Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - 92: The Power of Persistence: Nick Daniel's Billion Dollar Path

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

This week on the Escape The Drift Podcast, John is excited to share the incredible story of Nick Daniel, co-founder of the billion-dollar fitness brand V Shred. Nick gets real about his humble beginnings growing up in small town Oklahoma and how a passion for self-improvement led him to become a dating coach at a young age. Listeners will learn how Nick's chance meeting with future business partner sparked the idea for their first online business. Against all odds, the duo bootstrapped their company from just $1000, relying solely on affiliate marketing and their marketing genius to build V Shred into the global powerhouse it is today.Nick shares invaluable lessons learned over his entrepreneurial journey, from the importance of finding a visionary partner to trust but verify strategies. He also offers rare insight into building a brand people love through authentic connection. For anyone chasing their dreams of creating an impactful company, this episode is full of actionable wisdom from a true success story.Highlights:"We started with 1000 bucks. And we've never taken a penny of funding, not one penny no funding bootstrapped it up to 1000 ourselves.""I always put maximum effort into everything and he drove home mastery mastery and discipline is built by the by showing up over time. And not missing every day every day.""I wanted to travel the world. I wanted to get rich, I wanted to go help a bunch of people and I wanted to go see, I want to stretch myself to whatever the hell the limits were of those possibilities..."Timestamps:00:00: Nick Daniel Introduction03:01: Upbringing05:33: Overcoming Limiting Beliefs11:56: Managing Business Growth14:36: Affiliate Marketing21:44: Personal Growth28:19: Mentorships35:11: Work Ethic42:31: Building A Business50:20: Scaling59:56: Going Viral1:06:35: Creating A Successful Online Business

That was also a driving force, I think, for me. To want to get out of Oklahoma and to want to get out of that small town. I had big dreams and just, I remember always thinking, especially once I started reading books, I remember getting ready and thinking Grow Rich and being like, first time it clicked for me that everything my parents were saying wasn't gospel or everything I was hearing in my small town wasn't gospel. possible. And now escaping the drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift,

and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of Escaping the Drift. And man, I got a banger for you today. I'm not even joking. I mean, if you are literally somebody that's sitting at home with a computer, I got a man with a dream for you. What I'm talking about is this guy. You know, he's somebody that I've known for a little over a year now, and I love this dude. I love his partner. I think they're great, incredible people. We've had some amazing times out and about, but more importantly, this dude, there's somebody that runs down your feed and all your social media.

And you've seen this dude a million times. And this is the guy behind the guy. This is the guy that one of the best compliments I ever heard anybody give him was one of his competitors that simply said that company wouldn't have shit if it wasn't for these two genius marketers behind the company. And I love that. And he's one of those genius marketers. He is the founder of, co-founder of V Shred, over a billion dollars in fitness sales now online. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Nick Daniel. Nick. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. What's up, man? Not much, man. How are gentlemen, this is Nick Daniel. Nick.

Glad to be here. Glad to be here. What's up, man? Not much, man. How are you, dude? I'm good. I'm good. So a billion dollars in sales for V Shred now. Yeah. And I think the craziest, the craziest part about that story is we started with a thousand bucks and we've never taken a penny of funding. Not one penny.

No funding, bootstrapped it up to a thousand dollars. For those of you that are living on the moon or don't listen to social media, whatever, don't go through it. If you've seen that guy, Vince roll down your like super fit dude, like you can like eat off his washboard abs and stuff. Not that, you know, not that I'm looking, but I'm just saying you could do that. And he's trying to get you to take the fitness quiz and then get you and get and change your health and change everything about you. You're the guy behind the guy. Well, I think, you know, there's, there's a couple of us, man. And I think all the partners, um, you know, we carry each other. I've got really special business partners. We all kind of carry a different, different bucket

for the company, but yeah, man, like we're Kevin, myself, Roger, we're behind the scenes and Vince is in the front taking the good and the bad with being in the front, man. Yeah. And if you're watching this on YouTube and you don't know what I'm talking about, this is, if you want to know how good looking Vince is, he's the face of this company. And look at this dude. Like he's not even the face of this thing and that's how it goes. But how do you get, so, okay, listen, you're young. How old are you now? I just turned 40. You just turned 40 right now. Right. So, and V Shred is how old? How old is this? I believe this is our eighth year. You're eight years in. So at 32 years old, you started this, but I know that,

you know, you started as an affiliate marketer. That was your main thing is you figured out the secret sauce of how to sell other people's stuff at a high level online. And I want to get to that, but I want to talk a little bit earlier, man, because the first thing I always like to talk about with every entrepreneur that comes on the show is how you got to be you. You know, a lot of it, I always ask, is it nature? Is it nurture? Tell me about growing up, Nick Daniel, where'd you grow up? Tell me about the folks. Tell me all that. Yeah. I think it's, I think it's both of those things, right? I grew up in a really small town called Blanchard, Oklahoma, really tiny town. We had like one stoplight. I think we had a Sonic, no Walmart, no movie theater, nothing like that. No mall. And my parents were,

you know, my mom was a school teacher. My dad dad was in the he bought right away in the oil business and we didn't have a lot of money growing up but we weren't poor either probably lower middle class um my dad was kind of a john wayne type character very disciplined um i would say got most of my i'd say be sure it wouldn't be here if it wasn't for my dad. My dad was very strong guy. Always made his dream big. Always made us, made me, got me to reading books very young. The good sides of my dad were strong, high character, always live in truth, always made you live in truth as a kid. And always made you really put the work in. I would go hit baseballs until my hands were bloody.

I would throw the football in the backyard until, you know, I'd have to get a new football every so often just from wearing it out, throwing it in the backyard by myself. I wasn't a great athlete, but just from my dad's, who he was, and how he went about things, i always put maximum effort into everything and and he drove home you know master mastery and discipline is is built by the by showing up over time and not missing every day every day yeah and i think on the other side of that my dad was also probably took that stuff too far um my house could definitely be abusive at times

and uh that would that would, that would also a driving force, I think for me to want to get out of Oklahoma and to want to get out of that small town. I had big dreams and just, I remember always thinking, especially once I started reading books, I remember getting reading, thinking, grow rich and being like, first time it clicked for me that everything my parents were saying wasn't gospel or everything I was hearing in my small town wasn't gospel. Ah, there's a possibility. Yeah. Yeah.

I was thinking like for 40 bucks, I'm getting to hear the neurons of Henry Ford or these, these great minds that came from humble beginnings like I did. And it just was such a like moment of being able to step out of my own prison built by my own limiting beliefs and all that kind of stuff. So that was when it really hit me like I'm getting, I don't know, there's another, all these, all these cool things. My dad taught me about work ethic and, and drive. I'm seeing some of these guys cause I'm, I'm ADD and I know everybody says

that, but I'm legit ADD. And so when school, You might just get up and walk out halfway through this. If that happens, don't worry guys. I'll bring them back in. I'm legit ADD. And so when I just get up and walk out, if that happens, don't worry guys, I'll bring them back in. I promise if that happens, my keys may be somewhere on the roof around here. But, uh, yeah. So like when I got, you know, going through school, I always found school really hard and it worried me thinking like, man, there's maybe I'm just not smart enough to do something big. Or maybe even though I dreamed big and i wanted to go do special things i just thought maybe that wasn't in the cards for me because what i would study it wouldn't come to me quick but reading some of these books and seeing that there were these outliers and that some of these

things like add can actually be your superpower yeah and it is it has proven to be my superpower as long as you can reign it in take the combination of my dad's bad-ass work ethic and belief in yourself and self-reliance and, um, hard, high levels of discipline combined with the environment of being like, I love the people in Oklahoma. I love the people in my small town, but I wanted to travel the world. I wanted to get rich. I wanted to go help a bunch of people. And I wanted to go see, I want to stretch myself to whatever the hell the limits were of those possibilities. See, that happens to a lot of people though, man. I find, you know, it was funny. I came from a very small town in North Florida as well with a lot of that same thinking. I got out of it fairly early. I moved away when I was 16,

thank goodness. But I didn't really see it on that level until I lived in Detroit, which is pretty funny. Cause that's's a that's a big community. And I lived there for a short amount of time. And it was like everybody there, like you're born, you marry your high school girlfriend, you buy a house four blocks away from from your parents house. And then you go to work at the plant. Yeah. And it's like wash, rinse, repeat. And if that when you're surrounded by people that have that limit, it's not really a limiting belief. I'm not, I don't think that's the wrong phrase. I think it's just cyclical

