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 to say in your blog post that you go fifteen thousand dollars a month is all i need i’m happy that was like ten years ago i think but uh that’s but you used to say fifteen thousand single and no kids is easy right now if i had a guess on my burn rate 120 to 180 a month what that’s insane so what is how does that break down so what what’s the like what’s the bulk of it whether so house probably is the biggest one no i have no mortgage okay so you’re spending 120 180k without spending anything on your home [Music] so neil i i was telling you a little bit about what you’re getting into we record everything by the way so like we just hop into it but sean kind of knows who you are i’ve been a fan of yours for like 10 years can i tell sean and the audience who i think you are and you could tell me if i’m wrong and like what i’m missing sure go for it all right so you’re neil patel so i know you because you used to have this blog called quick sprout i read it maybe 10 years ago it’s probably a 15 year old blog if i remember correctly at first it was mostly about like seo but eventually it kind of like warped into being about seo about content but just about business in general and you would do like crazy stuff like you would build a business that made a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue by like you just picked like a random niche and i think it ended up being supplements and you like blogged every month about how that was going and you used to blog about all types of crazy stuff but then eventually you also started a company called crazy egg which i heard was doing many millions of dollars a year in revenue and it was a bootstrap and you own the whole thing then you and heaton started kissmetrics and raised a bunch of money it didn’t end up working out wonderfully but it was like uh it could have been actually quite huge heaton wrote a great blog post about like where uh you know where a couple errors were made but now you’ve got like a seven or eight hundred person agency that is also a bootstrap like the rest of your stuff and you’ve just kind of been balling out like for like 15 years in the world of business just killing it with agencies is that right did i get everything mostly right mostly closed so crazy came first uh heathen’s a co-founder on that he has it all or uh you know he owns uh crazy egg um as well so it’s not just me anymore and then there’s another guy named john butler who was also part of crazy egg at the beginning and then quick sprout came later i started blogging on about business and stuff like that uh kissmetrics then came kissmetrics didn’t work out quick sprout started to have a big audience related to marketing we tried to create seo software on there i did that with my co-founder heathen at the time he’s like all right how about we create a company out of this i’ll do the software that didn’t work out i didn’t want to be part of it anymore he took it over and he ended up making it a business site directory you know informational site whatever you want to call it has affiliate offers which you already know about and then the last one was the ad agency which is correct and then there’s been a lot of stuff in between here and there a lot didn’t work out but generally speaking i tend to do one thing at once focus and currently i spend all my time on my ad agency and that you’re you’re at six seven hundred how big is that at the moment and it’s only like five or six years old right yeah so we’re on our fifth year and then this year will be end of year five uh we’re at roughly 700 people i think maybe a little bit more maybe by the year 900-ish if i had a guest who are these people these are like 700 anonymous indians in india what’s going on who are these people uh we do have some people in india but what’s funny how many people do you employ in new york that’s what i want to know that’s my agency testimony you’re in brazil too though right yeah we’re in brazil majority of our people are in the united states if i look at a region wise the united states has the biggest head count we also have offices in australia canada uh uk brazil i think we’re opening up germany soon we’re looking at italy we’re looking at france and a few other regions as well but our model is is like our ad agency in india markets companies in india it’s not really used to outsource american work into india and what work are people doing like what’s the service that you’re providing all digital so like seo pay-per-click email marketing conversion rate optimization organic social paid social the list goes on and on and do all the customers come from neilpatel.com it used to be that way then we started getting a lot through word of mouth i would have never really guessed that word of mouth drives business how how many can you say how many uh so most people i would say like our audience they’d be like oh yeah it’s cool to have like a personal brand but me and sam have figured out oh wow this [ ] really does open up more doors than you would have expected uh you’ve been doing this for a long time so neil patel which is kind of like a personal blog where you’re talking about like you know hacks and experiments and strategies that you’ve you know figured out how many can you say how many millions that brought in in client bookings what for the agency like what uh how big did just the referrals from neil patel get you before other stuff kicked in like word of mouth and being recognized in the industry and other things like that i think the neil patel brand got us to around like 30 40 million in revenue and then word of mouth started kicking in and then other things started kicking in and employees started bringing in their own deals because they worked in the space for so long and then we saw more and more growth got awards that brought us deals um being a minority owned business that helps believe it or not there’s if you’re indian and you live in the united states you’re considered a minority and i was about to say are we a minority i think you guys feel like i never get minority you’re the majority of ceos out there so i mean it’s funny because we go through rfps and some of them ask if you’re what is it like mbe certification or something like that i forgot what it’s called or minority business enterprise and i was like well i’m not a minority there’s like one plus billion of me in this world right and they’re like oh you’re a minority i’m like what are you talking about there’s like a billion plus indians in this world how are we a minority and they’re like oh in america you’re a minority and in some of these rfps they’re looking it says in there we’re looking for um lgbtq i don’t know what the yeah all four of the letters are um you have the tattoo on your arm yeah the queue’s there and then a woman-owned businesses veteran-owned businesses and the other one was minority and i was just like wait there’s actually a quota that these big fortune 500 companies have to hit and they’re like yeah and i was like well i’m a minority they’re like well you need the certification and i was like i gotta have a certification to tell you that i’m a minority and at first i didn’t realize i was a minority they were telling me oh you’re a minority we reached out to you we’re hoping that you would be a good fit and i’m like i’m a minority and they’re like yeah you’re a minority in the united states you’d help us meet our quota do you have the certification i’m like what are you talking about and then we went through the process and got the certification you got to get your papers bro you got to get your papers right i would have been offended and then as soon as i realized wait this is to my advantage oh hold on um i also got solar panels on my house does that help you know like i’m a dog wearing glasses uh yeah exactly i have a vision impairment uh called farsightedness you know so what else works in my favor here you know like was the certificate just turned the webcam on and it looked at you and it was like yep that was it that’s not enough and what’s funny is our ceo or vp operations one of the titles i forgot what tracy’s title is she asked me for this like six months before we did it she’s like hey need your birth certificate i’m like yeah why do you need my birth certificate she’s like oh we need him for this certification like whatever and the moment someone ended up telling me how uh magic johnson generates a lot of his revenue because he’s a minority and gets a lot of contracts partners with other businesses white labels it uses his name becomes a quote-unquote owner of that business and then outsources oh wait tell me about that give me an example what’s what’s an example of the magic johnson formula sure so i don’t know if this is true this is just what someone in the minority space ended up telling me so that’s the caveat i don’t know if this is true or real and they’re saying let’s say if someone has a food company and they have the contracts with all the hospitals that are run by the government like the va they’re looking for minorities to provide it but there’s already a lot of big corporations that provide the food so magic johnson may go create a business that’s in that space partner with the big supplier who already provides a food to these hospitals he’ll go get the contracts and then work with them to actually put those yeah wait you never heard you never heard of this my my