Hormozi Teaches Me Everything He Knows in 90 Minutes
You probably recognize this guy, Alex Hormozi. He's known as the $100 Million Man, and he's probably the most popular business teacher on YouTube. So last week I flew to Vegas and I asked Alex to teach me the things in his new book, Money Models. Ah, how to make money. Thank you. Yeah. He says that this one concept has made him more money than anything else in his career. How would we improve our business? By thinking in money models.
So let me walk you through the actual economics of this. If 10% of people buy something that's 10 times expensive, you double your revenue.
So the classic upsells, you can't have X without Y.
You can't have a burger without fries or whatever, right? It's like, you can't have X without Y.
I recorded the whole session and I wanna share that with you here today. All right, if I reset your bank account and your followers, change your name and face, so I reset you to zero, how long do you think it would take you to get a million bucks in your bank account?
Well, having lost everything twice, I'll tell you what I did.
What do your haters get right?
He's off on the road.
Let's travel.
You got a new book.
If I read this book and it's gonna start a little campfire in my head, what's gonna happen from Money Models?
You will love this book if you liked Offers. And so a money model is a deliberate sequence of offers. Many businesses have more than one offer. And so it's how do we sequence those in the right way that accomplishes a financial objective. And so the financial objective for this book and what I try to go for, for every business I have, um, is something that I've always called client, client financed acquisition. And so the reason that we've been able to scale—
One user pays for the next user?
Yes. And a slight tweak on that, which is so it's 2x CAC plus COGS.
Okay.
So this is our— this is the big thing that we want. So it's basically gross profit in 30 days. So I guess I could move this over here, but it doesn't matter. Gross profit in 30 days is greater than 2 times CAC plus COGS.
Let's just explain the terms for people who don't know. Yeah. Gross profits. You're not talking about overheads. In this. So gross profit, CAC, cost of customer acquisition, COGS, what it costs you to deliver the product or service that you deliver. And what you're saying is my bar, my golden rate, my golden number I'm trying to hit is I want to take the cost to deliver the service and get the customer, double it, and in 30 days I need to be hitting that number. That's my goal. Whether that came on the first offer or what you're saying now is the second, third, fourth thing I sell them along the way, along their customer journey.
It's exactly that.
Can you do like a stupid tangible example?
Yeah. So the first business I ever did this in was the gym business. And so it's a a really simple example. Everyone gets it too. So when I came into the gym business, what the vast majority of businesses did is they would run low ticket, like $21, 21 days, or they run a free month or free 14-day trial, whatever. That was the primary way of getting people in. And so let me walk you through the actual economics of this. And so if you have a business, let's say Old Way, right? Someone comes in, let's say you pay whatever, $10 a lead, that's your CPL, cost per lead. And then you can convert, let's say you're getting, you know, 20% of these people to to start a trial. So that means that it costs you $50 to start a trial. And then 1 out of 3 of those trials, which is the industry average, convert. And typically the conversion for like a bootcamp or something like that is going to be about $99 a month, right? That's, that's what it costs. And so your CAC. Yeah, exactly.
Here's the first 30 days.
Exactly. And so you're, you're upside down here. Now, not only that, it probably took you 2 weeks to like before between when you like got the lead before you got the trial and then 21 days. Now you're 5 weeks. And so by the second month, now you're like, okay, I got $99 times 2. Now that doesn't even take into account that like that $99 is not all free. Like there's costs involved there. But let's just say that these guys are amazing and they're running 100%, you know, margins. And so it's like, okay, so this is going to take 60 days for this business to basically recoup the money. Now, the problem is that in the gym industry, especially, many customers leave within 4 months. And so it's a very tough way to make a buck. And so what I kind of came in and started doing was we'd run these challenges and I'd spend the same amount of $10. I'd have the same— you were here when you started started your—
you did the same model initially?
No, I saw people doing it. I saw people doing it. And so then it was like a 3-step permutation. I like, I don't even want to tell the backstory, but basically figured it out, tried it out at a gym. It worked at that gym. And then I started my gym. That's basically what happened. So, uh, same, same cost per lead. I would close the same. I'd get 20%, uh, of these businesses. So it would cost me, let's call it $50, whatever. Um, to— for me though, I would off of that $50 I would sell up front and I would make $500 because your $500 offer was— yes, a challenge. So you win your money back. So if you lose X amount of weight in X amount of time, we get your money back. Now that was the beginning of the offer. That's an attraction offer. So it's one of the offer types I talk about in the book. And so it's like, okay, I got $500, but we didn't stop there because what are you going to do after you have your, your thing? Well, you need some supplements. It's like, all right, so then we'd— 48 hours later, we'd sell $200 of supplements, call it, you know, 80% gross margins, whatever. It's like, okay, so I get $160 plus, plus $500. So now I'm at $660. All right, great. Now on top of that, it's like, all right, 3 weeks in, it's a 6-week, 6-week deal. I would then say, hey, I'm going to roll this towards a 1-year membership. And so boom, we'd roll that over, which is another mechanism that we use. And so then I get the 1-year, 1-year member. Great. Now at week 6 or between week 3 and week 6, we'd make a second offer and say, hey, you're already a member. Can I just save you some money? And they say, sure. And we say, hey, if you want, what we can do is if you just prepay for the whole year, we'll knock, knock 2 months off. And so then all of a sudden I get about 20% of people to prepay for the whole year, which is a $2,000, $2,000 cash upfront, which if it's 20% and we add all these together, I'm getting about $1,000 upfront in the first same period of time that these guys are getting $99 or $199. And so my ability to outspend them in a, in an auction-based based on attention on like Facebook or Google search or whatever, it was like unparalleled. And so because of that, I was able to not only outspend my competition, but because it cost me— like if you're actually doing LTV to CAC on this, cost me $50 to make $1,000, I'm getting 20 to 1, 30 to 1 upfront. And so I was actually able to finance the opening of all my locations that way. So I could spend $5,000 in ads and make $100,000 back and literally paint the walls, put the lobby in, buy the equipment. And by the time I actually opened the gym, because I do presales for a month or whatever, I would actually already be cash flow positive day one without actually having to invest capital. And so fundamentally, I will continue to tinker. And this is where I got spoiled or whatever. Maybe my belief set changed is that this was the first model I ever had. And so every business I've had since then, I was like, I know there's a way if I just keep tweaking it until eventually this thing will print. And then when that happens, you don't need the outside investors because you cash flow getting customers. And so you basically almost like every business I've had has been supply constrained. Because I can blow the doors off on the front end because I can acquire customers. And so like, this has been the skill that's probably been the largest, you know, contributor to my material success. And like, Allan went from 0 to, you know, $1.7 million a month within 6 months. Gym Launch went from 0 to $2.2 million a month in 20 months. Prestige Labs, 0 to 1, 1.5-ish in 6. And so like, each of them just very quickly just ramped because I could get customers at a profit. And when you look at the actual, like, where the mechanics of the money happen, as soon as one customer comes in, right, one guy comes in. Now, if he gives you that 2x CAC plus COGS, then it's like, okay, well, I've paid for him and I paid for the delivery, right? But he comes loaded. He's holding this guy by the throat. He comes loaded with my next customer. Right. And so but then this guy brings me two more. And so basically you keep doubling.
He comes loaded.
Yeah, exactly. And so then at that point, you literally only have to acquire— you have to have the cash or the wherewithal to acquire the first customer. And then everything after that is, is financed by the, by the customers. And the greater that discrepancy, the more you don't have to even put more capital into the business at all. And so that was a very long— as, as fast as I could say it, that's, that's the, that's the, that's what we hope to accomplish, the good money model.
All right. So a lot of people will talk about how you need $1 million and 3 years of experience to start a business. Nonsense. If you listen to at least one episode on this podcast, you know that is completely not true. My last company, The Hustle, we grew it to something like $17 or $18 million in revenue. I started it with like $300. My current company, Hampton, does over $10 million in revenue. Started it with actually no money, maybe $29 or something like that. Nothing. And so you don't actually need investors to start a company. You don't need a fancy business plan. But what you do need is systems that actually work. And so my old company, The Hustle, they put together 5 proven business models that you could start right now today with under $1,000. These are models that if you do it correctly, it can make money this week. You can get it right now. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now back to the show.
I want to break down a couple of things in here just to, because I can, first of all, this is great. You know, in, I come from Silicon Valley, in Silicon Valley, uh, virality rules all. Yeah. And, and they, they, you know, the early growth hackers, in fact, there's a book called The Viral Loop. The guy, my mentor, the guy who, who kind of plucked me when I got to Silicon Valley. He's featured in that book because early on he was like scraping Hotmail and he realized, wait, I have no marketing budget, but one user can get me the next user through this thing called the K-factor.
Yeah.
And then you measure the K-factor, it becomes like, this is how Facebook and other, other businesses grew. You've created a version of the K-factor for, um, non-tech, uh, businesses that are not gonna grow virally, but you can grow, you could finance the next customer through, through the existing customers. I wanna point out a couple of important things. So the first one was, this is what— this is kind of book one. So this is, you know, your $100 million offers book. Yeah. And I would— a key difference here for any entrepreneur is that you're able to charge $500 when this guy's probably honestly struggling to even charge $99 a month. I drove by a place here that was like $5 entry offer, the Las Vegas Fitness Club or whatever, because you were not selling a gym membership, which is a cost to the customer. You were selling a transformation promise. Yep. Right. So you're selling customer transformation, the happy ending. So first of all, what, what are you actually selling? That was a key thing. The second was you were then upselling, upsell one of your money model. Yep. And you had a good insight here in the preview your team sent me, which was basically that you want to sell where the customer pain is highest. Can you talk about that?