thinking. It's just, this is just what you do. You're from here. This is what we do. This is who we are. And escaping that type of thinking, man, I think is something that's really important. So it's cool that, that you, that those books opened that door for you. Huge. But the books were everything to me. And, uh, how'd you find the books? Um, I mean, my dad had some books laying around in the garage that were some pretty good books, like thinking grow rich that dust on them. And, um, once I found that one, I just, I'd go to the library and I'm kind of an introvert. I'm a practice extrovert, but I'm naturally kind of introvert. And so once I found them, I was just like, I need all of these. I just saw it like downloading the matrix of like, you know, when they plug the thing

in your head, I was like, I need all of this. So I started reading two books a week since I was probably 17 and haven't stopped just because I'm like, I need all of this. Where are my blind spots? They're everywhere. And I want all of that information. You know, it's funny. We're going to talk about, I'll get to something with that a little bit, because that can also, it's funny, that level of curiosity, because I do a lot of that same stuff. And you reach a point where you kind of go down the rabbit hole sometimes with stuff. And it's like, I've got to catch myself a lot thinking, you know, is it better for me and less expensive in the long run to just hire somebody to do this rather than trying to learn every ins and outs of how it works. 100%. I think the way I see it now as I've gotten older is now it's more finding books that are the next big blocker. Like what are you reading now?

Like right now I'm going through a couple of operations books. I'm going through, you know what, oh, interesting. I'm actually, to contradict what I just said, I'm a class marketer. And now I know I am. As soon as Alex Ramos, he came out with his new book, I've already read it. I've read it three times. And I've taken notes and highlighted it. I have it in my I have it in my bag. Yeah. So even though my world class marketer, I think there's like, where's your big blind spot? You know, I'm watching a lot of YouTube

videos and things around, you know, if we get to the point where we do an exit the next few years, I don't need to know everything about that. I've hired a great team for it, but I also don't, it's like trust, but verify, can I get a 30,000 foot view of everything around that? So I can ask, you know, the right questions and push them when I think you pushed, or when I can fire people that I don't, that I'm like, you don't know the limit amount. I know you're out of here, dude. I love that trust, but verify, man. That's a, that's a lesson. I, you know, I took a, I took you're out of here, dude. I love that trust, but verify, man, that's a, that's a lesson. I, you know, I took a, I took a hit this week, which sucked, which wasn't a huge

hit, but a lot of us had invested in this company called flower foods. It was a foods company. I probably know what I'm talking about. I almost did too. Okay. You almost did too. I just, yeah. Not because I had some big intellectual reason not to. I just missed that one. Be grateful you didn't. Because somebody sent me on the PR wire. This is how we all found out. Literally on the PR wire, Chapter 11, bankruptcy auction at their offices. Oh, yeah.

And that's how we found out that that went south. But again, here's the funny thing. I, instead of trusting knowledge about a particular situation, which was doing some of my own personal research about what the impact on this product might be in the marketplace, the demand of this product, the marketplace, the history of the people with this. I just trusted some people that told me that it was a good idea. Yeah. So shame on me. Maybe I should have done a little bit more of my own research into that sector before I wrote a check. We'll take our lumps on that and we will take more.

Yeah, we will. But the point being is I love that trust but verify. But instead of trusting people, trust independent information that you find in research on your own. I love that. Or like to your point, you know, finding the right, hiring the right people. Or like I found a financial advisor. Now I run all the deals that we get involved in. He does crazy due diligence on the people,

um, on, on the market, on their past history. And so I, I am getting better about hiring the right people, but I've, I've vetted the shit out of that.

Yeah. That guy's going through the process. And so, yeah, but, but in general, I think trust, but verify,

I take that into our hiring. Like when we hire a new executive, I think I stole this from Mark Cuban. Everybody's like, don't micromanage, don't micromanage. Anybody VP up, I micromanage the holy shit out of them for the first two or three months just because I want to be in their hip pocket. I'm not going to trust that they bullshit me in an interview. I'm not going to let them hire 10 people in a silo. I want to have hard KPIs on them, and I want them to be checking in with me specifically.

So that's my verify face. Even though the resume was great, the rest of the team stamped off on them. So that tool has been helpful for me in a lot of areas. Are you using EOS to manage your business? You just said KPIs. We were. So, like, man, I'll you what a funny story about eos when we built vshred uh we got to about 20 million a year 30 million a year and just it was literally the four of us and one girl that was working for free and we were all

doing everything from i mean i'm doing ceo stuff customer support stuff writing emails to the point where i'm starting to break i could feel myself myself starting to be like, yeah. And just going, is this, when does this, this getting rich thing get good? If we take our hand off the wheel of this thing for five seconds, it's gone. And we were about to board the plane to go to Brazil for new years. And I was downloading some business books and I downloaded traction because it was rated. So I thought the name was stupid. I was like, what? Why is this rate? I have that in my office. Yeah. So I got it and I was so burnt out. We were all so tired and I'm jogging on the beach and I had go ahead and play on it. And just the first chapter I stopped and I started bawling, crying. I was like, this is our freedom. Finally. Oh my God. And I sprinted back to the hotel. I was like,

everybody downloads this fucking book. We're doing this this right now you've got to hear this and everybody's like oh so for the about the first well i guess that was probably two years in we used eos for probably four years after that and i don't think there's any better or worse i think any of those frameworks can be really good uh okay ours is fine it's a little complicated sometimes you don't have a coach to literally facilitate all of it right now we use something those frameworks can be really good. Okay. Ours is fine. It's a little complicated. Sometimes you don't have a coach to literally facilitate all of it. Right now we use something called HOTS. It's very similar to that same methodology. It's just the coach I hired. That's how they ran everything. And I liked the framework, but man, EOS was good to us. It changed my life. Yeah.

Yeah. We moved everything here to EOS in the last year and it's made a huge difference with their game changer man for you as a as an opera as the operator business owner you get your freedom back and you can get to that 30 000 foot view you need so you can dip in where you need to dip in but you know zoom way out and get that position that 30 000 foot view you really need to run it at a higher scale when it's big yeah it's it's impossible to work i always tell people it's impossible to work on the business when you're working heavily in the business. That's right. And, um, I think, you know, as you get bigger, you still will need to work in the business, but you need to be doing it at just the right parts. So, you know, so like

if you're working, if you get too zoomed out, then you've kind of let grow the wheel too much and it can get weird. You can be like, I don't know my business that well. I don't know why it's not scaling. I don't know why I don't like these people in this meeting. I don't know who hired these people, you know, that kind of shit. But, uh, but at the same time, if you're, if you're too in the business, you get blindsided the other way because you're, you're burnt out. You're not, you're not zoomed out far enough. The reason I'm laughing so hard is because nothing bothers me more in my businesses that when I look up and somebody's walking around, I'm like, who is that? Just nothing.

Like, I'm like, I should know every single person. Like I should intimately know every single person that works here. Well, it's also a sign you're scaling. Yeah. And like, I'm like, who's that? Who's that person? Right. And I gotta tell you, like, I gotta tell you, this is what about when I start studying every year.

Because we have one of the things that I'm so passionate about is just having an epic holiday party, dude. It's just like epic. I mean, you know, most big companies in our space are in like, you know, a stupid, you know, boardroom or stupid like conference center or some terrible ballroom at some hotel. I'm like, we're going to burn Hakkasan down tonight. That's what we're doing. Right. That's how we roll. And, but I start studying around now because there's 600 of our agents that work for us directly. And there's one of me. Yeah. And guess what? They all know who I am. And one year I'll tell you about the worst mistake I made at Christmas party. This is bad. This is bad. Having our Christmas party. This is bad. This is bad. Having our Christmas party, this is probably eight or nine years ago. And, uh, and this girl walks in and it's late, right? It's late towards the end of the party. And this girl walks in who I know to

be really good friends with one of the other guys that works here. And she comes walking up and she's got a date and I'm, and she doesn't work for us. I know this. So I'm assuming it's late. We were at a big hotel, known spot. I'm assuming that she had made a call. Where are you? We're here. Our party's winding down. You should come.

That's what I've assumed has happened. And she walks over with this guy and I'm assuming this is your date, whatever. I say, I'm like, hey, what's up? How are you? Good to see you, blah, blah. She's like, oh, good. You know, blah, blah, blah. Where's Scott?