in-laws my in-laws own a moving company and they’re minorities they’re uh black they’re haitian immigrants and they win deals partially because of that reason because like morgan stanley or something like that if they want to move they want to they have some type of policy in their company it says we we want to get rfps for or we want to get bids from these types of companies i had no idea how i didn’t obviously i knew this exists i just didn’t realize how significant it was i definitely didn’t know the magic johnson formula which is frankly genius on his part if that’s if that’s actually what he does right we don’t know that part but it’s true but think of it this way right it’s a quota so if i go and i get an rfp let’s say from boeing which funny enough we lost the rfp because we’re over spice for what they wanted um and racism let’s say the price is very similar to the competition i have rewards showing that we were the agency of the year so like all right these guys are good at what they do we have the case studies and if we’re similar pricing like oh this is minority helps us hit our quota let’s give the business here right yeah yeah of course you have some merit uh to go with it for the first 30 million dollars of business you got that and you must have gotten that by year two or so if you’re growing this fast um what was the main year three sorry three what was the main service like when i think of like because i went to your website and i actually submitted a lead to figure it out there was the maximum you ask what your website is and what your budget is and it’s like zero to ten thousand ten thousand twenty thousand and then just fifty 000 plus so were you serving like mostly small businesses and what like what were you were you doing as simple stuff as like making their yelp page good like what were you doing yeah so it’s not that small we do have some smbs like that but we actually first started off in uh mid market our clients would pay us like a minimum of 10 grand a month and what would you do for 10 000 a month so nothing was cookie cutter it was all custom it’s like maybe they need seo maybe they need to help on paid management maybe they need some cro or email marketing or a little bit of everything right but the plans would start at 120 a year right 10 a month and scale up from there to 20 a month 30 a month whatever it may be what was most in vogue as the service when you started like the trend everybody wanted and then what’s the in vogue thing today when we first started it was mainly seo and what does that mean though what does that mean you use ha refs or something and your employees like look which terms they should rank for and then you write an article for them so it was optimizing their on-page code helping build links creating content promoting the content and making sure that traffic converted into leads or sales assuming if they weren’t services um and it was a positive roi for the guy that sounds like a ton of work for 10 000 a month it would start at 10. it depended on the keywords how hard they were to rank for and it would go up from there and what about now sam i love when you describe people’s businesses because you’re just like uh so what does that mean you just google their name and then it doesn’t show up and then you go write an article with their name and it’s like what’s the hustle dude you just read the new york times and then you just cut out half the words and then you hit send in an email like is that what is that what the hustle is yeah nailed it i mean it can be it like like like you know uh there’s there’s always more nuance and complication in reality but like if you can explain things in a fairly simple way where it’s like what’s hubspot oh they just make software so when you people sign up for your website you can email them and call them you know what i mean like you could i’m just trying to dumb it down a little bit but when you look at the business when they first started massive churn how to add tons of features how to figure out onboarding how to figure out training there was a lot of stuff that went to make hubspot a multi-billion dollar company right a lot of people look at it as email but they do more than email they do more than a crm they’ve added actually if anyone in the space has a 10 attraction they have a history of adding a lot of those features for free which is a smart model and then gobble up market share get them into the ecosystem and hopefully they stick around and so what’s what’s the popular you should do the ad reads uh for us yeah oh that was amazing by the way sam i think you should make suburban dictionary which is just you explaining businesses without like any uh any of the complicated stuff like yeah what is it well if you get covered like this call them and email them the the three syllable dictionary like i i explain complicated things but no word is above three syllables that’s what we’re gonna call exactly uh what by the way i was just gonna say ben brought up one point on that minority thing ben you want to say that that sounds pretty interesting you slacked us something but neil kind of mentioned this too but like this is really really in government work because the government is like very hardcore about hitting their quotas for racial minorities and so around here like i actually know a couple guys and basically what they do is uh the people i know are all african-american they get the contract they put their name on the contract they then outsource the entire thing to like uh deloitte or kpmg or whatever and uh they take like you know 15 of the revenue or whatever they create a consulting firm that’s like the minority minority inc and then minority inc goes and gets the contracts and farms it out to to like deloitte or whoever that’s great i can’t find this client info have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out-of-sync spreadsheets are dueling databases hubspot grow better i lived in uh in indonesia for a while and they had such a bad traffic problem jakarta has like i think the worst traffic in the world like you just going two miles you might be there for two hours and uh so they were like okay we need to create like a carpool incentive so how do we create an incentive where if you have three or more people in your car then you can go in the fast lane and so this so it worked for like you know a month it was like oh wow this is great if we carpool we get to go faster and then this like little industry sprouted up where people would just stand at the edge of the carpool lane like a hitchhiker and they’d be like oh get in your car if you want a third rider i’ll just hop in and we could ride in the fast lane and then they would get off on the other side and ride back with somebody else and so they would be professional like you know hov lane participants so they would just spend all day riding with you in your car so you’d be sitting there and someone would just get in the back seat with you it’s just like a random indonesian person and you would give them 10 10 like rupees or whatever and then 10 baht and then they would you know get out on the other side a mile later it was amazing you uh neil was was quick sprout uh ben there you go uh was quick sprout i mean so that was your main business quick sprout and crazy egg were your main business for a while before it was just a blog and then my co-founder he then ended up taking it over now it’s his blog so what was your main source of of revenue and income because like i said i’ve listened to you forever like you’ve been crushing it it seems like for financially for like 10 plus years i don’t know if i’m crushing it but uh the main source of income was crazy for most my life and then it ended up becoming the ad agency and sam you said something at the very beginning that if i was listening to this i’d be like wait hold on i want to hear that story you said something like just for kicks he would like spin up a business that like did 100k a month in revenue what’s an example of that tell that story because that sounds awesome yeah so everyone thinks like it’s really hard to make money online and then you got these shysters or like buy this for a thousand dollars and you become rich which never really happens maybe every once in a while but for most people it doesn’t so they create a business on anything and people are like go create a nutrition business my audience picked i gave them like a lot of different options they picked a nutrition business and i was like all right let’s create a blog get a ranking get some traffic and then funnel people in through quizzes through uh emails and let’s bundle them into uh supplements rank higher on amazon get traction and see what happens and it did well and that took you like uh months years how long did it take it wasn’t months it was much more than that i think it was a year right a little bit less than a year i think it was like nine or ten months so it wasn’t like one or two months sadly but a little bit less than a year so it’s pretty good it was an awesome it was an awesome blog post series shawn you got to google it google like quick sprout or neil patel then like hundred thousand dollars a month and it was like a monthly update it was pretty amazing i i don’t think we may have deleted it now i don’t know if it’s still a line but and then so i took the money i made from crazy egg and i would park it into other things so it’s like stock