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 like you got to choose the business model that’s right for you but answer the question of like okay can this audience that i have make me a billionaire [Music] i have one house that’s gonna pull off like 15 000 a month and it’s just a single house so you’ll beat it by quite a bit no way really what’s what’s the house worth uh i bought it for 900k that’s right dude that’s crazy 700 a night where where is it yeah uh it’s in in boise uh like right next to the boise state university stadium oh so do you get like basically like football tourists or what do you who who’s renting this thing for 700 a night in boise we’re live by the way nathan we’re live great no for real um who’s renting it so you get like all graduation everyone coming in to you know tour the university or whatever else and then um uh just anyone coming to downtown it’s like a five bedroom brand new construction sam it actually looks like the kitchen looks somewhat similar to uh the place you just linked me to so so why haven’t you bought some more like floating shelves in the tile backsplash and all that why haven’t you bought like yeah in the same area that’s my question yeah it’s a million dollars it’s a million dollar or 900 000 or whatever you said under a million dollar house that’s making 20 15 grand a month why don’t you buy 50 of them well i i i just bought this one and so it’s not making that yet but that’s what we’re like the bookings for the summer it’s at i just did 8 000 for january locked in um and then the summer bookings are coming in at like quite a bit higher um like so the january ones you know are last minute and and boise is slow there but uh yeah the summer ones are coming in at eight nine a thousand dollars a night eight hundred nine hundred or a thousand a night um which is wild and we haven’t put a hot tub on it yet so i just bought a hot tub today and uh so we’ll get that in there i should be able to charge a little bit more and it’s gonna be good wow so we should start uh we should intro intro well yeah so you’re we’re live that might go live this is nathan barry nathan barry um i’ve known nathan since a gum road meetup shawn i went to a gumroad meetup in like for real uh i’m not joking she doesn’t join that sounds maybe 2012 2013. nathan was doing gumroad he had this book called authority right authority yep and i don’t even remember what the book was about just making a living online but then you also had graphic design stuff and you had a really cool blog and you uh you sold all types of stuff but i’ve been homies with you for a while and then you launched this thing called convertkit and i was like nathan like the other thing’s working just do that and anyway now it’s a business that both sean and i i think are i didn’t end up i didn’t end up doing it there’s some mechanics problem with the way we can get into it we’re an llc in it it gets complicated uh as like pass-through funds and stuff like that but yeah but sam you’re okay i’m in the cool club and basically his business convertkit does like 26 i think million dollars in recurring revenue it’s like a mailchimp competitor that’s better and different their their revenue is all completely live so if you google convertkit revenue yeah like 20 the revenue 29. do you regret now that your business is actually kicking ass do you feel like i kind of wish this wasn’t all super transparent or you know because it’s good early on transparency is great early on it gets you a bunch of people interested then when you start winning you know you’re giving more value than you’re getting back usually by that by doing that yeah so i think it’s uh a great idea if it’s for a mission reason a terrible idea if it’s for like a marketing reason and i actually had two friends who sat me down at one point and they’re like nathan this is an intervention take down your like public metrics page and which they were right like they had talked to competitors who were like wow this is so helpful like you’re scrolling through and they’re like you know your competitors are doing this right i’m like i know but really it’s like uh it’s a mission thing of the whole mission for the company is help creators earn a living and so if we can put this public blueprint out there that’s not just like the snapshot of time where you know you’ve done it with companies where you’re going through and you’re like oh they said here they’re at 10 million you know you’re like trying to piece together the trajectory we all have the same spreadsheets um and so like actually doing it in real time means that someone can be like okay i’m at 50k mrr churn is absolutely brutal right now oh i wonder what convertkit’s churn was when they were at 50k right and you can go back and you can find the date range and be like oh in this time here’s all of their metrics here’s how fast they’re growing and everything and so it’s like this for anyone who wants it it’s this master class where you have to dig in and find the data but you can find everything about our business and my hope is that it’s like breadcrumbs that every future entrepreneur who wants to how much recreation how much traffic does hopefully in another industry do you know what’s up how much traffic does that page get i don’t know it’s not actually even our page it’s convertkit.baremetrics.com right and uh it’s not even ours so wow presumably not that much okay so you’re for real not using it for marketing if you don’t even know how much traffic it gets okay now i believe you but when you said the mission thing i have a i have a system of uh tuning out whenever anybody says values mission vision things like that i’m just like yeah by default i do not believe anything you’re about to say for the next 30 seconds how many um how many people work there now because when you you wrote this blog post two years i forget i’ve been reading your blog for so long i don’t remember the years but you wrote a blog post and you’re like oh we are making let’s say eight million dollars a year but we basically had twenty thousand dollars in the bank or that’s i don’t remember the exact numbers but it was almost as extreme as that right yeah so uh the company’s totally self-funded there’s no outside capital and so when we hit like this period of rapid growth we grew from 2000 a month to 100 000 a month in 12 months and uh you know that was just on 50 grand that i’d put in we spent all of that money and so what happened is the company was growing and profitable but we were doing like three percent profit margins and so we’ve gotten down to the point where we had i think like ten to twelve thousand dollars in the bank and like that was growing but we were like expenses were increasing by so much more that uh like our days worth of expenses was getting shorter and shorter and so that got uh super scary you guys want to know okay random story so uh i i think you all know andrew warner mixer i was at a mixergy meetup in san francisco like he would do these scotch nights and uh uh after one of those like we i think we were walking out of the building and he’s like dude you know it kind of pulls me aside he’s like dude you seem super stressed and i was like yeah like and i kind of told him the financial situation and we were like our bank balance was growing but you know you’re like now paying all these people and you have no money and so i told him about that and and he said okay here’s what we’re gonna do i’m gonna wire you 25 000 tomorrow you’re going if you need the money spend it do whatever you eat whatever you want with it whenever you feel right like pay me back um or if you don’t need it like just put it in a savings account like just let it be in you know like an insurance blanket for you and then uh wow you know why did you know him well anything if he uh we’d hung out in person i think twice before so i knew him a little bit on the podcast and we were gonna say the only thing what oh the only the thing he said is like if you do decide to raise funding like convert that into you know like i’ll be the first person in for that um if not what a smart move okay but i think that’s a good move the thing that he said is the only thing that will piss me off on this is if you ever try to pay me interest on it like don’t try to make this a loan in any way and so i held onto the money it sat in the bank account for like eight or nine months uh we grew our bank account to the point that we had plenty of savings in the bank and all of that and i wired the money back and like uh andrew is forever one of those people where i’m like thank you just because he pulled me aside and was like dude you seem stressed and he was like here let me loan you a security blanket that’s one of the coolest stories i’ve heard that’s frankly that’s amazing shout out to andrew we gotta have it we gotta have everyone now just for that story uh we’ve joked about it before but we should have them on for sure because if he’s done it to you he’s probably done like some weird stuff like that to a bunch of people so that’s he’s probably has some interesting stories yeah i mean he knows everyone too so he’s he’s i’m looking at your guys’s revenue chart there’s a huge spike every november what did you do is like a black friday deal or what what causes this huge yeah we can talk about whether that’s a good idea or not um so early on right when you need cash uh the thing that you do in sas is you push annual plans right because you have this uh cash flow problem and so we started pushing annual plans as part of our black friday sale you know to bring forward a bunch of that cash um and so we kind of just kept doing that and then what it did is it aligned a whole bunch of uh um renewals you know annual payments right around that same time so it just keeps getting bigger and bigger right until it gets the point that you’re pulling in like four and a half million dollars in a single month um you’re also getting all the churn at the same time so i don’t know that like like we’re not gonna keep doing it by the way there’s so many things like that in business that i’m like we’re doing this i can’t really say if it’s a good idea or a bad idea i wish i could but we’re just we’re just gonna keep doing it for now and then like i just kind of feel like it’s gonna work out but i could totally see that like we didn’t need to do any of this or that this like long term is hurting us more than the short term gain what’s an example um like in my d2c business as far as kind of thinking about this is uh we do this model that like drops new products all the time every single week we drop new products and it’s great because it causes this sales spike but it also puts you on this treadmill of new products