I'm like, oh, he's over there. Blah, blah, She's like, Oh, good. You know, blah, blah, blah. Where's Scott? And I'm like, Oh, he's over there. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I started talking to her date being the nice, you know, considerate person that I am. And I'm like, Oh, and I'm like, how long you been dating? Laura is like, Oh, we just been out a couple of times. It's fine. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, Oh yeah. It said, I was, I know. Well, I'm glad I got to meet you. It's cool that she brought you to meet Scott at his Christmas party. And the guy looks at me and goes, I worked for you for like a year. I was mortified. And guess what? Guess what? I'll give you one. Guess what happened within three weeks of that interaction? He was out. He was gone. And I don't blame him. I don't blame him. So I make a conscious effort

to start studying all of the faces with all of the names. Cause we have that luckily within our systems and I'll start studying because I, I there's cause dude, I, a, I should know everybody B I want to know everybody, but it's hard. There's a lot. Yeah. It's all start studying. It is. It is hard to decide you've gotten to me. Yeah. I'll start setting. It's a lot, but let's go back. Let's talk about, because you really cut your teeth. I mean, they don't like, they'd be nothing without those genius marketer guys. That doesn't happen by accident, right? So I want to go back to you and Kevin, who is your partner.

I love Kevin. I wish he could have been here today, too, but you guys are running in different directions all the time, and I get it. It's almost like having you in the same room is impossible. It's like one of you is Batman and one of you is Bruce Wayne. I'm not quite sure which one is which. Like, you might be the same person. I don't know.

You just don't want an Australian accent for the other one. I think it's Australian. I'm guessing. He's English. He's English. Close enough. Kevin, I'm so sorry. I apologize, buddy.

I'm so sorry. But yeah, so you guys, how do you become friends? How do you start affiliate marketing? Walk me through that process. A lot of people don't even know what I'm talking about. Yeah. So pretty wild story with you know what I'm talking about. Yeah. So pretty wild story with, with, you know, I, I was teaching dating workshops. Um, I was about to go to law school and I went through a bad breakup and I had a scholarship

to law school, got to the front door and I was like, I'm going to flunk out. I feel horrible inside. I'm not going to be able to do this. And I just, after interning for for for a law firm i was like this is not i thought it was seven thousand dollar suits and ferraris you thought it was suits well i cool suits at least i thought damn it this is exactly what i needed this file folder i've solved the case it was bad so yeah so it was after interning it was like sitting in these courthouses in the back of these courtrooms, digging through these books. I was like, this can't be my life for the next 50 years. There's no fucking way. And then, uh, yeah. So I,

I was reading every book, doing what I do. I started reading every book on depression and breakups and all that kind of stuff and stumbled into some books on some actual dating seminars. And I went to them thinking like, I don't know, maybe it'll make me feel better. We'll see. And I loved it because it was all inner game stuff. And, and. Tell me for the love of God, we're talking about mystery from that show. The game, Neil Strauss book. Tell me. I did read that book. Yeah. I gave that, I gave that book to my son. He should read it. I'm trying to help him. Good Lord. Anyway, keep going. That was one of the books I for sure. Yeah. So I took one of the seminars and I loved

it. And I just told the guys, I was like, Hey, can I, can I come to these seminars? Okay. Stop for a second. Stop for one second, guys. If you think you need dating help, right? Again, please go to YouTube and just look at my dude real quick. I don't know if it's going to make you feel better about yourself or worse about yourself, but this dude saying he needs dating help is like me saying I need help picking out something off a menu. Anyway, keep going. You know what though? It's interesting. It's just ridiculous. So it was like right after college and in college you meet everybody through social circles. Yeah. And so that was easy for me. You know, in high school you meet everybody in social circles right after college. When, when, whenever

I went through a bad breakup, I was like, Oh shit, all my friends moved off. Uh, we're not going out. There's no social circle. I I'm not used to walking up and saying hi to a girl at the bar and I don't even know how to do that. Yeah. So it just felt, just felt like start, not even starting over. It felt like a foreign universe to me. All right. And, uh, but anyway, yeah. So I went in town and took the seminar and it wasn't what I thought it was. it wasn't a bunch of bullshit lines and you know silly shit it was actually like self-accountability and getting over your

inner game shit and bad beliefs around some of it i didn't need to be fair a lot of i was like hey i do a lot of this and this is fine it was more just getting out of your own way the looks on the other guy's face is there to take this where they just like, I'm so fucked. This guy needs help. I'm just completely screwed. Like, no, no, I just, I'm picturing myself sitting there feeling, you know, to take the seminar.

I got to be in a certain headspace about myself in the first place, right? I got to be there. And they got to see you walk in and just be like, god this just so much i think you know what man if they knew what i was feeling on the inside it was okay you know so like sometimes i think i was 22 years old i was broke as shit and confused about a lot of things and just like why why is why am i not this is i just remember thinking this is this went from easy college to this is about to get hard and I'm not getting I'm not even meeting the type of women I would want to date got it I don't even know where to start so I don't have a social circle so what do we do now that kind of

thing yeah but after taking the seminar I was like these guys this is really cool like this is a lot of inner game stuff nobody taught me and I loved it so I was like I grabbed the the lead instructor guy I was like dude dude, can I, can I pay my own way? I'll sit in the back of the room and take notes. And in turn, I just want to keep learning. I don't think I got enough out of three days and I want to really master this. He was like, yeah, sure. So I, I blew every goddamn dollar I had traveling the country and teaching these seminars for free. And I would sit front row and take the notes and type them up for the guy. And I'd help the, help the guys any way I could, the students.

And then after doing that for about six months, they were like, they'd be like, we've never seen anybody this committed to this. Like, you really know this inside and out. Would you want to get your own workshop? And I was like, hell yeah. So I spent the next few years traveling the world, teaching those workshops. So you were mystery. No, no, no cowboy has it

i'm about like this okay good enough all right i think that was why my seminar was interesting because i was like there was a lot of things those i was seeing with those guys teaching those that were good but they're also some goofy shit that like if you played sports in high school and you you know good with girls and in your social circles that you're like, this is all unnecessary. So once you, once I got the cool parts from them with the inner game pieces and getting over approaching somebody to bar and all that stuff, the rest of it came pretty natural for me. So I just kind of built my seminar around that and made it less intense as some of theirs were. But yeah yeah so i was teaching a seminar in london and i met kevin

at a book signing and he must have been 17 or 18. because i was 23 maybe yeah something like that and really cool kid walks up asked me a few questions and he found out i was teaching and we ended up talking for a couple hours about stuff him and his buddies were there and then uh i left and then we took the the uh the class out to some random random ass bar you had to pick really it was tough to pick bars or clubs you could take people to because you're rolling with like 12 dudes yeah that's not that you're not getting that yeah you're not getting into most clubs so you had to go to like these big giant clubs like and i'm guessing it's not looking like the uh the starting lineup for the for the clippers is walking it no no no they no yeah there were

there were guys struggling and guys from all different archetypes and and yeah they needed it so i was like but yeah so i go to this this random club on the next night i get a tap on the shoulder or i tapped in the show i can't remember at this point but anyway kevin was there i was like well that's fucking random yeah and so we talked for a little bit just loved that kid i instantly just just connected thought he was a special dude but uh i was leaving the next day to fly back to um to la and when i was leaving i i one of my buddies was a night nightclub promoter in london and i was like hey this kid lives on the outskirts of london i was like this this kid's a star i don't know for what yeah but he's special i can just tell it's like should let him help you. Him and his buddies are trying to figure all this stuff

out and they're young and he tell you he's hungry and he's just a, you'll like this kid. Just let him try. And so he ended up helping my buddy with that stuff. And I didn't know Kevin at all at that time, other than those two times we chatted and come to find out he'd been doing affiliate marketing stuff since he was like 13 years old. So he's kind of a savant with that stuff or at least an outlier with the amount of time he put in. And then when I would fly back to London to see my other buddy, there was an instructor that ran a bunch of nightclubs and stuff out there.

He and Kevin had become really close. And so when I was hanging with Kev, whenever we, whenever I would go back to London and then we became really good buddies. So I started asking him, if you want to come help me on seminars. And so I'd go all over the world teaching seminars. And anytime I was in Europe or anywhere near where Kev was, I was like, hey, coming out.

Through that, I, you know, we would just end up having endless talks about, he kind of did the same thing I did. He's in the front row taking the notes. And by that time, I took the dating coaching seminar very serious because I remember being, I remember how depressed I was and how much it was, had ricocheted through my whole life. And once I got that part sorted, how much better the rest of my life got. Just having that piece handled. So we're laughing. I'm laughing.

