Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en well i remember we were drinking we were drinking water a little paper cup we were at this burrito place and you were like if uh if i could buy this cup for five cents and sell it to you for seven cents that’s my passion yeah i feel like i can rule the world i [Music] episode the guest from episode 2 which was one of the best episodes ever of this podcast and then it was taken down for a bit i don’t know what happened there was something we got to take down make a little edit people started hitting me up hey what happened to ramone’s episode that’s how much people cared they wanted to know that people were just keep attracted to that episode still in the library something happened some people noticed which was amazing to me and now you’re twitter famous yeah as of today well because of you and sam yes because as of today because you and sam retweeted me and i got like almost 8 000 followers overnight i went from 2 000 to 11 000 uh within 24 hours so wow okay well it’s not just because we retweeted i retweeted a lot of stuff you told a great story uh i’m just actually gonna i’m gonna find the hook here uh because you did a good job did sam write this for you uh or did you have him edit this because this was so well done i felt like you can’t this can’t be your first thread and you started off this good on your first thread how did that happen no well it’s sam dripping off the whole uh tweet so sam actually helped me um okay this one would work this is the concept this is a little bit like how you format it then he gave a little bit like i would start with this i will do this and i will explain that uh then of course i you know explained it and then um so what’s the difference this looks great how would you have started it normally and then i’ll show i’ll read what what the end result was what would you have normally said or what do you remember what your v1 might have been yeah well like you you and i are friends so you also know me personally sam too is like typically i would not start off with like i bought something for just little as x and now we’re doing why uh i will not to brag yes and um but you know sam said like no that’s you need to do that um and you know it’s true as well right so why not just uh explain it that that’s what people get people interested um and you know now i think we have seven thousand likes and a bunch of thousands here’s what you’re saying you said two and a half years ago i bought a dog ramp business for three hundred thousand dollars already interesting what the heck is the dollar grant business since then i’ve sold 35 million dollars of dog ramps boom that’s the the hook right um yeah you know this little thing turned into a big thing and then the promise why you should read this thread i’m going to explain why i bought it how i scaled it and why i bought a business versus starting from scratch but first dog ramps question mark and then that is and then the little hand pointing down like come read more that is uh you didn’t take my power writing class but that is exactly what you would have been my star student in this if you had done this as the example because it has all three elements right so it has the what i call the frame i bought it for 300k and i’ve sold 35 million so that’s the wow factor why should i pay attention to this and why do i stop scrolling right so you have a scroll stopping number 35 million dollars of dog rams you have a curiosity gap which is what the heck is a dog ramp and how did this guy do it and then you have a promise which is i’m going to tell you a b and c but first dog ramps which is like you you give them a lightweight entry way that they they have even if they don’t want to know how you bought it while you scale it all the operational stuff i do need to know what the heck dog ramps what the heck and so uh beautifully done and then you tell the story and the story is kind of amazing because people know that i people know that i don’t talk about what my e-commerce business is but they know that i have an ecommerce business what they don’t know is that it started because we were hanging out in your backyard and we were talking and the whole time we’re talking uh your phone is just going to ching it’s like the i didn’t even know what this was it’s the shopify shopify’s like notification sound and um you didn’t even notice it because it’s always just normal to you your phone was sitting on the table and i was like do you need to get that like what is that sound and you go oh sorry that’s like sales and i was just like you know people love this idea of make money while you sleep like passive income oh make money while you sleep that is a sexy idea this was this is even better it was like you were just chilling and having fun and money was just being made for you on the side and just like a little cha-ching every five minutes and it was literally in that moment i was like i’m gonna do this i’m gonna start an e-commerce business because i can’t sit here and just let remote have all the fun this is too good so you inspired me to do it for sure that’s awesome yeah i had to turn off that notification uh because it drove me crazy eventually like uh cheating teaching every time there’s a cell uh but it was fun in the beginning i was really like almost like that uh you know endorphin release each time exactly um and if you’re on youtube if you’re watching the youtube channel which is just i don’t know what is it youtube.com my first million i think or hustlecon something like that just search my first million on youtube you’ll find it but you can see the ramp behind ramone so he’s got the uh all the products behind you so the company’s called alpha paw that’s your thing so we’re gonna talk about uh a couple different things i thought it’d be fun to have you on your substitute teacher for sam and like any substitute teacher the class always has more fun when the sub comes in uh so so that’s what we’re going to do i think we’re going to talk about a couple things i want to talk to you kind of uh buying and selling buying businesses rather than starting businesses so how you do it and we’ll go through some examples maybe of what’s out there and then we’ll jump back and we’ll dig into kind of like your story so uh how the heck you got started but i first want to give the the the people and myself