market for a long time the stock market’s had a really crazy run right then you also have things like investments a lot of venture funds uh angel investments and then sometimes you just get lucky sometimes you don’t and it’s a numbers game we had talked about doing a content series like this to grow the podcast i was like you know i think one of the best ways to grow the podcast could be if we do a challenge like what you described and one of the ideas was like what if sam created his own uh sam sticky stickyaki his own a condiment brand and we basically show how we build a dtc brand like from from idea to like branding to marketing to and we just do it all transparently to like like get people hooked on okay let me see how you guys actually build this thing now it’s a lot of works which is why i think ultimately we didn’t do it but how well did that work for you was that like just kind of like a good content thing or was it like no that was like drove a lot of growth for the brand and the blog i’m curious how well that worked for you it didn’t drive as much growth for the brand um but it did help out every little bit like i did crazy experience so i spent like a hundred and something or two hundred and something thousand on clothes wanted to see what that did in business meetings uh spent money applying first class everywhere she wanted to see what that would do but yeah i tried a lot of different experiments and it was just for shits and giggles um and it was also a reason to justify some of my expenses and i’m like i want to apply first class because i remember my first time flying first class someone else paid for it i’m like wow this is i’ve been missing out this is a lot better than being crammed up and flying all the way to europe from los angeles you know in economy and then i was like man let’s do some experiments and let’s see if i can justify this expense but yeah that’s amazing and you just you did you say early on that you just gave heaton so did you invest in heat and shaw’s other company sean neera yeah yeah so we’re both neil we’re both investors in nira which is he he is your cousin right no brother-in-law brother-in-law yeah sorry and uh heaton’s amazing he’s another he’s a great blogger as well and sean and i both invested in his company called nera which is either gonna be a dud or it’s gonna be like the biggest company ever i know like it’s like a company that’s close like they’re gonna close like multi-million dollar contracts i would guess that’s it’s like a big old business potentially a big old business but did you say that you gave him crazy egg uh so with crazy egg what ended up happening is is what i wanted to do is we were doing business forever together and then eventually i just said hey you can have the monthly distributions and i’m gonna go create another business why would you give that why uh he didn’t ask for it nor did he care for it nor does he want it you know he’s never been about money neither him or i have and we’re not rich i can’t actually speak for him i’m not rich i’ve just done well enough and i don’t spend as much so it’s like don’t really need the money does that make sense like if you just don’t spend money you don’t really need much cash dude you just said you dropped 200 000 on clothes what do you mean you don’t need money well that was experiment right but that’s not my daily life like i’m wearing a white t-shirt with stains that my kids spits up on um they’re probably like 10 20 bucks i don’t know what the white t-shirts cost but they’re not really white anymore so i try not to do video recordings in front of white walls anymore uh because you can just tell the discoloration from it nonetheless so did sam say you live in brazil is that what no i have a uh division in brazil like we do marketing in brazil for brazilian companies and you live in texas where do you where do you live vegas vegas okay amazing and uh have you um is it easy for you to keep your burn rate down because like uh i i was telling sam this i spend like i don’t know twenty five thousand dollars a month now just like and i’m not i don’t even feel like i’m dude i think sean you might i think you might spend more than that now if i bet you added up because i know how you spend i bet you it’s more than 25 it might be it might be a little more uh but it’s not more than 30 i would say i don’t think it’s more than 30. so i but like it’s yeah i got two little kids but i got two kids but they’re like babies like like you know like they don’t eat food you know so so you know there’s diapers sure but like it’s not them it’s meat i would take 30. you said it’s a steep burn rate or it’s a good burn rate i would take it i’ll trade with you okay gotcha so when you say you don’t spend much what do you say is your monthly burner because i think for most people listening right they like most people don’t talk about how much they make or how much they spend all right how much you make sometimes that’s sensitive how much you speak well but but neil you actually wrote this in a blog post you said uh you said i spend this is i don’t know if you’re actually i have no idea if you’re single or if you have a family and you can avoid that right now but you used to say in your blog post that you go 15 000 a month is all i need i’m happy that was like 10 years ago i think but uh that’s but you used to say 15 000. single and no kids it was easy right now if i had a guess on my burn rate 120 to 180 a month what that’s insane so what is how does that break down so what what’s the like what’s the bulk of it whether so house probably is the biggest one uh property tax property tax uh for both my homes and hoa dues is probably close to 200 a year okay great we’ve got 12 000 of the way there where all right yeah so there’s okay life insurance is 25 grand a month what my whole life policy yeah that’s 25 to 300 a year uh no no wait wait what what the hell is a 25 000 a month life insurance policy what can you explain that this is just a benefit like if i die my wife and kids get money like a life insurance policy yeah well i get that but is that normal i’ve never heard uh like either i’m done but you’re dumb who’s dumb here am i dumb because i’ve never heard of anybody spending that much on their life it’s like an investment account it builds over time so it’s not like it goes away right most life insurance policies are for call it 10 years and then you buy another one mine just keep going and you can borrow against it just think of it as like a investment vehicle so that’s 25 a month okay now i understand staff uh cleaners nannies driver we have a full-time driver i think that ends up being around 57 a month um fifty seven hundred fifty seven thousand you know a driver uber what why are you more affordable i optimize for convenience in vegas i go through this company they charge a hefty premium i go through this company and i have decals on my car so if i do a meeting in front of a casino the car can just stay in front of the casino it doesn’t have to move if i’m going to the airport you can straight up pull up into the plane or whatever you want to do and you don’t have to go through terminals or anything like that so that makes it like so part of your strategy as i’m picking this up is that you live the best lifestyle you want and it’s all expensible the way you do it uh i don’t know if it’s all expensive isn’t that what you meant with the decal like it’s a company it’s like marketing it’s like a like a marketing vehicle for you so there’s a limo company if i have their own windows i pay them i can end up parking wherever i want in theory not literally wherever i want but in most cases i can park wherever i want and the car can just sit there and wait for me so all right so what else anything else do you fly private he’s like i buy a daily disneyland fast pass just in case i decide to go that day um what’s been what’s been the number one uh like kind of like where you feel like most people don’t most people think this is too expensive and not worth it but for me i get way more value i’ll give you an example in my life right so i i thought i had burn rate until we started talking so this is great i’m feeling so much better about myself but the one thing i did was i hired a private chef so i was like all right that i think i always thought that’s the lifestyle of the rich and famous and i thought wow that’s cool because you eat healthy and it tastes great you don’t have to fuss with time and you know cooking and dishes and groceries and all that stuff and so to me it’s like a no-brainer i’m like dude anybody with any kind of money you should be like that should be one of the first like fancy car later private chef now like because i’m like to me the value the reward way outweighed the cost i think most people don’t typically make that trade sounds like you’ve experimented with many ways of spending money what has been a good reward for for cost uh trade that you’re like this one is is great that most people don’t do i don’t know i mean i’m in a bubble because i have a lot of friends who are like me sadly in which we spend a lot and we don’t know it’s reality i know that sounds bad to say but it’s true right uh cook is not bad uh housekeepers and best you don’t have to do your own dishes and stuff although funny enough i enjoyed doing that and ironing because it’s uh it’s kind of like meditative for me it’s relaxing i don’t know why watching tv and ironing