No, of course. I'm laughing. But no, but you were literally changing people's lives. Oh man. Like I wouldn't have done it if it was some bullshit thing. It was a big deal to me. And like the guys that would come in there were from all walks of life. It'd be guys that just went through a divorce,

guys that were struggling their whole life with girls and it felt like a ghost and nobody ever saw them guys that had were went to medical school. So they'd just been studying straight through and they look up in there, you know, whatever age 30 or whatever. And they're like, shit, what happened?

What happened? I don't know. Yeah. Oh, you know, or, and everything in between. So, and I just always pretend I was in the front row and remember how depressed I was. And so I would really try to over-deliver on the seminars and make them special. And I'd put together a few other seminars. I'd put together an inner game seminar. That was a good two day, 15 hour seminar that would just go through all these things around trauma and around weird, weird belief systems that you get. If you're raised by your mom, why, why do you guys fall in the friend zone? They, they overcompensate by trying to be the best guy in the world at all times because their mom

raised them to be a good little boy and didn't teach them attraction like their father would have. And so their whole life could be stifled by that their whole life till they die do you know what i mean and other guys that are just flat out ghosts they didn't have a maybe they didn't have a strong father that taught them to have accountability with working out or with taking on scary moments in your life and and and facing your fears like these are just a lot of it was kind of like teaching people how to father themselves a little bit. You know what I mean? And in different, in different ways, whether that be you're an introvert or that be that you're just like, you're, you can't imagine what it does to the human psychology to be a ghost, the opposite sex from the time you're five years old until you're 25, 30. And that's a chunk of men out there. And I'd have those guys and be like,

fuck that we're fixing this. You know, I, your whole, your, your whole life's going to suck. No matter which money you make, no matter, you're going to be resentful to women. You're going to be resentful to guys that have your dating life. You want your kids. Are you going to have kids? Could you even have kids? Anyway, I just fell in love with the guys we were helping. And so I really took it serious. But yeah, so anyway, Kevin and I, he would travel and we'd teach the seminars. And then in our downtime, we would just talk about books we were reading, our visions of life, what we want to do with business. And he just had big visions like I did. I'd never really met many people like that.

I love everybody from Oklahoma. They're some of my favorite people in the world. But when I started a lawn mowing business when I was 13 and try to talk my friends into it, nobody was down whenever I was in college. Got things to do. Got cartoons to watch, buddy. Work. Shit. I got the rest of my life for that right now. I'm trying to hang out. Yeah. And then whenever I was in college and I was like, Hey, let's, we should be reading these books. Have y'all seen this book on this? Read gotta read for a class i'm trying to go get drunk yeah there you go and then whenever i wanted to move you know talk people into my buddies into moving to la i was like this is a small fishbowl we always

bitch about this we're gonna get the fuck out of here i don't care if we're broke in la it's still or new york or let's go get in a bigger harder city and get some bigger better mentors and it just always felt like i was nothing against them. That wasn't their vision. That was my vision. And, and, and me trying to convince anybody into a vision usually doesn't work. It's better if they're already aligned with that vision, then it's rocket fuel. So when I met Kev, I was like, damn, he doesn't just talk like this. This kid reads books all the time. He's violently serious about we now, we don't know what that's going to be yet. We're still trying to work it out. We're still broke as shit. But the other cool thing about traveling, teaching those dating workshops, the seats were $3,000 a seat. And so you were getting very affluent guys in these seminars.

So I was getting to meet these world-class minds that had done amazing things and all these different facets of life. And so you can't help, but go, go grab dinner with these guys and get to know him and be like, man, I'm, I'm getting osmosis of world-class thoughts. Yeah. Just being around a different level of thinking. Yeah. And all these different mentors. They were dying to be around you because you had the secret sauce they didn't have. So, which was cool. Cause it made it very easy to go grab dinner. I think that's a good point too, dude, because I think the mistake that a lot of people make when they get around other, not other, when they get around, you know, high performing people is they try to like fake it till they make it kind of match what they do. Like, oh, I can do

the same thing you can do. And then that, you know, people that are really performing at a certain thing at a high level can smell that bullshit a mile away. Like don't, you never know what you have that might be of high value to someone else. It doesn't have to be what they're trying to do. So my, you know, again, if you're going to approach somebody that's high value, just go with whatever you're good at. Don't try to be good at saying you're good at what they do. Just be good at what you're at. Yeah. And then see where it, see where it comes together. And I think that's probably, you had so much of what they wanted and you, and here's the thing. If you would align these 15,

20 dudes up on a wall and said, that dude's a private banker, that dude's a hedge fund manager, that dude's this blah, blah, blah, blah. Would you ever have guessed just by looking at them and hearing what they needed, that they needed what you had? No, no, no, no. Not a chance. I'd say 50% of the class had the same reaction you had early in this joke around, right? Where there would be guys that would commit. And it be funny with kevin and i teaching this thing because i mean i'm 23 24 25 26 and i was very transparent about hey look you guys have figured out way more don't look at me as some definitely don't look at me as some fucking guru of anything like i'm 24 years old i broke i'd just tell him i'm broke and i put a lot of time into this because of how bad i was hurting and And I've got this piece figured out. Y'all have all of this figured out and lifestyle and, and becoming a fully evolved man is the most

important part. Not this bullshit. I'm going to tell you guys this weekend, other than where you're stuck. That's it. You know, and they appreciated that authenticity around that and not, which I think is why it helped me get mentors. Cause they were like, Oh, he's not trying to be anything. Even, even with the thing he's's good at he's not trying to overemphasize or pretend he's more than he is because nobody's going to believe that when you're 23 years old yeah you know i mean love that but um but yeah so anyway through that uh one of my mentors was a really badass affiliate marketer that i met when we were doing that and we became really good buddies and uh i saw him working on his laptop and in between he became one of the instructors eventually or and then uh he'd be working on his laptop in the back of the

room or whenever we'd be somewhere and i'd be like do you have a team somewhere he's like no i was like well you might be asking how much money you make he's like i'll probably make a million plus a year and he was 23 24 22 i can't remember and i was never being like holy fucking shit this is crazy like how are you making a million bucks yeah are you doing this just you sitting here in the back of the room part-time yeah your keys i was like well do you have a warehouse somewhere do you have no then that's when i started but do you mind if i ask you what you do and he was he was doing affiliate marketing he's like why i i've mastered the art of media buying and I can sell pretty much anybody else's product because I know as long as the commission's right and it converts their page converts well enough, I'm good enough at the traffic.

And I'm going to be like, what's traffic. I mean, it was that, I was that early in it. And I just told him I could see where that was going. And I knew the dating workshop thing was a fun chapter for me, but I always knew it'd be short lived. And it was more a chapter where I got to travel the world. I could meet all these great people uh it gave me excuse to read even more books which i loved but i knew it wasn't

going to be for me for for long and so i and i but i when i met him i was like oh man everything's really going to ecom and the internet and so i was like hey could i uh i was like i will work i'll work for you for free and you can keep all the money for as many years as it takes. I don't want a penny. I'll get up early and I'll stay on as late as you work or as late as you want me to work if you'll let me learn what you learn. And I won't steal any of the things you don't want me to steal, but I'll bust my ass and

you can keep all the fucking money that I make you. And he was like, really? I was like, yeah, please let me learn this. Let's go. Let's go. And then so he sent me an email i was in london and he sent me an email on a monday i'd never moved out of oklahoma and he was like all right dude you have until friday to pack your shit and move to la the deal's off friday five o'clock at midnight i'm at night or whatever and i was like

holy shit you know like this got real this just got real you know so i flew back to oklahoma and i went in and my parents were already kind of freaked out that i dropped out of law yeah giving up law school to go teach dating workshops it's kind of a weird thing to explain especially somebody like my dad yeah and uh i came home with a u-haul truck and i was like hey i'm moving to they were like, we got to get you drug tested. Because you're like, tell me about the job. Well, see, I don't make any money. What do you mean you don't make a lot of money?

No, no, no, no. I don't make any money. But you got to see it. It's okay. I'm going to learn something I can do. Okay. Yeah. That's going to go over real well with a small town, Oklahoma dad.

