Danny Jones Podcast - #20 - Making Millions & Drinking White Claw | Clayton Johnson

Episode Date: September 11, 2019

Digital marketing entrepreneur and INC 5000 business owner Clayton Johnson joined the podcast to talk ranking content on Google, YouTube, and the future of the freelance economy. Clayton grew his company 15x when he decided to move to Medellin Colombia and change his lifestyle. WARNING: We were hammering down White Claws in solo cups filled with ice and it gets overwhelming at times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What were you telling me about the White Claw? I'm just a second ago? I love the analogy. Dude, the White Caw is a genius, first of all. I love it. Actually, I mean, not particularly. I don't really love the taste necessarily, but White Claw in general is amazing

because this is now... It's like what Jewel is to cigarettes, white Claw is to beer, right? Definitely. Because, you know, I actually like beer, but objectively, like the first time you ever tasted a beer when you're really young, you took, you drank it. I mean, we like it now because it has alcohol in it and you get, you have a quiet taste and stuff.

But like the first time you have it, it tastes like fucking garbage. It's gross. Same thing with a cigarette, dude. People like cigarettes. You can, you can, a cigarette can be very enjoyable. Oh, yeah. After, you know, after you smoke. All sorts of different times.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, but the first. Me and you shared a new port on the side of the road one. Exactly. Yeah. But the first cigarette you ever have, it's terrible. Probably not the best tasting thing you've ever had. So now that everyone's becoming white,

or becoming health conscious and stuff. The whole idea with a hundred calories. Dude, it's a vodka soda with some flavor in it. Five percent. It's fucking crazy how it's blowing up. It is crazy, man. If I were as a beer company, I'd start producing this immediately. Everybody has.

Nattie Lighty Light. White Claw, ASMR. They didn't even pay for this. This is free. I was saying, I was talking earlier. I was like, we need one. White Claw to advertise on our show, and we're like, White Claw is the last company that needs any advertising.

They would probably pay us not to promote them. Dude, there's a bunch of companies jumping on. Like, Truly's in the game. But not even just like white Claw. I heard that shit sucks, though, compared to White Claw. I don't know, man. You got to have like, if I was White Claw, I'd just start truly. So I'd have two brands so that everybody could argue with them.

You're both sides. Oh, my God. Is that what you'd really do? Yeah, for sure. That's genius. Yeah. You got to win both sides. but then you've got to like start little fights.

You start the beef. Yeah, start the beef. And the beef, like, it just makes everything grow. Dude, it's like those, like, YouTube people, man. The, if you start beef, it's not like you're going to destroy the other. It just makes them both grow, dude. Yeah. Same in the music industry.

Like rap beef, rappers beefing. Yeah, dude. If I were white, like, call, I'd buy both brands and I'd run commercials trash in the other brand. Trashing them both. Yeah, that's genius. And maybe, like, promote one a little more hardcore on, like, the East Coast and one on the West Coast. start like a little like state by state battle or something. Oh my God.

That's next level. That is next level. If you need marketing help. That's next level marketing. All right. So we got to do like an intro for this for you, Clayton. Clayton Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, is a digital marketing entrepreneur genius from Medellin, Colombia. I'm not from Medellin, if you can tell.

Why? Give me the factual background of Clayton Johnson and who you are. Okay. For what's relevant, I'm Clayton Johnson. I am the CMO of a company called. the Hoth HOTH and it's an SEO company based here in St. Pete, Florida. It's been growing pretty quickly. Last three years we got an I-NC-5,000 list three years in a row. So it's pretty cool and that's pretty much what I do. So I love marketing, all things marketing. I grew up in

Indiana, lived in Chicago for five years, moved to Medell in Columbia for three years, and then now in St. Pete. Damn. Hanging out with you. What is the I-N-C-5,000? see 5,000 is the top growing companies in the U.S. So the fastest growing companies. That's crazy. So the hawth, your marketing company is one of the fastest growing. Yeah, we hit it three times in a row. Not just marketing companies, but just any company.

Any company in the U.S. Or anybody that applied. That's pretty badass, dude. But yeah, that's what a marketing company should be, right? They should be one of the fastest growing companies. If you're good at marketing, marketing helps create sales and grow businesses. So you better be on that list.

And so we've been smashing. And it's in downtown St. Pete? Downtown St. Pete. Yeah. I'm very familiar with you guys. Worldwide, baby, actually. Worldwide, baby. Well, main office is in St. Pete.

It used to be a virtual company, so we used to like not have an office. And actually, to be honest, the vast majority of people that work at the Hoth are not in the office. We literally have hundreds or maybe even thousands of people that are working freelance for us. And they live all over the world. Yeah, it's crazy. So it's kind of like Uber. for journalism, kind of, or Uber for search engine marketing.

What do you call that when people are developing content that also helps boost your search results? That's pretty much one of the main products that you guys have? Yeah, well, I mean, if we're talking about the freelancers, like we have 500 people on one team and they're content creators. So essentially for SEO, it's all about ranking on search engines, right? If you, you know, people are typing in questions about your products and services that you're selling every day, right? And so in order to show up there, you got to have some kind of content like that actually ranks.

So we help people create that content. And that could be in the form of like blog posts, for instance, that if you have a question like how, how much does it cost to remodel my home, right? That would be like a piece of content you want on your website. Somebody's got to write that. And so we help a lot of businesses write that type of content. and we have enough, you know, customers and orders and all that kind of stuff to provide 500 people with work. So that's what the majority of those people are doing.

They're literally everywhere in the U.S. or they can even be outside, you know, worldwide. Yeah. And literally just working from their homes or whatever, but they're trained by us writing, like, really good content for our clients. That's crazy. And you're so young. Your company is so massive to build something like that. that's just digital and all on the internet and all based on on people all over the world freelancers.

It's like a very, a very modern type of business. Yeah, man, 100%. I mean, this is like a whole new economy that we're kind of like entering into with people being able to work from wherever they want, whenever they want. I mean, think about, yeah, like you said, like Uber. Uber like allows pretty much anybody that has a car to have a job right now and you can turn it off, turn it on and off whenever you want. Is that why the company grows so fast? Is that what's allowed you guys to hit that Inc. 5,000 list every year because the model is built like that so you can scale up super fast? Kind of, to some extent.

Yeah, I mean just because you hire freelancers doesn't mean your company's going to grow. You have to sell the products first, right? You have to sell the services. So that is the big thing. But there is a great thing about, you know, the freelance model in terms of keeping controlling costs, right? As you scale up, controlling, like, human labor is like your number one cost in a business. And in this case, if you were to hire people that work in the office, you have to have enough work for one person to work 40 hours every single week all the time. And then also on top of that, there's we pay benefits and have like all this different stuff.

Not everybody wants that as a job. Some people want to work one hour a day. Some people want to work five hours a day. Some people want to work 10 hours a day, right? Some people want to work in a week and then take another week off. Some people want to just have the freedom, right? And the way our system works is, you know, kind of like Uber. You can literally, there's a list of tasks.

And after you're approved and trained to work for us, you just log in, you click, I want a new article. You write the article, and then you send it in. That's it. You can stop working. You can do more, whatever you want to do. It's a lot like, a lot like Fiver, or one of those gig-based companies, where, depending on whatever your creative skill is, whether it would be writing, video editing, photography, graphic design. You can basically go in, find a bank of jobs that need to be.

done and pick what you want to do and then get paid for it. Ours is a little different because we like actually train everyone that comes in and they're like, it's very specific for what they, what they do. All the writers are trained on exactly how to write it, you know, in an SEO optimized way, how to write for web, how to do interlinking. They have to be good. They have to have a certain level before they can actually be approved to do those jobs. Yeah, actually we only hire like the top one person of writers.

Like literally for every 100 people apply it, we only hire one person. Wow. Or one person. That's crazy, man. In terms of the model, yes. Like the whole economy of being able to, like the gig economy, right? It's blowing up. It's changing like the way people work now.

And I think that's actually one of the reasons that we are successful. We sell the services really well because we're a marketing company. But that allows us to scale and keep our costs, you know, right in line where they need to be. What did you say you went to college for? And you went to college at Indiana University. Oh, in Indiana. And at the time they called my degree telecommunications, which, sounds I've never heard of that it's because it won the award for the worst name of a degree to get ever

telecommunication so you got a degree for telemarketing yeah exactly yeah yeah good thing like I own company now so I don't have to put that on a resume you know because people would be like what no but I was going to like work on movies and stuff too like I made like a documentary I did like media studies that's so wow things like that so dude it's kind of the thing about now today is whatever you study, it's like irrelevant because all the information you could ever want to learn is online. Like you can pick any career path. It's crazy. Yeah. How did you get a degree in telecommunications wanting to make films and documentaries and movies? And how did you transition into working or starting this company?