nanny’s help so you get the freedom and you can watch your kids when you want to but you can also do meetings and stuff um the probably the the best expense i ever spend on is private planes not because i like it it’s uh i don’t mind playing commercial not really any difference for me but it helps me optimize for time so i can see my kids more because i have to sometimes do a lot of meetings for work and just going and then coming back the same day just really in and out really quickly like sometimes i’ll be home quick enough like go from vegas to utah for a conference speak come back and i’ll be home quick enough to pick up my kid from school i like to meet really well valuable that’s worth some money are you saving any money then or are i mean are you just taking a fat draw from the agency in order to pay for this or are you able to expense a lot of it to the agency how does that work i don’t expense any of it to my company i just personally paid so you’re just the agency is just that profitable of a business it’s doing that well or investments or savings i’ve done well enough in life or i’m okay why did you do an agency so me and sam always talk about like uh we have many mottos on this podcast for example we don’t do public math for example you don’t say you’re rich you say you’re post-economic uh these are things we’ve picked up from from guests along the way and one of the one of the models one of the mottos that we say is uh you know agencies suck and uh it’s like and the reason we say is not because they uh like they do well that’s not that they suck it’s like they suck as a business choice like if i could i always thought if i could choose between software or an agency i’d do software because it’s like oh it’s not a services business it’s gonna work while i sleep and they can scale up and i don’t have to open up offices in poland and brazil and all these other places but you chose that you did software and you chose agency now why’d you make that choice and what’s great about agencies that i’m kind of like not giving enough credit so you’re looking at business as in software is more scalable it’s more desirable by public market ex hubspot versus accenture accenture has way worse multiples than hubspot accenture is a bigger company from a revenue even a standpoint but now take a different approach okay helps us publicly traded companies you guys are both hubspot employees i’m assuming still is that correct kinda sure whatever your guys’s deal is right but you guys are pretty much at hubspot now imagine creating a business and you don’t plan on going public you don’t care for the limelight you don’t care for any of that in business what’s a successful business good revenue growth and good revenue and profitability right all that really matters at the end of the day whether you grow or not grow is how profitable are you would you guys agree with that statement assuming you’re doing something that’s ethical and you’re not selling drugs no i wouldn’t agree with that i would say there’s a third thing which is like is this enjoyable and like do i like my day-to-day and with the more people you have most people would say that’s just a little bit more headache uh than than but that’s not software or consulting anytime you build a big company you tend to have a large amount of people whether it’s hubspot or whether it’s accenture everyone has yeah but you can have you can probably have a much higher revenue per employee with software versus let’s say you own a massive landscaping business you’re gonna have to have tens of thousands of people well but what’s the difference from dealing with how many people does hubspot have like six thousand i don’t know five thousand six thousand is probably a lot i’m guessing on the number but what’s the difference of dealing with five thousand or six thousand people and twenty thousand people there’s a point where it doesn’t matter and it’s a lot of people either way like it’s not like you’re at fifty people you still have thousands of employees to deal with and you need managers and layers and all that kind of stuff yeah but you’re hiring at some good or bad you’re hiring a different type of person so for example if you’re vaynermedia they’re based in new york they can probably only afford to pay some of their lower level employees 70 or 80 000 a year and so you just have to get a ton of people like that and have to have higher churn versus say a bigger company where you’re able to pay a significantly higher salary because the revenue per employee is much higher so perhaps there’s a slightly different day-to-day with because of that not necessarily let’s say you’re a vaynermedia he could be doing it to optimize for profit ones if i told you his ltv was six seven eight years right then at that point you can still hire high quality people and pay my arm and a leg you got what i mean right like you look at the extent they’re charging accounts so much money and their contracts are long and i don’t know what vaynermedia’s ltv is but there’s a lot of consulting companies that have ltvs of six seven years for clients and their clients are spending you know a hub spot yes just more revenue per you can say potentially in software you can get to more revenue per employee but i know consulting companies that only take on contracts that are like five six million dollars and upwards so you have high margins and you can have a high revenue per employee but either way no matter what as you build a big business you’re going to need more people and it’s a headache to manage whether you pay them 70 000 or whether you pay them 150 000 it’s still more of a headache and the notion that if you hire someone for 150 000 i’m not saying you’re saying this it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a better employee right and you know it just means different types of headaches correct exactly engineers for example are very expensive in this economy right the point i’m getting at is a consulting company i had the demand for it a lot of people want to pay me for marketing and there was just so much demand it would have been silly not to do and if i’m not trying to go public or i’m not trying to sell money is money green is green as long as you’re happy doing what you’re doing take the cash will you ever sell the i wouldn’t say i would never sell the company but i don’t care to ever sell the company because i love what i’m doing we also have good growth too right like i don’t know what will grow this year 60 something percent which isn’t bad you know with the market going up and down and fluctuating 60 something percent is my guess at our size is decent yeah the part i was actually talking about was a little bit more like i think you’re you’re totally right that like if you’re gonna win big you’re gonna end up with a bunch of employees and like you know it might look like 150 might look like a thousand it might look like 10 000 but like you know in either case you’re gonna have managerial work and headaches and it’s just different types the part i was really talking about was like you know i’ve now built let’s say a media company content and then it’s like done educational stuff so courses which are like you know a different thing and then there’s like a built software company and you know we ended up selling that one and then it’s like and then there’s um services which is like client services like like consulting or agency model and what i hate what i what i love about content media is it’s actually pretty fun to create and it’s cool because a lot of people consume it so they kind of you know you get that like hit um but you got to like you got to bake the cake every day right so like you know the hustle or like the milk road or this podcast like we have to come on and create the content again uh you know for the most part we we’re not doing like super long evergreen stuff uh so you know like with the hustles the daily news that our milk roads and daily newsletters we got to bake that cake every day whereas software it was like we built one product and yes we might we will improve it over the course of a year you know every year we’re going to improve it but like fundamentally um we didn’t have to like recreate the product come up with a new viral story or a new great content segment uh that would like require like a new genius uh with software it’s like you come up with one genius moment and then you sort of refine it make it work better over time and get rid of bugs and things like that so i prefer that part of software which was like making a product rather than making kind of like a disposable uh you know consumable piece of content or like i have an e-commerce company and like it’s a pain in the ass to have supply physical products that are supply chain constrained and like we have a warehouse we got warehouse problems with our e-commerce business and so i’m like man digital was sweet compared to e-commerce but e-commerce is quite profitable that kicks off a bunch of profits that’s nice so every business has these pros and cons and i always thought agency was um the part i always thought was a pain in the ass was like the client services you are reinventing the next campaign and the next winning marketing you know formula for them and you have to keep clients happy all the time and clients are sort of like never satisfied in a way that like they if software is like you can have nameless faceless customers that