Yeah, I, I'd love to talk about this. So basically, I think so many people, businesses, etc., get they think about that, especially services, because 78% of businesses are, they think about they have a term that they deliver for a customer and they typically want to renew when they're about to stop getting paid. Right. Which is typically the absolute worst time to try and renew.
It's like an ex-boyfriend.
Hey. Yeah, right.
I'm back in town.
Yeah.
It's like, oh, I guess I'm on month 11 of my annual trial.
No, exactly. And so there's basically 5 times that you want to sell a customer. So number one, I'm just going to move this. Okay. Number one is immediately, right? So that's like in the same conversation. The second one is after basically some sort of activation point. Next you have your halfway, just because like you're like, why halfway? Because it's halfway. And that's why it works.
Because we're humans.
Yeah. You have your last chance at the end and then you have milestone. Which is, which can happen kind of anywhere in here, but basically they have something occur. So this is something they do. This is something that happens.
So the action item for a company here is map this for yourself. Yeah.
But if you're like, okay, well, which of the 5 do I do? You want to sell at the point of greatest deprivation, not the point of greatest value. Sometimes the point of greatest value and the point of greatest deprivation occur at the same time. Not always though. So I'll give you my simple example, which is like if I go to the best steakhouse in the world, and I have a steak and I'm like, this is amazing. And the waiter comes back and says, hey, would you like another steak? I'd be like, I'm good. And they're like, what, you didn't like the steak? And I'm like, no, the steak was great. They're like, why aren't you getting another steak? I was like, I'm good. They're like, well, if you, if you like the steak, you'd get more steak. And the thing is, is that so many businesses are trying to sell and upsell that way. They're like, my customers suck. They're so cheap. It's like, no. So at that point, I might have a, I might have deprivation around something that's sweeter and lighter, and that might be the right time to offer dessert. Right, versus more of that other thing. Now, the deprivation occurs at the same time as value creation when the first loop of value that gets created creates the next problem. So if I help you get leads and you get leads, then you're like, holy shit, I'm overwhelmed. If I say, hey, would you like me to help you work those leads? Then it's a very natural upsell where greatest value and greatest deprivation happen at the same time. If you are a business that doesn't have that type of I'll just, I'll just speak broadly. If that doesn't occur in your business or on a short enough timeline, then that you, you don't want to sell at that time. Right. And so that's basically what we strive for. And that's why I've always been of the belief, like when someone comes in with red hot pain, that's when you sell, not when you offer your trial.
Right. And so for, let's take— you can use the gym. We can use a different business if that maybe, maybe that'd be nice. Yeah, sure. If you can. What would you either, you know, either marketing or a money model? Well, you know, you can either walk through a money model or you can walk through this for another business. Let's do another example.
Sure. Let's say you have an SEO agency, whatever.
So if you— actually, we can use one of my real businesses. Yeah, sure. Okay, so we have this business somewhere.com. We basically help you find talent that is overseas. So we help businesses where you're like, I really want a developer, but I'm not trying to pay $150.
Did you ever invest in that too? Yeah. Okay, got it. I thought it was—
okay, got it. Yeah, so we own this business somewhere.com. So for example, I got my assistant through this. You know, I'll hire developers, graphic designers, data analysts, whatever you need. There's talent is everywhere in the world. Hard to find. They put boots on the ground in different locations. So South Africa, Philippines, and they have hundreds of recruiters in each of those areas to find who's the best 1% in each of those locations to come work for you this year. Amazing. Right? Great business, great margins. Love it. Love this for us. Happy owner. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so now what's the problem? So today the way our money model works is customer basically listens to Sean's podcast. So we'll just do this. Or they follow Nick on Twitter. Yeah. So we get leads from one place. Exactly. Not exactly fully, but that's a bulk of it. And they come in, they book a call, and on that call we try to sell them a contingency-based thing which says, if we find someone, pay us a fraction of their salary. Now they're so low salary typically because you're getting talent from different regions of the world. That will come out to, let's say, you know, maybe $6K per customer. And what we do is that happens and then we stop and we go fishing again for the next one. Yeah. Okay. Help us with our money model. How would you— if I took— if I read this book and I want to go help Nick improve this business. Yeah. How would we improve our business by thinking in money models?
Yeah. So the question would be like, Do we need— so if I'm looking at this, right, we have attraction offers. So it's like, do we have a big demand issue or do we have an LTV issue, which might be upsells? Do we have a conversion issue, which might be downsells?
All of the above. Everything can be improved.
Or do we have a continuity thing, right? And so there are different structures that lend themselves more to one versus the other type of problem, right, that we're trying to solve. And so like for an attraction offer, if you're like, you know what, let's get a shitload more, you know, phone calls in the door, I would say, hey, I just got this absolute savage. And I would be like, this is the dude. All right, this guy is a fucking guy, whatever. Now, who here wants him? And I would say the business that like we're going to do a raffle and everybody who, who submits to win this guy now obviously got to be ethical and loyal, but assuming that you're not a fucking idiot, right? Uh, this is, this is the guy that you're going to get and you have to be a business that's like this in order to qualify. Cool. So they're going to enter their information in order to get in the raffle. So they get this guy. Now you're going to say, we will pay for this guy for a year as our, as the deal, as the big giveaway. Not only is he amazing, we'll also pay for him for a year. And so that makes a huge, you'll get a gigantic amount of demand. But what's beautiful about it is that the demand is for your most expensive or ideal product. And so then at that point, the person, like every single other person who opts in is a qualified lead who say, you know, we can't give you Carlos, but we can give you so-and-so and you, we'll give you a partial scholarship, we'll give you a partial win, whatever. And you knock whatever off, 10%, 20% off, and then you roll that right into the continuity. So that would be an example of an attraction offer that you could attach to that existing thing. From an upsell, downsell perspective, it would be like, and there's 5 different ones. That's just one that I pulled out.
List.
That's a giveaway.
We write giveaway.
Yeah.
And we'll write Carlos.
Yeah. And so like the, just for everyone's just listening, the weight loss version that I had was something called win your money back, which is a different, was a different mechanism. Right. And so there's, there's 5 different ones that I think that work exceptionally well for bringing people in. Depends on the type of business. And so for yours, there's buy X, get Y free. There's a bunch of different versions, but like think this makes the most sense. Cool. We'll use a giveaway. All right. So then upsells and downsells. So, um, with down— so I'll, I'll start from down sells. So you can have feature down sells, you can have free trials, you can have payment plans. Now for your particular business, payment plans doesn't probably— that doesn't really make sense cuz it's a continuity thing anyways. And so it's like, okay, we have free trials, which you kind of have with contingency. So it's like that part's— that risk is kind of, um, averted. But from a down sell perspective, they might think, okay, well I can't afford 6. Now that's a business decision more than anything. I like to think of feature down sells. So I can get you somebody who's maybe not as PhD level, whatever, but we can do it for $3K a month. And that person might give you more opportunities to say yes. That would be the downsell component. From the upsell perspective, there's, there's 4 different upsell structures that I like. The classic upsell is you can't have X without Y, right? Which is like, you can't have fries, you can't have a Coke without fries, you can't have a burger without fries or whatever, right? It's like, what? You can't have X without Y. And so it's like, you don't want to buy this big, you know, this big framed art without insurance, right? So there's always a you can't have X without Y.
And so the, So for here, because they said yes, naturally you say yes to this next thing. Exactly. In order to make your first decision an even more sound decision.
And this is why the whole deprivation thing that I was saying earlier is so important where like right now—
like supplements. Yes.
Because some people are like, well, I don't want to sell them something else. It's like, well, you just created this new problem that they weren't aware of, which you will now make them aware of, which is, oh, sometimes these guys flake out, whatever. And so we have insurance that we can offer for this type of thing. So me just shooting from the hip here, I was— I'm running through the different—
Easy one here in this situation is payroll. So great. A lot of companies are not set up to pay people all around the world. We can manage that for you.
Yeah.
And we'll do it for you for $500 a month. Yeah, we'll take care of this because you're going to— you're going to build out a remote team here all around the world. You don't want to be doing compliance and payroll and foreign exchange tax reporting. Yeah, we take care of all that for you. We have— we have an accounts team that does that.
Perfect. And so that would be the natural upsell that you do. You tack on. And so some people— and I'll just make this point. A lot of business owners will think, well, why don't I just include that in the main offer? So I'll just say in my experience, it's a lot of times, as, as bad as this may sound, it's easier to get the second yes after you get the first yes. And so like, it's like, well, maybe if I included that, they'd buy at $6,000, $7,000 a month. It's like, yeah, but you might also just raise your price to $7,000 a month and then do it again. Right.
And then still have it.
And so because I mean, the amount of gyms were like, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to take the challenge system and then just include the supplements. I was like, or you could just do it the way that I've already tried 100 times. Like, believe me, if I could sell more upfront, I would. It works better this way. And I had this whole psychology around it, which is like, you have these different wallets in my mind. It doesn't work this way, but like, it's like my grandmother used to say this thing, like, I would go there and probably like your family, like, overfeed. She'd have, she'd have enough food for 10 people when I go and see her on my own. And I would just, she would stuff me to the gills. And one time I went there with my dad and she, she and I have different languages, so she's tough to talk to. But she said something under her breath after she walked away, after I was like dying. And he cracked up. I was like, what did she say? And he said, well, you said you were full. And she said, well, your, your, your main stomach's full, but your dessert stomach is empty. Yeah. And so it's the same idea here where it's like, well, their person wallet has been spent, but their, their tax avoidance operation— what a pain in the ass— isn't. And that one's still full. So we can still tap that one. And so if we're, if we're drawing this, it's like, okay, So we've got payroll as our upsell. Cool. And you'll know your services better than I do, but it's like, okay, so we have 1 or 2 things that we can include in the upsells, but the mechanism of doing it is part of like part of the Money Models book. And so the X without Y, the way that we probably present it. So each of that whole section is a lot more on the scripting of it.
