One Question Friday: What’s The Fastest Way You've Had Your Life Changed By Money?

I'll talk about a friend first. So I was with, uh, a friend that sold his company for close to a billion dollars. And I was with him. I was with him when the money hit the bank. We are at their apartment and immediately, like, he's like, all right, I think it— I think it happened. We went to the ATM. He previously had like $300,000 in his bank, which is not a little amount. So he wasn't like destitute at all, but he was 28. And we went to the ATM and there was $90 million in the bank account. And immediately afterwards we went to McDonald's and we got a number one each. We each got a Big Mac and we went back to his apartment and watched TV and like, we're like, that's pretty cool, isn't it? And, uh, it was really cool. Like it was pretty crazy. The crazy part is not just the $90 million, but if you do the math of $90 million, conservatively, if you look at historical average, $90 million at, let's just round it up to $100, $100 million at $130 becomes $200 at $40, which becomes $400 at $50, which becomes $800 at $60, which becomes $1.1 at $70. $1.1 billion. So you can see this, it's not just that they have $90 million, it's like, well, you're— it's a surefire way, more likely than not, that you're gonna be a billionaire at some point while you're alive. That was crazy. So, uh, that, that's one story. Do you have one?

I got a couple. So we've told this one on the pod before. People are sort of familiar, but I'll do a fast version of it, which is Million Dollar Homepage. So Alex Tew, who is a friend, and I think you're friends with him as well, I think he was 21 years old and he was like, "I want to be a millionaire. I want a million dollars. How do I do this?" And he kind of asked himself this question, which was like, "How do I make a million dollars in like the next like month or two? You know, which is, um, not the question most people ask. Nobody will teach you or recommend that you ask this question, but he asked it. And guess what? The brain is a, uh, a question answering machine. And so you ask that question, the brain, if you believe that everything is possible, will start to come up with ideas. And one of the ideas he came up with, this is back in, uh, I don't know when Million Dollar Mindset started.

Yeah, something like that. So basically 2005, he creates Million Dollar Homepage and he's basically like, uh, you know, just like, I don't know, he's 19, 20, 21 years old, something like that. And he's like, okay, I'm gonna make a website that's 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. Each pixel is just like a little square. And he's like, cool, every pixel's a dollar. And he kind of made it like at the top it says, be a part of it, of internet history. And the site website's still up. You can go to milliondollarhomepage.com and you can kind of, You could see all the pixels. And so basically he was like, if I sell each of these squares for $1, I will make $1 million. And sure enough, he did. Uh, January 11th, uh, the final tally was $1,037,100 by the end of it. And so he literally made $1 million. And I asked him, I was like, you know, how'd you get like, you know, he basically, he built something that was like designed to go viral. So it was almost so stupid. And so like, uh, either some people shared it because they thought it was fun, funny, and cool, and other people thought it was dumb, dumb, and dumber. And so like, you know, either way it evoked a reaction out of everybody. And so you can go there right now and you could see all the pixels that sold. And basically companies would buy it because they thought, oh, if this is going to get a bunch of traffic, um, then cool, I might get a bunch of clicks if I put my billboard here. A bunch of people have tried to replicate this since, but he made $1 million in I think 2 months time period. And then he went on to do something, and then he blew it over the course— he blew all the money in the course of the next year, just kind of having party, bought it up, bought a condo, you know, like he did what a 21-year-old would do. And he was like, oh, I for sure— I'm just gonna— dude, I did it so easy the first time, I'm just gonna keep making hits. I don't have to worry about saving this, I can just blow it. And then I think it was 10 years of like not having another hit. Trying thing after thing after thing after thing until he built Calm. And then Calm took several years before Calm became a thing. And now Calm is a, I don't know, $2 billion company or something like that. Um, and in the meditation space. So kind of an amazing story on his part.

I, um, what I did starting at age 20, or I forget which age I was, like 2 years before my exit, I used personal capital. Or, and as well, which is like mint.com. It's just like Mint but different. And you can manually add stuff. And I manually added enough money that it said my net worth was $16 or $17 million. And so I had that on there and I just started like seeing that number because of course money, you can buy stuff, but in a lot of cases it's really just like this, like number on a spreadsheet where like, you know, it's just like a digital thing. Like you could put 3 zeros behind it and like it, kind of starts feeling real for a minute. And that's what I did. And so I put that my net worth was like $17 million, like, uh, 2 years or a year and a half before my exit. And then when I got paid, I remember thinking like, this feels cool. But then like 20 minutes later, I was like, it kind of— I was— I'm kind of used to this now already. Like, I see that number already. And so I would say I'm still getting used to, uh—

Uh, yeah, that's what I do. I'm like, I'm not a businessman. I'm a, I'm a guy who dreams and tries to achieve it. It just so happens that it's in the form of business, but that's what I did and it made a difference. And I actually noticed that here, but here's my, I wrote this down. So I felt a big difference when I had $20,000. The next big difference that I felt in my life was when I hit $100,000. This is all liquid net worth. The next big difference was when I hit $500,000, and then the next one was $10 million. And I think that maybe, maybe like the $40 or $50 range will be the next one, and then maybe like the $100 range will be the next one. That's what I think. But I remember it feeling like between like, uh, $500,000 and like $10 million, I kind of almost felt the same.