like yeah some percentage of them will will write into your help desk that’s in the philippines or whatever but like you’re not having to like you know send account reports to your you know your big client to keep them happy yeah but you everyone has their own problems in software a lot of people have turned this issue and they can’t figure it out or they have competitors who come into the marketplace and just undercut them on pricing for the same features because it’s cheaper and cheaper to build software these days right so they all have their own problem to me i look at it as if you can find the right people so every time i start a company i find in people to put in place that have already done it multiple times before because your risk of failure are lower and they already know everything to do so i don’t have to deal with client relationships i don’t have to deal with customer service or anything like that i get to do what i enjoy doing which is go and create content be the face etc and uh my wife enjoys what she gets to do right she gets to donate the money although we don’t really consider us donations we look at as investing we’re investing in people although we really don’t ever collect any money back it’s more so you’re investing into making the world a better place or people’s lives a better place or whatever it may be what’s uh who were who were your first three clients at this at this agent because i don’t know they were small companies and right now who’s an example client a fortune 100 software company like that is a typical company think of any big large corporation in b2b that’s a great example of one of our customers or even b2c actually think of any fortune 500 company that’s a prime example of a customer what’s uh and who’s the ceo of your agency are you no i’m never the ceo i’m a terrible manager i’m one of the worst managers ever uh his name is mike gullickson he was the ceo no he was the president of i prospect which is an ad agency owned by uh densu i believe in i prospect maybe they had four or five thousand people is my guess and what when you how early into the business did you have a hired ceo or hired leader day one i won’t start a business without a ceo from day one and what did you pay them in the first year first year is my co-founder for like 100 and that’s because you basically went and drummed up 100 grand worth of business and you’re like hey mike uh i got i got this clients to give a hundred grand you want to run this thing for me and help it get deployed no uh our business didn’t start off that way i probably put a total of five million bucks into the business of my own money so it’s bootstrap but not really bootstrapped if that makes sense it’s kind of cheating um and it gets easier and easier as your entrepreneur right the more the more successes you have and i’m not saying i’m successful by any means the more capital you have to deploy into the next thing so reduces chances of failure and when it’s your own money this is just my thesis and i could be wrong on this i have no data points when it’s your own money you’re much more careful than when if you raise like 15 20 30 million dollars of venture capital right you really look at every single dollar uh but mike was the ceo from day one he’s a great operator has no agency experience eventually we got in a president and then eventually from there we got in a ceo and have you guys crossed a hundred million in revenue yet yeah we do nine figures that’s crazy man what i mean that’s just pretty wild that you’re able to like parlay this blog that was already always kind of a juggernaut but this blog into a nine figure a year business i mean it’s been a good run i hope it i’m knocking on wood although you probably can’t hear for the chris but uh i hope it keeps going and more so we’re just having fun like for me what i enjoy doing is building a business um i know i have an expensive lifestyle i generally don’t do stuff with the money like i overpay like house staff like nannies and stuff like that when i say overpay i drastically overpay not by like 10 20 30 40 like i really mean drastically overpay because i look at people i’m like if you’re cleaning a house how are you gonna live on this like i’ll give someone six figures to do that i know that sounds kind of crazy or stupid but like i’m not giving my kids money so might as well take care of other people in this world who need it more than um but we do did you say that you’re not giving kids money yeah i’m not gonna give my kids money nothing leave nothing we have a trust set up what they’ll get maximum is like if they’re on the street and they can’t provide and they’re going to be suffering like i will help pay their bills um or put them in a normal home or like if my kids like i want to be a doctor and i want to go spend all my time in africa helping other people out and i won’t get paid for this and i need you know x five thousand dollars a month to live or ten thousand so i can just go volunteer all my time but like sounds good i’ll pay for that but like i won’t give them money for the sake of it like if they’re like i want to go travel to see italy or i want a honda accord and like go buy your own honda accord go travel on your own with your own dime like you know i don’t believe in just giving people money because i think there’s other people who need it more than we do sean are you gonna give your kids money i don’t really thought about it like my oldest is two so i think i got some time to figure that out but i i lean more towards so i’ve kind of heard both arguments like um i know somebody who they if some people are like you know uh you know i do there’s some people i i’m definitely not in the camp of i do this for my kids i want to leave my kids with a whole bunch cause i’m like that may be the worst thing you could do for them um not because it means that they’re ruining drug addicts yeah you take away you know agency in a way right like you you want people to like it’s not that it’s good or bad it’s actually just it’s just way lower on the totem pole of priorities it’s like i just don’t even focus on that it’s like if i’m gonna leave them something it’s gonna be a certain set of character character traits and skills and like uh mentality that’s what i’m trying to leave money is like i don’t know 15th on the list of like i don’t know we haven’t even gotten to think about that yet but i’ve thought a lot about what are the character traits and mentality and like mindset and skills that i think i can help build and like that’s the focus that’s the one that matters that’s the that’s the gift if whatever else comes from beyond that i don’t know we can figure out like the foot it’s like the footnotes so like we’re very similar i have a two-year-old and a less than one-year-old right and i look at it as you want them to be productive units of society right you want them to be ambitious hungry uh caring thoughtful happy like whatever it is there’s a lot of characteristics that you may want children to be but i look at it as like they don’t need money even like with my wife and i we go over our expenses we look at what we spend on travel and we do some of this because it’s easier but like my wife and i are actually considering cutting out all private and just going commercial now the main reason our expenses are high is due to cobit so if it wasn’t for cobit i would just be going in a normal airport i didn’t know how covered was going to impact with young kids could afford it i was like yes just start flying private and we haven’t gone back to commercial yet but we’re thinking about going back because like my wife and i look at the money is like yeah we spend all this money on travel and airfare and hotels if we donated the money people would have a better life do we really need it that much what do you do when you donate that like what’s a good way to donate in your opinion so there’s like you know ranging from not donating to donating to one thing to donate to a bunch of things to like getting involved or seeing the impact or like you know i know people who if they donate to africa they’ll actually their family will go take a trip every year so that they’re more connected to the people and they actually see the impact and they take their kids with them so they see the impact like what have you found that’s a good way to give so we have a balance it’s my wife and i team up um this is gonna sound bad but i don’t like volunteering my time my wife loves volunteering her time i think it’s very inefficient for me to volunteer my time i should make the money versus volunteering my time because the money for the hours spent if we donated the money would have a much bigger impact to the cause than if i actually spent my time i don’t my wife yeah and my wife loves spending the time and like from going to soup kitchens or so she picks the causes we have a few thesis so like one thesis is is we or not really thesis but rules one rule is is we don’t like money going to organizations that have tons of high overhead we actually want our money going to the causes so if it doesn’t go to the cause then we tend to not pick that um organization the second thing that we look for is uh organizations who are like uh self-sufficient right it’s just like how can this continue going even if someone wasn’t managing so like a great program for example is my wife likes donating to women’s education we used to donate also to