John Wayne character was not happy. And yeah, so I loaded up the small small the few things i had and drove to la second day i was there got my car stolen and i had about five grand in my bank account total and then uh slept on an air mattress for about a year but it was the best internship if you want to call it that i ever had my life yeah and about my at the end of that first year um the other guy that was there with us he left and i i told the guy we were working with i was like hey there's this kid that's traveled the world with me kevin great sit-ins really fucking special i'm telling you this kid's special and he's been doing this type of stuff since he was 13 he hasn't been doing it at your level because he's so young i was like but i'm telling

you he'd be a good addition and then i did the same thing to kevin that that guy did to me like you got three days till friday to get your trash here and he still lived with his parents i mean he was that young you know so anyway that's fast forward that's how he came out and then we started working with that mentor for a couple years and man it was just sitting by i'll tell you the biggest takeaway from it was everybody thinks they work hard until you sit somebody that next to somebody that works fucking hard, hard and efficient. He would sit there. He made us get desks side by side with him and he would get up in the morning and work on the hardest thing of the day. And then the next thing and the next thing and never check Facebook and never fuck around.

Now, given I would have different examples of how I do this at our scale now. Yeah. But this is a, if I was a young, young man or woman out there trying to get it rolling, sitting by next to somebody who's an absolute savage with work ethic will blow your mind how much they can get done in one day and how consistently they do that day after day after day. I was like, Oh, this is what, even if I knew affiliate marketing, I wouldn't make a million bucks. Cause I don't work like this. Yeah. Thought I did. I thought I worked hard until I sat next to him and it completely changed everything for me. Wow. So you picked up not just the information, but also the work ethic that he

takes together. And the efficient work ethic, right? So it's like, well, we all, it's easy to piddle and do the shit you like, but if you had a robot version of yourself and it only did the right thing, the right next step, even if it was hard and shitty and sucked, but it just did that every time, every time, every time. if you could clone yourself and how that played out what would that look like every year oh dude it'd be so much further ahead wouldn't it be close what would it look like in a month what would look at you know so yeah that was a big big game big level up even though didn't make a lot of money it was the best like intern internship-ish thing i could say you know i found the best I found in life.

When you look at the things that you've accomplished or the, the events in your life that you find to be great, it's never the, never the result. It's the payoff. It's always, it's always the, it's always the pain that you go through. That's the journey is always the better part. I mean, you know, as simplistic as it is, you think about like rushing a fraternity, right? Like it's never as much fun to be a brother as it was to be a pledge, getting your ass kicked. When you're pledged, getting your ass kicked, it sucks. But you look back on it. You're like, I had more fun doing that than I did on the other side of it. And just, I think falling in love with that process is what a lot of people, you know, can't get over. I mean, and they can't, they can't quite get there.

So affiliate marketing, for those of you that haven't figured it out by now is essentially where literally you're just the person that's driving the traffic that, you know, most big, most big programs, links, you know, I'm sorry, most big programs or online offers or whatnot will offer you what's called an affiliate link where they will pay you a percentage of the final sale. If you are kind of the procuring cause for that, that they don't care how you get that sale. Or if you, if you lose money to get that sale or you make money, that's not their problem. Yeah. It's your problem as the affiliate. Yeah, exactly. You're just, they're going to pay you 15, 20%, whatever it is of how that works. And there you go. And then you buy the traffic, you do whatever

you need through whatever channels you can come up with or however you can get there. It doesn't matter. So when you and Kevin first started doing this together, I mean, I knew you had told me at one point that you guys, your, your general business model was let's find 20 things. I think this was it. Let's find 20 affiliates. We're going to start running all 20. Let's find the one that works and then narrow everything down on that and write it till she bucks us. Yeah. We had a couple other good mentors in the affiliate world and they would, you know, same thing with the networking networking you have to network with these affiliate agencies so that they give you the best offers but you have to they only give the best offers

to the people doing the best traffic whoever's doing the most volume will get the best offers and so thank god we had some other mentors uh that were already had cracked that piece and so getting to sit next to them and watch how they networked and how they opened that piece up was a big, how they negotiate. So, so back me up. Are there agencies that handled this or are you going directly to these,

these businesses? There's both, right? So there's, there's, there's the networks, but I don't want to speak to this now cause it's been so long since I did this.

But back then going through the networks a lot of times was rough cause they could scam you and, or they could, they could, they could grift off and go, ah, you actually got 15 cells, not 20. Oh, you got a thousand. So it was not 2000. And you'd be like, as were a lot of times when you had built the relationships directly with the offer owner, if it was a good, you know, you had to be careful that way too, because they could just disappear and not pay you. So you need a really good relationship. So going through the networks is oftentimes

safer, but if you had really good relationships, oftentimes the offer owners were more honest and the big ones you knew that they had optimized their pages. So by the time you have the traffic, you're running the best thing you can and that piece is handled. So one thing I liked about the affiliate side for somebody cutting their teeth is knowing what I know now about business and what you know about businesses, the operations is the hardest part, right? I don't say it's the hardest part. It's, um, the people's the hardest part. People's the fucking hardest part. But, um, the operations, I guess what I'm saying is it's hard. Once you get to a certain scale, it's hard to maintain mastery over the one or two or three really nasty skill sets that could help a business explode. And when you're doing an affiliate side, you actually don't need to know all these operations. You need limited operations.

You need to understand your ad budget and, okay, where am I getting these offers and how we send our pages up? There is some operations, but it's not the same as when you get a company scaled up and you're like, you have to know all of these different components about the the operations team the website the finances the customer support sizes your your your ability to stay very narrowed and deep starts to like wane and you have to be a little more wide to be a good ceo and when you're in that affiliate side you're getting to learn a very deep, powerful skillset and really one area, one thing, one thing mastery.

Yeah. And we didn't know that at the time we weren't doing that strategically, but when we, as we got farther into B-Shred, we were like, holy shit, we've actually just spent the last 10, 15 years getting world-class mastery at this one thing.

So when you guys would do the affiliate links, so you would start 20 different things. You would just buy it. So you were buying ads. Were you doing your own videos? What were you doing? We buy ads on usually on, on Facebook for us, for the most part, we did do some Google stuff, but you might take 20 offers, but it could all be the same product. You're just trying to see which offer is going to convert the best. Cause you don't really control that they do. So you might take 15 um so it wasn't always about your ad buy actually it probably was very little i mean obviously you had to be good at

what you were doing but the end result really did depend on the skill set of the people that had the page that would be i would say that that would be 25 to 50 of it okay you need to go get a good offer past that how you how you test ads, how fast you test your ads, uh, the bidding strategies within Facebook or Google, that's where the real like secret sauce is that's hard. So all things being equal, you could hand a really good offer to a thousand affiliates in 950 of them might burn out and not be able to make that work as where the, because the traffic they're buying is too expensive. They don't know how to get the right, the right,

they don't know how to find the right ads. They don't know the right bidding strategy. So yes, you need a good offers kind of table stakes, but past that, it's how good are you at the media buying side? What's the, what is the, what is the target ROI you guys would shoot for an affiliate back then? Just, just so you're profitable because you didn't have any, you didn't shoot for an affiliate back then just just so you're profitable because you didn't have any you didn't really have other than you're you were just swapping dollars you're just if i spend a dollar i just want two back i don't care if i spend a

dollar i want a dollar 35 on a map that's right as long as i'm up i'm up that's right but with affiliate world if you find the right offer you do get immediate buying you could be making four five x on your on your os like easily maybe even more sometimes depending on the on the right offer and the only thing that sucks about it is once you get a little older um i mean there's guys out there i don't everything i'm saying with the take it with a grain of salt it's somebody is would be out there rolling their eyes going that's funny because i run an affiliate network with 50 media buyers and we do 100 million dollars a year fair enough that's true good for you we're talking about your personal experience my personal experience and i'm talking about

somebody young out there the thing i that we kind of grew to not like about the affiliate world was we don't own a business we could sell it's just it's kind of like a mercenary like we're really good at the skill we'll run the out of your offer if you ever decide you're shutting your business down because you didn't run it well or you can't keep up with the inventory You don't have the supply chain to keep up with how hard we're pushing this, or you got in trouble because you're doing something else in your business. You're gone. Now we have to go find something else and keep, and you keep doing that over and over. And on top of that, you just made all this, you just did the hardest part, which you made all this crazy amount of sales, which most people can't figure out. You can hire operations. You can hire customer support.

You can hire all these other things, getting the world-class marketing and media buying, that part's really difficult, especially at the highest, the highest scales. So we were like, God damn it. Why are we, why aren't we taking the time to learn these other, we just cracked the God mode piece. So why aren't we taking the time to crack these other pieces to build something that we could sell or that we could give to our kids someday? And that's when we kind of made the shift, to be sure. What's funny, you know, when you were so gracious. And again, I thank you for this time and time again.