Right, right, right. Yeah. The, uh, similarly, first jump was $25K. Uh, we won it in prize money for our startup, like at a business plan competition. And it was like, oh sweet, we can work on this for the whole year. And just, this will be here. This is the money we need to live on. And we need to, so 3 of us lived on $25K for a year and a half or something like that. It was amazing. And, uh, that was a huge jump because it was, freedom for a year and a half to not think about money, to just try to build something cool. I'll also share something that's similar. So forget getting super rich quick, which I think is a good exercise to do. Um, like what would I do if I really wanted to like 5x, 10x, if I wanted to make a million dollars in 3 months, what would I do? And if I wanted to do that, how would I do it? Uh, worthwhile exercise. The other one is like baby goals. So I heard Kevin Hart on some podcasts and they were like, Kevin, man, you've, You're now like the biggest movie star in the world. Like, you know, you're up there, bro. You have the huge comedy specials, movies. You got it all. Like, did you think that you could do this? He's like, he's like, well, I never really thought about it, to be honest. Like, I just— he's like, I didn't think like this huge goal because that would almost like— it just seemed too, too different from where I was. It wasn't really even useful if I thought about it. I could say it, but like, it didn't matter because I was so far from it. He's like, so I just did baby goals. Like, just here's a little baby goal. Let me get to this point and another baby goal, another baby goal. And I actually think that baby goals are a lot more useful and a lot less talked about than like having the big, hairy, audacious, you know, dream and goal. You, you need both. They're both useful at different times, but I would say most people would, should, would probably be better off doubling down on a baby goal. Lemme give you an example. When I was 21, uh, we were working on our business, our startup, and we had a business plan and we had a, an LLC and we had all all the like important sounding things that we thought it takes to do a business.

It's like, you know, oh, come over, let's play house. Let's play doctor. It's like we're playing business cuz we got this like, and literally it was embar— it's embarrassing. We had a binder of a business plan that was like 300 pages and we used to brag about how, well thought through our business was like, we've thought through every detail. What are our employees, what the uniforms will be, what the, yeah, binders full of, full of plans in this case. And, and we, we had like, here's how, here's how we're gonna do employee promotions because we think that the way that companies work is, it's like all this shit that didn't matter. And like, again, 21 years old, too dumb to know that that wasn't what was important. Uh, until we got, we took it to a meeting and we got sort of laughed at where the guy was like, oh, like, This is your business plan? And we were like, yeah, it's a, and we thunked this binder onto the ta— desk. And he was like, I'm not reading this. And we were like, oh yeah, yeah, that's okay. But just, we wanted to show you we've thought it through. He goes, that means you're thinking about the wrong things. And we were like, oh. So we kind of, we're getting, we get this feeling like maybe we're doing this wrong. This is about 9 months in. We're like, maybe we're doing this wrong. So we're just sitting there one day, we're like, all right, why don't we just like for the weekend, let's just make a business and like, let's just try to make $1,000. Like, can we make $1,000 in a weekend? 48 hours as a challenge to ourselves. Can we get to $1,000? And I swear I learned more about like actually building a business in that 48-hour $1,000 challenge than I did the entire year of like working on the business because we were like, okay, how would we do this? What's a product that we think people want? Uh, we don't, you know, we're, instead of like being married to our current idea, it's like, well, what's a simple product? That like people want. And my buddy was like, oh, we used to live in Boulder. And he was like, Trevor was like, you know, you ever seen like every time we walk around campus, all the sorority girls and like frat guys, they all have these wristbands on like the Livestrong band, but they have this like stack of wristbands. And he's like, there's this new one that's like a really thick one. It's like triple the size. And it's like, I don't know, that seems to be in. He's like, what if we made those? Like, that seems like that's pretty simple, like to sell those. And we're like, oh yeah, you could just like customize it. You could put like, you know, The Hustle on it, or you could put like Milk Road on it, or you could put like your brand name or your, your frat name or whatever on it. They're like, that'd be cool. I think we could sell like a bunch of those. And so we were like, okay, uh, what should we call it? And like everything that we had been super thought through and thoughtful about, we just like did in 5 seconds. Like, what's a good name? What's a good name for these like fat, like wristband things? Uh, let's call it The Fat Band. And then we created thefatband.com, bought it on GoDaddy in 5 seconds. Logo here. Let me just use Impact, the like thick font. Okay. Impact. That's the, that's the logo. Boom. Done. Um, product. Okay. Let's not try to have the best product. Like, is there just something on Ali— we had heard of Alibaba as like, is there something on Alibaba or AliExpress that we could just get these like made? I didn't even know the word dropshipping, but we figured out that same concept ourselves. We're like, oh dude, you can just buy these for, you know, 17 cents. And then if you include shipping, it's only this much. If we sold each one for $1.50, like that would work. We could do it. We'd only need to sell whatever it was. Like, we only need to sell 700 bands in order to make $1,000. And hey, that's actually— we could even be profitable if we did it. It's like, all right, well, how do we sell this thing? We only have, you know, like 24 hours left. And so we just started like posting on our own Facebook pages and calling like anybody who we could think of to be like, hey, would you— do you want this for your sorority? Do you want this for your, your group? And like, we found one girl who he used to date who like Basically, she bought— she was like, oh, my parents are having an anniversary party and there's like 200 people coming. I'll take like 250 of them. And we like made a sale and we were like, yeah, just like read out your card, credit card. I don't even know how we took the payment. Like, we didn't even have anything to take payment. We just like took the payments. I'm out of that PayPal of us or something. And dude, that feeling of getting to $1,000, like, you can see the smile on my face. I still feel that, how good that felt that weekend. And that was when I first was like Oh, this is what it feels like to do something real. Everything else we've been doing is fake. And like, I, it was so obvious to me and it changed the way we did our main business too. And like that thing paid for like, you know, a little bit of, uh, side hustle money, uh, as we went. This data is wrong every freaking time.