Yeah. A marketing company. Well, I worked on a couple films in Indiana. I actually worked on one. You know, Kevin Sorbo? No. Kevin Sorbo used to do that one. one shot he had the sword i'll look it up um kevin sorbo yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah look it up you'll you'll know who the guy is and you'll be like oh that that dude um shit what was the name of the uh

what the show hercules do you remember hercules oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah if you see a picture you'll be like yes that yes i know who he is so he was the main actor on this film dude he is now probably this is dude i graduated in 2008 so this is from college yeah so this is like 11 years ago because I'm old now. Okay. Time goes fast. But anyway, so yeah, I wanted to work on movies. So I worked on a movie that was being filmed in Indiana, and he was the main actor.

And I was like, this is fucking cool, dude, fucking Hercules. And I went up to that dude. This is funny. I went up to him. I was like really scared because of my first movie I've ever worked on. I was a PA. So, you know, I got there first. I was the last one to leave, just running all the time.

I was like just trying to. Do you remember the name of the movie? No, I don't remember. I can find it though. But I was like so scared because I was like, man this is maybe going to be my future and I went up to him I was like Mr. Sarbo hey I'm Clayton this is the first movie ever worked on do you got any advice for me he goes don't fuck it up hell yeah that's awesome I was like fucking Hercules but but yeah I worked on that

movie and it was fucking horrible and I hated it and what were you doing every day Lee I was like just coffee around yeah I was like running I went into get the director like his prescription and he didn't have prescription so like I had to get the pharmacist to call his doctor and I sat there and waited while they didn't he's like can't get a hold of doctor so I was like I can't come back without this fucking prescription is my first movie you know what I mean stuff like that and then they treated me like total shit and I was like fuck the movie industry I'm gonna start a marketing company make millions of dollars that way dude that's a great idea that I was a PA on dolphin tail yeah that Warner Brothers movie

that was in here and it was a lot just like working on a construction site my first job was construction it was just like working on a construction site and a lot of those guys a lot of those guys that work in those different apartments, like it's electrical, there's camera, there's sound, they're all just like carnies with dental plans. That's what they call themselves. I don't know, man, but those guys work hard as fuck. Yeah, they do.

And, like, if there was some little kid that was like bright eye, butcher tails, I beat him down too. So, you know what I mean? I can understand it now that I'm a little bit older, but at the time, it was just so demoralizing. Like, just, I just got treated like, I didn't like it. Yeah. But that's the way it is.

So then how did you get? get into starting the hawth. So yeah, my, my homies in, um, in Chicago, actually one of my friends that I graduated with, we reconnected when I moved to Chicago. And he was like, um, studying marketing, doing affiliate marketing, started the company. Yeah, affiliate marketing. And, um, started a company, uh, started the company. And then he was like, dude, you got to come on here. And so I joined like super early on. And then just started smashing ever since, you know, started smashing. Yeah. Smashing that like button.

Yeah. Well, the good thing is, like, dude, like, I didn't know anything about SEO. They don't, they don't teach SEO in college. I thought SEO is dead. Yeah, you think SEO's dead? It's not, dude. Is Google dead? Hell no.

It's like one of the biggest companies in the world. Dude's growing every day. So as long as there's organic search results, you know, SEO will not be dead. So, you know, the cool thing is, like I didn't study any of that, right? And so you can literally learn anything online. And that's kind of how I learn SEO. There's so many resources, courses, and all kinds of different stuff.

I do that all the time. Still do it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Anything you want to learn is online. Every time I've, anything I've ever learned, like doing this kind of shit or making video,

everything I've learned was from like a YouTube video or an article that I searched. It's a great thing because, you know, when I was, um, I grew up in Indiana and I was not poor, you know, but I got like a ton of financial aid.

Like most of my college was paid for by a financial aid just because, you know, whatever. Um, and, You know, I saw people that were like, dude, I can't go to college or something, you know. And at some point in the past, that would have been like a really bad thing.

Like going to college was kind of like a ticket, like going to ticket. Now it doesn't fucking matter at all, dude. And in fact, it's like almost there's a very good case for going to college is a fucking horrible idea. You know what I mean? Right. There's this dude I follow Alex Becker. He's super smart. But he made a big case where he's like, look, if I had a course,

and I told you it was four years You had to take my car for four years And every year it costs $60,000 And there's no guarantee That you get anything out of it at the end Dude, that would be a fucking scam, bro He would be in jail

But that's exactly what college is like right now But student loans are the one thing You can't escape for some reason Yeah, I didn't know that but that sucks Bernie said he's going to wipe him out Yeah except Bernie comes in he's going to wipe him out Okay like that.

We'll see. Well, I mean, shout up, dude, I think that there's going to be a huge revolution. You know,

like, this is kind of a theme tonight that we're talking about is like this new economy of how people are working and stuff. It's kind of crazy is because, like, if someone came to me

and they're a dope programmer and they didn't go to college versus a programmer that went to college, I don't give a fuck. You know, I care about if they can do the job and they can do the job right and they can do the job well.

And if somebody is so motivated that they went and learned on their own, there's a good chance that, You know, that's going to, could be even better, you know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, like, for me, like, I didn't go to college from marketing, and I can outmarket, like, many people that come in to, you know.

That went to college. The office, you know, dude, we have masterminds when people pay $50,000 and they come in, I'd do, like, a day with them, you know what I'm saying? And these are very smart, savvy marketers. So, you know what I'm saying? I didn't learn any of that stuff from college or anything. Like, you learned that in the trenches and books and courses and just, getting after it.

Yeah. And you ran the company out of Medell-Yin, Colombia for a while? Well, like I said, it was like a virtual company because you can start a company without an actual...

That was in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, you can start a company without an office now. It's great. Of course. And it can be a legit virtual company. There's a company right now called Zapier.

You ever heard of it? No. Zapier, like, if you ever want to be like, hey, fill this form and then I wanted to send it to an email or I wanted to like go into a Google Doc or something like that,

Zapier connects all the APA online. Okay. Anyway, it's a big company that a lot of people use. Okay. All right. They have 200 employees

and they're 100% virtual, dude. You can... It's like a lead generation type thing? No, no, no. It just connects all types of apps. You want to connect Salesforce to Lufu. You want to connect any kind of app that you would normally need a programmer to connect.

Right. You need this lead to go over here. Okay. That's what it does. Wow. So, but anyway, the whole point is that it's a virtual company's got... It's a big one. It controls a lot of parts of the internet.

200 employees, 100% virtual, dude. You can totally do a virtual company. And that's kind of the way we operated for a long period of time. 200 employees is kind of a lot of employees. That's a lot. Fuck, yeah, that's a lot of employees. Are you kidding? So you can totally run a virtual company.

So when I moved to Medellin in 2014, we were a virtual company, but we only had a handful of people. I mean, we clearly had like a ton of people that were like freelancers, but it was always like that. I'm talking about like core team. And then in 2014, we actually weren't as big as we were now. I mean, I went through like a big personal transformation in right before I moved to, right before and during when I moved to Medellín. Why?

This is like where everybody that's like stuck, you know, right before you have this big breakthrough, it's always like something internal, dude. It's always something about you. You think it's like your situation that's holding you back or something, but it's like it's totally internal. And that's what happened to me, man So I was in Chicago And I was Chicago was like one of the best places on earth During the summer

And then the winter And the winter is coming And then so one summer Or one winter It was my fifth year there The I was on my 18th month of winter Dude

Because it's so fucking long It's horrible dude God damn Anyway So the company was like Just kind of stalled and I didn't know marketing at the time. I was not that good. I used to run ops.

I used to run operations for it. And, um, uh, dude, I was on the 18th month of winter and it wasn't growing and I wasn't growing and I was like getting kind of frustrated and I was just, every night I would just drink. I would go and I would grab, hold, you know, I put on like my, uh, a coat and scarf and everything waddled down to this little corner liquor store, get a ball of gin, come back and make gin so those because I was trying to save a little calories, you know, because I still self-conscious. You drink by yourself or you go to bars?

