this five Dolly hit one of them was trying to get into med school and he failed the entrance exam five or six times in a row. So like, you know, he basically for several years couldn't get into med school. And so they instead took a five dollar ice cream making course together and that's like, you know part of how they learn how to make ice cream for Ben and Jerry's so they open up the shop and it wasn't like pints like you see today. It was a shop, but it was
In Vermont in the freezing cold winter and so they're about to go out of business like in month three because nobody wants ice cream when it's already snowing outside like a blizzard outside. And so they you know, they there alright. What do we do? We're screwed. So what do we do? And they had this camp with this promotion is like this long acronym like nine letters long and it stood for one cent off per degree celsius under, you know, freezing or whatever it so you got like 12 cents off if it was 12 below freezing and so they
They and that like that promotion was funny people liked it. So they like came in like pity them and basically bought a little ice cream took them through the winter. So then they were like still struggling and they started the strategy of like making pints that I go. Let's go to restaurants and give them the pints because otherwise just going to melt here nobody's coming to our shop and eventually they get into corner stores and they start selling and finally the business is working and they're like, oh my God, this is great. We sell we sell pints to these corner stores and they sell our product for us. This is a good business.
And then one day like this stop getting orders from like a whole area in where they lived and they were like what the hell happened. They go in to talk to the store owner. They said guys I didn't want to tell you this but you know, I got word from a big ice cream. He's like what he's like, yeah Haagen-Dazs came to us and Haagen-Dazs, which is owned by Pillsbury Pillsbury sent us. This letter said I don't know who this Ben and Jerry is but like you need to stop selling their stuff only sell Haagen-Dazs or we're pulling all Pillsbury products from your shelves. He's I can't do that.
I need my crescent rolls. I can't do that. I can't do this guys. I'm so sorry. And so the guys are like shit we're screwed, but they had this value which is I turned the disadvantage into an advantage. And so there were like, all right, how can we use this? And so they created this whole campaign called what's the Doughboy afraid of and they would put a print these like posters that were like the pint of Ben and Jerry's with the giant like do Pillsbury Doughboy hands about to strangle it and it would just say what's the Doughboy or
a dime and then on every pint of ice cream they sold they said we're under attack call this number to hear the story about what's going on why Pillsbury is trying to put out your favorite ice cream brand and then they recorded like an answering machine that would just tell the three-minute story and say like if you think this is screwed up by these stickers and buying a pint of ice cream just so you know show Pillsbury, you won't you won't be bullied and eventually the New Yorker takes the story and you know, Jerry standing outside of pillsbury's a headquarters by himself picketing as if he's a protester and
Take this picture. They run this in the New Yorker and Pillsbury has to like completely back off because it looks terrible for them as a you know, as a brand to be doing this and secondly a whole bunch of people found out about Ben and Jerry's I didn't know about it before because this story was a lot more interesting than just here's a cool ice cream brand started with these two hippies and Vermont. And so then they exploded and sales into that they became successful and I remember hearing that and so everything that would happen in our first business like we were, you know, 20 years old basically trying to start this music and everything that would happen we get rejected.
Or get a cease and desist letter or whatever. It was. We're like, this is our Pillsbury moment. All right, what's the Doughboy afraid of how do we flip this and so very quickly it went from like anything. That was bad. We got height because there's like this could be our story that were telling someday and that just became like embedded in my mind. And so I almost don't even remember the individual like kind of like rejection moments because it was all like, all right, how are we going to use this to go viral? How are we going to use this to to our advantage? And that's just like, I don't know.
I've been doing it for like 15 years since
by the way Ali welcome to my life. So I asked on a question. He tells me this amazing story where I'm totally enthralled. I was into it. He does such a good job of telling the story and I'm like, I don't know what to say. I'm interested in.
Yeah, I like it's all down this little bit of like, I remember what I asked but like yeah, what
else you gotta keep telling me tell me another time. I want to
learn for you Ali. I want to learn about titles. So I think that one of the reason your horse
Does so well is that it's not called, you know how to be how to be famous on YouTube It's called The part-time YouTuber Academy and part-time. I think just appeals to a whole different segments of people and I always think about these choices because when you see the title what you don't see is the 50 other options that were considered and I think about this with like your entire Channel like I go to your YouTube channel right now.
