Sabri Suby, founder of Australian growth agency King Kong and Shark Tank Australia investor, breaks down five zero-capital business ideas he would start today — from cross-channel ad arbitrage to TikTok Shop affiliate marketing using AI-generated content. He also shares his sales philosophy (the Godfather Offer, the yes-yes-yes-no funnel, his free book strategy), and life principles including “kill the little bitch inside,” engineering fun, and the importance of showmanship.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Sabri Suby (guest, founder of King Kong agency, Shark Tank Australia)
Introduction [00:00:00]
Sam: Today I’m talking to Sabri Suby. He is kind of like the Australian Gary Vee — he’s got a marketing agency, he’s on Shark Tank Australia, and he’s a fun guy. I wanted to brainstorm with him businesses that he would start today.
So the question was: over the next 18 months, where does he see the opportunity? If you’re starting from scratch with no resources, maybe no experience or capital — how would he still make it? Because this is a guy who took his laptop and basically built one of Australia’s biggest growth agencies. I wanted to hear what he would do today.
We brainstorm ideas, and then at the end we talk about some of his sales philosophies — because he’s a very good sales guy — and also some of his life philosophies, how he lives his life a little differently than most. Enjoy this episode with Sabri.
Idea #1: Cross-Channel Ad Arbitrage [00:01:00]
Sam: What are some business ideas you’re excited about right now? Trends you’re seeing, opportunities — if you weren’t doing what you’re doing, what things would you be interested in? What businesses would you go create?
Sabri: So I’ve got a few, and I’ll start from the bottom and lead up to the best one — what I think the best opportunities are.
The first thing that would be a very compelling offer: when you’re running a business, you start with one traffic channel. You make an offer, get something working — it might be Google ads, Twitter ads, TikTok, doesn’t matter. You run with one channel, see some success, and then sales are coming in, customers are coming in. And like a lot of businesses, there’s always so much more opportunity flying by you.
The challenge is focus. That’s the main thing. When I was running businesses, I had shiny object syndrome really badly early in my career. That’s where I had these ups and downs — I made money, then I lost all my money, then I had to do everything again. All because I lacked focus, always looking for the next new sexy sales channel or the next new business model.
A lot of businesses know they need to focus on one thing, so they focus on one traffic channel — but as a result they also say no to a lot of other opportunities.
So I think a very good opportunity right now is to reach out to businesses that are running ads on one platform — say, Google — and say: hey, you’ve got your funnel dialed in, it’s obviously working, but I noticed you’re not running any Facebook ads. That’s almost always because they need a team, they need expertise, or they tried it before and it didn’t work because they used the same hot-traffic funnel from Google on cold Facebook traffic.
And you just say: look, I’m going to do everything for you. Don’t pay me a cent. I’m going to build the funnel, run the ads, show you that this works — and I just want a percentage of the sales from this channel. There’s no risk. It only results in something that’s actually proven.
There’s a lot of people who are all-in on Meta ads right now and are waiting to see what happens with TikTok. They’re not running TikTok yet. You could come to those people and say: awesome, what we’re going to do is run TikTok as a platform for you. We’re going to build the funnel — and there’s different creative compliance for TikTok versus Facebook, so we’ll build all of that for you, run the ads, do everything. You’re not doing it right now, and we just want ten percent. We’ll do everything.
Sam: What do you call that pitch? It’s like a reverse sell — you’re making them an offer they’d be a fool to refuse.
Sabri: The Godfather Offer. Making your prospect an offer they simply can’t refuse.
When I think back to all the roles where the companies were crushing it and growing very quickly, they all had a very strong offer. That was the one throughput to all of it.
The same thing happened in e-commerce. A lot of stores are on Shopify but not on Amazon. You can go to every Shopify store that isn’t on Amazon with a very simple rinse-and-repeat pitch. You search for Shopify stores above a certain traffic threshold — you can use SimilarWeb or a Chrome extension to find that — and you reach out cold. You can always get the business owner’s email.
You say: hey, I noticed you’re not on Amazon, probably because it’s a big lift, operationally intensive, you don’t know where to start. But I did a little research and three of your competitors are on Amazon. There’s a tool that’ll show you exactly what they’re selling — and your competitors are doing a million dollars a month on Amazon right now. There’s also low competition for this keyword. I think you’re leaving X dollars on the table.
It’ll take some time to ramp up, but I can do that for you. Leave the items in your warehouse, you don’t even need to ship to Amazon yet. We can start simple, then get more complicated once it starts to show results. You could pick up five or ten thousand a month per client. Ten clients at five thousand a month is fifty thousand a month — and that’s really something one person who understands Amazon FBA could do. To understand Amazon FBA is about four months away from being good enough to operate it for one store. Do it for two stores and you’ll be able to do it for ten — you’ll just have to hire a couple people.
So I think the core idea is: find a group of businesses, a class of businesses, that are not on a specific channel, and make them a custom Godfather Offer to get on that channel.