Fuck, yeah, I'd drink by myself. Dude, and I would sit there and I would watch how I met your mother just get fucked up every night, dude. And then I'd wake up in the morning and I would like try to work. I'd work as much I could until I couldn't eat more and I'd start drinking again. So I was like a functional alcoholic, you know. And, um, not like, were you drinking it all at work or no? No, no. Work was my table, dude. It was a virtual company. I'll work at home. Oh shit. You were working in your apartment?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the whole company is virtual. Okay, I thought maybe you guys had like a universal space you guys worked in maybe. No, no, no, no. In Chicago. No. No. There wasn't office. It was a virtual company, aka no office.

What I meant was maybe you guys still had like a. Now it's different. Okay. Now is different. But yeah, we literally had no office. So I would just watch how I met your mother, which, you know, you can watch that brainless, you know. I've never seen that. So anyway, the wintertime was hard on me, man.

It was really, it was hard, like emotionally. And there was one day I woke up and I was working. and I just couldn't work anymore. I literally just went out from the desk. And I sat on the couch and I felt like this pressure on my chest. Like I laid down and I just felt like someone's pressure on my chest. And I was like, it was kind of hard to breathe. And that moment I was like, what the fuck are you doing, dude?

And so I had this like immediate thing that's like, dude, you have to change. And I was like, what am I going to do? I was like, first of all, fuck Chicago winter, never doing this shit again. I'm moving somewhere else. And then I was like, where should I go? Let's go to Medell in Colombia. I'm going to sell everything that I have And let's fucking go

So that's exactly what I did You know I planned for it My lease got up sold everything Why Columbia Well the cool thing is You know someone actually invited me There like the year before So I went for like one month before

Okay And then I met some cool friends And I was like I can just go back there You know So just that one little trip It's like dipping your toe in the water It's enough to make you have the confidence To be able to go

So that's what I did man and I moved to Columbia and when I got there you know I just started changing everything right and I think that I was looking for something I didn't know what it was

but I was looking for something and the cool thing is that sometimes when you go looking for something you find it right and that's what kind of it was for me not that Medellin in particular has like something magical which I do think it is magical

but the idea that you know this like thing happened to me like this that moment I remember where it was just like it was a breaking point of like struggles. It was just like I couldn't grow. Didn't know what I was doing middle of Chicago winter. And that was a breaking point. And I was like, I have to go find something.

I went looking and just did that big break. And as soon as that happened, like everything changed. I started looking for how to like get up in the morning, how to start a morning routine, how to like set goals. And then I was also in a really good like new environment with no fucking snow. Yeah, way better. Hell yeah. And all that shit started happening. And I started, you know, just mapping.

it all out. And then, you know, you could just, you can just see like in every way from like, if you look at our like revenue growth, you can just see like, boom, October 2014. Yeah, like that. Really? Yeah. Yeah, for sure, man. We were, we were stalled out for like a whole year. We were doing the same revenue every month. Now, there was a time where you sold the company, right? There were some people came in and purchased the company, but you stayed, you stayed with the company during the transition or whatever. Did that happen before after you moved to? That was before.

That was before. So like we sold it in 2013, like early 2013, something like that. Okay. Sold it to another company. And then the other founders left and I stayed on and got a little bump and revenue. And then we flatlined and then that whole like at the end of that first year of just flatlining, that's when that kind of happened. I think that right before you moved there was maybe the first time I met Mark.

Oh yeah? During that hostomania times. Dude, I love Mark. He's a crazy, he's a crazy dude. Mark is one of the owners of the company that had bought the Hoth. Yeah. Yeah. And I met him during the Hostomania,

when we, this company idea he had where he wanted Hulk Cogan just to be like a competitor for GoDaddy. It was like a Hulk Cogan based, what do you call it, hosting company? It's a hostomania. Hostomania. Yeah, yeah, I got looped into that project for like 20 minutes to. So Hulk hit me up and just like, hey, I need you to shoot a commercial for these internet guys. They want to do a hosting company all about me.

We're going to take down the host Gator brother. Yeah, I do. That's how I met Mark doing that wrecking ball. We put him on the wrecking ball. Hulk Hogan smashed through it. That was famous, dude. I don't live on internet history forever. That will.

Hulk Hogan wrecking ball. Just search that on YouTube. That's a genius. And then I remember shortly after that, they invited me to Vegas. And then I remember him and David, like, on the computer, like, check out this hawth. It's this new thing we got. Look at this.

Yeah. Five grand a day. Yeah, we were like a little baby. company at that i mean not baby company i mean we did we were doing maybe like a million dollars in revenue or something a year a year a year yeah um so it was a successful company what's it do now can you talk about that or no uh yeah i mean our numbers are in the i nc list so oh really yeah yeah so probably do do like a a million and a half per month right now per month yeah quite a bit of growth yeah what was the uh the difference between when you made

that changed, like, how much money were you making then? And then when you changed and went to Columbia and you saw that big spike, like, what was the difference? We were probably making, like, between $80,000 and $100,000 a month when I went to Columbia. And then now we make, like, $1.5 million a month. So there's, like, a 15-X growth in the last, like, handful of years, whatever, is, like, four years. God, yeah. That's awesome. So what specifically did you do in Columbia that made that change?

lots of things man I think like there's some like obvious shit that's not taught and actually made me mad about school made me mad about like how like there's so many things they didn't teach you none of it there's so many like really really important things that if you want to do shit you need to know these things right so a lot of it is like personal stuff like how do you perceive the world like one of the things is um uh take 100% responsibility for everything like a lot of people go through and they're like oh this situation happened to me I fucking can't do this because this is whatever. It's like you have to eliminate that shit.

You have to eliminate any kind of complaining. And you have to just take responsibility for everything and be like, dude, whatever. This is my responsibility. Like, it's not your situation. It's you all the time. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. Like, that's just a mentality thing. And that, it's hard because being like, oh, this person did this thing to me or this

happened to me. Like, that's an easy way out. You know, that feels good because you're like saying, I don't have any of that responsibility. You know, like, that's not my fault, you know? And when you go like, shit, maybe it is my fault. or maybe I just have to take responsibility for it anyway. Like that's fucking hard to do. But ultimately that gives you confidence, you know,

because you are the one that can actually fucking do something about it now. It gives you like that ability to be like, all right, I'm taking a fucking responsibility for this and I'm going to do something about it. You know, I don't care if it was right or wrong or whatever, something happened to me because it's now my responsibility. And that gives you the power. Now you got the power to change shit. Okay.

And, dude, people can't. change. You can change a lot of shit. You can fucking change everything, dude. And you did change everything. Fuck, yeah, I changed everything. Are you kidding? Dude, there's so many crazy shits that happened, so many crazy things that happened in, in Colombia

in terms of, like, mentality. Yeah. That made me believe that this is true. And it's hard. Like, if your shit is not going very well, or you're stuck or whatever, it's, like, almost impossible to believe that what I'm saying is true until you, like, start seeing it, like, little things.

if I could like reel back everything to one thing that I kind of like focus back on that helps is just this this phrase of think about what you want not what you don't want so most of the time that if you feel like super bad or whatever you're almost always thinking about what you don't want you're like oh man you're running away from things and they're running towards things well it's you're focusing on the wrong thing right you're like oh man I didn't get this raise or I didn't get this money or this fucking shit's hard or whatever. You're thinking about the shit that you don't want.

What you do want is you want to get the money. Or you want to get the viewers or you want to get whatever. And so if you only focus on that and you start thinking like, okay, how could I get it? Your mind starts getting really creative on different ways that you could try. You know, and as soon as you start feeling bad again, you just check yourself and go, wait, what am I thinking about? Is I'm thinking about something I don't want or what I do want. Let me give me an example. Here's one of the crazy things that happened.

is that I started dating a girl who's now my wife. Boiya. Bam. Yeah. I started dating Wendy. She's Colombian, clearly. And what's crazy is that, like, in the U.S., we get passports and we can go all over the world. So if I'm like, yo, do you want to go to Costa Rica?

You want to go to Paris. Whatever you want. We can just go. You don't even think about it. Just go. Not everybody in the world can do that. Like, you need like visas and stuff if you have a different kind of passport. So, for instance, Colombia, if to come to the U.S., you have to get a tourist visa,

which means you literally have to fly. It applied. You have to fly to the capital. You have to go an in-person interview to get the visa to even come to the U.S. Okay? Wow. And they deny lots of people. Yeah.