And I will say popular right? You know, some of your titles are just really good how I type really fast all caps and then 156 words per minute or how I ranked 1st at Cambridge University the essay and your the thumbnails you're holding up like this notebook that looks like it's got you know, the secret instructions inside or my evidence-based skincare routine. So even though I said you weren't the most beautiful guy you got good skin and you but sank my evidence-based skincare routine.
Is so different than just saying my skincare routine. I'm curious. What's your method to Madness? I'm getting good at titles or how you come up with the stuff. Yeah. Nice.
We think a lot about titles what we found basically is that the only thing that allows us to predict the performance of a video is just the title. It's not even a thumbnail some people like thumbnail below and and educational Channel my thumbnails look broadly similar. It's very rarely the thumbnail it just tends to be the title if we know that if the title is good then by default
Content is going to be at least reasonable and useful. That's our main thing is like is this useful? And so the video is going to fly or Flop based on the performance of the title. How do you have any title will be
good though, by the way, that's the same offer separating the offer from the delivery of the of the offers the same principle, right?
Exactly. It was the same thing for the buck. You know, it took like about 100 iterations to land on feel good productivity as like the thing we had I've still got my Apple notes followed would like hundreds of style options trying to get at this idea of like being productive in a nice fun. Joyful sort of way.
Way and the title actually came to me in the shower like two years into the Journey of writing the book on just on that note. One thing I would do differently. Next time is any future books that I write I would make sure I've got the title nailed before trying to write the book because the title informs the concept and the hook which informs everything else and there was so much like surgery we had to do on the book once we came up with that title to be like Oh, okay. That's the title. So now let's reject everything in the book to make sure it like matches the promise, you know the offer the title and the thumbnail of
Of the book, but when it comes to YouTube videos, we just do a lot of iteration. He's like, how do you know a
good title from a bad? Like when you're when you're trying to decide what what are your obviously it's just a judgment call over time you get a bunch of intuition. But is there anything you do or anything that led you to be better at
titles? Yeah, we do a lot wait, we have the strategy that we cutely called viral replication, which is a by the way you grow a YouTube channel is by getting a viral video and the easiest way to get a viral video is to just copy the title of another video that's already.
Gone viral. So a lot of our best titles have been just looking around on YouTube sometimes within our nation sometimes outside of our Niche and looking at the view to subscribe a ratio of that particular video. So like back in the day, I saw some guy made a video like how I use my iPad as an engineering student. I was like, okay interesting but that video had like two million views and the dude had like 20,000 subscribers like, huh? That's that's interesting. There's something about that title that's really popped. So I thought how our use my iPad as a medical student sounds cool. So I made that video and
It was the first video on the channel that went viral. They've got over a million
views all sigh, huh? Yes, that's what billion views and it's how I take notes on my iPad Pro in medical schools that the one
yeah, that's the one and that was the third year in to my channel. Yeah are using software to help you do this or you just browsing web browsing we using vid IQ the Chrome extension, which shows us the subscriber count of the channel just next to their name because otherwise you have to click on it and see what the subscriber count is. We've also now started becoming more sophisticated with A/B
NG titles and thumbnails so we use thumbnail test.com which is made by one of our Twitter friends to just test the shit out of the back catalog and that generates a bunch of free views basically every day because we can refresh an old video that's like three years old by just giving it a new title or any thumbnail. There's a lot of like repeating that process over and over again before landing on a title. We often have like twenty titles to choose from and sometimes if we're really not sure well like test it on Twitter and on Instagram and on YouTube Community post will say hey which of these four
Phil's would you be more likely to click on and often there's like a clear winner and well, okay cool. Let's just do that and we make sure we don't even think about writing the video until we have nailed a title because obviously I like the the framing of the title and thumbnail radically informs the way you can do the video.
Our producer by the way, I just sort of look down. She's like taking notes on how we can improve our Channel. What's the what's the software that you're fooling around with because I bet you've seen a lot of interesting craters logical businesses. I bet you've had a lot of opportunities run by you. Why did you sell this one? And what is it? Yeah. So this is what actually launching like this week. It's called voice pal and it's like a voice notes meets a i transcription meets converting your voice note into
Summary, which you can then turn into a tweet thread or a LinkedIn post or a journal entry or whatever you want. It's not launched yet voice paldang me for whatever people are listening to this. It will have been launched by then. This is an idea. I've kind of had floating in the back of my mind partly. Thanks to listening to your guys's pod for a few years, which is that
creators have a massive distribution Advantage, but do not know how to make products product people know how to make products but really struggle with distribution So in theory, if you can combine those two things if you can Parry creator with a product that fits Their audience nicely now you're winning because the product makes a product and the creator has a distribution and so partnered up with a friend of mine has a second time founder. He's exited like to well third time found out he's exited to companies and he was like, hey, we should totally build some cool productivity software together and I was like, yes, we absolutely should.