Sam: Yeah, I think that is something not a lot of people are talking about. It’s a nice shoe-in — you’re already able to identify a group of people who would be perfect candidates. They have money, but they don’t have the time or expertise for that channel.
The mistake people make is doing this for podcasters — like, “hey, you should be posting clips, I’ll do it for you.” And what they forget is that most podcasters don’t have enough money for this. You want to go fish in a pond where something like e-commerce works, because if an e-commerce store is still in business three years later, it’s making money. And for them it’s easy to justify a new channel because it will also generate money right away. You can make a strong case for why Amazon is worth it because it’ll generate revenue from day one.
Sabri: Exactly. Whereas posting your podcast clips on TikTok — you’re not necessarily going to get money or even podcast subscribers from it.
Sam: It’s harder to justify the sale. If you’re giving someone an ROI, it’s a much easier sale than “here’s another expense to get clips chopped up for you when you already have no money.” All right, what’s idea two?
Idea #2: Affiliate Funnel as a Service [00:12:00]
Sabri: So number two is probably the place I would start if I didn’t have any skills.
One thing that’s happening right now is that CPMs on Facebook are through the roof. There’s pretty much one certainty other than death and taxes: the cost to advertise next year is going to be more expensive than this year. It’s going to keep going up. A lot of SaaS businesses are really feeling the pinch — their payback periods have gone from six months to twelve months to eighteen months. I read a report the other day about Salesforce, and their payback period is something crazy, like two or three years.
So as long as that continues, there’s going to be an arbitrage for people who can deliver customers with a lower CAC.
A great way to do that: a lot of businesses — whether it’s HubSpot, GoHighLevel, ClickFunnels, Hyros — they offer insane affiliate commissions. HubSpot’s affiliate commission is roughly 30% recurring up to one year.
Sam: In dollar terms, roughly what is that?
Sabri: If you look at the pricing page, Marketing Hub is $800 a month, Marketing Enterprise is $3,600 a month. So let’s just say $800 — and they pay you 30% over the year. That’s about three grand per customer, without having to operate or maintain that customer. You’ve offloaded everything to the actual company.
And there are some that are even more lucrative than that. Hyros says they pay a minimum of one thousand and up to $15,000 for a customer.
So what I would do in this niche: pick one niche, let’s say chiropractors. Build out a full funnel that I know converts for that niche — the opt-in, the email flows, everything. Then build a list of all chiropractors in whatever geography you want to service. You can do this on Upwork, BuiltWith, a whole bunch of tools.
Then I’d run a campaign — cold outreach, cold calls — and say: hey, I can see you’re running ads right now but you’re sending them to your homepage. Just tell me the date we can hold the funeral for all the money that’s being murdered. So instead, I’ve already built you a funnel. Here it is — the email flows, the landing page, the offer, the text messages. You don’t need to pay me anything. I usually charge $5,000. All I ask is that you sign up through my affiliate link to get HubSpot. Of course you have to pay HubSpot, and I get my kickback.
A lot of agencies that service chiropractors or dog washers or whatever niche — they’re actually charging for this stuff. If you can go out there and offer it for free in exchange for using your affiliate link, that’s a very compelling offer.
Same thing with Hyros — their guarantee is a 15 to 20 percent uplift in revenue. Build a list on BuiltWith of all Shopify stores, cross-reference the ones running Facebook ads by checking for the Facebook pixel, and say: I will guarantee to increase the revenue tracked from your ads by 20 percent.
Sam: Oh, I didn’t understand the genius of your idea at first. I thought you were just saying: become a HubSpot affiliate and run traffic to get people to sign up. But no — you had a two-step system. You’re saying: find a bunch of people who, if they were sophisticated in their funnel, would have enough leads that they’d need to use HubSpot. So you say: let me create a free turnkey funnel for chiropractors, then go give it to the chiropractor. They say, wow, thanks — what’s the catch? And you say: the only catch is that these leads need to live somewhere. They should live in HubSpot. Use my affiliate link when you sign up. And that’s how you drive a higher volume of customers to these SaaS products — by giving away the thing to the end user who needs to use it.
Sabri: Correct.
Idea #3: After-Hours Live Chat Service [00:21:00]
Sam: All right, cool. I like it. Give me another one — something that’s not as internet-marketey.
Sabri: Well, pretty much all of mine are in that internet marketing niche. But here’s the next one.
There are 400 million small businesses in the world — 60 million in America, 5 million in the UK, 2 million in Australia. As everyone moves online with people all over at different time zones wanting to get in contact with businesses, a lot of these businesses have a Google My Business listing with their reviews and all those things. But very few of them offer live chat. So I would offer live chat as a service.
If it was just me starting a side hustle, I could do it after hours — where a lot of businesses don’t have the manpower to offer support after hours or to field inquiries.
And again, it would be free. I would say: hey, I’m going to do this for you, no charge. Because a compelling offer is infinitely more powerful than a convincing argument. I don’t want to get into a convincing argument on the phone about why they should pay me money to do this.