really kind of a crash course on this process of buying businesses because i was amazed when you told me you bought this business for 300 000 and did you buy this off of flippa or quiet light or where’d you had to buy this this one yeah i bought this on a similar broker like quite light uh they’re not around anymore but it was a similar broker uh not as flippa but it’s uh it’s more of a broker and when you bought it i was sort of like what the heck like who does that i didn’t even know anybody who does like off these like random websites like i can see you buying something for a few thousand dollars but 300 grand i thought was a lot and i was like dog ramps what the heck and you had told me then that uh you’re like yeah the business is doing good and the person really wasn’t doing any marketing or they didn’t run any facebook ads i think was the case and so you just saw like a clear clear growth level so break it down like what is your why do you do this and then how do you do this buying businesses thing like i me personally i think it’s also like what’s your personal preference what’s your skill set some people are really good at going from zero to one are really builders others are really good at going from one to ten and those are you know scalars uh i’m not really good at building i’m better at scaling and so i like to buy versus build because it gives you a lot more speed it gives you history and data and it’s similar like real estate where i try to find crappy houses that you need to fix up but in a good up and coming neighborhood if that makes sense right right like you know like okay yes good market there’s a market fit you know if this house was amazing you would be able to rent this out for two three four times more than the current uh owner does uh it’s the same with with website so i look for websites that have a good product mix uh product fit um has history uh it doesn’t have to be you know going really well i’m not looking for websites that are overly optimized so i tend to not buy websites from other internet marketers uh because they already did all the things that i probably would do for it so it’s not really room for growth so i look for so what was the person what was the person like or what was the business like when you bought the dog ramp business so describe kind of what you saw and what made you decide yeah i’m gonna buy this one yeah um it solved a real problem i i wasn’t aware that this is actually a problem um i have a dog but i have a pit bull i don’t have a small dog ben so there’s a real problem for a niche audience that you really can target on facebook those were the good old days that you really could niche target still on facebook um it had not a lot of competition at that time not a lot of people were promoting ramps on facebook instagram uh or even amazon the website was a very crappy uh website where i knew that if we switched to shopify we’d increase or improve the copy the pictures etc the conversion rate would most likely increase um this case uh the two founders were not doing any facebook ads there was no paid acquisition happening at all and even though they had a decent-sized customer database they were not emailing even existing customers let alone trying to capture you know a card abandonment uh so this was a good market which is pets it’s uh it’s you know a house that you said okay if i renovate the kitchens the floorboards the the countertops which is like redoing the website and the branding of it the copywriting and then lastly they’re not even trying to rent it out they don’t rent they don’t post it on craigslist they don’t have flyers out in the neighborhood saying come rent my place which is they weren’t doing paid advertising uh to get customers so you saw it you bought it and you grew it what’s another example so let’s walk through um let’s walk through some real examples and you tell me kind of like what you like or dislike about some of these businesses because i know you did some research on on what’s out there today yeah um so for example there’s one out it’s sort of a crossword puzzle website so think of like when i think a lot of people play these awards with friends games or cross or scrabble games and then there’s a website out there apparently that you can just put in your letters and it will give a bunch of awards recommendations website yeah exactly um and i kind of love it because it’s so there’s no nothing to do like you i think there’s probably a database that’s already pre-built that you can buy you build it basically once um and then it’s just trying to get seo traffic you know uh to your website so for example there’s one for sell now for nine million dollars they started it in 2017. um does 3.5 million in revenue and because there’s no really team needed it’s like it’s almost all profit it’s like three around three million dollars of profit and it’s just you know printing money basically um i like these type of niches where not a lot of people think about but there’s definitely a huge search volume another one what would you do so give me two two pieces on that so the first is um with something like this would you how would you try to grow it or would you would you not buy this because you say i don’t know how i would grow this you know i get i get a faster payback on my money so what would you do how would you think about the growth levers for this one yeah that’s a good question um i will personally not buy it at the moment but because the price tag typically i only buy you know things in a couple hundred thousand dollar range uh not millions the old what i would without knowing too much of the current business model i definitely would try to increase rpms meaning how can we squeeze more advertising dollars out of the same traffic they get like tens of millions of visitors a month and i looked at a couple of similar websites and i think there’s a huge opportunity by placing ads differently just to increase rpm similar if you have an e-commerce you want to increase conversion rates if you have a content site you want to increase rpms meaning how to get more people to click on the ads or things like that so i would do that secondly i would look and do research like for sure if there’s a huge segment of people that love scrabble what is this like what other games do they like and maybe build a sub uh sister website that does i don’t