And, you know, so the people that they want to approve are people that are going to go back to Columbia, right? Because it's a tourist visa. Okay. And so they, the typical person that they're going to deny is like a single girl. Right. Is getting married to come over here. Well, well, no, they would typically deny somebody that's single and is a girl. and doesn't have a lot of money

because the likelihood that she's going to stay illegally in the U.S. is very low. It's high. They don't want people to stay in the U.S. Stay illegal. Stay illegal. Yeah, they want people to come in and get the fuck back out.

Right. They want you to go back to Columbia. They want you to go back to Columbia. Right. They don't want you to stay illegally in the U.S. Because now... But if you're a single girl, you're going to... Chances are you're going to get married

and then you're going to become a citizen, right? It could happen like that. But they just don't... On a tourist visa, they want people to leave the U.S. They want people to come in the U.S. and then leave. And they want to make sure that you have a reason

to go back. And if you don't have a big reason to go back, they're probably going to deny you your visa. So anyway, so my friends had girlfriends that they wanted to show

the U.S. too, right? A bunch of people from you, my friends from the U.S. A bunch of expats. A bunch of expats living in Colombia and they want to take their Colombian girlfriends. And they would,

they would apply, pay like a couple hundred books or whatever, hundreds of dollars to apply for the visa. And they would, fly him to Bogota which is the capital they would go to the interview

and guess what fucking denied like I have one friend Santa's girl up there boom denied another friend Sanis grow up there boom denied another one like three in a row dude and so I'm like I want Wendy to come meet my family and stuff and I'm like dude we don't

the likelihood of this is going to happen is very low you know we just saw it like my friends three people denied right in a row so I went back to that mentality like what you think about what you don't want of what you do want. And so we started thinking about like, okay, if we want to do it, how can we do it?

What are we going to do differently? So we got lawyer, we got a plan. We made her have like a reason to go to the U.S. Yeah. Like we got a registered for a conference. I called up, I called it the conference is at Northwestern University. I was like, hey, it's an international student. She was like, I mean, this is actually like a microbiology conference because that's what she studies.

Right. Anyway, got them to send like a sealed letterhead like invitation that showed it. And so when I had a lawyer and I had a lawyer practice questions with Wendy for like, what's going to, you know, how they're going to do the interview and stuff. So she's really prepared. So when she went to do the interview, she flew on the plane, sat next to a girl. You know, she was doing the same thing. She was going to go in and get a visa. And Wendy wait in line with this girl.

And she went out and she came out crying. She got her. The other girl got denied. The other girl got denied. She was on the plane with. But Wendy went in there and crushed it. It came out with an approved. Wow, dude.

I know, dude. That's crazy they gave you the answer right then and there. Yeah, they do. But that's just like, that's one of the crazy, like, examples of, like, doing this whole thing, this whole personal transformation that was like, dude, this shit's real. Like, you can change anything by the way that you think. So that's just one of the many things that happened that made me believe, like, the way I do now. Yeah, it's a whole different, changing your whole, your whole perspective on things. Yeah.

So what was... It's not like the situation, dude. It's like you. You know, it's like internal. It's the way you think. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not where you are. It's not...

There's no, like you said, there's no excuse that you can make about your surrounding your environment or anything else. It's all in your head. You can make, you can make excuse me. You can do whatever the fuck that you want. Right, but the excuse is going to do shit.

I mean, like, what do you want to do? Like, you are your biggest limiting factor. Right. You know, so... Hmm. You would think, uh, well, I guess, no, Chicago, I mean, is known for just booze and food. Yeah.

What is Medellin known for? I mean, it's known for fucking drugs and partying, right? Yeah, kind of. I mean, that's kind of the weird. Oh, what's that sound? I know we get that all the time. Fuck it. Traffic.

That's the weird thing is that people know Medellin for what they've seen in the movies. Cocaine, right? And to be honest, I didn't know anything about Medellin before I moved there. Medellin was never on my list of places to go. Really? You know, I had like Rome, Paris. Yeah. Medelline was the one.

Yeah. Like Columbia? I was like, what the fuck is in Columbia? That's crazy because when you told me that I'd never been there. When you first told me that you lived there, I was like, holy shit, because I've read books all about. I've read like multiple books about it. Yeah.

And, dude, Columbia, so, you know, it's known for what happened in, you know, 70s, whatnot, 80s, Pablo Escobar and whatnot. But the crazy thing is, like, that shit died like a long time ago. You know, that died like 15 plus years ago. It's been gone, and they've been trying to, like, change the reputation ever since. Not that drugs don't exist, but fuck, man. Drugs exist everywhere. Chicago's a murder capital of, you know, the U.S., or at least it was, for a period of time.

Right. And so, dude, there's drugs and murders everywhere in any big urban city, you know. But it's really beautiful, though, because, I mean, for me, I have a personal connection to it for, well, many things. You got your wife there. I got my, I found my wife there, and I had a great time there. and I met a lot of amazing people when I was there. But Medellin is kind of crazy. You just have to experience it for yourself.

First thing is when you come into the city, it's in a valley. So you come in from the airport, and when you first get into it and you can see the valley, there's literally lights going up both sides. It's a weirdest site you've ever seen. So it's like no matter where you are in Medellin from above or below, you have a view. So like, because it's lights going up both sides of the mountains.

It's crazy. You got to just check out a picture. of it so you can see it. Yeah. And then you come into Medellin, and it's, it's strange because on one hand, it's like super developed in some downtown areas. Like, you remember seeing the picture of the building that I lived in? Oh, yeah.

Super modern, brand new building. Yeah, crazy. But then you can also drive down the street 10 minutes and see, like, what, like, kind of poverty that I've never seen before in my life. So it has a little bit of both. They're trying to really totally transform it. And actually they've done some really amazing things. Yeah.

They have this thing called the Metro Cable, which essentially one of the hard things about poor communities is like you can't get like transportation to go get a job. And especially in Medellin with the geography like with going up the hills, to walk down a fucking mountain to go get a job is literally impossible. So right? So that would mean poor communities to stay poor. So what they did is they put these crazy metro cable things that you can like get like a little gondola things that right on. cables up above and they can go down and you can ski lift yeah ski lift kind of top like that and it connects to the metro which is like you know the the buses and the um the trains they go all around the city wow so it allows poor you know poor communities have access and so that's a big thing

and then they're also like pushing for technology coming into the city and like doing kind of incubators and startups and there's a startup scene there really dude there's a we work there's like young hustlers down there like trying to start up big business big uh online marketing companies yeah for sure and there's like we work is down there oh really yeah we work i mean we work as an office there's a y combinator startup called rapy um why combinator is like a startup accelerator and um there's a company called rapy that went through by combinator and then blew up in columbia um crazy thing dude rapy is a service it's kind of like uber eats but um you know uber eats is like doubles the price when you go get it because we're in America and people need paid money and cars are

expensive. Yeah. Well, in Columbia where the cost of living is way lower, there's a lot more available workers and they ride on like little motorcycles or like mopeds or whatever, like all day. So you just zip around the city. So the cost of labor is low. The ability to go get... Bring your mic a little bit closer. Yeah, ability.

You can scoot it if you want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the ability to go get like stuff and pick it up is, um, you know, it's, um, you can't really fast. And so to get something delivered there, it costs like a dollar or two, you know, like versus like 10. That's wild.

And so Rappi is a company that literally said, like they just developed an app, and they got a bunch of people like riding scooters all around town. And so Rappi blew up in Colombia. And was crazy as you know how Venezuela had, you know, like Venezuela economy like collapse and a bunch of bad shit went on Venezuela. A bunch of those people migrated to Colombia looking for jobs. right at the same time

that Rappi was blowing up. So all those people that were... Yes, they're all available and they start working for Rappi. So Rappi, like, to some extent, is saving the Venezuelan, you know, what do they call it, the people that are moving out of Venezuela. Really? It was wild, and everyone loves it.

Because now, literally, if you live in Columbia, you can get everything delivered to your house for, like, pennies, you know what I mean? That's so sick. Yeah, it is super sick. Wendy never left the house. just order everything you literally order it's like it's like amazon here yeah exactly

it's like room service for anything you want like it's your house is it true like most of people in columbia are super christian because you were telling me that they really put christmas on like a whole other level in columbia oh sure yeah well i don't know like the christmas lights are just like on a whole other level like the whole city's lit up

and dude it is wild like I don't know if I can accurately judge percentages of religious people in Colombia. I mean, there's a lot of Christians, a lot of Catholics and stuff like that. But in general, the Christmas spirit is on, dude. It is on, dude.