Instead, I’d say: I can look at your Google My Business listing and see that you get a lot of traffic after hours when you guys aren’t open and no one can get in contact with you. I’m going to field those leads, nurture those leads, and then send them to your sales team — or even close some of them through chat. And I just want a 20% commission as a result.
I would start it as just me until I got it going, then hire some people in the Philippines or wherever to actually service it. For businesses that are already running ads or ranking on Google, it’s just a nice little shoehorn — it just fits.
Sam: I like it. What’s your mindset when you’re starting something like this — are you trying to build a $20 million company or trying to get to $1,000 a month? What’s your goal or approach to get to that first milestone?
Mindset: Don’t Be Broke, Then Think in Skills [00:25:00]
Sabri: I can tell you how I thought about it, and at the beginning it was just: operation don’t be broke. You are broke right now and you need to not be broke. So it wasn’t like I had some big elaborate vision of having all these team members and multiple offices and a book — none of that. It was just: you need to not be broke.
So I look for what I call customers with a bleeding neck. The neck is bleeding and they need an immediate solution. I like to get as close as possible to the revenue-producing activities for a business, because that’s the oxygen — that’s the blood of the business.
If I was just starting, the first lens would be: replace my income. Everyone has this magical number of 10K per month they want to hit. And going through this route is a clear way to get there.
But the other lens I like: what are the skills I’m going to need to possess to make this business get to $10,000 a month, and what’s the half-life of those skills? Am I going to be learning just Facebook ads? What I know about Facebook ads right now is going to be infinitely different in three years. So the half-life of those skills is maybe 36 months, and then I’ve lost those skills and they don’t compound for me.
So I’d be looking at: what are the skills I’m going to acquire where this might be a dirty little side hustle at 10K a month, but I can then use those skills and build something really big further down the line? Which brings me to the last business idea — what I think is the best opportunity right now for people who want to get started, by far.
Idea #4: TikTok Shop AI Affiliate [00:29:00]
Sabri: The idea I want to talk about is something you need no money to begin with. You don’t need to show your face, you don’t even need to use your voice. There’s nothing about it that you need — and it is a market that is completely exploding. You can earn, at a bare minimum, $10,000 per month. And there’s proof of people making $100,000 a month doing this. Do I have your interest?
Sam: You have my attention.
Sabri: So we all know TikTok Shop is exploding right now. And what we’re also seeing is that YouTube Shopping is about to have a second crack at it — they’ve just launched their thing. TikTok Shop launched a platform that allows brands to sign up, offer affiliates, and have people sell their products with a product tag, getting a percentage of whatever sales they drive toward that business. Social commerce under that umbrella is completely exploding.
You can use a website like Kalodata or one called FastMoss, and you can find the best-selling products on TikTok Shop. They’ll show you exactly the revenue these products are doing, and they’ll show you the TikTok videos and reels people are using to actually sell them.
Now you might be thinking: I don’t want to show myself, I’m not a content creator. Here’s where the magic happens — you don’t need to do any of that.
A lot of the people selling the most through these platforms are using ElevenLabs. Twenty bucks a month — good to go. You can go to something like Kalodata, look at the scripts of the top-performing videos, figure out what’s making the most sales, what’s getting the most views, reverse-engineer that. Then plug it into ElevenLabs for the voiceover, use Midjourney or whatever free AI image tool to create the visuals, throw it all into CapCut, and you’re off.
And there are people printing with this. Kids who used to work at Chipotle are earning $50,000 a month doing this. Not by doing a thousand of them — by doing one a day.
Sam: Give me a story. How did you stumble across these people?
Sabri: I kept seeing these crazy ads. One of them was for something called shilajit resin — this black tar. The ad was like, “this is what would happen to you if you ate shilajit every day for 14 days.” I was like, what the hell is shilajit resin?
It’s this black tar they get from the Himalayas in India. It has like all of the essential minerals — you drink it, you put it on your teeth, wild stuff. And they sell it in these tiny little jars that look like a lip balm jar. It comes with a golden spoon. For anyone who runs ads, that is immediately a killer pattern interrupt — this black tar looking really weird on the feed.
So I started seeing these things everywhere. They were all AI voices, making the most outrageous claims I’ve ever seen — it doubles your testosterone, increases your pencil size as they call it, all these wild things. And once I clicked on one, the algorithm knew, and I started seeing them everywhere. I was like, I need to go down this rabbit hole. I am a man of the internet and this is my duty.
So I found this company called Better Alt Himalayan Shilajit Resin that all of these TikTok affiliates were pushing. Then I found Kalodata and plugged them in. They were selling 91,000 units over about a 90-day period — roughly a thousand units a day. I was like, that is insane. Then I went further down the rabbit hole: they’d done just shy of $9 million in shilajit resin in 90 days. That’s $100,000 a day on TikTok Shop.