know like what’s it called sudoku uh or whatever um so that’s that’s the two the two things that i would uh if i would buy this type of website and and basically when you buy something like this most people say i don’t have nine million dollars and i think when you started doing this when you first started looking at these websites you also didn’t have enough money to buy one of these so tell tell the story of like how you first started going to these websites even when you didn’t have enough money to buy buy one of these companies like i’ve actually bought and sold uh websites that started with buying something for 500 and then sold it for you know 1500 i started on flippa 12 years ago um and you know i’ve bought an pinata website that sells uh pinatas you can send a picture uh of sam and uh it makes a pinata of him yes a company in mexi in texas texas would make a piano and then ship it directly to the customer so i bought that uh for five thousand dollars that i scraped together um improved the website traffic and uh made my money back in two and a half months and then sold it a month later for 22 right so it’s not huge numbers but those really you know helped me to grow a little bit and really get a lot of experience then um when i started soap up um i actually saw a similar website for sale on flippa that was for sell for a hundred thousand dollars was in the daytime uh tv uh era too and uh the topic was about daytime tv of course i didn’t have money i had like um a couple of thousand dollars i was not able to buy that um but what i did is like hey let’s see if there’s something there let’s do a small test build a fan page uh see how the engagement goes and then see really how you know if there is something there and then grow from there i guess we should explain you um you created if people have listened to episode two they know the full story uh we won’t go the full story again this time but your claim to fame that what episode two is about is telling the story of how you created a soap opera um content site like a soap opera a website that was basically just saying hey you’re watching days of our lives or you’re watching uh you know i don’t know the young and the restless um here’s the recap here’s the spoilers of what’s coming next you kind of built like a spoiler site for daytime soap operas like who the heck thinks of that and then you ended up selling it for nine or ten million dollars cash and that’s like an amazing amazing exit and this is from a guy who has never watched a soap opera episode in his life so i think people love that because it was so a random but b interesting and relatable how you did that and it sounds like one of the ways you were getting business ideas was you were going on these websites and you i think you told me at the time you’re like i saw a website for sale that was also in the daytime tv niche that was like a hundred thousand dollars for sale and you’re like cool like i don’t have a hundred thousand dollars but if this is worth a hundred thousand dollars maybe i could make something like this and then you went through this process where you said okay how can i test these ideas because uh when i met you you i was like all right what’s your passion uh you know silicon valley style and you were like you know what problem you really want to solve what topic what industry really passionate about and you were like there was a cup on the table i remember we were drinking we were that’s my passion like i like to buy things and sell things for a little bit more and i’m basically an internet marketer and i don’t care if it’s cups or dog ramps or soap opera spoilers it doesn’t matter to me i love the process of like business and selling things and i was like that’s amazing uh you know i love the the sort of self-awareness and honesty and then when you were testing ideas for for before you created the soap opera site you went on facebook and if i remember correctly you basically made like 30 fan pages or something like that because at the time you could promote a page a fan page on facebook for like cents you could go get a bunch of likes of your facebook page and likes weren’t worth too much but you could kind of test what topics are people most engaged with what what topics if i post content in this page will i get a bunch of likes for and i think it ended up being like the top three were something like what was it was like right wing politics uh like soap operas and what was the last one it was like wrestling or something like that yeah wrestling was really popular soap opera was very soaps and politics uh wrestling and uh cars were also pretty pretty high up right um and then you were like you know i hate politics i don’t want to do politics what’s the next best one soap operas okay great uh hire this woman in the midwest to write uh blogs every day about soap operas and then drive traffic baby uh selling yes to go sell some paper cups exactly and i just didn’t really overthink it i didn’t wrote a business plan i just like gone when on upwork.com hey looking for a writer that can write soap opera spoilers put a very simple blog up just to test to see would people go from facebook onto a blog and write the story and that’s how it basically started and then you know started with 10 cents a day from making from google adsense and then a dollar a day and then 10 and that’s how it grew right okay let’s look at a couple more deals and then we’ll we’ll jump around again so give me give me another one that you saw before you came on the pod that you want to talk about yeah so this this is one i just saw uh an hour ago i just thought it was interesting interesting it was a goat milk soap website itself what the heck is that yes so apparently uh goat milk soap is better for the environment uh and it’s better for they say it’s cruelty free because apparently a lot of soaps the traditional soaps they do testing on animals etc uh so they claim and like forgive me for people that you know know about goats milk soap i this is the first time i heard about it and that’s why i uh that intrigued me it could probably be a product that people that use this already passionate about it seem like you know people that are into keto are super passionate or you know there’s tons of these examples where it’s a pretty small niche but people are so passionate that they they will spread the word for you