that you have to release every week and that means you gotta do photo shoots of those products every week and then that means that you have to have inventory whether you sold your previous inventory or not you got to buy new inventory like most brands they don’t do that they only buy your inventory when they’re out of the old stuff so even though inventory sucks out cash you know it’s like well it’s i’m buying it because i there’s i’m sold out we’re not even doing that but on the other hand it’s creating like that when i look at his chart it’s creating this spike every single week and i’m like okay so that’s good but these other three things are bad and like i don’t know how to weigh these against each other because they’re in different categories that speak different languages and on different time scales so it’s just hard to hard to know if this is like a dumb idea or a bad idea or a good idea um i think the thing to look for in that is uh something that served you before might not serve you now so like that served us really well for a period of time because it brought in this cash you know and you could tell the team like hey like payroll is good we’re set for a long time and it gives that level of comfort and also like in the early days churn is often high in a business just because you don’t have very many mature accounts and so locking that in is really good but then if you get to this long you know much later in the business you’re like look we’re on accrual accounting it we don’t really care we have plenty of cash in the bank like this spike at this time doesn’t make a difference right and so just i’d watch for those things where it’s like this served the business well for a while and it doesn’t anymore who built the early version um so i did all the design and front-end development um and then i hired uh freelancers to um you know write the rails back end and then that went okay and then it went much better when i hired a long-time friend named david to come on and like full-time uh build it but that was two years in and you know it was making enough it was making enough money to pay him no that was where i paid him out of the 50 grand that i put in which was like our our savings and everything seems like a pretty good return i mean 50k and you’re able to get that built and turns into what it is now or at least it got you to enough revenue to pay people yeah and uh i mean it’s wild what you can do when one you’re doing a lot of the design and code yourself you know so you gotta count that in the cost but um but but yeah and then you just fund it with that makes it sound easier than it is but you know you fund it with growth simple not easy yeah simple not easy so so sean nathan he’s got this blog post called like how to how to build well yeah i think it’s called laughs we have another blog post ladders of wealth he’s got this actually this other great blog post called um the billion dollar creator i think it’s called or the billion dollar blog let’s do the billion dollar let’s do the billion dollar one all right i’m sorry to sam i don’t know where you’re going with that well well i just want to say so this whole thing about transparency so nathan i don’t think you publicize this but i’m on this email list and every month or week probably month i think he sends out dude it’s the craziest [ ] i’ve seen he sends out his entire net worth and you could see like how much cash he has how much uh like which stocks he owns of and of how much uh like his angel investments like you see his entire fi all of his finances i gotta get on this list that sounds amazing it’s all the content that i wanted to that i wanted like other people to publish like sam you talk about fat fire and like that’s it fantastic subreddit and i just want like more of those conversations because i’ve written a ton about people who have or like how to get from say like zero to a hundred thousand dollars uh on the internet you know that’s you mentioned my book authority that’s what that was um but like once you kind of get to the point where you’re making a hundred thousand two hundred thousand or more online like people don’t talk about what you do with their money because you know if you do that someone’s like oh you know like there’s sam just bragging about how much money he has again or you know something like that and so i was like okay i’m gonna make a private newsletter and i just charge people 100 bucks like just to filter out the the uh anyone who’s going to complain about it i guess or say that i’m bragging and then just say i’m going to write about all the stuff that i wish i knew when i made like my first 250 grand uh online and so the way that i i describe your blog or that email is it’s kind of like face tattoos and cornrows i think it’s super cool when other people have them but i don’t want it like yeah you know not not for me but i i it’s cool when others have them there’s only 200 people on that list so it’s it’s a small group right now dude i don’t know man but sean what was your question about well i wanted to kind of walk through the the framework here so you have this blog post that’s kind of like i know you worked on that for a while uh kind of shaping your thinking here and um and then we also have sam who’s somewhat bearish on the idea of the creator economy thinks he’s kind of overhyped over over buzzword and you’re mr creator economy in a way uh nathan so i think this would be this this might be good um but let’s walk i don’t think our opinions are opposites by the way i would i would say probably our opinions are not opposites yeah for the sake of argument let’s just uh let’s just walk through so you basically have these four rules of building a billion dollar audience so um i guess like first why did you even want to do this uh like kind of like what got you interested in this and then let’s walk through the four yeah so the article asks a question like the whole premise of it and that is what is the most profitable uh place to direct attention right so everything we do right we’re recording a podcast now whatever you’re doing on on tick tock or if you’re a movie star or everything else right you have attention and brands want it they’re willing to sponsor you know all this stuff and so it’s like okay you have the opportunity to point that attention somewhere what’s the most way to do that long term because you look at people um you know maybe who are taking sponsorships right five grand uh you know to sponsor the newsletter or you know 500 bucks for a sponsored um uh instagram post or anything like that that’s actually not that profitable and we when you dive in you learn that the most profitable thing to do is to create your own product and to drive that attention to something where you actually build equity long term so it’s like a longer uh article talking about that but like the richest movie stars you know like take jessica alba for example right she has made a lot of money from movies but the bulk of her wealth is from starting a company using you know being the spokesperson for her own company um and then my other favorite example would be ryan reynolds um who you know right he’s doing ads for other people and probably getting paid a million bucks here 10 million dollars there you know that kind of thing and at some point he goes like forget that i’m going to buy my own companies with mint mobile and aviation gin and i’m going to be my own spokesperson so i don’t get cash i get equity and so you know you just watch this process of people doing it over and over again and that’s actually my hypothesis with convertkit right of i have attention on the internet through running a blog and a newsletter and all of that how do i want to monetize it sponsorships ebooks membership a bunch of things i’m like nope i want to monetize it through convertkit building a sas company like that’s my version of the billion dollar creator so that’s the whole premise of the article and it’s like uh so you have a couple examples so okay so rule number one is you have to build more than a personal brand so what does that mean you give the example of jessica alba of mark from primal kitchen so what what is the nuance here it’s like it’s not just your face your name you need to actually create a brand around uh around your lifestyle or your interest is that it by the way sean primal kitchen is the sugar-free ketchup company that i like so this guy named mark he’s like kind of looks like the 65 year old version of me but like even more jacked and he like has a health and health blog and he starts selling ketchup and he sells that for like 300 million dollars yeah so i mean what mark did uh with uh amy’s blog was called mark’s daily apple and it was like the leading you know like paleo kind of health blog in that space and a blog like that you know when he was doing this 2006 2010 that kind of thing you can make a million bucks a year off of that blog and he was right but you play that forward um and that’s it’s all about him all about his name um all that write his name is in the name of the site but i mean you can build substantial wealth that way what he didn’t said is he started primal kitchen you know kickstarted this whole brand by saying i have the most popular site in the space let me you know make these uh paleo-friendly uh ketchup mayonnaise that kind of thing and then he goes you know how big his audience was do you know how big how much traffic he had at the time it wasn’t huge huge like it was like ours yeah thousand subscribers on the email list maybe so a hundred thousand kind of like trusted audience size to kick kick off this yeah you gotta remember audiences were a lot smaller like even just 2015 2012 like that kind of time frame but yeah then he sells it to craft for 200 million dollars you can’t sell a blog to like a blog doesn’t sell for 200 million you know uh like all of these things and the crazy thing is he still owns the audience right the thing that that kicks out of this whole product he still owns he can sell off the that whole brand talking to him at a conference you know he’s just on to the next thing figuring out what he wants to do next he didn’t have to sell his his name and whole identity with it uh and craft is so thrilled with their purchase kylie cosmetics is probably the biggest one that people know about because you have tons of attention through instagram tick tock whatever the tv show whatever instead of just saying hey i’ll you can pay me because people used to say wow you have to pay twenty five thousand dollars for a tweet from kim kardashian or then if that was twenty five thousand then it went up to like two hundred fifty thousand then two million dollars for an instagram post from is it