And so the first idea that we're launching is this thing called voice pal, which is like you record a voice note and it transcribes it and it can turn it into whatever whatever you want. And we're trying to figure out like the messaging around this like double your productivity using your voice something to that something to that effect, and I'm going to be launching this week for our thousand beta testers and I'll post it on Twitter and Linkedin and then use that to her and hopefully we'll just get those thousand people very quickly how much in charge. Yeah, we're thinking like $10 a month initially. We've already got like 20 paying users from the alpha.
And family test that we did where we sort of found 30 people to like 20 of them are like super super power users and almost all of them converted to paid when Pablo the co-founder reached out to them to be like hey, would you like to buy Early Access to this and a lot of people are using it already for like journalists and like lawyers and stuff for like recording depositions and things like that bunch of people are using it for journaling as well. So one thing that I'm really bullish on is like, you know to your point about wouldn't it be cool to get to 10 million Revenue. I think the way we get there is I don't try and
Through content, but we try and get there through building cool software products on the side that I can that I use personally that I would like our whole fucking love a journaling out the does this I'd love it to do list app that's different to things and to do this by doing the think that's smart and then we plug at our audience. I think that's I think II think I would agree with that theory of you're not going to get to where you want to go by doing the content Revenue itself. Have you guys seen the app opal? So it's opal .s. Oh, it's like
no
man. You guys got to check this out. So opal .s. Oh, so it says
find your focus make the most of every day with the world's greatest screen time software. So the problem with iPhone software is that you know, like the screen time thing. You can just click like Bypass or whatever so somehow these guys made it to where I can't bypass so between 8:00 or 9:00 and 6:00 p.m. I cannot go on social media on my phone and they've done it in such a way that like, I literally can't bypass it and it's like $120. They've got a crazy amount of reviews and I think that
What I think is going to happen is I think I think there's already a lot of these but these like screen time Focus session app apps I think historically have done pretty good. So there there was a few ones the past couple years. There's Chrome plugins for this but this one in particular is the only one that's stuck with me. I don't I have no idea who these guys are. This is like a promotion. I just I just thought it was cool. I could see launching something like this. I think they charge $200 or $300 for a lifetime license.
And then a hundred dollars a year, but I really like like if I'm you I would look at what are the most what are the best apps out there for productivity who's spending the most on advertising and how do I acquire a small part of their company or launch something similar because I don't have to my margin will be their advertising budget. Yeah, that is like exactly the way we're thinking. We're sort of thinking of it as a sort of barbell strategy where there's a couple of companies that I've invested in to get like a
All Equity stake in the company rise is one of them are eyes Eddie. They're like another Focus time tracking you type thing that I've been using for like two years and so the weigh-in we invested in them, but we invested sponsorship dollars. So like however much it was like for sponsorships worth of investment into the company and it's great because I use it everyday. I love it. It's easy to recommend and when I say I've invested in the thing is some people like, oh he liked he liked it so much. He actually invested in it. So that's for a small Equity stake. And then on the other side of we're trying to do these sort of co-founding software.
Duct for like a 20 or 30 percent equity stake. So I'm trying to try an experiment with both but I'm particularly bullish on like building our own shit because I think that's where I get to mold the direction of the product in a way that personally suits me and one of the cool things about that is like well what I love trying to find is apps where but apps where I can share a screen shot of the thing which promotes the app without it looking like a promotion. So, for example, whenever I duel workout I use the app strong and I just screenshot and post on my Instagram story.
We'll always get like dozens of comments being like what app is that right? I love with me because I'm like, this is an app. I don't own and it's really good. But if I did own the app strong or a workout tracker and I would just posting screenshots on my workout. No one would think I'm plugging a product. They would think oh, he's sharing screenshot of this product, right? So I'm always looking for these organic promotion opportunities that don't look like they're that they don't look like they're like another one is scriv Scribner. Is that what it's called? I know you love that app that writing app, which I think it's just like a guy in like Montana or something like, you know a little bit
And I'm like that who owns that writing tool but you should acquire stakes and these businesses or launch some of their own and I think you'd be very successful at that. Yeah. Yeah. One thing I've been thinking a lot is that with a lot of these productivity apps they tend they tend not to be differentiated on the product itself, like fundamentally all to-do list app to do the same thing. And when you watch reviews of them, it's like, oh well things 3 has slightly nicer animations and todoist has like teams and
One is available on iPad. So you should get that. It's like the the product features that differentiate these are so small. So if we could in theory just clone one of these we're in our own way in our own design language, whatever and we've got feature parity on the product side. We will have a distribution advantage and the market for these productivity apps are so huge that like, you know, a few users would be pretty good how many users to let's say if you owned Scribner opal how many users could a handful of your videos Drive do you think?