um so this is my website you can find it on flippa um just search goat milk soap it’s it says four years old monthly profit 20 000 a month uh it’s got a 29 profit margin and it’s selling at a 1.8 x multiple right so okay so what is that so let’s say 20 times 12 we don’t do public math but we do type things in 240 240 times 1.8 so it’s selling for 400 something thousand is that right correct 400 425 is the asking price right okay amazing so walk me through how do you think about something like this yeah so first um i look at i will do a little bit research about the product uh does goat milk really work is it more of an uh more of a gimmick or does it actually solve a problem or are people really you know interested is there a need for this and again if it’s a gimmick that’s fine too right i mean this is not like oh the answer is no we’ll not buy it uh it’s just important to know right back to the pinata example exactly um how many because it’s very important too for like not all bit ideas have to be a hundred million dollar idea like i think a million dollar a year business is amazing as well uh right so uh maybe goat milk soap is you know um a very passionate niche um product uh i will look um i will do research like okay how many people in the us search for it uh you can use google trends or you can use uh all kinds of um search volume um trackers um that you can see how many people are searching for these keywords i will look on instagram or they’re like is there a rabbit fan base you know like goat milk you know fans or facebook groups um then i’ll also look on amazon is this sold on amazon if yes how is the trend and what is the sales and then you can use a tool called helium 10 to see how many uh how much revenue a listing is doing it’s by the way really amazing tool uh to do research i do the same for pet products you know i look what is trending on amazon um what is you know blowing out the waters for sales and then i will do research if we should also start selling that then i look of course on the business stuff like business um is the is the trend up or down or flat um and also like most the business i bought were either flat or down because that’s how you know you get you know a good deal uh so even if it’s flat even if it’s not trending up i still would you know potentially buy it uh what is important are the traffic channels diversified is 100 or 90 coming from just facebook or is it just emails or is it just um seo that could be a little bit you know risky uh especially if it’s all paid traffic from facebook uh because all the e-commerce founders or listeners uh on this podcast will know you know apple can make an update and suddenly you know the paid uh traffic landscape changed so i’m looking for diversified channels then of course i look at revenue profit margins so you can really calculate like okay if i pump is this going to be more of a skill where i can pump more money into facebook i put a dollar in i get three dollars back or is this more like a long term play where i have to create seo content that you know is less costly but it’s a longer game and then also what’s important to understand what you’re buying are the trademarks or the patents is there email subscribers or in this case they have a 43 000 email subscribers there’s 33 000 sms subscribers i think there’s a social media all these things um in my opinion are valuable because that’s the same with when i bought alpha paw they had a huge instagram following the huge facebook following they had an email list they had trademarks and patent all that was you know uh included in the sale and if you those are great those are the assets and so let’s take a business like this let’s say it’s 400 000 listing um how does it work you know if you don’t have 400 grand lying around you know in in a briefcase like a like a you know evil evil genius what do you what do you do how do you buy a business like this if you don’t have 400 grand lying around yeah so you can use um sba loans uh to buy internet businesses um sba loan is basically a business loan small business loan um that i don’t know when they started um a few years ago where they now also fund internet businesses and you can borrow up to 90 so technically you can buy something for that is for sale for 400 000 and you only have to put down 40 000 um and the interest rate is is pretty low it’s anywhere between five and seven so it’s it’s higher than a mortgage but it’s much lower than a traditional you know a business loan um for you know for people like us then the second thing you can do when you see the asking price of 400 000 you can always there’s a cash upfront offer and then you can offer like hey i will pay you 250 000 cash up front at closing uh the remaining 150k i will pay you spread out over the next 12 months interest-free um so every time i buy business that’s never 100 hundred percent cash on closing i always have 60 to 80 percent cash in closing and remaining it’s either seller’s note or an earn out and that keeps the seller you know helpful because they’re you know they need to help you out plus it lowers the amount that you have to loan so let’s just say let’s just do a little loan calculator so sba loan is what 10-year loan something like that yes so 10-year loan so let’s say you did the full amount no seller financing just for simplicity uh simplicity here so you put down 40k you’re going to take the other 360 k as a sba loan and let’s say you’re paying 6 a year for 10 years so your monthly payment on that loan is gonna be four thousand dollars this business makes twenty thousand dollars a month of profit so you take the twenty thousand dollars a month of profit you pay back your loan for four you’re left with 16k of profit every month right now so you could buy this today and be making money and so that that difference let’s say 16k you only put down you know you only put down 40 000 so it only takes two and a half months for you to get all your equity back and then you’re p and you’re profitable every single month and you can reinvest some of that into growth so that’s like a pretty s uh sweet deal and that’s more than most people are making at their quote-unquote safe job correct and sba the beauty with sba loans they of course they look at your personal credit history and etc but they really look and make a decision the the lenders on the business so they