two million dollars it got it got up to that range where it was like either hundreds of thousands or low millions to get like an actual like endorsement post from from one of them and um and so then you know cool you can make a lot of money doing that you’re right you can you could stack up quarter million dollars at a time but kylie cosmetics was a billion dollar brand so i was like well who wants to who wants to pay me to promote their products well it’s mostly like skincare products makeup products or for kim kardashian it’s her shapewear like you know like uh and khloe kardashian it was like you know fashion or whatever so chloe launches true american jeans uh kim kardashian launches i think it’s called what was it skims skims is it like the shapewear brand dude sean you’re on top of it keep going kylie kylie cosmetics kanye yeezy shoes right layers like they all turned to say who whoever is the most willing advertiser actually you become my competitor and i’m going to launch my own brand my own equity and have my own equity in this thing and there’s a guy in the nba who gets made fun of for this which is this guy lavar ball i don’t know if you guys know this guy but basically he has three sons all three wanted to make it to the nba and this guy’s this like loud mouth guy they got like a reality show around them because they’re sort of like the like you know basketball version of the kardashians there’s three brothers and like a a kind of an overbearing parent who is like architecting their business strategy and when they were gonna the guy was gonna get picked second in the draft and nike offered him a contract in adidas and instead he created big baller brand and you know triple b he created his own shoe line and like the shoes kind of sucked and like you know he didn’t have the full business plan and people were making fun of him for like oh wow you turned down a guarantee 10 million dollars from nike to like launch this thing 10 million a year or whatever and it’s like actually that was the right move now maybe his execution was slightly poor but that was actually the right move and a lot of these nba players would have been better served had they done that themselves well how’s it going now the shoe thing so the shoe thing’s not going good basically the guy they had running it like was like kind of stealing from them so they fired him that was like a black mark on it the second brother never made it to the nba so that was like a little bit of an issue um the first brother kind of underperformed his potential at that time uh and actually now that it would have worked because the youngest brother the one who was like the the the one who’s kind of like he was kind of like a a [ ] boy a little bit he’s you know he’s like had a goal you know like a diamond grill had like a lambo at 15 and was like you know he was kind of off the reservation he actually turned out to be the best one he’s actually a star player and if they had kind of built it properly around him it probably would have done a lot better so i um nathan you’ll get a kick out of this so like three or four weeks ago we did this thing where we said we’re gonna give five g’s to one or two three people who take our clips download it post it on tick tock and get views there’s this kid who did it and i don’t remember how many views he got but like our hashtag i think got 30 million views in like two weeks and this guy accounted for a lot of them and multiple of his videos got a thousand or sorry a million views one video got so big that we drove thirty five thousand new members to the subreddit and they complained and i was like reached out to this kid i’m like who are you and he replies back with like michael you michigan.org or something like that or dot you or whatever it is i’m like wait dude are you in college and like he calls me and i face time with him and he’s in his dorm room and he’s young he’s in still in college he’s doing his universe i think and and he’s really cocky not in a bad way but he’s like he’s got hutzpah he goes man i knew i was going to do this i wanted to prove to you guys that i could do it i want you to pay me money to do this now and i’m gonna do this for other people and we’re gonna change the media game and i’m gonna raise money and i was like okay hold on dude hear me out and he goes i’m gonna i’m gonna go raise money for this thing uh do you wanna invest i go bro listen you do not wanna raise money for this here’s what you should do you are so talented at this that don’t raise money for this but get it big and start launching other stuff on top of it and if you want to raise money raise money for that stuff and own all he owns this thing called like um i forget what it’s called future but he’s got like eight handles now that have like a million something follow followers i’m like no no don’t raise money for this thing man own that forever and that’s your piggy bank and your audience raise money for like this other thing that you want to do and funnel it through there but don’t sell that thing because i raised a little bit of money for my thing which was like that and i i don’t regret it because i got the outcome that i wanted but i do regret it because it definitely hit you’re massively handicapped because of it yeah one that’s i think such a good point because you can have that platform to launch whatever you want in the same way that you know marxism can use his platform to then go launch the next thing right he probably has contracts that say he can’t compete in the exact same space but he could do a fitness thing or he could do something else right you have the great point well i was gonna give an example conor mcgregor is doing this pretty brilliantly in the ufc so like uh the ufc gets knocked a lot because of they have like low fighter pay right like the the percentage of revenue that they give to their fighters is way lower than other sports nba is 50 nfl’s like 50 ufc is like i don’t know 15 or 20 so the fighters are you know they go out there they get their you know face beating in and they’re they’re they’ll make twenty thousand dollars off that fight or forty thousand dollars or eighty thousand dollars and then they only get to do that two or three times a year so it’s like a pretty brutal sport for low pay what conor mcgregor did was instead of selling the attention try to try to make money as his kind of like service fee he created a brand around literally every part of his lifestyle so he’s like all right this thing’s gonna get me famous but then okay what am i famous for people like my suits at the press conferences cool i’m launching a suit brand okay um i’m irish i’m going to launch an irish whiskey irish whiskey i think just sold for i don’t know if you know samus yeah like he walked away with a hundred exactly then he’s like um cool uh i’m super fit because i’m a ufc fighter my body’s amazing here’s my p90x program it’s called mcgregor fast you can you can buy my program and subscribe to that and you can get fit with me oh you’re getting fit and um guess what else do i do i recover okay here’s a recovery spray that i spray on my leg that’s like you know like makes my leg uh recover faster after workouts and the guy is literally just selling like every piece of his lifestyle as a independent brand like uh you know i think at one point he was thinking about launching a sports betting exchange it’s like what is the best business who wants to pay me oh draftkings wants to pay me hmm maybe instead of draftkings is mcgregor kings now and i’ll launch a competitor he just he just opened up a bar called the black ford exactly oh you know i had good good success with whiskey what else do we do irish stouts okay i’m gonna so he bought a bar not that the bar is that good it’s like a bar in his hometown your bar’s not gonna make a ton of money but then he used that bar as the like basically the backdrop to film him creating a stout and now he’s going to sell a stout as a new like alcoholic beverage brand and uh it’s kind of amazing the guy’s going to become a billionaire and fighting is going to be the lowest part of his income stream is my guess which is insane i bet you i bet you mcconner conor mcgregor i bet you he goes well he might make a million he might lose a billion i think he could uh nathan oh you’re you’re worth like uh did you reveal the valuation of your company uh we we raised it 200 million okay so let’s just i let’s just i don’t know what the facts are but let’s just say you own 90 so you’re worth 180 million dollars do you think that you can ever spend through that uh i would have to radically change my lifestyle but do you think is that enough yeah that’s so much more than enough i think i spend like 200 grand a year so if that gives you an idea if you take a like if you set aside the things like when i’m not buying assets that’s your burn that’s your actual burden it’s like 200 a year so yeah it would take a lot to yeah to spend through uh through that we let’s go let’s go to this wealth ladder thing well i i hold on there’s a point uh i’ll go so what what sean was saying about um like the trend between all of these people is that that’s what’s in the rule number two of selling products not attention and that’s the flip right so conor mcgregor is a perfect example of this because everyone’s expecting people to sell attention right that’s the the nascar logos plastered all over the car equivalent of that you’re like great conor’s doing that every celebrity and so you know you expect that uh everyone like every influencer is going to do that and the wealthiest people are the ones who are like great i’m going to not do that i’m going to promote my own product conor is the extreme example of like i’m going to do 10 of these or something most people are like let me do one or two but that’s where you’re going to build this real wealth let’s just hit the other rules real quick so rule number three drive higher customer value through recurring or repeat purchases so you’d rather have a a product that you can that has repurchase rate versus a one-off that’s the big idea there yep yeah and that’s the thing if you just look at the most valuable brands you see that a lot of them are selling a product that someone buys many times right yeah so you know if my first million created an idea journal it’s probably not going to have super high repurchase rate because your you know one journal will last you a long time versus if we made uh you know the pure money deodorant and pure money deodorant is something that you would go through every two months then that consumable is going to be worth more than you know so product selection is important here yep and so even just going back to the ketchup example right right