Sam: In 90 days?
Sabri: Yeah. And that was just the tip of the iceberg, because then I went to their funnel. Thousands and thousands of reviews. And then if you go to their website, they say they’ve sold 9.5 million servings. It was like $200 million worth of shilajit if you calculated it at their average order value.
Sam: Okay, so they’re crushing it. What’s the other one — GuruNanda, the teeth thing?
Sabri: You would’ve seen GuruNanda’s oil pulling kit everywhere. These guys are all over TikTok — they do lives, their funnel is very impressive. And they’re doing like 100,000 units a week through TikTok Shop.
What they all have in common is story-based copy. It’s all about the story behind the thing. They’ll focus on ancient oil pulling — the Egyptians used to do it, there are still mummies under the pyramids that have perfect teeth because of it. They hook you in like that.
Sam: Who’s behind these things? Is this just two 26-year-olds?
Sabri: I don’t know the founders behind these specific products, but what they all have in common is story-based copy. They focus on the ancient, the exotic, the dramatic — and then they hook you in and you’re sold before you realize it’s a product pitch.
Sam: And what are the numbers on GuruNanda?
Sabri: They had done about 1.2 million in sales through the app, 100,000 units a week, 40,000 reviews, and there are like 30,000 videos tagged with GuruNanda on TikTok.
And here’s the really smart thing — the crazy part is all of these products have way more reviews on Amazon. Because what they’re doing is they’ve got a lot of people promoting the product on TikTok, getting a lot of attention and eyeballs — but then people arrive at Amazon, which is much more trusted, and they get a little bump in conversion rate. They’re already sold from a video, then they get all these secondary sales.
So the opportunity is twofold. You can start as an affiliate, and the skills you’ll learn are copywriting, how to grab people’s attention, how to understand the social currency of these platforms, what goes viral. You can take those skills to any business and explode their sales.
And then you can do exactly what I described — get some traction as an affiliate, then go to a brand and say: hey, pay me $20,000 a month. I’m going to build out TikTok Shop as a platform for you, do all the creatives, crank the revenue. A $20,000 per month retainer plus 5% of sales. You don’t do anything.
And I’ll do you one better — I know you’re running a lot of Facebook ads, and anybody who does knows the number one bottleneck is creative. So I’m going to run all these TikToks, make them go viral, then give them to you to run on Facebook, which you can then scale up on paid ads even more.
Sam: This is a great idea. The beauty of what you just said is you’re going to learn more timeless skills: copywriting, consumer psychology, video editing, video storytelling, how to utilize social media to go viral. These are horizontal skills that can be used in any business — and you’re getting paid to do it. You’re getting paid to go to school to build the most valuable skills that exist for marketers going forward.
Sabri: Exactly. And that’s the reason why I think it’s the best — because the skills you’re getting paid to acquire are going to serve you for the rest of your life. We are going to be communicating in 20 to 30 years from now, and it’s going to be even more fragmented, an even greater war for attention. If you get the reps in now, if you’re uploading a TikTok a day — just imagine the understanding you have of human psychology in a year, in two years. And what that will allow you to do is walk into any legitimate business and know this stuff cold.
Sam: I think this is great advice for people early in their careers whose main attribute and asset is hustle and willingness to figure things out. Especially if you don’t have coding skills, or assets to invest. I was that guy — 21 years old, no coding skills, no money, no track record. Whereas this is something where the bar to entry is so low it’s applicable advice to almost anybody at the beginning.
Sabri: You just don’t need anything to get started other than time. And when you’re broke, that’s all you have. Most of these people are already spending four and a half hours a day on their phone — so it’s a very ripe opportunity.
Kill the Little B*tch Inside [00:48:00]
Sam: You have a few phrases I want you to explain. One is “kill the little bitch inside.” What is this? It sounds like a David Goggins thing.
Sabri: Yeah. I think there’s a duality of man that is present. Whenever you’re trying to do something hard, there’s the little bitch that comes out and starts to whisper in your ear. Like: hey, it’s cold outside, Sabri. You’ve been working out all week, man. It’s okay, just roll over and go back to sleep. Or: hey, you’ve already had really great conversations this week, you sent out some very promising proposals — you don’t need to make another 20 cold calls. Just knock off for the day and go hang out.
There’s always that little bitch that comes out. And typically, the harder the thing you’re doing, the louder it gets. It is the best salesperson that exists because it knows all your little weaknesses, your little vices, and it knows exactly how to hit those pain points.
I’ve found that the harder things I do, the more I develop my ability to silence that voice — and to do things despite it. And I have an interesting relationship with that little voice because if it rears its ugly head and tries to say that stuff to me, I put it through pain. So it’s like: you’re suggesting I skip the gym because I’ve got a little tweak in my muscle? Just for recommending that, we’re going to finish the workout with 15 minutes of hill sprints.
Sam: You don’t just ignore it, you penalize it for showing up so that it doesn’t do it again.