I will thank you to the day I die. But you guys were gracious enough to take on my little hungry 15-year-old this summer. And my son, Hayden, actually interned with you guys this summer. And that was awesome. He had a great time and loved it. And, you know, it was funny. I thought going into it, I thought he would come out of it wanting to do affiliate marketing. And you guys were pounding that into his head early on.

Like, no, no, no, no, don't do this. Build a business. Build a business. Build a real business. And just learned how to buy ads. And I thought that was interesting. So, dude, you definitely, this is not just bullshit. Don't do this.

Don't do this. You should do this instead. You pounded into my kid for, you know, all summer. So, so that was awesome. He's a great kid. It was fun working with him. And the thing is though, like with the tools out there now, I don't see a massive advantage of only doing the affiliate side. Yeah. Now that being said, if, if cash is tight, it just depends. Like if you're going to go, you can do a digital offer and it's just a camera and building the course. And there's all these programs out there if you're going to go, you can do a digital offer and it's just a camera and building the course. And there's all these programs out there where you can pay to build a course and host it.

And all that is just all these cool tools now that make the bar of entry from the tech side far easier than it was 10, five years on what my focus was, I might still do the affiliate thing purely defined what I was excited about or what I thought could, um, yeah, what could convert, what could turn into a business. And almost everybody has an affiliate link out there. So you can at least try to me in your world of kind of online e-comm affiliate marketing is essentially in my world, like real estate, like wholesaling, like it's, it's like, I don't really want to be in the deal. I got a good deal. I can flip the paper. I never have to close. I don't have to put a lot of money into it. I can still make money, but it's how I kind of get going. You know, you don't make real long money in real estate. So you start holding, that's where, that's where the long money is. But to do the holding, you've got to know a lot more other pieces, your level of mastery and the other pieces has to increase. So the affiliate thing can be really good or, but, but again,

right now with the ability to white label and some of the things we talked about in the summer is you get to skip some of like, you don't need to know manufacturing. You don't need to know that you can plug it right into Shopify tomorrow and have a gamer supplement. Yeah. It comes right out and comes right out. And there you go. Now, will you want to make it better at some point and do a bunch of stuff? Sure. But you can do that and you get to keep the customer.

You get to keep the buyer's list. Yada, yada, yada. When we're done with it, I'll show you my $100,000 bottle of vitamins I have sitting on my desk. I have a bottle, literally. It's my lesson to myself from a long time ago when we started a nutritional, me and my sister started a nutritional supplement MLM, spent a hundred thousand dollars on, on, on inventory to have in a warehouse. Didn't take it. It's a long story. That's why I didn't take off. But yeah, that's the last thing I have is I have one bottle of our vitamins as a reminder to, as a reminder to never buy anything before,

you know, somebody wants to buy it. Don't buy inventory until you know you can sell it. Yeah. And that's, that's it. Yeah. that's why i'm saying like even showing your son this summer is like at this with today's environment you can get a shopify store you can connect it with all of these on-demand products and you can even without buying a goddamn product yeah slap a picture of that on the website put sold out and then put put in your email whenever this is about back in stock yeah let me know like reminded and just push some traffic over to that site and be like, damn, they're all putting their email there. Now you've got a lot of work to do past that, but it's just a different world.

Yeah, but it gives you the idea that it's there. So when you and Kevin first started on the affiliate, how much money were you, because obviously you just both had a job making zero or sleeping on air mattresses in L.A. How much did you start with when you started affiliate marketing? Well, the good thing is that mentor i was telling you about he he was already rolling and so once um he we he made his partner so when i brought kevin on he was like what do you want to do and i was like i'm gonna split my my half with kevin with kevin he's that special and because he was like well this

kid's young do we i go i'll take all the risk. I'm going to split it with Kevin. And so we got it really rolling, but he bankrolled it to start. And then being young and being dumb, we got it scaled up pretty good. But then at some point, we didn't know we didn't know. I was still only 24 at the time. Kevin was amazing. You didn't pay for this, did you? Didn't pay for this. Oh, man.

Things went weird. And then he left the country and we we were we thought we were about to be millionaires and overnight we're back to zero business law number 655 which is this everybody's cool until they're not that's the rule so yeah no he would never do it no the guy's cool i mean how many times i've heard that no no no no don't worry about it is everybody's cool yeah until they're not like a breakup. It's like, like they're awesome. Yeah. That was a great lesson, man. And I think it was also Kevin and I've been through, I mean, best friends now for 20 years, cause we've been through a handful of situations like that and always had each other's back

through really hard times and times when we could have walked away from each other or when times when the next partnership, somebody wanted to partner with Kevin or me, but not the other. Yeah. We were always like, sorry, it's a package. Yeah. And that's pretty rare, but I think it's a good lesson. One, regardless of how loyal and great your, I mean, Kevin, I've worked on other projects since then. And even when it's me and Kev, we still get contracts with each other. Yeah. Even though that's my ride or die best friend. You got to got to yeah so it's like one lesson there is get everything contracted even if it's with a mentor and it can feel weird because it's your mentor and you're like i can't i can't even let

me do this they'll respect you more to come the right way and say hey can we get this on a contract but i'm all in i want to work my ass off yeah and then the other piece of that is vetting kevin you know like brian tracy always says pick your business partners like you pick your wife and's, that's how big of a deal it is. And don't pick a business. Don't work with anybody you wouldn't want to work with for 10 or 15 years. And that's a hard lesson to, that I've messed up a few times too. Oh yeah. I live that. I mean, I've got, you know, I've had several partners throughout my life. I've got one that's here that, you know, I was with him at F1 on Saturday. I mean, we're, we're, we're around each other all the time and, you know, we've done very, very well together. I got another one I'm about to take a $2 million judgment against. So it's like, you know, it's just, yeah, there's,

there's good lessons and that's how it is. And the contracts will, will protect you. Yes. With things to do that, you can sleep better at night. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, when people run off with the money, you still don't sleep. Yeah didn't sleep good. Yeah, after that first one, we went bankrupt. And I mean, Kevin and I went from, we were super young, but thinking we were about to be millionaires, multimillionaires to selling his car to pay for ads and eating ramen noodles and protein shakes for about a year. Oh, geez. It was rough.

So, okay, let's skip ahead to V Shred now. How do you go from literally, and this is a crazy thing to even say, I'm sure it's crazy. You go from $1,000 to a billion dollars in sales with no outside capital. No outside capital. No seed money, no raises, no nothing. Just straight up, bootstrapped up, thousand bucks to a billion. Yeah. Walk us through it well it would after that after that that

dude left the country and we were left really broke we had a couple other friends that were in the affiliate affiliate game and we they knew we were really good at media buying so we started working with a couple of our other buddies but they were far you know it was their company and they were a lot way it felt like a job it didn't feel like a partnership and regardless of what it felt like that they were gracious enough to let us work with them but i was like this is their thing this is never going to be our thing no matter how much money we make this place it'll never be our thing and at the time i just remember i was talking to kevin being like hey kevin kevin started doing music school at the time. And so he was part-time doing the affiliate stuff, part-time doing that.

And I was like, Hey, I'm going to work on something on the side for us that is long-term. And this may take a lot longer. So you gotta be patient with it, but we can't, I don't care how much money we make with these guys. We can't ever sell this. This will never be ours. And it was starting to get to that place where being an affiliate the the agency the traffic um platforms don't like affiliates sometimes like if you don't do it the right way and it was getting to that place where they don't see affiliates as a branch of that business they see them as these like

renegade pirates kind of pirates on the, on the traffic sources. So you're getting accounts slapped all the time and you're like, well, that doesn't make sense. Nike doesn't get their accounts slapped. Yeah. I'm in business here. I'm in business here. This doesn't feel like it feels like they could take this away from us at any time.