you know you’re going through catch-up every month every couple months you know that’s way better than something that uh lasts forever right billionaires catch up great okay so then last one uh choose a better business model so um what do you what are you pointing out here with choose a better business model yeah so there’s a couple things in this one is uh well i’m using the example of uh vani hari who has the food babe um so she had information products business she’s selling cookbooks meal plans all that and then she teamed up with a friend of mine derek halpern who was also in kind of that online business space and they went and made uh like a health supplements company and so it’s completely different they’ve made this switch from you know that business model into uh selling this product that people are buying on a recurring basis that you know the brand can be acquired but then i think the other example that’s interesting um i love listening to andrew wilkinson on the show you know he did his whole thing his whole thing is using a very cash flow positive business right in meta lab of they’re doing agency work honestly it’s a very profitable business but it’s not value that high in the market and so he’s like okay i’m gonna take low to medium quality revenue and use it to go buy really high quality revenue you know because agencies they’re not as recurring they’re not a high multiple if you want to sell the business so it’s like great i’m going to go buy software companies or start software companies you know and so i’m going to trade in you know one set of revenue for another and then you see this a lot in software where someone will launch two like you’ll have two versions of the same tool one’s like the wordpress plugin version where it gets it done and all that but none of those really turn into like substantial companies and so the ones that made it are like optinmonster where they built a wordpress plugin it was okay made millions of dollars but like it’s not valued like a software company whereas when they go and rebuild uh like cya bulky rebuilt opt-in monster as a sas platform added more features you know they can charge a different pricing model um all of that and and then it’s really valuable right you have to raise money at silicon valley evaluations you get to sell the company at those multiples um even though it’s like fundamentally accomplishing the same three people who i think left money on the table you named two of them i have a third actually you might have named all three um okay so you talked about ramit sethi who you think you know maybe he’s making 10 million a year in revenue selling kind of high-end courses his audience is all around personal finance and he pointed out like at the time where he had a bunch of audience and trust in personal finance and was advocating for a philosophy of like hey you know low fee index fund style investing set it and forget it um you know saving a certain portion of your revenue he could have built wealthfront which just got acquired for 1.4 billion you know yesterday or something like that uh which was like a robo advisor doing just that so instead of selling courses could have built a software product so left left some value potentially on the table um another one is tim ferriss right tim ferriss has makes a ton of money on sponsorships and ended up making a ton of money through investing in the right startups because of his brand name but you know could he have done what joe rogan did uh with like on it supplements right like i think tim ferriss has a huge trusted audience he said look i tried every supplement and here’s my issues with them so i’m launching the paleo ketchup i’m launching the nootropic supplement i’m launching the the protein powder whatever whatever he could have picked you know i think is is a 500 million dollar business given the size and trust of his audience uh but it seems like he didn’t go that path so what do you think of that of that oh the third was marie uh i think you had her in here uh and you i think you pointed out and yeah you pointed out two things she builds everything at her name instead of uh building like brands that can be dissociated from like her person the product is her telling you content her selling you time and consulting or whatever else her selling you a course versus her creating a product based on her belief system and you trust her so you think this product is gonna work for you so listen to this sean you’re well not exactly but you’re criticizing these people you’re doing the exact same thing so you’ve got this big audience of people who like and trust you that shockingly trust you and do what you say but you’re building this other thing that people are begging to know what it is like do you think that like uh you’re you should follow your own advice here oh totally um you know that’s why i like this article i think it’s it’s an eye opener for it pieces together a bunch of like anecdotes and philosophies and by the time you read it all the way through you’re like yeah of course of course i agree with this so i did it in a way with the fund so for example podcast uh podcast ad revenue i think our first year i made like 70 000 or something like that in podcast ads it wasn’t much it was like a very the the value of the audience i felt was bigger than the the value of the trust in the audience was bigger than the the ad revenue and so i bet on that i was like okay well what if i raise the fund from these people who have been listening and i’m not going to take any i’m not going to do any pitch meetings i’m not going to make a presentation i’m just going to say hey if you trust me from this podcast and you want to invest alongside me in startups you can and so now that fund is like an eight million dollar a year investment vehicle so if you just take the math on that you get two percent of that in management fee okay that’s not that much but then you get 20 of carry so 20 carry means you’re basically getting 1.6 million of startup equity that you’re investing per year for free so 70 000 in ads versus 1.6 million in startup equity of which i get to pick the startups and i think those startups can you know what if that’s 5x in the next uh you know seven to ten years so that means each year i’m getting something like five million dollars a year of value out of a product created from the podcast so that’s an example of doing it example of not doing it is i do a course uh and the reality is i do the course just because i i i like teaching and b i like the instant cash flow from that because i can go buy stupid [ ] with it so for example uh like i wasn’t i stopped teaching my course because i just got busy doing other [ ] and then i really wanted to go like do some random nft speculation and i was like ah i feel stupid doing this with my money what if i just like did a course for you know two weeks and then that let me go buy a board ape and a crypto punk and whatever else okay that sounds more fun um and so i’m like i’m down to you know teach successions to do that that seems like a good trade in my head mentally but i would say that’s not actually a good use of time and then the new thing we’re building the new product is kind of in that boat right the milk road isn’t called sean’s crypto newsletter it specifically has a new brand name and it has like staff around it and it’s a product that if it works can be big and it’ll be supercharged or kind of initially initially uh distributed by people who already follow me and like my content and then the second criticism which nathan can address which is like and maybe ramit would say this he’s like well but i like blogging and i don’t know anything about starting like a per a fintech company and what’s the what’s your reply to that nathan yeah i mean i think that’s a great answer and like all these people who i like lightly pick on in my article they’re all friends and and so that’s one where like you got to choose the business model that’s right for you but answer the question of like okay can this audience that i have make me a billionaire trying to have as many examples of like if that’s the outcome that you want you know or maybe it’s not a billionaire right because you raise money or something else but getting on that hundreds of millions of dollars on type scale then it’s like okay well here’s the framework that has to happen and if you’re saying like look you know these we listed people who have amazing businesses right they’re complete control of their time making millions of dollars a year you know like absolutely no complaints there so this is all on the case study of like how would you do it actually one of my favorite examples i used um michael hyatt as an example in this article and he replied like he sent me an email right after it and said like hey we actually discovered the exact same thing personal brand entirely we’re selling digital products we’re very tied to our email list we’re doing like sponsors and stuff like that and we realized like oh this business is gonna you know reach some limits and so he then built out all these sub businesses they built out a journal product you know other physical products and realized okay how can we build what we take what we have now and use it to leverage um you know other independent brands and like kickstart and launch them and so it’s fascinating to like use someone as an example and have them come back and be like you’re spot on in describing our business but you’re actually two years like you were spot on two years ago we realized the same thing we’re fixing it and now like everyone will see the result a little while from now and so yeah if people want this path you know that’s that’s the way to go about it how big is this how many notebooks does this guy sell uh i don’t know that i have the numbers i’m trying to think what he what he put in the article but it’s uh his other products are now bigger than all the things that we know him for so in the tens of millions of dollars that’s crazy um all right what were we saying sean i was gonna jump to the ladders of wealth because i think this is the other kind of nice framework that you have so um and this is kind of like i think some people have heard of kind of stuff like this but i just want to like lay out the fast version and then we can go into whatever’s whatever’s interesting from this so you have this image of uh of a series of ladders and it’s not like one ladder that you just go up up and up it’s basically like if you use if you choose this method of wealth creation your ladder can be this high but if you choose this method of wealth creation it can go one rung higher or it can go two runs higher or four rungs higher depending on which one