Every single house. The pictures are insane. Every single house has crazy lights. And I was like, dude, straight up, this is a business opportunity. If you want to sell lights, like you would sell lights to literally everyone. If you just search Christmas lights in Columbia,

dude, oh my God. And the parks are even more insane. You know what I mean? The parks, they go all out, dude. Lights everywhere. It's crazy. It's like you're walking through a whole other fucking universe with all the lights they put up. But that's part of the Colombian spirit is they're like, they're very, they love celebrating.

You know what I mean? Whether like things are going good or bad, like, you know, people celebrate and they celebrate together. Very like into the family, very into celebrating. Like it's kind of a cool thing. I don't know. Yeah. It's a little weird, dude. Think about little Indiana boy, me,

like going out to the first time I went to Wendy's mom's house. And, like, dude, there, it isn't like you go hang out with, like, Wendy's friends in a house. Like, they live with, most people live with their family until they get married. Yeah. In Columbia. Right.

And then they still continue to, like, hang out their family, like, all the time, like, every weekend, you know? Yeah. Multiple times a week. Where, like, in the U.S., I mean, this is very general. I'm just saying in general. We love independence, dude. Once we're out, you know, we're out.

But they, like, it's so, so family-oriented. So the first time, man. Yeah, everybody down there parties with their family all the time. Parties with the party and you go partying? You're going to party with your parents and your brothers and sisters. Yeah, you're party with your parents, brothers, sisters, aunt, uncle, grandma. Yeah, everybody. Yeah, the whole family, dude.

And the first time I went there, I'm like, there's 40 people at when he's out of us. You know, it's like every aunt, uncle cousin, every day. And then, dude, they're doing, like, salsa dancing. There's a little white nerd. Yeah, I'm a little white nerd. I had no idea. what's going on, man. But then, like, after you...

Because, like, the first time you hear that type of music, you're like, dude, what? And, but then you get into it. And now, like, I love it. There's a special thing about it. Oh, they don't give a fuck. They just dance like there's no tomorrow, dude. And you think that, dude,

like, you know, like, in college, like, the teacher, like, black out and, like, they're like, yeah, we party harder than anybody else. Dude, that shit is fucking nothing compared to Colombians, dude. They will literally party for days, dude. All that cocaine. Dude, I don't know. Actually, I think they're good at pacing themselves too.

And they also just straight love parting. Like, literally, I'll go, and I'll drink too, I'll drink too much. I'll drink like I was taught in college, like get drunk. And then, like, I'll go home and pass out. And then I'm getting, you know, pictures the next day with call or face chat, you know, like Wendy's mom's, like FaceTiming her or something. And they're like, where's still party? I'm like, what the fuck?

Dude, all night. long you're still going. Damn. Dude, it's wild. And it's not just like, oh, that happened one time. It happens every time. Every single time, dude. It's wild.

I love that. It's a beautiful thing, dude. You got to go. I want to go. You got to, and you can't just, like, hang out of the friends of Columbia. You got to go hang out of Colombian family and feel it, dude. You got to get in there. Stay with somebody's house with their family and let them cook for you and do all that.

Oh, yeah. They're going to cook. Dude, they have a system, man. They got like a whole system of how to party. They know the meals to make. What about the food? How is the food there? food's good.

There's a lot to say. I mean, Chicago's got good food, too. It's not a gastronomic center of the world. Like, if you go, like, Italy, man, Italian food is amazing, you know, or whatever. Or Mexico, maybe, like, Mexico's gastronomic center. Columbia is not like that. Columbia is not like, oh, man, yes. It's a typical Latin American food, which is, like, meat, rice, and beans.

Yeah. And not to say that's not good. You can have some fucking great meat, rice, and beans. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, there's not a ton of. of, um, it's not a gastronomic center. But that said that there's still some very amazing Colombian dishes.

Nothing right home about. I had, no, there is some really good stuff. Um, but, uh, you know, you can't compare it to like in Italy or something like that. Right, right, right, of course. And one of the things about interesting about Medell gene is like, um, in the, in the area. Medell gene. Well, they call it Medellin. Okay. So like in double L's in Spanish, you use like, yeah.

Medalin. It looks like medaline. So if you're a U.S. and your white dude can't pronounce anything. It's medallin. If you pronounce it like Spanish, you know, with the double L is, be like Medellin. But colloquially in there, they pronounce double L's like a hard J, like Medellin. Medellin. Yes, and similarly like they would say like Komotejamas, you know.

Okay. Yeah. They say Komote Jamas? Yeah. Like the double L is a hard J. Oh, wow. So anyway. So anyway.

So, yeah. So. Oh, fuck, what was I saying? Some stupid probably. So what? Oh, I was saying to Medellin. The, it's like there's some parts that are like really up and coming. And there's some really, really nice restaurants.

Yeah. And like the area that I live. So you can get like all different types of food and go to like super nice restaurants for like 50% of the price that it would cost like maybe somewhere else like in a big city. Right, right, right. It's crazy. So what made you decide to come back? back to the U.S. Lots of things.

You know, over the course of growing the business, there was, well, growing a business at different stages needs different things. And we came to a stage where it was growing so fast we actually needed to have an office. And so we started getting an office and then we started adding a lot of people to the office. And you got like an office where there's like 20 plus people working in it. And I'm one of the dudes like supposed to be running it, you know. And I came back and visited a couple of times and I was like, the vibe.

You know, like I feel like I need to be part of the culture too. Because culture is such an important part of growing a company. Like you fuck up the culture, dude fucks everything. Kind of like your mind. Like, you know, it's not just like, just go do the work. It's all, there's a lot about the mindset that you have. So I need to make sure that that mindset is integrated into the company. And I felt like a pull to come back and cultivate that.

You know what I mean? And actually just be a part of it. It's kind of weird if like one of the main dudes is, I don't know, somewhere living, right? Right, because. So sort of be like a vision. visual idea what it is. It's this giant, you have the whole 15th floor of this giant office building in downtown St. Pete that overlooks the Tampa Bay. Yeah, we do now. Now, yeah. And there's, I don't know how many. There's dozens and dozens of employees. Yeah, there's like 45 people working

in the office. 45 people. Okay. Okay. And it's just like the super dope like modern area with bean bags and like different rooms and hangout areas and a fridge full of La Croy. Yeah. Yeah. Typical stuff. Right. And just people just walking around, you know, doing fun shit. Yeah, that's cool, man And working. And you weren't there in the beginning. Now you're there. So now you're able to walk around and talk to everybody every day

and you guys do cool stuff and have story time. And another part was like I couldn't really, like, I got married this year and I wasn't married and, you know, before that, clearly. You and me both. So, yeah, I remember we had some good moments together. Yeah, we had some good moments. You held my ring, my engagement ring. While we were in Costa Rica.

No, where were we at? We were in Costa Rica. Mexico. Mexico. Yep. That was good times. It was good times, dude. But, yeah, we didn't used to have the office.

And I wasn't married. So, like, if I was going to move here, like, I kind of had to marry Wendy, too. I mean, so it all kind of happened at a really good time. Wendy and I got married and she got her visa. And then I was able to actually, like, really move here. That's dope, dude. Yeah, it was beautiful. It all worked out.

So I'm a very lucky guy. So let's go back to talk a little bit more about like marketing and ads and shit like that. Marketing is fucking bananas. It's interesting how companies like yours that have all subcontractors, like gig-based workers, just get to pick the gigs they want to work on. I feel like America or the world in general is going that direction. I feel like it's going to be a majority of that. type of work in the future yeah and like nine to fives you're gonna kind of fade out especially as

like the college institution starts to die off which it's already doing and it's gonna it's when it's gone and it people aren't just going to college to get jobs I feel like that's gonna take over people are it's all gonna be kind of freelance work people just going online and getting gigs based on whatever they're good at I want to be good at this I'm gonna watch a couple videos learn how to do it then I'm gonna go see if I can get paid to do it yeah with someone like the hawth or with like fiber or shit like that yeah well i mean you're talking about a lot of different things in in that statement but in general yeah there's way more opportunities for everybody and like the idea of the freelance economy like being able to work whenever you want or

choose your work and not have to do the same job all the time that idea is exploding right now i mean look look at look at what upwork is look at there's a company called top towel i love upwork dude yeah yeah i use it all the time yep a lot of businesses get it's started on Upwork. I have a lot of friends that started their own business, like a lot of friends that were like in Medellin or working virtual. They started a company like literally on Upwork just going in because there's people posting jobs that says like, hey, I need somebody to do this. And you can go and you can say like, hey man, I can do that for you. And you get the job and then you literally just do it. You know, it's pretty simple.