Okay.
So it's like, hey, what a lot of people do is they do this. You don't want anything else, do you? And so when you say that, everyone says yes by saying no. And by that it's like you get 80, 90% take rates on the upsell. Rather than saying, hey, do you want— it's a binary, it's a different question, right? Now they have to consider a purchase. And so all of them have like tiny little repositionings that work really well. But that I think would make sense. Like you'd say, that's the classic upsell. There's rollover upsells, there's, which is one of my favorites, there's anchor upsells. Which an anchor upsell would be like, let's say, you're like, okay, if you want, Nick will go find the person for you. I'm just making it up. Right? And he'll do it for $15,000 upfront and, you know, $10,000 a month. Now, at that point, they're like, shit, it's like, that's a lot. It's like, or if you're good with the exact same work being done by someone that Nick trained, we can do it for one-third the price. And it's like, oh yeah, that's fine. And so the key part is that you anchored them to— the anchor is part of it, but there's also like what you want to anchor. And so the way I learned this was actually at a Salt Lake City suit place. So I go in, a friend of mine sets up a private suit appointment with me. Now I'm not ballin'. I have like $10,000 to my name. So I was like, he's like, you got to have a boss suit if you want people to take you seriously. This is many years ago. Obviously, I've really listened to this advice. And so I go in there and the guy's like, all right, I'll get you. He asked me, what do you want? I said, a boss suit. And so I'm 23 or 24, something like that. And so he puts this suit on me and he's like, what do you think? I was like, oh, I look awesome. And then I, I looked at the tag and it was $16 grand.. And I was like, I think I turned white, right? And I was like, and I think he saw me like, just like freak out. And he's like, hey, he's like, do you care about the brand? And I was like, no, not at all. And he was like, I got you. And so he— the thing is, is that he had his lineup already picked for me and he just pulled the second one, put it on me. He's like, what do you think? And I didn't even look in the mirror. I just looked straight at the tag and it was $2,000. And I was like, thank God. I was like, okay, I can like— my friend's not going to be embarrassed that he sent this his poor, you know, his muggle, his non-Mag folks over, peasant. And so anyways, I ended up checking out and then he was like, well, you can't have this without that. He was like, well, you want to make sure that you have the little pocket thing and you want the socks, whatever. So I ended up leaving for $2,500. And I remember after I left, I was like, I spent 5 times more than I had budgeted for this thing. And I realized, I was like, oh, but the key part wasn't just that there was something expensive. Number one is that you actually have to sell it. I said, because sometimes people put anchors, but they don't really like commit to the anchor. If you just say it and then immediately like don't even acknowledge it, then it's just like, this is this thing we put in the sales process. I don't know why it's there. That's dumb. You have to commit to it because the thing is, is 10% of the time you have a whale and they'll fucking buy it. You're like, holy shit. But the other 90% of the time, the key is that the thing that differentiates the anchor from the core offer is a very negligible thing. And so for me, the brand didn't matter. Or like, he might be like, do you care what kind of wool? This is, I'd be like, I don't fucking care. Now somebody might. And the reality is they probably don't actually. They just always buy the most expensive thing, right? Like Layla just always asks what's the most expensive thing and then she just buys it. That's how she rolls, right? She just always wants the best shit, you know, whatever. But the thing is, is you wanna have a model that allows for that. And if 10% of people buy something that's 10 times expensive, you double your revenue. So it's still worth it. And that, that's why the anchor should be super fucking high. And so that's an example of a different type one. But this one, uh, is a, is a classic upsell, which would be positioned the way I said, which is a, a no-based, a no-based yes. We covered the downsell with a feature downsell and then continuity. Now you already have a continuity business, so there's no real point to like saying how do we, how do we do that? But one of the like, there's different mechanisms that I use in that on that side. But one of my favorites is like something called a waive fee. So this works really well with expensive stuff. So we would say, hey, for us to go find this person, it's, it's $10,000 upfront, or I can waive it if you commit to a year. And so you just waive the fee, but you get the commitment. And, and the thing is, it's like, oh, if you're not sure, then just pay the $10,000. You get month to month. No sweat. And so with that also, you say— and we would stack it. So we'd be like, okay, we're going to waive the fee. We commit to a year. And if for some reason doesn't work out with Carlos, we'll get you, we'll get you another Carlos within 90 days or whatever. No, no cost. And so then it's like the— so you, you decrease cost and you decrease risk with the continuity and commitment. And we create artificial pain in the moment. Now, what happens if they're like, hey, 6 months in, I want to cancel? It's like, no worries. Just pay the fee, right, that I waived for the commitment. So it actually creates a very simple contract, which is like, you just got to pay that on the way out the door. So it also increases stick. So that's like it has like 3 prongs to it that makes it— but it's very easy to understand, very elegant. And so that's one of the continuity mechanisms that I use.
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When I'm looking at a business, I'm running through the different mechanisms that we use. Like, okay, we're having issues. We're having a lot of friction here right now. I'm guessing because you're selling continuity on the front end, it's probably not a huge deal. Right? Or but maybe churn is, I don't know. But here it's like, okay, which part of this process needs to get lubricated? Is it we need to lubricate people coming in the door and that's where we'd use a raffle or a giveaway or sweepstakes or something on the front end. Or it's like, you know, like the thing is, is they're signing for 6, but we need them at 10. It's like, okay, well then we need to put more lubrication here. Or you know what, we're getting all these unqualified, like 80% of the leads that are coming in are unqualified. We make the business decision. We, we want to sell to these people. Okay, we have a gross product. A gross margin product that's sufficient, that still makes sense. We still have 80% gross margins on this inferior product. Okay, how do we present it? And that's where the downsell would actually become really key. So I had a business that I, close friend of mine had, and what we did was for the downsell, he, we basically had this super high ticket thing that we were selling. He's a PhD for health stuff and he does all this like really weird health stuff for people. I'll just, I'll just, if you have a problem, he's the last person you go to and then he fixes it. That's his whole thing.
Okay.
And so what we did though is we created a downsell that re-upsold people. And so they'd get sticker shock and he would say, no worries, if you want, I can do it for, you know, $2,000 less, but I just won't include a guarantee. And so then people were like, I kind of want the guarantee, and then they'd re-upsell themselves. Right. And so the guarantee is worth that to me, which actually gets to show you. So then there becomes the art. I talk about this in the book of How much do I decrease price versus how much do I decrease value? And so the play between those two, if you— if the more you study the customer, the more you understand which components they value the most. And so typically when I'll create a downsell structure, I'm going to think, okay, the first downsell I'm going to give is actually to reupsell the main thing. Now, if they really can't because they clearly said no, even though it's a big, a big issue, then I say the next one I'm going to do is going to be a tiny thing with a large decrease in price. Right. And so the first one, it's like small decrease, big drop in value. You know what? I'd rather have the main thing. The next one though, I'm going to have a bigger drop in price with a smaller change in value.
At that point, price is actually the thing that's stopping you. Exactly.
Right. And so then, then it's basically how do I ethically lower my price without saying I'm selling different things to different people? That way I can change the terms rather than saying— because I never discount, but I will change terms like, oh no, they got something different than you, which is why they pay less. If you want, I can give you that. That's fine. But you just won't get what you're getting now. And so that's, so that's a little bit of a brief overview in terms of how I think through creating these. But you can see right now, like if you were to do just even like a raffle once a quarter, it's like that would probably feed all your leads for the next whatever. Yeah.
And I think one of the best parts about this is every business has some version of this, right? This is a different way of looking at a funnel. Yeah. But the cool part of what you, what I think you're doing with your books is you're basically taking the parts of the funnel. Offer, getting leads through the door, being able to actually sell the first thing to them. And how do you string together things to maximize the value you're getting for every of that hard-earned lead that you already paid for and busted your ass for. And one of the things I like about this is that you've basically codified a lot of what the best people do, but they do it in their business, then they get rich and then they sort of relax.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right? I don't need to go back. I don't need to even label what each of these things were, but you've sort looked at it and said, okay, let's call that an attraction offer. What are 5 examples of those that I've seen? And then you're on the lookout for 'em. You see it in this business and that business and you start to put it together. So I think that's very, very valuable even as a structured way of brainstorming because I think most people in their business, most founders will understand, yeah, I want to get more demand and I want to make more money per customer. But these vague wishes. And I think the key is to sort of not be most people. I have this like rant about most people. I'm like, you know, we try to fit in. That's our nature. Yeah. But it's like most people in America are overweight or obese. Most people don't like their job. Most people get divorced. Most people don't have enough money to, you know, to pay for an emergency procedure. You don't want to be most people, yet you want to fit in. It doesn't really make sense. And so I'd love to understand from you where you see a lot of entrepreneurs.
Yeah.
When it comes to money models, What do you see as, what are your most peoples that you're seeing that if we just drew kind of like, here's how most people are doing this, and if you just made these sort of 1 or 2 tweaks, you're now not in the most people bucket anymore. You're operating in a different way. Your business is going to have a higher chance of success or be worth more.