Sabri: I do. Because I think the biggest lie people tell themselves is the lie every day. People say “I need to work out” or “I need to do this” and then they start their day by lying to themselves.
For me it’s binary: if I know I’m not going to do something, I just don’t say I’m going to do it. I don’t want to teach myself that I make promises to myself I don’t keep. That’s a really bad thing.
So if I feel like I don’t want to go to the gym the next day, I’ll just say it now. I won’t say I’m going to go and then lie to myself.
Sam: What do you do when you get caught in that situation where you said you were going to do something and you didn’t?
Sabri: I catch it ahead of time. But the tax is always more volume — more of the thing I said I was going to do that I didn’t do. Not only do I do it, I now have to do more. It comes to collect.
Life Philosophy: Have More Fun [00:53:00]
Sam: What are some big ideas that serve you well — life philosophy, lifestyle techniques, beliefs you have that most people don’t live by? What’s some wisdom in the form of something you actually take action on?
Sabri: When I started my career I thought I needed to look and act a certain way. I was watching business shows, reading business books — okay, I need to be this serious dude, wear a blazer, show up like a businessman. As a result I had to act a certain way that wasn’t really indicative of having a lot of fun.
Over the years, the world just tries to beat you down to being vanilla — to fitting in, to not being that person with a bit of showmanship, a bit of flair, a bit of fun. People think “this is business, so I need to act a certain way.” And I definitely fell into that.
So one of the philosophies I try to embrace is just to have more fun. Everything that I do — just have more fun in my life and in my business. Because at the end of the day, the revenue, the sales numbers, the profits — the years roll by, and unless you’re having a lot of fun doing what you’re doing, nothing else matters.
Actually, it was only after I started focusing on having more fun that I started making a lot more money.
Sam: What’s an example? What did you do that was more fun, and how did that lead to more money?
Sabri: A specific example: about a year and a half ago I put together an ad campaign. Usually I’d think, how do I make this convert best? How do I make it work for cold traffic? And then I thought, let me start from a different place: what would be the funniest ad? What would I need to do to have the most fun?
We did all types of outrageous things. One was me dressed as a priest, with Lord Zuck and Lord Elon in the background, having a funeral in a church for the money that’s being murdered in most people’s ad campaigns. Everything in that script was fun and funny. That one campaign tripled our sales.
But it’s more than just a transactional example. I try to do something really big, take a big swing, something risky, every year. Because I know myself — I know the urge I have as an entrepreneur to stay engaged and scratch that itch. The big sin I made early in my career was I scratched that itch through other business opportunities.
What I do now is stay present, but attach the new and novel thing to the main thing. It might be a new campaign, a new channel, or a new offer I’m going to run. That scratches the itch. And I think that as people get older they take things a lot more seriously and forget that we’re all just here having fun at the end of the day.
I like to talk to strangers — lots of strangers. We’re told from a very early age not to talk to strangers. But strangers have got everything you want. My wife was once a stranger. My customers, my business partners, my best friends — all of these guys were strangers to me.
And parties, entertaining people — it’s so easy to get caught up in organizing your business life and meetings and events. People don’t take that same vigor and discipline with planning fun and making events fun. When you do that and you have fun in your downtime, it makes you bring so much more zest and life to your everyday business, because it’s not just this neverending constant grindstone.
Sam: There was a great Google principle called 20% time — they acknowledged that the most talented people they wanted to hire would never just be chained to a desk. So they said: explicitly use 20% of your work time to do something completely different from your normal day-to-day. And out of that came some really great ideas. Facebook’s hackathons were their version of this — forget the product, forget the roadmap, let’s just build something tonight. And I think the like button came out of one of those hackathons. The most-pressed button in the history of the universe.
We used to have a “do cool shit” budget — we’d take about 10% of the marketing budget and say it has to be a no-ROI play. We think it’s awesome but it’s not measurable, not proven. It was only out of that extra 10% that we’d do things that were the kind of big swings and out-of-the-box ideas that might result in a big winner — or might result in a good story to tell and a creative release that we now use for something else.
Tim Ferriss was on the podcast and he said: I’ve learned that just because I charge my batteries doing something silly doesn’t mean I have to use them doing something silly. He’ll do something that’s not “productive” because it charges his batteries, and then he has batteries to go do more productive stuff. If you only ever do the super productive stuff but it’s draining your batteries, that’s not the way.
Sabri: And as we get older, most people think getting old means getting boring. Just think about how most people live — they have kids, all these things happen, and they feel like that’s almost part of what it means to be boring and just fit in.
There’s this annual survey called the Happiness Index that measures people’s happiness. If you ask most people to rate themselves one to ten, most say seven.
Sam: Yeah, obviously.
Sabri: But I don’t want to live at sevens. I want to be very happy and I want my life to be very full. Far too often we take things seriously that do not need to be taken seriously, and we feel like because we’re naturally getting older we’re getting more cynical. You need to do silly things that charge you, because you want those sprints.