will never fund you if there’s too high of a risk right if they think like oh if uh we cannot you know the the borrower cannot pay the the interest month over month um so it’s amazing too i actually spoke with uh joe valley from quite light broker uh today and he told me story there was a a woman she bought a business for 1.25 million with an sba loan two years ago and just closed and sold the same business for 5.5 i believe it was in the five range um but put only 10 percent down so she only she didn’t even put 200k down but her return was you know 4 million i don’t know so if done right you know sba loans is a really great tool a good leverage tool uh to get into internet businesses or buy a business amazing uh yeah it’s this is one of the tricks now uh what do you give people a sense of how do you know make sure you’re not buying a lemon yes that’s uh i get a question a lot um so when you go to flippa.com i would really be careful because flippa.com is a marketplace anybody can just upload you know their listing or their website and basically claim whatever it’s on you to do the due diligence if you go to a broker like white light brokers they basically do all the vetting for you they will like look at the business is everything legit um so the risk is much smaller um but regardless if you’re new to this if you are you know it’s your first business you can hire a due diligence company uh centaurikai’s synterica.com is one i think those are the biggest uh well-known you pay you know it depends on the listing price but it’s as cheap as a couple hundred dollars um and it goes up from there but they do all the due diligence for you they look through all the traffic is it legit is the revenue legit is whatever everything they claimed is at all legit and then they can come back to you with like well we looked at all the data all the numbers you bought it for 1.2 but we think it’s actually worth 900k because these are the reasons um so definitely recommend going with a due diligence company um like centurica gotcha okay and give okay so these are uh business you could buy what was the first kind of like how the heck did you become you right so how are you figuring out how to do this give people kind of the uh not not you don’t go deep into anyone but just describe kind of the journey and then i might poke into some that sound interesting so okay you’re you’re ramon you’re born and uh i don’t know i don’t know when you got your entrepreneurial start what was the first kind of like entrepreneurial venture you were in your teens or or 20s or what my first real business was an construction business um i’ve done things before that but were like nothing really significant but i think the way how i started the construction company is really my dna that makes sense because if i look back a lot of other companies i started basically the same i didn’t know anything about construction and and uh the story um i will keep it very uh quick but i think it’s maybe could be helpful for people that maybe are overthinking steps or overthinking things i was out of job was 20 years old had to pay my rent co-worker of my mom said i need a painter to paint the inside of my house i can pay you x i forgot the number but it was worth like a month’s worth of money that i made in three days so i thought oh this is amazing i can you know be my own boss it’s a lot of money the harder i work the more money i make that was really what intrigued me right like if i can do this in one day i will actually you know have make the same amount of money than in a whole month so you got paid not your input and um and as you know like in my high school dropout right so there was not uh officially 15 but i stopped really going when i was 14. um okay so that’s basically we got a letter right that’s u.s ninth grade i don’t know what my mom actually got a letter from the board of school to with an official waiver like okay your son doesn’t have to go to school because in holland you have to go to school mandatory to 16. they actually gave me a pass because no high school wanted to accept me but that’s a different story so that’s a bad guy the on sunday night she paid me out i said this is amazing so on monday morning i came up with a name house improvements or home improvements one of those two build some uh design a couple very ugly business cards made a one-page uh website and put an ad out on the dutch version of craigslist and i thought you know what let’s just not do only painting let’s do like we do everything construction like remodeling from a to z whatever you don’t know how to do any of that by the way no no i don’t know anything i barely said so so what gives you that confidence to say i’ll i’ll renovate everything a to z and yet i don’t know how to do anything a to z i think that’s the naive thing part of me that i still have is like let’s just see first if i can get a job and then figure out like how to solve or do the job and so an hour later or two hours later i got an email uh from a guy saying hey i’m looking for an electrician uh and um i am rewiring the whole building blah blah i said sure no problem i’m a ninth grade dropout i’ll be there in three hours i got this i went out to bought an official construction outfit um so i really looked like a construction guy or like you know and i went there the next morning and um disclaimer of course i will not have done things that will you know potentially kill people but i just wanted to see like you know i don’t know like maybe it was something simple so he gave me he gave me the tour and it was like he i couldn’t even understand the words he was saying like oh we need to wire this and we need to do and the floors were open and the walls were open and uh i was still playing along but in my mind i was like and there’s no way i can do this plus it’s dangerous as [ ] um so he went out to run some errands i waited for him um because i didn’t want to be like you know an [ ] just go left so i waited for an hour he came back and i was like listen i’m gonna be honest i don’t know [ ] about the construction company i don’t know [ ] about elektra just started yesterday i want to build a construction company but i don’t know anything and he was because he was an entrepreneur he laughed his ass off and he actually gave me work he said like you’re hilarious um just help me with you know getting carry this