I would say not enough entrepreneurs are students of business and they're students of the thing. And so I'll give, I'll give you an example. So I will never claim to know more about remote work business or HVAC or plumbing or whatever, but people fly out here not for that, but because a very good understanding of the variables that create money. And so it's like, okay, how can we arrange these variables? And then we will fit— like you said, the payroll thing. I was like, okay, great. You have a thing. I'm not going to be the one who immediately knows that, right? But I'll be like, there's a slot here that we're missing, right? And so one is they're not big enough students of business. Number two is a lot of times it's like, well, this is what everyone else does, to your point. And so like, well, I'll give you an example. I had a guy who did guard services, right? And so they staff like buildings like this, right, with, with guards. And so he had huge cash flow issues because he was paper thin margins, but it's super sticky. People stay forever and it's very commoditized in terms of competing for bids. And so, you know, after talking for, you know, extended period of time, I was like, okay, well, why don't we just say that people pay quarter at a time and pay upfront? It's just, oh yeah. And he's like, well, no one does that. And I was like, so let me give you the best overcome in the world. Someone's going to ask you and they're going to say, well, everyone else does it. You're like, we've just always done it this way. That's all you have to say back. That's all you have to say. We just— it's always what— it's how we've always done it, right? And as crazy as that is, that is still the number one excuse. Yeah, it's still the number one overcome. Like when I used to ask for credit cards on the phone for someone to show up for, you know, personal training or trial or something like most places do not do that, but they'd be like, why do you need my card? Like, this is how we've always done it. And then they're like, okay. And so there's all this. Like, it's so funny how some of these little lines just make huge differences in your life.
You like weaponize the, the, the, the, the uselessness of most processes. It's like we're all so used to processes.
Stupid policy. That are stupid.
100%. That we're just like, oh, it's one of those.
Got it. From management. And they're like, oh yeah, retarded.
Yeah, got it.
In. And so, so one is, but like when I had to spend probably 30 minutes with him to just like, just get him to just be okay with asking for the money, getting paid quarterly, number one, and getting paid before you do service rather than after you do service. And so, I mean, everyone throws around the word first principles, but it's like very few people actually think from first principles, like what prevents us from doing this? And I think that's, that's like, this is the constraint, cash flow. Then like, what are all the things we can do? Can we change payment terms? Which is the first thing you're going to do if you have cash flow issues. Can we push our stuff out net 30 always? Right. Like how can we change this, this cash flow balance in our business?
What's the money model of acquisition.com?
So this is really interesting. So it's so hard for me because what I have to write about is not the rules that I have to live by. And so my favorite movie in the world is, is The Matrix, like many people's. But there's the line in The Matrix when Neo's looking at Morpheus and he says, so you're telling me that I'll— I can dodge bullets? And he says, I'm telling you that when you're ready, you won't have to. And so all of the things that I write about, like even like selling tactics and things like that, they assume you have no brand. And so like when you have a brand, you have so much demand and so little supply that you can set your own terms. I can have zero attraction offer and make the, the absolute worst offer in the world. I don't have to make a grand slam offer at all because I might say I don't want to deliver much at all. I will promise zero, I will guarantee nothing. And like, but because then that'll still give me less operational constraints on the back end. And so at the end of the day, like the reason I have the two parts of my logo are this is a lever and this is supply and demand. And to me, those are the two biggest, the two biggest forces in business. And so like, if you have—
I always thought it was a whale's tail.
That's exactly what it is. Yeah. But like, those are the two strongest forces in business. And so all of these things are to help lubricate or create or channel demand when you have little. When you have an ocean of demand, it's hard to lose. And so the model that we have is very different. It's almost like a Ward Away model. Of like, we, you know, we invite entrepreneurs out here who we think are interesting. We look at the business and then we say, hey, change these things, call us in a year. And that's, that's basically what we did. We took our diligence process that we were doing for multiple years. And I was like, what the catalyst for it was that we had— we were getting all these thank you emails. So all these founders come in from my content or whatever, and they'd be like, you know, they took— my deal team took 6 calls with them and was like, at the end was like, listen, these two metrics suck. Do these things, see how it works for a year, give us a call. And they were like, this was the most valuable process I've ever gone through. And then I was thinking like, that cost me a lot of money, right? And so I was like, well, what if I just charged for diligence functionally? And then I got— then I could actually staff it better and all these other things. And so that's functionally what we do from the advisory practice that then feeds the deal side.
So you have the content which creates the brand. Yep. What you did is you turned your cost into whether it's a profit center or breakeven, I don't know. But yeah, you know, something like this. This is your workshops. Yeah. What did you call it? You called it something else just now.
Advisory practice.
Advisory.
Okay. Yeah.
So this is your advisory. Yeah. And you say, okay, pay us $5,000, come over here.
Yeah.
But then you do have an upsell here to like more advisory, which is like, yeah, so we just do.
So basically from there, it's this is how we basically how we see value creation. And so we say like, this is our framework for creating value. If you like this, happy to help you. If you're like, this is cool, I'll go do this. Awesome. But the consulting side's true consulting. It's, it's one thing like they come, we identify the constraint, we say, okay, okay, well, we're going to go look at comps. We're going to look at the different ad strategies of people who are bigger. We're going to say this is the funnel and this is the offer that we think you should do. And we say this is all you have to do. When you do that, call us. And so it's 100% from point to point. It's not like an ongoing thing. It's literally one-time consulting. And that's the quote, that's the quote upsell.
And then at the bottom here you have the equity side.
Yeah.
Where you're like, great, the private equity side, right?
Yep.
You're going to buy the businesses that—
Yeah. And the venture arm now, which we do a lot of. And venture.
Okay, gotcha. Interesting. When you started, how much of this was figured out as you go? 100% of it. Grand master plan visionary.
Well, there's turtleneck. Some things were master— Yeah, right. Yeah. Some things I would say the big goals were master plan. The all of this mechanics was absolutely like figured out as you go. Like the books and how they've all been structured has been a 5+ year plan. And you'll, you'll see what, what I do at the launch and why. It's going to be awesome. But it will, it will, it will all be revealed. But like the mechanics of like the prices and like how we do that, like that was very much born from like, I am currently spending money on this team. We have way more demand than we have supply. Maybe if I can generate more revenue here, I can staff it better. I can get more luck surface area because I can look at more of these deals. Because you've probably seen this, like some companies look terrible on paper and then you meet them, you're like, oh, these guys are awesome, right? And so we had to do so many, like, I mean, we'd probably talk to 1% of the papers that we'd, that would come in. And I was like, I know we're missing stuff. Right. And so that was, that was basically the thesis behind this.
I mean, I think it was brilliant. I was like, wait a minute. So he basically gets paid for people to come and open up the kimono. They get value too. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. These are not dummies. These are business owners. Like they should be making good decisions. But I was like, wow, that's a—
The median size is $4 million. So it's not like they're not small business. That's median. So like there's plenty of like tons of good businesses. Every, every, every time we have a workshop, top one's usually between 30 and 100, you know, and there's plenty in the 8— like every single— I don't think we've ever had one that doesn't have multiple 8-figure companies.
I want to play a game with you. Do we have the, uh, the game here?
Oh, what is that? What is the game?
So the game was this.
Roro.
Okay, so, so this is gonna be a game that we're calling Make It or Take It. All right, so you're gonna have to shoot. I know, I know you got Big in the Bachelor. We're gonna have to get up for this.
Yeah, okay.
So you're gonna take a shot. Okay, I'm gonna see how far back we're gonna go here, but I think we'll set that as the benchmark here. You make it, you're off the hook.
Okay.
You miss it, you have to take it with one of the tough questions that we spin the bottle. I was like, I really like Alex, and I was like, uh, what do people want? So I asked people, what do you want an episode? The guy puts out a ton of content. Yeah, you know, I'm not just going here to get views. Like, well, yeah, let's do something new, let's do something fun. And so they were like ask him some tough questions. So I said, okay, let me think of some tough questions, but let's make it fun.
How would you guys—
all right, so first shot, uh, go for it. And then you get a—
and then if you miss it, do I ask you the question?
If you make it, yeah, you can ask me the question. That's fair. Or I burn the question. Uh, so it's up to you. So here's the question at hand.
Okay, what's the question?
Perfect. So the question is, what do your haters get right?
What do my haters get right?
Meaning all— you know, you get criticism as anyone does. But sometimes there's, you know, some criticism is fair or there's components of it that's fair. So what do the haters get right?
Steroids is one. You know, he's just, you know, he's here for the money. I would say from like the philosophical angle, you know, I would say there are people who are like, you know, say that like Alex doesn't have a life. And I'm like, well, yeah, yeah, I'm pretty open about that too, you know? So it's like they will use a fact as an insult and I'll be like, I agree, right? So that's—
I think that qualifies. I think that's one, right? Like, yeah, I mean, they're intending it as a hater comment.
Yeah.
But you're like, yes, and I agree.
I agree. Yeah. And if you— if only you knew.
I'm open with that.
Yeah. No, because if you ask these, like, I'm here 7 days a week, like I work all the days until I cannot work and then I take a day and then I continue to work again. And I, I work 12 hours most days. I'm usually here 5 to 5. For 6. And so it's—
is that a temporary thing? Are you like, I'm in an era of my life where that's what I want to do? Or you're like, that's who I want to be.
It doesn't feel— this doesn't feel like a push for me. Like if I, if I want to push, I work third shift, which is I work 18. If I do that for an extended period of time, that starts to grate on me. But like 12 is like, that doesn't— yeah, like 5 to 5, I'm like, I still feel like I've got plenty of time to like chill out and do whatever.
All right. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised cuz I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have 8 different Mercury accounts. I have 7 for, uh, different companies that I'm a part of and then I have, uh, my own personal account cuz now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. Uh, and the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive and you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder. It's an entrepreneur. Um, you could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and, and annoyances and decided to, you know, actually fix it himself. And really any type of entrepreneur you are. Let's say you're an agency. Well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And, uh, thank you for sponsoring the show. For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.
So let's do another question. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Make it or take it.
All right.
Nice question. All right. All right. What do I got?
I love it. All right. If I reset your bank account and your followers, change your name and face. So I reset you to zero, basically drop you in another— drop you in another life, another country. How long do you think it would take you to get rich again?
And what's rich?
Rich would be, let's say, for the name of this podcast, my first million to make a million bucks. Get a million bucks in your bank account.
A year.