you choose so here’s here’s how it works so it’s basically the lowest ladder the smallest ladder is you’re selling time for money so that’s having a job or being uh yeah having a job basically then there’s your own service business so this might be like an agency you’re charging by the project you have some clients you charge some hourly rate whether you’re you know it doesn’t matter if you’re like making logos for some company or you’re a lawyer you’re actually in the same boat you have a service business with clients you charge an hourly rate then there’s product side productized services which is it’s giving a given example of a product of productizing yes so the example would be let’s say i charge 100 an hour to redo the copywriting on your website you know and so i’m i’m doing that or i say for a thousand dollars one time you can buy it with a credit card you know i will go and rewrite your site you know or write you one whole landing page um and so there’s a couple really important things there uh one the purchase is being made without me talking to you like if i’m charging a hundred bucks an hour we’ll probably have a conversation you’re like we’re planning that um second thing is it’s pre-packaged so you know exactly what you’re buying and then the the third thing is that the time and money are totally disconnected so if i get better and better uh if i hire people any of that right like i’m not having to sit there for 10 hours and do it and so there’s a bunch of these skills that they have to learn to do the productized service an example a simple example we i think ryan beagleman came on the pod long time ago and he talked about drop servicing which was a version of this so like the the example he was given is like there’s these products that are like um you pay thirty dollars and i’ll draw a picture of you you and you give me a picture of you and i’ll draw you as a simpsons character or like you can send this as a gift so somebody loves the simpsons you can give me a photo of them i’ll draw it as sims character you get it so it has all the elements you talked about self-serve you come in has a predefined price you just click a button and you pay um you get a defined product end product out of it so we’re kind of both clear on the bargain and then third you don’t know how long it takes me you don’t know how much it costs me i don’t have to do the work myself so with a lot of these character services it’s like it just gets piped to a you know person in the philippines who’s an artist they take the gig they submit it they get seven dollars the the service keeps you know whatever twenty three dollars and uh and it’s all done so that’s like an example of a productive service and uh by the way isn’t there like a facebook group called production who runs that there’s a guy running that’s pretty interesting yeah we talked about him uh yeah great name green felt maybe or something like that so so what he does is he’s got this facebook group and the reason i like is so niche but it’s actually pretty valuable for if you’re in that niche so he has this facebook group called productized uh services or something like that productized businesses and um and what he was doing was he would just show an example so he’d say oh look this is a real estate agent and before here’s how it used to work you know here’s their page here’s their face call them up become a client blah blah blah and he’s like oh sorry that’s not a good example it’s i make what i design websites i can code anything you can hire me as a freelancer and then he changed it to a product i service which is you’re a real estate agent you need a website for your company i make real estate agent websites come here pick one of the six templates push go i’ll give you a website um and i’ll charge you a fixed fee of 250 or 500 to give you that website and so it’s basically a way of productizing a um a service you know what the best name that i’ve ever heard for that is jack butcher who’s our friend and he has this course it’s got it’s a beautiful it’s called build once sell twice it’s so good it’s such a good name i took the course yeah did you love it yeah i loved it just because everything jack does is done so well so you know uh he could you know write me a birthday card and i would be like wow i love birthday cards now it’s like do i really love birthday cards or do i just love jack butcher i think i just love jack butcher actually yeah his ability to take something and like distill it down to the absolute essence uh and like build one cell twice is that like it’s selling products you know you’re saying okay i can make this thing a single time and and then sell it as many times as i want which everyone talks about the upside of that of like oh this is going to be amazing right i can build this and sell it a bunch of times no one talks about the downside that like it’s so freaking hard to do the first like to make the first one you know whereas if i’m building a one-off thing like using websites for example like okay i’m supposed to build a website for sam he’s paying me 2000 bucks like i build this out it’s not that hard i can use my skills to do it the product version is like building a website builder you know that’s incredibly hard and so you have this like trough for a long time where you’re not going to make money in the short term but the like the leverage is incredible how old are you now 31. so you’re 31. as long as i’ve known you we’ve known each other since we’re both like 23 24 you’ve always pretty much been the same where you were pretty calm very patient i would say patient would probably be the best word to describe you and there’s been a lot of times i remember in 2014 or something like that i didn’t have much money but i hollered at my really rich friend and i was like man nathan is doing like a hundred grand a month like in revenue this thing’s gonna be big you should try to invest and maybe i could broker a deal and you would and uh if i did that then i met you you probably had a ton you’ve also probably had a ton of people who were trying to buy the company for a life-changing amount of money and you’ve probably had loads of other um opportunities so my question is how have you stayed pretty calm and also incredibly patient throughout all this patience is something i struggle with sean was telling you about uh how he launches like a new does a new drop every week and like and i i think that that’s rooted in like oh but we need the numbers to go up this week and like you got caught and i’ve done this i do the same thing where i’m like but it’s not growing now and i need to so how have you done so patient and long-term focused well i think part of his personality and you’re right that like uh patient and relentless are probably two things you could use to describe me back then uh and now but i think a lot of the ideas that are in some of these articles or that i try to write about is really in building this one thing so i think about what analogy that like is strip malls versus skyscrapers let’s say we’re getting into real estate development and we’ve got a piece of land and you’re trying to decide okay what what should we build on it and so you want to make money quickly and so you build like uh you know first little office building or something you got like a radio shack there now you’re making you got a little bit of cash flow coming in you know you want to expand so you build another you know add on to that now we’ve got a subway and we’re we’ve built it out and we’ve got a little strip mall or a shopping center and that’s like we’re gonna use up our land uh each time we’re expanding horizontally and so we’re you know launching a new product the version of this is the like the blogger podcaster someone who’s like i’ve got my ebook my membership site my whatever other thing that i’m doing you know i keep adding and each one makes a little bit of money my approach on everything is the skyscraper model of like i’m gonna do one thing and i’m gonna keep pouring everything into that and just keep going taller and taller and taller and make some and so like convertkit is my attempt at a skyscraper and like in the billion dollar creator article it’s all about people i think who are building those skyscrapers you’ve not you’ve not always done that actually i think and i think that that’s a good strategy but i i would actually say it’s pretty cool that you’ve not always done that and i’ll give you an example but the reason why it’s cool is because like you’re flawed and you do you you definitely have you’re you’re even though you’re incredibly patient long-term thinking like maybe it’s not rooted in this probably but like there are some examples for example like you’ve done a bunch of book launches you’ve launched like eight or nine things that’s that have sucked uh you did this great twitter thread were you well no he did this twitter that’s very sucked yeah he goes here’s the nine things that i’ve created that were horrible no he had a threat i don’t know if he used the word suck maybe he said fail yeah flopped or something like that so this is something else right like we all want to jump in and build the most perfect product uh and you can’t do that because there’s all of these skills you have to learn like that’s the point of this ladders of wealth creation article is that like business and building wealth is the combination of like a thousand little skills and if you try to do it all at once you know like you’re going to fail and so that’s like in these ladders the one point that i’m trying to make is that the like you know i put marketplaces and social networks you know and at the top of the hardest ladder and then just below that is sas because if you think about the number of skills that you have to know in order to do that like sam what was uh the first product you sold online i uh well there was two it was liquor so i sold alcohol on the internet and then i also created a guide on how to how to find a roommate in san francisco okay so that guide like do you remember as you were trying to figure out how to collect payments for that or like how to put together a page that would sell it that’s why he was at the gumroad meetup i ended up using gumroad because it was so stressful i couldn’t figure out i was like well i was like i remember going to shopify i’m like well does shopify let you sell pdfs how does that work so yeah one of those things right you’re trying to figure out how to do like okay how to collect money on the internet is something you have to learn and now we’re just like we could we could rattle off a whole bunch of ways someone’s starting out saying hey i want to get into this they don’t know how to collect money on the internet