men’s education as well so you find these people in these villages you say hey you can’t afford to go to school get a degree we’ll pay for you to go to college go get a degree come back teach kids in your village for a few years whether it’s under a tree or anything people can learn anywhere right and then you know go move on with your life and do whatever you want but at least you’re giving back to your own community and what we found is when we started giving because we’ve been doing this for so long now uh well actually not that long but when i mean long i’m talking about like 10 11 years where we’ve been donating and it’s picked up quite a bit over the last like five six years when we started giving the money to men a lot of the men we saw a very low conversion rate from them actually coming back and teaching people in the village well when we gave the money to women for their education a lot of them came back and fulfilled on the promise it’s not like you get a signed contract right it’s just like hey we’re gonna pay for everything come back help people out within your village which country we’ve done this in both india and africa so different parts of africa and uh in india and then another program that we’ve done is like growing gardens where a lot of people who have aids don’t take the right uh don’t take their medication and aren’t doing well they’re getting they’re given the medication for free but if your body doesn’t have the right nutrients it rejects it so what we’ll do is we’ll do programs like growing gardens we’ll give them money they grow food and then not only do they eat nutritiously or well they’ll more likely take their medication and you’re also growing enough food so that way other people in the village can also eat so it’s like but my wife picks all the causes she vets them she loves it like she’ll go this is wednesday in two days she’ll end up going to a function uh scouting out more non-profits and organizations i won’t go like i think it’s a waste of time i’m like if i’m gonna make more money she can donate it it’s a better roi than if i go spend three four hours mingling when she could just do that and i can go make more so that way we can donate more other than your own private businesses what have been your best financial investments that’s allowed you to to donate and and make a lot to give away stock market has done really well companies like apple amazon google facebook i know facebook’s down but they still have been a tear if you just bought the stocks early enough um because some of these companies have grown 30 40 a year in the public markets compounding right and it really adds up uh angel investments have done really well for me and i would say probably those are the two biggest um stock markets still has done well although in the last 6 months i’ve taken a beating because i’m in 100 tech companies like i don’t diversify like everyone’s like oh you need some oil and you need this i’m like yeah i’m just gonna go all tech and people are like oh you’re silly look how much you lost but if you look at the whole time when i first got in i’ve done well and i invest in what i understand and i’m 37 so who cares you know another 10 years everything should rebound assuming you pick the right companies what’s your portfolio look like in terms of percentages not including private businesses my public portfolio i if i had a guest i probably don’t even have more than 20 stocks amazon i i won’t be able to name them all but amazon google facebook apple microsoft hubspot salesforce adobe atlassian shopify um i’m missing some as well and of your liquid of your of your liquid net worth how much is in public equities versus other versus real estate just non-agency if if i think at your agency is your agency the only company that you own a significant stake in if yes exclude that then what’s your portfolio look like uh no i have quite a bit of other companies because i started using a lot of the cash to buy other companies for like three four or five x ebitda and then you just fix them and grow them and then just cash flow i would so if i look just at cash invested in other companies that aren’t mine like not companies i’m buying that or anything like that i would probably say 80 to 90 percent is in stocks what companies were you buying any that we can find that we like like we bought uber says it was a software company bought it for 120 put 3 million into it um it took i think less than seven or eight months to get to a million a month in revenue what’s it called ubersuggest hrs competitor that one did well uh we just bought another map a lady named lisa crazy and then we just bought another one we haven’t announced it we bought it for 8.6 i think a month ago a month and a half ago uh so we’ll see it does a hundred thousand a month uh we think we can grow it within 12 months to probably like four or five hundred grand a month in profit so forget revenue we just will look at it as a cash flow so do you uh have rules around that like okay i have to be able to grow it using neilpatel.com or it has to be in the marketing niche so the agency benefits no it’s like would you buy like brick you know like a [ ] laundromat or if i can grow it i won’t do too much brick and mortar but i’ve invested in other people’s brick and mortar like i have a friend who does a lot of brick and mortar businesses um like one of my buddies has a roofing company and i was like oh cool you can buy it for 3x it’s good size and i can show you a few things and we can probably increase the profit by like 60 within 12 months so it’s like it’s just good cash flow right like if you’re getting like 30 40 50 returns on your it’s great and then you also have to keep in mind because of my my history and i’ve been doing this long enough i also can get debt at really cheap terms and large amounts of debt like i can get debt at like 3.6 plus silver so if i’m buying a business for 5x in many cases because of the economics of my whole portfolio you know some businesses i put down like on the one that was um 8.6 2.6 was uh paid over 12 or 18 months or something like that but we put six mil up front i could have got a loan for it but i was like yeah this is easier to put the six mill and not deal with the paperwork but sometimes we’ll just do loans on 100 of it but zero down right and what do you like okay so you do what you do now so you have your time and it’s pretty much probably fully allocated let’s say to the agency and then some of these other things um if somebody was smart but didn’t have your you have a bunch of visibility you kind of know where your industry is going you see adjacent opportunities but hey i’m not going to go do them i don’t have the time uh what are opportunities that you see that you think somebody listening to this who’s just like smart hustler i got more time than i have ideas um i got more time than i have money where would you go if you were that person what would you what would you suggest for them to look at as like you know opportunities that you see today i would look for opportunities in anything that they’re good at and i know that’s not the answer that you’re looking for but what i found that the issue is when people go look for opportunities that make some money when you’re not passionate you don’t put in the time and energy required to actually make it successful that’s a big issue we see maybe some people have it in them where they can make something successful because they’ll just tough it out but most people we see will just quit because they just hate what they’re and so but i think a lot of people don’t know what they love to do they don’t have like they don’t if they already had what they love to do they wouldn’t be you know looking for opportunities so you know uh sort of like a by-definition problem there right so somebody who’s who’s thinking about okay i don’t love what i’m currently doing i’d like to i want to get to where this guy’s at but which is basically like seems happy and successful right um he he seems like he said he loves what he’s doing i’d love to do that but what if i don’t know right it’s like when my sister was going to college my dad asked her you know she’s like what should i major in he’s like i don’t know what’s her favorite subject and she was like lunch like you know i don’t i don’t have a favorite subject i don’t love any of these subjects um so what am i supposed to do like am i just out uh you know i’m just not one of those you just having a lot of different until you find what you’re passionate about because if you try a lot of different things you’ll typically find something that you’re naturally good at usually what you’re naturally good at you’ll also tend to favor and what you like and then just double down on that but if you’re looking for industries with opportunities i see a huge slowdown in e-commerce not only the e-commerce market shrinking i’m not saying that but the growth in the e-commerce market isn’t as what it was once used to be right when coveted first kicked off so you’re gonna see the multiples go down to buy e-commerce shops d2c brands right so great opportunity for buying and go fix them up and grow them and scale them another great opportunity right now is uh free so i look at the whole software market as really backwards okay in which right now it doesn’t matter if you’re a hubspot or canva eventually someone can just create a me too company and just undercut you on