HubSpot, grow better. So I've built maybe 7 or 8 different businesses, whether that just be like a real estate thing or The Hustle or a court or just whatever. I think almost all of them, I got to $100,000 in sales before I filed an LLC. And the reason I do that is momentum. And like, people are like, Ben's laughing and people are like, oh, it's illegal. First, I don't think that's illegal. You can use your Social Security number and like get a lot of this stuff. Like you can like enter your Social Security number. And second, I have no idea. It actually might be illegal, but like I don't care because I'm willing to like sacrifice those things and get in trouble for the sake of momentum because momentum is like the lifeblood. Like when you're going, because once you start getting sales, it gets addicting and you like taste, you taste it and it works out amazing. Listen to this. So there's this, um, so I tweeted out that I want to dress better. And this guy who's got like a fashion Instagram thing, what's it called, like Well Built Style or something like that. He DM'd me and he's like, hey, like, look at my Instagram. Like, I think it fits what you want. And I go, yeah, this actually is great. He goes, tell you what, I'm going to make you a presentation on all the things that you buy. Just send me a Pinterest board of the people who you admire and like your personality, and I'll study your Instagram and study your Twitter to understand your body and your personality, things like that. And I'm gonna send you a PowerPoint with like image, like it looks for you, and then just a link to buy like all these clothes. I said, all right, great, what's in it for you? He goes, if you like it, pay me $300. And so he spent like a week doing this and he sent it to me. I was like, this is sick, man, I would have paid way more than $300, by the way. And I just, he goes, he goes, well, that's awesome, here's my email, just PayPal me $300. And I did it. And this is a beautiful, perfect example of a person who just They just did it. They did it the right way and it just worked. And like, then you do that maybe 10 more times and then eventually you quit. You create a questionnaire on your website and then you like do a pay half upfront and then you do this and then you do that and then you hire a couple more people. Like it turns into shit really fast. We don't plan like, well, how many people would buy this? You really just think like, well, how big do I want it to be? And like, would a million people buy this over the course of 3 years? Yeah, maybe that sounds about right. All right, that's cool. Let's do it. And, uh, right, that's typically how it works for me. And, uh, I think that's how it should work for most people in most cases. Not all the time. Some guys are starting big companies like car companies and shit like that, and that does require planning. But for most people, most of the time this works.

The, uh, the question was about getting rich quick, and I think my takeaways are that there is a benefit to actually thinking through how would I do it if I wanted to. Like, let me not just be like, pretend to be morally opposed to the idea of getting my outcome faster, right? Like, it's fine. Getting rich quick kind of gets a bad rap, but like, I think we all would love to get to our dream outcomes faster if possible. Might as well ask the question, could I get there really fast? And what, what does the brain come up with? You don't, you're not obligated to do it. Second thing is, instead of focusing on getting rich quick, I would say get revenue quick, especially if you're kind of like early in your entrepreneurial career because Getting any revenue quick will like make the whole thing real. You'll stop playing startup and you'll actually be in the game. You'll feel what's real. It'll force you to focus on the only, only the stuff that matters. And you won't end up like me with a 300-page binder full of business plans. Like it's almost like a caricature how dumb that was. Um, but it's like I took it to the extreme end of like the wrong way to build a business is like to super overplan and never like go to market and actually try your thing. Um, and you know, the, the fat band thing that I did was by far the best thing I did early on in my, my kind of entrepreneurial thing. Didn't get rich off of it, but in a way I did cuz I actually learned about how to do a business for real, which is what ended up helping me become wealthy. But you know, that skill ended up helping me become wealthy. That experience did.