Alex. Yeah. Well, having lost everything twice, I'll tell you what I did, which was I find a local business that's typically a service that I think I can sell for a lot of money, and they're typically undercharging. And so I will say, hey, how cheaply will you let me sell? Basically, if I, if I send you 100 customers, how cheaply would you do it? Would you charge me to do that? And so I get an agreement on price from them and then I sell for whatever the hell I want.
I brought you volume.
Yeah.
What's the lowest you could deliver the service for that volume?
Yeah. And so let's say it's a back cracker. Let's say chiropractor. Whatever. And I say, okay, how much will you crack backs for at the absolute cheapest? And he says, $25 a session. I say, okay, cool. So I can sell packages of 10 for $250 and you're cool with it? And he says yes. So I'm going to go and sell packages for $3 grand, right? And I'm going to make the spread. And it's because I know how to sell and how to get leads, right? And so, I mean, this is what I did. I mean, obviously I did it in the gym space, but that's, that's what I did when I lost everything. I just went to gyms and said, hey, but for them I could— I negotiated zero. So like You already have all your cost basis. I'll just add you customers. And then after the first month. Exactly. So I would, I would take the first, the $500. I'd say like, I get to keep that. And then after 6 weeks you can confirm memberships are all yours. So zero CAC for you. I take all the risk, I do all the work. Right. And that's— and then I would— I did about $100 grand every 21 days doing that.
Is there a better or worse type of service business that you'd go for? Like knowing what you know now, like I sold the gym.
I for sure do healthcare.
Healthcare.
Oh my God.
Healthcare means what?
White lab coat, anything, any service. Yeah, like pseudo— I call it pseudo-medical. Okay, so that's where, like, I mean, that's why I like teeth whitening. That's— we have a chain of 28, 28 stores. Like, I love pseudo-medical stuff. So laser, you know, laser, laser skin stuff, laser hair removal, you know, the chemical peels. I love all that stuff, like the beauty medical, like, intersection. You can just sell your eyes out. It's amazing.
What's the why you love it? Because of the demand?
Because it's huge supply demand inequality. So there's— if you see, if you look at the stats there, it's insane. Like the amount of demand of like boomers and all this stuff you like want to stay young and the supply side on it is so low. And the reason I know this is because every single med spa that walks in these doors is killing it. And I talk to the founders and I'm like, whoa. And I'm like, so how do you market? They're like, we just kind of like open up. We just We just announced that we're there. Website? Yeah. No, they're like, yeah, we have a phone number. People just kind of come in. I was like, they don't know. That's not, that's not how it works.
That's not how most—
that's how, that's how crazy the supply demand difference is. And they don't think about pricing. They think about nothing. They just— and they make, you know, 40% more. They have no idea. And so that's why I would do that.
That's like a heat signal for you.
Yeah, that's 100%. When I, when I see a lot of people who don't know what they're doing all making money, I'm like, okay, there's something there that's good. And so that's what I would do because that's what I did do. Right. Thank you.
All right, let me get— wait, wait, let me get another question here that I want to do because I got a couple.
Yeah, because it's like if you need to make $100 grand to $1 million, you could do that. Like if you just— if you know how to generate leads locally and sell, you just get a service business that agrees to take customers for a price and then you just sell as much as you can.
All right, go ahead.
Oh, man.
Well, then you want me to burn it?
You can ask. What are you doing? What did you get most wrong in the past 3 years?
Okay, I'll tell you this. I started with a bit of a portfolio approach. So I kind of had this thing where I was like, I don't want to operate, but these guys are operating well. I can add a bunch of value similar to what you guys do. Private equity, whatever. And I took minority stakes in several companies that have done well. But basically when they do well and I add value, I just sit there wondering why the hell don't I own more of this company? And I realized that I could have made more and really simplified my life with one great business. It doesn't take many great businesses to get to the next levels of wealth. Business can be worth $100 million, $500 million. They can get very big. And so I would've been better served doing less. And I got it wrong. I thought that I was being, I thought I was playing the game at a bit of a higher level when in actuality, if I had just kept it simple, picked one of those businesses or built one great business, I could have done better than I did spreading my focus with less work.
I made the same mistake. All right.
Yeah, we did.
We did 24 deals in 24 months and then we consolidated down to 5. Yeah. Like, you just— it's— I mean, it's 80/20. You're like, wow, that was dumb.
Power law applies. Yeah, basically.
Oh, well, it still rules.
Yeah. All right, let's do the next one.
All right. All right. Now I've got— now I've got my—
my— I got to move the benchmark.
But you just ask it, whatever.
All right. I was going to ask you this one. It's funny. Should entrepreneurs— should successful entrepreneurs get a premium?
Um, should's tough as a, as a frame. If it's your kid, it's my kid. Uh, well, if they're my kid, they're gonna have my money, so yeah, I'd say yeah, get it. I mean, um, for me, I, I asked Layla. Basically, it's like when you, you want to, you want to have a prenup in the— when you have somebody who doesn't want to sign a prenup. Like, that's like, that's the only, that's the only way I can say it. Yeah, it's actually that. So Layla and I, I thought I was like rich when I met Layla, which I wasn't, but like I thought I was rich. And I said, will you sign a prenup? And she was like, sure. Like, I don't care. I don't want your shit. And so we were on the way to the courthouse to get it notarized or whatever. And in a dramatic flair, I tore it and threw it out the window because it was so not a thing. She was like, I don't want your shit. Like, it's fine. And I believed her. And like we've built everything together. So, but I think that is very risky advice. And so I would say the vast majority of people should, like, should strongly consider it.
Romantic. I like it.
All right, here we go.
I'm going to give you one. Okay. I like this question, so I'll do this one.
Oh, perfect. Bumped in and out.
I know. This is an easy one. This is actually not that tough a question. If you could only follow 3 people on X, meaning if you had to slim your content diet down.
Oh, that's a really good question.
To bodybuilder mode where it's like, I'm just chicken and broccoli or whatever. Who's your chicken and broccoli of your content diet? People you genuinely, you genuinely value what they're putting out there on. I think maybe Twitter is one of your big platforms. Yeah, I know.
It is. I mean, Elon would be one. So I have two more, two more people to, to, to use. Oh, you know, it's weird. I'm actually, I totally like use Twitter like a, like I just like let it serve me whatever. Right. And so I just like love all this thread. Yeah, I just like kind of like just let it feed me whatever. I'm trying to think about the other accounts that I would be like, oh, I would, I'd miss them if I didn't see them. Right. It's actually hard. It feels like I'm like, who are two of yours? Who are two of yours?
Naval would be one.
Okay. Naval's a good one.
You know, the others, I mean, I would cheat and be like the news aggregator. So it's like, oh, at least I get all that. But I wouldn't actually pick that.
You know who I actually think puts really good content? Anker from Carry.
Okay.
Yeah, I actually like his stuff a lot. Interesting. Yeah, I like his stuff. That'd probably be my second one. Just, it's very tactical. Very— oh, you know what? I love George Mack's stuff. Yep.
George Mack. Although I'd cheat. I'd be like, just text me the thing.
No, George is really good. I actually really like George's stuff. Yeah. Now as I'm thinking about it, it's like, say, help puts good stuff out. Um, obviously Williamson puts good stuff out. So like, yeah, now that I'm thinking through it, it's like, I have like this blank, but no, I like— I think George, George just has some of the most unique takes, and I think that's why I like his stuff a lot.
Yeah. All right, well, thank you for playing. Thank you. Make it or take it. He took the tough questions.
Promosi hot hands. Hard questions. Yeah, the, the three, you know, the biggest errors, man. That's, uh, because it's like, which ones cost me the most, and then which ones did I miss the opportunity the most? So it's like, I have— it's like, I—
it—
because like just based on that, like, I thought I've really beat myself up on this. I have missed more $100 million net gains and multiple $100 million net gains than I have made, which makes me really angry. But then I thought about it and I was like, you always say no to more deals than you say yes to. So as a numbers guy, you're always going to miss. You're literally going to miss more winners than you have. Right. But like, but like, I could tell you all, like, it's like I say their names before I go to sleep at night. Like, I, Like one of them, Arya Stark. Yeah. And some of them I'm like, I should like— this one was in the— like, there's no— like, there was a gym franchise, like, buddy of mine. I've known him for years. He's been in the business for 30 years. He finally went on his own to start a franchise. And then I, I was like, we need to do the business this way. And he's like, I just, I just want to run a franchise. I was like, dude, let's just privately own a mall. It's a great model. And I was like, I'll fund the whole expansion. And he's like, I've already sold 40 units. Like, you know, I don't want to flip back and And so I ended up like not doing the deal and he'll exit for probably $120 million. And this is in 3 years. And I was going to— it was for 50% of the company. And I was just like, he was a friend. It was fitness for— I was like, there's— I should not have missed this deal, you know what I mean? There's a content creator that I, that I love and have followed for more than 10 years. Talk to them. You know, we had a— we were going to get a 33% stake in the company.. And from the time that we said no to the deal, I'd say 24 months later, they're now probably $150 million company. And it's just like, I have like 4 or 5 of these ones that I'm just like, I should like, that was like, that one I said no because I knew the amount that he, he slash they wanted from me was going to be more than I wanted to commit to. Like, it was like, I think they saw it as like an acquihire. And I was like, I'm not going to I will do this, but I'm not going to dive in.
I had a moment like this in Silicon Valley. I thought I was saying my big miss. I was like, I forget which one it was. Maybe it was like Calm or something. I think I was buddy with Alex and he was raising probably like a $4 or $5 million valuation. It's now $2 billion. So I could have easily written a check into Calm, disregarding the fact that at the time I had no money, was not angel invested. There's many reasons I missed that in addition to just not thinking it was going to be a winner. But besides that, I I was telling some story about one of these, one of these misses. And I thought I was like sounding cool because I missed it. And literally I just got big dogged by this guy in Silicon Valley who was just like, he's like, okay, welcome to Silicon Valley. He's like, what are you talking about? Everybody, anybody has baskets of these. Are you kidding me? You want to start? Like, I could, how much time you got?