But that means you can, the things that are important to you, which is a lot of things that are important to our people our age is like. like I want to work not going to that office. Right. I do not want to commute. They want freedom. I don't even have a car. I want to when I want. And or maybe like, let's say you want to like go to like another country, like let's say somewhere South America or maybe you want to go to Eastern Europe or you want to go to Thailand or something like that.

There's these like big expat hubs that you can go to. And a lot of people are like, yo, I can't afford to travel. And the crazy thing is that it's cheaper to go there a lot of times than it is to stay wherever you're at. It's wild, dude. That is pretty insane. And so the things that people care about, they can meet those requirements by, you know, by doing this freelance economy type stuff. You become a freelancer, go do whatever you want.

Don't work the typical 9-5. And you get to travel the world. Just bring your MacBook with you wherever you want. Exactly, man. And it's crazy. I thought there was like a handful of people doing this. No. It's like a literally global movement.

Man, I met like literally hundreds of people and Medina alone. There are thousands right now that are like expats. from the U.S., from all over the world, that have came to Medellin as like a nomadic center. But that's not even a big nomadic center, dude. Like Southeast Asia, Thailand, that's a huge one, dude. There's probably tens of thousands of expats there right now working from their laptops.

That's wild, man. I would say working from laptops on the beach, but those people are fucking stupid. Those people are psychos. Have you ever... Who would fuck would take your laptop to the beach? You know how hot those laptops get? Dude, plus trying to read in the sun.

That's a terrible idea. Never work from the beach. Hell. That sounds like hell. You should be drinking margaritas on the beach, not working. Hell, yeah. You got to fucking learn to draw a line somewhere. Yeah, you should be working in an air-conditioned apartment, and then, yeah, that's how I would do it.

But, yeah, man, outsourcing in general, like, that's huge now. And actually, I've read some statistics on freelancing. I'm not going to quote any because I would sound stupid because I don't know them off the top of my head. Yeah. But the freelancing economy, the idea that bigger companies, instead of hiring somebody now, like onboarding them and paying benefits and all this kind of stuff, they're really, a lot of companies are now into just hiring a person specific for this job. They don't care where you are, whatever. They'll pay you even more than they would pay like a normal person because to onboard a person is crazy high. If they can hire a specialist, they can just come in and nail a project, that's really growing.

That's why the freelance economy is growing so much right now. Yeah, and also like basic media companies, like Forbes or any kind of magazine, Vice, their majority of their people are remote and they're just writing articles for a flat rate that get posted on a website. I mean, Forbes is a great example of that. Well, I mean, in industries where it typically costs a lot to produce something, I think writing is a big one. I mean, think about how much it costs to onboard. order, like a writer, pay for their benefits, their salary, have them in an office.

Dude, our office costs $25,000 a month. Right. Rent. Rent. Every month. Yeah. That's not like including snacks, all that other. Everything.

Whatever. It's not the power bill. Yeah. So, man, think about, like, what if that expense just doesn't happen now? There's ways that you can cut costs and, like, people don't even want to come to the office. They fucking hate traffic, dude. So, fine. No, no office. All right, you work first. We'll hire a freelancer. Dude, you cut out tons of expenses. The product that stays the same. You know what I mean? Actually, it might even get better because the writers are happier about whatever they're doing. Yeah, so what's the point? They're at home. Exactly. So for us, there's some positions where it makes sense to have an office. We're not going to get rid of an office because we need it. There's different times at a company. We need different things. Right now, like a lot of people in the office are managers. We have people that 500 people, 500 outsourced team. Yeah.

And we want that person in office for a lot of other reasons. Right, right, right. But the idea of companies hiring freelancers to just snipe projects, like, that economy is exploding. So if somebody is thinking about like, oh, I don't know, should I get a real job or should I be a freelancer? If you're talented, dude, there's a huge economy. Oh, hell, yeah. If you want to go after it, dude, there's a huge economy. A lot of people are afraid, though, to leave that 9 to 5.

You know what I mean? Leave the security of that. Yeah. With all the benefits to just go full-time freelance. Yep. It's a scary jump to make until you do it. Well, until you have, you see one billion other people doing it. I mean, I actually have this theory.

It's called the river theory. It's for wussies like me. Like, I am a very risk-averse person or used to be. I'm a little less now, but I mean, I've come from like the middle of Indiana. Like, I'm conservative, you know? Like, I'm very risk-averse. I don't want to take risk. I'm like not necessarily like an entrepreneur.

heart not from beginning. Right, right, right. And, like, I have this theory, like, the river theory, which means it's, like, if you know you want to go in that direction, you know, but you're too scared to, like, just go there, you can, like, just get around people that are going there and hop in the river with them and, like, you know, that it'll help you, like, get there. That's a way that. That is a good way.

That's a good method. Just get around people that are going where you want to go or are where you want to go. Right. And then it's crazy how, like, things become possible. Yeah. Like, do you remember, there's a big, you know, Roger Bannister, I think this is his name. He's a guy that first ran the four-minute mile. Mm-mm.

Something like that, five-minute mile. I don't think I've heard of them. Anyway, it's the first guy that broke, like, the five-minute mile. Okay. That sounds so stupid because I don't know if it's a five-minute or four-minute mile. Tomato. Anyway, so, yeah, this guy, nobody could run that fast, and then this guy broke it. And then right after that, like 10 more people broke that record.

Okay? So the whole idea being that like, dude, it's... Once you know it's possible, everybody can do it. So if you can just go find those people, which there's communities everywhere to find out people that are like you that are doing what you want to do. Then it becomes possible in your mind and then like immediately like you can start doing that stuff. Right, right. You know, that's the way to hack it. Do you guys work with like any publishing companies or any like big like media companies or anything like that or?

Kind of. We have some things in the work right now with some crazy big, like, multi-billion dollar companies because of like literally what we're talking about right now, which is publishing companies. They have a lot of costs, you know, and their costs are high and their profits are shrinking, like publishing companies, right? So if you're trying to run like a newspaper, you're, I mean, your margin is shrinking. So people are trying to move that digital, but digital is all about, you know, they're selling like CPM ads on the sides, you know, like banner ads. And that's based on. And that's based on. on CPM, it's like cost per thousand impressions. Right. And so they just need more inventory, you know. And so they need, and the way to get more inventory is to have more articles that rank in Google. And so the cost of them having like people in office, like journalists writing articles. Crazy. It is like so high.

And plus the articles that they write are news. So they go up and they go down. Like they don't rank in Google for like a long time. Right. Because it's like this happened today. Tomorrow, we don't care about that. They have to write news shit all the time. So we have an ability to create this like evergreen content.

Plus we're an SEO company that ranks stuff. Yeah. And so we have some things that we've been, you know, working on some different models that, you know, this could be pretty interesting for a publishing industry because we have literally a workhouse of 500 people and we can triple that very easily. We're literally producing,

we're producing over 50 million words of content, you know, per year. Like, you know, what I'm saying. It's fucking insane. Way over 50 million, okay? This just depends. I'm just trying to give you the scale of what we can create.

And we create a content that is evergreen, meaning that it'll rank forever. It's already optimized for SEO. You know what I mean? And yeah, we can just do it at a very low cost, like a wholesale cost, because everything that we built is scalable,

process size, and it's built by cost per, you know, article outsource workers. Right. That's interesting. It's like they're trying to, they're trying to just, like, feed the, I mean, it's the whole argument of, like, quality versus quantity. And obviously, it's, in Google, it's, like, quantity wins.

Well, it's both. It seems like that. Is that true? I mean. It's both. You need both. You need both. How do you have both?

How do you have, like, find a balance between quantity and quality? Because, I mean, there's, like, there's people fucking on YouTube. We just sit there and talk to the camera about nothing for 10 minutes, and they do it every single day. And they just get insane. amount of fucking views. I think there's like there's different I don't want to comment on an all because there's different reasons that

certain things happen, right? But in for Google what works is having a big fucking website, right? Meaning like you ever see the same sites come up all the time? You know like Wikipedia comes up fucking every search, right? Yeah. Okay? That's because Wikipedia

is like an amazingly strong website and it has a billion pages on it, right? So Google loves these big websites that are big brands, these big trustworthy brands. And so you've got to have a... If you have a lot of quantity, yes, that's good for multiple reasons.