box over here yeah and he paid me the same amount of dollars or euros uh hourly rate than uh he would have done before i think also by the way if we have young listeners i think it’s so important to do those things when you’re young because if i would do it now i’m 40 years old not endearing i don’t think it’s not endearing it’s not like oh i appreciate your hustle no it’s like hey you’re con man like yeah yes if you’re young take advantage you know sam was also really genius of doing that as well right like you can’t just get away with so much more of showing hustle but also like i think he appreciated that i waited for him and just be like honest like hey listen i don’t know [ ] about this um but he gave me a really good tip he said in order to own a construction company you don’t have to know everything or do yourself if i were you find freelancers you focus on getting the projects and then you outsource it to freelancers so that’s what i did and found an electrician freelancer plumber you know everything you need a whole crew that you need um and two weeks later i got a second job and i didn’t do anything i just had my cruise assembly yeah yeah i sold it for 10k my cut was like around 5k and that’s how i basically grew the construction company and within a year a little over a year we were like at 20 to 24 people depending on how many projects we had and at that time we did close to a million dollars or million euros sorry a year uh in revenue and you’re like 19 20 years old something like that at that time yeah 20 21 when we you know we’re here in and so what happened to that happy ending or sad ending to the story well very quick maybe story about how i scaled the scaling part i think that’s also uh maybe could be helpful for people is that the big problem with construction is every like the job is two weeks and you have to find another job their job is four weeks they have to find another job right so it was really hard to keep the guys busy um and really you know make sure that um the the projects align if that makes sense so i thought hey who can i find what can i do so i don’t have to find jobs anymore real estate investors they buy apartment buildings all at once they all need to be renovated at once so i went to um local real estate uh meetups um that was actually horrible because i was a really out of my place i was way too young i was like you know blue collar guy uh with all these fancy pens but one thing lead to another that i met the biggest uh uh real estate investor in my region that i lived and he was like literally built buying apartment buildings at the foreclosure every month between 20 and 100 buildings at the time so now he became my client and he was my client to the end basically i never had to search for a new uh customer the so that was all the good news then i made a bunch of mistakes uh cash flow projection was one where construction you really it’s a similar a little bit similar like with e-commerce i think you could grow yourself into bankruptcy if that makes sense making for example you with a construction same with e-commerce you have to put a lot of money up front i have to pay every friday the crew i have to buy the supplies but i only get paid all the way at the end when the project is done the faster you grow the more projects you have the more money you have to put out in open and you have to wait for it so that started that was really uh and i was just not good at cash flow projections well i just didn’t do it another thing that really was bad was growing too fast that i have to hire people that i normally would not have hired um and really lost grip of the business that makes sense and you know it started to break i had to close the company uh and after three years more or less and our mutual buddy silly was at my house this weekend and he said something like uh i don’t know if maybe you already maybe this is the guy you already talked about but he said he said you had some like mentor kind of help you early on uh somebody who really changed the course of your life i i i don’t know is he talking about that guy that who gave you that first kind of insight to hire freelancers or is there somebody else no he’s talking about no this is a different story okay tell that one um all right that story uh was before my i was um almost 18 or around that time my mother kicked me out the house you have to you know live um you have to figure your [ ] out so i have to pay rent so i had to find a job at a local best buy um the the dutch version of best buy a couple weeks in i said like this sucks right like uh long hours whatever and um there was a guy came coming in in a nice expensive suit uh he wanted to buy something was not in stock he gave me a business card and said like software solutions and i didn’t know anything about software or programming or whatever but i need more solutions because poor solutions whatever i didn’t know but i just knew like okay hey there’s a lot of money to be made and a lot of opportunity in because this was like the early internet days right like you know i’m an old [ ] right this is like uh before 2001. uh before the internet bubble as people remember um so i didn’t know what he was doing but it was something in software and solutions and how you knew it was good because he came in in a fancy suit or you separately had been thinking about the internet uh separately been thinking about because i always was like trying to you know oh let’s buy this type of product in germany and then try to sell it in holland like i was always trying to build these doing these schemes uh legal of course but um internet was just like this whole new like for me my like this was like amazing like there’s so many upper so much opportunity um and so i knew that i just didn’t know like exactly what how to get started how to even you know write a line of code or whatever um so i started stalking him and said hey um and this is again the benefit of being young like hey i want to get a job at your company and he said no uh we don’t we’re not hiring but i kept stalking him respectfully but i did caught stalking him for months like three four months to a point where he said you know what i’m so sick and tired of this in a good way um let’s make a deal if i’m gonna give you a book on friday we have an internal exam for programmers if you uh pass that exam um i will give you