pricing and what i’ve learned is if you can create a software company that already has a brand that has a free product and you just make it really good for free and you just keep adding more and more to it a great example of this is photo p so there’s this company called photo p it’s uh we love it photoshop and it’s like they make very little to no money so i hit up one of my buddies who is great at outreaching and i told him i want photo fee i offered him 10 million he said no offered him 20 million he said no i can take photo p make it a really good canva competitor undercut him on pricing whatever be worth 10 20 40 billion whatever they are no but i probably can cashflow that thing to like or five million a month in ebitda right it’s like who cares what it sells for what it’s worth you’re saying make it free and you’re saying cash flows like a [ ] so what how do you take a free product in cash like how would you explain that well he said he said a canva a canva knockoff canva knockoff so you make you make almost 99 of it for free you charge for one percent but that one percent is enough where you can drive in the revenue so you don’t ever make as much as like a canva or like a mailchimp or a hubspot but hey if you can make millions a month in profit it’s still good what’s your math there so when what’s the calculus when you’re thinking so like let’s say photo p according to similar web has 10 million uniques a month or something what was your math is that right yeah it is right uh we researched it yeah so like what was your calculus to get to uh four million and even a month like what would how many people would you need to run it and what was the what’s the calculus there sure so i can probably get the thing from 10 million visitors i can so let’s say i bought it for 20 right he wouldn’t sell to me for 20. um i’ve never outreached him but i had a buddy outreach to him for me who just does all my outreach so let’s say i bought it for 20 i’d put another 10 into it so now i’m out 30 million dollars i’m really good at growing traffic and i know i can grow this thing to roughly 40 million uniques a month i just have a i don’t know how but for some weird reason i know traffic really well and how to calculate what i can get it to and all this kind of stuff right and i’ve done enough research and competitors of what features drive x amount of traffic just looking at so many competitors in the space so let’s say if i get it to 40 um what is it called 40 million and what what are the one or two things that you’d get at the 40 million like seo basically so uh more seo more virality uh increasing the quality of the templates increasing features uh adding ai in there like click a button we can automatically detect backgrounds remove it filters for social media because a lot of people use them for social media logo generator website as a lead gen [ ] like that right so then so let’s say you got up to 40 million right at 40 million i can easily monetize let’s call it like one percent of the traffic or let’s be even more conservative like a half a percent 200 000 people if i have 200 000 people hypothetically paying three dollars a month okay that’s 600 000 the reason i give you on average three dollars in certain countries you may want to charge different pricing like india and stuff like that so it’s more affordable so three dollars a month and at three dollars a month if a customer stays for ten months that’s six million dollars you can probably run the thing with less than a million million and a half and burn each month so then you think oh so then for a million and a half burn you would need once you have tons of revenue right when you don’t have tons of revenue your burn is much lower on the monthly basis yeah but so then how many people then if it’s you’re looking at 30 people you need to run that operation i i don’t even think 30 but let’s say 30 total so i think i can actually run the thing for under a million dollars a month right so i’m just trying to do the math in my head but i mean the revenue was under a million two there was like 600 000 or something right 600 000 a month but if a customer stays for 10 months you’re looking at 6 no no okay if they’re paying three dollars a month if you have 4 40 million not 4 million but 40 million you’re converting a half a percent that’s 200 000 paying customers a month if they pay you three dollars a month that’s 600 000 they last for 10 months that’s 6 million dollars a month in mrr over a year you’re making 72 million dollars in revenue that’s crazy you’re a very interesting person you uh i just i think i dig you because you’ve got your hands at so many different things i honestly don’t at this point i don’t run anything i come up with ideas i have really good operators who are great at execution like go do this it’ll make money here’s a play with go and just do it so how many businesses do you own i don’t know i don’t really count i only look at over under 10 over over under 20. i don’t know 20 is probably getting close so probably under if i had a guess and how many of those 20 how many of those 20 companies have more than five employees full-time employees i don’t know i don’t really count employee head count i only know my ad agency head count because they do reports and i get in my board meeting decks like i’m like oh we got 700 people and you own 100 of most of these companies it seems like you’re not raising extra capital you might you give your ceo of really anything um i always give equity to uh profit share i usually have a partner who runs things will get equity and then i’ll do profit share what’s the uh ideal setup for profit sharing and equity for your partner uh partner give them maybe 10 of the business they run it plus a really nice salary when i mean nice salary industry or more than industry and then you have a pool for employees like another 10 pool so then you losing total 20 i’m left with 80 myself i put up all the money if it does well great if it doesn’t i lose the money no one else is on the line uh if it does well no one has to pay me back the money everyone just takes their distributions the moment it turns profitable from a monthly standpoint does that make sense they don’t actually have to pay back any of the other stuff and then do you also do give them 10 the distribution or do you make that even uh heavier for them well if i’m losing 20 in total which is my deal structure then 20 of the profits gets distributed on a monthly basis i love hearing about this what do you think sean yeah i think it’s dope i um i had just seen you kind of from afar for a while that i i got i know he you know loosely like we’re friends but uh so you know i didn’t know a lot of the story i know i knew sam has talked about you before on the plot i think it’s or maybe off the pot i’m not sure but sam had told me some cool stuff um but i didn’t know a lot of this so for me this was dope because i got to learn a bunch of new things uh sometimes when we have a guest it’s like dude i’ve already listened to 10 of your things i’ve been following you for five years you know so it’s like i already know a lot of it and i’m doing sort of like translation work for the audience i’m like tell them about this hey tell them about that thing you did uh versus in this like i genuinely wanted to know a bunch of the stuff and i thought you know uh this is interesting to me yeah you’re great there’s two people that i wanted to talk to sean who are like neil so i mean there’s neil so i wanted neil i like finding these people that like are doing really well and a lot of people know about but there’s also this whole other world of people who have no idea who they are neil you’re one of those folks i’ve been i’m an og reader so i’ve known you forever the other one is syed so syed we talked about syed a bunch on here him and neil i think are very similar which is very generous but also like pretty cutthroat when it comes to business and has their hands in just dozens of different things and they’re just quietly crushing it and not even talking about it and he’s a very generous person too i know he has a school i think in the same city i have a school in or a different city i don’t know he actually went to go see his school but uh really generous guy uh him and i have built schools in third world countries and stuff like that yeah it’s just like you you too you guys are i don’t know if you’re like this neil but i know it seems like he’s like this where he like has this uh you know software business that’s making who knows tens of many tens of millions uh in revenue and probably that much in profit but and he like buys a gas station or like he like just it’s just like dude are you kidding me like you’re a you’re like a tech tycoon and you also own like 30 gas stations it’s just kind of funny here’s the thing some of those businesses sell for like 3x ebitda you get 33 returns on your money if you have good operators and you can put technology in place in marketing and you can grow to maybe 50 times irr that’s great it’s just the question of can you scale it up and can you do ones that are large enough i know i’m just saying it’s cool that you know this stuff that’s what you’re eclectic him and i actually shouldn’t speak for him but i’m a little off right but the the madness or the methodology i think is great for cash flow it’s terrible if you want to be like oh i’m going to create the next airbnb and take this thing