Number one is because it's going to make your website bigger so you're like a bigger brand in Google's eyes. You have more pages in your website. And number two, you've got more pages. That means you've got more chances to rank. You can write about everything, you know what I'm saying? Right. So you have more chances to rank

because every single page is about some kind of different keyword that somebody searching about. Okay? So that's quantity. But then you also have to have quality because if people can... come to your website, the best thing is, is keep them coming back to your website. And if they get to your website and you have shitty content and they're like, yeah, this website sucks,

they're never going to come back to your website again. So you have to have both. The good thing is like, we found a way to do both, right? We only hire the top 1% of riders, so we know we got quality, we train them, all this kind of stuff. And then we do it on a very scalable process. So we have shitloads of scale. We can produce literally thousands of articles a week. Yeah. So we got both. And that's the way to do it. Do both quality and quality. But you can't mix quantity and quality because then you'll go fucking broke. Well, if you're one person, you can't mix them, right? If you're one person, you either like bang out a bunch of articles or you pay out a couple of good pieces.

But we have a lot of people that are trained to do the same thing. Yeah, but you're, you mean, if you want to have both at the same time, you have to hire the best of the best, the best, the best of the best, the best, the best journalists, the best writers, the best video producers, whatever. you can't afford to hire the best of the best times a thousand i mean you have to be able to you have to be able to compromise and that's where that's where you're that's why i can't comment on on on every single yeah way that quantity and quality i'm talking about from an SEO perspective and publishers okay and i mean you know like regular publishers yeah um there's definitely you know like let's say HBO or something uh you know they like every show there's got to be pretty fucking good quality you know what i mean they're going to spend a

lot of money to produce one episode of one show. How's their fucking SEO? HBO. They don't need... I mean, they might need SEO, but I mean, like, that's not their gig, you know? That's not how they make their money through SEO. Because people know...

I mean, that's a very good example. That's a very good example. That's a very good example. That's a very good example. Yeah. Because they only spend... I mean, look at Game of Thrones. They spend how many millions of dollars per episode, over five million an episode. Right. And in that case, it makes way more sense to do quality. Right. I mean... But they still did quantity, too, because it did... fuck 12 seasons

Yeah, they did. They spent so much fucking money dude. Every episode was a movie budget. We gotta be making it back

though. What's that? Got to make it back. Make that money back. Yeah. Yeah. So, um,

I don't know. Netflix is... So what's a stronger brand? HBO or Wikipedia. Dude, these are two totally different things and two totally different marketing.

I would say that HBO is a stronger brand because Wikipedia's asking me for $5 every time I'll go to their website. I know. They're poor. They're poor. They're poor.

Are people paying it? I think so. I don't know what actually... Did you know a Wikipedia? I didn't pay for it, but... Damn, this fucking kid's sucking down the white claws. Dude, I had one. I only had like two of them.

I know this guy's had like six. Two. The problem is white claws is I need double strength, man. Maybe we need an app that can deliver us white claws. Fuck yeah, dude. Rapby needs to exist in the U.S. But the problem is we need to get like a bunch of like low... We need to like totally change the minimum wage to be able to like make it financially

viable. You know what I mean? And also we have to We have to construct cities in a different way so all the buildings are close together. Yeah. And then everyone has to ride motorcycles and stuff. So see, there's just there's just things that are different. That make it economically feasible. So what's the key to making like a podcast good? You got to just do like a hundred of them a day. Fuck if I know, dude, I don't run pack a half. But you got to think about like a website, right? You got to have more pages. No, everything is different. So YouTube is not the same. So YouTube does not rank the same as Google. Yeah, we were talking about this yesterday. Yeah. Yeah.

Because we were, I was like, the thing about YouTube is, okay, so I live in the Google world, right? Because Google is the largest search engine in the world. Google is like one of the biggest companies in the world. And do literally just ranking on Google can make you literally millions of dollars. Yeah. Just ranking if you're in the right industry and stuff like that. You can make or break your business, 100%. and the thing is like when people go to Google every time

they're typing in something because they're looking for something they're trying to solve a problem right it's like there's an intent of that search right I need to figure out how to get this wine out of my carpet I'm looking for a fucking plumber you know they're looking for something very specific right where YouTube is a little bit different most of the traffic on YouTube to people's videos

is not by people searching even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world most of the traffic is not via people searching. Most of the traffic is people that see this shit on the right hand side that says like suggested videos. They're clicking on that, right? That's where like 80%... What's up?

Talk a little bit closer to know. That's where like 80% of your traffic is coming from. It is like people clicking on suggested videos. So while optimizing for searches in YouTube is important. People are looking for things. People search for things in YouTube. The more important thing for YouTube is to have like a clickbait type title or a good, you know, and or a good thumbnail, right?

So I think that's why, like, you know, viral type stuff works on YouTube so well. It's because people just keep clicking on that shit, you know, they're not searching for things. I am, though. Whenever I want to find something, it's probably 50-50 I'm going to YouTube to find the answer. No, don't get me wrong. It's not that people do not search on YouTube. There's a lot of people that do. But I'm saying the majority of traffic that people get to their videos is through suggestive videos.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. If you look on your channel, if you look on your channel and you break down like where it is. I can show you right. I can look at it right now. Yeah.

It's also, it's like 80% suggested videos probably. So you should optimize for SEO. Like you should optimize your titles and stuff. If you're talking about something specific, if you have a guest on, that's really popular. When people type in their name, they're searching for it. Yeah, definitely have that in your title. But I would prefer to have a crazy title. Suggested videos, 33%.

Browse. features 31%. What does browse features? I don't know. I'm not a YouTube expert. Okay. But most of it is not search, right? Search was like 30%.

The other 30%. Search? YouTube search 8%. 8%. There you go. Boom, boom, boom. Okay. That's different external.

Because people might search for concrete. People might search for a guest that you had on. But what they're mostly going to do is they're going to be like watching that and they'll click over some other shit, you know. Right. that's where most of the traffic is going to be. And so that's why you want those thumbnails look so good. So in this video, if we were optimizing for SEO,

we'd be like Clayton Johnson, SEO, the Hawth, you know, anything that we would be talking about in this. But I think it would work so much better if we had some kind of crazy title, you know. Yeah, but what it? Because if you look at some of the biggest... If you look at some like the biggest thing, I mean, this is, like I said,

you said you're not an expert, but an argument to that would be like, look at some of the biggest. of the biggest YouTube creators like for example look at fucking PewDiePy you read his titles like sometimes he just types in some weird Greek font and just makes up some fucking bullshit that's what I'm saying that he doesn't need to optimize for SEO

so people yeah right so people are familiar with his with him and his character and his content and they basically at that point all you need to see is a thumbnail with his face and you're just going to fucking click on it yep I mean if you're doing entertainment content yeah that's way better now there

there's a big play facts first Well, yeah, yeah, that's entertainment content. Yeah. Now, there's another play that you could do. So, like, let's say, like, for instance, you wanted to sell Bluetooth headphones, right? You can make a video that's, like, best Bluetooth headphone reviews, because people love reviews online. Tech reviews.

And then, like, you would optimize your video for that, and people do search for that. That's not only going to come up when people search for headphone reviews in YouTube. That's also going to come up in Google, too. You know, you ever been searching on Google and a bunch of videos up at the top? Yeah, that's right. That's why you got to optimize that for SEO. So that's a different play. Because this is an entertainment show versus like trying to sell something or whatever.

Right. That's or like even a how to. Right. You know, how to videos. Do it yourself for something. There's also a whole wave of people that just don't want to be entertained. They want to fucking learn shit. Yep.

Like they listen to these long ass videos or listen to them on Spotify or iTunes or whatever because they want to like learn new things. They're on car. It's like listening to an audio book kind of. Yeah. Because if you have somebody on there who whatever is really like an expert in something and you want to learn more about that, So it's kind of like a whole, it's very new. It's a very new type of audience to YouTube. I love it.

It's like a knowledge explosion. But what people really want, people what really want, they want infotainment, dude. Infotainment. What's infotainment? Infotainment is information, but that's entertaining at the same time. Because like, you know how when you read books as a kid or in school, you're like, okay, this is information and it's so painfully boring? Yeah, dude. Okay.

Information exists everywhere. What doesn't exist. is information in an entertaining way. Right. You know what I mean? That's why, like, the best... There's a bunch of people, like, online right now on YouTube that teach, like, how to program,

but it's kind of almost like a V-log while they're teaching you how to program. You know what I mean? They tell you, like, behind the scenes, like, Hey, guys, how's it going? It's me. It's Oscar. Today I'm going to be programming my...