i will hire the company will hire you and give you a six-month internal program to become a microsoft uh developer but you have to promise me if you fail this exam on friday you have to leave me alone for the rest of your life i said okay let’s do it they know what it was expect he gave me a book about microsoft database access access database programming study that if my life was depending on it did exam and i passed uh i didn’t pass a plus but i passed enough and uh so they gave me a job like gave me a job um and for six the next six months they trained me i was able to become a microsoft software developer within this company they gave me a lease card they gave me a laptop they gave me like phone like it was it was insane yeah so this guy really changed my life because i think learning how to code uh really is helpful also in other ways in in your life like because it really um you analyze problems in situations just different if um when when you know how to code that makes sense and you but today you don’t consider yourself like a coder like let’s say for your your ecommerce website you’re not the one going and making changes is do you do it like sometimes or early on before you hire people do you just do stuff yourself or no you’re just saying learning it back then and using it back then and learning how to think that way was helpful yeah and at the that time i had to learn visual basic that language doesn’t even exist anymore so it’s like uh i know how to read php and html and you know i know i know how to do it but i’m like i never i never do basically i i think it’s more of breaking down what was so frustrating as a programmer is like finding bugs so you have like a 10 000 line codes and there’s one thing bro it breaks you have to go through like all the codes but it really trains your brain like okay how to circle that circle down but like um really try to narrow down what it could be where the problem could be and that mindset you can use in in all kinds of other right you know real life situations so i don’t program right now no okay fair enough and we got five minutes left you had a game you wanted to play at the end let’s do let’s do the game okay so i wanted to ask you and why did you want to play this game by the way uh because i think your audience would like to know these questions like would you rather so it’s a root your mother let’s give the people what they want all right so here’s the first one would you rather be the ceo of apple or the president of the ufc oh okay president of the ufc like dana white uh too much travel i’m traveling i’m on the road all the time dealing with with all kinds of head event planning like when i threw my wedding i was like this is the only event i’ll ever throw like this and uh for the ufc every weekend they throw you know a mega wedding so no way i’m doing i also wouldn’t really want to be the ceo of apple so i’ll take the job i’ll go buy your company for half a trillion i’ll buy my company for half a trillion and then i’ll peace out all right that’s awesome um i saw this on a meme actually would you rather have dinner with jay-z or take 500 000 cash uh five hundred thousand dollars cash easy uh what would you do would you take dinner with jay-z i feel like you might be a i want a unique experience person no yeah i will take the cash too there was there was a whole debate uh like people saying like you should take jay-z because like let’s say i feel 50 000. 50 000 i think is a closer bet here then i will in the situation right now i will take the dinner um if i have no money i will take the cash right yeah yeah i’m in the same boat i think the dinner is most likely going to be kind of lame but you know i get a good story who knows maybe maybe we hit it off maybe he’s interesting uh 500 000 that’s you could go buy your charity dinner with jay-z for for 90 000 and have the rest left over for goods after that or you can buy a goat milk soap website yeah exactly i mean whatever that’s the question would i rather have that goat milk business today or this dinner with jc tomorrow i’ll take the goat milk business today thank you um let’s do would you rather would you rather bootstrap bootstrap a million dollar business or vc back 10 million a year business um i think i would rather have a vc backed 10 million your business i’ll tell you why i think that once you can get a business to 10 million dollars i think the odds of you being able to get it to 50 or 100 are quite high i think 0 to 10 is a lot harder or more likely to to round down to zero then 10 will stay at 10. so i think 10 million really what you’re saying is hey just stick with it for a little bit longer and you’ll be at 30 40 50 70 something like that million within two three years so i think that’s the case and then i’m i’m actually a lot of people think vc means you’re vc forever and that you’re in this endless uh chase they’re like well the vcs say you need to grow the vcs say you know you’ll have to raise your next round my experience with vcs has actually been quite different which is vcs give you the money they might want you to do something but it’s your call what you do and like you can raise one round and never raise again from vc or you can raise one round and grow at the pace you want um they might strongly advise you to do something but it’s on you to say look are you gonna fire me do you have the power to do that are you gonna fire me if not then i’m gonna need you to you know shut the [ ] up and stay in the back seat and like let me do what i’m gonna do here so i think the 10 million business is just better than the bootstrap to 1 million then a very quick for the listeners that have an idea but not the capital would you tell them to try to get vc money or try to get the company started uh get some revenue and then do the vc route or yeah i mean this is going to sound cliche but it’s true and whoever is doing this needs to hear this which is raising money is not the uh it’s not the goal like so a lot of people are like hey i want to talk to you uh like i’ll invest in a company and they’ll say i want to talk to you about you know what metrics we need to do to be able to raise an a in nine months or you know we’re starting planning for our series b i want to talk to you about what metrics we need to do to hit the b and i’m like i understand what they’re saying and it’s good to be thoughtful