Exactly. It's like, oh, I wrote the check. I missed, did the date.
You know what?
How many different versions of this? And he, but he said something smart. You know, he was, First, he was like, shut up, basically. He's like, shut up. You think this is like a really cool, unique story? Yeah. Not only is this not cool and unique, it's actually just a standard cost of entry if you're going to play this game. Totally. So like, what are you talking about? Yeah. But the second thing he said was he's like, I think you're taking the wrong lesson from this because I was focusing so much on what I missed out on. Yeah. Versus what the root cause analysis of why didn't I do this?
Yeah.
Oh, okay. And I've actually since then changed this where it's like, actually a lot of these misses were like deals I liked, I wanted to do, they wanted to do it. We just didn't chase or kind of follow up enough to like make sure a transaction goes through because doing a deal takes a sprint at the end. And then we actually like operationalized a bunch of those once we, once we got over ourselves and the, the kind of weird ego of missing, you know, life got a lot better for us. But I had to, I had to learn that the hard way.
But that's, that was probably a big one. I, and then a lot of my big misses have been like strategic mess-ups. Like one of the big, like one of the biggest errors I ever made at Gym Launch was I started Allen, the software company, and I should have built a CRM for gyms. And that was like, I had the right idea.
What did Allen do if it wasn't?
It just, it worked leads because the biggest pain point they had was working leads. CRM wasn't a pain point from a monetization perspective. If I had put them all on the platform, then I would have all their metrics. I would have been control revenue. There's so many things I would have been able to do.
You could have used the pain to get them into like the sticky forever product.
On the other side of the coin, what are the biggest hits that have happened post the gym launch and whatever?
This building. So this was like an unexpected, like, wow, this was way, way more alpha than I would've guessed.
What do you mean by that? Literally the real estate value or you mean just the serendipity of—
No, no, no. So I bought this building before we did any— like, it was just like, I just wanted a place, have a gym. So like, I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to buy a big building. And Layla was like, we don't— like, we're all remote and we have like, you know, with the— on the just the pure holdco, I think at the time with like 15 employees just on the investment side. And I was like, and so, and so anyways, I was like, I really want this building because it was the old UFC building. It's kind of cool. I was like, I will figure out a way that it will pay for itself, right? And so the only reason the advisory practice got stood up was because I was like, well, we have this space. I was like, let's just— I'll make a post to see if anyone wants to come out. And then that's what sprung this. Like, there's huge demand for that in-person versus remote stuff. And so then it was like, great. So we meet all these businesses and we generate cash flow. So it's like both things. But like this for sure, like that whole thing would not have happened if we didn't have like zero chance. I wouldn't have done it because I— it was just like, I have the space. Let's try. I just would never have taken that leap. So that was probably a huge, like, didn't guess it was going to be a win-win. That's probably like the biggest, the biggest one that's like that.
Plus, I mean, you've got like, you know, Michael and a bunch of the other guys who are here all the time now, which I think it was very tempting and very easy to be fully remote.
Yeah.
And I think remote works.
Remote works.
Yeah.
But in like the business Olympics, the people who are serious about it, they're going to be together. They're going to be co-located. Yeah. You know, like I paid Diego, I was like, move across the country, I'll pay you more. Just live. And I was like, the rule is here's a 5-minute radius from like where I live. Yeah. Pick a place. That's the only rule of coming out here because there's, you know, you can't really replace that.
Oh, totally. We're 80%. So now we're 80% in person. And so I think we're at like 90-ish employees, something like that. And so the only thing that we allow as remote is infrastructure. So HR, well actually HR is here, but finance can be remote, certain tech roles can be remote, legal can be remote.
This has actually become my favorite podcast question. I don't know if you have a good answer to this because I think you're so locked in and focused on what you do, but just what are you really interested in lately? What are you very obsessed with lately that's not your core day-to-day work? Meaning not like a hobby, But just like, I'm kind of fascinated by this, or just like, keep reading about this, or I keep wanting to meet people in this doing this thing. What's that thing?
I only have two and they will not be— well, one's the tried answer, which is like, I'm reading up on AI just like you are, and I spend a ton of hours looking into it. The other thing is completely unsurprising is that I'm actually really into gym equipment. Like, my Instagram is gym equipment. It's gym equipment.
Are we talking like novelty gym equipment or what do we like? Kind of like I get all these like your neck cracker, your Achilles machine. No, no, no, no.
Mine's like commercial, like giant industrial. Yeah, yeah. Like, like the stuff that you see at gyms.
Like, and why are you so interested? What's— what's— get me interested in it.
Well, if you like, if you train hard, like you start to notice that like some, some machines are better than others and like, why are they better? And then you start looking at like force curves for like, okay, where does the, you know, where's the tension the highest? And then it's like, does it correspond with where hypertrophy is maxed out for like the range of motion for the muscle? And like, just like, what's the feel of the equipment and the range of motion and the adjustability and, and like what, like what kind of bearings are they like? You can get, you can go like pretty far into this. Yeah. And so I'll say this, there's the, there's this a new thing that came out. It's called the Voltra. I'm not sponsored by Beyond Power. And I think that, I think in, I think 10 or 15 years, gym equipment will look very different. And it has not changed for a very long time. And it's because basically magnetic resistance hasn't— wasn't a thing and now it is. And so like a Vulture, for example, is it's like a brick. It's literally the size of a brick. It's this big. It can get to 200 pounds of resistance. Right. But not only that, you can do single-pound increments, which is amazing for strength work because like most people, the like— side note for anybody, a lot of reasons you get stuck at a machine or on dumbbells is because the percentage jump is too big. Like girls with dumbbells, it's like the worst. They go from 20 to 25 pounds for a girl. It's a 20% jump in, in, in weight. And so they just can't make the jump. They just get stuck. Whereas like the perfect gym would have literally 100 dumbbells that are 1 pound, 2 pound, 3 pound, 4 pound, all the way up. And then you can make this progressions much easier. So anyways, it goes single-pound increments. You can also change the eccentrics so you can have it be way harder on the way in versus the way out. And the next thing is you can change the curve so you can make it like really hard at the front. So for any kind of pulling movement, you want heavier here because you're stronger here, lighter here. On the flip side, if you're doing pushing movements, you want to be lighter here, you know, heavier here.
And you do that by just telling it the movement. Yeah, you can just move the curve.
You can change the curve. You can manually change the curve. And so because of that—
Is this a European company, by the way? I don't know. I— somebody sent me this. They were like, because I was buying the Bowflex, like adjustable, like 2 dumbbells, but you could do all these weights. And he's like, you really want to get it, get these. And I think that's probably Nubell.
That's probably Nubell.
Okay, maybe that was the one.
That's probably what it is. But yeah, the best ones right now are the Rep/Peppin adjustables. They go to 120 and they're all metal. There's no plastic. Anyways, I mean, like, I can talk equipment, but that is probably my— but I'll sort of— I'll close the loop on the, on the Vulture thing. The reason that I think it's so interesting is that like all the selectorized pieces, you see stacks of weight, right? You put a pin in it and there's a stack. Those, they take up so much room because you have to have room. You have to balance the piece of equipment from when people are moving it. And the stack takes up a huge amount of space. And from a shipping perspective, it's so expensive to ship 400 pounds, right? Plus the machine. Right. And so it takes more square footage. It's more expensive. It has smaller increments. You can't change the strength curve. There's all these reasons. And so they find like the tech is finally there where I think that there will be a next generation of machines where they will only have the electronic. Yeah, exactly. And you just literally plug it into the wall. And the thing is, the square footage will be smaller. The actual machines will be cheaper because this is Vulture's Gen 1. As soon as like, like in 5 generations, it'll be $200. Right now it's $2,000 for the brick, but it'll be cheaper than weight. As soon as it's cheaper than, than mass-based iron physics. Yeah. Yeah. As soon as it's cheaper than mass-based iron, there's, there's basically no point to having mass-based resistance. So I get very excited about that stuff because I think it's going to be really cool for gyms because I mean, I obviously come from that space, but the amount of things that you can now be able to do as a gym owner. Now, I don't own a gym right now. I do own a gym, but just not commercial. There's so many more things you can do with customers that like your ability to do like true hypertrophy training in a large group setting when you have that type of resistance, it's safer. You can't get hurt on it. Like there's all these things that are beneficial for it. So I think that that's my, that's my 10-year call. Yeah, that people are expecting. I think it'll, I think a huge amount will be magnetic. It'll be cheaper for gym owners. They don't break as often, incremental, all the reasons I said, and it's less space.
Dude, that was a sick answer. That was the one I was like, I don't even know if I'm going to ask him. I feel like he's going to tell me like, I really liked writing this book. And I'm like, okay, great.
No, gym equipment. Have you seen my gym? No, I'll show you.
Okay.
Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, you'll see it and be like, oh, you said you're geeking out on AI. Anything like what's it— you use it a ton.
What do you use it for? Yeah, I use it a lot. I use it. I mean, I feel I, I just say I'm ashamed I use it all the time and I am ashamed at my use cases. I know I should be using it better, which I think many people feel that way, but I feel like at all levels everyone feels like they should be using it more.
But, um, there should be a word for like AI guilt.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's like overwhelming sense of AI guilt. Yeah.
I think Elon has AI guilt. You know what I mean? So, uh, I would say like I'm the most interested part that I'm in for like where I'm focused on AI is actually, um, phones because obviously I come from the sales background and so that use case, like I want—
phone call?