It’s not about sitting down and grinding 16 hours a day just because you have the hours. It’s about doing your most meaningful work. I find I do my most meaningful work when I focus on having more fun, because if you’re going to compete with somebody, it’s like the Naval quote — you want to do things that feel like play to you and look like work to others. If you can inherently have more fun doing those things, you’re going to do them longer, you’re going to get better, and you’ll see better results.
Sam: Can I read you a quote about this exact topic? An hour before this podcast I was supposed to be preparing for the pod, but I was deep in a rabbit hole on Sylvester Stallone. Studying the story of Rocky and Sly. He said: “I think that life belongs to people who can make a sick joke out of it all.” And he said: if you take life too seriously, you think one of two things — either life is a comedy or it’s a tragedy.
And it reminds me of a Tony Robbins event I was at once. 7,000 people from 56 countries, totally different ages, backgrounds, economics, everything. He says: show me what a depressed person looks like. How does a depressed person stand? Don’t say a word — just stand. And everybody instinctively does the same thing. Shoulders down. How do they breathe? Shallow. How does their face look? And you could see everybody, regardless of background, knew. We all knew the protocol.
He says: you’ve all practiced this. You know what stress looks like, what depression looks like. It’s instinctive.
You said something earlier — that we all believe as you get older you get boring. Nobody says that out loud, but I think it’s an implicit belief baked into all of us. Just like knowing that if I want to be in a low-energy depressed state, I should hunch over, breathe shallow, shuffle my feet, and talk in a low voice — that is going to manifest that. In the same way, most people truly do believe and accept that as they get older life becomes more boring. We need to uproot and eradicate that as a default.
Sabri: Correct. And it’s all driven by the activities you do. Think about why you feel more energized and excited for life when you’re maybe in your twenties versus later in life. A lot of the time it’s because people stop doing new things. They repeat the same thing every day.
It’s like the Munger quote: “Show me where I’m going to die, so I never go visit there.” Why do you have a bit more pep in your step when you’re always doing new things, always taking big swings? There’s always a gain to explore.
And to quote the little bitch in the back of your mind: yeah, I have kids now, I have responsibilities. But whoever said that means you can’t also do new things, or have fun while doing those things? It’s just little exercises you can put in your daily life to make the ordinary extraordinary.
Conversation Hack: Ditch “What’s New?” [01:06:00]
Sam: This is a little small talk pro tip. One of the most common questions people ask is: “so what’s new?” That’s what we ask people when we see them.
And if you’re on the receiving end of the “what’s new?” question — it’s like, oh god. Nothing’s really new. But for most of us, nothing is really new between the last time we saw you and now, right? We’re still working the same job, still got the same kids, still got most of the same things.
So asking “what’s new?” is a terrible question to ask. It pins the other person into a kind of sad realization about their life in that moment.
A different small-talk question that generates much more interesting responses: what’s something you’re excited about coming up? I’ll ask people this all the time — I’ll even say “what’s new?” so it doesn’t sound different, and then I’ll follow up with: what’s something you’re looking forward to right now? What are you excited about? What’s coming up for you? And then they’ll tell you about this thing they’re going to go do, and they light up.
People light up when you ask them what they’re looking forward to, because we need things we’re excited about and looking forward to. And to your point — we should be building the muscle of having more fun, of planning things we’re genuinely excited about.
Sabri: You’ve got to engineer them. You can’t just wait for them to happen by chance. The best way I’ve found to do that is sit down at the start of the year with your partner — whoever it might be — and not just plan your work year with projects in Q1, Q2. Do that for your own life. We’re going to go on holiday here, I want to try this, I want to do something crazy here.
Sam: What are some examples of things you do?
Sabri: I like to look at all the different areas of my life — relationships, wealth, health, all of those things — and I have these pillars. For me, I like to go away every 90 days. I’ve got three daughters and a wife. I work very hard. I love to travel, go out for food, do cooking classes, experience new cultures. I don’t wait for when I need a holiday — I just plan them in advance, because I know a 10-day holiday is going to give me that zing, that juice. I come back and get way more done in the next quarter.
So we plan the year in terms of all the holidays we’re going to take. And then a little hack I like to do when you’ve got kids and you’re traveling: whenever we go to a new city or country — we try to go to multiple new countries a year — I go to ChatGPT and ask it to write me a children’s storybook about that place. I read it to my daughters leading up to the trip. You can say: make it have three characters, these are their names — and then fuse in all the things about that culture. It makes everyone way more excited. Because the anticipation is always more fun than the actual event itself. So it makes sense to invest in the anticipation.
Showmanship as Currency [01:12:00]
Sam: You have a pretty interesting set of interests that align with what I’m interested in. I texted you and said hey, what should we talk about on the pod? And you sent me four words, all of which I’m actually interested in. One of the first ones you said was “showmanship.” Talk to me about showmanship — why is this on your mind?