I don't want, I don't like this. And so at the time I was kind of, I could see a lot of e-com stores popping up. This was when that was really first starting to take off Shopify. I just, we didn't use Shopify, but I started seeing that kind of stuff pop up. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to, I'm going to get with the guys. And well, first, yeah, we live in the same building as Vince, which is the face of our company. And Roger, our other business partner, he ran some of the nightlife out there and he's

kind of been a jack of all trades on stuff and he could he could code a little bit and so i just grabbed those guys i was like look why don't we try something on the side i was like vince i know you've never done business i think he was 19 or maybe even 18 i can't remember the time and but i was like i want to do something in a mega niche with what Kevin and I could do with the media buying. We've seen massive scale with one of our mentors we worked with, you know, we could do 500 grand a day some days and just crazy scale on the, even on the affiliate side. So I was like, we not many media buyers I know, know how to do that. So this is going to be really hard and it's not going to be flipping it on like that did. but the fact that we've got that skill is wild and so as i kind of mapped it out i was like mentioned brian tracy

earlier he's probably one of my favorite authors ever i know he can be kind of uh people think he's kind of dry but it's been a huge his stuff has been a huge help for my life one thing he says is no matter what you're trying to attack whether it be a new business or you're trying to get into great shape or anything you want to be world-class at, everybody thinks it's like 7,000 skill sets. It's really like three to five. And now there's other like ancillary ones and stuff that'll come up, but there's three to five skill sets. And if you can really think about and be right about what those three to five are, and you can become top 10% in the about what those three to five are and you can become top 10 in the world at those three to five skill sets then then anything's possible yeah that thing's that thing will be unlocked whatever that is yeah and so as i listened that i kind of sit down and wrote it out

and i was like media buying especially when you have no money when you're starting with like nothing so it's like all right the media buying that's the hardest one and we got it. And then I was like, the second one to me would be copywriting. So can we write compelling sales pages or videos that, that would, that truly convert? Cause we've ran offers and we know this one doesn't convert and this one does. And it's the same goddamn product. Same thing. That might even be a better product. Their sales page is better.

Best marketer wins. how'd they do that well they're world class at the copywriting and and what's on that page or in that video so it's like okay that's one of them and the third one was can you get a spokesman that's world class on video that and we don't have a celebrity we're never going to have a celebrity it's not that we didn't see yeah for now yeah back then it didn't the thought of what it was like that even an option we don't have any money for that so when I when I met Vince I remember thinking like okay I wrote down all the mega niches a mega niche is where it's a infinite ocean so real estate could be one dating could be one like everybody it's something everybody has to have or wants yeah so

everybody wants love everybody wants health everybody wants to be younger everybody has to have real estate everybody has to have insurance there's probably 10 or 15 mega niches yeah as i went through those i was like what's something that especially after teaching the dating coach thing and seeing how good it felt to fly out on a Friday and leave on a Sunday and get letters from guys. Even now, you know, like guys send me their wedding photos and stuff. And you're just like, fuck man, I want, I want to get rich, but I want to do something that I feel fucking awesome about as well. And I was like, man, I, and it needs to be something that, that we could do if it was, you know, we're going to teach you bonds trading i don't know bonds

trading and i'm never going to know bonds trading so it doesn't matter that ain't gonna happen so i started crossing off the ones that wouldn't make no sense yeah and just kept narrowing it down until i was like which one of these would be fun that would light us up and that would help a bunch of people and that we would actually use and want to do year after year even even if we get older. And so the fitness thing kind of landed on that one. And then, um, and Kevin and I had ran diet and fitness type offers before. So we're like, this is pretty similar to what Kevin and I've done before. And you understood the copywriting understood the funnel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Didn't quite understand the funnels, but I was like, I could get there. And then when I met Vince, I was like, told Kev and Roger, I was like, dude,

this kid is different i was like everybody's going for this meathead like steroided up monster looking dude and they think like that's not what people actually want to look like yeah that's actually they're getting likes as a freak show versus likes is like i want to be like this person yeah on instagram whatever i was like vince is the fight club brad pitt Brad Pitt dude. You know who he is? He's this, I thought about this this morning. He's the new Tony Horton. Yeah, 100%.

That's who he is. Yeah, but he's like, it's a handsome dude who's not all, you know, overly monster, bodybuilder jacked. He's who you want to look like. And then he's also from Ohio, so he's really down to earth and he's a great person and he really cares about people.

So I was like, this is just a, this is, this is the perfect, this is unique. This is way different than most of the shit I'm seeing out there. Yeah. And so when we grabbed Vince,

we were like, Hey man, do you want to do this as a side project? I know you've never done anything like this. I know you're modeling all over the world, but we'll do the side projects and see what happens. But Kevin and I have done some pretty wild shit with the media buying thing. So if this was to hit, it would, could be huge. Wor huge worst case maybe it pays your rent and it's just a little side project

that you'll learn a lot about business and e-commerce and i'm gonna be learning a lot right along with you because i've actually never made these offers before yeah we've only done the media buying but i know we can figure the rest of this out yeah so that's kind of how it started and he said sure i'm in he was like yeah let's do it because i've seen you guys do yeah you came up when in the first video oh man they're like yeah so when vince came over when we first had to talk about that kevin and i used to have a shared office maybe about this size and we had uh quotes from all of our favorite authors just just crazy like from from ceiling floor all over some when vince would come in be like, you guys are weird. This is different. I don't know guys that are,

you guys are always on fire. You're always working. You're always talking big stuff. So by the time we got around the V-shirt thing, he was like, I'm in dude. He's like, just be around you guys. Y'all tell me what to do. Y'all's brain's different. I'm I'm in. So we're like, all right, hell yeah. So he's always been, he's always been down. And he's always been like a little brother to us and down to learn and super hardworking. So.

And when it first started, so you guys got, so how quick until you had some traction? So took a minute. So like, uh, we, we went and filmed like a, an ad program and yeah, so we, we round up a thousand bucks between all of us. And I told the guys, I've been reading too many business books at this point, trying to get ready for this. i was like the biggest mistake we can make is and not be as like i want our knowledge and cash flow to unlock more money not say we need stuff or how are we going to move without that i was like we don't deserve that stuff if we don't know how to do it so we have to figure that out either by bootstrapping it or whatever one we don't have a lot of money so we're gonna put $1,000 in this fucking account

and we have to make every penny of it count. And the guys were like, all right, shit. So, we don't have enough skill sets, so we don't need to buy, there's nothing we need to buy. There's nothing, we need to go learn. And so, we need a fucking camera. Roger could code, we could video. That was it.

So whenever we went to, we asked our buddy to borrow his gym, we mapped out an ad program and we duct taped iPhones. We ordered like a $10, uh, lapel mic and we duct taped two iPhones to a tripods. So we didn't want, I was like, we're not written cameras, none of that shit. And Vince wrote out a ad program and he, it, he he it was brutally hard and at the time we thought we would be selling this to guys not to and we thought everybody wanted four percent body fat yeah so we were just like shit these programs need to be fucking hard and so we got with one of our buddies it was a badass trainer and he helped us put together really good programs i was like dude make them where people really get

fucking shredded so they were long brutal brutal, brutal, overdone programs. Yeah. And Vince films this ad program and he accidentally films the advanced one last. So he does the beginner one. So he's completely smoked. We only have like, we only have like an hour and a half in this place that our buddy let us borrow.

We're going to let you in, but you got to get out. So Vince goes beginner, intermediate by the time he gets to the advanced, when his abs are breaking and he's shaking and dying. That's how we started. You know, we got that one filmed. It took us a while while like we roll the thumb kids do the hardest thing first

so then i'd never like i said i knew what good funnels looked like but i'd never actually written one and so remember what i was saying about the copywriting the media buying and getting somebody really good on camera but i'd i'd taught seminars all over the world. So I knew what it was like to speak and to teach and to teach to an audience with all different starting points. And I would picture if I had a seminar with 10 people or 300, I would build avatars in my head of every one of the people in there. And I would teach until I saw the light bulbs go off on every different archetype, not just talk to myself or not just talk to the general archetype in the room. And so Vince was great looking kid fired up young as shit. And he's just talking to himself and he's confident. He's always got swag. And so we had to sit there for, we would sit there for 12 hours a day and he would start going through his, um,

the video script we wrote. And I'd be like, Nope, start over. No, you've got to talk, start over. You got to talk to this person,

that person, start over, start over. I mean, 12 hours a day. We did this for six months. Cause I was like, that's one of our boxes.