Probably thousands to tens of thousands based on what the users are for that we drive to like skillshare and Brilliant and these are there like this pansori type things. If there's a do resonate with the audience then yeah, there was a time where Sean brought up some company that does accounting or his taxes on the Pod and then afterwards he asked he'll II don't think Shauna you didn't have any hidden had no stake. He was just like I just met this guy and it was cool and I ended up using the product and it was interesting. Here's what it was.
And then he like hollered at them two weeks later and was like you see a bump and the guy was like raving, you know, I don't know what numbers I'm allowed to say or not. But Sean you could decide if you want to say it or not, but it was like a substantial sum. Yeah, and then that
calendly was booked out like four months or something. I don't know if they didn't have a lot of slots or what happened. But like that was that was great for them when that happened. Yeah,
but then we both had a light bulb moment and were like, yeah.
Oh there's
something there, you know.
What I mean now, of course, you have to pick and choose which ones you do and you can't do too many at one time. You probably should only do one at a time for a certain amount of time. But yeah, like we had that same moment as well. So one thing that we did was we so we've recently launched our prison a few months ago a studio called Hey friends, which is like a done with hunger and sahil. Yeah with Hunter Tylo. Yeah, because that UVA you guys work with them as well and one tweet for me and yeah, just like one tweet drove.
Two million, mrr. Was of leads that they're still like going through the sales calls and like trying to shore up capacity because there's so many honors 14,000 mrr. Was only more. So wow. Okay, that's a shell of a like literally a hundred hundreds of people that sign up for a fourteen thousand a month sales call and of like shit like we can only on board like one or two people a month because we need to hire editors and script writers and all this kind of stuff and it's just like one tweet and Twitter is the isn't even on any platform. But I guess it's why people with people the people like you guys are more likely to read a tweet of mine then what
A video. So if I'm like, hey, I've got this 15K a month YouTube is a service thing. It's like that draws so many leads and we're like, huh? That's interesting Sean. And I asked Tina we did this thing. I think two years ago Sean. We're maybe you know, maybe a year ago where we were like, okay, so we understand how there's these billion-dollar business is built on Instagram that's been done a maybe a couple times with the Kardashians and a handful of other people. It's very possible that it's happening or has already happened with YouTube, mr. Beasts and
Whoever, you know, there's many more that have built businesses that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even more on YouTube. It hasn't happened yet with Twitter and our prediction was like this is going to happen more and the reason it's going to happen more is because a there's a business audience on Twitter a bit more than those other platforms. And so you can sell higher price things and be the conversions quite high. So like I don't know what the click through rate on your video. So how many people click a link to your products it probably is less than 1% on Twitter. It's not crazy that to be 5% at times.
Three post a link in five percent of people click it and were like, wow, we could just drive way more traffic to a website. It hasn't happened yet. I think it's in the process of happening. Hopefully Sean and I and a couple of our friends are in route to doing that. But I think it's going to happen in the next five issues here in Twitter
famous. Right? Like I can I can go on YouTube and Instagram and I know like, oh, I don't know who Charlie d'amelio is, but I know that that's a person that's Tick-Tock famous like started on that platform got huge on that platform has a huge fan base on that platform. You could say Dan.