Like what do you mean by phone call? Like sales calls, customer support calls. Like right now we have fully implemented AI support and it's crushing. It's doing so— it's like, it's amazing. So right now over 90% of all tickets are being resolved entirely with AI, which is— I mean, you have an e-commerce or multiple, right? Like it's so— it's amazing. And like the— like I'm getting these thank you emails like, you guys rock. Like This was 2-minute response. Like, you guys are on it. And like, the whole thing's AI. And so I'm like, that it's obviously the text-based side is there, but like, it's weird because the, if you let you like Grok 4, I'm sure you got the upgrade or whatever.
The voice keeps getting absurdly better.
Like, I, Grok's the one I use for voice. So it's the only one that I do voice stuff with. I do all the other stuff with the other ones. But I'm like, why? Like, it's so close. Like the latency is so close that I just— that's the use case that I'm waiting to crack. Like we've been working on one for a year now and the latency, but it's still like it's, it's like not, it's not good enough that I'd be like, I want to waste money on, you know, leads for it to call. But it's like maybe it's 6 months, but that's the one. That's the one that I have my most finger like on the pulse.
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I do. I hired an AI tutor. Like, basically every week, because I'm like, it's a full-time job to keep up with.
No, dude, 100%.
So I said, I'm going to sit down. I was like, I'm paying $500 an hour.
Yeah.
What you're going to do is you're going to come with a list of like, blow my mind, point 1, blow my mind, point 2. But I get to drive. Yeah, right. Because like, you, you set it all up, but then like, I get to be caveman.
This is how I learn everything. Yeah. Just so you know. Like, yeah, that's how I learned how to run Facebook ads. I paid a guy $750 an hour and I said, just explain to me how you're doing this and then I'll learn it. I think I learned it.
Literally coaches are like coaches for adults. Is this like, I don't know why there's maybe an embarrassment factor or a lack of imagination or creativity. I think it's just massively underrated.
Highest ROI money.
Also the difference, it's like engineering, right? They had like 10x engineers. There's really like average coach, a good coach, and the best coaches is these orders of magnitude jumps in how good they are. So the other thing people do get wrong is they just take the first coach that they have versus be really promiscuous and go date around and Go find a coach that will just rock your world because whether it's fitness or food or whatever, I have probably 6 or 7 coaches in rotation right now in my life. Oh, really?
For AI or in general?
I have AI. No, just general. I have AI. I have my food girlfriend. She calls me every morning, helps me think about how am I going to eat today and helping me uproot all my bad habits through that. I have my personal trainer who does a very specific functional training thing that I like and I do. I got a basketball coach. There's people like, are you going? You're not going to the NBA. What are you doing? It's like, well, I love playing basketball. I decided being better at basketball is not sucking. Yeah, this is more fun. It's like I can go to cardio or I can have an NBA trainer train me.
Oh, it's awesome.
It's way better than just doing cardio. So why would I not do that? So I just have a bunch, but it's become to the point where it's comical. It's like I'm just looking for an excuse. Like, oh, what other coaches can I add to my piano teachers?
Everything. I'm such an advocate of this. For anyone who, if we're still even rolling, but, um, they've all left. Yeah, they've all left.
Yeah, we're just hanging out here.
No, but like, um, I think the, some of the highest ROI money you can spend is one-on-one tutoring. Like, just like, like every time I really need to learn something, what you said, like, I just like, I will pay you a huge amount of money to just sit with me and teach me something.
Which by the way is the killer AI use case, right? So like, that's going to be the thing where once we get it, I forgot what it's called. Have you heard like the Bloom Two Sigma thing? Basically, there's this long-term study. People want to fix education, so rich people fund like, how do we do it? And then they go do the research and they're basically like, the number one way to get like an actual 2 sigma, which is like the standard deviation jump in outcome, is one-on-one tutoring. Problem is, doesn't scale. So they wrote it off. So for the last 30 years, we've just been like, well, we know the thing that works doesn't really scale and it doesn't, you know, can't be affordable. So we'll try all these other things. But it's like, hey, wait a minute.
It's bad.
That's now viable. And so let's see what happens.
You know, are you in Austin?
No, I'm in the Bay Area.
San Francisco.
Alpha School. Yeah.
Because Joe— yeah. So I talked to Joe about Alpha School and I mean, the stuff they're doing is wild, but the issues that they are encountering has nothing to do with education. Yeah. It's everything to do with policy. Right. Such a pain. But it's like, okay, 2 hours a day, we're moving at twice the speed. So that's— so 1/4 the time, twice the speed. They're moving at 8 times the speed of a normal school. And their scores are top 98th percentile. So it's like 8 times the speed and the quality metrics there. And then the other 6 hours of the day, the kid just learns whatever they like. They code apps, they do public speaking, they do budgeting, they learn all these other life skills. And it's like, God, did you hear— did you see that clip by Alexander Wang? Hopefully I didn't—
Scale?
Yeah, yeah.
Which clip was it? Well, he's like, I don't want my— I don't want a kid until I'm 30.
Until it's native.
And I was like, man, that was one of the more insane statements nuts I've ever heard. Yeah. And the good, like, that's the good weird of Silicon Valley is you run into people very intelligent.
He's on the edge.
Yeah. Who will say batshit insane stuff with a straight face. And then you're like, wait, am I insane? Or is he insane?
I can't tell.
He's probably right, but he's crazy.
He has way more context on this, which is what scares me. It's like when you have one of those, it's like, well, you have to know something. Like if we have the same information, you might be crazy by my standards.
Right.
But if I assume that you are intelligent and can make good decisions, then it means you know something I don't know. And so that's what frightens me from the AI.
Or you have different values.
Yeah, exactly.
But Peter Thiel had a great, one of the great Peter Thiel insights was when he went around and he was like, university is a bubble. And he was basically saying, you have to look at university as a bundle. Education, great, sure, 10%. Babysitting, maturation of 18 to 22-year-olds is what's there. Social, there's an insurance policy for parents where you're like, I don't know, just go to college. I feel like that's what I needed to do for you. And there's like a filtering thing, which is like, well, we trust that Harvard filters you, so we, yeah, we'll just trust their filtering process. So like college does all these different jobs. And his take was basically like, if you want to disrupt it, you don't just disrupt the whole thing. You have to unbundle the bundle and figure out what to do. And so like, I feel like this is just such a common business thing, which is like, oh, healthcare sucks or this sucks. It's like, yeah, it sucks. Cool. But until you've realized that that thing is actually a bundle, you really have no shot at like upending it in any way. You got to take one part of that bundle and just 10x that and figure out a way where the other stuff doesn't apply to you because you didn't promise that. And if you could do all that, it works. The way I think about what you do is you're a teacher on YouTube, which is not a surprise to you, but people think of YouTube as either A, social media, okay, maybe another, it's just content, it's entertainment. But dude, I got little kids. Miss Rachel is the best preschool teacher in the world. She has 34 million preschool students who watch her on her app. Great. Like that. She is the best teacher. Therefore, she should get this huge outsized number of students. Totally. And like Khan Academy was a great teacher. You're a great business teacher. Like, I literally look at YouTube like it's a high school. There's just classes to offer. Like, I can go to David Sarna and get the history of entrepreneurship. That's an elective I decide to take.
Yeah, totally.
And like, you're basically like Business 101 or business whatever, like, you know, business fundamentals. Yeah. And it's like, great, I can go take business fundamentals with my professor, you know, Harozi, and like, I think when you start to look at YouTube as also a bundle of music and entertainment and education, then you start to think about how I might use it differently than the average person. Right? Because like both you and I probably wish we started on YouTube 10 years earlier. Yeah. And it was the people who saw YouTube as more than what others saw it that actually got that advantage.
Yeah. No, I think that's really good. Yeah. I think it reminds me of the Naval quote that I like a lot, which is technology democratizes consumption and consolidates production. And so it's like, which means if you're the best in the world, you get to do it for everybody, right? And so, yeah, I actually, I think about that a lot when we talk about our channel, which is like, how do we, how do we just make this the best business content, you know, possible? And that's, I mean, that's the whole goal. It's like if we just keep doing that, then we'll be okay.
I think you're doing a pretty damn good job of it.
I appreciate it.
The hard part is, is I'm curious how you do this because at one point in time, I think I even talked about some podcasts. I was like, I think he's great and smart. But then the problem with YouTube, because the goddamn views are public.
Yeah.
Is they give you an outer scorecard to use. Yeah. That may not be the one you want, right? And it was like, I remember once I looked at your channel and it was like, if you're broke, do this.
Yeah.
If you don't have enough money for Chipotle, do this. I was like, dude, he's just going to attract broke people. That's the opposite of what he kind of like wants, you know, or like it's easy to optimize because guess what? There's more broke people who are more desperate that are on YouTube with a bunch of time to kill. You're going to get 2 million views on the Broke Guy video. Yeah, but like, I'm never going to click that. And you probably want some people like me clicking some of your content. Totally. And so like, I think that's the challenge with YouTube overall is like, if you take their metrics as your metrics, you might have a big problem.
It's 100%. It's a— so yeah, it's 1,000% a problem. And we, it's like we just, we put as many controls in place as we can and it's still tough. And so right now, here's where it gets like, let's, let's peel a layer back.
Yeah.
So where it gets really interesting is that if I make 6 videos, this is our actual cadence, 5 of them I want to be business first, business deep, whatever we want to call it. And then 1 out of 6, I say I'm okay to just like make it wide. Brutally honest truth about whatever, right? That one video will get more views than the other 5 together. And so then how much does that actually weight the brand? So even if I actually think about my input—
Production versus consumption.