He has to be world fucking class. And so you had the media buying and then we got Vince. He's a bad-ass and he just never got pissed at me. And he did get a little bit frustrated, but I was like, can you, you, you, once you get this down though, you're going to be different than all the other spokesmen on the planet. You just need repetition. And then once it clicks, man, he, as you can see, he's unbelievable. But, um, and the third part, so we had, we had that, but the, what the scripts I was writing for him were dog shit. They were bad. I could tell

they were bad, but I didn't understand why. so i bought every copywriting book i could every copywriting book i could find every course we weren't really networked with anybody outside of the affiliate world which was useless for building for what we're trying to build and so it's just us on an island so i i i would just spend all day all night reading every copywriting book i get my hands on um and trying to write something that made sense and then we handed to kev and kevin running the best he could he's like it's not there yet dude yeah not there yet he knows exactly how to make this pop and he's just looking at us going it's not saying it saying it this ain't it at that point i'm getting scared because i'm like maybe i don't have the game for this maybe that worked because those products most of them had celebrity spokesmen and and these maybe

these guys know how to build funnels better than we do imposter syndrome started to really flare creep in on you scared the shit out of me and also it really was scary because i finally felt like i'd built this my perfect team and we were all believing in each other and we were all ride or die for each other. And I was like, damn it. This was, I talked to all these guys into this shit. They're ready to do it. They're all world-class at their thing. I'm the one not pulling off this copywriting thing.

I got to figure this out. And then we had tested every funnel on the, every iteration of a funnel I could think of. And we got back, Roger grabbed me one night. It was like, Hey dude, we we're we're out of money like we can't pay vince and summer next week it's it's pretty much done and i was like oh my god what are we going to tell this kid because we had kevin and roger and i had not paid ourself we paid vince and paid summer the girl that was helping basically for free yeah but we didn't want to scare him we wanted him to be relaxed he was super young he quit modeling to do this and so we want to make sure he was okay but we were at this

point almost out of money the only thing that had worked for us was buying shout outs this was early days of instagram yeah where the um uh what do you call it the influencer yeah but the chronological order like when you made a post oh yeah everybody everybody's going to go down yeah yeah it was now they show it to a little bit audience and if it hits it goes out or as we like to call it the good old days good old days yeah and so when so we had summer the girl that worked for us she would get on kick and grab all these handles from all these weird accounts and we pay 50 bucks for this one 100 bucks for this one to these same pages that we're handing to kevin we can't get them to work on paid traffic but these cheap shout outs would mop up enough to

to get us to keep you moving to keep us moving and then i you know we circled up and i was like that's not a business this is gonna that's gonna fucking change so your clock is ticking for if kevin can't get it to work we're fucked you know so then i gotta i gotta tell you that is one of the biggest weaknesses that people make in my business is they don't understand. They don't understand that there's some teams in this Valley that are big, right? Big real estate teams. And they are 100% dependent on leads from Zillow. Yeah. And I firmly believe that in any day now, Zillow is going to pull that rug out from underneath them. And then what do you got? They're done overnight. And dude, you've got to take no matter what kind of business you're in, you've got to look at it and say where can somebody pull the rug out from underneath me

and if you are not planned for it and expecting it you're foolish 100 even if they never do you've got to plan for it and expect it and know exactly what you're going to do that day 100 and like i think it's double down on what works yeah but violently But violently have a, have a, a team or a side project that you're like, people's bonuses are attached to making this other thing happen. This other thing, we got to go. Yeah. And if they don't, they're out of here and keep finding people that do, whether it be other traffic sources, other offers, gain control, gain control a hundred percent. And yeah. So then from there, I remember one day one day sure enough they flipped it off and they were like no more of that and summer calls me she's like none of these converted today zero of

them like oh and so we were trying we go a little bit farther nothing nothing now we're losing a little money and roger tells us hey man we're this i think we're done like this is it so i go i go on a run one day and i'm sitting on this park bench and i mean we had all been busting our ass so much and so fucking tired and we'd burnt our boats we had cut ties with all everything else stuff because it was working enough to put to put some enough money in the account to go try and we kind of burn our boats to go do this and kind of piss some people off saying we don't want to do that anymore and um it was almost over it was almost game over i remember i'll go on a bench i'm going to run i'm sitting on this

park bench i'm i start bawling my eyes out i'm like this is fucking done i don't i don't know what else to do i've tried everything i can think of and then i started going through everything every ad i could think of and everything i was seeing on the internet and then um one thing that jumped to me was there were these guys there were these videos i was seeing that were like an hour and a half like an hour long hour and a half long but i remember just going like nah no way that's stupid nobody's gonna watch a video for an hour that's crazy and then but but i kept seeing them a lot and then i was like kevin isn't this crazy and he was like yeah i mean is, but it wouldn't be running it. Like media binds, you kill things that don't work.

Yeah. It's like, it must be working. And I was on that bench and I thought about that talk Kevin and I had, and I was like, that's the only fucking thing we haven't tried. So I got off that bench and sprinted, hauled ass home and got a, I went and found every one of those videos I could find, whether it was on skincare, whether it was on whatever the hell it's on, it was shit. I just wanted to see the breakdown of an hour-long video in the structure. So I Got all those videos. I found a guy in India or wherever to transcribe all of them for me

Send them back to me. I put them in Google Docs each one of them and then I I got my copywriting books And I was like, okay look for the formula. What's the fucking formula in this thing? Yeah. And so I started being like, that's the lead. I went through like five, the lead's yellow. Okay. This is the golden threads. This, this is this.

I did that with probably 20 of these videos that I could find. I was like, all right, I think I get, I think I get what they're doing here. And I just pulled up a new Google doc and was like, okay, I'm going to write my version of a lead. Wrote that, wrote this piece. Then just kept going all the way my version of a lead wrote that wrote this piece then just kept going all the way down wrote this piece versus piece called vince was like come over here dude called that trainer guy that we knew and i was like hey i don't know these three parts i need i need our thing here that's only you two would know they got together and thought through

like what our three big ideas were that were going to be in the that were in the programs got that piece handled build all that figure out the rest of it and then we get on a train or as i go to go vince goes and films it you get on a train going down to this conference and on the way there and back roger edits it on so we had to do everything you know he's a pro banging it out yeah roger starts banging it out edits and like hey here's how these look make it kind of like slide into here and stuff and blah blah blah put some text overlays there we cobble this thing together and now we're down to like like when we got back we had a good 400 left in the bank oh jeez total and if we didn't get that to work it was like game over game over like we're shutting the doors on this thing let's not talk about this anymore and uh so we're we're like some kev writes some ads has been filmed

those ads real quick to kind of match the video it goes this quiz we have and he throw kev throws him in and we wait like an hour and then kev goes holy fuck like what he's like i need to check these stats again what come on dude just threw him i can't say that yeah he goes no it's right this is 900 roi and we fucking dog pile each other and roll around on the floor lose our minds and then so for the next next few weeks we had so kevin just drains all the money 400 bucks boom pause and then we wait for whatever time that the bank account to clear the next day pause the ads refresh refresh okay the money cleared turn it back on i'm gonna go rip it okay do it again so you just started stacking the chips all in stack the chips all in stack the chips all in stack the chips we do that until you know we

built the you know until we probably got to like a hundred thousand in cash and then from 400 bucks from 400 bucks that's and then um from there we're like oh oh my God, we're doing it. Let's go. Let's go. And, um, we keep ripping it and we go in one day and summer, that girl that was our very first employee, she's, she's in the office, bawling her eyes out, clanging on the computer. And she's like, what's wrong? Just, oh God, did something break? It's not working anymore. She's like, there are 30,000 customer support emails.

I don't know what that is. And we had a Gmail hooked up to this thing. We had no idea how to do any of this stuff. There's just us, you know. So now you're like, okay, new problem. Here we go. And so that gets us caught up. And then from that day till now,

it's just been solving. Every day. And just continue. The next problem. Up to the right, up to the right, up to the right, up to the right, up to the right. And then just whatever the next big fire is, putting it out.

Putting it out. Well, bro, look, man, a billion dollars in sales is nothing to shake a stick at. That is an impressive stat. And, uh, and I'm sure that I, fuck, I know you guys have been fielding. Hey, what do you want for that thing? What can we do? And I know that that day is coming and, uh, and then it will be, you know, hopefully some days on a yacht and then off to the next adventure, I'm sure. But, uh, but yeah, dude, I look, man, if you have not checked out V Shred, check out V Shred. If they want to find you in particular, Nick, how do they find you? And don't be calling them, say, I'll come intern for nothing. Cause don't just, you can't just DM people that it doesn't work.

It's ridiculous, but they want to find you. How do they find you? My Instagram is about all I have is I think it's at Nick Daniel 11. That's about the number 11. That's about the only way to find me right now. I'm going to get a podcast going in the next few months. Love that. Love that, man. Love that. So check out Nick.

Check out V Shred. Dude, thanks for coming, man. It's always good to see you. And that was just such a ballsy story. I love it, dude. I love it. Thanks for having me. All right, guys.

Well, we appreciate you and we will see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review. Give us a share.

Do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.