Darien and others were doing that on Instagram on Instagram first came out and on YouTube you had, you know, whoever the tons and tons of people mr. Beast and others don't even know who that would be on Twitter who the hell is Twitter famous
like the hill. Maybe it's not hell's
our friends. I hold up most Twitter famous guy out there that make that's the biggest like no fastest. I he'll sounds great but like shouldn't it be a famous person like you should there be like the whoever, you know, like like, mr. Beast is like massive PewDiePie was massive. These were like,
Massive massive creators who is that on Twitter? I don't even know like is there and I'm on Twitter all the you I'm I guess you are our friends. I don't I don't know. I can't be the thing. I think it was a really why does it not have that that's insane and needles
are really depends on what audience you're going up like normal people have never heard of style Bloom. The only people who have other people who are in our sort of like business. Yeah, that's some sex alone. See
ya, you know on Instagram it was like beautiful people went there were the mass-market famous people right? And then
On YouTube. It's like the funny vlogger Types on Twitch. It was like winter is in this Fortnight player in the world. All right for that super popular makes sense that ninja super popular. Dr. Disrespecting these guys shroud whoever I don't even know who those people are on Twitter who is like, is it Elon? Is he the only guy who is like or train us on Twitter? Oh, yeah Trump like there's some fun. They're famous. They were him is off Twitter, which is why they're big on Twitter. Like is there anybody who's this natively so good at tweeting that they just got huge because if not something is
Broken about this platform.
What's not broken by point is its small its small its how many people how many users is Twitter have I don't know three or four hundred million. It's yeah. Yeah a fraction compared to what the other platforms have. So it's just small and also its text based. So it's a little bit less exciting. So like and you don't exactly see like the view count like you do on YouTube. So I see Ali's video that has six million views and I'm like, oh many other people know this person. I'll see you at we just randomly through my my feed and I don't necessarily more one to one versus one two,
They so I don't know that other people's art people are consuming it, but that's okay. It's know it's there is no famous people but that's okay you I think you could still build a big business because there's people like Ali or you or my on there who will spend more
money Twitter's like 20 years old. It's not big now. It's never getting big like this is a 20 year old product. There's 300 million people like who's more than 10 million followers. They're like who is not already famous like trumpet Elon take them out that has more than 10 million followers organic. I don't know like I know this video account that got
popular right? Like that's insane to Me Maybe. It's like a couple. Yeah. There's maybe some of these like crazy. You know, like if Jerry took like is there even like an F Jerry type of account on Twitter?
I don't know. I don't think
so. There is somebody who knows just yelling at the podcast player right now. Like why aren't they saying blah blah blah
obvious. So we're all friends with the most famous guy on Twitter style plume.
Yeah congrats dwarf amongst midgets. Yeah. That's basically what's going on here, like well and the only reason
he's famous is because he's Indian so he has a billion potential fans and he's ripped. So he's already gonna attract all the dudes by the way. It's never women that are attracted to the rip dude's always other
Men like me who see a rib guy and he like talks about productivity. So he's got this whole other angle. So he's like this. He's a he's a triple assassin.
So he's he's he's he's super hot also like the yeah using combination of these accent British. Our London
accent in was founded all proper. He's got it all he's he'd be a he had everything.
Thanks for doing this man the name of the book and what does it feel good productivity? It's coming out in January or December 26, right? Yeah, December 22nd feel good productivity. It's about the more velocity with the way. That's right actually build meaningful sustainable. Yeah. Yeah. I did. You not know that most gifts are bought literally three days before that shit for the product. That was that was this whole like astrology that the Publishers did when they were like well if we go before Christmas were competing
With cookbooks and like celebrity Memoirs and those are often gifted over Christmas rather than like self-help books. But if we go just after Christmas people are on a new year new me kind of thing. So maybe that's when it will hit. Okay. I'm not sure how much of this was astrology versus like actual data, but I mean, they seem pretty switched on so much. So maybe there was some data behind it as well in your cover looks like an air table spreadsheet the cover we okay here is the thing with with these sorts of books that they're the reason Atomic habits were so successful is because it was picked up by the demographic of women.
In the 30s in the midwest apparently which is like by far the biggest demographic of people who buy books and especially people who buy self-help books and it really hit that crowd like sometime in the pandemic so kingdoms of the world like win a bunch of a bunch of ladies named Kinsey. Yeah that kind of thing, you know, it was stupid. And so the publisher was like look productivity is to Bro e we need to have a cover that will be a bit more gender neutral feel a bit more like and a fresh and inviting and you know, that's
productivity is like in
my Alison abdal good point. Yeah about right
but that's why the covers are like bright and colorful. And so that's also my vibe. I like Ryan colorful. Well, the landing page is beautiful. It looks good, man. You're gonna kill it. Congratulations and all this. Thanks man. Thanks for thanks for giving us a shout outs and and will will have to repay you in some way when your book comes out and we'll share it. But we appreciate you coming on and we'll wrap up here. That's the pot.
I feel like I could rule the world.
No way. I could be what I want to put my all in it like a Days on the Road Less Traveled never looking back.
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