they don’t know how to write headlines they don’t know how to collect email subscribers why that even matters right all of these things and so i think the best way to do it is to learn through a bunch of these other little products right and so that was like basically what you’re seeing all the way along with the ebooks and everything else is me learning all of the skills that ended up culminating and being able to build conversations yeah that’s right and then the other thing is like if i say i only focus on convertkit like that’s not fully true because i like to have contrast in my life i think that’s something that helps and so like we we started off you know riffing on some real estate stuff and the reason that i like it is because you spend all your time sitting in front of a computer doing something tangible like airbnb or something in the real world like to me is the opposite because i get to actually go see a real property i get to you know visit in person it’s a totally different experience my friend um sean blanc says uh if you work with your mind you should rest with your hands and that’s i like that idea of like just doing something that’s the opposite and so i think if you give yourself these little indulgences of buying a house in airbnb or starting like a one-off paid newsletter that you run on autopilot or sean what you’re doing where you’re like run out and make a course and then you’re like okay that was fun i think that can be a creative outlet that helps you focus on the main thing rather than saying like oh i’m going to go create 10 main things when you’ve been creating convertkit let’s say that either you’ve sold the company and you still want to like do interesting things or you’re 21 or 25 years old and you want to start something what interesting opportunities or problems that need to be solved have you discovered where you’re like i can’t do that now but it’d be pretty cool if someone like someone could totally get into the blank and do blank yeah okay this is uh honest but a terrible answer to your question because of the night because i also did it right um is as we were doing email marketing you know and running the newsletters for like james clare and tim ferriss and everyone else um the thing that i wanted to do is then get into commerce of like okay we have this whole side of it right where we’re sending all the emails have the connection to the fans now i want to build um the like the credit card processing and i want to get a cut of everything that they sell um and so then i realized like oh and that was always the answer uh actually if someone’s like if you weren’t doing convertkit what would you do now i always said i’d go start a gun road competitor and then the nice thing is there’s that synergy there so it’s like okay i went and started a gun road competitor called convertkit commerce it’s in the same product so it’s like both a realistic answer and probably not very satisfying for you because it’s totally different gumroad has been around for a long time now up until recently they pretty much had never done anything to change it um and no one is competing with them there’s a downside it doesn’t make that much money like i actually don’t know what it makes anymore but as of a couple or a few years pass like he would tweet out his revenue and like it was really hard to build a business where he was making like four percent of someone’s like ten dollar pdf you know what i mean so that’s why you have to build a build a better business model right and so if you look at something and say how could we improve that business model the thing that i saw in that is like okay uh what if we had another product alongside it that we sold it’s right so for convertkit we make money off of uh your email subscription and so i now have these two things that go hand in hand and so uh the commerce side is really good because now like we’re able to for every one of our customers right who’s selling products we’re able to make a little cut of that and they don’t feel like they’re paying us anything extra because it’s just a bit of a credit card processing fee um and then it also reduces our churn because anyone who’s selling through convertkit commerce right they’re now like convertkit is paying them rather than uh the other way around and so we saw a radically low return so i’d argue that like gumroad by itself or you know the gumroad competitor that i wanted to start by itself you’re right it’s not that good of a business model but when you pair it with convertkit and make the creator marketing platform this is turning into a sales pitch but you get the idea that i’m trying to make um it’s the like the combination of those two things that then makes it a fantastic business model and so you have to look at okay this is working i want to go after this in whatever space it is and then take a step back and say okay what are the flaws in the business model what other products do i pair it with what other audience do i targeted against you know any of those things that actually makes it a compelling business instead of like an average business do do you actually are you still hands-on convertkit or are you i know you’re the ceo but do you have someone helping you run it or are you still the guy in charge no i’m uh way too hands-on uh the thing that people don’t tell you in startups is that like the growth that you see is a whole bunch of stacked s-curves you know of like you figure out things that work and it takes off and then it levels out and you got to figure out the next uh plot or like the next uh stage of growth and so i’m very hands-on like we’ve had a few executives leave over the last year uh just a lot of change and so i’m like completely into recruiting new executives uh working with the team to design the next version of the product and so yeah i’m not the the like uh case study of what you should do for the perfect execution on you’re not the four-hour work week i i’m not the four-hour work week [Laughter] do you grind i mean i know you got like 18 kids no three yeah i know i i just because as long as i as long as i remember you i think your oldest are like you had your oldest when you were young and so i always would tease i’m like what do you have like 40 kids now um and uh but you you are you grinding right now or do you have is it a 40 hour work week uh it’s uh it’s right now it’s a lot more than a 40 hour work week but it’s interesting of trying to structure that around like kids you know of it’s a lot of like waking up early you know or like this weekend uh we’re headed out for our team retreat like meeting everyone up in person so i’m leaving saturday morning so like this morning when my kids woke up early i we went out of the house and like spent two or three hours together you know before because i know i’m gonna work all day and and then be gone all next week so yeah i don’t work a crazy amount but at least like 50 to 55 hours a week is probably what i aim for so i don’t know if that counts as grinding but it’s definitely not not relaxing it’s in the middle yeah in the middle i think of grinding and neck grinding what do you think sean uh i think it’s great you know i think convert i’m a user so i uh and i i complained to nathan all the time i’m like i’m paying too much for convertkit and he’s like you do complain about that and he was good and i just point out how much money you make yeah he was like um but you know email’s like making you all this money and i’m like yeah but i just feel like email’s free and like this should be free and i was like i was like can i just get this for free and he’s like well you know like let me know what you think is you know you’re very very patient with me and it was sort of like you know because i was like i was like i don’t know i told ben i was like ben go find like what we should use instead of convertkit and then kind of like search for a couple products and then he was like well you know like they’re all kind of worse but there are some cheaper options you want worse but cheaper and i was like oh [ ] i gotta choose worse but cheaper wait what’s your what’s your what’s your bill every month i think i pay like 400 a month maybe more i don’t even know uh that’s what you’re and how much money do you make a month well see it’s not about that right like it’s more those are two separate things i feel like because because the email directly doesn’t make me that much money uh it’s like got it through the email i build the audience and then through the audience if i launch a product or a course or whatever yeah that makes a bunch of money but that’s separate work i gotta go do with a separate set of costs that go into that and so we actually did we were like oh should we switch and then i kind of respected that nathan wasn’t just like uh whatever it takes to stay you know here you go free i was like i was like uh okay the fact that he didn’t do that tells me like he knows the value of his and um as much as i hate that i’m you know not getting this like free discount or whatever i respect that and so i stuck with it nathan are you mormon no i’m not dude you got the big mormon energy man i mostly just hear from you sam you’ve never heard that from anyone else i mean you live in idaho you you you had kids at 21 like you’re you work hard you’re honest it seems like you don’t party you got hardcore mormon energy mountain dew all the time yeah gotta avoid the caffeine uh no sean what i was gonna say is uh that what what’s funny is so like tim mcgraw and arnold schwarzenegger both have convertkit newsletters and they pay full price and they don’t ever give me [ ] about it but then it’s the it’s like the internet influencers where they’re like i should get this for free you know and i’m like no so it’s fascinating because we’ve had that a lot over the years right of people saying like hey what discount can you give me do you know how famous i am and kind of what’s fun is getting into uh i separate them from internet famous and actual famous and the more you’ve gotten into the actual famous space the more it’s very easy to say like no man here’s the value that we provide and and i think i was giving you a hard time because you had just done a thread like two weeks earlier about your paid newsletter that was making like 50 or 100 grand a month i can’t remember if i like linked you to the same thread but that’s what i wanted to do in the twitter dms so how big is how big is arnold’s list oh we can’t say those numbers but he’s uh still relatively small who’s whose list is bigger his his list are my list my list is not very big but uh his experience i think it could be the same thing as arnold no way that [ ] you don’t have a favorite little uh like business