public and be like on the farms list like it’s not what i do is that are you motivated to become a billionaire what what’s your motivation factor what are you motivated by well i won’t ever be a billion i’m not saying i have the opportunity to but even if i did uh i would never be there because we donate our money and when i mean donate like not wait till you’re dead to donate like actually donate on an annual basis how do you figure out how do you figure out how much you want to give because there’s always like like when i think about it i think like well i could also invest this money it’s going to grow i’m gonna give more later but then i’m not helping somebody now and so what’s the right number what’s the right percentage basically for me to be giving on an annual basis how do you figure that out for yourself whatever my wife wants to give what person what percentage does that come out to uh we don’t have a percentage keep in mind businesses are so large i can get loans for anything on almost any type of business i can’t go buy a business for a million dollar a billion dollars but if i wanted to buy a business for 100 million dollars i can go get a loan on that like literally for most of it so i still i don’t have to worry anymore about do i need more of it to invest it’s just we find the right causes and is it going to make a big enough impact that’s more that’s more about how we look about donations we don’t really look at it from the aspect of am i donating x dollars or too high of a percentage we look at it as do we actually think it’s going to make a big impact in the next year or short run or two years we don’t want to wait like 10 20 years to see an impact we also don’t want to put money towards like things cancer research i think cancer is really important i know a lot of people who have died from cancer but i don’t have enough money to make it into cancer versus you know solving some of the basic things out there like i can make an impact on things like education in a region i can’t make an impact on cancer i just don’t have enough cash for that where uh what is your school you said i have a school that sounds tight i want a school uh i’ve never seen it we have a school i think it’s in cambodia and we’ve done a few others but i don’t really keep track my wife does and you know the bigger thing is it’s not my school it’s more so the kids school and are they learning and getting value from it i uh i remember the first school that i bought and forgot about i was gonna say um when i buy my school it’s for sure gonna be my school they might attend my school in cambodia yeah i’m like that guy i bought a couple i’ve got a couple schools in this couch cushion back here just i just forgot about it i just it’s a little scene i played in a while ago i remember when i was on college camps i saw like you know whoever the rothschilds or like the rockefeller’s uh name plate or whatever on the like uh the library at duke campus and i was like who would do this what’s the point of this you know like so it’s already nice not that kind of schools i don’t have that kind of money mine’s like little kids i didn’t understand the appeal until you said you basically described a school you have and forgot and have never visited and i was like ah that sounds like something i want i don’t want my name played on you know the villanova like 10th library on campus but like just to know that there’s you know 12 kids in vietnam attending my school they’re wondering why does this name have so many a’s and it’s you know who is this who is this benefactor silent benefactor who has forgotten where our school where school is that sounds like a perfect blend of giving and egomania that i live for so that’s perfect neil we uh we usually so we don’t have guests on often and when we do we typically never just ask them questions like this we like it’s more of a conversation where we’re brainstorming stuff we asked you tons of questions because you’re just a very fascinating person i hope you’ll come on soon and you can actually brainstorm uh like another uber suggests or something like that you know like actually go through some of this i i hope you’ll come back again because this is awesome yeah it was so funny i was doing the interview i’m like oh crap i should have never told people how much i spent a month should i never told people i donate money and i was just like it goes against a lot of what my wife and i do we’re more of don’t tell anyone anything live our lives and do whatever it makes you only told it because it’s not like you’re bragging we like kind of begged you to tell like we were kind of got under we were like yeah tell us go go tell us it’s not like you’re like i don’t think that’s bragging it’s not even bragging it just feels weird to talk about expenses right because there’s so many people who struggle for like clean water or shoes right because i was like yeah yeah yeah but this is interesting those people uh if they ever listen to this podcast they’ve already been filtered out by our douchiness in other uh episodes so don’t worry those anybody who’s sensitive to that’s probably gone by now but also there’s there’s actually a lot of like i actually pretty passionately believe this like not only am i curious from like a oh i wanna know i wanna learn uh but like i actually pretty strongly believe that the way that people are like treat money as a pretty taboo thing um actually is like a net like a huge net negative on most people so you know people don’t know what other people make therefore they don’t know what like they don’t know when they’re underpaid they don’t know what’s possible they don’t ever like sometimes the most valuable conversations i have with somebody is just somebody for whom they do something like something’s very normal to them it would be abnormal to me but it has now expanded my world view of what’s possible and what could be normal for me like oh maybe it could be normal to actually like give more donate more have a school actually that sounds like something i actually would go talk to my wife about today is like something we should go do that like it’s not because you weren’t bragging about it you highly you just kind of were honest about how you live your life which is no there’s nothing wrong with that that’s great in my opinion and it expands other people’s worldview for something maybe they want to go do or something that they haven’t considered and like it’s really weird to me that we keep the stuff under wraps and if somebody’s just honest about like the way they live their life it’s sort of like there’s like all this like negative taboo around it and like [ ] that i don’t like that at all and it’s been like when sam first met me i think i think i’ve told the story before but like the second day i met him and then like the next day he messaged me on facebook investor was like so like how much do you make and he was like no like what do you pay yourself he’s like so then what he and then i like i was like whoa that’s like super forward and he’s like but he told me why he was like so i’m trying to figure out how much to pay myself as an entrepreneur i have no [ ] clue and like my investors think i should make this much but i don’t know is that normal and like i can kind of ask you and dance around it or like i’m just asking like five friends what they make in the same role as i am it’s like startup ceo and like that’ll help you figure out what’s normal what’s the range of like possibilities here and then after that he was like so what do you do with the money like what do you invest he’s like wow that’s a lot you know what are you investing that i was like yeah he’s like what are you investing in i’ll start telling him and he’s like cool i’m investing in this and now i got new ideas about what i could be investing and i it really became very obvious to me in that moment i was like oh [ ] you’re at a massive advantage if you have a few people you trust that you can talk openly about this sort of thing with and the podcast was basically taking that doing it at scale i was like all right well what if me and sam are pretty honest about like the [ ] we do and like what if we could get guests to be honest about the [ __ ] they do they’re like that’s actually a pretty valuable resource for people who don’t have five they don’t happen to have that lucky group of five friends who are all motivated entrepreneurs who are also open and honest about what they do it’s like well not everybody’s located in a place where they have five people geographically around them that they can trust to talk about that stuff and so the pod kind of like serves as that so that’s my uh justification for why you shouldn’t feel bad about about sharing that information did it work neil do you do not feel but if you want we’ll bleep it out or whatever if you feel like that too okay it is what it is i still feel bad but it is what it is i thought it was yes i thought it was a great speech show and i i i felt good about that thank you deal that was a great speech but i i i still feel bad because i look at money as like a tool to help other people and i’m not saying that’s right or wrong that’s how i just do but i also know i spend more than i should um and i probably should cut back and live a more humble life and spend a lot less yeah dude i’m inspired by how you spend and how you live and it’s uh you know you’ve done some good in the world by inspiring me