Right. So if I actually put my inputs like I might have a 50% philosophy brand and 50% or, you know, motivation, whatever you want to call it, right? Like mindset, etc. And then 50% business-y. But in terms of my production, it's 90% of my time is business. It just like doesn't get the reach. And so it's actually one of the things that frustrates me in some ways because like if I, like if I get stopped on the street, I'm always curious like what was the, you know, what was the thing? And so, but like business owners for me, because like I see the people walk in the door and you have to be at a certain level to walk in the door anyways, is like they are more, more listening and reading in general. And like we have the, we have a whole series we do called Cash Cows, which is kind of like what we did with the Hormozy Hotline, but I have them in person and then I do the whole, the whole thing and it's like an hour. And those ones right now average like 150,000, maybe 200,000 views per video. But like a brutally honest million, like it's just like I can do like We could do one right now. And I know exactly what we're going to say in it. But when I ask who here likes those who shows up, they're like, please keep making those. And so I keep asking them just because I need the reinforcement.
Yeah, of course. Because you need an inner scorecard.
I need something.
The outer scorecard is only going to tell you one thing. So you have to instrument like an antenna yourself to get the signal that you're actually looking for in a way that's not necessarily biased, but If I don't put up an antenna, there is no generic antenna for this.
Also a little tiny thing that may be helpful or useful, but we actually just this quarter switched our metric. So we used views as basically the way that I did it before was like, we will make content about these topics and then as long as they're within these topics, then we maximize views. So that's the constraint. And then maximize within that constraint. We have now switched to subscriber count, subscriber growth, even though subscribers matter zero.
Right.
It's just, yeah, it doesn't matter for distribution, but it's a great—
it's a signal of loyalty.
Exactly. It's a quality score of like, I thought this was valuable enough that— so now I can still do the same constraints on, on the content, but then use the subscriber because that gives us the— because subscriber still has baked into it some element of reach. But if you— if I make a Brutally Honest video, I'm not going to get the same amount of subscribers I am as like 13 Years of Business Advice, like one of my best videos ever. That's— but hardcore business. Anyway, just something that we've switched to just this quarter.
I can't figure it. So I basically figured out what do I want, which I can't measure. So first was what do I want? I was basically like, I created it in popularity, they have the Q score. So I basically was like, give me the Z score. What's the Z score? The Z score to me is a trust score. So I was like, all right, probably should have been a T score. I think about it, but it was the Z score, which is basically I realized that all content, what you actually want is number of people reached times the quality of the person reached. Sure. Times the depth of their trust in you. Sure. And basically that's the equation you ultimately care about. So like you can reach a lot of people on TikTok, but if they're just like, you know, if they're not the people you're trying to— Dude, like Donnie. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's— you have to discount factor because you're not— your second variable is not very good. And then the third, which is like, how much do they actually trust you? Not like they watch that piece of content or they like that thing or they hate watched it. You're like, yeah, I got views, but like actually they're like, this guy's an idiot. Or like, you know, I hate this guy. So that's what I wish existed. Now that's never going to exist. So I had to backchannel it and basically a shame metric. So I said, if I make a thing, do I want to go put it in my favorite group chats? Me, myself being like, I made this, guys. There's a lot of shit I make that can get pop— that's popular that I would cringe putting it there because they'd be like, bro, what the fuck is this?
That's a great, great bar.
We don't need this or care about this. I'm like, what is this for?
Why did you put this here?
Versus other things. I did this one thing that went nowhere virally. I did this, I spent 2 months just studying the process of creativity. I basically realized with AI is productivity values going down and creativity values going up. So I was like, how do the most creative people in the world work? I've studied Elon and all those guys, but I actually have no idea how, you know, Seinfeld and Picasso and all these other guys, how they operate. So I studied that, I put it together. And I put it out there again, went nowhere, kaput. But I've like internalized these lessons deeply, so it's still a win. But that was the one where if I put it in my group chats, my most successful peers were actually like, dude, this is actually sick. Like I actually have, I didn't know this, I took this, I needed this, blah, blah, blah. So I've had to use basically like my own cringe factor of like, do I want to put this in there or would I feel like kind of stupid doing that? Would I feel like I need to soften it with some some context and some excuses to put it in.
Yeah, that's— I think, I mean, I think what you hit on is like such a painful part of creating content is that the entire— the reinforcement system leads you away from the actual business goal. I mean, if you do this for business, which I do, like it leads you away from your business goal, which makes it very— you just have to have a lot of discipline of like, this is the stuff I'm going to make and it will underperform and that is okay. And it gets harder when you, when you get, when you know how to make the stuff that really hits from a views and all that stuff perspective.
The more you know. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, but you know, it's, I mean, this has been, it's probably one of the largest focal points that we have as for our brand. And I feel like it's an accordion. It's like, you know, if we, we do just hardcore, hardcore business content and then we'll be like, all right, let's, let's make a little bit of personality stuff. Let's show a little bit. And then it's like, oh, that did great. And we're like, oh, fuck, we're way too wide. And then like, So I think we just kind of oscillate.
One thing I wish you did more of, just my personal request, was you did something— it was like a short or something. I don't know who made this. Somebody in this room might have made this, but it was like you were just talking about the gear you wear. You're talking about your shoes.
Yeah, right. And I bought those shoes.
The Darwin outfit. And so, yeah, you called it your Darwin outfit. You're like, I can wear this in the rain and in the pool, and then I can get out of the pool, go to a restaurant, and it works.
I can go for a hike tomorrow.
And, you know, I think that's great because first of all, it didn't feel like I'm trying to be the Kardashian. So it didn't feel like you were trying to show me something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just like, oh, you want to know like something I do in my life? Here's something I do in my life.
Yeah.
What I thought was interesting about that was, A, it was a good find. You'd actually put real, like your own nerdiness into like doing something for your own lifestyle. So it was like it meant something. But B, every time I wear those shoes, I think of you. And there's something to physical anchors in a digital world that like actually matters.
I'm a huge believer in that. Yeah. Side note, like huge believer.
So I think this is like a little sauce there. And I think the other part of it was, I made a mission for the year, like a misogi for the year. And I thought it was like, it should have been about business or like getting in great shape or whatever. But when it was like, oh, I know what I want to do. I was like, I want to learn to jam out on the piano. I was like, and so I just made that my mission and I took it like incredibly seriously and like had a great time doing it. And so just yesterday I just turned on a live stream on Twitter. I was like, I think they have this feature. I just live streamed myself doing like a piano practice, not even like a performance. I was just like fucking around, like trying to learn these songs. I'm not good. I've been doing this 6 months, dude. I got so many DMs from like, again, the same thing, like the people who I don't want to send my content to because I'm like, you're a billionaire.
What do you—
how to get rich from a guy 10 times less rich than you. Yeah, but I got them being like, dude, I've been wanting to practice. I love how you made time for this.
Is that what you—
which one did you get? What room is that? Who's that teacher? How did you find her? Do you think a teacher is better than the apps? And I got so many of those. I was like, there's something to the lifestyle content when it's really like—
I could talk about gym equipment, for example. Like, you can probably see that I like, I'll light up when I talk about it.
Exactly. If it genuinely lights you up and it shows, it's like for other successful people who I don't like— I've read all the books now. I don't really need a lot of like how to grow my business. I'm actually pretty good at that.
Sure.
And so like one cool way I thought your lifestyle stuff worked was it attracted me to that where I probably wouldn't watch like 10 of the other videos, but that one I was like kind of interested in. Really interested from a different angle. And I think you kind of turned the spigot off on that. I noticed., but like my personal request is give me 10% of that back.
Yeah. So this is the dichotomy that has to be managed, which is the thumbprint of the creator, in my opinion, should be the representation of their current life, which means it can change. Right. And so it's like I spend, maybe it's like 10% of my time is fitness oriented. And so like maybe 10% of my content should be fitness oriented. And then probably 80% of my time is business oriented. Then maybe 10% of my time is philosophical and maybe 5 and this is now 105, but is relationship, whatever. Right. And so it's like that, that's my mix. And maybe in a different season it'll change. And so the content should be— I always think it was like, should be glass. It should be like when someone meets me, it's exactly as they expect it.
Presentation.
Yeah. The only thing that fucks that whole thing up is the algorithm. Yeah. Because I can absolutely make that, that, that thumbprint. It's just that this one will get 10 times the views. And so then if you're trying to manage the mosaic of your brand, with all the little, all the little shorts as tiny little squares. It's just that you can't control how big the square is in the middle of the fucking face that you're trying to build.
So that makes sense. But that's what I'm saying. Like those, that thing about your shoes didn't get a lot of views, but it made an imprint on me. Yeah. And I would say like I would carry more weight than like, I'll say 1,000 random views. Tim Ferriss said this once. He's like, do I want 10,000 random people selected at random somewhere in the world to like my stuff or half of Davos to be like, to really respect what I do? He's like, one's a big number, one's a big, one's big value, right? Like, which one do I want? Yeah, I think there's something similar there. And also, like, you know, you were talking about, like, they have different wallets or different stomachs.
Totally.
Yeah. It's like, I only have a certain wallet or stomach for, like, educational business content, me reminding myself I need to do more at work.
Yeah, right.
But I actually have other wallet share to give you.
Interesting.
On another area, my fitness wallet share, you could get some of that. Yeah, you can get some of my outfit wallet share or my relationship wallet share as an entrepreneur dealing with, you know, busy relationships, right? Like, so think of it maybe with your own analogy.
Yeah. No, I really like that. That's— I mean, it's always— I— we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. Yeah. So I'm with it, dude.
All right, we should—
we should appreciate you. Thanks for— thanks for having. Thanks, dudes. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel. Never looking back.
My friends, if you like MFM, then you're going to like the following podcast. It's called Billion Dollar Moves. And of course, it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the number one audio destination for business professionals. Billion Dollar Moves. It's hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist, and with Billion Dollar Moves, she wants to look at unicorn founders and funders, and she looks for what she calls The Unexpected Leader. Many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic. She does it with unfiltered conversations about success, failure, fear, courage, and all that great stuff. So again, if you like My First Million, check out Billion Dollar Moves. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Again, Billion Dollar Moves. All right, back to the episode.