model synergy that weakly so he was on like it’s fun like as he goes around promotes his newsletter right because he goes on like jimmy kimmel and he’s talking about his email newsletter which is is always fun um yeah i go on indie hackers dude when like a business model thing that’s funny is when one convert a customer links to another to grow their list so like when tim ferriss links to uh arnold’s list and said like hey you know go sign up for arnold’s list it added you’re like 40 000 subscribers and it’s just like our cut just goes up you know just one customer just referred to the other but now anyway it’s a fun dude you got to write a blog post like the best way to grow your list partnerships here’s like a list of like interesting people to partner with so uh i have a vp of growth opening uh do you want to come come here for morning brew actually as we discussed last episode yeah last episode morning brew offered me a job too there you go it’s actually like a great power move is to just offer uh staff writer jobs or staff jobs to ceos of other companies just to like flex on them okay you know i heard things are tough um just so you know we’re we’re always there’s always a home for you here so let’s just say of mailchimp like the like a month into starting the hustle um i like we wrote blog posts whatever and we were i was trying to hire writers and i saw this awesome article and i and i don’t remember where it was but the author was nelly bowles i think her name is b-o-w-l-b-o-w-l-e-s and now she’s like a really famous new york times person and i think like even when i found her she was actually at the new york times but like had just done a one-off piece for this small magazine and i emailed her i’m like you are so good would you love to interview for a position at my company like we’re looking for bloggers and she was like that’s cute but no thanks and uh i will never forget that she told me that’s cute i’ve i have held this grudge against her for years because she said it’s cute for years you could just imagine like the little pat on the head and the hair tassel that went with like you know like it kept me up at night like so many i was like i’m gonna how am i gonna get revenge and i don’t have a good way but that was like eight years sam’s like arya stark before bed every night he says a list of the names of the people he needs to like get revenge on is like nelly bowles i definitely have you know like what they said like i got like a bunch of champagne bottles with people’s names on it and whenever i get back at them like crack that champagne bottle open and drink it like yeah i want some people’s heads on my desk that’s for sure we have a buddy on that list not much turns out not much yeah just don’t call me cute um just be like you know comment on one of his instagram uh you know videos and just be like it’s awesome for a beginner just let me move on you’re still at it awesome we uh we have a buddy who is like the nicest guy in the world like uh you know we’ll give you the shirt off his back and uh nice to everybody kind of strangers kind of animals kind of everybody and you go into his house and on his fridge he’s got this like clip art picture of a of a brand name of a another company’s logo with a target and like kind of like a red target like a sniper um and he’s got three of them on his fridge and i remember going over like what’s this about and he’s like oh yeah he’s kind of like you know those are my those are my competitors i just every day when i come to the kitchen i just want to think about you know just sort of killing them basically and i was like whoa there’s a dark side to the uh to mr nice guy here do you have one of those nathan i would bet anything nathan does not have anything like what we’re talking about he’s got you are so wrong i bet you that he he will i don’t know if he’ll admit it i bet you he hates mailchimp oh see i have weird feelings about mailchimp because i have so much respect for them and like dude you have respected them like the guy who killed john lennon has respect for him it’s called a love knife you love him so much you want to kill him that’s like what it is it’s like the guy who like killed the pope that’s what you’re gonna do so you have to separate the businesses like the business from the people so i think that’s true like one time uh i was at a conference and ben chestnut was speaking and so i emailed him and was like hey man were you i don’t even know why he said yes but it’s just like like big fan of what you’ve done like all in all fairness for a competitor trying to take as much business from you as you can but would you be up for sitting down and talking and he said like yeah i have a flight at this time so i’m checking out the hotel so like meet me in the hotel lobby you know and we’ll chat for 30 minutes gave you the wrong hotel love it great power move bent chestnuts set me on this wild views yeah it’s like you missed your flight he never had a flight but no he like he sat down with me and told me all about how they launched their free plan and all this stuff and then the they were inc magazine’s uh company of the year this is the inc magazine like in 5000 event and so the editor in chief from inc magazine comes up while we’re talking he’s like hey ben great talk all of that and uh um he ben goes hey do you know nathan he’s trying to kill my company and like as he introduces me to the editor-in-chief of ink magazine and anyway so what would it look like if you just like assaulted him right there sam’s gone now he’s still thinking like like killing nelly balls with the love knife or whatever for the record nelly i’m not gonna i’m not gonna do anything is this the same person that you had the interview the famous interview with at the new york times or the new yorker or whatever it was and like the interview did not go well it did not go is this with her no that was uh aaron griffin and she like came to interview me and i don’t even know why but she was fishing for stuff and she’s like so like what do you do in the weekends like listen to joe rogan that’s what she said to me i’m like what like no like he doesn’t even like that’s monday to friday he doesn’t even have a podcast yeah and she was like well like because you’re like a tech bro and i’m like first of all most of new york times revenue is digital you’re a tech company so you tell me what your tech friends do and uh so anyway yeah that thing did you storm out or or how did that end sometimes yeah i was just like i don’t know what to say i’m out of here yeah i i it didn’t it didn’t end well that’s so good ah those interviews i’ve only ever had one of those um i don’t remember who it was with but where you’re like okay i i think we’re done where you can just tell that they’re like looking for some angle and all the questions are weird but why would anyone hate you because you’re kind of perfect it’s good that you bring that up like just like it’s like well it’s true so i’m not sure what the problem is yeah it’s like i like this i’ve got there’s a lot of it’s like it’s like the shower clip of biden uh the other day when he called the the journalist was like on the way out did you see this clip a stupid [ ] like what do you think about inflation and biden just like in that moment was just like he lost it he was just like yeah great stupid son of a [ ] that’s how i imagined nathan like breaking character in like one of these interviews so okay sam i have a question on this then like do you think that being so nice in all of this and and like everyone likes me it holds back my uh growth as an entrepreneur and you know uh internet so i want to be internet celebrity no because um a like you’re happy and it’s working so i think that’s like the goal and b you actually have dropped it a couple times so you don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to but basically you didn’t like what sahil at gumroad did and you called them out and it was pretty uh it was pretty vicious and i knew that do you know this sean what did he call him out for dude he just like publicly kind of [ ] slapped sahil and like for one it was crazy uh so i was around as sam was talking about i was around gumroad from the very beginning uh i think i was the first independent or at one point they told me i was the first independent seller to cross ten thousand dollars in sales on government so like from the very very beginning um and uh anyway so friends with tons of people there and like spent a lot of time at their office and all of that and a huge friend of sawhill’s but at one point he like got burnt out on the company they had to offer to buy the company he didn’t take it he laid everyone off instead like it wound down and and like ultimately failed but the thing is with a platform like that they don’t like fail and disappear they just like fail when coast and still like the software still works and all that and then he came back and told this totally different story of like uh here’s how i you know like vc is evil and i’m running the company like in this totally new way um here’s how i run it in five hours a week with like two contractors and that was frustrating but i didn’t say anything but then when they went and raised new money and didn’t give any they they got all the vcs to write off their equity they got all of the team members to be like hey it’s a failed company like give up your equity and all that as part of and they went and raised a bunch of new money and didn’t uh go back and give the original team members like that pissed me off because it was like i know exactly who built the software you know like because i sat next to them as we were talking about it you know at their office in san francisco and like i know they don’t have any equity and i know that you didn’t take care of them and now you’re like telling this new story and everything so uh yeah i guess sam i do make some enemies on the internet and when you said that i was like well as i don’t know sahil uh he seems like a nice guy from my limited interactions with him but i was like well if nathan’s saying that it’s probably true yeah and you know you could separate the person from like the decision i’ve made a bunch of bad decisions uh but i don’t think i’m a bad guy and oh me too i’ve made a lot and and so you know i i would separate the two like because he you know probably a nice guy i i don’t know him super well either but um but you’re right like you know the the way he kind of got twitter famous in a way was to come out and tell this story of like the kind of like it was like a fail story that worked it was like we were the hot thing we raised money we had all these expectations people bet on us it didn’t work um and so now we’re in