Sabri: Entertainment is the currency that buys the attention of your prospect and of your marketplace. Showmanship for me is a lot of things — storytelling, stage presence and energy with the way you show up, visual storytelling, being able to surprise and bring drama and excitement to whatever it is that you do.
Regardless of the business you choose to build, you quickly realize once you get to a certain height that you’re in the people business. You’re in the business of leading people and communicating to those people, regardless of what the product or industry is. And your ability to be a showman — to bring a bit of pizzazz, a bit of that sauce to things that seem ordinary, things that seem mundane and boring, whether it’s a job advert, an interview, a team meeting, an all-hands — becomes infinitely more important.
It’s one of those lost art forms. Most of our communication is done through text and email, so people naturally plateau where they don’t really emphasize it anymore. And I think with everything happening with content creation and the importance people are placing on building an audience, there’s a Renaissance of showmanship having to come back.
Sam: I like that — showmanship is the currency that buys the attention of your prospects. It seems kind of polarizing, right? The people who are out there creating content on TikTok and YouTube probably know more than anyone how important showmanship is and they’re benefiting from it. Then there’s a whole bunch of people opted out of that, living in emails and text messages where most business owners live.
And I buy what you’re saying — when you’re communicating through just emails or running ads, you tend to conform or subdue yourself into a very transactional, dry, informational way of communicating. And that actually does you a disservice.
Is most of the new business you get through content you’re making on YouTube?
Sabri: We run a lot of ads as well, so we get that too. But I look at it as the whole ecosystem. The YouTube content is also a way to get more reps in. I understood that I want to become a better storyteller, get my hooks more dialed in, get better at retaining people’s attention, learning storytelling techniques — foreshadowing and all that. I came up through the whole world of direct response, and I understand the landscape is changing. You really need to become even better at storytelling.
And all the reps I get in on YouTube I can then translate to all the ads I do, the emails, the video sales letters, whatever else. Even presenting and just being a showman. Instead of getting feedback from maybe doing a launch or a campaign every quarter, I’m uploading a YouTube video every week. It’s about practice.
Sam: What’s something you’ve learned in the gap between good and great on storytelling and showmanship through content?
Sabri: I wouldn’t put a crown on myself and say I’m great yet — I’ve still got ways to go. But fundamentally, it’s understanding how you first hook somebody’s attention, then retain it, then make an ask.
A lot of people start by focusing on how to make the ask — how to write the most influential, persuasive copy, how to have a huge emphasis on the offer. But I think the number one thing if you want to improve the conversion rate of anything, on any vehicle, is to focus on improving consumption first.
Place a disproportionate amount of your effort on first getting that consumption. The way you do that is by understanding the hook and understanding the lead. How do I create either a pattern interrupt or a pattern match to my market? And then how do I foreshadow, build stakes, delay the payoff, have multiple storylines running simultaneously?
Because if you can do that, and if you can earn that viewer — yes, you want a very strong offer, but it doesn’t matter how strong the offer is if you don’t get people to that part of your pitch anyway.
Stop Praying to the Internet Gods [01:20:00]
Sam: You have an interesting method — I was just reading one of your video titles that I really like: “Sell Like Crazy: Stop Praying to the Internet Gods.” What’s the premise of that?
Sabri: A lot of people sit around and hope and pray to Zuck that they’re going to get cheaper CPMs, or that the algorithm wouldn’t be so wild and volatile. Or people beg for referrals and operate their business by whatever fate falls in their lap. Most businesses don’t have a repeatable, predictable way to put a dollar in a machine and turn it into three or five or ten dollars back.
With all the businesses I’ve seen, with the thousands of clients I’ve worked with, that’s the one thing most people are missing: a repeatable process to go out there and get clients. Because if you don’t have that, you have an expensive hobby that’s worse than a job. You don’t get vacations, you’ve got all the stress, you end up working double the hours you would in a normal job.
Sam: What are some examples of repeatable systems — great sales funnels you’ve seen right now that you could walk me through?
Sabri: On the lead-gen side, a basic funnel is having a piece of information — a video, a free report, something — that gets your target market to raise their hand and say: hey, I’d be interested in learning more about that.
The first cardinal sin most businesses make is they go out to their market like they’re in the dark ages. They lay out their wares like they’re in a marketplace — “here are all the products and services I’ve got.” A little bit of back and forth on prices, then the deal is done. They’re just like: get a quote, buy, bye.
You will get ten times the amount of people if you go out to your marketplace with something of value — to educate people, to lead with your best foot forward. Use a piece of content that’s going to be bait to get that person to raise their hand in a sea of people.
It can be a free report about anything. Then once you get them to raise their hand on a very small, non-confronting ask, you have them arrive on a page where you make your offer. A basic two-step funnel. Instead of “get a quote” or “contact our sales team,” it’s: “here’s a free piece of information.” They download it, then they arrive on a page that makes them a Godfather Offer to get on the phone. And you get ten times the volume of people coming into communication with what you do.