Hacking my iPhone 12. Yeah, and they'll do stuff like that. Like, let me teach you how to program through this... Smash that like button. Well, yeah. But they'll teach you how to... to like a program through real world situations or show you like I know there's like a dude

that's like here this is me doing an interview with Google or something like that and they'll like do the interview live so you can see it so it's like entertaining and informative at the same time yeah yeah yeah so if you're a content creator and you want to do how to shit make it entertaining because that information already exists

online it's just painfully boring that's true yeah people just really want to be entertained dude they do people are just bored all the time so like that spend all their time with the phone and on the internet. God damn. You know how bored people are?

All right, thinking about this. How many times do people just sit that you go through their entire day and they get to like the last few seconds of the day and they're just going like this and their phone laying in their bed just going like this like, please God, give me like one more thing of entertainment

before fucking bad. I saw a great tweet. I saw it. I retweeted this. I saw this on Twitter. This guy posted scrolling is the new smoking. Dude, for show. For show, man, people are just painful.

That's true. That's why if you can give them some, like, good infotainment, dude, that's where it's that. And they can stop scrolling and watch your infotainment. Well, if they're going to scroll, why don't they stop on your video and give you, like, the ad revenue or sell them a product or something? Yeah. Or help them.

I mean, like, that's really at the core of it is, like, you're trying to help people. They're looking for stuff, you know? They're looking for ways to improve their live, like, get better headphones or whatever. Infotainment. Yeah. I just saw, you know, like, you know, Like, kids' content is a huge thing on YouTube, right? Yeah, yeah.

There's a bunch of moms sitting at home being like, how the fuck don't I make kids? Raise this kid. How do I raise this kid? I give him a fucking, get him an iPad. I got pregnant again. YouTube will teach me how to do this. Yeah, I'll just figure how I raise this kid on YouTube.

Just buy another iPads. Yeah. Have to play with kids, YouTube. No, no, no, no. How do I make this kid go to sleep? Yeah, yeah. They have the entertainment. like the cartoon shit on YouTube

YouTube kids. Or like kids opening like little kids opening toys or people opening toys and kids will sit there and veg out on the iPads watching these YouTube videos for hours. Yeah. And people use that as babysitters for their children.

It's genius. I don't know, but we're in a weird generation. We're the first generation that like grew up half without the internet and half with the internet. You know what I mean? So like this will never be again. Like when I tell my kids that like I didn't have internet

or I didn't have a cell phone when I was like growing up. It is crazy. Dad, you're a fucking dinosaur. Yeah, for real. Yeah. That is nuts. But what I was trying to get to was,

just this, starting this week, YouTube is phasing out monetization on kids' content. They gave him like four months saying, okay, we're going to, because there's such a huge part of YouTube relies on this, they made a huge announcement

that in four months from now, they're going to stop this. So now all these people, like people have to stop, have to find something else to do. No, they don't. It's crazy, dude. What do you mean they don't? Because they can do advertorials. Because they can put integrated, like, advertisements

into their videos. You know, like, product placement. Like, that's the most common way that people refer to it as like product placement. That's true, but that's a huge loss of revenue. Just straight up Google ad revenue. Yeah, but they have enough views that they can demand, like, huge amounts. They still have the attention. Yeah, as long as you have

the attention, then you can still sell it, you know what I mean? Yeah, that's true. I didn't think about that. And then if, like, it's a really big deal, there's lots ways around. They can start, they can start getting people to subscribe on an email and start siphon them off to like another platform where they're going to run ads on them. So, there's lots of, lots of different ways. Siphoning off their subscribers

to sign up for an email list. Yeah, be like, we're going to do exclusive content, but we're only going to be doing on our own website from now on. So subscribe to our email list and we'll let you know when it launches. And then when it launches, you have a list of like two million people. And you email them every time to come out of the new video. And now they're not going to YouTube anymore. They're only going to your website and then you're running

shitload of ads all over your website and doing the fuck that you want with it. So there's lots of ways around whatever platform. And I mean, the real thing is the attention. Like, if you have the attention, you can capture that and you have the relationship with the audience, you can put them wherever you want. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. What I just read today, Dave Chappelle's new, Dave Chappelle said that strippers are like the street version of Google.

Strippers are the street version. What? I don't understand. Yeah, you got to break that down. I don't know about that. I think he meant like strippers basically know. a lot about a lot of shit. You can ask a stripper.

They got the scoop on everything. They got the scoop on everything. They got the lowdown about a lot of shit. You can get a lap down to a stripper. You can ask her about this, that, and the third. Where you want to go to eat, where you need to buy some weed at. Where you want to score some drugs? Where do you want to do anything. What's the closest gas station?

The strippers know. They know. Is Wawa still open? All right. Dude, Dave Chappelle is... That new stand-up is... is pretty good. It is amazing. Yeah, but they were just saying how all these

all these big news platforms like Vice and Vox were crushing him saying don't watch Dave Chappelle's new... They were. They said, I don't know, they said he like... They don't watch it, it's terrible. I don't know, because he's kind of like controversial, I guess. He talks about gay people and

you know, the LGBT and stuff like that. Yeah, so these are like, people like Vice who are super super left-wing, super left-wing media companies are like saying don't watch Dave Chappelle's new thing. Even rotten, tomatoes had a zero percent. You're like, you don't need to watch this. Rotten tomatoes gave it a zero percent where it was just people that worked for

rotten tomatoes that were hired to rate it. They gave it a zero percent. Did you watch it? It was politics. Did you watch it? Yeah, I watched it. What did you think? I thought it was good.

Yeah. Yeah, he does like, you know, he crosses the line between like offending people. Fuck, yeah, he does. And it's comedy, but I thought it was good. I mean, you know, anybody that goes up there and just talks it how they think it, I think is admirable. Yeah, I think, you know, Dave Chappelle, like,

it's hard because we live in this this time right now where it's like a hypersensitive society. Yeah, it's very sensitive people. And Dave Chappelle is, like, one of the few people that somehow is able to talk about, you know,

hard stuff like this. And, like, that's the beauty of comedy. Like, the beauty of comedy is, like, the darkness of, like, being human brought out into the light. And, like, the best, the best, comics like have to talk about that type of stuff. Oh, for sure. Oh, yeah. And like the best thing is like, I mean, it's hard like for me to say anything because I have had so much, you know, growing up. Like I'm a white dude in America. You know, like, I have nothing to say. White privilege, Clayton. Right. Some of people would be like, you know nothing. You've never suffered about anything. And so it's hard for me to say anything. But I mean, one of the beautiful things about comedy is like being vulnerable and like, bringing out like bad shit and like talking about it and laughing about it like that is comedy at

its core and it's a beautiful thing for everyone if you can do that like he even addresses this specifically in a stand-up special he said he had a uh a trans woman um coming to his uh his gigs and he's going to make a bunch of trans jokes and he was like she laughed harder than any fucking person that was there he has specifically addressed that and like i think that's like one of the beautiful things yeah about comedy you know Mm-hmm. Definitely. If you can participate in that. Or if you just want to think about what you don't want,

instead of what you want, you can fucking go have a terrible life. Go have a terrible time. A little hole, lock yourself in a room and fucking feel terrible all the time. So whatever you want to do with your life. It's up to you. Sweet man. So what's next for Clayton in the hall?

What's on the horizon? Oh, man. We got so many cool things happening, man. I mean, like, I, one of the coolest things that I've been working on is there's so many different parts about growing a company, and it requires so many different skills at every stage, right? And, you know, just like I really focus on that kind of, what's limiting me at that time was my inner person, you know, and I had a big breakthrough then. Well, I need another big breakthrough. I mean, we come to a new point because you have to do, you have to have a totally new skill sets at different times. and then at that time I just need to change myself

like I need to change my schedule I need to change what I worked on during the day I need to change my mentality now we're at a point where we have to manage like we have 45 people in office so now I have to figure out how to organize this structure here and manage people and people want different things now

so now instead of focusing on just making the company like marketing it better I got to focus on giving people like a career path you know and encouraging them and showing them these good mentality and then, you know, creating opportunities for them. And then at the same time serving our customers at a higher level. So expanding our products and services.

It's a really complicated thing. It requires a whole new mindset. So that's kind of stuff that I'm working on. Okay. Yeah. Cool, dude. Self improvement. Yeah, for sure.

I love it. Cool, dude. Well, that was a good podcast. All right. Thanks for having me. Let's wrap it up. Let's go out some more white claws. Yeah.

Blacklow! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and all your wisdom. Yeah. It's been great. Sweet. Thanks, too. All right. Peace, guys. Thanks, bro.