this new mode and i’ve seen the light it was sort of like you know i got baptized and now i believe um that this business should be done this other way okay fair enough um and some people really liked that they thought it was very transparent all that good stuff but it was weird that like you know a year or two later it’s like i’m raising new money at a hundred million dollar valuation it’s like wait you’re back on the that train like weren’t you kind of saying like you know all the things that were wrong with that model and like yeah championing the the freedom that you were getting and the choose your own destiny and getting off the rat race maybe i read it wrong maybe i was just skimming and i missed the point but like that did seem strange to me and then like you’re saying nathan like it’s kind of weird to kind of to do that whole thing in public when a whole bunch of people bet on you lost money on you um and are not participating in the like you know future and so that would leave a bad taste in people’s mouth i think so you know i think it’s fair points um you know and i’m sure i’m sure he’s got his side of the story about why it’s not bad and why it’s not that and all those things so you know fair enough but he’s not here so i’m just going to say my side and it seems like that’ll be the final word i mean tons of credit to sahil afterwards because he like he owned up to parts of it and we had a good conversation about it and he actually then when he launched his book um he actually included convertkit and the story in it which i was really surprised so uh as far as people who don’t hold a grudge i think uh sahil’s one not so like there’s just one guy i always call my rival and uh i’m sure from his perspective he’s either like who is this or he’s like wait why are we rivals we we got a lot we got one just fine and in my head this is like somebody i met in uh when i was in college the guys got like a super ultra rich dad like billionaire dad and uh i always used to joke like if i ever played basketball there usually wasn’t like another indian guy like playing basketball so if there ever was like the running joke and my group of friends in college was well sean we know who you’re guarding like you have to guard him and you need to win your match up here like your honor is on the line basically like we need to know who’s the better indian basketball player on the court right now it was just like this running joke and so that got extended once we i started a business with my college friends they were like well seems like this guy is like you know your rival and i played into it and we kind of made it a thing where the guy would be like you know hanging out with richard branson on his island and we were like just trying to create a chip on our shoulder underdog stories like you know i’d be sleeping on my air mattress that i was planning to return to target to like save money because our business wasn’t doing any good and if you saw this other guy like you know sipping pina coladas with richard branson it just felt like oh those are the halves and we’re the have-nots and so i was like manufacturing these little feuds or like um i remember we did a we when we bought bibo back we were going to relaunch it and i gave the scoop to this girl who was like really nice journalist to me um she was somebody i’d met she seemed really nice and i was like hey do you want this the story like i’ll give you the story about like what we’re gonna do and how it all played out she’s like yeah great so we she comes over i do the interview it’s like literally you know we’re playing patty cake it’s all good article comes out the next day and the headline is like just some vicious it’s remember bibo huh yeah that you know that flop is back again it was just like it was like oh my gosh it’s like disgusting hurry as he told yeah if you like spinach go eat some of the stuff that came out of shawn’s teeth it’s still probably there so i felt so backstabbed you know not no love knife just straight knife and i remember just being like so i never had the interview where i walked away i had the opposite where i felt completely and i texted her i was like yo what the [ ] because actually the article was fine just the headline was completely brutal it was just making fun of us and saying like get a load of this [ ] schmuck and um and she’s like sorry like the editor writes the headlines and he just thought that that’s what would get more clicks like i don’t have any say in that and i was like oh so [ __ ] you in your profession uh was like you know where i landed on that um i think that was my only feud actually my other one where i called uh what’s her name uh the jake paul of journalism was probably the other one taylor lorenz yeah like i think that i actually think it’s great fuel i mean like i joke to my wife i’m like i’m fueled on like carbonated water and like grudges like i think grudges i think are like the greatest fuel ever like isn’t that like the whole thing about being like a chip on your shoulder like approaching what it is like crutches is like my macros yeah i’m just like yeah like i gotta make sure i get my rage in that day otherwise i just don’t feel like myself it’s like ari gold i just love firing people um so anyway i think it’s good i think rage is great that’s the key takeaway from this episode people listen sam you do need like a lloyd let me go manufacture some bridges somebody yeah every when we first met ben levy or i met him the first time you were like well you know sam’s a little challenging i just had to give him a heads up don’t take it personal if he kind of fires off ari gold is actually a great great analogy because there’s no there’s no um what’s it called like there’s no hate behind the words right like i’m yelling but i love you like it has nothing to do with how much i like you or how good i think you are i’m just yelling because i’m yelling and uh so i tried to give him the heads up but you were so zen uh this was post post exit sam is a completely different guy he’s uh you know you’re not already old anymore he’ll come back in due time um dude nathan thanks for coming on happy uh happy you you’re able to make it i uh i bailed on you last week sorry and i’m happy that we made it work this time yeah thanks for having me it’s always fun you wanna know yeah um okay so if people want to follow me online uh i’m i’m currently trying to grow my twitter audience so you should go follow me there uh i’m trying to see if i can go from i’m at fifty thousand you know i only want the most dedicated fans who are like really no i’m just kidding thanks for the advice uh sean add that to your ladder shove that in your ladder you know what we didn’t discuss and i don’t have time now but one time sean nathan renamed the company convertkit to something else and he didn’t realize it but it meant like something like it was disrespectful to hindus hindi’s hindi plural and it was disrespectful and he made this huge name change and they changed the company back to convertkit after like 24 hours wait what was it what was what was that i speak what is that i mean service but in sea culture it means like selfless service and like the highest form of worship yeah and so it’s the whole thing like i’m doing it i’m doing a service for you i don’t know i don’t find that offensive that’s not offensive yeah there were uh a lot of people who did find it offensive and so yeah if we’re talking we talk about mistakes turns out i’m not as easily offended i got in trouble so uh hindus didn’t find it offensive and i actually had a lot of people who were like that’s like thought that it was awesome or something like that um but yeah everyone who was from the sikh culture they were like sorry it yeah it had a much different meaning uh there so anyway that was a 500 000 mistake but uh i owned up to it so that’s the whole thing for another by the way that the the convertkit good name the other thing like seven or whatever you said not a good name like so i think hindu maybe can that doesn’t seem like the right name for an email yeah conversation is a great name that’s such a good name well so maybe it was a 500 000 mistake that will turn out to be a multi-million dollar win do you do you still have the domain because we should just launch like a um prayer uh service or like you know like a philanthropy uh thing for india under that i have some indian startups that might want that name i do have the domain there’s actually two startups one that went through y combinator and one other uh that uh have asked for it at one point but i paid 340 thousand dollars for the domain so i’m i’m kind of hanging on to it this is a four letter domain four letters i don’t even know how to spell that word i spell that word s-e-v-a yeah but um it sounds like a bottled water dude something that you’re gonna like send emails from so i think smart move my uh i got in trouble this morning because i wrote so in the milk road edition that went out this morning uh one of the things we covered was like oh the fed the fed had this meeting about interest rates and how that’s affecting like the markets and i was like basically i put a picture up of the committee that meets the fed open market committee and it’s basically like a bunch of old white people and i was like you know and today you know i had a bunch of different openers that i scrapped one was like here’s a picture from a nursing home i visited recently oh wait no that’s not right that’s the fed open market committee and i scrapped that and i said something else and then i was like you know at today’s elderly white people committee and i like i had a strikethrough and i was like no at the fed open market committee rural mcdonald’s at like 7 a.m people got mad at you it’s like a seas candy and yeah people were like you know the skin color has nothing to do with it i was like yeah of course it’s a joke and it has everything to do with my joke and like just the picture’s funny and like wait i thought we could make fun of the fed with no repercussions like that there’s like certain things that are really safe to punch at and uh the fed seems like one of the safest you know the fed you know the the senate like who’s who’s defending their honor i don’t understand who are you is your mom on this is your grandma on this panel yeah some people got mad at me um i was like you should go ahead and unsubscribe because uh my filter is a lot looser than that dude nathan thank you this is awesome yeah thanks for having me we’ll have to do it again sometime and we’ll have to hang out in austin when you get this new property we’ll come and do a workout on you know on the ranch come on let’s go sounds good challenge accepted grudge initiated you