Sam: What’s a specific example?
Sabri: Say you’re a digital agency and you want to sell your digital marketing services. Instead of “hey, we can help you grow your business with digital marketing,” it’s: “here is a free report — the 22 things you need to know when running Facebook ads.” That’s only going to pull in people interested in running Facebook ads. A percentage of those people are going to be interested in having someone run their Facebook ads for them. That’s it on the lead-gen side.
On the e-commerce side, it’s all about first getting people’s attention through content. The brands that are crushing it right now — they’re not saying “here is our goop in a bottle.” They hit you with content that looks completely organic, slides under the radar, doesn’t look like a sales message. You’re watching it because it’s interesting. The algorithm does all the optimizing for you. And then you get to the end and they make the ask.
If they’re selling a testosterone supplement, they’re not like “here’s this testosterone supplement, buy it.” They’re like: “did you know testosterone in males has dropped by 70% over the last ten years?” That gets someone’s ears to perk up. Or they’ll post a clip of Joe Rogan talking about testosterone that just looks like someone sharing a clip — and then it starts to weave you into an actual product pitch.
Sabri: I saw a brilliant one the other day. I’m in the process of building a house, and it was a reel on TikTok. The guy’s like: “these are the best 20 things you definitely want building inside your house that nobody tells you about.” He’s listing a whole-house water filter, a dehumidifier for the whole property, essential oils that diffuse through your AC, heated tiles — I was like, dude, this is fire. And then at the end he says: “all of these things are expensive. So if you’re wondering how to afford it — I’ve put together a course that shows you how to buy and flip homes, so you have the money to buy all this stuff.”
Sam: That’s an absolute judo flip at the end. Forget about having a home you can’t afford — the way you could afford it is if you take my course and learn how to make money online. That’s amazing.
The Free Book Funnel [01:28:00]
Sam: You did this with your book, right? I remember going down your free book funnel once and thinking this is very, very smart. You’ve got a free book funnel. Tell me about it. How many people have gotten a book from you through this?
Sabri: We’ve sold a million copies now.
Sam: Are you selling them or are they free?
Sabri: Yeah, it’s free plus shipping. We’re on Amazon as well, but overall it’s about a million copies between the Amazon and the funnel.
Sam: When I saw this I thought it was genius. Because books aren’t good money makers anyway. So instead of trying to make a profit charging nine bucks for a book, you give away a free book on how to sell. And then you create what I call the yes-yes-yes-no funnel: the person is hearing you tell them how to do something, how to get better at something. You’re not selling them anything. They’re saying yes, yes, yes — that all makes sense, that’s a great example, that’s a great point. Yes, yes, yes. And at the end they say no — I don’t have the energy to do that.
And the ideal prospect for a lot of these businesses is somebody who is now convinced that you know your stuff, but also convinced they don’t have the time, energy, or skill to do it themselves. So you say: I’m giving you the playbook. But if you don’t want to do this yourself, or don’t have the time — luckily we’re here, we do this for you. You’ve all but convinced me that you are an expert at this and I want to enlist you to do it.
Sabri: Yeah. And I think there’s a caveat to that. A lot of people when it comes to book funnels or any of these kind of things effectively make the book a thinly veiled sales pitch — that’s the only purpose of the book.
What I did differently: we were getting so much inbound to what we were doing, and we’re a premium agency, so a lot of businesses couldn’t afford to work with us. They would always ask: who else would you recommend, the no-frills version of what you guys do? In the beginning I’d try to find some people who seemed to know what they were doing and send them their way. And they would always come back to bite me — “hey, you recommended this person and they just murdered my money.”
So I decided I was going to write a playbook to help those people — give them everything for free, no holds barred, literally the full playbook without holding anything back. And maybe in the future they might come back as a client. If not, that’s completely fine.
A lot of people go the opposite route and build the yes-yes-no funnel where the book is basically just a sales letter for the core offer. I was very conscious of not doing that. Because books are interesting — books aren’t like a YouTube video or a reel. That book is going to be around in some capacity, hopefully long after I am gone. So you really need to pour a lot of time and energy to make it the best you possibly can.
The distinction is: it’s not a bait and switch. You don’t buy the book and then realize you’re being teased with secrets and the actual stuff is hidden behind the agency. You lead with your best foot forward. You give them everything. And then if they arrive at the decision to work with you, they don’t feel like you’ve been holding back the eleven herbs and spices.
Closing [01:35:00]
Sam: That’s a very good point. Well dude, thanks for coming on. I knew I would learn some stuff about marketing, but I also got some good life tips and life wisdom out of this, which is always a good thing for me. I appreciate you coming on. Where can people find you or get more about you?
Sabri: It’s been a pleasure, thanks for having me. You can find me at Sabri Suby — I’m pretty much on all platforms. And if you liked this, you can go to YouTube and check me out.
Sam: Awesome. Thanks, man.
Sabri: No problems.