and plan but there’s this sort of implication raising money is the milestone and it’s like oh what business what does this business need to do to be able to achieve this outcome and it’s actually the opposite it’s i have a business outcome i’m trying to get to i’m trying to get to 10 million in revenue with 20 ebitda i’m trying to get uh 20 market share in this market or 5 i want to grow 20 a month you have a business outcome in mind and then you just say do i need more money to make that happen yes or no um money is the fuel it is not the destination it is not the it’s not the point of the journey uh uh for for raising money and so i would just say like yeah when you start when you have the idea uh the goal is okay well i need to get like one customer 10 customers 100 customers a thousand customers you start doing that and then at some point if you get stuck because you lack the money meaning you truly you need to go buy inventory or your you paid ads are working you just need to spend more to get to the next milestone then you raise the money don’t raise don’t raise as your excuse to go do the business and you also see a lot of uh deals or people approaching you and you know me in a little bit lesser way but i do feel like there’s a lot of people think they need money to launch a business but actually don’t because they think oh it needs to be pretty or it has to have all these functionalities um but maybe they could just like start with one functionality and just have you know a fiverr designer just do it and you know do it at least get started yeah my favorite people to fund are people who have uh created a company and like made all the mistakes ended up with a small win where they got a taste of winning but you know not not not enough to go retire on a yacht because the next time they start they’re like not going to waste those six months on design mock-ups and branding and getting the trademark and all this other stuff like they know what are the traps and they know what what you really need to do versus what you think you need to do and there’s a big gap there but usually even if somebody tells you experience is the best teacher because uh the voice in your head typically from most entrepreneurs i meet the voice in your head typically is giving you some bad advice your first first time through and it’s okay like just go do it learn those lessons and then the second time you’re much better off yeah i agree then last question would you rather do a boxing match against sam or do an man with me and suli uh both i i’d rather do the boxing match with sam because that sounds more fun and exciting uh than like an endurance race but uh yeah so i would do a boxing match with sam i think that’d be great i’ve always wanted to like feel what it’s like to be in a real fight like i think i got into like one or two little altercations when i was younger like in high school or middle school but it was always like i hit the kid and then he he ran away or like he hit me and then it got broken up and it’s like it never was like okay let’s do this let’s get let’s start no one’s gonna break this up and the point is to actually get in a fight so i would do it although sam is definitely like you know on horse tranquilizers or whatever like horse you know growth hormone or whatever he’s taking that guy’s uh built like a absolute monster right now so uh you know i need a little training period but i would do it actually a lot of people because he’s been posting videos of me and him sparring um you know he wants to become an uh uh fitness influencer now um to his credit by the way he posts pic he posts videos of you hitting him and him going down normally when people post they cherry pick what makes them look good he does the opposite he posts up you hitting him in the liver shots and him falling down over and over again like a compilation and to be also to his credit he um he started four or five months ago um not super serious not that he’s doing it every day but he he actually got really good really fast um you know i’ve been training much longer um but a lot of people on the twitter comments actually are voting for uh you versus sam so yeah maybe we should give us what they need let’s give the fans what they want yeah we need we need like a kickstarter or gofundme or something it’s like if uh if if certain number of people vote for this or buy the pre-buy a pay-per-view five dollar pay-per-view of this we’ll do it we need like whatever ten thousand pre-buys okay ten thousand provides that’s the goal ten thousand pre-buys of a ten dollar pay-per-view and then we’ll do it okay let’s set it up and then um you can give me like give me like i don’t know four months to train and we’ll fulfill the training yeah four to six whatever each one can get one uh good trainer boxing trainer uh do you do what you’re going to do boxing or mma or no boxing is simple i don’t have time to learn five martial arts so we’ll get to the point where we’re both shitty at boxing and then we’ll do it yeah let’s do it i think we should uh do it and then maybe silly and i can box too as though the free uh with that yeah we should we should get anybody it’s a ceo boxing tournament and we stream it uh and we do it in a really small ratchet like boxing gym here so we can go there and then we’ll just stream it for for the people right uh 10 000 free buys that’s a lot but i think it’s doable uh especially if you can get the support of your listeners yeah we’re saying it now uh people will just have to see uh we’ll just have to get them a link and let’s get him a link and let’s do it yes i can’t wait all right perfect um okay i gotta run i gotta do a call with this guy ramon thanks for being on where should people find you so now you’re twitter famous so is it ramon vanmir is that your your twitter handle right yeah ramone at ramon van meer all together ramon vanmir go buy if you have a small dog like i have a maltipoo uh i have four of your ramps in my house because it’s a lifesaver uh otherwise your dogs get like you know injured backs and they’re jumping off couches and stuff like that that’s like imagine jumping onto something or off of something that’s three times your height right that’s what they’re doing and so these ramps are onto the bed onto the couch up the stairs you know that’s how i use them so go buy go buy some ramps from alpha paw you